Page 23 of Feathers in the Wind
He lifted her on to the saddle and swung up behind her across the broad withers of Florizel. He looped the reins around her, drawing her in against him. Her slight figure fitted well into the circle of his arms as if she had been made to fit. Only she hadn’t, he reminded himself, she belonged to another man.
As Florizel took his first loping steps, Perdita stiffened, her hand going to the bandage around her head.
‘Are you up to this?’ Adam enquired.
Her shoulders squared. ‘I’ll be fine. There is no need for you to be concerned.’
‘There’s every need. The countryside between here and Banbury is overrun with the rabble from Stratford and they will be undisciplined and lawless.’ He huffed out a sigh. ‘You were lucky, Perdita. Very lucky. When I think about what could have happened.’
She lowered her head, offering him a tantalising view of her elegant neck brushed with dark curls.
‘I know that now, but Joan needed me.’ She laid her head against the heavy leather of his buff coat and closed her eyes. ‘Why did the Market Hall explode like that?’
‘We think they were storing powder there and a spark caught. But enough talk of war, we have an hour in each other’s company. Let’s talk of other matters.’
She glanced up at him. ‘What other matters?’
He mused for a long moment and asked the question he had longed to ask since he had first met her.
‘Tell me how you came to Preswood?’
‘I had nowhere to go.’ He caught the strain in her voice as if it were almost too much to relate. ‘My husband’s debts had taken all my jointure. His family turned me out.’
‘Your husband?’
‘Samuel Gray. My father sold me to him when I was but sixteen and he a man near sixty.’
The enormity of what she was saying hit Adam like a jolt. A girl of sixteen forced into marriage with a man forty years her senior?
‘Had you no say in the matter?’
She shook her head and flinched, her hand going to the bandage. ‘My dear father beat me and starved me into submission,’ she said. ‘What choice did I have?’
None.
A growing well of anger rose in Adam’s chest. If he were to meet Perdita’s father…
‘And your father could not help you when this husband died?’
‘He had died two years earlier. His business had been sold. I had no other family to turn to except my mother’s kinsman, Geoffrey Clifford. He and Joan offered me a home without condition. Whatever I lacked in love or family, they more than made up for.’
Adam said nothing for a long moment. Joan would always be the one who took in orphaned kittens, stray dogs or injured wildlife — or unhappy children. She would not have hesitated to take in this lost waif and given her the love she needed to heal. Was that why Perdita had agreed to marry Simon? Was it gratitude?
He changed the subject. ‘How did you come to be called Perdita?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. A fancy of my mother’s. I looked for the name in the Bible but I couldn’t find it there.’
He laughed. ‘The Bible? You’ll not find it there. Perdita is a character from a play by Shakespeare.’ He glanced behind him at the receding church tower of Holy Trinity. Shakespeare’s burial place, they said.
‘Is it? A play? Truly?’ She twisted to look at him. ‘I’ve not read any of his plays. My father and my husband did not approve of such things. What play is it?’
‘A Winter’s Tale,’ Adam said. ‘Perdita was the daughter of the king and queen. It would mean ‘lost’, if my Latin serves me correctly.’
‘Lost?’ Perdita repeated vaguely. ‘Is that me? Am I lost? It seems that we share something in common.’
His breath caught. ‘What is that?’
‘We have both been lost, have we not?’
