Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) (2 page)

Noah’s heart clenched, and he felt a thin sheen of perspiration dampen his forehead and upper lip. “Where did you get that?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, the manuscript was worth more than the shop and all its contents—more, probably, than the whole village of Dunnett’s Head. If such a treasure were to be damaged, or lost, there would be hell to pay.

And it would be Noah who paid, not his son. It was always Noah.

Valerian—God, how he hated that pretentious name, hated even more that it fit the young rogue so well, in its innate elegance—smiled in that way that made his father want to box his ears. Noah had done exactly that often enough, as it happened, and relished every blow, but Seraphina invariably coddled the rotter afterward and made the rest of them suffer.

“It belongs to the baron,” Valerian said, following a short silence. It was as close as he’d ever come to explaining anything he said or did; he seemed to have some personal rule against giving reasons.

Krispin, that nimble shadow of a boy, spoke at last, in a quavering and earnest voice. “Our tutor told us we could take it,” he burbled. “Just until we go back for our lessons. . . .”

Noah felt the blood pounding under his right temple. Lessons. Books. That had been the start of it, Seraphina’s foolish insistence that her sons be taught to read, to yearn after poetry and art.

The older man fixed his gaze on Valerian. ‘Take it back to the keep,” he commanded in a tone of coldness and thunder. “Now.”

Valerian’s look, indeed his whole manner, was one of purest insolence. “I will not,” he replied very quietly.

Noah closed one fist—he was a big man, and stronger than his son, and he wanted with all his soul to strike the impudent pup over and over, to force him to his knees, to make him bleed and whimper—but Seraphina was beside her husband in a trice. She gripped Noah’s hard arm in her small hands, their tiny bones fragile as a bird’s skeleton beneath her silken flesh, and looked up at him with both a plea and a warning in her strange purple eyes.

He could bear no more of it, her choosing this whelp over him, her own mate. It was an abomination! “This is still my house, my shop,” Noah said evenly. “And I, God help me, am still your father. I am the master here, and you will do as I tell you or take a hiding the likes of which you’ve never imagined.”

“Noah!” Seraphina whispered, horrified, clutching at him again.

“Enough!” he rasped at her, wrenching his arm free and nearly oversetting her in the process, glowering all the while into Valerian’s magnificent, hateful young face. After a few deep and tremulous breaths, he managed to speak more calmly. “Now. What shall it be?”

Valerian spat onto the rush-covered floor.

His behavior was beyond enduring; Noah wrenched the precious manuscript from the lad’s grasp, shoved it into Seraphina’s, and struck his son with such force that Valerian stumbled backward and collided with a wooden support beam. Blood trickled from the comer of his mouth, and the fires of deepest hell blazed in his eyes.

He didn’t say that he hated his father, for there was no need to speak of it. Noah knew a moment of torturous despair, and wondered if things would have been different if he’d made Seraphina call the boys by solid, ordinary names, such as Thomas or John, Gideon or Joseph.

Seraphina screamed, but Noah could not stop himself. He cuffed the lad again and entangled a meaty peasant’s hand in that mass of chestnut hair, pulling hard, forcing his firstborn to his knees.

Valerian did not fight back, even though Noah could feel the strength surging inside the youthful, granite-hard body; he endured each blow, each kick, each slap and wrench, all the time gazing upon his father with that ancient, murderous contempt in his eyes. Only when it was too late did Noah realize that this very passivity was Valerian’s greatest weapon; by suffering the punishment without struggle, he had assured his mother’s undying devotion. At the same time he had sealed Noah’s doom, robbed him of the last shreds of Seraphina’s esteem. He, this changeling with the face of an archangel, had at last destroyed that which Noah valued above all else.

He drew back his foot, with a mighty moan of sheer agony, and kicked the crouching Valerian as hard as he could.

Seraphina shrieked, kneeling in the rushes to gather her bleeding and now-unconscious offspring into her arms, cradling his head on her bosom. When she raised her eyes to Noah’s face, his worst fears were confirmed; the hatred he saw in her gaze would outlive them all.

Though she might lie beside him every night, and even suffer his gropings and groans in the darkness, though she might sit across the board from him for a hundred meals, nay, a thousand, Seraphina was eternally lost to him.

Noah felt tears burning in his eyes, for he loved his wife the way a saint loves God, with fevered and unutterable devotion. He held out one hand to her, unable to speak, and she stared at the twisted, calloused fingers for a long moment, then turned her head away. She buried her face in Valerian’s hair and spoke not to Noah, but to their second son.

‘Take your brother to his bed,” she told Krispin in a bleak, distracted tone. “I’ll get a cloth and some water.”

Only then could Noah manage one desperate word. Her name.

She rose, helping Krispin lift an insensate Valerian to his feet. She did not look at her husband, and her words sliced through him like a reaper’s scythe honed for harvest. “May God curse you, Noah Lazarus,” she murmured. “May all His angels despise your name, now and on the Day of Judgment.

Valerian

I remember clearly, even after six hundred years, that I awakened sometime after sunset, in the dark, cramped little cell I shared with my brother, feeling as though I’d been trampled by the baron’s horses. The straw in my pallet rustled when I moved, and I heard Krispin breathing softly in his own bed, against the opposite wall, but there was another noise tugging at the edges of my mind. It was several moments before I realized what else I was hearing—the sound of my father’s drunken, disconsolate weeping.

I closed my eyes, as if to block it out, for although I had never loved Noah, I was not immune to his suffering. I did not revel in his injuries as he did in mine.

“Do you think she’s left him at last?” Krispin asked.

“No,” I replied, unable to withhold a small groan as I shifted on my bed, disturbing bruised muscles and broken skin. “She’ll never leave him. Where would she go?”

There was a brief silence, within the room at least. Without, Father’s wails grew louder and more desolate, like the cries of a wounded wolf, and I wondered if his agony would drive him to come after me again. Although he was not a cruel man in any other respect, there could be no denying that he enjoyed taking off strips of my hide.

“You’re not his get,” Krispin speculated, with no emotion whatsoever coming forth in his voice. “That’s why he hates you so much.”

The words wounded me sorely, although they shouldn’t have. Certainly I’d had the same thought myself more than once, and I’d often pretended, when I was small, that I had sprung from the loins of someone far more interesting than Noah Lazarus, bootmaker, of Dunnett’s Head, Cornwall. A smuggler, for example. Or a poet. Or one of the pirates who plagued the coasts of both England and France.

Alas, I had the boot-maker’s broad shoulders and powerful, long-fingered hands; I had his temper and his oddly aristocratic nose, though he probably hadn’t noticed the similarities. Oh, I was Noah’s seed all right, but he couldn’t have despised me more if I’d been begotten by the devil’s great-uncle. And rather than try to make peace with him, to win his affection, I had always mocked him instead. Even now, after all these centuries, I’m not sure why I had to defy my father, to constantly rouse his ire; I only know that I could sooner have ceased breathing and stilled my own heart than begged him to love me.

“Valerian?” Krispin sounded slightly irritated; it always annoyed him when he spoke to me and I failed to reply straight away. “What do you think? Are you his son, or are you a bastard?”

I smiled in the fetid gloom, even though I ached in every conceivable part of my anatomy, even though I wanted, on some level of my being, to weep and weep until my body was dry as sun-parched straw. “I am his son,” I replied, “and I am most assuredly a bastard.” Krispin did not laugh at my jest, and I was sorry for that. It would have been a comfort to me, his amusement.

Things began to crash against the walls and floors in the outer part of the house where Father kept his shop. He was overturning cherished possessions now, flinging them in rage, and I shuddered inwardly, praying he would not remember me.

“He might have loved us,” Krispin said at length, “if we’d wanted to be bootmakers.”

I was weeping silently by then, and I didn’t want my brother to know, so I didn’t speak. But I knew it wasn’t our rebellion that made our sire hate us, most especially me. It was the fact that our mother had always taken our part against him.

After a while Father was quiet. Krispin drifted off to sleep, and so eventually did I. On the morrow Mother gave me the book that had started the latest battle, carefully wrapped in her best shawl, and spoke to me in a subdued tone.

“You bring it upon yourself, Valerian,” she said, pouring water from a ewer into my wooden cup. Father was not in the shop, and Krispin had gone down to the sea at daybreak to watch for ships, the way he always did, so Mother and I were alone. “Always baiting him, always defying him. Why do you do it?”

I was ashamed, for I knew she had endured much because of my willful nature. “I don’t know,” I answered glumly, tearing off a piece of coarse brown bread for my breakfast. My lower lip was swollen, and it hurt to chew and swallow. I did not express my fear that if I ever stopped rebelling against Father I would instead grovel at his feet, pleading with him to love me.

She looked upon me sternly, then touched my hair. “Be gone. He’ll be back soon, with the things he needs to put the shop to rights again, and he mustn’t find you here.”

I nodded, snatched up a second piece of the hard, dry bread, took the manuscript shrouded in poor brown cloth, and started for the door. Matthew Challes, Brenna

Afton-St. Claire’s tutor, whom she generously shared with the boot-maker’s boys, disliked laggards and dealt with them severely.

I was the first to enter the schoolroom, that hallowed, light-filled place, with its rush-scattered floors and windows opening onto a vista of the wild sea, and Challes gasped audibly when he saw me. He was a tall man, taller than I was by the span of my hand, with deep-set brown eyes, a poet’s sensual mouth, and pale skin. There was a faint smattering of pockmarks across his right cheek. “So Noah’s been at you again, has he, lad?”

I simply nodded and held out the book.

Challes set it aside, with less reverence than I would have expected, and stooped slightly, eyes narrowed, to study my battered face. “Good God, it’s barbaric. How do you bear it? Why haven’t you run away to London or gone to sea?”

I could not go from Dunnett’s Head, though I dreamed of it, because I knew my mother would perish if I abandoned her, and because there was someone else I could not bear to leave, but of course I had too much pride to admit the truth. Blessedly, before I could be compelled to make an answer, the Lady Brenna breezed into the schoolroom, and as always, I felt my steady heartbeat turn to a violent
thud-thud-thud
when I saw her.

She was fifteen that year, nubile and womanly, and it was generally known that her father, the baron, was seeking far and wide for a suitable husband. He had only two requirements in a prospective son-in-law, as I recall—social rank and a respectable fortune. The contents of the baron’s coffers, never remarkable, had been dwindling rapidly for a generation or so.

I remember quite clearly that I would have given my immortal soul to be her mate, to bury my hands and face in that wild cascade of lush, red-gold hair, to see myself reflected in those jewel-like green eyes, to press my body against hers, my masculine frame moving in sweet, intimate concert with her soft, lithe one.

To this day I recall that she was wearing a velvet frock that morning, rendered in a deep blue, and that it was no less beautiful for its shabbiness.

Seeing me, and my wounds and swellings, she winced in mingled amusement and sympathy. “My poor Valerian,” she said, touching my cheek with a light, cool hand. “When will you learn to steer around trouble instead of sailing straight into the heart of it?”

I had no answer for her question; I was too busy wondering if she knew what even so innocent a caress did to me. Although my tunic fit loosely and hung to the middle of my thighs, thereby covering any involuntary evidence of my desire for milady, a sidelong glance at my tutor told me he’d guessed the true state of affairs.

I blushed and pretended I hadn’t seen the mating of mirth and censure in his gaze. I was just opening my mouth to babble something inane to Brenna when Krispin came in, bearing an armload of autumn wild- flowers and grasses and beaming.

“For you, milady,” he said, holding the gift out to Brenna and following up with a courtly bow. He adored her, as I did, and I wondered if she knew and returned his esteem in even the smallest part.

The light of pleasure blazed in her eyes, and I was bludgeoned by jealousy.

It was Challes who interceded, clearing his throat loudly. “Here, now, no more of this nonsense. Sit down, the lot of you, and we’ll begin our lessons.”