This Towering Passion

by Valerie Sherwood

  Cromwell’s men . . . that was why she could not go back to the Cotswolds. She wondered if anybody had told Flora that Jamie was dead. It made her feel sad.

  She roused herself from this reverie. “If I go with you,” she said in a strained voice, “you must understand that I am not your doxie. You’ll not take me again against my will?”

  His expression hardened, and she could not read it

  “Not against your will,” he said shortly.

  They had little to say to each other that day or the next. They tried for London, but the roads were well guarded and Geoffrey hesitated to try to run that iron gauntlet. Instead they sought the back roads, going nowhere. Geoffrey showed no inclination to talk to her, preferring instead to listen for the sound of hooves that might mean soldiery and to keep his erect hawklike head swinging about for any sign of trouble. Lenore understood that Cromwell’s men were beating the countryside for “traitors” and how easily their lives could be forfeit and so followed him doggedly.

  But with Snowfire stumbling from fatigue and herself reeling in the saddle, trying to jar herself awake, she began once again to think of Jamie and her life at Twainmere and great tears rolled down her cheeks. As her breath Caught in a sob, Geoffrey, who had been riding ahead, suddenly swung around in the saddle and cast a penetrating look at her.

  “Why are you crying, Lenore?” he asked.

  “I was thinking of Jamie,” she answered miserably. “Jamie was not a soldier as you are.” Her voice broke. “ 'Twas his father’s claymore he took with him. He’d have had no chance against experienced troops.”

  “Every man must fight a first battle,” he said, dropping back to walk his horse beside hers. “To survive it, ‘tis best to have luck—and your Jamie didn’t have that. But look at it this way, Lenore: battle-luck he had not, but woman-luck he had, for while he lived, he had you.”

  His voice was caressing, but it did not console her. Her tears rained down the harder.

  Geoffrey sighed and peered through the trees. “I discern you’re hungry and will take a sorry view of things until you’ve eaten. It would seem there’s an inn up ahead and no soldiery in sight. Since we’ve no money, think you that you could distract the landlord and his lackeys with some story while I steal a bit of hay and grain for the horses?”

  Lenore nodded, dashing the tears from her eyes and drying her wet face. Snowfire was her darling, and she was determined to see him fed.

  Boldly she rode up to the inn door and dismounted, handing the reins to a stable boy. The landlord had come to the door, and behind him his wife, a slatternly woman, peered out at this unlikely traveler. Lenore drew everyone’s rapt attention by telling them excitedly of an overturned coach on the road a short way back, filled with gentry wearing gold rings and velvet cloaks, crying out for help. “They said they’d pay well for assistance,” she told the landlord.

  The landlord, a fat man with small eyes, straightened to attention at the sound of the word “gold.” He rubbed his hands together. “You, Eben,” he told the boy. “You come with me now—ye can take care of the lady’s horse later. My good wife will fix ye a fine supper, m’lady.”

  Lenore smiled winsomely at him. “Well enough,” she said. “Meanwhile I’ll walk my own horse to the stable. ’Twill limber my bones.”

  The slattern disappeared inside, and her husband and the stableboy started off at a fast clip down the road.

  “Now you’ll have dinner, Snowfire,” Lenore murmured. She was walking him toward the stable when she met Geoffrey. He was laughing.

  “I heard your last words,” he said. “You’ve a natural talent for acting, Lenore.”

  She saw that he was holding a pie.

  “I filched it from the kitchen window while the cook wasn’t looking,” he told her. “We’d best away to eat it before there’s a hue and cry.”

  “Not yet,” said Lenore grimly, leading Snowfire toward the hay where the bay was already contentedly munching. “We can allow them time for a few bites while you and I fill a sack with hay and one with grain.”

  They tarried as long as they dared and then rode swiftly away and found a little copse of trees near a small stream and shared the pie, which was kidney and very good, while the two horses ate their hay and grain.

  “We can follow this stream a ways down,” said Geoffrey, finishing his last bite of pie and licking his fingers appreciatively. “Walking through it will keep dogs from following our trail—in case the landlord takes offense at the loss of a pie and some horse feed.”

  Lenore got up abruptly. She thought she heard a distant baying.

  A little farther on, they left the stream and climbed a low hill where Geoffrey surveyed the countryside. “Does it look safe to you?” she wondered.

  He sighed. “Who can tell these days?”

  They walked their horses down to a country lane, but left it when they saw ahead a knot of Cromwell’s soldiers and knew they’d be stopped and questioned. They plunged into a beech grove and soon were riding crosscountry, and Lenore was quite lost. She hoped Geoffrey knew where he was going.

  When they stopped and slept by a small spring, she was dead tired and fell asleep instantly. She did not see her tall cavalier stand smiling down at her.

  Running for your life was a good bulwark against grief, Lenore found. Though she mourned for Jamie in the days to come, she found Geoffrey to be an interesting distraction.

  She had become more curious about him as they rode. And although she had seen him looking at her sometimes in a way that made her blush and turn her head away, he had not laid a hand on her since that night when he had raped her.

  She wondered if it was gratitude because she had not betrayed him at Boscobel, or if he thought she might run away and be caught and alert the countryside to his probable whereabouts. Or perhaps he was a man of his word.

  “What do you do for a living?” she asked him once as they lounged beneath a tree, eating apples, seeing through its low branches a manor house with inviting mullioned windows that flashed gold in the sun—one of so many manors they dared not approach, for who knew the political leanings of the dwellers therein?

  Geoffrey, about to take a bite out of an apple he had acquired in a raid on another manor house’s storage bin, paused in astonishment. “I am a gentleman, Lenore,” he said with just a touch of frost in his voice. “With the King, I’ve been enjoying the hospitality of those who would receive us.”

  “Beggars,” she said bitterly.

  “But royal beggars,” he said in a blithe voice. “Come, Lenore, why this questioning? Are ye not satisfied with me? Have I not protected you thus far?”

  “I see you have no trade and we will starve,” she said flatly.

  “Ah, that we’ll not,” he said, and his voice had a steely edge. “Not while this arm can hold a sword or a pistol.”

  She did not ask him what he meant. It had a comforting sound, and she had been buffeted enough—she was in need of comfort.

  “We’d best get on,” she said, rising and smoothing down her green dress over her yellow petticoat. “They may have seen us from the manor house when we crossed that open field, and all wayfarers are suspect now.”

  “You’ve learned fast,” he said wryly. But he got to his feet and mounted his patient horse.

  For a time they sought shelter in woods and deserted huts, finding food and drink and fresh hay and grain for their horses in “safe” manors which favored the King. This was a dangerous business, in which Geoffrey usually went on ahead to get the lay of the land, for sometimes the manors had changed hands or were occupied by Cromwell’s men. More than once they rode for their lives with musket balls singing after them. At one place they were told that the King had fled into the West Country, but now was safely got away to France, ’twas hoped. Everywhere they heard grisly stories of those who’d been taken, tortured, killed, or sent to barbaric lives of slavery in the Barbados.

  On their wanderings, she learned Geoffrey’s moods. Somet
imes he was pensive, studying her with a wistful eye and sighing, as if he had some great decision to make. At other times, lighthearted (“Come along, Lenore, for there’s a fair at yonder market town and none to know who we are—we can slip into the town and mix and mingle for an hour or two with the rest!”)

  At the fairs Geoffrey would look around him keenly and sometimes desert her for long intervals. He came back with money or food—once with a cloak. She did not ask him how he came by these things, but she was sure he engaged in dicing—a dangerous game for him, for he had little coin other than that he occasionally was able to borrow from sympathetic supporters of King Charles at “safe” houses, and such supporters were usually hard-pressed themselves.

  But the fairs were few, the hardships ever present. Although they took the name of Daunt to cloak their real identities and let everyone believe them a married couple on the way to visit far-off relatives, there was always the danger of being discovered and transported to Barbados—or worse. For Lenore was haunted by the sight of crossroads gibbets with dangling bodies which now decorated the countryside as grim reminders of the cost of trying to overthrow a revolutionary regime.

  They avoided the crossroads, for these were usually guarded by soldiery, but sometimes from a distance Lenore could see that the ancient stone markers which had guarded England’s crossroads since time immemorial had been vandalized by Cromwell’s troops. Noses were missing from the ancient stone faces, ears, and locks of curling stone hair. The face of England was changing beneath the Roundhead boots ... as her life was changing. Sometimes it made her want to cry.

  They had been riding aimlessly, changing direction to whatever seemed at the moment safest, but had gradually drifted south into Dorset, as they tried to avoid the roving troops who seemed to be everywhere.

  “Faith, we’ve nearly been pushed into the sea,” growled Geoffrey, frowning as they passed the ruins of twelfth-century Corfe Castle. He nodded toward the ruins. “Destroyed by Cromwell’s army five years ago. Another mark against our great Lord Protector.”

  Lenore nodded in silent understanding. She knew what Geoffrey meant. Cromwell’s Ironsides were pulverizing history under the hooves of their horses.

  “Faith, I could use a drink,” he muttered.

  She knew a sudden sympathy for him, this man she had tried so hard to despise. For it was he who bore the heavy responsibility for their safety, he who had put his broad back between her and the flying balls from the Roundhead musketry. If he was edgy, she guessed the cause: he wanted her.

  Though to her surprise, after that first night, Geoffrey had respected her grief. She had watched him suspiciously as the days went by, half expecting him to seize her unaware or from behind and take her by force. But he did not take advantage—not even when he came upon her unexpectedly when she was bathing in a stream near which they had pitched camp and she rose dripping and naked from her bath and almost blundered into him along the bank. His eyes had lit with a certain roguish delight, but he had turned away abruptly while Lenore dressed herself with trembling fingers. Nor had he spoken of it when she appeared, red and embarrassed, but fully gowned.

  It was a hard life, like that of the running deer in the forest, but it had its compensations. Sometimes on crystal clear mornings they feasted on a fat fish from the rivers, or a hare Geoffrey brought down. They lounged in shady groves at midday and ah and talked. Once, by a small fire hastily made in the shelter of a cliff, she sang village songs in a low voice while Geoffrey lay on his back and looked at the stars Geoffrey told her of London, of Paris and life in the royal court. She marveled to hear him, and it made her see a great world outside, of which she had only dreamed. He made it seem near and close and reachable as she listened lazily to the sound of his deep rich voice beside her.

  That Geoffrey wanted her she was well aware. It gleamed in his gray eyes as the days progressed, in the lingering touch of his hand when he happened to brush her. She was all too tinglingly aware of her tall cavalier. Less and less she was stabbed by thoughts of Jamie, reckless Jamie who had left his people for another country—and then ridden out to die for his own in the end. Before that dark wolfish face with its saturnine smile the memory of Jamie faded day by day. And gradually Geoffrey alone occupied her thoughts.

  What happened was glorious . . . and inevitable.

  CHAPTER 5

  From Corfe they rode west into Devonshire, skirting Lyme Regis and Sidmouth, for the soldiery were harrying the countryside there, seeking out Royalists to bring them to trial, and the roads were still unsafe for such as they. North of Exeter they crossed the River Exe, by night for added safety. Because Geoffrey grumbled that he was tired of fleeing the Ironsides, they turned southwest into the wilds of Dartmoor, beautiful and desolate. Pursuit in this rugged terrain seemed unlikely, and Lenore, whose grief was fading, although she did not yet realize it, could give herself up to enjoyment of the beauty of the wild countryside.

  Hawks and ravens rode the skies above them, and red deer, startled, shied away from their path and disappeared across the coarse grasses into thick clumps of oak and ash. They passed dolmens and cairns, and skirted the edges of the great central swamp where five great rivers including the Dart and the Taw had their source. Since the weather had continued unseasonably warm, they pitched their camps below rugged granite tors that rose high and majestic above the plain. Here above tiny campfires they roasted the birds and rabbit. Geoffrey brought down by arrow from a bow he had fashioned himself. This was a further precaution against discovery by prowling bands of soldiers who might be attracted by the sound of a shot.

  As they rode south, Lenore had become more and more aware of Geoffrey’s concentration on her. It made her uneasy, although she refused to show it. He was a strong, virile man and although he had been meticulously polite in his treatment of her since that first night somehow she sensed that this brittle film of politeness which existed between them was about to snap and elemental feeling would be unleashed.

  She noted how he found excuses to brush her—reaching across her to pick up his bow, or a stick of wood for the fire. Always she felt his touch go through her as if her body were a lute and a master musician had idly rested hit hand upon the strings. It disturbed her that Geoffrey should have this incredible effect upon her, so much that now she backed away unobtrusively if he came too close. That he was aware of this she was sure, for there was something restive in his flashing glance that made her remember that first night when she had lain beneath him, struggling vainly until she had surrendered herself to splendor.

  Came a night of big brilliant low-hanging stars and a big white moon that silvered the moor and turned the treetops into swaying silver lace. Somewhere from the trees a dove cooed sleepily, and an owl’s wild call broke the silence. They were camped under great gnarled oaks, had dined on hare and cold stream water. Now their campfire was out; only the tang of its smoke remained.

  Geoffrey had risen and was pacing restlessly about. There was something of the caged tiger in him tonight; all day she had noticed it. Now he came, his boots making no sound on the soft turf, and stood just behind her.

  It made her nervous having him so close, and she leaped up quickly to face him.

  Although it was dark in the woods, the moonlight caching down through the branches illuminated his broad-shouldered form, his aggressive stance as he stood there, feet planted with determination. Moonlight gleamed on his dark waving hair as he bent slightly from his tall height to survey her. That it illuminated her own rapt face, as well, she was not aware.

  But Geoffrey was. He saw the amethyst lights flickering in violet eyes shadowed by dark lashes, her golden hair cascading in a shimmering shower around her bare shoulders. That moon of the moors had paled her molten hair to the soft gleam of yellow metal, he thought idly—the precious stuff men fought and died for. He was agonizingly aware how the silvery light highlighted the pearly tops of her round breasts. God, how she stirred him! She with her insolent walk and that flung
challenge in her eyes. The throbbing memory of how it had been to hold her in his arms made his loins ache with desire. He had given her his promise that he would not take her against her will, but of late her soft, relaxed gestures, the smiling way she regarded him when she thought he could not see her, had told him that if he took her it would not be against her will, but something she desired as much as he, whatever her soft lips said about it.

  He straightened his broad shoulders and took a deep breath. She had reproached him for not respecting her grief. Well, he had respected her grief. Week by week he had waited for that grief to abate, for the sad distant look to leave her face. But now—his blood rose in him, pounded impatiently in his temples as he looked at her— now he would wait no longer, brook no refusal.

  “Come here, Lenore,” he said lazily.

  She smiled warily but did not move.

  A moment later his long arm had reached out and hauled her close against his chest. At the very touch of her a thrill went through him and—yes, he thought he felt her tremble, too.

  Lenore had known this moment would come. But she had pushed away the thought, nervously. Now a breathless tension possessed her that made her throat dry. The buttons of his coat cut into her soft breasts and she moved restively.

  “Why d’ye not obey me?” he asked, his voice casual as he toyed with a lock of her long hair.

  This was the moment she’d dreaded, feared—wanted She was a free woman, no longer handfasted, and he a free man. But she would not be made his easily.

  “I’ll obey no man,” she said, tossing her head so that her bright hair shimmered and fell along his arm. “And certainly not you.”

  He laughed and tilted up her chin to smile down into her reckless face that regarded him steadily, for all her heart was beating with blows that sounded in her ears like drums.