But she was on her feet, gathering her bag.
‘You only have to wait,’ she said softly, standing by the door. ‘That ain’t so hard, is it?’
She must know that it was the hardest thing of all, thought Adam, surely she must.
But he looked after her as she hurried, head down, through the churchyard, and then he could do no more than sit in the seat she had recently vacated, staring into space, in a profound rapture, for the rest of the evening.
Chapter Twelve
HER WEDDING GOWN was no more than a shift with a coarse peasant dress over the top. In her hair she wore a garland of flowers. He didn’t
approve of such ornamentation, but since she was a bride – his bride – he decided to let it pass.
Few guests attended the event, the sole witnesses being Sir Henry Shields of the manor and his wife. Previously, the good preacher had thought the changes to the marriage laws and the introduction of banns a good thing, but this past three weeks had had cause to differ. If he could have married Evangeline sooner, his influence might have saved her kinswomen. As it was, they had been hanged in a trio at Parham, just the week before.
But Evangeline survived, and Evangeline was the important one.
Even in her grief, she was beautiful. Her tears didn’t redden her nose or dim her eyes like they did with other women. Instead, they made her soul shine through the defiance and the lack of refinement. She was a living thing; she breathed and felt.
He might have postponed the wedding to a less inauspicious time, but it seemed the witchfinder snapped at his heels, eager to come back and bag the final female of the quartet. Even if it was not so, he felt it must be.
His ring on her finger, he bore her away to a frugal breakfast at the manor, courtesy of the Shields, and then they returned to his abode.
‘Good wife,’ he whispered, as soon as they were through the low door. ‘There is but one duty left me to perform.’
She raised her face to his and accepted a kiss. She was always so passive, never responding in kind, yet never recoiling from him either. It was, he supposed, a maidenly modesty within her, which knew the meaning of sin and avoided its active commission. But now, within wedlock, there was no sin in this. He sought to remind her.
‘Dearest love, we are wed. Such as it pleases us to do will also please the Lord. We act in good faith and with the blessing of the church if we …’
He reached for the neck of her shift and made to lower it, exposing the upper slopes of her breasts. Again, she merely tilted her neck to one side and let him, her eyes half-shut and distant.
‘Do you love me?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she replied.
He held his hand where it lay and stared at her.
‘You say no? You do not love me? I, who have saved you?’
‘You did it for your own base reasons. If my mother had taken your fancy, she it would be who stood here today.’
A great anger arose in him. He tore the shift to the hem of her bodice and held her close to him, their faces touching at the nose tips.
‘You would prefer to have swung? You would prefer to burn?’
‘No, sir, and that is why I am your wife, and each day I chide my own weakness. Yet I will not bear you love. I will never bear you love.’
His vision flushed hot red and the blood thumped in his ears. Seizing her by the shoulder, he flung her on to the bed that lay in the corner of the single-roomed dwelling.
‘If you will not bear me love, then you will bear me obedience,’ he vowed.
In his ears rang her screams, and forever more he would never forget her fearful eyes, her whispered curses, the thin, mean pleasure he drew from his transgression.
And the other thing he would never forget was the stain on the sheet afterwards.
No blood, only his own issue.
‘You have another lover!’ he bellowed, beside himself, on his knees before the crucifix that was the room’s only embellishment. ‘You have duped me.’