Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The sound of Richard’s waist belt preceded him everywhere.
I think it made him feel powerful—you heard his money before you saw it.
If, say, you were a thief, and you had the idea of relieving him of his coins, you would swiftly change your mind when you saw the dagger, followed by the look in his eye that not so much asked for a fight, but welcomed it as a friend.
When I heard the familiar jangle and the tread of his kid leather boots on the stairs, I took a deep breath and brushed some imagined dust off my jacket.
I stood as he entered the room, bright and invigorated from a business trip to Manchester.
His gold earring caught the light; his gray eyes gleamed.
“Fleetwood,” he greeted me, putting my head between his hands.
I bit my lip where he kissed it. Could I trust my voice to speak?
We were in the wardrobe, where he knew he would find me.
Even though nobody had lived at Gawthorpe before us, it was the only room that truly felt mine.
I had thought it extremely modern that Richard’s uncle, who designed the house, had thought to include a room just for dressing when he had no wife.
Of course if women designed houses they would be as much a part of the plans as a kitchen.
Having come from my own house of gray stone under gray skies to Gawthorpe, with its rich, warm color, as though the sun was always rising on it, and three floors of gleaming windows, bright as the crown jewels, and the tower in the middle, I had felt more like a princess than a mistress.
Everything was new, including us, though part of me felt old as time.
Richard had led me through the maze of rooms and all the fresh plaster and shining panels and little passageways teeming with decorators and servants and carpenters like ants in a nest made me feel dizzy.
I tended to keep at the top of the house, out of the way of everyone.
If I had a baby in my arms or a child to take down to breakfast I might feel differently, but while I didn’t, I kept to my rooms and my wardrobe, with its pleasant view of the rushing River Calder and Pendle Hill.
“Conversing with your clothes again?” he said.
“They are my constant companions.”
Puck, my great French mastiff, roused himself from the Turkey carpet, stretching and yawning and revealing a jaw so wide it could fit my head inside.
“You fearsome beast,” said Richard, going to kneel by the dog.
“Not for long will you be the singular object of our affections. You will have to share them.” He sighed and got to his knees, weary from a long ride. “You are well? And rested?”
I nodded, tucking a loose strand of hair under my cap. Lately it had been falling out in great black clumps when I combed it.
“You are troubled. You have not…you are not…”
“I am fine.” The letter. Ask him about the letter.
The words hung thick, an arrow poised on a pulled bow, but there was nothing but relief in his lovely face.
I held his stare for a moment too long, my dark eyes on his light ones, knowing my opportunity to ask him was passing, slipping through my hands like sand.
“Well, Manchester was a success. James always thinks he should go with me on these trips but I fare just as well alone. Perhaps he is only exasperated because I forget to write down receipts. I’ve told him I keep them as well in my head as in my jacket.
” He paused, ignoring Puck sniffing at him. “You are in a quiet mood.”
“Richard, I read the midwife’s correspondence today. And the doctor’s, who delivered the last.”
“That reminds me.” He reached deep into the emerald velvet of his doublet, his face lit with a childlike excitement.
I waited, and when he withdrew his hand he dropped into mine a strange object.
It was a small silver sword, long as a letter opener, with a shining gold hilt.
But the end was blunt—it would not cut a cake—and all over were little spheres dangling from miniature hooks.
I turned it over in my palm and it made a pleasant tinkling sound, like horses coming to a halt.
“It’s a rattle.” He beamed, shaking it so it jangled.
“They are bells, look. It’s for our son.
” He did not even try and disguise the longing in his voice.
I thought of the drawer that I kept locked in one of the bedrooms. Inside were half a dozen things he’d bought the other times—a silk purse with our initials, an ivory horse that could fit in a palm.
In the long gallery was a suit of armor he bought to celebrate the first time my stomach grew.
His faith that we would have a child was clear and strong as a stream, even when he was trading wool in Preston and passed a trader selling miniature animals; when he was with our tailor and saw a bolt of silk the exact color of an oyster’s pearl.
With the last one, only he knew if it was a son or daughter, and I did not ask, because I was still not a mother.
Every gift he gave me was a token of my failure, and I wished I could burn them all and watch the smoke rise from the chimney and be swallowed by the sky.
I imagined where I would be without my husband, and my heart was full of grief, because he had given me happiness, and all I’d given him were three absences, their souls extinguished in the gentlest breeze.
I tried one more time. “Richard, is there anything you wish to tell me?”
Puck yawned and settled on the carpet. Richard’s earring glinted. A deep voice called his name from a distant floor below.
“Roger is downstairs,” Richard said. “I should go to him.”
I put the rattle on the chair, eager to be rid of it, leaving Puck to sniff curiously at it. “Then I will come down.”
“I came upstairs only to dress. We are going to hunt.”
“But you have been riding all morning.”
He smiled. “Hunting is not riding, it is hunting.”
“Then I will go with you.”
“You feel fit for it?”
I smiled, and turned back to my clothes.
“Fleetwood Shuttleworth! My eyes, look how pale you are,” Roger’s voice boomed across the stable yard. “You are whiter than a snowdrop but twice as beautiful. Richard, have you not been feeding your wife?”
“Roger Nowell, you do know how to make a woman feel special.” I smiled, drawing up on my horse.
“You are dressed to hunt. Have you accomplished all your ladylike pursuits of a morning?” His voice carried to every beam and corner of the stable yard as he sat astride his horse, tall and broad with a gray eyebrow raised in question.
“I am come to spend time with my favorite magistrate.”
I pushed my horse between the two men’s.
Roger Nowell was easy company, and I admit now that I suppose I was a little in awe of him, having no father to compare him to.
He had enough years to be mine or Richard’s father—grandfather, even—and as ours were both long dead he became a friend to us when Richard inherited Gawthorpe.
He arrived on his horse with three pheasants the day after we’d arrived and stayed all afternoon, explaining the lay of the land and everyone in it.
We were new to Pendle and this part of Lancaster, with its rolling hills and shadowy forests and strange people, and he was a wealth of knowledge.
An acquaintance of Richard’s long-dead uncle who had been the chief justice of Chester, who provided the closest link the family ever had to the crown, Roger had known the Shuttleworths for years, and settled himself in our household like an inherited piece of furniture.
But I liked him from the moment I met him.
Like a candle, he burned brightly, and his mood would flicker easily from one to the next.
But as wax runs down the sides, he had his way of drawing you in smoothly until you were stuck.
“News from the palace—the king may finally have found a suitor for his daughter,” Roger announced. The hounds in their kennels were driven wild by the sound of us and were brought out, teeming and panting around the horses’ legs.
“Who is it?”
“Freidrich V, Count Palatine of the Rhine. He will come to England later in the year and hopefully put an end to the parade of jesters trying for the princess’s hand.”
“Will you go to the wedding?” I asked.
“I hope to. It will be the grandest the kingdom has seen in many years.”
“I wonder what sort of gown she will wear,” I thought aloud, but Roger didn’t hear me over the whines and barks of the hounds, and he and Richard moved out of the yard to begin the hunt.
With the hounds on leashes I realized the quarry would be hart, and I wish I had asked before.
A hart at bay was not a friendly sight, with its antlers slashing and eyes rolling; I would have preferred almost anything else.
I thought about turning round, but we were already in the forest so I followed Richard’s slim, dark green back and Roger’s wide brown one.
Edmund the apprentice acted as whip, riding alongside the dogs.
As we went through the trees I heard glimpses of their furtive conversation and rode silently behind them, half listening.
An image from the day before came to me: spilled blood, glassy eyes and the strange golden-haired woman, and I shivered.
“Richard,” I interrupted. “There was a trespasser on our land yesterday.”
“What? Where?”
“Somewhere south of the house, in the woods.”
“Why did James not tell me?”
“Because I did not tell him.”
“You saw him? What were you doing?”
“I…went out walking.”
“I told you not to go out alone, you might have got lost or tripped and…hurt yourself.”
Roger was listening.
“I am fine, Richard. And it was not a man but a woman.”
“What was she doing? Was she lost?”