I should leave him, she told herself bitterly. A man who would lie to me, who would use me thus! But even as the thought crossed her mind she felt herself weakening. The truth was—she did not want to leave him. She wanted to stay forever by his side.
She covered her flushed face with her hands. “Why did you not tell me, Geoffrey? Why let me think—?”
“I could not bear to see the look on your face I see there now,” he said simply, his dark face fraught with the anguish he felt for this golden angel he loved. “But today when you looked at the church with such yearning, I knew I could keep the truth from you no longer. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me, Lenore?”
Her hands dropped away, and she saw that his sober, hawklike face was near and close, his stern lips only a kiss away. She could feel like a throb in her veins the pressure of his concern for her, of his desire for her— yes, of his love for her. For that was love she read in his worried gray eyes.
His voice deepened. “Humbly I beg your forgiveness, Lenore, for you will always be the wife of my heart.”
Something in that rich tone tore painfully through all the barriers she had thrown up against him, broke down all her well-guarded defenses.
“Oh, Geoffrey, it will take getting used to,” she said in a blurred voice.
He sighed. “That I know. But at least there is truth between us now. Wait here, I’ll bring back your horse.”
Lenore stood mechanically pulling twigs from her hair and watched him go. Watched that straight, arrogant back, that swinging stride—the walk of a vigorous man in his prime. A man who had had many women—and who along the way had married one of them. A man she would never cease to love ...
Her hands clenched convulsively. Nothing was changed, she told herself dully. Nothing was changed. She loved him as much as ever, and he loved her. Only now there was this Frenchwoman, this Letiche, who bore his name. They had lived together for a week in France; suppose Letiche bore him a child? Oh, no, that would not happen, it would be too awful. Lenore turned her head away and let the wind fan her hot wet cheeks.
I love him, she told herself fiercely, even while something inside her wept. He is mine. And again, with grim determination: nothing has changed between us.
Ironically, next day they chanced on a country wedding procession, their path to the church strewn with rushes. The bride, a fresh-faced village girl with shy eyes and long fair hair, was clad in the traditional russet, with a circlet of corn-ears around her head.
Brooding, Lenore paused to watch and was reminded of Meg’s wedding, which had been very merry. A flowery garland had barred the couple’s way at the cottage gate, and the bridal pair had had to jump it or pay a forfeit. Tom had cleared it readily, but Meg had jumped over and caught her heel in her russet gown and would have fallen had not Tom leaped forward and caught her in his arms.
Lenore remembered the adoring look in Meg’s eyes as Tom Prattle swept her up in triumph and carried her over the threshold of his cottage, how Meg had pledged him everlasting love by dipping a sprig of rosemary in the wine they drank at the end of the ceremony . . . and within a month Tom had been reeling home drunk and knocking over bowls and cream crocks onto the hand-stitched house linen with which Meg had lovingly filled her bride-chest.
Lenore sighed, turned her back on the procession, and galloped after Geoffrey, who had gone on ahead. Perhaps marriage wasn’t everything. Perhaps the important thing was to find a man who loved you and stay with him, whether the banns were posted or not.
For a flashing moment she remembered Jamie, who at another village wedding had won the bride’s garters and drunk too much bride-ale. Golden, faithless Jamie . . .
She cast a sharp look of appraisal at the dark warrior who rode along beside her. Was he any better?
Ah, she had to believe he was . . . she had to, for ’twas his child she carried in her body.
Lifting her chin, she rode on. Nothing has changed, she told herself defiantly. Geoffrey loves me—he will always love me. Nothing has changed.
Geoffrey turned to her. “In Oxford,” he promised, “everything will be better.”
Better? Lenore gave him an odd look. Could anything ever be better than the close idyllic relationship they had shared in the lonely forests, the wild moors? They would be enjoying civilized life again, that was true, but— better?
For a moment, like Lot’s wife, Lenore looked back, treacherously, at what she had lost. Like yesterday’s roses, shedding their petals, memories drifted through her mind, blowing softly, fleetingly, through the doorway of a past on which the door was now closing. Sharply, almost with physical pain, she recalled the splendor of the mornings beneath the high tors when she had waked warm and blissful in Geoffrey’s arms with only the wild sky and the soft earth around them, and stretched out her arms to greet the new day and found them filled— with Geoffrey and his love for her. Like flower petals drifting down a stream—lovely but swiftly gone—bright pictures floated by: of herself standing beside Geoffrey with the sea wind whipping her hair on the ruined heights of Tintagel Castle, looking out across the sea toward Ireland, and for a magic moment half believing that he was Lancelot and she his Guinevere. Riding with him beside her through endless virgin forests to little woodland clearings where they warmed themselves by tiny campfires and sought each other’s waiting arms—wonderful secret places where they and their love were alone with God.
Would Oxford be better? She hoped so. Fervently she hoped so.
BOOK II
THE MISTRESS
PART ONE
* * *
THE TOAST OF OXFORD
Oxford, England 1651—1652
CHAPTER 9
Through a drizzling rain they rode north across the Berkshire Downs to Oxford, that ancient Saxon city which had once stood on the frontier between Wessex and Mercia. Here the River Cherwell, flowing south, joined the Thames on its meandering journey eastward toward London and the sea. Southeast lay the beechwoods of the Chiltern Hills and to the northwest rose the Cotswolds, where Lenore had left her young dreams.
Wet and miserable, Lenore hardly saw the vista of Oxford rising ahead of her. Instead she kept her eyes bent on the rutted road where their horses’ hooves found uneasy footing on the slippery clay. She did not care that here in the palace of Beaumont, Richard the Lion-Heart had been born, or that Sir Walter Raleigh had been educated here—she had been sick again this morning and now as they slogged through the cold mud, she felt that she would never again be dry or warm.
The rising spires of this alien city gave her unease. Oxford was not a village like Twainmere, she realized with a sudden sense of panic, it was a center of learning and commerce. Physical comforts they might have here, but in other more important ways their lives would change, and with a flash of insight she knew it would not be for the better. Hunted though they had been, in a way these past weeks they had wandered through a dream world, Geoffrey and she. Here in Oxford they would be surrounded by other people, people who would change and shape them; they would no longer be—like Adam and Eve—alone in their private Eden.
More than that plagued her. A feeling of dread, a sense of doom, of something waiting . . . waiting. Oxford had been here all along, but Geoffrey had carefully avoided this refuge. Why?
She gave him a narrow look. What hadn’t he told her
“I see no soldiers,” he observed, reining up to survey the road ahead. “The countryside must be tired of hunting down Royalists.”
“Yes,” said Lenore bitterly. “Soon Cromwell’s Ironsides will have killed them all or transported them to the Barbados as slaves!”
He shot her a troubled glance. She had had a bitter tongue ever since she had learned of his French wife. He sighed. After all, who could blame her? “You’ll feel better,” he assured her, “when you’ve sat a while by a warm fire and dried your clothes.”
Lenore gave him back a scathing glance. “Then don’t dawdle here talking about it,” she said, sneezing. “Let’
s on!”
Geoffrey narrowed his eyes for one more keen look up ahead, but the countryside appeared to be peaceful. They slogged on.
Just before they crossed the Thames, the rain stopped and the sun broke through the clouds, flashing gold upon the city’s honey-colored Gothic spires and towers. But when they rode past Christ Church it had started raining again, and the city they entered was wrapped in a depressing gray gloom.
“Charles I held his last Parliament here,” Geoffrey commented as they clip-clopped down High Street. “Here Cromwell beseiged him during the Civil War.”
For a moment their eyes met, and she knew they were both wondering if the murdered King’s son, whom Geoffrey had followed overseas and finally to defeat and rout at Worcester, would ever reign in England as Charles II
But safety, more than politics, nagged at her in this old university town.
“Think you we are safe riding in so openly?” she wondered as they negotiated the sodden, rain-emptied streets. “Should we not have waited until dark?”
Geoffrey shrugged. “We’ve not been stopped—perhaps because the weather is uncommon cold and wet; it may be those who’d harass us are huddled in warm taverns. Though, faith, tis no wetter than I remember Oxford to be.” He frowned as he noted Lenore was shivering and cut abruptly toward an inn where small-paned windows glimmered from the fire within. He alighted and over her protests swung her off her horse and carried his bedraggled lady over the mud into a warm firelit common room. There he left her, drying her skirts before the fire, and went to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of his old nurse.
Facing the roaring fire in the big stone fireplace, Lenore suddenly felt eyes upon her and turned her head, her face flushed with the heat, to note that a young man had strolled into the empty room and now stood at gaze, feet wide apart, admiring her. She blinked, for his was quite the handsomest face she had ever seen. About Geoffrey’s height, though thinner, he had an arrogant bearing, a pale complexion, and a head of thick hair the color of caramel satin. He was foppishly dressed in honey-colored velvets with more Mechlin at his throat than the law allowed, and he was taking in the details of her trim figure with a pair of languorous caramel eyes.
Before this bold inspection, Lenore hastily lowered her skirts and turned her back primly to the fire, regretting that since his entrance she could not lift her wet skirts so that her bottom—chilled and tired from riding—could feel the bracing heat. She sighed and went over and sat down rather stiffly at a table.
A pretty vacant-faced girl flounced in from the kitchen with a blackjack of warm port for Lenore and gave the new entrant a delighted glance.
“Hello, Dorothy,” he said to the girl as she passed. “Bring me some ale to warm the liver, for we’ve had naught but rain these three days past.”
The girl Dorothy hastily set down the black leather tankard before Lenore, forgot her, and turned her full attention to the newcomer. “Right away, Master Gilbert,' she said in a flustered voice, and Lenore thought, in shrewd amusement: Dorothy knows our Master Gilbert rather too well, if the look she gave him is any indication
Master Gilbert gave Dorothy a familiar pat on the rump as she passed him on her way back to the kitchen, and she jumped and giggled and swished her brown linsey-woolsey skirts away from him. Master Gilbert turned his bright inspection back upon Lenore, who looked pointedly away from that slender, handsome face, the skin almost girlishly perfect and showing no sign of the weathering a soldier, for instance, might have. Too pretty, she thought contemptuously, but when Dorothy returned and Master Gilbert engaged her in conversation as he drank his ale, Lenore stole another look at him. More maids than Dorothy would find this vision attractive, she admitted. And he must have courage, too, to wear his hair so long and his clothes so fine—although in truth many of the Lord Protector’s cohorts—including his own wife, if gossip was to be believed—dressed finely, so Puritan drabness had not reached everywhere in England!
The wine warmed her and after another stint of standing by the fire, her back pointedly toward Gilbert, now working on his second ale, she began to feel quite restored, but worried about what might be keeping Geoffrey. It was a relief when at last the oaken door swung open and Geoffrey strode in, cloak swirling about his lean legs. He cast a keen look about him, and so relieved was Lenore to see him safe returned that she jumped up—not noticing that the handsome fop nearby had hastily turned his back at the sound of the door creaking open.
“What news?” she asked eagerly.
“Bad news, I’m afraid,” he said in a low voice. “I found the house where she’d been living readily enough, but she and her son have been gone these twelve months. Tis reported they’ve joined the Quakers and have crossed the sea to the American Colonies.” He was peering intently over her shoulder as he spoke, and his puzzled face suddenly cleared. “Gilbert!” he cried in a strong voice. “Gilbert Marnock!”
Master Gilbert of the caramel hair swung around, and his handsome face mirrored disbelief. He leaped up and came over to clap Geoffrey on the back. “Geoffrey! Lord, I feared it was one of my creditors seeking me! Tis a pleasant surprise!”
Geoffrey wrung the proffered hand. “What brings you to Oxford, Gil?”
Gilbert’s winsome smile lit his sunny countenance. “My parents knew not what to do with me, so at long last they decided to give me an education!”
Geoffrey threw back his dark head and laughed. “Faith, they took their time about it! For we’re the same age! But what of the Lady Millicent? You were to marry her, I thought.”
A grimace passed over that handsome face, and a lace-cuffed arm lifted as if to brush away cobwebs. “How like you to remind me! When the Lady Millicent recovered from her long-standing malaise sufficient to wed, her father had already plunged into the King’s cause—and as you can imagine, it brought him down. Her fortune’s none so fair these days. As for me, though I’ve fled the betrothal, I’ve not yet begun my studies here—and may not, for I’ve no taste for books, as you know.”
Lenore watched this scintillating fellow, puzzled. Was he then a fortune-hunter? But Geoffrey turned his broad smile toward her. “Lenore, this is my cousin—Gilbert Marnock.”
Instantly Gilbert made a lavish leg to the lady. “So fair a face I have not seen in Oxford, Mistress Lenore,” he said gallantly, with a ring of truth to his voice. “Have you come then to make our gray skies sunny?”
“She has come,” said Geoffrey dryly, his voice lowering, “as I have—to find a safe hidey-hole until the hue and cry for Royalists dies down.”
A slight change in the expression of those languorous caramel eyes told Lenore that Gilbert Marnock had upgraded her from courtesan to aristocrat in his mind. She gave him a dazzling smile.
“We heard you had come over from Holland with the King, Geoffrey—but word reached Marnock Hall that you’d died in Worcester.”
“ ’Twas an exaggeration,” smiled Geoffrey. “As you now perceive.”
Gilbert shot a glance toward the kitchen door. “This is no place to talk. Dorothy’s a good lass, but after e couple of tankards she’ll tell any likely lad all she knows, and add a dollop of imagination to boot! We’d best adjourn to my lodgings—right next door.”
Minutes later they had climbed the wooden stairs of the half-timbered Tudor house next door and were entering the most cluttered lodgings Lenore had ever seen. A tumble of handsome clothing and books and tankards and trenchers were strewn everywhere.
“Come ye in!” cried Gilbert hospitably.
Geoffrey removed Lenore’s still-damp cloak and pulled off his own soaking one, hanging them on an overcrowded nail in the door. Gilbert tossed piles of his clothes from the room’s two chairs into the nearest corner—already heaped high. With a careless velvet arm he cleared a small oak table top and dug from the clutter of a cupboard not only wine but three silver goblets which he polished on his velvet sleeve. Lenore, shivering from the contact with her damp cloak, accepted her goblet gratefully and felt th
e hot liquid warm her body. Still digging in a heaped-up jumble, Gilbert came up with a box of sweetmeats which he offered to Lenore with a careless, “My mother sends them down to me from Marnock Hall—she thinks me monstrous underfed.” And then, seating himself gracefully on the edge of the oak table with one long leg dangling, he took a sip of wine.
" Tis good to see you again, Geoffrey,” he said in a hearty voice, although his gaze did not leave Lenore’s bodice. “A fascinating tale we heard of you—of course, discounted it.”
Geoffrey raised his dark brows quizzically.
“We heard you were not only dead, but risen! ’Twas reported your ghost was seen at the Wells Fair consorting with the Angel of Worcester—that lovely naked lady who rode in like Godiva to aid the King!”
“I was there,” murmured Geoffrey, with a humorous look at Lenore.
Lenore’s color heightened, and her round breasts rose and fell in indignation. Was she never to be rid of that ridiculous story? It had even reached Oxford!
Geoffrey leaned back in his chair, stretching his long legs in their muddy boots. To Gilbert’s curious, “Where’ve ye actually been, Geoffrey?” he sighed.
“Running,” he said, downing his wine and accepting another. “Running the length and breadth of England, Gil. Faith, I’m tired of it! But with the hue and cry dying down a bit we’d hoped to find safe lodgings in Oxford. But I find my old nurse removed to the Colonies. I looked for Ned Bight but was told at his lodgings that he’s away and may be gone the night.”
“Ned’s courting a girl at Marston across the Cherwell. He may be gone for days! At any rate, he’s likely to linger until his betrothed’s family throws him out.”
“So that’s the way of it? Think you he will marry her?”
“Like as not. He says he’s been thinking of settling down.”
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