The Maiden Bride

by Linda Needham

  She put her hand on his, absorbed his scowl and his heat. "Go find yourself some sleep, Nicholas. We'll be eleven when you wake."

  * * *

  Bloody hell. Now he was running a nursery.

  The whole birthing affair set the kitchen out of bounds to Nicholas and the other men for the entire day and well into the night, an impenetrable enclave of women and their mysteries.

  When night came again, Nicholas took up residence at the dais table in the middle of the great hall, all the better to keep Mullock's calculating greed in his sights. The boy, Toddy, had eaten as if he hadn't in weeks, then had fallen asleep on a hearth pallet hours ago.

  "Soon, Nicholas," Eleanor said a dozen times. He saw her only in hurried streaks of shimmering white skirts as she raced through the great hall on her befuddling missions.

  And each time she passed him, tossing him a smile or a sigh, he regretted every moment of his life before her. Every moment but Liam.

  He could easily imagine his wife's belly growing large with his sons and his daughters. And all her generous, consuming happiness smiling down on him every morning.

  Sometime in the small hours after midnight, after prowling the castle for doors left open and gaping gates, and checking that Dickon was at his post, Nicholas returned to the great hall to wait out the babe.

  Eleanor was sitting at the long table, one hand propping her chin, fast asleep. It was no doubt meant to be a brief nap, but she was breathing soundly and sagging to the left.

  "To bed with you, madam." When she only wiggled her nose, he lifted her into his arms, and she snuggled under his chin as he carried her up the stairs and into the solar.

  Nicholas had hoped his heart would behave more wisely tonight, but it was battering him again—for more reasons than he cared to count. Because she spoke in unknowing allusions, and he listened too carefully for every one of them.

  Because this had once been his office and his bedchamber, and had lacked only a wife to make it whole then. This wife, this beguiling one who snuggled against him, her dazzling hair piled on top of her head—a loosely knotted, wildly red crown, adorned just above her left ear with a sprig of wilted violets.

  The familiar breeze off the ocean tumbled from the high windows, scented with her cinnamon and saffron, and Hannah's rye bread.

  Hardly the same room he'd skulked around in the afternoon before, looking for his journals. She'd scrubbed it clean of the darkness and the aching in his stomach. Something warm was pouring into his heart, yearnings for the impossible.

  She stirred. "Cora had a healthy little girl, Nicholas."

  "Good." That made eleven souls for him to watch over.

  "I'd like one, too."

  "One what?"

  "A babe, someday. When I find a husband."

  He slipped her onto her pallet, a sorry thing that needed a frame, and covered her with the counterpane, knowing there were warmer blankets somewhere. He hadn't burned them all.

  "Good night, my lady." My wife.

  He might not be able to kiss her or to sleep beside her, but he damned well wasn't going to risk anyone doing her mischief.

  They'd have to go through him to get at her.

  * * *

  Plink.

  There was that sound again; the ringing of hammer against stone. Eleanor bounded from the table to the office window, and tried to catch the sound as it came again from the evening darkness.

  Plink.

  She'd noticed its melody twice while she was settling Pippa into bed, and many other times in the last few days. Nicholas would know the reason, but he was never around when it came—and she never thought of it except when she heard it.

  Plink.

  The sound took her back to the masons who came every morning to work on the abbey church. A sound so familiar at the time that it had become a comfortable breeze, like the regular bells of the convent's daily offices as she went about her garden chores.

  Only this wasn't a bell, it was a mason's hammer. Nicholas's. And it wasn't coming from anywhere inside the castle or the bailey or the bakehouse. It drew her to lean over the window casement into the darkness, where it seemed to be rising up from the cliffs below.

  Or from the foaming sea that tossed and misted the pale blue light of the full moon against the rocks. An old piece of iron chain, banging with the ebb and flow of the tides?

  Plink.

  "Hello!" She shouted her loudest, but the lonely word came back to her on the breeze.

  She was sure that Nicholas was at the center of it—sure she would find him out there on the cliffs somewhere, building a ship or fixing the wharf, the bright moon silvering his broad, bare shoulders just as the sun turned them to gold.

  But working at night—and so near the cliffs? What was the man thinking? She raced down the tower steps, out onto the curtain wall, and into the enduring wind, to look for him over the side.

  "Nicholas?" If the plinking was his, he'd become invisible down there where she'd yet to explore, because there was no safe path around the base of the castle. But there was nothing below the ramparts but those hungry-looking rocks and the sea.

  But the plinking was closer now, and freed of its echo.

  She hurried up the external stairs that led onto the flat roof of the next tower, where the night had grown to enormous proportions and the wispy clouds skiffed past her nose.

  Plink.

  She scrabbled out across the thick embrasure, lying on her stomach and clutching the rough edge of the stone with her fingers, and peered over the side.

  Good heavens, there was a chapel. A tiny one—or a very large one; the soaring height of the tower and cliffs and the vast proportions of the boiling sea muddled her judgment.

  But it was a chapel. Hiding there below the castle footing, where the great cliff divided into two; one part sliding away toward the restless waves into a rocky shelf of starkly limned shadows; the other lifting skyward, offering up the chapel on a dark promontory, standing fast against the constant wind, its crippled tower in full view of the sea yet masked entirely from the castle.

  A tattered thing, roofless and ringed by moonlit rubble, so utterly beautiful in its loneliness. It was embraced in shadowy, meticulous scaffolding, rigged with pulleys and a great, freewheeling windlass, like the skeleton of a giant bird no longer able to fly.

  The whole of it made her heart ache.

  And made her think of Nicholas.

  She watched the stars for a long time, waiting for the sound to come again, but it never did.

  * * *

  Chapter 15

  « ^ »

  A chaos of blessings. That was the only way Eleanor could describe the next morning at Faulkhurst.

  Her wayfarers seemed to be dropping out of the wide blue sky like angels from an overcrowded heaven.

  She and Hannah had only just fed the children when Nicholas strode into the kitchen, looking like a storm about to lay waste to a shoreline. She could only imagine that his truce with Mullock had fouled completely.

  "What's happened, Nicholas?"

  "I would see you now. In the great hall." He lowered that rock-rumbling voice, his gaze piercing. "Immediately." He left then, obviously expecting her to follow him.

  "Come see what Master Nicholas found in the village, Nellamore." Pippa hurdled after the man, his little shadow.

  He was standing in the center of the room, taller than ever, and he and his blazing, impatient temper were flanked by a trio of the most hairy-limbed, stouthearted, good-humored characters she'd ever seen.

  "Lady Eleanor Bayard," he said through his stark white teeth, like a truculent court herald forced into service at sword point. He made one of his irreverently mocking quarter bows. "Your new tenants, madam."

  "M' name is Skelly, m'lady," the largest of them said. "An' these two blighters beside me be Volney and Samuel."

  They all bowed excessively and with a good deal of ornament, and had barely straightened when Samuel asked, "Might we have a bit of
something to eat, milady? We've come a far distance."

  That made her terribly happy. "From where?" she asked as she hurried them to the table. She could feel Nicholas narrowing his gaze at her, no doubt suspecting her of some nefarious deed to have gained seven new people in the last two days.

  And he would be nearly right, if the truth be known. Not nefarious, exactly—but with a certain amount of risk.

  "We're from out the Fens way, milady."

  "That far away?" Then her unorthodox plan was working fine, marvelously in fact. Nicholas was watching her more closely than she'd like, though, because she felt a bit guilty for her secret. But it was hers to make and hers to keep, whatever the man's opinion.

  "I'll expect two of them at the armory, madam," he said. "In a half hour's time."

  He left abruptly, but came storming back into the hall not ten minutes later, having collared an unruly teenage boy in each of his broad fists.

  "These must be yours, my lady." He gave the newcomers a shake to stop the wide-eyed squabbling between them. "I found them outside the gate."

  "Thank you, Nicholas."

  He glared and rumbled at her, then at the growing accumulation of crates and tables and chairs that Mullock and his crew had carried in from the four corners of the keep.

  Then he stalked out again into the blazing sunlight, taking a huge amount of her breath along with him.

  He wouldn't approve of the reason for her success, but they were coming. Not in wispy drifts, but by the handful.

  Heaven-sent, each one of them.

  Faulkhurst had a grand total of sixteen residents now. The castle was alive with people, who were running efficiently hither and yon. Things were going well. Maybe too well.

  Rumors would soon spread beyond those she had planted, of her success, of her widowhood.

  And then it would begin.

  Edward's machinations, another husband she didn't love.

  And Nicholas … but there her imagination ended. Because it all seemed so clear, yet so impossible.

  * * *

  Nicholas shucked his clothes and his boots, and steamed off the stone dust and sweat and the chill of the sea air in his underground grotto pool. The deep and ancient place was the only remaining refuge where he could reorder his thoughts after his wife had scrambled them.

  As she had today with her parade of opportunists.

  Miracles, Nicholas, she would say if she were here in the pool with him, swimming her eddying circles round him like the selkie she probably was. If he ever dared invite her again.

  But this migration was no fluke; she had concocted something that stunk of shadiness, something that would come back soon to harm her.

  And tonight he would know the source of all her hand-fashioned miracles, or else he would— What? Explain himself fully and then annul her on the spot?

  He'd have been bloody all right, if she hadn't been so … perfect. So wifely.

  But then what sort of blistering punishment would that have been, eh? Ah, no. He had to fall madly in love with the woman—a folly that he meant to cancel immediately. He simply wouldn't look into her eyes, wouldn't listen to her laughter, or let her share her sugared plums with him.

  He had to practice to leave her.

  He dressed in a clean tunic and leather hauberk, locked the door behind him, and climbed out of the catacombs to the foot of her tower. The sound of a battering ram somewhere above him sent his heart into his throat.

  Surely a squad of Edward's bowmen or a band of Mullock's cutthroats was clamoring up the stairs ahead of him, toward his unsuspecting wife.

  "Christ." He drew his dagger and took the steps three at a time, steeling himself for a battle to the death if need be.

  "Stand away!" Her chamber door was gaping wide and the candlelight dancing against the dark walls as he charged into the room, through a cloud of her floral fragrance, and right into her trap.

  "What's the matter, Nicholas?" She was kneeling in her night shift in the middle of the room, wrestling with two badly jointed timbered pieces, poised to strike a mending peg with a mallet. "What are you doing with that dagger? Has something happened?"

  "I thought we were under attack, madam." He sagged against the table and sheathed his dagger.

  "Not that I know of. Why didn't you tell me about the chapel, Nicholas?"

  "The what?"

  "The chapel out there on the seacliffs. I saw it last night." She was clad to her ankles and wrists in her plain, unadorned night shift, hair newly washed and tousled every which way. When she stood, she might as well have been wearing cobwebs, for the brightness of the candles lining the edge of the table behind her created a tantalizing silhouette.

  He ought to leave immediately, ought to save his inquest for a greater distance, a safer time—when her defenses were down, and his were in better repair. "The chapel isn't safe, madam. It hasn't a roof."

  "I could see that well enough. But it should be listed with the other buildings that need mending. Have you been working on it for long?"

  He hadn't been working on the chapel at all lately, but on Liam's little headstone. Every night, for the few minutes that he could manage until his memories crept upon him and made his hands quake until the chisel was useless. A few letters more and he would be done. That much closer to being able to leave here.

  "I do what I can, madam, when I can. But the chapel is beside the point. I want a brief but comprehensive explanation from you."

  "As I do of you. Is the chapel on your list?" This wasn't going to be easy; he could smell the blue lightning in the air between them, hated the falsehoods he told with such increasing ease.

  "Yes, it is."

  "Good, sir. Because we do need one, and a priest. Even a monk would do nicely." She gave the peg a smack and the two pieces went together with her smile.

  Nicholas broadened his stance, crossed his arms against his chest, and looked straight down his nose at her. "Where the bloody hell are they all coming from?"

  She blinked innocently. "What do you mean?"

  "Well, let's take Skelly for a start." He stepped squarely in front of her, because she was as slippery as one of her merry thieves when she had a mind to be, then took the mallet and the peg out of her hand and set them on the table.

  "He's from the Fens, didn't he say?" He wasn't in the least surprised when she put her hands on her hips. "I'll take my mallet back."

  That only made it easier for him to lift the woman off her feet and set her on the tabletop, the better to keep her in place for once and watch her eyes for her riddling.

  Because she was practiced at that, and he'd become vastly susceptible to her since he'd lost his mind and kissed her.

  "I want to know exactly how you are conjuring your minions, madam—the sixteen of them who've stumbled across my—my path since you arrived here."

  "Actually, Nicholas, it's seventeen as of this evening." She was gazing up at him with such unwavering innocence that he didn't notice, until his pulse thickened to honey, that she was running her beguiling fingers lightly through his hair, idly tucking it back behind the ridge of his ear. Her explanation dashed around inside his head like eiderdown.

  "Seventeen." He had heard that much.

  "Aye, Nicholas, Wallace arrived just after supper. He says that he's a blacksmith!"

  "Bloody hell, madam." He caught her hand before he lost himself completely and did something idiotic—like spanning the scant inches between them and capturing her mouth with his. "Another man arrives out of the mist, which bears out my point exactly. Is it your sorcery that brings them here?"

  "Don't be absurd." She laughed too easily and looked guiltily away, then tried to slip down from her perch. But he held her there with his hands on either side of her hips, the length of his thumbs sizzling from the warmth of her nearly bare thighs.

  "Have you posted a sign on the crossroads at Penrith and Furness?"

  "No." She shook her head, but captured her plait and began to fidget with its
tail.

  "Nay, of course you didn't. Mullock surely didn't come that way, and I doubt any of the rest would know their own name if they saw it writ in large blocks. I want to know how Skelly and Cora and John and all the rest of them knew to come to Faulkhurst."

  "I can't say exactly how they came."

  He bent as close as he dared, said with bared teeth, "I think you can, Lady Eleanor. We are out on God's last outpost. Did you leave a trail of coins for them to follow?"

  "Of course not." Then her eyes lit brightly and she ducked beneath his arm and was off the table, to pluck a quill and knife from the holder. She began to shape a hasty nib. "But that's a fine idea, Nicholas. Brilliant!"

  He was at her shoulder in the next moment, lifting the quill out of her hand. "Don't even think it, madam."

  She turned toward him and opened her mouth to speak, but he put a finger across her lips to stop her. A damnably stupid thing to do, for they glistened in the candlelight, soft, warm, and much too near.

  Too much his wife.

  Arousal now seemed a constant state for him, a radiant rush of pure lust that made him feel callow and brutish. And he had once again trapped her hips between his thighs and the table.

  "Tell me where they come from so I can still repair the damage. These are grave matters, and grave times. I am your steward, am I not?"

  "A very good one, Nicholas. Quite miraculous, really." Her gaze was smoky and, Christ in heaven, she moved her hips—slightly, experimentally. He stood away before he could read the meaning of the wondering in her eyes.

  "As your steward, madam—" he cleared his throat "—I cannot, I will not, haphazardly accept a parade of strangers streaming through the gates at all hours without question. Tell me how and why they are coming."

  Another denial perched lushly on her lips, worried there by her teeth and her so rarely downcast eyes. He thought for an implausible moment that he had truly cowed her, but the eyes that found him sparkled with the mischief of success.

  "Rumors," she whispered finally.