Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

John pulled the nightcap off his head and came into the room.

“I don’t want you to have me in your bed as part of your duty,” he said carefully.

“No.”

“I would want there to be warmth and tenderness between us.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to forgive me for going away and leaving you alone and unprotected, and for being with another woman.”

She hesitated. “Did you leave her of your own free will?”

John could not find a simple answer. “She saved my life,” he said. “I was starving in the forest and she took me to the Powhatan and they accepted me for her sake.”

Hester nodded. “Did you leave her of your own free will? Did you choose to leave her and come home to me?”

“Yes,” John said. “Yes.” The baldness of the lie dropped like a stone into the pool of candlelight by the bed.

John got into bed beside Hester and took her hand. It was white-skinned after Suckahanna’s bronze, calloused by the work she had done for him in his house and in his garden. The backs of her hands were scratched, she had been tying back the climbing roses. John took her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers one by one.

With a sense of relief he felt desire slowly rising up. At least he would be able to do the physical act, even if his heart were not wholly present. He turned the palm of her hand over and planted a kiss in the middle.

Hester put her hand on his shoulder and stroked the short hair at the nape of his neck.

“Do you love her still?”

He stole a quick glance at Hester’s face. She was intent, serious. She did not look enraged as she had every right to be. He risked telling her the truth. “Not as I love you; but it is true. I do love her.”

“You have never loved me,” she said steadily. “You married me as an act of convenience and sometimes I think you have felt gratitude or affection toward me. But it was not a marriage for love and I never pretended that it was.”

Her honesty alarmed him. “Hester…”

“I don’t want us to pretend,” she said. “I would rather know the truth than live in a world of pretense.”

“Do you want me to leave you?”

“No!” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean that at all.”

“But you said…”

She drew a breath. “I said that you married me for your convenience, to care for your children and to guard the rarities and the garden. But I married you because I needed a place to live, and a name, and also-” She smiled at him, a friendly, shy smile. “I was in love with you, John. From the moment that you came home and I walked down the stairs and saw you.”

He put his hand under her chin and turned her face to him. Her cheeks were pink with embarrassment but she met his eyes steadily with her direct, dark gaze.

“And you forgive me?”

She gave a little shrug. “Since you came home to me – of course.”

“And you love me still?”

“Of course. Why should I change?”

“Because I have wronged you.”

“Are you home to stay?” she asked with her usual practical directness.

“Yes, I am.”

“Then I forgive you.”

He paused for a moment. “Do you think we could start from the beginning again?” he asked. “With your love for me and me learning to love you?”

Her color deepened and he saw the little white bow at the neck of her nightgown trembling as her breath came faster. “Do you think you could learn to love me?”

John released her hands, put his lips against her throat and then gently untied the fluttering bow. “I know I could,” he said; knowing at least that he hoped he might.

At the end of April, Alexander Norman sent a note to the Ark.

I write in haste to send you urgent news. The king has ridden off from Oxford and left the court there. No one knows where he is bound but this must mean the end of the war. He has no more than a dozen gentlemen with him. He must be fleeing to join the queen in France. Thank God at last it is over.

John took the note through to Hester and laid it down before her where she was working on the household accounts at the drawing desk in the bay of the Venetian windows in the rarities room.

“So it is all over for him at last,” he said.

She glanced quickly up at him. “You must be glad that it has finished. Just think of getting the country back to normal.”

“Normal!” he exclaimed. “Who will be king if he is in exile? How will the country be run?”

“By Parliament!” she said impatiently. “I thought that was what they were fighting for!”

“I can’t help but think of him, without the queen, riding out, knowing he has lost everything.”

“Many other people have lost everything,” Hester observed grimly. “And their sons and brothers and husbands too. Another two years of this and Johnnie would have gone. He’s been wild to die in the king’s service ever since the war started.”

John nodded and turned to leave the room. “I just think of him,” he said. “Riding out on his own. I hope to God he has someone with him who knows the way to Dover.”

“Newark!” John exclaimed and looked at Alexander Norman in complete disbelief. “What the devil is he doing in Newark? I thought he was going to France!”

“He rode around,” Alexander said. “You have to admire the style of it. He came within an hour’s ride of London and apparently thought of riding in to test the mood of the people.”

John gasped in horror.

“And then he rode to King’s Lynn, and then on northward to Newark.”

“What the devil is he doing?”

“I think he didn’t know what to do,” Alexander said. “I think he was riding and hoping that something would happen, a stroke of luck, the arrival of a French army or the Irish army or a sudden change of heart in Parliament. I think he was just spinning out the time before he surrendered.”

John shook his head. “To the Scots?” he said somberly.

Alexander nodded. “To the Scots army at Newark.”

“Does he think that they will treat him better than his own people?” John demanded. “Does he think so little of Englishmen that he goes to the Scots who were the first to speak against bishops and the prayer book? Has he forgotten that his own father came south and never went back to Scotland willingly again? His own father said: “no bishops, no king”? And the Scots have never had bishops.”

Frances, sitting by the fireside in the parlor of the Lambeth house sewing a little nightdress, lifted her head at her father’s distress. “If we can only have peace now.”

“But what will they do with him?” John asked. “They’ve been his enemies since the start of this. They must hand him over to Parliament at once, and then he is no better off than if he had come direct to London.”

“He must be hoping that he can play them off against the English army and Parliament. If he is there in person, offering them the chance to conquer England, who can say which way they would go? They could fall in behind him and march on England with him as their figurehead. That must be his fondest dream.” Alexander ticked off the options on his fingers. “Or they can set him up in Edinburgh as their king and not ours. Or they can help him get abroad and pretend they had nothing to do with it, so they don’t have his imprisonment on their hands.”

“Or they can hold him as a pawn in their own game,” John exclaimed. “Who is advising him? Who ever could have advised him to stroll around the kingdom and then go to the Scots in the end? What fools does he have at his side? Why is there no one there thinking of his safety?”

“I think he is trusting to luck,” Alexander said. “And still, even now, who knows which way the luck will run?”