This Towering Passion

by Valerie Sherwood

  Sometimes when she rode into camp after a long, hard, dusty ride, and heard his pleasant melodic laugh ring out, she asked herself why. Why could she not love him? She liked him, she admitted honestly to herself that he attracted her, that she might even be happy living with him, but. . . Monty’s way of life was precarious and she knew she could never have Lorena with her if she became his mistress.

  There was another reason, too—Geoffrey. Her love for him, so deep and real, acted as a barrier between her and other men, a high wall that she could not climb over even if she wanted to. Bitterly she reminded herself that Geoffrey was the past, which was over, but something young and stubborn in her heart would not have it so. She was being true to Geoffrey—but she would never have admitted it.

  Nights when she longed for Geoffrey’s arms, and to hold little Lorena to her breast again, Lenore tossed on her pillow at strange inns and fought back the urge to write to Flora, to send for her child, or even to ride boldly into Twainmere and take Lorena and Snowfire away with her. But in the sleepless gray light of dawn she always realized her folly. Her life on the road was dangerous and impermanent. She could provide no proper home, no proper friends for a growing child. Perhaps it would not always be so; she could pray and hope for a better day. A day when she would be reunited with her golden daughter; hoping that love could one day reclaim her heart...

  BOOK III

  THE LONDON WENCH

  PART ONE

  * * *

  THE KING’S DOXIE

  London, England 1660—1662

  CHAPTER 24

  It was the last of May, and a great day for England. For on Friday just after dawn King Charles II—who had fled from Worcester in defeat nine years ago—returned in triumph to his homeland. In beautiful clear weather he landed at Dover and knelt on the beach to give thanks. His journey to London was a triumphal march. Cheering crowds lined streets hung with garlands of ribbons, and scarves and spoons, and even silver plate.

  Having banqueted at noon on Tuesday with the Lord Mayor, the scarlet-robed aldermen, and numerous notables whose gold chains glimmered against the black velvet of their clothing, the young King was at last ready to enter his capital. And at half-past four the mighty procession poured over London Bridge and into the City, where costly tapestries festooned the streets and the conduits ran with claret.

  In the jostling crowd along the Strand, Lenore Frankford waited for the procession to pass. Her thick, red-gold hair had been carefully combed into a shining coil at the back, while fashionable long side curls reached down to her shoulders. She was dressed in the best she owned-—an amber silk gown with a low wide neckline which showed her gleaming white shoulders to great advantage. Her tight bodice hugged her round breasts and tapered to her narrow waist, and her billowing skirt was slit down the front and tucked up at both sides to reveal a full petticoat of rippling russet satin. From beneath her full skirts peeped a pair of dainty square-toed shoes with high yellow heels.

  The effect was so striking that of the many admiring glances she’d received as she hurried to join the crush along the Strand, few had noticed that her dress had been cleverly mended in several places, that her petticoat was threadbare, or that her high-heeled shoes were badly worn. Who would guess that she wore one glove and carried the other because it was too badly stained to wear? For the woman in the amber silk gown would always command attention. When a tall man with a cane elbowed her with a curt, “Sorry, mistress,” in an attempt to get a better position, Lenore turned and looked at him. Looking down into her lovely face, he had said softly, “Sorry, indeed!”

  Lenore was used to these tributes to her beauty, for she was as slim and as lovely as the day she had ridden out of Twainmere, seven years ago. Her complexion was as sheer and fair, her glorious violet eyes had the same heartstopping quality, and her swift, blinding smile still dazzled the viewer.

  But the years had given Lenore other things—a sense of style which she had not had in Twainmere, and a certain hardness of viewpoint. She had not made her way easily, and often she’d endured hard times, but she had never once given up. Now she stood on the Strand in the full flower of her beauty, looking a woman of molten gold in the sunlight.

  Nearby hawkers cried their wares—little cakes and pies and other sweetmeats. People shouted to one another and leaned out the windows from above. In the distance now came the sound of trumpets and hooves. The procession was approaching, and the crowd strained forward.

  Beside Lenore, a stout little woman pulled her small daughter back from the street. “Look where those pikemen are standing, Sallie,” she told the child. “That was where Charing Cross stood until the Ironsides tore it down! Well, the new King will put it back, you’ll see!”

  Lenore’s gaze flew to the company of six hundred pike-men who waited to parade before the new King. All London, she knew, had mourned the loss of Charing Cross, erected in 1290 by Edward I as a memorial to his dead Queen. A lovely monument to love, destroyed in the struggle between the Ironsides and the King. Just as in another way that struggle had destroyed her, she thought with a fine sense of detachment . . . first Jamie, then Geoffrey, and finally Lorena had been wrested from her. And now the bachelor Charles was returning to London to ascend his throne—bloodlessly, by invitation!

  Shouts and applause dinned in her ears, for the procession was in sight now. Three hundred horsemen flashing drawn swords in the sun and wearing scintillating cloth-of-silver doublets led the way. They were greeted by a mighty roar. Many other companies followed, and Lenore was pushed this way and that as people shoved each other and craned to see better. Now came the trumpeters, adding to the din, and eighty red-garbed sheriff’s men, the silver facing of their cloaks aglitter. And now the City Companies rode by, with liveried footmen attending them. From the windows ladies richly gowned leaned out waving scarves, their eyes bright. For England was to have a King again, a tall, handsome King—and he was a bachelor!

  Buffeted and pummeled by the exuberant crowd, her pretty shoes trod on painfully more than once, and with several black and blue marks where she’d been elbowed, Lenore watched the great Companies ride by almost in a blur. So much ... so very much had happened to bring her to this day. Now, with the crowd around her going wild, her own life seemed to pass before her in review.

  After her first triumph at Cirencester, she had settled into her job as if she had been born to it. Montmorency Hogue had bragged that she was the best “advance man” in England! She had bethought herself always of the safety of the troupe of strolling players who depended upon her —indeed, one mistake on her part could bring them to ruin. Early on, she had learned to be crafty in her choice of men to deal with in strange towns; she had learned to study men across a tankard of cider, or from beside the public horse trough in the village square—and to assess them for what they were. Her beauty—impossible to disguise—had been a mixed blessing. Often she had found it necessary to fight off unwelcome advances—once or twice with the aid of a large pistol. She had done her work unstintingly, making sure the towns she chose were “safe”—if anywhere was safe for such as they. She had even managed to save a little money and had dreamed of emigrating to the Colonies and taking Lorena with her— the old dream she had shared with Geoffrey.

  When in September of 1658 Oliver Cromwell had died, her heart had leaped in hopes that the King would be restored—and she would be cleared of at least one charge they could raise against her; she could no longer be called a traitor to the Puritan regime. But Cromwell’s thirty-one-year-old son Richard had succeeded him, and nothing was really changed. Dancing was still forbidden, alehouses were still closed on Sundays—and constables could still forcibly enter people’s houses and search them for evidence of breaking Sabbatarian laws. Celebrating Christmas was still forbidden....

  But not only Lenore, all of merrie England was heartily sick of grim Puritan ways. Morris dancing and May Day games—even archery and cockfighting—had never been stamped out entirely in the villa
ges, and although there was now a death penalty of adultery, juries all over England were refusing to convict accused adulterers. Nationwide there was a rising revulsion to stern Puritan repression.

  In 1659 rumors were rife. The King was living in the Spanish Netherlands, holding his impoverished court at Brussels. Tall, athletic, good-looking and cynical, at twenty-eight he was more popular with the English people absent than was Richard Cromwell present. Monty ran his fingers through his white hair and his young-old face showed pent-up excitement as he told Lenore enthusiastically that it was just a matter of time—England would turn the fierce Puritans out and there’d be plays again, and dancing, and general merriment. She’d see!

  What Lenore saw was something quite different.

  On a quiet Thursday she rode into Winchester, casting about for the most likely sporting inn that would furnish information of the kind she needed. And scarce had her arrangements been made before she received word that somewhere on the road Montmorency Hogue had been recognized by a magistrate who passed by in a funeral procession—and he and his entire troupe had been taken. Lenore rode back at a gallop to try to help, pretending to be a bereaved sister of Monty’s. He muttered in his jail cell that she should save herself—he and the others were like to be transported, if not worse.

  Lenore, who had come to feel indeed that she was Monty’s sister, had taken an emotional farewell of him. But she had taken his advice and ridden for London. She had arrived there on a bitter winter day—and found the city torn by riots. Strife had broken out all over England; the country was fast sinking into anarchy.

  Monty’s troupe of strolling players had avoided the larger towns through fear of arrest, and Lenore was amazed at the size of London. A city of some four hundred thousand souls, it was a warren of narrow streets and winding unpaved alleys, muddy, filthy, with no proper drains and continually weeping waterspouts and roof drips which drenched the hurrying passersby long after the rain had ended. Smoke from the “sea coal” and fog from the river combined to make the air a dirty soup, and coughing and consumption were rampant. Overcrowded and noisy, rat-infested, whole families were crammed into single rooms, and the poor and the wretched overflowed damp, dark cellars.

  But it was an exciting place, for careening coaches and hurrying horsemen and people afoot filled the streets and, weaving between them, sedan chairs carrying great ladies and bewigged gentlemen who took snuff.

  Lenore was enthralled by it. Like any visitor from the country, she took in the sights, staring in amazement at the great hulk of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the mighty Guildhall, so huge they dominated the City’s other buildings. Wistfully she studied the great Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, before whose handsome windows a great scaffold had been erected and Charles I beheaded there. It seemed to her an unnecessary indignity that the King should have been forced to climb a scaffold looking into the windows where he had so often dined, but she was even more shocked to learn that the lovely Tudor palace at Greenwich had been converted by the irreverent Commonwealth into a biscuit factory. The inns of London were still jolly places—if one had money to buy food and drink —but sometimes at night Lenore dreamed of the gaiety that must have been here before the Puritans came.

  Lenore, who had saved a little money but had no real vocation, had decided to take lodgings and see which way the wind blew—commonwealth or monarchy. For surely, she told herself, the issue must be decided soon—England could not hang poised on the brink forever. She settled in at the George in Southwark near London Bridge, where another lodger, a Mistress Potts, took an immediate liking to the lovely young newcomer with the dazzling smile. Mistress Potts was a fat, garrulous woman in her midfifties who spoke in stage whispers and nodded her head significantly at her own remarks. She’d been widowed in Brighton and had sold out and taken her “widow’s mite” and come to London to live out her days. She had no deep convictions about king or commonwealth, and since she received letters from friends scattered all about England— people she had met while they vacationed in Bath— Lenore found her a good source of news.

  The weather was so cold that December that the Thames, its flow slowed by the great piers that supported London Bridge and the houses that lined it on both sides —froze bank to bank, and a great Frost Fair was held. Stalls were set up on the ice selling food and souvenirs and fancies. Lenore bought for Mistress Potts a slip from a printer’s booth bearing her name and the imprint “The Thames,” which Mistress Potts—temporarily bedridden by a cold—exclaimed over and hung on the wall of her room.

  By the end of January there was open talk of a Restoration. General Monk, at the head of a large force, had crossed the Tweed—word reached London that his troops had waded knee-deep through snow and icy water in Northumberland, but he had reached York and then Nottingham. Lenore chafed at the delay. If England was going to become a kingdom again, she wanted them to get on with it.

  Although several men at the George showed an immediate interest in her, Lenore gave their advances her habitual cold shoulder. Coolly she returned the stares of hot-eyed men and admiring youths who stripped her with their eyes and brushed on by them, intent on her own affairs. This was Geoffrey’s legacy to her . .. she still, in her heart, considered herself his wife. It would have galled her to realize that she was a one-man woman and was being faithful to him all this time, but it was so.

  Mistress Potts leavened Lenore’s time of waiting with gossip. She was one of those women who were certain every man she met intended to rape her. The stable boy, she whispered hoarsely to Lenore, had patted her bottom as she passed by him in the stable! Imagine! She had not told on him, for if the innkeeper knew, it well might cost the stable boy his job. Indeed, what were young men coming to?

  Since Mistress Potts was nearly as broad as she was tall, and panted as she waddled about, Lenore thought it more likely that Mistress Potts’s posterior had been caressed by a saddle hung from a beam or some other likely dangling implement as she lumbered by, but she forbore to say so. Mistress Potts was always so happy with her near-brushes with lascivious disaster.

  ‘You should not go out on the public streets without a mask,” she reproved Lenore. “ ’Tis dangerous to do so! There are footpads about—-and worse!”

  Lenore sighed. Although it was true that many ladies wore masks at popular public gatherings—such as executions—she had always been quite happy to go about barefaced. But when in late January Mistress Potts presented her with a face-mask like her own, Lenore took it—and accepted Mistress Potts’s invitation to sup with her at the Swan in Fish Street. Since it was a fine, sunny winter day, marred only by the smoke from the sea coal pouring out of the chimneys, they walked there by a circuitous route. Along the way Mistress Potts kept nudging Lenore and loudly whispering that this fellow in the broad hat, or that one with the great beard, was attempting to attract their notice—and wasn’t Lenore glad she’d worn her mask for this public outing “as proper ladies do”? Lenore was glad for quite another reason: Mistress Potts’s stage whispers of imagined advances was attracting amused attention. With her face red above and below the mask—which left most of her forehead and her lower face below the eyes exposed—Lenore quickly interrupted to point out buildings of no possible interest, children playing with wooden swords—anything to distract Mistress Potts from her favorite subject.

  At Cheapside Mistress Potts was distracted by something else, for there the rioting apprentices had set up a gibbet. She paused to exclaim over it, but Lenore seized her arm and forcibly hurried her on.

  “But ’twas interesting!” Mistress Potts kept wailing. And later over their feast of marrowbones and loin of veal at the Swan, her round face grew avid, and she whispered loudly, “Think you there will be a hanging in Cheapside?” Lenore gave her a quelling look. She had seen enough of gibbets, of bodies dangling at the crossroads, when she had ridden with Geoffrey after the King’s defeat at Worcester.

  “Oh, well!” said Mistress Potts in a huff. “If you don’t car
e to know what’s going on!” But a moment later her interest had shifted. “See that gentleman in the purple coat with gold buttons over there?” she hissed. “He is making eyes at me!”

  “Is he?” murmured Lenore absently.

  “Indeed he is! Well—I suppose he has given up, since I have not condescended to notice him,” she said, as the gentleman rose and left. “Do try the tart, my dear—and these prawns and cheese are delicious!”

  But memories were eating at Lenore. Memories of a dark sardonic face and arms that had held her close, memories of long languorous nights spent on the lonely wilds of Dartmoor, and an interval at Oxford when she had thought nothing could separate them, nothing mar or damage their love for each other. Her heart wept, and she shook her head at the great tart and hardly touched the prawns and cheese.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” confided Mistress Potts.

  “You know that man in the blue coat who sits in the common room at the George every night smoking a pipe?”

  Lenore, roused from her reverie, gave her a puzzled look. “The man with the sharp-pointed nose and the very strange boots,” elaborated Mistress Potts. “I think he comes to the George to watch you, Lenore.”

  “I think he comes there because he has nowhere else to go,” said Lenore flatly. “He seems lonely and speaks to no one.”