Joan Wolf (6 page)

David didn't give her a thought. He went home after dark as he did every night and found his dinner simmering in the oven. He lit the candles and went to see what Mrs. Copley had left him to eat. As he was setting the table he heard the door open. He looked up and saw Laura Rivingdale.

She came into the room and closed the door behind her. “I was lonely all by myself in that great house,” she said. “I thought I'd come and talk to you."

He didn't ask her why she had come to Newmarket alone. He didn't point out the number of servants at the Lodge. He simply laid the fork on the table and said quietly, “I see."

She took off her cloak and came forward into the light of the fire. She looked very lovely. “I have been thinking of you, David,” she said softly.

"Have you?” He hadn't moved, and his still beauty drew her like a magnet.

"Yes,” she murmured huskily. She was tall, but she had to reach up quite a long way to pull his head down to meet hers. He remained perfectly still for a minute, with her mouth on his, as if he were holding his breath. Then his arms came up to encircle her and draw her closer. After a long moment she pulled back from him and looked up, meeting his eyes, golden now with desire. “Let's go into the bedroom,” she said.

"All right,” he answered, and held the door for her to precede him.

Laura stayed on at Newmarket for several months. She told her husband and her interested friends that she had not been feeling well and her doctor had prescribed quiet and regular exercise, both of which she was getting at Hailsham Lodge. In reality she could not tear herself away from David.

For the first time her life Laura found herself emotionally involved with a man; that the man was seventeen years old was one of life's ironies, she thought. Several times she tried to explain to herself what it was about David that so held her. It was, she decided, a quality of tenderness that she had never found in any other man. Perhaps it came, she thought, from his working so much with animals.

She was endlessly curious about him. He looked as if he should be up at Oxford or Cambridge with the sons of nobles and gentlemen, not exercising horses in someone else's stable. There was nothing coarse about him; he was clearly cut and defined from his chiseled face and sensitive, mobile mouth to his fine, narrow, strong hands.

"Who were your parents?” she had asked him curiously a week after their first encounter.

"They were French,” he answered readily. “My father was the steward for a noble family in Artois. He was killed protecting his employer's property during the revolution. My mother died shortly after him. My aunt took me out of France and brought me to England when I was one."

She looked at him, a puzzled frown between her brows. They were in bed and he was lying on his back, his hands clasped behind his head. The fire lit up his streaked blond head and long, golden lashes. He did not look at all French. She said as much.

A slow, terribly attractive smile came over his eyes and brows, although his mouth remained grave. “All the members of one nationality do not necessarily resemble each other,” he said gently.

There was a slight pain inside her chest as she looked at him. “You are so
beautiful,"
she murmured in her throat.

At that he did laugh. “And so are you,” he replied, and reached for her once again.

She could not get enough of him. He was tender. He was patient. He was passionate. He was the best lover she had ever had. He was seventeen years old. He did not love her.

It was the knowledge of this last fact that hurt her the most. He was kindness itself; he would never want to hurt her, but the sight of him, beautiful and, ultimately, inaccessible, did hurt her. It had begun very shortly after her arrival in Newmarket. She had seen Jane's painting hanging over the mantel in David's cottage and had asked him about it.

"It is magnificent. Who did it?"

There was a tiny pause. “Jane,” he finally said.

"Jane?” She turned to him in surprise. “I didn't know Jane could paint like this."

He had looked at her in a way that was unmistakable and had changed the subject. He did not want to talk about Jane.

As the weeks and months went by, the shadow of that unspoken name hung like poison over Laura's mind. It drove her wild that he refused to speak about Jane. Every time Laura tried to introduce her name into the conversation, David would give her an inimical stare that said clearly “No Trespassers.” It was Jane who stood between them; it was Jane who gave him that look of untouched purity that she found so agonizingly attractive; it was Jane he loved.

Spring came and still Laura was at Hailsham Lodge. In a few weeks, Jane would be home from school and David found himself in a dilemma. He wished Laura would go, but he didn't know how to tell her. He wasn't quite clear about his own feelings, but one thing he was sure of: he never wanted Jane and Laura to meet. He never wanted Jane to know about Laura. In some obscure way he felt he had betrayed Jane and the feeling made him uncomfortable. He began to avoid the cottage, staying on later and later at the stables on the pretense of hard work.

But when he returned home late one evening, she was there. He came in quietly, acknowledging her presence at his table with a brief nod. He went right to the stove and stirred the simmering stew.

"It's rabbit,” Laura said tightly.

"Good,” he said. “I'm hungry.” But he made no motion to dish out the food. He turned, leaned his shoulders against the wall, and looked at her gravely. Laura saw something in his still face that frightened her. She took a breath and hurried into talk, trying to forestall him, to head off whatever it was he was going to say to her.

He let her go on without interruption and when she finally ran down said, as if she had not spoken at all, “It's no good, Laura. We must stop seeing each other.” His voice was so soft and so final that she went very still.

"Can you tell me why, David?” she said at last, her voice sounding breathless.

"There are many reasons,” he replied easily. “Your husband is one of them. So is Lord Rayleigh. He would not be at all pleased to discover that his trainer was having an
affaire
with the wife of one of his friends.” His pronunciation of the word
affaire
was distinctly French.

She clenched her hands. “Is it because Jane is coming home?"

He stared at her, hating her, hating the sound of Jane's name on her lips. “Yes,” he finally said tensely, “it is because Jane is coming home."

She was taut as a strung bow. He had hurt her, now she wanted to hurt him. “They will never let you near her, stableboy,” she flung at him. “They'll marry her off to some great lord and you'll never see her again."

His eyes were pure gold, his nostrils pinched and white, his mouth thinned with anger. “I don't think of Jane that way,” he said coldly.

She prepared to leave. “Yes, you do,” she told him brutally. “But your great love will get you exactly nowhere. Rayleigh will see to that.” She left the cottage, slamming the door behind her, and the next day she left Newmarket for London.

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It is my lady, O, it is my love!

Oh, that she knew she were!

—William Shakespeare

David's whole life belonged to Jane. Now Laura's words threatened the security of his love. Over and over again they replayed themselves in his brain. “They'll marry her off to some great lord and you'll never see her again.” After Laura left, he had automatically gone about his nightly chores, forcing himself to eat some of the stew, washing up the dishes, and mending the fire. When he could think of nothing else to do, he went and sat down on the edge of his bed. The words drove back into his memory, brutal and inescapable. “You'll never see her again.” He buried his face in his hands. He was still sitting there when the fire burned out.

In the two weeks that remained before Jane's arrival, David sought to stave off his fears. Jane was still young, he told himself. They could not possibly think of marriage for her for years. He never questioned the purity of his own love; he had never felt for Jane what he had felt for Laura Rivingdale. It did not occur to him that his experience with Laura would radically alter the way he looked at Jane.

Jane had been home for two days when she arrived in the stableyard with a picnic lunch and some fishing poles. “You can take an afternoon off from your labors,” she told David. “Let's go fishing."

He hesitated a minute, then capitulated. “All right, I'll get the gig."

They drove out, heading for their secret place without even discussing their destination. It was automatic. They always went there when Jane came home.

They spoke lazily. Jane was content because she was with David, and he was absorbed by his own new thoughts. They tied the horse and gig in the woods and proceeded by foot along the narrow path that led to the lake. Jane went first and David watched her walking, comparing this summer's Jane to the Jane of last year. Her old, much-washed muslin dress moved easily with her body. He noticed for the first time her slim, supple waist, the curve of hip that tapered to long, slim legs. He swallowed. She would be seventeen in October, he thought.

They emerged from the trees into the sunlight and Jane laughed delightedly. “Now I really know I'm home.” She turned to him, her extraordinary eyes alight. “Whenever I feel I can't bear Bath for one more minute, when I know that if one more silly girl chatters at me I shall
scream,
I run to my room and close my eyes and pretend I'm here."

"Do you really, Jane?” he asked curiously. “And does it help?"

"Yes. I feel peaceful again. As though I were armored against the world and no one could bother me anymore."

He stared at her intently. “Why is that, do you think?"

She frowned a moment, in concentration. “I'm not sure,” she said slowly. “I think it's because this is
our
place. Nobody but us has ever been here. Heathfield is associated with many people, but here there is only the two of us. It's our safe place, I guess. No one can get at us here."

He suddenly said fiercely, “Do you remember the time you said you wished we could stay here always?"

She nodded, surprised by his uncharacteristic vehemence. “Yes. I remember."

"Sometimes I wish it, too."

She looked up at him, a puzzled expression on her face. “Has something happened, David? You sound strange."

"Why?” he said tightly. “Is it strange of me to want to be with you?"

"No,” she answered consideringly. “But other people have never bothered you the way they bother me. You get along with people better. You never feel out of place, like I do at school."

He looked at her face with its patrician bones and he began to laugh. “I fail to see how people can bother you, Jane, when as far as I can see you simply ignore most of them. And you feel out of place at school because you feel superior. I have never had that luxury."

She put her head on one side and looked at him through narrowed lashes. “What you say of me might be true, David Chance, but I've felt inferior to you, which is more than you can say about me.” Having delivered what she thought was a home thrust, Jane smiled brilliantly. “Come on, let's eat. I'm starving."

"You're always starving,” he said automatically as he followed her closer to the lake, but his thoughts were far away. Stableboy, Laura had called him. They'll never let you near her, she had said. He avoided looking at Jane as they sat sharing the food she had brought. He was afraid of what she would read in his eyes.

After lunch they both fished. David caught two middle-sized fish immediately and decided to give up. Jane was determined to catch something and stayed on while he went back to stretch out on the grass. His thoughts were mixed as he watched her nimble, vigorous figure moving about on the rocks. Her skirt was kilted up and he could see the perfect oval shape of her kneecaps. The slender calf and high-arched instep were as familiar to him as his own hard-muscled horseman's legs. She had a small half-moon-shaped scar behind her right knee. He saw it in his mind's eye; he was too far away from her for it to be visible now. He stared for a long time at the slender, proud body, a body he had watched every year as it grew in beauty, and some deep-buried feeling began to stir within him.

There was a shout of triumph from the lake and Jane was coming toward him waving a fish whose scales glinted in the sun. She sank to the ground beside him and pulled the ribbon from her hair. It rippled around her, blue-black in the bright sunlight. He reached out briefly to touch it. “I love your hair,” he said.

"It's not stylish. It doesn't curl. They want me to cut it,” she answered.

"Don't."

"Not if you don't want me to,” she answered agreeably.

"I don't."

"All right.” She smiled at him. It was the smile she reserved for him only. It had been his property for years. Why now should the blood suddenly start pounding in his veins? There were tiny beads of sweat on her forehead and neck. She swung her hair forward over her shoulder and began to plait it. David jumped to his feet and started to collect their things. “What are you doing?” she asked, surprised.

"I have to get back,” he replied curtly.

"But, David,” she was beginning when he cut in across her words.

"I don't own Heathfield stables, Jane, I am only employed to help run them. I can't take hours off at a time to go picnicking."

She stared at him in bewilderment, sensing hostility that she did not understand. She opened her mouth to argue, but the face she was looking at was set and stern. She rose effortlessly to her feet and began to help him gather their belongings. When they were all packed into the bag she had brought, he turned into the woods leaving Jane to follow with the fishing gear.

Her eyes were on David's back as they moved along the narrow path and she did not even see the root that tripped her up. With a cry she was flung to her knees; the fishing poles went flying as she broke her fall with her hands.