Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT

J ack placed his free hand over Leda's, holding her against him as they walked what was called the New Road. Around them the crowded brick and timbered houses, crowned with the church steeple, gave way to scattered wooden buildings, cottages, and barns. Then nothing but a sea of green pasture dotted with browsing sheep, fields of newly sprouted corn, and verges marked with blooms of wildflowers. The sky shone the color of pale love-in-a-mist, with white clouds roaming like sheep that had strayed into the firmament. Jack did not have a poetical soul, but he like most people could be struck by beauty, and by the sense that he had been gifted a treasure of a day, and a treasure in the woman beside him.

Leda paused before a chalky slab of stone, a metal plaque pressed into its surface.

"Maud Heath's gift, given in 1474," Jack read. "What, the marker?"

"The Causeway," Leda answered, amused. She tugged him down the trail, wide enough for two people, with grass pushing up between the cobbles.

"Maud Heath lived in Langley Burrell, which we'll pass, and made this trek every week, bringing eggs, butter, and cheese to the market in Chippenham, likely to the very square where we alighted. She was left widowed at her husband's death, and since they had no children, she bequeathed the town a trust paying eight pounds a year to build and maintain a path for other travelers. It goes all the way to Wick Hill, where there is another marker in her honor. This is a floodplain, you know, and it can become quite muddy or even impassable at high water. A great nuisance if not a bar to her income."

"An intrepid woman, Maud." Jack could see Leda doing such a thing.

"Had she children, she would have given her goods to them, and her blood would live on if her name was forgotten. But she granted her money to the community, and now generations have benefited from her vision and her name is remembered through the ages."

Her tone left little doubt which future she preferred for herself. Jack smarted at the implication. "So the best possible status for a woman is a childless widow."

"'Tis the only way a woman might be granted complete freedom over her life," she answered. "Though of course, that life is greatly eased by a comfortable income."

"But not a man?"

She glanced his way, as if surprised by his grim tone. He was surprised himself. He had been taught, as a youth, that man was made to rule the world, and woman made to ease the burden of man. He had known Anne-Marie was not happy with her lot, but not before Leda had he wondered why.

"I imagine many a merry widow has been pleased to adorn her life with a man," Leda responded. "As companion and bedfellow, a lover with whom she might amuse herself, and then send him home where others are obliged to clean and cook and do for him, or he must look after himself."

He flushed. She spoke of beds. Of the pleasures he had imagined enjoying with her, giving her, since their hands first met in the minuet.

They walked the path through the growing grasses studded with wildflowers and the scent of rich, watered earth. "So you enjoy managing people, but not in a housewifely capacity."

"Precisely."

"As a sort of manager of relationships."

"Or a disinterested friend. Without my own motives clouding the question."

"We all have motives," Jack said. "Which way?"

"This way. That road leads to Langley Burrell."

"How is it you know the area? Did you live in Chippenham?"

"A…family member moved here. At her marriage. I visited many times." She walked briskly along beside him, but her manner was stiff and disjointed, not at all her usual grace. "When my marriage…dissolved, our servants needed someplace to go. We found a lodging near here, where they could live in peace."

"They did not wish to stay on at the house?"

She hesitated for a long time. There was something afoot here.

"When my husband died, his nephew inherited. My husband was a harsh, self-serving man, and I feared his nephew might be even crueler."

"He, your husband, left you nothing to live on? No jointure?"

"He left me nothing but scars and shame. My marriage was a horror for me and for the people you will meet. That is why I hope you will ask them no questions. I do not wish to stir painful memories." Her jaw set as if she braced herself against memories of her own.

"I see why you have no good opinion of marriage," Jack said quietly.

"From what I have seen, marriage at best is a yoke for a woman, and at its worst can cost her life, or drive her to madness." She marched on.

They passed a small village, farmhouses clustered near the street, women throwing wash over bushes, dogs chasing boys as small girls picked flowers and herbs. They came to a bridge, no more than boards set over a stream.

"The Clapper Bridge," Leda said. "Not far now."

Jack smarted the whole time. Her remark about madness. An accusation? Did she know what had happened to Anne-Marie? Did she blame him?

Of course she did. Everyone had. He was to blame.

They crossed a wider bridge over what Jack guessed was the Avon, breaching its banks in a spring rise. Leda looked with dismay at the wooden boards that had once constituted the Causeway, some planks floating off their wooden piles, some underwater.

"I had not considered this. Oh, dear."

"Hold this." Jack thrust the butcher's parcel into her hands and held out his arms. "If I may?"

Her brows knit together, that sign of exasperation he was beginning to adore. "I don't see what—" Her words ended in a gasp as he swept her into his arms.

"You warned me I would wet my boots."

She clutched his arms. "But I did not mean… this ."

Her in his arms. The instant, powerful flare of lust, and a certain triumphal possession. He'd wanted her back against him the moment she slid off his lap in the coach. She was light yet substantial, her curves fitting against his, and she belonged here.

"Are you glad now you did not leave me kicking my heels at the Angel? I am saving your boots."

"You are giving me palpitations. Please do not drop me."

"Wrap your arms around me."

"Then if I fall, you fall, too."

"You trust no one to look after you, do you?"

A silence followed, then she said quietly, "No one ever has."

He curled her closer to him and kept his balance as a board shifted beneath him. Water, speckled with grains of silt and algae, slipped over his boot. He tried not to wonder if it would stain the fine leather. "Parents?"

"Fine, upstanding people, concerned with one thing only: that my sister and I make marriages reflecting well on them. At least with my sister, they succeeded."

"And your husband was cruel."

She did not answer, which said enough.

He cradled her against him. Almonds and forget-me-nots teased his nose. "And with my aunt, you do the looking after."

"It is the purpose for which she hired me," she said drolly. "Nay, don't step there—that pile is rotten. Try that tuft." She pointed.

"And now you are going to direct me in how I carry you." The tuft gave way, a deceptive mound, and his boot squelched into mud. Water leaked through a seam. The leather would definitely be ruined.

"You needn't carry me at all. I can walk."

He hoisted her more firmly against him, bringing her head closer to his face. He wished to hold her till his arms gave way. "Have you considered that a different husband might look after you?"

"Husbands do not acquire wives to pet and coddle them."

Jack pressed his nose to the buckram of her bonnet over her temple. His breath stirred the wisps of hair peeking from beneath the brim.

"I would pet you. Often."

Her eyes feathered shut and a muscle spasmed in her throat, above the high collar of her jacket. A shiver passed through her into him, a ripple of desire.

She desired him, perhaps as much as he desired her, but she was valiantly fighting.

"Put me down here. By the monument."

Drawing out the effort as long as possible, he set her on her feet on the plank pathway, which held firmer now that the ground had risen to river meadow. She smoothed her bodice and skirts while Jack read the inscriptions on the monument, again dedicated to Maud Heath.

Atop the pillar, metal flags marked a sundial on all four sides, with the usual epigram. "Let us do good while there is time," Jack read. "That is your motto, I think."

"You know your Latin."

"Only what was beaten into me at King's Ely."

She joined him to regard the weathered monument. Warm sun glossed her cheek.

"Perhaps beatings would have improved my French. My governess despaired."

So she'd had a governess who taught her French and parents concerned about how high she married. She'd been born to a gentleman's family, which explained why she had sought employment as a lady's companion and not in trade.

He could marry her. Not that there was much family left to bemoan if he married beneath him, but Leda Wroth would not lower the Burnham name or the Brancaster title. If anything, Jack lowered it. As a baron's lesser son, his father had stooped to trade—never mind it was a profession he loved—and Jack had himself been apprenticing to a trade of his own when a distant uncle's sudden death passed the estate and the title to him. Ten years later, he still didn't feel easy in his role of lord of the manor, certain that behind his back, both his neighbors and tenants referred to him as the shoemaker's son.

Better that than the Mad Baron.

"This one is sadder," he said. "I will return to you never."

"Time will not return? But we always have time, until we die."

So she was not a poetical soul either, which would explain why she had been unmoved by his discussion of Coleridge.

"This moment will never return," Jack said. "Once it passes, it is gone."

She met his steady gaze. In the sunlight her eyes had the shade of the violets clustering along Maud's path.

"A mercy when the time is a harsh one," she murmured. "Its passing."

"And a sorrow when the moment is a joy," Jack replied. "Which is why Horace tells us to seize it, I suppose."

Her lips were the color of the frog orchids that would be blooming soon in the quarries around his home. He wanted to show them to her. He wanted to touch her linen cheek, the rose blush appearing there. He wanted to fit her once more against his body and not let go this time.

He wanted to hitch himself inside her, couple them completely, and stay there.

"I don't suppose," he said, his voice sounding strained to his ears, "you would allow me to kiss you."

For a wild heartbeat or two, as the warm sun beat on the back of his neck, he thought she might say yes.

She broke from his gaze. "Not so near a church." She pointed to the mill near the river, and a simple chapel standing alongside, in great disrepair. "St. Giles."

She didn't want him. Jack braced himself to take the rejection manfully.

"A church beside a mill beside a river? I imagine that structure floods quite regularly."

"And is infested with vermin living off the corn, so Mrs. Blake says."

"That is Bath stone," Jack said in surprise, tugging off his gloves as he approached the church. Anything for a distraction. He was accustomed to being alone, but Leda's rejection went deep. He ran his hands over the face of the building, since he was not permitted to touch her.

"Limestone. A fine chalky texture, but weathers well. Do you see the outlines of shells on the surface here? They are small enough to make an excellent freestone. You can cut it in any direction without splitting, and it makes a smooth surface for dressing."

She watched him with her head tilted to one side. "Knows Latin and architecture."

"Not architecture." He brushed a hand across the wall, wondering how long it had stood here, resisting all the forces of nature and time. "Stone masonry. I would have been a mason if the title of Brancaster had not come to me."

She raised her eyebrows in polite interest.

"A more difficult trade than you'd think, making bricks." He dusted his hands and refit his gloves. "There need be precision in the recipe and in the firing, and it is difficult to find both the right mixture and the right baking process. Believe me, I've tried."

Another set of failures, the evidence scattered all about his home, which she would see when she arrived. Was there anything he could do that might impress her?

He had carried her quite far without dropping her. That must count in his favor.

"Come," she said. "We are close."

He sensed apprehension in her as they moved away from the willow and alder near the riverbank and toward an English oak that stood at some distance, crowning the stand of lesser trees around it. As they neared Jack saw the top of a brick chimney, then the cottage attached, a simple structure of wattle and daub, no more than one room stacked over the other.

"It's what they call a squatter's cottage," Leda said, sounding apologetic for the humbleness of the place. "There's a common law that says if you can build a home and have a fire in the chimney in the span of a day, the place is yours to call home."

A nightmare for landlords trying to collect rent from tenants, Jack thought. He didn't know what he had expected of Leda's acquaintances: a gentleman's manor, perhaps, or a merchant's home in town. Certainly not a small English cottage, with no other buildings in sight save a small withy shed. The garden was lovely, fruit trees in flower, vegetables peeking from their beds, and a buzz of insects in the air along with song from the birds swooping among the trees. Voices came from inside, and in the yard a boy's quarrelsome shout.

"Now, Nanny! If you don't kick over the bucket, you daft beast, I'll let you have the beet tops from my dinner. And maybe the beets, too."

They were close enough to hear the response from inside, a woman's voice, amused. "You'll eat your dinner, Ives, if you want to grow sprack, else you'll go no higher than Nanny there."

The path turned a corner and Jack saw the boy, white shirt flapping half out of his breeches, trying to milk a nanny goat that did not wish to cooperate. The yard was tidy, with various implements scattered about: a trough for the goat, a butter churn, a washtub turned on its side to dry, a basket sitting beside the front step as if the owner had been interrupted in an errand. A hen scuttled away from Jack's feet as they approached.

Leda clutched the paper packet to her middle as if she expected the boy to throw stones and she might use it for a shield.

The lad spotted them and straightened, pushing back his cap. "Hi, here's strangers at the gate! Gander-flanking, are ye?"

"No, we are not wandering or lost." Leda swallowed hard. Her smile was forced and bright. "We have come to visit. You must be Ives. I am Mrs. Leda Wroth."

"Mrs. Wroth?" The boy blinked.

Then his face broke into a delighted smile that revealed several missing teeth. "Mum!" he bellowed at the house without turning. "Me other mum is here! The fancy one."

Setting down the milk bucket, he placed his feet and executed a perfectly courtly little bow, his speech turning formal. "I am delighted to finally meet you, Mother."