Questing fingers were loosening the laces at her back and Henrietta leaned against his chest to make it easier for him undo her
bodice. Part of her mind was stunned by his audacity but the drugging sensuality his knowing fingers was orchestrating in her overrode all her reticence.
The light was green and heavy on her closed lids, the silence absolute save for the murmur of bees and the susurration of blood in her veins.
Matthew laid her back against the cushioning turf and took a deep, ragged breath. ‘You are so beautiful,’ he said, so low that she hardly caught the words. He slipped the bodice from her shoulders to savour her skin for a long moment. He lowered his mouth to the swell of her breast revealed by the slipping bodice, caressing the warm skin with gentleness. ‘I cannot believe you are really mine,’ he murmured against her skin.
The tenderness in his voice unleashed all the pent-up guilt and her burgeoning love for him. Her throat thickened with tears and a sob she could not repress shook her.
One hot tear splashed on to Matthew's cheek. ‘My darling. Henrietta, why are you weeping?’ He sat up, pulling her into his arms. ‘You are overwrought. My passion for you is driving me too fast… the wedding… last night. Forgive me. Do you want to go back to the house?’
‘No!’ Henrietta protested with more haste than modesty, her vehemence bringing a smile to his lips. ‘I want to be here, alone with you. Only, I thought you would be angry with me after this morning. I am sorry. I should not have pressed you so or said those things about my father and James.’ He looked away, not meeting her eyes. ‘I know it pains you to speak of it – I will never mention it again.’
Matthew got slowly to his feet and stood staring out through the screen of spear-shaped leaves to the pond beyond. For a moment Henrietta feared she had awoken his anger again until he turned to face her.
‘No. We must speak of it. I was a fool to think I could keep it from you. This marriage must be a clean beginning for both of us. Secrets are like droplets of acid, corroding where they touch. There will be no secrets for us.’
Henrietta dropped her eyes, unable to match the sincerity in his green gaze. ‘Go on,’ she whispered.
‘I knew the King was wrong. His demands were ruining the country and had to be resisted. But I thought then, at the beginning, that I could not bring myself to fight my fellow countrymen. I was already involved as lawyer to Lord Hargraves, a moderate man whose views were much in accord with my own.’
He shredded a leaf between unconscious fingers, gaze opaque. Henrietta felt he was looking back at his younger, more idealistic self. ‘When he became a colonel with Cromwell's army he asked me to accompany him as an intelligence officer.' Henrietta met his eyes and he spoke sharply as though rebuffing a criticism she had not intended. ‘I held the rank of major, I was not a spy skulking around the taverns for scraps of gossip. Hargraves used me to interpret the information and reports that reached him, to handle his correspondence and cyphers.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘The roads of England must have been thick with couriers carrying concealed messages. It is a wonder any of us can write an open letter in plain English now.’
Henrietta's answering laugh was hollow. ‘How came you to fight, then?’ She had to turn the conversation from secret messages before her guilt showed on her face.
‘As a man of honour I could not avoid it. When the fighting came I found I had no choice, there was no middle path, no party of compromise to join. It was Parliament or the King and to choose either meant to fight and kill.’
Henrietta looked at him with compassion. How difficult it must have been. Her father and James never had a moment's doubt that their cause was right and that to fight and kill for it was right also. But this man, her husband, had thought deeply, made a difficult choice. He had faced the consequences of that choice and his conscience and his scars would never let him forget. ‘I understand, Matthew. Please believe me, I admire your honesty and I respect your convictions even though I cannot share them.’
Matthew knelt beside her, his eyes on her face. ‘I have opened my heart to you, Henrietta. I have never spoken of my feelings about this to anyone, not even to Sarah. There is nothing else I am keeping from you. I beg you, be as honest with me. Let us not start this marriage with secrets between us.’
If only she could. Her heart contracted painfully within her but her conscience held firm. She had sworn an oath not to reveal James's secret and now he was dead no one could release her from that promise. She was a poor liar and he must have read her unease on her face.
‘Nothing you are prepared to tell me even now,’ he finished coldly. ‘If this is the way you want our marriage to be, madam, then so be it. I shall return to our guests and leave you alone to the contemplation of your secrets. I hope you find them adequate company.’
Chapter Seventeen
The August weather was so hot that the harvest was early that year. The scything gangs had finished cutting and the wheat stood in stooks across the shorn landscape and the village boys were enjoying themselves earning a few pence scaring birds off the drying ears of grain with catapult and pea-shooter.
From her vantage point on the gatehouse roof Henrietta could see the gleaners stooping to their task in the last field to be cut. The village women and children moved slowly between the stooks gathering the fallen ears of wheat in their kilted-up aprons. Beyond them the occasional gleam of silver marked the course of the Bourne, sadly diminished by the lack of rain since late Spring.
Henrietta's back ached in sympathy with the women who had been working since sunrise. But they would feel the labour worthwhile, for the right to glean their lord's fields would keep them in flour the whole winter long.
Small children played among the stooks at hide-and-seek and, when they thought themselves unwatched, slid down the polished slopes of stacked wheat. The older children sat in what shade they could find, minding the babes in arms and watching over the water flasks and baskets of bread and cheese.
The sight reminded her why she had climbed the tower and her momentary happiness evaporated. She had come to look for Matthew, who had left her bed that morning before she woke as he had done every morning of their marriage.
Try as she might, nothing she did or said broke through the unnatural pattern of the last month. Matthew was punctiliously polite to her by day, but no more. There was no conversation, no exchange of news, no discussion of the estate. On the occasions when he went up to London on legal business he told her nothing when he returned.
Her refusal to tell him the secret he sensed she kept had put an insurmountable barrier between them. Henrietta knew she had hurt him deeply, even though he didn't love her. For a proud and private man to open his heart as he had done, and then to be rebuffed, was something he could not forgive.
Matthew avoided her company, her touch, until they were alone together at night. But in the darkness of their chamber he was passionate, fevered almost, like a man who had thirsted all day but who could now drink his fill. He never spoke to her of his feelings, never asked of hers.
When he fell asleep she lay dry-eyed, lying still so as not to wake him in case he thought her using her wiles to soften him. She could find nothing to alter his coldness. He had demanded her duty and obedience and she gave both in good measure; the household ran with clockwork precision despite the grumbles of servants used to more easy-going ways. Matthew appeared to accept this as the usual way for Winterbourne. In desperation Henrietta forced standards of deportment and behaviour on herself that had Aunt Susan shaking her head in wonderment and no little concern and enquired, with clumsy attempts at subtlety, whether there were any signs yet and then murmured that it was early days.
If anyone had thought to ask her opinion Henrietta would not have said it was early days. Matthew came to her every night, yet only yesterday her hopes that she was with child had been dashed. There was no one in whom she could talk of her disappointment. Her aunt and Alice would merely tell her to be patient and she could hardly confide the real reason for her unhappiness to them.
The crunch of wooden-soled shoes on the carriageway below recalled her to the prese