Women of Courage (180 page)

Robert shook his head in surprise. “But I can’t get him a pardon, Ann, if he’s been tried already. No-one can, except the King, or Judge Jeffreys!”

“Then perhaps I should go to
him!
At least he offered me a
part
!” She spat the words in his face, furious, and tried to get past him to the door, but he put out a hand to stop her.

“No!” His anger had returned, mixed with astonishment. “You can’t go to him, girl - he’d have you burnt, as well. What do you mean, a part?”

“You know how they are to die, don’t you? Well, he offered me a part of my father’s body! I’ve got to try to save him, don’t you see?”

She tried to push past him again, but again he stopped her, and this time the tears came - short harsh sobs that she could not stop and which gave her no relief. He tried to pull her to him, but she resisted, so he let her cry, his hand gentle on her shoulder. He sounded shocked when he spoke.

“That was a filthy thing to say, Ann. The man is as bad as that bastard Kirke!”

She brushed away her tears with her sleeve. “I thought
you
would have more pity than Colonel Kirke. I heard a girl slept with him to free her father, and when she woke up in the morning her father was hanging outside the window on the inn signpost.”

Robert winced. “And you thought
I
was like
them?
You must really hate me to believe that!”

But Ann was unrepentant. Her rage against her own failure had turned to fury against him. “But what you say is just the same, isn’t it? You won’t save my father so he’ll be hanged and drawn and quartered just the same, won’t he? It won’t make any difference to him!”

“I didn’t say wouldn’t save him, Ann, I said I can’t.” Robert tried to keep his voice low, conscious of the drinkers in the bar downstairs, but Ann did not care.

“Why can’t you? You’re an officer, aren’t you, a gentleman? You could see this Judge Jeffreys, speak to him.”

“He would only think I had been bribed. And what should I say, Ann - that your father is innocent? If he was caught at Sedgemoor with a musket in his hand, no-one is going to believe that.”

“It doesn’t matter who believes it, if he lives.” She pleaded with Robert despairingly, the carefully curled ringlets of her hair sticking to her face with tears, and as he stared silently back she suddenly saw herself not just in his eyes, but in her father’s. She remembered the thin, ragged figure of her father standing there in the courtroom, quietly defying the judge. What would he think if he could see her now? But then, what else could she do?

“Robert ... I will be your mistress - I will do anything you want if you save him! He is my
father,
Robert!”

“And I had hoped to be your lover!” The words were spoken in bitter self-contempt. He turned away from her, as though her touch was suddenly loathsome to him. Then he whirled round again silently.

“Do you not see what an insult it is to me, to come to me like this? To cheapen yourself like a common whore from the gutter? To do this to me who already worshipped you, who made a fool of myself for you, who even offered ... “

He took a deep breath, and tried to lower his tone and collect himself. “Listen, Ann. I could have helped your father if I’d wanted. I can help him still. Not to get a pardon, but at least to save him from the hangman and get him transported. And I would have done it gladly, if you had only come and asked. You only had to ask, and I would have done it, because I loved you. But now - how can I love someone who cheapens herself as you do, who thinks of her body as some sort of bribe to give to the man with the greatest power? It’s finished, Ann. You disgust me!”

He turned away abruptly and stared unseeingly out of the window.

Ann stopped crying. She knew that when she did start to cry, later, she would never stop; but now the pain went too deep for tears. Yet with the pain, part of it, was that last tantalising hope that she had to reach for even as it was snatched from her grasp.

“You
can
save him?”

“I could have, if you had simply asked.”

“Then will you do it now, if I kill myself?”

The words were spoken so quietly, it was a moment before he reacted at all. Then he turned, frowning as though at an irrelevance. “What?”

“If I give my life for his, will you save him? You despise me, and I despise myself, so I would be better dead.”

“What stupid nonsense is this? How would you kill yourself, anyway?”

“I don’t know. It must be easy enough.” She stood still, and spoke quite dully, as though to do so deadened the pain. “If you give me a gun or a knife, I will do it now, if you like. But you must promise to save my father, first.”

“Ann! What are you saying? That’s a mortal sin!” He strode over and grasped her arms, as though to prevent her from hurting herself, though she had made no move to do so. She looked up at him through a tangle of auburn hair, her face pale and unweeping like a ghost’s.

“I am damned already for a whore, and for lying to God about my love for you.”

“Lying to God? What do you mean?”

“I told him in my prayers I would not love you, because I thought it was a sin. But it was a worse sin to lie to God, and to pretend to love a man when I did not. I made him a coward.”

“What?”

“Tom, who I was betrothed to. I pretended to love him, and even lay with him once, to give him courage and make it true. But it was a lie; he hated me for it, and God punished me by making him a coward instead, so that he took the King’s pardon.” She spoke quite dully; it did not matter what she said now.

“You lay with him to give him courage?”

“Yes. So you see I was a whore already, before I came to you. And now I am punished for that too, since I have lost your love.” She stood in his arms quite blankly, not trying to move, yet ready to go when he would let her.

“Ann!” His voice was anguished; he shook her to put life back into her, and her head swayed on her neck like a doll’s. “What have you done to yourself? If you loved me, why did you come to me like that, like a whore?”

She shook her head slowly, numbed by the confusion feeling.

“How else should I come? It’s what you wanted me to be and what I am. If I am a whore I should behave like one, and play the game. You don’t love me - ‘tis only a game to you.”

“How
can
you say that?” His fingers tightened so hard on her arms that she cried out in pain. “How many times have I told you that I loved you? Good God, I have been on my knees to you before now! Are you blind?” He let her go suddenly and turned away, hammering his fist softly on the wall.

“That’s just a game, Rob, a rich courtier’s game. I wanted you to
do
something - something important. Save my father.”

He turned back to her slowly, the pale anger making the freckles stand out on his skin. “I told you, Ann. I would have done it for a word from you. You had no need to throw yourself at me like that.”

“Then I was wrong. But Rob, don’t you see? I was only going on my knees to you - trying to give you too much, as you did to me. We made the same mistake.”

They stared at each other silently, two statues in an empty room, while the clock ticked on the mantlepiece and voices rumbled below their feet downstairs. Ann thought she would remember him always like that, his face quite flat and still and drained of emotion. Then the tension between them broke, and she turned to go.

“No, Ann, stop!” He was at her side in a second, his hand lightly holding her shoulder. “You’re right. Please stay. We can’t part like this.”

“How can I stay?” But even as she spoke, his arm pulled her to him and they came together in an embrace that was so tight she felt they would crush themselves both together into one person. Slowly, as the embrace lasted, she drew comfort from him, and felt what she had not realised before - that he needed comfort from her as well. She buried her face in the curls of his wig to hide her tears, and then sneezed as one got up her nose.

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t breathe.”

He loosened his arms and looked down at her, shaking his head slowly as though in pain.

“I’m sorry, Ann. It’s too cruel, this time. It’s too cruel to all of us.”

“At least we’re alive.”

“Yes. I will try to save your father. Of course I will. I wish I could save all the poor devils!”

“Oh, Rob!” She hugged him again, weak with relief and gratitude, and then somehow the embrace faded into a kiss, so long and healing that when at last they paused their sense of time and what had gone before was blurred, and it was almost as though they were back on Colyton Hill again. And when they had kissed once there seemed little purpose but to kiss again.

The floorboards creaked quietly under their feet, and voices came and went in the yard outside, and at last Robert drew back and looked gently down at her, a smile hovering shyly round his lips.

“You will not kill yourself now, then?”

“No!” She smiled, and laid her cheek against his. “I do love you, Robert, truly.”

“And I you.” He drew his head away to look at her seriously, a frown puckering his brow. “That’s why I cared how you came to me. You do believe that, now?”

She looked into his eyes, remembering the times she had believed, and the times she had doubted. Sometime she would have to decide.

“Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, Rob, I do believe you.”

Still he looked at her, steadily, the puzzled frown fading in momentary relief and then returning. His voice shook slightly as he spoke.

“Then - not as a whore - will you come to bed with me?”

She was surprised how her heart raced before she replied. But then, the gift of her body should follow the gift of her love, and it was what she had come for, in a different way.

“Yes, my love.”

He smiled, and led her gently to the bed.

48

A
FTERWARDS, AS she lay curled around him with her head on his chest, listening to his quiet breathing and the thump of his heart, and feeling the strange roughness of his legs against hers, she marvelled at how something so simple could be so different with each man. After Tom, and the dragoons, she had thought of love-making as something only men desired, which she could give to them, or they could steal from her; she had not expected to be given anything back. And she had thought Robert so shy and nervous at first that she had regretted her decision, thinking he would spoil it all by being afraid to take the gift she offered.

He had led her to the bed, and helped her to loosen the lace fastenings at the back of her dress, his fingers shaking slightly. Then he had retired behind the curtains on the other side of the bed, leaving her to take off her clothes alone. She would have kept her shift on, but she remembered the dragoon in the wood tearing her clothes from her, and more than him, the feeling of simple goodness she had had later, naked and alone amongst the ferns; she felt that that was somehow part of the gift of herself. So she had crept, a little cold, naked and uncertain, between the sheets under the great canopy of the four-poster bed, drawn the curtains behind her, and listened to Robert undressing behind the curtain.

But then, as he had slipped in beside her, he had been at once so gentle and firm, kissing and caressing her as he explored her body with such obvious delight, that she had felt herself relax and respond with warmth and abandon - an abandon that increased until when he had finally mounted and entered her there had been none of the dry, tearing pain she had feared, but a liquid, fluttering joy in her loins that grew and grew with each thrust until at last, when he moaned and stiffened and held himself hard and deep inside her, she cried out with surprise and regret that he had stopped. She had felt something wild and glorious was about to happen, and she felt flushed and confused because it had not.

For a while he had lain beside her and they had kissed softly and looked into each other’s eyes and talked of nothings, like his freckles and her curls and the shape of his nose. Then, perhaps because she feared the awful moment when she must leave, she had leant over him and put it off by another kiss, which somehow went on and on as their hands drifted over each other’s bodies. His caresses were languid at first, but hers were hot and more urgent, and at last when he roused himself to enter her again she was already at the point where she had been before, and her desire swelled and blossomed into full flower throughout all her limbs as he thrust on and on, until he shivered and trembled in his turn and collapsed into her exhausted embrace.

For a long time after that neither of them had moved, until they had felt the sweat trickling cold where his chest pressed her breasts together; then he had heaved himself off her and lain flat on his back, and she had curled herself gratefully round him.

Now she did not want to move. For a while his hands stroked her back, and then he lifted himself up on his elbow and looked down at her. He smoothed the tumbled red hair away from her face, and laughed softly.

“What are you laughing at?”

“You.” He smiled down at her.

“What about me?”

“You look so surprised. As though you didn’t know what would happen.”

“I ... haven’t done that before, Rob. You shouldn’t laugh at me.”

“No. I’m sorry.” He smiled down at her, and for once there was no frown at all in his face, but only love and delight. She smiled shyly back, and put up a hand to touch his face.

“Do you ... still love me now?”

“Yes, Ann. I do.”

And then, she could not help it, the tears came into her eyes, and she had to turn her face away and wipe them on the pillow. When she looked back at him the frown was in his face again, and she was sure she would lose him, now of all times he would change his opinion of her and she would lose everything she had always wanted or hoped for.

“I’m sorry, Rob, I’m sorry.” She smiled desperately through the tears, and sat up and kissed him. “I’m not sad really, truly I’m not. ‘Tis just that there’s been so much pain and evil and – I do not deserve to be here!”