Flustered though he was, he couldn’t help a smile. Leaning back in his chair, he watched her, pondered her. True, she was totally opposite of what he’d hoped to find in a wife, but there was something so sweet and genuine about Splendor that he often forgot to remember that she was not the perfect duchess he’d vowed to have.
Perfect duchess. How many times had he thought about those words in the past ten years? Thousands of times, he was sure. And when he’d thought of them, other words followed. Words like conventional and plain. Dutiful, ordinary, meek, and normal.
He’d never thought of words such as sweet or generous. Kind hearted, joyful, or caring.
“I don’t suppose you have ever slid down a rainbow, have you, Jourdian?” Splendor asked, reaching for a warm, soft roll.
He pushed his empty plate away, and took a long sip of port. “No.” But his mind was on another topic altogether. Sweet, generous, kind hearted, joyful, and caring, he mused again. Those were the things he thought about Splendor. But what did she think about him? It was curiosity that made him want to know, of course. Curiosity, and nothing more.
She’d said he was handsome, and she liked the sound of his laughter.
That’s all she’d said. All the good, anyway.
Beyond those things, she thought him rude and uncivil. Had made that perfectly clear to him.
He wondered if she had any other feelings for him.
Curiosity was a beast. He supposed he ought to fight it back, but he didn’t want to. The questions concerning her feelings for him loomed in his mind, too great to ignore now.
“Jourdian?”
He shook himself mentally. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
“’Twas as if you were in another place, another time. Is something troubling you? If so, perhaps I can help.”
There it was again, he mused. That generosity and caring that felt like a warm hug to him. “I was only thinking. About my work.” God, what a lie, he thought. What work? Oh, he’d read through some interesting reports and answered letters and inquiries, but he’d ignored his real work, the business concerning the Gloucester orchards. He hadn’t been able to concentrate on the deal, what with Splendor’s smile and happy chatter distracting him.
Tomorrow, he thought. First thing in the morning, he would complete the transaction.
“I asked you if you wished to slide down a rainbow with me, husband. ’Tis supremely wonderful, the feeling of gliding down a swath of misty color.”
Gazing at her over the rim of his glass, Jourdian drank more port. “It sounds interesting, but I believe I’ll give it a miss.”
Splendor nibbled at her bread. “Harmony kissed Emil. And Emil kissed her back.”
That bit of news took Jourdian unaware. “When did this happen?”
“Last week. The day I brought the Shakespearean characters to life. Do you remember when I transferred us into the house after Harmony gave you two heads? Emil and Harmony remained outside together. ’Twas then she kissed him and he kissed her back. She took his clothes off, too, and he hid his cattail behind his hands. Harmony told me everything. She visited me yesterday, but ’twas a quick visit, Jourdian, and she did not make mischief. She only wanted to know when Emil would be coming back to visit you. Since I did not know, I could not tell her.”
Jourdian made a mental note to confront Emil when next he saw his cousin. Emil was more than likely trying to acquire a fairy of his own, and the very notion alarmed Jourdian immensely.
Emil and a fairy. God, there was no way in the world to guess what would result from such a combination.
“If I made a wish of you, would you grant it for me, Jourdian?”
He set his glass down. “What sort of wish?”
“First you must agree to grant it.”
“I will not agree to grant a wish before knowing what that wish entails.”
“Then I’ll nay ask it.”
“Fine.” He picked up his glass, pushed away from the table, and ambled over to the fireplace.
He didn’t care what wish she wanted from him, he told himself. Whatever it was, it would probably irritate him, so it was better that he didn’t know what she wanted.
What she wanted.
Besides a child, she never wanted anything from him. Never asked him for a thing.
Still, only a fool would promise to give what he didn’t know he would be forced to give.
What did she want? he tried to guess. Had she changed her mind about jewels and trips abroad? Did she desire more clothing?
Since she’d never asked him for much, he realized that whatever it was she wanted now must mean a lot to her. It would probably make her very happy to receive it.
Jourdian wanted her to be happy. She’d twisted his life inside out, but he simply couldn’t help wanting her to be happy.
“All right, Splendor, I’ll grant your wish,” he said abruptly, turning from the hearth to look at her. “Now, what is it?”
“Why did you decide to grant my wish so suddenly?”
“Would you have me not grant it?”
“Nay.”
“Then I suggest you ask it before I think better of your request and deny it to you.”
She rose from her chair and began to float around the room. Watching her, Jourdian realized she was performing the fairy version of pacing. She was nervous, he understood then, and his curiosity over her wish intensified. “Splendor, I’m waiting.”
She stopped beside the bed and trailed her fingers down the midnight blue canopy.
“Do you want me to make love to you?” Jourdian asked, wondering if that was why she’d stopped by the bed.
“I always want you to make love to me, Jourdian, but ’tisn’t the wish I would put to you now.”
“Then what—”
“Might we go outside? ’Tis a beautiful night, husband. See how the moon paints the earth with her silver,” she said, pointing toward the moonlight on the terrace. “And look how many stars—”
“It’s almost midnight,” Jourdian interrupted after glancing at the clock on the mantel.
“An enchanting hour.”
“It’s cold outside.”
“I promise you will be warm. Please, Jourdian.”
A midnight walk on a cold December night, he mused. “Very well.”
And then he was there, outside beneath the moon and the stars, strolling hand in hand with Splendor. She’d taken them into an intricate maze of hedgerow, he noticed, and he could hear night creatures buzzing and chirping from within the thick branches.
A bit of frost sprinkled the hedgerow leaves with pretty patterns of sparkling white, and yet he didn’t feel the chill in the winter air. He wore nothing but pants, a shirt, and shoes, but he was warm.
Warmed by fairy thrall.
His feet crunched into brittle leaves and snapped twigs as he walked, but Splendor’s gait was as quiet as the fall of a single snowflake upon a still and glassy pond. With the exception of her violet eyes and hair of flame, she was almost the same color as the moonlight that spilled so beautifully upon her. Pale, she was, ethereal, like an angel.
And she was his.
Tenderness thrummed through him, a soft emotion that caused him to stop and take her into his arms. He kissed her, a whisper of a kiss, as soft as the light in her eyes, as gentle as the sound of her sigh.
“Your wish,” he murmured. “What do you want, sprite?”
“’Tis not something I can hold in my hand.”
His curiosity deepened.
“’Tis an explanation I seek, Jourdian. One that I have yearned to have since the night of our wedding.”
He drew away from her, but clasped her wrists. “What do you want me to explain?”
She gazed into his eyes, eyes whose silver rivaled that of the moonglow. “Love,” she said softly.
He let go of her wrists and all the tenderness he’d felt only moments before. Spinning on his heel, he left Splendor and her questions behind him.
They all caught up with him. “Jourdian, why did my mention of love that night so infuriate you?”
He walked faster.
Splendor began to fly. Behind him, and then beside him. “Jourdian?”
With long, irate strides, he searched for the maze’s exit. As a boy, he’d known exactly where it was, for it was within this very network of dense bushes that he and Emil used to hide from the Heathcourte servants. Many years had passed since then, but his memory had not dimmed.
In only moments, he left the maze and stalked toward the house. He’d traveled only several yards before a shower of silver fell around him.
Loath to know what magic Splendor had performed, he shut his eyes and damned her to hell and back.
But when he opened his eyes, he found her much closer to heaven than to hell. She sat on a cloud, high in the night sky and against a backdrop of twinkling stars.
And he sat on the cloud with her. With the aid of the moonlight, he saw the roofs of his house and his barns, all hundreds feet below.
Apprehension snaked through him. How was it possible to sit on a cloud? “Magic,” he mumbled. “Damn it all, Splendor—”
“Jourdian, I brought you up here so you cannot escape me.” Determined to best her, he moved toward the edge of the cloud. “I could jump.”
“Aye, that is what you could do, and then you would fall.”
“You’d save me. You’d throw your stardust at me.”
“I might miss.”
He leaned back into the puffy whiteness, then noticed the cloud was drifting. Already, his house and barns were gone from sight. “We’re moving.”
“A breeze blows our cloud, but do not worry.”
He was sitting in the middle of the sky, sailing over the English countryside on a damned bit of vapor, and she told him not to worry? “Bloody hell.”
Splendor tilted her head toward her shoulder. “Has it ever come to your notice that you say ‘ bloody hell’ and I say ‘sweet everlasting’?”
“There are far more drastic differences between us than our epithets.”
“Jourdian, what is it about love that so distresses you?” When he turned his head to look at her, she saw misery in his eyes. Saw it as clearly as she saw the huge full moon above. “Do you resist speaking of love because in truth you nay know what it is? I thought all humans knew what love is.”
“I never said I didn’t know what it is.”
“I have heard it said that love brings indescribable joy to those who feel it.”
Joy? Ha! “Get us off this cloud and back into the house.”
“I do not understand any of this, Jourdian. Love should fill you with deep happiness, and yet—”
“I wish for you to take us back down to land!”
“I shall grant your wish, Jourdian, when you have granted mine.”
Fury burned the voice from his throat. He could do naught but sit there and glower at her.
But Splendor looked beyond the glint of rage in his eyes, and she saw his simmering bitterness and that agonizing sorrow.
Plants growing in his room would not ease his bitterness, she realized then. Decorating his home in his favorite colors and bringing fictitious characters to life would not lift his grief.
Only a clear understanding of his problems with love would give her the means with which to kill his pain.
“I cannot help you,” she whispered achingly. “I am powerless to give you the succor you need.”
“I do not recall asking you for help,” Jourdian retorted. She did her best to ignore the spite in his voice. “Do you know why I cannot help you?”
“No, and I do not care…”
“Your pain is somehow connected to love. And I, Jourdian, cannot feel love. ’Tis why I have asked you so many questions about it. My emotions are not as deep as yours, for as a fairy I lack the substance you have. Compared to you, I am like a puff of misty air or the quick twinkle of a star. I shimmer, but blow on me, and I vanish. Consequently, the supremely profound feeling of love is something I will never know. Therefore, I have no way of comprehending your misery, much less alleviating it.”
Her admission stunned him. Only a short time ago, while they’d still been in their bedroom, he’d wondered what feelings she harbored for him.
He knew now that whatever they were, they had nothing to do with love.
Splendor…incapable of love. An ironic twist of fate, he mused. He wouldn’t love her, and she couldn’t love him.
“All I wanted to do was give you joy,” Splendor squeaked, and pressed her face into his shoulder. “And now I realize that I cannot, for you will nay be happy until you have faced, fought, and conquered whatever monster it is that dwells inside you. The beast will eat you alive, and I can do naught but stand by and helplessly watch. Not even my magic can save you. I—I am so very sorry, Jourdian!”
She began to sob into his shirt, and Jourdian saw a mass of her diamonds fall over his legs and sprinkle down toward earth. “Splendor, don’t cry. Don’t—”
“I cannot help it.”
Her fragile body quaked, and he knew the pitiful sound of her cries would make angels weep. He was no angel, and the burst of compassion he felt for her at that moment nearly knocked him off the cloud. She wept for him, he realized. Cried her precious diamond tears because she wanted to help him and could not.
Instinct began to shout at him, his intuition telling him in no uncertain terms that no other woman he might have married would have cared about him as much as Splendor did. Perhaps it was true that her emotions were not as deep as those of humans, but what feelings she possessed she gave with all her heart and soul.
Something welled up inside Jourdian at that moment. Rose from a place so deep he could not understand where that place was.
He forgot his anger. Couldn’t even recall why he’d been angry with her in the first place. “Splendor,” he said quietly, his arms enfolding her, “whatever resentment I carry inside me has nothing to do with you. Things happened… A very long time ago, things—”
“A very long time ago,” Splendor murmured, her mind racing. “Aye, when you were a little boy.”
“Yes, and—”
“Emil told me your parents were always gone.” Little by little bits of comprehension began to come to her.
“Emil’s mouth is as big as Reverend Shrewsbury’s.”
“The two people you used to weep for were your mother and father. I was right about them. You loved them, didn’t you, Jourdian?”
Jourdian sighed heavily, knowing that if he did not submit to Splendor’s interrogation, she would keep them in the sky forever.
He swept a handful of cloud into his palm and tossed it into the air. Its gentle flight into the distance somehow eased his tension.
“Jourdian?”
“Yes, Splendor,” he said quietly, “I loved them.”
She waited for him to tell her more, and her wait seemed as endless as the sparkling night sky. “Please tell me the rest. I would nay ask if I did not care.”
He didn’t know whether it was the possibility that he would spend the rest of his life floating around in space or the fact that he truly needed to talk about his childhood, but her poignant entreaty coaxed memories to his lips. “I was fascinated with them,” he began softly, a bit hesitantly. “My mother was very beautiful, and when I was little she seemed like a jewel to me. She glittered, both outwardly and inwardly, always laughing, always wearing flash and bright colors. And my father… He was a very distinguished-looking man, tall, broad shouldered, and with a short gray beard that I always wanted to touch but never did.”
“Why didn’t you touch it?”
Jourdian smiled a sad smile. “I was afraid…Well, perhaps fear wasn’t what I felt. Intimidation might be better. Touching his beard didn’t seem like something I should do. I was in awe of him. Authority and power touched everything he said and did, and I wanted to be just like him.”
He paused a moment before continuing, watchi
ng a star shoot across the heavens. Stars had always been so far away. Now he was so close to them he could feel their heat, just as he could feel the heat of flames in a fireplace. “I longed to be with my parents. It seemed to me that I was always at Heathcourte, where nothing wonderful ever happened, and they were always away from Heathcourte, where every wonderful thing in the world could happen.”
“Why did you not go with them when they did wonderful things away from Heathcourte?”
Jourdian shook his head. “I was only a lad, and would have been in the way. Moreover, I had to learn to be a duke. Had to study academics and etiquette. I couldn’t have learned such lessons on some deserted island where treasure was buried. Nor could I have learned them in a native jungle or in a bullring in Mexico. So I was forced to stay home with a mass of highly intellectual schoolmasters and proper-minded governesses.”
“But your parents always came back to you and Heathcourte.”
“And they were gone again.”
“Aye, then they were gone again,” Splendor said, recalling all the times his parents had left the mansion so soon after having arrived.
“Even after my mother died, Father remained gone. He closed himself away from everyone and everything, and he never opened himself again. A few years later, I buried him alongside my mother.”
“I know.”
“Emil told you.”
“Aye.”
“What else did that loquacious cousin of mine say?”
“Do not be angry with him, Jourdian,” Splendor chided gently. “’Twas Emil’s longing to help me understand you that compelled him to tell me about you. He loves you.”
“I know he does, Splendor,” Jourdian whispered.
“He told me how he met you. How sad and lonely you were, and how the two of you became fast friends. He described your mother as a woman who longed for every expensive and exotic thing life had to offer, and he said that your father was happy to accommodate her.”
She drifted off the cloud and hovered in the air in front of Jourdian. “You never felt your love returned, did you, Jourdian? Not by your mother or by your father. Your father was too involved with your mother, and your mother was too involved with getting everything she wanted. And… And even after your mother was gone, your father still did not love you. He could not love you because …your mother took all the love when she died. And then your father died, too, and when he did your last chance to feel a parent’s love died as well.”
A Basket of Wishes Page 27