The Maiden's Hand (11 page)

Oliver liked watching her. She was as bright as a new-minted copper, absorbing all that she saw with a hunger that made him angry for all the years she had been sheltered at Blackrose Priory.

He spied a new face in the crowd—a woman. She came and sat near him, arranging her layered skirts around her like the petals of a flower. The fireglow bathed her in friendly hues, shadowing her age-weathered face and burnishing her white hair gold. Though he had known the members of this tribe for years, he did not recognize her.

Summoning up his knowledge of Romany, he said, “I have not met you before, have I?”

Lark glanced at him sharply. “You speak their tongue?”

“Aye.”

“How singular.”

“No more singular than knowing Latin, a language no one speaks yet everyone must learn.”

“I am Zara,” said the woman, her voice deep and husky, her eyes sleek and sanguine. “A wanderer from afar.”

She was most intriguing, her white hair oiled to a sheen and pulled tautly into two glossy braids. She had a ready smile, revealing a missing tooth on the lower front. When she turned her head toward the fire, Oliver saw that upon her cheek blazed a remarkable star-shaped strawberry stain.

No wonder she bore herself with such confidence and sat in a place of honor next to Rodion. Those born with such marks were considered blessed.

“Where did you come from?” Oliver asked.

“Far beyond the Narrow Sea. From the kingdom of Muscovy.”

Oliver felt a twinge of familiarity. “My honored stepmother comes from a place called Novgorod.”

Mystery and magic glowed in Zara’s gleaming eyes and shaped her smile into a learned arc. “I know.”

Zara
. Juliana had spoken of such a woman. A seeress, she was, the one who had prophesied Juliana’s journey to England.

Although Oliver put little stock in stargazing and soothsaying, Juliana had always maintained that the woman called Zara had once tapped into her soul and foretold events that shaped her life.

“’Tis you!” he said in an astonished whisper, abandoning Romany for English. “But how—”

“One of your own father’s ships brought me after…” Zara, too, switched to English, spoken with a broad, guttural accent. She looked into the heart of the fire, and
reflected flames danced with misty memories in her eyes. “After Czar Ivan’s men killed my husband and made slaves of my children.”

“Ah, you poor woman!” With a catch in her voice, Lark put down her bowl and reached across Oliver, grasping Zara’s hands.

The Gypsy woman took in her breath on a hiss, as if Lark’s touch had burned her.

“I’m sorry,” said Lark. “I didn’t mean to hurt you—”

“Hush. Do not move.”

“What have I done?” Lark asked. She caught her lower lip in her teeth and dropped one shoulder as if bracing herself for a blow.

Zara leaned forward, her eyes keen with fascination, the strange star on her cheek shining in the firelight. She turned Lark’s hand over in her own, spreading it out, tracing her slender finger along the palm. “It is you.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You are one of the three.” With a jerk of her head, she motioned Oliver away.

A powerful tension seemed to pulse in the air and flow across the bond between the two women.

“I still don’t understand,” said Lark. “What three?”

“I saw your fate before you were made,” Zara said. “It was on a night of fire in Novgorod. Three women. Three fates flung like seeds upon the wind. The circle was begun before you were born, and will endure long after you are gone. You are but a part, a ripple in the water.”

“Why me?”

“Because of vows that flow from a young man’s lips.” Zara took Oliver’s hand and linked it with Lark’s. The Gypsy woman stood, looking wholly refreshed, and wandered off to the musicians.

Feeling intrigued yet unsettled, Oliver extracted his hand from Lark’s. “Wine,” he muttered, and brightened. “This calls for wine! Let us vow, Lark, to drink and make merry.”

Lark pushed the stew around in the clay bowl. Apparently she had lost her appetite. “What do you suppose she meant?”

Oliver shrugged. He did not enjoy the vague, prickly feeling at the back of his neck. “Perhaps it is the way an old woman enlarges her own importance. The poor soul has no more family. ’Tis a sad thing to feel useless, and so perhaps she makes prophecies to prove her worth.”

“As a Christian, I can but agree,” Lark said. “Still, she gave me such an odd feeling when we touched.”

Oliver laughed. “To you, all touching is odd, sweetheart.” He ran a teasing finger down her cheek and tickled her ear. She gave a little cry and drew away, and he laughed again. “See? You squeak and squawk like a hen for the stewpot.”

She sniffed and turned her attention to the Gypsies sharing London gossip. They possessed a wealth of it, for in their travels they had learned to become both open-eared and unobtrusive.

“The she-king is said to be desperate for an heir.” Rodion uncorked a flask of plum wine, took a drink and passed it on.

Jillie cupped her hands around her mouth and said loudly, “One of Queen Mary’s advisers even consulted Zara to divine Her Majesty’s chances of having a child.”

Oliver gave the flask to Lark. “You need this, my dear, for you’ve gone quite pale.”

“I don’t often find myself privy to treasonous talk,” she whispered. Then she took an impressively long drink of the plum wine.

“Tis said,” Rodion continued, “that Queen Mary is conspiring to steal someone’s newborn babe. Fact is, they arrested a tailor’s wife for saying another lady’s child would be named the queen’s own.”

Lark nearly choked on a mouthful of wine. Oliver patted her back until the spell passed.

“I don’t believe that for an instant,” Oliver felt obliged to say.

“Nor do I,” said a Gypsy man. “For all that she is a sickly, bitter and ill-advised woman, the queen adheres to strict principles.”

“Pity the same is not true of her chief minister, Bishop Bonner,” Rodion said. At the mention of Bonner’s name, his listeners tucked their thumbs and crossed their fingers. Old Maida clutched at the rope of white garlic hanging from her belt.

A tambour rattled suggestively. The mood of the gathering lightened as if a pall had been lifted from their midst. Laughter erupted, and people stood up, clapping raised hands.

“I don’t suppose you dance,” Oliver said.

“Of course not,” Lark retorted.

“Would it disturb you if I did?” he asked, jumping to his feet.

“Would it stop you if I said aye?” she fired back.

Disagreeable stick, he thought, walking away from her. Why did he let her bother him? Laughing, he joined hands with the Gypsies forming a circle.

As he took up the whirling motion of the round dance, he let the rhythm sweep him back to the summer-gilt days of his boyhood. Thanks to his stepmother, he had learned to love the ways of the Romany people. They cared only for the moment, never fretting about what the morrow
would bring. Certainly they never wrung their hands about the fate of their immortal souls.

Bare Gypsy feet thumped upon the trampled ground. The inner circle was comprised of women, and facing them were the men, forming a circle of their own. They never touched their partners yet moved with such harmony that the men and women seemed to be joined in some primal way. The shadowy rhythm suggested the music of love played between two bodies.

Oliver tried to focus his attention on the Gypsy girl vying for his attention. She was as dark and sweet as a ripe cherry. She did not cage herself in busked corsets or stays but decked her body in a loose, low-cut blouse and colorful skirts.

Even so, Oliver was shocked to discover that he could not summon the easy, earthy desire he usually felt for women. A cold horror seized him. Perhaps this was the beginning of the end. Perhaps this lack of passion was the first herald of his inevitable march toward an early death.

No. Sidestepping his dance partner, he glanced over his shoulder at Lark. She sat clutching the skin wine flask. Her face held a most gratifying look of shock and yearning.

His blood began to heat. Lark was the key. Somehow, his passion and desire all centered on her. And of all the women Oliver de Lacey had held in his arms, only Lark felt exactly right.

Deep in a secret, unacknowledged part of him, he remembered Zara’s prophecy. She had joined his hand with Lark’s as if it were an act ordained by a higher force.

The fire had spent itself to embers. The frenzied, exotic music had faded to echoes of plucked strings and drum rattles, and the dancers had drifted into snoring heaps of tangled limbs and blankets.

Oliver was nowhere to be seen.

Joints creaking with stiffness, Lark rose to her feet. The wine she had drunk rushed to her head, and she listed like a wherry on a wave.

“Steady,” she muttered to herself, stepping gingerly over a sleeping man. She passed a group of children lying intertwined like a litter of puppies. What strange and wondrous folk these Gypsies were.

A few weeks earlier she never could have imagined that she would be among Gypsies. Spencer had assured her that they were lawless beggars and thieves. In truth they were a joyful lot who loved good food, fruity wine and wild dancing. They harmed no one.

She crept close to the pallet where Richard Speed lay. Thick, coarse blankets covered him to the chin. In the uncertain moonlight he appeared pale and peaceful, his wounds salved and bound by the woman called Maida.

Lark walked on, her skirts rustling over the night-dewed grass. She felt oddly alert, her imagination still aflame, hours later, with the words Zara had spoken.

Vows that flow from a young man’s lips.
Surely Oliver was right. They were an old woman’s musings or perhaps a trickster’s ploy. Yet Zara had asked for nothing. Or had she? Lark remembered the look in the Gypsy’s eyes when Zara had linked her hand with Oliver’s.

Lark inhaled deeply of the cold night air and eased the frown from her brow. There was no use fretting. She should enjoy the pleasant numbness of the plum wine, and she should not neglect her prayers.

Leaving the circle of caravans and the horses sleeping with heads hung low, she went down beside the river. There she found a mat of soft grass and fell to her knees.

She had always found a certain spiritual rapture in
prayer, but tonight the feeling eluded her. Instead her mind clung to images of the Gypsy dance and Oliver de Lacey. Closing her eyes, she saw him again. The flickering firelight. The pure gold of his hair. The loose eddy of his unbound sleeves. The flash of his smile.

He danced as he seemed to do all other things—with his whole heart, with every fiber of vitality he possessed. Though Lark rubbed her eyes with her fists, she saw him still, his powerful arm wrapped around the waist of a smiling Gypsy maid, his crooked smile heartbreaking and enigmatic, hinting that his temperament could change in a blink from joy to melancholy.

Dry leaves rustled beneath her as she shifted and forced her eyes open. She stared at the gleaming black ribbon of the river flowing past, the secret gurgles whispering to her. Still she thought of him, of Oliver de Lacey, so fair and rowdy, so comely, amusing, bright and aggravating that he seemed almost a character of myth rather than a real man. He was possessed by a vigor and lack of temperance that both fascinated and frightened her.

She had grown exhausted simply watching him.

And yet she couldn’t
not
watch him.

It was time to confess the truth to the Almighty.

She pressed her hands together—palms damp, nails chewed—and squeezed her eyes shut again.

“Lord,” she whispered. Her tongue felt thick, stumbling over the words. She drew a deep breath. “I have been possessed by an evil temptation.”

There. She’d said it. Lightning did not strike her dead, so she rushed on. “It is Oliver de Lacey, Lord. I cannot stop thinking about him. Forgive me, but more than once I have wondered what he looks like without his…his clothes. When he was dancing tonight I kept staring at his legs. His
legs.
”

She paused, listening to the night wind sifting through the long grasses nodding at the riverbank. She still seemed to have the ear of the Almighty, so she continued baldly. “I feel a ripple of
something
—heat or cold, I know not which—up my spine when I hear the sound of his laughter. And dear Lord, he laughs far too much. Though it is no affair of mine, I cannot help but feel pleased that his face is not marked by pox scars. And when I see the sky reflected in his eyes I almost forget I am a godly woman and—”

“Sweetheart, your prayers are about to be answered.”

Lark shot to her feet as if something had exploded under her skirts. “How dare you disturb my privacy!”

Oliver de Lacey grinned. It was the same lazy, insolent smile she had just complained to the Almighty about. Oliver strolled down the riverbank on the silk-clad legs she had just described to her heavenly host. And then, self-assured as any actor on a stage, he laughed. And aye, it was the same spine-shivering sound she both craved and dreaded. Heat, she decided insanely. The shiver was heat, not cold.