Skelton paused halfway down the path, looking at the house next door. The curtains in the bay window parted, and for a moment Skelton had a view of the two women within: Mrs Ecub and Mrs Matilda Flanders, watching.
Again he touched his hat, but this time his eyes twinkled, and a small smile lifted his mouth.
“Major!” Frank yelled.
I’m off to war, Skelton said to the two women.
We know, Matilda replied. We’ll hold a Circle. Be well.
For an instant Skelton’s mind was overwhelmed with memories of the Circles he’d held with these two women, with the intimacy, both sexual and emotional, and his eyes softened.
Then he was gone, running down the path towards Frank and his motor.
Gog Magog Hills, Cambridgeshire, and Oatlands Palace, Weybridge, England
Simon Gautier, Marquis de Lonquefort, gripped the armrests of the wildly rocking carriage and grinned lasciviously at his current mistress, Mademoiselle Helene Gardien, sitting across from him. She was sixteen, with the face of an angel and the body of a temptress, and she was squealing with feigned terror, although whether at the wild movement of the carriage or at the wanton expression on his face, Lonquefort didn’t particularly know—nor did he particularly care. Outside, the driver had whipped the team of horses into a frenzy, and they plunged recklessly down the forest track, their hooves and the abused wheels of the carriage marking each dip, each hole and each rock that pitted their way.
Lonquefort was a man who disdained sedateness, in every aspect of his life.
His uncle, and his guardian since the death of his father, had sent Lonquefort for a season to the austere colleges of Cambridge in an effort to wean him from the fleshly delights of his native Paris.
Lonquefort was a man not to be outwitted and in July of this year of our Lord 1629 he arranged for the passage of Helene across to England. She was young, pliable, tender and fresh, and she shrieked delightfully whenever Lonquefort buried himself within her pleasures, which explained why Lonquefort had hired carriage and driver for this day expedition to the Gog Magog Hills, four miles south of the university city: the Cambridge dons were starting to complain about the noise. What better way to calm their shattered nerves and to indulge his own desires than to take Helene in the centre of some stubbled field, or on the incline of some gentle hillside slope, where she could scream to her heart’s content and he could…
Oh God, he was going to have to stop the carriage soon!
As Helene pursed her sweet lips for yet another cry, Lonquefort glanced outside. He’d been told the Gog Magog Hills were gentle rolling slopes cleared by years of grazing, yet the view which met his eyes contradicted all reports he’d heard.
Forests crowded about, thick and dark.
Lonquefort frowned.
Helene squealed.
Lonquefort looked at her.
She gave another cry and jumped slightly in her seat, her breasts jiggling just enough that her nipples slipped briefly, tantalisingly into view above the frothy lace of her bodice.
Lonquefort forgot the strangeness of the forests.
“Stop!” he cried, his voice so thick with desire he could barely manage the word. “Stop, I command you!” He lifted his cane, banging its golden head against the roof of the carriage.
The driver swore as he hauled on the reins in an effort to stop the violent plunging motion of the horses.
Lonquefort couldn’t tear his mind away from the violent plunging efforts he would soon be engaged in. As the horses finally came to a halt, he leaned forward, grabbed Helene by the hand, flung open the carriage door, and hauled her outside.
“Wait here,” he said to the driver.
Lonquefort managed to get Helene twenty or thirty paces inside the treeline before his lust overcame him. He pulled her to him and tore her bodice apart. He grabbed at her breasts, bruising them, then pushed her first against the broad trunk of a tree, then down so that she lay beneath him amid the leaf litter of the forest. He bit at her neck, and her breasts, and his hands grabbed at her skirts, fumbling in his haste.
Oh God, oh God, he’d never wanted her this badly. Never! Never!
Helene cried out, but he took no notice, and did not realise that the tone of her voice had changed from the provocative to the terrified.
She beat at his back and his shoulders, trying to push him away.
He took no notice.
Helene grabbed at his hair, but her fingers encountered not fine, powdered brown hair, but the soft velvet of antlers.
Lonquefort thrust deep and Helene, gasping with horror, felt not her lover, but the heat and strangeness of a wild beast. No, no…of a beast so untamed she felt as if she would die from the force and horror of it.
Lonquefort’s movements became frenzied, and Helene lay quiescent beneath him, shocked beyond resistance. Her face was devoid of its usual rosy colour, her eyes wide and staring, her injured breasts heaved, her breath whistled in her throat, her hands now clutched behind her at the bark of the tree, preferring to find comfort there before the pelt of the creature that was mating her.
Then, suddenly, wondrously, she was at peace, and she sighed, and closed her eyes. While the beast above and inside her still felt wild, he no longer seemed strange, or frightening, and she lifted down her hands from the bark of the tree, and buried them within his pelt, and she whispered, “Anything for you. Anything.”
And she felt then, within the pit of her belly, the beginning of something incredible, and Helene knew that her life as a girl was done.
She sighed once more, and was replete.
“Madam?”
Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, looked up from her embroideries, and put a practised smile on her face.
“My good lord,” she said, rising, then sinking in a deep curtsey, “I had not expected you.”
Charles I looked at his wife, repressed a sigh, then instantly hated himself for his impatience. Other men managed with wives they found difficult to love, and so must he. Besides, she had been ill, had miscarried of a child, and doubtless some of her coolness could be ascribed to her aches both of body and of spirit.
At this thought Charles looked a little more closely at his wife. Sweet Lord Christ, she was only sixteen, and yet her face was drawn and lined almost as if she had lived through twice those many years. There were shadows under her dark eyes, her cheeks were pallid, and her hair had lost the luminosity that he remembered from their awkward, fraught wedding night.
What kind of man was he, then, to have brought a girl to this extreme of weariness? What kind of husband, to look in irritation on a woman, and judge her unkindly, when she had just lost a precious child? What kind of king, if he could not care for the most important of his subjects? What kind of lover, if he could not make her smile?
Now Charles smiled himself, and the expression was unexpectedly kind and warm, wiping away much of the aloofness which Henrietta Maria found so intimidating.
“You and I have made a poor start to our marriage,” he said, “and I am sorry for it.”
The false smile froze on Henrietta Maria’s face, and Charles could see the confusion in her eyes. They had spoken nothing but banalities to each other in the entire first year of their marriage. This degree of forthrightness, and spoken so winsomely from a man prone to the most frightful bouts of stuttering, patently had caught her off guard.
Charles suddenly felt a most unexpected wave of mischievousness wash through him. She was but a girl, after all. Why had he not remembered that? His smile warmed, his entire face relaxed, and he was rewarded with the slightest of thaws in his wife’s own expression.
Charles glanced behind him. “We would be alone,” he said, and with those words, and a wave of his hand, he dismissed from the royal presence the entire bevy of ladies-in-waiting, valets, diplomats, secretaries and courtiers who normally attended every waking moment of king and queen.
Henrietta Maria’s face grew uncertain.
“Am I so unkind a husband,” he asked, holding out his arm for her, “that you must look so suspiciously upon me when I seek a moment or two alone with you?”
“You are not unkind,” she said, slipping her arm through his as he led her for a gentle stroll down the splendid gallery of Oatlands Palace.
“Then if I am not unkind I have most certainly been—” he paused awkwardly, his speech struggling to master the word “—ungracious.”
She did not reply.
He stopped, and turned to her, cupping her small face between his hands.
Her muscles tensed beneath his fingers.