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Updated: June 5, 2025
There is a frightful racket of music and parrots and German, with old Handel bellowing and the King eternally clinking one piece of gold on another." Gilbert Penny listened with a tightening of his well shaped lips. "It's into that chamber pot we pour our sweat and iron," he asserted. Ludowika Winscombe studied him.
He watched a hawk, diminutive on the pale immensity above. "Heavens," Ludowika finally spoke, "how wonderful ... just to sit, not to be bothered by by things. Just to hear the water. Far away," she said dreamily; "girl." From where he lay he could see her arms, beautiful and bare, lost in soft Holland above the elbows; he could see the roundness of her body above the lowest of stays.
Her husband lay with his eyes closed, his head bowed forward on his chest, as if in sleep. At irregular intervals small, involuntary contractions of pain twitched at his mouth. At times, too, he muttered noiselessly. Extraordinary. Ludowika and Felix Winscombe and himself, Howat Penny. A world peopled only by them; the silence of the room dropped into infinite space, bottomless time.
"It will be difficult." His face became grim, but he made no direct reply. A silence fell on the room through which vibrated the blows of the trip hammer at the Forge. The day was grey and definitely cold; a small cannon stove glowed in the counting house; but Ludowika kept mostly to her room. She sent him a note by the Italian, and Howat eyed the fellow bowing in the doorway.
They might live in one of the outlying stone dwellings at the Forge ... for the present. He was glad that Gilbert Penny, that he, was rich. Ludowika could continue to dress in rare fabrics, to step in elaborate pattens over the common earth. That could not help but influence, assuage, her in the end.
He would make her forget the gardens of fireworks and scraping violins; but forget or not she was his ... Ludowika Penny. Jasper Penny stood at a window of his bed room, his left arm carried in a black silk handkerchief, gazing down at the long, low roof of Myrtle Forge, built by his great, great grandfather Gilbert over a hundred and ten years before.
Then he would crush her against his heart. Felix Winscombe raised up on an elbow, distorting the row of sanguinary Indians. Ludowika moved to the edge of the bed, and put a firm, graceful arm about him. A grey shadow of pain fell on Mr. Winscombe's features. The silence was absolute. He seemed to be waiting in an attitude of mingled dread and resolution.
Nothing else stood before its flood; all thought of Ludowika's final happiness was lost with the other detritus. The tense closing of his hands had symbolized his feeling, his intent. He held her in a manner as nakedly primitive as the inchoate sexuality of the emotion that had engulfed him. Ludowika did not appear for supper, and he was possessed by a misery of vague apprehensions.
We'll get your sister to play Belshazzar and pretend we're across the green from St. James." A mood darker than any he had lately known settled over him. It was natural for Ludowika to be lonely, at first; but in a little she would grow to love the wild like himself. She must. The Province was to be her life.
Ludowika displayed a grave interest in the details of the house and iron at Myrtle Forge; he explained the processes that resulted in the wrought blooms despatched by tons in the lumbering, mule-drawn wagons. They explored the farm, where she listened approvingly to the changes he proposed making, kitchen gardens to be planted, the hedges of roses and gravelled paths to be laid for her.
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