Chapter Text
His rifle slung over his shoulder, Leonard was running. Not towards Adrien and his men, trying to contain the flames raging towards his homestead, but up the knoll where the pastor held Mathilde, explosions lighting the sky behind him.
He had helped the British take the Germans by surprise, and they would win their battle. While he was about to lose everything.
If he didn’t hurry.
If he didn’t tell his injured body to run through the pain. And not mind the scorching in his lungs. If he—
“Mathilde!” he yelled, locking eyes with her, and seeing her reach out to him while the pastor pulled her back. He lost her from view and pushed harder, running up the path circling the knoll. He heard screaming. He heard Mathilde call to him, her voice cutting through everything else: the angry crackling of the flames engulfing his farm, the distant shudder of canons awakening the enemy to their defeat, and the sound of his own breath.
“Mathilde!” he shouted once more. I’m coming, my love, he meant to scream. Hang on! Just, please, God!
And then there was frightened bleating and more gunshots, closer, but Leonard shut them out. He had to reach the top. He—
He heard Stoffel, pleading with someone. It had to be the pastor.
“It is God’s will!” Leonard heard the loathsome voice thunder back.
“No! No, it wasn’t! It isn’t! ” Stoffel cried again, just as he came into view, as Leonard was coming up to the top of the hill. The boy looked desperate, a rifle too big for him in his shaking arms.
“Atonement demands sacrifice!” the pastor hissed.
Finally reaching the oak tree, Leonard saw him too. Saw the clergyman command Stoffel to shoot. To shoot the lamb between them—Twinkle. What madness was this?
“You’re evil!” Stoffel cried, now seeing the pastor raising his own firearm, German-made, towards him. But, when the gunshot rang in the air, the pastor swivelled towards Leonard.
Exhaling, Leonard lowered his smoking rifle, and clenched his jaw. Stoffel called his name weakly, but Leonard kept his eyes on the pastor vacillating, a wet patch staining his habit, right over his heart. The man also looked down, at his fatal injury, and then, raising his eyes once more to Leonard, he… smiled, before toppling over.
That’s when Leonard saw her.
Mathilde.
Mathilde…
Lying in the grass, blood painting a blossom on her white frock.
“Master Leonard ,” Stoffel repeated, near him. Sobbing. “I couldn’t stop him.”
But Leonard was already rushing to Mathilde’s side, a silent moan choking him, his hands trembling over her body, over the stain growing under her left shoulder blade, before he put pressure on it, before he took her in his arms.
She felt loved.
In his arms.
Leonard raised his head and shouted to Stoffel to get help. But Mathilde didn’t hear him. It was quiet around them. Why was Leonard so scared? Couldn’t he hear the birds, and the wind, and the brook below?
She felt loved.
In his arms.
In the heat of summer, as warm as his caresses. As lulling as his voice, so deep, so mesmerising; its lilt, susurrating, hypnotising, like the sweet, sweet buzz of the furrowing bees gorging themselves all around them.
The hive was nearby, hiding in the trunk of their tree. Leonard knew how to plunge his hand inside, delicately, to gift her the bees’ nectar. Before she’d gift him hers.
“Mathilde! Sweetheart? My love, open your eyes!”
While he confessed his love. With words, immodest and true, rumbling his need for her. Irrepressible, imperious, too-long contained it hurt, it ached, it seemed to tear him apart, it—
Shutting his eyes and moaning, Leonard pulled Mathilde to him, lifting her from the bed of red flowers on which she lay.
Oh yes, she felt loved.
Amidst the poppies. His bearded cheek nuzzling the curve of her visage, his lips tasting her pulse, the strength of him crushing her gracile form—
Trying to stop the blood from staining more of her white dress.
The one she was so desperate to lose, the one he was ruffling, and ripping, so eager to free her.
“Mathilde, please!” My love, he kept thinking, mine, mine, mine. Not yours! Not Death’s! Feverishly. Like a prayer from which there could be no escape. To which he wanted her to surrender.
“Leonard, Leon—ugh!” Mathilde suddenly moaned, weakly, but breathing him in. He smelled of hay and sweat and sweet cloves. She remembered that smell well.
And then, as he pulled back, hearing her, the sun crowned his head with a golden halo. He blinked and looked at her, smiling through his tears.
“Hush, don’t speak,” he said. “Help is on the way,” he whispered, his deep, deep voice pushing the sounds of war away. “Stay with me, Mathilde. Please,” he repeated like a summons, an echo to the spell she had woven, on the first day of summer.
You are mine. Dear Lord, you are mine.
“Don’t speak now,” he murmured, embracing her tighter. But Mathilde didn’t listen.
“I…” she whispered, weakly. “I thought he’d let me go if he knew about the baby.”
The—
Mathilde’s words shot through Leonard, leaving him wordless and in shock, as he gazed down into her emerald eyes before his shaking hand went to hers, spread upon her belly, where she was still trying to protect their—
He nuzzled her, rocking back and forth, telling her to save her strength, but she shushed him again.
“I should have told you first,” she whispered, her lips brushing Leonard’s beard. “I love you so,” she sighed, her eyes beholding him before closing, not seeing Leonard call to her, pleading—
Just as Colonel Johnston was now reaching the knoll with one of his medics, and with Stoffel, helping soldiers with a stretcher. They had to drag Leonard away…
*
What a freeing sensation, Mathilde thought, floating above Leonard’s oak tree on their secret mound.
She couldn’t see her body, nor Leonard. Their knoll was unscathed by war, the flowers there waving in the wind with bees furrowing in their heart; the fires long forgotten, it seemed.
Stoffel was there though, all grown up but still a shepherd, with Twinkle’s progeny grazing about. It was his farm now, bequeathed by Leonard, though he never rebuilt the homestead, choosing to live in the honeymoon cottage, left vacant after the war. A garden grew in the ruins of the house. He saw to it himself, and filled it with berry bushes—in her honour.
The scene shifted and Mathilde was back in time. Just after the battle, when smoke still rose from the dying fires. She saw Adrien stepping out of the fuming cellar doors with most of her artwork, hidden there before the attack, as per his father’s instructions. Adrien lives, oh thank god! She thought. She saw him waving at the train station, with Alex next to him, in uniform and crutches, a large portfolio under one arm. Was the war over then? They were leaving and she felt herself smile, knowing her watercolours bound for Paris, to decorate their flat or be sold to collectors—to Colette, maybe, her favourite writer!
And then she saw a couple—no, a small group of siblings in modern garb she didn’t recognize, standing in what had once been Leonard’s barn, but now was hallowed ground. It seemed, they came to pay their respect.
A century after World War I left so much of Belgium scarred, muddied and barren, and another World War bruised it some more, Mathilde understood that grass and new forests grew eventually to quietly cover forgotten trenches. And, in the sunny fields, poppies smiled again without blood staining their petals.
Such beautiful pastoral scenes born anew in which she willed Leonard again, on their secret knoll, holding her in his arms, for her to reach the sun, his velvet voice calling her mon amour .
Without the medic taking her pulse.
She’d have to commit it all to memory and paint it soon.
***
“Mathilde?” Leonard said, softly stirring her. She must have fallen asleep, pausing for a moment—while she painted on the terrace of their Edwardian cottage.
“Leonard…” she answered drowsily, unaware she wasn’t dreaming anymore. But knowing there was no need to guard herself, while she looked at him like a woman in love.
She saw Leonard smile with pride, his tall frame eclipsing the sun. There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes: this is how she looked, in the aftermath of pleasure. He’d never tire of that look.
“You fell asleep,” he stated. Simply, tenderly—as was his way, always.
The man she loved… and who loved her back. Because, you see, she had wed him and not his son.
“Someone is hungry,” he rumbled, holding up the small bundle in his arms for her to see.
Mathilde smiled. Blossom, their daughter, was fretting, her little whimpers mixing with the chirping of birds nearby. It was spring again, and the air smelled of tender grass.
“Must one do everything?” Mathilde asked in jest, making Leonard laugh softly. But then, breaking character, she lifted eager arms towards him, wiggling her fingers, and he gently slipped the baby to her, stealing a kiss. She was wearing a lovely white dress, from which she partly freed an alabaster breast to pacify their daughter.
Humming with delight as he admired them, Leonard kissed Blossom’s blond head, before sitting down to look at Mathilde’s new painting.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he whispered, “it’s coming along so beautifully.”
Mathilde had indeed painted a pastoral scene but, in this one, the flowered meadow and set of rolling hills were of the landscape just beyond the canvas, its luminous beauty sprawling lazily in front of their eyes. The landscape from their new home.
In Sussex.
It’s where Colonel Johnston—or Lord Johnston, as he was still sometimes called—had his estate, and estates need running. He knew he’d find no better man than Leonard to turn it around and make it the Eden it once was, and could be again. In partnership with him. He considered it a small gesture when compared to Leonard’s sacrifice and the saving of his life.
It’s where they settled, Leonard and she, after the battle, after the fire, after losing the farm, because the war, it seemed, was only beginning and Leonard wanted Mathilde and their unborn child safe.
During the ensuing months, during which Mathilde was told to rest, to recover from her injury—a prescription she more or less followed, finding that long walks in the countryside and baking pies with Victoria plums or apples by the name of Royal Gala, was much better medicine—a certain irresistible farmer went to work. He gave older plots a rest, planting according to various soil properties, and gently redesigned the land to please the eye. The formal gardens became less so, enliven with flowers he knew would bloom all in a sequence, the following year: timid snowdrops running along the fence, daffodils prancing over bluebells and hyacinths, before tulips showed their brand new dresses; violets hiding in the shadows with lily-of-the-valley; and then, glorious peonies, before roses got to reign for months and months. He couldn’t wait for Mathilde to hoo and ahh! He mowed a pathway through the wild meadow to reach the brook running through the estate; he pruned the trees for them to frame the fields he knew would turn golden before harvest time; and next to their cottage, he made sure lilacs would thrive again underneath the nursery. It’s the first flowers their child would smell when she’d come into this world. While wisteria would run like ivy over the windows to the master bedroom, because its scent reminded him of Mathilde.
“You don’t regret it, do you?” she whispered suddenly, turning her glance from the vista to Leonard’s visage, her head resting on his shoulder.
She had thought him incapable of ever leaving his country. But he had. And though he succeeded in making their British estate even more of a paradise than the memories they cherished of Flanders, it wasn’t the land of his ancestors.
“My darling,” he rumbled amorously, huddling closer, with the air of someone who’s about to spin a tale—she knew him so well: “There was once a Roman general,” he began, “called Gaius Plinius Secundus; known to his friends as Pliny—well, actually, Pliny the Elder—”
“You don’t say?”
“Yes! And having travelled all over the Empire, never staying long in any port, he was asked, one day, if he ever missed his home. And do you know what his answer was?”
Playing along, Mathilde shook her head while Leonard caressed her little finger, around which Blossom had closed her tiny fist. “I never left mine. Home is where the heart is.”
“And you find yourself kin to this general, then?” Mathilde asked tenderly.
“Oh no!” Leonard answered, smiling behind his beard. “If Home is where the heart is, then I have found mine.”
He lowered his face to Mathilde, his glance slipping from her long-lashed emerald eyes to her rose-petalled lips and, pausing there, whispered: “I still mean it, my darling, you are my home.”
He kissed her then, and he kissed her later.
In their cherry orchard, with Blossom between them. In their modern bathroom, with hot running water, while she bathed with their baby, surrounded by bubbles flying about! Under the mistletoe covering their front porch, because one always should kiss under mistletoe regardless of who was cooing about. And in the soft violet light of night when, finally , their little one was sound asleep, and they could meet again in wonderment.
It’s then Leonard would take his time, disrobing Mathilde, his lips in search of the scar crowning the swell of her breast, the one letting him know she was truly there, in his arms.
The wound was in the shape and colour of a raspberry, so fitting for a pie faery!
Sometimes, it made him smile, rumbling dangerously upon her skin, to behold it and kiss it, before leaving its softly jagged edges in search of the other berry waiting to be licked and plucked, its juice quenching his thirst. At other times, kissing the scar, tears would veil his vision and Mathilde would need to hush him. Hush him with more kisses — I’m here my love, I’m right here —her hand caressing him to rev up those growls in her ear, and feel his hips, at long last claiming her; famished and triumphant! To make her whimper, to make her arch her back for him to feast upon her bosom and let his arms lift her to better mate. She’d never tire of his strength, nor his tenderness; her scruffy, virile, Green Man of mythical lore!
“Come for me; let me feel you,” he’d whisper hoarsely, barely holding in moans of pleasure as he took her passionately, to wed her anew.
How glorious it felt, harvesting his desire, this man she had not dared look upon with amorous eyes until it was almost too late.
Until war was upon them, and threatened to take everything away.
Leonard Lambert. The man she had always loved.
But she was in his arms now.
She was in his arms.
On their knoll. In their bed. Of flowers or linens.
And he made her feel loved.
He made her feel alive.
Forevermore.
