in the courtyard struck the half-hour. Down the avenue William would be waiting with the carriage, so that she could drive up to the house as she had planned.
'I trust you enjoyed your dinner with Lord Godolphin,' said the Frenchman.
'Very much so,' she answered.
'And the fish was not too indifferently cooked?'
'The fish was delicious.'
'You will lose your appetite when we go to sea.'
'On the contrary, the sea air will make me ravenous.'
'I shall have to sail with the wind and the tide, you realise that? It will mean leaving before dawn.'
'The best time of the day.'
'I may have to send for you suddenly-without warning.'
'I shall be ready.'
They walked on through the trees, and coming to the avenue, saw the carriage waiting, and William standing beside the horses.
'I shall leave you now,' he said, and then stood for a moment under the shadow of the trees, looking down upon her.
'So you will really come?'
'Yes,' she said.
They smiled at one another, aware suddenly of a new intensity of feeling between them, a new excitement, as though the future, which was still unknown to them both, held a secret and a promise. Then the Frenchman turned, and went away through the woods, while Dona came out upon the avenue, under the tall beech trees, that stood gaunt and naked in the summer night, the branches stirring softly, like a whisper of things to come.
Chapter X
IT WAS WILLIAM who awoke her, William shaking her arm and whispering in her ear 'Forgive me, my lady, but Monsieur has just sent word, the ship sails within the hour.' Dona sat up in bed at once, all wish for sleep vanishing with his words, and 'Thank you, William,' she said, 'I shall be ready in twenty minutes' time. What hour is it?'
'A quarter to four, my lady.'
He left the room, and Dona, pulling aside the curtains, saw that it was yet dark, the white dawn had not broken. She began to dress hurriedly, her heart beating with excitement and her hands unnaturally clumsy, feeling all the while like a naughty child proceeding to a forbidden venture. It was five days since she had supped with the Frenchman in the creek, and she had not seen him since. Instinct had told her that when he worked he would be alone, and she had let the days go by without walking through the woods to the river, without sending messages even by William, for she knew that when he had laid his plans he would send for her. The wager was not a momentary thing of folly, broached on a summer's night and forgotten before morning, it was a pact by which he would abide, a testing of her strength, a challenge to her courage. Sometimes she thought of Harry, continuing with his life in London, his riding, his gaming, the visits to the taverns, the playhouses, the card-parties with Rockingham, and the images she conjured seemed to her those of another world, a world which concerned her not at all. It belonged, in its strange fashion, to a past that was dead and gone, while Harry himself had become a kind of ghost, a phantom figure walking in another time.
The other Dona was dead too, and this woman who had taken her place was someone who lived with greater intensity, with greater depth, bringing to every thought and every action a new richness of feeling, and an appreciation, half sensuous in its quality, of all the little things that came to make her day.
The summer was a joy and a glory in itself, the bright mornings picking flowers with the children, and wandering with them in the fields and in the woods, and the long afternoons, lazy and complete, when she would lie on her back under the trees, aware of the scent of whin, of broom, of bluebells. Even the simple things, the basic acts of eating, drinking, sleeping, had become, since she had been at Navron, a source of pleasure, of lazy still enjoyment.
No, the Dona of London had gone for ever, the wife who lay beside her husband in that great canopied bed in their house in St. James's Street, with the two spaniels scratching in their baskets on the floor, the window opened to the stuffy laden air and the harsh street cries of chair-menders and apprentice boys-that Dona belonged to another existence.
The clock in the courtyard struck four, and the new Dona, in an old gown long laid aside to be bestowed upon a cottager, with a shawl about her shoulders, and a bundle in her hands, crept down the stairway to the dining-hall, where William awaited her, a taper in his hand.
'Pierre Blanc is outside, in the woods, my lady.'
'Yes, William.'
'I will supervise the house in your absence, my lady, and see that Prue does not neglect the children.'
'I have every confidence in you, William.'
'My intention is to announce to the household this morning that your ladyship is indisposed-a trifle feverish, and that for fear of infection you would prefer that the children did not come to your room, or the maid-servants, and that you have bidden me wait upon you myself.'
'Excellent, William. And your face, so solemn, will be exactly right for the occasion. You are, if I may say so, a born deceiver.'
'Women have occasionally informed me so, my lady.'
'I believe you to be heartless, William, after all. Are you sure I can trust you all alone amongst a pack of scatterbrained females?'
'I will be a father to them, my lady.'
'You may reprimand Prue if you wish, she is inclined to be idle.'
'I will do so.'
'And frown upon Miss Henrietta if she talks too much.'
'Yes, my lady.'
'And should Master James very much desire a second helping of strawberries-'
'I am to give them to him, my lady.'
'Yes, William. But not when Prue is looking… afterwards, in the pantry, by yourself.'
'I understand the situation perfectly, my lady.'
'Now I must go. Do you not wish you were coming with me?'
'Unfortunately, my lady, I possess an interior that does not take kindly to the motion of a ship upon the water. Your ladyship follows my meaning?'
'In other words, William, you are horridly sick.'
'Your ladyship has a happy turn of phrase. In fact, since we are discussing the matter I am taking the liberty to suggest, my lady, that you should take with you this little box of pills, which I have found invaluable in the past, and which may be of help to you should some unhappy sensation come upon you,'
'How very kind of you, William. Give them to me, and I will put them in my bundle. I have a wager with your master that I shall not succumb. Do you think I shall win?'
'It depends upon what your ladyship is alluding to.'
'That I shall not succumb to the motion of the ship, of course. What did you think I meant?'
'Forgive me, my lady. My mind, for the moment, had strayed to other things. Yes, I think you will win that wager.'
'It is the only wager we have, William.'
'Indeed, my lady.'
'You sound doubtful.'
'When two people make a voyage, my lady, and one of them a man like my master, and the other a woman like my mistress, the situation strikes me as being pregnant with possibilities.'
'William, you are very presumptuous.'
