A spell of bad weather kept everybody indoors for a week. Despite that, Verity managed to avoid Armiger so well that she wasn't entirely sure if he wasn't also trying to avoid her. They hardly ever seemed to be in the same room of the house at the same time. And if they were, it was never alone, except for the one time she had come into the library and found him asleep on the couch, a book fallen to the floor beside him.
She watched him in silence. His chest rose and fell with his sleeping breath, the buttons of his shirt pulling against the fabric, and then falling slack again. One of his hands was lying over his belly, the same hand she had stabbed with the needle. The bandage was gone now, and the wound was so small as to be invisible.
She hadn't really meant to do it. It had been a reflex, more than a reaction, and as soon as she had done it, she had been filled with an all-consuming, painful remorse. Even now, she felt guilty for it. But her guilt couldn't compare to her sense of betrayal.
He had sworn to her, in the early days of their courtship, that he believed implicitly in her honour. Now that one word – lovers – spoken in the heat of the moment seemed to prove to her that deep down, he didn't. Deep down, beneath what he believed he thought, there was something he felt: doubt. And she realized, now, that she could never prove it to him, that Harlan had not taken her chastity, or, worse, that she had not given it to him. And she burned with the indignity of needing proof at all. She had thought he had some faint measure of faith in her. He did not.
His hand moved, his eyelids fluttered, he woke, and looked sleepily up at her.
"Verity." His hand pulled coaxingly at her skirt, inviting her down to the couch with him.
"I only came to get my book," she said, and swept away, without it.
The atmosphere of the house was oppressive. Outside, rain fell in sheets upon the mud-browned lawns. Indoors, Mrs Prothero's baby kept everyone up at night with its colic, and Mrs Prothero's mother and sister bickered ceaselessly in French.
One merely damp morning at the breakfast table, an argument between the two reached new heights of temper and volume. Verity stared at her plate and tried to pretend she wasn't there. Armiger buried himself in an apparently fascinating letter.
"Vous n'êtes pas ma mère!" The daughter shrieked across the breakfast service. "Vous ne l'êtes pas! Vous ne l'êtes pas!"
Chair legs screeched backwards against the terracotta floor. Something crashed against a far wall.
"Ça suffit!" Prothero shouted.
He was standing up. It was he who had thrown the coffee cup against the wall, where it had shattered, and sent an ugly brown splatter over the pale yellow wall paper. Slowly, droplets of coffee began to ooze down the wall.
Verity froze in her chair. She had never known the amiable Englishman to shout, let alone to be so angry. Everybody was silent, even the old Madame Gagnon and her daughter.
Prothero wiped his hand over his face. He shrugged, and said something in rapid French. Mrs Prothero protested, Armiger interjected. There was a discussion that Verity could take no part in. Eventually, something was decided. Mrs Prothero and her sister swept from the room. A maid wiped the coffee stains off the wall, and picked up the pieces of broken cup.
Verity looked anxiously around her, wondering what was going on.
"We're going on a picnic," Armiger said, seeing the question in her eyes.
She looked doubtfully out the window, at the iron grey skies.
"It'll clear up," Prothero said forcefully. "Sun'll come out. March weather always changes quickly."
He was right, as it turned out. By the time the seven of them (for the three-year-old Henry was also invited) climbed into Prothero's two coaches, a pale sunlight was peering curiously through the clouds. When they arrived at Bastien's Castle, in the middle of the forest, the sun had climbed out fully, and the world, though still damp, seemed infinitely more cheerful for it.
Bastien's Castle, Mr Prothero explained to Verity on the way there, wasn't a castle at all, but a tiny little stone hovel in the middle of the forest. In the eight century, a peasant had insurrected against his lord, Duke Corentin, and proclaimed himself King Bastien of the forest. If he had had any followers, his revolution would have been swiftly put down. As it was, everybody looked upon him as a crazy fool, and Duke Corentin tolerated King Bastien with amusement, even encouraged him. King Bastien began to build his castle in the forest, from local stones and mud and branches. For a moat, he diverted water from a nearby stream, and managed to make a muddy puddle around his castle. In wet springs, it had been known to grow as deep as two feet. In dry summers, it was often nothing more than baked mud. The castle itself never expanded more than the one low stone room, which still stood today, forlornly, in the middle of its moat.
King Bastien's tale ended sadly, said Prothero. It occurred to King Bastien that every king needed a queen, and the only woman of high birth from thereabouts was Lady Rozenn, Duke Corentin's daughter. What had amused the duke until the day King Bastien stole off with his daughter amused him no longer. King Bastien was slain by the duke's own blade.
Scores of local legends remained about the place. Some said King Bastien haunted it, and that on moonlit nights you might come across him, and be granted your deepest desire. Darker legends suggested you really didn't want to.
Either way, it was a pleasant picnic spot, in daylight at least. The moat was silver and sparkling in the pale sunlight, surrounded by pleasant grasses. Weeping willows overlooked the stream, and the forest around the castle had been cleared into a sweet, grassy little meadow, across which butterflies flitted and blue-bells nested. The building itself seemed to be held together by moss and lichen, and was reached by a charming wooden fretwork bridge that someone had put up in more recent years.
Inside, Verity found it less charming. There were no windows, and the only light came through the open doorway, and the mossed-over smoke hole. She had to stoop not to bang her head on the ceiling, and the floor was an unpleasant, tacky mud, that smelled like rotten fish and mould. A pile of stones in one corner suggested what might have been a throne, at one time. A shaft of sunlight slanted through the smoke hole and across the seat, warming it for a king who hadn't sat there in a thousand years. The entire place had a forlorn air of abandonment and waiting.
"Not the most pleasant home," Mr Prothero admitted, entering after her. "Look, someone's been lighting fires. I suppose the local children play here. I can't imagine how anyone ever lived here though. It's miserable."
"Yes. Miserable's the word for it." For a moment, she could almost see Bastien, as he had been, cross-legged on his ramshackle throne, lording it over his imaginary domain and stolen queen. "What happened to Lady Rozenn?"
Prothero hesitated moment, before answering, "She took her own life. She drowned herself."
"Gruesome." Verity shuddered. Suddenly, the atmosphere of the hut was too much for her, and she went gladly back into the sunlight outside.
They ate lunch in the meadow, on the grass, and when they were finished, walked up and down the shore of the stream, or into the gentle green woods. Baby Henry splashed his toes in the water of the moat, and screamed when he discovered how cold it was. Mrs Prothero rushed to comfort him. Verity skipped stones in the stream, but never managed more than three skips before they sunk. There were not enough rocks around to discover any really smooth and flat, for skipping. Then Baby Henry decided he want to do it too, only for Baby Henry it meant slamming the largest rocks he could into the moat, and dodging the splashes (he had already forgotten the cold).
Verity distracted him, and took him up to the meadow to pick bluebells, and chase butterflies. He cried out in delight and chattered to her in French she could not understand. She talked back to him in equally incomprehensible English, and when he was tired sat him down to braid his golden hair.
Mrs Prothero came to sit by them. She smiled charmingly at Verity. She had forgiven her already for the carpet, because she was never a woman to hold a grudge.
"You like cheeldren? You want to have a chay-ald? A babee?" There was genuine interest there.
"Well, I – I don't know... I haven't really thought about it." She had vaguely supposed that sooner or later there would be a child, at least since the night Armiger admitted he wanted her as a woman, as well as a wife. But she thought now that he might have changed his mind about that, and she was no longer so sure about even her own mind.
Mrs Prothero laughed. "You're married! You must tink about it! But, maybe.... already? It's too quick, to know..."
Verity flushed. She couldn't answer that, in English or any other language. She handed the boy to his mother, and muttered she needed to stretch her legs.
She strolled off at random down a little forest path. There was no fear of getting lost here, because the forest was not deep, really, more of a wood, and the paths well made if a little overgrown at this time of year.
Even in early spring, perhaps, particularly in early spring, the forest was beautiful and welcoming. Daffodils were poking up from cold pockets of moss, and little green leaves were budding out along every grey, spidery branch. She meandered through rabbit trails, and at intervals dived off the path to examine a bird's nest in a tree, or chase a weasel or a rabbit.
She enjoyed it, but a distracted part of her mind was concentrated on the idea of children, and the longer she walked, the more the distracted part took over, until she was hardly seeing the forest at all. The truth was, she had always longed to be a mother. Perhaps, for the wrong reasons. As a child, her own mother dead, her father useless and unnurturing, she had marked up the scores of grievances life had dealt against her, and determined that she would protect her own child from them. She was sure she would have one. She needed a daughter, to give her the things that she had missed, as a daughter. And now, thinking about it, the agony of that perverted childhood dream came back to her, and she wondered if perhaps, for that reason alone, she would make a terrible mother. She would be one of those mothers, she thought, who wanted everything to be about themselves. She would be selfish.
And Armiger – what kind of father would be make? She knew he had had a son, who had died. But he never talked about his son, or his first wife, and Verity had never dared ask. She didn't even know if he wanted a child, or how he would treat one. Perhaps he was the sort of man who believed children should be raised by hired nursemaids, and only seen at appropriate moments, like christenings and funerals.
"I should have asked him all this before I married him," she said aloud, to a blackberry bush. "Why didn't I ask him?"
But she hadn't, and now it seemed impossible to do so. She could hardly bring herself to ask him to pass the butter at breakfast, let alone a question so vital as this.
It was in that unpleasant mood that the first drop of rain fell on her cheek. She raised her head to the sky, and saw the fragile sun had been once more conquered by clouds.
"Oh dammit!"
She was at least a mile from the others by now, a mile from shelter – perhaps more, she had lost track of time. She turned back, and hurried down the path, looking anxiously up at the sky. Another rain drop fell down between the branches, then another and another. Then the drops became a shower, and the shower became rain, and then there was a sudden roll of thunder, and the rain became a pouring flood.
She took shelter under the branches of an oak tree, shivering. There was nothing for it but to wait out the storm. Uncomfortable drips of water ferreted their way down between the leaves to strike her on the head. In the distance, there was another roll of thunder.
She shifted under a broader branch. Thankfully, her clothing was warm, and she wore a stout coat over her linen dress and petticoat. To be sure, the rain had invaded through her collar, and the mud at her ankles, but a storm so fierce could not last long, and when it had ceased, she would be back to the clearing, and off with the others, to home, where there was warmth, and fires, and hot tea.
She was right, in the very least, about the storm. It blew itself out to a thin pattering rain within a quarter of an hour, and the thunder moved off to the distant eastern hills. She shook herself out, stamped her feet, and made the dreary walk back to the clearing in the drizzle. The sky was now slate-grey above her, though it could not be past four o'clock.
She got back to Bastien's Castle a short while later, shivering, and acutely conscious of just how unpleasant it was to have damp stockings in muddy boots.
For a moment, she stood still, in bewilderment and shock. Huge changes had passed since she had been here two hours ago. The silver moat had swelled to be five feet broad, and brown with mud. The carpet of bluebells was flattened and bruised by wind and rain.
And the two coaches, and everyone who had arrived in them, were gone.
I think everyone in the world has been forgotten some place at least once, especially as a child. It's not a nice feeling.