This Towering Passion

by Valerie Sherwood

  But Lenore’s heart was filled forever with memories of Geoffrey. The pain of his defection was deep and searing. These were good offers, by Twainmere’s standards, that she was receiving, she knew, for she was dowryless, no longer a virgin, and saddled with a small baby—but good offers or not, they were not for her. She supposed she should have been grateful for them, but she was not. These offers made her feel vaguely guilty, as if her stormy heart should have been willing to settle for something less.

  Michael’s fate haunted her. At times it seemed that he could not have perished at the crossroads, that she would look up and see his round, smiling face, his lively red cloak. Then she would look down at Lorena and realize that had not Michael slowed down big Tubbs— and died doing it—neither she nor Lorena might be alive today. Her world seemed ringed round with guilt and heartbreak. Some nights she woke screaming from her sleep thinking of the cutthroats who had pounced upon them at the crossroads. Sometimes she woke from bright shining dreams of Geoffrey ... and remembered he was gone and thrust her face into her pillow, soaking it with her longing tears.

  Outwardly she remained calm. She walked the cobbles and the dusty paths in her plain gray dress with eyes cast down. She was like a penitent, doing penance for sins she could scarcely remember ... for Twainmere knew naught of Geoffrey; it was wild, golden Jamie they remembered.

  She did not seek company, but walked alone . . . sometimes to the churchyard to stroll among the graves!

  It was redolent with the sweetness of wild honeysuckle that in summer made a riotous growth over the gravestones. Her lovely young mother she had hardly known lay buried there, her stern carpenter father who had never loved her—and Meg.

  It was Meg’s grave she wept over, touching the cold stone—so new among so many mossy ones—with questing fingers as if to bring Meg back. Vividly she remembered the young Meg who had been so sure life would be good to her. She shivered. She wouldn’t want Lorena to end up as Meg had.

  It did not occur to her that she, too, might end up as badly.

  On lazy summer afternoons she sat on the churchyard’s low ivy-covered wall and looked at the blue and yellow wildflowers that had burst-into bloom over Meg’s grave, and past it she saw the simple stone that Flora had erected for Jamie, her handfast lover, even though his body lay at Worcester in some unmarked grave. And sometimes she pondered over how different her life would have been had Jamie not belatedly remembered he was a Scot and fallen beneath Worcester’s south wall....

  That Lorena was Jamie’s she did not doubt. Her coloring was too perfect a match for Jamie’s. She sighed. Geoffrey had been right about that, although it still puzzled her, for by her count Lorena should belong to Geoffrey....

  One day she saw the black-haired girl, Lizzie, who had giggled with Jamie in the marketplace. Lizzie was trudging past the vicarage on her way to market, carrying a huge basket of fruit. And in her browned left arm was clutched a small baby just a little older than Lorena and already with a mop of hemp-white hair and blue eyes. When she saw Lenore, Lizzie came to a sudden halt, and her dark eyes flashed.

  “What a pretty baby,” said Lenore in an attempt at friendliness. “Can I hold him?”

  “No,” said Lizzie sullenly, backing away. “And it’s a her, not a him.” She hurried away dragging the baby and the heavy basket of fruit.

  Flora came round the corner of the house.

  “Have you seen Lizzie’s baby?” asked Lenore.

  Flora gave her a keen look. “I have. ’Tis Jamie’s.” Flora’s voice was gruff. “I knew he was seein’ her,” she said. “Slippin’ over to her house in the afternoons. But ye must not feel bad about it, Lenore—’twas not in Jamie’s heart to be faithful to a woman. Lizzie married Silas Tilson right after—after Jamie was killed at Worcester.”

  “Silas Tilson? But he must be past ninety!” gasped Lenore.

  “Aye. And glad our Lizzie was to get him—so she’d have a name for her brat! I think he knew about Jamie, when he offered for her. He’s not like to have any children of his own at his age, and now he has a young wife and a child he claims as his.” She shrugged.

  “Poor Lizzie . . .” murmured Lenore, for Lizzie had had a light dancing foot.

  She noticed that after that day Lizzie avoided the vicarage and reached the market by some other path.

  Lenore looked about her more keenly after that. After Jamie’s death, there had been a rash of marriages in Twainmere, it seemed. Lighthearted Jamie on his visits to village maids had enjoyed more than honey-cakes . . .

  Mollie Paxton alone had held out—and she was being married on Thursday.

  When Mollie’s wedding procession filed past the vicarage on a path strewn with wildflowers and rushes, Lenore stood with her baby in her arms at the low wall watching them go by. She thought Mollie looked radiant in her russet dress, with a circlet of myrtle crowning her honey-colored hair. Mollie tossed her head and gave Lenore a triumphant look as she passed, a look that said plainly she had taken Jamie from Lenore—if only for a while— and now she was taking permanent possession of another of Lenore’s erstwhile suitors, Dick Fall.

  Flora came up behind her. “Find a good man and wed him,” she advised, seeing Lenore’s wistful gaze follow the procession. “Although ’tis true I’d miss the bairn”— her voice roughened, for she now loved little Lorena almost as much as Lenore did—“but ’twould be best for ye.”

  Lenore, the flirt who had gaily notched her red heels— a notch for every offer, and from all the best catches in the village—gave her a shadowed look. Was that the way to forget Geoffrey, for whose arms she longed every night?

  All that first week after her arrival she had had wild nightmares when she had cried out for Geoffrey. Sometimes in those black dreams she was running lost and barefoot through endless dark forests, being stalked by terrible pursuers—Swan, Tubbs, and dark faceless demons that boiled up out of a hell that seemed near and close—behind that next tree, past that clump of thornbushes. As she fought her way through brush and vines and low-hanging branches with her breath sobbing in her throat, she would see before her a clearing and know in her heart that all would be well could she but reach it. And just as she broke through the last of the tangled foliage, Swan would leap out to bar her way, grinning hideously. At those times she screamed for Geoffrey and woke up in a cold sweat, shaking.

  “ ’Tis—’tis the nightmares,” she’d gasp, when Flora would burst in.

  “I know.” Flora was a grim figure in her nightcap, but her voice was gentle. “I’ve had them.”

  Lenore remembered Flora’s nightmares, how she had seen a blood-soaked countryside before the Battle of Worcester. On one of these occasions she turned a frightened face toward Flora.

  “What do you see for me. Flora?” she asked. “You have The Sight. We all know it.”

  Flora gave her a troubled look. “I see nothing,” she mumbled. “Sometimes The Sight is given me and I can foretell a thing as clearly as if it were happening before me—but for you I do not see the future.”

  To Lenore as well as Flora her future was impenetrable. At first she had planned to write to Michael’s mother, had even chosen the words: “Your son died bravely. . . .” But a letter could be traced, and she had to remember that Gilbert waited vengefully in Oxford and would like nothing better than to see her on the gibbet. How could she be sure Michael’s mother would not be in touch with Michael’s Oxford friends, who would casually pass on to Gilbert what they had heard? She waited, telling herself that Michael’s mother already knew of her son’s death, for he had been felled at a crossroads marker and his body would have been found by the first passing traveler. It never occurred to her that Tubbs might have hidden Michael’s body.

  She had not even told Flora of her terrible experience in the woods, or of Michael’s death . . . for her explanations of why she had not written Michael’s mother her condolences would have brought out other painful recollections of Gilbert. . . and of Geoffrey, who never ceased
to haunt her dreams.

  Resolutely she tried not to think of Geoffrey, filling her days with caring for baby Lorena. She launched into the housework at the vicarage with a vengeance. She’d have loved to go to market, swinging a basket over her arm, but Flora said wisely that the people of Twainmere would have to get used to her gradually again—going to church was all right, but she must not appear to flaunt herself, Flora would do the marketing. Sometimes, left alone at the vicarage, she was plunged into sadness, remembering Geoffrey, who was—God alone knew where; he’d made it to France, she supposed, back to his French wife ... The thought made her cry, and she cursed the day she’d met him, for she doubted her sad heart would ever be her own again.

  Oh, why could he not have believed the child’s coloring an accident of fate, gift of some remote ancestor? Why could he not have accepted Lorena as his? She realized of course, how much he had counted on the baby, how he had looked forward to Lorena’s birth— and what a shock it must have been to see that blond hair, those blue eyes staring up at him from her small piquant face. Well, it had been a shock to Lenore, too. She had counted up the days so carefully, and she had been so sure, so sure.... She smiled down at baby Lorena through her tears and the child cooed back at her. She sighed. It was all over now. Her girlhood had changed into womanhood, and her womanhood into motherhood, and she would never see her lover again.

  “Don’t grieve so,” said Flora abruptly one day as she carried in a basket of fresh sun-dried laundry.

  “I—I’m not grieving,” protested Lenore guiltily.

  “Yes, you are. Any fool could see it. Your life isn’t over, you know. I thought my life was over when my Kenneth went a-hunting in Scotland and fell and twisted his leg and froze to death and never came back to the glen. I was sure I’d go to my death a miserable, weeping woman. But then Jamie was having so much trouble with the kirk—he being young and only wanting to be a natural man and have good times—and I found myself thinking about him instead of my own troubles. You’ve got Lorena—you should think about her.”

  “Oh, I do.” Lenore gave a wan nod.

  “The hurt will stop,” stated Flora, so firmly that it must be a fact.

  The hurt did not stop, but it abated from time to time. The community, which had been aloof at first, was beginning to accept her again. Sedately Lenore now accompanied Flora to church on Sundays. A new and different Lenore, garbed in a plain gray dress with a white linen collar—and with her flaming hair bound up tightly beneath a coif. People who had frowned when they first saw her on the street began to unbend and nod to her pleasantly. Men who at first had looked at her warily, eyeing the child in her arms, began to give her long, lingering glances again. It would not be long, Flora warned her, before suitors would come banging on the vicarage door, and Lenore would be well advised to take one of them.

  But this lull in Lenore’s stormy existence was not to last. Before the month was out, Flora came flying into the house on a sultry day with her face a thundercloud and grabbed Lenore, who was making a pie on the kitchen table, her linen apron dusted with flour. She grasped Lenore by the shoulder and spun her around so fiercely she knocked over the flour crock.

  “Why did ye not tell me ye’d killed a man?” she cried, shaking Lenore. "Why?”

  “But I didn’t!” gasped Lenore, choking on the white cloud of flour that had arisen and borne almost back to the kitchen wall by this onslaught.

  Flora, too, choked on the dust that filled the kitchen. Her face encrimsoned and she was temporarily unable to speak. Lenore beat her on the back and then ran and opened the kitchen door to let out the white cloud. She tore off her linen apron and flailed the air with it.

  “I was—almost to Lizzie Tilson’s, bringing her a poultice for her sick child,” gasped Flora, and stopped to cough. “On the other side of the hedge I heard two men questioning Old Ben, the mute. They were angry because he wouldn’t answer their questions, and I was about to call through the hedge to them when I realized they were asking about you! Some student was found dead at the crossroads north of Oxford. He’d told a friend you were running away together, and the friend swears you left Oxford with him. His mother says he had money on him—she believes you killed him for it! They traced you through a shepherd who directed you to Twainmere when you left the road and got lost. They’re here to arrest you, Lenore!”

  Her face almost as paper-white as the flour dust that covered it, Lenore laid down the apron. “I did not kill him, Flora,” she said. “And we weren’t running away together. He was on his way home to Coventry and I was to Banbury to race Snowfire at the fair. We were attacked by robbers at a crossroads. They killed Michael and—and I may have killed one of them, for I plunged a dagger into his back rather than let him harm by baby.”

  Flora stared at her, blue eyes blazing from her floury face. “I believe you,” she said shortly. “But others will not, for no robbers were reported seen about, and the student’s was the only body found. They’ll ask why ye did not report it, why ye fled.”

  Slowly the force of that sank in on Lenore. She was trapped. Everyone would believe she’d killed Michael—lured him away from Oxford and killed him for the money in his pockets! The very fact that she’d not reported his death was a black mark against her. She could hardly explain she’d not reported it because she was fleeing treason and assault charges in Oxford!

  “Oh, Flora,” she whispered, appalled, “what am I going to do?”

  “You must run for it,” said Flora grimly. “For they’ll be here soon, and I’ll have no way to keep them from taking you.”

  The two women looked at each other.

  “Lorena ...” whispered Lenore, brushing the flour from her white face.

  “Ye must leave her with me. Snowfire’s leg hasn’t healed well enough for a long ride and—’twas a daft idea, anyway! Whoever heard of a woman making her living racing at fairs? Lorena will stay with me—till you can come for her. . . .” She let that trail off. “I’ll find a wet nurse for Lorena and take care of her as if she were my own child. Come, Lenore, ye must pack!”

  But Lenore was hardly listening. She was looking instead out the kitchen door, past the bee-haunted musk roses, past the clipped yew hedge, out at the low hills of the Cotswolds. She had hoped to lose herself at the fairs when Snowfire was well enough again to race, for the hunt for “traitors” was dying down and it was unlikely assault charges would be pressed beyond the walls of Oxford. But murder! For that they would hound her the length of England—and to deliver herself from the one trap would be to fall into the other.

  She dusted the flour off her hands and swallowed. Never had she meant to give Lorena up. But—what chance would Lorena have, if her mother was on the run? It would be hard enough to make it alone, impossible with a small baby! Here Lorena would be raised with all the care and trappings of a vicar’s daughter, she would learn to read and write and to cipher—arts Lenore had so recently slaved over herself at Oxford and in which she was hardly proficient. Her beloved daughter would be well-dressed and housed, for Flora would see to that.

  A sob escaped her.

  “There’s no sense crying,” Flora flung over her shoulder. Already she was throwing together meat and cheese and bread and honey-cakes into a linen tablecloth which she knotted at the corners. “You’ll take the gray horse,” she said. “I’ll tell them you rode away on Snowfire so they’ll be looking for a woman on a white horse. Tuck your hair under a coif, for it’s conspicuous. I’ll hide Snowfire in the woods and ‘find’ him later. You can be sure I’ll be good to him.” She turned. “Where are you, Lenore?”

  Lenore was in the next room bent over Lorena, hugging the child’s small body to her own and crying. She pressed a last kiss on Lorena’s sweet, smiling face. Her baby . . . she was leaving her baby! Lorena gurgled and lifted a tiny hand toward her, and Lenore’s will nearly turned to water.

  “Lorena well may die if you take her with you,” Flora warned from the doorway. “A baby cannot stand
the hardships we can. Here.” She thrust a purse into Lenore’s hand. “This will get you gone. Seek the back ways. I’ll say you went west. If ye’re careful,” she added gruffly, “it should be enough to take you all the way to London.”

  Lenore shook her head and put the purse down on the bed. “I’ve taken too much from you already,” she said wearily, “and you will need that money for Lorena’s keep. I’ll take nothing with me, Flora—that way they can search the house and you’ll have proof you expected me back shortly.”

  Flora’s eyes glinted with a kind of fierce admiration. “I will insist they search,” she promised. “ ’Twill slow them down.”

  “I’d best go.” Lenore fled from the room back into the kitchen. Already her arms felt empty. She had need to place distance between them. For if she stayed another minute, she’d snatch Lorena up and run away with her . . . and then Lorena might end up like those other children she’d seen in a dozen towns, children who’d once had secure homes and were orphans of the war and were now small tragic beggars on the highways.

  “I’ll write to you,” she mumbled.

  “Letters can be traced,” warned Flora. “The townsfolk will not take this lightly. They’ll expect you to write, and some will doubtless keep a sharp eye out. I wouldna write were I you.”

  Lenore expelled a ragged breath. “Very well, then I will send you money. In pincushions. Expect them—for somehow I will get it. I mean to pay for Lorena’s keep.”

  She took the food Flora thrust upon her and hurried out the back door before her decision could crumble.