The Maiden's Hand

by Susan Wiggs

  Although Oliver put little stock in stargazing and soothsaying, Juliana had always maintained that the woman called Zara had once tapped into her soul and foretold events that shaped her life.

  “’Tis you!” he said in an astonished whisper, abandoning Romany for English. “But how—”

  “One of your own father’s ships brought me after…” Zara, too, switched to English, spoken with a broad, guttural accent. She looked into the heart of the fire, and reflected flames danced with misty memories in her eyes. “After Czar Ivan’s men killed my husband and made slaves of my children.”

  “Ah, you poor woman!” With a catch in her voice, Lark put down her bowl and reached across Oliver, grasping Zara’s hands.

  The Gypsy woman took in her breath on a hiss, as if Lark’s touch had burned her.

  “I’m sorry,” said Lark. “I didn’t mean to hurt you—”

  “Hush. Do not move.”

  “What have I done?” Lark asked. She caught her lower lip in her teeth and dropped one shoulder as if bracing herself for a blow.

  Zara leaned forward, her eyes keen with fascination, the strange star on her cheek shining in the firelight. She turned Lark’s hand over in her own, spreading it out, tracing her slender finger along the palm. “It is you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You are one of the three.” With a jerk of her head, she motioned Oliver away.

  A powerful tension seemed to pulse in the air and flow across the bond between the two women.

  “I still don’t understand,” said Lark. “What three?”

  “I saw your fate before you were made,” Zara said. “It was on a night of fire in Novgorod. Three women. Three fates flung like seeds upon the wind. The circle was begun before you were born, and will endure long after you are gone. You are but a part, a ripple in the water.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because of vows that flow from a young man’s lips.” Zara took Oliver’s hand and linked it with Lark’s. The Gypsy woman stood, looking wholly refreshed, and wandered off to the musicians.

  Feeling intrigued yet unsettled, Oliver extracted his hand from Lark’s. “Wine,” he muttered, and brightened. “This calls for wine! Let us vow, Lark, to drink and make merry.”

  Lark pushed the stew around in the clay bowl. Apparently she had lost her appetite. “What do you suppose she meant?”

  Oliver shrugged. He did not enjoy the vague, prickly feeling at the back of his neck. “Perhaps it is the way an old woman enlarges her own importance. The poor soul has no more family. ’Tis a sad thing to feel useless, and so perhaps she makes prophecies to prove her worth.”

  “As a Christian, I can but agree,” Lark said. “Still, she gave me such an odd feeling when we touched.”

  Oliver laughed. “To you, all touching is odd, sweetheart.” He ran a teasing finger down her cheek and tickled her ear. She gave a little cry and drew away, and he laughed again. “See? You squeak and squawk like a hen for the stewpot.”

  She sniffed and turned her attention to the Gypsies sharing London gossip. They possessed a wealth of it, for in their travels they had learned to become both open-eared and unobtrusive.

  “The she-king is said to be desperate for an heir.” Rodion uncorked a flask of plum wine, took a drink and passed it on.

  Jillie cupped her hands around her mouth and said loudly, “One of Queen Mary’s advisers even consulted Zara to divine Her Majesty’s chances of having a child.”

  Oliver gave the flask to Lark. “You need this, my dear, for you’ve gone quite pale.”

  “I don’t often find myself privy to treasonous talk,” she whispered. Then she took an impressively long drink of the plum wine.

  “Tis said,” Rodion continued, “that Queen Mary is conspiring to steal someone’s newborn babe. Fact is, they arrested a tailor’s wife for saying another lady’s child would be named the queen’s own.”

  Lark nearly choked on a mouthful of wine. Oliver patted her back until the spell passed.

  “I don’t believe that for an instant,” Oliver felt obliged to say.

  “Nor do I,” said a Gypsy man. “For all that she is a sickly, bitter and ill-advised woman, the queen adheres to strict principles.”

  “Pity the same is not true of her chief minister, Bishop Bonner,” Rodion said. At the mention of Bonner’s name, his listeners tucked their thumbs and crossed their fingers. Old Maida clutched at the rope of white garlic hanging from her belt.

  A tambour rattled suggestively. The mood of the gathering lightened as if a pall had been lifted from their midst. Laughter erupted, and people stood up, clapping raised hands.

  “I don’t suppose you dance,” Oliver said.

  “Of course not,” Lark retorted.

  “Would it disturb you if I did?” he asked, jumping to his feet.

  “Would it stop you if I said aye?” she fired back.

  Disagreeable stick, he thought, walking away from her. Why did he let her bother him? Laughing, he joined hands with the Gypsies forming a circle.

  As he took up the whirling motion of the round dance, he let the rhythm sweep him back to the summer-gilt days of his boyhood. Thanks to his stepmother, he had learned to love the ways of the Romany people. They cared only for the moment, never fretting about what the morrow would bring. Certainly they never wrung their hands about the fate of their immortal souls.

  Bare Gypsy feet thumped upon the trampled ground. The inner circle was comprised of women, and facing them were the men, forming a circle of their own. They never touched their partners yet moved with such harmony that the men and women seemed to be joined in some primal way. The shadowy rhythm suggested the music of love played between two bodies.

  Oliver tried to focus his attention on the Gypsy girl vying for his attention. She was as dark and sweet as a ripe cherry. She did not cage herself in busked corsets or stays but decked her body in a loose, low-cut blouse and colorful skirts.

  Even so, Oliver was shocked to discover that he could not summon the easy, earthy desire he usually felt for women. A cold horror seized him. Perhaps this was the beginning of the end. Perhaps this lack of passion was the first herald of his inevitable march toward an early death.

  No. Sidestepping his dance partner, he glanced over his shoulder at Lark. She sat clutching the skin wine flask. Her face held a most gratifying look of shock and yearning.

  His blood began to heat. Lark was the key. Somehow, his passion and desire all centered on her. And of all the women Oliver de Lacey had held in his arms, only Lark felt exactly right.

  Deep in a secret, unacknowledged part of him, he remembered Zara’s prophecy. She had joined his hand with Lark’s as if it were an act ordained by a higher force.

  The fire had spent itself to embers. The frenzied, exotic music had faded to echoes of plucked strings and drum rattles, and the dancers had drifted into snoring heaps of tangled limbs and blankets.

  Oliver was nowhere to be seen.

  Joints creaking with stiffness, Lark rose to her feet. The wine she had drunk rushed to her head, and she listed like a wherry on a wave.

  “Steady,” she muttered to herself, stepping gingerly over a sleeping man. She passed a group of children lying intertwined like a litter of puppies. What strange and wondrous folk these Gypsies were.

  A few weeks earlier she never could have imagined that she would be among Gypsies. Spencer had assured her that they were lawless beggars and thieves. In truth they were a joyful lot who loved good food, fruity wine and wild dancing. They harmed no one.

  She crept close to the pallet where Richard Speed lay. Thick, coarse blankets covered him to the chin. In the uncertain moonlight he appeared pale and peaceful, his wounds salved and bound by the woman called Maida.

  Lark walked on, her skirts rustling over the night-dewed grass. She felt oddly alert, her imagination still aflame, hours later, with the words Zara had spoken.

  Vows that flow from a young man’s lips. Surely Oliver w
as right. They were an old woman’s musings or perhaps a trickster’s ploy. Yet Zara had asked for nothing. Or had she? Lark remembered the look in the Gypsy’s eyes when Zara had linked her hand with Oliver’s.

  Lark inhaled deeply of the cold night air and eased the frown from her brow. There was no use fretting. She should enjoy the pleasant numbness of the plum wine, and she should not neglect her prayers.

  Leaving the circle of caravans and the horses sleeping with heads hung low, she went down beside the river. There she found a mat of soft grass and fell to her knees.

  She had always found a certain spiritual rapture in prayer, but tonight the feeling eluded her. Instead her mind clung to images of the Gypsy dance and Oliver de Lacey. Closing her eyes, she saw him again. The flickering firelight. The pure gold of his hair. The loose eddy of his unbound sleeves. The flash of his smile.

  He danced as he seemed to do all other things—with his whole heart, with every fiber of vitality he possessed. Though Lark rubbed her eyes with her fists, she saw him still, his powerful arm wrapped around the waist of a smiling Gypsy maid, his crooked smile heartbreaking and enigmatic, hinting that his temperament could change in a blink from joy to melancholy.

  Dry leaves rustled beneath her as she shifted and forced her eyes open. She stared at the gleaming black ribbon of the river flowing past, the secret gurgles whispering to her. Still she thought of him, of Oliver de Lacey, so fair and rowdy, so comely, amusing, bright and aggravating that he seemed almost a character of myth rather than a real man. He was possessed by a vigor and lack of temperance that both fascinated and frightened her.

  She had grown exhausted simply watching him.

  And yet she couldn’t not watch him.

  It was time to confess the truth to the Almighty.

  She pressed her hands together—palms damp, nails chewed—and squeezed her eyes shut again.

  “Lord,” she whispered. Her tongue felt thick, stumbling over the words. She drew a deep breath. “I have been possessed by an evil temptation.”

  There. She’d said it. Lightning did not strike her dead, so she rushed on. “It is Oliver de Lacey, Lord. I cannot stop thinking about him. Forgive me, but more than once I have wondered what he looks like without his…his clothes. When he was dancing tonight I kept staring at his legs. His legs.”

  She paused, listening to the night wind sifting through the long grasses nodding at the riverbank. She still seemed to have the ear of the Almighty, so she continued baldly. “I feel a ripple of something—heat or cold, I know not which—up my spine when I hear the sound of his laughter. And dear Lord, he laughs far too much. Though it is no affair of mine, I cannot help but feel pleased that his face is not marked by pox scars. And when I see the sky reflected in his eyes I almost forget I am a godly woman and—”

  “Sweetheart, your prayers are about to be answered.”

  Lark shot to her feet as if something had exploded under her skirts. “How dare you disturb my privacy!”

  Oliver de Lacey grinned. It was the same lazy, insolent smile she had just complained to the Almighty about. Oliver strolled down the riverbank on the silk-clad legs she had just described to her heavenly host. And then, self-assured as any actor on a stage, he laughed. And aye, it was the same spine-shivering sound she both craved and dreaded. Heat, she decided insanely. The shiver was heat, not cold.

  Oliver bowed deeply before her. “Aye, it makes me happy indeed to learn that I have led the saintly Mistress Lark into temptation.”

  Seven

  She was glad for the shadowy darkness, for her cheeks were on fire with humiliation. “You are the first man I’ve met who considered causing me discomfort a worthy deed.”

  “You are wrong, my lady Righteous.” He stopped just in front of her, so close she could feel the heat of his body and recognize his unique scent. A heady, shockingly familiar essence.

  She knew he meant to intimidate, to make her quail in awe like…like…

  Like the helpless, smitten sinner she was.

  “I meant no insult,” he said in a rich, intimate whisper. “’Tis only that I had feared you were made of stone.”

  “I?” Incensed, she spun away and stalked back and forth along the bank of the river. “I—made of stone? Just because I don’t drool over a conceited Lord—Lord Worm like you? I care about the poor and infirm,” she declared. “I love God with tenderness and reverence. I—”

  “Indeed.” Clearly unmoved by her tirade, he handed her a dipper of water from the stream. “Cool your tongue, Mistress Firebrand, lest you sear someone with it.”

  She stopped and took a drink of the fresh, chill water. On her second swallow she realized she was obeying him, spat out the water, and simply glared at him. She always did as she was told. Lately that had not been much of a virtue.

  “It is admirable to care about the poor and to love God.” Oliver lounged against the trunk of a tree, his face in shadow, his voice betraying sardonic amusement. “But where in the scripture is it written that a woman should not be human, should not feel the desires and yearnings of a healthy young body?”

  “A good Christian is chaste in thought and deed.” Even as she spoke the words, she knew they were not her own. Spencer had taught them to her. Spencer had taught her everything.

  Oliver de Lacey made her doubt long-held beliefs when it was so much easier accepting them as fact.

  “A good Christian,” he countered, “is one who can tell good from ill. One who can confront and conquer temptation.”

  “I can tell good from evil.”

  “Then what am I, Lark? Am I good? Or evil?”

  His bald question startled her. “I was never meant to judge you, my lord.”

  “Oh no?” He pushed away from the tree, detaching himself from the concealing shadows. For the first time Lark realized he was angry. Truly angry, and he was barely in control. With his shoulders taut, his prowling gait restrained, he reminded her of a predator about to strike.

  “Never meant to judge me, were you?” His mocking tone cut like a blade. “My dear Countess of Contempt. My dear, pious, holier-than-a-nun’s-arsehole Lady Lark.” He grasped her by the upper arms and forced her to look up into his face. “Since the moment you pulled me out of a pauper’s grave, you have done nothing but judge me.”

  She flinched, though his hold did not hurt. “You were insolent to me that night! You asked me to have your baby!” She had not meant to remind him. She wished she could take it back. Mortified, she twisted herself out of his grip.

  “Which some women would take as a compliment,” he shot back.

  “Well, I did not.”

  “And from that moment on, you considered me a flesh-loving beast.”

  “When have you shown me otherwise?” She was shouting now, but she was past caring. “I sought your help, only to find you in a gambling den draped with a—with a—”

  “With a ha’penny whore,” he filled in for her. “And a jolly good day it was, until you came along with your big black cloak and your little pinched face and your ‘burn in hell’ attitude.”

  “Which you promptly proceeded to scorn.” She poked her finger at his chest for emphasis. “You all but drowned me in the Thames. You dragged me to a fair I did not wish to attend. You—”

  “Enough!” He caught her finger in his fist. “You win. I am the blackest of sinners.” The raw, pained note in his voice made her want to cover her ears, to run and hide. “The fact that I braved an attack by brigands for your sake, that I roused a crowd to riot so you could rescue Richard Speed, were only temporary lapses into virtue.”

  She did not want to think of him as a man who could be hurt. “It’s not that I’m ungrateful.” Her voice was soft and low-pitched.

  He put one finger beneath her chin and stared into her eyes. “Am I truly that repulsive to you, Lark? So odious, so tainted by evil, that you would pray on your knees to escape me?”

  “I was praying for my own sake, not yours.” How had he done it? How ha
d he managed to turn things around and make her feel guilty for something she said in private prayer?

  “Begging for release from temptation, were you?”

  She didn’t answer. She avoided his gaze.

  “Temptation!” he roared, grabbing her again. “You do not even know the meaning of the word.”

  She winced, and he took a deep breath. “I have never met a woman who could so easily arouse me. To anger,” he added quickly. His hands began to ride slowly up and down her arms. “Lark, I don’t claim to be an expert in theology like the most holy Mr. Speed, but I have learned something about temptation. Something I can teach you.”

  His gentle caresses soothed her. “Yes?”

  “I know you think you should banish me from your presence, from your thoughts, from your life if need be, in order to triumph over temptation.”

  It was exactly what she had been thinking. “Go on.”

  “That would be no victory at all. True triumph and true grace come from confronting temptation.”

  “Confronting it?”

  “Aye, and exploring it at its deepest level within yourself. And ultimately, sweet Lark, finding the strength to resist.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” She felt light-headed now, lulled by fatigue and by the tender stroking of his hands on her arms, up and down, shoulder to elbow.

  “Let me show you,” he whispered. “When I lean down and touch your ear—like so—that is temptation.”

  The moist flick of his tongue on her earlobe nearly set her aflame. She knew she should run—far away, to a place where he could not find her—but instead she stayed riveted and spellbound by the sorcery of his touch.

  “When I slide my hands down your back—” he demonstrated “—and then cup you against me—” He pulled her so close, she could feel the entire length of his body. “That is temptation.”

  He brought his hand up, smoothly removing the fabric partlet that covered her décolletage. “When I caress you here, where your breasts rise against your bodice, that is temptation.”

  She was truly on fire now, and the worst of it was, she did not care. All the reliable old proverbs and cautions flew out of her mind.