The Pleasure Garden: Sacred Vows\Perfumed Pleasures\Rites of Passions (13 page)

“Get rid of those Gaelic pains in the ass to the English crown, eh?” Edmund stated quietly.

“Indeed. There, you do see. I underestimated you.” Gregory raised his again-empty glass in salute.

“It is true, my old friend, that I am not as cunning as you are when it comes to politics, nor do we share the same view on relationships. And frankly, I am very proud to be just like my father in that respect.” Edmund walked over to the study door and eased it open, inviting Cara, her father and his brother, several parliament members and Edmund’s father and mother into the room. All eyes were on Gregory. “You were right about one thing, however. You did underestimate me.”

Gregory’s eyes darted from one face to another. “Where is my father? Where is Lord DeVerden?”

Edmund’s father spoke. “He is being detained in his chambers after being shown mercy, until he can be tried by a just court of his peers.”

“You cannot do that. He is the lord deputy of Ireland, appointed by the king.”

“Yes, well, he chose to forfeit his title and rights when offered the option of a quick trial by the Ormond tribe
waiting just beyond that door.” William Collier glanced at Edmund with a smile. “Which leaves me as acting lord deputy until another can be appointed.”

Cara moved to Edmund’s side, putting her arm around his waist. Confused and angry, Gregory threw his glass at Edmund, who caught it in his hand. Their eyes met as Gregory was ushered from the room by two of the castle guards, now under the new lord deputy. “I fear you will be busy answering too many questions before parliament to attend our wedding, Gregory, but rest assured, we will be thinking of you.”

Gregory left, screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs.

Edmund looked down at Cara and kissed her soundly, causing a rousing cheer from the villagers in the outer hall.

Edmund’s mother walked over to Cara and took her hands. “As it happens, the abbot is due in tomorrow, and he thinks he is here to marry the lord deputy’s son.” She glanced at Edmund and raised a brow.

He smiled at his mother and pulled Cara into his embrace. “What say you, milady? It’s rather whirlwind, and on the eve of Beltane, true, but would you consent to becoming my wife?”

“Whirlwind, Edmund Collier? I’ve waited three long years for that proposal. Yes, I will marry ye.”

12

One month later

“LOOK AT THE FLOWERS!” MOYRAN CLAPPED her hands with glee.

Cara stepped from the tower stairs into the bright light of midday. She and Moyran had been on a walk, learning the names of flowers. As though by magic, bits of spring had come to the garden. Hidden beneath the brambles and brush, evidence of life had begun to blossom. She smiled, watching her daughter discovering tiny flowers in the grass.

“Time to go, Moyran.” Cara felt a quickening inside and covered her stomach with her palm. She smiled, knowing that by winter Moyran would have a playmate. Cara reached up, plucking one of the perfect pink roses from above the gate, and took a last look at the garden where she’d found new life. A soft breeze lifted her hair, as though gently kissing her cheek, and in the wind a voice whispered.

“Thank you, my queen, for your heart that is true. You were my first, which now leaves two.”

Cara ushered her daughter through the gate and looked up to see Edmund waving from across the field, where the labyrinth lay beneath the tall grass. The red-haired little girl ran to her father, squealing as he lifted her in his strong arms and twirled her around.

Cara quietly shut the gate, looked over her shoulder and smiled at the Green Man mask, with his laughing hollow eyes and secret smile.

PERFUMED PLEASURES

by Charlotte Featherstone

PROLOGUE

England, 1856

HE WAS SWEATING, THE CRISP SHEETS CLINGING to his body as he tossed and turned. Agony rifled through him, tore at his mind as he thrashed, trying to free himself from the black web of sleep and nightmares.

With a groan, he fisted the sheets, anchoring himself for what was to come, vignettes from the war, the terrifying months spent in the trenches. The death that had surrounded him. He smelled it: war, disease and those who lay dying. He smelled his own skin, burning from smoke and heat, mixed with the metallic tang of blood. He felt the pain as if it were happening all over again, in real time, and not just in a nightmare.

When would he wake up? When would the visions and memories end? Or would they? Was he to endure this nightly—the war? The horrors? The pain of what he had done to others, and what they had done to him—all in the name of God, queen and country?

“Give him something, damn you.”

The gruff voice called to him from the deep recess of his
mind. He was awake now—but not really, for the memories continued to bombard him like the artillery fire that had once held him hostage in a trench. Mentally, he tried to reach out, to grasp for the owner of that voice, but he was sucked back into the war, with the sound of artillery fire whistling above his head, and the gurgling, rasping breaths of his best friend, who lay dying beside him. Goddamn it,
no!
He didn’t want to relive that memory, or the sound of his friend’s last breath, or the way his sightless eyes stared up at him.

Thrashing his head from side to side, he tried to shake away the thoughts, pleading with his mind to purge the memory and spit out another, less painful, recollection of the hell he had endured otherwise known as the Crimean War.

He felt the eyes of the two men standing beside the bed watching him. One detached and clinical, studying the lunatic. One horrified, realizing what his coin had purchased—a ruined body and broken mind.

“If you do not relieve him of this…this pain, then by God, I will.”

“He must be awake to take the laudanum, my lord.”

“I will not see him this way, goddamn it.
Do something!
”

His uncle, and the only avenging angel he had known since before he had gone off to war. He was here now, in his room, witnessing his weakness. He would see the extent of his wounds. His once fit body withered on the left side. He would know that inside that wasted body was a spirit and mind just as shattered.

He had always admired his uncle. Always sought his approval—his respect and admiration. To be like this now, weak and mewling, and succumbing to a nightmare, was
more than humiliating. It was degrading. Impossible. Not for the first time, he cursed the army surgeon who had dragged him from the burning trench.

“Let me die,” he had begged the surgeon and his fellow soldiers as they lifted him onto a litter. It had been the pain talking, the pride. He knew the extent of his injuries, felt the agony burning beneath his skin. He hadn’t wanted to return to his uncle and Fairfax House a failure.

They hadn’t listened, of course, and in the end, he had lived, a fright. A beast, like something out of Mary Shelley’s book. A living piece of meat no more alive than a corpse.

“Give him something, Doctor,” his uncle growled. “For God’s sake, man, have a heart.”

If he could weep, he would. But his one good eye no longer would—or could—produce tears. He was no longer in pain—not the physical kind, at least. Laudanum served only to numb his mind and thoughts and subdue the sinister nightmares that always came to him.

Beside him, he was aware of the doctor rummaging through his leather satchel, while outside, the wind howled through the leafless branches, echoing what he himself longed to do. Cry to the sky and God and curse his own injustice.

The winters had been unbearable in the trench, and the sweat on his body immediately cooled, making him shiver, taking him back to those cold, miserable days when his fingers were nearly frostbitten, and his toes utterly numb inside his snow-and-mud-caked boots.

Mercifully, the doctor’s thick finger was thrust into his mouth and the bitter taste of opium paste was put under his tongue. It was not long before the images of war—the dead soldiers, the wounded friends, the cries for help—receded.
In his nightmare, he stood whole, unmarked, on the field of Balaklava, a disembodied voyeur, as he watched the last few scenes play out.

And then he saw her, his saving grace. The image that had kept him alive while in the trench.
Catherine
. The lovely girl who had grown up to be everything he desired in a woman. The woman he had loved for years. The woman who was not meant for the nephew of an earl, but for the heir—his cousin.

The February winds gusted once more, rattling the double glazed windows. Spring would be here soon, and so would Catherine Tate. He only prayed that when she arrived, he would be dead, and her memories of Joscelyn Mallory would be the stuff of dreams, not the nightmare he had become.

1

LAMB WAS BEING SERVED FOR DINNER, AND Catherine could not help but think how symbolic it was, for she felt rather like a sacrificial animal. But then, the springs spent with her parents at Fairfax House usually made her feel that way. But never more so than tonight, with Edward’s lascivious leer focused on the mounds of her breasts.

Every spring it was much the same. She and her parents spent every May at the estate. Her parents and the earl had picked that month because Edward was home from school then, and they thought it a delightful thing for the two of them to become better acquainted during their month-long sojourn to Fairfax House.

How she loathed these visits. Edward was always hovering by, watching her. This year, they had arrived a fortnight early, and for the past weeks she had been forced to endure her intended’s brazen glances and whispered innuendos. After two weeks she was utterly repulsed by him. What it would be like after years of marriage to the man?

Glancing away from Edward and shoving aside her morose thoughts, Catherine gazed out of the window to
the garden, which had once thrived with life, but now sat dormant and fallow. She would be mistress of this manor soon. In a week, to be precise. It was her solemn vow to restore the beauty of the garden—and hide in it, far away from her lecherous husband.

“To a long and happy union,” Lord Fairfax called, raising his goblet of wine. “We have waited a long time for this year, have we not?”

Catherine’s parents—poor, but of noble blood—nodded enthusiastically. Indeed, they had waited for what seemed like forever for their only daughter to grow up and rescue them from genteel poverty.

A realist, Catherine understood the nature of this union. It was a trade of money for bloodlines and beauty. The current Lord Fairfax was only half a generation from the working class. His mother, a blacksmith’s daughter, had been fortunate enough to catch the roving eye of the eccentric fifth Lord Fairfax. In a union of lust, Fairfax had married the blacksmith’s daughter, and brought shame—and an astonishing amount of common red blood—to the union. As a consequence, the current Lord Fairfax desired true blue blood for his continuing dynasty, choosing his own wife from a noble family. His son, Edward, was to do the same, thus ensuring the future Fairfax lineage and their blacksmith ties would be diluted.

It was her blue, but rather aenemic, blood that would provide the future earls of Fairfax with a credible pedigree. Catherine knew that she was considered pretty and desirable, but her lack of fortune made it difficult to form alliances with suitable lordlings. But Lord Fairfax had “all the blunt in the world” or so her father had claimed, and he had all but purchased her years ago, to be the plaything for his spoiled, cold son.

Edward. How she reviled that she was to become his. She had always been able to spurn him, to be granted however small a pardon from his advances. But those reprieves were lost now. She was to marry Edward, and become the future Lady Fairfax. Her body would belong to him, and she would be forced to endure his attentions, or suffer the very real consequences—debtors prison for her parents.

It was no secret that Lord Fairfax had paid off all her father’s debts, both the legitimate ones incurred by the estate they lived in, and the debts of honor that her father had brought upon himself by his incessant gambling.

Catherine knew her role in this bargain. She had been sold to the Fairfax dynasty because she was an aristocrat whose family found themselves down on their luck. As a young girl, she had been told that her beauty and her body were her greatest assets, and that many a man would pay to possess her. She knew then that would be her fate. That some man would purchase her. Unfortunately, it had been Lord Fairfax whose purse opened the widest. And his son could not wait to paw his possession.

Edward had been trying for years to get his hands, and whatever else he desired, up her skirts. The fact had always revolted her. She hadn’t wanted Edward, despite the fact that he was handsome and athletic. Her heart belonged to the other male who resided at Fairfax House—Edward’s cousin. Joscelyn.

An image of a dark-haired, wild-eyed Joscelyn came to her, and she felt her skin heat and flush with desire. A yearning she tried to keep hidden from those at the table. But Edward, with his steady gaze lingering upon her, noticed immediately. The smile, and the gleam in his eye, told her that he believed her blush to be the product of his undivided attention upon her person—and her breasts,
which would not be subdued in the low-cut gown her mother had insisted she wear.

She was not an innocent—not any longer. Once, she had been, but then one night in her bedroom, during those past springtime visits, Joscelyn had awakened her to the delights of being a woman. He had stripped her of her innocence. No woman could ever claim to be innocent after having her body thoroughly kissed and touched. No woman could declare inexperience after allowing a man to explore her sex with his lips and tongue—to have Joscelyn, thick and hard, moving inside her, claiming her body and soul.

Joscelyn had done that. And she had been ruined for anything else. Anyone else. It was only him she desired. That night three years ago, still lived on so vividly in her mind. It was the night before he’d left for the Crimean War. She had been in love—still was—and her virginity was the only thing of value she had to give her lover before he went off to war. It was her gift to give, and Catherine knew she did not want the selfish Edward to be bestowed it. So she had given her body and her maidenhead to Joscelyn, despite the fact that she knew Fairfax had purchased it for his son.