The Master gave the order and the tables and benches were swept aside to make space for the highlight of the evening – the Harvest Ball.
Gerda and her golden gown were soon hidden among a crowd of eager young men, while other couples lined up for a country dance. Margareta longed to be among them, but her father would never allow her to dance, because there was no knowing when her siren side might take over and decide the poor boy needed to die instead of dance with her.
So Margareta watched and kept Penelope company, for no man would think of asking the widow of a saint to do something as frivolous as dancing, or so Penelope said.
"How fares young Kay?" Penelope asked.
Margareta pointed at the boy, who sat moodily in the corner with his ale.
Penelope clapped her hands. "You’ll be taking me out on the boat for sure. I hope we’ll have fine weather tomorrow, because I fancy a trip out on the ocean!"
So would Margareta, she admitted to herself. To be out on the waves, breathing in the salt spray and listening to the swish of the hull cutting smoothly through the sea, instead of the smoky air in the hall full of music and shouting and the stomp of booted feet.
"Lady, would you do me the honour of joining me in this dance?" the man to Margareta’s right asked, extending her hand.
Margareta shook her head and Penelope piped up, "The Lady Margareta is under a vow of silence until her brothers return."
"But that won’t stop you dancing, will it, my lady?" the man persisted. "Your father said –"
"Her father wants his sons to return just as much as Lady Margareta," Penelope said smoothly, cutting the man off.
Margareta dared to look into his eyes. They lit up with his eager grin, as if he truly didn’t believe she could refuse him. She lowered her gaze, frowned, then shook her head emphatically.
"Meg, be a good girl. Go dance with the king’s envoy," the Master ordered, stabbing a figure finger at the dance floor.
She shot her father a look of surprise. Didn’t he care what happened to the ambassador? What if something happened and her true nature took over and…
"Dance, girl!" the Master commanded.
Unable to refuse, Margareta laid her hand on the envoy’s proffered arm, and allowed herself to be led onto the dance floor. She shot Penelope an imploring look, begging her friend to keep an eye on her thoughts and that of the ambassador.
Margareta glimpsed Penelope’s grave nod before she and the ambassador were whirled away into the organised chaos that was a country dance.
Thirteen
The moment she stepped into the great hall, Erik knew his search was over before it had even started. She was here – the girl in his dreams. Or at least he thought she was.
He didn’t remember her having curves like that, or perhaps he’d been too young to notice. Her dark hair was hidden mostly under a veil, but a rebellious tendril had escaped. She moved like a stately lady, which indeed she was, if she was the Master’s daughter. The grey-clad widow at her side looked like her companion or her chaperone, Erik wasn’t sure.
The girl sat beside him, close enough to reach out and touch, though he didn’t dare. She shared a bench with her chaperone, he judged, when the widow shot him a shrewd glance that seemed to size up his very soul.
He met the widow’s gaze, willing her to believe that his intentions toward the girl were honourable. How could they not be? He’d come here to find her, and here she was, not a foot from him!
Erik scarcely tasted a bite of his meal as he struggled to keep his breathing even. He wanted to blurt out everything to her, everything that had kept him away for the last six years and what brought him here now, but every time he tried to say something to her, his voice died in his throat. What did a man say to the woman of his dreams, when he saw her for the first time in six years?
And so he waited for her to break the silence. A silence he should not have noticed, amid the noise of a hall full of people making merry to celebrate the harvest, and yet the silence stretched in his mind until it lay like a great gulf between them.
The tables were cleared away to make space for dancing, and Erik’s heart leaped. A ball! At home in his father’s court, the ladies would form up and dance, spinning around one another like flower petals blown by the wind, before coming together as the complex pattern drew them in at the end of the dance.
Erik held his breath for a moment in eager anticipation as the first girls stepped out into the cleared space. But they were followed soon after by men, forming up in couples like no ball Erik had ever been to. Only then did it strike him that none of those present were nobles – the hall was full of common people, dressed in such bright colours that it hadn’t occurred to him to look more closely at their clothes. This was a prosperous place indeed if even the peasants’ clothes were as coloured as those of his father’s courtiers.
He waited for the girl beside him to join the dance, but she remained resolutely in her seat. No partner, perhaps?
Before he’d truly thought the words through, he blurted out a clumsy invitation for her to dance with him.
Her eyes met his – two blue jewels that seemed to hold the depths of the ocean inside them. But the one thing that they didn’t hold was any spark of recognition. She shook her head, which made the grey widow pipe up in the girl’s support.
Erik’s heart ached at the thought that this wasn’t the girl he was looking for – how could she not recognise him, when he knew her instantly? – but his ever-optimistic imagination ventured that if she had changed in the intervening time, so had he, and it would take time for her to remember him. Just because he hadn’t been able to forget the shipwreck and how she’d saved him from it, didn’t mean she had been similarly affected. Perhaps she had endured many shipwrecks, and rescued many helpless boys, and there was nothing special about him at all.
No, he’d felt it then and he knew it now. There was something between them, a connection that once made could not be broken. He felt it in his bones.
The grey widow would not stop him from dancing with her.
Erik countered her arguments as to why the girl shouldn’t dance, and just as he felt he had the upper hand, a male voice cut in.
Master Nicholas ordered the girl to dance with him.
The girl’s eyes widened, and she looked affronted at her father. She was no dutiful daughter, this one. If not for her vow of silence, the girl would have given her father a piece of her undoubtedly strong mind.
The Master either ignored or dismissed her rebellious glance, and repeated his command.
With an expression that said her father would rue this later, the girl rose gracefully, every inch a veritable queen as she took Erik’s hastily proffered arm.
The dancers parted and bowed to allow them to take their place at the head of the formation. The musicians faltered, then began anew, hesitantly at first, then more boldly as the girl stepped across the divide to place her palm against Erik’s.
Heat flared between his hand and hers, surprising him. She should have been cold, icy, not warm to the touch. Perhaps he was wrong, and she wasn’t…
Deep blue eyes sucked at his soul as they whirled among the other dancers, assessing him as frankly as though she were the Master himself.
Erik stumbled, forgetting the steps, nearly sending them crashing into another couple.
Her arms grew rigid around him, steering him bodily away from the others for all the world as though she had the strength to lift him off his feet. Or pluck him from the ocean into a boat.
Now it was Erik’s turn to stare at her. Either she was, or she wasn’t.
They moved apart, as required by the steps of the dance, and Erik was forced to partner three other girls before he could approach her again.
"Do you remember me?" he asked urgently. "That day in the water?"
She grimaced as he trod on her foot.
Erik opened his mouth to apologise, but she brought her slippered heel down so hard on his instep all that ca
me out was a pained yelp.
She broke free of his hold, weaving expertly through the dancers until she reached the edge of the room. An imperious wave of her hand brought a servant with a goblet. The girl took the goblet, turned on her bone-breaking heel, and strode out of the great hall, with the grey widow hard on her heels.
Disappointment welled up in Erik’s throat. If he hadn’t been so clumsy, she might have answered his question. Then he’d know if she truly was the right one.
With considerably less grace than the girl, Erik made his way through the dancers and back to the dais, where he slumped to the bench beside Master Nicholas’s chair.
Gesturing for a servant to fill his cup with wine, Erik said to Master Nicholas, "Your daughter is certainly a very spirited girl."
Master Nicholas drained his cup. "That she is. Break her, and she’s yours. Consider her a gift."
Erik’s mouth dropped open, and he hastened to close it. Break her? She would outlast the strongest granite, Erik was certain. For a wave might break against a rock, but no man could master the ocean. Least of all him.
"My father would welcome a marriage alliance between his kingdom and yours," Erik managed to say. He bowed to the Master and bade him a good night before heading up to his chambers.
It wasn’t until he was alone in bed that Erik realised he hadn’t even asked for her name.
Fourteen
The moment the door to the great hall closed behind Penelope, Margareta slowed her steps. Her feet hurt after being stomped on by that boor. What had possessed him to ask her to dance when he was so abysmal at dancing, and he didn’t even know the steps?
The water in the ewer splashed over the side with the force of the waves Margareta’s fury had created. She forced herself to calm down, at least a little.
"From the moment he entered the room, he fell under your spell," Penelope said softly. "He could think of no one and nothing else but you."
That made him no different to any other man present tonight, Margareta knew. The lure of a siren was almost impossible to resist, which was why she’d refused to dance with him. What had her father been thinking, telling her to dance with him? If she killed some king’s ambassador, there could be war. Already she seethed at his touch.
"I didn’t read your father’s thoughts, so I don’t know the answer to that," Penelope replied. "I was too busy keeping an eye on you and your lover boy."
She would never take that boor as her lover, Margareta fumed. His thoughts had undoubtedly been filled with all the things he dreamed of doing to her if he could get her alone and naked. Margareta’s money was on him being the forceful sort, who dreamed of pinning her to a bed beneath his weight and forcing himself between her legs. Marginally better than the ones who delighted in the dream of forcing her to her knees to pleasure him with her mouth.
"Neither of those," Penelope said cheerfully. "His thoughts were quite refreshing, really. Yes, they were of you, but mostly he focussed on your face. And the light was sort of blue, like you were under water. There’s something different about him. Not that it really matters. You probably won’t see him again. He’s here on some sort of quest, but he keeps those thoughts hidden. At least, he did last night, when you were there to distract him." Penelope dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Judging by the tone of his thoughts, he’d make a more attentive lover than most men. He was genuinely sorry when he stepped on your feet."
Not as sorry as Margareta intended to make him if he ever touched her feet again, she resolved grimly.
Penelope laughed. "I’m sure you’ll think of some truly diabolical torture for the man. You can tell me what you’ve decided in the morning. I am going to return to my chambers, where I hope the sisters have managed to get Melitta to sleep, and where I intend to do the same."
Margareta wished her friend a silent good night. When she was certain Penelope was far enough away, Margareta left her room and headed for the beach. A swim in the cool water would do her good. She could dive down deep and change the currents to her heart’s content until she felt better. Damn her father for putting her too close to that man. It was almost as though he wanted her to kill the ambassador.
No, surely not.
Fifteen
By the following morning, Margareta was back to her usual sunny self as she sat in the brightly lit bower with Penelope. As had become their custom, Penelope worked on her weaving, while Margareta busied herself copying some of the older, crumbling manuscripts from the library before they became entirely unreadable.
Father often commented that writing was a man’s job, and not suitable for a lady. The priory had a group of monks whose sole occupation was to illuminate the manuscripts they found in the library, as Margareta knew well, but she’d watched the monks at their work, and it left a lot to be desired. Oh, their books were beautiful enough, written in lovely letters and illustrated with the most exquisite pictures, but for every manuscript they copied, another dozen crumbled to dust, they were so slow. Completing a single page could take days, the way the monks did it, and on her father’s death, this library, like all of Beacon Isle, would be hers. And she did not want to lose any of the texts it contained.
So, while the monks made beautiful books, she collected the scrolls they left behind, and transcribed what she could decipher. Her pages were plain but readable, which was more than she could say about the originals, and if the monks wanted to turn her work into beautiful books, at least they’d still have the text from the source to go by, instead of it being lost altogether.
One winter, when the harbour had completely iced over and kept all the ships away for weeks, Margareta had run out of ink. Bored beyond belief, she’d undertaken to reorganise the library. Through the centuries, the books and scrolls had been placed on shelves based on the date they were bought or last read. That meant the earliest scrolls had crumbled together into indecipherable fragments that Margareta lacked the patience to piece together, but it also appeared that some of the older scrolls had been removed from their original shelves and shoved back into pigeonholes which were already occupied by more recent manuscripts, making a mess that had only worsened through the centuries.
Two days after she’d finished her Herculean task, the harbour ice had finally cracked and more ink had arrived.
Margareta had intended to write a document, summarising her filing system so that anyone could easily find what they sought, but in the course of her cleaning, she’d found so many scrolls in need of copying before their contents disappeared altogether that she’d had other priorities for her time. Even now, she fought against time to preserve all of them.
Most days, she was fascinated by what she read. Stories about wars fought in lands she’d never heard of, with exotic names and all sorts of strange animals, or accounts of men and events she couldn’t even begin to understand. Senates and votes and pharaohs and all manner of strange words came up in these manuscripts.
Today’s scroll tried her patience. Not only had the writer failed to put spaces between the Latin words so that the reader might know where one word ended and the next began, but the words themselves left a foul taste in her mouth. The unknown writer who had first penned the words believed that all the ills of the world could be cured if only husbands controlled their wives, who were apparently all violent, uncontrollable creatures. So either they could be controlled, or they couldn’t, Margareta fumed. She was tempted to drop this scroll in the fire and be done with it. A violent, uncontrollable creature…why, she hadn’t attacked anyone yet!
The servant who entered the room was a welcome interruption.
"Mistress, the Master asks for some scrolls from the library, which he says only you can find."
Margareta glanced at Penelope.
Penelope waved her away. "Go, help your father. I’m poor company anyway. One moment, I am so close to getting this cloth right, and the next…it falls apart and I must try again. If I hadn’t seen that finished piece of velvet with my own eyes, I’
d swear it wasn’t possible. Perhaps I should stick to silk."
Margareta smiled. She knew Penelope would never give up. The woman was as gifted with a needle as she was with a loom, and if anyone could create a new cloth by herself, it was Penelope.
"Bring back something interesting this time, instead of that dry old history scroll. Knights and dragons and…violent, uncontrollable creatures," Penelope called after Margareta.
Margareta chuckled silently to herself. These six years of silence would have been impossible but for Penelope’s mind-reading talents. As she marched purposefully through the corridors of her father’s house and into the priory, Margareta resolved to deal with this errand as quickly as possible, because she knew exactly which book to bring back to share with Penelope.
Sixteen
A servant brought Erik breakfast, along with the welcome message that Master Nicholas had not only granted his request to use the library today, but he’d given him an assistant to help him navigate their collection of books. Erik was under no illusions that the assistant wouldn’t report his every move back to the Master, but it was of little concern. He could easily hide his father’s mission under the cover of his own project. Master Nicholas would think him crazy, which he undoubtedly was, and leave him to his own devices.
Erik wolfed down his breakfast, dressed and demanded to be shown the way to the famous library. The maidservant lost no time in leading the way – Erik had trouble keeping up with the girl as she trotted through the richly decorated passageways. It wasn’t until they reached the bare corridor that marked the start of the priory that she slowed down. Erik thought he heard her breathe a sigh of relief as she weaved through the monks. Almost as though she feared walking through the corridors of the house proper. Or was he the one who scared her?
The girl abruptly stopped, then spun on her heel to stand beside the doorway instead of passing through it. She dropped a deep curtsey. "The library, sir." She dashed off before he could thank her.
Silence: Little Mermaid Retold (Romance a Medieval Fairytale series Book 5) Page 4