The Maiden Bride (3 page)

Bloody hell. He'd never bayed at anything in his life.

He could see them fully now, hovering with their opinions at his wife's elbow while she chopped a pile of greens: the girl-child, the older girl, shaking out a blanket with her whole reed-thin body, and a young man, bear-like and tall in his unchained prowling.

Surely there were others, if she meant to mount a full-scale invasion against him: hired thuglings who were even now skulking round his castle, rattling his bolts and bars, finding the doors locked tightly against their larceny.

Not that it mattered what the devil they found or stole. Let her have the place and all its peril. She would soon enough find the land barren and impossible, and then she would leave on her own, to apportion her fancies elsewhere.

"Enough speculation, Dickon, and you, too, Lisabet. He's neither ghost nor gargoyle; just a man. He was, in fact, plainly…
"
The woman paused and tilted her head, tapped the arching heart of her lips with a finger that must have smelled of the fresh dandelion she'd just dropped into the kettle, deciding upon just the proper word for their inauspicious first meeting—wife to gargoyle, husband to comely thief.

He waited, unbreathing, to hear the candid truth of himself as seen through the discerning eyes of his wife.

"Plainly…"

Forbidding,
she would say of him. And barbaric.

"—lost."

Lost?
Lost!
Bloody hell,
she
was the one
who'd stumbled into his castle, assuming him
dead, who'd nested herself in the middle of his great hall, commandeering
his
kettles,
his
well water, burning kindling from his stores as though he were running a wayfarer's inn.

Damnation!

"His name is Graystone, Nellamore."

Graystone?

The woman seemed as surprised as he. She turned from hooking the kettle handle on the hob and knelt in front of the little ghost child, who sat cross-legged on the tabletop, walking a straw poppet around a landscape of chunked onions and assorted greenery.

"What did you call him, Pippa?"

"Graystone."

"Is that his name, sweet?" His wife shared a bemused smile with the others, tucked some of that curling gold behind the child's ear. "Did he tell you his name before I found you in the tower?"

He hadn't said a bloody word to the child.

"No, Nellamore." The little girl captured his wife's chin between her small hands. "But he needs a name, don't you think?"

His wife pressed a smiling kiss on the girl's nose. "I do, Pippa. Graystone's a fine name.
We'll call him that until we know the truth of him."

That can never be, madam.

Even as he loosed the thought, she stood and raised her eyes to the gallery. Cinnamon and red clover. The clear force of it hit him straight on, splintered through his chest like rays of summer sunlight.

He stood in the utter darkness, unmoving, inhaling her scent even from there; feeling her hair as it swept across his face in the wind and through his fingers, her heat still caught up in the wool of his chanson, in his chest and at his groin, where her lithe hips had so softly opposed his as he held her trapped on the battlements. He'd only vaguely noticed the fine shape of her at the time, the sleekness of her thighs against his, her belly, the smoothness of her cheek, the stubborn line of her jaw in the bowl of his hands.

So abundantly alive, and so late in coming. He stilled his ragged breathing, ignored the delinquent racing of his pulse at the memory of her searing softness, denied the head-spinning scent of her, and that utterly unanswerable quickening in his groin for this bountifully beautiful wife—whom he could never touch or taste or embrace because of the promises he'd made in his son's name. He dropped more deeply into shadows.

But she knew, this prying wife of his. Or
thought she knew. Suspicion and that deft self-possession raised her chin higher and
brightened the flush across her brow, her
mouth contracting impatiently into a glistening, unfurled, untasted rose.

Then she looked away from him, and the gallery grew chilled, emptied of the light.

"We've plenty of work to keep us busy toward the harvest, Dickon. We'll take stock of the castle stores in the morning, room by room, from undercroft to attic. Then we'll go to work on the keep to make it livable enough, and then the bailey, and the village."

An endless inventory of pointless labors: scrubbing, sweeping, laying cobbles, thatching roofs, restoring stone walls. The woman must have brought along an army of skilled craftsmen: masons, carpenters, a cadre of black
smiths. Though the devil only knew where she'd encamped them.

They weren't anywhere in the castle. He'd have sensed the altered sounds: a change in the icy whispering of the wind in the corridors as it mourned through the towers: an echo of the living who still haunted him.

Not that it mattered anymore. There was
righteousness in that, and relief.

The young girl coughed and then sneezed as she shook out another well-used blanket. "But we're only four of us, my lady. We'll be stretched as thin as a spittle of milk, don't you think?"

A cold, sharp stone dropped into his chest.
What madness was this? Just a child, a young girl, a beardless boy, and a lunatic woman with a taste for the impossible?

Hell and damnation.

"We may be only four right now, Lisabet." His guileless wife stuck one of
his spoons into
one of his kettles and stirred blithely. "But we've got room enough for a whole castleful
if they come."

Only four.

Christ—there it was, blinding in its brilliance: his final obligation. A test of his endurance, of his resolve.

There would be no leaving his wife here to find her way alone—to starve, to freeze in the winter in his ruin of a castle. She and her misfit band would perish within the week, and he'd have four more demon souls to battle him on his way into hell.

Damnation. Why did you come, madam? Why now? Another month and he would have been safely gone from here, would never have
known that she still lived, or that he was so damnably obligated to her.

But she was as alive as the sun, breathing fire and fury. And that changed everything.

As surely as it changed nothing at all.

Nicholas slipped away from the dancing lights into the familiar closeness of the under
crofts,
grateful for the secret dark
passages
that led from under the castle, up his private staircase, and into the hush of the scaffolded chapel perched on the edge of the sea.

The moon had dodged the storm and shone through the open rafters to shadow the stone floor of the sanctuary with sharp-edged chevrons of pale blue and
midnight
. Why he'd come here, where the ghosts were so plentiful and his damnation so vivid, he couldn't fathom. Habit, perhaps.

He'd started to rebuild the long-neglected chapel when he'd first returned from the endless bloodletting on endless battlefields. He'd been damned arrogant to have believed he could so easily make amends for the hundreds of churches he'd sacked, for the lives he'd claimed with his insatiable blade.

For that beggarly boy he'd nearly run his sword through
in
the nave of St. Justin's, when the full meaning of his life had come crashing down on him.

And in the end, for the most selfish motives of all: to finally claim his bastard son and shore up his darkened soul with good works.

But God had devised a more pointed penance for his lifetime of brutal sinning, a retribution that had laid waste to all who'd had the misfortune to come near him, innocents and devils alike. Though he'd tried to protect them with his life, they'd all been struck down—by plague and famine and a sunless winter—until he was left finally, utterly alone.

Until now. Until Eleanor—wild-haired and unbending in her impossible dreams. And he feared her most of all.

Separation was the only way.

And so you are annulled, wife. Dismissed by me, here and now, witnessed by the sea and the hissing rocks.
If not in the eyes of the law, then surely in the stark impossibility of a marriage between them. He would see the matter closed in secret: one last indulgence purchased with his plunder. After all, a marriage never begun was no marriage at all. It was—

Impossible.

The sterile coolness of distance had always served him well in the past, had muted the metallic stench of blood on his sword and armor, had deafened him to the shriek of steel through living bone, had allowed him to see past the carnage to the numbness.

Yet that distance had failed him completely when he needed it most of all.

I'm so cold, Papa. Hold me.

He would keep his distance from the lady of the castle. It was for the best. He would set immovable boundaries around their dealings and look upon her merely as another charge against him, a penance to be quickly done with forever.

The Lord of Faulkhurst was no more.

Chapter 3

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A
fter dinner, Dickon had stationed himself in the portico with all the pomp and pride of the king's own bodyguard. "Not beast, nor thief, nor anyone else shall pass me and live, my lady."

But he was fortunately fast asleep in his threadbare blanket now, which was far safer than having the quick-tempered lad meet up with the prowling night shadow named Graystone.

Possessive beast! This is my great hall, not
yours.

Eleanor had sensed him in the gallery earlier, had felt an unsettling sense of being studied from afar, of her eyelashes ruffled, her nape sniffed and blown hot.

Graystone. Her gargoyle.

Or her husband's wicked, restive ghost.

Trouble in either case—and unfinished business, for no amount of bellowing or chest beating was going to evict her.

Or keep her from her bath.

Though the kitchen was dusty and dark and nearly empty of pots and utensils, it contained one true blessing: a hot spring that bubbled and steamed unchecked through a pipe that jutted out of the wall near the outside door. The water swirled merrily around inside a long limestone trough and then drained out through another pipe into the kitchen garden.

She'd thought of little else through supper: a steaming, skin-pinkening soak and blissfully scented solitude.

When all was finally quiet, with Pippa and Lisabet snoozing on pallets in front of the hearth, Eleanor filled the half barrel in the pantry with water from the spring, barred the door from the inside, then stole a quietly magnificent half hour to wash her hair and soak herself to wrinkles, steaming away the memory of too many baths taken in near-freezing streams, wondering all the while how a gargoyle-infested, tumble-down old castle way out here on a forgotten spit of land had so quickly become a part of her breathing.

"Because it's mine."

There. She'd said it. Felt it all the way through to the marrow, as thickly hot as the lavender-scented steam rising off the water.

"My home. My castle." Where she needn't ask permission of anyone to plant what she pleased in her fields, or to endow a village school for girls and boys, or to one day marry a man she actually liked—

Or loved. Because marriage was a good and holy undertaking, if entered into with an honorable intent—with an honorable man.

Aye, marriage had to be a partnership, a fact she'd never fully realized until a few hours ago on the ramparts, while her gargoyle was testing her, making her defend her marriage to Bayard.

Her marriage, indeed. She hadn't been his partner, by any measure. Neither in sickness, nor in health, nor anytime at all—because he'd never given her the chance. He'd never even come to claim her as any husband would. Hadn't sent for her, or bothered to dispatch a message or an edict, or even a simple query as to her welfare, let alone her dearest wishes. He'd used her—as her father had always done—for his inscrutable purposes, and then he'd set her aside, forgotten her entirely while all hell was breaking loose upon his lands.

While she was turned out of her home and away from the people who needed her most, by her own uncle.

And by a king who made bargains with devils like William Bayard.

Mother Mary, what sort of union it would have been? A wife ought at least to respect her husband, the father of her children. It was difficult to find anything to respect about a man who lived only to loot and plunder and kill.

The misbegotten blackguard.

But here was her chance. She'd show him exactly what sort of life he'd missed out on: a wife with brains enough to resurrect his castle and his village with her bare hands, to plant his fields and cart his goods to market. To swell his stores and defend his house.

And God knows she'd have been an excellent lover to the man, given the chance. A willing one, because she had a wickedly passionate imagination, which had been working just fine in the close presence of her gargoyle—working overtime, in fact. She could smell him still, the heat of him, that electrifying connection.

God only knew what sort of wantonness she'd have heaped upon a husband that she loved.

The poor man.

The ruthless bastard.

She might have lounged in the steaming water until morning, if she didn't have hours of work yet to do. A map to make of the fields, strategies to devise against those who would try to steal Faulkhurst from her because they might think her lacking.

She dried and dressed in her only clean night shift, and stepped from the pantry with her cresset lamp into the pooling dimness of the deserted kitchen.

She was just setting the lamp on the table when a shiver crept across her shoulders and prickled down her chest like fingers. Knowing exactly what—nay, who—she'd find there, she blinked at the shadows directly across the table, though she couldn't quite see him.

Her gargoyle. The shifting, smoke-scented image of him coalesced into dark robes and brooding shoulders. And as he stepped closer, a face that would remain in her dreams forever. His cheeks were cleanly shaved to his moustache and the edge of his jaw, his hair blown wildly and long, making him look larger and more wrathful than ever.

And completely untamable.

"Were you born in shadows, sir, or do you just find them pleasant company?"

The man had a devilish way with his silence, letting it spool out until she thought he hadn't heard, his gaze wavering from hers only to track the length of her gown to her knees, then to linger indulgently at her breasts, at their very tips, until he raised his eyes to her mouth and made her knees weak.

"My name is Nicholas Langridge, madam. Not Graystone." He leaned forward into the lamplight and said, without the slightest hint of deference, "And as of this moment, I am your
steward."