Watch the Lady (17 page)

“What's the matter?” Her voice was drunk with sleep.

“A ghost!”

“What do you mean?”

“In the courtyard.” A pulse thrummed at her temple.

“You must have dreamt it. Get into bed.” Jeanne patted the place beside her.

“No, it was really there. I heard the footsteps. It drifted over the yard.”

“Shhh, it is just your imagination. It is easy to mistake things in the moonlight. If it were a ghost, you would not have heard its footfall.”

“No, of course.”

“It was probably one of the servants slipping off for a lovers' tryst.”

“Yes, yes,” said Penelope, feeling silly in the face of Jeanne's pragmatism.

“You are unsettled. No wonder, in your condition.” Jeanne brought her small hand to Penelope's belly. “Just think, you have a new life growing in there. It is bound to put you off kilter until you are used to it. Turn your mind to happy things. Dorothy will be arriving tomorrow; she will cheer you.”

•  •  •

The following day was sultry, so hot that Penelope and Jeanne wore their bodices only loosely laced and left off their sleeves and farthingales altogether. Essex and Wat had their doublets open to the waist and even Lettice, who liked to be dressed correctly whether or not visitors were expected—for the sake of the servants, she always said—had abandoned her ruff. They sprawled in the great chamber with all the windows and doors open wide in an attempt to encourage the sticky air to shift a little, but it refused and lassitude settled over them. Penelope thought of Dorothy traveling in such heat, hoping their party had broken the journey at an inn. Jeanne passed round cups of small beer but it was lukewarm and unappetizing. Even shuffling a pack of cards seemed like a Herculean task, so they chatted about nothing much and swapped riddles.

“I am tall when I am young. I am short when I am old,” said Wat, his voice squeaking and cracking as he spoke, making him redden and clear his throat, reminding Penelope that even the baby of the family was becoming a man. She remembered, with a jolt of love, rocking him as an infant. “I live long when I am fat, and short when I am thin. What am I?”

“A candle,” they replied in unison.

“That is an old one,” said Essex. She scrutinized him but he seemed relaxed and content, with just the bruise flowering beneath his curls as a reminder of the previous day's distress. When she looked closely, though, she could see that his eyes remained flat as flint. “Your turn, Mother.”

Lettice waved her fan in the general direction of her face. “If I have it, I share it not. If I share it, I have it not. It is what?”

“Love?” said Jeanne.

“You answer ‘love' to them all,” teased Penelope. “I think it is a secret.”

“It is, indeed,” answered Lettice. “Your turn.”

“Let me think.” Penelope shut her eyes, allowing her head to sink back into a cushion, and found those familiar words circulating in her mind:
When Nature made her chief work, Stella's eyes
. She had thought it a great compliment to be named a star, burning brightly, a heavenly body, but it came to her then in a wave of sadness that a star is a distant thing offering nothing but an ephemeral spark in the night sky. The sun offers warmth and light and life, even the moon lights the darkness, but a star is cold and impotent—just a pretty speck. “I can fall but never am hurt. I can shoot but never do harm. I can burn but never do scald. I can be seen but never be touched. What am I?”

“This one is love, surely,” said Jeanne, which caused everyone to laugh as Penelope shook her head and rolled her eyes.

“Is it water?” asked Wat.

“Water can scald,” said Lettice. “Is it pride? No, it can't be that.” She took a sip from her cup, scowling. “Is there not a chip of ice to be had in this house?”

“I don't know. What are you?” asked Essex.

Penelope felt a vortex of nausea pass down into her belly and, suddenly desperate to move, pulled herself up to her feet, taking in a series of deep breaths. “I am a star.”

“Oh, of course,” said Jeanne, “a falling star.”

Penelope looked out of the window, remembering the stream that ran through the bottom of the orchard, suddenly girded by a desire to sit on its bank in the shade of the trees and dangle her feet in the cool water. “Who will join me on a walk?” No one replied. “In that case I shall go on my own.”

Once out of the house and in the orchard where the grass grew soft, she kicked off her shoes, pulled off her coif, and unpinned her hair, picking up her pace to feel, at long last, the movement of air on her exposed skin. The grasses and wildflowers grew tall, harebells and poppies, bright patches of color, haloed in clouds of baby's breath and cow parsley. She followed the path, stepping carefully over the brambles where it was overgrown, occasionally stopping to unhook her dress when it became tangled. The bushes were thick with vivid green berries, promising an abundant late-summer harvest. A vague memory came to her of picking blackberries in that very place once, years before, cramming them into her mouth as if she were starving. Someone was stung by a bee that day, but she couldn't think who, could just see an image of adult fingers trying to prise out the sting, and recalled learning that a bee dies once it has stung. She tried to make sense of it, wondered why God would make a creature whose only defense had such grave consequence. She walked on, drawn by the thought of the cool water. But as she arrived she saw that the stream had dried to little more than a trickle. She walked beside it, seeming to remember that somewhere along that stretch the water gathered into a natural pool.

A twig cracked, she stopped, suddenly feeling watched; a little chill moved through her and with it all the fear from the previous night returned. She stayed silent for a moment, hearing only birdsong and the hum of crickets, but then came the sound of something rushing through the orchard grass, and she understood what it was only when Spero let out a yelp, jumping up at her in an excited frenzy. She stooped to stroke him, laughing at herself for her misplaced unease, supposing it must have been the past crowding about her that was having that effect. Spero tore off ahead in pursuit of a scent and she ran after him, feeling simple happiness rise up in her as if she were a girl once more and free of cares.

Her foot suddenly caught on a root and the ground came hurtling up to meet her. She broke her fall with an outstretched palm, bending it right back at the wrist as she crashed heavily to earth, knocking the breath right out of her. She lay on her side, cradling her painful hand, and was besieged by a creeping fear that somehow she had dislodged her baby in the fall, feeling swept up in regret for her recklessness.

“Are you hurt?”

Looking up, she saw a man looming above. The sun was behind him so she couldn't make out his features. Her mouth opened to scream but, as in a nightmare, no sound came and she felt her mind separate off from her fear, offering up the idea that she must have hit her head and lost consciousness, for this man she imagined before her was Sidney.

“Stella, are you hurt?”

He squatted beside her, seeming so very real, with that black smudge of ink and the male tang of his sweat. She stretched out a hand to his sleeve, then took it back, fearing the illusion might vaporize under her touch.

“Sidney?” she whispered. She could see the faint embroidery of scarring on his face, as if someone had stitched a word there that she was unable to read.

“You are hurt.” He took her hand. She could feel him; he was solid, fleshy, warm, as if real. “Look.” There was a cut across the ball of her thumb where she'd broken her fall and the blood had seeped onto the white cuff of her shift; but she felt no pain and wondered momentarily if she were dead, finding herself slipping into a maelstrom of panic, thinking she might have been caught up in some kind of witchery.

“I have frightened you.”

“What are you?”

“Stella! I did not mean to alarm you.” She lifted herself up onto an elbow, only then feeling the sharp pain of the cut and the throb in her wrist. It began to dawn on her that this was no specter, or figment of her imagination, or malign, conjured-up ghoul. “What a fool I was. I wanted to surprise you and I scared you half to death. I should never have come.” He had taken out a handkerchief and was wrapping it around her hand to quench the blood flow and then, without a word, she allowed him to help her up and convey her to the shade of a nearby tree, where they both sat leaning against the trunk. Spero appeared once more, bounding out of the undergrowth, stopping a few feet away from them, curling his lip in a silent growl.

“Here, boy,” she called, patting her thigh to beckon him, but he sat at a distance in the path, stiff, like a sentry. She turned to look at Sidney properly; he was disheveled, his clothes creased and covered in burrs, his eyes ringed with dark shadows. “I think you need to explain yourself. What are you doing here?”

“I was with my father in Ludlow. It is but a day's ride. I arrived late last night. Too late—I slept in the woods.”

“It was you.” A wave of tenderness broke over her. “I heard your footsteps. I thought you were a ghost.”

“I terrified you twice, then! What a fool I am to come upon you in such a way. I had thought to see you without all the others . . .”

“No.” She took his hand—“Not a fool”—bringing it up to her lips, seeing the dirt trapped beneath his bitten nails, opening his fingers, closing her eyes, and planting a kiss at the center of his palm. “Though perhaps an inn might have been a more sensible choice of resting place.”

“I wanted to be close to you.”

“Now that is a little foolish.” She was trying to dilute the atmosphere with humor, fearing she might be entirely overcome.

“I have tried to forget you but you draw me like a lodestar.”

“You think of me as a star,” she said quietly, “as if I have no feelings. Yet I am a woman—flesh and blood.” She pinched the thin skin of her inner arm, as if to prove the fact. “It is painful for me too, to be apart from you.”

He expelled a deep breath, as if releasing a century's worth of air. She held his gaze as he inched closer. When their mouths finally met, tongues slip-sliding, she teetered on the precipice of lust, on the brink of losing herself irretrievably. But with sudden clarity she remembered the life growing in her belly and pulled away abruptly. “I cannot.”

He groaned, like a dying animal, as she prised herself out of his grip.

“If you love me truly, you must let me go,” she said.

“What, for your honor? Because you belong to that man . . .
Rich
?” He was billowing with anger then, as if all the love in him had transformed into rage. “You will not make a cuckold of
Rich
? What do you owe
him
?”

“Oh, my love,” she murmured, placing a hand over his, which he snatched away like a sulking child. “I do not love him.” She took his hand again, holding it tight that time, refusing to be denied. “It is you I love, with every fiber of myself, and no other. But . . .”

“But, what?” He looked at her then, his eyes teeming with anguish.

“I am with child.”

He brought a hand up to each side of his head and shut his eyes. “
His
child; you carry
his
child.”

“Yes,” she said, “my husband's child.” It was only the thought of the seed germinating inside her, which she hoped to heaven had not been dislodged by her fall, that was holding her in check. “I have made an agreement with Rich. It is not he whom I must honor, but the pact I made.”

“Pact?”

“I will give him two boys and then I will be free.”

“But—”

“No,” she interrupted. “Do not ask me why, for I will not tell you, nor anyone.”

“Stella,” he said, pulling her back into his embrace. “I am lost without you. I have never wanted anything as I want you.”

“And I you.” The words seemed woefully inadequate but as she said them, at last, she fully understood the true meaning of desire, the invisible hand that will push a grown man, who should know better, into a day's hard riding in the hope of a glimpse of his love at the end of it; the torture described in poetry; the force that will make a person drop every principle he ever had to quench the thirst of it. She collected together all her resistance, finding somewhere the strength to hold her ground in the face of him, to put her head before her heart. “But I cannot. I have promised to remain faithful until I have birthed both boys.”

“Oh God.” His face was the image of despair.

“If I keep my side of the bargain, he will keep his, and once I have fulfilled my duties I will be at liberty.” She paused, picking a long grass stem and pinching the seeds away from its head. “Then I will be yours.”

“But he will never know.”

“
I
will know,” she replied. “If I cannot adhere to my own moral code, then I am not worth the flesh and blood I am made of. I do not care about what others might think of me. I do not even care if I make my husband a cuckold or myself a whore. But I care to keep my promises—or I am not me.”

“You . . .” He took both her hands in his, faltering, seeming to search for words. “You are remarkable. There is no one like you.”

“Not so remarkable,” she said, thinking about the extent to which she would lose the power she had got a taste for if she compromised herself with a dark secret of her own.

“I will wait,” he said, then repeated it: “I will wait.”

They sat in silence for some time, she tucked into the crook of his arm, he stroking her hair. She dared a moment's wondering about how it would be, until finally she said, “I must go. They will be worried about me—in my condition.” She extricated herself from his arms, suddenly deflated by the thought of separation. “What will you do? Will you present yourself at the house, say you were passing?”