The Lovers

Richard Courcy strode from his study and across the dining room. It was full of strangers this evening, it frequently was these days. Nobody appeared to notice Richard despite his strange clothes and wild looks. As always, he headed down the passage and through the old doorway out into the yard and the storm. It had been raining since day-break.

His horse was waiting for him near the stables. It was a huge, black stallion with a white mark on his forehead that had determined his name – Flash.

Richard mounted Flash and rode out of the yard past the expensive cars parked there. Once in the lane the horse started trotting. Richard spurred him some more and they galloped down the lane towards the village. How many times had he done this journey, on nights like this, to collect that wretched girl?

At the edge of the village, Flash slowed to a trot at the cross-roads and then a walk as they moved quietly along the lane and into the deserted streets. At the far-side of the village, Richard reined-in the horse and they waited where the oak tree had been.

Soon Richard saw her come running out of the alleyway, laughing and cursing the weather. She smiled as she reached him and jumped onto the wall, then onto Flash behind Richard. 'Let's go', she whispered. He turned the horse and they headed out of the village towards the lodge in the woods as usual.

She was holding him tight and whispering in his ear. He urged the horse on and soon they reached the stream through the woods. Normally the horse could easily wade across, but not tonight. Because of the rain, the normally placid stream had been transformed into a roaring river twice as wide as normal. Richard turned the horse back, then turned again. They were going to jump it. 'No!', she screamed, too late. Flash hesitated then took off. He stretched out as if trying to feel for the far bank. He came down short of it, his legs vanishing beneath the torrent and his head hit the bank with a skull-splitting crash. The girl fell from the horse and was carried back towards the bank they had just come from. She grabbed a branch an pulled herself out of the water.

Flash fell over into the raging mass and slid under the surface. Richard fought to get free but was trapped by the weight of the horse pinning his leg, foot still in the stirrup, to the rocky bed of the stream. He struggled until his strength ebbed away, he couldn't reach the surface to breathe. He gave up the struggle and water filled his lungs.

The girl watched from the bank, then turned and fled silently back to the village.

It had been the woodsmen who found the dead horse in the stream in the morning. Then a few yards away was the half submerged body of Richard Courcy. They got him out of the stream onto a hand-cart and pushed him back to the village. There they transferred his body to a farm cart and took him up to the hall.

Two days later he was buried in the family vault in the village church. On the morning of the funeral, the village baker looked out of his door through the early morning mist towards the oak tree and saw something hanging from it. He wiped the dough from his hands and walked towards the tree. As he got closer he broke into a run and started screaming as he saw the lifeless body of his only daughter with a rope around her neck.

After Richard's funeral, much later in the day, by the light of candles and lanterns, she too was laid to rest. Nearly everybody from the village watched silently as she was buried, not in a fine tomb, not even with a cross, but in the lane between the crossroads and the village. None of them, not even Richard, knew of the child she was carrying – Sir Richard Courcy's child.