Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire

One of the Reverend John Thornton’s favourite rituals was to sit by his window, with all but one of the candles in his chamber extinguished, and watch the night settle over Woburn Park as he sipped a small glass of wine. It relaxed him for his bed, enabling his mind to let go the myriad little worries and irritations that had beset it during the day: one of the children refused to pay attention; the eldest son, Francis, was weaker than usual and unable to attend his studies; the new translation of Machiavelli (never to be displayed in the schoolroom) had yet to arrive even though he’d ordered it six months past; and Noah Banks…

Noah Banks. Invariably, during this nightly peaceful ritual, Thornton found his mind returning to the strange girl-woman that the countess had brought into the household. Noah was an unsolvable puzzle. How had she become so learned in ancient languages and in history and the manner of conquerors and saints, when, by all accounts, her father had barely enough learning to write his sermons each week, and her mother could only sign her name with a cross? From where had she received her wit and her perception?

And at such a young age.

She was sixteen years old, yet she had the maturity and demeanour of a woman far older. During his thirty-two years Thornton had met women who, although young, had been old far beyond their years. Women who had suffered, women who had been debased—the wretched of street and alleyway. These women wore their experience and knowledge poorly; hardness glittered from their eyes, and spilled in brittle and bitter words from their mouths. These were women who had been spoiled; not allowed to ease from innocence into experienced womanhood with gentleness or the guidance of either a parental or spousal hand.

Noah Banks was not one of these hard, ruined women. She wore her experience and knowledge easily. It did not emerge in her demeanour as coquettishness, which Thornton would have despised, or as pride, which he would have loathed even more thoroughly, but as a deep peacefulness of which he was—he sighed, admitting it to himself—deeply envious.

She was a girl (a woman) who Thornton suspected had such boundless compassion combined with her strange store of knowledge and experience that she would, to whoever loved her, become an endless source of comfort.

Of shelter.

Thornton slouched in the wooden chair, his half-drunk glass of wine resting on his chest. This was a rare moment of relaxation for him. The Reverend Thornton was a man who never relaxed in another’s company, only in his own. He was a tall man, his long legs now stretched out before him, crossed at their ankles, with shoulder-length, wavy dark brown hair worn swept back from his brow. He had a thin humorous mouth, and dark eyes that sparkled with what might appear to be mischief—save that Thornton so habitually clothed himself in the dark tones of Puritan garb that the humour of his mouth and the mischief of his eyes was (thankfully for the reverend’s public persona) quite obscured and shadowed. Thornton had dedicated himself to God and to instil the knowledge of God into his young charges; his humour and mischief he tried to bury or to ignore.

Now relaxed, at ease, Thornton’s eyes drifted lazily over the deep twilight outside, the still of the gathering night broken only by the movement of a small group of deer towards the shelter of a stand of great oaks and the haunting cry of an owl, out hunting mice and kittens.

There was a movement—the sudden sweep of the owl’s wings as it launched itself from one of the trees—and Thornton sighed, and sipped his wine.

The only reminder of the day past was the line of gentle light sinking across the horizon of the hills. It was a beautiful sight, peaceful and powerful, and Thornton imagined for a moment that the land was about to rise up and reach out to him, seeping in through the window until it embraced him and made him part of its earthiness.

“Do you feel it, John?” she said, and her voice seemed so much a part of the gathering night and of the gentle landscape beyond the windows, that Thornton was not perturbed, nor even overly surprised, to hear her speak, here, within the inner sanctum of his private chambers.

He turned his head, slowly, almost lazily, but otherwise did not move.

She was standing a pace or two inside the door, and Thornton, so given over to the magic of the twilit landscape, found himself thinking that she had not entered the chamber as any mortal person would have done, through the door, but had instead just materialised where now she stood, just as the night slowly fell outside without any discernible movement of arrival.

Then his reserve roared to the fore.

“Noah!” Thornton said, rising so abruptly from his chair that the remnants of his wine spilled from the glass. He suddenly realised that he stood before her in bare feet, clad only in breeches and a linen shirt that he’d unbuttoned in the warmth of the night, and he almost dropped the glass in his haste to set it to one side so he could pull the shirt closed about his chest.

“John,” she said, and smiled.

It was very gentle, that smile, and so unexpected in a sixteen-year-old girl, so comforting, so deep, that Thornton’s hands stilled where they fumbled at the shirt.

Noah was still dressed as she had been this evening, when she’d sat with Thornton and the earl and countess for an hour after supper. In the past year she’d taken to wearing the costume of a woman rather than a girl, and this evening she was wearing one of her favourites: a full skirt of green silk topped with a bodice of green and ivory striped silk, its square neckline low cut over the swell of her breasts, the lacy cuffs of her chemise tumbling from its elbow-length sleeves. On most sixteen-year-old girls the costume would have looked ridiculously and horribly provocative, but on Noah it looked perfect, perhaps because she eschewed the overbearing ringleted hairstyle so beloved of women of fashion and wore her sleek dark hair loosely piled atop the crown of her head where it made clothing that would otherwise have been overly flirtatious and insulting to Noah’s youth merely an adornment to the beauty of the girl herself.

“The land,” she said, her head inclining very slightly towards the window. “Do you feel it?”

“What?” he said, stupidly.

By the Lord, what would happen if the earl or countess discovered their charge in his room? What if a servant happened by, and heard Noah’s warm, rich voice issue forth from beneath the door?

He knew he should be demanding she leave. He knew he should be furiously stoking the fires of his indignant anger, of his moral outrage…of his concern for her innocence, for sweet Jesus’ sake, but Thornton could do none of this.

He could only stand, and stare at her.

“The land,” she said yet again, and he marvelled at how calm her voice was; how assured. “You were sitting in the chair, being at one with the land. It is why I am here.”

“Noah…”

She walked forward, as if her presence within his chamber was the most natural and expected thing, until she stood directly before Thornton; then she turned calmly about, and presented her back to him.

If she had been coquettish, if she had been hard, or abrasive, if she had shown wantonness or lewdness, if she had shown herself to be overly practised…if Noah had done or shown any of these things, Thornton would have found it easy to open his mouth and speak scathing or condemnatory words, or perhaps to have taken her arm in a gentle hand, and spoken to her words of wise caution as he escorted her to the door (and, in both instances, to have presented the earl with his regretful resignation in the morning).

Instead, he found himself staring transfixed as his hand—moving as if it were controlled by a mind other than his own—raised itself to the bare skin of her shoulders above the neckline of her bodice, and rested itself there, its palm flat against her soft warmth.

She drew in a slow, deep breath, her head tilting back very slightly, and Thornton heard joy in that breath. He moved his hand across the rise at the back of her neck, where the column of her neck joined her shoulders, and realised that he was caressing her.

And then realised that his other hand had raised itself to the laces of her bodice and was pulling them loose, one by one.

One of her hands raised itself, as if to pull at the sleeve of the bodice.

“No,” he whispered, and, kissing the back of her neck with a soft, gentle mouth, pulled her bodice free himself.

She caught it the instant before it fell to the floor, and draped it over a nearby coffer.

Her chemise was made of a very fine linen, a lawn, and Thornton could see the gleam of her skin through it.

Sweet Jesus, her skin…it glowed in the night, as if it were lit within by a soft ivory fire.

Then the chemise was unlaced, seemingly of its own accord, and was falling away, and Thornton’s hands had slipped about her body, and were now caressing her breasts.

She turned within the circle of his arms, and lifted her face for his kiss.

Her breasts brushed against the skin of his chest, and Thornton groaned as he bent down to her, and kissed her with more abandon and passion than he had ever thought himself capable of.

“Do I taste foul to you?” she said, pulling her mouth away just enough to speak the words.

“Foul?” he said. “How could that be?”

“A man said to me once, as he kissed me, that he could taste the foulness of corruption in my mouth.”

“I taste no foulness,” he said, and it was true, for he could taste many things in her mouth—warmth, comfort, tenderness, knowledge beyond knowing, peace—and not one of them was in any manner a close cousin to foulness.

“John Thornton,” she said as his mouth slipped down her neck, and his hands fumbled with the ties of, first, her skirt and then of her underskirt, “you are a very good man, which is why I am here.”

Suddenly everything seemed right in John Thornton’s mind: why she was here, and why he reacted to her with as much abandonment and lack of care as he did. He felt somehow graced by the privilege she bestowed upon him.

He did not feel like the earl’s trusted tutor, taking terrible advantage of one of his charges.

He did not feel like a man of God who had abandoned every tenet of his belief and righteousness at the first sight (taste and feel) of a tender, swelling breast.

She was unclothed now, and Thornton pulled back from her so he could disrobe. She smiled as his clothes fell away, and pulled him back to her, and she did not seem perturbed or frightened by the feel of his hardness against her belly, and he did not feel perturbed at her lack of fear of his nakedness and arousal.

He sighed, content, and lifted her to the bed.

Thornton had slept with two women in his thirty-two years. The first woman had been the kind of woman he both despised and feared: a hard, brazen woman, a widow, who took into her bed young students from the nearby Cambridge colleges for a few pennies scattered across the sheets once they had done.

He had gone to her three times, driven by the rising, almost uncontrollable desires of youth, and he had despised himself far more than her as he’d risen hastily from her bed and self-consciously tossed the pennies on the sheets.

The second woman Thornton had lain with was another widow, but this time a woman that Thornton had hoped to wed. He was twenty-five, newly graduated but not yet a full member of the Church of England, she twenty-nine, and they had spent a few months in the summer believing that perhaps they had a future together. Their two brief, hurried couplings had been cumbersome, awkward and guilt-ridden, and had likely been the reason the woman and Thornton had decided, finally, to go their separate ways.

But this, this, this was the first time in his life that Thornton felt as if his sexual union with a woman was also a complete union of body and soul with another human being. There was no awkwardness for either of them, not even in her virginity: no fumbling, no guilt, no desperation.

Only sweetness, joy, and a warmth and comfort that Thornton had never imagined could exist.

All this, he wondered at one moment, as she arched her body into his, and laughed, and told him how wonderful he was, in a girl only sixteen.

But, oh, in sinking into her he felt as if he sank into generations. It was as if he were being invited home after years spent wandering lost, as if he had found himself deep within her.

“John Thornton,” she whispered to him as she caught at his hips with her hands, and encouraged him into a slower and deeper rhythm, “do you feel it?”

And yes, he did feel it. He felt the rise and fall of the land as it rolled away over hill and dale; he felt the joy in the waters of the streams and lakes as they tossed and turned under the sway of the moon; he felt the blessed peace of the night give way to the gentle joy of the morning, and then slip away again into twilight and mystery.

And he felt her, all of her, and knew that there was nothing else awaiting him in this life that would give him any greater sense of joy and blessing than this woman could.

Later, when they lay quietly side by side, he kissed the beauty of her shoulder and said, “Be my wife.” What more could he ask for but that she be beside him, and be the mother of his children?

“I cannot,” she said.

“Why?”

She did not immediately reply, and Thornton felt for the first time a great sadness within her.

“I would destroy you,” she whispered, “for eventually I would have to leave you.”

And he could see how that would be so. If she married him, and then left him, it would destroy him so completely she might as well have stabbed him deep within the heart before she had walked out the door.

“I will be your lover for a while,” she said.

“It will be enough,” he said, knowing it never would be, but that he would need to content himself with it.

She sighed, and rolled over so that she faced him, and took his face between her eyes.

“Can you feel it, John Thornton?” she said again, and he could, as before: the rise and fall of the land, and all the strange faerie creatures that were somehow associated with this woman, and he knew that she was no real woman at all, but a rare, magical being who had, for whatever reason, decided to stay a while at Woburn Abbey and there to bless his life with her presence.

“Be my lover,” she said, and he nodded, the movement brushing his mouth against hers.

“Yes,” he whispered, and he felt then the land itself sigh, content.

Inside the stone hall the imp stirred, made mildly uncomfortable by the woman’s closeness with the man she lay with. It sent a query to its master, but because the imp itself was merely mildly put out, and only mildly curious, its master dismissed the event.

“It is of no matter,” he told the imp. “She can whore with whoever she wants. It will give her no respite, no relief, no escape.”

The imp grinned, and settled back for that day when its master would need more of it than the occasional report on the activities of the woman the imp inhabited.

Then the imp’s grin faded, for this stone hall was a cold and barren place (or so it appeared to the imp), and it sighed, and wished its master would find a need and a purpose for the imp soon, for it grew lonely and bored.