Virtue's Reward

by Jean R. Ewing

  “I woke you?” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Richard, what is it? The wound? Is it troubling you?”

  She could see the play of shadows on his face as his mouth twisted in a self-mocking smile.

  “ ‘Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan / Maim’d, mangled by inhuman men?’ Go back to bed.”

  “Let me see it. If there’s infection, it must be taken care of.”

  “Generous Helena,” he said, coming into her room and closing the door behind him before leaning back against it and fixing her with his midnight gaze. “Can you still express concern for a fellow who exhibited such scurrilous behavior to you? May I hope you have forgiven me?”

  “For your accusations? No, I haven’t, but I’ve no desire to see you develop a fever and be consumed before your time like the Lionheart.”

  “Ah, noble crusader king! No one was so solicitous of his wounds, were they?”

  “If they had been, perhaps he would have lived out his natural days and not been succeeded by his intemperate brother, Bad King John.”

  Richard walked quietly to the window and gazed out at the moonlit gardens.

  Helena watched his lithe movement, then sat down in the chair by the fire and folded her hands. She knew that her knuckles shone white with tension.

  It may not have been the cry of a wild creature, she thought, but he certainly moves like one! Helena, dear girl, the man has made it quite clear why he married you, and he doesn’t even trust you. Be careful, for heaven’s sake!

  At last he turned, and crossing the silver-dappled carpet stopped in front of her.

  To her surprise, he dropped on one knee beside her chair.

  “Helena, I’m a sorry fellow and a worse husband. The wound to my arm barely broke the skin. It really was only a scratch. I have no pain and certainly no fever. I have darker secrets than that, my dear.”

  With sudden insight, Helena knew exactly what he was going to say next. Why he had cried out. Why danger lay like a shadow behind his eyes. Why he would not share his bed at the inn, and why he had left hers before she awoke.

  “You have nightmares,” she whispered.

  “Alas, it’s pretty pathetic, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t see why. You’ve been in a war, after all.”

  He ran his hand lightly down her arm until his fingers rested over hers.

  “Do you think King Richard wailed in the night like a banshee?”

  “If he didn’t, it was only because he was hardened to destruction. Look at what happened at Acre! Blameless prisoners lined up for slaughter.”

  “Yet he has come down to us as the very model of chivalry. At least I don’t have the slaying of innocents on my conscience.”

  Helena was wise enough to stay silent. Was there something else on his conscience? Or was it the remembered terrors, the things he must have witnessed?

  “All I want in the world is tranquillity, Helena.”

  “And Acton Mead,” she said with a rueful grin.

  “Which you have brought me.”

  “Yet I can’t bring you tranquillity, can I?”

  Because you don’t trust me, she thought, and without trust we can never make anything of this imprudent marriage.

  Her answer was a low laugh.

  “I don’t see why not,” he said and pulled her forward into his embrace.

  A fingertip gently outlined her lips, then he stroked both hands back through her hair. She closed her eyes, trembling at her rush of response. Sensations coursed, delicious, delicious, burning deep into her heart. Ah, such a lovely pulse of heat in the blood! He caressed the bare skin of her arm and wrist. Lovely, lovely, even lovelier as his mouth followed, kissing the sensitive places in her palm. At last, at last, as she shook with longing, he lifted her face up to his. His lips smiled as they met her eager mouth.

  A loud crash reverberated in the hallway, as if an entire wall of iron tools had leaped from their hooks and all hit the floor together. Richard pulled away instantly.

  “Damnation!” he said lightly. In one lithe movement he was on his feet. “ ‘Ring the alarum-bell:—murder and treason!’ ”

  The crash was followed by muffled thuds and a voice cursing.

  Richard had already crossed Helena’s room and entered his own.

  Moments later he reappeared. His teeth flashed white in the moonlight. He was laughing. Yet he had armed himself with a pistol. With rapid movements he was priming and loading it.

  “Richard, for God’s sake! Do you suspect something?”

  “More someone, dear heart. Inanimate objects don’t usually move around by themselves, or raise such an intemperate amount of noise in the night. Stay here!”

  Chapter Eight

  Which was more than any human had the right to expect. Helena followed Richard into the hallway. A man was struggling with the remains of a suit of armor that had stood before the long window at the end for perhaps a hundred years, and before that must have graced the castle of some Acton progenitor.

  Greaves and cuisses clattered aside in a tumble of metal, and the man cursed again. He tossed aside a pauldron as if it were some old kitchen pot and tried to stand. The armor had fallen in pieces around him, but the intruder had put his foot through the open neck of the sallet and he fell to the floor again in a cacophony of clatter.

  Richard laid down the pistol and calmly struck a spark from the tinderbox that sat on the hall table by Helena’s door. An instant later flames danced from the candles in the sconce. The trespasser looked up and squinted into the light.

  “Is that you, Dickon?” he said. The blue eyes were slack-lidded. “I seem to have founder— I seem to have found . . .” He grinned at them.

  “You have both found and foundered on our ancestor, Sir Lionel, dear boy,” Richard said as the intruder’s eyes tried in vain to focus.

  “It’s Harry!” Helena exclaimed.

  “Indeed,” Richard replied, going to his brother and removing the steel neckpiece from his foot. “And splendidly drunk, perhaps.”

  “How did he get in?”

  “Up the ivy, as we did as boys. Come on, old fellow!”

  Henry grinned again and tried to bow to Helena. The result was that he slammed his head into what remained of Sir Lionel’s armor stand and slumped like a rag doll to the floor. Richard picked him up bodily, like a child, and slung his brother over his shoulder.

  “Go to bed, Helena,” he said calmly. “I can manage.”

  “But he broke into the house!”

  Richard’s eyes were shadowed by the flickering candlelight, but silver lights danced off his hair. “So?”

  “I would have thought even you could see that someone who would get drunk and climb the ivy in the middle of the night, for God knows what purposes, might not be the person in whom one should repose such infinite confidence.”

  “You know nothing about it.”

  “If I don’t know enough to understand what is going on in this house, it might be related, don’t you think, to your remarkable reluctance to confide even the most basic facts? Richard, how do you know Harry can be trusted?”

  Richard shifted his brother’s weight a little and turned with his burden toward the guest bedrooms. Helena wasn’t sure what enabled him to control his emotions, but his voice was perfectly level, even slightly amused, as he delivered the parting comment.

  “Helena, you were an only child. The delights of being the oldest of six are beyond your understanding. I won’t have you trying to interfere with my family. Go to bed!”

  And since Helena saw that there was really nothing else she could do, she did so.

  But not to sleep.

  Birds had begun their dawn chorus, and pink light began to steal in at the windows before she eventually closed her eyes in exhaustion.

  Richard had armed himself with a pistol against his own brother. Did he think his life was in danger? Would Harry really try to harm him? Who had fired that shot in the woods that had slashed Richard’s
coat sleeve? Without question the second son stood to gain everything if his older brother died.

  The thought went through Helena like a knife blade. Harry was just another irresponsible sprig of a wastrel aristocracy, but Richard shone in her world like a sun.

  She hadn’t expected it, although she remembered the intense premonition she had felt when she had first seen him riding up the drive at Trethaerin. What did she know about him? He was the son of an earl who did not get along with his father. He had mistresses in London, and one was called Marie. He had traveled the world and read almost everything worthwhile ever written. He had fought in the Peninsula.

  To Cousin Edward he had been the ideal of manhood.

  He could make up silly verses.

  Instead of smiling at the thought, Helena was horrified to find tears trailing down her cheeks. She thumped at her pillow and with determination rolled over and buried her face in its soft comfort.

  * * *

  Her husband was not at the table for breakfast, nor was Harry. It was midmorning before Richard strode into the small sitting room that Helena had set aside for herself, where she could go over the household accounts and the menus. The goose quill she had left the day before on her desk had dried and twisted, so she was making herself a new pen. She had left the tall French windows open to the bright autumn sunshine.

  Without a sound Richard came in from the garden, the white roses blazing in glory behind him.

  “You’re very proficient with your penknife, Lady Lenwood.”

  Helena looked up. His hair was ruffled from the breezy day.

  “I should hope so. I have enough years of practice, after all.”

  Richard glanced over the books and papers scattered on Helena’s desk.

  “You’re a more than practiced housekeeper, aren’t you?”

  “I kept house for my father for many years after my mother died. It’s the least I can do.”

  “For me?” he said with a sudden laugh. “Dear creature, if I had wanted a housekeeper, I could have hired one.”

  “Yes, but Acton Mead would not have come with her, would it?”

  “Touché. But I want you to enjoy life, too. I know I haven’t been fair. Helena, will you allow me to try to start all over again?”

  There was a slight rap at the door. Helena called out permission to enter, and a tousled dark head appeared, to be followed as the door opened all the way by Harry. There were dark circles under his blue eyes.

  “I’m not interrupting, am I?”

  “Of course you are, damn you,” Richard said good-naturedly. “How’s your head?”

  “Like a boiled turnip.”

  “I’ll have a mixture made up for you,” Helena said.

  Harry made a face. “Rather be cured by the hair of the dog.”

  “You will go to Mrs. Hood this instant and swallow whatever remedy she feels moved to recommend,” Richard said sternly. “I intend to talk to my wife about horses and about the delights of the view from Marrow Hill, and I don’t need your amiable commentary.”

  Harry began to laugh, then winced. As he left the room, he managed to wink at Helena.

  “Sorry about Sir Lionel,” he said. “Dismembered more thoroughly than he ever was in the Crusades.”

  Helena had already dismissed him. Her attention was entirely on Richard. “What did you want to say about horses?”

  “I don’t even know if you ride. Do you?”

  “A little—not particularly well, that is. Well enough to get about Trethaerin and Friarswell on a gentle old nag.”

  “Good, because I have the very old nag to suit you. We’re going riding.”

  * * *

  The old nag proved to be a rather pretty chestnut gelding called Bob. He had two white stockings and a blaze. Bob was, however, perfectly gentle, and Helena was able to take the reins with confidence once Richard had swung her up into the saddle.

  Bayard stood like a gentleman as his master mounted, then tossed his head only once in impatience at Bob’s careful gait once they started.

  “I want you to see all of Acton Mead. We’ll go up to the top of infamous Marrow Hill. There’s a view all the way to London.”

  Richard seemed lighthearted and cheerful as they rode together through the home wood and past the patchwork of fields and lanes that surrounded the house. Helena did her best not to let her eyes feast on his strong back and lean thighs. Did he know quite how splendid he looked on horseback? Probably! Little that Richard did seemed to be done without an impressive awareness of the consequences.

  In which case, why had he come to Cornwall and so casually married her? A debt to Edward, of course. But was that enough to make him marry a stranger? She remembered the earl’s words at King’s Acton. One of the Salisbury daughters would just as surely have given him possession of Acton Mead. But for better or for worse, they were wed, and he had offered her a new beginning. She was determined to grasp the opportunity with both hands.

  Marrow Hill proved to be a rocky prominence bristling with trees. As they began to ride up the narrow trail through the dark woods and leave the green fields behind, Helena felt as if she were entering a foreign land.

  “As boys, this trail was the place for grand deeds of derring-do!” Richard said suddenly. “Here we could be Charlemagne or Sir Lancelot. A suitable spot for dark intrigues and swashbuckling adventures, don’t you think?”

  “I think it’s more a place for hanging on to one’s saddle and closing one’s eyes,” Helena replied.

  A cliff plunged down to her right into the gorge of a little stream. The resulting chasm seemed to be entirely too close to Bob’s hooves as he walked steadily up the path. To her left, a thick growth of trees began to block the sunlight. They were passing a final brave stand of huge oaks before the woods became dense with undergrowth.

  “Yes, but the view from the top is worth it,” Richard said.

  And with those words, Bayard exploded.

  As Bob jumped out of the way of the charger’s flailing hooves, Helena was almost thrown from the saddle. She grasped at the reins, but the reliable chestnut had already come trembling to a halt and she was able to look back over her shoulder.

  Bayard was still airborne. Half a ton of horseflesh slammed down with a twist, then bucked again. Richard stayed with him, still firmly in the saddle, but with the next leap the animal’s hind hooves landed at the very edge of the trail. Earth crumbled and gave way. Bayard lost his footing and staggered backward. White flashed around panicked eyes, and the charger rolled down into the gorge.

  The dreadful sound of rending branches and the harsh crash of rock echoed, as boulders were dislodged and bushes uprooted by the horse’s flailing body tumbling over and over to the streambed below.

  Helena screamed, then clamped one hand over her mouth.

  Richard had already sprung from the saddle to catch at the branch of an overhanging oak. In a shower of leaves he dropped back to the ground, but then he immediately swung over the edge of the cliff to go after his horse.

  “For heaven’s sake, Richard!” Helena called out. “He must have been killed.”

  “That brave creature saved my life many times. I damned if I’m going to let him die in a stinking little toy canyon in England.”

  In a tangle of skirts, Helena slithered from Bob’s back and ran to the edge of the path.

  “But he almost killed you—”

  There was no reply. Richard was climbing steadily down into the ravine. His bright head moved in and out of the sunlight, and a lithe play of shadows ran across his shoulders. Then he disappeared from view beneath a canopy of leaves.

  Helena stood absolutely still for a moment as silence settled over the woods. Somewhere below Marrow Hill the stream that had carved the chasm must surely emerge onto more level ground. There was no way to bring a horse back up the cliff. So if Bayard was not dead and Richard could lead him out, that would be the only way.

  Leading Bob by the bridle, she picked her way back d
own the path, her pulse thundering in her ears. Richard could have died!

  At the bottom of the hill she led Bob around the edge of the woods until she met the stream gurgling out among the trees. So she had been right about that. She tied her horse to a low branch and started to follow the water’s edge into the chasm.

  She walked straight into Harry.

  He grinned at her as if nothing in the world were wrong and greeted her with a quote.

  “ ‘How now, spirit! whither wander you?’ ”

  His black hair was encrusted with twigs. His jacket looked much as if he had slept in it—or raced carelessly down from Marrow Hill?

  Helena wanted to take him by the lapels and scream at him, but a cool voice cut in before she could speak.

  “ ‘Over hill, over dale, / Through bush, through brier, dear brother.’ ” Richard turned to Helena. “It’s all right. Bayard is hurt, but he’s not dead. With ropes and some men, I can get him out.”

  Leaving Helena ready to weep with relief and frustration, Richard issued rapid explanations and orders to Harry.

  Harry grinned at her as he went up to Bob and stripped off the sidesaddle.

  “Having left my nag on the other side of Marrow Hill, I’m obliged to borrow your noble steed, ma’am, but how the devil do you ladies ride in these things? If I meet anyone, I shall be the laughingstock of the county.”

  “Unless you get back in five minutes with help, you will wish for such a wholesome result,” Richard said. “Get going, damn you!”

  Harry saluted and galloped away.

  Richard instantly plunged back into the woods. Helena followed.

  His long legs caused him to pull away from her unless she trotted like a child, and there was no trail. Several times they scrambled over fallen rocks and once squeezed through a narrow cut in the cliff, the stream gurgling at their feet. Richard reached back to help her just that once in an absolute silence. There was no point in stating the obvious: A horse could never come out this way. It was hard enough for a man to get in.

  They emerged into a small clearing. The bay charger, stripped now of Richard’s saddle, stood tied to a tree, head hanging. His once glossy coat was dark with sweat. Liberally scraped and cut, the horse might have been wrung in a giant mangle.