underdress, her feet bare on the chill oak floor, as cold as the fear in her heart.
Please do not send his lordship back, please do not.
Taking a candle, she opens her chamber door, listening for distant voices in that cavernous House of the Three Turrets. There are none. For a moment she wonders whether she should call for Agnes, her maid. Eleanor has always loathed the black whalebone beams of the long gallery, full as it is of oaken shadows. Hearing Agnes’s peaceful snores from the adjoining chamber, she thinks better of it.
At the main staircase Eleanor stops and looks over the banisters. The dogs are now whining; why, she cannot fathom. Only her husband’s steward is there. What could be the reason for the hounds to be so disturbed? She watches Master Goodwin. He is holding a basket, staring at its contents with a puzzled expression. Snow dusts his doublet and cakes his boots. The glow from the fire catches his face. A face to be relied on, she thinks, and in that moment she sees him for the first time, as if she had never noticed him before. Kind eyes, generous lips unlike her husband’s mean, hard slit of a mouth. She wonders what those lips might feel like if they were to kiss hers. One thought stitches itself into another forbidden thought and she finds herself imagining Gilbert Goodwin being a gentle lover . . . and in that instant she knows what she wants, what she longs for: to be loved without leaden cruelty.
So the sorceress’s magic begins to work, for tell me how does a cuckoo lay her egg in a magpie’s nest if not with the help of nature’s charms?
Lord Rodermere had never considered his wife to be a handsome woman but that night Eleanor is not without beauty – a slight frame, delicate. Her hair is tumbled, sleep has given her a soft glow. As she walks slowly down the grand staircase, holding on to the balustrade, her gown falls open. The outline of her body, her breasts, show through the muslin underdress.
Gilbert Goodwin is suddenly aware of her and sees, not the wife of his lord and master, but someone vulnerable, lost; finds himself moved by the very image of her.
Eleanor and, she suspects, Gilbert Goodwin, knows there is another, invisible, presence watching them. This house of whispering oak seems always to be calling the forest closer, admitting its spirits.
‘What is it?’ she says.
Gilbert holds out the basket to her.
Her sad brown eyes take in the infant, fast asleep in the wicker basket, wrapped only in rabbit fur.
‘Is it faerie born?’ she asks.
‘I do not know, my lady,’ says Gilbert.
He does not think it an unwise question.
The babe lifts one small, perfect hand, nails as delicate as sea shells. She touches his finger and feels her heart being pulled towards the infant’s, knotted round his.
‘Have you ever seen such a beautiful child?’ she says.
‘No, my lady. There is a note.’
Pinned to the fur, written in the unmistakable hand of Francis, Earl of Rodermere, it reads, This is my son.
Later that St Valentine’s Day, when the snow had settled thick and white, covering the truth of earth and the lies of lovers, Eleanor wondered who it was who had entered the house that bitter winter morn, who it was who had been intent upon mischief. In the quiet of that afternoon, as the sun once more began to fail and the snow fluttered at the window, she shuddered with the joy of remembering and felt not one ounce of guilt.
Gilbert, Eleanor at his side, had carried the basket up the stairs, through the long gallery to her chamber. Neither of them had said a word, nor had the infant announced its arrival. Gilbert closed the door and they waited, hoping that none of the servants had heard or seen them.
She whispered, ‘My maid is asleep in there,’ and Gilbert Goodwin silently closed the door to the antechamber.
Still the infant had not cried out.
At the end of the bed was a chest where Eleanor had kept the swaddling clothes and the sheepskin bedding that her babes had slept in when newly born. She took out what was needed and wrapped the babe in the long linen cloth before laying him in the cradle to sleep. His hand fought its way free to find his mouth.
‘You will be needing a wet nurse, my lady,’ said Gilbert.
‘Not yet awhile,’ she said and sat to rock the cradle, to think what she should do, how she would explain the child’s sudden appearance. Could she claim the baby as her own? True, when she was with child, she had been slight, had never grown to the size of a galleon in full sail.
Back and forth, back and forth, the cradle rocks back and forth and with each gentle movement she feels a strange heat. It starts in her thighs and spreads up into her belly, into her very womb, up to her breasts. It is an overwhelming heat, the like of which she had never experienced before. She stands up abruptly and forgetting all about Gilbert, forgetting all about modesty, she throws off her fur-lined gown. Still her womb feels to be a cauldron of flame. She discards her underdress.
‘I am on fire,’ she says.
Gilbert sees her naked, her arms wide open and turns his face away.
‘My lady, shall I call for Agnes?’
She looks at him and he turns to her, his full lips parted. She leans forward, her lips touch his. It is kindling for the blaze.
Frantically, she undoes his doublet. He pulls off his shirt, her hand slips into his breeches, she is pleased to feel his cock is hard. On the bed he parts her tender limbs, kisses her lips, her neck. He nuzzles her breasts and gently enters her, not with the violence she is used to, nor is the act over with the pain of a few uncaring thrusts.
Gilbert whispers, ‘Slowly, my lady, slowly.’
He takes his time, waits for her. At each stile the lovers encounter he helps her over, and deeper into her he goes. Then, at the height of their ardour, when all appears lost, Eleanor gives a cry that wakes the baby, that makes the lovers pull away, she embarrassed by the completion of an act that she never knew could be so tender.
Gilbert climbs out of bed, picks up the infant and holds it to him. They wait for the knock on the door, for their sin to be discovered.
But there is not a sound, the house is still wrapped in an enchanting spell. The sorceress would not allow these two lovers to be disturbed. More needs to happen before the cuckoo is well and truly hatched.
Eleanor looks at Gilbert, naked, holding the infant close to him and her breasts ache. They feel full, painfully full, just as when she’d had her own babes. Leaking milk, she takes the babe from Gilbert and begins to feed him. With each thirsting suck he assures his place in her affections. She looks up at her new lover.
‘Tell me what has happened to us – do you know?’
Tears fill his eyes.
When the infant had finished feeding, Eleanor searched hungrily for a mark upon him for she had no doubt that her husband had been
