This Towering Passion

by Valerie Sherwood

  After that the bridesmaids retreated, passing with much giggling the groom, attired for bed with a nightcap hanging down over one eye and being escorted to his marriage bed by unsteady-footed friends.

  “Ned will ne’er survive it!” grinned Geoffrey. Lenore gave him a wan look. Lally was the one who might not survive this wedding—Ned and Lavinia would be fine, she thought sadly.

  No sooner were the couple in bed together than the whole company poured into the room to wish them happiness and drink their health once again. Lenore, exhausted, was glad when the curtains around the great fourposter were finally drawn and the party withdrew below stairs for an evening of revelry. There would be no honeymoon, she knew, for Ned would stay here with the bride’s family for a time, and then he would take her to the new house his father was building for them in Somerset on land he had purchased for Ned.

  The wedding guests so overflowed the house, and so raucous was their merriment, that sleep was impossible and they made their way back to Oxford, yawning, via the family coach and the ferry at dawn. Lenore knew she looked haggard. Exhausted, she let Geoffrey undress her and put her to bed as if she were a child.

  Tenderly he kissed her forehead and drew the coverlet up about her neck and offered her a glass of wine. Lenore shook her head and smiled at him through a daze of fatigue.

  “Lenore,” he sighed, taking her hand and looking down at her ringless fingers, caressing those fingers as he spoke. “There will be better times for us. When the child is born and you can travel distances again, what say ye to America? In the Colonies a man can indenture himself for, say, four years—and after that he’s free again and can make a fortune if he’s a mind to.”

  Lenore’s eyes opened wide. For a moment fatigue left her and she felt excited, as she had in the Cotswolds on fair days. The American Colonies seemed far away and hospitable and beyond the law. Who would care there if Geoffrey’s name was Wyndham or Daunt? Who would know that he had a French wife?

  “I’d like that,” she said honestly. “Oh, Geoffrey, I’d like that so much.”

  “I’m trying to arrange it, but ’tis devilish hard without money.”

  Lenore was smiling as she went to sleep.

  Geoffrey had dressed and gone out before she awakened, but she opened her eyes to a loud banging on the door. “Lenore, open the door—Gwynneth had your tray ready and I’ve brought it up.”

  Lenore got up and opened the door. Lally brought in the tray and set it down, then straightened up to confront Lenore. Her face was white and drawn. “Is it done, then?” she asked tensely. “And is Ned happy? Oh, Lenore, do you think he will be happy with her?”

  Sleepy and disoriented, Lenore stared at Lally. Her rose silk dress was so shimmery, her slate-blue eyes so sad. Lenore pulled up a chair for Lally and went back to sit on the bed. She ran a hand through her long hair.

  “It is done,” she said. “They are married and”—she studied Lally’s mask-like white face—“I think he will be happy with her,” she added hesitantly.

  “Tell me about it—and eat your breakfast.” Lally sank down on the bed studying her gloves; she did not look at Lenore.

  “I’m not hungry,” sighed Lenore. “Lavinia is pretty and . . . and rather silly. But I think she loves Ned; at least, she seemed very happy.”

  Lally winced.

  “There was a great deal to eat and drink—far too much, and most of the guests were reeling or sleeping it off in corners when I left. Lavinia wore the handsomest bridal gown I have ever seen,” Lenore continued. “It was white. All the guests wore beautiful scarves in bright colors, and Ned gave his friends gloves like these.” She nodded at the fringed gauntlets Geoffrey had received, which were tossed carelessly on the table beside the tray.

  Lally turned to regard them. “Ned always had good taste,” she murmured.

  “And a deep pocket,” said Lenore on a note of asperity. “His father has bought land for him and is building them a home in Somerset.”

  “So the wedding went well?”

  “Yes. The bridesmaids carried rosemary branches— gilded. The ring was plain gold. There were beautiful wedding gifts, and a great deal of dancing and pledging the bride’s health, and that night—”

  “I think I have heard enough,” said Lally in a thick voice. “I only wanted to—” her voice shook—“to know if you think Ned will be happy. And you have told me he will.” Suddenly she turned a tormented face to Lenore. “Is—is Lavinia very pretty?” she asked hoarsely.

  Lenore nodded, swallowing. “She is a little thing, with a great deal of dark hair and bright eyes and a tiny mouth. She seems lost in her rich gowns, they billow about her, and she smiles a great deal—and giggles. Yes, Lally, she is very pretty.”

  “I am glad for him,” said Lally in a broken voice. She brushed her hand across her eyes and rose. “Ned wanted to provide for me, but I have already made my arrangements.”

  “You—you have?”

  “Yes.” Lally moved rapidly to the door. She almost blundered into it, and Lenore guessed her vision was blurred with tears. “I am moving in with Gilbert.” She ran through the door with a swish of rose silk skirts and closed it quickly behind her. There was a sound of finality in the closing of that door.

  Lenore’s heart ached for her. She hoped Lally would find happiness with Gilbert, but she doubted that was possible.

  Geoffrey came home, bringing her a pouch of apples— for just before arriving in Marston she had expressed a mad desire for apples. She was full of fitful fancies where food was concerned these days, suddenly dying for a potato or something more exotic at odd hours—and sometimes losing her taste for it, even before it could be procured for her.

  She was pleased that Geoffrey had remembered her ardently expressed desire for apples—even though that desire had now departed. Carefully she arranged them in a bowl, polished one against her petticoat, and bit into it. Geoffrey sat down across the table facing her.

  “Did you really mean what you said about going to the Colonies, Geoffrey?”

  He flashed her a quick smile and polished an apple on his sleeve before he answered. “And would ye like that?” She nodded.

  “Then I must find a way to make it possible.” He leaned back, rested a booted foot on a nearby bench, and frowned. “Money is an obstacle, even if one is not so nice in the way one comes by it.”

  She did not press him. To show too much eagerness might lead him recklessly into danger. Meanwhile there was to be an even more important event—the birth of their first child, conceived on their first, memorable night of loving.

  CHAPTER 16

  Lenore, who had felt so well during the bulk of her pregnancy, now found herself nervous and short-tempered and full of aches and pains. She felt incensed that as her waist thickened and she moved about with difficulty, the wild young lads had all fallen away, leaving only young Michael, with his cherubic face and dog-like devotion, who came over and sat with her on the excuse of tutoring her in penmanship. Even bookish Lewis now occupied himself elsewhere.

  Feeling ill much of the time, her fingers all thumbs as she tried to work on the baby’s layette, she was brusque and quarrelsome with Geoffrey. He bore it well, blaming it on her condition. But on gloomy days she fell to brooding about his wife in France and imagined Letiche sailing for England and converging on Oxford to whisk Geoffrey away. The unlikelihood of such an event comforted her, but the thought that it could happen gave her world a sour flavor. Sometimes the wine of youth was turned to vinegar.

  Lally—now living with Gilbert—stopped by sometimes, but she was dispirited, not her former breezy self. Once she sported a purple bruise beneath her right eye and replied shortly to Lenore’s query that she had fallen. Lenore was sure Gilbert had struck her, and she worried.

  “Ned and Lavinia have left Marston—they have gone to Somerset,” she told Lenore in a dispirited voice. “He was in Oxford today, and I saw him for a moment. He is very busy overseeing the building of their new home.
He said he missed talking to me.” She sounded wistful.

  Lenore had thought Ned might miss talking to spirited Lally after scatter-brained Lavinia’s giggles. “You should forget him,” she counseled sternly.

  “Easy to say,” murmured Lally. “Lenore, the reason I came by today is there’s a play being given this afternoon in a barn outside town.”

  “A play?” Lenore was fascinated. Although plays were strictly forbidden in Cromwell’s England and the Puritans had closed the theatres, she had learned in Oxford that there were threadbare roving companies of strolling players who still wandered the back lanes when the weather was clement and held their plays in forest glades, in barns, even in caves. But these were of necessity furtive gatherings, for should the strict Puritan authorities descend on them, they well might fine the audience and whip the players out of town tied to a cart-tail. “I’ve never seen a play, Lally,” Lenore admitted.

  “I know ’tis near your time, and with Geoffrey away you hesitate to go out,” said Lally. “But there’ll be a cart to take a group of us there, and I’d take it as a favor if you’d accompany us, Lenore. You see . . ..” she hesitated and her slate-blue eyes were clouded. “I’m not getting along well with Gilbert.”

  Lenore’s gaze flew to Lally’s black eye.

  “And it’s not the first time,” Lally muttered. “Although ’tis the first time the bruise showed.”

  “Leave him!” cried Lenore fiercely.

  “That’s what I must decide,” said Lally in a weary voice. “But in the meantime, it would help to have someone . . . along with me today.” Her voice faltered a little.

  “You see, Lenore, it hurts Gilbert’s pride that I still love Ned. He can sense it. I suppose that wounds a man.”

  “Certainly I’ll go with you,” said Lenore warmly, and Lally gave her hand a quick squeeze and left, promising they’d be back to pick her up.

  In the big barn that warm afternoon Lenore sat on a pile of hay beside Lally and watched the play—her first. On her other side a pair of lovers whispered and giggled, never took their eyes off each other, and so missed the entire performance. On Lally’s other side Gilbert sulked, rarely laughing even at the actors’ best sallies. Lenore watched with rapt attention as the players—all men, though some were dressed in skirts portraying women’s roles—wearing their ordinary clothes, presented Will Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  But the gaiety of the performance was spoiled for her when, in the general buzz of conversation between acts, a name jumped out at her from someone speaking just behind her: “Letiche d’Avigny,” and someone else said, “You mean Letiche Wyndham?”

  They were speaking of Geoffrey’s French wife!

  Lenore sat straighter and then hunched down as another voice muttered sharply, “Hush! Can’t you see—?” Lenore scrounged down in the hay and tried to make herself smaller; not for worlds would she have looked behind her to see who was speaking.

  Lally, who’d been talking to Gilbert in a low tone, turned and asked anxiously, “You’re so flushed, Lenore. Do you feel all right?” She snapped resentfully, “I’m fine,” and Lally looked surprised.

  But for her the play was ruined. She hardly heard the rest of it and yearned for it to be over. She only nodded when, at the end of the performance, Gilbert seemed to have mellowed and Lally murmured a “thank you” in her ear as the returning party of playgoers let Lenore out at Mistress Watts’s in the gathering dusk.

  She walked cumbersomely upstairs and opened the door to her lodgings to find Geoffrey waiting for her, hands clasped behind his back, pacing the floor. He swung toward her as she came in, looking exceedingly tall and with a grim expression on his dark face.

  “Where’ve ye been?” he challenged. “Mistress Watts said ye rode off in a cart. I knew not where to seek you.”

  “I went to a play with Lally and some others,” she defended.

  “A play!” he exploded. “Lally must be mad! Faith, had the authorities got wind of it and taken actors and audience together in their net, think you they would not have questioned you? Tis your life would be forfeit! So Lally is carting you around to plays these days! Does she not know how often such performances are raided?”

  “Well, nothing happened,” said Lenore in a sulky voice, pulling off her gloves. Actually the jolting ride in the cart had made her feel a bit ill.

  He was not to be put off. “Since I cannot always be here to protect you, promise me you’ll do nothing rash when my back is turned.”

  “I do nothing rash whether your back is turned or not!” she flashed. “I wait, wait, wait to have your baby! I’m so awkward I can hardly get around. I’m tired of waiting, Geoffrey! And,” she added accusingly, “someone in the crowd mentioned your French wife.”

  He looked taken aback, but Lenore, ill and irritable, put her hands to her throbbing temples. “Tell me of Letiche,” she said in a hard voice, “for all seem to know more of her than I do!”

  Geoffrey sighed. His face looked drawn. “I have told you about her, Lenore.”

  ‘Tell me again.”

  “Lenore, you flay yourself with these thoughts. ’Tis—”

  She swung on him like a tigress, her face white, eyes blazing. "Tell me, Geoffrey! I have a right to know more about this woman whose very existence denies my child a name!”

  “She does not concern you!” he shouted, flung out and was gone for three days.

  Feeling desolate, as if Geoffrey might never return, Lenore struggled out and clumsily walked the cobbled streets. She had begun to think much on death. It could be she would, die when her baby was born ... in this city where so many had died before her. Her thoughts were morbid. Oxford was a bloody place. Here in St. Frideswide’s priory all the Danes in the city had once been collected and burned alive. Here the murdered Fair Rosamond, Henry II’s beautiful mistress, lay buried, her epitaph calling her the Rose of the World . . . and in an unmarked grave somewhere lay Amy, wife to Robert Dudley, that favorite of Queen Elizabeth, who perhaps had had her hurled downstairs to her death in a fit of jealousy.

  Mistress Watts sensed Lenore’s despondency and had Gwynneth bring her up a hot posset, saying it would give her strength. Cooped up in her lodgings, Lenore fretted, for with her new unwieldy awkwardness, walking tired her. She wandered downstairs and fell into conversation with the cook. The cook had been married ten years and wanted a child. She dipped out a cup of soup from the kettle with a long iron dipper and sat down and told Lenore earnestly that she was drinking the waters—sold at a guinea a bottle—of the holy well behind the little church at Bimsey, said to make women fertile. ‘Twas so expensive, she sighed, that if she did not become pregnant soon, they’d have no money to buy a christening gown! She looked at Lenore’s girth enviously.

  Lenore sipped her soup and listened. Mistress Watts came in and tried to entertain her, briskly maintaining that the house next door was haunted by the ghost of a Puritan housemaid who had been deserted by her Cavalier lover and had died of a broken heart. Lenore gave her a wan smile. She had no assurance at the moment that she too had not been deserted by her cavalier lover.

  Lally came by, bearing a beautiful long gown for the baby made of fine linen trimmed in lace. Lally’s bruise was fading, she sported a bright, brittle smile and walked with a challenging swagger. Lenore saw how happy she was and brooded about this change in her friend.

  She slipped into a terrible despondency, feeling herself as much a prisoner in her upstairs lodgings as those unfortunate university prisoners lodged in the old prison of Bocardo, from which everyone maintained there was no escape. She had seen them lowering collection boxes on long strings, hoping for alms, and had even sent up in compassion a few pennies she could ill afford to give away, when she had chanced to walk by. Even the time she spent in the stable with Snowfire did not cheer her very much.

  And so passed the late days of her pregnancy, with the world outside bursting into blossom and Lenore’s own heart heavy as she waited for h
er child to be born.

  Though he had left her in anger, Geoffrey came back in a very different mood. She did not hear him ride up, did not even hear his footsteps on the stairs, for she was dozing, lying awkwardly on her back on the big square bed. His touch must have waked her, for she opened her eyes to find him looking down at her as he smoothed back the hair from her pale face, and the expression in his eyes was very tender. “Lenore,” he said, “I was wrong to fling out and leave you. I realize that you do not feel well, that you are on edge, that this waiting—especially in our uncertain circumstances—is hard for you. If it is Letiche you wish to hear about, I will tell you of Letiche.”

  Repentant, now that she had got him back, she reached up and put her fingers against his mouth to silence him. “I have no need to hear, Geoffrey—I was angry.”

  “Nay, perhaps you do. I thought you understood, but if you do not—a friend of mine told me the d’Avignys were wealthy; I saw for myself how Letiche dressed, how she lived in Brussels. And the d’Avignys were said to have a finer house by far in their native France—in Paris. Little did I know that her parents had spent all their substance to launch Letiche into society in hopes of a rich marriage for her! My friends contrived that I would seem rich myself, with rumors of great estates in the West Indies. Her mother convinced me that little Letiche would inherit the d’Avigny estates near Boulogne, which I knew were extensive. We rushed to one another’s arms, each believing the other to possess a great fortune. Came the reckoning, after we were wed. When I admitted I was penniless, Letiche’s mother set up a great wailing. A doctor had to be called. It all came out at her bedside then that they’d nothing, either—the great estates near Boulogne were indeed d’Avigny estates, but they belonged to a widowed uncle with two strong young sons of his own! So even though Letiche was an only child and his favorite niece, there was really no dowry, nor any chance of our making our way together.”