The Maiden Bride

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  Chapter 1

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  The Northwest Coast of England

  May 1351

  "Pardon my sayin' so, Lady Eleanor, but this late husband of yours left you the sorriest damned castle I've ever set eyes upon."

  "Aye, Dickon, Faulkhurst is a mite frayed about the ramparts—but it's our home now." Eleanor Bayard muzzled the curses she wanted to rain down upon William Bayard's blighted, unlamented soul.

  At last, home. And hope, and three of the dearest companions in the world to care for. This was not the time for letting regrets and recriminations gain a foothold—not when she'd come so far.

  "I like it, Nellamore."

  Eleanor laughed and lifted little Pippa into her arms, bird bones and feathers, a breeze captured inside an eider pillow. "I do too, Pippa. Very much."

  "It needs buckets of paint, my lady." Lisabet battled the sea wind for balance atop the stubby wall of the overgrown kitchen garden.

  "Needs a hell of a lot more'n paint, 'Bet." Dickon snorted and cast his young sister a skeptical frown. "A mason, for a start."

  Aye, and a carpenter and a smith and so many other things that Eleanor didn't have and didn't know where she would find anytime soon.

  May your eternity be blazing hot and sticky with gnats, William Bayard.

  No, she would not allow her very wicked, very dead husband to ruin this fine moment.

  "Above all else, my loves, Faulkhurst needs the four of us. Desperately." And we need Faulkhurst.

  "An' the ghost, Nellamore, don't forget." Pippa's gamin little face needed scrubbing, despite last eve's streamside wash-up and another that afternoon.

  "Faulkhurst needs a ghost?" Eleanor nosed a kiss against the gilded curls at Pippa's temple.

  "It has one already. A huge grey one." Pippa's dark eyes grew round and earnest. "I saw him myself. Over there, walking on the sky."

  She pointed toward the roiling storm clouds and the grey tower that rose a full four stories out of the seaward wall. It was the highest point in all of Faulkhurst, overwhelming the stocky keep and the tiny, deserted, tumbled-down village and the seaswept cliffs beyond.

  A tower wheeling with gulls. "Sweet love, did your ghost by any chance have wings?"

  Pippa shook her head gravely, casting Eleanor a glance that belied her six years. "It's not a bird, Nellamore. A spirit. Like my papa's and my mama's, too."

  God rest them both, whoever they might have been.

  "If it is a ghost, Pippa, we'll put him to work fixing the roof of the bakehouse first thing in the morning."

  "He'll like that, he will."

  "As for now, 'tis high time we made ourselves at home."

  Dickon let free a battle cry and then took off toward the keep with Lisabet fast on his heels.

  But for all their eagerness, Eleanor found them waiting for her and Pippa just inside the dim portico, staring into the bleak vastness of the great hall.

  "Do you smell it, Lady Eleanor?" Lisabet captured Eleanor's hand and held it tightly, trembling. "A hospital."

  Unmistakably. That cold, lonely smell of suffering and sorrow: the aromatic pinch of charred juniper and thyme—futile remedies against the pestilence. Too familiar and terrifying.

  "Aye, it must have been, Lisabet. Once."

  Where were you then, husband, when your people were perishing in their agonies? Hiding in your fortress across the sea?

  But William Bayard kept silent, as always: her black-hearted, proxy-wed, sight-unseen husband, who'd at least had the good timing to die of his sins—or of the plague itself—before she'd had to meet him face-to-face.

  Before their marriage could begin in truth.

  "I'm hungry." Dickon's stomach howled, and Pippa giggled.

  "So's the squirrel in your tummy, Dickon."

  "I hope it likes dandelion pottage," Eleanor said, sweeping them all into the hall. "Lisabet, Dickon, we need firewood. A bonfire's worth, to light the night and tell all the ghosts that we are here."

  A full pantry in the kitchen, or even a small chest of grain, proved too much to ask from the departed Lord of Faulkhurst. Their wilted carrots and dried peas would have to do once again.

  But at least they'd be cooked in her very own home tonight—not by the side of the road, or under a bridge.

  She and Pippa sang their favorite melodies to keep away the shadows while they assembled the kitchen trestle in front of the hearth in the great hall. They added benches, and then a roaring fire as Lisabet and Dickon rushed in and out with armloads of firewood, and tales of rusted locks.

  "Massive ones, my lady, on every door!"

  And deserted sheds. "As if the smithy was hammerin' away on a horseshoe one moment and a blink later he was gone."

  And sometime during the noisy chaos of settling into their new home, Pippa disappeared.

  "She's vanished, my lady!" Lisabet's eyes spilled over with tears.

  "Just like the blacksmith an' the wainwright." Dickon's face was pale.

  "She can't have gone far." Please, God. Eleanor's heart failed every other beat and thudded loudly against her ears. "She was here talking about that grey ghost of hers. I only turned my back, and—"

  The ghost.

  They'd been nearly a year together, the four of them, abiding Pippa's fearless adventuring.

  "The tower," Eleanor said in relief as she grabbed her cloak and bolted toward the door. "You two stay here in case she comes back."

  Trying not to panic, she dashed up the shadowy incline of the inner ward toward the tower, then through the labyrinth of deserted buildings.

  Around every corner was another disturbing vignette, as though ordinary castle life had been tragically interrupted in the midst of a workday. Carts littered the bailey, burdened with kindling and wool sacks left to stand out in the fierce weather. The farrier's apron danced at the end of its ties in the ceaseless wind, and a picket of lances waited for war, their blades rusted beyond use. A cookpot, yearning to be warmed over a bed of glowing hot embers; a saw craving the sweet taste of pine—all of the parts and pieces waiting for life to come again.

  Perhaps Pippa was right: there were ghosts at Faulkhurst, her husband's among them. Though he had died on one of his estates in far-off Calais, he seemed close by, as though he watched and waited, too. But then, some spirits had more reason to be restless than others.

  And needed evicting if they didn't behave. Eleanor ran up the tower steps. The fist-thick, ironbound door was open just wide enough for a determined little girl to slip through.

  "Pippa?" She shouldered the door a half foot wider and entered an octagonal room, utterly dark but for the pale light slicing through the arrow slits.

  The perfect place for Pippa to go looking for her ghost.

  "Pippa?" she called again, but only the wind replied, sighing far up inside the tower, beyond the spiral-stacked shadows of the wooden staircase that drilled its way through the center to another floor two stories above.

  She hurried up past the first landing and then the next toward the open doorway above, a pale rectangle of grey.

  And Pippa standing just inside, bathed in sunset-tinted amber, staring up in open-mouthed, wide-eyed wonder at something across the room that Eleanor couldn't yet see.

  All this intrigue for a roosting gull.

  "I found him, Nellamore." A ragged whisper, gentled by awe. "I found our grey ghost."

  "Oh, Pippa—" Breathless with relief, Eleanor climbed the rest of the stairs to the landing and entered the room.

  But as the shadows shifted, an enormous shape moved against the high, half-shuttered wind
ows—a looming barrier of darkness that dwarfed Pippa and the arching hearth and everything else in the cold room.

  Her heart stopped and went icy with dread and the rawboned scent of bleakness.

  Ghost or ghoul or nightmare, the monster was peering down at Pippa, poised to strike, held at bay by the child's simple curiosity, which had obviously disturbed its sorcery.

  Terrified that she'd come a moment too late, that Pippa would be gone in the next breath, Eleanor whispered, "Pippa, come here!"

  The dark eyes that found Eleanor were terrible, forbidding. Her heart started with a cold thump, then drummed madly as he stared down at her from the advantage of his great height.

  "Do you see him, Nellamore?"

  "Oh, yes, Pippa. I see him." I feel him. In her bones and in her breast, in the dizzying lightness that whirled and eddied in her stomach. A rogue breeze lifted her hair, sending a chill from her nape to her toes.

  He was death poised on the edge of midnight, arrested on the wing. The beast turned toward her fully, his shoulders as broad as the rafters, his great wings furled but ready to envelop them both if she didn't shake free of the spell he'd cast.

  "Come here, sweet." Keeping her eyes trained on the beast, prepared to throw herself in his path if he took a single step toward Pippa, Eleanor reached out her hand and inched toward the child.

  But Pippa was utterly transfixed, studying the beast as though he were a fox cub she'd come across in the forest.

  "He came out of the wall, Nellamore. I saw him."

  Those fathomless, unreadable eyes shifted their darkness to Pippa's eagerness and then sharply back again to Eleanor, as though he didn't trust her.

  Dear God, he was huge and feral, and there was so dreadfully little room to maneuver Pippa to the stairway behind her.

  "Reach for me, sweet. Take my hand."

  "My papa is a ghost too, isn't he, Nellamore?"

  "Please, Pippa! My hand." Her fingers trembled uncontrollably.

  But Pippa took another inquisitive step toward the silent, seething intruder, and said, "Are you my papa's ghost?"

  "Leave here." It was a voice grown dark and deep with disuse, an untamed resonance that paralyzed Eleanor's breathing and made her want to weep. The boards moaned beneath her feet, a mournful sound that made the room seem to tilt. The meager light from the tall windows went away completely as he straightened to strike.

  "Come away, Pippa! Please!"

  A thunderous bellow roared out of him, rattling the shutters, scattering her strategies into motes. "What are you doing in my castle?"

  "Your castle?" Oh, wonderful day! A madman holed up in her turret. She had an insane, terrifying thought: that the castle was deserted because he'd eaten everyone, chewed them up with those gleaming white teeth.

  "Be gone from here, woman. Now!"

  Knowing better than to stand in a tiny room and debate the ownership of Faulkhurst with a lunatic three times her size, especially one who was bearing down on her, Eleanor grabbed up Pippa and raced down the spiraling steps.

  "Hold tightly to me, Pippa!"

  But the girl was straining back over Eleanor's shoulder, waving and squirming, throwing her off-balance. "Good-bye, grey ghost. Come see us tomorrow!"

  "Pippa, please!" Eleanor heard a swooping sound—which might have been her cowardly stomach—felt her hair swirling upward in a sulfurous breeze, the stairs lurching behind her.

  They would never make it to the room below, let alone to the bailey. Sweet Pippa would be ripped from her, and both of them would be broken to bits, their brittle bones cast into the sea. And then brave Dickon's and dear Lisabet's, leaving the beast to lie in wait for his next unwitting victims.

  And William Bayard would have won at last.

  Not while I have a breath or a bone left in my body! With no other course but to sacrifice herself to the monster's mad chase, she stopped short and sent Pippa scampering down the turn of the stairs.

  "Run Pippa! To Dickon." I love you dearly!

  "I'll bring Lisabet, too!"

  "Noooo! Don't—"

  But Pippa was safely out the door, and the monster was on Eleanor in the next breath, clamping his ironbound arm around her waist, lifting her backward against his massive chest as though she were a rag poppet, squishing the air from her lungs and the mettle right out of her heart.

  His threat seared itself against her nape. "I give you one fair and final warning to leave here as you came, madam."

  Steamy heat poured off him, melting swiftly through her cloak and her woolen kirtle, surrounding her like a chastening flush; he smelled of a sea-misted sunset and the powdery grit of stone.

  Though her teeth chattered and her breath came in ragged gasps, she was suddenly, blazingly furious at the man: for threatening Pippa, for his savagery, for thinking himself master over her castle and all her hard-fought dreams.

  "I don't need your warning, fair or otherwise. I am— Sir!"

  She was suddenly in the air, and then she was standing on the floor below, free of his manhandling. He leveled that demon-dark stare down on her again in his doomed campaign to terrorize her into leaving.

  "Do you know, madam, what I do to thieves and intruders who disturb me?"

  Her wanton, runaway imagination ambushed her with thoughts of his curling smoke and his battle-bronzed hands, of his insolent heat and artful terrors that had her grasping for her wits.

  "For the last time, sir, I am not a—"

  "Thief, madam?" He made a satisfied rumble in his throat, pleased with his own judgment. "Ah, but you are."

  "I'm not—"

  His laughter stopped her denial, as cold as the stone that braced against her back. His eyes never left hers for a moment of peace, hungry for something she couldn't give him, growing darker still until she saw hot fires flickering there. "In truth, madam, I roast thieves, and then … I eat them."

  "Do you?" An absurd question, but her knees had turned to custard, her lips to sun-warmed honey, because he was carefully charting them with his eyes.

  "Aye, madam thief, then I toss their scrawny bones over the seawall for the crabs to scavenge. Now, leave here."

  As though she could, even if she wanted to; he was as close as he could possibly be. The nostrils of his long nose flared, no doubt sniffing out his supper. Next he'd be weighing her for roasting time.

  "I'm not a thief, sir. I am—"

  "Trespassing." He rolled the word around in his throat, letting it hiss against her ear, a sound that tumbled along every nerve and lighted startling little fires and improbable expectations.

  "No." He was too close. "I'm not!" Too astounding. "'Tis you who are trespassing." He lifted the corner of his darkly moustached upper lip in a mockery of a smile, and seemed to grow larger.

  "In case you misunderstood me, madam—" his breath was soft against her cheek, laced with a deceiving sort of spice; bayberry or juniper, as though he'd been prowling an exotic forest, sampling sunlight by the handfuls "—you have as long as it takes you and your child to walk across the bailey and through the gate to be gone from my sight."

  He waved a dismissive hand toward the door, turned his broad back and started up the stairs with his weighty tread, having exiled her, having gotten the very wrong idea that she would give up her home—the only place she had in the world—without a fight to the death.

  "I will not be gone today, sir, or any other day. I have legal claim to this castle by right of marriage. I am Eleanor Bayard, wife and widow of the late Lord of Faulkhurst. And make no mistake, sir, from this moment on, you are here at my leave!"

  It was as though all the world stopped as he did—the clouds and the gulls and her heart as well, the sun and the moon, all of them spellbound as the man turned slowly and stared down at her darkly.

  "What did you say?" She had expected another resonant roar, would have preferred that to the piercing sharpness of his whisper that stole the lightness out of the air.

  "I said, sir, that you… That I am Lady
—" She swallowed, her throat as dry as a handful of autumn leaves. She hardly looked the part of a lady at the moment, and hadn't for the better part of the past two years. Her kirtle was homespun russet and hanging loose, her cloak only a woolen blanket fastened by a bit of stick through a convenient hole; her feet clad in boots that Dickon had found on a cobbler's table in an abandoned village.

  But blast it all, he had no choice but to believe her, and to obey her orders. She squared up her pride, shoved her fears behind her courage and leveled her best glare at those censuring eyes.

  "I am the widow of William Bayard, the Lord of Faulkhurst." Feeling bolder because he still hadn't moved—though one should never fully trust a mountainside of solid rock—she took three unsteady steps up the staircase toward him, clutching the railing.

  "This is my castle to command. Not yours. It never has been, even if you found it abandoned, or if you stayed behind when everyone else left. I intend to rebuild Faulkhurst, to make it a far better place than it ever was under my husband's indifferent care. That being the case, sir, you will do as I bid from now on—should I decide to allow you to stay."

  There.

  And yet he remained still—a stone gargoyle, perched precariously in that edgeless space between the air and the solid earth, between heaven and hell. They were mythical, menacing creatures, transfixed in their motion, kinetic carvings of sinew and claw imprisoned for eternity in limestone.

  She'd studied many from the ground, her neck craned and aching as it was now, imagining that one of the creatures might spring down upon her if she stared too long, if she caught its unseeing gaze. But this one had eyes of living embers; had thick, seething muscles that were even now shifting dangerously beneath his woolen cloak.

  He was on her in the next breath, pinning her arms behind her with his great, hot hands wrapped round the railing, bending her backward so that her entire world became nothing but him and the raging flight of her heart against her chest, close enough for her to see the tiny flecks of grey in his eyes.

  "Again," he said, surrounding her with his heated scent of fresh-hewn oak and seafoam.