She preened, she actually preened. If he’d had the energy, he would have laughed.
She nearly sang it out. “You were as wild as I was, Nicholas.”
His eyes crossed. He blinked. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps. I suppose you wish me to get myself together, don’t you?”
“Yes. I just looked over at the journals, and I swear to you, they’ve moved closer to us.”
Nicholas sincerely hoped that Captain Jared’s ghost hadn’t nudged them closer since that would mean the old boy had gotten himself a ghostly eyeful. He raised his hand and lightly touched his fingertips to her lips. “I love your mouth.”
She ran her tongue over her bottom lip and he swelled, ready to take her down again. He swelled even more when she looked down at him.
No, he had to get a grip on himself. At least she was wearing her chemise—how did that happen? But a chemise didn’t matter since he was a young man and he was newly married and—he took her down, both of them laughing wildly, then there were only whispers and deep sighs. This time, he managed to work her chemise up to her neck.
When he buried his face against her breasts, and moaned deeply, all those dark places inside himself that had been empty far too long, bubbled and filled, perhaps even overflowed. It was astounding.
When he handed her his handkerchief, she walked into the trees, giving him a quick smile over her shoulder. Her wild curling red hair tangled about her shoulders. He lay back and closed his eyes, grinning like a fool, he couldn’t help it. When she came back, her chemise was in place again.
He dressed himself, then assisted her with the buttons on her wrinkled gown, even rubbed at the grass stains, and knew the laundress would know well what had happened to the mistress’s gown.
“It is two hours after noon, Nicholas, only the second day of our union, and you have already loved me three times.” She gave him a huge grin. “And I loved you.”
“I have always liked the number four. Would you—”
She raised her face to the cloud-tumbled sky. “I am stalwart, I am focused, I will not let you distract yet again. Ah, but you are beautiful, Nicholas.”
He had to clear his throat three times before his brain was focused enough to read from the first ancient journal. The handwriting was spidery and barely legible, the years had so scarred and faded the ink.
“This entry is dated the same year as his marriage to the Wyverly heiress,” he said.
“Goodness, you remember that?”
“No,” he said absently, “Captain Vail wrote it here.”
“Have you already read the journals, Nicholas?’
“Just a few pages here and there. In this first one, he chats about what was happening at the time—how his decision to wed the heiress was a good one because his pockets were so empty they were dragging the ground. His creditors were six feet behind him, and closing fast. You will like this: She is eager, a fine thing for a virgin of seventeen, and even though she has an arse the size of a cow’s—”
“What a nasty thing to write, particularly when she saved him.”
“Yes, very true,” Nicholas said. “He goes on to detail the actual building of Wyverly—at great boring length, I might add—and the workmen he’d like to kick in the arse. Ah, he appears to have an obsession with this rear part. All right, here we go. Now he writes about what happened to him the previous year when he lost everything in the Mediterranean, his ship, his cargo, his crew, yet he was saved. He writes, I knew something wasn’t right. I was lying on my back and I couldn’t move. A single light shone directly onto my face, but it wasn’t a strong light so it didn’t blind me. The light was strange, all soft and vague, and it seemed to pulse like a beating heart.
. . . I don’t know who or what this being is, but I indeed promised to pay my debt so that I would continue living.
. . . A young girl appeared in front of me, her hair streaked with sunlight, loosely braided down her back, eyes blue as an Irish stream, freckles across her small nose, a sturdy little girl with narrow hands and feet. She threw her head back and she sang.
“What did she sing, Nicholas?”
He saw that she knew well what the little girl sang.
He read:
I dream of beauty and sightless night
I dream of strength and fevered might
I dream I’m not alone again
But I know of his death and her grievous sin.
He looked up at her. Neither said a word. He knew she also realized she was the little girl. Rosalind whispered, “Then what does he write?”
A child’s voice, sweet and true, it called forth feelings I hadn’t known were in me, feelings to break my heart. But those strange words—what did they mean? What male died? What female’s grievous sin?
. . . She spoke again; this time her words rang clear in my brain: I am your debt.
She said slowly, “I don’t suppose we can escape it now. I was the little girl and whoever, whatever it was who demanded Captain Jared pay this debt—whatever this debt is—I’m it.”
37
They gathered up the remains of their picnic and rode silently back to Wyverly. Nicholas felt the fear in her, just as he felt it in his own gut. He didn’t like it and sought to distract her. He spoke of their tenant farmers and the repairs he was making on their cottages, the new equipment he’d provided for their fields. He was nearly hoarse from talking so much when at last they were sitting again in the library, both of them looking over at the earl’s chair. It remained perfectly still, and hopefully vacant.
Rosalind said, “I wonder where our ghost goes when he’s not in this room.”
“Don’t be afraid,” he said abruptly.
“That isn’t possible,” Rosalind said. “I’ve never felt such fear, not since I was eight years old, woke up to hear I’d nearly died, and couldn’t remember who I was. Worse yet, I still don’t know who I am. I only know I am a debt.” She slammed her fist on the chair arm. “What bloody debt?”
Suddenly, one of Captain Jared’s songs was clear in her mind. She recited the verses slowly aloud.At last the girl comes home
A girl who never belonged
To her is owed the debt
Well met, my lad, well met.
The little girl nearly died
The monster nearly won
The debt was paid by another
But the race must still be run.
How could she remember the words so clearly, so easily? She looked up to see Nicholas studying her, his fingers steepled.
“Yes,” he said, “I remember them as well. It all began when a being whose identity we don’t know, whose identity Captain Jared never learned either, a being who saved his life, took him to this unidentified place, told him he had to pay this debt because, as this being told him, I have sworn not to meddle. It is a curse that I must obey my own word.”
“What being would promise not to meddle, Nicholas? That is what a magic being does—it meddles, it plays, or it devastates. And I am the debt, yes, I will accept that though I was also seemingly the debt over two hundred years ago, the debt Captain Jared was to have paid, and how can that be? Who was he to pay a magic debt?
“I don’t know anything of a debt, I don’t even know who I am. All I know is that wretched song. It’s always been inside me, you know it was the first thing out of my mouth when I finally began to speak after Uncle Ryder brought me home.
“I don’t know who the monster is in the song. Obviously it was Uncle Ryder who saved me. The race must still be run. So it’s still there, the monster, the mystery, the need to pay the debt, whatever it is.
“And then after you came, we found Sarimund’s book, the Rules of the Pale. Or rather Grayson did. What does that wretched book have to do with anything? Why can I read it and not you or Grayson? Who cares about this red Lasis who kills the Tibers in fire pits? None of this makes any bloody sense and I’ll tell you, Nicholas, I’m very sick of all of it.”
She jumped to her feet, grabbe
d a pillow, and threw it at the old earl’s chair. The very heavy chair tilted a bit, then settled again.
“Oh, go away, you miserable old fright! I didn’t strike the chair hard enough to make it move. I am a normal female person now, not some sort of planted dream from hundreds of years ago. Am I a wizard’s debt, for God’s sake? A wizard who’s sworn not to meddle?”
The chair tilted again, then settled.
They both stared at it. Rosalind growled deep in her throat and threw the other pillow at Nicholas. He snatched it out of the air six inches from his face. “Sit down, sweetheart. It’s time—” His brain closed down a moment. No, he had to say this, he had to tell her the truth now. No choice.
“Time for what?”
“It’s time I was completely honest with you. It’s time I told you who I am and what I know of this.”
Something was very wrong here, and she knew she really didn’t want to know. But there was no hope for it. Her heart jumped, then begin to thud, slow hard strokes. She sat beside him and clutched his arm. She said, her mouth so dry she could barely form the words, “What do you mean, who I am? You actually know something? Tell me who you really are. Tell me what is going on, Nicholas.”
He took her hand in his, began stroking her long fingers. He stared into the empty fireplace as he said, “I was eleven years old when I first dreamed of you. You were a little girl, skinny, your glorious red hair in braids, the line of freckles scattered across your nose. You had the sweetest face. Then you sang your song to me. After you’d sung, you fell silent and looked at me, sad and empty, and you said, I am your debt.
“I finally told my grandfather about the dream after I’d dreamed it a half dozen times. Always the same, always your face, your voice, that haunting sad song.
“To my astonishment, Grandfather told me he’d had the same dream as a boy but it had simply stopped when he’d been about sixteen, but he’d never forgotten it or you or the sense of failure. He said his father had told him the same thing, but he’d never understood the debt either, and his dream had stopped also when he’d been a young man. It was as if, my grandfather said, whoever or whatever had brought on the dreams had given up. My grandfather supposed it went all the way back, although exactly how far he didn’t know, and it always came to the eldest son and he always dreamed that dream, but then, as he gained years, it simply stopped. But not the feelings of loss, the feelings of something vital left undone.
“I asked him about my father. Had he dreamed the dream? My grandfather told me my father was the second son and he denied any such dream, as did his older brother, the first-born son.
“And so it came to me. Then he recited the words of the song, looked at me sadly. ‘I never did a thing, Nicholas, never did a thing because I didn’t know what to do, like all the men in our line, I suppose. But now it is your turn. It is up to you to pay the debt, if the debt finally appears.’ He told me he believed the little girl had somehow been out of time, and surely that was beyond a man’s comprehension, but he knew she would appear when it was right for her to appear, and not before.
“Perhaps, he told me, now it was time and she would be there for me, but in truth, he didn’t know, though he was hopeful.”
Nicholas fell silent.
“Did the dream fade away when you were a young man?”
He shook his head. “No, and that is how I knew I was the Vail to pay the debt. I dreamed the identical dream perhaps twice a month. After I met you I dreamed it every night, until we wed. But not last night.”
Rosalind said slowly, “Perhaps this all ties together with the Rules of the Pale. It was your grandfather who told you about Sarimund the wizard and Rennat the Titled Wizard of the East. I dreamed of Rennat, and he told me I would come into my own and to obey the Rules of the Pale, and he kept repeating it.”
He stared at her. “Rennat actually appeared to you? He told you you would come into your own? Those were his words?”
She nodded, searching his face. “So the Rules of the Pale must fit in all this mess somehow. What is this all about, Nicholas? Who am I?—What am I?”
Nicholas smoothed his thumb over her palm. “I kept dreaming about you, the little girl with the rich red hair and eyes as blue as the summer sky, and the beautiful haunting voice. I knew someday, Rosalind, knew all the way to my soul that I would find you and I would save you since you were now my debt. It was time, you see, it was the right time, and something deep inside me knew it was the right time. And so I came for you.”
“To pay Captain Jared’s debt?”
“Yes.”
“You came to London, you saw me, recognized me, married me. A debt is one thing, but—why did you marry me, Nicholas?”
Not a single word came to his brain.
“You didn’t succumb to the coup de foudre, as the French say, did you? You did see me across the ballroom, but your heart didn’t fall to your feet, did it? You said you recognized me, Nicholas. And you came to me. Why didn’t you simply tell me who you were, what this was all about?”
“I couldn’t very well tell you when I had no idea what I was to do. What would I have said to you? Besides, whatever I could have said, you would have believed me mad. Your Uncle Ryder certainly would have put his boot to my back and kicked me out.”
“So you believed so strongly in this debt business that you married a girl you didn’t even know?”
38
“There was more to it than that, Rosalind.”
“Yes, there was the Rules of the Pale. And Sarimund and your grandfather—who just happened to have another sort of Rules of the Pale written by this Sarimund character. Now that’s a universe of madness in itself, isn’t it? You must have been so excited when it turned out I could read the bloody thing—but the Rules of the Pale didn’t tell us anything, nor did the scribblings of Sarimund that your grandfather had in his possession. He couldn’t read it either. That’s what you told me.”
“No, he couldn’t. And it drove him to near madness. The hours he spent trying to decipher it. I can remember him sitting up until late into the night studying the code, trying to figure it out.”
“But he couldn’t, because it isn’t really a code. It’s magic, some sort of enchantment.”
“Yes, perhaps so. Who knows?”
“So since I’m the only one who can read the bloody thing, I must be magic as well. Do you agree?” She laughed over his silence, an ugly sound because it was filled with fear and something else he couldn’t identify. “Oh, yes, I’m so magic I was nearly beaten to death. I’m so magic I can’t even remember who I am or how I could possibly be anyone’s debt.” She jumped to her feet and paced the length of the library. “That visit of Rennat the Titled Wizard of the East in my dream—and what does that ridiculous title mean anyway?—I’m to come into my own. How would he know that? Why did he come to me? What does he want me to do?”
“Perhaps Rennat was the wizard or being who saved Captain Jared’s life. After all, he isn’t a simple plain wizard, he’s the Titled Wizard of the East. Perhaps he also caused the storm, the being who brought the huge wave that destroyed Captain Jared’s ship and killed all his men. He set it all up so Captain Jared would believe he did owe him a great debt.”
“You believe Rennat brought the storm? That bespeaks a power neither of us can comprehend, Nicholas. Could a wizard do that, even a wizard with a bloody title?”
“I don’t want to believe it but there doesn’t seem to be a choice for me. It also means that this is a very powerful being, if this being did indeed bring Captain Jared Vail under his thumb. It can only mean that Jared Vail was the only man to pay this debt. If it wasn’t Rennat, was it Belenus, the wizard Sarimund wrote about at Blood Rock? Or Taranis, the Dragon of the Sallas Pond? He was the god, after all, supposedly immortal and all-powerful. Is that why we were led to the Rules of the Pale? But again, why Grayson and not one of us?”
She walked over to the big mahogany desk, pausing a moment by the ghost’s chair. S
he leaned down to say into an invisible ear, “You might try to be of some assistance here. A song perhaps that isn’t lewd, a song that really means something.”
There was nothing from the chair.
Rosalind sat behind the desk in the overlarge leather chair. “Let me get a piece of foolscap and a pencil. I want to list out all the questions. Then we will try to go about answering them one at a time.” She sat down and began writing. He watched her silently until at last she looked up at him. She said very precisely, “The question at the very top of my list, Nicholas, is why did you marry me? You are the only one who knows the answer to that question. Tell me now.”
His brain, working at a furious speed until this moment, shut down. Nothing at all came out of his mouth.
She said, her voice utterly expressionless, “Very well, I don’t really blame you for keeping quiet. Your answer wouldn’t be excessively gratifying to a new bride, would it? So allow me to answer it for you. You married me because you knew if you were ever to figure out this debt business, figure out what exactly was owed to me, figure out exactly what you had to do in order to rid yourself of the wretched dream, and this immense sense of obligation you feel, that the men of your family have felt for many generations, then I had to be close to you, I would have to be tied to you. Yes, I can understand that you would be terrified I would get away from you.
“So as I see it, you married me because you felt you had to.” And she wrote it down.
He lunged to his feet. “Bloody hell, no!”
She looked him dead in the eye. He was pale, his eyes blacker than midnight. Slowly, at last, he nodded, and his black eyes were now desolate, his face leached of color. “Yes, that is what happened.”
Rosalind slowly rose, the pencil still in her hand. “So much has happened since I met you, so many inexplicable things. I’ll wager it’s because the two main players are finally together. Do you remember I asked you once if your grandfather was a wizard and you told me you didn’t know? But then you told me he knew things, guessed things that no one else would know?”
Catherine Coulter the Sherbrooke Series Novels 6-10 (9781101562123) Page 149