Their voices carried on the cold air and Helena winced, biting her bottom lip so hard she tasted blood in her anger.
It wasn’t as if Aaron had parted with so much as a shilling for the arrangements.
Slush seeped through her shoes and it began snowing again, muffling the scene to an eerie silence. Her cold hands inside her gloves gripped that of each of the elder boys, walking on either side of her in shocked silence. A tearful Chloe carried Little Charles in his black robes, a dazed look on his baby features.
The pall was raised from the coffin for the burial and at that moment Helena looked up through the falling snowflakes, straight at William. Tanned, lean and handsome, his dark eyes bored into hers as they stood with her husband’s coffin between them. She looked away abruptly, as if to even acknowledge him publicly would be further disloyalty to Guy, although he could no longer be betrayed.
Her throat closed as she stared into the gaping hole in the ground where her husband would lay. Forever. Panic welled in her chest and she must have made a sound, because Henry grasped her elbow with a firm hand and guided her away.
After the service, the customary drinking and biscuits took place at Palmer House, where Helena watched faces loom in front of her and away again, accepting expressions of respect and admiration for Guy, none of which she heard properly.
Finally, everyone left and the house settled down for the night. Unable to sleep, Helena pulled a cloak around her shoulders and padded across the hall to Guy’s room.
The bed was stripped bare, the luxurious hangings and bedclothes removed and burned to stop the spread of infection; the floorboards, cold beneath her feet, where his favourite turkey rug once lay.
An icy draught cut under the door and she shivered. Her throat ached, although her eyes remained dry as she stood by the window where she had spent so many anxious hours during his illness.
She leaned her forehead against the glass, relishing the cold against her flushed skin. Below her, some of the links still guttered, throwing pools of light on ground churned by the mourners’ carriages.
A cloaked figure hovered by the gate, a hand resting against the cloth-draped gate post. Lingering there in the darkness, a white face turned to stare up at the windows, as if disinclined to leave its lonely vigil. Finally, the figure turned away, passing beneath the guttering link. Helena saw it was a woman, her hood fallen back to reveal red hair.
Chapter Thirty
April 1695, Exeter – Aaron
Aaron began the five-day journey in the post coach to Exeter on a bright spring morning, shaken into Hammersmith, bumped through Salisbury and covered with dust in Honiton. Even being plagued with fleas and lice in none too clean inns was insufficient to dampen his spirits.
His first sight of the walled city pierced his heart with familiarity and nostalgia for the young man who left it without a backward glance ten years before. How naïve he had been, and how much simpler life had seemed then.
When had he aged into a battle-weary soldier?
The coach rolled to a halt in South Street and Aaron spotted Samuel Ffoyle pacing the road in front of the White Hart. The Master of Cloth workers hurried forward to greet him, while two servants transferred Aaron’s bags into the inn. This process proved slow, for Samuel was constantly hailed by passers-by, though their curious looks slid past Aaron, marking him as a stranger.
“That will change before long.” Aaron chuckled. “They shall all know the Woulfes are back inside a se’nnight.”
Although he remained the tall, spare man Aaron had known in childhood, Samuel moved more slowly and seemed occasionally breathless, stopping for short rests as they made their way around familiar city streets. His hair, secured at his nape by a black velvet ribbon in perpetual remembrance of his beloved Meghan, who had died the previous year, was white at the temples and new lines surrounded his eyes.
Aaron suggested they call at The Ship, where he made a special point of speaking to Matty Lumm, offering condolences on Tobias’ death. Hailed as the widow of the hero of Aughrim, she apparently revelled in a certain notoriety.
When Aaron mentioned his service to the king, Matty sniffed. “Tobias chose ’is road,” she banged a jug of ale down on an already wet table. “I meck me own way now.”
“I feel guilty about my treatment of Tobias, Samuel,” Aaron said when she sauntered away. “In some ways to Matty as well. You know he left the East Gate property to Helena?”
“Don’t fret on it,” Samuel mumbled, holding the inn door open for him. “He never told Matty he owned that house.”
The visit to the Guildhall proved satisfying, if tedious, with the lawyer seemingly intent on getting everything in order, overawed by the royal seal on the documents Aaron produced.
“Lord Blanden has spent a considerable amount of money on the estate,” the man blinked myopically at them over a scarred wooden desk. “Although I believe the house remains relatively untouched.”
“Fortunate for him,” Aaron snapped. “Had he touched my father’s manor I would—”
Samuel placed a restraining hand on Aaron’s arm. “We assume everything is in order, Master Methuen?”
The lawyer bowed them out of the tiny office. “I hope you are not disappointed when you see it.”
“I won’t be.” Aaron called confidently over his shoulder.
The stone façade of Loxsbeare Manor looked neglected, but achingly familiar. Climbing plants were torn away in places, obscuring the upper windows. Rangy thistles grew up against the brickwork, strangling the ornamental box hedge whose geometric pruning had been his father’s pride. The stable doors stood wide, revealing a deserted interior with stools, leather harnesses, and buckets strewn about on a layer of dirty straw.
With shaking fingers, Aaron inserted the heavy key in the massive front door, its iron ring and studs so achingly familiar he had to fight to keep his breathing steady. The door swung inwards on creaky hinges and, as he stepped into the lofty hall, the house closed around him like a well-worn cloak.
He was home.
His boots kicked up dust as they clicked hollowly on the floorboards leading into the great hall. He went to stand before the massive fireplace, feet apart and hands clasped behind his back, almost as if searing flames crackled away behind him instead of a stone cold grate scattered with bits of straw and paper.
Samuel ran a hand over the mantel, bringing his fingers away rimed with dirt. “Blanden had trouble engaging servants.” He slapped both palms together to remove the dust. “Your family commanded a lot of loyalty hereabouts.” He tipped his head back to study the ceiling. “He lived here with his wife and son, a couple of kitchen staff, a footman, and groom. He employed a secretary too, but rumour said the man was a priest.”
“I heard he had converted.” Aaron followed him back out into the hall, scenes from his childhood chasing through his head.
“He made a passably good Papist, for a while,” Samuel said. “He changed back when King William arrived, although from what I heard, he hated the idea of a Dutchman on the throne. Not when there were perfectly good Stuarts still alive.”
Aaron laughed at the oblique insult to King William, but London and the court seemed a long way away now.
“Aaron.” Samuel’s flat tone commanded his attention. “When Tobias wrote to me from Ireland in ’ninety-one, he said if you ever came back here, I was to show you the cellar.”
“The cellar? Is this a jest, Master Ffoyle?” Aaron made to wave him off, but the look on the man’s face changed his mind. Instead, he lifted his arm in a theatrical gesture, and bowed. “Lead the way, sir.”
Following Samuel’s laboured pace, Aaron dipped his head to avoid the low ceiling at the bottom of the cellar steps. The last time he had been down there, he could stand upright. Narrowing his eyes to adjust to the dim light, he strode past empty wooden shelves, an odd stone jar, moving through pieces of frayed linen discarded on the sandy floor. “There’s nothing here!” Impatient, he brushed a cobweb f
rom his shoulder.
Samuel ignored him and approached the wall at the far end, where he crouched, brushing the sand away from where the stonework joined the floor.
Impatient to be back upstairs, Aaron was about to suggest again that they leave, but stopped short as the wall suddenly swung inwards. “What in God’s name—?”
Samuel straightened, cocking his head in an, ‘I-told-you-so’ gesture as he brushed sand from his hands. Frowning, Aaron followed him into a second room, a third of the size of the main cellar that contained a row of small windows near the ceiling.
“I had no idea this was here.” He raised his arms to indicate the stacks of packing cases containing bundles wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine. “What is all this?”
“In his letter, Tobias said your father showed him this room,” Samuel said. “That when the soldiers gave orders for the manor to be prepared for a new owner, he and Betty Humbold hid these things down here.”
“Dear Betty.” The memory made Aaron smile. “Have you heard anything of her?”
“She died, four years ago.”
“Ah, I see.” Aaron accepted this fact stoically; he had not set eyes on the woman in ten years.
Aaron unwrapped one of the packages, spotted another, and dropped the first, the pattern repeated as he walked around the room, unable to believe his eyes. “These are our possessions. They have been here all the time?”
Samuel nodded. “Must have been. I certainly didn’t know they were here.”
Aaron wandered the room, running his hands over familiar items he imagined he would never see again, mentally putting everything back in its original place in the house. “Why did you never mention it? Even after Tobias was killed?”
Samuel held both hands out in appeal. “To what purpose? When Blanden still owned the manor, it was lost with everything else.” He strode to a stack of packing cases piled up to head height at the far end of the room, muttering to himself. “He said it would look like a false wall.”
“What do you mean? What would?”
Samuel ignored him. “We need more light.”
“There’s a lamp over here.” Aaron picked it up and shook it. “With oil in it, if I’m not mistaken.”
Samuel produced a taper and flint from his pocket, expertly lighting the wick. An orange glow sprang to life, illuminating their faces.
“What are we looking at?” Aaron asked, frowning.
“I don’t know, yet.” Samuel lifted the lamp higher. “I believe this is where your grandfather used to hide the goods the smugglers brought off the river.”
“Smugglers?”
Samuel eased through the gap in the packing cases. “Yes indeed. Thomas Coumbe was a frequent visitor in your grandsire’s day. Perhaps I’ll tell you about him one day.”
A wooden chest with iron corner plates and hinges held a pile of books and a pewter candleholder, half a gnarled candle and several stubs scattered on the surface.
A narrow truckle bed covered with a thin mattress and what at first glance looked to be a faded blue long coat with buff turned-back cuffs trimmed in tarnished gilt embroidery lay on the bed. Aaron’s eyes focussed and his stomach turned over in shock as he realised what he was looking at, and all thoughts of smugglers vanished.
“It’s a body,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“Which has been here for some time by the look of it.” Samuel indicated the room. “This cellar floor is mostly sand, so it’s cool and dry here.”
Not unfamiliar with corpses, Aaron stepped closer, studying the dried flesh receding from the facial bones had the consistency of brown leather. The coat buttons were tarnished, and two of them sported black stains. The breeches, torn and frayed in places, had dried splashes on the fabric, which could have been mud, or blood.
“This must be the man Blanden shot.” Samuel spoke at Aaron’s shoulder. “His demon was nothing more sinister than a traveller, probably come to beg for alms, or maybe even rob them.”
Feeling bolder, Aaron stepped closer, indicating a long-dried bloody wound on the man’s upper chest. “The musket ball hit him right there.” He cocked his chin at the concealed door behind them. “Then he must have crawled in here and died.”
A dirty cravat hung loosely around the corpse’s neck, in what was once good quality cambric but was now brittle, stained with dirt, and ingrained dust. A frayed and yellowed linen shirt covered the sunken chest, with wispy strands of brown hair lying limply against shoulders beneath a visage Aaron was trying not to look at. Why did he feel so unsettled? It was just a body. He looked down at the floor, where an empty baldrick was propped against the bottom of the bed, the hilt of a sword poking out from underneath.
“Aaron.” The single choked word brought him up short, penetrating his detachment. “Look closer.” Samuel’s voice was heavy with sadness.
He looked into Samuel’s face, seeing there what he refused to acknowledge, and whispered an incredulous, “No!”
Reluctantly, Aaron turned back to search the ravaged features for a familiar sign. His brain screamed denial, but it was there, in the texture of the hair, the shape of the brow, even the deflated nose and chin, shapeless from desiccation. “It cannot be.”
“I believe so. I think Tobias saw it too.”
“Father?” All Aaron’s past hope drained away and grief took its place. Then questions. “Why didn’t he come to you? Why did he hide down here?”
Samuel held the lamp aloft in a quivering hand. “It looks as if he lived here for weeks.” He swept his arm in an arc encompassing the bed and the table, the books and the candles.
“But if I got away to Holland, why couldn’t he?”
“And leave his family behind?” Samuel shook his head. “He came back for them. For you.”
Aaron stood frozen, unable to take it in. His throat hurt.
Samuel placed a hand on his arm. “Imagine what it must have been like for him, Aaron. To have escaped Sedgemoor, only to return and find Blanden occupying his home. His wife dead and his family gone. Himself under sentence of death. Perhaps he crept in here to give himself respite to decide what to do. Then time passed and his state of mind grew worse. He began wandering the house with the intention of driving Blanden out. They said the Blandons were plagued with the sound of footsteps and movement at night for weeks. How could he have known the man would shoot him?”
“Did he know about Mother, do you think?” Aaron asked helplessly.
“Everyone knew about Lady Elizabeth, but to my knowledge, no one reported seeing Sir Jonathan after the rebellion.”
“And Miles Blanden killed him, without even knowing what he had done.” He stooped to pick up the sword from the floor, hefting its weight in his hands. “He caught me playing with this once. He gave me such a whipping I—” His throat closed and he fought back tears. “Samuel. If father made provision for us through you, then why didn’t he have a plan for himself?”
“He didn’t think he needed one.” Samuel set the lamp down on the chest. “If he failed, he fully expected to die.”
The room closed in and Aaron felt a sudden and irresistible urge to get out of the cellar and into daylight again. He flung away from Samuel and the travesty on the makeshift bed, retracing his steps beneath the stone arches and up into the great hall, the setting of so many of the Woulfe triumphs and celebrations. The shabby hangings and dust-covered floor receded as memories crowded into his head, of the day he learned he was to go with his father and uncle to join Monmouth.
Aaron tilted the blade in his hands, watching the sunlight reflect off the dulled metal, recalling clearly the last time his father had worn it. The last day he had seen him alive.
He cursed God aloud for the unmourned death of Sir Jonathan Woulfe, and with an anguished cry, lifted the sword and dashed it against the stone fireplace, where the hilt separated from the blade with a clang and skittered across the floor.
Chapter Thirty-One
June 1695, Palmer House, London – Helen
a
Helena glided towards the coach in a riding habit of violet brocade embroidered in white and silver, its simple lines requiring few petticoats. She had paid a ludicrous amount for it at Bourne and Harper’s warehouse on a rare trip to Covent Garden, but for the first time in months, she cared how she looked.
The colour also enabled her to conform to half mourning, since more than six months had passed since Guy’s death.
Palmer House had been in a fever of activity since dawn, with all the servants involved in preparing the children for the journey and stowing their large amounts of luggage.
The Palmer carriage stood in the drive, the Devereuxs’ directly behind it. The third in line belonged to Henry and Mary Ann, who stood on the front steps with Hannah between them. Two carts, with horses in the traces and a mountain of luggage positioned at the rear, formed a grand convoy ready to move off down the western highway.
Mary Ann gasped when she saw her. “Helena, you would make the exiled Queen Mary Beatrice envious.”
“Thank you.” Helena adjusted her glove. “Although it has all been such a rush. Aaron was so insistent we all arrive together.”
“His letter was full of his plans. You cannot be surprised at his enthusiasm.” Henry absently smoothed down Hannah’s curls.
Helena shook her head. “No, not really, and I long to see Loxsbeare again.”
Edmund clambered from one seat to another, refusing to settle, while Jonathan protected his seat by a window with a hard shove when his brother got too close.
“I’ll give you a sweetmeat if you behave. Or a whipping if you don’t,” Chloe threatened, holding tight to a squirming Charles, who fussed and pulled Chloe’s cap over her eyes.
Helena considered sending the twins to another vehicle with Hannah and her nurse, but it was too late and the gates swung open and the carriages rolled out onto the road.
Jonathan tugged at her skirt. “Mama?” he asked in his high, clear voice. “When we reach Exeter, you will show me the Guildhall and the walls where Great Grandfather fought in the war? Papa told me I should become acquainted with my family’s country.”
The Goldsmith's Wife (The Woulfes of Loxsbeare Book 2) Page 26