All the Sweet Tomorrows (65 page)

“Hah!” she snapped at him. “How many times did you turn me away, Adam de Marisco? Twice, as I recall, and now suddenly it is I who would turn you away, but you will be patient. I swear to you I will not marry again! I will learn to use men as they use women. I wonder how patient you will feel when you see me flirting with another man, Adam.”

He grinned infuriatingly at her. “Get it out of your system, little girl, and when you are ready to be sensible again I will be waiting patiently for you, as I always have.”

“Ohhh!” God’s bones, he was making her so angry. He was treating her as if she were a child instead of a woman of thirty-one who had just come through a terrible experience. Skye drew in a deep breath to scold him further, but he forestalled her, saying:

“Look, there is Archambault!”

Unable to resist, Skye looked through the coach window. There on a gentle hill that rose above the River Cher, she saw a charming small château with its steep red-tiled roof, its four rounded corner towers, and very French dormer windows. Below it along the river were the vineyards of Archambault, and behind them a generous estate of fields and woodlands. It was a perfect summer’s day with a cloudless, deep-blue sky and bright golden sun. The river ran cheerfully by the green vines and ripening fields of maize and wheat. The forest was in full leaf. There were cattle grazing in the fields, and sheep, too. It was altogether the most peaceful scene Skye had ever seen. She had not believed that there was any place on this earth
that
peaceful.

The coach rumbled onward up the hill to the château, drawing to a stop before a tier of steps crowned with carved and gilded double doors of weathered oak. As the vehicle stopped, the doors to the château were swung open by a liveried servant, and
several footmen came running down the steps followed by a rather beautiful woman in a taffeta gown the color of purple primroses, its low-necked bodice embroidered in silver and crystal beads. The woman’s hair was coiffed as Skye wore hers, parted in the middle, drawn back and gathered into an elegant chignon. There were pearls in her hair.

“Adam!”

“Maman!”
He sprang from the coach, and caught her up in a bear hug of an embrace, squeezing her until she shrieked, and kissing her soundly upon both cheeks.

“Put me down, you great oaf!” she scolded him laughingly. “You are destroying my coiffure, and what will your lovely Skye think of me if you do!”

“She will think what I think. She will think you are the most beautiful, the most marvelous mother in the whole world!” He set her gently on her feet.

Gabrielle de Saville’s glance softened with the fondness a mother harbors for her firstborn, then quickly she demanded, “Well, where is she, my son? Where is this paragon you have written me about?”

Skye felt her cheeks coloring as she heard Adam’s mother’s words. As she stepped down from the coach, her small hand in Adam’s big one, she had no idea of how lovely she looked. She was wearing a simple light silk traveling dress of leaf green with a soft scooped neck and comfortable hanging sleeves, which were cool for coach travel. She had only a simple strand of pearls about her neck and matching earbobs in her ears. She looked fresh and very beautiful.

“Maman, may I present to you Skye, Lady Burke, better known as Skye O’Malley. Skye, my mother, the Comtesse de Cher.”

“You will call me Gaby, my dear,” Adam’s mother said graciously, “and I shall call you Skye. You are every bit as fair as Adam has written. Welcome to Archambault! I hope you will stay with us for a long visit.”

Skye blinked back her sudden tears. “Madame … Gaby … your welcome is most kind. I am so grateful for your hospitality.”

Gaby de Saville put a motherly arm about Skye. “There, my dear, you are safe now. Here at Archambault nothing will hurt you. Adam has written to me a little bit about your bravery and how you sought to rescue your poor husband from Morocco. I am so sorry about his death.”

Skye bowed her head.

“Come,” said the comtesse, “we must not stand here. The family is gathered inside waiting to meet you.”

As they walked up the steps and into the château Skye looked admiringly at Adam’s mother. She had borne her eldest son when she was fifteen. She was now fifty-seven, yet her thick, dark blond hair was still full of warm golden lights, and her eyes, the same smoky blue as her son’s, were bright and knowing. She was nearly as tall as Skye herself, and she was as slender as a girl, with fine, full breasts. Adam, Skye decided, did not look like his mother except for the color of his eyes and his nose, for Gaby de Saville had given her son her aristocratic, elegant French nose. The comtesse’s face was that of a little cat, though, with a pointed chin, and a provocative rosebud of a mouth. As they followed her into a lovely salon with long windows looking out onto a colorful garden of brightly colored flowers Skye thought that she was going to have a friend in this charming Frenchwoman.

The salon was filled with chattering people who all stopped in mid-sentence and stared as they entered the room. In the moment of heavy silence that followed a scholarly looking man detached himself from the group and hurried forward to place an arm about the comtesse.

“Skye, my dear, this is my husband, Antoine de Saville, Comte de Cher.”

“M’sieur le Comte, you are so kind to offer me your hospitality,” Skye said, holding out her hand to be kissed. She liked the look of this balding, somewhat paunchy man whose brown eyes twinkled appreciatively at her.

“Madame, how could I refuse such beauty,” the comte said, kissing Skye’s hand fervently.

His greeting seemed a signal for the room to erupt. “Adam!” three of the women shrieked, flinging themselves at him. With a delighted roar Adam de Marisco managed to envelop them all in a crushing embrace.

“Mes enfants! Mes enfants!”
Gaby cried. “You must wait to greet your brother until after I have introduced our guest.”

“Pardon, maman,” the three said with one voice as they stepped away from Adam.

“Skye, my dear, these three ill-mannered creatures are my daughters. This is Isabeau, and Clarice, and Musette.”

The three women curtseyed, as did Skye in return. She knew that Isabeau Rochouart and Clarice St. Justine were Adam’s full
sisters, children, like him, of Gaby’s first marriage to John de Marisco. The two sisters looked like their mother, but their hair was dark, as was their brother’s. Musette de Saville Sancerre was Adam’s half-sister, and she, a miniature of her mother, was just twenty-five, the youngest of Gaby’s children.

Now the others came forward to be introduced. Alexandre de Saville, the oldest child of the comtesse’s second marriage, a widower with three young children. Yves de Saville and his wife, Marie-Jeanne, with their children. Robert Sancerre, Musette’s husband, and their three children. Then there was Isabeau’s husband, Louis, and their daughter, Matilde, who was sixteen. The last to be introduced was Henri St. Justine. He and Clarice were the parents of four children ranging in age from nineteen to eleven, and they had all come to see their Uncle Adam.

Skye was both delighted and astounded by the size of Adam de Marisco’s family. This was certainly a side of him that she had never known or even suspected existed. For her, he had always been the rather lonely island lord whose mother had remarried and lived in France. He had mentioned his sisters, Isabeau and Clarice, in passing, but she had never realized that his mother had had a second family, and that Adam was so obviously beloved by them all, even his two younger half-brothers. She stood now almost shyly as they clustered about him, kissing and hugging him, and chattering all their news.

Then she felt a hand on her arm, and she was led off to a comfortable settle. “They will all talk at him for the next ten minutes until they realize he is really here, and intends to stay for a time,” said the Comte Antoine de Saville, smiling at her.

“I did not realize that his family was so large,” Skye said.

“He does not talk about them?”

“No,” she answered slowly, “but now I suspect he kept this knowledge to himself lest he grow lonely for you while living by himself on Lundy. He would not neglect his small holding.”

“Perhaps now,” the comte said, “that will change, madame.”

“Of course it will, darling,” Gaby said, seating herself next to them. “Adam tells me that he plans to wed with our lovely Skye.”

“No!”
The word burst harshly forth from between her lips as Skye reddened with embarrassment.

“Oh dear,” Gaby murmured, looking equally chagrined.

“You don’t understand, Gaby,” Skye said in an effort to explain.
“I love Adam, but I will not marry again. Each of my husbands has suffered death. I am a jinx! Besides, I want to be my own woman now, not someone’s possession. Has Adam told you that I spent close to a year in the harem of a wealthy Moroccan in my effort to rescue my husband? For the Arabs a woman is a possession like a sword, or a hawk, or a garment; and I was treated exactly like that. I have had all I can take of that sort of treatment at a man’s hands, and I have been most frank with Adam about it. Still he persists!”

“You say you love him, my dear,” Gaby said.

“I do! It is a strange love, for it has grown during the time I have been happily married to others, yet love Adam I do. I want his happiness, Gaby, but I am not that happiness. He must understand that!”

“Of course, my dear, of course,” Adam’s mother soothed. “Men can be so obstinate when it comes to women. They simply do not understand us.” She smiled at Skye, thinking what a lovely daughter-in-law she would be. The Irishwoman was everything Adam had written of her. She was beautiful, intelligent, and warm. That she did not know her own mind right now was most apparent to Gaby de Saville. When the shock of her experiences in Morocco and the death of her husband had worn off, then she would see clearly that Adam de Marisco was the only man for her. “We are going up to Paris in a few weeks,” she said brightly to Skye. “King Henri of Navarre is marrying with our own Princesse Marguérite de Valois on the eighteenth of August. You will naturally come with us.”

“I should love it!” Skye exclaimed. “I have never been to Paris.”

“Then that is settled,” Gaby replied. She stood up. “Come, my dear, I will show you to your apartments now. You must be exhausted after eight days on the road.”

“I am,” Skye admitted. “We passed through some lovely cities—Avignon, Lyons, Nevers, Bourges—but we didn’t stop. Adam very much wanted to get to Archambault to see you all.”

Gaby de Saville led her guest from the salon, where Adam was still surrounded by his family. Catching Skye’s eye as she passed him, he grinned and shrugged helplessly, and she was forced to smile back at him. He blew her a kiss with his fingertips. “He is a good son,” the comtesse was saying as they moved up the main staircase of the château to the bedroom floors. “You have no idea how hurt and ashamed he was when that wretched Athenais Boussac spurned him, and then, not satisfied
with merely refusing my son, made his bad luck a public thing. He has, of course, told you of her?”

“I have heard the story,” Skye replied. “He never mentioned her name to me.”

“How like my Adam! A gentleman even in regard to
that
one!”

“She was a fool, Gaby! The fact that he cannot sire a child has had nothing to do with his abilities as a man.” Skye stopped a moment as they reached the carved door of what was to be her apartment while at Archambault. “You know that we have been lovers, Adam and I.”

“But of course, my dear!” the comtesse laughed.

“It does not shock you?”

“You are both free of any spouses, and of an age, my dear Skye, if you will forgive my mentioning it, that should allow you both to choose your own course in life. You and my son are good for each other, and despite what you say, I suspect that one day I shall welcome you as my
belle-fille
. No!” Gaby put two fingers on Skye’s lips to stifle her protest. “Do not argue with me, my dear. Leave me some hope!”

Skye had to laugh. Gaby’s attitude was so very much like Adam’s. “Now,” she said, “I know where Adam gets his stubbornness.”

Gaby chuckled back as she opened the door to the chamber and ushered Skye into the small salon. “His father was equally pigheaded,” she said. “Oh, the fights John and I used to have! They fairly made the old walls of Lundy Castle ring. He’s been dead over thirty years now, my dear, and I still miss him! Without my dearest and kindly Antoine I don’t know what I would have done.”

“Then Lundy was still whole when Adam was young?” Skye looked about the little salon. It was a most charming room with its linenfold paneling and a wall of diamond-paned windows that overlooked the river and the fields. There was a small fireplace flanked by stone greyhounds with a fire already laid and ready to light.

“Yes,” the comtesse replied. “John de Marisco unfortunately got into an argument with Henry Tudor over the favors of a rather amply charmed lady of the court. She was more than willing to take on both King and courtier. The King, however, was not of a mind to share even a temporary mistress. In a temper King Harry sent one of his ships out of Bideford, and they blew
the castle almost to bits. Both my husband and the lady in question happened to be in residence at the time. They were killed.”

“How terrible for you!” Skye sympathized.

“The loss of the castle, or the loss of my husband?” was the reply.

“Both,” Skye said.

Gaby de Saville laughed. “Yes,” she answered, “it was terrible. John occasionally strayed, and I knew it, but then I am a Frenchwoman, and we are taught to ignore such things. Still, this particular piece of foolishness cost my children their home, and Adam his full birthright. The King was furious, and could not bear the sight of us, having transferred his anger to all the de Mariscos now that John was dead. When Adam, then but eleven, accused the King of murdering his father, our fate in England was sealed. We were banned from court, and having no other place to go, I brought my children home to France. We were welcomed at King François’s court, as my father had been one of his most trusted advisors in his younger days. The King gave us a small pension, took Adam on as a page for Queen Eleanor, and the next thing I knew he arranged a marriage for me with my dear Antoine.” She smiled. “Sometimes things work out for the best, even when it doesn’t seem they will.”