The burden of that responsibility overwhelmed him. He would have to throw her over his shoulder and tie her up and heave her into a carriage, and she would never speak to him again.
“Please, Ninian,” he asked desperately, appealing to the intelligence he knew she harbored behind her crackbrained notions. “Don’t you see I can’t let you risk yourself?”
Unexpectedly, she wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her head against his chest. “I love you for who you are, Drogo. I love you for wanting to take care of us all. But at some point, you have to love us enough to let us do what we think best. You cannot think and act for all of us forever.”
He clutched her close and swore he would do that so long as he was surrounded by fools and lunatics.
But they weren’t, he knew. Ninian could produce results he couldn’t comprehend. Dunstan was as strong and intelligent and reliable as Drogo himself. Ewen might be careless with money, but he had a brilliant mind. None of them were fools or lunatics. None of them were children any longer.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he whispered into her hair, offering her the one fear that terrified him most, praying she didn’t hear his vulnerability.
“You may regret that someday when we have half a dozen Malcolm and Ives rearranging the parapets and blowing up the kitchen.” She nestled closer into his arms. “Or I could always promise to come back and haunt you should I die. There are no guarantees, Drogo. We must do our best with what little knowledge we have.”
“Why couldn’t we do it quietly in some peaceful corner of the world where there are no brothers or sick villagers or flooding streams?” he asked mournfully.
She laughed. “Or witchy aunts and cousins. The roads are causing difficulty, but they’re on their way, Drogo. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He wasn’t about to consider the onset of another pestilence. “Is there nothing you can do to protect yourself from the contagion?”
She shrugged and released him. “Stay away from the water, I suspect. But if the burn is flooding, then the wells may be contaminated too. I don’t know how such things work.”
The water. He could very well do something about the damned water. With something factual he could grasp, Drogo swung his stubborn wife into his arms and carried her through the swamp of the yard to the waiting carriage.
“I will fix it,” he promised. “If I have to blow up the whole damned mine, I will fix it.”
By tomorrow night, he’d have her in his bed, and the planets would return to rotating around the sun again.
Thirty-seven
“Where’s Ninian?” a young voice cried from the front entrance of the castle.
“Where’s Alan?” an older one called no less eagerly as its owner swept into the great hall trailing an assortment of silks and scarves.
Lydie stared in amazement from the staircase as an entourage of fair and chattering Malcolms streamed across the threshold, followed by a collection of servants bearing trunks, carpetbags, and various and assorted oddments whose purpose Lydie could not immediately discern.
“Where’s Drogo and those fascinating brothers of his?” another feminine voice purred as an enchantingly beautiful Malcolm in full powdered wig drifted into the room to admire a tapestry.
Lydie had accepted her place as nursemaid to the infants, understanding that Ninian’s talents and knowledge were far greater than her own. She hadn’t complained when all the servants, almost to a man, had followed either Ninian or Drogo to their assigned tasks. But she did rather object to playing the part of lowly housemaid to a swarm of chattering females.
She glanced ruefully at her woolen gown unadorned with panniers or petticoats and decided she’d followed Ninian too far down the path of rural dishabille.
“Hello, I’m Lady Elizabeth, Ninian’s companion.” That sounded innocuous enough. Using the poise with which she’d descended many a grand stairway, she glided down this one. “I’m so sorry that no one is here to greet you. You have come at just the wrong time. There is illness…”
The small, gray-haired lady trailing scarves hurried forward. “Yes, yes, we know. We have come at just the right time. But first, show us dear, darling Alan. An Ives! It is beyond imagining. We’ve never had a male before. Be a dear…”
As they swept her up the stairs again, Lydie glanced over her shoulder at a familiar greeting from below.
“Lead the way, Lydie,” Sarah cried cheerfully from the back of the pack. “We’re about to find out how it’s really done!”
How what was really done? Lydie wondered, before she was forced into the current of chattering excitement and lost her ability to think of anything at all.
***
Ninian laughed as kegs of ale rolled off the farm cart and through the rose-covered gate of her granny’s garden. Two milk cows mooed loudly from their tethers at the back of the cart. They must have emptied the castle cellars. Drogo had solved the water problem—for now.
“They’ll all be drunk,” Mary whispered in puzzlement from behind her.
“Better drunk than dead,” Ninian answered cheerfully, hurrying back to the makeshift hospital. “No one drinks water until Drogo has found the solution.”
“But it’s been a year and no one has found a solution,” Mary protested, hurrying after her. “We haven’t even figured out the problem yet.”
“But that’s what Ives are good for.” Cheered by this evidence that Drogo finally understood that he wasn’t an island all alone, Ninian returned to mixing the elixir that seemed to work best on the children. “They’re not devils. They’re geniuses. One cannot expect geniuses to think the way others do.”
“No, I suppose not,” Mary said doubtfully, reaching for the pot Ninian indicated. “But why haven’t these geniuses done something sooner?”
“Because they’re idiots.” Still smiling, Ninian added a squeeze of lemon, sniffed the result, and nodded approval. At Mary’s puzzled expression, she dimpled. “Men cannot be smart about everything. Ives are idiots about people and geniuses about things. Adonis will explain it. Tell me when he arrives.”
She swept off, not hearing Mary’s weak “Adonis?”
***
“The water pumped from the mine must run off into that stream down there.” Dunstan gestured to a valley farther down the hill where a stream lapped over the banks.
As another load of coal rumbled from the mine’s black hole, Dunstan, Drogo, and Ewen stood on a hill opposite, watching the operation as the rain drizzled around them.
“I suppose closing the mine isn’t an option?” Ewen asked.
“It would bankrupt half the countryside, put men out of work, and leave their families to starve,” Drogo replied absently, studying the distance from mines to stream.
His particular talent was math and finance, talents he’d developed to save his family from ruin. He might waste a few spare hours on the impractical study of the stars, but he knew nothing of mechanical operations. He couldn’t see how a mine miles distant from a village could cause disease.
“A holding pool,” Ewen suggested. “An earth barrier to hold the mine runoff, prevent it from reaching the stream…”
“That could take months,” Dunstan objected, showing some sign of interest for the first time since the holidays. “You would need men, shovels…”
The terrain here was barren—bald hill after hill, giving the feeling of looking into forever. The dark figure traipsing along the distant stream could easily be seen from any rise. Drogo watched the confident stride with growing suspicion.
Abruptly leaving his brothers to argue the mechanics of the problem, Drogo strode downhill in the direction of the stream. He had a right to know.
The other man had to have seen him coming, but he stuck to his intended path. With cold gray rain obscuring the landscape and a fog rising off the water, Drogo strode determinedly
in a path intersecting with the stranger’s.
The newcomer evinced no surprise as Drogo appeared in front of him. Shoving his rough, ungloved hands into his coat pockets, slouching his tricorn hat so the water ran away from his face, he waited for Drogo to speak.
“Adonis, I presume?” he asked dryly.
The other man bent his head in what could have been agreement. “The Earl of Ives and Wystan?” he countered.
“The same. My wife claims you can tell us the origin of the burn’s problem.”
“Ives’ machinations and Malcolm foolishness,” he replied without hesitation. “Your wife’s family has arrived. Make no mistake, they can cause as much chaos as yon mine has wreaked.”
“Shall we go somewhere drier to discuss this?” Drogo didn’t want to hear more superstitious fancy, but he damned well wanted to know more about this man who looked so much like himself.
The larger man regarded him warily. “You haven’t much time for discussion. The flood will reach the castle walls soon. And the witches are brewing a storm. They have yet to learn that just the diversion of a whisper of wind can disturb nature’s balance. The loss of one small butterfly can start a chain of events reducing a village to sticks.”
The castle. And Alan. Panic licked along Drogo’s veins, but he was growing accustomed to it now. He panicked when he could not control events, but as Ninian had warned, he could only control so much. He must learn just how much was his to control.
“How do you know so much about Malcolms?” It wasn’t an idle question. He could see the stamp of Ives on the man’s features, but no Ives he knew of had ever consorted with Malcolms in recent memory. Until him.
The other man looked as if he would refuse to answer, then shrugged. “My mother is one. Are you in this with me, or not?”
Another Malcolm and Ives offspring, one who had evidently survived his unusual childhood, and in this generation, not a past one. Why didn’t the Malcolm women know of this anomaly? For Alan’s sake, he needed to know more.
He needed to save Ninian and his son first.
Drogo studied the stranger’s open expression carefully, then nodded, accepting what he didn’t have time to thoroughly investigate. He needed help, and this man offered it. “Come meet my brothers. We’re in this together.”
***
“We’ve driven the sheep to the highest shelters we can find, but the wind is picking up. They hate wind. And if it starts to thunder…”
Nate’s father didn’t have to finish the sentence. This was a farming community. Everyone knew the erratic temperament of sheep. They’d dive off the nearest cliff if frightened enough.
Ninian peeked out the window. Water ran down the road in front of the rose gate. Wind tossed and turned the leafless limbs of the trees. This was even worse than the night she and Drogo had first made love. But Drogo wasn’t here, so it couldn’t be their fault. It was just some fluke of nature.
“My lady, your family has arrived,” a soaked messenger shouted, emerging from the kitchen but unable to navigate the crowded parlor of pallets, children, and parents.
Every head in the room turned. Embarrassed, the messenger made a show of doffing his dripping slicker and hat. Silence suddenly reigned, and Ninian knew all eyes had turned to her.
The wind howled, the rain increased, the flood waters rose higher, and her family had arrived. The villagers needed no more than two and two to reach four, and she couldn’t be certain that they weren’t right, though it wasn’t as if her aunts intended harm.
She had no way of knowing how the illness spread, if she could carry it to the castle or if the water or something else beyond her knowledge caused it. She dearly wished to speak with whichever of her aunts had arrived, but she didn’t dare risk Alan or her family.
“Why couldn’t God have made me a mind reader?” she grumbled. “At least that would have been useful.”
“Healing is useful,” Mary pointed out. “The children are much better now that you are here.”
They did seem better, but Ninian saw no proof that her gifts were responsible. She was better organized, more knowledgeable, and simply noticed symptoms better than most. If she could but teach Lydie the same, she would do as well.
That’s what she preferred to believe, just as she preferred believing her family really did not affect the weather, that her meager prayers to the wind did no more than make her feel better. Perhaps she would never truly know, but so long as people believed she could help, they needed her. Perhaps faith counted most.
Giving up any hope of seeing her family soon, Ninian kneeled beside the next child in line, lifted the toddler into her arms for a hug, and persuaded a mug of sweetened willow water into her. Her breasts ached with milk, but she had a potion for that too. She just hated the idea of giving up Alan’s feeding so soon.
“The water’s across the road!” someone shouted several hours later as the wind continued to howl and the rain poured.
“My chicken coop!” Alice wailed as she watched the river of water rising below.
What the devil was her family doing? If they couldn’t stop the rain, then they needed to help her with the sick and leave the weather alone.
Not that she’d noticed any of them with a talent for healing. Reading auras and painting portraits was just as useless as recognizing the fears and anxieties mounting around her as swiftly as the flood water.
***
“What do you mean, we can stop the flow with gunpowder!” Drogo shouted.
“Well, he’s right.” Ewen scribbled a quick calculation and sketch on the battered flyleaf he’d torn from a book in his pocket. “A keg or two, at just the right angle, and we can bring a good part of that hillside down. We’d have to pump—”
“A keg or two? Where the devil would we get a keg or two, providing we’re insane enough to attempt it?” From the door of the cramped mine foreman’s cabin, Drogo glared at the misty gray rain covering the countryside. He needed to go back to Ninian. And Alan. He’d take them to London and safety, out of this world of lunacy that seemed to have infected even his brothers.
“I can find it,” Adonis declared without inflection.
“He’s Scots,” Dunstan commented, with seeming irrelevancy.
Ewen and Drogo turned to stare at their taciturn brother. The stranger merely tipped his chair back and produced a pipe from his pocket, tapping it on the table to clean it before reaching for the tobacco in his other pocket.
Ever curious, Ewen asked the less obvious question. “How do you know?”
Dunstan shrugged and took a gulp of ale. “Accent. English tutor, apparently, but definitely Scots underneath the polish. One of the tenants has a Scots wife.”
“What the devil has that got to do with the way the world turns?” Drogo asked acidly. He didn’t even know who the damned stranger was. His national origins were of small concern.
“If you want to trust a Scot with gunpowder, you’re more a bedlamite than your wife. What do we know of him, anyway?”
The stranger crossed his arms over his chest and raised a questioning eyebrow, as if he, too, were interested in the answer.
“Ninian trusts him. She said he had the answers.” Even as he said it, Drogo knew how insane that sounded.
Dunstan was quick to point out the flaw in his logic. “She’s a Malcolm. For all you know, the lot of them want us out of Wystan. When was the last time an Ives could trust his wife?”
There the question stood in all its stark cold logic, asked by the latest victim of an entire string of failed Ives marriages dating back generations.
Why would any sane Ives trust a wife with a history like that to draw on?
The stranger raised eyebrows remarkably like his own, and Drogo scowled at his look of expectation. One more question to be solved—who the devil was this damned Adonis? As far as he was aware, his father w
as the only son of the earl who had survived adolescence. He supposed there were uncles and cousins elsewhere. Ives weren’t precisely a close-knit family, given their tendency to lose wives and children on a regular basis. And the earls had only been gone from these parts for fifty years or so. The features could have carried through several generations.
His mind had wandered from the crux of the matter. Why would an Ives trust his wife?
The crushing weight of that question nearly killed him. Could he believe Ninian’s dimpled look of innocent abstraction? Or should he believe the night she’d come to his tower had been a ploy? Would she have forced him to suffer the torment of the damned while he watched her bearing his son for some obscure revenge of her own? She’d told him often enough Malcolm and Ives don’t mix. That damned diary proved it.
He thought of Ninian casually scooping up a village child and kissing his cheek, of Ninian scolding his younger brothers back to school, of her surprised and pleased expression when she’d thought she’d conquered the weather just for him.
If he had been fooled by those performances, then he deserved to play the part of fool now. Trusting Ninian and her instincts meant risking the mine, the village, his brothers, and everyone around them. He had to do it, or just give up and die.
He fixed his gaze on the stranger Ninian trusted, the stranger who looked like a slightly older version of himself. Adonis met his gaze squarely, defiantly. Could he trust this man with dynamite and his mine? Ninian would. He would trust her, and keep the man under close watch at all times. He had little choice. Ninian would never leave Wystan while the flood threatened, and saving her and his family held priority.
“Ewen, have the men start digging the holes to plant the charges. Adonis, make up a better name than that of a damned Greek god and take Dunstan with you to fetch the gunpowder.”
Adonis dropped his chair to the ground and nodded. Dunstan and Ewen looked at Drogo as if he’d lost his mind.
Drogo ignored them all as he strode for the door. It was damned well time for them to shoulder a few of the responsibilities around here. “If the charge goes off wrong, it could blow up the whole mine and send the river down the valley with it. I’m clearing everyone out of the mine, and then I’m warning the village.”
Merely Magic Page 33