A lily for Lillian.
A sob rose in her throat.
She remembered how she had pressed the brand against his skin, how the smell of burnt skin had filled the room.
Oh God, please, no… no…
Tears streaming down her face, Lillian scrambled to her feet and ran deeper into the forest. She did not care whether thorny branches reached for her dress or cobwebs caught in her hair. Like a small, injured animal, she sought the solitude of the dark, green shadows.
Farther and farther she ran, reaching for the silence of the forest, far, far away from human society. The heart of the forest, known only to badger and fox. And then she slipped and fell, her elbow scraping over the bark of a tall tree, her face buried in old leaves.
Her breath hitched in her throat as she inhaled the musty smell of decay, overlaid with the fresh tang of earth. Her heart pounded in her ears like a drum, drowning out all other sounds. Lillian drew her knees against her chest and rolled herself up into a ball. There she lay, an unborn child in the womb of the forest.
Little by little, the hammering of her heart subsided and her breathing evened. Gradually she became aware of the sounds around her, the rustling of a small animal and sometimes the hoarse call of a jay.
She rolled herself onto her back and stared up to the roof of leaves above her, the brilliant green interwoven with twirling specks of dust and sunshine. Her arm tickled where a few ants scrambled across her skin. Between the twigs of a tree, a spider had spun her web and, touched by a lone sunbeam, the threads glittered like spun silver.
Lillian’s chest rose with a deep breath.
As the light slowly faded, a breeze stirred the lazy stillness among the trees. Leaves rustled, changing the play of light and shadow on the ground below. The little breeze ruffled Lillian’s hair and brought with it the faint, sweet smell of faded woodruff.
Lillian sat up.
This time, she did not fight the memories that rose inside her. Memories of summers gone by when she had walked through other forests with Nanette. Together they had collected the delicate stalks of blooming woodruff in wide baskets, to be bundled and dried. Woodruff to soothe nerves and fight headaches. Woodruff tea to waken the tired heart in late spring.
Lillian’s heart gave a painful thud.
Everything needs balance, she heard Nanette’s voice say. One to do the healing…
But this year, Lillian had let the time to collect woodruff pass by. It had bloomed unnoticed, tiny white stars in the shadows of the forest. So many chances missed—chances to heal, to help—all wasted…
As if awakening from a deep dream, Lillian rubbed her eyes and looked around.
One to do the healing…
Pictures of bloodied flesh and puckered skin passed again before her inner eye. A lily burnt into a man’s chest.
A lily for Lillian.
Her responsibility.
Her heart squeezed with remembered pain and guilt.
She had fled, had lost herself in a dream of lush flowers and frolicking lambs, while in the past few weeks Nanette had done all the healing on Ravenhurst lands.
Her responsibility.
Lillian took a deep breath. Now the lambs were grown and the flowers nearly faded; it was time to step out of the dream. The woodruff might have wilted, yet there were still other plants to collect, other remedies against sickness and disease, against pain and illness. They were waiting for her, in the fields and meadows and in the expanses of the forest. They were waiting to be picked, dried, made into salves or filled into small muslin bags for tea. It was the least she could do.
Lillian squared her shoulders. Determinedly, she walked away and left the faded woodruff behind.
~*~
On the same evening, Troy allowed himself the luxury of sitting in one of the deep leather chairs in the library and enjoying a glass of brandy with his friends. The smoke of cheroots hovered in the air, a bluish veil filling the room with the familiar smells of male company. How he had missed these quiet evenings spent with his friends; how he had longed for the sight of their faces, the sound of their voices, all these weeks and months.
How he had feared he would never see them again.
Troy suppressed a shudder.
He had had friends in the military, too. Friends whose deaths he had witnessed. Their young, clean-shaven faces had been burnt by the Spanish sun and then lost all ruddiness in the winter that was to follow. He remembered the hollow cheeks of the men when their rations had barely kept them alive, the over-bright eyes of those who had been swept away by the fever. He remembered the faces of the men who had been ripped apart by cannonballs or gouged open by bayonets. He recalled the scrawny drummer boy who had accompanied them to foreign lands, his sightless eyes turned up to the smoke-darkened sky, his thin body shapeless and bloodied in death. Troy remembered the screaming of horses, the screaming of men, the roar of the cannon, and for a long moment he was lost in his memories, thrown back into his own private hell.
“—flowers all over. Have you heard a word of what I’ve said, Troy?” Drake sighed and muttered something unintelligible.
“I’m sorry.” Troy took a large swallow from his glass of brandy. The alcohol burnt its way down his throat, all the way into his belly. Yet as cauterizing fires went, this one provided only a temporary refuge. To drown memories in alcohol was not a method Troy preferred.
He grimaced.
Besides, it was not very effective. Especially since some of the memories were embedded in his flesh forevermore.
His hand rose and splayed over his chest. Quickly, though, he let it fall.
“You were saying?” he asked. He looked up in time to catch one of Drake and Justin’s silent exchanges. Over the years the two of them had brought this wordless communication to perfection. Troy himself had never known such closeness with another living being.
For a moment, Drake looked almost bashful. In his cheeks color came and went. Then he raised his glass in a silent toast. “I was saying…” He drank. “…that Bair Hall has taken on disturbing similarities to Bedlam.”
“Due to your precious dogs,” Troy tried to joke, and he nudged one of the silver-brown creatures lounging about on his Persian carpet with the tip of his boot. Anna, Sophie or Marie, whichever it was, grunted sleepily and continued to snore, paws up in the air. And no wonder it was, since the dogs had spent the afternoon jumping at his great- great-grandfather’s hunting trophies and erupting into loud excited barks whenever one of the deer-heads had dropped to the floor with a dull thud. The splendid fourteen-pointer, the centerpiece of the trophy room downstairs, had been transformed into a twelve-and-a-half pointer with a missing eye. With an eye patch, it might look a proper would-be pirate deer.
Grinning, Troy took another sip of brandy.
Drake sighed. “I told you, we would compensate you for the damage.”
Troy raised an eyebrow. “And I told you that it is not necessary. Great-great-grandfather made sure that the attics are filled with hunting trophies. Why, he once brought home an elephant foot. What do I need an elephant foot for, I ask you?” He shrugged.
Drake heaved another sigh, his face remaining serious. Troy grimaced wryly. He dreaded what was to come. His friends certainly saw too much.
“I was talking about the fact,” Drake said slowly and carefully, as if talking to an especially dense person, “that day after day you shut yourself up in your study as if it were a monk’s cell and you in the application line for holiness.”
“Drake,” Troy groaned.
“And about the fact,” his friend overrode him, “that the Countess of Ravenhurst, your wife, is running around the garden like a fey maiden straight from a gothic novel.”
Justin nodded in agreement. “Barefoot and all bedecked in flowers—a fair Ophelia she would make.”
“And what is more”—Drake leaned forward, his beseeching gaze on Troy—“she has not taken any meals with us since that first evening, nor does she sleep in the fa
mily apartments.”
“Don’t try to deny it,” Justin drawled. “We were curious and looked into the countess’s rooms. Unless your wife prefers white sheets over all her furniture…” His voice trailed away suggestively.
“There is no proof of her existence in this house, Troy,” Drake continued. “No proof at all that she lives here. It is as if she were a ghost haunting your gardens. Heavens, Troy, the girl doesn’t even know where the library is. She practically told us she’s living on fruit.”
That finally got his attention. “She told you?” It came out sharper than he intended.
Drake rolled his eyes. “We talked to her this afternoon. We had a picnic in the garden—”
“In the garden?” Troy surged to his feet in an attempt to evade the icy fear that clutched his heart for his friends. “She saw you? Together?”
“Blast it, Troy! You told us that you’ve talked to her about it.” Drake shook his head, incomprehension written on his features. “She did not seem shocked, if that’s what you are thinking. What is the matter with you? She is a sweet girl, your wife, yet you behave as if… as if…” His hands waved through the air.
“As if she were the devil incarnate?” Troy laughed harshly, the sound grating on his ears. “A sweet girl, you say? God!” He turned around, his back to them, so they would not see his face, would not see… He ran both hands through his hair.
“Troy,” Drake said, his voice gentle, “whatever misunderstanding there is between the two of you, I am sure—”
Troy felt as if he were suffocating. “A misunderstanding? ” he choked. “Merde! Drake, you are a blathering innocent. A misunderstanding? A sweet girl?” He shrugged out of his frock coat and let it drop to the floor. With shaking fingers he started to unbutton his waistcoat. He did not heed the rustling behind him, nor the sound of Drake’s worried voice.
“Troy, what are you doing?”
In his haste he ripped off some of the buttons of his shirt, and they fell to the floor like pearls, tears of a long-forgotten deity nobody cared about any longer. When he was finished, not only his hands shook, his whole body trembled. His skin was slick with sweat.
He turned around to face his friends. “A sweet girl, you say?” he repeated. “A misunderstanding?” He parted the lapels of his shirt, exposed his chest to their gazes. With something akin to satisfaction he watched how Justin’s nostrils flared, how Drake’s eyes widened with shock. “Do you call this a misunderstanding? She held the brand that seared my skin. Your ‘sweet girl’ did this.” He dropped his hands to his sides, suddenly bone-weary. “The Countess of Ravenhurst, my friends, is a cold-hearted, evil little bitch, a cunning schemer… I would have done anything to prevent her from marrying Alex.”
Justin drew on his cheroot, then leaned his head back to puff out perfect circles. “Even ruin her,” he remarked, his nose still in the air.
“And even marry her yourself,” Drake added softly.
“Should I have stood by and watched her destroy my foolish, besotted cousin?” Troy snorted. “Better to let my family think me the villain in that particular farce than…” His fingers clenched into fists.
Drake rubbed his forehead. “Yet the girl we’ve met, she doesn’t give the appearance of being… evil.” He and Justin exchanged another one of their unfathomable glances.
Tiredly, Troy lowered himself onto his chair. His bones seemed to have suddenly gained added weight, dragging his body down. “Well, she is.” He grimaced. “My family, of course, adores her. She would have made the perfect viscountess. And now…” Unsteadily, he reached for his glass. “And now.…” The brandy felt good on his tongue, the liquid a burning distraction from the aches of his body. Or perhaps it was just his soul that hurt. Who knew? “And now we have to keep face and the family honor and all that, so my grandmother has ordered me… us back to London for the Little Season.” He took a deep breath, and finally he looked at his friends once more.
Thoughtfully, Justin munched on his cheroot. “You hate London.”
“I detest London.”
“You could always say no to her,” Drake said carefully.
Troy sighed. “She raised me. You know that I—”
“Feel honorbound to jump whenever she snaps an order. Yes, we know.” Justin’s drawl had a sarcastic timbre.
“She raised me. She took me in after the death of my parents.”
Justin just rolled his eyes. “Heavens, Troy, you were the heir. They could have hardly sent you to an orphanage.”
“Nevertheless—”
“I know, I know.” As if in surrender, Justin raised his hands. “So, come September, we’ll just flock to London, one and all.” When Troy opened his mouth, he lifted one of his elegant black brows. “You did not really think we would leave you alone, did you?”
~*~
In the following weeks, Lillian roamed the fields and meadows with a purpose. In the shadow of a boulder on a forest clearing she found milkwort, and at the bank of a small river, she picked some late elder blossoms. She found a meadow with blooming fennel and even some hedge-hyssop. It was too late to harvest the knotted figwort, yet she knew where to find some the next year if some of the younger people from the village would want a cure for bad skin.
And so, she brought Nanette basket after basket of delicate blossoms, cut-off stems or carefully dug-up roots. In the evenings, they would wash the roots in Mrs. Blake’s kitchen and dry them between layers of linen cloths. The rest of the plants they would bundle or spread onto a kiln and leave them in the attic above Lillian’s bedroom to dry.
“’Tis the only place old Fitzpatrick isn’t goin’ to find ’em,” Mrs. Blake had sniffed. She held no fondness for the housekeeper, as Mrs. Fitzpatrick repeatedly tried to tyrannize the female servants and even rapped the chambermaids’ fingers if she found a speck of dust on a cupboard or a chest of drawers.
“That woman’s a pest,” Mrs. Blake would mutter, and then Lillian would imagine how she would do things differently if she were the mistress, the real mistress of Bair Hall. She would hire a new housekeeper and would make sure that the lower servants were treated well. She would put small, potted trees in the bare inner court where only the gurgling of a little fountain disrupted the silence. She would put pots of flowers in the entrance hall, would put flowers on small tables in the long hallways so their fragrance would fill the emptiness and bring the Hall to life. For Bair Hall, Lillian now realized, was in the grip of paralysis, another enchanted castle where a curse had put all life to sleep.
The Hall was a big house, built to fill with family and friends. Yet when she had finally started to explore the mansion, she had found that dustcovers shrouded most rooms, that they had settled on the furniture like numbing layers of snow.
But it would take more than the kiss of a prince to break the spell. So much more; and despite all Lillian knew about healing herbs, she did not have the remedy to battle the demons of her husband’s past. Anger and remoteness seemed to have become so much part of him that she could not even imagine him without the deeply etched grooves bracketing his mouth, or without the circles under his eyes that bespoke his weariness.
Sometimes, in the evenings, she would hide in the shadowy dimness of the gallery in the library, while below her husband and his friends sat around the fire, smoking and talking. His voice would lift then, and he looked relaxed. Yet the shadows under his eyes never waned, Lillian saw.
She would curl up in one of the wide, comfortable leather chairs and listen to the blend of male voices. There, in the darkening library, when the conversation lazily moved from one topic to the next, she learned that her husband was a well-read, highly intelligent man. He displayed open affection for his friends’ dogs, and Lillian wondered why he did not have dogs of his own.
And another thing she noticed: While Lord Allenbright and Mr. de la Mere would frequently laugh when alone, there was never any laughter to be heard during those evenings in the library. They would just talk about Lati
n literature or Greek sculpture, about horses and pointers, about London politics and the riots in the countryside. They would talk and talk, lost in earnest discussion. Sometimes the sound of their voices would lull Lillian to sleep, curled up on her chair like a stray kitten.
Yet, what made her husband who he was?
Despite all the evenings Lillian spent in the library, the answer to that question remained elusive. She witnessed her husband’s reserve even with his best friends, even when he lost the veneer of social politeness. It seemed to her that Ravenhurst resembled a tiny snail that never really left his protective shell. It was understandable, under the circumstances, yet she suspected that such a life would prevent him from ever healing properly.
Everything needs balance.
Nanette had taught her to heal, and still… still, the enchanted castle would forever remain locked within its spell; the sleeping prince would never wake up, and the beast would never be transformed. For how could her husband forgive what had happened to him? How could he forgive the theft of his soul?
Lillian sighed.
When depression threatened to weigh her down, she went outside to wander alongside fields, through meadows and below trees, to harvest what nature offered freely. Day after day, week after week, she would come back to the Hall, her basket full of flowers, herbs and blossoms so the supply would last over the winter.
Until one day, when the corn on the fields was golden and almost ripe and the rose hips were almost ready to be picked, Lillian came home and found Nanette earnest-faced. “Lord Ravenhurst wants to return to London,” the old woman said. “And you are to go with him.”
Lillian schooled her features into nonchalance. “I see. And when does he want to set off? Next week?”
There was pity in Nanette’s kind eyes. “Tomorrow, chou-chou.”
Lillian swallowed. “I see.”
“It was to happen sooner or later, you know.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” Lillian turned away. She would have thought he would prefer to spend the autumn and winter in the country, and only return to Town in spring. She had thought to see the apples ripen, to watch the harvest on the fields, to wave the birds good-bye when they started their journey to the south. But it was not to be.
The Lily Brand Page 14