A Most Unseemly Summer

It was a familiar word to her, one which she had not thought to hear again in this connection, and the senses that moments before had been submerged beneath a roaring storm of emotion now emerged, chilled and shaking, drawing her attention to the prickly coldness at her back and the pale shocked stare of the moon. Tears blinded her, shattering the white orb into a thousand pieces.

‘Let me go,’ she whispered yet again. ‘Let me up now, I beg you.’

‘Who are you? Tell me, for pity’s sake, woman.’

She turned her head away, suddenly shamed by his limbs on hers, his hand slowly withdrawing, leaving her breast bleak and unloved. ‘No, I’m nobody. Let me go.’ The tears dripped off her chin.

His sigh betrayed disappointment and bewilderment, but there was to be no return to the former roles of captor and captive. He rolled away, lying motionless in the dark as Felice scrambled unsteadily to her feet and hobbled away with neither a word nor backward glance, wincing at the pains that now beset her like demons, clutching her chemise in both hands.

She could not know, nor did she turn to see whether he followed, nor did she know how she found her way out of that vast walled space and through the stone arch that had once been closed off by wooden gates. All she knew was that, suddenly, it was there, that the rough ground had changed to cobbles that hurt her feet unbearably, and that she used the pointed finials on the rooftop to show her where the Abbot’s House was.

Predictably, Lydia scolded her mistress on all counts, especially for leaving the two deerhounds, Fen and Flint, behind. ‘Whatever were you thinking of, love?’ she whispered, anxious not to wake young Elizabeth. ‘Why didn’t you tell him who you were? He could have been somebody set to guard the site at nights. Here, hold your other foot up.’

Shivering, despite the woollen blanket, Felice obeyed but felt bound to defend herself. ‘How could he be? All those who work here would know of our arrival. He’d know who I was, wouldn’t he? But he didn’t guess, and that shows he’s a stranger to the place. Ouch! My wrist hurts, Lydie.’

‘I’ll send Elizabeth to find some comfrey as soon as it gets light. Now, that’ll have to do till we can have some water sent up. Into bed, love.’

Bandaged and soothed and with a streak of dawn already on the horizon, Felice gave in to the emotions that surged uncontrollably within her, awakened after their seven-month suppression. She had shared her heartache with no one, though faithful Lydia had been aware of her relationship with Father Timon, Lord Deventer’s chaplain and Felice’s tutor, and of the manner of his death. Now this stranger had forced her to confront the pain of an aching emptiness and to discover that it was, in fact, full to overflowing.

The revelation had both astounded her and filled her with guilt; what should have been kept sacred to Timon’s memory had been squandered in a moment of sheer madness. Well, no one would know of that deplorable lapse, not even dear Lydia, and the man himself would now be many miles away.

But try as she would to replace that anonymous ruffian with the gentle Timon, the imprint of unknown hands on her, ruthlessly intimate, sent tremors of self-reproach through her aching body that were indistinguishable from bliss. The taste of his lips and their bruising intensity returned time and again to overcome all comparisons until, once again, she sobbed quietly into her pillow at the knowledge that that memory also would have to last for the rest of her life.

By first light, the servants were already astir under the direction of Mr Peale and Mr Dawson, the clerk of the kitchen from whom Lydia had obtained buckets of hot water. Elizabeth, a blonde-haired, scatterbrained maid of sixteen and the apple of Mr Dawson’s discerning eye, had been sent off to find some comfrey for Felice’s bruises while Felice herself, examining her upper arms and wrists, found exactly what she expected to find, rows of blue fingertip marks that were visible to Lydia from halfway across the room.

‘Merciful heavens, love! I think you’ll have to tell Sir Leon of this when he returns,’ she said. ‘It’s something he ought to know about.’

‘By the time Sir Leon Gascelin returns,’ Felice replied, caustically, ‘this lot will have disappeared.’ She stirred the water in the wooden bucket with her feet, enjoying the comfort it gave to her cuts and scratches. ‘And by the sound of him,’ she went on, ‘my well-being will probably be the last thing on his mind.’

‘Lord Deventer said that of him? Surely not,’ said Lydia, frowning.

‘Not in so many words, but the implication was there, right enough. Keep out of his way. Don’t interfere with his plans. And above all, remember that he’s the high and mighty surveyor to whom we must all bow and scrape. Except that he’s not available to bow and scrape to, so that gives us all time to practise, doesn’t it? Pass me that comb, Lydie.’ Thoughtfully, she untangled the long straight tresses, recalling how it had recently been undone by a man’s fingers. ‘I should wash it,’ she mumbled.

A shout reached them from the courtyard below, then another, a deep angry voice that cracked across the general clatter of feet, hooves, buckets and boxes. Silence dropped like a stone.

Another piercing bark. ‘Where, exactly?’

The reply was too quiet for them to hear, but Lydia mouthed the missing words, pointing a finger to the floor, her eyes wide with dismay.

‘That doesn’t sound like the steward,’ whispered Felice.

Lydia crossed to the window but she was too late, and by the time she reached the door it had been flung open by a man who had to stoop to avoid hitting his head on the low medieval lintel. He straightened, immediately, his hand still on the latch, his advance suddenly halted by the sight of a stunningly beautiful woman sitting with her feet in a bucket, dressed in little except a sleeveless kirtle of fine linen, half-open down the front. It would have been impossible to say whose surprise was the greater, his or theirs.

‘Get out!’ Felice snapped, making no effort to dive for cover. If this was a colleague of the miserable steward, Thomas Vyttery, then his opinion of her was of no consequence. Yet this man had the most insolent manner.

He made no move to obey the command, but took in every detail of the untidy room as he bit back at her. ‘This is my room! You get out!’

It took a while, albeit a short one, for his words to register, for the only other person who could lay claim to the Abbot’s House was Sir Leon Gascelin, and he was known to be away from home.

The man was tall and broad-chested, the embodiment of the power that she and Lydia had facetiously been applauding. His dark hair was a straight and glossy cap that jutted wilfully out over his forehead in spikes, close-cropped but unruly enough to catch on the white lace-edged collar of his open-necked shirt. Felice noticed the ambience of great physical strength and virility that surrounded him, even while motionless, and the way that Fen and Flint had gone to greet him with none of the natural hostility she would have preferred them to exhibit in the face of such rudeness.

He caressed the head of one of them with a strong well-shaped hand that showed a scattering of dark hairs along the back, while his straight brows drew together above narrowed eyes in what might have passed for either disapproval or puzzlement.

Felice’s retort was equally adamant. ‘This house belongs to Lord Deventer and I am here by his permission. As you see, I am making no plans to move out again. Now, if you require orders to bully my servants, I suggest you go and seek Sir Leon Gascelin, my lord’s surveyor. That should occupy your time more fruitfully. You may go.’ Leaning forward, she swished the water with her fingertips. ‘Is this the last of the hot water, Lydie?’

Lydia’s reply was drowned beneath the man’s icy words. ‘I don’t need to find him. I am Sir Leon Gascelin.’

Slowly, Felice raised her head to look at him through a curtain of hair, the hem of which dripped with curving points of water. She had no idea of the picture of loveliness she presented, yet on impulse her hand reached out sideways for her linen chemise, the one she had worn yesterday, gathering it to her in a loose bundle below her chin. Promptly, Lydia came forward to drape a linen sheet around her shoulders.

‘Then I have the advantage of you, Sir Leon,’ Felice said over the loud drumming of her heart. ‘I was here first.’

‘Then you can be the first to go, lady. I require you to be out of here by mid-day. My steward tells me that you call yourself Lady Felice Marwelle, but Lord Deventer never mentioned anyone of that name in my hearing. Do you have proof of your relationship to his lordship? Or are you perhaps his mistress with the convenient sub-title of stepdaughter?’ He looked around him at the piles of clothes, pillows, canvas bags and mattresses more typical of a squatter’s den than a lady’s bedchamber. ‘You’d not be the first, you know.’

Outraged by his insolence, Felice shook with fury. ‘My name, sir, is Lady Felice Marwelle, daughter of the late Sir Paul Marwelle of Henley-on-Thames who was the first husband of my mother, Lady Honoria Deventer. Lord Deventer is my mother’s third husband and therefore my second stepfather. I am not, and never will be, any man’s mistress, nor am I in the habit of proving my identity to my stepfather’s boorish acquaintances. His message would have made that unnecessary, but it appears that that went the same way as his recollection that he had a stepdaughter named Felice. He assured me that he sent a message three…four days ago for you to prepare rooms in the guest…’ She could have bitten her tongue.

‘So you decided on the Abbot’s House instead. And there was no message, lady.’

‘Then we share a mutual shock at the sight of each other, for which I am as sorry as you are, Sir Leon,’ she said with biting sarcasm. She felt the unremitting examination of his eyes which she knew must have missed nothing by now: her swollen eyelids, her bruises, her soaking feet, all adding no doubt to his misinterpretation of her role. Defensively, she tried to justify herself whilst regretting the need to do so. ‘I chose this dwelling, sir, because I am not used to living on a building-site, despite Lord Deventer’s recommendations. Whether you received a message or not, I am here to prepare rooms in the New House next door ready for his lordship’s occupation in the autumn. And I had strict instructions to keep well out of your way, which I could hardly do with any degree of success if our two households were thrown together, could I? Even a child could see that,’ she said, looking out of the window towards the roof of the church. ‘Now will you please remove yourself from my chamber, Sir Leon, and allow me to finish dressing? As you see, we are still in the middle of unpacking.’

Instead of leaving, Sir Leon closed the door behind him and came further into the room where the light from one of the large mullioned windows gave her the opportunity to see more of his extreme good looks, his abundant physical fitness. His long legs were well-muscled, encased in brown hose and knee-high leather riding boots; paned breeches of soft brown kid did nothing to disguise slim hips around which hung a sword-belt, and Felice assumed that he had stormed round here immediately on his return from some nearby accommodation, for otherwise it would have taken him longer to reach an out-of-the-way place like Wheatley.

‘No,’ he said, in answer to her request. ‘I haven’t finished yet, lady. You’ll not dismiss me the way you dismissed my steward yesterday.’

Instantly, she rose to the bait. ‘If your steward, Sir Leon, knows no better than to refuse both hospitality and welcome to travellers after a two-day journey, then it’s time he was replaced. Clearly he’s not up to the position.’

‘If Thomas Vyttery is replaced at all, lady, it will be for handing you the keys to this house.’

‘That was his only saving grace. The keys remain with me.’

‘This is no place for women, not for a good few months. We’ve barely started again after winter and there are dozens of men on the site,’ he said, leaning against the window recess and glancing down into the courtyard below. It swarmed with men, but they were her servants, not his builders. ‘And I have enough trouble getting them to keep their minds on the job without a bevy of women appearing round every corner.’

‘Then put blinkers on them, sir!’ she snapped. ‘The direction of your men’s interest is not my concern. I’ve been sent down here to fulfil a task and I intend to do it. Surely my presence cannot be the worst that’s ever happened to you in your life. You appear to have survived, so far.’

‘And you, Lady Felice Marwelle, have an extremely well-developed tongue for one so young. I begin to see why your stepfather was eager to remove you to the next county if you used it on him so freely, though he might have spared a thought for me while he was about it. He might have done even better to find you a husband with enough courage to tame you. I’d do it myself if I had the time.’

‘Hah! You’re sure it’s only time you lack, Sir Leon? I seem to have heard that excuse more than once when skills are wanting. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my feet are wrinkling like paper, and I must hone my tongue in private.’

It was not to be, however. Enter Mistress Elizabeth bearing a large armful of feathery green plants, her face flushed and prettily eager. Without taking stock of the situation in the chamber or sensing any of the tension, she headed directly for her mistress and dumped the green bundle on to her lap. ‘My lady, look! Here’s chervil for your bruises. There’s a mass of it in the old kitchen garden. There, now!’ She looked round, newly aware of the unenthusiastic audience and searching for approval.

Felice looked down at the offering. ‘Chervil, Elizabeth?’

‘Comfrey, Elizabeth,’ said Lydia. ‘You were told to gather comfrey.’

‘Oh,’ said Elizabeth, flatly.

‘You have injuries, lady?’ said Sir Leon. ‘I didn’t know that.’ His deep voice adopted a conciliatory tone that made Felice look up sharply, her eyes suddenly wary.

‘No, sir. Nothing to speak of. The journey yesterday, that’s all.’ In a last effort to persuade him to leave, she stood up, holding out the greenery to Lydia and taking a thoughtless step forward.

She went crashing down, tipping the bucket over and pitching herself face-first into a flood of tepid water, flinging the chervil into Sir Leon’s path. He and Lydia leapt forward together, but he was there first with his hands beneath her bare armpits, heaving her upright between his straddled legs. Then, to everyone’s astonishment, he lifted her up into his arms as if she weighed no more than a child and stood with her in the centre of the room as the two maids mopped at the flood around his feet.

Felice was rarely at a loss for words, but the shock of the fall, her wet and dishevelled state, and this arrogant man’s unaccustomed closeness combined to make any coherent sound difficult, her sense of helplessness heightened by her sudden plunge from her high-horse to the floor.

His hands were under her knees and almost over one breast that pushed unashamedly proud and pink through the wet fabric; his face, only inches from hers, held an expression of concern bordering on consternation. He was watching her closely. Inspecting her. ‘You hurt?’ he said.

She peered at him through strands of wet hair, shaking her head and croaking one octave lower. ‘Let me go, sir. Please.’

He hesitated, then looked around the room. ‘Where?’ he said.

‘Anywhere.’

For a long moment—time waited upon them—their eyes locked in a confusion of emotions that ranged through disbelief, alarm and, on Felice’s part, outright hostility. It was natural that she should have missed the admiration in his, for he did his best to conceal it, but she was close enough now to see his muscular neck where a long red scratch ran from beneath his chin and disappeared into the open neck of his shirt. His jaw was square and strong and his mouth, unsmiling but with lips parted as if about to speak, had a tiny red mark on the lower edge where perhaps his lover had bitten it in the height of passion. His breath reached her, sending a wave of familiar panic into her chest, and as her gaze wandered over his features on their own private search, he continued to watch her with a grey unwavering scrutiny, noting her bruised wrists before holding her eyes again.

Her gaze flinched and withdrew to the loosely hanging points of his doublet that should have tied it together; the aiglets that tipped each tie were spear-heads of pure gold. One of them was missing. She took refuge in the most inconsequential details while her breath stayed uncomfortably in her lungs, refusing to move and gripped by a terrible fear that seeped into every part of her, reviving a recent nightmare. She fought it, terrified of accepting its meaning.

His grip on her body tightened, pulling her closely in to him, then he strode over to the tumbled mattress where she had lain that night and placed her upon it, bending low enough for his forelock to brush against her eyelids. He stood upright, looking down at her and combing a hand through his hair that slithered back into the ridges like a tiled roof. Without another word, he picked up the grimy doe-skin breeches she had worn in the garden, dropped them into her lap and strode past the sobbing Elizabeth and bustling Lydia and out of the room, without bothering to close the door. They heard his harsh shout to someone below them, and the two deerhounds stood with ears pricked, listening to the last phases of his departure.

Mistress Lydia was first to recover. ‘For pity’s sake, Elizabeth, stop snivelling and help me with this mess, will you? What’s that you’re fiddling with? Let me see.’

‘I don’t know. I found it under the chervil in the kitchen garden.’ She held out her palm upon which lay a tiny golden spear-head with a hole through its shaft.

Lydia picked it up, turning it over in the light before handing it to her mistress. ‘An aiglet,’ she said. ‘Somebody lost it. Now, lass…’ she turned back to Elizabeth ‘…you get that wet mess off the floor and throw it out. Plants and men are rarely what they seem: that chervil is cow-parsley.’

Chapter Two

T he unshakeable determination that Felice had shown to her early morning visitor regarding her occupation of the Abbot’s House now collapsed like a pack of playing cards, and whereas she had earlier brushed aside Lydia’s suggestion that they might as well return to Sonning, it now seemed imperative that the waggons were loaded without delay.

‘We can’t stay here, Lydie,’ she said, still shaking. ‘We just can’t. Send a message down to find Mr Peale.’

Mistress Lydia Waterman had been with Felice long enough to become her close friend and ally and, at five years her senior, old enough to be her advisor, too. She was a red-haired beauty who had never yet given her heart to any man to hold for more than a week or two, and Felice loved her for her loyalty and almost brutal honesty.

‘Think what you’re doing, love,’ said Lydia, businesslike. ‘That’s not the best way to handle it.’

Felice winced at the advice, given for the second time that day. ‘I have thought. That was him!’ she whispered, fiercely. ‘This is his missing aiglet that Elizabeth found. He’s a fiend, Lydie.’

Lydia lifted a dense pile of blue velvet up into her arms and held it above Felice’s head. ‘Arms up,’ she said, lowering it. ‘Losing an aiglet in the kitchen garden doesn’t make him a fiend, love. And he didn’t arrive here until now, so how could it have been him who chased you? Last night he’d have been miles away.’

‘If he was near enough to get here so early he couldn’t have been far away, Lydie. He must have been snooping while they believed he was away, looking for something…somebody. And I recognised the voice too, and the way he looked at me. I know that he knows. He wanted to humiliate me.’

‘All men sound the same in the dark,’ said Lydia, cynically. ‘But he picked you up out of the water fast enough.’

‘And he pretended to believe that I was Lord Deventer’s mistress, too.’

‘Perhaps he really believed it. His lordship’s no saint, is he? It was an easy mistake to make, with him not recognising the name of Marwelle. Turn round, love, while I fasten you up.’

‘I don’t care. We’re not staying. We can be away tomorrow.’

‘No, we can’t,’ Lydia said with a mouthful of pins. ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday.’

Lydia’s pragmatism could be shockingly unhelpful, yet not even she could be expected to share the torment that now shook Felice to the very core. The knowing stranger she had presumed would take her secret with him to the ends of the earth now proved to be the very person whose antagonism clearly matched her own, the one with whom she would not have shared the slightest confidence, let alone last night’s disgraceful fiasco.

He would misconstrue it, naturally. What man would not? He would believe she was cheap, a silly lass who needed reminding to think before she allowed a man, a total stranger, to possess her, hence his whispered warning that should more typically have come from her rather than him. Oh, yes, he would revel in the misunderstanding: she would see it in his eyes at every meeting unless she packed her bags and left.

It was a misunderstanding she herself would have been hard-pressed to explain rationally, a private matter of the heart she had not discussed even with the worldly Lydia, for Father Timon had not been expected to know what it was frowned upon for priests to know, and his role of chaplain, confessor, tutor and friend had progressed further than was seemly for priests and maids of good breeding.

Timon Montefiore, aged twenty-eight, had taken up his duties in Lord Deventer’s household soon after the latter’s marriage to Lady Honoria Fyner, previously Marwelle, and perhaps it had been a mutual need for instant friendship that had been the catalyst for what followed.

Friendship developed into affection, and the affection deepened. As her mother’s preoccupation with a new husband and a young step-family grew, Felice’s previous role as deputy-mistress of their former home became redundant in Lord Deventer’s austerely regimented household. Rudderless and overlooked by the flamboyant new stepfather, Felice had drifted more and more towards Timon, partly to remove herself from Lord Deventer’s insensitivities and partly because Timon was always amiable and happy to see her. He had been exceptional in other ways; his teaching was leisurely and tender, arousing her only so far and no further, always with the promise of something more and with enough control for both of them. ‘Think what you’re doing,’ was advice she heard regularly, though often enough accompanied by the lift of her hand towards his smiling lips and merry eyes.

She had discovered the inevitable anguish of love last summer when Timon had caught typhoid fever and her stepfather had had him quickly removed from his house to the hospice in Reading. Forbidden to visit him, Felice had been given no chance to say farewell and, during conversation at dinner a week later, she learned that he had died a few days before and was already buried. Lord Deventer was not sure where. Did it matter? he had said, bluntly. Until then, Felice had not known that love and pain were so closely intertwined.

Since that dreadful time last summer, no man’s arms had held her, nor had any other man shared her thoughts until now. Her terrible silence had been explained by her mother as dislike of her new situation, exacerbated by talk of husbands, a remedy as painful as it was tactless to one who believed her heart to be irrevocably broken.

The usual agonies of guilt and punishment had been instilled into Felice from an early age and were now never far from her mind without the courteous priest to mitigate it. The replacement chaplain had been stern and astringent, not the kind to receive a desperate young woman’s confidences, and she had been glad to accept any means of escape from a house of bitter-sweet memories upon which she had believed nothing would impose. But last night’s experience had suggested otherwise in a far from tender manner, and her anger at her heart’s betrayal was equal to her fury with the shiftless Fate who had plucked mockingly at the cords that bound her heart.