‘No. Now.’
She pulled away his soiled garments, peeling them from bruised and sore-encrusted skin; she helped him to lift fabric that had become stuck to the dried blood of wounds and promised to look to see if the wounds were infected — once he’d rinsed the filth off. She tossed the rotten rags aside and helped him to enter the shallow stream, lifting handfuls of icy water over his shivering body whilst he rubbed hard at the muck. It was too dark to see all of the marks on him but narrow black wounds and wide spreading bruises marked his shrunken frame, blooming as the water washed away the encrustation. He rubbed with his hands and his fists ever more vigorously until Florence placed her hand on his shoulder and nodded that it was all gone. Then, as promised, she inspected the wounds — and there were many — but they were mostly shallow stab wounds. The most brutal one, which made him limp, was in the top of his thigh. It was ugly and bruised around the impact point.
‘Can’t see any infection,’ she managed to smile at him. ‘I think you’ll heal.’ She didn’t want to imagine what had caused it.
‘Yeah. I will,’ he breathed out heavily. ‘In the middle of it all, I worried about infection, you know? No penicillin — we’re back in the dark ages — people die of the smallest things . . . here, but he used a knife that he’d heated in the flame. Don’t think he was looking out for me, just thought it would hurt more.’
‘I’ve got something . . . in Cook’s bag.’ She took out a small pot of honey and some muslin cloth. Daubing the honey onto the cloth, she placed it on the deep wound and pressed it there until it stuck. ‘Anti-bacterial. Should be Manuka really but . . . ’
‘Feels . . . good. Bit sticky.’
Florence tried to think of something to say but all of her words were useless. ‘You’re OK, Nat. We’ll keep checking them, washing them clean. I’ll help. They’ll heal, promise. Do you want me to try to stitch them?’ she hoped to God that he said no.
‘Not much point. They’ve dried up. Let them be. Is that food?’ he nodded towards the sack she carried. It seemed that his jaw ached and his face hurt around his eye socket which made it difficult to chew. She broke up the bread for him and scooped out the dough while she ate the crust. He was able to chew the cheese. All she could offer was her tenderness. After he’d swallowed a flask of ale, he looked her in the eye.
‘Did you wait long?’ he asked.
‘As long as we could. Pru dragged me away when we heard the revels ending.’
‘Ah. Not long then.’
She’d hurt him. ‘I thought that you’d left me there. Deserted me.’ There was no room here for anything except the naked truth.
‘Why would I . . .?’
‘You know! Revenge. For . . . Denzil. For deserting you.’ Florence could barely say the words. She’d harboured the guilt for so long.
He surprised her. ‘You didn’t desert me! You were just trying to make a life for yourself here.’
‘You . . . understood?’
‘Well, yeah, now! At the time, I thought you were a total bitch!’ No punches pulled.
‘I was. But I wasn’t . . .’
He raised his eyebrow.
‘Denzil threatened me. He said that if I didn’t persuade you to go, then he’d make sure that you died. He could have done it you know. Wouldn’t have been difficult. Thief, witch — or just ambushed you somewhere by those thugs.’
‘I believed you. Bloody convincing. Very painful Florence Brock.’ His eyes looked up at her, his head still lowered.
‘I shouldn’t have gone with it. I was . . . afraid.’
‘And now?’
‘Still afraid but there’s something else . . . cheesy . . . I think I’ve found my courage. I can face stuff even though I know it’ll hurt.’
‘Every soldier has to find that. Always afraid but coming to terms with it and facing it. Interesting experience isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. Definitely interesting.’
‘I did try to tell you, you know,’ he offered tentatively. ‘About Denzil.’
There was a touch of reprimand in her voice, ‘You told me that Denzil smelled wrong! What was I supposed to make of that! What sort of warning was it supposed to be!’ She was actually still cross with him for that.
He saw her point, ‘Well, I didn’t have any real info. I just knew!’
She cocked her head at him.
‘OK. I was jealous. You were mine — and I was yours. I thought that we’d been literally thrown together by fate and that we’d found one another, two souls out of time. I thought that it was meant to be. All that stuff.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’
He wouldn’t pretend now. ‘I wasn’t sure that you felt the same — that you loved me as well — as much. You kept on about taking it slow.’ He stuck out his damaged bottom lip.
Florence leaned in towards him, careful of his fragility. She put her lips to his — tenderly, trying not to hurt him. Hers were soft and warm against his cracked, dry lips but the sensitivity of the touch tingled and made his heart beat strong. Their lips parted for a moment, eyes opening and mouths smiling at the rightness of it. She didn’t expect it, in his damaged state but he sought her lips again with a fierce intensity which surprised her.
He thought that she tasted of ginger and nutmeg like a rich pudding. She embraced him and he clung on to her, the kiss knocking them both over and back into the mud and with an ‘oof!’ from her and a sharp ‘arrggh’ from him as his injuries jarred. There they lay, her arms holding him in his pain and pleasure and he whispered, ‘So that’s a yes then.’ A statement, not a question as his cut hands found her face and held it firm between them. The layers of confusion, doubt, unsaid confessions, lifted and only truth remained.
‘Just one thing,’ he frowned, wincing at the pain of the freshly bleeding lip. ‘Never tell anyone that I’m your servant again — or brother!’ Laughing, she kissed him and then wrapped him up in a warm blanket and watched over him whilst he slept.
Nat’s wounds were slow to knit together. His leg wound, in particular, seemed to be deeper than the others, deep into his thigh muscle, causing their progress to be slow. They had to stop too often for him to rest the leg and then they would listen for the sounds of pursuit and although they heard the barking of hounds in the distance, they didn’t come any nearer, eventually fading away into the distance. It gave them hope that Denzil was either dead or incapacitated with Holless at his side.
At dusk, they sank gratefully onto the moss and shared out the little food that was left. Florence, hungry as she was, ate the hard biscuits and gave Nat the softer food — and the cheese. Water wasn’t a problem as the forest was bisected with streams and rivulets. Nat washed his wounds and Florence checked the progress of healing. He told her what he knew about Cook - Kylie and she laughed at the name. After the third day, the wounds looked less angry and felt less hot and she noticed that Nat was able to walk less stiffly.
The blankets that Dorcas had given her were wonderful and Florence gathered moss to pad out a simple mattress, laying one blanket over it and covering themselves with the other. They shared it with the forest fauna, of course but it was a small price to pay for some comfort and Nat had found it too painful to lay without some cushioning. They lay beside one another and she turned towards him, rising on her elbow,
‘Better today. You walked further.’
‘Easier to move the leg. Not quite so sore, you know?’ He grinned.
She pulled off the honey dressing and saw that the skin was beginning to knit together well. It had done it job.
‘Still, bits that hurt quite a lot,’ he pouted.
Was that a leer? ‘Really. Mmm. So . . . how much better are you, exactly? We wouldn’t want to do anything to make things worse, would we?’
‘Lip’s still a bit sore — might want to be careful.’ She kissed him there. He seemed inspired now, ‘Hands are bruised,’ Florence kissed each knuckle. He was thoughtful, ‘And that leg wound is very tender,’
>
Florence grinned back at him. ‘Oh, dear. Well, perhaps we should wait . . .’
‘I’m really starting to feel much stronger, you know. I think that I could manage . . .’
‘A biscuit?’ She was laughing at him.
‘Come here.’ He reached for her hand and pulled her down to him, kissing her thoroughly. She didn’t care that her lips were smeared with his blood and he stopped feeling the pains of his body any more. ‘Florence Brock, I love you.’
‘Oh good.’
It wasn’t easy. Woodland floors, even padded with moss, are stony and full of insect life. There was a lot of crying out, not always in ecstasy but with sharp pain, as small rocks dug themselves in, but eventually, neither of them noticed the discomforts any more. Entwined like the tree roots that they’d nestled into, they lost themselves in the heartbeat of the forest. And if they did notice it, they soon forgot that the beating of their hearts seemed to be amplified by the deep throbbing of the great trees themselves.
46
Out of the Abyss
Despite the euphoria of escape, and the glow that found them grinning dreamily at one another, Florence and Nat now recalled why living in the forest was neither romantic nor idyllic. Survival was very different to a woodland stroll, an energetic ramble or even camping out, and while passion in the embrace of tree roots might be . . . extraordinary — for the first time — thereafter, there was a sense of extreme lumpiness. The rosy glow of the pastoral myth is nothing like trying to make love in the forest which is tiring, insanitary and unrelentingly soggy.
‘One of my lecturers once told me something amazing,’ Florence offered, swatting away a cloud of midges. ‘If you could weigh all of the insects in the world, they would easily out-weigh the humans.’
‘I believe that,’ Nat growled, scratching at swollen bites on his neck. ‘They’ve fed on so much of me, they’re probably sending messages to all of their bitey little friends about the banquet.’ Lots of insistent bugs were intent on inveigling their way into their crevices and feasting; it was irritating and sometimes they found themselves arguing in the way that people in love do: with sudden passion and quick forgiveness. One heated dispute was a squabble about whether nettle sting was more painful than briar scratches. It ended in laughter when Nat attempted to rub dock leaf juice into Florence’s stinging rear after a call of nature had gone wrong and she’d fallen heavily in a ripe nettle patch.
He rolled, spent, onto his back, ‘I give in. You are absolutely right. Nettles every time. Just tell me when it happens again.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Florence sighed contentedly.
Despite the hardship, each day was good, together without the tyranny of fear — and in love. They realised how fragile they’d been with one another before. How so much had been unspoken because they couldn’t be sure of the other’s response but now it was easy. There was nothing that couldn’t be said and nothing that needed to be said. They had looked into the abyss and climbed out of it.
Nat began to grow strong again and their confidence grew that they had escaped pursuit. Florence fantasied that Denzil’s wound had punctured an artery and he’d bled to death — slowly. His blood could drain away into the depths of the . . . Nat didn’t need to tell her what Denzil had done; she’d seen. She didn’t know how much Nat remembered from the lair so she started to tell him about what she’d heard coming up from the blood drain.
‘I know.’ His voice was very quiet. He remembered everything. He had long hours on his own in there. ‘I think that there were three down there — all adults thank God! I heard them crying sometimes. Hard to tell how long they’d been there. He threw scraps down as well as my blood and animal blood.’ Nat kept his emotions out of his voice. Those people deserved more than his helpless pity. ‘I think that there was another entrance to it because I heard Holless down there and I’d seen him go into what I thought was an ice-house, when I was leaving the Hall. Inhuman the pair of them.’
‘Ice house? Wasn’t one at Locksley.’
‘Probably was but it was grown over. The door’s set into a bank. It would have been easy for it to disappear over the years.’ He stopped for a moment and took her hands. ‘Florence, those people . . . they were like us. Their speech . . .’
They talked about how Denzil had known about the others. Did he or Holless wait by the great trees in the forest? That didn’t make sense. How could he possibly have known when it might happen? When they’d tried to use the trees, it hadn’t worked. What did Denzil know that allowed him to predict arrivals? It would have been really useful to interrogate him about it but they’d have to settle for him being dead.
‘He can come and go through them. He brings things with him — small, next to his body. He showed off his gramophone to me. Brought the bloody thing through in parts. God knows how long it took him.’ They thought of the return journeys he must have made. They were quiet, trying to understand how he’d done it, longing to know the trick of it.
‘Should we have tried to free them, Nat? We ran.’ They both felt the shame of it.
‘How, Florrie? What could we have done? You only just managed to rescue me.’ He kissed her. ‘Maybe . . . if we find these watchers . . . get some help . . . But they sounded very weak. I don’t think that they’ll last long down there,’ his voice faltered. ‘That was my real fear, you know. I think that once he’d got what he needed from me, he was going to throw me down there too.’
She agreed and wondered if that it might have been her fate too.
Each day, trying to live like this, exhausted them; it was hard work, surviving. They stopped in the afternoon, on the banks of a stream where the light was vividly neon green and the water shone black. If they had been on a hike, it would have been a romantic spot, a likely place to picnic with clean water and the floor coated with springy moss. In any case, they were both too damned tired to get wet crossing the stream this late in the day but if they thought that this was a fairy dell, they were mistaken. The moss lied and hid sharp limestone rocks which dug in to them at every angle and the reason that the moss was so plentiful was because it thrived on the moisture of the basin, quickly soaking into their clothes and making them even more dejected. The idyll was a cruel mirage.
‘It just doesn’t get any easier, does it?’ Florence sighed in defeat, stating the irritatingly obvious, her voice flat. ‘I have beetles and crawling insects attempting to burrow into every crevice and once they’re there, they bite!’ And as if to prove her point, she scratched her crotch with a sudden urgency and vigour! Nat barely hid his smile at the action and, turning away, was proud of this restraint, his irritation, quite literally, being as great as hers.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about them. It’s probably the parasites which are doing the damage.’ And he buried his hand down his britches and had a rummage that a baboon would have been proud of.
It made her laugh; he could always make her laugh and she loved him for it and then she groaned with disgust and resignation. What had they come to! ‘We have to find someone to take us in, Nat. I’m a creature of the age of comfort and convenience and I’m just not designed for this. What I wouldn’t give for a wet-wipe!’ She had, in the back of her mind, that worry that her period might happen while they were out here and she’d absolutely no idea how she would cope with the practicalities of that occurrence other than to rip up her skirts and use them as rags. She had very few shreds of dignity left but that would have been unthinkable. She’d dealt with a dump in the woods but she’d be damned if this entirely feminine dilemma would reduce her to forest moss!
Nat was down by the stream, scooping up the sweet cold water and was splashing his dirt striped face and lank hair, shaking the water away like a shaggy dog. Bathing had become a ritual to him since his humiliation at Denzil’s hands. His feet were blistered from walking and his arse was sore from too many berries and he knew that Florence was right. They needed shelter. They really wouldn’t last much longer like this. Before long,
they would be worn down by poor diet, exposure and exhaustion and then disease would grip them for which there would be no prescription. He came back from his ablutions with a measure of resolve.
‘OK. We start to look for somewhere tomorrow. A farm, a village that might put us to work.’ There was a pregnant pause. ‘When do you think that he’ll give up on us?’ A forlorn question he knew.
‘I doubt that Denzil will ever stop chasing . . . us.’ They both knew that she meant her. She was Denzil’s obsession; he was the bonus prize. If Denzil found them Nat’s fate was clear but hers was terrifying. Denzil would keep her close by him. He would abuse and torture her both physically and mentally. He would stroke and stroke her until she bled and he would never, ever, let her go. Nat couldn’t let Denzil have her. No. He couldn’t let Denzil capture her. It wasn’t just the chill of the water that made him shiver.
They needed protection. Re-joining his army was forgotten; he’d burned that bridge when he agreed to take her from Denzil. Nat wondered what the General made of the letter which told him the grim future of the English Civil War and the execution of his former friend, the King? The army would have moved on without him and he may now have a deserter’s price on his head. He hoped that Fairfax had burned the note.
Their spirits were low but they found comfort and warmth in one another, curling up in the roots of a beech tree, as much for warmth as affection. He sat with his back to the trunk, affording her the cushion of his body and she propped herself between his legs and lay her head back on his chest. She rested her hand lightly on his wounded leg but he was strong enough now to wrap his arms around her.
They had made an interesting discovery in their time in the woods. With an instinctive wariness around the great trees, they still sought for any tree which might have an aperture which would hold them both and might just transport them. They hadn’t found one large enough but they had found something else. As they lay in the roots of the trees, they became conscious of a warmth — a re-energising — that seemed to pulse from it. At first, neither mentioned it, thinking it an illusion until Nat said,
Shadow of the Savernake: Book One of the Taxane Chronicles Page 44