The Maiden Bride (2 page)

"Run Pippa! To Dickon."
I love you dearly!

"I'll bring Lisabet, too!"

"Noooo! Don't—"

But Pippa was safely out the door, and the monster was on Eleanor in the next breath, clamping his ironbound arm around her waist, lifting her backward against his massive chest as though she were a rag poppet, squishing the air from her lungs and the mettle right out of her heart.

His threat seared itself against her nape. "I give you one fair and final warning to leave here as you came, madam."

Steamy heat poured off him, melting swiftly through her cloak and her woolen kirtle, surrounding her like a chastening flush; he smelled of a sea-misted sunset and the powdery grit of stone.

Though her teeth chattered and her breath came in ragged gasps, she was suddenly, blazingly furious at the man: for threatening Pippa, for his savagery, for thinking himself master over her castle and all her hard-fought dreams.

"I don't need your warning, fair or otherwise. I am— Sir!"

She was suddenly in the air, and then she was standing on the floor below, free of his manhandling. He leveled that demon-dark stare down on her again in his doomed campaign to terrorize her into leaving.

"Do you know, madam, what I do to thieves and intruders who disturb me?"

Her wanton, runaway imagination ambushed her with thoughts of his curling smoke and his battle-bronzed hands, of his insolent heat and artful terrors that had her grasping for her wits.

"For the last time, sir, I am not a—"

"Thief, madam?" He made a satisfied rumble in his throat, pleased with his own judgment. "Ah, but you are."

"I'm not—"

His laughter stopped her denial, as cold as the stone that braced against her back. His eyes never left hers for a moment of peace, hungry for something she couldn't give him, growing darker still until she saw hot fires flickering there. "In truth, madam, I roast thieves, and then … I eat them."

"Do you?" An absurd question, but her knees had turned to custard, her lips to sun-warmed honey, because he was carefully charting them with his eyes.

"Aye, madam thief, then I toss their scrawny bones over the seawall for the crabs to scavenge. Now, leave here."

As though she could, even if she wanted to; he was as close as he could possibly be. The nostrils of his long nose flared, no doubt sniffing out his supper. Next he'd be weighing her for roasting time.

"I'm not a thief, sir. I am—"

"Trespassing." He rolled the word around in his throat, letting it hiss against her ear, a sound that tumbled along every nerve and lighted startling little fires and improbable expectations.

"No." He was too close. "I'm not!" Too astounding. "'Tis
you
who are trespassing." He lifted the corner of his darkly moustached upper lip in a mockery of a smile, and seemed to grow larger.

"In case you misunderstood me, madam—" his breath was soft against her cheek, laced with a deceiving sort of spice; bayberry or juniper, as though he'd been prowling an exotic forest, sampling sunlight by the handfuls
"—
you have as long as it takes you and your child to walk across the bailey and through the gate to be gone from my sight."

He waved a dismissive hand toward the door, turned his broad back and started up the stairs with his weighty tread, having exiled her, having gotten the very wrong idea that she would give up her home—the only place she had in the world—without a fight to the death.

"I will not be gone today, sir, or any other day. I have legal claim to this castle by right of marriage. I am Eleanor Bayard, wife and widow of the late Lord of Faulkhurst. And make no mistake, sir, from this moment on,
you
are here at
my
leave!"

It was as though all the world stopped as he did—the clouds and the gulls and her heart as well, the sun and the moon, all of them spellbound as the man turned slowly and stared down at her darkly.

"What did you say?" She had expected another resonant roar, would have preferred that to the piercing sharpness of his whisper that stole the lightness out of the air.

"I said, sir, that you…
That I am Lady—" She swallowed, her throat as dry as a handful of autumn leaves. She hardly looked the part of a lady at the moment, and hadn't for the better part of the past two years. Her kirtle was homespun russet and hanging loose, her cloak only a woolen blanket fastened by a bit of stick through a convenient hole; her feet clad in boots that Dickon had found on a cobbler's table in an abandoned village.

But blast it all, he had no choice but to believe her,
and
to obey her orders. She squared up her pride, shoved her fears behind her courage and leveled her best glare at those censuring eyes.

"I am the widow of William Bayard, the Lord of Faulkhurst." Feeling bolder because he still hadn't moved—though one should never fully trust a mountainside of solid rock—she took three unsteady steps up the staircase toward him, clutching the railing.

"This is
my
castle to command. Not yours. It never has been, even if you found it abandoned, or if you stayed behind when everyone else left. I intend to rebuild Faulkhurst, to make it a far better place than it ever was under my husband's indifferent care. That being the case, sir, you will do as
I
bid from now on—should I decide to allow
you
to stay."

There.

And yet he remained still—a stone gargoyle, perched precariously in that edgeless space between the air and the solid earth, between heaven and hell. They were mythical, menacing creatures, transfixed in their motion, kinetic carvings of sinew and claw imprisoned for eternity in limestone.

She'd studied many from the ground, her neck craned and aching as it was now, imagining that one of the creatures might spring down upon her if she stared too long, if she caught its unseeing gaze. But this one had eyes of living embers; had thick, seething muscles that were even now shifting dangerously beneath his woolen cloak.

He was on her in the next breath, pinning her arms behind her with his great, hot hands wrapped round the railing, bending her backward so that her entire world became nothing but him and the raging flight of her heart against her chest, close enough for her to see the tiny flecks of grey in his eyes.

"Again," he said, surrounding her with his heated scent of fresh-hewn oak and seafoam.

"Again,
what?"

Don't come now, Pippa. Stay away.

He snapped off a growl, then bellowed, "Your
name,
madam."

It took her two tries to find enough air, and then only enough to whisper. "Eleanor."

"Eleanor—" he said instantly, taking in her name with a gasp, tasting the sound of it on his tongue. Then he said again, slower this time, "Eleanor," with such care, such profound desolation, that it made her ache inside, made her stomach flip and her heart fall wide open when she ought to be wary of him.

"Aye, sir. Eleanor." She would have reached up and brushed that wind-whipped, darkly falling hair off his brow if he hadn't still had her hands pinned safely behind her, where they couldn't betray her. "I am the late lord's—"

"Christ—" He made a horrible snarling noise, full of anguish, then lifted her, grabbing up her kirtle and cloak, and flew with her up two flights of stairs, out the door to the wall-walk, and into the piercing gold of a sun that had won a last squint between the lowering clouds and the sea.

"I am your lady, sir! Put me down!" She felt like an ungainly bird who'd forgotten how to fly. Her skirts tangled in his cloak as he wedged her against the breast wall overhanging the seacliffs, where the waves looked small and far, far away, the rocks huge and sharp and clamoring for her bones.

"Proof, madam," he said, roughly grazing her hair off her face with both hands, then tilting her chin to him with his thumbs, as though he would lean down and kiss her with that very hard-sculpted mouth.

"Proof of what?" Her heart battered her rib cage, out of control with fear and some unnameable fluttering low in her belly. She could see him better now, the raven black of his hair striped copper by the sun, cut roughly to his shoulders and slashed by the wind; a weeks-old beard, black as the night and shimmering. Eyes of deepest indigo now focused, in all their madness, on
her.

"Proof that you are Bayard's wife."

A long shudder rolled down her spine, a deep and dark knowing that lodged in the pit of her stomach. Something of the raw earth connected her to this man, something anchored them both to the bedrock, to each other, forever more.

"I'm Bayard's
widow:
he's long ago dead of the plague. Though I don't have to prove anything at all to you." She struggled to free herself, but he held her fast with his grip around her upper arms. His hips pressed her thighs against the stone, a molten and unyielding trap that made her look up into his harshly angular face, into all that intensity.

"Married where?"

Dammit all, she didn't want to recall that ignominious event. Her father, Bayard's lecherous ambassador, and a leering, tippling priest—what a mockery of wedded bliss that had been. "You will let me go. I am the lady here and you are—"

"Where?" His breath mixed with hers and the mist from the storm-driven waves, and made her struggle harder to be away from him.

"I was married at my father's manor, damn you. At Glenstow." As though her answer could mean anything to the brute whose eyes reflected the devilish orange of the sunset. "In
Cornwall
. How many more details do you need? The rain was falling in cold sheets. I wore a green worsted kirtle and a hempen snood."

His voice tumbled low right through her, a leveled threat. "When?"

"Two and a half years ago. On the eve of St. Cecilia." A wicked night, much like this had become. "I was married by proxy, sir. To a scroll of unyielding vellum and a pot of indigo ink."

The man's eyes darkened to raven and the wind whipped harder at his hair, at his shoulders. He bent to her as though he would share a secret just between the two of them, out here at the tattered edges of the world.

Nay, madam. Not to vellum and ink.

You were married … to me.

Chapter 2

«
^
»

W
illiam Nicholas Bayard stuffed his dark confession back inside his chest like the malediction it would become if he let it loose between them.

Wife?
Impossible. She could
not
be alive. Eleanor Bayard was safely dead of the plague, along with the rest of her bloody family. They'd told him so. Someone had—a hundred years back, when the world had been growing dark and indistinct. When things mattered.

Yet here she was with her proof: this ghostly wife who smelled of bread and nutmeg and bedstraw, of sultry kitchens and the murmur of the living, the exquisiteness of her scent caught up inside the folds of his cloak, in his hair, and on the riffling wind.

"Have I convinced you, sir?"

That I have gone utterly mad? Oh, yes, madam, you have.

Though he had expected the madness of hellhounds and slathering demons to beset him in these last days of freedom in the carnal world, a plague of doubts and a parade of soul-tempting delights.

How the hell was he to know that those temptations would come for him all at once in the guise of a wife, one so very breathtaking in her rumpled rags and her outrage?

She was looking up at him without a hint of her earlier fear, waiting for him to answer; her new-fawn eyes softly unflinching, her wildly red hair whipping at the edges of her hairline and streaming out in the sea wind to snag the fading light of the day.

She was magnificent.

And mine.

Buttermilk skin and keen-edged tenacity. The very sort of perfection gleaned from his dreams, by an omniscient and highly skilled God who faithfully practiced his art of conspicuous damnation.

The God who knew the best way to break him, one blow, one unbearable loss at a time.

Why not this one, too?

A blackened soul, a shattered estate, a dead son. And now a dazzlingly, home-scented wife returned from the grave.

"Christ, woman, why did you come?"

Yet he already knew the answer:
to bedevil you, husband; to call up your shame and revel in it—to make you pay for your blasphemies in the only coin you understand.

"I came, sir, because Faulkhurst is my home now—my widow's dower, granted to me by King Edward only last month. So, you will unhand me."

Or bed you, wife, as is my right.

And his desire, to bend and taste the pale damson of her ripe mouth.

Aye, to take her here at long last, on the crumbling ramparts of his castle, where the wind tugged as madly at her skirts as he would do in his revel between her pale, precious thighs. As he might have done in those long, dissolute ages past, the vile creature he used to be—would always be, in the depths of his heart.

In the eyes of God.

Aye, she was that kind of a temptation. The sort he ought to let go before he lost control completely. She was eddies of warmth curling round him, tempting him to call her wife, when he could not.

For he had other, weightier debts to pay.

"I don't know or care who you are, sir. Faulkhurst may look abandoned and available to the first vagabond who ventures past and takes a fancy to it, but it's not. It's mine. I mean to sow the fields and graze sheep on the hills. And dig the village out of the ashes."

Do you, wife?
That single word—
wife
—taunted him to speak it rashly and close by her soft ear. If he did, he would be husband and lord then, alive once more.

William Nicholas Bayard risen from the dead. No. That was no longer possible. He was beyond that now, beyond caring, already condemned and buried deeply in his self-imposed penance, sworn everlastingly to a solitary life with no provisions for wives or titles or estates.

Less than a month from now, he would enter the cloisters of
St. Jerome
, and be quietly done with the world.

Certainly done with this wife.

"Be gone, madam." Still, it hurt to whisper the words; it left him more hollow than he'd ever known. He shifted his shoulder aside and she swiftly shoved away from him in her escape, running along the curtain wall, her ragged skirts flying out behind her, leaving all that heady fragrance to tug at him.

From the tower passage she spared him a glowering glance, with a relentless finger leveled at him. "Mind your ways and your temper in my home and among my household, sir, else you'll find yourself outside the gate come morning."

Then she disappeared into the darkness, as though she had never been.

Her
home?
She still misunderstood him completely, this wayward wife of his. He could not possibly let her stay here, no matter how loudly she made her claim, or however royally it had been decreed.

Faulkhurst would beat her down, would smother her in its corruption, if it didn't crush her first beneath its precarious arches. He hadn't room for the weight of her life on his soul if she died here of his negligence—not with all the other lives settled there like lead. He would be rid of her tonight, if she weren't already running toward the gate with the child, and the others she mentioned. He'd fill her fool head with fiery visions of hell and send her on her way before she could settle in.

And should she refuse to leave, he would tell her … what? That
he
was William Nicholas Bayard, and very much alive?

Christ in heaven—there was his towering dilemma, the teetering balance between this life and the next. He couldn't banish her with the power of the truth. Not without ungodly consequences to her, and to his monkish vows. His soul was already pledged.

To exert his lordship over Faulkhurst, over this untimely wife of his, would mean a stark confession of everything, would mean that she would learn of the sins and the heathen soul of Nicholas Bayard. His past, his present, and the unalterable fact that he had no future at all.

And what then? She had that innocently meddling look about her; a conquering angel who would steadfastly stay if she knew the truth of him. Who would demand a merciful household, chests of sun-washed linen, spice merchants, holy days, and children.

Sons.

If she knew.

He drew a careful breath, guarding against the grip of his heart around his throat, against the sting of the salt-thick wind behind his eyes.

And the memories. He wanted nothing to do with them.

He went to the curtain wall and watched her cross the shadowy inner ward, darting inexorably between the taunting ghosts and rotting carts. Though he willed her and her defiance toward the gates that would speed her away from this place of desolation, she went deeper and deeper into the castle until she was only another insolent phantom, dashing up the steps of the keep and disappearing into the great hall.

My
great hall, wife.
Where the windows glowed with a pale tinge of orange, where a thin spiral of smoke slipped from the chimney into the unwary stillness before the storm blew in off the sea.

He had been well warned of her coming to the cliff tower; had tasted her delicate fragrance as it climbed the stairs ahead of her, slipping unseen past the little pale-haired ghost to wreathe the rafters and cloud his senses. He should have lashed out immediately and sent them both scurrying away in terror.

But he'd lived so long without feeling the tread of another across the floor, so long without the melody of another voice in the room with him, that a drunkenness had settled into his marrow, had warmed and slowed him, had stopped him entirely.

And made him listen for too long to the heady whisperings.

Reach for me. Take my hand.

He'd thought she'd been talking to him.

Nellamore.
Such a little voice. His hand ached to be filled again, for that gentle tugging.

Jackstraws, Papa? Oh, please!

A raging sorrow wrung his gut raw. The ache, the monumental loss was still larger than his chest; it pressed at his ribs, sizzled against his eyes, and thawed out in that single moment of confusion, in the blinding glare of the woman's impossible announcement.

I am Eleanor Bayard.

Wife.

* * *

And in that clever guise, she was an ordeal designed for him alone. An immutable lesson to those who ignored a vengeful Heaven, to those whose sins were legion, the stuff of living legends. Whose redemption had come too late.

Much too late to appease an exacting God. And in the end, far too late to save his own son.

I love you, Papa.

Nicholas swallowed back the harrowing sob and sought the soothing coldness again, conjuring it out of discipline, stuffing brittle fistfuls of it back into his chest, where its comfortable chill settled again into his bones, back where it belonged.

She had been wholly right on one count:

William Nicholas Bayard was dead, had been for a very long time. A surprise to the deceased, but not wholly unexpected and hardly mourned—by anyone, it seemed. The king had decreed it, had declared his wife to be legally widowed, his estate forfeit to her, to her grandiose plans to graze sheep and restore a tiny village that God's anger had shaken to its foundation.

The rotting fields, the village and the ashes, the false promises, fallen skies, deserted streets, the pounding seas, the tyrannical shadows.

The graves and the staggering sorrow.

Well then, Madam, take Faulkhurst exactly as you found it.

All of it gladly hers, for he would be gone from here someday soon. He remained only to finish the chapel roof.

And the boy's grave marker.

Then he would keep the last of his pledge: to take his vows of penance and poverty, and be done with the world.

Though he shouldn't care what became of the woman, he made his way along the cold passages of the undercrofts, past doors that he'd locked for good, past barricades of tumbled archways, and up a set of hidden stairs into the murky shadows of the gallery in the great hall.

Allying his own darkness with that of the moonless night, he became a part of the stonework colonnade that overhung the darkly vaulted hall. A single torch flame wobbled against the blackened stone wall opposite, battered by the age-old breeze that seemed to come from inside the earth itself.

He hadn't been inside the great hall for a year, since he'd scrubbed it clean of the pestilence and closed it up. He'd thought he had evicted all the ghosts that day. But they had returned, alive in the clatter of pots and spoons and the dancing disorder of footfalls.

"But, my lady, please—"

"I do understand that you are worried, Dickon. But you needn't be." It was his wife's voice, a silken sensibility that took hold of his chest and tugged at him.

"If he touched you or Pippa, I'll—"

"He didn't."

He'd done far more than touch her yet she was defending him?

"And I've taken care of the problem," Eleanor finished.

"You
killed him?" The young man's voice cracked with newness and his callow admiration.

"Not even close, Dickon." She laughed, a smoky, sinuous sound that inched him closer to the railing, toward her gentle reassurance. Just enough to see her this one last time—so that he could remember. "Murder was my late husband's way, not mine. I merely put him in his place."

Ah, she would have been the tussling sort of wife, opinionated and unflinching in every part of her life.

"Bravo, my lady!" A fist thumped down on a table—the boy's, no doubt, as his voice slid back to its rocky depths and stayed. "But still, he threatened you, this ghost. I'll run him through the next time I see him."

"You won't, Dickon. And I tell you again that he isn't a ghost, any more than I am." She laughed again. "More like a gargoyle—"

Gargoyle, indeed!

"Truly, my lady? Like that huge, snarling gargoyle we saw hanging over the lady chapel at St. Oswald out Rainsay way? Remember that, Lisabet? Hideous, he was."

Hideous?

"Oooo! I do remember, Dickon," the young girl said with a trill of laughter. "I'll bet this one bays at the moon."