Once Upon a Tower

by Eloisa James

  “Well,” Edie said, disappointment pinning her to the ground like a lead weight, “the next time you want to talk to your wife, Gowan, you’ll have to give her more than an hour at dinner and a visit whenever you can spare the time from your estates. That would be your next wife.”

  “I don’t want another wife!”

  Of course, she couldn’t flee in the morning without speaking to him. A marriage, even as brief and turbulent a marriage as theirs, had to be respected. “We will speak in the morning. I’m sure my father will agree to delay our trip back to London for another day.”

  “You cannot leave me!” His voice cut like a knife through the sound of the river.

  Edie forced her icy, wet fingers to uncurl from the windowsill. “It’s over, Gowan. I am leaving.” She closed the window. And latched it.

  Gowan stared up at the tower. She had refused. His whole body ached from the beating he had taken, riding for hours, being thrown off, landing in the ditch. His horse had fled, and he’d walked for an hour before reaching a village where he could get his ribs bound up and buy another mount—for approximately three times what the beast was worth. Then he’d ridden for another five hours, ribs be damned.

  But Edie had locked the door, and then the window. A minute later he stalked back into the castle, shaking water from his cloak like a dog. He was on his way up the stairs, when he walked straight into Layla. She stopped short, her mouth falling open.

  “Good evening,” he said, a streak of humiliation going down his backbone. This woman knew—

  The thought died at the look in her eyes. “You!” she said, stabbing him in the chest with her finger. “I want to talk to you.”

  Layla burned like a torch as she swept ahead of him into the study.

  “My husband will have his own piece to say to you,” she announced, pivoting to face him as he closed the door behind them.

  It seemed that his inadequacies as a husband were public knowledge.

  “How dare you,” Layla cried, “how dare you act in such a despicable way to your wife!” She advanced on him like an avenging angel. “How could you say such disgraceful things to someone who is so dear, and so loving? You are a contemptible man, Kinross. Contemptible!”

  It was as if one of the Greek Furies had whirled into his study: he examined her with as much bemusement as he might an ancient goddess. “Edie and I have much to discuss.”

  “That is an understatement.”

  “I want to make the point that I am not appreciative of the role you have played in my marriage,” he stated.

  A flicker of guilt went through her eyes. “I should never have taught Edie as I did. I apologize.”

  “It was not helpful,” he said, picking his words carefully. “But with time to think, I have come to realize that Edie considers you her mother. I am certain that she and I will be able to forge a new—”

  “You idiot!” Layla’s contemptuous voice cut his off. Whatever remorse she had felt was clearly exhausted. “You have no idea what you did to her, have you?”

  “We argued,” Gowan replied, anger flaring in his gut again. “That is not unheard of in marriage, Lady Gilchrist. You yourself experienced some difficulties.”

  “My husband and I have never said the things to each other that you said to Edie. Believe me, Jonas could strip me bare of every inch of self-respect, if he wished. But he would never do so, not only because he loves me, but also because he is a decent man.”

  A moment of silence elapsed before Gowan could speak. “How dare you say such a thing to me!” he shouted, every semblance of civilization leaving him.

  She didn’t even flinch, just crossed her arms over her chest and raked him with her scornful gaze. “Now I see the man whom Edie described. You can’t frighten me with your temper. I have my faults. But I would never, not in million years, do to any human what you did to Edie. Never.”

  What she was saying finally filtered through to Gowan past the haze of pure rage. “What in the bloody hell are you talking about? You make it sound as if I hit her. I did nothing to Edie!”

  Her eyes bored into his. “Oh? You did nothing? The woman I found in your wake, stripped of all self-respect, convinced that she was a failure as a mother and a lover: that wasn’t your work? Because I think it was!”

  He stared at her.

  “She may have pretended to have an orgasm; so what? You were so oblivious that you didn’t notice. Where’s the greater crime?”

  She wasn’t saying anything that Gowan hadn’t told himself.

  “You idiot,” Layla said. “You sneering, despicable—”

  “You’re beginning to repeat yourself.”

  “You made her feel as if she’d done something disgusting, after the first orgasm of her life. You told her she lay like a pancake, when she had no idea what else she was supposed to be doing in bed. Now she thinks she’ll never experience pleasure without drinking herself silly—because you told her so! Even worse, you convinced her that she had no ability to be a mother—Edie! You said that to Edie, who is one of the most loving, giving people I know.”

  “She had written me a letter and told me that she didn’t want children.” But even as he said it he remembered that wasn’t quite right: she had written that she didn’t want children immediately. “And when she met Susannah, it was obvious . . .”

  “You fool!” Layla cried. “Susannah is mine; Edie didn’t even have a chance. She’d never held a baby, did you know that? Her father didn’t allow her to play with other children; it was too important to preserve that talent of hers. She could have won Susannah over with time, but no, you had to give the child away without even discussing it! Then you left your own wife crying on the floor, having stripped her of everything that made her a woman.”

  Gowan’s lips had grown numb. He just stared at her, silently.

  She came closer and poked her finger into his chest again. “After which, you slammed your way out of the room, upset because you had bought damaged merchandise. As if you, a tedious, stupid, despicable bureaucrat, were good enough to touch the hem of Edie’s skirt. You, who didn’t even know what a cello was.”

  Gowan couldn’t speak.

  “You’re a philistine,” Layla said, her voice dropping when he didn’t fight back. “You married the most beautiful, loving woman in all England—aye, and Scotland, too—and when you learned just how inadequate you were in bed, you blamed her. Let me tell you something, Duke.” Another poke.

  He felt as if he were hardly breathing, as if only scorching air was reaching his lungs.

  “The only reason you haven’t heard the word inadequate from the women who preceded Edie in your bed is your title. That’s it. Don’t fool yourself by thinking that Edie is incapable of pleasure. You are the problem. And those satisfied women you’re comparing her to?” She actually slapped the table in her rage. “Every single one of them lied to you.”

  Dimly, Gowan perceived that Edie had apparently never told her stepmother of his lack of experience. Not that it mattered.

  Layla’s lower lip was quivering. “You smashed her as if she were a piece of china that you bought in a street market, and then you left her with a shattered heart. All she’s done since you left is play her cello—because you made her believe that’s all she’s good for. She’s lost so much weight that she looks as if she has consumption. She’s convinced that she will be a terrible mother, and that no man will ever love her. She’ll probably never be able to take pleasure in the bed, because you showed your disgust. You despicable—” But she was sobbing now, and the rest of her words were lost.

  Gowan didn’t move. Her portrait of him was so ugly that he was rooted to the spot, dimly aware that he’d gone white.

  Layla had a hand braced on the table, her head hanging, weeping. The door opened. There was a second’s pause, and Lord Gilchrist rushed straight past him. He gathered Layla into his arms and Gowan heard him murmur something as he pulled her head against his shoulder. It seemed the Gilchris
ts were together again, not that he cared.

  Had he done that to Edie? What had he done? He began filtering back through his memories. Suddenly, he remembered the expression of horror in her eyes when he announced that she had no skill with children, the way she wept as she insisted that she had tried with Susannah, the mute grief in her eyes.

  He remembered shouting his father’s loathsome comment about pancakes, but he hadn’t meant it to apply to her. She had twisted in his hands like a live flame, driving him mad with every catch in her voice, with—

  He made her feel as if she had disgusted him?

  Lord Gilchrist delivered his wife tenderly into a chair, turned, and slammed Gowan under the jaw with a blow so solid that he crashed to the floor like a felled tree without time to twist sideways and protect his left arm. “That’s for my daughter,” Gilchrist snarled, standing over him. “Don’t think I can’t get this annulled, because I can. I’ll tell the king that a bloody Scotsman reduced my daughter to a shadow in a matter of weeks. Don’t think you’re keeping her dowry, either. And don’t you ever frequent an English ballroom looking for your next wife. I’ll make sure that every man in the country would rather send his daughter to the Americas than marry her to you.”

  Gowan’s body hurt so much from slamming into yet another hard surface—though the floor was slightly better than the ditch—that he only dimly registered as Gilchrist ushered his wife from the room.

  It wasn’t merely the pain. It was the knowledge that he had stripped Edie of dignity, of self-respect. He’d hurt the one person he loved in the world. He’d ruined her. He’d taken . . .

  The bleak truth of it pulsed along with the physical pain that was searing his left arm as if a hot poker stretched from his knuckles to his elbow. The binding around his ribs hadn’t protected them from being jarred in such a way that he couldn’t breathe.

  He had just managed to get to a sitting position when Bardolph walked into the room. Gowan took a deep breath, and his cracked ribs blazed with sudden fire. “Help me up,” he said, shortly.

  Footsteps came toward him and he glanced up. He didn’t usually think of Bardolph as being a mere decade older than he was; his customary frown made him appear thirty years older.

  But now he realized that he’d never seen Bardolph when he was truly disapproving. “I’m leaving,” his factor stated, staring down at Gowan without lifting a finger to help him up. “You may consider this my notice.”

  Gowan had braced himself on his right hand so he could get up without using his left. Bardolph stepped forward and kicked his hand out from under him. Gowan crashed down again, a stifled groan escaping from his lips.

  Bardolph couldn’t hate him with more virulence than he did himself.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” Gowan said, staring fixedly at the legs of the chair before him. “I love her.”

  Silence.

  He wasn’t even sure Bardolph was still there. Maybe he was waiting for the right moment to kick him in the kidneys.

  “I love her so much.” Gowan’s voice broke, and for the first time since the day after Molly had disappeared beneath the floodwaters, he lost control. With the raw cry of a soul in pain, he said, “I love her more than—”

  A rough hand grabbed his left arm and hauled him to his feet. The agony was so acute that he shouted involuntarily.

  “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, your shoulder is dislocated!” Bardolph exclaimed.

  “Ribs. I was thrown from my horse.”

  “That’s not a good enough excuse for staying away for two weeks,” his factor said, stepping back and folding his arms over his chest.

  Gowan turned away. “The truth is that she’s better off without me. I’m turning into my father.”

  “Your mother was an inebriate long before she married your father. The household knew it within a week. It’s a miracle that you weren’t born with your brains as addled as an egg.”

  Gowan absorbed that.

  “You still have a chance.” Bardolph’s voice dropped to a growl. “She hasn’t left. I did my best for you, you ignorant, ungrateful sod. I bought you time to come home by kitting out that tower. Every man in this bloody castle would have walked on their knees to Palestine for a touch of her lips, and you left her here alone, crying for you.”

  Why hadn’t he turned around ten paces from his own front door? Why had he ever left the person he loved most in the world sobbing as he turned his back? Regret was a poker to his heart, sharper and fiercer than the pain in his arm.

  Gowan went back out the front door, not even noticing the footman who pulled it open.

  When he reached the tower, he leaned against it, taking refuge from the rain and trying to put it all together. He’d hurt Edie so badly that she lost confidence in her ability to love a child—a curse rose from deep in his heart—and he’d somehow convinced her that she had behaved distastefully in the grip of pleasure.

  So she was leaving him. Of course she was leaving him. He straightened, but staggered as his cracked rib shrieked a warning.

  Edie was the only person in the world who mattered to him. His mother and father were gone; they had been too troubled to love him, and what love he had for them had burned away. Molly was gone. His aunts were cordial, at best, and Layla had adopted Susannah.

  But Edie loved him. She had said so, and he had to believe that: believe the three words that she said just before he left her. If she loved him, she might forgive him. There was a heart of darkness lurking behind his ordered life, but he was banishing it.

  He had to tell her. He had to put that heart at her feet.

  Intimacy was something they should have explored together, but his determination to follow a flawed plan had destroyed it. He was so desperate to please her that he ruined everything between them.

  If he had just admitted his ignorance, she would have trusted him. They could have found a way together. But he had been afraid: afraid to fail, afraid that she would despise him, the way his father had. That was the truth of it.

  He fell back a step and looked up at the tower. It loomed tall and gray in the dark, its silent bulk attesting to the men who had died climbing it in a vain attempt to impress their beloveds, if the tales were true. The only one who made it past the second level was the black knight, who, according to legend, still walked the battlements.

  Edie hadn’t gone back to sleep. A soft glow came from her casement. She’d unlatched the window after he left, and it stood ajar.

  If he called her name, she would close the window against him and keep him out.

  He tilted his head back so the rain struck his face. Romeo climbed to Juliet’s window, didn’t he? Of course, he probably had use of both hands and intact ribs. Gowan managed to close his left hand into a fist with no more than a grunt of pain. So his wrist hurt: it still did as commanded.

  He started climbing quickly, but slowed almost immediately. The stones were slick with rain, and the ascent was considerably harder than he had anticipated. Halfway up it occurred to him that he might not make it to Edie’s window. But there was no way down except by falling. Whether he would survive another fall was an open question.

  Even as the thought came to him, his right hand slipped and all his weight swung from his left for a moment before he caught on again. A deep grunt broke from his lips; he’d never felt pain like this before. A second later, Edie looked out the window.

  Her figure was blurred by the rain on his eyelashes. But he could see her cheek, illuminated by the glow of the fire behind and to her left. She peered down and out.

  Then she shrieked. “Gowan!”

  He couldn’t spare breath for a word, not even for her name.

  “No! Go back down, Gowan. I demand that you go back down!”

  He clung to the wall, cheek against the cool wet stone, and listened to his wife. When he caught his breath, he lifted his head and said, “I love you.”

  There was a second of silence, and then she implored, “Please, Gowan, please go back. I�
��ll let you in. I’ll do anything. Please don’t keep climbing up. I’m so afraid.”

  “Can’t do that. I love you, Edie. More than anyone. More than—more than—” He reached up with his left hand again. Cold, fierce determination filled him. She was there, above him. He could not allow her to leave him.

  Edie leaned out the window, her face glowing against the dark stone. “You’re so beautiful,” he said, his breath catching between words. “The most beautiful woman I ever met. Like a fairy. Goddess.”

  “Drunk,” she said to herself.

  He was moving faster now. He didn’t care about the ground, dwindling below him. His wife was leaning as far as she could out of the window, her golden hair falling forward over her shoulders and down the gray stone of the tower.

  He had to rest for a moment because his wrist was on fire, and his ribs were shrieking with pain. “You cannot leave me,” he said, the words coming from his mouth somewhere between a command and a prayer. He reached, and hauled himself up a little farther.

  “I know I’m shite in bed,” he said, not looking up because he was afraid the weight of his own tipped head would tear him from the wall. “But I can improve. We can stay in the bedroom, the two of us, for a year and a day. No footmen, Edie. I promise you that.”

  He reached up again with his left wrist—that was the worst and a grunt broke from his lips despite himself.

  She was sobbing and the sound of it drove him higher.

  “I’m your falcon.” The words exploded from his heart, the way they had come to him when he’d stared into the loch and tried not to think about her . . . and had failed.

  “Gowan, you’re out of your mind,” Edie cried, leaning out the window so far that her entire upper body was visible.

  “Don’t fall!” he shouted, his voice exploding into the rainy silence around them.

  “I won’t. Just please, please, Gowan, you’re close now. Just two or three more moves.”

  “It’s this bloody wrist,” he told her. “I might have broken the damned thing.”

  He heard her gasp, but he was pulling himself up again. “You’re not mine,” he told her, just below her now, almost within reach. “I’m yours, lass. You’re a net that I’m tangled in.”