The Penwyth Bride (The Witch's Daughter Book 1) (17 page)

He paid no attention to the quivering stems and leaves. He stood at the gate, listening intently. In the waning light I saw that his hair was wet and slick as if he had held his head under a pump, the golden length wrenched back into an untidy queue. The cut over his eye slit his brow angrily, and blood blotched his breeches.

I began to tremble all over.

Immediately he whipped off his coat. The gleam of silver thread on his sumptuous waistcoat caught the fading light as he settled the coat over my shoulders.

Despite the stifling summer’s heat, I was grateful for it. I felt cold, and the close-woven twill with its faint body warmth was a small kindness amidst a day filled with brutal revelations and cruel acts. A stifled sob broke from me.

“There, there,” he murmured inanely, shifting his weight from foot to foot in discomfort.

“Mr. Penwyth, I am so very grateful,” I began before a stronger sob choked off my words.

He made a gesture of negation, and moved away to stand sentry again. “Why did you let yourself get drawn so far from the main house? Your kind must never relax guard now when so much ignorance is widespread.”

“You know of us--of what I am.”

“I knew as soon as you said you could see the lights by Tol-Pedn-Penwith. In this Hundred, only witches can see the
alaw
.”

I remembered suddenly that his mother was rumored to be a witch, as was his mistress Tamzin Fulby.

“Please do not tell Sir Grover or Lady Penwyth,” I begged.

“I’m in the habit of keeping my own counsel.”

The affront in his voice made me squirm.

“The cottagers said you were casting spells. Is that true?”

“No.”

“Then what were you doing?”

“I don’t know. I . . . went outside myself.”

“Went outside yourself?”

“I fell apart. You have no idea how difficult it can be to keep it all bottled up, especially when . . . an upset occurs.”

“And what was it that upset you?”

“D-Damon. He said . . . he said I was--”

Dull. Homely and crippled. That he would lie with me out of duty to get an heir on me--only he didn’t know that I could never give him one.

I swallowed another sob, the future stretching before me bleak and cold: an unloved wife of a handsome gentleman. How they would pity him, especially when the heir would never appear. And how they would sneer at me.

Roger regarded me without emotion. “And so the scales fall. Cry, but he will never be worth it.”

“What you mean?”

Roger smiled sourly. “Everyone knows, Miss Eames, that you were brought to Cornwall for my cousin. Your marriage to Damon was to be the capstone of a very lucky year for the Hermitage Penwyths. In fact, the reason I was out on the moor just now was because I’d had my fill of listening to Jocasta receive discreet congratulations from the county gentry.”

Impatiently he pushed back a juniper branch waving for my attention. “Oh yes, they are all in high glee at the Hermitage. Sir Grover is busy mentally balancing his accounting book with the money from your portion. Susannah is praying that the distraction of your engagement will temporarily allow her more freedom to see her low-born beau, and Damon--”

“Yes? And Damon?”

“Is now wondering where you are.”

“Oh.”

Crickets began to chirp as the night closed in. Faint yelps and bursts of laughter from the ending Revel carried in to the garden on a puff of air. I knew that Lady Penwyth would be waiting impatiently in the blue-swathed parlour for the good news, while far away in the North, her sister Sarah waited for a letter . . .

I put my head in my hands. Everything had become too complicated to bear.

“Take me instead,” came a whisper out of the brewing darkness.

I raised my head. “What?”

“I said: take me instead of Damon. Marry me.”

My eyes burned the shadow trying to read his face. He shifted again in his peculiar way, as if Mr. Newton’s gravity weighed too heavily on his shoulders. “I know how it is when the world seems to conspire against you, Miss Persia Eames. If you were living at Lyhalis, no one, not even the folk of the moor, would dare harm you. None of them come to my side of the Hundred for reasons you would not understand. You would be protected there.”

“But--marriage?” I was having difficulty grasping his words. “It seems an extreme solution, doesn’t it? And one that requires an enormous sacrifice on your part.”

He did not smile over my feeble attempt to prick the tension building between us. “I want to marry you,” he said.

“Why?” I burst out in amazement.

I waited for him to make a remark regarding my rank or wealth, or even something about spiting his cousin. “I--you--I can talk to you.”

To my surprise, he dropped his gaze to hands fisted before him, suddenly looking young and unsure. “I don’t often talk to others with ease. But I can with you. You seem--steady.”

I could not help feeling a sense of deflation. “Dull, you mean.”

“Steady,” he repeated firmly. He looked up and fed me one of his disarming smiles. “I can hold onto you--if you keep your feet on the ground.”

That forced a laugh out of me. He brought a hand up to his brow, as if he became suddenly lightheaded. The sight of his lacerated, beautiful fingers sent an unwelcome prick of heat through me.

“But is there no one in Cornwall who is a more suitable partner for you?” I asked. “Someone who would be better matched in income and elegance? They say you are a rich man with a high lineage. I have some means, but I am a nobody.”

“There is no one else I can have.”

A wealth of meaning infused the terse statement: misery, fury, loneliness. The latter I detected only because I knew all about loneliness, how it crept out in weak moments to canker simple pleasures. Roger Penwyth and Persia Eames: two lonely strange people who did not know the movements to a minuet everyone else was born knowing.

“Has your guardian and Sir Grover contracted you to my cousin Damon?” he asked with a note of bitterness as my silence drew out. “Or do you hesitate because you harbor tender feelings for him?”

I thought on it. Despite Damon’s perfidy, I still felt a swell of love for him. There were no strange undercurrents when we spoke, no dark moods to negotiate. Turning my back on Damon would be to turn my back on a life where I could live amongst those who saw me as a woman, not a witch.

Except that now the Cornish godly knew what I was. They would never rest until I was dead.

Despite my initial reaction to Roger’s offer, I began to consider it more thoughtfully.

I had no doubt that Roger would protect me. I only had to hearken back to the snarling anger he displayed earlier as the villagers closed in--a rogue wolf guarding his kill from the rest of the pack. And apparently my affinity did not repel him.

Roger, like Damon, also had a mistress. But I did not care if Roger carried on with Tamzin Fulby, for I did not love him. Damon, because I loved him, would break me again and again over his women until I was nothing. Even then I might have considered the marriage and taken what scraps I could, except I knew I could never live with his contempt.

Between my lashes I peeped at Roger waiting for my answer to his question about Damon. His gaze was intent, and through his accustomed expression of sullen melancholy I could see anxiety lurking there. I don’t know why, but I knew that for all his wildness and inclination for solitude, Roger needed me in a way few others would. We were both outsiders; that alone united us.

Grinding down a surge of hope, I probed further. “Why do they call you The Penwyth.”

“That is my name,” he replied, surprised.

“Not a Penwyth.
The
Penwyth. I heard it while you were wrestling Jack Toddy, and again, just now, before the . . . stoning.”

“The name is only a feudal remnant of long ago, when the Hundred was divided into princedoms. Folk here still use the old titles for the few family lines left after the coming of the English.”

I felt there was something he wasn’t telling me, but he moved a step closer, a silent step.

“How is it that you know how to wrestle?” I said hurriedly. “Tom Pyder tells me it is an old Cornish custom.”

“I was initiated early into the wisdom of learning to defend myself. Brutes like Toddy are two a-penny on the streets of St. Ives. He was wrestling for the money. I, for something else.”

“Which was?”

“Can’t you guess?”

The timbre of his voice changed over the last words, burred and smoky, slithering over my sensitized skin.

“You haven’t given me an answer,” he murmured.

“I cannot bear children,” I rushed out, my last defense. “My clubfoot . . . it is the sign of a barren womb.”

“I don’t want you for that.”

His voice drew a velvet line down my neck. I shivered, feeling the air about us grow charged and thick.

The last of the light faded away. Roger became a shadow, outlined only by the blotting of stars. A twig snapped under his heel, my only clue that he approached.

I huddled deeper into his coat. The smell of his skin infused the fabric, a blend of lavender and a man’s sweat. Intoxicating and frightening, I could feel myself being drawn by him again, into a place I was not certain I wanted to go.

“There is something between us, Persia, is there not?”

His voice stroked my throat, seeping down between my breasts.

“A certain . . . sympathy.”

Oh, his voice. . .

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Ah, so you feel it too? When you look at me with those eyes of yours, fogged as if you’ve just woken from sleep, I want to lay down in you and forget everything, forget it all except your eyes and your blushing cream skin . . .”

Lassitude rippled up my spine. “To speak truth, this beguilement disturbs me. No--it frightens me.”

“And entices you as well.”

Tears of hunger formed at the corners of my eyes. “Yes.”

Roger now loomed behind me. Every nerve tensed but he made no move to touch me. Only his voice slid over me, tendriling down my belly.

“Imagine how it would be between us, Persia. Begin to imagine as I do . . .”

My lids closed.

“Imagine,” he whispered.

His breath heated the skin of my neck, and without volition I imagined tangled limbs and the scent of joined flesh; secret sounds and whispered words; the swooning flight of senses.

I bit down on my cut lip against a cry of pain. My skin burned in a sulfurous fume of unresolved passion; desire smoked from my hair and fingertips.

In the darkness his eyes gleamed as they regarded me. Oh, he knew what I was thinking. He knew everything about me, and I knew nothing about him at all.

“Will you have me?”

There was only one answer I could make.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Ungrateful slut!” Lady Penwyth shrieked. Her hand lifted to deal me a slap.

“Jocasta,” Roger rumbled warningly.

We stood in the parlour. Candles had been brought in against the night, turning the blue walls into a cavern of trembling shadows. Sir Grover’s and Lady Penwyth’s gentry guests had already gone home, leaving behind an ocean of card tables, empty wine glasses, and cake crumbs.

Lady Penwyth’s groomed fingers balled before she lowered them. “How dare you promise yourself to Roger Penwyth, of all men on this earth,” she hissed. “Are you aware of how much he hates us?”

“I think we all know there is only one in this room whom I am close to hating,” Roger said softly.

I flicked my eyes to Sir Grover. His were chips of ice, causing me to shiver.

“Lady Penwyth,” I began, willing my voice not to tremble, “I do not choose Roger over Damon because of any malice, please believe me. Roger--”

“Roger, Roger, Roger!” she screamed again. “How dare you use his christian name to me? This affair is of a longer duration than I had realized. How long have you two been conspiring behind my back?”

“There has been no conspiracy,” I insisted on the verge of tears.

“Well, it cannot be love that binds you,” she spat. “Is it lust? Look at you, hair disheveled, clothes stained with dirt. Have you been lying with him in a hayrick or behind the henhouse where anyone might see you?”

The level of Lady Penwyth’s anger shocked me. I had expected her to be upset, but her venom frightened me. Involuntarily I moved a step closer to Roger, who seemed coldly amused by Lady Penwyth’s rage.

The front door slammed, causing me to jump. Damon strode into the room, hair ruffled, features animated, step springy.

“Ah Miss Eames, there you are. You’re a dashed saucy puss to hide from me all day. I’ve been looking for . . . you . . . is the card play over already? Did a mouse get in and upset the guests?”

“Mouse indeed,” Sir Grover murmured. “Why don’t you ask your cousin what has happened?”

“Roger?” Damon’s voice hardened with dislike. “And why should I do that?”