She thought of something, now properly awake. “And your Uncle Jerrid? He’s not worried? He’s not worried about staying with Sissy and Adrian?”
“What odd questions,” Nicholas said. “Jerrid finds Adrian a bore and Sissy a fool, but no more than that, and he never worries about anything. He’s a man who laughs sober, though prefers to laugh drunk. He seems to have been born with some part his elder brother missed, for my father growls sober and growls even more when pissed.”
They slept warm. Nicholas did not make love to his wife. He lay some time thinking of her while she curled within his embrace, returning to the dreams he had interrupted. He discovered a strange peace, hearing the soft sound of rhythmic breathing and the little tickle against his neck. His hand lay across the dip of Emeline’s breast, and beneath his palm he felt the strong steady beating of her heart. He listened to the little mutters of her dreaming, the small alarms and the complacent murmurs as she settled again. Sometimes her breathing became a tiny wheezing snore, and then she grunted, snug and satisfied by some dreaming pleasantry. Nicholas smiled, holding her to his own heartbeat, finding delight in her night time busyness.
It had been a long time, and he had missed the smooth tempting touch of her skin and the gentle swells of her hips to her belly and to the rise of her buttocks, the hollows of dimples and her other beckoning secrets. He had missed the heat of her naked breasts, the hard thrust of her nipples beneath his fingers, and the lush curls of the hair between her legs. He had missed the silk of her inner thighs, the eager push of her lips to his, her little gasps when he found her places of greatest sensitivity, then the enormous thrill of her climax. His own climax, for which he yearned, he dismissed, yet still he remembered, enjoying the memory, of touch and entrance, his deep pleasure in discovery, and the teaching of her which she accepted with such excited obedience. He had missed all the joyous lovemaking which had haunted his own dreams for those days and nights gone, but which he knew he could not now expect of her. So he lay quiet, thinking and remembering as he fondled, his hands careful across her half clothed body, as he kissed her cheek, though she knew nothing of it.
When he finally slept, his dreams were less kind. It was his mother he dreamed of, and his siblings as they died, and the awful black fear of seeing the same again. And in his dream he realised that he had now, at last, found love again, and that the same end might accompany it. Being long past midnight, he slept late. It was David who woke them both, knocking, a little timid at the door. “My lord?”
It was nearly two hours later when David returned with the herbs and medicines Nicholas had instructed him to obtain, by which time Emeline was impatient for her dinner, to speak to her sister, and to hear all the news.
“The groomsman Bill is sneezing his beard off, my lady,” David said, laying out the tubs and packets he had bought on the little table. “And there’s not a victim of the Great Mortality I’ve ever heard with the sneezes. Every other horror including the cough and the delirium, diarrhoea and buboes, yes, my lady. But a simple tickle of the nose, no. So a man that sneezes does not have the pestilence, he has the influenza perhaps, or just a simple cold which he complains about far too loudly. There is no infection in this hostelry.”
“As yet,” whispered Emeline.
Nicolas inspected his squire’s purchases. “Very well, David, there’s enough here to dose a hundred of us. Now give me a few moments alone with my wife before I ride out with you to this wretched village and deliver a share of those medicines.” David left as Nicholas turned to Emeline. “Well, little one, does the shopping expedition please you? And now, since it matters to you, I’ll take whatever you wish to your undeserving Ralph Cole. But it means leaving you alone for an hour or three.”
“It was me who asked you – and my promise to that poor man. But my love, I shall be ill with worry until you return, fearing you’ll be caught and kept by those horrid patrols. The monks must be fierce indeed, and they intend no one to leave that village once arrived. What if you don’t come back?” Emeline stood in a hurry, brushing down her skirts and reaching to straighten her hair. “Or perhaps, if you allow it, I might come too?”
“Allow it?” Nicholas grinned. “How timid and obedient you’ve become, my sweet. When did you last ask my permission for anything, making your own decisions to gallop half way across England and land yourself in more trouble than the entire package of wretched Woodvilles have managed since the old king’s death.”
“I’m being polite because I really want to come with you.”
“So I’ll answer you politely, my love. But the answer’s no. What, and risk you coming in contact yet again with the damned pestilence? It’ll be me and David alone will go since we’ve no fear of this sickness, having beaten it before. And we’ll come back, that I can promise you.”
“And so if you don’t –” but she was interrupted.
The footsteps up the stairs, small vehement steps reverberating with determination, reached the bedchamber’s small door. The voice was equally loud and equally recognisable. “If the child believes she can avoid me with silly stories of disease and death, then she is very much mistaken,” announced the baroness. “She will immediately abandon all disabilities and ailments at this instant, pull herself together, and prepare her apologues.”
David’s mumble. “My lady, I beg you, if you could keep your voice down?”
“What? Whisper? Certainly not.” The baroness thumped on the attic door. “Emeline, I demand you let me in and prepare yourself for a well deserved interrogation.”
“Oh, bother and Bedlam,” sighed the baroness’s daughter.
Nicholas opened the door to his mother-in-law. “My lady, though the joys of seeing you here are naturally immense,” he said with quiet amusement, “I cannot permit entrance. Allow me to explain.”
“Make her go away,” moaned Emeline from the other side of the door.
Nicholas closed the door. “The risk is genuine, my lady,” he told the irate baroness. “And it is imperative not to alert the staff here, or we will be asked to leave. Emeline needs warmth and comfort. But if you enter here, you may catch the disease yourself and even carry it to others.”
“Oh, Lord have mercy.” The baroness pushed past, entered the tiny attic room and stood central, eying her daughter. “I forbid it, Emeline,” she said. “Do you hear me? It is utterly forbidden.”
Nicholas, grinning, came behind her. “I have told her the same, madam. But now, if you’ll leave my wife to me, I promise you she’ll be as well protected as is ever possible since I have some experience of this disease and no fear of it. I’m sure she’s not been infected, but in all decency, we need to allow for the possibility and keep our isolation.” He led the baroness again from the room. “She’s in good hands, my lady, I assure you. In the meantime it’s Avice, I think, who is half delirious with worry.”
It was a wary and hurrying Harry Bambrigg who later carried four platters, still steaming, and set them for Emeline on the tiny table. She ate her dinner alone.
Nicholas and David left the Fox and Pheasant and took the low road for the nearby village, its watching and officious monastery, and its lonely suffering. They saw no one else, but kept close and did not speak. When they came to the village, it was late morning, and bright with a smell of damp and peaceful warmth. But no movement disturbed the clustering houses, no market coloured the grassy square, no village shops were open, the church stood empty and silent, and only the sharp little wind disturbed the silence. The horses’ hooves clattered down the lane, but no one came to their door as the shadows from the houses narrowed the path.