Lament for a lost lover

“Only way, mistress. Do you want him so he’ll never mount a horse again?” He looked at me pityingly, for he could see how shaken I was. “They know no fear, mistress. That’s why they have to learn when they’re young. He didn’t know what happened then.

Just as well.”

“Jasper, take care of him.”

“Aye, mistress. I’ll make a horseman of him yet.”

That incident made us friends in some odd way. I noticed Jasper looking at me now and then. Of course he despised my fancy gowns, the trappings of the Devil, he would call them. But he respected my love for my child and he knew that I had made him the guardian of Edwin and he liked that.

One day when I was in the stables there alone with him, he came and stood before me rather awkwardly.

“Mistress,” he said, “I’d like a word. Have wanted it these many days.”

“What is it, Jasper?” I asked.

“ ‘Tis about your husband, mistress. He were shot over here ... not far from this spot.”

I nodded.

“I want you to know it were none of my doing.”

“Jasper,” I said, “he came here into danger. He was posing as a stranger. I should never have come with him. It was through me that he was betrayed.”

“That were so, mistress. You showed your true nature and it were not that of a woman who serves God as she should, and I told those who should know and one came to see. But nothing had been done then. ‘Twere not because of that that he were shot. Mistress, I want you to know that not I nor any of my friends fired the shot that killed Master Edwin.”

“Do you know who?”

He turned away. “I want only to say it were not my doing.”

“So it was nothing to do with his being ... the enemy.”

“It were not done by us, mistress. That’s all I can say. ‘Twouldn’t have been for us to kill him. We’d have took him for questioning but not to kill.”

“You know who did it, Jasper?”

“ ‘Tis not for me to say, mistress. But I don’t want you to think I was the one who had anything to do with the killing of that boy’s father.”

“I believe you, Jasper,” I said, and I did.

News was coming in from the neighbouring towns. It appeared that a very virulent form of bubonic plague had broken out in the slums of St. Giles’s and so fierce was it that it was fast spreading through the captial and beyond. People were collapsing in the streets and were left there to die because none dared go near them. We were very worried because Lord Eversleigh was there with Carleton and Uncle Toby and we had had no news from them.

Each day we heard horrific tales. No one who could get out of the capital stayed. The Court had left and an order of council had been issued that stringent measures must be taken to deal with it.

Lady Eversleigh was frantic with anxiety.

“Why don’t they come back?” she demanded. “They would never be so foolish as to stay there. What can it mean ...?”

“Not all of them,” she went on frantically. “It couldn’t happen to all of them. Have we gone through those years of exile just to come back to this?”

Charlotte and I shared her anxiety. I realized how fond I was of my father-in-law and his brother, but somewhat to my surprise it was Carleton who kept coming into my mind. I kept picturing him writhing on a bed of pain, his face and body disfigured by hideous sores, and fervently I wished that he were here and I could nurse him. That seemed crazy, but I told myself I felt this because I should have enjoyed having him in a position which I was sure he would find humiliating-shorn of his dignity, at my mercy. What a strange thought to have at such a time, but Carleton did arouse emotions in me which I had not suspected I possessed. And with them came a certain elation, because however mysterious their absence might be, something within me told me that Carleton would be all right. Nothing would ever get the better of him-not even the plague.

Then when I was with my mother-in-law and Charlotte I wondered how I could have thought so much of Carleton to the exclusion of my father-in-law and Uncle Toby who had both become dear to me.

Each day we waited for news of them. There was none, but we did hear how the plague was spreading, and that, even as far from London as we were, we must take precautions and be very careful of strangers travelling from afar.

Everyone was talking of the plague. There were such epidemics two or three times in every century, but there had been nothing to compare with this since the Black Death. I thought of what I had seen of London-those evil-smelling gutters in the back streets where rats foraged among the rubbish left on the cobbles, and all the time I was thinking of Carleton lying on his bed, needing care. And what of Lord Eversleigh and Uncle Toby? They were not so young. They would be less able to fight the terrible disease.