The Virtuous Widow

At last they reached the top of the stairs. Straight ahead of them was the tiny room where Amy’s bed was tucked—no more than a narrow cupboard it was, really, but cosy enough and warm for her daughter. On the right was Ellie’s bedroom.

“Bend your head again.” This time she was ready when he lurched forward and stumbled into her room. She managed to steer him to the small curtained-off alcove where her bed stood. He sprawled across it with a groan and lay there, unmoving. She collapsed beside him, gasping for breath, weak with relief. Her breath clouded visibly in the icy air. She had to get him covered, while he was still warm from the exertion of the climb.

She had no nightshirt for him to wear. He was too broad in the shoulders and chest for any of her clothing and she had long ago sold anything of Hart’s that remained. The few thin blankets she had did not look warm enough to keep an unconscious man from catching a chill. The thickest, warmest coverings were on Amy’s bed.

She wrapped him in a sheet and tugged the covers over him. She took all the clothes she possessed and spread them out over the bed—dresses, shawls, a faded pelisse, a threadbare cloak—any layer of cloth which would help keep out the cold. She fetched the hot brick and set it at his feet. Then she stood back. She could do no more. She was shivering herself, she realised. And her feet were frozen. She normally got into bed to keep warm.

But tonight there was a strange man in her bed.

Amy’s bed was only a narrow bench, as long and as wide as a child. No room for Ellie there. Downstairs, the fire was dying. Ellie sat on the wooden stool, drew her knees against her chest and wrapped her shawl even tighter around herself in an illusion of warmth. She had used up all her extra clothes to make the bed warm for the stranger. She stared across at him. He lay there, warm, relaxed, comfortable while she hugged herself against the cold. He had collapsed. He was insensible. He wouldn’t know she was there.

She crept to the edge of the bed on frozen toes and looked at him. He lay on his back, his breathing deep and regular. In the frail light of the candle the bandage glimmered white against his tanned skin and the thick, dark, tousled hair. There was a shadow of dark bristle on his lean, angular jaw. He seemed so big and dark and menacing in her bed. He took up much more of it than she did. And what if he woke?

She couldn’t do this. She crept back to her stool. The chill settled. Drafts whispered up at her, insinuating themselves against her skin, nibbling at her like rats. Her chattering teeth echoed a crazed counterpoint to his deep, even breaths.

She had no choice. It was her bed, after all. It would do nobody any good if she froze to death out here. What mattered propriety when it came to her very health? She ran downstairs again and fetched her frying pan. She took a deep breath, wrapped the sheet more tightly around herself and stepped into the sleeping alcove, frying pan in hand. Feeling as if she were burning her bridges, she closed the curtains which kept the cold drafts out. In the tiny, enclosed space, she felt even more alone with the stranger than ever…

Outside, pellets of hail beat against her window.

Carefully, stealthily, Ellie tucked the pan under the edge of the mattress, comfortingly to hand, then crept under the bedclothes. He wasn’t just in her bed, he took up most of the space. And almost all of the bedclothes. Without warning, she found herself lying hard against him, full length, his big body touching hers from shoulder to ankle. Threadbare sheets were all that lay between them. Ellie went rigid with anxiety. She poked him. “Hsst! Are you awake?” Her hand hovered, ready to snatch up the pan.

He didn’t move; he just lay there, breathing slowly and evenly as he had for the last fifteen minutes. She tried to move away from him, but his weight had caused the mattress to sag. Her body could not help but roll downhill towards him. Against him. It was a most unsettling sensation. She wriggled a little, trying to reduce the contact between them. Her frozen toes slipped from their sheet and touched his long legs…and she sighed with pleasure. He was warm, like a furnace.

Fever? She put out a hand in the darkness and felt his forehead. It seemed cool enough. But that could be the effect of the cold night air. She slipped a hand under the bedclothes and felt his chest. The skin was warm and dry, the muscles beneath it firm. He didn’t feel feverish at all. He felt…nice.

She snatched her hand away and tucked herself back in her own cocoon of bedclothes. She closed her eyes firmly, trying to shut out the awareness of the man in her bed. Of course, she would not get a wink of sleep—she was braced against the possibility that he was awake, shamming unconsciousness, but at least she would be warm.

She had never actually slept with a man before. Hart had not cared to stay with her longer than necessary. After coitus he had immediately left her, and once she had quickened with child he had never returned to her bed. So the very sensation of having a man sleep beside her was most…unsettling.

She could smell him, smell the very masculine smell of his body, the scent of the herbal poultice she had made for his injury. His big, hard body seemed to fill the bed. It lifted the bedclothes so that there was a gap between him and her smaller frame, a gap for cold drafts to creep into. She wriggled closer, to close the gap a little, still lying rigid, apart from him, straining against the dip in the mattress.

Slowly, insidiously, his body heat warmed her and gradually her defences relaxed. The combination of his reassuring stillness and the regularity of his deep breathing eased her anxious mind until finally she slept.

And as she slept, her body curled against his, closing the gap seamlessly. Her cold toes slipped from their cool linen cocoon and rested on the hard warmth of his long bare calves. And her hand crept out and snuggled itself between the layers that wrapped him, until it was resting on that warm, firm, broad masculine chest…

Weak winter sun woke her, lighting the small, spare room, setting a golden glow through the faded curtains that covered her sleeping alcove. Feeling cosy, relaxed and contented, Ellie yawned sleepily and stretched…and found herself snuggled hard against a man’s ribs, her feet curled around his leg, her arm across his prone body.

She shot out of bed like a stone from a catapult and stood there shivering in the sudden cold, staring at the stranger, blinking as it all came back to her. She snatched some of her clothes and hurried downstairs to get the fire going again.

The man slept on through the day. Apart from him sleeping like the dead, Ellie could find nothing wrong with him. She checked his head wound several times. It was no longer bleeding and showed no sign of infection. His breathing was deep and even. He wasn’t feverish and he didn’t toss and turn. He muttered occasionally, and each time, Amy came running to tell.

Amy was fascinated by him. Ellie had managed to stop her daughter referring to the stranger as Papa, but she couldn’t seem to keep her away from his bedside. The weather was too bitter for her to play outside and the size of the cottage meant that if Amy wasn’t with Ellie downstairs, she was upstairs watching the man.

It was harmless, Ellie told herself. And rather sweet. While Amy played with her dolls upstairs, she told him long, rambling stories and sang him songs, a little off-key. She told him of her special red wishing candle, that had brought him home. The child seemed quite unperturbed that he never responded to her prattle, that he just slept on.

It would be a different story when he woke. If he ever did wake…

She probably should have fetched Dr. Geddes. But she disliked him intensely. Dr. Geddes dressed fashionably, yet his tools of trade were filthy. He would bleed the man, give him a horrid-tasting potion of his own invention and charge a large fee. Ellie had little money and even less faith in him. Besides, Dr. Geddes was a friend of the squire…

She folded the shirt, now clean and dry, and set it with his buckskin breeches on the chest in her room. Both garments had once been of good quality, but had seen hard wear and tear. There was nothing incongruous about a poor labourer wearing such clothes, however. In the last year she had been amazed to learn of the thriving trade in used clothing—second-, third-, even fourth-hand clothing. Even things she’d thought at the time were total rags she knew now could have been sold for a few pennies, or a farthing.

She’d sold everything too cheaply, she realised in retrospect. Her jewellery, her furniture, treasured possessions, Amy’s clothes, her beautiful dolls’ house, with its exquisitely made furnishings, the tiny, perfect dolls with their lovely clothes and charming miniature knick-knacks—she could have sold them to far more purpose now. She had been ignorant, then, of the true value of things.

Still, they were neither starving nor frozen, and her daughter derived just as much pleasure from her current dolls’ house, made from an old cheese box, with homemade dolls and furnishings made from odds and ends.

Ellie examined the stranger’s other belongings. There were precious few—just the clothes he stood up in. His stockings were thick and coarse but walking on the bare ground in them had made holes, which she had yet to darn. She had found no other belongings to give a clue to his identity, only one item found wadded in his breeches pocket, a delicate cambric handkerchief, stiff with dried blood. An incongruous thing for such a man to be carrying. It did not go with the rest of him, his strong hands and his bruised knuckles.

She recalled the way those big, battered knuckles had slipped so gently across her cheek and sighed. Such a small, unthinking gesture…it had unravelled all her resolve to keep him at a distance.

He was a stranger, she told herself sternly. A brawler and possibly a thief as well. She hoped he had not stolen the handkerchief. It was bad enough having a strange man sleeping in her bed, let alone a thief.

Rat-tat-tat! Ellie jumped at the sound.

Amy’s eyes were big with fright. “Someone at the door, Mama,” she whispered.

“Miz Carmichael?” a thick voice shouted.

“It’s all right, darling. It’s only Ned. Just wait here.” Ellie put aside her mending and went to answer the door. She hesitated, then turned to her daughter. “You mustn’t tell Ned, or anyone else, about the man upstairs, all right? It’s a secret, darling.”

Her daughter gazed at her with solemn blue eyes and nodded. “’Coz of the squire,” she said, and went back to playing with her dolls’ house.

Ellie closed her eyes in silent anguish, wishing she could have protected her daughter from such grim realities. But there was nothing she could do about it. She opened the door.

“Brought your milk and the curds you wanted, Miz Carmichael,” said the man at the door and added, “Thought you might like these ‘uns, too.” He handed her a brace of hares. “Make a nice stew, they will. No need to tell the squire, eh?” He winked and made to move off.

“Ned, you shouldn’t have!” Ellie was horrified, and yet she couldn’t help clutching the dead animals to her. It was a long time since she and Amy had eaten any meat, and yet Ned could hang or be transported for poaching. “I wouldn’t for the world get you into troub—”

Ned chuckled. “Lord love ye, missus, don’t ye worry about me—I bin takin’ care o’ Squire’s extra livestock all me life, and me father and granfer before me.”

“But—”

The grizzled man waved a hand dismissively. “A gift for little missie’s birthday.”

There was nothing Ellie could say. To argue would be to diminish Ned’s gift, and she could never do that. “Then I thank you, Ned. Amy and I will very much enjoy them.” She smiled and gestured back into the cottage. “Would you care to come in, then, and have a cup of soup? I have some hot on the fire.”

“Oh, no, no, thank ye, missus. I’d not presume.” He shuffled his feet awkwardly, touched his forehead and stomped off into the forest before she could say another word.

Ellie watched him go, touched by the man’s awkwardness, his pride and the risky, generous gift. The hares hung heavy in her arms. They would be a feast. And the sooner they were in the pot, the safer it would be for all concerned. She had planned to make curd cakes for Amy’s birthday surprise. Now they would both enjoy a good, thick meaty stew as well—it would almost be a proper birthday celebration. And if the man upstairs ever woke up, she would have something substantial to feed him, too.

She smiled to herself as she struggled to strip the skin from the first hare. She’d thought him a thief because of the handkerchief. Who was she to point her finger, Ellie Carmichael, proud possessor of two fat illegal hares…?

He had slept like the dead now, for a night and a day. Ellie stared at his shape and wished she could do something. She wanted him awake. She wanted him up and out of her bed. She wanted him gone. It was unsettling, having him there, asleep in her bedclothes. It was not so difficult to get used to it during the day, to assume he was harmless, to allow her daughter to sit beside him, treating an unconscious man—a complete stranger—as if he was one of her playthings. During the day he didn’t seem so intimidating. Now…

She hugged her wrapper tighter around her, trying to summon the courage to climb into the bed beside him once more. In the shadows of the night he seemed to grow bigger, darker, more menacing, the virile-looking body sprawled relaxed in her bed more threatening.

But he hadn’t stirred for a night and a day. Another night of sharing would do no harm, surely. Besides, she didn’t have any choice… No, she’d made a choice, her conscience corrected her. She could have called for help. He would have been taken “on the parish.” But he wouldn’t have received proper care—not with the poor clothing he wore. An injured gentleman, yes, the doctor or even the squire would see to his care. But there were too many poor and injured men in England since the war against Napoleon had been won. They’d returned as brief heroes. Now, months later, as they searched for work or begged in the streets, they’d come to be regarded as a blight on the land. It wouldn’t matter if one more died.

There were too many indigent widows and little girls, too.

She could not abandon him. Somehow, with no exchange of words between them, she had made herself responsible for this man—stranger or not, thief or not. He was helpless and in need. Ellie knew what it felt like to be helpless and in need. And she would help him.

Without further debate, Ellie wrapped herself in her separate sheet—she hadn’t lost all sense of propriety—and slipped into the bed beside him. She sighed with pleasure. He was better than a hot brick on a cold winter’s night.

This time there was little sense of strangeness. She was used to his masculine smell, she even found it appealing. The sag of the bed felt right, and she didn’t struggle too hard against it. After all, if there was too much of a gap between them, icy drafts would get in. But recalling the immodest position she had woken in, she determinedly turned her back to him. It was not so intimate, having one’s back against a stranger, she thought sleepily, as she snuggled her backside against his hip.

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