A Place Called Freedom - Ken Follett [45]
He let go. “You’re going to regret this for the rest of your life,” he said, and he walked off.
Lizzie stepped out of the castle door and pulled her furs more tightly around her. The clouds had partly cleared, and there was a moon: she could see well enough to pick her way across the drive and down the sloping lawn toward the river.
She felt no remorse about letting Robert down. He had never loved her. If he had, he would be sad, but he was not. Instead of being distraught about losing her, he was furious that his brother had got the better of him.
All the same, the encounter with Robert had shaken her. He had his father’s ruthless determination. Of course he could not take High Glen from her. But what might he do instead?
She put him out of her mind. She had got what she wanted: Jay instead of Robert. Now she was eager to plan the wedding and set up house. She could hardly wait to live with him, and sleep in the same bed, and wake up every morning with his head on the pillow beside her.
She was thrilled and scared. She had known Jay all her life, but since he had become a man she had only spent a few days with him. She was leaping into the dark. But then, she thought, marriage must always be a leap into the dark: you could never really know another person until after you had lived together.
Mother was upset. Her dream was for Lizzie to marry a rich man and end the years of poverty. But she had to accept that Lizzie had her own dreams.
Lizzie was not worried about money. Sir George would probably give Jay something in the end, but if he did not they could live at High Glen House. Some Scottish landowners were clearing their deer forests and leasing the land to sheep farmers: Jay and Lizzie might try that, at first, to bring in more money.
Whatever happened it would be fun. What she liked best about Jay was his sense of adventure. He was Willing to gallop through the woods and show her the coal mine and go to live in the colonies.
She wondered if that would ever happen. Jay still hoped he would get the Barbados property. The idea of going abroad excited Lizzie almost as much as the prospect of getting married. Life over there was said to be free and easy, lacking the stiff formalities that she found so irritating in British society. She imagined throwing away her petticoats and hooped skirts, cutting her hair short, and spending all day on horseback with a musket over her arm.
Did Jay have any faults? Mother said he was vain and self-absorbed, but Lizzie had never met a man who wasn’t. At first she had thought he was weak for not standing up more to his brother and his father; but now she thought she must have been wrong about that, for in proposing to her he had defied them both.
She reached the bank of the river. This was no mountain stream, trickling down the glen. Thirty yards wide, it was a deep, fast-moving torrent. The moonlight gleamed off the troubled surface in patches of silver, like a smashed mosaic.
The air was so cold it hurt to breathe, but the fur kept her body warm. Lizzie leaned against the broad trunk of an old pine tree and stared at the restless water. As she looked over the river she saw movement on the far bank.
It was not opposite her, but some way upstream. At first she thought it must be a deer: they often moved at night. It did not look like a man, for its head was too large. Then she saw that it was a man with a bundle tied to his head. A moment later she understood. He stepped to the riverbank, ice cracking beneath his feet, and slipped into the water.
The bundle must be his clothes. But who would swim the river at this time of night in the middle of winter? She guessed it might be McAsh, sneaking past the guard on the bridge. Lizzie shivered inside her fur cloak when she thought how bitterly cold the water must be. It was hard to imagine how a man could swim in it and live.
She knew she ought to leave. Only trouble could result from her staying here and watching a naked man swim the river. Nevertheless her curiosity was too much for her,