The Pleasure Garden: Sacred Vows\Perfumed Pleasures\Rites of Passions (24 page)

Collapsing on top of her, he entwined his fingers with hers. “That was worth any price I had to pay to come back to you, Cathy.”

They awoke to the songs of robins and sparrows. The sun was bright, and Joscelyn stirred, feeling Catherine’s warm, sated body pressed to his. Cracking open his eye, he glanced around, amazed by the greenery that met his gaze.

“Look,” he whispered to Catherine. “The garden has come back to life.”

She rose, her breasts bare, and he could not resist touching them.
Eve in her garden,
he mused.

“This is…this is impossible,” she gasped. There were the beginnings of buds and blooms. Purple wildflowers carpeted the grass by the fountain, and even the brown weed that had been growing in the cracked and broken stone had turned a lush green. She looked back at him, her eyes full of wonder.

He shrugged and reached for her. “There is something to be said for Beltane magic,” he whispered, “and the power of my seed.”

She slapped him playfully. “Conceited man.”

He sobered, brushed her hair behind her shoulders and captured her face in his hands. “Marry me. Run off, right now, and we will go to Gretna Green. We can be wed by nightfall, and it will be Beltane, and I’ll follow you into the woods and make passionate love to you.”

When she hesitated, he placed a silencing finger over her lips. “There is no need to worry about your parents. I’ve settled your father’s debts. It is up to him to go on from
here. You cannot continue to pay the price of his follies. Marry me, Cathy. I’ll make you happy. I’ll give you babies, and love, and a garden that you can play in—a garden I’ll play with you in.”

“Wh…how?” she stammered.

“My uncle,” he said. “He gave me my mother’s dowry and I used it to pay off your father’s debts. It will be the only time, Cathy. Your father is a grown man. It’s time he saw to his own debts. But he’s starting with a clean slate, and if he resists the follies of his past, he’ll be all right.”

“Your uncle?”

Joscelyn smiled. “I was as astonished as he was, but it’s true. He realized what he had done by saddling you with his son. He wanted you to soften Edward, to make him a better man. But when Fairfax realized his son was a callous brute, he comprehended that what he had done was causing you pain.”

“And you.”

“Yes. He knew I loved you. He’s atoned for his decisions, Cathy. He’s given us the freedom to run away and be wed.”

Hugging Joscelyn, Catherine cried against his shoulder, and in that one sensitive spot on his neck, where the scars permitted feeling, he felt the warmth of her tears.

“Joscelyn?” called a voice from the other side of the gate. “If you’re there, make haste. Edward is home. I’ve ordered his door locked, but he stirs.”

“She hasn’t consented yet, uncle,” Joscelyn replied, smiling at her.

“Then what is your answer, Lady Catherine? Is my nephew worthy of you? You needn’t worry for your parents. There will be no breach of contract suit, and no re
criminations from my son. You’ll be safe and protected, and allowed to follow where your heart lies.”

“Cathy, I love you,” Joscelyn whispered. “I always have, and I know I always will. Our lives will be modest, nothing like yours would be if you married Edward—”

“Oh, hush,” she sniffed. “Yes, yes, yes, I’ll run to the ends of the world if only to be with you.”

“Not the ends of the world, my love, just Scotland.”

“Prepare the carriage, Lord Fairfax!”

There was a chuckle beyond the gate. “’Tis already done, my dear.”

And as Joscelyn rolled her beneath him and kissed her, they heard a whispering in the wind….

“The garden has entwined them with a kiss and an embrace. The young lovers have been set free, but for me, I still seek that magic maiden who will make the number three.”

RITES OF PASSION

by Kristi Astor

1

April 1919

IT’S THE GARDEN THEY SAY IS HAUNTED, NOT
the house itself.
Those words echoed in Emmaline Gage’s mind as she approached the walled garden in question, one trembling hand reaching toward the latch on the wooden gate. Pausing, she glanced at the copse of trees just beyond the gate, then toward the woods in the distance.

I can do this,
she assured herself. After all, Emmaline was a woman of science; she didn’t believe in haunts. Such nonsense didn’t frighten her, wouldn’t send her scurrying away. Not after everything she’d been through, the horrors she’d witnessed over the past several years.

Festering wounds and rotted, burned flesh. Amputations performed without adequate anesthesia. The cries of the suffering, followed by the silence of death.

Indeed, what were restless spirits compared to the horrors of war?

Emmaline pushed away the memories, refusing to walk that path in her mind. Instead, she took a deep breath and
forced herself to reach for the latch and slowly, cautiously, ease open the gate and take a step forward.

As soon as the gate closed behind her, a breeze stirred. The hem of her skirt flapped against her calves; a lock of hair blew across one cheek. The leaves rustled noisily while Emmaline scanned the garden, looking for the source of the voice she heard carried on the wind.

Come, sit beside me,
it seemed to say. She’d felt the pull toward the garden every day since her arrival at Orchard House a fortnight ago. Until now, she’d ignored it.

Feeling suddenly courageous, she took several steps down the uneven cobbled path that wound through the overgrown shrubs and wild plantings, more brown than green. Hastily, she scanned the rectangular space, but saw no one. Of course not. It was only her imagination. There was no voice, no intruder. There was nothing but the wind whistling over the crumbling stone walls, and through the treetops.

It was an eerie sound, to be sure, but not a supernatural one. She let out her breath in a rush, feeling relief coursing through her veins. And then she allowed herself to look around, walk the full perimeter, her heels clicking against the flagstones beneath her feet.

Despite the garden’s current state of neglect, it seemed to fill her with a sense of peace. There was something comforting, almost familiar about the space. Still, the garden needed a skilled hand, and she wasn’t certain she was up to the task.

Anticipating this, she’d tried to hire a gardener when she’d first arrived at Orchard House, but everyone in the village of Haverham had sworn there was no point, that in all the years that Mathilde Collins had lived there, no one had been able to make a go of it. The garden was beyond help, they said, and haunted besides—which was all stuff and nonsense. Emmaline shook her head in frustration, hurrying toward a
stone bench in a shady corner. She sank onto the seat with a sigh, running her fingers along the face of the Green Man etched into the rough, uneven stone of the bench’s back.

The garden was spacious, enclosed by high stone walls on all sides, save the one with the green wooden gate. Though she could still discern the garden’s original design, most everything was overgrown and wilted, with several square, fallow beds scattered about. Near the center of the garden stood a stone well, a tin watering pail perched on the rim.

On the far side of the well what looked like neat rows of rose bushes stood wilting in the sun, not a bloom in sight despite the season. Or was there? Squinting against the glare, Emmaline raised one hand to shield her eyes as she attempted to make out a spot of color there at the end of the second row. Rising, she hurried toward it, taking care as she picked her way across the path.

And there it was—one pale pink blossom clinging to a spindly, thorny branch. Her heart swelled with hope at the sight of it, and tears stung her eyes. She retrieved the pair of shears she’d slipped into her pocket, and clipped the bloom, bringing it to her nose to inhale its scent. A single tear slipped down her cheek, and she wiped it away as she made her way back to the bench.

It was a sign. Surely it must be. How else could she explain it? A single flower, no more, and so very familiar.

Her legs trembling, she sank back onto the bench, holding the delicate rose by its stem. She ran one fingertip along the bloom’s velvety petals as she allowed the memories to come flooding back.

Oh, Christopher! Why did you leave me all alone?
Come August, he would have been gone a year, killed at Amiens. Emmaline had been on the front herself at the time, assigned to a casualty clearing station at Allonville. They’d been
celebrating word that the Allied forces had broken through the German lines and advanced nearly twenty kilometers when she’d received the news of her husband’s death from Christopher’s field commander.

Their marriage had been brief, yet glorious. Emmaline had never expected to fall in love, to marry. She’d been twenty-three—a spinster—when she’d enrolled in the nursing program at Pennsylvania Hospital. When the war broke out in 1917, she’d volunteered to go to Europe, to join the Army Nurse Corps. After all, what was there to keep her in Pennsylvania?

Nothing. No one.
Her parents had died of influenza, one right after the other, and her brother—a drunken lout, by all accounts—had long since moved to New York, where he was no doubt getting himself into all kinds of mischief. And so she’d gone to Europe. She’d been stationed in Liverpool, working in an army hospital, when she’d first met Christopher Gage, a dashing young captain in Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, who was recuperating from a broken femur sustained in battle.

Captain Gage had long since been released from the hospital, but remained at the base on administrative duty while his leg continued to heal. He’d come to her ward one day to visit an old school chum who’d lost an arm to a German grenade, and it was love at first sight as far as Emmaline was concerned. He’d asked her to dinner that very same day, and began to court her in earnest.

He’d swept her entirely off her feet—figuratively speaking, of course—and they’d married in a quiet ceremony at the base chapel not two months later, with her wearing her dark blue serge street uniform in lieu of a wedding gown, and Christopher as dashing as ever in his khaki uniform. She’d carried a bouquet of pink roses identical to the one she now
held, and was attended by Christopher’s sister, Maria, who’d traveled up from London for the wedding.

Soon afterward, they’d each managed to secure a week’s furlough—seven glorious days—and enjoyed a brief holiday at a nearby inn before Christopher was sent back to the front, fully healed in both spirit and body. Emmaline had gone back to her nursing duties with a renewed zeal. Despite their separation, she’d been deliriously happy. She had hope. A future. And then, with one telegram, she’d lost everything.

Emmaline blinked away the tears that threatened to blur her vision. The past was immutable, entirely unchangeable. There was no point in dwelling on it, in reopening the wound and poking at it with a stick.

Glancing around the garden, at the house looming off in the distance, she reminded herself that this was her future—the future that Christopher had given her. Orchard House, a grand but somewhat crumbling Cotswold estate, Christopher’s sister had called it when she’d written to offer it to Emmaline. Apparently Christopher’s great-aunt Mathilde had lived there most of her life, and had left it to him, her favorite nephew, upon her death. Which meant it was Emmaline’s now, and Maria had insisted that she should have it.

Had she any other alternative, she might have refused to take ownership. But she had no family save her wastrel of a brother, no home, and she could not bear to go back to nursing. Not now. She had some money saved—all her earnings, tucked safely away—but even living frugally in London, she was sure to run through it far too quickly, and then where would she be? Back on the wards, she guessed, as she had no other skills, and no prospects.

No, Orchard House was home now. Only, when Maria had called it “crumbling,” she had not been exaggerating. Emmaline had spent her first fortnight tidying up, and the
house still wasn’t cleaned to her satisfaction. Perhaps it was a result of all those years living in hospital dormitories, but she could not countenance a spot of dust on any surface, linens that weren’t pristine and crisp, or an untidily made bed.

Thank goodness Mrs. Babbitt—Mathilde’s long-time housekeeper—had agreed to stay on, if only a few days a week. Beyond that, Emmaline would have to manage on her own. It wasn’t that she was incapable of keeping house; Emmaline and her mother had managed well enough during her youth in Pennsylvania. It was just that Orchard House was so very big. At one time, it had been the grandest house in all of Haverham, and would be still, had it been better maintained throughout the years.

Instead, furniture in various states of disrepair had been piled haphazardly in cobweb-filled rooms, and weeds grew up through cracks in the floorboards. In unused wings, exterior walls had begun to crumble. Only the house’s main wing remained fully intact and livable. It would be far too costly to restore Orchard House back to its original state. At best, Emmaline hoped to simply maintain its current condition.

Luckily, the estate encompassed a great deal of land, most of it parceled out to tenants whose rents would help pay the bulk of Emmaline’s expenses. She would keep the books herself; she was clever with sums and enjoyed such work. She would do her own cooking, too. She looked forward to it, really—the busywork. It would keep her mind occupied, help stave off the loneliness that had crept into her heart.

She knew she should be grateful for her current situation. There were so many war widows who were worse off than she was. She had a home, an income. Generous neighbors, she mentally added, remembering the basket of blueberry scones that Mrs. Talbot had brought over that morning. And she would always have her memories, she reminded herself.
Nothing, not even the passage of time, could take those brief, beautiful memories away from her. Smiling, she brought the fragrant bloom back to her nose.