Chapter 4
Elizabeth
Elizabeth was delighted with the plans for the second day of the bridal tour, for she had always hoped to see Stonehenge one day.
As the carriage left Basingstoke, William said, “What think you of the North Hampshire Downs?”
Fascinated, Elizabeth breathed, “There are so few trees here! All these hills rolling out, forever, like a rumpled but infinite counterpane!”
“Indeed. We are quite used to fields and forests, but the southern grasslands look a bit like the moors that lie north of the Peaks.”
“And the colours!” Elizabeth said. “I can see that it must have looked quite different back in April and May—surely all that grass would have been green, then—but now the grass is hundreds of shades of tawny brown. And there are so many wildflowers! I especially adore the bits when the autumn hawkbit mixes with the scabious—all yellow and mauve and purpling blue.”
“You see over there, where the harebells are growing in the chalk? Blue against white is such an unusual sight in nature.”
“I have read about chalk being exposed by the grazing of sheep, and the chalk escarpments, but I did not fully realise how bright-white it can be.”
As they rolled along, Elizabeth puzzled over the artificial humps she noted on various ridges. Trying to remember what she had read about the area, she decided that she must be seeing ancient burial mounds. She asked her well-travelled husband, and he nodded.
“Those are indeed barrows. Note how some are rounder and others are longer. Soon we will see the Iron Age hillforts, and—much harder to notice—we will also pass long ditches that were dug long ago.” As they passed the looming scarp slopes and the straight banks carved into the plain, William named the various features.
After their stop in Amesbury, they rode into a more rugged landscape that William called the Salisbury Plain.
“Now it feels more like a wilderness,” Elizabeth said. “I already feel…so much atmosphere!”
But as they approached their destination, they saw farms and hundreds of grazing sheep, and Elizabeth felt the magic of the ancients dissipate…until….
“Oh!”
Stonehenge itself suddenly appeared. The rings of stones, some capped with horizontal lintels, were a familiar sight, recognisable from the pen-and-ink drawings Elizabeth had studied. But it all looked so small. So…lonely, really. An ancient wreck in a sea of dried-up grass.
William chuckled. “Disappointed?”
Elizabeth said, stoutly, “Not at all. There is nothing, from this view, to tell us the scale, but I know that when we drive among them, we will see the massive size of these stones and will sense the wonder of how ancient peoples erected such enormous uprights and lintels.”
He continued to look out of the window, but his grip on her waist tightened. “Most people are disappointed because, from here, it does look small.”
“Well, I know the height of the outer stones, so the illusion does not confuse me. But what I am surprised by is that it looks quite lonely. I do not know how an ancient monument can feel loneliness—” she chuckled at her own nonsense “—but I did not truly imagine Stonehenge being surrounded by so much…seemingly empty landscape.”
When the carriage pulled into the first circle of stones, William handed Elizabeth out, and she caught her breath.
“This!…the silence. And even the lack of silence—the wind whistling as it travels past the sarsens! It is all very much as if Ancient Druids are whispering messages of wisdom and prophecy.”
William recited Thomas Warton the Younger:
"Thou noblest monument of Albion's isle!
Whether by Merlin's aid, from Scythia's shore,
To Amber's fatal plain Pendragon bore,
Huge frame of giant-hands, the mighty pile.”
And Elizabeth answered with a bit of Wordsworth: “Pile of Stone-henge! so proud to hint yet keep / Thy secrets.”
They stood in an embrace, soaking up the atmosphere.
Eventually Elizabeth broke their embrace to spin around among the smaller bluestones.
Then she darted about, inspecting the almost-buried altar stone, bending down to gain another perspective of the thirteen- to twenty- foot-tall uprights, and finally circling each ring.
When Elizabeth could finally drag her eyes down from the monument, she saw that the servants had unpacked a picnic luncheon and a very familiar green quilt—the very quilt they had used on Oakham Mount so many times during their courtship.
“William! This is…just perfect!”
And it was.
The stop that night, at a hotel called the Red Lion, was in the town of Shaftesbury. The supper was adequate rather than excellent, and William looked as if he wished to grumble, but Elizabeth deliberately smiled him into a better frame of mind.
“I wish you to know, William, that just our first two days of travel have exceeded my every expectation for the entire trip. Stonehenge was exactly what I dreamt it would be—but also almost unbelievably better. One cannot explain the feel of the place, not even in a travel guide—not even in poetry! I…I thank you, sincerely, for making this journey possible.”
William stared at her, his eyes black with desire.
They had finished eating, and he scooped up the unfinished bottle of wine and a single wine glass, with one hand, and with the other, he took her hand and led her to their bedroom, where he locked the door.
Putting down the bottle and glass, he surprised Elizabeth by pulling his hand away and standing before her without any contact at all.
She cocked her head, wondering what he was feeling.
When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “You know that I want you. At all times, I seem to be fixated on having you, holding you. But I want to say something beyond that, and to do so, I feel I must stand apart from you, lest I act once more on that longing that never seems to go away.”
Elizabeth was not worried—she knew that, whatever he was about to say would make him even more dear. She felt the solemnity of his words, tone, and expression, and she stood still, not a hint of humour in her eyes or mien.
“Seeing these sights again with you is like seeing them for the first time. I expected to get great joy in watching you experience Stonehenge. I knew you would love it. I should have felt enjoyment but not surprise. But somehow, you have made the ordinary—such as the Downs—very special, and you have made the special—Stonehenge—positively magical. It is not just the sparkle in your eyes, the enthusiasm in your step; I know you well enough to have foretold that. There is something about the way your clever, original mind works; the things you already know, the questions you ask about that which you do not yet know—it is all of that which makes each place we pass by, and especially each we stop in, so much more delightful than it was, even, when I first espied it.”
Elizabeth was teary eyed but nodded at certain phrases and statements.
“William, it is hard for me to imagine enjoying even so wondrous a place as Stonehenge, even a tenth as much as I did with you, if I had been with any other person. Who else would recite poetry to me, on the spot that inspired the verse? Who else could slake my need to know specifics? Who else could honour my whimsies with a perspective of his own on the ancients?”
And then they fell upon each other with far fewer words but a great mutual appreciation.