proper shelter of the night. They regularly created their own world of feather pillows and tangled black hair and white skin, and Eleanor was surprised by how natural and how good it felt.
On her wedding night she had known next to nothing, and Nathaniel had no more practical experience than she did. But he knew what to do, as he seemed to know everything else, and he guided her confidently.
They learned quickly, together.
Eleanor had been ashamed, at first, of the way her body led her. She had believed that she should be passive and reticent, and meekly let Nathaniel do whatever it was he needed to do to her. But then she had discovered another Eleanor within herself, this Eleanor who would not be subdued except by what her husband did. It was not a matter of allowing him, as she had imagined, but of meeting him halfway. Sometimes, to Nathaniel’s delight, it was more than halfway. Then she heard the other Eleanor scream out in the intensity of her response.
She had been ashamed until Nathaniel told her that there was nothing they could do together, in the seclusion of her bed, that was either wrong or unnatural. She believed him, as she believed everything he said.
‘Come back soon,’ Nathaniel whispered, when he had installed her trunk and boxes in the train with their little Iffley housemaid who would be her lady’s maid at Stretton. ‘I wish I was coming with you.’
He did wish it. He liked to see his wife and her twin sister together. The double vision intensified his pleasure in the secret Eleanor known only to him, as well as tantalizing him with a sense of the other secrets the sisters shared only with each other. He thought, sometimes, of what it would be like to have the two of them together …
‘That would be quite unsuitable,’ Eleanor rebuked him. ‘This is a time for women.’
‘Not when my children are born. You won’t banish me then.’
‘You will have to wait and see what happens when the time comes, Nathaniel.’
The train was on the point of departure. Eleanor smiled up at him from under the brim of her feathered hat. She suspected that they would not have so very long to wait.
‘Come back soon,’ he ordered her. ‘I didn’t marry you to have to spend more than a day without you.’
‘I will,’ she promised him. ‘As soon as I’m sure Blanche doesn’t need me any longer.’
Nathaniel stood on the platform waving until the train was out of sight. At Shrewsbury, Lord Leominster’s groom was waiting with the carriage to drive Eleanor to Stretton.
The approach to the house was by a winding carriage drive through the trees of the park. By this time Eleanor was familiar enough with the view to be ready for the sight of Stretton itself, but the size of it still made her catch her breath at the first glimpse. The trees suddenly gave way to reveal a lake and a bridge and the house standing on a vast slope of grass beyond the water.
The original house was very old, but in the eighteenth century an ambitious Earl had commissioned Robert Adam to extend it and impose the appropriate grandeur on the south front. Now two short wings curved outwards from the main body and a dome had been added to crown the new composition. The centrepiece of this symmetrical arrangement was a porch raised on eight stone pillars, reached by a pair of stone staircases that rose from the gravelled drive. The effect was magnificent, but the Leominster fortunes had never properly recovered from the expense.
The comparison of Stretton’s creamy stone bulk with her cottage at Iffley made Eleanor smile a little as she was handed down at the porch steps.
The butler who swept down to meet her assured her that her ladyship was waiting anxiously upstairs. Eleanor almost ran in his stately wake. She found Blanche in the doorway of her own small drawing room on the first floor, and the sisters fell into each other’s arms.
‘You look so well, and pretty,’ Eleanor exclaimed when they were alone. Blanche did look well, dressed in a loose blue robe that almost hid her bulk. She rested one hand proudly on the summit of it.
‘Sir John says that it will be any day.’ Sir John Williams was her obstetrician. ‘I wish it would come.’
‘And this is so cosy.’ Eleanor walked admiringly round the room. It was decorated in pale blue and eau-de-nil, with watercolour landscapes on the panelled walls. It was new since her last visit, and she thought how well it suited Blanche. The Adam interiors of the rest of the house were very fine, but they had been left untouched for a hundred years. The fabrics were beginning to decay, and there was an air of chilly gloom.
‘John ordered it for me. It is so comfortable to have somewhere pretty and warm to sit. I spend all my days in here. Oh, Eleanor, how glad I am that you are here.’ Blanche sat down on her blue sofa and patted the place beside her. ‘Let me look properly at you.’ With her head on one side, she examined her sister’s face. She saw contentment in every line of it, and something else too. There was a richness, a new lustre that she had not seen before.
‘And I can see that you are well.’
Eleanor smiled. ‘I don’t feel so very magnificent. I suffer from sickness. I believe … Blanchie, I haven’t even told Nathaniel yet, but I think I may be in the same condition as you are.’
After hugging and exclaiming, the sisters sat back to look at one another again. They felt that as married women, both carrying children, there were matters to be discussed that they could not have touched on before, for all their closeness.
Blanche said delicately, ‘Tell me, Eleanor, how do you find the married part of marriage?’ She saw that her sister’s mouth looked fuller than it had been, and her eyes were soft. There was colour warming her neck and cheeks.
‘Surprising, at first,’ Eleanor said. And then, laughing, ‘But afterwards, like … finding out the answer to a riddle. A rather good riddle, with a particularly satisfying solution.’
‘A riddle?’ Blanche was staring at her, uncomprehending.
‘Yes, just that. One that you have half overheard, and never understood before. And you?’
‘John is very good,’ Blanche answered, aware that it was no answer, any more than Eleanor’s had seemed. But John was good, she told herself. He did not trouble her so very often, and when he did materialize in her bedroom, sliding in in the darkness to lie briefly on top of her, he seemed so insubstantial, so thin and light that she wondered if he was completely there. Afterwards he would whisper to her, ‘I’m sorry, my dear. Will you forgive me?’
Blanche had no idea why her forgiveness should be necessary, because she had not felt particularly violated, but she gave it readily. She was fond of her husband, and recognized his kindness.
After waiting a moment, Eleanor realized that Blanche would say no more. She murmured, ‘Yes. I’m sure he is.’ She was remembering the letter she had started to write to Blanche on the night of meeting Nathaniel. She had known then that it was not the right thing to finish and post it.
Eleanor stood up and went to Blanche. She kissed the top of her head, in the middle where the dark hair parted to reveal the white skin beneath. Then she wandered to the window, and looked down at the wide park.
‘Will the baby be an heir for John and all this?’
‘I am quite sure it is a boy, and
