by Juliana Gray
A great deal, it had turned out.
The light against her eyes became too much, and she opened them and turned her head to the man in bed next to her. He lay sprawled on his stomach like a little boy, his hair dark and tousled against the white sheets, his lips parted. How relaxed he looked, how happy. The sunlight gilded the curves and planes of his muscled back with watered gold.
Her lover, the Duke of Wallingford.
She had no illusions. Yes, he loved her, or thought he did; she meant more to him than any woman had before. Yes, she had his heart, at least. But eventually he would stray; eventually some other woman would snare his passion, even for a moment, even if he still loved her devotedly. He might resist at first, but one day his strength would fail him. It was inevitable. The habit of promiscuous mating was stamped in his bones and blood. She had known this from the beginning, had told herself repeatedly that her interest in Wallingford was largely carnal, tinged with affection. An infatuation, at the very most. She had deliberately protected herself from any deeper emotion.
But there was no use pretending anymore. She loved him, his magnificence and his hidden tenderness and his human failings. She loved him with every filament of her body and heart. She would have him on any terms, even marriage, if he absolutely insisted. She would wring every joy and every pleasure she could from him, until he strayed. And it would hurt when he did, because she loved him so; but if that was the price, then she must pay it.
She had always wanted a grand passion, and now she had it. She ought to be thrilled. How often did one have the chance of a grand passion, in this modern age of steam engines and electric lamps?
Wallingford’s eyes cracked open and blinked, sleepily. “Abigail.”
“Good morning.”
He lifted his head and rose up on his elbow. “Darling, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she whispered.
“You’re weeping.”
“Only happy.” She wiped at her eyes.
“Mmm.” He gathered her up and kissed her. “Not nearly so happy as I am. I feel like a new man. A redeemed man.”
“Yes, you’ve redeemed yourself thoroughly. All is forgiven.”
He laughed. “I don’t mean that, exactly, though I’m deeply relieved I didn’t send you away screaming this time.”
“I did a great deal of screaming. So did you.” She nestled herself against his chest. The sunlight warmed the back of her head; Wallingford warmed her front. All she wanted was a little coffee, and the world would be perfect.
Simply perfect, she told herself.
Wallingford stroked her arm. “Abigail, I realize you despise the very mention of the word marriage . . .”
“Oh, don’t.”
“And I won’t mention it again, for now. But I want to make my intentions clear, Abigail. I want you to be my wife. I consider us already bound in honor, after last night.” He picked up her left hand and kissed it. “Just so you know.”
“I know.”
“I won’t push you, Abigail. But that’s how it is. And I won’t give up, not ever. If I have to marry you on my deathbed, God help me, I will.”
She said nothing.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“You’re talking such rot, Wallingford. Marriage and deathbeds, really. Must you take everything so seriously?”
Wallingford sighed. “Abigail, you have my faithful love, I swear it. I promised Morini . . .”
Morini.
She jumped up as if electrocuted, in an agonized flash of protesting muscles. “You what?”
“Back at the castle. I promised her that if she told me where to find you, I’d make you happy . . .”
Her body shook. “You saw her? You saw Morini?”
“No.” He propped himself on his elbows. “She’s a ghost, isn’t she? But I felt her there. I stood there talking into the walls like a madman, because I couldn’t think of anything else. Are you all right, darling? You’re trembling.” He took her shoulder and drew her back into the pillows. “My God! You’re like a leaf in a breeze. Did you think I didn’t know?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in them. I thought . . .” She shook her head, trying to make sense of his words. “Did she speak to you? Did you hear her?”
“She sent me a note, through the maid.”
“And that’s all. You didn’t see her, you didn’t hear her.”
“No. I can’t, can I? Any more than you can see Giacomo. Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.” She forced her fists to unclench. “Of course you can’t see her. There’s no reason you should. Nothing’s changed, after all. Do you still have this note? May I see it?”
“If you like.” He kissed the top of her head, swung out of bed, and groaned. “Good God. You’ve done me in.”
“Whilst you’re up,” she said, in a small voice, “would you mind having coffee sent in?”
“Of course.”
He strode naked out of the room with his pantherlike grace. Abigail lay back in the pillows and pulled the sheet over her body. The faint trace of bergamot drifted into her senses; she wrapped her arm around Wallingford’s pillow and buried her nose in the warm, clean linen. From the other room came the sound of the telephone crank, of Wallingford’s rich voice issuing orders.
He had admitted his love for Abigail. He had told Morini of it, and the curse hadn’t lifted. He still couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear her.
What did that mean? That he didn’t really love her? Or that his love wasn’t of the faithful, eternal sort necessary to appease the wrath of Signore Monteverdi?
Unless there was no curse at all. Unless they were simply the playthings of Morini and Giacomo, of idle ghosts with nothing else to do except to meddle in the lives of gullible English houseguests.
“Here we are.” Wallingford appeared in the doorway, lit by the golden streak of morning sunshine through the crack in the curtains. He set his knee on the bed and handed her a sheet of folded paper. “The coffee will be up directly.”
“Thank you.” She sat up against the pillows. Wallingford reclined next to her and kissed the ends of her hair, kissed her neck, toyed with her breasts. Her lover, she thought in wonder. Her body warmed beneath his touch. She unfolded the paper and tried to bring the crooked words into focus.
Signore Duca
You ask where is to find the signorina. She travel to Rome with her sister, for to see the ottomobil of Signore Burke. You must find her and tell her . . .
Wallingford bent his head to suckle her breasts, and her breath whooshed from her chest. The ink blurred before her. “Stop that,” she said. “I’m trying to read.”
“Can’t stop.”
She lifted the paper high above his dark silk head.
. . . tell her of your love, and you must promise always to be her faithful love. You must then give her a message from Signorina Morini. You must . . .
“Oh! Do stop. I can’t . . . oh!”
Wallingford’s finger slipped between her legs. “Don’t mind me. Only refreshing my memory. How wet you are, love. Do you always wake up like this?”
“Wallingford . . .” She groaned. Her head fell back. “This is important.”
“Vital.” His tongue trailed across to her other breast, while his fingers kept moving in the same clever little circles that had sent her out of her mind last night. “Carry on reading, darling. Have you got to the part about my faithful love yet?”
Her hand crumpled the side of the paper. She forced her eyes to open again.
. . . You must tell her that the Signorina Monteverdi live now in the Convento di San Giusto in the city of Siena. She has the instruction for the Signorina Abigail, before the . . .
“What?” Abigail shot up.
“What the devil are you doing? Lie down.” Wallingford nudged her.
“No! We must leave at once! Oh! Where are my clothes?” She tried to scramble away from him, but his hands grasped her shoulders.
“We�
��re not going anywhere. Good God. What’s the hurry?”
“It’s important, Wallingford!” She tugged at his hands.
“I’m making love to you, for God’s sake. What could be more important than that?” His voice was imperiously Wallingford, who did not take kindly to being thwarted, even in bed.
“This!” She shook the paper at him. “We must go to Siena at once!”
“Siena? Why the devil Siena?” He snatched the paper.
“Because Signorina Monteverdi is there! She’s really there! At the convent!”
“Who the devil’s she?”
“Didn’t you even read this?”
He looked at the writing. “Of course I did. I was to find you in Rome, and . . . oh, that’s right. Monteverdi . . . Siena . . .”
Abigail gave his shoulder a push. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier that Morini had a message for me?”
“Because it rather slipped my mind, with everything else going on, races and weddings and seducing you. Besides, as the note quite clearly states, I was first to declare my undying love to one Signorina Abigail.” He brandished the paper triumphantly.
“But you said all that last night! We could be halfway to Siena by now!” she said desperately.
Wallingford dropped his hand and stared at her. “Are you mad?”
“I am quite, quite sane.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “I must go to my room and pack, and while I’m there you must call for your cab to take us directly to the station . . .”
His hand snared her arm. “Calm down, Abigail.”
“I am calm!”
“You’re completely overwrought.”
“This is important, Wallingford.”
He kissed her shoulder. “This is important. And this.” He kissed her neck.
“You don’t understand,” she said, but she allowed him to draw her backward into the sheets.
“It can wait a half hour, Abigail. The coffee’s on its way. You can’t go anywhere without breakfast, can you? You need your strength.” He was above her now, kissing her ravenously.
“My things . . .”
“I’ll have the maid pack your things. The chap downstairs will arrange the cab and the train.”
“You don’t understand.” Oh, his languorous lips, his caressing fingers. She couldn’t think, could hardly remember what was so important. How did he do that to her?
Something about the note. What had she read, at the end? Before the . . . Before the what?
“Be easy, sweetheart. We’ve all the time in the world. Let me into you, let me make love to you again.” He nudged at her, stiff and gentle all at once, making her swollen parts sting and her thoughts swim into delirium. “I promise I’ll make it worth your while.”
She opened her legs and put her arms around his neck. “Five minutes. No more.”
Thirty minutes later
Abigail.”
She moved her head.
“Abigail, sweetheart. Your coffee.”
“Hmm?” She lifted her head. A curtain of hair fell away from her eyes, revealing Wallingford, who stood by the bed in a dressing robe, holding a steaming cup and grinning ear-to-ear with an unmistakable expression of male satisfaction.
“Oh.” She scrambled up and took the cup. Something nudged at the back of her mind, some important reminder, lost in a frenzy of tangled limbs and Wallingford’s driving body and . . . and the headboard . . .
Oh, God. The headboard.
“I’ve checked with the fellow at the desk,” Wallingford was saying calmly, quite as if he hadn’t just made her scream with ecstasy up against the headboard of a substantial Italian bed, with the morning sunlight streaming through the window and her hands pinned against the wall. “There’s a train leaving in an hour. Someone’s packing up your room right now. You can wash and . . .”
Train. Siena. The note.
“Oh!” She scrabbled around the sheets. “The note! Where is it?”
“Right here. What’s the matter? You’re as jumpy as a hare.”
She snatched the note from his fingers.
. . . ottomobil . . . faithful love . . . Monteverdi . . .
There it was.
She has the instruction for the Signorina Abigail, before the first full moon after the Midsummer.
Morini.
“Good God!” Of course! What had Morini said, that day in the kitchen? Something about a midsummer moon. The end of midsummer. Abigail’s mind stumbled over itself, racing with calculations. How many days since Midsummer’s Eve? How full had the moon been that night?
“What’s the matter?”
“The moon! When’s the next full moon?”
He blinked. “The moon?”
“Moon! Glowing orb in the night sky!” She shook the paper.
“Oh, do you mean that odd bit in the note, at the end? I don’t know. Another day or two, I suppose.” He shrugged and picked up the newspaper on the coffee tray.
Abigail’s shoulders sagged with relief. “Thank heaven. Then we still have time.” She eased her aching limbs out of bed and looked down. “Good God! The sheets!”
Wallingford glanced over from the newspaper and laughed. “That should give the laundry maids something to gossip about.”
“You’re so terribly amusing. You forget I’m an unmarried woman.”
“Well, whose fault is that?” He brushed her cheek and nodded at a door across the room. “There’s a bathroom en suite, if you’d like to wash. Your clothes will be here any moment.”
“Thank you.” She felt suddenly shy, standing there naked, conversing with Wallingford about baths and laundry.
He must have seen her consternation. He leaned over and kissed her head. “Shall I join you?”
“No, thank you. I can manage.”
His thumb brushed her cheek again. “You’re safe from insult, you know. If anyone says a word against you . . .”
She tilted her chin. “It’s my choice, Wallingford. I am quite prepared for the consequences.”
“There’s my girl.”
She kissed him and went to the bathroom. She scrubbed herself thoroughly in the enormous white enamel tub, until the steam rose from her very pores to cover the mirrors, and then she skipped back out into the bedroom, wrapped in a thick Turkish towel.
“Oh, it was divine!” she exclaimed.
“Was it? You look divine, all pink and clean. My turn, then.” He kissed her, tossed the newspaper on the bed, and strode for the bathroom door, from which a thin vapor of steam still escaped. Just before his hand reached the knob, he turned his head over his shoulder. “Oh, and I was mistaken about the moon.”
She choked on her coffee. “What’s that?”
“I checked in the paper. The full moon’s tonight.”
TWENTY
The dun stone walls of the Convento di San Giusto glowed gold in the late afternoon sun, crowned with familiar crumbling red tile. It looked no different from its neighbors, all of them clustered cheek by dusty jowl in a narrow street near the cathedral.
“You’re certain this is the place?” Wallingford asked the driver.
“Che cosa?” asked the man, addressing Abigail. She translated quickly, and he nodded with vigor. “Si, si. Il convento, signorina.”
“He says this is it.” She looked at Wallingford. His face was damp and slightly flushed beneath his straw hat; the July sun beat down without mercy on the black roof of the cab they’d hired from the train station. Both windows were open, but the breeze drifted through them like the draft from an oven. “You’ll wait outside for me, won’t you?”
“The devil I will. I’m going in with you.”
She made a little snort of laughter. “Wallingford, my dear, it’s a convent. They’re not going to let you inside. Foxes and henhouses and all that.”
“We’ll see about that.” He prepared to rise. “I’m not going to allow you behind some locked cloister gate to cavort with bloody ghosts, Abigail. Not without some sort of protection.
”
“Have you ever met a nun, Wallingford?”
He paused. “Not a real one.”
“Then you’ve no idea. Your vicious despot is nothing compared to an abbess defending her flock. You might be the Emperor of Wallingford, and it would make no difference at all. They won’t let you in. Besides,” she added, rising from her seat, “there’s eternal damnation to consider.”
He grumbled something about eternal damnation and his arse, and jumped up to help her out of the cab. “I’ll be waiting right here,” he said.
“I won’t be long. I only need to speak with her.”
“I don’t see why. I don’t see how some woman of three hundred years ago has anything to do with you, or us, or my damned ancestor. It all sounds like an elaborate hoax.” He folded his arms and stared down at her, willing her to challenge him.
Should she have told him the story, after all? But what choice did she have? On the train to Siena, before she had fallen into a dramatic and exhausted sleep on Wallingford’s shoulder, he had demanded to know what errand could possibly be important enough to roust them both out of a perfectly satisfactory bed of sin. There was no resisting him. She had sketched out the history of the castle and the curse of the long-ago Monteverdi family. At the mention of the English lord, he had turned pale. Next you’re going to tell me his name was Copperbridge, he’d blurted out, and Abigail had searched her memory and said Copperbridge! That’s it exactly!
He had told her, with reluctance, about his grandfather owning the castle, and the revelation had flashed in her brain like an illuminating light.
Is destiny, Morini had said.
The cathedral bell tolled the quarter hour with a slow and dignified clang. Abigail looked up at Wallingford’s grim face. “Think about Giacomo and Morini. Think about your grandfather owning the castle.”
“Some natural explanation, I’m sure. Some trick of Olympia’s, the old scoundrel, God knows why. To marry me off somehow.”
She put her hand on his arm. “Don’t try to talk me out of this. Just let me see if she’s there, if it’s really her. What’s the harm?”
“All sorts of possibilities come to mind,” he said darkly.