The Maiden Bride Page 2

  "Again, what?"

  Don't come now, Pippa. Stay away.

  He snapped off a growl, then bellowed, "Your name, madam."

  It took her two tries to find enough air, and then only enough to whisper. "Eleanor."

  "Eleanor—" he said instantly, taking in her name with a gasp, tasting the sound of it on his tongue. Then he said again, slower this time, "Eleanor," with such care, such profound desolation, that it made her ache inside, made her stomach flip and her heart fall wide open when she ought to be wary of him.

  "Aye, sir. Eleanor." She would have reached up and brushed that wind-whipped, darkly falling hair off his brow if he hadn't still had her hands pinned safely behind her, where they couldn't betray her. "I am the late lord's—"

  "Christ—" He made a horrible snarling noise, full of anguish, then lifted her, grabbing up her kirtle and cloak, and flew with her up two flights of stairs, out the door to the wall-walk, and into the piercing gold of a sun that had won a last squint between the lowering clouds and the sea.

  "I am your lady, sir! Put me down!" She felt like an ungainly bird who'd forgotten how to fly. Her skirts tangled in his cloak as he wedged her against the breast wall overhanging the seacliffs, where the waves looked small and far, far away, the rocks huge and sharp and clamoring for her bones.

  "Proof, madam," he said, roughly grazing her hair off her face with both hands, then tilting her chin to him with his thumbs, as though he would lean down and kiss her with that very hard-sculpted mouth.

  "Proof of what?" Her heart battered her rib cage, out of control with fear and some unnameable fluttering low in her belly. She could see him better now, the raven black of his hair striped copper by the sun, cut roughly to his shoulders and slashed by the wind; a weeks-old beard, black as the night and shimmering. Eyes of deepest indigo now focused, in all their madness, on her.

  "Proof that you are Bayard's wife."

  A long shudder rolled down her spine, a deep and dark knowing that lodged in the pit of her stomach. Something of the raw earth connected her to this man, something anchored them both to the bedrock, to each other, forever more.

  "I'm Bayard's widow: he's long ago dead of the plague. Though I don't have to prove anything at all to you." She struggled to free herself, but he held her fast with his grip around her upper arms. His hips pressed her thighs against the stone, a molten and unyielding trap that made her look up into his harshly angular face, into all that intensity.

  "Married where?"

  Dammit all, she didn't want to recall that ignominious event. Her father, Bayard's lecherous ambassador, and a leering, tippling priest—what a mockery of wedded bliss that had been. "You will let me go. I am the lady here and you are—"

  "Where?" His breath mixed with hers and the mist from the storm-driven waves, and made her struggle harder to be away from him.

  "I was married at my father's manor, damn you. At Glenstow." As though her answer could mean anything to the brute whose eyes reflected the devilish orange of the sunset. "In Cornwall. How many more details do you need? The rain was falling in cold sheets. I wore a green worsted kirtle and a hempen snood."

  His voice tumbled low right through her, a leveled threat. "When?"

  "Two and a half years ago. On the eve of St. Cecilia." A wicked night, much like this had become. "I was married by proxy, sir. To a scroll of unyielding vellum and a pot of indigo ink."

  The man's eyes darkened to raven and the wind whipped harder at his hair, at his shoulders. He bent to her as though he would share a secret just between the two of them, out here at the tattered edges of the world.

  Nay, madam. Not to vellum and ink.

  You were married … to me.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  « ^ »

  William Nicholas Bayard stuffed his dark confession back inside his chest like the malediction it would become if he let it loose between them.

  Wife? Impossible. She could not be alive. Eleanor Bayard was safely dead of the plague, along with the rest of her bloody family. They'd told him so. Someone had—a hundred years back, when the world had been growing dark and indistinct. When things mattered.

  Yet here she was with her proof: this ghostly wife who smelled of bread and nutmeg and bedstraw, of sultry kitchens and the murmur of the living, the exquisiteness of her scent caught up inside the folds of his cloak, in his hair, and on the riffling wind.

  "Have I convinced you, sir?"

  That I have gone utterly mad? Oh, yes, madam, you have.

  Though he had expected the madness of hellhounds and slathering demons to beset him in these last days of freedom in the carnal world, a plague of doubts and a parade of soul-tempting delights.

  How the hell was he to know that those temptations would come for him all at once in the guise of a wife, one so very breathtaking in her rumpled rags and her outrage?

  She was looking up at him without a hint of her earlier fear, waiting for him to answer; her new-fawn eyes softly unflinching, her wildly red hair whipping at the edges of her hairline and streaming out in the sea wind to snag the fading light of the day.

  She was magnificent.

  And mine.

  Buttermilk skin and keen-edged tenacity. The very sort of perfection gleaned from his dreams, by an omniscient and highly skilled God who faithfully practiced his art of conspicuous damnation.

  The God who knew the best way to break him, one blow, one unbearable loss at a time.

  Why not this one, too?

  A blackened soul, a shattered estate, a dead son. And now a dazzlingly, home-scented wife returned from the grave.

  "Christ, woman, why did you come?"

  Yet he already knew the answer: to bedevil you, husband; to call up your shame and revel in it—to make you pay for your blasphemies in the only coin you understand.

  "I came, sir, because Faulkhurst is my home now—my widow's dower, granted to me by King Edward only last month. So, you will unhand me."

  Or bed you, wife, as is my right.

  And his desire, to bend and taste the pale damson of her ripe mouth.

  Aye, to take her here at long last, on the crumbling ramparts of his castle, where the wind tugged as madly at her skirts as he would do in his revel between her pale, precious thighs. As he might have done in those long, dissolute ages past, the vile creature he used to be—would always be, in the depths of his heart.

  In the eyes of God.

  Aye, she was that kind of a temptation. The sort he ought to let go before he lost control completely. She was eddies of warmth curling round him, tempting him to call her wife, when he could not.

  For he had other, weightier debts to pay.

  "I don't know or care who you are, sir. Faulkhurst may look abandoned and available to the first vagabond who ventures past and takes a fancy to it, but it's not. It's mine. I mean to sow the fields and graze sheep on the hills. And dig the village out of the ashes."

  Do you, wife? That single word—wife—taunted him to speak it rashly and close by her soft ear. If he did, he would be husband and lord then, alive once more.

  William Nicholas Bayard risen from the dead. No. That was no longer possible. He was beyond that now, beyond caring, already condemned and buried deeply in his self-imposed penance, sworn everlastingly to a solitary life with no provisions for wives or titles or estates.

  Less than a month from now, he would enter the cloisters of St. Jerome, and be quietly done with the world.

  Certainly done with this wife.

  "Be gone, madam." Still, it hurt to whisper the words; it left him more hollow than he'd ever known. He shifted his shoulder aside and she swiftly shoved away from him in her escape, running along the curtain wall, her ragged skirts flying out behind her, leaving all that heady fragrance to tug at him.

  From the tower passage she spared him a glowering glance, with a relentless finger leveled at him. "Mind your ways and your temper in my home and among my household, sir, else you'll find yourself
outside the gate come morning."

  Then she disappeared into the darkness, as though she had never been.

  Her home? She still misunderstood him completely, this wayward wife of his. He could not possibly let her stay here, no matter how loudly she made her claim, or however royally it had been decreed.

  Faulkhurst would beat her down, would smother her in its corruption, if it didn't crush her first beneath its precarious arches. He hadn't room for the weight of her life on his soul if she died here of his negligence—not with all the other lives settled there like lead. He would be rid of her tonight, if she weren't already running toward the gate with the child, and the others she mentioned. He'd fill her fool head with fiery visions of hell and send her on her way before she could settle in.

  And should she refuse to leave, he would tell her … what? That he was William Nicholas Bayard, and very much alive?

  Christ in heaven—there was his towering dilemma, the teetering balance between this life and the next. He couldn't banish her with the power of the truth. Not without ungodly consequences to her, and to his monkish vows. His soul was already pledged.

  To exert his lordship over Faulkhurst, over this untimely wife of his, would mean a stark confession of everything, would mean that she would learn of the sins and the heathen soul of Nicholas Bayard. His past, his present, and the unalterable fact that he had no future at all.

  And what then? She had that innocently meddling look about her; a conquering angel who would steadfastly stay if she knew the truth of him. Who would demand a merciful household, chests of sun-washed linen, spice merchants, holy days, and children.

  Sons.

  If she knew.

  He drew a careful breath, guarding against the grip of his heart around his throat, against the sting of the salt-thick wind behind his eyes.

  And the memories. He wanted nothing to do with them.

  He went to the curtain wall and watched her cross the shadowy inner ward, darting inexorably between the taunting ghosts and rotting carts. Though he willed her and her defiance toward the gates that would speed her away from this place of desolation, she went deeper and deeper into the castle until she was only another insolent phantom, dashing up the steps of the keep and disappearing into the great hall.

  My great hall, wife. Where the windows glowed with a pale tinge of orange, where a thin spiral of smoke slipped from the chimney into the unwary stillness before the storm blew in off the sea.

  He had been well warned of her coming to the cliff tower; had tasted her delicate fragrance as it climbed the stairs ahead of her, slipping unseen past the little pale-haired ghost to wreathe the rafters and cloud his senses. He should have lashed out immediately and sent them both scurrying away in terror.

  But he'd lived so long without feeling the tread of another across the floor, so long without the melody of another voice in the room with him, that a drunkenness had settled into his marrow, had warmed and slowed him, had stopped him entirely.

  And made him listen for too long to the heady whisperings.

  Reach for me. Take my hand.

  He'd thought she'd been talking to him.

  Nellamore. Such a little voice. His hand ached to be filled again, for that gentle tugging.

  Jackstraws, Papa? Oh, please!

  A raging sorrow wrung his gut raw. The ache, the monumental loss was still larger than his chest; it pressed at his ribs, sizzled against his eyes, and thawed out in that single moment of confusion, in the blinding glare of the woman's impossible announcement.

  I am Eleanor Bayard.

  Wife.

  * * *

  And in that clever guise, she was an ordeal designed for him alone. An immutable lesson to those who ignored a vengeful Heaven, to those whose sins were legion, the stuff of living legends. Whose redemption had come too late.

  Much too late to appease an exacting God. And in the end, far too late to save his own son.

  I love you, Papa.

  Nicholas swallowed back the harrowing sob and sought the soothing coldness again, conjuring it out of discipline, stuffing brittle fistfuls of it back into his chest, where its comfortable chill settled again into his bones, back where it belonged.

  She had been wholly right on one count:

  William Nicholas Bayard was dead, had been for a very long time. A surprise to the deceased, but not wholly unexpected and hardly mourned—by anyone, it seemed. The king had decreed it, had declared his wife to be legally widowed, his estate forfeit to her, to her grandiose plans to graze sheep and restore a tiny village that God's anger had shaken to its foundation.

  The rotting fields, the village and the ashes, the false promises, fallen skies, deserted streets, the pounding seas, the tyrannical shadows.

  The graves and the staggering sorrow.

  Well then, Madam, take Faulkhurst exactly as you found it.

  All of it gladly hers, for he would be gone from here someday soon. He remained only to finish the chapel roof.

  And the boy's grave marker.

  Then he would keep the last of his pledge: to take his vows of penance and poverty, and be done with the world.

  Though he shouldn't care what became of the woman, he made his way along the cold passages of the undercrofts, past doors that he'd locked for good, past barricades of tumbled archways, and up a set of hidden stairs into the murky shadows of the gallery in the great hall.

  Allying his own darkness with that of the moonless night, he became a part of the stonework colonnade that overhung the darkly vaulted hall. A single torch flame wobbled against the blackened stone wall opposite, battered by the age-old breeze that seemed to come from inside the earth itself.

  He hadn't been inside the great hall for a year, since he'd scrubbed it clean of the pestilence and closed it up. He'd thought he had evicted all the ghosts that day. But they had returned, alive in the clatter of pots and spoons and the dancing disorder of footfalls.

  "But, my lady, please—"

  "I do understand that you are worried, Dickon. But you needn't be." It was his wife's voice, a silken sensibility that took hold of his chest and tugged at him.

  "If he touched you or Pippa, I'll—"

  "He didn't."

  He'd done far more than touch her yet she was defending him?

  "And I've taken care of the problem," Eleanor finished.

  "You killed him?" The young man's voice cracked with newness and his callow admiration.

  "Not even close, Dickon." She laughed, a smoky, sinuous sound that inched him closer to the railing, toward her gentle reassurance. Just enough to see her this one last time—so that he could remember. "Murder was my late husband's way, not mine. I merely put him in his place."

  Ah, she would have been the tussling sort of wife, opinionated and unflinching in every part of her life.

  "Bravo, my lady!" A fist thumped down on a table—the boy's, no doubt, as his voice slid back to its rocky depths and stayed. "But still, he threatened you, this ghost. I'll run him through the next time I see him."

  "You won't, Dickon. And I tell you again that he isn't a ghost, any more than I am." She laughed again. "More like a gargoyle—"

  Gargoyle, indeed!

  "Truly, my lady? Like that huge, snarling gargoyle we saw hanging over the lady chapel at St. Oswald out Rainsay way? Remember that, Lisabet? Hideous, he was."

  Hideous?

  "Oooo! I do remember, Dickon," the young girl said with a trill of laughter. "I'll bet this one bays at the moon."

  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 th
e 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.