I could hardly wait to see it.
Even now, when we were promised to each other, Richard stood by his strange but rather touching resolution not to bed me while I still bore Edmund’s name, while I was Eleanor Ashfield not Eleanor Glanville. But that did not prevent us from spending the entire journey to London touching and stroking and kissing and murmuring little words to each other, until we were both driven half to distraction. We cooled our ardor only by concentrating on discussing preparations for the wedding, planning who should come to the celebration and what amusements we would have, what fresh-killed livestock we’d need for the serving of meats; roast, baked or boiled.
I wrote it all down in the notebook I had once carried with me when I was observing butterflies, in what already seemed like a different life. I had no need of butterflies anymore. I had what I had longed for. I had him right here beside me.
I had the top of the pencil in my mouth, was sucking it as I was thinking about puddings. I felt Richard watching me.
“We should make an application to the Episcopal authorities for a license to marry at St. Mary’s Redcliffe in Bristol,” he declared softly. “Queen Elizabeth herself called it the goodliest, fairest and most famous parish church in all of England. You should be a bride in no less a place.”
“But we can return to Tickenham for the feasting? And have dancing on the grass?”
“Surely. We can do whatever you want, my little Nell. We can have new silver plate for the top table, and gloves and bridal ribbons for every guest.”
“Oh, yes.” My second marriage would begin in color and brightness and joy, and so in color and brightness and joy it would continue. “I have longed for a merry wedding since I was a child,” I said, tossing notebook and pencil aside.
He kissed me, laid his cool cheek against mine, whispered into my hair. “Did you have such sweet dimples then? What were you like?”
I let my hand wander over his thigh, slip round to the inside of it. “I was forever getting into trouble and doing things I shouldn’t.” My hand drifted up slowly to his crotch. “I was very curious, you see,” I whispered. “I still am. I like to experiment.”
He closed his eyes, dropped his head onto my shoulder, shifted nearer to me as I rubbed him, felt his desire rising at my touch. When he rested back against the velvet upholstered seat, I watched the little lines between his brows pucker now with pleasure and I leaned over and put my lips against them, kissed also the grooved crescents at either side of his mouth.
“Nell,” he moaned. “What are you trying to do to me?”
“I want to love you,” I whispered. “I love you so much.”
“Do you?”
“Surely you know that I do?”
But he did not look sure at all.
Too soon the coach came to an abrupt halt and we were there, on the paved street in front of the arcaded façade with its expanses of plate glass, behind which were the most beautiful displays of fans and feathers and lace.
We followed the other elegantly dressed shoppers who sauntered inside into one of the sheltered long galleries. It was lined with merchants’ booths, with counters and glass fronts and awnings, and shelf upon shelf of all that I had been taught to see as foreign and decadent and Popish.
Richard slipped his hand almost possessively round my waist and I felt my pulse quicken again, did not know, though, if it was with desire for him or desire for all the unimaginable and once forbidden luxury arrayed before me. I felt like a child before a table laden with cakes and sweetmeats.
“If I lived in London I should come here every day,” I said.
“Would you?” He gave me an interested smile. “Perhaps we should live in London, then.”
“Oh, I could never leave Tickenham. But we must visit often.”
I was as delighted by the liberty of the women I saw as I was by the goods, the way they seemed free to parade publicly with their friends, to drink coffee and gossip and shop as they chose. After my experience of the closed world of scientific societies and coffeehouse clubs, this was a revelation.
“Are we going to just stand here gawping all day, Nell?” Richard smiled. “Or are we going to shop?”
I carried on gawping. “I don’t know where to start. I’ve completely forgotten what we need.”
“It is not all about what you need, my love,” he said to me, softly suggestive. “It is about what you want.”
“You know very well what it is that I want.”
“Besides that,” he said, his eyes crinkling. “Besides what you already have on order for your wedding night.”
I giggled. “You are scandalous, sir, to talk so in a public place.” But we were not alone in our flirting. It seemed the desires of shopping were linked very closely to the desires of the flesh. Perhaps the sermon writers had a point when they associated shopping with encouraging illicit sex, even going so far as to accuse the women in this place of being little better than harlots.
The mercer’s servant certainly had a tongue far freer than any I had ever heard. “Oh, there’s nothing like the feel of fine linen on your skin,” she said in seductive tones, as she caressed a bale of sheets and fluttered her eyelashes at Richard. “Do have a feel, sir. Go on, do. ’Tis not often you get offered such a pleasure for no charge.”
“Nor from the lips of such a pretty face.” Richard returned her smile, as he walked his elegant fingers over the sheet she offered him.
“Have you touched anything finer or smoother?” she cooed.
“Only a young girl’s skin.” He flirted back, clearly enjoying the repartee and obviously not unpracticed in it.
“Can you imagine having anything better close to your naked skin?” she went on. “Can you imagine anything better to lie upon or beneath?”
“Only a young girl’s skin,” Richard repeated, with a chuckle.
I twined my arm very firmly around his and dragged him off up the broad avenue.
“But we need new sheets,” he protested laughingly.
“Not from the likes of her, we don’t. One more second and she’d have been over the counter and ripping off your shirt, fine linen or no.”
He laughed. “Now who is jealous?” But as if it pleased him.
I slid my hand around his waist, let it rest lightly on his hip, just above the hilt of his sword. He shepherded me past a booth named Pomegranate and another shop called The Flying Horse. We bought luxurious gold silk from Naples for my gown, a bolt of burgundy wrought velvet for Richard’s suit, gold lace to trim cloaks. We bought coffee, chocolate, tea, sugar and spices, and then went to a stall selling gems. “Show me the biggest Oriental pearls you have,” Richard said. “The brightest and the roundest.”
He bargained with assurance and skill, drove down the price by a half and then bought them, with a small lacquered cabinet for keeping them in.
I had never seen him so at ease. “I’d never have guessed you’d be so interested in browsing the wares of drapers and haberdashers and perfumers and silk mercers,” I said, tucking my hand back inside his belt. “You like it here as much as I do.”
He kissed my hair. “I like buying things for you.”
“You must have something too. What will it be?”
He chose a jewel-encrusted scabbard and silver dagger and I was sure that must be the last purchase, but he had moved on to another silver merchant. We had already bought trenchers and a sugar box, new mustard pots and saltcellars and wine pots, but he picked up an escalloped fruit dish, the kind that would be displayed on the buffet, and I felt a shadow pass over me, transitory as the shadow of the wings of a swan in flight but enough to ruin my enjoyment, because I knew, as everyone did, that plate was displayed as a symbol of status and of wealth. I understood how much it must matter to Richard, because he had seen what it did to his father to have it all plundered and stripped away. I understood it, but it troubled me.
He saw that I was troubled, mistook the reason. “Regard it as an investment,” he said. “If w
e are ever in need of ready money, we can have it melted down.”
“We will have to do it immediately, if we spend any more.”
“No we won’t,” he said easily. “The world runs on credit now. Dealers in luxuries are particularly glad to extend credit to landed gentlemen and ladies. Enjoy it now, pay for it later.”
“Why does that sound more like a warning than an opportunity?” I tried to put George Digby’s comment about profligacy from my head. Failed.
Richard was looking at me strangely and I slid my eyes away from him to the floor. “What is it?” he said very low.
I raised my face to his. “I think a beggar girl might not do for you after all,” I tried to tease, but his eyes flared, the blue of them suddenly glacial.
I thought how I would have to grow accustomed to this unnerving changeability of his. I would learn to notice the warning signs and triggers and find ways to avoid them and divert him, I told myself, as I had learned to divert Forest from the tantrums that erupted whenever he did not get what he wanted. Sometimes.
WHEN JOHN SMYTHE RODE over from Ashton Court to see him, Richard was with Forest in the great hall, where they had both been for most of the morning. Richard had removed his small ornamental sword from his hip and was demonstrating with great patience just how to hold the hilt and draw it from the jeweled scabbard to make a lunge.
Our neighbor was a trim-bearded and very aristocratic young man who behaved as if he was twice as old as his years. He had already adopted the irascibility and pomposity of his father, Sir Hugh, who had died several years ago. In his role as deputy lord lieutenant, John Smythe had come to tell us that the militia was being put on readiness for an invasion by the Duke of Monmouth.
It should not have come as any great surprise. Talk of rebellion had been brewing since before the second King Charles died and the new King James took the throne. But why did it have to happen now, just days before my wedding?
“You will join us, of course, sir?” John Smythe said to Richard. “Colonel Portman has sent out a call for young and able gentleman to lead our troops.”
My eyes flew to him as my heart turned over. With a hiss of metal that reminded me poignantly of skates on ice, Richard dropped the sword into its sheath, handed the encrusted hilt back to Forest.
The boy took it in a trance, watching him as intently as was I. “Will you go and fight, Mr. Glanville?” my son asked eagerly.
The civil war was not even a distant memory for him, no more than a thrilling adventure from the ballads that made no mention of Somersetshire being turned into a blood-soaked battlefield, of people being starved out of their houses and those houses pillaged and burned, of children being raped and murdered before their mothers’ eyes, of the inhabitants of this country being reduced to a state close to destitution from which many were only just recovering. I had been born into that aftermath and it was still very real and raw for me. My blood felt chilled to think such hardship might return. Richard showed no outward fear, except that his lovely face had gone ashen and the tension was evident in every line of his body. I sank down into a chair, suddenly lacking the energy or the will to stand.
“Will you go, sir?” I had not noticed Bess come into the room, carrying an armful of my new gowns.
I glanced at her and her eyes told me everything. Ned and Thomas would be going to join the rebels. Their fathers were club men in the civil war. They would see it as their duty to defend the grand old cause, the Protestant cause, just as my father would have defended it to his dying breath. He would turn in his grave to see John Smythe in his house, asking my intended husband to help lead the militia in support of a Catholic king against a Protestant pretender.
The differences between us had seemed of no account before, but never had I felt them so keenly as now, when Ned and Thomas and the other Tickenham men were probably already collecting pitchforks and scythes and rounding up their friends to rally to the cause of the Duke. The war had never been over for my father, and it seemed it was never really over for England, least of all the West Country. If Richard joined the militia, our family would be split in two. Bess and I would be on opposing sides, our men at war with one another. We would be enemies under the same roof.
Richard came over to me and sat himself down quietly on the arm of my chair. I slid my hand over to rest on his thigh, not sure if it was to comfort him or myself.
“I am to be married in a few days,” he said, finally answering the question only I had not dared to ask. “Nothing will disrupt that, not war, nor flood nor famine. After it is done, if the militia still needs me, I will decide what to do.”
“Very well, sir. Thank you.” With an abrupt click of his heels, John Smythe bowed and left.
Forest whipped out the little sword, sliced the air with it. “How old d’you have to be to fight?”
“Old enough to know what you are fighting for,” Richard said.
“What are the rebels fighting for?” my son asked.
“To rid the country of kings and Papists,” Richard said sardonically. “Same as it ever was.”
I had never quite shaken off my conviction that Edmund had died of Papist poison. I could not help fearing what it would mean to have a Catholic on the throne, could not help thinking it might be better if the rebels won—except that Richard would be fighting against them. If they won, he would have lost, just like his father, and I did not know how he would cope with that.
Forest came over to Richard and handed back the little sword with obvious reluctance.
“Keep it,” Richard said.
Forest’s eyes were wide as trenchers. “Really, sir? Can I?”
“It is too dangerous, Richard,” I said, ignoring my son’s scowl. “He is too young.”
“I was only four when my father gave me my first sword,” Richard said easily, reminding me, as if I needed reminding, of that pressure his father had put on him from such an early age, to win, always to win.
I could not be so cruel as to remind him that his father had also thrown him into a lake, to drown or swim. I could not be so cruel as to remind him that he was not the father of my son. Though looking at them both, with their two heads of black hair, Forest looked to be more Richard’s child than mine.
I glanced from my husband, the son of a Cavalier, to my son, the grandson of a Roundhead major, and felt truly thankful that my father was no longer here to see them together.
“Who will win?” Forest asked, practicing a parry with the sheathed sword. “The rebels or the King?”
“Ah, now, that is always the question,” Richard said. “Tell me, who would you stake your money on? A king with trained infantry and mighty guns, or a disorderly rabble with scythes and pitchforks? Whose side would you rather be on?”
The words came to my tongue of their own volition, were out of my mouth before I could bite them back. “You should not be so confident,” I said. “You, of all people, should not need reminding that the first King Charles did not win. For all his battalions.”
His expression changed, darkened. “You speak as if you would see our King and all his armies defeated too.”
“I no longer care,” I said slowly, “whether a person be Puritan, Protestant or Papist. Just as I do not care if they be kin to Roundhead or to Cavalier.”
“Are you quite sure of that, Nell?”
Summer
1685
My second wedding day could not have been more different from the first.
The predicted invasion had not happened, and I refused to let the threat of it spoil the day.
It began with much eating and drinking, so even before we made it to church half our party, Bess and Ned, John Hort and the Walkers and Mother Wall, were all headed for mild intoxication, everyone very loud and merry.
Richard and I traveled to Bristol in a coach with glass windows and liveried pages, the sun shining brightly all the way. I had a golden dress to match my golden curls, and a necklace of sapphires and diamonds that Richard had g
iven to me as a wedding gift.
The soaring church of St. Mary Redcliffe was festooned inside with violets and roses. Precious little of the medieval stained glass had survived destruction during the Reformation and by Cromwell’s army, but the very highest windows were still intact and were enough to illuminate the spacious interior with a myriad of colors. The sunlight filtered through them and made colored patterns on the floor. It gleamed on the golden basin in which the guests were to cast their brightly wrapped gifts.
“Look,” I said to Richard, as we walked to the aisle over a pool of red and yellow and purple light. “We have found the foot of a rainbow.”
He stroked back a wisp of hair that had drifted over my cheek. “And see, here is the gold.”
But for all the radiance around us, he appeared today as if haunted by his own private shadow. He seemed more than usually preoccupied and troubled, and I imagined it must be the promise he had made to John Smythe that was distressing him. He’d said he would join the militia, if need be, as soon as our wedding was over. I took his hand in mine, leaned into him and kissed him, to be rewarded with a gentle, transforming smile. There was a mischievous sparkle in his eyes again as he whispered to me of the wedding vow that Protestants had foresworn as pagan idolatry. “I shall worship you with my body, Nell, forever, so long as you will always worship me with yours.”
“Oh, I will. I will.”
It was enough to irk even the mild Puritan in William Merrick, who muttered that the whole event was a shameful display of pomp. And that was before he found out what was planned for later.
The bridesmaids showered us with flowers and sprinkled us with wheat as we proceeded from the church, and my smiles turned to an amazed stare when I saw what was waiting to greet us for our return to Tickenham. A hundred riders on horseback had come to escort us back to the house, and all the grand families—the Smythes from Ashton Court, the Digbys from Clevedon Court and the Gorgeses of Wraxall—had turned out in their finest coaches.
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