Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [599]
As she looked towards the sunrise, over that beautiful, harsh emptiness, she knew that she wanted Jethro. It was so simple, this primitive, ancient world up on the high ground.
She wanted to be with him, as she had been before, on the edge of the great chalk nakedness of the plain.
As she came slowly down into the valley, where the farmhouses were stirring, the poignancy of this desire and longing grew: she ached again.
And yet, she knew it could not be.
She was not surprised by what she found.
The farm was a pleasant, white house with a tiled roof and an air of modest prosperity about it.
She sat on her horse and looked it over carefully. Jethro had been lucky. One of the children appeared, saw her, ducked back into the house, and a few moments later a dark-haired young woman appeared.
She moved with a slow, casual insolence, taking Jane in with curiosity. She stood in front of her.
“Lookin’ for Jethro?”
“Yes.”
The look in the girl’s eyes was not hostile, not suspicious, just curious. But also it told her, beyond the shadow of a doubt that she knew. She knew. Not, probably, that she had been told. She knew by instinct. And strange to say, it did not even make her blush.
Why should it? She had just spent a night with the gypsies and seen the dawn rising, over the plain.
“I’m Jethro’s woman now.” She said it quite factually, flatly. There was a pause. “He went out early. Be back in an hour. You want to wait for him?”
Jane smiled. Why, now of all times, should she feel such calmness, a lifting of the spirit? She almost laughed. Should she wait for Jethro? There seemed no point. She had seen his farm, his woman.
“No,” she smiled. And with a wry irony, “I was just passing.”
She turned her horse.
As she rode slowly up the slope and reached the beginning of the high ground again, she thought she caught sight of him, a solitary figure moving along the edge of the ridge. She did not turn towards him; she nudged her horse forward and became, once again, a part of the plain.
The scandal of Jane Shockley’s adventure took years to die down.
By nine o’clock the previous night, the houses in the close themselves seemed to be huddling together in a speculative murmur. She had gone out in the early morning in a hurry – the groom had been questioned. She had attacked Hob Nob in the street with her riding crop – the whole town was buzzing with that. And now she had completely vanished – no one knew where.
Only one man had an inkling. Which was why in this early morning a search party was sent far out onto the plain, since Mr Mason had told them he thought she might have gone riding there. More than this Mr Mason, with quiet wisdom, did not choose to say.
Stephen Shockley was beside himself: so much so that from the hours of nine until eleven at night, he had stood with his stick in the hall, motionless, refusing a chair, and receiving a constant stream of folk from the close as the drama continued.
But the greatest scandal of all had been when Miss Shockley, somewhat unkempt, arrived back at noon the next day and announced as though it were the smallest thing in the world, that she had been caught in a storm and spent the night with gypsies.
After that, it was universally agreed, poor Stephen Shockley had begun the long but irrevocable process of his last, bitter decline.
It was a month after this that Mr Porters made the Christian, not to say heroic gesture of offering, if not to restore her reputation, at least to force the shocked scandal to subside, by offering, once again, to marry her.
To his astonishment, she refused. He retired to his villa shaking his head and