by Jane Feather
She jumped when the countess barked, “Temple. I thought Miss Peabody was leaving.”
“What is that curious sound?” Mr. Radwinter asked.
“What sound?” the countess demanded. “I hear nothing.”
There was a bang, and then the sound of baying mixed with yips and barks and the patter of dozens of paws. It was growing closer.
“Oh, no,” May said. She rushed into the hall with Temple behind her.
Through the arch between the saloon and the hall rushed a white-and-cream ball of fur. In close pursuit were Puck and Echo, leading a band of happily barking mongrels. The fennec bounded toward May and Temple, saw them at the last moment, and dashed into the Blue Drawing Room. The dogs skittered into a turn and scrambled after it. May and Temple exchanged horrified stares.
“Dear God,” Temple said.
“The poor thing.”
Grabbing her hand, Temple said, “Come on.”
They rushed back into the room in time to see the fennec jump onto the fireplace mantel, toppling delicate porcelain and precious silver. The countess screamed. Aunt Violet screamed, and Mr. Radwinter shouted. Hurtling around the room, the dogs jumped for the fox, but it sprang from the mantel to the top of a tall armoire where it stayed, panting. Puck stood on his hind legs, bounced in place, and barked incessantly. All around him his other hunting fellows wiggled, danced, jumped, and yipped at the same time.
“Stop this,” the countess screamed. “Stop this at once.”
May was busy trying to grab dog collars. “Don’t shout. You’ll only get them more excited.”
Breedlebane, Fidkin, and Small Tom came to help. One by one, she and Temple captured the dogs, and the three men took them away. Once the fennec was caged, Mr. Radwinter was asked to conduct Aunt Violet to her room so that she could lie down.
Temple set the fennec’s cage down on a table beside the fireplace. May removed the shawl she wore fastened to her gown with a brooch and covered the cage with it. Then she and Temple surveyed the ravaged drawing room. The dowager countess was standing in the midst of broken porcelain in front of the fireplace, her whole frame rigid. May reddened at the distaste she met in the woman’s stare. She cast a shamed glance at Temple, but he was smiling at her and appeared not to have noticed his mother.
“Do you know I’ve never seen a more ridiculous sight than that daft springer of yours bouncing in place in front of my armoire on his hind legs like a jack-in-the-box, with his ears flapping, his tongue hanging out, and his nose pointed straight up at that fox.” He leaned toward her and touched the tip of her nose with his finger. “Except perhaps you trying to outrun me and tripping over your own skirt.”
May felt her insides begin to tingle at the look in his eyes. She was warm and cold at the same time, and she just knew she was grinning like a clown.
“Temple!”
May started at the sound of the countess’s hunting-horn voice. Temple raised his eyes to the ceiling before addressing her.
“Yes, Mother?”
“I cannot have that creature in my house.”
“It’s only a fox, Mother.”
The countess closed her eyes for moment before answering. “Not the animal. That creature.” She nodded at May. “Never have I seen such a mannerless, indelicate person. Miss Peabody, I find myself unsurprised that you are, and will no doubt remain, a spinster.”
Silence invaded the Blue Drawing Room. Shame drained the strength from May’s body, and she dared not look at Temple. Spinster. She had been exposed for what she was—unappealing, indecorous, lacking in the gentle ways that Temple so desperately needed to assuage his battered soul. She didn’t dare look at him. She couldn’t bear to see the distaste in his eyes.
“Miss Peabody, you will take yourself out of my house at once,” the countess was saying.
“Mother, shut up.”
May felt her mouth drop open. She looked up to see Temple glare at the countess.
The dowager gasped, then said, “You forget yourself, Temple. It’s all this upset. You need quiet, and peace.”
“Mother, I think you need quiet and peace. I’ll arrange for you to take a house in Spain for the winter. It’s much warmer there.”
The countess was so rigid she began to resemble one of the Corinthian columns on the portico. “And Miss Peabody?”
“She isn’t leaving, Mother, you are.”
“Temple!”
“It’s time for you to dress for luncheon, Mother.”
Without another word, the countess swept out of the room, her head held high. Surprise and confusion robbed May of speech. She clasped her hands and stared at the tips of her boots, all at once afraid to look at Temple.
“Miss Peabody.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Now, may I have a private word?”
May’s head shot up, and she found him standing in front of her, his arms folded over his chest, his eyes glittering.
“I’m sorry about the dogs and the fox. I’ll pay for the damage, although it may take me a while. I really did try to tell you my orphans were coming. I forgot in the confusion when we first met, and after all, you were terribly mean to me.”
“Mélisande, shut up.”
He was coming toward her, and he was looking at her as if he was planning something dangerous. Perhaps he was angry after all. May backed up, but hit the armoire. His arms came down to either side of her and blocked her escape. She tried to duck under his arms, but he captured her wrists and held them against the armoire. His body pressed against hers, and she felt his breath disturb the fine curls at her temple. Then she heard his low, hoarse whisper.
“At last, a private … word.”
The world grew dark as he lowered his mouth to hers. She sank into that hot, misty place to which his touch always sent her. His lips lifted for a moment.
“Mélisande, would you mind very much if I retracted my retraction?”
“What?”
He moved back so that he could see her face. “I’m asking you to marry me, little pea.”
“I will accept if you’ll promise never to call me a pea again.”
“I promise.”
She freed her hands and wrapped them around his neck. Temple lifted her against him and kissed her, but his lips formed an O and he gasped as May heard a ripping sound. She looked down to see Isis sink her claws into Temple’s trouser leg. The black material ripped again as the cat pulled on it and arched her back. This time Temple cursed and snatched the cat by the scruff of her neck. Alarmed, May almost protested, but Temple lifted the cat and stuffed her into the crook of his arm. He stroked her flat little head until she purred.
May watched the two for a while, but her patience gave out. She grabbed Isis and held the cat so that she could look into her blue eyes.
“That’s enough. He’s mine.” She set the cat outside the door.
As she closed the door, the swirling colors of the little green bottle came to mind, and with them, a reminder of her dream, her wish. She’d pursued her dream, and it had come true in an unexpected way. Setting her back to the portal, she took note that that glittering look had returned to Temple’s eyes.
“Now, my lord. You wanted a word in private?”
SUZANNE ROBINSON
SUZANNE ROBINSON is the award-winning author of such bestselling historical romances as The Engagement, Lord of the Dragon, and Lady Dangerous. She is also an acclaimed mystery author under the name Lynda S. Robinson. Don’t miss her thrilling romance The Rescue, on sale now.
EPILOGUE
HE WAS WAITING for her when the girl walked slowly into the village as the faintest gray lightened the eastern horizon. He stood just within the village walls, the dogs pressed to his sides.
The girl stopped beside him. She stroked the nose of the laden donkey and ignored the dogs who sniffed and slobbered around her ankles.
“Where have you been?” he demanded, a taut whisper in the predawn stillness. “I’ve been waiting for t
hree hours. Would you force me to leave you without one last farewell?” His voice was anguished. “The elders have decreed I must be gone by dawn. They will kill me if I’m found within five miles of the village.”
“There was something I had to do,” the girl replied. She raised a hand, pushing it beneath the hood of her cloak to touch the back of her neck, which felt cold and exposed and slightly prickly.
“What have you done?” His voice was suddenly harsh with shock. Roughly he threw back her hood and then stared in dismay. “What have you done?” he repeated. “Your hair … your beautiful hair. What have you done?”
“I sold it.” She smiled suddenly and the solemnity vanished from her face. Her eyes glowed and showed him again in all her joyful beauty the girl he loved, the girl for whose sake he was now banished from his home.
“I sold it for an answer that wasn’t forthcoming.” She lifted her hand and touched his face. “It was foolish of me since I had the answer all along.”
He didn’t understand what she meant. He could think of nothing but the consequences of what she’d done. “What will they say in the village when they see you shorn?” His hands raked through the short jagged silvery cap. “You look like a shaved harlot,” he murmured in distress. “No man will take you to wife with the shaved head of a whore.”
“But will you?”
He stared down at her. “I will not condemn you to share my exile. I have said so.”
“But if you leave me, you will condemn me to the judgment of the elders. As you say, no virgin has a shorn head.” She continued to smile at him, her face radiant with the knowledge that the die was cast. “They will say that the loss of my maiden hair proves that I was not innocent. They will say that I share your guilt, as they suspected all along.”
She hadn’t realized it when she had sought the druid’s help, but the very act of seeking that help had confirmed the only decision she could possibly make. By selling her hair, she had burned her bridges. And some part of her had known exactly what she was doing.
The decision was now irrevocable. She was going with her love into exile. And he could not now refuse her.
“They will be right,” she continued softly. “If there be guilt in loving you, then I am guilty.”
“No,” he whispered. But beneath the syllable of protest and denial stirred the beginning of hope. The beginning of an acknowledgment that there could be another future than the one he faced alone.
He caught her to him, pressing his lips to her broad forehead. He had wanted her to stay safe in the village, to live the life that was her due as the daughter of a chief. He had taken upon himself the punishment for an illicit love, strengthened in his resolve by the conviction that the woman who held his heart must never suffer for his love.
Beyond the walls of the village, denied all kinship support, their prospects were bleak. But as he looked into her smiling eyes and read the strength and power of her love, a surge of optimism thrilled him.
“We will go to the sea,” he said. “I’ve heard it said that seafarers accept strangers into their villages more readily than farmers.”
“I have always wanted to see the sea.” She linked her arm through his, turning with him toward the village gates.
She was smiling to herself, thinking, We will follow the druid’s green bottle down the river and see where it leads us.
A cock crowed its arrogant, jubilant greeting to the morning as the man lifted the girl onto the donkey’s back. She glanced once over her shoulder to the village that was all she knew of the world, then she turned her face to the future that she had chosen.
Let
JANE FEATHER
Capture your heart once again with the third and
final book in her spectacular “Charm Bracelet
Trilogy” …
THE EMERALD SWAN
on sale now
Paris, August 24th, 1572
THE WOMAN STOOD trembling, breathless, on the corner of a narrow fetid lane running up from the river. Her heart was beating so fast every dragging breath was an agony. Her bare feet were bleeding, cut by the jagged stones along the quay, and her thin cloak clung to her back, wet with sweat. Her hair hung limp around her white, terrified face, and she clutched her babies to her, one in each arm, their little faces buried against her shoulders to stifle their cries.
She looked wildly up the lane and saw the first flicker of the pursuing torches. The voices of the mob rose in a shrill shriek of exultation as they surged toward the river. With a sob of anguish, she began to run again, along the river, clutching the babies, who grew heavier with each step. She could hear the footsteps behind her, a thundering pounding of booted feet growing closer. Every breath was an agony, and slowly, inexorably, the despair of resignation deadened her terror. She could not escape. Not even for her babies could she run faster. And the crowd behind her grew, augmented by others who joined the chase simply for the pleasure of it.
With a final gasp of despair, she turned and faced her pursuers, the babies still pressed to her breast. She stood panting, a hart at bay, as the crowd with their mad glittering eyes surrounded her. Every face seemed filled with hatred.
“Abjure … abjure …” The chant was picked up, and the words battered against her like living things. The mob pressed against her, their faces pushed into hers as they taunted her with a salvation that she knew in her heart they would deny her. They were not interested in a convert, they were interested in her blood.
“Abjure … abjure …”
“I will,” she gasped, dropping to her knees. “Don’t hurt my babies … please, I will abjure for my babies. I will say the credo.” She began to babble the Latin words of the Catholic credo, her eyes raised heavenward so that she couldn’t see the hateful faces of the men who would murder her.
The knife, already reddened with Huguenot blood, swiped across her throat even as she stammered to an end. The words were lost in a gurgle as a thin line of blood marked the path of the knife. The line widened like parting lips. The woman fell forward to the cobbles. A baby’s thin wail filled the sudden silence.
“To the Louvre … to the Louvre!” A great cry came over the rooftops and the mob with one thought turned and swept away, taking up the clarion call, “To the Louvre … to the Louvre,” like so many maddened sheep.
The black river flowed as sluggishly as the woman’s congealing blood. Something moved beneath her. One of the babies wriggled, squiggled, wailed as she emerged from the suffocating warmth of her mother’s dead body. With a curious kind of purpose the little creature set off on hands and toetips like a spider, creeping away from the dreadful smell of blood.
Ten minutes passed before Francis found his wife. He broke from the lane, his face white in the sudden moonlight. “Elena!” he whispered as he fell to his knees beside the body. He snatched his wife against his breast, and then gave a great anguished cry that shivered the stillness as he saw the baby on the ground, gazing up at him with almost vacant eyes, her tiny rosebud mouth pursed on a wavering wail, her face streaked with her mother’s blood.
“Sweet Jesus, have mercy,” he murmured, gathering the infant up in the crook of one arm as he continued to hold her mother to his breast. He looked around, his eyes demented with grief. Where was his other daughter? Where was she? Had the murdering rabble spitted her on their knives, as they had done this night to babes all over the city? But if so, where was her body? Had they taken her?
Footsteps sounded behind him and he turned his head with a violent twist, still clinging to the child and his dead wife. His own people raced from the lane toward him, wild-eyed from their own desperate escape from the massacre.
One of the men reached down to take the child from the duke, who yielded her up wordlessly, bringing both arms around his wife, rocking her in soundless grief.
“Milord, we must take milady and the child,” the man with the baby said in an urgent whisper. “They might come back. We can take shelter in the Chatelet if we go q
uickly.”
Francis allowed his wife to fall into his lap, her head resting on his knee. He closed her open eyes and gently lifted her hand. A gold pearl-encrusted bracelet of strange serpentine design encircled the slender wrist. A single charm swung from the delicate strands and his tears fell onto the brilliant emerald cut into the perfect undulating shape of a swan. He unclasped the bracelet, his betrothal gift to Elena, and thrust it into his doublet against his heart, then he raised his wife in his arms and staggered to his feet with his burden.
The baby wailed, a long-drawn-out cry of hunger and dismay, and her bearer hoisted her up against his shoulder and turned to follow the man and his murdered wife as they vanished into the dark maw of the lane leading away from the river.
Dover, England, 1591
IT WAS THE most extraordinary likeness.
Gareth Harcourt pushed his way to the front of the crowd watching the troupe of performers who had set up their makeshift stage on the quay of Dover harbor.
Her eyes were the same cerulean blue, her complexion the same thick cream, and her hair was exactly the same shade of darkest brown, right down to the deep reddish glints caught by the sun. There the resemblance ended, however. For whereas Maude’s dark hair hung in a cloud of curls teased daily from curling papers and tongs, the acrobat’s crowning glory was cut in a short straight fringed bob that owed more to a pudding basin than the more sophisticated tools of feminine coiffure.
Gareth watched with considerable enjoyment as the tiny figure performed on a very narrow beam resting on two poles at some considerable height from the ground. She was treating the six inch width as if it were solid ground, turning cartwheels, walking on her hands, flipping backward in a dazzling series of maneuvers that drew gasps of appreciation from the audience.
Maude’s frame was similarly slender, Gareth reflected, but there was a difference. Maude was pale and thin and undeveloped. The acrobat, standing on her hands, her bright orange skirt falling over her head, revealed firm muscular calves encased for decency’s sake in skin-tight leather leggings, and he could see the strength in her arms as they supported her slight weight. She released one hand and waved merrily, before catching the beam again with both hands and swinging sideways, tumbling over and over the beam, her hands changing position at lightning speed, her skirt a blur of orange as she turned herself into something resembling a Catherine wheel.