An Unlikely Match (22 page)

He stopped not far from the window, looking around him, his expression one of concern. “I know you are in here.” His voice barely rose above a whisper. “I cannot even say how I know, only that I do.” He paused, obviously waiting for her to confirm his words, casting his eyes about the room. She neither moved nor spoke. Somehow, it was easier that way. “Please don’t hide from me, Gwen.”

His pleading tone nearly undid her. But she found a certain heartbreaking solace in her invisibility. Given time, he would forget about her, forget that she wandered the corridors of the home he shared with his wife and family. All of Tŷ Mynydd would forget. She would simply walk the long-since fallen walls of her one-time home unseen and unheeded and find a quiet corner to spend her days and nights. Time would continue its relentless march until that day’s suffering was little but a memory, held only by herself.

“I am sorry you found out the way you did,” Nickolas said. She knew without further clues that he referred to his own engagement. “I had intended to tell you myself, but . . .” He stopped and took a shaky breath. Nickolas pushed his fingers through his hair. “Sometimes life is terribly unfair, Gwen. If only one of us had been born at a different time, four hundred years earlier or later than we were.”

If she hadn’t been a ghost, Gwen would have wept.
Unfair
did not even begin to describe how fate had treated her.

“I have never had a family.” Nickolas sat on the edge of her bed just as he had several times before whilst they’d spoken with so much natural ease and friendliness. “I have always wanted one. I have always wanted, if I ever was fortunate enough to have the means to support a family, to have children and a wife and a home. And . . .” Again, he pushed out a difficult breath. “That kind of future,
any
kind of future, is impossible with a lady who is already dead.”

Despite her determination to remain undetected, the slightest of breezes picked up in the room at the pain his well-intentioned words inflicted.

Nickolas watched the fluttering window curtains with a look of resignation that must have matched her own. “Miss Castleton is a fine lady, kindhearted and good-natured. I believe she will make a good wife.” His gaze broke away from the swaying curtains and moved quickly around the room. Gwen knew he was looking for her. “I have to try to make some sort of a life for myself, Gwen.” A hint of determination entered his tone. He rose to his feet. “I just wanted you to know why. And that . . . that I do care about you. I just can’t . . . I am making the best of a difficult situation and have every intention of being happy. I hope that you can as well. I want you to be.”

Happy?
Gwen knew she would not be. In time, she might find some degree of contentment. In the meantime, she would keep her suffering and herself concealed and allow the world around her to move ahead and leave her behind.

Nickolas stood up and walked silently to the door. Over his shoulder he offered a heavy “Good night, Gwen” and was gone, the door locked once more behind him.

It was the way things had to be. He would create a life for himself, and she would fade into memory. In her invisibility, she would find a semblance of escape from the pain of losing him whom she had never truly had to begin with. They had had their last conversation, their last moment of friendly interaction. She had known the joy of his eyes locked with her own for the final time.

“Good-bye, Nickolas,” Gwen whispered into the empty room.

Chapter Nineteen

Gwen hadn’t anticipated losing her sanctuary. The room remained locked, except for the daily dusting the maids continued to undertake. ’Twas not an invasion that drove her from her room but her own memories. The peace and solace she’d once known there had vanished. The chamber reminded her of Nickolas and how much she missed him already, despite only three days having passed without his company.

She avoided the house entirely now. At night she walked the fallen walls of Y Castell, silent and lost. During the daylight hours, when the house teemed with activity, its occupants appearing without warning, she traversed the farthest corners of the estate where no one ever ventured.

But loneliness overtook her on the third day of her exile, driving her to the one person other than Nickolas she would have most liked to have near at hand to soothe her aching heart. She stood at her mother’s headstone on the side opposite her father’s grave. That the two were buried beside one another had kept her away more often than not over the centuries.

Gwen’s own monument stood several rows behind her. She kept her back determinedly toward it.

Nickolas had promised her she could remember the castle in any way she chose. Often over the previous three days, she had closed her eyes and pictured it as whole and strong as it had been in her childhood, the angel statue gone, her mother yet living, and Nickolas himself come as a suitor seeking her hand. She imagined him taking her away from Y Castell before the arrival of King Henry’s troops, before warfare and cruelty robbed her of everything. Inevitably, however, the daydreams dissolved, and reality returned in all its ugliness.

“Oh, Mama,” she said. “Why must fate continually crush me?”

She glanced over at her father’s grave. He who actually deserved the punishment she endured had escaped it all after only a handful of years. She’d once longed for his affection and approval but had found, after the passage of so many painful years, that she could not think of her father without hating him. Gwen decided long ago not to let his memory poison her, so she thought of him as seldom as possible.

Pushing her father firmly from her mind, Gwen once more addressed her absent mother, wishing she could truly talk to her again. “I am so very lonely, Mother. I have no one to talk to, no one to care about me. Another four hundred years of this will drive me mad, and yet there is no escape. Perhaps I could come talk with you on occasion, when I am particularly lonesome. As I sincerely doubt you and Father are in the same location”—heaven hardly seemed the appropriate final destination for him—“I need not worry about him overhearing. This is all his fault, you know. All of it.”

There was no answer beyond complete silence. These would be one-sided conversations, a dissatisfying stand-in for the company of another person.

She allowed her eyes to wander to the distant house, where Nickolas was likely just having his breakfast. Only a week earlier, she would have turned to him for a jovial story to liven her spirits. They would have wandered the grounds or the house and simply talked.

“I cannot recall the last time I saw you in the churchyard, Gwen.”

She spun at the sound of Dafydd’s voice. Her distraction had allowed him to approach unnoticed, without a thought given to whether or not she’d remained invisible.

“Good morning, Dafydd. I had not meant to disturb you. I came to”—she found herself reluctant to admit the purpose of her visit but did so anyway—“visit my mother.”

He did not laugh at the futility of her effort. Something like empathy crossed his face. “No one has seen you these past few days,” Dafydd said.

“The household has been occupied with planning the upcoming festivities. I imagine they have been too busy to notice me.” She managed the lie with a convincing degree of casualness.

Dafydd nodded. “The engagement has only added to the chaos, I’m afraid.”

“Do they seem happy?” Though she strove for a tone of disinterest, Gwen knew she fell quite far from the mark.

Dafydd studied her rather more closely than was comfortable. Understanding dawned in his features. Gwen braced herself, not knowing how he would respond. “You’ve fallen in love with him, haven’t you?”

She wanted to believe it was compassion and not pity that colored his tone. There would be no avoiding the question, and she could not feel comfortable lying to a man of the cloth on the grounds of a church. “Quite hopelessly, I’m afraid.”

“Hopeless.” He repeated that single word with a nod of understanding.

Hearing him confirm her evaluation of the situation only broke her heart further.

“Will you come to the wedding?” he asked. “You have never missed one in four hundred years.”

She had pondered that very question again and again since learning of Nickolas’s engagement. “The neighborhood will surely notice if I do not make an appearance.”

“That they will,” Dafydd agreed. “And will likely see it as evidence that you disapprove of Tŷ Mynydd’s newest master and his bride.”

Gwen sighed. “I cannot do that to either of them.”

“Then you will subject yourself to the sight of watching the one you love marry another?” An odd mixture of empathy and surprise colored his words.

“Perhaps you ought to warn the ladies to secure their bonnets—the chapel is likely to be a bit windy.” She tried for a joking tone but failed quite miserably.

Neither of them spoke as they stood on that bit of hallowed ground. She knew not what occupied Dafydd’s thoughts. Hers were quite firmly on Nickolas, as they had been so often since his arrival at Tŷ Mynydd. How she loved him! And she would be forced to watch him marry. She would endure that to ensure his acceptance in the neighborhood, to make his life a little easier.

“Might I ask you a question, Dafydd, as a man of the cloth?”

His attention returned to her. “Are you in need of spiritual advisement?”

She nodded.

“You may ask anything you wish.”

“I have thought back on the twenty years of my life, and I cannot think of anything I might have done to warrant four hundred years of penance. Dying young seems harsh enough but would not have been so terrible if I’d been permitted to actually move on. I might have been with my mother all these years.” The wind kicked up by her sadness mingled with the late October breeze. “Why must life be so very unfair?”

“I don’t think any of us understands why good people must pass through so much pain.” Dafydd’s expression seemed to indicate he too had experienced undeserved difficulties. “We simply must learn from them and live the best life we can until our sojourn is over.”

She held her hands out in frustration. “But my sojourn will never be over. My lot is centuries of loss piled atop pain piled atop suffering. There is no end to it.”

Dafydd looked apologetic but offered no words of solace. He likely had none to give.

“Do you know why I avoid the cemetery?” she asked.

“The angel?”

“That statue is certainly a factor,” Gwen acknowledged. “But it is more than that. I look around at all these names, and I envy them. They have found rest. Most, I am certain, have passed on to their reward. Their struggles here are over, and I envy them that. It is not a peaceful feeling to endure.”

“You wish to move on?”

Sorrow cut deeply into her. “More now than ever before.”

“He has truly broken your heart, hasn’t he?”

She allowed herself to begin fading into invisibility. “Life has broken my heart. Irrevocably.”

“Can I do anything for you?”

“Pray for me, Dafydd. Pray for a merciful release from this never-ending anguish.”

A harsh wind whipped at the grounds around them.

“And is there anything you’d like me to tell Nickolas?”

She shook her head. “I think it best to allow him to forget I ever existed.” Invisibility cloaked her entirely as she spoke those final words.

“I will pray for you, Gwen,” Dafydd said, his eyes searching around.

She did not respond out loud but thought,
Perhaps God will listen to
you
.

* * *

Life at Tŷ Mynydd little resembled what it had been a mere few days earlier. Miss Castleton had grown discouragingly quiet even as her mother had grown far more vociferous. There was talk of a Christmas wedding at the Tŷ Mynydd chapel, though Dafydd, who had lost a great deal of his usual outgoing, friendly nature, was being very elusive as to his availability to perform the ceremony. Griffith had taken to silent studies of Nickolas and Miss Castleton, though he never revealed what he was searching for. Mr. Castleton was in a pother over the glaring absence of Gwen, something that weighed on Nickolas as well.

She had not, since the first day of the house party, been so entirely absent. Her presence had always been felt, either in the form of mysterious winds or by an actual appearance. Even on those days when she did not cross paths with one or more of the houseguests, she had been seen at a distance. But four days had passed without a single soul seeing even a fleeting glimpse of her. The maids who tended her room found it empty. The grooms who had nightly seen her walking the now-fallen walls of the ancient castle reported not so much as a hint of her.