Uncertain Magic

by Laura Kinsale

  She stood frowning at the heavy wood, sure that he had jumped to old conclusions. It made her angry, to realize even a moment alone with another man was enough to spark his jealousy, when she had reason enough to believe he had spent four entire days ravishing a besotted débutante. She said sharply, “I’d like a word with you, Lord Geoffrey.”

  Geoffrey had been deep in trying to puzzle out Faelan’s peculiar plans, but the tone of her voice made him look up quickly.

  Roddy grimaced at his cheerful response. It was outside of enough, she thought, to have a murdering rebel bent on high treason turn to one and ask, “What’s to do, poppet?”

  “I’ve found out that Faelan keeps other women,” she said boldly, hoping to jolt clear truth into his head by her brazenness.

  It didn’t work. Instead of dwelling on Faelan’s sins, Geoffrey immediately took Roddy herself to task. “Good God, madam,” he said stiffly. “That’s no fit topic to bring up with me.”

  Roddy tried to catch his eye, but he would not look at her. He turned away to the writing desk. Little hussy, he fumed. Knew she’d never make a proper wife. What the devil can he want with musicians? Already lists of possible recruits were forming in his mind, and he reached for a pen and inkwell as he sat down.

  “Geoffrey,” she said urgently. “People say that Faelan—”

  “Gossip,” Geoffrey said absently. As far as she could tell, he believed that himself. He began writing names. “Don’t listen to tattlemongers, Roddy. That isn’t like you.”

  She made a small huff of frustration. “Geoffrey,” she snapped, “Faelan told me why you wrote Papa that letter of recommendation about him.”

  Geoffrey sat up. A wave of guilt swept him, and then a memory of Faelan’s arm around Roddy’s waist. He shrugged, setting his moral unease aside. “It seems to have turned out well enough.” He looked up, not quite straight into her eyes. “There are higher causes that we have to obey sometimes, Roddy. Things that override individual claims on our duty.”

  She had an idea what her husband would have said to that. With only slightly more politeness, she murmured, “Spare me the lecture, please,” in her best imitation of Faelan’s razor-sharp smoothness. Geoffrey’s surprise gave her a moment’s heady power, and she plunged on. “I want to know…Geoffrey, I need to know, is Faelan…do you think that he’s perfectly—” She broke off, struggling to frame the question, afraid to put it into words. “—in control?” she finished, unable to keep the scared quiver from her voice.

  Geoffrey stood up so suddenly that the chair tottered on two legs and then fell back into position with a loud thump. “What are you saying?” he asked, in a voice of deadly challenge.

  The instant defensiveness was both reassuring and frightening. “Faelan told me he doesn’t remember things,” she blurted. “His father, and—”

  “Of course he doesn’t,” Geoffrey snarled. “Damn you, have you been pestering him about his father? Leave off, Roddy—I warn you. That’s over; years gone, by God. Do you think I’d have written your parents that letter if I’d thought there was the slightest danger to you? He promised me—he vowed he’d never hurt you. It was an accident, Roddy. An accident that he’s better off forgetting. Lord, he’s lived with it all his life—can’t you let well enough alone?”

  Behind the words was a turmoil of emotion, of anger and loyalty, and beneath it all, a twinge of fear that drove the aggression. Geoffrey believed what he was saying, because he was afraid not to believe it.

  She opened her mouth to speak again, but Geoffrey grabbed up the paper he’d been using, without even sanding the ink. “I’d best be dressing for dinner. As would you, my lady.” He gave her a chilly nod as he passed her for the door. “Faelan and I will be busy enough without your meddling. I’d advise you to go shopping with Mary tomorrow, and refrain from bothering your husband with foolish questions.”

  Roddy pulled the bedclothes up under her chin, wondering if she would spend the night alone in this lumpy bed. The sheets were clean enough, even if their rough surface tended to rub raw on the tender skin of her cheek and ear.

  Thinking of those sensitive spots made her think of Faelan, of his lips, his breath soft and seductive on her skin, and the cold distance he had maintained through the long and uncomfortable dinner.

  Roddy wished she had done as Mary, and pleaded a headache. It was apparently a good enough excuse to avoid sitting down with the Devil Earl. During the meal, Faelan had refused to discuss his plans for the guns, and those plans were all Geoffrey thought about, so conversation was slow and desultory. Roddy had left them immediately after dessert—hours ago.

  She turned over and stared at the candle, burned down nearly to its holder. A slow dribble of wax made a puddle on the table, a liquid pool that gleamed like gathered tears. She felt her own eyes go hazy, and her throat filled. In spite of all the rest, in spite of Ellen Webster and Liza Northfield and the horrible fear that Faelan was not…right; in spite of it all, the worst was to lie in this bed alone and want him.

  The candle went to a bright prism of color, gold swimming with blue and red and green. She sniffed, hearing the forlorn plop of a tear on the stiff sheets. Damn him, damn him. Everything that should have destroyed her faith only seemed to drag her deeper into love than before.

  Below, the sounds of the taproom had subsided long since. She heard footsteps down the long corridor, coming closer—pausing at the door to the anteroom of their suite. So…he would stay there, on the narrow bed in the outer room provided for husbands who preferred—for whatever reason—not to sleep with their wives.

  But after a moment she heard him move again, coming closer down the hall. The click of the door handle was loud in the silence.

  Roddy drew in her breath as the door swung open and the faint light of his shielded candle made dim new shadows in the room. When she looked, he was standing in the doorway with darkness behind him and a decanter and glass in one hand. She waited, but he came no farther. She sat up at last, and whispered, “Faelan?”

  “I thought you would be asleep,” he said softly.

  “I waited for you.” Her voice sounded small in the wide, misty ring of candlelight.

  “Did you?” He lingered in the door. “Did you indeed.” There was an odd ambivalence in his stance, as if he could not decide whether to enter or withdraw. He seemed to be inordinately interested in the carving at the foot of the bed; he spent a full minute staring at it without speaking.

  Finally Roddy said, “Will you come to bed, my lord?”

  His light eyes flicked up toward her. She felt the gaze like a physical touch, gathering in her tousled hair, caressing her face and shoulders and breasts. She moistened her lips, letting them part in an invitation she was barely aware of.

  His mouth curved in a bitter smile. “How eager you look,” he said. “Is Lord Geoffrey occupied elsewhere?”

  Her eyes went wide, with shock at first, and then with dawning anger. He set down the candle, turned, and shot the bolt home on the door. She watched him as he strolled into the room, the candlelight painting contours of dark and light on his face.

  “I fear your rebel prince has found a willing chambermaid,” Faelan said. He sat down on the bed, and Roddy caught the sweet whiff of alcohol on his breath. “A mite more buxom than you, my dear. I’m afraid you aren’t quite in Geoffrey’s usual style.”

  “I believe you’re drunk,” Roddy said.

  He grinned, his eyes glowing demon-blue. “Do you think so?” The long black lashes swept downward, a slow perusal of her breasts that made the blood rush to the surface of her skin. “But drunk is so much better than insane, don’t you agree?”

  He shifted, setting the glass down on the table with careless force and pouring a generous splash of amber liquid. He held the glass up in a mock toast. “To honesty, my love. I shall stay here and keep you an honest woman, and you shall make sure I remain an honest man. I should be distressed to wake in the morning and find that I’d murdered my wife and
my only friend.”

  “Nonsense,” Roddy said sharply. “Is this because I stayed a moment to talk to Geoffrey?” She glared at him with her chin set. “Whatever do you think, that we arranged some tryst to cuckold you and Mary under your very noses? Give us credit for some discretion, my lord, if you give us none for simple honor.”

  His lips curved without humor; he downed the shot of whiskey in one swallow. “Ah, but I know to a fine degree where Lord Geoffrey’s honor begins and ends. If he wanted you, he’d have you if you were willing.”

  “Well,” she said stoutly, “I’m certainly not.” Which was somehow better than admitting that Geoffrey harbored no desire for her whatsoever. Faelan’s obsessive jealousy was insulting, but it was just a little gratifying, too. The way his blue glance traveled over her and left and returned again with renewed intensity made her throat tighten in anticipation.

  “You loved him, did you not?” Faelan poured himself another whiskey. “You married me for children, as I recall.”

  Roddy thought of Geoffrey and his plans to murder the parson. “Perhaps I loved him once. I don’t think I knew him very well.”

  As the words left her lips she realized how true they really were. She’d had access to Geoffrey’s mind, but she’d never known him. Even with her talent, she’d never seen past the surface of fine ideals and reason to the man beneath. On his visits to Yorkshire, there had been no chance to see how his philosophy translated into action. In all the years she’d known him, she’d never even learned of Faelan. Yet she was finding now that her husband had been a central figure in Geoffrey’s life for far longer than she could claim to have been so. “Not well at all,” she added pensively.

  Faelan’s vivid eyes met hers. “This talk of murdering the rector…that shocked you, did it not?”

  Roddy blinked, taken by surprise at the insight. She nodded.

  “I thought so.” He ran his hand idly along the shape of her leg beneath the covers. “He’s Protestant, Roddy. Do you know what that means?”

  She frowned, trying to guess what he was hinting, and finally looked at him in blank question.

  “It means,” Faelan said, “that the rector is not only a kind and honest old man—which he is—but that he sends his men out by night to steal the tithe corn from the Catholic leaseholds.”

  Roddy tilted her head. “Tithe corn. I would hardly call that stealing,” she said.

  His hand moved upward, skimming her cheek. “You may say so to the babes in arms who go hungry for it. Or the tenants who can’t meet their rent and face eviction.”

  “But a tithe, my lord. Only one-tenth—”

  “No. One pound sterling an acre on potatoes and wheat. Five shillings on hay. And even for those who can spare it, there’s enough bitterness in their hearts to murder any number of kindly parsons. You don’t know, Roddy; you can’t imagine…‘No Catholic may sit in Parliament,’” he recited, his voice going to a soft, legalistic singsong. “‘No Catholic may be a solicitor, gamekeeper, or constable. No Catholic may possess a horse of greater value than five pounds. Any Protestant offering that sum can take possession of the hunter or carriage horse of his Roman Catholic neighbor. No Catholic may attend a university, keep a school, or send his children to be educated abroad. No Catholic may bequeath his estate as a whole, but must divide it among all his sons, unless one of those sons become Protestant, where he will inherit the whole estate.’” His recitation trailed off, and his long eyelashes lowered, as if he were seeing something far away. “I was almost a man before those laws were amended. The Relief Acts are two decades old, but no one forgets. No one forgets wrongs in Ireland.”

  “But Geoffrey isn’t Catholic,” she said.

  He lifted one eyebrow. “How very observant you are, my clever little wife. There’s the rub. What shall we make of this glorious rebellion of Geoffrey’s—a fight for liberty or a religious war? His peasants with their pikes and pitchforks don’t know the difference, I assure you.” As he spoke the candle flickered, light glancing off his elegant cheekbones and the muscled line of his throat where his cravat had been loosened. Roddy watched him, the way his look grew distant and intent, and his dark brows drew together as they had when he was bent on helping Geoffrey out of his muddle. “And just how this sacred freedom will fill their bellies is a thought that seems to trouble no one.”

  “I think,” she said softly, “that it troubles you, my lord.”

  He looked back at her and shook his head, the frown in his eyes turning to a cynical smile. “Of course. Me and my potatoes.” He finished the last of his whiskey and set the glass aside. “But cow dung and crop rotation are so dull, you see. There’s not a stirring speech to be had among them.”

  Her fingers crept across the blankets and settled over his. “They aren’t dull to me,” she said. “I’ll listen to your speeches.”

  “An Argument on Behalf of Turnips in the Rights of Man,” he proclaimed lightly. “Subsistence Before Independence.”

  She drew a light circle on the back of his hand. “I’m hanging upon every word.”

  “Further eloquence seems to have deserted me.” He lifted her fingers and bent his lips to the base of her palm. “Perhaps you’d like a demonstration of some other talent.”

  His caress was cool and practiced. She felt his reserve still, the dark part of him she could not know. But he dragged her down, as he always did; he knew what he could do to her. He took her hands and spread them wide against the bed, bent to her, and shared the hot taste of whiskey as his tongue probed between her trembling lips.

  Her body arched beneath him, seeking through the bedclothes, wanting his weight, his hands on her breasts. She would have reached for him, but he pinned her wrists and lowered his head, nuzzling aside the plunging neckline of her gown, exploring until his mouth found the taut, waiting peak of her bared nipple and pleasure shot through her groin. Her throat worked soundlessly; her body twisted and begged. He took her to a peak of agony, of exquisite, flaming need, and left her there on the brink of explosion.

  As she moved beneath him, her breath short and straining for more, his lips traveled upward to the curve of her ear.

  “There’s still this,” he whispered, above her tiny, panting moans. His fingers tightened in cruel possession on her wrists. “You still belong to me, cailin sidhe.”

  Chapter 13

  “Hobbies,” Faelan called them, but Roddy would have given the surefooted local ponies a prouder, sweeter name to match their setting. The road that skirted the wild peninsula of Iveragh between the mountains and the sea was new, but Faelan had chosen older ways, overgrown paths that wound in and out of valleys and clung to the sides of cliffs where the waves rolling in from the Atlantic echoed an eternity below. They traveled in a blowing mist, she and Faelan and one extra pack pony, a fog that made the rocks to their left no more than a mass of slightly darker gray and the pitch to their right a single step into nothing. But the ponies never faltered; they placed one hoof in front of the other, heading home, passing wild grass and furze dripping with gleaming mist in the hopes of the oats they were sure would be waiting.

  It seemed to Roddy that the fog thickened with each mile, as if they were heading into the far unknown reaches of the earth, leaving life and land and frail humanity behind. She found herself oddly pleased with the notion. Somehow this atmosphere was magic, a shining cloud out of which the most fantastic of dreams might coalesce. There, if she looked hard enough, she might see the golden towers of a castle in the distance, or feel the mysterious flutter of an angel’s wings. She felt, if she would only listen, that someone sang to her through the shifting prisms of sunbeams in the vapor.

  Fog had only been fog in Yorkshire. It had never felt like this.

  She had caught Faelan’s fever, it seemed. She loved Iveragh already. Ever since they had left Dublin, this place had pulled at her, an eagerness that was physical, that had made her as impatient as her husband with the gliding trip down the Grand Canal from Dublin. The ne
w inns along the water had been lovely and well kept, and the green and gold countryside moved past in stately beauty beneath the late-autumn sun, but it was all a transitory picture.

  Something stronger called them, even though the weather, the quality of the inns, and their mode of transportation had worsened with each change. In Tullamore the canal ended, and the hired chaise could not seem to go fast enough on the smooth, uncrowded roads. Through Roscrea, to Limerick and Castleisland, where they had abandoned Martha and chaise and baggage and mounted good Thoroughbred hunters. Even those were temporary, though, for when they had arrived at the little town of Glenbeigh in a dismal rain, Faelan had traded one hunter for three hobbies, and sold the other horse on the spot. After one night in a tiny inn where the bed smelled of mice and the chimney smoked too badly for a fire, Roddy had been happy to set out on the road to Iveragh.

  She shifted in her stiff sidesaddle, careful not to throw the balance of the shaggy pony beneath her. Ahead, the mists around Faelan’s dark figure were glowing red-gold with the lancing fingers of sunset. They began a rapid, sudden descent, and Roddy swayed with the sliding steps of her pony. She began to smell the sea, very close. A dog took up deep-throated singing somewhere a long way ahead.

  The sunset had faded to murky evening by the time Roddy could make out the string of whitewashed houses with slate roofs through the gloom. More dogs joined the first, and the ponies broke from their wild path onto the lonely main road to a sonorous bugling that bounced off the cottages and the invisible hills.

  Faelan halted before the second house. No one came out to greet them. The stone cottage was empty, its windows gaping curtainless and the roof sagging, but Roddy was aware of people all around in the others, of mild suspicion and greater curiosity. Through her gift she could interpret emotion and image clearly, but the native language added a confusing element, as if she were holding a conversation in which she could understand only every second or third word. She let the ribbons of thought roll past her without concentrating, too stiff and weary to deal with her talent, or even wonder very hard what Faelan planned to do next.