Lisa

by Joan Van Every Frost

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Lisa said grimly. “You don’t need a companion, you need a gaoler. Where did you get all that food?”

  Cynthia regarded her slyly. “What food? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Lisa picked up the corner of the sheet and showed her the gravy stain. “That food. The food you stuffed yourself with after I went to bed last night.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cynthia said with dignity.

  “All right,” Lisa grated, “you won this time around. I don’t know who you got to bring it to you, but it doesn’t matter because from now on I’m sleeping in here.”

  Cynthia’s expression turned sullen. “You wouldn’t!”

  “Oh yes I would. If you think I’m going to baby you all day just so someone can undo it every night, think again. And there’s no use running to Dr. Jarrell, because he agrees with what I’m trying to do.” She wondered just how much he really did agree, but he certainly hadn’t told her not to continue with her plan. “So go back to sleep and see if you can digest that disgusting load, you and Tommy both. I’ll be in around the middle of the day with a bed and my things, what little I’ve got.”

  As she went downstairs, she suddenly remembered the footsteps in the middle of the night. Could they have been made by Cynthia’s mysterious benefactor? But who would want her wallowing in her bed like a stranded whale all her life? And who would want that life to be short? Unbidden, a vision of Jarrell came to her mind. He had more reason than anyone else. He was married to her and yet couldn’t stand the sight of her. When she so obligingly began to eat herself to death, he must have rejoiced. They why the hurt, vulnerable look on his face when she had as much as accused him of malpractice?

  Her thinking went glimmering as she saw Eric pass by below the stairs. “Eric! Wait a moment! I’ll take you up on that ride after all if you still want to go. Her Highness is sleeping off a huge dinner she managed to sneak last night.”

  Eric’s face lit up, and he took her hand as they ran through the house toward the back door and the stables. Priddy shook her head as they raced through the kitchen and around the side to the drive. Toby was cleaning tack when they reached the stable yard, and he smiled a good morning at her.

  “I’ll saddle Christian myself, Toby, but you saddle Dancer for the lady.”

  “Dancer?” she asked, having expected him to say Twinkle.

  “He shies a bit, but he’s got beautiful gaits, and you’re perfectly capable of handling him. You little vixen, to let me believe you couldn’t ride!”

  “Blast,” she said suddenly. “I’ve got to go back to the house and change.”

  “Toby!” Eric called to the boy as he was brushing Dancer in his stall before putting on the saddle. “Have you got pants and a shirt that Lisa can use? We’re just going out to the moor, so no one will care how you dress,” he added when she started to protest.

  A grinning Toby showed her his room in the stable, and handed her some clothes. When she came out, she had to hold up the pants with one hand, and Toby gave her a length of thin rope to use as a belt.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?” Jarrell said from behind them.

  They all jumped guiltily, even Toby.

  “We’re going riding, Brother Mark,” Eric answered defiantly.

  “With Lisa in those clothes? She looks like a tramp!”

  “A charming tramp, though, won’t you admit?” Eric was beginning to enjoy himself.

  “I know that what people think doesn’t matter to you, Eric, but give a thought to Lisa. Nice young ladies do not wear men’s clothes and they do not go out riding with young men unchaperoned.”

  “Mark, Mark, how stuffy can you be? We’re not going near Dunwiddleston, only out on the moor.”

  “Only out on the moor ... You fool, there isn’t anything we do that doesn’t get reported and then embellished in the village. For all of me, they can go straight to hell, but Lisa may have to live there one day.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Jarrell,” Lisa broke in. “I’ll go up to the house and change.”

  Jarrell was still there when she got back, and he and Eric had obviously had words. “Do you really intend to go out alone with him?” Jarrell demanded. “When you know what the villagers and the police are saying?”

  “What can I say?” she answered. “We’re going openly, and I hardly think he’ll attack me. As for the villagers, I refuse to live my life for them. They didn’t care the winter we almost starved, and I’m not going to care about their sensibilities now.”

  “Bravo!” Eric applauded. “Fare thee well, dear brother, and keep a candle in the window.” He and Christian danced sideways up the drive.

  “Have a care, Eric. If you treat Lisa the way you treat most of your lady friends, I’ll break your neck.”

  Jarrell and Toby were still standing there looking after them when Lisa and Eric disappeared around the front of the house and headed out toward the road.

  7

  At the road they turned away from Dunwiddleston. The horses were feeling good and they pranced and tossed their heads, Dancer pretending fright at bushes along the way. On the big red stallion, Eric appeared strong and proud and free. Lisa found herself wishing that he wasn’t so different at Hartsite, so often more like a charming, willful child than like the man on the horse. If he could just get out from under the shadow of his brother, he would grow up and stop all that nonsense of running to Burresford to take up with the prostitutes there.

  Young as she was, Lisa had a suspicion that buying a woman who was willing to bed down with anyone was an avoidance on the man’s part of the danger and vulnerability of a close relationship. To love was to open oneself willingly and trustingly to the possibility of great hurt. There flashed before her the memory of the pain on Jarrell’s face when she scolded him about Cynthia, and she wondered if something she had said had reminded him of his dead wife. What a loveless house, with Jarrell hiding in a hateful marriage, Eric running to sterile liaisons with sluts, Mrs. Lewis living on her memories, and Carrie Stephens? She was a cipher: mourning widow or woman lying in wait? For what?

  “Eric,” she burst out impulsively, “tell me about your sister. You’re very fond of her, aren’t you?”

  “Carrie? Of course, I love Carrie.” The expression on his face reminded her of when he laid his cheek against Christian’s head that first day at the stables. Did he have that expression when he talked of herself? “She’s only a year and a half older than I am, but she always mothered me. Far more than our own mother ever did,” he added bitterly. “Mother was beautiful and vain and utterly useless as a mother. Our father doted on Mark, I think, because he reminded him of Mark’s mother, who died when he was six. He indulged our mother and loved to look at her, but I don’t think he really loved her. She couldn’t have cared less whether he loved her or not as long as he petted her and paid attention to her and gave her money and jewelry and clothes. She flirted with everyone but never seemed to get into any real trouble. I think it possible she didn’t like men’s bodies, only their attentions to her.”

  “It must have been beastly for you and your sister,” Lisa commented, easing Dancer out of one of his starts.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Eric said carelessly. “We had each other. We did everything together. Mark was different then, much less sour, but he was seven years older than we and went about his own affairs. He and we neither liked nor disliked each other; our paths just didn’t cross very often.”

  “And Carrie? What happened when she grew up?” Lisa prompted.

  Eric scowled. “She fell in love, that’s what happened,” he said bitterly. “I tried to tell her it wasn’t love at all, only infatuation, but she wouldn’t listen. She was so obsessed that she talked herself into a position as a governess in his house, just to be near him. That was right after our father died and left everything to Mark.”

  “Governess!” Lisa exclaimed, startled. “You mean he was marr
ied and had children?”

  “Yes he was — very married. There were two children, a boy and a girl.”

  “But how did she expect to get anywhere with him under those circumstances? At best she could only have been his mistress.”

  “I don’t think she really thought about it. All she would tell me was that she had to be near him, that that would have to be enough.” Christian bowed his powerful neck and snorted. He obviously thought they were going too slowly.

  “What happened?” To Lisa this was like one of the novels she had been reading, every bit as romantic and improbable.

  “I suppose she might be there yet, teaching a couple of grown children, only there was a fire.”

  Lisa shivered. The thought of fire had always terrified her.

  “Matthew’s wife and little boy were burned to death right then. The little girl survived, but had to be put in a nursing home, completely off her head. She died there later on.”

  “So Carrie married her true love after all. What happened then?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see much of them, mainly because I couldn’t stand him. He didn’t even wait a year before marrying her, but he always looked as if he were at his own funeral. I think he may have done more than just looked at Carrie even before his wife died. He was a handsome man, I’ll give him that, but spineless. Here he was, married to a real beauty and it was almost as if he didn’t care. By the time I moved in with them, he was well on his way to drinking himself to death. I don’t know why he bothered to commit suicide ... ”

  “Wait a minute,” Lisa protested. “ You moved in with them?”

  “Yes, right at the end, after they bought Hartsite. Carrie said she was losing her mind, that he’d become a complete recluse and that she had to have someone she could talk to out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “What were you doing up until then?” Lisa asked.

  “Just managing to get by. Mark gave me an allowance, which I suppose I should have thought was generous of him, but that money and much more should have been mine outright. It wasn’t fair of my father to leave it all to Mark.

  “Why didn’t you go to work?”

  Eric looked at her, exasperated. “My dear girl, I would have had to take a position as a clerk or something equally dismal, and made no money at it besides.”

  “Why didn’t you get trained to do something better? Be a physician like Dr. Jarrell or a lawyer, or an architect?”

  “Books were never my specialty.” Eric grinned at her, then just as suddenly became serious again. “Don’t you realize that most of the people on this earth scrabble around and work their fool heads off just for the privilege of eating and sleeping? As far as I am concerned, I have been given just so many days to be alive, and even fewer days to be young and in good health, and I mean to make the most of them. For eight years I’ve watched Mark mope about virtuously grieving over a lost love. Not for me. I want the feel of a good horse under me and the touch of a woman’s lips. I won’t know those things when I’m in the grave, so I intend to have my fill of them before I die.”

  “What about marriage and children?”

  “Now there is a real woman’s question. Of course I’ll marry and have children, but I’m damned if I’ll let my marriage sink into the grey shapeless nothings I see all about me. The woman I marry is going to have to be as hell-bent on sucking every last sweet drop from life as I am, and we’ll celebrate life and living every day of our lives.” His grey eyes glowed, and he looked straight at her. “You haven’t had a chance to do much of it yet, but you’re like me — you’re alive and anxious to live every moment.” He gave Christian his head, and the big horse thundered down the dirt track, steadily pulling away from Dancer, who was flat out but just not as fast. Where the track turned, there was a rock wall some six feet high with a wooden stile. Eric gathered Christian in and put him at the wall. The big horse seemed to squat down for a moment, then with a great thrust of his muscled flanks reared up and soared over the wall with a foot to spare.

  Lisa had never jumped a horse before; the big draft horse colts she had ridden were just not built for it. She aimed Dancer at the stile, which was a good foot lower than the wall. A natural jumper, Dancer collected himself with no help from her, flicked his ears up, and the stile was under them. As they came down, she leaned on the reins crossed over his neck, and then they were cantering easily toward Eric and Christian.

  “Bravo!” Eric called. “I didn’t know you had jumped horses, too.”

  “I never did,” Lisa laughed. “What wonderful fun!” Eric swung Christian around and took off at a gallop again. They jumped two lower dry stone walls and swept up a long slope that took them to the beginning of the upland moor country, a rolling dark sea of heather broken only by the light green of a large bog over toward the west. Eric seemed to know where they were going, for when the heather became really dense, they hit an old cart track overgrown with grass. The horses were blowing heavily, and they pulled up to a walk to let them get their wind. Overhead, long streamers of cloud whipped across the sky but failed to darken the sun that shone warm on their backs. The wind had died to a faint breeze that hardly stirred the hair of the horses’ manes.

  At last they came to a small granite quarry that had given purpose to the cart track. Eric dismounted and picked a tiny flower growing among the stones.

  “This reminds me of you,” he said, holding it out. “A flower among the stones.”

  She got down from Dancer and took the tiny thing from his hand. “It seems a shame that it struggled so hard to grow in such an unfriendly place, only to be plucked up by a passerby.”

  “I’m no passerby, Lisa.” He stood in front of her in the bright sunlight, and the dark fringed grey of his eyes seemed to look clear through her, piercing her heart. The strong brown column of his neck rose up from the open shirt collar to form his well-shaped head covered with the slightly curling red gold hair that trembled in the light breeze. His full mouth was slightly open, showing the white edges of his teeth. Tiny drops of moisture beaded his upper lip. Never had she looked at another human being with such rapt attention to every detail, the pores of his skin, the lock of hair that had tumbled down across his forehead, the faint laugh lines around his mouth.

  When he slowly reached for her and drew her gently toward him, he was no longer a stranger. The feel of his lips was familiar yet piercingly sweet, and the bright sun rocketed orange across the darkness of her closed eyelids. His back was warm and hard beneath her hands, and the smell of him became a part of the bright sweetness. Swept away on a tidal wave of passion, she hardly noticed when they were no longer standing. The honey of his mouth had made her drunk, almost beyond thought and awareness. In her intoxicated vision he still galloped through her mind on the great red horse, plunging out of the flames that threatened to engulf her, and sweeping her along with him to safety. Only a blind stubborn shred of instinct made her pull abruptly away.

  “No, Eric — we mustn’t do this!” She could hear the chink of the bits as the horses grazed unheeded with their bridles still on.

  Eric drew back and looked at her, at first hardly seeming to see her as he struggled away from the tidal pull of his desire. His eyes were blank silver as if on a statue, slowly darkening, almost black with anger.

  “What do you mean?” he asked hoarsely at last. “Don’t you ever toy with me like that again, Lisa. Never.”

  “I’m not toying. I won’t be one of your women you bed down with and forget. I’d rather not have you at all than have it that way. Farm or no farm, I’m not some little country slut you can treat as you like.” She knew she was chancing losing him entirely.

  “So Mark’s been carrying tales, has he?” Eric was clearly furious. Unused to being refused as well? “Did it ever occur to you that he wants you as much as I do? I see him watching you as you move about a room and I want to throttle the both of you.”

  “Stop being so silly. Your brother has eyes only for a lost pas
t. He doesn’t care about me or any living woman, including his wife. I understand why she got fat. You really resent him for having all the money, and you’re willing to think him guilty of anything.”

  “Right now it’s you I want to throttle.” He took hold of her again and kissed her brutally, bruising her lips and forcing her mouth open.

  The threat of force appalled her, and she had a fleeting vision of an unfamiliar room with a low sloping roof and her Uncle Henry coming at her. Instinctively she hit Eric on the side of the face as hard as she could.

  He stood back and looked at her with eyes as flat and black as obsidian, his fists clenched, and the mark of her hand livid against his white face. Without a word he swung about, grabbed up Christian’s reins, and vaulted on. She just managed to take hold of Dancer’s bit as Christian lunged by them and disappeared down the track at a dead run. Dancer plunged about as she mounted, wild to be off after Christian on the homeward path. She quieted him, and they walked back toward the road. At the last jump, Dancer misplaced his feet, pecked badly, and nearly fell. Lisa hardly cared, so deep was her misery. She knew how close she had come to giving in to him, and now she suffered both remorse for the blow and regret for the refusal. Had Eric appeared at that moment, she would have allowed him to make love to her right there in the dirt of the road. But if he had had his way with her, a small voice insisted, how long would it have lasted? He would have to love her enough to trust her with his freedom, or else she would be just another of his many conquests.

  When she neared Hartsite, she met Jarrell on the bay mare. “I happened to see Eric go by alone on the Dunwiddleston road, and I came to look for you. Are you all right?”

  She nodded, tears suddenly blurring her eyes.

  “What happened, or should I ask?”

  “I — we had a fight. I don’t think you have to worry anymore about what I do with Eric. I don’t think he’d touch me now.”

  “You’ve got more character than I’d given you credit for, Lisa. Believe me, you won’t be sorry.”