[Barbara Samuel] Night of Fire(Book4You) (19 page)

A faint sense of dread moved in Basilio. He did remember the girl, tiny and laughing, with yards of black hair, sitting with his mother on summer afternoons. She had charmed them both. "I remember."

"You mother worried that she would grow to be too beautiful to be hidden in a nunnery, and her father was greedy and a gambler. The scene was set, even then, for the disaster that brews now for Analise.

Your mother—" the word grew rough. He laced his hands stoically behind his back, regained control.

"Your mother asked me to protect her when the time came."

Basilio made an impatient sound. "I know this! Why are you telling me all over again when I have agreed to the marriage?"

"The English woman. How did you meet her?"

He shook his head, wondering why it mattered. "She is a writer. I read some of her essays." Wearily, he sat at the table and put his head in his hands. "I thought she was a middle-aged widow."

"She threatened me."

Basilio raised his head in time to catch the quirk of his father's mouth. To his surprise, his father chuckled.

"What was her threat?"

A lift of a shoulder. "It does not matter." He turned, his face not unkind. "Any man can understand why you fell in love with her, Basilio Fierce, strong, beautiful."

Too much emotion. Basilio raised his hand. "No more, Father. Please."

"If you do not marry Analise, her father will give her to Tortessi."

Heavily, Basilio rose. "I know. Excuse me."

He climbed the stairs to the chamber he'd shared with Cassandra. When he opened the door, the scent of her—musk and wildflowers and cloves—enveloped him. It brought the memory of her hair, trailing over his arm.

A feeling like a knife wound seared the middle of his chest. His flesh burned with sensual memories—the smoothness of her skin, the sweetness of her kiss, the throatiness of her laughter. He thought of the long conversations they'd shared, and the simple, rare, deep pleasure he'd found in a mind that engaged his own. His heart ached with the certainty that she was his only love, would ever be the only woman his soul would even recognize. It was more than passion, more than friendship, a combination that transcended both.

How could he let her go?

But even as he stared at the blue and green of the Tuscan hills, he knew that he already had. The only thing that could destroy the beauty of what they'd shared was his guilt, and if Analise married Tortessi, his conscience would never allow him to sleep again.

So he would don this mantle. But even in his resolve, he could not halt the grief that swelled around him.

He put his hand on the glass, wondering how he would bear it.

Analise allowed herself to be garbed in the breathtakingly beautiful gown her mother had ordered from Rome. She did not protest, did not weep, did not smile. She lifted her arms when directed, turned her head when nudged, stood straight to let them tie her into her corsets. The voices of the women rose in waves of excitement around her, then subsided and rose again.

Beyond the windows of the villa a heavy rain fell on the green Tuscan hills, and Analise watched it, thinking fancifully that the angels were weeping with her.

In her hand, she clutched a letter that had come only this morning, a letter that had followed her from the convent to Florence to the villa, and only just arrived. It was the letter Basilio had asked her about that morning he had come to see her, demons in his eyes. Now she understood.

Analise burned with shame over her weakness. She had known she ought take her vows, but she had been too afraid to defy her father. If the letter had reached her, it would have given her courage enough.

And now she also understood that the young beautiful Count was a pawn as much as she. What hope could such a marriage have of ever bringing joy?

But it was too late. Because she had been a coward, she would be married today to a man who did not want her. She had resolved to do her duty in this marriage, but the angels knew her heart. They wept in her place, because she could not disappoint her mother and father by doing so.

A servant girl from the village, hired especially to help Analise with these preparations, whispered, "

Bellissima
!" her hands clasped under her chin.

Analise turned to the long, smoky colored mirror. Dispassionately, she viewed her beauty. Very thick dark hair and smooth olive skin, and her best feature, blue eyes, which startled against the darkness of her hair. Her figure was like her mother's, full at bust and hip, and much had been made of that bust so it flowed indecently into the square bodice of the pale gown. "A fichu," she said firmly, and held out a hand.

The girl made a token protest as Analise tucked it in.

"Do you know the Count?" she asked.

"Oh, yes! You will be pleased, my lady. He is young and healthy and beautiful." She adjusted the back of the fichu carefully. "It is said he is kind, good to his servants. Such a man does not beat his wife, no?"

"Thank you." The girl had given the reassurance Analise needed.

"They're waiting."

Analise hesitated, looking over her shoulder to the dark clouds. There was still time for a miracle.

"Please," she prayed silently. "Let me go back!"

The girl was young, too young. Basilio turned to her in the silence of the chamber that had been prepared for them and his wretchedness increased a hundredfold. Yet whatever he felt, there was no wretchedness in the world so deep as that of his young bride.

She stood, tiny and straight, adorned in her great cloak of dark hair, and raised her eyes to his. He had expected a virgin's terror, but in the enormous and extraordinary blue eyes, there was something else. A fire, dark and turbulent; one he would not have anticipated in a sixteen-year-old, never mind one so gently reared. "We have sinned here today, sir," she said suddenly, her chin lifting.

"Sinned?" He halted in the act of removing his neckcloth.

From her bodice she took a folded parchment. He recognized his hand on the letter. "It came too late,"

she said, her mouth tight. "Had it come only one day sooner, I would have heeded its message. It came to me here, following me from Corsica."

He let go a snort of humorless laughter, bowing his head. "And had I acted in true conscience and faith when I first knew my heart, you would have had the letter one day sooner." Regret knifed through him, then he raised his head. "God's will is done now, and we are bound."

"God's will?" she echoed with a fine irony. Twice today he had seen intelligence in her. But of course she would have access to knowledge in the convent that she could not have gained else-wise. "Is it?"

"That I cannot answer." In sudden decision, he turned and locked the door so no servant could disturb them. When he turned back, purpose in his step, she shrank away, and he shook his head. "Do not fear me, Analise. I had no more wish for this than did you." From the desk he took a knife and cut his finger

—not so obviously that it would be noticed, but enough to bring welling drops of blood to the surface.

She watched him silently as he strode to the bed and, a little to one side of the center, smeared the blood on to the sheets. "There," he said, turning back. "It is done."

She closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands, her bravado dissolving in the soft trembling of those long white fingers. Gently, Basilio led her to the bed and pulled the coverlet over her. "It would be better if you untied your gown," he said quietly. "Sleep now."

"Thank you," she whispered, reaching out a hand.

He nodded. "Sleep," he said again. Shedding his coat, he settled at the desk, looking out to the rain pouring beyond the windows. With only a single taper to cast flickering light on the page, Basilio took up his pen, and the words frozen in him for a month came pouring free. He wept as wrote, and once was so overcome that he put his head in the curve of his elbow, waiting for it to subside. But write he did. And every word held Cassandra's breath, and the curve of Cassandra's breast, and the sound of Cassandra's laughter.

He wrote until his pen fell from his fingers, leaving a small blot in the shape of a star across the page.

Then he fell, exhausted, into sleep.

On a cold, wet November night, Cassandra opened the door to her London house. Only then, looking at her familiar things with new eyes, did she understand how very much she had changed. The servants had lit fires and her cook had prepared a comforting English meal—roast beef and potatoes and carrots.

Cassandra praised it and ate it because she was hungry, but her mouth craved olives.

In the great basket of correspondence that had collected during her travels, there were three letters from Basilio. She took them out and put them on the table, telling herself she needed to burn them. It would be cleaner.

But she was too hungry for a the sound of his voice in her head, and she opened the first.

10 August 1787

My dearest Cassandra,

As I write this, you are bent over your translation, and I am besotted with the bend of your white
neck, by the small curls that have escaped your attempt to tame that wild hair, the seriousness of
your brow as you bend over your work. I dare not say what is in my heart, for this is too new, and
I sense that you were badly wounded and will need time to see that I am different.

But here, in this letter I will mail to be waiting for you when you return to your house in Piccadilly
Street, I will confess the truth: I broke my betrothal, and there is but one wish in my mind
—
that
we shall spend our days together, all of them
.

It is not simple matter, of course. My father is going to be very, very angry with me when he hears
the news. He is likely reading my letter in this moment
—
oh, anger is not a fine thing on his face
.

No, it will not be simple. And I will not speak of this to you except in this letter, which you will not
see until you return to your home, but you are my heart, my love, the very blood that runs in my
veins. It was fated that we should find one another across such vast distances, fated that our
hearts should become one.