The Night Side

by Melanie Jackson

  She rose to her feet and found that she was able to face Anne Balfour with an assumption of calm that matched Colin’s own.

  “M’lady, George said you were ready to retire. I am here to assist you. Immediately, if it is quite convenient.” Anne’s voice was as cool as her gaze.

  Frances stared at the widow in consternation. Never had the other woman sounded so cold and disapproving. Her eyes, when they rested on Colin, were as hard as pebbles.

  “I shall bid you both good night then,” Colin said. Putting up his knife, he added: “Do not forget what we discussed, my dear.”

  “I shan’t forget anything,” Frances answered.

  Colin nodded once to the rigid Anne and then bowed himself out.

  Walking down the empty corridor, Colin considered the small tableau that had just been enacted. He wasn’t certain if it was the circumstances of being caught in midseduction, or some natural and unexplainable antipathy, but he decided he did not care for this particular Balfour. He’d seen eyes like hers staring out from under an executioner’s hood.

  It might be that her moral outrage at their intimacy in Frances’s bedchamber had made her speak coldly to Frances. It could also be that for some reason she was less than fond of her niece by marriage and did not wish for her to become aligned with a man who might one day be master. Either way, Colin decided that Anne Balfour would bear watching. Perhaps Tearlach should be given the honor.

  This last thought caused a not entirely pleasant smile to curve his lips.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The last, the dreaded hour is come,

  That bears my love from me:

  I hear the dead note of the drum,

  I mark the fatal tree.

  —“The Ballad of Gilderoy”

  The weather the next day treated them kindly. George, believing that he was aiding their search by serving as a decoy, was left to his archery practice while Frances accompanied Colin on his explorations.

  Admittedly, neither of them was as attentive to the task as they might have been on another occasion, but the sun was making a rare and unseasonable appearance. The golden light demanded appreciation. Too, it was not always so easy to think logically when the object of one’s dreams—both waking and sleeping—was so near and one was entirely unchaperoned.

  Frances found herself caught in a delightful emotional quagmire made half of rare and heady freedom, and half of desire, and it seemed to her that Colin was secretly smiling about her new irresponsibility. Indeed, he seemed bent on encouraging lightheartedness in both her and George.

  And to good account, she assured herself. She had not been raised to approve of a life of delights and diversions, but some recreation was necessary—especially to a boy. Already George’s spirits had lifted, and he no longer minded practicing his archery and seeing to the tedious task of mounting a watch on the keep’s walls. She had heard Colin suggest that George watch for malefactors to shoot, and this was what had wrought this change of attitude. And George’s new interests in turn allowed her to leave him for short periods of time, and ramble through the countryside with Colin, where it happened—most reasonably—that he often had need to assist her through the rough terrain by holding her hand or arm, and they were able to speak freely while no one was about to hear them and turn disapproving eyes their way.

  Nor did his encouragement end there. He seemed bent on nurturing a mobility of mind that was foreign to her experience. Perhaps it was some outpost of maturity or experience that she had not yet reached that allowed him to question tradition and, if found wanting, to easily break with it. This was indeed antithetical to everything she had been taught about duty and her role in the universe, but she found the possibilities it offered to be something headier than wine. Her rebellions had all been of the mind and spirit. Colin Mortlock rebelled in fact. Without fanfare or declarations, he simply went his own way.

  Frances studied Colin as he slowly scanned the nearby countryside, looking either for enemies or clues. Or perhaps just looking. Who could know what went on in such a free mind? What she did know was that his face, even in profile, made her heart trip along on stumbling feet as it rushed her toward some decision.

  Her mother had wanted a match for her daughter with the son of an old friend. Had her mother lived, it was possible that she would be a comtessa by now. And had her father not died so suddenly, it was probable that he would have arranged a marriage for her to someone else—perhaps even the MacLeod, if there were enough to gain politically or financially from the match. In neither case were her wishes or happiness of much concern.

  But her parents were gone, and she was left to arrange her own life. She had to choose wisely, for there was no one to avenge her if she were played false by her husband. This had been her dilemma from the moment her father had died.

  She had been convinced that a period of reflection was in order before deciding whether she should encourage Colin. But now, it seemed that her heart and body had made the decision her mind could not. It was ready to reap the benefit of the increased liberty granted by her circumstances. What was the point of having the means to pleasure, if she did not use them?

  And from this thought, she had somehow in the last days arrived at the point where she was prepared to deliver herself into Colin’s care—even with the emotional uncertainty that lingered when she considered the paradoxes of this rather mysterious man.

  “Colin?” she called softly, glad she had chosen an attractive gown to wear, glad that she had allowed art to assist nature so she would be pretty for him.

  “Aye, love?” he asked, his tone absentminded.

  Her heart rolled over anyway.

  “Cher, look at me.” She touched his arm.

  Obedient, he turned toward her, his eyes focusing on her face, his expression softening. “I look,” he answered softly, smiling slightly. “What am I to see?”

  “Only the one you called love.” She was unable to maintain her gaze and released herself from the visual embrace even as she asked, “Do you wish me to be your love? In truth, not just name?”

  “What a foolish and utterly dangerous question.” Colin reached out and laced their fingers together. “My shy violet, your words are bold, but you look quite alarmed. Are you certain you wish to speak of this now?”

  “Need we actually speak of it?” she asked. “Could you not…write me a poem?”

  Colin laughed softly, but she could not imagine why. “I think these are deep waters that had best be tested before you wade in too far. You have yet to discover what is fashionable modesty and what is true reserve. Only experimentation can tell you this about your nature.”

  “Oui?” She did not entirely understand what he meant, but admittedly she did sometimes look into Colin’s eyes and sense that she was drowning. Still, recalling her wonderful feeling of the night before, she wanted to press on into this ocean and see where the tide took them.

  “Still, a little adventure would not hurt on so fine a day. And I do mean to have you to wife,” Colin explained, perhaps to her or perhaps to himself. “I should be clear about that, if you have any doubts about my intentions.”

  “But of course.” Frances’s face lifted to his. Then after a moment she colored as she lied: “I had not thought that you meant otherwise. You are an honorable man.”

  Colin touched a finger to her crimson cheek and then smiled again. “No rose on earth has such color,” he murmured. Then: “What is an honorable man to do? I think there might be divergence of thought on this matter. I have to think what will best keep you safe.” He stared at her intently.

  Frances could not think what to say. Once again, he was alluding to something she did not understand.

  “But then why not? It was always my plan,” he murmured, brushing a kiss over her lips. When she did not pull back, Colin turned and urged her away from the cliffs. To her relief, he said: “Come. Let’s find a bit of shelter.”

  They passed behind a small hedge of trees, bent nearly
double from years of the sea’s furious storms and the constant wind. They were misshapen but balked the worst of the ocean’s moaning tempests as they sucked what life they could from the rainwater that accumulated in the shattered rocks where they grew.

  In the hollow behind them, nature had laid down a convenient bed of thick moss, not yet tinged with the melancholy colors of autumn that painted the rest of seaside flora. Colin took Frances’s hand and led her into the rough bower. He shed his cloak onto the moss and then knelt down, bringing her with him. Frances looked into his eyes, so close, so deep, and thought fleetingly of the puppets Colin had mentioned some night earlier. She felt every bit as bereft of will, a doll to be guided and bent to his resolve. Was this normal? Was it right?

  A small inner voice protested. But the voice sounded very much like one of the sisters at the convent, and she chose to ignore it. Frances did not yet know every aspect of her own mind and heart, but she had realized the thoughts that sprang from her religious training had an insidious power over natural inclination. This was power she no longer wished to surrender to some phantom teacher. She didn’t know yet if the ethics she lived by were her own, or those of her parents and teachers, but she knew she did not want to evade responsibility for her decision to be with Colin by hiding behind foreign religious training. Truth could not keep company with mindlessness. It would only be her truth when she had embraced it on her own.

  Above them, the sky was hard and clear and filled with silver light that pierced the eyes, and she closed her lids against it, preferring the softer fires that glowed within. They were simple and pure. With them to warm her, she was able to unlock the door that had been held fast against desire, and push aside the cold skeletons of parental morals and mistakes, which guarded her against knowing her own true feelings.

  A gentle hand caressed her face and then tugged at her cloak’s ties. The heavy velvet slid from her shoulders with a sigh barely heard above the sound of the distant waves that paced restlessly, like some softfooted insomniac, marching up and down the beach as he waited for the night hours to pass.

  “Be at ease, my love,” he murmured. “It is not your death you go to.”

  His love. They were just sweet words, but the shackles of responsibility, like stones sewn into the seams of her cloak, were somehow shed as Colin put the drape from her. She felt wonderfully weightless and free.

  She sighed, allowing him to lower her to the ground. If this was the moment he had chosen, then she was ready to render up the virtue that the nuns had labored so diligently to protect. A part of her mind might protest, but only incoherently, for cold, logical thought melted under the twin fires of hope and longing. Reason reeled as it lost solid form and its icy foundation melted into gleaming pools of amorous thought. The moment for cerebration was past. It was the hour when emotion held sway. This was the moment when she would find her truth.

  She heard him set his scabbard aside.

  Then Colin’s lips found hers, and this time they were familiar as well as warm. They called to something inside her that was at once wonderful but also nearly unbearable. Something that craved to be set free along with her mind.

  A clever hand loosed the neck of her chemise and it slid from her shoulder. Warm lips touched her collarbone.

  “I have always wanted to kiss a woman wearing the wind and sun and nothing more,” he murmured, turning his head and kissing the fingers clenched in his hair. “It is how the creator made us. Why should we be so shy with the one we trust?”

  “Colin,” she sighed, slipping her arms about him and urging him closer. He might want her to wear only the sun and wind, but she wanted to pull him about her, too. To wear his body, if not his love.

  It was not what her parents would have wanted, she knew. This passion had come to them before acquaintance—or even complete trust. But she and Colin could begin with this, she told herself, and in time she would come to know Colin’s heart, his past, and then comprehend the mystery that surrounded him. There would be time enough for all—

  Lucid thought was snuffed out by the desire rising within her. It was an animal, wild, seeking escape, seeking nourishment for all the years it had been denied. It rode with a companion, loneliness, and it, too, was hungry. She had never known that one could tremble so violently from anything except fear. She curved herself into his body, wrapping herself about him and praying he could soothe the beasts that seemed to gnaw at her heart and make her blood rage.

  The sun disappeared into a bank of fast-moving clouds, and Colin could feel Frances shiver violently, as the wind that pushed the clouds along ran over them in a long and icy exhalation that carried the scent of freshly wounded plants. Awoken from adoring reverie, Colin looked past the passionate tangle of his lover’s hair and immediately spotted the hart’s-tongue fern, which had been trampled under a heavy paw. Beyond it lay a patch of bronze lichen raked to ominous furrows by giant claws.

  He closed his eyes in exasperation, wishing to postpone thoughts of murder and mayhem and give himself to the sweetness of the moment, but it would be shameful, distasteful, perhaps even suicidal to consider making love in a place frequented by the giant hound. Bad enough that he had even once considered taking her without first explaining who and what he was, and what her life would be with him when she became his wife. In his desire, he had forgotten to be a gentleman—and more importantly, an honest one.

  And it was turning cold and stormy. Autumn storms could be furious and cold. He couldn’t risk her health to the inclement weather, however wondrous and unexpected the passion between them.

  “I hadn’t thought that I was issuing an invitation to danger when I said to come lie with me,” he murmured, raising himself slightly. His body didn’t like the separation and protested vehemently.

  “What is it you see?” Frances asked, her eyes open now and beginning to show fear as her ardor drained away. The sight cooled his fervor more thoroughly than the storm-carrying wind.

  Colin, exasperated with Fate and physically much disinclined to rise, nevertheless managed to give Frances a last sweet kiss and then roll to his feet. “We’ve found our hound’s trail.”

  “Mon Dieu!” Frances exclaimed, also coming to her feet, and snatching at her cloak where she kept a slim dagger. It took her a moment to secure the knife, as her gown was prone to slipping with its sleeve and neck untied. “Where is the beast?”

  “The remains of his dinner are over there,” Colin answered reluctantly. He had just noticed the cracked yellow bone half hidden under the disturbed fern and rucked moss.

  Clearly appalled, Frances nevertheless started for the protruding bone.

  “Don’t!” Colin said, picking up a stick and turning over the yellowed relic. As he had feared, it was human rather than bovine.

  “Can we be sure it is the work of the hound?” Frances asked, though she did not truly doubt that it was the hound’s leavings. There were no wolves near Noltland, no predators large enough to gnaw bones in half.

  “Aye. Look at the bite marks. The width of them is suggestive of something with a large jaw.”

  “You do not touch it,” Frances said softly, shivering in spite of her cloak being replaced. “That is because it is cursed? Or mayhap haunted?”

  Not haunted. No spirit remained with the shattered relic.

  “Cursed? Not per se.” Colin turned and helped her secure her garment. He caught a last glimpse of her delicately flushed skin, and frowned. “Unless my own curses count. Then they and the beast are certainly damned for interrupting us.”

  “Then you hesitate because it is not from an animal?” she guessed shrewdly. “That is a man’s arm, is it not?”

  “It is not from a well-dressed cow or sheep or deer,” Colin admitted, knowing he couldn’t keep the truth from her, yet still feeling reluctant to reveal his suspicions. Human bones were bad enough. To confront the gnawed bones of one’s own ancestor was gruesome in the extreme.

  “Frances…”

  She ducke
d her head and said: “Do what you must.”

  Colin nodded once and then propped back the fern with a stick. He searched swiftly for the proof he suspected might linger nearby. He turned over the pathetic remnant of clothing, which had been a cuff.

  “Whose is it?” Frances asked faintly. “Perhaps someone who drowned?”

  Colin pulled aside the branches of a leafy shrub and found a narrow tunnel. It pointed toward the keep’s south wall, where the cemetery was located. It wasn’t likely that individual graves had been disturbed, but there was the ill-constructed mass vault that sat over a burial pit. It backed up against the castle wall.

  “I believe the hound has been using its master’s secret castle access and has found Noltland’s ossuary. I fear he has been helping himself to the bones.” Colin let the bush fall back over the opening.

  “Mon Dieu!” Her lovely flush was fading as her skin turned a shade as translucent as a single layer of oyster shell. “Can we not return it to the grave?”

  Colin shook his head. “It is probably just needless worry on my part, but too many of the old graves contain the bodies of plague victims. People who have contact with old bones sometimes fall ill. I do not want you touched by anything so dangerous.”

  Shivering, Frances fell back a step, grateful to be received into Colin’s arms when she stumbled. “Then there is still another way into the castle that we have not found?”

  Colin shook his head. “Perhaps not. It may be that this tunnel leads only to the dungeons, and those are now secure. But we must find the opening to the outside and arrange for it to be sealed regardless. We can’t have the beast dining on the dead.”

  “Oui. The living must be protected from this dead menace, or we may all fall ill. Winters are a cruel time here.” Her answer was again briskly practical and almost made him smile, in spite of having his seduction interrupted.

  “And the dead seem to likewise need protection from the living’s nasty pets.”

  Frances shrugged, her color beginning to return to normal. “Oui. That, too. But we cannot concern ourselves too much with dead people, Colin. There are too many living ones whose needs are greater.”