Fairest Of Them All (18 page)

Some instinctive yearning for refuge drove Holly to the castle chapel. She dropped to her knees before the dusty altar and folded her trembling hands, offering up a wordless prayer for the restless soul of Austyn’s grandmother. Apparently, the poor woman’s plunge from the north tower window had failed to restore the freedom her vindictive husband had denied her. Holly started violently as a hand came down upon her shoulder. “Praying for the soul of your pagan husband, my child?”

“Good Lord, Nate,” she swore, scrambling to her feet to find the priest lurking behind her. “You frightened the devil out of me. What are you doing here?”

All it took was an acerbic roll of his eyes to make her realize the idiocy of her question. “I should have known you didn’t come to seek me out Why I’d almost suspect you’ve been avoiding me.”

With his lean, wiry body blocking her retreat, all Holly could do was incline her head to avoid his eyes. “Please don’t lecture me. I’ve no need of any more guilt to burden my soul.”

“I’ve seen little enough evidence of a troubled conscience in the past fortnight On the contrary, your behavior has been quite . . . shameless.”

Holly lifted her head, unable to hide her hurt at the injustice of his accusation. Her retort died as the beams of sunlight slanting through the lancet windows revealed his haggard condition. His robes were rumpled, the hair around his tonsure disheveled. Shadows dwelt beneath his dark eyes.

She reached instinctively for his arm, distressed anew by the sharp angles of his bones beneath the nubby wool. “Have you been ill, Nathanael? You look terrible.”

“Ah, but you don’t, do you, child?” His benevolent smile chilled her. “Your lashes are growing. Your hair is beginning to curl. Your very teeth grow brighter with each besotted smile you bestow upon your lord.” His gaze flicked to her bodice, lingering just long enough to make her face heat” Twill be only a matter of time, I suppose, before even your tender young breasts begin to bud.”

Holly withdrew her hand. “Don’t be ridiculous. My new duties have consumed my attention. I haven’t had time to darken my teeth or crop my lashes or ... or—”

“ Thou shalt not bear false witness!’ “ Nathanael thundered. “So cease your lying before you’ve more than just your unholy lust for a Welsh pagan to repent!”

Holly’s first instinct to quail beneath his attack was supplanted by a stronger urge to lash out, to hurt him as he was hurting her. “What would you know of lust, Brother? Or of love for that matter? Of the tender devotion that can bind a woman to a man? A wife to her husband?” Holly had never meant to reveal so much, but the truth spilled over like a brimming teardrop, leaving her heart exposed and raw.

“Ah, ‘tis worse than I feared. You fancy yourself in love with the churl when all you really desire is to feel his greedy hands pawing your naked flesh. To submit to the indignities of his animal lust!”

Holly’s hand shot out, wiping the sneer from Na-thanael’s face with a single open-palmed blow. The color bled from his cheeks, leaving only the brand of her handprint. His eyes clouded with dazed hurt. His hands hung limp at his sides. The crumbling of his pious armor made him appear not only vulnerable but terribly young.

“Oh, Nathanael,” Holly whispered, besieged by pity and remorse. She lifted a hand to his cheek as if the caress of her fingertips could somehow erase the damage they’d done. “Please forgive me. I’m so terribly sorry.”

Neither one of them saw the man who slipped from the back of the chapel like an angel banished from the presence of God.

Austyn rode.

The thunder of a man’s rebuke. Fierce, impassioned words, pitched too low for his ears to decipher. A woman’s response, her plea unintelligible, but trembling with fervent conviction. The unmistakable crack of a hand striking human flesh.

He had rushed forward then, prepared to do battle for his lady’s sake, only to discover Holly, his Holly, with her palm pressed tenderly to a man’s cheek. His Holly, begging prettily for a man’s forgiveness. A man of God perhaps, but first and always, a man.

A veil of darkness had descended over his eyes.

And he had flung himself on the bare back of his horse and rode.

Austyn rode until the silent bellow of rage trapped in his lungs subsided to ragged pants. He rode until his fists unclenched from their primal need to do harm. Until they surrendered the seductive temptation to smash and maim and utterly destroy the wall of sanity he’d labored upon for a lifetime, one heavy stone at a time. A wall so thick and so high that it was already completed before he realized too late that he had enclosed himself inside.

He rode until he could do nothing but slide off his winded mount and drop to his knees in the tall, coarse grass at the edge of the river.

The rising wind whipped his hair into a frenzy, stung his burning eyes, sang a mournful refrain over the rushing in his ears. Gray clouds scudded in from the west, bringing with them a wistful hint of the sea that had birthed them. Austyn remembered laying on this very bluff as a small boy, his head pillowed by his mother’s skirts as she recited from memory one of the epic poems he adored. Tales of battle. Tales of valor. Tales of honor.

She had raked his hair from his brow and smiled down at him, her eyes alight with love. “Someday, my son, you’ll be such a man as these. A knight A hero. The pride of the Gavenmores.”

Austyn doubled over, sickened by the memory. Sickened by the poison festering in his soul. He had thought Holly—his funny, homely little Holly—to be the one who would purge him of it. Twas utterly ludicrous that she would be capable of provoking even a shadow of the debilitating jealousy that had scarred the hearts of the Gavenmore men for generations.

He pressed a hand to his heart, feeling beneath his tunic the outline of the token bequeathed to him so grudgingly by the beauty he’d encountered in the Tewksbury garden. Now there was a woman to incite madness in the heart of a man! he thought There was a woman worth surrendering his soul for! But when he closed his eyes to conjure her face before him, her exquisite features melted, reforming into a puckish grin and a pair of animated violet eyes. Her mane of sable curls vanished, disintegrating into springy tufts that bobbed like a nest of baby snakes, yet felt surprisingly silky to his touch.

Austyn groaned. What in God’s name was he to do now? Rush back to the castle, drag that snide priest from the chapel by his cowl, and demand to know the nature of the man’s impassioned quarrel with his wife? Corner Holly and bully her into a confession of wrongdoing?

He came to his feet, setting his lips in a grim line of determination. He wouldn’t give that treacherous witch Rhiannon the satisfaction of doing either. Twas but a single stone of the wall around him that Holly had crumbled with her clumsy affections and artless attempts to please him. It could be easily enough repaired with the mortar of indifference. And what man would dare to judge him for refusing to count the terrible cost of that indifference?

As Austyn swung himself astride the horse and drove it back toward the castle, the first cold beads of rain struck his face like a baptism of his mother’s tears.

Thunder rumbled over the black mountains like the purring of a giant cat A cool breeze drifted through the oriel window of the solar, carrying with it the gentle pattering of the rain on the balcony. Twas the seventh day of rain and the gloom and damp were beginning to sorely vex Holly’s nerves. She paced the cozy chamber, the defiant crackling of the fire on the hearth only heightening her restlessness.

Carey sat sharpening his arrows on the windowsill while Emrys, Winifred, and Elspeth played a muffled game of dice in the corner. Two yellow hounds drowsed before the fire. They lifted their broad heads to give Holly a doleful look as she swept past.

She stopped abruptly before the table, planting her palms firmly on its freshly polished surface. “Sir, I have strewn the floor of the great hall with new rushes and dried herbs—sweet-smelling tansy and lavender, basil and winter savory, even a sprinkling of winter-green.”

Her boast earned her only a taciturn grunt from the man behind the table. A man nearly buried behind a mound of ledgers and scrolls. A man who’d barely spoken to her for a sennight and who only endured her company when he could devise no escape from it.

Holly wracked her brain for more achievements to recite. “I’ve scrubbed the rust from all the manacles in the dungeon.”

“Very industrious of you,” he said, refusing to grant her even the boon of a glance. His voice was as cool and distant as the silvery web of lightning arcing over the river.

Elspeth crooked a sympathetic eyebrow. Winifred and Emrys stared fixedly at the dice. Carey scowled at Austyn’s back.

Holly straightened, her back rigid. If she could no longer please her husband, perhaps she could anger him. Any stamp of emotion upon the impassive beauty of his countenance would be a welcome variation.

She reached up to tug a lengthening curl, her eyes narrowing with a hint of temper only Elspeth recognized. “I’ve asked Winifred to prepare pickled lamprey for your supper tonight”

Nothing. Not even the threat of pickled eel could induce a shadow of his crooked grin, a petulant twitch of his chiseled lips. lips that had once praised even her smallest effort with extravagant charity.

Holly folded her arms over her chest and tapped her foot on the floor. “I fear I accidentally spiced your porridge with hemlock this morn. You should succumb to the throes of a convulsive death by nightfall.”

“That’s very nice,” he murmured. Snapping a ledger closed, he rose in one crisp motion, directing his words at Carey. “I’m off to the north fields to see how long the rain will delay the haying. I shall return at eventide.” He brushed past her as if she were invisible, leaving her standing empty-handed and hollow hearted before the table.

Carey unfolded himself from the windowsill. “My lady, you mustn’t take his brooding to heart The Gav-enmore lords have always been prone to black moods. They harden their hearts and—”

Holly lifted a hand to silence him, forcing a tremulous smile. “I fear that one must first possess a heart before one can harden it”

Terrified that Carey’s compassion would entice her hurt and frustration to spill over into tears, shei turned and fled blindly from the solar.

Holly wandered the castle like a restless wraith, pondering how she was going to endure the next thirty years of Austyn’s indifference. Had he treated her with such callous apathy from the beginning, she might have been left the comfort of blaming her unsightly appearance or her churlish behavior. She might have resigned herself to a marriage between two strangers who were destined to remain thus until death parted them.

But Austyn had given her a taunting glimpse of something more. Of stories shared before the fire after an exhausting, but exhilarating, day of labor. Of a crooked smile and a deep rumble of laughter, made all the more precious because they were bestowed with such rarity. Of a strong masculine hand that reached to rumple her butchered hair as if it were yet a cascade of sumptuous curls. He had given her all that, then snatched it away without even a clue as to what terrible transgression she had committed to lose his favor.

Had she known what sin to confess, she might even have humbled her pride to seek Nathanael’s ear. The priest had apologized for their quarrel, vowing that it was only concern for her soul that had prompted his outburst, but relations between them remained strained and guarded. He spent most of his days poring over the musty Gavenmore histories he had discovered in a chapel vault

As Holly passed an arrow loop, a watery swath of sunlight informed her the rain had ceased at last Too late, it seemed, to dispel the gloom of her spirit Each time she rounded a corner, her pathetic attempts to prove herself a fit wife for Austyn mocked her the fresh coat of whitewash covering the cracked plaster of the buttery walls, the pungent aroma of the herbs crunched beneath her shoes, the tubs of scarlet poppies perched along the battlements. She had left her cheerful stamp on every chamber of the keep, abandoning only the north tower to its cobwebs and ghosts.

Holly could bear it no longer. She snatched up a woolen shawl and fled the castle by an outside staircase. Escaping the enclosed courtyard, she trudged through the wet grass of the inner bailey, paying more heed to the clouds scudding across the sun than to the shy footfalls behind her.

“Gwyneth.”

Holly sighed wearily. She was not in the mood to be mistaken for anyone’s wife, dead or otherwise. “No, Father Rhys,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder at him. “I’m not Gwyneth. I’m Holly.” She could not quite banish the wistful note from her voice. “Aus-tyn’s Holly.”

He shook his head. “Gwyneth,” he repeated with stern conviction, pointing at the knoll just beyond her.

A phantom of a shiver caressed her nape. The breeze teased gooseflesh to her arms as she drifted toward the stone cairn nearly smothered by a blanket of ivy and weeds.

She stopped at the edge of the unmarked grave. “Gwyneth?” she whispered, hugging the shawl tight about her.

The wind bore the echo of Austyn’s baritone, its gruff timbre softened by an edge of yearning. / remember everything about her. Her voice. Her smile. The angle at which she tilted her head when she was singing.

Gwyneth. Rhys’s wife. Austyn’s beloved mother. Holly swallowed around the lump that rose unbidden to her throat.

She glanced back at the keep, frowning in bewilderment. She could understand why the castle had fallen to neglect without a mistress to maintain it, but she could not fathom the disgrace of this untended grave. Her own mother’s tomb was kept dusted and polished, lit day and night by costly beeswax tapers, decorated with armfuls of fragrant yellow jonquils each spring on the anniversary of her death.

A stray beam of sunlight slanted full across Holly’s face, warming her for the first time in days. Perhaps ‘twas not too late to win her husband’s favor, she thought. Perhaps she had sought to impress him with trivial domestic accomplishments when all he really required was a simple gesture of her devotion. A gift from the heart.