The Maiden's Hand

by Susan Wiggs

  Sebastian, the younger twin by moments, clapped his hands at the musicians. “If you please, my masters,” he called. “A new dancing measure.”

  A tambour rattled. The head musician whistled a salute on his pipes, and then the slow, measured beat of a pavane commenced. Simon drew a partner from the visiting ladies. Sebastian paired up with a journeyman weaver of Malmesbury. Though their friendship always caused a few eyebrows to rise and ears to redden, the sight of the two no longer created a stir. Oliver did not pretend to understand his brother’s preference, but considering his own past way of life, he was hardly in a position to condemn anyone.

  Speed looked mildly curious.

  Oliver chuckled. “The fact that Sebastian has an identical twin makes for no end of fun. Usually at poor Simon’s expense.”

  Stephen de Lacey bowed low before his wife; they stepped down from their table to lead the set.

  Oliver caught Kit’s eye. “Shall we?”

  Kit blanched. “Shall we what?”

  “Ask the ladies to dance, minnow-brain.”

  “What if she says no?”

  “Then you can hurl yourself off a parapet.”

  “Really, Oliver, I—”

  “Hsst!” Richard clutched Kit’s arm. “I see trouble coming.”

  As splendid as one of the peacocks that roamed the grounds, Havelock was making his way toward them. He favored Speed with a broad smile, his intention clear. Oliver leaned over and murmured an order into Kit’s ear.

  Kit went from pale to red in an instant. “No,” he whispered.

  “You must,” Oliver hissed.

  “You’ll owe me a blood debt.” Kit rose and ungraciously dragged Richard up with him, leading the mortified, beskirted reverend to the tennis court to join the other dancing couples.

  Oliver lifted his cup to greet Havelock. “You’re too late, my lord. That lady is spoken for.”

  Havelock looked wistfully at Speed. “So I see.”

  “She is not your sort, anyway. Too robust.” Sending Havelock on his way with a brimming goblet of claret, Oliver crossed the grassy sward.

  Lark had been watching the revelry from the bride’s seat of honor, a canopied, thronelike chair at the high table. The massive seat, carved with leering gargoyles and oak leaves, dwarfed her. To Oliver, she looked like a little girl playing at being a princess. Her face reflected a childlike wonder; her rain-soft eyes seemed to drink in the entire merry scene. He didn’t have to ask if she’d ever seen a fête before; he knew she had not. Filled with bittersweet affection, he sank to one knee before her.

  His easy gallantry never failed to startle her. Oliver liked that, liked the way her cheeks flushed and her breath caught when she looked at him and put her hand in his.

  “You think that’s interesting?” he asked, indicating the dance on the tennis green. “Watch my sister.”

  Belinda and Brock were in rare form with their incendiary display. With the basin of a fountain reflecting their artistry, they set off sizzling stars and great wheels of burning color, a miroire chinoise that launched a spectacular glowing bird. Each child received a pharaoh’s serpent egg, a black pellet that hissed and grew into a snakelike shape.

  “It’s wonderful,” Lark cried, and the exploding stars were reflected in her eyes. “Your sister makes magic.”

  “She’s actually quite practical. Her formulas for gunpowder are much in demand. She put her foot down, though, when my father attempted to launch a rat into the air with a rocket tied to its back.”

  “He should use Bishop Bonner instead.”

  For a moment her solemn look deceived him. Then he realized she had made a jest, and he burst out laughing. “If anyone can draw you out of your shell, my lady Lark, my family can.”

  For the pièce de résistance, Belinda had fashioned several great aerial shells. But something went wrong; within seconds of the fuse being lit, the entire garden was shrouded in smoke.

  Oliver waved away a thick, sulfurous cloud and felt an ominous tickle in his lungs. Panic jolted through him. Not now, he thought, forcing his chest to relax in the way that sometimes warded off an attack. Not with Lark watching.

  “She must’ve mismeasured the charge,” he said, trying not to wheeze, “or failed to mix the powder correctly.”

  “I can see nothing!” Lark said, squinting through the jaundiced fog. “Is everyone all right?”

  Through the smoke, he saw Kit running up the hill toward Belinda and then noticed, with a twinge of brotherly concern, Richard Speed stealing a kiss from Natalya.

  “Everyone is fine,” he said, willfully denying the twitching in his lungs. “Lark, I want you to stay here with my family while I take Speed up to London to await a ship to carry him abroad.”

  “No.” Her instantaneous denial both gratified and frustrated him.

  “You’ll be safe at Lynacre.”

  “My own safety concerns me little.”

  “Don’t you like my family? I know they’re a bit odd, but they’re good people.”

  Lark looked at his family with her heart in her eyes. “They are an amazing, marvelous, magnificent clan,” she said softly.

  “Then why won’t you stay with them?” Oliver asked.

  “They are not mine.”

  He felt a curious squeezing sensation in his chest, and the feeling had nothing to do with the smoky air. “To God, Lark,” he muttered, “you do tug at my heartstrings.”

  She laid her hand over his. “No one has ever said anything like that to me before.”

  “Perhaps no one’s ever cared for you as I do.”

  A cautious joy lit her gaze. “Perhaps. But you are so capricious, Oliver. Only this afternoon you were begging me to go sailing off to Amsterdam with you. Now you want to leave me here with your parents. Tomorrow you might want to ship me away to Smyrna.”

  “I have given it much thought. We’ve been lucky, running with Richard, keeping him hidden. But if our luck runs out, the game is up.”

  “Game,” she said, her voice harsh. “That’s all it is to you.”

  “Lark, I—”

  “I do not fight for justice to amuse myself.”

  His temper sparked. “That, madam, is painfully apparent. However, I have decided that it’s safer for you to stay at Lynacre.”

  “And I have decided to go with you and Speed to London.”

  “No.” Lord, but the woman kindled his ire like no one else. “You can’t go. And that’s final.”

  In London, Lark and Oliver and Speed stayed at Wimberleigh House, between the Strand and the Thames. To the vast dismay of Richard Speed, the Russia Company ship had been delayed. He moped like a lovelorn boy, penning letters to Natalya in Wiltshire and seemingly oblivious to the tension between his host and hostess.

  Lark had won the battle over whether or not she would stay at Lynacre, but Oliver extracted his price. He did nothing blatantly cruel; in fact, in her company he was his usual attentive and tender self.

  But he was not always with her. He made a point of leaving for long periods of time each day.

  One evening, when she heard his step outside the door, she did not look up from her reading.

  “There you are, my love,” he said, striding into the room. He stopped in front of her, bent, and framed her face with his hands. “Good Lord, but you look luminous. I should have stayed abed with you all day long.”

  She could not help but smile. “Where were you?”

  “Out and about.” He went to a side table and poured himself a cup of wine. “Down to the keys to watch the shipping.”

  “No sign of the Mermaid?”

  “None. And what have you been doing?”

  The question never failed to startle her. He was inordinately interested in her opinions, her thoughts, the things she knew and read and dreamed about. She had never known any truth save what Spencer had told her. With Oliver, she was learning that beliefs could—and sometimes should—be challenged.

  “Reading Erasmus.” She i
ndicated the book in her lap with a nod. “The Apothegms. No wonder the church has banned his writings. I think tomorrow I should read some poems to lighten my mind.”

  He laughed. “Read the Latin ones my brother Simon brought from Venice. The illustrated ones.”

  “Those are bound to be banned for an entirely different reason,” she said, blushing. She felt that Oliver tried to expunge the ideas Spencer had drummed into her: that women were inherently unwise, venial creatures. That they had no thoughts of their own and that their time was best spent in menial, somber pursuits such as sewing and reading scripture.

  He taught her chess and backgammon and mumchance. He gave her books by Heywood and Calvin. He watched with delight as she read John Knox’s latest diatribe against women and grew furious enough to pen a challenging letter to the radical Scotsman. Some evenings Oliver read her the old, aching sonnets of Petrarch in a voice that made her melt with emotion.

  Feeling her usual confusion of affection and exasperation for her husband, Lark took her sewing from the basket by her chair. She acted out of long ingrained habit rather than conscious thought, deftly stabbing the needle into the fine white lawn of the tiny chemise.

  A baby’s garment. Too late, she realized her error.

  “Oh, drudgery!” Oliver snapped. He snatched the chemise from her and balled it in his big fist. “How many times must I tell you, Lark, I don’t want you laboring over menial chores.”

  It was a labor of love, but she could not tell him that. She stared in horror at his fist, wondering when he would realize what he held in his hand. He had eased the way for her to avoid telling him about the baby. Her initial reluctance was fast turning to deception.

  Just as she gathered breath to blurt out the truth, he tossed the wadded chemise into the basket without another glance. Then he knelt in front of her and took her hands. “Talk to me, Lark. You’re hiding something.”

  She hesitated, frozen with surprise and fear. She had no idea he was so sensitive to her moods and nuances. “I never meant to hide it. H-how long have you known?”

  He held her gaze with his. “Since our wedding night.”

  She pleated her brow in a frown. “But that can’t be. I—”

  “Lark. The fact that you were not a maiden is nothing to me. You’re mine now. That’s all that matters.”

  Her head began to throb, her heart to pound. It wasn’t the baby at all, then. This, though, was infinitely worse.

  He caressed her hands lightly. “It would hardly be fair for me to condemn you, given my own adventures. Yet you seem troubled.”

  The color dropped from her face. Memories roared out of the past, and her heart seemed to shrivel in her chest. Like a fool, she thought she had escaped the shadows.

  She could not find words to form a lie, so she merely drew her cold, shaking hands away from his and clenched them into fists on the book in her lap.

  “Lark?” The very gentleness in his voice broke her heart. “I did mean what I said. Some men put great stock in virginity. In you, there is so much more to treasure.”

  “No,” she managed to whisper at last. Her eyes drowned in tears of shame. “There you are wrong.” Her vision blurred from the tears, and she was back in that place again, that shadowy room where the dark, masculine voice called to her, taunted her, never ceasing until she yielded. “I should have stood firm, but I—he—”

  Oliver’s hands captured hers again. “Stood firm? But Lark, Spencer was your husband.”

  “Not Spencer!” She snatched her hands away and stood. The book fell with a thud to the floor. She hurried to the tall, narrow window and pressed her burning face to the glass as sickness rose in her.

  “Wynter.” Behind her, Oliver spat the name like an oath. Then, with calm, deadly intent, he added, “I’ll kill him.”

  “You will not!” She spun around, her hands clasped as if in prayer. “I beg you, Oliver, don’t harm him.”

  For the first time he looked at her with suspicion. Eyes narrowed, lips taut. “Why not?”

  “Because he is dangerous. Because I don’t want to lose you.”

  He stood unmoving, his eyes bluer than the summer sky and bright with fury. “Tell me the truth, Lark. Is your concern truly for me—or for him?”

  “That’s vile. You know I hate him.”

  “Then let me avenge you. He took your honor. He treated you like dirt beneath his heel. He deserves to be punished.”

  She sank to her knees before him. How could she explain what had happened that one night, what she had said, what she had felt? She could not, for she barely understood it herself. “Oliver, I beg you. Leave this be. It is over. We never even see Wynter anymore.”

  He grasped her shoulders and yanked her up to face him. “You would beg me on your knees to spare him?”

  “You’re not a violent man. Why sully yourself with the blood of someone like Wynter?”

  “Because he hurt you. Because you cringe whenever he walks into a room.”

  “It would hurt me more if you attacked Wynter. Don’t you see, Oliver? No one knows. If you seek revenge, all the world will know.”

  “I see. And the world is not as forgiving as I am.” He let go of her and stepped away, backing toward the door. “I should have been prepared for difficulty,” he muttered, and she could see the barely contained rage in the color of his cheeks. “You accused me of loving you too easily, so I suppose I should not be surprised that you are making it difficult. If not impossible.”

  In the weeks following their quarrel, they never spoke of Wynter again. Lark passed many hours in the sloping, shady gardens. She remembered the first time she had come here to seek help for Spencer. Not in her most mad fantasies had she imagined that within a year she would be married to the de Lacey heir and expecting his child.

  She certainly hadn’t imagined falling in love with Oliver.

  Or had she?

  One of the first things he had ever said to her was to ask if she would have his child. His query had been impertinent, improper and wholly inappropriate. Yet she had not been able to deny the thrill that had eddied through her like the first breath of spring after an endless winter. Had it started even then?

  On a warm afternoon, she stood in the ornate river garden and watched the constantly flowing river. Barges and lighters, tilt boats and ferries, slipped past, their hulls gilded by the sun, tillers scoring the surface of the water with their wakes. It was an idyllic, peaceful scene, viewed from the rose-decked garden.

  How odd to know that just a small distance downriver, the severed heads of traitors and heretics leered from the gates of London Bridge. Or to imagine the queen, fighting constant illness, still trying desperately to govern her squabbling councillors. Or to picture the hidden mews and alleyways, rife with squalor.

  London festered with secret sores. Lark did not blame Queen Mary. The problems were too many and too deeply rooted to be solved by one woman—a woman who probably had no idea how much her subjects despised her Spanish advisers and chief ministers, Bishop Edmund Bonner in particular.

  It was odd to think of Queen Mary pining for her absent husband, pining for a child.

  Odd indeed. Mary yearned for a child she could not have. Lark had never dared to dream of having a child, and yet in five short months she would give birth.

  And she still had not told Oliver. She had come so close, that night he had made her confess about Wynter. If Oliver had only stayed silent, had only listened, she would have told him.

  “Froth and bother,” she muttered under her breath. She plucked a daylily and ripped the delicate blossom to shreds. Oliver had taught her a few choice oaths. From time to time she would let one loose, revel a moment in the delicious wickedness of it, then repent.

  It was a strange, waiting time. She had expected her growing body to give away her secret much sooner, but she retained her slim shape, save for a gentle roundness easily concealed by her gown.

  The weeks had flown by at a furious rate, like leaves
blown before a stiff wind. At first the excitement of being in London, the private thrill of harboring Richard Speed, had been amusement enough. She drank it all in like a parched tree in a soft rain, and time passed, and she did not notice the days drifting by.

  Until lately.

  Oliver still smoldered about their quarrel, still watched her with hooded suspicion and hurt. Although he was affectionate and caring, he held part of himself at a distance. He left her much to herself, even at night, and she missed him. Ached for him.

  A gloomy restlessness blanketed the entire household. Richard Speed was about to go mad from the isolation. He was not allowed to leave the house. No one was allowed in to see him. He was a man accustomed to walking out among people, to talking and preaching of great matters. Hiding for so many weeks was beginning to wear on him.

  Lark marked the changes in herself, as well. As each day passed, she glowed brighter with high health. At the same time, Oliver drifted farther away.

  The changes were subtle, yet she could no longer deny that he stayed out later at night, drank more, laughed louder and brooded longer when he thought she wasn’t looking.

  At first she attributed his mood to his anger about Wynter. After several weeks she began to think it was only an excuse. He longed to go back to his bousing and carousing, to the dark dens of Bankside and Southwark, where no one judged him, no one expected anything of him, no one cared.

  Grumbling another borrowed oath, she told herself to cease her moping. The garden was fragrant with late roses and borage, and the lowering sun turned the river to a ribbon of amber.

  The day held a peculiar magic for Lark. For whatever else was happening to her life, she knew unequivocally that a miracle was taking place inside her.

  This morning, while lying in bed and wishing Oliver were beside her, she had felt something.

  Low in her belly. A flutter. A lifting sensation. A quickening.

  It was her baby.

  Even now, hours later, the memory had the power to touch her soul with wonder. The child had sent her a message. I am here. Love me. Acknowledge me.