This Towering Passion

by Valerie Sherwood

  “Twainmere,” he murmured. “ ’Tis a long way off.”

  “I know,” she said. “I think I’m lost.”

  He smiled and pointed out directions and told her what landmarks to watch out for. She thanked him warmly for the stew and rode away, and he followed her with his pale eyes as long as she was in sight. Widowed she might be, he thought, but not for long. Such a woman as that would have another husband soon. Somehow seeing her had increased his loneliness, for once he’d had a young wife . . . once long ago. Now he recalled too vividly what it had been like to hold her in his arms, to sleep with her, to wake up with her beside him in the pink dawn and turn over and lay a sleepy arm across her breast. He sighed and got up to move his sheep to a new pasture.

  Feeling easier now that she was sure of her directions, Lenore pressed on, following the sheep trails, which indeed were almost the only roads of these Cotswold Hills. She moved by easy stages because of Snowfire’s leg, riding by daylight, hiding by night in sheltered copses where she was beset by nightmares that left her white and shaken in the moonlight. She prayed that there would not be a summer thunderstorm to bog down the track and make the going more difficult for Snowfire—and she was fortunate, the weather held.

  Her shoulder no longer hurt her much, and her scratches were well on their way to healing, but her food had run out and she was very hungry when in the fading light of a red sunset she reached Twainmere. People were at supper, she guessed, as she rode down the deserted street of the familiar village.

  The honey-colored stone of the cottages was turned deep pink by the rosy light. But the smithy was empty, the cottage behind boarded up and deserted, the garden that had been Flora’s pride overgrown with weeds. Lenore dismounted and with a sinking heart peered in through a broken shutter. The dimness showed her an empty room with a rat scurrying about. Flora’s cat must have left, too. Somehow she felt the cottage had been empty for a long time.

  Lenore, usually so resolute, for once was daunted. Could Flora, disheartened by Jamie’s death, have packed up and gone back to Scotland? If Flora had left, Twainmere might not be safe for her. Tom Prattle would be quick to denounce her, and there’d be none who’d care to take in the town flirt, come back with a babe in her arms. Doubt twinged at her. No one had seen her yet— perhaps she should leave quietly the way she had come.

  She remounted, feeling a sudden rush of homesickness for a village that no longer had a place for her. She remembered then that Robert Medlow, the young vicar —one of the few men in Twainmere who had seemed immune to Lenore’s wiles—had been very fond of Flora. If anyone would know Flora’s whereabouts, Robert Medlow would. She wheeled her mount and headed down the deserted street, past the churchyard where Meg slept beneath a fresh-hewn stone, and dismounted at the vicarage.

  It had not changed—just as nothing in Twainmere seemed to have changed. She hesitated, then carefully placed the-sleeping Lorena in one of Snowfire’s saddlebags—she did not want to answer questions about the baby just now, and the young vicar was sure to ask. Lorena continued to sleep peacefully. Lenore flexed her arm, which had gone nearly numb from holding Lorena for so long, and stood studying the pleasant ivy-covered building with its yew hedge and low stone wall overrun with red roses. She had been careful to tie Snowfire to the hitching post, as well as the gray mare. For these were familiar surroundings to Snowfire, and she wouldn't want him limping down to Tom Prattle’s lean-to stable, expecting hay and currying and a comfortable bed of straw!

  She had rapped but once on the oaken door of the vicarage before it was flung open and Flora herself stood before her in the rosy evening light. Each was as startled as the other.

  “Flora!” gasped Lenore.

  Flora, her blue eyes filling with tears, held out her arms and Lenore went into them with a sob. They stood there rocking and laughing and crying. Lenore hadn’t realized until this moment how much she’d missed Flora; somehow gaunt Flora had taken in Lenore’s heart the place of Meg who was gone, and now here she was at the vicarage and somehow she couldn’t stop crying.

  “There, there,” said Flora, moved. Surreptitiously she wiped the tears from her eyes as if it were shameful to cry. “We thought you’d died at Worcester, Lenore. We got word you’d been seen going into the town—at least, some wild tale; we thought it must be you from the description—but none had seen you leave. We thought you might have been buried along with—with the others.”

  With Jamie, she meant.

  Lenore stood back, smiling through her tear-blurred eyes and catching her breath. “I wanted to stay, Flora —I wanted to bury Jamie myself. But a cavalier wouldn’t let me—he said I’d be taken if I stayed. ’Twas he who saved me from the Ironsides, Flora; he got me through Cromwell’s lines outside the city. We ran half across England together. How is it you’re not at the cottage, Flora?”

  “I married Robbie—the vicar,” said Flora simply.

  Lenore’s eyes widened. The vicar, no less! “I’m glad for you,” she said sincerely.

  Flora sighed. “I would have married Robbie long before this,” she admitted, “but for Jamie. I felt Jamie needed me, for he wouldna settle down—and you were but a young thing. But come and sit yourself down, Lenore. Robbie’s out visitin’ the sick and I’m waitin’ supper for him. We can have us a talk. You’ll be stayin’, of course?”

  Lenore hugged her. “Indeed I will. And just wait till you see my baby!”

  “Baby!” Flora trailed her out. “And I see you’ve still got Snowfire!”

  Lenore nodded proudly. “But he’s gone lame and needs resting.” She drew Lorena out of Snowfire’s saddlebag. “Flora, this is my little Lorena.”

  She held Lorena up for Flora’s inspection, and the older woman bent down and smiled at the child—then she peered closer and her eyes widened in shock.

  “ ’Tis Jamie’s,” she whispered. “That hair, those eyes...”

  “Yes,” said Lenore in a tight voice. “That hair, those eyes—that’s why my cavalier left me. He said the baby wasn’t his, but belonged to the Scot.”

  “And he was right,” cried Flora in an excited voice, bending over the baby. She looked up sharply at some inflection in Lenore’s voice. “This cavalier was your lover, then?”

  Lenore nodded gravely. “I’ll not keep it from you, Flora. I lived with him when we were on the run, and later in Oxford where I went to bear the child. I would have married him, Flora, but—I learned he already had a wife. He left me after Lorena was born.”

  Pity shone in Flora’s eyes. She looked at Lenore, so beautiful in the rosy copper light from the dying sun.

  “You are young,” she murmured. “ ’Tis no more than I would expect. Young blood runs wild. But ye’re scratched and bruised, Lenore. Did you take a fall?”

  “Yes—a fall.” Lenore did not feel she could tell Flora about all the recent things that had happened to her just now; that must wait till later. “I’d nowhere to go after he left me, and I thought of you and hoped you’d take me in.”

  “And you were right to come here,” said Flora warmly. “Come into the house. My, it’s getting dark—I’ll light a candle. You must be hungry, Lenore.”

  “Yes, but—Flora, could I take Snowfire and the gray mare back to the stable? Snowfire’s exhausted, and I’d like to feed him and water him and bed him down in the straw. I’ve been bathing his ankle in the streams and springs every chance I got, but ’tis badly swollen still.”

  “Of course..Put the bairn down on my bed—ah, she’s a sweet child with a fair face!”

  “She may wet your bed,” Lenore objected.

  “Let her,” said Flora crisply. “ ’Tis good to have a bairn in the house—and this one Jamie’s.” Her eyes sparkled, and in the candlelight dusk she looked suddenly years younger. “She’s my niece, you know,” she added proudly.

  Together they fed and bedded down Snowfire and the gray, and Lenore tended Snowfire’s hurt foreleg.

  “Your gray mare looks to be a valuable hor
se,” commented Flora.

  Lenore nodded. She did not explain how she came to have the mare, who was probably stolen like the amethyst ring. She could not bear to speak of the crossroads attack, which still haunted her dreams. For now she would let Flora think this gray riding horse was a gift from her lost lover.

  “You can have the small room at the back,” decided Flora. “ ’Tis an extra room we don’t need and ’twill be a great help to me to have you about again, Lenore.”

  It was all Lenore could do not to cry again. She gripped Flora’s hand thankfully.

  Robert Medlow, the vicar, was a pleasant, vacant-faced, unassuming young man of medium build who always seemed a bit absent-minded. In a way he seemed a strange match for tall, gaunt Flora, but when Lenore saw the way they looked at each other, she knew they were in love. There was something shy and humble in the way Robert Medlow treated Flora. He greeted Lenore with courtesy and much less surprise than Flora had, saying it must have been God’s will that had spared her at Worcester—and see, here was the fruit of it!— indicating Lorena.

  Lenore, remembering the horror of Worcester, thought grimly that it had indeed been God’s will—and Geoffrey’s will, too, for had his hard fist not rendered her senseless at Barbour’s Bridge, she would have stubbornly stayed and doubtless gone to her death for it, like other hapless souls.

  They made her comfortable and fed her a good supper of cold mutton and cider and berry tart. Afterward Flora led her into a little room that was better than anything she had ever had except at Oxford. That night she slept dreamlessly, even able to forget the nightmares of the road.

  The next day, walking with Flora in the scented old garden with its moss roses and musk roses, surrounded by hedges of clipped yew, she paused in the shade of a May-flowering beech. “I don’t deserve you, Flora,” she said simply.

  “Ah, that’s foolishness,” said Flora, flushing with pleasure. “Robbie is as glad to have you as I am.”

  “But to take in not only myself, but the baby, too— it’s very good of him, Flora.” She brushed away a lazy bumblebee that wanted to light in her hair.

  “Robbie’s glad to have a bairn around the house,” said Flora, carefully smoothing her full linen skirt. “Since there’s not likely to be one of our own.” She reached down, plucked a musk rose, and cupped it in her bony hand. “The bees are all at work gathering honey. Our hives should do well this year.”

  Lenore blinked. “Do you not plan a family of your own, Flora?” She would not be put off by talk of bees. Flora looked away, through the beech branches toward the north. She might have been looking at Scotland, so distant was the look in her shadowed blue eyes. “That is denied me,” she said in a low voice. “God’s will or man’s will, it is all one—I’ll bear no child.”

  Lenore was puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

  Flora sighed, looking down into the musk rose as if she might somehow find the answer there. “Robbie’s been very good to me,” she said carefully. “He’d offered for my hand before you and Jamie were handfasted, Lenore, and I’d always said no, I must look after my wild young brother. But when Jamie died, Robbie hurried over and offered for my hand again. I said no, ’twas not proper— there should be a period of mourning—but he told me roughly we must be married right away. He was right, Lenore. Marrying Robbie was all that saved me from the wrath of the village. For there were those who claimed Jamie was a traitor who’d rebelled against the Lord Protector, and they might have whipped me through the village tied to the tail of a cart. But once I married Robbie, all was forgotten, for the people here love Robbie.”

  “I know that, Flora, but what has all that to do with your raising a family?”

  Flora turned and gave her a level look. Her voice was wistful. “I’ve no child of my own, nor like to have any, since Robbie comes not to my bed.”

  “Never?" gasped Lenore.

  “Not once.” Flora sighed. “Robbie is an humble man, a man of God, and—he had a strange childhood. Robbie holds me in high esteem that will not allow a sinner such as himself to touch me.”

  “Robbie a sinner?” Lenore stifled a laugh. “Get him drunk,” she advised. “Maybe he’ll forget he’s a sinner and remember that he has a wife!”

  “Robbie touches not spirits,” declared Flora gloomily. “Nor women?” Lenore asked hesitantly.

  “Nor women,” said Flora firmly. “ ’Twas hard getting used to, for my first marriage was—was not like that. My Kenneth strove with me every night and thrice got me with child—though each time I miscarried. I had not thought that Robbie . . She tossed the moss rose away. “But now I manage to turn my mind to other things.” She held out her arms and took baby Lorena and rocked the child in her arms and began to croon to her.

  Lenore looked pityingly at Flora, a stiff but kindly woman, so eager to give affection, yet balked at every turn. “ ’Tis something I’d never get used to,” she told Flora frankly. “I’ve need of a man’s arms about me.” Geoffrey’s arms, she thought sadly. No one else’s will do. Not now, not ever. Since those arms would never hold her again, her bed would be as cold as Flora’s. Her eyes flew to the baby. Lorena would get her through it. Bringing up her child would fill her days, her nights. . . .

  “Robbie’s a good man,” said Flora absently, smiling as the baby began to laugh and coo. “Mayhap one day . . She shrugged. “Meanwhile it will be almost like having my own child to have Jamie’s bairn in the house!”

  “Do people here still feel so savage toward those who fought for the King?” Lenore asked, troubled. “It could be they’ll think that I aided—

  “Robbie will tell them better, and they’ll believe him. ’Twas bad here at first with neighbor suspecting neighbor and treason in the air everywhere. ’Twas worse at other villages than our own. We had no hangings here.”

  Lenore shivered. How often she and Geoffrey had come upon gallows erected at the crossroads and looked up and seen their grim burdens swinging aloft. “Those were bad times,” she murmured soberly. Even as she acknowledged how bad those times were, she realized now they had brought her the best thing in her life—her love.

  “Bad times are still with us,” Flora told her in a crisp voice. “These vengeful Puritans,” she said in a cautious, lowered voice, “would take the starch out of everyone. Why, a laddie can scarce make eyes at a lassie without courting the stocks! But my Robbie’s a godly man, and his cloth will shield us from troubles others might have. But ye’ll wear no red dresses here at the vicarage, Lenore,” she added sharply. “Nor red heels, either!”

  Wistfully Lenore remembered those notched red heels . . . notches for would-be lovers . . . How long ago it seemed! She followed Flora into the house, pensive.

  “First ye must change your hair,” Flora decided. “It may have been proper in Oxford, but ’tis outlandish here. If ye want the town to accept ye, Lenore, ye must quieten down your wild looks.”

  Meekly Lenore arranged her hair in as severe a style as she could. It gave her dignity but only made her more striking.

  Flora peered at her and frowned. “Ye’re still too beautiful, Lenore. Ye’ll incite envy. Your dress, now— we’ll take the lace off those cuffs. It’s torn anyway.” Lenore winced as the delicate point lace was ripped free and tossed aside. “And we’ll replace that collar with a new one that hides you better.” Flora shook her head and sighed. “Anyone would think that having a baby would have made ye heavier, steadier, but ye look like a girl still!”

  Lenore was proud that should be so, whatever Twainmere felt about it, but she made no comment.

  “On second thought,” said Flora, studying her with her head on one side, “ye still look like a flirt. I’d best cut down this gray dress of mine for you.” She pulled a dress out of a chest and showed it to Lenore. “The material is old—which will show ye’re not rich. And plain—which will show the old women ye’ve repented.”

  Lenore quirked an eyebrow at Flora.

  “Whether ye have or not’s another matt
er,” said Flora grimly. “ ’Tis the appearance of repentance that counts!”

  “I never made a very good impression on the village, if you’ll remember!” Lenore reminded her wryly.

  “We’ll change all that.” Flora was confident.

  “Will we?” Lenore gave her a troubled look.

  “Yes. Ye were a flirt then, out to make all the men want ye, out to make all the other girls jealous. Now...”

  Now I’m a woman with a child, a deserted woman. . . . Lenore finished the sentence silently. No longer a woman to be feared, but one to be pitied. It was a galling thought.

  She bent her head over Lorena so that Flora would not guess what she was thinking.

  Lenore settled in at the vicarage, although Twainmere’s reaction was mixed. None raised the question of her possibly traitorous acts at Worcester, for she was now a member of their well-loved vicar’s household. Tom Prattle glowered and muttered whenever he saw her— but that minor irritation Lenore could ignore. The lads who had been so hot to wed her had thinned out. Two had moved to distant towns, three had married village girls, one had drowned in the river while fishing. Dick Fall and Stephen Moffat, who had fought over her by St. John’s bonfire Midsummer’s Day before last—how long ago that seemed to Lenore!—looked startled when they saw her. Dick Fall was now betrothed to honeyhaired Mollie Paxton, of whom Lenore had once been so jealous. And big Stephen had wed a girl from the next town and gone to live with her people; it was said they had a baby on the way—he was seldom in Twainmere.

  Not that Lenore would have lacked for suitors, had she shown any interest in the matter. Young Bob Sonners had lost his wife to a distemper in May—she’d been cupped and bled to no avail—and he was looking for someone to share his bed and care for their three children. Cart Moffat, Stephen’s older brother, whose health had long been so poorly none had expected him to live, though he’d been treated with all manner of herbs and even conserve of violets, had finally rejected all treatment—and had magically recovered from his mysterious ailment. Now, though still thin and pale, he was casting sly sheep’s eyes at village maids. And old Dunster, who had made life so miserable for his milkmaids when he was in his cups, had hiccupped and said loudly after church that if no one else wanted Lenore, he’d have her—aye, and her babe, tool