by Susan Wiggs
“You can burn in hell.” Oliver’s own words startled him. Once, almost a year ago, he had groveled and pleaded for his life. Now here he stood, chained like an animal, beaten but not broken. Not even close to broken.
Lark, he thought, his heart rising on a surge of love. Lark had taught him that a man needed a place to stand, a purpose to drive him.
“That is your final word, my lord?” Bonner asked.
“It is.”
Bonner’s dark eyes were hooded, as if he concealed some secret knowledge. He sent a nod to the guard by the door.
“You might find,” Bonner said, “that you’ll change your mind yet.”
His silent entourage melted from the room. Only the bishop and the warden remained. Bonner’s ham face held a look of expectant relish.
The fire snapped and flared, and a coal rolled out onto the hearth. Hearing a gasp from the doorway, Oliver looked up. His heart seemed to stand still.
“Lark,” he whispered.
She stood riveted, pale with shock. A voluminous hooded cloak wrapped her, and he had the fleeting, insignificant thought that summer had turned to autumn during his imprisonment.
In that frozen moment he saw himself through her eyes. His upper body lay bare and furrowed by wounds. Chains pulled his sinewed chest and shoulders taut, and his flesh ran with cold sweat. His hair had grown long and lank, his ragged beard was unclipped.
Rousing himself from shock, Oliver yanked at his bonds, feeling the cold burn of the iron manacles, glad of the pain, glad to feel something other than fear for her.
Bonner broke the silence. “Take him down,” he ordered.
Keys clanking, the warden came forward. The manacles fell away. It took all of Oliver’s strength to remain standing. He swayed, his vision blurring as he watched Bonner and the warden disappear through the door.
The moment the door thudded shut, Lark rushed to Oliver, an anguished cry on her lips. She caught him against her.
She felt sturdy and clean, unbefouled by the corruption of imprisonment.
“Don’t try to stand, my love,” she said.
As one, they sank to the floor. Oliver felt as if his every joint were on fire, but he ground his teeth together to keep from crying out. Lark untied her cloak and removed it, spreading it out near the fire.
She looked at the burns and lacerations on his chest and back. She seemed to study each individually, and when she saw him watching her, she said, “I feel each one as if it had been inflicted on me.” She pressed her lips to his shoulder, which bore the scar of last week’s flogging. “I cannot look at all the wounds as a whole yet, for if I do, the pain will be too great.”
“Ah, Lark.” They huddled close, then, silent, hearts and eyes saying what their voices could not.
In time, he cradled Lark’s face between his hands. Was it only last winter that she had saved him from the hangman? “Everything about you is the same, yet not the same,” he said.
She gave him a tremulous smile and passed her hand down over her abdomen. “I trow you do not mean the obvious.”
He kissed her brow, right at the hairline, and inhaled deeply. She smelled as fresh as gillyflowers in springtime, and he would always think of her this way, warm and clean and new.
“Nay,” he said. “When first we met, you were a stubborn, ill-tempered, self-righteous little mort.”
She tried to laugh. “So I was. I suppose it was my way of hiding.”
“You simply had no trust in yourself.” His tone deepened and softened in case Bonner’s men had their ears pressed to the door. “I saw you defeat a brigand, save condemned men and teach the Princess Elizabeth a lesson in humility, all with no notion that you were doing anything extraordinary.”
He slid his hands down to cup her shoulders. A thousand times he had held her like this in his dreams.
“Look at you now.” He tried to keep the catch from his voice. “Glowing. Self-assured.”
“Then that is even more extraordinary,” she said. “Never in my life have I been less sure of myself.”
He drew her against him and simply held her. It hardly seemed possible that he had once thought holding a woman without bedding her to be a waste of time.
That was before Lark. Back when he had believed love was something to be given out like coppers tossed to the crowd at a pageant.
Now he knew better. Love was too precious a gift to be flung about. Its true value could only be known when it was hardest to give—perhaps to the person who least wanted it.
“Why do you smile?” asked Lark, caressing the line of his jaw.
“I was remembering the first time I tried to make love to you. Being refused was a new experience.”
She opened her mouth, looking apologetic, but he stopped her from speaking. “You were right to refuse me. I had to earn my place in your life.” Looking into her eyes, he fancied he could see the rain.
She blinked fast. “I found the letter. The one you wrote to our child.”
He blew out his breath. “And?”
“I would hate you if I did not love you so much!”
“Love me? But you said—”
“I was wrong.” He heard the bitter edge to her voice. “I thought I was a learned lady. Able to quote scripture as easily as I could spin and weave.” Finally she drew a deep breath. “Nothing has prepared me for the way I love you.”
From the blackest despair shone the brightest joy. “Say it again, Lark.”
“I love you. Does that come as such a surprise?”
“You said you could not. That I was false and shallow. That I failed to love with my whole heart.”
“Tis I who failed,” she said. “I wanted you to change. To become solemn and logical and conventional. Now I realize I love you because your heart runs wild. Because you laugh and tease and defy convention. Because you are everything I am not. I do love you, Oliver de Lacey. I do love you with so much of myself that there is none left to ever doubt you again.”
He wondered if she had any idea of the value of the gift she had given him. She made all his suffering worthwhile, gave meaning to everything he had ever done, ever been.
“Why did you not tell me about your illness?” she asked.
“What illness?”
“Belinda told me the asthma plagues you still. You let me believe you had outgrown it, yet you still have attacks.”
“You would have worried.”
“You had a bad spell the night I told you about the baby, didn’t you?”
“Aye.”
“You doused yourself with wine and pretended to have gone carousing rather than admit you were ill.”
“Aye.”
“For pity’s sake, why?”
He took her hand in his and stroked it. “That’s just it, Lark. Pity. I could live with your contempt more easily than with your pity. There is nothing to be done about my condition. From the time I was a babe, my father consulted physicians and astrologers, healers of all sorts. None of them offered any hope. They consider it a miracle that I survived even this long.”
“Oh, Oliver.” She held fast to his hand.
“I daresay the greatest help of all was Juliana. She took me out of the sickroom and into the world, gave me the ephedra herb, and in spite of all predictions, I thrived.” With a pang of bittersweet remembrance, he thought of the rough-and-tumble days of his boyhood at Lynacre. “I even dared to think the disease was cured, for I ceased having attacks around the time I sprouted my first beard. But every once in a while, the illness would besiege me.”
“You should have told me. It’s too frightening to endure alone.”
“Lark, I have looked death in the face. There’s nothing fearsome about it, except to be separated from you.” They sat still for long moments, listening to the scratching of a rat in the dark and the murmured conversation of the guards outside.
“You know, don’t you?” he asked quietly.
“Know what?” Her gaze fled his. She seemed inordinately int
erested in things about the room: the coals in the grate, the slumping candle in the corner, the walls weeping with moisture, the arched lintel over the three steps leading to a locked door.
“I’ve been condemned to die.”
“You shall get a reprieve,” she shot back. “You must—”
“Lark, time is short. Just listen. There can be no reprieve.”
“Why not?” The red of anger and fear stained her cheeks.
“Because I refuse to recant.”
Her eyes widened, and at last she looked at him again. “You?”
He felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. “I surprised even myself. But it’s true. To give in to them now would discredit everything we’ve worked for, fought for. I will not forfeit my honor and the safety of Richard Speed and my sister.” And you, he thought, but did not say the words. “I cannot meet Bonner’s price, Lark. Not now.”
“Would it help to beg you?”
“Sweetheart, you know better than that.”
“Oliver.” She sat on her heels and regarded him furiously. “I want you to recant. Tell them you’ll name the sacraments and believe in transubstantiation and the absolute power of Rome—”
“Stop it!” He flung aside her hand. “Listen to you. You, Lark! The woman who told me that the cause of Reformation is worth dying for.”
“That was before my beliefs became a peril to your life.”
Bitterness chilled him. “Now I understand why they brought you to see me,” he said. “Did they instruct you to beg me to recant? Did they tell you the exact words to say, or did you think of them on your own?”
“Oliver, please—”
“Don’t ‘Oliver, please’ me! Think about what you’re asking, Lark. Shall I trade my immortal soul in order to spend a few more years on earth?” He caught both her hands then, squeezing hard as if to press his meaning into her flesh.
“I’m dying, Lark. I came close the night you told me about the baby. That night, when the illness seized me, I saw the most extraordinary vision, heard a voice that wasn’t a voice. And I had the most uncanny feeling that all I needed to do was reach out, and I would touch the hand of God.”
She gaped at him, and he laughed without humor. “I’ve never bothered myself with matters of deep faith, but the experience affected me profoundly.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not easy to speak of.”
“If I lose you,” she said solemnly, “I shall die, too.”
“No!” He startled himself with the violence of his reaction. “That would defeat me utterly. You must live on, Lark. And nurture our child and one day tell him about me.” He gentled his voice. “I have never been a man of honor, Lark. Never committed to anything save my own amusement. I was shallow and stupidly happy. Until now, my life has been a promise unfulfilled.” He smiled. “You once said I loved you because it was easy. What say you now, Lark?”
She waved her hand as if to banish the question. “What of our child, Oliver? A letter is a poor substitute for a father.”
He closed his eyes, trying not to see a smiling babe in a cot, a fair-haired child wading in a brook, an earnest youth bent over a book.
“Tell him I died well,” Oliver said quietly.
“Nay—”
“Better a dead martyr for a father than a living coward.” He didn’t want her to break down and cry. Though he hated his own selfish vanity, he feared that if she fell to pieces, he would, too.
Distance, he told himself. Distance would keep despair at bay and allow them to consider pragmatic affairs.
But first, ah, first, he allowed himself a blissful, surreptitious brushing of his lips over her soft hair. Then he put her away from him and stared intently into her face. The small, rounded chin. The wide eyes. The lips that trembled but allowed no sound of despair to pass them.
Her sincerity broke his heart, but he would not let it show. “Lark.”
“Yes?”
“I would speak of practical matters.”
She mouthed the word practical as if it were a foreign phrase.
“You are to put the properties of Eventide and Blackrose and Montfichet into a trust holding. My father will help you with that. Or Kit—” he cleared his throat “—if he survives.”
She looked at him with her soul in her eyes, and he couldn’t be certain she was listening. He went on. “I want you to leave London. Take Nance with you and go to Lynacre—”
“Stop it!” She put her hands over her ears. “I won’t listen to this!”
As gently as he could, he took her hands away, keeping hold of her wrists. The sensation of her heartbeat beneath his fingers was nearly his undoing. He remembered kissing her there, feeling her pulse under his lips. Almost brusquely, he released her hands.
“Will you do that, Lark? Will you go to Lynacre?”
“Yes.”
“Go soon. Tomorrow. It must be nearly November. The roads will be rivers of mud in the rain, so make certain you travel in dry weather. I think you’d best go by barge at least as far as Wimbledon—”
“Oliver.”
“—and do not stay at just any inn along the way. I’ll not have you—”
“Oliver.”
“For God’s sake, what is it?”
“Listen to yourself.”
“You’re supposed to be listening. I haven’t got all day, you know.”
Her cheeks paled another shade. “How can you make a jest at a time like this?” She held herself very stiff and straight. Her face seemed set in marble, white and immobile. “You’re so distant, Oliver. It’s as if you’ve already gone, and some horrid stranger is sitting here planning my future for me.”
“Well, there’s not much point in planning my future, is there?” he demanded. “Or shall we do that? What will I say tomorrow? Will I stand there with my gaze up to heaven and say, ‘Lord, here I am, do You find me good enough in Your eyes?” He heard the cruel edge to his voice, saw the bewildered hurt on her face. Ashamed, he glanced down.
Her gown had the bodice set high, and her velvet skirts draped her belly, grown huge with her child. His child. Theirs.
As he stared in amazement, something moved.
He must have made a noise, or the look on his face betrayed him, for Lark took his hand, and he could tell from her touch that all anger had drained from her.
She placed his hand on her belly. It was hard and taut. She arranged his fingers so that they splayed out.
“My hands are filthy,” he whispered.
“Do you think that matters now?”
It was the now that broke down the barrier. That one simple word conveyed, in a single breath, the desperate finality of what was to come.
“Oh, God,” he muttered.
She covered his hand with her own. She, too, had felt his wall of reserve crumble. And, bless the girl, she was not falling apart.
“For the first time in my life,” he said, “I find myself at a loss for words.”
“You don’t need to say anything.”
He stared at her. “I don’t, do I? Not to you.”
She smiled, and her lips trembled only a little. “Hold very still,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Your hand. Keep it still.”
He held his entire being still. A quiet hiss came from the fire. Somewhere, water dripped steadily onto stone.
Beneath Oliver’s hand, the baby moved. The wonder of it traveled up his arm and spread all through his body. He was feeling life. A life he had helped to create, a life that had grown out of his extraordinary love for this woman.
When he dared to look at Lark’s face, he saw her smiling through tears.
“It is a miracle,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Do you suppose it’s a boy or girl?”
“I’ve never even considered it. Have you?”
“No. I only pray you will be safely delivered.”
“I will, Oliver. I promise I will.”
“Do not name it for me,” he said suddenly. In spite of himself, his mind made a picture of a child with a beautiful round face, wavy dark hair. Blue eyes, like his own.
He took his hand away.
“Why not?” she asked.
He forced a grin. “A girl called Oliver would endure too much teasing.”
She, too, smiled, and he loved her for that, loved her for her strength, for not making their last moments harder by flinging herself, weeping, to the floor.
Time was running out. They both knew it, and, oddly, conversation lagged. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, that she was beautiful, that she had given purpose and depth to his life.
But she knew that. He could see it in her eyes.
Nervously she touched his knee through a hole in his hose. “I should have brought needle and thread,” she blurted out.
“Sweetheart.” He touched her chin. “There’s no need.” He could see that she was about to shatter, so he took her in his arms and said, “Do you know what I want?”
“What?”
“To dance with my wife.”
Her breath caught, and he was afraid she would refuse him. Instead she rose and helped him to his feet. There was no humiliation in leaning on her, just a tenderness that gripped his heart.
“I should have danced with you on our wedding day,” she whispered.
“You’re dancing with me now,” he said, holding one hand at her waist, the fingers of the other linked with hers. With his rusty voice, he hummed a love song. For one magical moment the dank, moldy walls faded away. Oliver felt no pain, only a huge, honest love that filled his chest and heated his blood. The song ended when his voice cracked, and they both stopped and faced each other.
He held her face in his hands then, tracing it with shaking fingers. He wanted to memorize every aspect of her. The softness of her skin beneath his fingers. The shape of her mouth, her nose, her cheekbones. The color of her eyes and the way they always reminded him of the rain.
Like a blind man, he moved his hands over her, gathering sensation into his heart, committing her to eternal memory.
“I won’t forget,” she said, clearly understanding exactly what he was doing. “Oliver, I will never, ever forget you.”
A shuffling sounded outside the door. Oliver ran his hand over her silky hair.