Page 101 of By the Sword
She looked at him and her face twisted in anguish. ‘But he hasn’t gone, Jonathan. Every time I close my eyes, I see his face, hear his voice…feel the muzzle of his weapon and I know I am utterly powerless. Prescott will haunt me forever, Jonathan. I can’t make him go away.’
The tears now streamed down her face, and she wrapped her arms tighter around her body, defying him.
He took a breath and straightened, still on his knees. Despite her rigid, defensive posture, he cupped her face in his hands, forcing her to look at him.
‘Kate, Stephen Prescott is dead and the guilt for his death is my burden, not yours. Sometimes we have to learn to live with memories that we think are too horrible to bear. We have to learn to recognise them for what they are–ghosts from a past that no longer have the power to hurt us.’
She dashed his hands away. ‘But I don’t understand your ghosts, Jon. What did you do to cause Stephen Prescott to hate you so much? I have a right to know about Mary Prescott…I have earned that right.’
He drew a long breath and rose to his feet. ‘I should have told you at the beginning, after the affair in York.’
He paced the length of the room before returning to her. He pulled up a stool and set it in front of her. Seating himself, he began.
‘It goes back long before the war when Giles and I went to Oxford.’ He paused, allowing a glimpse of memory to tug at the corners of his lips. ‘As anyone in my family will tell you, probably has already told you, we weren’t there to study. We learned to drink, to fight, to play cards and we learned the delights of women. If the war had not intervened I would probably look back and think those were the best days of my life. As it is…’ He tailed off and glanced up at her. She regarded him without blinking, her face without expression.
‘My mother blamed Giles for leading me astray but I don’t think either of us needed much leading. Giles had the luck with cards and I had something of a reputation with women. Giles and our friends wagered no small amount that I could seduce the daughter of one our dons, a girl called Mary Woolnough.’
He swallowed, remembering that drunken evening. A tidy sum had been put on the table.
‘The challenge lay in the fact that the Woolnoughs were Puritan, unusual in Oxford at the time, with the added challenge that Mary was betrothed to a young lawyer called Stephen Prescott.’
Kate gasped and put her hand to her mouth.
‘It was despicable, Kate. Giles and our friends made it their business to distract Prescott. He was the son of a farrier and by dint of his hard work he had turned himself into a lawyer with a promising career. His weakness was that he was socially ambitious and a snob and it made him easy prey. He was pleased by the apparent patronage of the young bucks and they enjoyed cheating him at cards and getting him drunk to the point of insensibility. While Giles and the others diverted Prescott, I paid court to Mary.’
He swallowed and looked away into the depths of the fire, remembering Mary’s heart-shaped face and brown eyes. So trusting, so easily flattered–so easily won. It hurt to recall thattime but he had promised Kate the truth and if she despised him for it then that was all for the good.
‘It was so easy. She was seventeen and innocent, impossibly pretty and had the sweetest nature, despite her ghastly family. She fell for me without much persuasion.’
‘The Thornton charm can be quite irresistible,’ Kate interrupted, her tone harsh and bitter.
He flinched and turned his gaze back on the fire, unable to face the scorn in her eyes. ‘What I had not counted on was my own feelings. I told the others I had failed and paid up the bet. It was a price worth paying. I was in love with her and she with me. We met in secret but her grandmother found some letters I had written and her family was outraged.’ He glanced up at Kate. ‘Believe me when I say I had not seduced her to my bed. However, neither my family nor Mary’s were willing to believe that. Letters were written to my father and I was summoned home in disgrace.’
He closed his eyes, remembering his father’s wrath and his mother’s tears. Looking back he could no longer be sure if their anger was directed at the nature of the relationship or the fact that they considered Mary Woolnough beneath them.
‘I would have married her but my father banished me to London to redeem myself by becoming, of all things, a lawyer. I don’t know what her family did to Mary but within months they had succeeded in marrying her to Prescott. Mercifully for the legal profession, the war broke out and when I returned to Oxford as an officer under Prince Rupert, I sought her out. She was living with her father and grandmother. She told me that Prescott, not surprisingly, had joined Parliament. Despite my yearning to see her, I thought I would do the honourable thing and not pursue the friendship anymore.’
Jonathan pushed back his sleeve and looked at the scar on his arm. ‘I took this at Marston Moor. It made me useless forfighting for a while and I found myself back in Oxford kicking my heels until my wound was healed. I could have had the choice of any number of court beauties but I was bored and lonely and despite my best intentions I went looking for Mary again and we found each other again.’
He drew a sharp breath and looked at Kate. The hands that had gripped the arms of the chair now rested in her lap and the clear grey eyes rested on his face without expression.
‘Nothing had changed, Kate. We still loved each other and she was trapped in a marriage to a man for whom she felt nothing.’ He swallowed. Now came the hard part. ‘This time there was nothing innocent in our relationship. Over the winter months, we stole as much time together as we could and we became lovers. What had begun as a foolish bet had become the dangerous game of adultery.’ He closed his eyes. ‘By the spring of ’45, I had run out of excuses. I had to go back to the war.’
The breath stopped in his throat at the memory of the frightful scene with Mary that had followed that news. The anguish of that last meeting still cut his heart like the blade of a bright sword. ‘Mary begged me to take her with me. She pleaded with me but I had no choice but to leave her in Oxford’
‘Why didn’t you take her?’ Kate asked.
Why indeed. The reasons had seemed so clear at the time.
‘I couldn’t have her trailing after me like a draggle-tailed camp follower. You’ve seen it, you know the life she would have led. She was not bred for that. She would have been at Naseby and you know the fate of the women in the King’s baggage lines.’
Kate shook her head. ‘No. What happened to them?’
‘The women, Welsh, Irish and English, were raped, mutilated and turned out to die in the fields and the lanes. It was not a proud moment for the Lord’s chosen. Surely you heard the stories, even in Yorkshire?’
Kate’s eyes widened and she shuddered. ‘I had no idea.’ She paused. ‘But you could have brought her here to Seven Ways?’
He laughed. ‘Here? My mother would hardly countenance me installing my mistress, someone else’s wife, under her roof. My mother called her a whore even before the war. As I saw it I had no choice but to leave Mary in Oxford, safe with her family, as a problem that I would sort out after the fighting ended.’
