Brothers at Arms (48 page)

It was not quite the truth, but she had so little, and Joshua wanted to give something extra to repay her kindness. He felt a sense of relief when Tess accepted the coin and placed it on the table, then watched in surprise as she took hold of his hand and turned it over.

“These are too soft to be working hands,” she said in a husky voice.

He felt a tingling sense of anticipation, as she stroked his palm and raised it to her lips, and then slid his hand inside her warm bodice.

“I have nothing else to offer you,” she said, “but you are most welcome to it, and I would be happy to serve you.”

Joshua blinked to shut out recollections of the last time his hands touched a breast, and then opened his eyes, knowing he could not avoid making a choice. To refuse and turn away as if in disgust would humiliate the woman; but to accept an offer she felt compelled to make was to take advantage of her.

Seeing the look of entreaty in her eyes, he reached out to stroke her cheek. She gave a little shiver of ecstasy as he trickled his fingers down her neck, past her shoulder to the curve of her breast, and then asked quietly, “Are you sure you want this?”

In silent response, Tess unlaced her bodice and let her skirt fall unhindered to the floor. She stood before him in mute agreement, and smiled. It was for him to take or leave and Joshua realised this gentle soul was everything he desired.

Who would have thought the drab clothes she wore hid the kind of lush curves the artist Rubens would have worshiped on canvas? Only a fool would leave her at home, unattended and unappreciated.

Warm, giving and responsive to his touch, Tess instinctively knew how to please. By so doing, she helped Joshua to shed the pent-up frustrations he had endured for months, and with it, his fear of being impotent. With a feeling of utter contentment, he slept in her comforting arms.

In a brief moment of waking, he listened to the sound of her breathing, and felt at peace. Outside, he heard the freshening wind rattling the window frame, and wondered if it might portend a storm. He knew he ought to go back to the Hall, but the realisation that Tess was lying awake watching him with anticipation, tempted him to stay. The sky was still light, so what difference would half an hour make? He had nothing better to do with his time.

When Joshua woke again he was alone, and knew by the gathering shadows in the room that more than an hour had passed. Hearing a voice outside the house, he leapt from the bed, and then realised with relief that it was Tess talking to the horse. He watched her through the window as he hastily dressed. She looked somehow different today, almost younger. Last week, he thought her hair was sand coloured. Now it looked the shade of ripening corn. Not only that, but she had softened her work-hardened hands.

One thought followed another. The fresh-smelling sheets on which they lay made him wonder if she anticipated this – or whether she normally changed the bed linen on a Saturday. He supposed that he would never know; and might never see her again.

After the intimacy they had shared, their parting was strangely formal.

Tess led the roan horse forward for Joshua to mount, before hurrying into the house and reappearing with his clean laundry. “You’d better not leave this behind, sir,” she said, “especially after coming to collect it.”

“Thank you,” he said softly, slipping one of each item of clothing into the deep inner pockets of his coat, “for everything.”

She gave a rueful smile and nodded acknowledgment. He left her standing amongst the trees her hand raised in farewell, but when he looked back she was gone.

In a daze, Joshua set off to ride his horse up the drive towards the stable block, oblivious of the gathering storm clouds and drizzling rain. Many times he and the other lads had covered the distance in ten minutes at a canter, but in his mellow mood and dawdling pace it took half an hour.

A sudden fork of lightning across the park brought Joshua to a sense of his surroundings. He urged the horse to a canter, but as he approached the stables there was a clap of thunder nearby and the deluge began in earnest. In seconds, he was drenched.

As he leapt down from the saddle, the stable clock started to strike the hour of six, and Ben Waters dashed out of the stables to take the horse under cover.

“Thank God you’re back, Joshua. We were getting worried about you in case you were down at the harbour. It’s due to be a high tide, and will be one hell of a night.”

“Sorry, Ben, I forgot the time,” Joshua said, preferring to let them think he’d been to the tavern than admit he’d spent the afternoon with another man’s wife. Not that he regretted it for a minute. He was sated. He had never felt so satisfied by a woman. Whatever was lacking before, Tess had cured him. All he wanted was to sleep.

For the last week of August, storms kept Joshua from the shore, but when he rode down to the beach on the first dry evening after he finished work, the thought of meeting Tess’s husband prevented him from approaching the house amongst the trees. Everything looked quiet, but he had no idea of the working hours that would ensure the fisherman’s absence, or how to explain his presence if the man was at home.

I’ve come to see your wife, Mr Dereham… to ask if she would oblige me again…
No, that wasn’t such a good idea, even if it was the truth. If he did that, he might be dragged off across the North Sea in a fishing boat and dropped overboard with no one at Holkham being any wiser. Joshua Norbery would simply disappear. He shivered at the thought and let a few more days go by.

Half-way through the following week, Ben Waters brought an invitation from his mother, asking if Joshua would like to share their Sunday tea.

With no valid reason to refuse, he accepted with grateful thanks and met Ben at the appointed time to walk the mile down the back drive to the cottage where they lived in the village. The groom would have saddled Joshua’s horse but he felt that it would be churlish to ride while another man walked at his side. Fortunately the Sunday afternoon weather was kind to both of them.

The food on the table was simply presented but delicious. Home-made scones that melted in his mouth, thinly sliced bread and butter lavishly spread with the new season’s preserves made from strawberries and raspberries grown by Ben’s father and grandfather in the walled garden.

Joshua wished that he could have given his hostess something in return, but she expected nothing, and was pleased when he praised the seed cake that he learned she had made especially for his visit.

It was one of Ben’s favourites, so she thought he might like it too. She sent him away with a chunky slice wrapped in a cotton serviette that he slipped into his pocket, and he wondered who would otherwise have enjoyed it had he not been there.

Amongst the family present, he recognised Ben’s younger sister, Mary, who was in service at the agent’s house. He had seen her earlier in the day when he sat down to eat his Sunday roast mutton with Mr and Mrs Blakeney. There were two siblings missing from the family group, but he met Ellie and Florence, the twins who were ten and little Tom, aged six, as well as Ben’s grandparents who lived in the adjoining red-bricked cottage. Being part of a family made the day one of the most hospitable he had enjoyed.

It was the following Wednesday evening when Joshua finally made up his mind to visit the shoreline again, slipping away the moment he finished work, without waiting to take his supper.

He had a strange sense of foreboding when he followed the path across the saltmarshes and a hollow feeling in his gut that vied with an aching need for information. As he approached the little house amongst the trees, he was conscious of an eerie silence. It looked strangely lost in the twilight.

When he knocked, the door opened at his touch and he stepped inside the shadowy room that he entered with Tess, but she wasn’t there now even if the kitchen furniture looked much as it did on the first occasion. He walked through an open door into the room where he had changed his clothes. The bed was neatly made as before, but the air was stale and the house had an unused feeling.

Curious, he stooped and swept back the curtain to look under the bed for the barrels that had probably contained “blue ruin”, and the wax-covered packages of what might have been tobacco. As he suspected, they had gone.

He had heard the grooms saying that large bales and barrels of contraband went inland to the towns, but smaller ones could be sold to local ale-houses or individual buyers. He wondered if any of them had ever found their way to Holkham. Surely not, for Mr Coke was a magistrate.

Dismissing the thought, Joshua slammed the outer door shut, and stood gazing across the expanse of beach at the rapidly approaching tide, all the while hoping that Tess wasn’t out in the gathering darkness.

Passing back through the village, he stopped at the Ostrich Inn to enquire her whereabouts. He only had to mention her name to gain a response.

“Mrs Dereham…?” the innkeeper’s wife said when he asked. “Oh, you mean the poor woman that lost her husband as well as her father and two brothers in that dreadful storm last month. The house is empty now, sir, for she’s gone back to live with her mother in one of the cottages near the harbour in the next village along the coast. The old lady was in a sorry state, by what I’ve heard. Half out of her mind with grief, from losing so many of her family. And worry too, I daresay, without the income they brought in.”

It was reason enough for the two women to be together.

Thinking back, Joshua realised that the storm to which she referred was during the night that followed the blissful time he had spent with Tess, so she might already have been a widow without knowing it when he left her.

“One of the crew from the Revenue Cutter reported seeing them heading towards the open sea, at a time when they’d have been expected to come back to shore. There’s no telling what took them out there with a storm forecast, but nobody saw them alive again.”

That was all the information that Joshua could glean, and he made his way back up the drive to the Hall to seek bread, cheese and a tankard of ale for his supper, but it was hard to swallow and sat for an unconscionably long time in his belly.

Poor Tess…he kept thinking.

It was two more weeks before the sea finally gave up the bloated bodies of the lost men. Accompanied by Mr Coke and his fellow workers, Joshua attended the sombre funerals, and heard whispers amongst the mourners of the sad consolation that Ned Dereham’s widow was carrying his child.

Joshua started in surprise, realising that it was Tess to whom they referred. He thought again of the wax-covered packages hidden under the bed in the cottage, and wondered if Ned Dereham and his fellow fishermen had set out under cover of darkness to collect more contraband on the night they died.

He wondered if the storm had really sunk the fishing boat or an encounter with the Revenue Cutter from Yarmouth, after the gruesome discovery of the missing riding officers in the salt marshes. Did the Preventives retaliate by sinking the fishermen’s boat out at sea, and let the tide bring the bodies back to land? If they could blame it on nature, there would be no questions asked.

Over and over again, Joshua mulled the stark facts around in his mind, as he pondered the problem. In the end, there seemed to be only one course of action. At the earliest opportunity, he set out to offer condolences to the widows.

Finding the cottages by the harbour was easy, but when he looked at five black doors in a terrace, he realised that he did not know Tess’s mother’s name. The landlady at the Ostrich had thought she lived at the middle dwelling, but couldn’t be sure. As he approached, a curtain twitched at windows on either side.

Joshua tapped gently on the door, knowing he was under scrutiny. And then, assuming an air of nonchalance he did not feel, looked over the harbour wall at the boats caught in the channel with the tide out.

He turned back, hearing the door open and saw Tess’s look of shock as she realised who stood there. “I’ve only just heard,” he said. “I looked for you at the cottage along the beach…”

“You shouldn’t have come here,” she said in a whisper, looking distraught. “People will see you… and talk…”

Tess seemed to have aged ten years since he last saw her, for the dark-coloured clothes she wore did not suit her. Her eyes were bleak, cheeks chalky pale and her sand-coloured hair that had flowed freely across a pillow was confined under a white mobcap, with only a few lank strands escaping the regimented frill. All the life seemed to have drained out of her.

Joshua suddenly realised her predicament. Tess had few possessions when he met her wandering on the wide-open expanse of the beach, but she had the freedom to walk where she liked, and do as she pleased in her husband’s absence. Confined here in her mother’s home she was subject to the restrictions of neighbours seeing everything that went on and making judgements about things of which they knew nothing.

And yet, knowing the nefarious activities that her late husband had combined with fishing, she was safer here, though whether she appreciated the fact he couldn’t say. Filial duty was expected of a woman and it was the price she paid for respectability.

“I’m sorry,” he said, realising that he had caused her embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

She shrugged her shoulders in acceptance of his words.

“Who’s that, Tess?” a frail-sounding voice came from inside the cottage.

“It’s all right, Mother. It’s just someone from the Hall,” Tess called loudly through the doorway, her voice calmer now.

Before he could move, the older woman said, “Don’t keep the gentleman standing on the doorstep, Tess. Bring him indoors.”

Tess gave a despairing sigh and stood aside to allow Joshua to enter.

“You’d better come in, sir,” she said, and added as an afterthought, “mind your head on the beam.”

Thankful for the warning, Joshua stooped, just in time to avoid the doorframe as he entered the dark hallway. Another step and he was inside a little parlour, lit by the flickering flame of an oil lamp and such light as passed through a small paned window to the front. From what he could see, the furnishings were sparse, but the beeswax and lavender scent was a testament to the attention lavished on what was there.