Once Upon a Tower

by Eloisa James

  He wished he could swing his wife into his arms, set out on the path to the river, and find some curve in the riverbank where they couldn’t be seen. He was rock hard and so lustful that he felt as if desire leaked out of him like mist.

  But his instincts had never led him astray. It was best to wait for the morrow. If there was anything Gowan hated, it was going into battle half-cocked.

  That was such a bad joke that he didn’t even bother to grin.

  Twenty-nine

  Edie plodded up the tower steps. Being with Gowan—being married to Gowan—was like finding herself mated to a tornado. A centrifugal force spun her about until she couldn’t think, and she just wanted to cling to him and gaze into his midnight eyes.

  And then she would wake up and realize that she was merely another appointment in his life. Not important enough to justify any of his time, it seemed, other than at dinner. She felt a surge of anger, followed hard on by a moment of clarity: neither one of them was willing to give up their time. She guarded her practice hours with as much intentness as he did his working hours.

  She continued up the stairs, thinking about that. The first level was completely empty, but just as Gowan had promised, much less dim. The tower had charming mullioned windows, with little diamond panes. She paused for a moment to look out over the river below.

  It was hard to imagine the Glaschorrie in full flood; at the moment its lazy current was barely perceptible. Small bubbles rose to the surface, but otherwise it was as flat as a dinner plate.

  She heard another burst of laughter and went back to the narrow, uneven steps and kept climbing. She reached another room, large enough for four people at the most, that might have once served as a dining room. Its table was blackened oak but there were no chairs. She looked at its battered surface for a moment and then checked the legs: sure enough, there were water stains.

  She climbed higher still and emerged in a bedchamber, identifiable by a wooden bed frame off to the side. Layla was sitting in a rocking chair before the unlit fireplace, pushing off with one toe to keep the chair in constant motion.

  Susannah was in her lap. She was curled up, facing away, so that she couldn’t see Edie. Layla put the index finger of her free hand to her lips, and Edie sank onto a stool at the side of the room. Her legs were tired after that climb.

  “Probably lots of people have died in the castle,” Susannah was saying sleepily. “Cats, too. Lots of cats. The whole courtyard is probably full of graves, and we walk over them all the time.”

  “I think,” Layla said, quite seriously, “that people and cats turn back to the earth after a while. So what you walk over is just earth, Susannah.”

  Susannah had her thumb in her mouth so Edie couldn’t understand what she said next.

  But Layla said, “I don’t think so. Their souls went up to heaven.”

  Then there was silence, but for the creaking of old wood rockers against the stone floor.

  After a while, Layla raised her head and said, quite calmly, “She’s mine, Edie.”

  “I can see that,” Edie said, feeling a little tug at the heart. “She’s had a hard time of it, hasn’t she?”

  “Not particularly. She was warm and fed, and I think the maids were quite nice to her. She’s dramatic because that’s her personality.” Layla smiled faintly. “I know all about that.”

  With her penchant for drama, Layla was exactly the right person to bring up Susannah. Of course she was.

  “I wish your father were here,” she added. “He will love Susannah.”

  Edie wasn’t so sure. Her father turned from merely stiff to downright rigid when it came to improprieties. How would he feel about a child who may or may not be illegitimate, who didn’t seem to have a baptism record?

  Layla guessed her thought. “You’re wrong, Edie. He would love her—will love her—because she’s bold and fearless, quite like you.”

  “I am not fearless.”

  “Most English ladies would have been terrified to marry a stranger and head off to the wilds of Scotland. And your duke is no milksop. Yet you are not in the least afraid of the marriage, or of Gowan, are you?”

  “I probably should have been. I was thinking earlier that I feel as if I’ve married a tornado.”

  “But you’re not afraid of him, are you?” Layla looked at her quite sharply.

  “How could I be afraid of him after growing up with Father? Father pretends that everything he sees is logical, but underneath he’s all emotion.”

  Layla sat with her arms wound around Susannah’s little body, her toe still pushing the chair back and forth. Then she said, “Yes, he is, isn’t he?” And she put her cheek down on Susannah’s tangled hair.

  So Edie sneaked away, back down all those stone steps, and wandered through the orchard before climbing back up the hill, following the path around all the way around until she could see the opening in the castle gates. Then she stopped and looked back at the tower. It looked very squat, if tall, from this height.

  Gowan was right to preserve it. And he was right to say that they needed to talk.

  If she and Gowan talked seriously, she would have to confess that she had only pretended to achieve pleasure, rather than truly feeling it. But if she tried Layla’s ideas for a romantic evening, perhaps she wouldn’t have to confess. Ten days had passed since they last tried, and she was hopeful that it wouldn’t hurt any longer.

  Either way, there would be no more pretending.

  Cow parsley grew in the shelter of the wall. The stems were very long, and had grown sideways and tangled with one another before erupting into spangled white flowers.

  She knelt down and began gathering flowers until she had a great armful of twisty, spare blossoms. They didn’t have the beauty of flowers bought at Covent Garden, in London, those with straight stems and regular petals. These were wild and unruly. Her first Scottish flowers.

  At first she thought they were odorless, but very close up, they had a faint sweetness, a windy scent. With one final look at the tower, she came back to her feet.

  She walked under the portcullis, thinking hard. In truth, she wasn’t brave, as Layla believed. A brave person wouldn’t have left it to Gowan to acknowledge that something was wrong, when the problem stemmed from her failures.

  Bardolph was passing through the entry—heading, no doubt, for Gowan’s study. He stopped and said, “Those are not flowers, but weeds, Your Grace.”

  Edie let a silence build precisely long enough to suggest that he had overstepped. “I would be grateful if you would send a maid to me with several vases. I shall be in my bedchamber. Oh, and Bardolph, my room needs to be completely redecorated.”

  He bowed, so rigid that his back looked like a tabletop. “I will summon Mr. Marcy, who directs renovation in the castle.”

  “Was Mr. Marcy responsible for the blue room, and the yellow room, et cetera?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “In that case he will not do. I’m sure you can find someone else. Thank you, Bardolph.” She began climbing the stairs, aware that small white flowers were brushing off on her clothes and falling to the ground.

  Once in her room, she managed to get the flowers wrestled into vases. The stems curled madly in different directions before blossoming into tight little white flowers. They brought a touch of welcome wildness to her sterile, blue room.

  Mary had removed all her clothing from the trunks. And it seemed that she had encountered Susannah’s French tutor, who was now being recruited to teach music as well.

  “He’s pretty as a picture,” Mary said. “He wears his hair quite long and tied back. He is the son of a marquis, or so they said.” The maid folded a frilly petticoat into a neat square with brisk flicks of her wrist. “He should not work. He should not be living here at the command of a Scottish duke, ready to teach music to a child of five.”

  She glanced at Edie. “And no one thinks that Miss Susannah will be able to learn to sing, let alone to play an instrument, Your Gr
ace. She’s an ill-tempered little thing, by all accounts. She spilled her milk on purpose, more than once, or so they say. What will you wear to supper?”

  “The sea-blue one,” Edie said. She had left all her white gowns behind.

  “The pongee silk,” Mary said, lifting the evening gown reverently from the wardrobe. “Your hair is a disaster. I shall put it up again and weave pearls through it.”

  Edie sighed and sat down. The whole day was lost.

  “Tomorrow I shall practice all morning,” she told Mary. “No interruptions after breakfast.”

  Mary nodded. “His Grace said that you were to have a footman outside your door to ensure you are undisturbed.”

  “No need for a footman,” Edie said. “I shall practice in the tower.”

  Mary wrinkled her nose. “Bardolph said that no one is allowed near that tower.” Then she started unbuttoning, and all the while, Edie looked at her flowers, thinking about how their curling stems resembled an intricate stave of music.

  It was as if Scotland had wild music growing just outside the castle walls.

  Thirty

  Supper was hellish.

  Edie and the Frenchman kept laughing at Layla’s gossip—which Gowan thought was rather coarse, though her stories never edged over into pure vulgarity.

  “From what I heard,” Layla was telling them, “being married to Lord Sidyham was like finding oneself a Christian in the Colosseum, whisker to whisker with a large tiger. I mean to say that he was absurdly primeval. Rabid. I was at a dinner party once when he accused his wife, in front of all of us, of being infatuated with anyone wearing a clerical collar. She was merely enjoying a conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and anyone who has met him knows that one would have to be truly devoted to the cloth to find him attractive.”

  “His was a quite unkind attack,” Edie said, adding, “though oddly specific.”

  “My thought precisely. As it turned out, Lady Sidyham had indeed allowed her respect for the priesthood to prevail over principle, because a few months later she and the local vicar disappeared and were last heard of in the Americas, where I believe they are quite happy.”

  Gowan couldn’t bring himself to look even slightly interested, not with coals heating the base of his stomach and bitter acid coating the back of his throat. He had taken one look at Edie as she walked into the drawing room, wearing a gown whose design emphasized the line of her legs, and then celebrated her breasts with a burst of ribbons and frills . . .

  And she had turned to him with a smile in her eyes. It was like being tossed on a rough sea, being married to Edie. One moment she was incalculably elusive, and the next she was within reach. One moment there was complete awareness in her dark emerald eyes, and then she turned to greet Layla, and all he could see of her face was the delicate curve of her cheek.

  For the first time he considered that perhaps madness was hereditary. Perhaps his father felt the same for his mother, and when she strayed, he had no recourse but to drink himself into a stupor and sleep with barmaids.

  Though, of course, Edie would never stray. Still, he had a terrible feeling that he couldn’t pin her down, couldn’t keep her by his side. She would lock herself in a room with her cello and be gone.

  Not that he would ever think—or want—to take her music away.

  But he couldn’t help the gnawing sense of jealousy. He wished she weren’t a musician. If she were an ordinary woman like Lady Edith, the young lady whom he thought he met at the Gilchrist ball: that chaste, wistful girl who scarcely said a word . . .

  She wouldn’t be Edie, he realized with a sigh.

  He was sitting at the head of the table, where his father had sat a million times, watching silently as Edie and Layla jested with Védrines, the violinist whom Bardolph had produced like a rabbit from a magician’s hat.

  This particular fellow was supposedly related to the Comte de Genlis, who was rumored to have met his fate at the guillotine, though one wouldn’t want to ask. Presumably, Genlis was his grandfather, and since Védrines had dressed in black velvet for the evening meal, there must have been a jewel or two smuggled out of France.

  Layla caught Gowan’s attention with an emphatic wave of her hand. “That liverish fellow with the mustaches, Bardolph, doesn’t approve of me.”

  “I find that impossible to believe,” Védrines said gallantly.

  He was a handsome man, the Frenchman, lean and tall. “You play the cello?” Védrines was saying to Edie. He leaned toward her, and Gowan had to suppress an instinctive urge to shove him back into his chair.

  “I do.” Edie smiled at him, her lips so plump and inviting that Gowan’s head swam for a moment. Why the hell didn’t he sleep with a hundred women before getting married? At least then he might have some control.

  Then he realized that Védrines was giving Edie a condescending smile and was crooning about how he felt certain he could help her improve her craft, although the cello wasn’t his own instrument. “The viola de gamba has a better tone,” the Frenchman said.

  Edie briskly disabused the man of his prejudices, which was amusing. But then the two of them began talking of things that he didn’t understand.

  “This will happen to you as often as you allow musicians at your table,” Layla said, from his left side.

  He turned to find her smiling at him, with a twinkle in her eye that he found far more appealing than her seductive ways.

  “Edie and her father are capable of talking like this for hours at a stretch.”

  “Have you ever tried to learn the language?”

  “It’s too late. They’ve both been studying for years.” She paused, just long enough so that Gowan heard Védrines say, “Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe,” and Edie reply, nodding, “added the seventh string to the bass viol . . .”

  “You see?” Layla continued. “They’ll come back to the realm of us mortals at some point. It’s like a secret society.”

  Gowan didn’t like it. He didn’t want Edie in a secret society, especially not with a handsome young Frenchman with an enticing air of tragedy hanging about him like a tattered cloak.

  “I prefer to play out of doors,” Védrines was saying now. “It is my deepest pleasure to take my violin into the gardens.”

  “I have never thought of such a thing.” Edie turned to Gowan and touched his hand. “Shall the two of us give you, Layla, and Susannah a recital tomorrow? We could perform in the orchards at the base of the tower in the afternoon.”

  “I shall be busy,” Gowan said, the words coming automatically to his lips. Why would Edie think that he would be free for an afternoon recital? Every hour of his day was scheduled. “Perhaps after dinner?”

  “I doubt we could see well enough to play outdoors after supper. Though we may be able to manage it with time. We’d have to learn each other’s rhythms enough to play without a score or very good vision.”

  He’d be damned if Edie would learn another man’s rhythms. And no other man was going to see her with that instrument between her legs. That was unacceptable. He could tell her later, when they were alone.

  “Layla, you can be our audience,” Edie continued, giving her stepmother a smile. “I promise we’ll play Dona Nobis Pacem.”

  That made the rage rise higher in Gowan’s throat. What had Edie said in that letter that made her stepmother follow them into a different country?

  Edie’s hair turned to dark honey in the candlelight, gold with glints of sunlight trapped inside. Pearls in her hair gleamed pale silver among the gold, turning Edie into a jewel.

  His jewel.

  He hungered to take her to bed, to thread his fingers through her lavish strands. But then some part of him shied away. It didn’t seem right that his orgasms were so overwhelming, sliding over him like a tidal wave, not when he would open his eyes to see that she was watching him, a faint haze of relief in her eyes.

  They had to talk first, in private. Tomorrow.

  He felt lonely.

  Fe
eling lonely was hell.

  After supper, Edie played for a couple of hours and then lay awake, waiting for Gowan to come to her chamber, but he didn’t. She heard, very remotely, the bustle of his valet . . . then silence. She lay awake a long time.

  The next morning she dressed and then went up to the nursery to see if Layla had truly slept in the governess’s narrow bed. She found her sitting on the floor, her hair a tousled mess around her shoulders, apparently marshaling a battalion of soldiers.

  “Hello,” Susannah said, getting up and going to stand at Layla’s shoulder, as if Edie meant to steal her away. Obviously, Layla and Susannah had fallen in love with each other. It had nothing to do with her mothering of Susannah, or lack thereof.

  “Hello yourself,” she said to Susannah. “You may call me Edie, if you wish.” Since Mama wasn’t an option.

  Then she crouched down and examined the way the soldiers were arranged. There were a great many of them; it seemed that Layla was in charge of the redcoats and Susannah of the blue. “Who is winning?” she asked.

  “It’s the third battle of the English against the Scots,” Layla said, stifling a yawn. “By some miracle, the Scots always win.” She had wound an arm around Susannah’s waist as naturally as if she’d known her from the moment she was born.

  “Three battles,” Edie exclaimed. “And you lost every time. Dear me, Layla. We Englishwomen have to do better than that.”

  “This Englishwoman has been up since the crack of dawn,” Layla said, with some dignity. “Naturally, His Majesty’s forces would win any battle conducted at night.”

  Layla never rose early. “How are you doing without the cheroots?”

  “I seem to be hungry all the time,” she answered, a frown pleating her brow. “At this rate, I shall become as round as a turnip.”

  Susannah hooted with laughter. “A turnip, a turnip!” she shrieked. She apparently decided that Edie didn’t pose an imminent risk, because she twirled across the room to where Alice sat sewing by the fireplace.