The Maiden Bride

by Linda Needham

  Disappointed to her soul that Mullock hadn't understood his own worth, she bundled the unnotched tallies and busied herself so that she didn't have to think any deeper than how much barley she would plant in the morning, because it hurt too much.

  Then, weary to her bones, she climbed the stairs to her room, ready for a good long cry.

  "Do you never sleep, woman?"

  "Nicholas." He was the familiar darkness that made her heart slip. A long warbling sob shook her. "Mullock's gone, isn't he, Nicholas?"

  "No."

  She snuffled and pointed out the window toward the gatehouse. "But I saw him go. You did, too—with his pack full to bursting. What happened?"

  "He changed his mind." Nicholas threw his dagger belt onto the clothes peg, looking like a husband come home to their bed after a long day's labor.

  "Oh, good." She gathered up her cloak, wanting to find the man and thank him. But Nicholas stopped her at the door.

  "Where are you going?"

  "I want to welcome Mullock home."

  "Christ, woman, leave the man a speck of pride. Don't ever tell him that you saw anything of it."

  "I wouldn't think of hurting him, Nicholas! You didn't clobber him, did you?"

  "Never laid a finger on the man. I even offered him a horse to be gone."

  "Nicholas, you didn't!"

  He shucked his boots and then his sword belt. "I never did trust the man."

  "But he's staying?" She took another halting step, wanting to throw her arms around him for saving Mullock, for everything that he meant to her—all those things that were so difficult to put into words because they were such a part of every day, of who he was.

  "He's staying—in spite of the fact that you've ruined him." Nicholas groaned as he lay back on his pallet, then turned his back on her.

  "Me? I have?"

  "Like you've ruined me." He sighed; and she could already hear the sleep in his voice.

  "How have I done that?" He waved a weary hand at her, a dismissal. "Did you two share a barrel of ale while you were gone?" She stepped between Nicholas and the wall, sat down, and leaned back against him.

  "Go to sleep, Eleanor."

  "How have I ruined you?" When he didn't answer, she tucked herself into the crook of his arm, then fused her back to his chest, sure that she would draw an objection from him.

  But he only slipped his arm around her waist and dragged her closer. "Because, my dear, you have stolen my will completely."

  But Nicholas, you've stolen my heart, and I can't imagine a more remarkable thief.

  It took long minutes before she heard Nicholas's heart settle against her back, until his breathing eased, until his marvelously steadfast erection finally rested.

  * * *

  Chapter 17

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  Your chapel, for my son's life.

  It had seemed a damned fair bargain with God at the time, his guileless, guiltless son offered earnestly against the sad ruins of a church—neglected for as long as he could remember—to be rebuilt with all due reverence, by his own hand and reconsecrated in His name. For His almighty purpose.

  One father's honest pledge to another, far more accomplished One.

  The task of rebuilding had seemed monumental at the time, ultimately compensating because it did seem so very impossible. The bell tower had tumbled down sometime over the course of uncaring decades, had broken the slate roof into tiny pieces and scattered them, had crushed the rafters, and shattered most of the cornice on its descent into the sanctuary.

  He'd spent months sorting through the rubble for usable pieces, clearing away the destruction. He had fashioned the scaffolding, the winches and windlasses, the work sheds, moving lime and cement supplies from the castle's stores, gathering tools—and learning how to use them.

  Hard labor, which he was grateful for, for he had never allowed himself idle meditations over the meaning of the pestilence, or the fear that his bargain could go so very wrong. The days had felled him with exhaustion, and ensured that his sleep would be dreamless oblivion.

  Only to wake and start again. Because he'd mistakenly thought he could overtake his sins.

  In all his years of warring he'd never once spared a thought for his soul or for anyone else's. His had been a brutal commerce, best executed with expedience and a distant heart.

  But in the midst of plundering a chapel so much like this one in a war-tattered village in some forgotten part of Brittany, he'd been brought to his knees by a boy.

  One so like his own son that it had felled him.

  Though no one would have blamed him, in the heady heat of a battle one body looked just like another, this one small and cowering in the nave of a chapel.

  Out of habit, out of numbness borne of too much bloodletting, he'd raised his sword to strike a bloody blow for his king, for his own conceit.

  "Please don't, sir."

  It was a small, unsteady voice. A dark-haired boy daring to plead for his life, though a sword point dented the pliable flesh at his throat.

  "Don't kill me, sir. I beg you. I'm all my mother has now. My father was just killed at the gate."

  Nicholas had lowered his sword, feeling righteous in his code of honor—that he had never, would never, kill a child or a woman. Beyond that, it hadn't mattered to him.

  "Your father knew the risk of resisting."

  "He was only a cobbler, sir. Now I'll have to be so—for my mother."

  Battle-brave, the boy had been. And as bone-thin as all the rest, because his town had been sacked three times that year alone.

  "How old are you, lad?"

  "Eight."

  Eight. For some reason he'd never understand, he'd thought then of his own son, the peasant girl's bastard. The boy who had his eyes and his coloring, who'd been conceived on a winter's night, of a virgin he'd dallied with until she'd made her arrogant claim against him.

  A son.

  His flesh. His blood. His legacy.

  He noticed the blood that had spattered him through the day's efforts, soaking through the mail to wet his tunic, and bile had risen in his throat, hot and bitter and tasting of metal.

  This was his legacy? This bloody game, tearing down homes and slaying fathers, leaving children to starve?

  "Go, boy. Now. Keep yourself to the shadows." He'd kept down his stomach until the boy was gone, and then he'd thrown off his helmet, dropped to his knees, and spilled his guts out onto the chapel floor.

  He'd bawled like a baby when the priest held his forehead, and again when he'd poured out his confession on his knees until he was empty and aching.

  Always thinking of his son, the one he'd denied.

  The town had fallen an hour later, and the carnage in the streets had sickened him again and again, until there was nothing left inside to give.

  He'd left the battle and then the camp, had scoured himself in a hot spring to boil off the evil that clung to him, and he'd set sail for Faulkhurst.

  Running from his past or walking into a dark abyss, it hadn't mattered. He'd given himself over to his God, and he'd found his son.

  He had worked here in the stonecutter's shed at night after the boy was asleep, after tending the sick and burying the dead, working for hours by the light of a dozen cresset lamps, chiseling away at the oak timbers that would once again span the vault above the altar.

  Sometimes still, when the moon was at its palest, he could see his son's dark eyes grinning shyly from behind the edge of the church wall.

  Can I help you, Papa?

  My boy. Nicholas swallowed hard against the sorrow and turned away from the surging flood of memories, fitting his chisel into the small channel in the stone marker.

  Liam, it read—crudely, because he wasn't very good at the subtleties, and because his hands so often shook while he tried to work.

  And beneath that: Beloved Son. Or so it would read when he left Faulkhurst, as soon as he finished those last two wholly inadequate words.

  A simple
, trembling tap with the hammer was all it would take to begin, one tap after another to mark the place he'd buried him. He'd grown expert with the mason's tools, but cutting heavy stone blocks hadn't the dreadful finality of carving this inadequate tribute to his son.

  "It's beautiful out here, Nicholas."

  For the briefest moment, he thought her voice had come from the sea. But she was standing in the rock-strewn pathway between the shed and the forlorn sanctuary, not a dozen feet from him, framed by glints of moonlight and the flinty cliffs.

  Peace and simple adoration and the pale saffron of the last moments of the sun softened her brow and her smile, and every part of him quickened—his pulse and his breathing and his groin. He came off his workbench and stood like a statue, not at all certain how he felt.

  Invaded. Grateful. Terrified. Wanting to confess.

  "Aye, it is beautiful, madam." You are. "How did you come?"

  She looked back toward the castle. "I took the path along the rocks."

  His heart pounded in sudden, helpless fear. He should have known she would scrabble her way out here eventually, should have shown her the passage beneath the wall. He stumbled over the need to stop her where she stood, to keep her from wandering the cliffs and slipping into the waves.

  "Christ, madam, a misstep and you might have killed yourself." He took her hands, looking for the scrapes that came from climbing over the rocks.

  "Are you a goat then, Nicholas?" She was grinning patiently, allowing him his tirade as she always did. "How do you come every night?"

  Her hands were softly callused but uninjured, so he let them go. "There's a passage. I'll show you."

  "Ah." She seemed unconcerned, at home with the sea, closing her eyes and tilting her chin to the brunt of the everlasting gale.

  "Which is no reason not to consider the place dangerous, madam. The chapel and the cliffs themselves are." He gestured toward the rubble and the rawboned rafters of the chapel, but she only shook her head at him, collecting the billowing sea spray on her cheeks and the ends of her hair, like fiery pearls.

  "You haven't let me fall yet, Nicholas." She looked down at the chisel in his belt, then to the workbench in the shed, to the rectangle of limestone sitting atop it and the mallet lying beside.

  His heart took off like a rocket. He wanted to throw himself in front of the evidence as she went to the shed, to block her view from his shame.

  She caught her hair with a sweep of her arm, held all of it fast against her chest and read simply.

  "Liam." Sweetly whispered like a prayer. Then she looked up at him in her diabolically compassionate way.

  "Who was he, Nicholas?" The sea came to life in the silence that she left riding the air. Thrashing tides and a whirling reel of spin-drift dared him to speak the truth.

  All of it.

  That he was William Nicholas Bayard, the husband she reviled. That she was his wife. That the boy whose grave lay beneath the wind-bent pine in the corner of the churchyard was his son.

  His heir and namesake.

  But he'd learned long ago that the truth had many colors; could be tinted in shame as well as in honor.

  "Liam was my son."

  She put her fingers to her mouth, and her eyes widened and sparkled with quick tears. "Ah, Nicholas, no."

  She was grieving with him suddenly, for a boy she'd never known. In every way that counted, he'd been her son, too, though she could never know it. For she was the kind of woman who would have loved the boy beyond all measure.

  Her warm, protective hand slipped over his, between his fingers to clasp tightly. Then she rose up on her toes and brushed her cheek against his, and whispered against his ear, "Be with your boy now, Nicholas. I'll find you later."

  "No." He surprised himself when he held tightly to her hand, unable to let go when he ought to keep his distance from her gentle weeping, from this unexpected island in the middle of a churning sea. "It's … fine. I was—"

  But he couldn't finish, only gestured to the bench, hoping she'd understand.

  "Your son." She touched the marker, ran her finger along the L and smiled with her generous heart, as though his clumsy asymmetry had made it more exquisite. "How old was he?"

  It was a mother's voice that slipped from her so easily, kindly and encouraging. Fashioned perfectly for a boy's scraped knees and loose teeth, for arms that would cuddle and care.

  Yet he had to fill that space between them with more falsehoods, the next lie about Liam becoming a part of the first. Step by step, denying his son his rightful place in the world as he skirted the truth.

  Which was no different than he'd done for years, and it sickened him to choose that path with Eleanor.

  "Liam was about eight."

  "Toddy's age."

  "I think so."

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and he felt the shaky sob that she was trying to mask. "What a lucky boy to have had a father like you."

  He could at least counter that false impression. He turned from her to the workbench, and bundled up the chisel and then the hammer in a leather clout. "In truth, I wasn't a father to Liam at all, madam."

  Any more than I was ever a husband to you, ever could be.

  "I can't imagine that, Nicholas. I've seen you with the children."

  "I was a soldier by trade, remember." He tucked the tools into a chest and shoved it under the worktable, rocking the lamps and the long, flighty shadows.

  "I've never known a boy who wasn't proud to have his father serve the king."

  "Ah, but you see, this boy wasn't mine."

  "Wasn't? Then why—"

  "That's what I had always told myself." He calculated each word as he said it, keeping to the barest details. "I had no use at all for families or children—or wives, or anyone but myself. Though Liam was my blood and my flesh, I denied him my name, almost to the end."

  "What of his mother? Did you—" She so rarely faltered in her course that he wondered at her hesitation. "Did you love her?"

  She would want to think that he did. "She was an easy skirt to me—the woodward's daughter. As innocent as I was carnal and corrupt."

  "Nicholas, you were never—"

  He held up a hand to stop her. "Please, madam; I know my own history. You know nothing of me beyond your own goodness."

  She sat on the bench, her hands in her lap. "What happened to her? Liam's mother?"

  "She died. I don't know when, or why. The boy was left to himself on the streets. I found him there."

  "On the streets—such a young boy."

  "I came very late to fatherhood, my lady—and I had much to make up to my son." Brushing this close to the truth made him feel recklessly free. "But the boy didn't know me at all. He was terrified of me when I first came for him. Hid from me, even."

  For some reason that made her smile. "And so you made toys for him, didn't you? Carved dancing bears and hedgehogs." Of course she would follow that trail; he'd led her there.

  "My feeble campaign to win him. I was … resolved to be his father. And he was as reluctant at first."

  "Oh, Nicholas, I suspect that your Liam came willingly to you in no time at all."

  "It took weeks, madam. Long, wasted weeks. And much cajoling. But in the end, we had only six months together, my boy and I."

  "Were they good ones? Good times for you and Liam?"

  "They were—" He swallowed back his ragged grief, focused on the horizon, the sea, its margins now barely discernable from the evening sky. He took a breath and then another. "They were heaven to me. And undeserved."

  Eleanor had tried not to weep, had tried to let Nicholas have his sorrow in his own way, but an ungovernable sob finally shook her.

  No wonder he haunted Faulkhurst: His son had died here. No wonder he prowled the ramparts and protected its heart. He was so wrong in his opinion of himself.

  "You were blessed as few men are, Nicholas. To know the true love of a son."

  He turned away again and wrapped the boy's headst
one in another leather pouch. "Ah, my lady, if you'd only known him…"

  She watched as he laid the pouch on a shelf below the workbench. His hands shaking, lingering overlong in the caress, this restless beast bested by a tiny boy's heart. It was so difficult to let go of unfinished sorrows, impossible to do it all alone.

  "Was Liam dark-haired like you, Nicholas?" she whispered. "Dark-eyed?"

  When he didn't move, or speak, she feared that she'd pressed too hard. But then he nodded. "Yes."

  "And strapping, too. Strong. I mean, for all of his eight years?"

  He turned away from the bench and met her eyes. "He was. And I—" But then his manner changed abruptly, her steward once more. "What is it you wanted of me, madam? What brought you out here in the middle of the night?"

  It was a start. A place to begin with this man who had such a tight hold around her heart.

  "Because, Nicholas, you missed supper with us—much to Pippa's distress. So I thought I'd come let you know that you made the children very happy today with their lessons."

  They were shyly delighted eyes that found hers. "Did I?"

  "You know very well that you did."

  The blackguard tried to shrug off his benevolence, but it was the essence of him. "Habit."

  "One to nurture, Nicholas." For the children that he loved now and who loved him back—as she did. "I hope you're prepared with your deep sack of pennies from our treasury. Pippa has a bucket of feathers for you."

  She felt ruffled again, focused upon as he straightened his shoulders. "What sort of name is Pippa? What does it mean?"

  "I don't know. It's what she called herself when I found her in a peach orchard."

  "That little thing?" Then the great man was frowning, outraged for the child who now lived in his circle of care. "By Christ, was she alone?"

  "Aye, and she seemed an angel to me, too weary just then to climb to heaven. And so I kept her. I want to believe that she was left there lovingly when no one was able to take care of her. She was bundled up in a long, finely embroidered linen shift."

  "And suffering the plague; I've seen the marks." That seemed to anger him, yet he sat on the edge of the workbench, caught her hand and drew her to stand between his knees. "What of Dickon? Was he infected?"