Once Upon a Tower (30 page)

Thirty-nine

G
owan rode into the stables around nine in the evening and dismounted, throwing the reins to a sleepy stable boy. He entered the castle through the kitchens so he wouldn’t be seen by any footmen, who would certainly inform Bardolph.

The great oven fires were banked for the night, and no one stirred except the kitchen cat, whose slitted eyes gleamed yellow from the hearth. Gowan grabbed a lamp and lit it, then went up the servants’ stairs and along the corridor. Not to his bedchamber: to hers.

He pushed open the door to find the room perfectly dark. The curtains were drawn, and the fireplace cold. The entire room was cold, far too cold. And it was empty. It even smelled empty, as if no one had inhabited it for a long time. He put the lamp on the mantel, noting indifferently that his hand was shaking. A sickening fear bloomed in his gut. He stood for one terrible moment as he realized what he was seeing.

She was gone. The bed was stripped and the room was empty.

There was only one object left in the chamber: the book of poetry. His soul roared with pain and his stomach churned as if he might vomit. He walked over, picked up that damned volume, and slipped it into his pocket.

Still, he had calculated the days since Bardolph’s dispatch arrived in the Highlands. He should have been able to catch her before she left for England. But she hadn’t left this room mere hours ago. There was dust on the hearth. She’d been gone for days.

He strode from the room, his face rigidly set. When he reached the ground floor, two footmen sprang from their chairs, alarm written on their faces.

“When did the duchess leave?” he demanded, his voice growling out of him in its new, angry cadence.

One gaped; the other said, “Leave, Your Grace, leave?”

They were idiots.

“When did she leave for England?” His voice rose to a bellow. “When did my wife leave me?”

E
die dreamed that the tumbling roar of the Glaschorrie River summoned her. The impossibility of it woke her: the river couldn’t be calling her by name. But even awake, she heard her name again. She went to the window and leaned out. Night had fallen, and although it was spitting a bit, the rain had let up considerably. Gowan stood below her, surrounded by darkness.

She opened her mouth, but no words came out.

“The door is locked!” he shouted up at her. “Can you come down and let me in?”

Edie pulled herself together. She had prepared herself for this moment; she knew what to say. “I will not talk to you in the middle of the night, Gowan,” she called down. “Go to bed and we can talk in the morning, before I leave.”

“Edie. You cannot— You cannot mean to leave me.” He didn’t shout the sentence, but she heard every word clearly. So it was going to be like that. He didn’t care to speak to her until he thought his possession was slipping from his grip. Bardolph’s message must have convinced him to come.

“Good night, Gowan.”

“You were planning to return to England without even speaking to me?” The disbelief in his voice would have made her laugh, if she didn’t feel like crying.

“We could have spoken any time in the past two weeks, had you chosen to return.”

“I was coming back; you knew that. I thought . . . I thought we might talk, Edie. Really talk.”

“Well,” Edie said, disappointment pinning her to the ground like a lead weight, “the next time you want to talk to your wife, Gowan, you’ll have to give her more than an hour at dinner and a visit whenever you can spare the time from your estates. That would be your
next
wife.”

“I don’t want another wife!”

Of course, she couldn’t flee in the morning without speaking to him. A marriage, even as brief and turbulent a marriage as theirs, had to be respected. “We will speak in the morning. I’m sure my father will agree to delay our trip back to London for another day.”

“You cannot leave me!” His voice cut like a knife through the sound of the river.

Edie forced her icy, wet fingers to uncurl from the windowsill. “It’s over, Gowan. I am leaving.” She closed the window. And latched it.

G
owan stared up at the tower. She had refused. His whole body ached from the beating he had taken, riding for hours, being thrown off, landing in the ditch. His horse had fled, and he’d walked for an hour before reaching a village where he could get his ribs bound up and buy another mount—for approximately three times what the beast was worth. Then he’d ridden for another five hours, ribs be damned.

But Edie had locked the door, and then the window. A minute later he stalked back into the castle, shaking water from his cloak like a dog. He was on his way up the stairs, when he walked straight into Layla. She stopped short, her mouth falling open.

“Good evening,” he said, a streak of humiliation going down his backbone. This woman knew—

The thought died at the look in her eyes. “
You!
” she said, stabbing him in the chest with her finger. “I want to talk to you.”

Layla burned like a torch as she swept ahead of him into the study.

“My husband will have his own piece to say to you,” she announced, pivoting to face him as he closed the door behind them.

It seemed that his inadequacies as a husband were public knowledge.

“How dare you,” Layla cried, “how
dare
you act in such a despicable way to your wife!” She advanced on him like an avenging angel. “How could you say such disgraceful things to someone who is so dear, and so loving? You are a contemptible man, Kinross. Contemptible!”

It was as if one of the Greek Furies had whirled into his study: he examined her with as much bemusement as he might an ancient goddess. “Edie and I have much to discuss.”

“That is an understatement.”

“I want to make the point that I am not appreciative of the role you have played in my marriage,” he stated.

A flicker of guilt went through her eyes. “I should never have taught Edie as I did. I apologize.”

“It was not helpful,” he said, picking his words carefully. “But with time to think, I have come to realize that Edie considers you her mother. I am certain that she and I will be able to forge a new—”

“You idiot!” Layla’s contemptuous voice cut his off. Whatever remorse she had felt was clearly exhausted. “You have no idea what you did to her, have you?”

“We argued,” Gowan replied, anger flaring in his gut again. “That is not unheard of in marriage, Lady Gilchrist. You yourself experienced some difficulties.”

“My husband and I have
never
said the things to each other that you said to Edie. Believe me, Jonas could strip me bare of every inch of self-respect, if he wished. But he would never do so, not only because he loves me, but also because he is a
decent
man.”

A moment of silence elapsed before Gowan could speak. “How dare you say such a thing to me!” he shouted, every semblance of civilization leaving him.

She didn’t even flinch, just crossed her arms over her chest and raked him with her scornful gaze. “Now I see the man whom Edie described. You can’t frighten me with your temper. I have my faults. But I would never, not in million years, do to any human what you did to Edie.
Never.
”

What she was saying finally filtered through to Gowan past the haze of pure rage. “What in the bloody hell are you talking about? You make it sound as if I hit her. I did nothing to Edie!”

Her eyes bored into his. “Oh? You did nothing? The woman I found in your wake, stripped of all self-respect, convinced that she was a failure as a mother and a lover: that wasn’t your work? Because I think it was!”

He stared at her.

“She may have pretended to have an orgasm; so what? You were so oblivious that you didn’t notice. Where’s the greater crime?”

She wasn’t saying anything that Gowan hadn’t told himself.

“You idiot,” Layla said. “You sneering, despicable—”

“You’re beginning to repeat yourself.”

“You made her feel as if she’d done something disgusting, after the first orgasm of her life. You told her she lay like a pancake, when she had no idea what else she was supposed to be doing in bed. Now she thinks she’ll never experience pleasure without drinking herself silly—because
you
told her so! Even worse, you convinced her that she had no ability to be a mother—Edie! You said that to Edie, who is one of the most loving, giving people I know.”

“She had written me a letter and told me that she didn’t want children.” But even as he said it he remembered that wasn’t quite right: she had written that she didn’t want children immediately. “And when she met Susannah, it was obvious . . .”

“You
fool!
” Layla cried. “Susannah is mine; Edie didn’t even have a chance. She’d never held a baby, did you know that? Her father didn’t allow her to play with other children; it was too important to preserve that talent of hers. She could have won Susannah over with time, but no, you had to give the child away without even discussing it! Then you left your own wife crying on the floor, having stripped her of everything that made her a woman.”

Gowan’s lips had grown numb. He just stared at her, silently.

She came closer and poked her finger into his chest again. “After which, you slammed your way out of the room, upset because you had bought damaged merchandise. As if
you
, a tedious, stupid, despicable bureaucrat, were good enough to touch the hem of Edie’s skirt.
You
, who didn’t even know what a cello was.”

Gowan couldn’t speak.

“You’re a philistine,” Layla said, her voice dropping when he didn’t fight back. “You married the most beautiful, loving woman in all England—aye, and Scotland, too—and when you learned just how inadequate you were in bed, you blamed her. Let me tell you something, Duke.” Another poke.

He felt as if he were hardly breathing, as if only scorching air was reaching his lungs.

“The only reason you haven’t heard the word
inadequate
from the women who preceded Edie in your bed is your title. That’s it. Don’t fool yourself by thinking that
Edie
is incapable of pleasure.
You
are the problem. And those satisfied women you’re comparing her to?” She actually slapped the table in her rage. “Every single one of them lied to you.”

Dimly, Gowan perceived that Edie had apparently never told her stepmother of his lack of experience. Not that it mattered.

Layla’s lower lip was quivering. “You smashed her as if she were a piece of china that you bought in a street market, and then you left her with a shattered heart. All she’s done since you left is play her cello—because you made her believe that’s all she’s good for. She’s lost so much weight that she looks as if she has consumption. She’s convinced that she will be a terrible mother, and that no man will ever love her. She’ll probably never be able to take pleasure in the bed, because you showed your disgust. You despicable—” But she was sobbing now, and the rest of her words were lost.

Gowan didn’t move. Her portrait of him was so ugly that he was rooted to the spot, dimly aware that he’d gone white.

Layla had a hand braced on the table, her head hanging, weeping. The door opened. There was a second’s pause, and Lord Gilchrist rushed straight past him. He gathered Layla into his arms and Gowan heard him murmur something as he pulled her head against his shoulder. It seemed the Gilchrists were together again, not that he cared.

Had he done that to Edie? What had he done? He began filtering back through his memories. Suddenly, he remembered the expression of horror in her eyes when he announced that she had no skill with children, the way she wept as she insisted that she had tried with Susannah, the mute grief in her eyes.

He remembered shouting his father’s loathsome comment about pancakes, but he hadn’t meant it to apply to her. She had twisted in his hands like a live flame, driving him mad with every catch in her voice, with—

He made her feel as if she had disgusted him?

Lord Gilchrist delivered his wife tenderly into a chair, turned, and slammed Gowan under the jaw with a blow so solid that he crashed to the floor like a felled tree without time to twist sideways and protect his left arm. “That’s for my daughter,” Gilchrist snarled, standing over him. “Don’t think I can’t get this annulled, because I can. I’ll tell the king that a bloody Scotsman reduced my daughter to a shadow in a matter of weeks. Don’t think you’re keeping her dowry, either. And don’t you
ever
frequent an English ballroom looking for your next wife. I’ll make sure that every man in the country would rather send his daughter to the Americas than marry her to you.”

Gowan’s body hurt so much from slamming into yet another hard surface—though the floor was slightly better than the ditch—that he only dimly registered as Gilchrist ushered his wife from the room.

It wasn’t merely the pain. It was the knowledge that he had stripped Edie of dignity, of self-respect. He’d hurt the one person he loved in the world. He’d
ruined
her. He’d taken . . .

The bleak truth of it pulsed along with the physical pain that was searing his left arm as if a hot poker stretched from his knuckles to his elbow. The binding around his ribs hadn’t protected them from being jarred in such a way that he couldn’t breathe.

He had just managed to get to a sitting position when Bardolph walked into the room. Gowan took a deep breath, and his cracked ribs blazed with sudden fire. “Help me up,” he said, shortly.

Footsteps came toward him and he glanced up. He didn’t usually think of Bardolph as being a mere decade older than he was; his customary frown made him appear thirty years older.

But now he realized that he’d never seen Bardolph when he was truly disapproving. “I’m leaving,” his factor stated, staring down at Gowan without lifting a finger to help him up. “You may consider this my notice.”

Gowan had braced himself on his right hand so he could get up without using his left. Bardolph stepped forward and kicked his hand out from under him. Gowan crashed down again, a stifled groan escaping from his lips.