The Nightingale Legacy (36 page)

“I know.”

“Dr. Treath said he’d wanted to speak to me alone and thus he followed me when I rode from Mount Hawke. He said he wanted to tell me about Nora Pelforth, that she had been his very good friend after my aunt Eleanor was killed, that he didn’t understand any of this and he hated it. But foremost, he didn’t want me to get the wrong idea if I heard he’d known Nora Pelforth from anyone else. He didn’t want me to believe he was fickle and hadn’t truly loved my aunt. He was distressed, North. I tried to comfort him, tried to assure him I quite understood, and he kissed me on the cheek and said he only wished that I could have become his stepniece.”

“Thank you, Caroline, for telling me.”

“I would have before, but I forgot all about everything when you began kissing me. You have great power over my mind, North Nightingale. Ah, that was lovely with you, in the copse, with those skinny slivers of sunlight coming through the oak leaves. I felt the heat of the sun on my face when you were over me. There could be nothing more wonderful than that.”

He shook, but managed to say in a calm enough voice, “Yes, it was lovely. I remember the heat of the sun on my back. What did he show you?”

She looked up at him a moment, studying him closely,
he knew, wondering why he was asking her, knowing it was distrust bred deep into him, yet accepting it, not getting angry with him, for he would change and he prayed she was right.

She said simply, “It was a letter that Nora Pelforth had written to him after my aunt’s death. In it she wrote that she knew how much he had loved my aunt and how very sorry she was. Would you like me to show it to you, North?”

He nodded and said, “No.”

“Thank you for that, I think. Dr. Treath never gave it to me so I would have to ask him for it, and that would be a bit embarrassing. Ah, well, at least half of you believes me.” She paused a moment, her fingers lightly stroking his upper arms, kneading him, and he knew it was unconscious on her part; she simply enjoyed touching him, having the physical contact with him.

She said, “North, I’m so sorry about your mother. Perhaps one of the three male martinets can tell you more about her.”

He didn’t say anything, but she could feel his pain, a pain from long ago that was vague now, but still there deep inside him. She placed her hand on his arm. “North, you said you remembered coming back here to Mount Hawke after that last horrible fight between your parents, when your mother left. Where were you living?”

He blinked, looked hungrily up at his grandmother’s portrait, and said slowly, “I don’t know, Caroline. I wasn’t living here, thus it must have been at another property my father owned, another property that I now own.”

“How many do you own?”

“There are three. A hunting box in the Cotswolds, near Lower Slaughter, a house on the Steyne in Brighton, and a country manor house in Yorkshire, near Northallerton.” He paused a moment, then said, “Good God, I forgot all
about that house when I was in Yorkshire just a month and a half ago.”

“Why were you there?”

“I was visiting a very good army friend of mine, the Earl of Chase, and his new bride. You would like both Marcus and the Duchess.”

“Duchess?”

“Yes, that is what Marcus named her when she was nine years old. She was his uncle’s bastard.”

“Goodness, North, I want to hear more about this.”

“All right. Perhaps this winter when we’re hunched close to the fireplace to keep warm, I’ll tell you about their Wyndham legacy and all that happened.”

Her eyes lit up and he kissed her quickly. “No, Caroline, later. I don’t want to be rushed in the telling. Let me tell you about the houses. I haven’t been to any of them in years and I just don’t remember if I was raised those first five years in one of them.”

“So you must have lived with your mother and father—when he wasn’t back here at Mount Hawke being poisoned by your grandfather—in one of these houses. That seems the most likely, North.”

“It’s possible. I shall write to my man of business in London and ask him to give me a full accounting. It’s something I must do in any case. He could tell me when my father and mother lived in one of those houses.”

“Perhaps we could even go to the one in Yorkshire and see your friends. Now, there’s something else I want to tell you, North. No, don’t kiss me again just yet, just listen to me.” She cupped his face between her palms. “You’re my husband. I love you and I will always love you, even when you’re old and haven’t a tooth in your mouth, and all bent over. I’ll still love you. Since I’ll probably be in the same condition, it shouldn’t prove too difficult. I will never, never
betray you. I would kill anyone who tried to harm you. You are mine and what is mine I keep forever.”

His breath hitched. “Caroline,” he said, his hands coming up to clasp her.

Owen walked whistling into the entrance hall, saw them standing there, Caroline’s arms around her husband’s neck, and said, “What is so serious? Is something wrong? Oh, I say, who are those women? They weren’t there before, were they? No, there weren’t any portraits of women anywhere, and I thought that was quite odd.”

“No, Owen,” North said, dropping his hands as he turned to face Owen. “Caroline found all my ancestresses in a room on the third floor and brought these two down. We’ll see that the others are restored and hung in their original places.”

“Caroline always had her nose everywhere when we were growing up,” Owen said, staring at the portraits. “You wouldn’t believe the stories she told me about when she was at Chudleigh’s Young Ladies’ Academy. She was a terror, North, never kept her mouth closed and never minded her own business. She always wanted to fix things, even me. Oh, I got a letter from my father. You won’t believe what he’s done, or perhaps you would, given you know my father quite well.”

It was very late. Caroline was reading in the library downstairs, a small branch of candles at her elbow. She was wrapped warmly in a scarlet dressing gown that she hoped North would admire excessively and wish to examine closely, then perhaps remove. She missed him and yet he’d been gone only three hours. He was visiting Sir Rafael Carstairs at Carstairs Manor. It had rained hard the past three days and there was a cave-in problem at one of the tin mines. They were meeting with other owners and managers
to solve the cave-in and equipment problems in three of the mines.

It was odd, but she’d discovered that she hadn’t wanted to stay in that big bed alone. It was cold and lonely and she hated it. No, she would wait for him to return, thus her presence in the library, reading Gottfried of Strasbourg’s version of the Tristan and Isolde story, written back in the reign of King John, that mangy and cruel fellow who’d finally been forced by his barons to put ink and quill to the Magna Carta. Good for the barons.

This story was darker and uglier than Malory’s later tale of doomed lovers, the only person worthy of compassion and respect being the dishonored King Mark. Ah, the patient and virtuous King Mark who only exiled his nephew Tristan and his own wife Isolde for their treachery, didn’t cleave Tristan in two and stick a knife in his young wife’s breast. Caroline knew that if she’d been King Mark, she would have gulleted the betrayers with great pleasure. Ah, but myth was more gentle and more lasting because it skillfully interwove all the classic themes of tragic love, betrayal, just a hint of triumph, but finally death.

This, then, was the portrait of all the Nightingale men since North’s great-grandfather. How noble they must have believed themselves, and how utterly conceited, comparing themselves to the mythical King Mark of Cornwall, going so far as to claim he’d held court here and not on the southern coast near Fowey, as legend had it.

At least they hadn’t touched King Arthur, leaving that richly magical king to live and die at Tintagel, a belief held fiercely by many Cornishmen. And, unlike King Arthur, whose legend lived on and on, few seemed to know or care about poor King Mark and his betraying wife and randy nephew. Caroline thought Arthur had been too strong a figure for the Nightingale men to take on, whereas the gracious
King Mark, really a wilting ninny, was much easier prey, much more satisfying fodder for their fantasies.

She rather wished the Nightingale men had picked King Arthur for their idol, for he’d endured, unlike the weakly sweet King Mark. After all, he, too, had been betrayed, by his queen Guinevere and his prize knight, Sir Lancelot. She shook her head. She realized they’d picked King Mark simply because he was the more forgettable, thus not many folk would care enough to bother disagreeing with them and their claims. Where people were impassioned about King Arthur, they were tepid at most when it came to poor old King Mark.

Caroline settled into the story. It was very difficult to decipher in the medieval French, but she did make out that Tristan, once exiled with Isolde, or Iseult, as the French wrote, swore to be with her “one heart, one troth, one body, one life.” But good old Tristan proceeded to meet another Iseult and fall in love with her. So much for men and their constancy, she thought. Caroline yawned and went to search again through the references to Tristan, reverently collected by all those Nightingale men who had nothing better to do since they were such idiots with their wives.

Caroline read until the words blurred, her eyes felt gritty, and she yawned hugely. There was so much and it was all, she was certain, from the colorful imagination of Gottfried, whose work, however, was taken quite seriously back in medieval times, silly as it seemed to Caroline now. The book fell from her hands onto her lap, then slipped to the carpet.

She awoke to a scream that made her fall off the settee.

S
HE WAS ON
her feet in an instant, her skirts yanked up to her knees, running into the entrance hall. She skittered to a stop and stared. Owen was straddling Bennett Penrose, his hands fisted in his shirt, shaking him hard, then pounding his head against the pale gold-and-white marble. Bennett was fighting him but he wasn’t having much success. He was yelling like a man who knew he was in dire straits. Caroline felt immense pride in Owen at that moment.

“Owen! Goodness, I think you’re splendid, but you must stop it, you’ll kill him.”

“He deserves it, the bloody bugger!” And Owen smacked Bennett’s head again to the marble.

“Well, he does, true enough, but I don’t want you to hang for killing him.” She lightly touched her hand to Owen’s fist. She saw his rigidity, his utter fury, and realized she’d never seen him so out of control in all his life.

“I gather it was Bennett who screeched?”

“Oh yes, and that was even before I hit him the first time, bloody little weasel.” Owen looked down at Bennett Penrose, whose nose was bleeding profusely and who looked dazed and very pale in the dim candlelight cast by the wall sconces. He didn’t yell again. Caroline thought he realized it would cast him into a very poor light to be yelling like a demented goat.

Caroline ripped off a strip from her petticoat. “Here, Bennett, wipe your nose. I don’t want you bleeding on the
beautiful marble. North wouldn’t like it.”

Owen got off him and stared down at the very handsome young man who was now struggling to sit up, dabbing his bloody nose. There was a wealth of dislike and, Caroline thought, of contempt in Owen’s voice. Well, he had beaten Bennett very satisfactorily. “Now, Penrose, you’ll tell us why you were sneaking about.”

Bennett continued to rub at his nose, without much success.

“Oh, goodness, let’s go to the kitchen and get some water,” Caroline said, and led the way to the nether regions.

Owen shoved Bennett into one of the chairs around the huge kitchen table where, Caroline realized, the three male martinets ate their meals with the three females. She wished she could be present at one of those meals. They probably gave each other severe indigestion. She could just hear Chloe and Molly giggling at nothing in particular and see the pained look on Tregeagle’s face.

Caroline wet a cloth and handed it to Bennett. She wanted to smash it against his nose herself. “Keep cleaning yourself up and tell us what you were doing here.”

“Nothing, I wasn’t doing anything,” Bennett said finally. He sounded for the world like a sulky boy. “This stupid fool jumped me, caught me completely by surprise, and when I hit the floor the blow stunned me so this fool could gain the advantage on me, otherwise it would have been he with the bloody nose and the cracked skull.”

Owen snorted and rubbed his bruised knuckles with satisfaction.

“No, Owen, don’t hit him again,” Caroline said. “He will, you know, Bennett, and so will I if you don’t tell us what you were doing here. You and I made a bargain. You got money and I was free of you, forever, as were all my friends. Now here you are again, skulking around at Mount
Hawke very late at night. I would say that you’re extremely lucky that North isn’t here. He would kill you.”

“I knew he wasn’t here,” Bennett said behind the cloth, now dotted liberally with his blood. “I’m not stupid.”

“Ah, so you thought that since it would just be Caroline, you damned bugger, you could do whatever you wanted.”

Caroline wondered at that moment what Owen was doing here. Well, at least his purpose wouldn’t be of a nefarious sort. “Why, Bennett?”

“You damned hound, you weren’t coming after Alice again, were you?” It was close but Caroline managed to hold Owen’s hands down until he calmed sufficiently.

“Good God, no,” Bennett said. “Keep him away from me, Caroline, or I might be forced to hurt him. I wasn’t after Alice. That little slut is probably so fat and ugly now I would puke to look at her. No, I lost the money. It wasn’t my fault. This fellow cheated me out of it, the bastard.”

“You lost the money gambling?”

Bennett nodded.

“You came here to steal something?”

“Well, not really, perhaps something small and not cumbersome, maybe Lord Chilton’s strongbox from his estate room if I could have found it. But I didn’t even find the estate room because this fool caught me by surprise.”

“I find that remarkably interesting.”