My True Love (34 page)

“
Hannah, why do you look so sad sometimes, as if you want to cry?
”

“
Do I?
”

“
Yes. If you want to cry, I’ll not tell. Sometimes I cry, too
.”

“
What do you cry about?
”

“
Pretty things. Sometimes something is so beautiful I cannot help but cry. Ian says that only girls do something so silly
.”

“
Ian is a silly boy. Pay no heed to him
.”

“
All the girls seem to. He has grown to be very tall
.”

“
Do you think him handsome?
”

“
No. He is still a bully
.”

“
One day he will be grown, and I’m sure be a nicer man
.”

“
Or one like Hamish who struts just like the cock in the henhouse. Why are you smiling?
”

“
It was just, perhaps, that I was not prepared for your description of Hamish. The years pass so swiftly
.”

There had been laughter here and a sharing of joy, but had it been enough for Hannah? Would it be enough for her? How odd that mother and daughter had both fallen desperately in love with men who were not destined to stay with them.

She did not have the nature for such sacrifice. She could not see herself staring wistfully off into the distance and wishing things were different. She would prefer to be more like Juliana. To declare herself a leper in order to be with her husband. To choose exile rather than loneliness.

Four hundred years separated her from Juliana. Title, birth, language, time, life itself stood between them. Yet the words she had written were timeless, and the message oddly the same as Anne’s thoughts.

Had Juliana ever been angry with Sebastian? She had evidently rejected his concept of honor. It would have demanded of him that he leave her, his home, in order to do what he thought was right.

God protect her from men of honor.

Juliana, at least, had had courage. She had not relied upon Sebastian to change his mind or return to her. All Anne had done was hide on an island and feel sorry for herself.

Shame was as unpalatable a dish as cowardice.

She stood, brushed off her hands, tidied her hair, and straightened her dress. There were things that needed to be said, truths that needed to be spoken before Stephen left Dunniwerth.

She turned and he was there. Not the Stephen she’d known, solemn and somber and only occasionally lit with amusement. This man was the embodiment of exasperation. A storm cloud walking. He was dressed in white shirt and black breeches. He was as sober in his dress as his expression, seeming to study her as the silence between them increased.

He was also dripping wet.

“Did you swim the loch?” she asked in amazement.

“Given that there was no boat, yes.”

He wore no boots. Stephen was always dressed more soberly than his companions, but she’d never seen him looking like this.

“It cannot be good for your arm.”

“I doubt a day spent in a dungeon is considered good treatment, either,” he said amicably. “You didn’t tell me I was entering a hotbed of Covenanters,” he said pleasantly. She distrusted that tone of voice. It was at odds with the look on his face.

His irritation did little to cool her own.

“Your men will be expecting you,” she said, turning away from him.

“No doubt,” he said. “After a while they will either stable their horses or leave for England. It is, after all, their choice.”

She turned and stared at him.

“Perhaps I’ll tell the king that I was captured,” he continued. He came closer with each step. She had the oddest feeling she was being stalked. “Or perhaps,” he said, smiling, “I’ll simply decline to participate in his war.”

Too many questions tumbled through her mind. The main one his reason for following her to the island. To blame her for the day he’d spent in Dunniwerth’s dungeons? Fine, she was culpable. Her father had taken it upon himself to imprison an Englishman he’d thought responsible for her disappearance. But she had not known. In fact, the moment she’d entered the red-brick walls of her home, she’d done everything she could
not
to think of him. The result had been a dismal failure. When she’d learned what her father had done, she’d ensured that he’d been released as quickly as possible.

“Did you mean what you say, Stephen? About not going to war?” She held her breath for his reply.

“Perhaps,” he said. And that was all. One word.

Did he expect her to beg? If she spoke at this moment, the words might well be tinged with tears, droplets clinging to the tail and to the spire of each one.

“One would think you did not care, Anne,” he said, touching her nose with his fingertip. “Except that you’ve been crying.”

“A mistake,” she said irritably. “I’ll not be like Hannah. Pining away for you.”

“Did I ask that of you?” He smiled then, a soft smile that scraped at the edge of her temper.

“You haven’t asked anything of me,” she said softly, the truth of that statement muting his smile. There had been no declarations between them, no vows of love, no sweetness that comes before a parting or instead of it. Even now they faced each other as adversaries instead of lovers. Angry with each other for the grief they’d each experienced. Afraid, perhaps, because of what might come between them now.

He was a man of isolation, and she had been a woman of cowardice. It would take courage for each of them to step out of their respective roles. Yet he had done so by coming to the island. It was her turn now.

“Stay right there,” she said, pointing at the ground at his feet. “Do not move.”

One eyebrow arched upwards. “You have a deplorable habit of doing that, Anne Sinclair,” he said dryly. “I feel it only fair to warn you that I don’t feel particularly well disposed to obeying orders at this moment.”

She ignored his scowl, left the clearing, went to her hiding tree. She stood on tiptoe and reached inside the hollow. She retrieved her drawings, wrapped in oilskin. The first of these drawings was a childish rendition. An image of a vision she’d had. He’d been sitting in the bailey, concentrating upon his drawing. His fingers were black with the charcoal he used, but they flew over the page, adding detail to doorways and embrasures, creating the proper angle of a merlon. She’d drawn him sitting there, his gaze on the east tower.

Another drawing had Stephen as the boy she’d first seen, sitting on the bed, Betty kneeling before him. There was a look of such loss on his face that it made her heart ache even now.

She rolled them into a cylinder again, held them close to her chest. Her heart pounded, a clarion bell of anxiety.

In this one thing, she would be as brave as Juliana. And in one other, too. She would tell him how she felt, so that if he chose to ride away from Dunniwerth, he would do so with the knowledge that she loved him. A memory or a regret for him to keep all the days of his life.

Chapter 31

I
n only moments she returned to the clearing.

Across the grass their gaze met. Her arms were wrapped around a package. Something she considered valuable or precious from the way she carried it.

She was an amalgam of beauty, grace, strength, and anger. Or perhaps it was not anger in her eyes. Another emotion, perhaps, one that made her look away.

Only hours ago his life had been somewhat his own. His body had been loaned to the king for the duration of the war; his arm strengthened to wield a sword and his aim sharpened to fire a pistol. He’d endured what he’d must because it had been there to tolerate. But dominion over his thoughts had always been his. When had that ceased to be?

When he’d realized he did not want to leave her.

“I want to show you something,” she said and placed the parcel on the tree stump then stepped back. He unwrapped it, since it was clear this was what she wished.

One by one he spread the drawings out. They were not witty portraits or clever caricatures, but sketches of him in various poses. One showed him standing at Langlinais’s east tower. Another bending and placing the brick that gave access to his hiding place back into its groove. Still another standing in front of his father, a look on his face of studied indifference. And one of him as a boy the night his mother had died. Dozens of sketches of him.

He felt his blood heat and then cool.

Questions came to his lips and were dismissed before being given voice.

“I did the first of them when I was ten,” she softly said. Her words settled into his mind like stones, each of them separate and distinct, as if she built a fortress with them.

He turned and looked at her.

Her eyes were wide. Was it fear he saw there?

“I’ve seen you all my life,” she said. “In my visions. No other person, Stephen, only you. The first of them happened when I was eight,” she said, and began her tale.

One so improbable that it could not happen. But he listened even as his hands shuffled the sketches and saw scenes she could not have otherwise known. A moment atop the east tower, when he’d felt a loneliness so acute that the pain of that moment speared him even now. A picture of him leaning over the Langlinais bridge. How many times had he done that as a boy? As many times as he’d ridden Faeren over the hills and meadows of his home.

It should have angered him, this odd knowledge she had of him. She had, with these visions, in vaded his privacy at the deepest level. But he realized that they were not something over which she had any power or control.

And he did not accept the idea of sorcery. Or witchcraft. But he believed in her.

She’d known his name. The hiding place he’d had as a boy. And looked on Langlinais as if she knew the castle as well as he. And he’d heard her call to him in a moment of great danger. Not fever then, but fate.

Silence stretched between them. Not the awkward pause between strangers. They had been too intimate for that. It was an utter stillness, like the one before a storm. He glanced up at the sky, certain that it was to rain again. Another thing he would have to grow accustomed to, the eternal rain of Scotland.

He sucked in his breath, felt the cool air bathe his throat, swirl inside his chest.

“I’ve seen you all my life,” she said again, and the words made him recall another moment. A night when she’d wept on his chest and told him that he’d always been there. She’d spoken the truth, and he’d disregarded it, pushed it behind his own pressing concerns.

It seemed to him that those things he had once cherished, such as loyalty and virtue, honor, nobility, trust, all of them were becoming suspect in this new world riddled by war. It was as if what had been important about his life had disintegrated, crumbled into dust like ancient silk. Harrington Court was no more, his plans for restoring Langlinais nothing but the dreams of youth. His country was at war, his king no doubt incensed with him. He doubted if he would ever return to London, or that he would ever see the court he’d known restored to its previous power.

But into that emptiness had come another life. One prepared for him even as he was unaware. A woman sent to him to ease his pain. To give him hope again. To frown at him and make him smile. She had a variety of smiles, all suited to her, warm brown eyes, and an endearing laugh. She was stubborn and brave, compassionate and sensual. She had the ability to make him think and the capacity to render him senseless. She had discovered him from beneath the man he’d thought he was.

His earldom was more than land. It was more than Harrington Court. More than even the castle, Langlinais. It was a heritage of men who had persevered despite obstacles and circumstances that might have felled other men. It had pushed him onward even beyond what he’d thought himself capable. Such courage would have to stand him in good stead now.

Only one thing concerned him. She stood silent, her hands clenched in front of her. He wanted to place his hands on her cheeks and purse her mouth, free the words that were entrapped there.
Stay with me
. Not once had she said it. He wanted the words.

But she had given up part of herself and waited for him to ridicule her. He saw the proof of it in her eyes. Fear. Not anger. That and a tear. One from a woman who did not cry easily.

Was love come so easily as that? Yes. But it had happened earlier than this moment, hadn’t it? When they’d stood in a dark tower, and she’d shivered against him as lightning split the sky.

She bent forward to gather up the drawings. He reached out and encircled her wrist with his hand. She turned her head and looked up at him.

“I don’t understand,” he said, offering her the truth.

She pulled away.

“But perhaps there are some things that I don’t have to understand. The miracle of Langlinais, for one. These drawings, for another.”

She seemed to be made of ice, so still she stood. He wanted, in that instant, to warm her, to hold her tight in his arms. Instead, there were words that must be said first.

“I’ve no home,” he said. “And I do not doubt that the king will offer a reward for my head, to be matched only by the Parliamentarians. Or your father,” he said wryly. “But I’ve dreams enough to occupy me and wealth I’ve managed to hide away. I come from a long line of men who have always believed in the future.”

She straightened.

One step toward him, then another, and her hand was on his chest. A surprisingly capable-looking hand, with long fingers and an imperious thumb. Not unlike the rest of her.

“Anne,” he said, and the sound of her name on his lips was like a gentle rain. As he heard her indrawn breath, his lips curved into a smile. She had the power to effortlessly distract him from any task, even that of studying her hand.

She was his to protect and defend and keep safe. To love and need and worship with body and mind and soul. His through all time, as Sebastian had loved Juliana. If the world crumbled about them, he would hold sacrosanct a few sparse clods of earth for her to stand upon. There he would hold her in his arms and find an answering comfort in her embrace.