Once Upon a Tower (29 page)

Gowan never came that day, which was a relief, of course. Nor the following day, nor the day after.

If Edie had learned how to lock away her grief during the day, she wasn’t so successful at night. The chasm in her heart seemed to open the moment she put her cello down. But the steely discipline of her childhood had snapped into place. If her father were to drop everything and head to Scotland—as she was quite certain he would do when he received her letter—he should be with them in another week or ten days.

She merely had to survive until then.

Thirty-six

I
t took two days for Gowan to find a decent man to appoint as justice of the peace. Everything in him longed to return to Edie. But he had come to the conclusion that he couldn’t, not quite yet.

He had come to her frozen, like snow, but he was learning to be the man she deserved. He was making time for her, for their marriage. In addition to the justice, he’d appointed a new bailiff to replace the one he’d dismissed. This one was young—just his own age, in fact. He would make mistakes, but he would learn from them.

There was only one more thing that Gowan had to master.

That night he bathed grimly, handling his body with the same exacting distaste that he had felt since leaving the castle. He called for a carriage, and a short time later he was ensconced in the warm darkness of the Devil’s Punchbowl.

No one in the pub had any idea who he was. He’d left his fine clothes at the castle; he was wearing sturdy Scottish woolens that beat back the rain and sleet, but rarely graced the shoulders of a London gentleman. And he’d come without servants, sending his driver to the stables to keep himself and his horses warm.

“What’ll you have, then?” the bartender asked, giving him an indifferent look.

“Whisky,” Gowan said, remembering the way Edie’s hair took on the burnished color of liquor in the candlelight. He pushed the memory away. This smoky place had nothing to do with Edie. He felt as if he were on one side of an enormous loch, and she was tucked away on the other.

After a second glass of whisky, he had started to feel warmer. It’s easier to bear loneliness when your vision is blurred.

“I know who you are,” the cottager next to him said suddenly. “Yer the duke!”

He grunted.

“The image of yer father.”

Gowan turned away. There were barmaids, of course. Pretty ones, too. Bonny girls with red cheeks and sweet giggles. Their bosoms glistened like butter in the lamplight.

He smiled, sharklike, at the prettiest one of all. She was perhaps twenty, with no wedding ring. Not that he cared if she was married. It occurred to him that he was punishing himself, and he pushed it aside.

He was done with blundering. He wouldn’t return to his wife until he knew his way around a woman’s body as surely as he did the loch.

The barmaid came to him as easily as a caught fish, threading her way through the crowd until she was standing between his sprawled legs, smelling like spilled beer and warm woman. Her smile had a cheerful lust to it.

She ran her hand up his thigh. He’d always told himself that no woman would be able to resist his rank, and therefore he couldn’t take advantage of an offer. He realized now that his thinking had been flawed. This woman knew nothing of his rank. What she wanted was the thick muscles she was caressing. She smiled more deeply. “My name’s Elsa,” she said, her fingers slipping inward.

“Gowan.” He leaned back against the bar, and let her do as she wished.

“You’re the brooding type, aren’t you,” she breathed. “I like that. Big and brooding.”

Her fingers slid toward his groin and his hand shot out instinctively, stopping her caress.

“It
is
a bit public here,” she said, her smile widening. The smile had nothing to do with his rank, he noted dispassionately.

“Would you like to come upstairs for a bit of sport?” she said, leaning in and nipping his ear. Her large breasts brushed his chest. “I can take a wee bit of time to meself.” She turned her head to kiss him and he jerked back.

“No kisses.”

“Perhaps I can change your mind,” Elsa said with a giggle.

He stood up and took her hand.

“Like father, like son,” the man next to him muttered, just as the barmaid pulled Gowan away from the stool. Gowan gave him a look. The man snorted. “Aye, and he had a cracked look about his eyes, just like you.”

He hunched back over his glass, and Gowan followed the barmaid’s round arse through the crowd.

Thirty-seven

E
die was slowly coming to accept that Gowan might not come home for weeks. He didn’t want to see her. She represented a failure so absolute that he couldn’t bear to return. He understood that she would never be what he wanted in the bed. Or he had decided that he could never trust her to tell the truth.

Tears made her throat scratchy, she discovered. They took away her appetite. It was easier to just push it all out of her mind and play the cello for hours. She kept playing even when her bow arm was tired, not wanting silence because her thoughts were loud enough.

Her father would come in a week or so. Meanwhile, the servants moved back and forth from the castle and the tower like toiling ants. She grew unexpectedly fond of Bardolph. He never showed by the slightest gesture that he disapproved of her move, though—as Layla said—perhaps that was because he disapproved of everything.

He stationed a footman at the base of the tower during the day so that she could easily send a note to Layla or summon Mary. And he visited twice a day. One morning he told her that there had been a quarrel over the footmen’s two-hour rotations at the tower.

“Why on earth?” she asked.

Bardolph’s mouth pursed. “The Scottish are not philistines, Your Grace. They wish to hear you play.”

Later, Layla told her that there was often a group under the tower window, a group that grew every day.

So Edie had her first audience. They never made a sound, so she ignored them, working over and over on a few measures until she was satisfied with it before she allowed herself to play an entire piece.

One day she heard Layla calling breathlessly, and threw open the window. Her stepmother was running down the hill, hand on her side, waving a letter.

“What is it?” Edie called down.

“Your father,” Layla panted. “He’s coming!”

“Yes, I asked him to come.” Even as she said it, Edie’s heart plunged to the bottom of her feet. He would take her away, of course. That’s what she wanted.

“No—no, he doesn’t seem to know of your letter!” Layla cried, flattening the page out. “He must have already left by the time yours arrived. He says he’s coming because he wants—he misses me!” Her face was shining. “He’s only three or four days away.”

“How wonderful! He’ll be so happy to meet Susannah.”

“Yes,” Layla breathed. Then she glanced down at herself with horror. “I’ve grown even plumper!”

Edie laughed. “You look wonderful.” Layla looked like a rosy, curvy young matron who loved her daughter and her husband, and had no worries about mistresses named Winifred.

Layla was reading the letter again. “He’s coming to take me home,” she said, brushing away a tear. “He says he didn’t realize until I was gone how much he loved me.” Edie pulled her head inside the window and ran down the stairs.

“Oh, Lord,” Layla cried as Edie opened the tower door, “what if he changes his mind?”

“He won’t,” Edie said. “Father adores you, Layla. It may have taken him a while to realize it, but he does.”

“We can all go home together,” Layla said. “It’s like a dream.” She crushed the letter to her bosom. “I read the letter ten times before I came to find you, because I couldn’t believe it. But I know his writing. He meant it.”

“He did,” Edie said, nodding.

“He says there is no Winifred and there never has been one. It felt so terrible to be the only one who cared,” Layla said, sniffing. “There’s nothing worse than being in a marriage when the other person despises you, rather than loves you.”

Edie’s heart gave a terrific thump—and then started again.

“Oh, darling, I didn’t mean you,” Layla cried. “You’re so brave about everything!” They had spent many hours in the last days dissecting Gowan. Layla hated him. Edie felt more desperately in love with him than she had imagined possible. She spent her nights alternately crying and waking up in a sensual daze, reliving the night when she had played the cello for him and he . . .

He had kissed her in that intimate fashion. She could have kissed him in the same way. In her dreams, her fingers skimmed every inch of his body.

Her eyes had been closed a great deal of the time when they were bed together, but she’d seen enough. The memory of the way he looked in Nerot’s Hotel when he climbed from the bed and turned away from her kept coming back to her. The twist of his body, with its pure strength and beauty . . .

Inevitably, she would remember the way his dark eyes looked at her, as if she was everything he wanted in the world. And then she would dissolve into tears.

Just then Bardolph rounded the path and came to join them. “As I’m sure Lady Gilchrist has told you,” Edie informed the butler, “my father will be here in a few days. I expect he’s traveling with his valet.”

Bardolph bowed. “I shall prepare a room for Lord Gilchrist.”

“We will remain only a couple of days. When he is rested, we will all leave. We shall require two other carriages, one for my cello and another for our maids and Susannah’s nursemaid.”

It was the first time she’d seen a true reaction on the factor’s face. His eyes went blank and his entire face slackened. “What?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Are you quite all right, Bardolph?”

He bowed, recovering himself.

“I think we’ll need three more carriages, not two more,” Layla put in. “I have a good deal of luggage, and Susannah has a great many toys that she will not want to leave behind.”

Edie smiled at that.

“The village,” her stepmother said guiltily. “It is such a nice place to visit of an afternoon. And once I determined that Susannah needed new dresses, it began to be as easy to pay a visit there as to summon the seamstress to us.”

“Three carriages, if you can spare them,” Edie said, turning to Bardolph. “We will, of course, send them back directly once we reach London.”

Bardolph had turned an odd color, like a weathered piece of parchment. “Are you quite certain you’re all right?” she repeated.

“Yes, Your Grace,” he said, with that withering tone she hadn’t heard recently.

She nodded and he left, walking quickly back up the path.

“Just when I think that man is turning human, he shows a reptilian side,” Layla commented. “I have to say, though, I’ve never seen anyone work so hard. He’s up at dawn and never sleeps.”

It started raining again, only pattering down. Edie drew Layla inside and they began to climb the stairs. “Who would have thought that Scotland was so damp? I thought that England was famous for rain, but I’ve never seen so much water in my life.”

“It’s very snug in your tower,” Layla said. “You should see how chilly the nursery becomes on occasion. I have moved the majority of Susannah’s toys into another room while . . .” And she talked on while Edie tried to imagine herself climbing into a carriage. Leaving the tower, Bardolph, the servants who populated the castle. And Gowan.

The fact that he hadn’t cared to return or even to send a message made it easier. If her problem-solving husband had wanted to solve their marriage . . .

He would have returned. Layla had turned completely against Gowan; she kept saying that a different man would come along. But every time Edie tried to imagine such a thing, she saw Gowan’s eyes and the way he used to look at her.

The truth was heavy in her soul: she would not love any man other than Gowan. So, for her, it would have to be music.

Thirty-eight

I
t was time to go home. The loch was whipped by rain, its edges beaten into froth by a brutal wind. All this water would be flowing to the Lowlands, Gowan thought absently. It didn’t matter. His evacuation plans for the villages bordering the Glaschorrie were in place, and Bardolph would see to it they were carried out, if need be. He would leave the next morning.

The door opened, and Gowan’s head jerked up. The daily report had arrived. This week Bardolph hadn’t written a word about Edie or Susannah, or even Lady Gilchrist, although he reluctantly found himself thinking of her as Layla again. It was hard to loathe Layla, even knowing that she thought him less than a man. He kept hearing Edie’s sob, “She’s like a mother to me.” Would he condemn her for telling her mother?

At the time, that word had whipped his rage higher. But it was unreasonable to loathe mothers, and he knew it. Stupid, really.

After reading Bardolph’s report, Gowan summoned the groom who brought it from Craigievar. The man reported that everyone in the castle talked about nothing but the duchess’s music.

Gowan frowned, confused. “Do they hear it from the corridor?”

The groom had spent only an hour or so in the castle before turning back. But his understanding was that Her Grace put on a recital every afternoon, somewhere other than the castle. Down by the river, he thought. Anyone who was free went along to listen.

Edie was holding recitals for his servants. The idea that his own footmen were seeing her with her legs spread on either side of her cello, ogling her as she closed her eyes and swayed with the music . . . It opened up a gaping pain in his chest.

The feeling wasn’t a new one. One night, when he’d been a boy of around six or seven, his father had caught his arm, gripping it so tightly that Gowan began to cry, even though he knew better than to show even the slightest weakness in front of his father. Sure enough, the sight had infuriated the duke. He had gripped him harder, twisting the skin so that Gowan cried out . . . and then his dog, his brave, loyal Molly, had barked and leapt in the air and bitten the duke’s cheek. It was just a scratch, but it didn’t heal properly, and His Grace carried the scar to the day he died.

Gowan never forgot the moment when his father took Molly by her hind legs and threw her far into the raging river. He saw her head for a moment, and then she was gone.

He had walked the river for hours the next day. Bardolph was a young footman at that time, assigned to keep an eye on the heir. They walked and walked; Bardolph never suggested they turn back, and he never said a word about the fact that Gowan stumbled along crying.

They never found her. She could have been swept out to sea, all the way. She could have washed up somewhere . . .

He didn’t believe that, though. He was no good at believing in fairy tales, even at that age. He’d seen her head go down, and he hadn’t seen it come back up.

The memory brought the pain back as if it had happened yesterday, though surely it was sacrilege to compare one’s wife to a dog. Molly had been a gallant, foolish creature. She’d loved him and been loyal to him. She had no resemblance to his will-o’-the-wisp wife, who wasn’t
his
and would never be
his
.

And yet he was like a man possessed. It didn’t matter what Edie had done or not done. He loved her. It was as if part of him, some vital part, was cut off merely because he couldn’t walk into a room and see her.

The butler opened the door again just as he turned away from the rain-streaked window. “Your Grace, there is an urgent missive from Mr. Bardolph.”

An electric shock went from the roots of Gowan’s hair to his ankles. Nothing was ever urgent except death.

Death was always urgent.

He ripped the letter open so fast that a corner of paper tore off and spun to the ground. He read it. Read it again, read it a third time. Bardolph must be mistaken. Edie couldn’t
leave
him. What was she thinking? She couldn’t leave him. They were married.

He had considered leaving
her
, to be sure. But the idea had evaporated twenty minutes from the castle. Even the very first night, lying in an inn on his way to the Highlands, it had taken all his considerable willpower not to return to the castle and beg her to let him back into her bed.

His attention spun back to the paper in his hand. Layla, Susannah, and Edie were all leaving. His family.
No.
He threw the letter down and strode from the room.

“Of course, Your Grace,” his butler said a moment later, bowing. “The coaches will be ready early in the morning.”

Gowan looked out the window. It was still early afternoon, but the sky was an ugly gray. “I’m leaving now.”

The butler blinked. “I could have a carriage ready in two hours . . . an hour . . . without your valet?” The last part squeaked out, but Gowan was already striding down the corridor.

He had horses stabled all along the road. If he rode steadily, trading horses, he could be at Craigievar in thirty hours, give or take.

Fifteen minutes later, he was warmly dressed and watching with irritation as his stable master checked the saddle. “He don’t like rain,” the man advised. “He might spook, so watch your seat, if you don’t mind my saying so, Your Grace.”

He did mind. He never fell from a horse. Ever.

There’s always a first time for everything.

A
fter three days, Edie finally gave in and asked Bardolph if he had informed the duke of their departure. Bardolph managed to convey with a bow that he disapproved of Gowan’s continued absence, which was consoling, in an odd way.

By the following morning, the ground had become spongy all the way down the hill to the tower, and the river had broadened and quickened. It was no longer a fat, lazy snake: now it rushed—with purpose. Its murmur had turned to a loud conversation, and her cello wound through the music of it as if the river played counterpoint.

Lord Gilchrist’s carriage drew up at the castle around noon. Edie saw it from the tower, but she decided that Layla and her father needed privacy. They would come to her when they were ready. She added a little prayer that her father would love Susannah as much as she and Layla did.

A couple of hours later she heard laughter and looked out her window. They were walking down the path, all three of them. And Susannah was holding the earl’s hand, bobbing beside him like a very small cork.

In the end, she had no need to inquire about happiness. Layla’s face was shining—and so was Lord Gilchrist’s.

“He is sorry,” Layla whispered, while Edie’s father was showing Susannah the strings to pluck out a children’s song,
Frère Jacques
, and teaching the little girl to sing it. “I said I was sorry, and that I hadn’t meant to flirt with other men. And that he was the only man I’d ever loved, and ever would love. And he . . .”

Edie stopped her with a kiss. “That’s between the two of you, darling.”

Layla pulled her into her arms. “You are my best and wisest friend.”

They went back to the castle after a bit, all four of them. On the way up the path, Susannah pulled Layla ahead, and Edie’s father said, very quietly, “I’m so sorry, my dear. I made a terrible choice when I accepted Kinross’s offer.”

Edie’s eyes filled with tears. “No, you didn’t. I love him.”

He shook his head. “You are coming home, and I shall have this marriage dissolved if I have to speak to the king himself. I
shall
speak to the king himself. And I fancy that he will respect my wishes.”

“You must rest after the journey,” Edie said, not managing to squash the errant hope that Gowan might still come, that she might see him once more.

“I can rest in the carriage,” her father replied. “It’s time to go home, Edie.”

And though it made her heartsick, she nodded. It was foolish to be shut up in a tower, barricaded against the husband who didn’t bother to knock on the door.

After an early supper, she returned to the tower and locked the door against a man who never came, pulling herself up the stairs with a sense of leaden exhaustion. Layla and her father were blindingly happy. Clearly, they had talked—
really
talked. What’s more, Edie had the distinct feeling that Susannah would bind them together like glue. Layla’s restlessness was gone, and her eyes were luminescent with happiness.

The rain beat against her windows like an unanswered voice, so finally she opened them to the cool air and crawled into her bed. It was only eight o’clock, but she fell asleep listening to the call of the river as it rushed to the sea.