I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers (4 page)

Chapter 4

The Maiden Dragon

I
n her sister’s carriage, a footman placed a heated brick beneath Eleanor’s feet and covered her lap with a rug.

Luxuries she was not accustomed to for a mission just short of folly.

Like naïve Perceval, who set off on his knightly adventure with only a sharp throwing stick, she was taking nothing on this quest, no experience at hunting for anything except theological minutiae in scholarly tomes and inspiring quotes in Scripture—all for her papa’s work. Now she was armed only with a cheerful coachman, a young maid, and a Gypsy horse trader she hadn’t spoken more than one sentence to in eleven years.

Impetuous, yes.

Maddened butterflies in her stomach, yes.

Daunted,
no
.

Arabella pressed a small pouch into her hand. Eleanor knew its contents not by the weight or shape, but from the plea in her sister’s eyes. It was the ring upon which the soothsayer had told three orphaned girls their fortune. A prince would recognize it, Lussha the Gypsy had said that day in the tent. He would know who they were.

“Take this,” Arabella said. “Please. I don’t know why, but I think you will need it.”

“Our sister, the fortune-teller in disguise.” Ravenna laughed, and blew a kiss to Eleanor.

Tucking the ring into a pocket, Eleanor watched her maid mount the carriage steps, ginger curls around her temples and eyes large as constellations. Young and farm bred, Betsy peered about the carriage in wonder.

“Have you ever ridden in such a carriage, Betsy?”

“Never, miss,” she said in a hush, then looked toward the men on the drive and her face pinched like a dried apricot. Taliesin spoke with Vitor and Ravenna as he walked his huge black horse from the stable. He mounted with such ease it seemed he made himself a part of the animal rather than its rider. With a nod to Luc and Arabella, he rode off.

The coach started forward and Eleanor lifted a hand to wave to her family. As the drive became woods and woods became fields, Betsy pressed her face to the window and peered ahead.

“I’m glad he isn’t riding in here with us,” she said with a squinting eye. “Beg pardon, miss, but I don’t think you should trust him.”

Eleanor had little experience with personal maids, but she didn’t think this was typical. “Why not?”

Betsy’s arms banded across her chest. “He’s got a dark look about him.”

“He is well known to my sisters. A trusted friend.”
Not hers
. “Betsy, do you worry because he is a Gypsy?”

Her teeth fidgeted with a truculent lower lip. “Is he, miss?”

“He is a gentleman.” He looked like one now. Mostly. Except for the earrings and those smoldering black eyes. And he was far too masculine to really be a gentleman. Too raw. Watching him ride ahead, she felt his ownership of the road, the ambling grace of power in his seat upon the stallion, the imposing breadth of his shoulders. He rode like no Gypsy she’d ever seen, nor like any Englishman, rather, like a knightly hero from medieval tales—tales that years ago he’d read as eagerly as she.

Arabella had been wise to insist he escort her on this journey. His dark presence alone would deter danger.

Eleanor’s skin felt tight, stretching over her bones like linen bound too tightly around swelling dough. Rain began to patter on the window, and the wood through which they passed loomed gray and ominous. In the shroud of it, darkness seemed to cling to the Gypsy. The gentleman.

Once upon a time, his eyes had not been so shadowed. And he had not been a gentleman. Far from it.

He’d been there since the day her new papa brought her and her sisters home, working in the vicarage, scrubbing floors, chopping wood, keeping the churchyard neat for Sundays. When after a time she realized that no other family in the parish had a Gypsy boy for a servant, she asked her papa about it.

“When Taliesin was no more than six years old, his aunt came to the door selling baskets,” Papa said. “I needed no basket, but a servant of the Lord cannot turn away a destitute soul. The woman did not want the work I offered. Taliesin did. He has returned each autumn since then.”

“Why do you let him sleep in the barn?”

“All of God’s wild creatures need a place to rest their heads.”

Eleanor wanted to point out that wild creatures did not need barns. Afraid to displease her papa, though, she closed her lips.

A sennight later she found the boy sitting in her chair by her new papa’s side, bent over a paper with a pen.

“Very good, Taliesin. If you continue to study, you will be able to write out all the Psalms by Christmastime.” Her papa had bestowed upon him the smile of pride she thought he reserved for her alone.

“Papa,” she asked him later, her cold, damp palms against her apron, “why are you teaching Taliesin to write?”

He placed his warm hand on her head and stroked her hair. “His people are an ignorant race. It is my Christian duty to help him become a responsible member of society. And I see a natural intelligence in Taliesin that deserves cultivation, so that one day he might fully flourish as a vine in the Lord’s garden.”

That night upon her cot she wept scalding tears. She’d had a papa for only six months, and she did everything she could to please him. To take second place in his heart so soon swamped her with fear. What if her papa decided to keep the orphan Gypsy boy not as a servant but as a son? Every man wanted a son. And the vicarage had only one extra bedroom. The dread of being returned to the foundling home where her hands bled from scrubbing floors and peeling turnips for hours, and where the headmistress beat their backs, made her heave great, choking sobs into her pillow.

But by morning she had dried her eyes and squared her shoulders, resolved to win first place. She did her chores swiftly and studied every extra moment. She excelled. Upon her tenth birthday, her papa presented her with a notebook of blank pages in which she was only to write Latin. She worked hard, and each day he smiled and called her his little scholar.

Then one day, conjugating “to be” aloud as he wrote his sermon, it happened.

“
Sum, es, est, sumus, este—
”

“It’s
estis
.” The boy stood at the edge of the doorway, a shadow in torn shirt and trousers, his feet wrapped in only rags despite the December frost.

Her papa lifted his head. “Continue, Taliesin.”

“
Sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt
.”

Her papa had barely noticed while she recited, but pleasure now covered his face. “How have you learned this?”

“Begging your pardon, Reverend. I found this.” He pulled a tattered primer from his pocket.

“That’s mine!” she cried. “Papa, he filched my book.”

“Your old book,” he said, surly. “A month ago you left it on the well and forgot about it.”

“Why did you keep this from me, Taliesin?” her papa said.

“I wanted to learn it, sir.” He looked directly into her papa’s face, as though he had the right to. When she had looked squarely into the face of the headmistress, she’d had her palms flogged. “I was afraid you wouldn’t like it,” he said.

“I do not dislike that you wished to learn Latin. Indeed, I am pleased. But I do not like it that you withheld your possession of the primer from me.”

“He
stole
it.”

“Daughter, if you cannot contain your lack of charity I will ask you to remove to a private chamber where you can bring your conscience into a more regulated state.”

She bit her lips together. But she saw the gleam in the black eyes of her challenger, and she was ready to surpass anything he flung her way. To her papa, Taliesin Wolfe might be worthy of charity. To her, he was a usurper. No lanky boy with hair falling over half his face would steal her papa’s affection.

His hair still fell over his brow, unconfined and satiny black as it had been in his youth. He was handsomer now. Much. She wanted to hate him for it, and for hurting her then. But she was no longer a child and she had learned to temper her emotions. To restrain them. It shouldn’t matter that beneath her skin surged unbearable heat. She would not allow Taliesin Wolfe to get the best of her ever again.

TALIESIN
RODE
EACH
day. Rarely speaking to her, he arranged for her meals and lodgings yet said no more to her than the innkeepers did. Oftentimes less.

In the carriage she read and talked with Betsy and tried not to stare when he came into view through the window of the closed carriage. Occasionally he had company, a farmer or tradesman riding alongside. It seemed that every innkeeper knew him, every stable hand extended his palm for the generous coin he would offer, and every ostler spoke to him with respect.

The first day of the journey became the second, then turned into the third, then the fourth. Slowly, with nothing to look at but shapeless wintry landscapes—
and him
—and nothing to think about but vexing memories—
of him
—and no one to speak to except a simple country maid, when the person with whom she had shared every book and every secret till she was nearly seventeen
barely spoke a word to her
—Eleanor went mad. The luxurious carriage became a prison, her innocent maid a jailer, and the man on his ebony stallion an incubus tormenter. Medieval morality tales were full of such stories: a virtuous woman was visited by a powerful eagle who, upon alighting, transformed into a handsome knight, only to be revealed later as a demon in disguise sent to tempt her into sin.

Clearly, she was losing her mind. Desire to
do
and
see
and
touch
and
taste
all that she hadn’t for so long clogged her head with wishes. Suffocating in the dark, she was the maiden dragon seeking freedom from her barren lair.

When the coach halted as day waned on the fourth evening, and the coachman, Mr. Treadwell, opened the door, she burst out of it and nearly fell into a heap on the road. Stumbling to right herself, she headed blindly toward the door to the inn.

“There now, miss,” Mr. Treadwell called after her. “Take care. Morgan le Fay stepped into a rabbit hole on the road not a quarter mile back. I wouldn’t want you to do the same.”

She swiveled around. “Who is Morgan le Fay?”

“That fine mare there, miss.” He pointed at one of the carriage horses. “She’s not nearly as clever as Lady of the Lake. But Lady’s a leader, so she’s got to have smarts.”

Arabella’s coachman had named his horses after characters from medieval Arthurian legend. How was this to be believed? “What are the others called?”

“Guinevere and Pendragon, miss.”

She lacked thought even for laughter. Dazed, she looked around and all about them saw nothing. No trees. No houses. No shrubs. Not even fields. In the falling mist she saw only dark stretches of undulating land, tufted with moss like seared emeralds and sprinkled with rusty scrub, rising in gentle hills like enormous waves. And all around, complete silence. Not even a hen’s cackle or dog’s bark marred the soft stillness. They had come to the moor, but deep in the moor where she had never before been, a place of unrelenting, silent solitude.

Like her soul.

Taliesin came out of the inn. In the settling dusk he looked like a great black shadow, a lord of darkness who might seize her silent soul and lock it away forever.

A shiver ran along her spine.

This, of course, was how madness began.

“The inn is nearly emp—” he began, but she ducked around him and hurried inside.

Within, lamps lit the papered walls in a cozy glow, and the scents of roasting meat and freshly baked bread tickled her nostrils. But Eleanor had no appetite.

Tea. She would drink tea. She’d read too many medieval tales full of dark demons and magical knights and unhappy ladies swept into scandalous adventures. And the monotony of travel was bound to make her fanciful. Tea would calm her.

Empty except for a pair of old men in a corner and a woman of comfortably middling years serving them dinner, the taproom was just the sort of place Eleanor liked. Yet she couldn’t sit. She’d been sitting absolutely still for four days.
And a decade
.

“Well now, miss,” the woman said with a smiling nod. “Do take a seat over by the fire and I’ll bring you—”

“Have you any chocolate?” She never drank chocolate.
Ever
. Ravenna did. Ravenna adored chocolate. But Ravenna had few inhibitions. “Have you?”

The woman’s bushy brows went up. “Well, now, miss . . . Come to think of it, I do. Mr. Hodges, you see, he likes to bring me treats from Exeter when he can. It just so happens that at Christmas last he brought me a tin of the dearest—”

“May I have some?”

“Well, I don’t know how I would be fixing it—”

“I’ll show you.” Throwing her cloak and bonnet over a chair, she took Mrs. Hodges’s arm and guided her toward the kitchen. “Have you milk? Sugar?”

The tin of cocoa was found, milk set on the stove, a sparing spoonful of sugar added, and the chocolate was heated. Chuckling, Mrs. Hodges said she’d never learned a new receipt from a lady.