Twelfth Night (10 page)

“My lady.” Adam interrupted her musings by
sliding an arm about her waist. “I believe you and I have an
interesting conversation yet to finish.”

“I do seem to remember something begun this
morning and left uncompleted,” she murmured. “But dare we leave the
party?”

“It is almost over,” he said. “Here comes
Father John with my secretary, Robert, to tell us when it’s
midnight.”

“If you think either of them will be accurate
timekeepers, you are much mistaken,” she informed him. “They have
both had too much wine and may well imagine it is still Christmas
when February arrives.”

When Adam burst into laughter at this remark,
she added, “Don’t be surprised if Robert asks your permission to
marry Connie’s personal maid. If he doesn’t, he ought to, after
what I caught them doing an hour ago when I went into the coldhouse
to get more butter.”

Adam’s renewed laughter was drowned out by
the sudden noisy appearance of Connie, who came from the kitchen
with Blaise behind her. Flushed, and with her hair pulling loose
from her braided earmuffs, Connie was banging on a pan with a
rolling pin while her husband cried loudly that midnight was
nigh.

“There’s another who has had too much wine in
celebration,” Adam observed. “Ah, well, Blaise can hold her head
when morning comes. It will make him a better husband.”

“Listen, one and all,” cried Father John,
supporting himself with a hand on Robert’s shoulder. “’Tis
midnight, ‘tis time to end the feasting and revels. Go ye to your
beds now and rise early to the profitable performance of your
duties with hearts grateful to Lord Adam, who has allowed you to
make so merry this night and all the other nights of Christmas.” He
concluded with a loud hiccup that brought a murmur of quiet
laughter as those in the great hall began to disband. Calling their
good nights and thanks to Adam, they filed out to the barracks, or
the loft above the stable, or the kitchen hearth, to seek their
pallets.

“A major cleanup job is needed here,” Aline
noted, looking around the suddenly empty hall.

“Tomorrow,” Adam said. “For now, my lady, I
am taking you to bed. I have a few important things to say to
you.”

“And some interesting things to show me, too,
I am sure,” Aline teased.

“Always,” he whispered, urging her up the
curving staircase.

When they had almost reached the top, Aline
looked back to see Blaise and Connie climbing up behind them.

“Good night,” Connie called out. “Sleep
well.”

“And you, my dear friend.” Obeying an
impulse, Aline went down a few steps to meet Connie so she could
hug her and kiss her cheek. “Be happy always, Connie. and you, too,
Blaise. Treasure what you have found in each other.” She touched
Blaise’s face lightly with one hand. He caught it, holding her
where she was for a moment.

“Thank you, Lady Aline. I regret those harsh
words I spoke to you a few days ago. You are a wonderfully wise
woman.”

She stood watching them hurry along the short
corridor to their bedroom, until Adam caught her at the waist
again, drawing her upward toward the lord’s chamber at the top of
the stairs.

“What a day it has been,” he said, taking her
into his arms. “No man on earth is more blessed than I am tonight.
My people sleep safe and secure, healthy and well fed, so I need
not worry about them. My son is happy in his marriage at last, and
I believe he will continue that way. And I have in my heart and in
my bed the most wonderful woman in all the world.”

When he kissed her, Aline wound her fingers
through his grey-streaked hair and pressed herself against his
strength. She felt his hands along her spine and then upon her
hips, where he worked to free the knotted sash that rested
there.

“I love you, Adam.”

“I love you, with all my heart.”

Swiftly he undressed her and then himself
before he lifted her into his arms to kiss her again. With his
mouth still upon hers he carried her to the bed. There, slowly and
tenderly, he aroused her to a state of desperate need until she
wept for the aching emptiness he had created and pleaded with him
to take her.

“If you are half-mad with longing,” he
muttered, “then I am completely mad. Only with you do I feel such
passion, Aline. Only with you.”

He knelt between her thighs and with one hard
thrust buried himself in her. Aline received him with a wild cry of
joy, giving herself up to his hot, driving passion, responding
eagerly to his ever-deepening movements. She loved his complete
lack of inhibition when he was inside her, loved the way he stayed
with her, no matter how long it took, until she shuddered and
gasped and cried out his name over and over in a strangled voice.
But with Adam it never took very long; with him her fulfillment was
easy and natural, and always, always, exquisitely tender in spite
of his forcefulness.

She loved most of all the moment when he went
rigid and caught his breath, and then relaxed and moved more slowly
in her, for she knew in that instant she was giving him what no one
else could, his own fulfillment with a woman who loved him deeply
and completely.

Only slightly less sublime was the time
immediately afterward, when he gazed at her in the candlelight as
though she was some incredible miracle of womanhood, when he told
her he loved her, no matter what might happen in the future.

When he slept, with his hand on her breast
and her head on his shoulder, Aline lay quietly so as not to
disturb him. She did not feel like sleeping. She was too happy. She
lay warm in his arms, listening to his breath and feeling his heart
beat, and knowing that in Adam she had found the love she had
always wanted.

Outside Shotley Castle the snow fell steadily
and the wind blew, shaking the shutters in the lord’s chamber. Adam
stirred and turned over on his back, releasing Aline from his
embrace. She tucked the quilt in around his shoulders and kissed
him lightly.

“Hmm. Love,” he murmured, and drifted off to
sleep again.

A blast of cold wind blew the shutter open,
letting in cold air and a shower of snow. Aline leapt out of bed to
close and latch the shutter. She paused with one hand on the
shutter, staring at the snow. Through a thick haze of white she
could barely see the castle walls. The wind stopped for a moment,
and in the stillness big, fat flakes floated gently downward across
the window opening, just like the flakes she had noticed from the
library on the day when she had first come to Shotley.

A slight stirring of air blew flakes against
her face and bare shoulders. She was standing in the wet, melted
snow that had blown in already and now more was drifting into the
room through the unglazed window. Shivering violently, she began to
push the shutter closed…

The stone window frame began to dissolve. The
latch and shutter vanished. Around her there was only
white…snow…cold….

“Adam!” Aline turned toward him. She saw his
bed, saw Adam sit up and throw back the quilt.

“Aline!” He was on his feet, trying to reach
her, but his figure began to waver and blur before her eyes.

“Adam, I love you!” She knew what was
happening, and she prayed he had heard her last cry. She had heard
his, in her heart if not actually in her ears.

“Aline…love….”

Then all was white and cold and silent.

“Excuse me, Miss Bennett. Miss Bennett? Are
you sick?” The voice was deeply masculine, with a cultivated
English accent.

“What did you say?” Aline took her eyes from
the falling snow beyond the library window to stare at the man in
the chair next to hers.

“Are you all right? You’ve been sitting there
so still, and you didn’t answer when I called to you.”

“I must have been dreaming,” she said,
looking around in wonder. “What a strange dream. It was so real. I
was speaking Norman French.”

“Dreams can be like that,” he said. “You
are
Aline Bennett, aren’t you? “I’m Phillip Mallory. I was
at your grandfather’s funeral. We nearly collided when you left
your sister’s house in some haste.”

“Oh?” Aline was having trouble adjusting to
being back in the library. How could she have had so long and vivid
a dream?

“I volunteered to follow you,” Phillip
Mallory said. “Your sister thought you would come here. She’s
worried about you because you’ve been so upset over your
grandfather’s death.”

“That seems a long time ago now,” Aline
murmured. Then she remembered what Luce had said. “You’re the man
she wanted me to meet. I’m sorry about that; Luce never stops her
matchmaking efforts.”

“This time it wasn’t matchmaking,” he told
her. “She wanted us to meet because I called her this morning, not
knowing your grandfather had died and hoping to visit him. He and
my grandfather were boyhood friends. I met him once. I met you that
day, too. You were just a little girl and I was all of
fourteen.”

“You knew Gramps?” She looked at him with
more interest after hearing that. Even sitting in a big library
chair he looked tall, and a bit too thin, as if he didn’t eat
regularly. His hair was dark with grey streaks in it. His eyes were
dark, too. On his ordinary face an indefinable sadness lay. Until
he smiled. The corners of his eyes crinkled and his entire face was
lit with pleasure. But he wasn’t looking at Aline.

“I remember this, and how beautiful the
illuminations were,” he said, indicating the Book of Hours that
still lay open in front of Aline. There was the December page, with
the painted castle gate under a blue, blue sky, with the men
straining to pull the Yule log across the snow and, in the great
hall the lady sitting by the fire. Aline pushed the book along the
table toward him so he could look at it more closely.

“If you want to touch it, you’ll have to wear
these,” she said, pulling off the white cotton gloves.

She went absolutely still from shock. On the
index finger of her left hand was a golden ring with a flower
carved into its surface. At the center of the flower was a small
red stone. Aline turned her hand over to stare at the smooth back
of the ring where the metal had been heated and stretched to fit
Adam’s hand.

Adam!
He had not been a dream. She
didn’t know what had happened to her in the library that afternoon,
but whatever it was, the ring was proof that she had not imagined
it. Adam, Connie, Blaise, all of the folk of Shotley Castle were
real and she had walked among them, had talked and laughed and
loved…
Oh, Adam, my dear, lost love
.

“This book is still as beautiful as I
remembered.” Phillip Mallory’s accented voice recalled Aline to the
present. “No wonder your grandfather treasured it. I’m glad he gave
it to a library where others can see and appreciate it, instead of
selling it to a private collector. Do you come here often?”

“Today is the first time.”

“Ah, of course. You are here because of the
funeral. It must be comforting to hold something he loved.”

“Actually…” She paused. If she told him where
she had been during that snowy afternoon, and what she had done
there, how the first bitter grief of her grandfather’s death had
left her because she had spent a holiday with a Norman baron, he
would think she was crazy. She said something else instead. “The
book once belonged to a woman named Judith.”

“I do recall your grandfather saying
something about the names at the end. I’m afraid I was so bowled
over by the glorious paintings that I didn’t really pay much
attention to his account of the history of the book.”

“Oh, my God!” She gaped at him, memory
flooding over her. “For all the times I looked at the book when
Gramps had it, I always looked at the paintings, too, and the
illuminated capital letters and the decorated margins. But you are
right; there is something written at the back.” She would have
seized the book had he not lifted a white-gloved finger to stop her
from touching it. Carefully, he opened the book to the last page.
Unlike the illuminated pages of the book, where the words were
still sharp and black, on this one page the ink had faded until it
was so pale she could barely read the words written there.

Adam, Baron of Shotley, to Judith his
wife
. Squeezed in between that first line and the next was a
note in someone else’s hand.
Maud, his second wife, wed in the
year of our lord 1126.
Below, in the first handwriting again,
was a neat list, each name on its own line.

Blaise of Shotley

Constance his wife.

Adam their son, born October in the year of
our Lord 1122

Aline their daughter, born Christmas Day,
in the year of our Lord
1125

Beneath this last notation was a single line,
by the same hand that had written the note about Maud. Directly
below the baby Aline’s name and birth date were the words,
A
Christmas Blessing

“Adam.” Aline could not stop herself. She put
her bare finger on the words she believed he had written as a
message to her across the centuries. Adam had known she would look
at the Book of Hours after returning to her own time. He had made
Robert write the list of names in his neat clerical hand and then
had added his own notes. “I’m so glad you married again. I hope you
were happy with her.”

Phillip Mallory was looking at her strangely.
She removed her finger from the book and sat with her head down,
her hands clasped together in her lap.

“It is always hard to lose someone you love,”
he said. “However, I know from personal experience that time does
heal the pain. And you do have the book to remember him by. You can
come here to the library and look at it when you feel the need to
be close to him again.”

“Yes.” Her voice was low. Phillip Mallory had
no way of knowing that they were talking about two different men.
“Time. It’s already centuries away and it can never return once
it’s gone. It is going to take me a long time to recover from what
happened today.”