The Maiden Bride

by Linda Needham

  Marry me, Nicholas.

  * * *

  Chapter 16

  « ^ »

  "We found the market cross in the village, milord, just where you said it would be."

  "And the second well, Skelly?"

  "Framed up, sir. You'll be drawing water from it by the end of the day."

  "Excellent. I'll be there when I'm finished here."

  Eleanor loved to work beside Nicholas as he wrestled with the castle reckonings and she made plans for the coming weeks; loved that he managed it all right in the middle of the great hall amid the clangorous comings and goings of the supper preparations.

  Hannah seemed to love it, too. "Sugared apples for you, Nicholas," she would say, tucking a plate of it and dark slabs of bread near his elbow. Lisabet saw that his cup was perpetually filled with cider, and Pippa made sure that her Nicholas was never at a loss for a bouquet of dandelions.

  He was by every measure the protective and proficient steward, sprawled with his elbows and arms taking up the whole of two trestles when he was scrawling in his rough script.

  Or pacing off the stables or prowling the ramparts, wanting to see everything firsthand, as he ordered and interrogated and cajoled the nearly fifty tenants who'd found Faulkhurst in the course of the last ten miraculous days.

  Fifty people—who ever could have imagined? The fields were being plowed and planted right on schedule, and Fergus and Wallace, the new smith, had repaired the mill wheel.

  Fifty was a grand number, which gave her pause over Nicholas's warning about the Ordinance of Laborers. Because he was a wise man, and because he seemed to care so deeply for her dreams even though they weren't his own, which made her heart ache with an impossible kind of love for the man.

  He'd never mentioned her rash request to deflower her, but slept each night wrapped in his blanket with his face to the wall. But the deed still needed doing, and he had not given a reason that satisfied her, so she would ask him again one day. Until then—

  "Your laundry shed is finished, madam." Nicholas leaned over her chin-propped musings, his dark eyes luminous and nearly smiling.

  He smelled of apples. And bedsheets. And happiness.

  Marry me, Nicholas.

  "Dear God!" She stood sharply and stared at him, her heart pounding, hoping that she hadn't really let that out between them.

  "What, madam?"

  "What did I just say, Nicholas?"

  He blinked at her and tugged at his perfectly black, perfectly shaped beard. "I'm not sure I know, madam. I had just told you that Fergus had finished the laundry shed." He leaned close enough to hear the hammering of her heart, and whispered, "Granted, it's not exactly plumb, but I'll take care of that tonight after he's gone to bed."

  You're the finest man I've ever known, Nicholas Langridge. And I'm afraid that I love you.

  "I— That's … that's excellent, Nicholas. Especially since two laundresses arrived only yesterday."

  He chewed on the inside of his cheek, dipped those dark brows, and whispered again, to her alone, "They are ladies of ill repute. Out of London, I suspect. You do know that, don't you, madam?"

  "Aye, Nicholas, and isn't it a fine thing that we've shown them a better way?"

  It seemed an ordinary reply, but the man's whole aspect softened. The indigo of his eyes deepened, and right there, in the full chaos of the great hall, he ran his thumb across her lips, softly, intently, as stirring a kiss as she could ever imagine.

  "You, my lady, are a fine thing. The finest I've ever known."

  "Oh." Her heart soared and sang. And it came to her to ask him again to make love with her, for she had a terrible sense of foreboding about all their success.

  But he was tugged away from the table to sort out a raucous disagreement between Mullock and the clerk she'd assigned to him.

  "I canna write as fast as the bloody man speaks." McDowell poked at Mullock's chest.

  "Cause ya listen like a deef old woman, McDowell." Mullock belly-butted the man, who belly-butted back.

  "Enough, the pair of you."

  In all disputes, Nicholas accomplished his stewardship as he did everything—thoroughly and long into the night, as though he was rushing to be finished before he could be overtaken by some calamity.

  Last week he was master mason, overseeing the armory and the bakehouse and the crumbling passage in the west wall and dozens of other projects.

  This week he was resurrecting the village, lane by lane, salvaging timber and tools and roofing slate—when he wasn't consulting with Dickon on the state of Faulkhurst's defenses, or advising Richard about the fish weirs and the mill.

  Or walking the fields with her, platting the crop borders that still needed sowing sometime in the next two weeks. He was as opinionated about farming and husbandry as he was about pulleys and forges and millraces.

  Not even the children seemed to confound or distract his efficiency.

  Not even Pippa.

  "Here, Master Nicholas." Pippa opened her hand and a fistful of acorns rolled all over the pantry accounts. "Is that enough, do you think?"

  "How many have you there, Mistress Pippa?" He looked fiercely businesslike, glowering across the table at Pippa and Toddy and their three equally unscrubbed companions, who seemed awed to silence by the commerce between steward and child.

  "Uhmmmm… Well…" Pippa and her golden curls disappeared under the table, only to turn up on the bench between Nicholas and Eleanor.

  "As many as these." She held up five tremendously grimy fingers.

  Nicholas seemed completely unfazed by the little hand in his face. "Which is what number?"

  He also seemed altogether comfortable when Pippa crawled up onto his lap and made herself and her pointy elbows at home there. "Dunno, sir."

  "Well, if you're going to be of any help to me, Mistress Pippa, you'll have to learn that this is five." He counted the tips of her fingers one at a time, making her recite each number along with him. Then he turned to the other children and made them recite the same. Still the stern teacher, still the vigilant steward who was looking after his accounts.

  Still Pippa's very own and much adored gargoyle.

  "And these are five again," she said, proudly holding out her other hand. "Do you see them, Nellamore?"

  They were wiggling right under her nose. "I do, sweet." She saw very much indeed.

  Nicholas shared a wryly pleased smile with Eleanor, then held the girl's hands still.

  "And how many fingers do you have on your two hands, Mistress Pippa?"

  "Ten." But the answer had come from Toddy, who seemed astonished that he'd spoken at all.

  "Exactly right, Master Todd." Nicholas lifted Pippa off his lap and stood her on the bench between them. "Now, Mistress Pippa, off you go to find me as many feathers as each of you have fingers."

  She squatted on her haunches and peered at him, nose to nose. "Each of us, Master Nicholas?"

  "Ten each, Pippa. Start with the kitchen garden. Toddy will show how many ten is if you forget."

  "I won't forget!" They scampered off in a noisy clump toward the kitchen, while Nicholas gathered up the acorns and put them in his steward's coffer.

  "What did you tell Pippa to find, Nicholas?" She couldn't credit her hearing. First acorns and then—

  "Feathers." He stood as he rolled up the planting map and tucked it under his arm. "I'm off to the village, milady. We're raising the cobbler's roof today."

  "What kind of feathers, Nicholas?" She followed his long strides out of the hall to the portico steps.

  "Gull, robin. It doesn't matter."

  "Yes, but why do you need them? Pillows? Feather beds? Every mattress in Faulkhurst is newly stuffed with fresh straw."

  He stopped and smiled at her, as handsome and as able as any man she'd ever known, and clearly pleased at this secret he was hiding. "I thought you of all people would know, Lady Eleanor."

  "I … don't." Eleanor was at a complete loss, but melted completely when he t
ucked his thumb beneath her chin to lift it, leaned down, and said, "Opportunity."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Feathers are ten a farthing if you know who's willing to buy them."

  "Feathers are?" Feathers? Then it hit her squarely in the heart, taking her breath away with its sweetness.

  He'd been playing with the children all along, sending them off on errands of their own to make them feel important, or to keep them safely out from under foot.

  He was already heading for the village, drawing a half dozen men alongside him as he crossed the bailey.

  Twice that afternoon she caught sight of him in the village, as she and her crew were plowing and planting the bean strips in the hillside fields.

  But watching him was an idle pursuit that brought on impossible fancies, and a crick in her neck besides. So she and Figgey concentrated on their plowing, the mare dazzled by the freedom of the open field, her unshod hoofs throwing up clods in every direction.

  She'd forgotten her gloves again, and she'd just stopped Figgey in the midst of a furrow to wrap her hands in her apron when a stream of children crested the ridge and came running toward her.

  As always, Pippa was in the lead, her muddy hem held up to her knees, her chubby little legs pumping across the furrows.

  "Look what we found, Nellamore!"

  "Did you find Master Nicholas's feathers for him?" They stopped and surrounded her.

  "Lots! And these, too, Nellamore."

  All their little hands opened to a menagerie of bears and badgers and rabbits, freshly carved and expectant of grand adventures.

  Eleanor laughed and knelt to pick a napping fawn out of Molly's palm. "Where did you find these?" Dear God, she hoped they hadn't raided Nicholas of some cache he'd been carving.

  Toddy hopped his whimsical rabbit along the freshly plowed furrow. "I found my rabbit sleeping in the cabbages."

  "And mine in the sage." Eamon leapfrogged his hedgehog over Toddy and the rabbit, and the pair of them raced along the next row.

  Nicholas. He'd purposely sent the children to the garden for their feathers, after planting his offerings to be discovered and played with.

  And loved.

  She looked out over the village and found him immediately, spotting him by the stark midnight of his hair, by his stance.

  He was clearly mourning a great loss, someone as dear to him as he was to her.

  "I know where they came from, Nellamore. The animals."

  She bent down to Pippa's beckoning. "Where?"

  She cupped Eleanor's ear. "From Nicholas."

  "You may be right."

  "I think he needs my pony."

  "Oh, Pippa!" Eleanor kissed her sweat-begrimed cheek. "I think he does, too. Run and take it to him."

  * * *

  Nicholas was two steps up the ladder against the tithe barn when he felt a tug at his shoe and heard a voice he'd come to cherish.

  "We have a present for you, Master Nicholas."

  There seemed to be dozens of children milling about below him, all of them carrying their carvings, Pippa with the largest smile. "A present, for me, Pippa? It can't be the feathers; I'm paying you for those."

  "Come down."

  Nicholas dropped from the ladder, knowing that his wife must have had something to do with this, and knelt beside Pippa.

  "For you, Nicholas." Pippa upended her belt purse, and after a few shakes a shell fell out onto the ground.

  "Well, that's the best present I've had all—"

  "Not the shell."

  Then something else dropped out of the bag—and with it a wave of memories that blackened the edges of his vision.

  Liam's gangly-limbed, sad-tailed pony, clumsily carved of sticks, because it had been his first attempt at trying to win over his son. It had suffered Liam's love bravely, and had died with him.

  "It's a pony, Nicholas. Do you like it?"

  "Where did you get this, Pippa?" He had only breath enough to whisper, and his heart thudded against the hollow of his chest. He picked up the pony in hands that shook, remembering the tentative wonder in the boy's eyes when he'd presented it.

  Do you mean the pony's for me, sir?

  "I found it on our first day."

  Aye, for you.

  "Where?"

  Why, my lord, for me? That question had hurt him most of all. That he had failed his own son in such unforgivable ways.

  "In the kitchen."

  Because, boy, I'm your father.

  "He wants to be with you, Nicholas." Pippa leaned over his arm and moved the horse's dangling legs with her finger, setting them to gallop in the air.

  "Well, I thank you for the pony." An offering to a son who had never known a father's love till then. From a father who had just learned what it meant to be truly afraid.

  Pippa cupped his ear for one of her noisy secrets. "An' we thank you for the animals."

  Toddy squatted in front of him. "We found this many feathers, too, sir."

  Nicholas counted up all the fingers, and reveled in all the smiles. "Sixty, looks to me. How many farthings is that, Toddy?"

  "Six?"

  "Six exactly." Nicholas stood. "Come see me in the hall after supper and I'll pay out your farthings then."

  They streamed away from him like little birds, headed toward his wife in the fields.

  A school. A village school, and a cleric who didn't mind having his robes tugged on or his toes tromped.

  Aye, a school would please his wife, would make her smile.

  * * *

  Nicholas had never let Mullock far out of his sight, still as surprised at the man's genius for organization as he was suspicious of it. He was a jumble of contradictions, alternately course-mouthed and then respectful; watchful with that piercing, single-eyed focus and then excessively gregarious.

  But always insufferably congenial. All of which damned him for a charlatan.

  So Nicholas wasn't in the least surprised when he discovered Mullock slipping out of the great hall late one moonless night, his wiry shoulders loaded down with the same towering rucksack that he'd arrived with. It raffled and clanked as Mullock dodged through the shadows, bulging with stolen plate and God knew what else.

  "Go, with my blessing, Mullock," he said beneath his breath. And welcome to everything you can carry, as long as it takes you far away from here. Away from my wife and her fragile dreams. Eleanor would be disappointed in Mullock, but it couldn't be helped. A valuable lesson in treachery.

  She would need to know this of men, when he was gone.

  Still, Nicholas quietly followed the scurrying thief into the shadowy village, past the tidy mountains of lumber and piles of slate, past the new well house and the market cross. There Mullock finally slowed, staggered under his unwieldy load, then stopped.

  At first Nicholas thought he'd been heard, so he hung back in the shadows. But Mullock was only muttering to himself.

  "Past time, it is, be damned." He hitched up his pack again and barreled forward, but only got three steps before he stopped again. "Beggar me bald!"

  He turned back this time and stared up at the castle. "Bloody, bleedin', beggarin' hell."

  He yanked a sack of coins from out of his belt, shook it hard, then laughed fondly, crowing-proud that he'd succeeded in outwitting the Lady of Faulkhurst.

  "On with it then." Mullock took three more steps … then rounded back on the lane again and stalked back toward the castle, muttering as he passed by Nicholas's hiding place.

  "Forget something, Mullock?"

  "What the—" The man staggered backward a step. "Ah, it's you, milord. Bit dark out, ain't it?"

  "Indeed. Your chance to leave, Mullock—free and clear. I won't stop you. In fact, I'll spare you a fine mount to be gone."

  But Mullock slumped his shoulders. "Bleedin' cockles, Master Nicholas, I'd like nothing better than to just leave."

  "The road is wide-open and calling to you."

  "You may think so, milord, just as I did. But
just you go and try to leave here yourself, someday. You won't find it easy at all."

  He didn't expect to, but for far different reasons than Mullock could imagine. "You've got what you came for, made a tidy profit."

  "A whole lot more'n tidy. But it's her bleedin' fault that I can't just up and leave." Mullock nodded up the castle road, his dark eye glistening with resentment.

  "Whose fault is that?" Good Lord, maybe his wife had been right after all.

  "Milady's. She's not a lady to disappoint and then expect to live a single day in peace afterward, is she?"

  The man had the right of it.

  "It was the saddest day of m'life when she trusted me, sir. Just—" he threw out his arms, jangling his pack "—just trusted me, 'at's all. With every bloody thing in her bloody castle. Beggar me, milord, what's an ordinary fool to do with that kind of weight pressing on him?"

  What, indeed?

  Make love with me, Nicholas.

  "He'd leave, if he were wise."

  "Aye. An' being the fool that I am, I guess I'm stayin' put."

  Christ, I envy you, Mullock. For staying, for the freedom to love her without consequences.

  Mullock started trudging back up the hill, weighed down by a scrap of woman whose only weapon was that she trusted too freely. "Here I thought I was feelin' so grand 'cause I was setting her up to steal her blind. But all along, 'twas just too bloody good to be bloody needed for once."

  Bloody good indeed. He and Mullock were a pair: a couple of sinners finding that hell could be nearly impossible to distinguish from heaven.

  When they reached the stable, Mullock stopped and reached his hand out to Nicholas's shoulder.

  "You won't tell her will you, sir?"

  The poor man didn't know that his wife had a gift for knowing everything. "She won't hear from me, Mullock. That I promise."

  * * *

  Eleanor had been gathering tally sticks from the new tithe barn in the castle forecourt when she saw Mullock sneak across the dark bailey with his pack. Too heartsick to follow and stop him, she could only stand and stare, then feared the very worst when Nicholas stealthily followed the man.

  Not you, Mullock. Please. She hadn't wanted to believe it of him; hadn't wanted to imagine that he'd plotted his theft against her, against them all.