Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

L illian was proven right about one thing. After she had gone to bed with Leo, her desire for him was a wild colt that slipped its lead and roved everywhere, intruding on her thoughts in the rudest fashion.

When he strode across the mound of earth above Wayland Smith’s Cave, helping his men cut back the shrubbery, she watched his shoulders flexing in the fustian jacket and remembered his body braced above hers. When he stripped off his hat and the sunlight picked out russet tones in his hair, the sight of his head at her breast flashed through her mind.

When he held her sketchbook, she studied his hands as they flipped through her pages and remembered his hot palms dragging along her skin, his hands cupping and shaping her breasts, his hand between her legs conjuring sensations she’d never felt. Want poked her like small demons with their pitchforks, inflaming her senses at the most inopportune moments, whisking her concentration apart like summer clouds.

She was a fallen woman—fallen far outside the bounds of sense. Now she knew why women were warned against giving themselves up to the pleasures of the flesh. But oh, such pleasure there was. She would turn and catch his eye on her, as she sat drawing, as she walked the embankment capturing its dimensions, or when she helped distribute luncheon to the workers, and blood rushed through her like a hare chased by a whippet.

Yet she could do nothing about it while they were surrounded by others at all times. Westrop had hired men from Ashbury, Kingstone Winslow and Kingstone Coombs, Idstone, even a carpenter from Compton Beauchamp. They were a competent handful, overseen by Claudius Caesar, Augustus’ father, who had brought his family from London and who had become Leo’s main source of support. The family, along with Hester, had also become Lillian’s main social interactions in the week since they’d arrived from Amesbury.

Lillian put aside her sketchbook as she glimpsed Paulina Caesar driving the dogcart up the downs, coming to deliver food and drink. It being too far to go home for the midday meal, the men would otherwise not get their dinner until four or five of the clock, and Paulina had taken to bringing a nuncheon of cold meats and cheeses for the crew.

Her daughter Octavia, seventeen, sat in the back with her younger sister, Faustina, and Hester between them. Octavia was a graceful young woman, already showing herself the mistress of household skills and no doubt ready to run a home of her own as soon as she wished. She was Hester’s age, but Hester had made fast friends with Faustina, eleven, and the two were thick as thieves, racketing about together with mischief in their eyes and whoops of laughter following in their wake. Lillian was gratified to see Hex enjoying herself so immensely, and even more gratified that Paulina had taken oversight of the domestic labor, allowing Lillian the freedom to join Leo, not missing a moment of this adventure.

Lillian came to the side of the cart and took the ribbons as the horse, a thick dappled gray, plodded to a stop under the dome of pearled clouds.

“You’re just in time. I think a mid-day meal will be welcome.” It boded rain later, and Leo had not permitted an idle moment for anyone, wanting to get as far as he could before the clouds opened.

“Any excitement today?” Paulina hopped down from the bench and shook out her white apron.

“They’ve gotten about a foot further in each of the three holes, but so far nothing, not even a potsherd.”

“Mrs. Carter said Roman artifacts are always turning up in the fields west of Ashdown. Pottery, coins, once a brooch that caused a stir. I’ve her ale for now, though my own should be ready soon.” Paulina passed a heavy ceramic jar to Lillian, who smiled at the weight of it.

“Paulina, if I’ve not said it before, I’ll say it now: you have saved this expedition. We would have expired on the second day if I were in charge of procuring and preparing food.”

Paulina nodded in acknowledgment, pushing a dark curl beneath her cap. “There’s ham with the special cure they do in Calne, and a blue cheese, and lardy cakes. With nutmeg this time. And some pickled vegetables from the Berrycroft farm. Their gardens are better than the Manor’s.”

“Mutton?” Lillian asked.

“For dinner tonight, along with my own recipe for Marlborough pudding. The lady at the Rose and Crown told me how to make it. Octavia, my love, take your father his ale.”

“Yes’m. Hallo, mum.” Octavia nodded a greeting to Lillian, then set out to her father.

“Has Hex been behaving for you?”

“A perfect lamb, when my own little pigeon isn’t stirring up something.” Paulina smiled fondly as the two girls wriggled down from the cart and ran toward one of the stones that hedged the barrow, where they had discovered a nest of great bustard eggs. “Mind you don’t disturb the babies, so they can hatch and grow to be the little bustards they’re meant to be,” she called in the fashion of mothers since the dawn of time.

“Bustard.” Faustina slapped a hand over her mouth. “What a funny word.”

“Bustard,” Hester murmured, and the two collapsed in giggles.

“We want to see the eggs.” The twins, Titus and Tiberius, popped out from the stand of beech trees and raced to join the girls. Paulina called out another warning, then sighed.

“Have the boys been underfoot too badly?” she asked her husband as he approached.

Both parents stood regarding their progeny, while Claudius sipped his jar of ale. He was a tall, solidly built man, with broad cheekbones and an angled jaw. Beside him, Paulina looked the female copy, with more refined lines to her oval face, long nose, and arched brows. They shared the same deep brown skin tone and jet-black hair, and Lillian was struck not only by their handsomeness as a couple but the way they seemed attuned to one another, following the other’s thoughts.

Paulina had told her a bit of their story. Claudius had been a child brought in to serve as a houseboy in the home of a landowner on the island of St. Vincent when the British seized it from the French. He’d worked his way up to valet and had been brought to England when the gentleman fled the First Carib War. Hearing about the Somerset case, which declared that a former slave could not be transported from England against his will, Claudius liberated himself while the gentleman was in London and found work at the docks. He took the name he’d been given by masters as his surname and chose his own given name after the Roman emperor who had conquered Britain.

It took him two years of weekly visits to the brewhouse where Paulina worked for him to screw up the courage to woo and win her, and they had six children who had so far survived the illnesses and vagaries that plagued the lives of the young. Lillian had never before beheld what she would consider the model of a large, loving family, nor had she thought to encounter another couple as wrapped up in one another as were her parents, but when Claudius turned to regard his wife, he looked at her as if she were the sun and stars together, the heat and light of his world.

“Your ale’s much better,” he said, lifting the ceramic jug.

She nodded. “I know.”

A small grunt came from the cart, accompanied by the thump of a heel hitting wood. Before either of his parents could move, Augustus, who was usually not more than a shadow’s length from Leo’s side, swooped into the back of the cart and picked up his brother, Anthony, not quite two. With great ceremony the elder brother conducted the younger around the site, introducing him to everyone and everything, including a peek inside the cave, framed by its enormous gray stones.

Lillian plucked a jar from the basket along with one of the packets of oiled paper and made her way to Leo, who was striding in a circuit around his holes. He’d swapped his fine coats and pantaloons for a workman’s fustian jacket and canvas trousers, with a kerchief knotted around his neck. He looked more like a pirate than an English gentleman, and Lillian battled the urge to grasp him by his kerchief and pull him toward her for a kiss.

“We’ve hit stone,” he said by way of greeting.

He held out a hand for the food but didn’t look at her or murmur thanks, too focused on the hole in the ground at his feet. A stray spring breeze flicked at his hair, carrying the scent of the hesperis flowering along the margins of the grove. Beech trees ringed the outer ditch surrounding the barrow, and their leaves shielded from sight the Vale of the White Horse, which would otherwise spread in green rolling splendor about them. A warbler called from a shrub, and a hobby sat in the branch of a tree, watching the flight of a dragonfly.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“The stone? It might simply mean more of these sarsens, lying about as at Stonehenge, long since sunk into the earth. Or there could be chambers below, and the stones are a ceiling. To get a proper look, we’d have to uncover the entire mound. I’ve never heard of such a thing being done at a site, and I don’t know if it’s even possible to do in the time we have with a crew this size.” He dragged a hand over his jaw in frustration, and Lillian flushed with the memory of how he held her jaw in his hand while he kissed her.

“The alternative is to go in through the cave.” He, in contrast, didn’t seem at all plagued by the memories that swirled around her like mayflies.

Lillian shuddered. “I’ll draw what you bring out of the cave, but I don’t care to go inside. Especially if a Norse elf still dwells here, as the residents of Ashbury would have us believe.”

“Old stories. Folklore. Myth.” He pressed the ham and cheese inside the slice of lardy cake and munched, studying the ground below them, sweeping his hand as he spoke. “If the ceiling is stone, the chamber could be relatively stable. A wooden platform, I’m not so sure. Timber posts could have rotted by now. In which case it would make more sense to come from above.”

He handed her the oiled paper and took the jar of ale. “Mrs. Caesar’s?”

“No, Carter’s. Hers isn’t ready yet.”

Leo squatted and ran a hand through the silt at the bottom of the nearest hole. “Chalk. I have a hunch that if we cleared more of the shrubbery, we’d find a more impressive ditch than that at Stonehenge, or even Avebury. The earth on the mound had to come from somewhere.”

He was sharing his thoughts with her, thinking aloud as her parents did to one another. She ought to appreciate this moment. Yet Lillian felt she wasn’t there with him. She was merely the deliverer of his sustenance and the receiver of his speculations, a cart with legs instead of wheels.

She prickled with heat at his very nearness, a pleasant awareness that warmed her veins like brandy, and he hadn’t even glanced her way, much less regarded her as if she were all the lights in the firmament.

She was being absurd. She was wishing he would behave with her like couples who had been building their lives together for years. Like people who were firmly and irrevocably in love. She was merely the woman he was pretending to marry, a woman he had taken to his bed, among who knew how many others.

She was the silly girl who had taken a gamble on being closer to him, volunteering to draw for his records, and he saw her as part of his expedition, not a companion. More fool she.

She turned away, intending to call to Hester and ensure she ate a bite, but Octavia had already spread a quilt on a cleared patch of ground and was handing around food to her siblings, Hex settled in among them like a fair-haired cuckoo in the nest.

Hester didn’t need Lillian, either.

The neigh of a horse alerted them to visitors, and the draught horse lifted his head in his harness, looking with interest toward the Ridgeway, where a vehicle approached. Leo had told her what the villagers said, that the beaten track was a thoroughfare older than the Roman roads, as old as human habitation in these isles. Lillian tried to imagine what they had looked like, and what their lives had been like, these people who carved the White Horse and carried their dead to this tomb, if Leo was correct about its function. It was easy to believe giants had once lived on this land, with the size of the monuments they left.

A man with more silver than brown in his hair drove a light chaise toward them, pulled by a single horse. The top was pulled back to reveal his passenger, who bore a cloud of white-blonde hair beneath her cap, and who held a dainty parasol between her pale skin and the cloudy sky.

“Tourists,” Leo muttered. “They’ll want to ask questions and poke around.”

“You must allow it, Leo,” Lillian chided. “The cave is a landmark that has been known for centuries. Of course visitors will be curious about it. And you yourself told me once the treasures of Britain should be open to all.”

“But not while I’m excavating,” Leo said, looking exactly like a sulky boy who didn’t want to share his new hoop and stick with a fellow. “I’m not shoeing his horse, even if he offers me far more than a groat.” It was custom, based on the old legends, for visitors to leave a groat or sometimes a half-farthing for the resident spirit, whether or not they required the services of a smith.

“I’ll answer their questions. Call me if you find something worth drawing.”

Lillian moved toward the new arrivals with a friendly smile, recognizing that she was doing what she’d always done: trying to make herself useful. Taking over the tasks another disliked, so they might feel fondly toward her because of it. Smoothing the way of someone she cared about, so they might show care for her in return.

She faltered as she approached the chaise. Did she care for Leo? Had he wormed his way, that quickly, into the list of people she would sacrifice for?

She chanced a glance behind her to see him squatting above one of the bore holes with Claudius, conferring and pointing. Her chest grew tight as if drawn by a net. She’d come to the point where the mere sight of him made her insides feel they’d been stirred into a pudding. The landscape around her shifted with him in it. He came to the foreground, and everything else receded.

That could not be wise.

“Hallo! Forgive us for descending on you, but we’d heard there was work being done at our favorite local monument, and we thought we must come pay our respects. I am the Reverend Woodfforde, and this is my sister, Temperance.”

“How do you do.” Temperance beamed a smile that transformed her from quite lovely to truly exquisite.

Lillian blinked. “How do you do.” She introduced herself and Paulina as the other woman joined them. Temperance bestowed a smile of equal loveliness upon them all.

“We are so pleased to have new folk in Ashbury,” Temperance said. “You cannot imagine how quiet it can be sometimes in our little village. You must come dine with us at Watercress Cottage. That is in Kingstone Winslow, just up the path from you, past the Upper Mill.” Her blue eyes, a paler, more delicate shade than Lillian’s own, scanned the knot of men standing above the cave. “We would be delighted to entertain Mr. Westrop, and you, Miss Gower, and you and your family as well, Mrs. Caesar.”

Unless Lillian imagined it, the girl’s gaze lingered on Leo, who now strode between the various holes, looking down into them and arguing with Claudius about something. That net around Lillian’s chest grew tight, clenching her heart.

Temperance Woodfforde was, by any estimation, a beauty. And Leo was incredibly dashing. Of course she would take an interest.

He’d secured Lillian’s promise to protect him from the advances of other women so he could focus on his work. But what happened when he met a woman he didn’t want defending from?

“You might join us for dinner at the Manor tonight, Reverend, Miss Woodfforde,” Paulina said cordially. “It’s a very modest table, only roast mutton and Marlborough pie, but we would be delighted to make friends in the area.”

Lillian tried to catch her eye and nod furtively in Leo’s direction. He was already impatient about the visitors. What would he say if he were called away from his digging to play the friendly host?

Host to a genial reverend and his very lovely sister. He might not mind in the least. Jealousy tanged bitter on her tongue, like raw comfrey leaf.

She’d followed Leo here because she wanted more time with him, as if within this ancient boundary they could spin out their stolen moments and belong entirely to one another.

She might have been enjoying an enchanted moment. But perhaps, for Leo, the spell was already over.