The Lady Who Broke the Rules (15 page)

Kissing. Stroking. Thrusting. ‘This,’ Virgil said, pushing harder and higher with his fingers, stroking over the smooth moist nub of her with his thumb, ‘this is what you’re doing to me.’ He could feel her swelling. He could feel himself thickening, pulsing. Her face was a mixture of confusion and delight. The knowledge that in this way he would be her first gave him immense satisfaction. He thrust and stroked and stroked and thrust, and then he kissed her, claiming her mouth with his tongue as she tightened around him and cried out, the pulsing heat of her, and the taste of her, and the feel of her hand, her fingers, on the length of him sending him over the edge seconds later, dragging a deep moan from his depths as he spilled his seed onto her hand and she slumped against him.

* * *

Solid. Virgil was so solid. Kate clung to him as if she were drowning. She felt as if she had been broken apart. Her body throbbed, wave after wave of sensation rippling out from the heat between her legs up, down, making her lightheaded, dizzy. She had been so furled tight and now she was—she didn’t know what she was. Unsprung? Was that a word? Like a clock which had been overwound. What she felt was red and sparkling and bright, bright, bright. Like a shower of sparks. A cascade. Her heart was pounding against Virgil’s chest. Or it was his heart. His hands on her back, his arms circling her so easily. When she wrapped her arms around him like this, her hands struggled to meet. His skin was like velvet, not soft, not rough, just velvet. Except his back. She traced his scars. She smoothed his scars. She nestled her face into the crook of his neck and kissed him. He smelled of lake and sweat and what they had just done. She didn’t know a name for it. No, Polly had given her several names, all of them far too vulgar-sounding for what she’d just experienced. It most certainly didn’t feel the least like a tickle.

Virgil hadn’t shaved; his chin was rough with stubble, though she could barely see it. She didn’t want to spoil the moment, but she had to ask the question which had been bothering her most of the night. ‘The girl you lost, did you love her?’

He tensed. ‘Yes.’

It was terrible of her, horrible, but Kate’s first emotion was jealousy. Virgil had loved someone. It was like picking at a scar, but she had to know. ‘How did you lose her?’

He put her from him, and got up, pulling his breeches on. His face was hard, his eyes hooded. ‘We should get dressed.’

‘I thought you trusted me.’ It was unfair of her. She could tell from the set of his shoulders, from the way he held himself, tight, the muscles on his abdomen clenched so hard she could count them. Kate scrabbled to her feet and began to drag her sopping swimming attire on. ‘Don’t answer that. I didn’t mean it. I shouldn’t have said it.’

‘No, you shouldn’t.’

She had as well cut the connection between them with a knife, but what had she expected? It was just physical, what they had shared. Pleasure, nothing more. It was not life-changing or any other sort of changing. They were still the same two people, scarred and confused both of them. She had acquired no extra rights over him.

Virgil folded the quilts and tamped down the fire as she struggled with her buttons and ribbons. He picked up the heavy chest and disappeared down to the beach to return it to its hiding place.

‘I can fetch the rowing boat, if you don’t wish to take another wetting,’ she said when he returned.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Virgil ran his hand through his cropped hair. ‘She died. Her name was Millie, and she died. It’s not a question of trust, Kate. It’s none of your business.’

She was shivering as she followed Virgil down to the water’s edge and began to wade in to the lake. Virgil dived in and began to swim in a powerful if rather splashy style for the shore. Kate took her time. Swimming always helped her think. Virgil was right, Millie was long dead and none of her business, but she wished all the same that she could ask more. What happened to her? Were they separated when Virgil was sold, or had she died before? Eleven years ago he’d only been nineteen. The same age as she had been when she’d broken her betrothal. Just a boy. No. Nineteen years on a plantation would have made a man of him many years before then.

Whatever had happened had scarred him more deeply than the savage marks on his back, that much was certain. Perhaps that was why his lovemaking had taken the form it had. They had not been truly joined. She was not Millie. Virgil, thank goodness, was not Anthony. Though those first few times with her betrothed, she hadn’t been completely indifferent. She’d forgotten that. Funny, but what she remembered until now had been boredom, indifference morphing into pain and humiliation, but in the early days she’d been interested enough to feel let down afterwards, disappointed. Now she knew what she’d been missing, she could quite see that what she’d experienced back then was a shadow of what it could have been.

Virgil was wading onto the grass at the side of the lake. As she walked towards him, she could almost touch the barricade he seemed to have erected around himself. He wanted to be alone. ‘Go back to the house,’ she said. ‘I have dry things in the changing room below the fishing pavilion—there is no need for you to wait for me.’

He hesitated, then turned away. Kate watched him go. On the horizon, in direct contradiction of her own mood, the sun began to break through.

* * *

A few days later, despite the cold which hinted at the winter to come, Kate and Virgil walked through the woods to the village. Finally, the visit to the school had been arranged. Conversation between them was stilted at first, but their shared enthusiasm for Robert Owen’s educational experiment soon broke down any awkwardness.

The Castonbury school was a single-storey purpose-built building with an enclosed garden to the rear. The local vicar, the adopted father of Lily, Giles’s betrothed, awaited them with Miss Thomson, the schoolmistress, in the bright entranceway. ‘Mr Jackson, it is an honour.’ Reverend Seagrove was a portly man whose benevolence was writ large on his beaming countenance, and his handshake was as warm as his smile was genuine. ‘Lady Kate, always a pleasure. And this is Miss Thomson.’

The schoolmistress dropped a shy curtsey. Allowing the vicar to do the honours, for he was every bit as proud of the school as she was, Kate watched Virgil’s reaction on tenterhooks.

The school room itself was spacious, with two rows of desks separated by a central aisle. The children were ranked, with the littlest ones at the front and the eldest at the back. The entire wall at the rear of the room was covered with a depiction of the two central hemispheres, and a large globe stood beside them. Light streamed through the long windows, and every other bit of wall space was taken up with bright pictures of animals and wildlife, both familiar and exotic. The atmosphere was happy and relaxed. The children were smiling, clean and alert. As he followed the vicar and the schoolmistress around the room, watching as Miss Thomson led a spirited history lesson which included a battle re-enactment, Virgil was extremely impressed.

‘Mr Owen believes that a happy child will be more receptive to learning,’ Reverend Seagrove said, beaming at him, as the children gathered round a table for morning milk. ‘We try to mix some play with our lessons. It is not good for the children to be seated at their desks for hours on end.’

‘You have quite an age range here,’ Virgil said to Miss Thomson, ‘how do you manage?’

‘We have the older children help the littlest ones with their reading and numbers, and I have a young woman who helps me three days a week,’ the schoolteacher replied, blushing.

‘Lady Kate is eager to recruit another full-time teacher,’ Reverend Seagrove said, ‘but we must first persuade the villagers of the benefits of keeping their children in school past working age. Unfortunately, Mr Jackson, many families depend upon their children’s income, and do not have the foresight to understand that the income could be significantly increased in the future were they permitted to learn more.’

‘What about educating the parents?’ Virgil asked.

Miss Thomson looked shocked, but Reverend Seagrove was much struck with this idea. ‘Lady Kate has been telling me all about Mr Owen of New Lanark. I believe he has established some form of institute which purports to offer an education to the adult members of his community.’

‘It is that aspect of New Lanark I’m most interested in,’ Virgil replied. ‘Without learning, you can never be free to choose.’

‘Most profound, if I may say so,’ the vicar said, nodding vehemently. ‘I will use that for a sermon, if I may.’ He smiled at Kate. ‘Perhaps we shall persuade the good people of Castonbury that there is a place for grown men in the schoolroom, after all.’

‘And grown women, too, I hope,’ Kate replied drily.

Reverend Seagrove chuckled. ‘Quite right, my dear. What do you think, then, of our little school, Mr Jackson?’

‘I think it’s a lot more than a
little
school. Your ideas are revolutionary.’

‘Lady Kate’s ideas, for the most part,’ Reverend Seagrove said. ‘It was she who insisted on our modern heating system. Most of our patrons felt it quite unnecessary to heat a school room. And the lessons, too, the participative elements you have seen…’

‘Come, Reverend Seagrove, you are making me blush. I merely followed Mr Owen’s tenets. I could never have raised the funds without your help, and while I am happy to take some credit for the principles upon which we teach, it is Miss Thomson here who has put them into practice.’

‘Then you are a remarkable team,’ Virgil said seriously. ‘You should all be proud of Castonbury school. You’ve given me much food for thought.’

Kate’s family were by degrees mildly interested, dismissive and scathing of the hard work she had invested in this enterprise. Many of the children’s parents had taken a great deal of persuading to allow their offspring to attend. While Reverend Seagrove and Miss Thomson had been unfailingly supportive and the school’s board of governors were slowly coming round to the ethos upon which it had been established, she was quite unused to praise. She had never doubted the worth of what she was doing, but having someone else perceive it and credit her with some of its success almost overset her. She had tried to pretend it didn’t matter what anyone thought. She had mostly succeeded. But it did matter, and Virgil’s opinion, whether she wanted to admit it or not, meant more than anyone’s.

‘Lady Kate does not know what to do with compliments,’ Virgil said to Reverend Seagrove, seeing her blush, ‘but nonetheless, I must tell you all, I think this is a remarkable place.’

Replete and revived by their morning victuals, the first awe which had overwhelmed them upon meeting their American visitor dissipated, the children gathered around Virgil, clamouring for stories, besieging him with questions, not all of which had any grounding in reality, having arisen from the various stories they had heard at home. Receiving Miss Thomson’s assent, he sat down on the floor with them in a circle around him and told them stories of the New World.

It was as if he wove a spell, Kate thought, watching. He held them captive, enthralled and yet totally at ease, just exactly as he had done with the servants at Castonbury. His tales of Anansi the spider were not what the school’s board of governors would call nice. They were subtly subversive, exactly the kind of story to make the children laugh gleefully, at the triumph not of good over bad, but of small over large.

* * *

‘I meant it, Kate,’ Virgil said as they made their way back through the woods at Castonbury afterwards. ‘You should be proud of what you have achieved there. I gather from the reverend that it was no easy task to persuade some of the villagers to send their children to school rather than into employment.’

‘There is so much more I’d like to do.’

‘There is always more. You cannot do it all.’

‘Yet that is exactly what you aim to do, judging by the plans you were discussing with Reverend Seagrove. I hadn’t realised they were so far-reaching. It sounds as if you wish to take on the burden of educating every freed slave in America.’

‘It’s the least I can do.’

She was startled by the sudden weariness in his tone. ‘You sound as if you carry the burden of slavery upon your own shoulders.
You
, of all people, have nothing to feel guilty about.’

‘Kate, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

The atmosphere which had come between them since the morning at the lake returned. ‘Virgil, I…’

‘Kate, we need to talk.’

She almost panicked. The past two nights had been spent assuring herself that what had happened between them had been purely physical. It had been intensely pleasurable, but it meant nothing more. By day, she could maintain a calm front, assuring herself that nothing had changed save she knew herself capable of pleasure. By day, she had the strength of her conviction. By night, she was as weak as a kitten. And it frightened her.

She had not loved Anthony, but she had cared for him and hoped to learn to love him. What she had discovered was that her feelings could be easily abused, she herself easily manipulated as a result. It had taken her five years to regain control of that life. She was
damn
sure she wasn’t going to do an about-turn and hand her heart over to a man who not only swore he could never care for her, but in a few weeks hence would be on the other side of the world. She almost panicked, because for a terrible moment she thought Virgil was about to declare himself, and for an even more terrible moment she thought herself about to accept him. Then she saw his face. Tight. Controlled. Fierce. And she knew she’d got it quite wrong.

‘You are leaving?’ she said with a sinking heart, because it was the only other thing she could think of.

‘You know I am, sometime before that claimant to the Castonbury throne arrives, but that’s not what I wanted to discuss.’

‘What, then?’

‘Is there somewhere we can be private near here?’

‘There is the orangery, but I think Wright is still working there. Or the fishing pavilion.’

They walked quickly and in silence. The pavilion sat over the lake with a view out to the island, a small square building which smelled of damp wood. Not the most romantic of places, Kate thought, then told herself that was exactly as it should be. An odd assortment of chairs and stools were huddled together by the window.