Free A World Apart by Peter McAra Page B

little boy, now become a strapping young man.
    â€˜Ah, she be gone back to her cottage. She helps to care for her old father. He be a cripple nowadays. She’ll be put to scrubbing and cooking till she’s old enough for the dairy, I shouldn’t wonder.’
    â€˜But is she — ?’
    â€˜Don’t get no ideas about that girl into your head, Master Harry. Your father said if anyone caught you trying to find her, to tell him straight away or he’d sack them from his employ. We’re all dumb here.’
    Harry had fretted for weeks after his letter to Eliza remained unanswered. During his brief visits home, during which his father ceaselessly supervised his contacts with Agatha Thurber, he could scarcely court Eliza. He recalled again and again the blood vow they had made in their youthful innocence all those years before. Would Eliza remember? Would she plan to honour her vow? For now, he was handcuffed against being with the woman he would always love. He could but hope that she would remember him as he would always, always remember her.

CHAPTER 8
    â€˜I been meaning to tell you, Eliza.’ Hannah wiped her hands on her apron and fixed her daughter with a meaningful look. ‘Young Will Hardy, as works as a carpenter. I saw him giving you sheep’s eyes at church not so long ago.’ She stretched her arms wide. ‘Now there’s a decent, upstanding young man. And him with a good trade, as can one day make enough money to build his wife a cottage.’ She hesitated, then added a postscript. ‘A cottage fit for a large family.’ Eliza turned away. The last thing she needed now was a matchmaking scheme from her mother.
    For long months Eliza had dreamed of the kisses they might share if Harry ever returned. From village gossip, she had heard of his obligation to marry Agatha Thurber. Even if he might still love Eliza, they could never share love again. Yet her illogical instincts, her dreams, refused to accept the too-obvious. How many nights had she lain awake, sensing again the desperate hunger of their last kiss? How often had she relived the rapture that had surged through her body as he lay naked beside her by the lake on that last summer afternoon? For too many nights, she let those dreams sweep her to ecstasy, let them take over her mind.
    She feels the skin on her naked back tingle as she lies in the soft grass. She watches Harry slide closer. Watches as his hands reach towards her. Her whole body quivers as those hands touch her shoulder, her arm, her breast. She begs him to lie closer, so their nakedness touches from shoulders to toes. She opens her mouth to invite his kiss. Drown in the warm wetness of it. Beg for more, more…
    She had wondered often what making love with Harry would be like. What tidal waves of sensation might wash over them as she gave her body to him? What might the future hold for the two of them? What would it be like to bear his children?
    Even back then, in the months before that wretched afternoon, a part of her mind — the part fuddy-duddies would call common sense — had told her none of those girlish imaginings could ever be. Now, in the cold light of her workaday mornings, she had ordered herself to accept reality. But to spite her logic, her love had grown each day, a huge oak weathering the storms of winter, gaining strength from adversity.
    Now, as weeks turned to months, Eliza wrestled again with cold reality. Her dreams of a life with Harry must now become dust, blown away in a bitter wind. Before his departure, she had never understood her foster-mother’s too-often-repeated wisdom that peasants and gentry were cut from different cloth.
    â€˜The gentry are people, and we are people, Mother,’ she’d often remonstrated. ‘We have the same arms and legs and hands and feet. We think the same, we move the same.’ She remembered her joy at discovering the classics, of reading Shakespeare, of