My True Love

by Karen Ranney

  People rarely sat still long enough for her to sketch them. Dunniwerth was a busy place, with most of its inhabitants given duties to perform. Therefore, a glimpse might be all she had of a face or a smile. She learned to store an expression away in her memory, to be unearthed when there was time. The emotion a smile carried or a laughing pair of eyes was more important to her than color.

  Perhaps it was because her work was done in monochrome. Shades of gray and white and black. One day she hoped to work in colors, to take the knowledge of what she’d learned from shadow and transform it into a painting that might last for a hundred years. Instead of a sketch that lasted only a few.

  She began to work on her drawing. Such occu pation eased her, hid all of her worries and fears. The past week had been an unbearable one. Constrained by propriety, by the cordon of servants that stood between them, and perhaps his own wishes, she’d been unable to help nurse Stephen. But the wish was there, and the wanting, too.

  She’d had to be content with hearing of his recovery from Betty’s daily reports.

  Would she see him soon? Another concern that was supplanted by her work. Too many questions, not enough answers. But then, Stephen had always been a mystery. At least now, she knew he was real.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Richard scowled at him from the doorway.

  Stephen handed the two lists to William.

  “My duty,” he said shortly. “Give the list of foodstuffs to Betty,” he told William, his young aide. “Tell her I understand that we are short on supplies. What she needs can be obtained from the village.”

  He had already sent out scouts to find General Penroth’s location. The general’s proximity concerned him. He disliked the idea of the Parliamentarians being this close to his home. Should Penroth wish to fight him, he was woefully unprepared. Sixty men against six thousand were not odds he would choose.

  William nodded. He was the son of the mayor of Langlinais, had been with Stephen since Edge-hill. He had been, like so many of the regiment, untried in war. But unlike most, William was suited for it. It was rumored that Oliver Cromwell pos sessed the same type of instinctive military nature.

  “You’ve barely recovered.”

  “But I have,” Stephen said, standing. His left arm was bent and bound to his chest, a position it would retain until his wound healed.

  “You would coddle me, Richard.”

  His suite of rooms occupied the whole of the east wing. A commodious series of chambers. Enough space to raise a family if the rest of the house disintegrated around him.

  He’d discovered in the last days, however, that it was not altogether a comfortable place. The bed was soft, the furnishings as elaborate as any in the house. The windows let in a soft light. The wall-coverings were in a soft hue, unlike the garish green parlor. There were enough touches to remind him that it was his chamber and therefore home. But it was too quiet and left too much time for thoughts he’d rather not have had.

  In his study, he could at least be of some use. Time was fleeting, and he’d lost too much of it in illness.

  “I want you well,” Richard argued.

  Stephen smiled. “I am as well as I can be. The king will expect me.”

  “Must you return? The war will get on well enough without you.”

  “I’m not sure the king will. His commanders are quarrelling, and his advisors are idiots.”

  “You sound more like a Parliamentarian than a Royalist,” Richard said. His look seemed to measure the effect of his words.

  “You are not the first to have made that pronouncement.”

  “Then why fight on the side of the king?”

  “I am the Earl of Langlinais,” he said simply. “My home is six hundred years old. A kingdom at least as venerable as the king’s, if not divinely acquired. I can understand his wish to keep his intact.”

  “So it is empathy that makes you fight?” Richard’s look was one of skepticism.

  “Perhaps,” Stephen said.

  “I’ve not your compassion,” Richard said. “But I can admire your loyalty, even though I think it misplaced.”

  “A great many Englishmen feel as you do.”

  “Why do I think you are one of them?”

  Stephen said nothing. There was, after all, nothing he could say.

  Richard studied him intently. “Have you grown that cautious in the past years?”

  “It is better to remain silent at court, Richard. Words are often twisted, while silence can never be misinterpreted.”

  “Then I do not envy the role you’ve chosen,” Richard said. An expression of emotion that surprised Stephen. “If you cannot put faith in your companions,” Richard said, “perhaps it is time to trust your enemies.”

  He left the room before Stephen could answer. Another dilemma. What could he have said? There was too much truth to Richard’s words.

  Stephen walked to the window, stood staring out at the panorama.

  This morning an encroaching storm cast dismal colors over the landscape. The lowering clouds, were dark, almost black, swept across the sky by winds that bowed the branches of tall trees and fluttered through the thick grass. A monochromatic array of black and gray tinted the hills.

  He loved his home. Loved it almost as much as he hated war. Yet its very existence would be threatened if he did not leave to fight for the king. A paradox he accepted even as he wished it were different.

  The house echoed with life around him. Six men of his regiment were at Harrington Court. They were soldiers who had not come from Lange on Terne or the neighboring villages, or they had no place to stay with relatives.

  It was an odd billet, his ancestral home. The floorboards creaked overhead, boots tapped against wooden floors in a strange tattoo. Water gurgled in the pipes from the cistern on the roof.

  He’d learned from Betty that the supply of ale had been replenished twice. Plus two of the maids fancied themselves in love. He only hoped that the sentiments were returned and his men had not taken advantage of the young women employed at Harrington Court.

  A motion caught his eye. He glanced below. Anne Sinclair sat in the garden, her head bent over her task, her cape fluttering in the breeze. What did she labor on so diligently? Why was she here? Where had she been going when the soldiers had waylaid her?

  Who are you?

  Questions he should have asked her, instead of simply pondering the nature of them alone.

  Chapter 6

  She was capable of sitting for hours focused upon a drawing and did so on this occasion. She found herself distracted, however, by the increasingly brisk wind. Finally, she surrendered. The sketch she was working on did not interest her as much as a playful breeze. It tossed her hair about and furled the edges of the paper. As if it dared her to follow where it led.

  Standing, she placed the board carefully atop her sketches and pulled her cape around her shoulders. She walked through the garden gate and let the wind take her where it would.

  The breeze caught her cape and whirled it around her ankles. A last breath of winter or a puff of spring come to tantalize and tease. Above, the sky boiled with gray clouds, lending a somberness to the scene.

  Anne frowned as she caught a glimpse of something in the distance. A spire, perhaps, or an outcropping of rock. But it seemed to be something more. A line of thick trees flirted with the view. The air, hazed by the brisk wind, added to the mystery.

  It appeared almost like a tower. Not a square tower, as Dunniwerth boasted, but a round and elegant structure topped with crenellated teeth of stone. There was something familiar about it, something haunting and mystical that lured her to walk across the expanse of green and see it more closely. A few minutes later she was out of breath and transfixed.

  It was her castle.

  A pair of birds sat close together on a branch nearby, their heads still and almost touching. Their tail feathers were in perfect alignment, pointing to the ground, identical white spots upon their tips like tiny a
rrow points. They looked to be discussing the climate or the other birds or something that only birds would know, a discourse held in a secret language undecipherable by mere mortals. The call of a crow, raucous and demanding, dislodged them from their comfortable perch, led them into being birds again and not companions.

  A squirrel chattered at her, clung upside down onto the broad trunk of a venerable tree. His face lifted, and he frowned at her, as if questioning her presence, so silent and still in this place of enchantment.

  For that was what it was. A time out of time, held frozen for that moment or however many moments she stood there.

  The last time she’d seen it had been in her mind. Nestled beside a boiling river, haughty and aloof in its befogged majesty. The bailey had been green with growth. The air had been perfumed with scents of flowers, and from the embrasures had come the petulant warble of newly hatched baby birds.

  She could almost feel the grass of the bailey beneath her feet, knew where it grew bare in places like a bald man’s pate. She could point out how high the river swept to the side of the wall. Below the buttery was a stairway that led to the riverbank, and it was here supplies were brought into the castle. There was a chamber that contained an odd oblong basin, and the oddest room of all, empty except for a tall wooden structure that fanned out like a broody hen and was filled with quills and glass bottles and stacks of parchment.

  Time had changed the place she’d seen in her vision. Time and the hand of nature, if not man’s. The castle rose up before her, no longer haughty. A stone maiden, perhaps, her dignity still intact, but her face wrinkled and worn. Even the sky, dismal and gray, seemed to mourn the change. One of the three towers was no more than rubble, another leaned perilously to the side. Only a third still stood proud and resolute. Memories furnished her eyes with details missing in actuality. The gate was no longer there, the broad front door had been taken down.

  A river stretched between her and the castle. The only way across was a brick bridge that spanned the expanse. Time had not treated it well. It looked to be almost fragile, imperiously so. Anne walked slowly over the bridge, gauging her safety by the groan and creak of hidden timbers. A stone crumbled and fell to the ground, and for a moment, her imagination sent her following it, turning head over feet, toward the frothy water. She looked over the side, surprised to find that the river was placid beneath her.

  At the other side of the bridge, the ground rose upward slightly to the middle bailey. There the grass was thick and green and as tall as her knees.

  Once it had been a place where people congregated. Laughter and jests, gossip and news, they had all been exchanged upon this broad rise of earth. There to the right was the upper bailey, where the entrance to the great hall lay. She walked a few dozen feet beyond, stopped, and looked around her. A gate should be here. One constructed of iron and stone and fitted with a small guardhouse.

  A feeling of almost unbearable sadness rose within her. She turned slowly, measuring the destruction around her. Hearing in her mind the echoes of voices and long-ago laughter.

  She was not there when Stephen entered the knot garden. The wind gusted around the topiaries in mad delight, flapped the edges of papers on the table as if summoning his attention. He removed the board she’d placed there and studied her drawings.

  An artist, then. He’d not known she had such talent. But then, he knew few things about her. Only that she’d spoken his name in his fever and lured him close, eased him when he was in pain.

  The first drawing was a caricature of a young maid, but where cruelty might have accentuated her prominent ears and made even more pronounced the shape of her large teeth, she’d been rendered lovely. At her feet, obviously groveling, was William, his aide. The second sketch was of Richard. He was standing at a bedside, a cup in his hand and a medicine chest tucked beneath his arm. There was a look of fondness on Richard’s face and an exasperated look on his patient’s. Stephen suspected the patient was Anne’s companion and that the drawing was less caricature than truth.

  It was something they shared in a way. His drawings were limited to structures, buildings that fascinated him and stirred his imagination. His fingers dealt in sharp angles and lines that followed a mathematical precision. He saw the world as it had been and wished to bring it back to life. She saw the world as it was and parodied it. He could delineate brick and stone and indicate where mortar was chipping, but he did not have the power to summon forth a smile.

  He came to the third drawing. His fingers held it steady against a growing wind. It was Langlinais. Not as it was, but as it might have been. The river acted as a mirror for the towers, the arches of bridge, and the crenellated roofs. A growth of willows, their branches heavy and trailing, marked the path close to the river, the sturdy wooden dock, and the retaining wall. She was not only capable of summoning forth amusement, but of creating pictures of great beauty.

  She’d evidently studied the ruins well, just as she had some grasp of history. Another mystery to layer upon the first. Identity and intent.

  He replaced the drawings where he’d found them, then glanced behind him. He looked up at the window on the second floor. His study sum moned him; his work was not yet done. There were other duties he must perform, provisions he must order, letters to send. Instead, he stepped away from the hedges that lined the garden.

  The hill upon which Harrington Court was perched was higher than the rest of the land around it. From here he could see the ruins of Langlinais. And walking in front of the east tower the figure of a woman.

  Unwisely, perhaps, he followed her.

  A doorway led to darkened steps, the interior of the tower made even more dim by the overcast sky. Anne braced her hand against the curved wall as she began her ascent. It seemed as if her feet knew the way, as if she’d seen these sloping steps before, could count their number in her mind. One hundred twenty-eight.

  A handhold was there, finally, and she placed her fingers within its worn groove and wondered how many hands besides hers had sought its safety. It was easy to pull herself up through the opening. Less so to stand upon the windswept tip of the tower and feel part of the oncoming storm.

  She had seen this place before. Had watched that view through Stephen’s eyes.

  She saw now the scene of so many of her visions. Not Harrington Court but this castle. Here he had stood as a boy, as a youth, as a man, looking out over his domain, feeling a pride of place and destiny and heritage. He had planned here, had sat against the curved wall with his legs drawn up and sketched the castle as it should be. She’d wanted to learn to draw the day she’d seen him doing so. And found a love in it. Did he feel the same?

  His life had not been as serene as she would have wished for him. Another vision had placed him within reach of his father’s fists. She had cried aloud that day and wished him far from there and to safety.

  She knelt on the floor, her hands tracing the line of bricks. He’d hidden his sketches here so that they would not be destroyed. A hidey-hole to protect what was most precious to him. She’d created one for herself, too, although she’d no need. But she’d searched through the clearing on the island for the perfect tree and hidden her best drawings in the knot created by a fallen branch. In prior years it might have been used as a nest, but from that moment on, she’d placed her treasures there, feeling a kinship with the boy she’d seen all her life.

  Her fingers trembled as she found the brick, coaxed it out bit by bit. Behind it was a rectangular space where, as a boy, Stephen had kept his drawings. She reached inside and found it empty. She hadn’t expect it to be otherwise, but she smiled at her optimism.

  The wind was rising, soughing around the curve of the tower, keening like a piper’s lament. She glanced up. The sky was black and angry, the storm no longer approaching but directly above her. A spear of lightning darted from one cloud to another, followed by a rumble of thunder that seemed to praise the show of light.

  Her hand trembled around the brick even
as her stomach clenched. A child’s fear. One the woman had not quite outgrown.

  It is God’s way of talking, Anne.

  A giant lives in the clouds, Anne, and his breath is the wind.

  Don’t be afraid, my child. It is but the rain come to nourish the flowers.

  Somehow those kind words had not eased her terror. Not then. Not now.

  She should not have been here, but she was.

  He stood disbelieving, half in and half out of the opening to the roof.

  Finally, he pulled himself up, stood defiant against the growing storm.

  She looked up at him. Her skin was tinted by a rosy blush, her brown hair blown by the wind. Her eyes were made almost black by the encroaching darkness.

  She knelt before the hiding place he’d made for himself as a boy. He’d laboriously removed a brick from the inner wall and hollowed out the space behind it. A place to store his most precious things, his treasures. No one knew of it. How had she known?

  Her lips appeared tremulous, as if they captured a sound and hid it trapped inside. His name again? Or had that been merely a fevered dream? This might be one. But he felt the wind blowing against his face, could feel the sudden chill of it. From somewhere close he heard thunder.

  She stretched out her trembling hand, the second time she’d done so. Just as before, he held out his own, touched her fingertips.

  The moment was important, portentous. He did not speak, could barely breathe in the spell of it. Once again, he felt as if he should know her, should say something to her, but the words escaped him. The moments stretched between them so strong and real that he might have reached out with his hands and touched them. Wrung them into tiny seconds. But instead, his fingers barely touched hers.

  Impatient to end his confusion, he reached out and gripped her wrist so tight that he could feel the blood pound there, could measure the warming of her hands.