by Bolton, Ani
Before I hit the ground, a firm hand on my arm steadied me, pulling me out of the worst of the trampling.
I looked up, prepared for Roger.
Instead Lady Penwyth’s amber eyes regarded me with shocked displeasure.
“Miss Eames, what do you here? Come away, come away, before we are both run down!”
I obediently followed Lady Penwyth, tearing my gaze from where Roger was now swallowed in the melee.
“I have been looking for you everywhere, we have guests of a more genteel sort gathered in the parlour, but my goodness! I never expected to find you here, watching the wrestling, of all things. Why Sir Grover continues to condone such a base activity is beyond me, tradition notwithstanding. Let the lower orders amuse themselves with a cockfight or bullbaiting if we must, but wrestling--”
“I didn’t . . . that is, I never intended to . . . ”
“I daresay, but no matter. Pray hurry, the Chutes have come to call, they are very well-set in the district, as are the vicar and his new wife, who is just as young and silly as I thought she would be--”
Lady Penwyth darted a glance over her shoulder at me, and halted. “Are you quite all right? Your face is so flushed. And your hands, good lord! They are steaming! You do not feel feverish, do you?”
Feverish, yes.
“No, no, I am well, just a trifle overset. I’m not very used to crowds.”
“No, you would not be,” she answered, regarding me thoughtfully.
I adjusted myself around my affinity, making sure it was fully suppressed, and struggled to tamp the lid on the strange humors unleashed by the past. I teetered on the brink of finding a dark place within, somewhere I did not want to discover. It was primordial and uncontrollable, and I fervently desired to stay where I had firm control over both my affinity and myself.
“Shall we go?” I said to Lady Penwyth. “I would not like to keep the Chutes waiting much longer.” I scuttled forward, but a body blocked my path.
“Excuse me, mistress.”
Nanny stood before us, twisting her chapped hands together.
“What is it, Nanny?” Lady Penwyth snapped, looking as if her nerves were frayed to the breaking point.
Nanny blanched. “Mr. Damon be asking for Miss Eames. He wishes her to meet him in the apple orchard, if you please mistress.”
“Ah.”
The way Lady Penwyth spoke that one word held a wealth of cautious satisfaction.
“Do go on, Miss Eames. I will make your excuses to the others.”
“Oh! Thank you.” My heart leaped up at Nanny’s words. I could guess just as quickly as his mother what Damon wished to speak to me about.
“Perhaps we shall see both you and my son in the parlour soon, Miss Eames. Hurry now, it will not do to keep him waiting. Our family could use a little good news today,” she murmured as she turned away.
###
The afternoon began to change over to early evening as I followed Nanny as rapidly as I could despite the lingering shakiness within. I was eager to trade Roger’s intense scrutiny for Damon’s amused teasing and let his flippant humor chase away imperatives I had no way of controlling.
Nanny and I made our way out toward the edge of the orchards where apple trees struggled against flocks of starlings pecking at their ripening fruit.
Nanny pointed. “There he be, mistress, waiting by the split tree.”
She indicated a tree gashed by a lightning strike.
“I see him,” I said breathlessly. I had caught sight of a figure, and I ignored a nearby apple tree waving her fruit-laden branch at me. “Thank you, Nanny,” but she had already melted away.
Wood doves called mournfully as I picked my way over dropped apples to the shadowy figure.
A male voice murmured out to me over the shivery strains of the far-away fiddle music: Damon’s, caressing and low. I could see his distinct silhouette against the tree, his elegant frame leaning on the trunk with characteristic languor. I took another eager step forward.
A female voice answered him.
I froze.
“You left me waiting for ’ee all evening last,” she said, and I recognized the voice as Jenny’s, Lady Penwyth’s maid--and mine.
“I explained all that, didn’t I?” came Damon’s reply. “Don’t go on about it so.”
“All right. But what about her? What are ye going to do about her?”
“Do? What do you mean do? We’ve talked about this. I’m going to marry her, but that will not change anything between us.”
The reply was indistinct, but I saw Damon’s arms go around another shadow that I had thought was part of the tree. “Now, now,” he soothed. “You can’t imagine that I’d want her over you? She’s homely, and a cripple, and about as entertaining as a door. But you must see that I have to marry her. The money--”
“Oh aye, that’s all you talk about these days is money,” Jenny replied savagely. “Money, money, money, when what ’ee used to talk about was love.”
Damon released her and shrugged. “It’s the way of the world, love. I need money, and Persia Eames has it. It would be foolish to throw this chance away.”
“And where do I fit in?”
“I’ve already explained.”
“I don’t know as I believe ye anymore.”
“Your jealousy is growing tiresome.” He turned from her as if he would walk away.
Quickly she caught his arm. “Wait. I didn’t mean it--you know how distracted I get when you talk of your marriage. I love ’ee so very much.”
Damon allowed himself to be mollified. He brought his hand up to her hair, gloriously unbound and woven with a garland of gillyflowers. “You know that when I’m getting an heir on this girl, I’ll be thinking of you . . .”
Jenny said something again, but I did not stay to hear Damon’s reply. I would not hear more.
Away I staggered in my herky-jerky gait, uncaring of any injury, uncaring of anything but flight.
The pain, oh. The farther I fled from the two lovers, the greater it grew, and the pinwheel of fire lit earlier by Roger Penwyth became a conflagration in my breast. The pressure was too great: Pretty Peter’s death, the fertile earth’s constant call to my affinity, Roger’s blood-anointed body unlocking scorching desires, and now my humiliation. I could not hold together any longer.
My shell burst. I spilled out, flying toward the trees and the grasses. I flowed into the dirt under my feet. I heard all there, a deafening clamor, and I felt myself spinning away like dried leaves caught in a whirlwind.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The flutter of a moth’s wing roared in my ear.
It beat in rhythm with my heart, leading me out of suffocation back up from the earth. Darkness blocked my vision; I struggled to open my eyes.
It was with horror I realized that they were already open.
Little by little I began to come back into myself. As I did so, a drone began to displace the tiny sounds. The air suddenly stank with the reek of strong body odors.
Oh God.
I stared at a wall of Cornish common folk.
They were muttering angrily as they regarded me with fear-dilated eyes. I flinched as callused hands spiked warding-off signs at me while others clutched stones.
In a panic I whirled about. They surrounded me in a dense ring, their grim expressions offering no hope of escape.
In my numbed fear, my hand involuntarily clenched around a rough object, and I looked down to see that I held a stick of hazel. Suddenly I realized that I had unknowingly drawn a circle of defense in the dirt, a thin line between me and the godly. At the north end, a totem of twigs formed a triangle, while at the south, two birds’ feathers lay in criss-cross. To the east, a spatter of water or animal blood made a small circle.
My voice caught over a cry of despair. To the west, no candle burned. The Inviolate Circle--a protective charm that had come like a savior from within the dim mists of my memory--was incomplete.
As my moan fled to
the purpling sky, my jury took it as a signal to render their justice. As one, they raised shards of native Cornish chalkstone in their left hands.
Though the faces that were beginning to blur, I caught a glimpse of the dairymaid I had seen earlier at the Revel, her expression filled with horror, pity, and a sickening sense of inevitability. She held her own broken piece of chalkstone.
A dart of pain shot across my shoulder. I gasped; the first stone was launched. Another struck my stomach. The third grazed my temple.
Soon it would be over, and I would go back to the earth.
My knees began to buckle. I was falling, falling, feeling no pain at last, only a sense of despair that soon women like me would pass into memory. I nerved myself to hit the earth, eager for her embrace. But I did not touch it.
My body draped across a hard, sinewy arm.
A male voice roared words in the near-extinct Cornish. There came an answer, screamed by a woman full-throated with fear.
I looked up. A man’s torso was bent protectively over me, clad in an exquisitely quilted waistcoat with one pearl button dangling. Through the miasma of terror, I caught a faint but bracing whiff from a lavender sachet, its scent clinging to the threads.
“Get back, the damned lot of you!” English words vibrated to me through the man’s body. “Or I’ll see all of you hanged for this night’s work.”
“She wandered among us casting her spells,” cried a man. “The cowslip began to rustle when she passed by, and there be no wind tonight.”
“She made my girl fall down mazed in her wits,” a woman screeched. “She be a witch!”
“Her foot be the Devil’s Mark!”
“Suffer not a witch to live, the Book says. Even The Penwyth cannot gainsay the Word of the Lord.”
Roger Penwyth’s rock-hard arm flexed under me. “By God I do gainsay the right of ye to commit murder. Get ye gone!”
A man stepped forward from the cluster. I recognized him as one of Sir Grover’s tenant cottagers. “Penwyth, this is naught of your affair. Tend to Lyhalis folk on your side of the Hundred, and leave us to tend to ours.”
“Disperse, and I will tell no one of what you have done. Stay, and you will regret it. For I know you all. The next one who lifts a stone will see how pitiless I am.”
At that the men drew back a little. But the women, some of them maddened by denial of their own latent affinities, urged their men to stand firm against my abomination.
I wriggled feebly in Roger Penwyth’s arms, and he brought me upright to stand in the shelter of his body. Warmth seeped to me where we touched. “Save yourself,” I whispered to him. “They will not relent, for now they are beyond reason.”
“Stand firm,” he murmured. “Lift your head and show your Quality. The common folk will not cross that line readily.”
I did not want to tell him that the common folk crossed it with more regularity than he might imagine, but I did as he bid, aping the haughty stare of my stepmother.
To my amazement, eyes began to lower.
“Go!” he bellowed. One by one, the villagers dropped their stones, and turned away. A few of the more fearful women muttered ominously under their breath. “She cannot always be in high company. One day, she will be alone . . .” But they obediently followed their men.
As the last one reluctantly disappeared, Roger exhaled a deep breath. A fading ray of sunlight echoing off the western horizon illuminated tense features. “They will come back,” he said. “Quickly now, come with me.”
He grasped my hand and pulled me forward. I stumbled after him silently, piecing together the fact that somehow I had wandered away from Hermitage property onto a lonely place on the moor.
The long September day at last began to admit the night, turning Roger’s figure into a graceful shadow striding confidently down a sheep’s track. In no time we came to a long stone wall.
“The walled garden?” I gasped. “Shouldn’t we go back to the main house?”
“If they have decided to waylay us, they would expect us to take that path.”
“Surely they will not come back after your warning.”
A smile slashed in the twilight. “The folk of the moor like me less than they like you. They only heeded me out of habit. I do not count on their forbearance long.”
“But Sir Grover--”
“Sir Grover’s protection is meaningless. You would be dead on the moor, and he would never be able to find those responsible. But there are some places in this Hundred that the cottagers dare not go--and one is here.”
He pulled open the wrought-iron gate, and we slipped inside.
Gloaming cast a pink tint over the garden. The plants rustled as I walked among them, and I threw a fearful glance over my shoulder to gauge Roger’s reaction.
He paid no attention to the quivering stems and leaves. He stood at the gate, listening intently. In the waning light I saw that his hair was wet and slick as if he had held his head under a pump, the golden length wrenched back into an untidy queue. The cut over his eye slit his brow angrily, and blood blotched his breeches.
I began to tremble all over.
Immediately he whipped off his coat. The gleam of silver thread on his sumptuous waistcoat caught the fading light as he settled the coat over my shoulders.
Despite the stifling summer’s heat, I was grateful for it. I felt cold, and the close-woven twill with its faint body warmth was a small kindness amidst a day filled with brutal revelations and cruel acts. A stifled sob broke from me.
“There, there,” he murmured inanely, shifting his weight from foot to foot in discomfort.
“Mr. Penwyth, I am so very grateful,” I began before a stronger sob choked off my words.
He made a gesture of negation, and moved away to stand sentry again. “Why did you let yourself get drawn so far from the main house? Your kind must never relax guard now when so much ignorance is widespread.”
“You know of us--of what I am.”
“I knew as soon as you said you could see the lights by Tol-Pedn-Penwith. In this Hundred, only witches can see the alaw.”
I remembered suddenly that his mother was rumored to be a witch, as was his mistress Tamzin Fulby.
“Please do not tell Sir Grover or Lady Penwyth,” I begged.
“I’m in the habit of keeping my own counsel.”
The affront in his voice made me squirm.
“The cottagers said you were casting spells. Is that true?”
“No.”
“Then what were you doing?”
“I don’t know. I . . . went outside myself.”
“Went outside yourself?”
“I fell apart. You have no idea how difficult it can be to keep it all bottled up, especially when . . . an upset occurs.”
“And what was it that upset you?”
“D-Damon. He said . . . he said I was--”
Dull. Homely and crippled. That he would lie with me out of duty to get an heir on me--only he didn’t know that I could never give him one.
I swallowed another sob, the future stretching before me bleak and cold: an unloved wife of a handsome gentleman. How they would pity him, especially when the heir would never appear. And how they would sneer at me.
Roger regarded me without emotion. “And so the scales fall. Cry, but he will never be worth it.”
“What you mean?”
Roger smiled sourly. “Everyone knows, Miss Eames, that you were brought to Cornwall for my cousin. Your marriage to Damon was to be the capstone of a very lucky year for the Hermitage Penwyths. In fact, the reason I was out on the moor just now was because I’d had my fill of listening to Jocasta receive discreet congratulations from the county gentry.”
Impatiently he pushed back a juniper branch waving for my attention. “Oh yes, they are all in high glee at the Hermitage. Sir Grover is busy mentally balancing his accounting book with the money from your portion. Susannah is praying that the distraction of your engagement will temporarily allow her
more freedom to see her low-born beau, and Damon--”
“Yes? And Damon?”
“Is now wondering where you are.”
“Oh.”
Crickets began to chirp as the night closed in. Faint yelps and bursts of laughter from the ending Revel carried in to the garden on a puff of air. I knew that Lady Penwyth would be waiting impatiently in the blue-swathed parlour for the good news, while far away in the North, her sister Sarah waited for a letter . . .
I put my head in my hands. Everything had become too complicated to bear.
“Take me instead,” came a whisper out of the brewing darkness.
I raised my head. “What?”
“I said: take me instead of Damon. Marry me.”
My eyes burned the shadow trying to read his face. He shifted again in his peculiar way, as if Mr. Newton’s gravity weighed too heavily on his shoulders. “I know how it is when the world seems to conspire against you, Miss Persia Eames. If you were living at Lyhalis, no one, not even the folk of the moor, would dare harm you. None of them come to my side of the Hundred for reasons you would not understand. You would be protected there.”
“But--marriage?” I was having difficulty grasping his words. “It seems an extreme solution, doesn’t it? And one that requires an enormous sacrifice on your part.”
He did not smile over my feeble attempt to prick the tension building between us.“I want to marry you,” he said.
“Why?” I burst out in amazement.
I waited for him to make a remark regarding my rank or wealth, or even something about spiting his cousin. “I--you--I can talk to you.”
To my surprise, he dropped his gaze to hands fisted before him, suddenly looking young and unsure. “I don’t often talk to others with ease. But I can with you. You seem--steady.”
I could not help feeling a sense of deflation. “Dull, you mean.”
“Steady,” he repeated firmly. He looked up and fed me one of his disarming smiles. “I can hold onto you--if you keep your feet on the ground.”
That forced a laugh out of me. He brought a hand up to his brow, as if he became suddenly lightheaded. The sight of his lacerated, beautiful fingers sent an unwelcome prick of heat through me.