to love and be loved in return is the greatest of all good fortune. If you loved your wife any less, you would not now suffer so badly.”
Vadim observed Anselm thoughtfully. “Only a man who had known real love could speak in such a manner. Who is she, Anselm?”
Anselm’s heart lurched. “Martha didn’t tell you?” How extraordinary. A woman who knew how to keep a secret was indeed a rare and wondrous thing.
“Tell. Me. What?” Vadim had visibly tensed. The steel edge in his voice sent a shiver along Anselm’s spine. Only then he realized what he had said and how those innocent words might have been misconstrued.
Chapter Nine
“You think I speak of Martha?” Anselm forced a laugh. “Oh no, my dear fellow. No! You have it all wrong. As fond of your dear wife as I am, Martha could never be the woman of my heart.”
“Why not?” Vadim scowled, obviously not pleased by this answer either. “You dare find fault with my woman?”
Drunken sot! Wisely, Anselm shuffled back a few steps. “You are being ridiculous, brother, but because you’re steaming drunk and cannot help the drivel you’re spouting I forgive you.”
Only Vadim didn’t look like he wanted any forgiveness. He just kept advancing, closing the distance between them, the tip of his sword raised in menace. “I think you had better explain yourself.”
Just then, Anselm stumbled over a slippery cobblestone, painfully jarring his side, an action that roused his own temper. “Oh, cease your demonic glowering. It won’t work on me, I assure you. If you want me to explain I will. Pin back those ass-like ears of yours, Lord Edgeway, and harken well to what I say. The truth is this: when I believed I was dying, I told Martha about Isobel.”
“Isobel?” Vadim frowned and lowered his sword slightly. “The miller’s niece?”
Anselm nodded.
“But… that was such a long time ago. You were only a boy back then.”
“Yes, I was. But tell me this, brother, can time diminish the memory of a great love? Would the passage of the years ease the pain if you were to lose your own dear wife?”
“No. Not if I lived three-hundred lifetimes.”
Anselm nodded. “There you are, then. When I thought I was dying, I didn’t want all memory of Isobel to die with me. That’s why I told Martha about my darling girl.”
“I had no idea Isobel meant so much to you.”
A fresh pang of bitterness warped Anselm’s heart. All at once, the years rolled away and the old waves of rage rolled in again, fresh and raw, just as they’d been in the beginning. He couldn’t hold back this angry tide and neither did he want to.
“How could you not have known? Didn’t I confess how I felt for her at the time?” The words spilled from his lips in a torrent of hurt. “But, no! Like everyone else you were too intent on convicting me for her murder—”
“No!”
“Yes! Believe me, even here in Edgeway I heard the rumors. Wherever I went, I heard the hushed voices that followed me, damning me for being a callous dog, the beast who despoiled an innocent virgin and then abandoned her to her fate, a babe taking root within her womb. A child of rape, at that!”
Vadim froze. “Rape?”
“Aye. That’s right.” Anselm glared at his brother, silently daring him to ask whether it was he who’d carried out such a loathsome deed. “Rape. Such an ugly word, is it not? I have often thought so.”
“B-But I thought—”
“Oh, I know full well what you thought—what you all bloody thought. But for your own sake, I beg you not to voice that suspicion here and now. Crippled though I am, I would knock you down before the words were spoken. Yes, Isobel was raped. But not by me.”
By common accord, they wandered over to a stone water trough set against the curtain wall and propped themselves against it, each lost in private reflection.
“Forgive me,” Vadim said at last, in a voice without the slightest hint of a slur. “In my ignorance, I fear I have wronged you terribly.”
“Yes you have, and you did,” Anselm replied coldly. “But you certainly didn’t act alone.”
“After all these years…” Vadim shook his head and sighed. “But why did you never speak up before? Why did you not at least try to defend yourself?”
Anselm gave a bark of bitter laughter. “And if I had, do you think anyone would have believed me, hmm? Would it have made any difference if I’d told you someone had already stolen Isobel’s maidenhead, that this living piece of human scum had planted his cuckoo seed deep within the precious body of my angel long before she and I were ever lovers?” He took a deep breath to banish the unmanly trembling from his voice. “Yes, I knew Isobel had been raped, though not by whom. I didn’t even know she was with child. Not until I p-pulled her body out of the millpond.”
Anselm fancied he could hear the gears and cogs turning within Vadim’s wine-soaked brain, slowly moving into alignment. As he weighed up the words of Anselm’s testimony, those small wheels turned faster and faster, gradually thinning the fog of alcohol until only the truth remained.
“I’m sorry, Anselm.”
“Do you believe me, then?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Splendid! That’s one down, now I only have the remainder of the Norlands to convince. My word! At this rate, I shall have my name cleared in no time.”
But the flippancy of Anselm’s words had no effect on Vadim. “I know you can never truly forgive me—and I don’t blame you—but for what it’s worth, my apology is sincere.” Reaching out, he grasped Anselm’s forearm. “Only now do I see the fullness of my own delusion. Oh, what a fool I have been. Me, the man who has long prided himself on his clarity of thinking. You were—you are—my brother,” he said fiercely. “I should have kept my faith in you. I should have demanded the truth from your own lips instead of allowing the ceaseless babble of ill-informed gossips to pollute my ears and tarnish my heart. Believe me, my remorse is deep indeed.”
The regret in Vadim’s eyes struck Anselm like a physical blow, such was its intensity. He felt oddly uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of such a look.
“Oh, pray, be easy on yourself, m’lord. I do not blame you,” Anselm assured him. Well, not much. “After all, since reaching adulthood, I always took great pains to keep you informed of my supposed conquests, did I not?”
Vadim snorted with laughter. “Aye, you did. And like a dolt, I believed your boyish boasting.” His smile faded.“If only I’d gone after you that day, how different our lives might now have been.”
“Perhaps.” Perhaps not. Not in every way.
Some things would never change. Vadim would still have been Father’s precious Golden Child, the rightful Earl of Edgeway in waiting. Anselm’s fate had always been to skulk in his brother’s lordly shadow, his would-be steward in waiting.
No. With or without Isobel, Anselm would have never found contentment living out the span of his days back in Darumvale. Grubbing around in the dirt had never held any appeal. He was no farmer and he’d never wanted to be one. Despite his family’s change of circumstances, he’d never learned to embrace the ways of the land as the rest of them had.
One way or another, he would have always ended up where he was.
Here. In Edgeway. Taking an alternate route, however, might have gained him a few more friends along the way.
“So, who was he?” Vadim asked at length, recalling Anselm to the present. “The man responsible for poor Isobel’s fate?”
“Jack.” Even after all these years, speaking the name aloud made him want to gag.
Vadim frowned. “Jack?”
“The miller’s son.”
“Him?”A look of horror crossed Vadim’s disheveled countenance and no wonder. “Erde!” Doubtless, he was imagining Isobel’s brutal defilement at the hands of her stinking, pox-faced cousin.
Ah, the joy of family, that safest of all havens.
Family. The very people who could be relied upon to love and protect one another from the various cruelties of the world.
Or so it ought to have been.
But as Anselm knew to his cost, life often failed to work out in the way it should.
“How did you discover his identity?”
“Brom told me. Do you remember him?”
Vadim nodded, his mouth curving into a brief smile of remembrance. “Of course.”
Sweet, simple-minded Brom. A giant of a man who possessed the trusting mind of a child. Vadim and Anselm had both been fond of him. ’Twas Brom who’d seen Jack abusing his favorite Miss Izzy. But for all his brawn, Brom was an innocent, ill-equipped to deal with evildoers of Jack’s ilk.
Brom had always lived in fear of Jack, the disgusting bully who’d made his daily life a living hell. By using threats and coercion of the wickedest kind, Jack managed to secure Brom’s secrecy. Even so, Brom had been consumed with the guilt of his long silence. And so, on encountering Anselm at Edgeway market some years later, his terrible secret finally burst free from his lips.
Brom had loved Anselm almost as much as they’d both hated Jack.
“Ah,” Vadim said with a satisfied, knowing sort of smile.
“Ah, what?”
“So you were responsible for the death of the miller’s son.” ’Twas a statement of fact, not a question.
“Me?”
“Everyone said it was a robbery gone bad, but I often wondered why the assailant didn’t bother to take his purse.”
Anselm shrugged and forced his expression into one of feigned innocence. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re getting at. I certainly hope you don’t suspect me of hastening the end of someone under Lord Edgeway’s protection. Murder, so I understand, even that of a vile rapist, is quite frowned upon in these parts. A crime punishable by death, is it not?”
“So it is.” Clearing his throat, Vadim sat up a little straighter on the lip of the horse trough, becoming Lord Edgeway once again, for he was the law, responsible for the safety of everyone within Edgeway’s borders. “Of course I don’t suspect you of any wrongdoing, brother. However,” he added with a faint smile, “if you had done away with the miller’s son, speaking as the outlaw I was back then, I would heartily commend you for your actions.”
Just then, a disturbance by the gate directed their attention away from the past. Effie, Martha’s maid, flew past the sentries. On spying Harold waiting nearby, she launched herself at him and, burying her face in his tunic, commenced weeping and wailing in his arms.
Anselm’s blood ran cold. He glanced at Vadim suddenly so pale and tense at his side.
“What news, lass?” They heard Harold say in an urgent voice. Taking the trembling young girl by the shoulders he held her away to read her countenance. “Speak, I say!”
“Lord E-Edgeway,” Effie sobbed. “Have you… seen him? He i-is wanted…at once.”
Leaping to his feet, Vadim ran to Effie’s side. “Have mercy, girl. Deliver your message swiftly.”
“Sh-She is asking for you, m-m’lord,” Effie stammered. “Your l-lady wife. She c-calls for you.”
In a trice Vadim was gone, bounding through the gate Effie had so recently come through, and vanishing into the night. What terrors must have accompanied him on his journey back up to the keep? Anselm shivered. One thing was certain, his imaginings wouldn’t be pleasant.
But Vadim was right to fear the worst. Death hovered close at hand by this night. Anselm could sense its grasping, bony fingers greedily seeking its next victim.
Abandoning his perch on the water trough, Anselm grabbed his stick and hobbled over to Effie and Harold. Now that her task was done, the girl rallied and stepped out from the protective circle of Harold’s massive arms. Visibly trembling, she stood with her arms about herself—whether for warmth or self-comfort he could not tell. Either way, her haste to find her master had been so great Effie had raced outside with neither a cloak nor shawl to protect her from the biting cold.
Sucking in her wobbling lower lip, the maid struggled to restrain the flow of tears that kept dribbling down her cheeks in a never-ending stream.
Looking horribly ill at ease, Harold harrumphed a couple of times and patted the maid awkwardly on her shoulder. As big as Harold was, however fiercely won his reputation on the field of battle, the poor fellow was ill-equipped to provide an unfortunate young woman with the comfort she so badly needed. The tears of a woman had the power to soften the spine of even the doughtiest warrior, it seemed.
Harold continued patting Effie, casting ever more desperate glances in Anselm’s direction.
“P-Perhaps I should seek out S-Seth,” Harold said at last. “As… er… Edgeway’s acting steward, Ma may well have need of his c-counsel.” The poor fellow’s discomfort was almost tangible.
Anselm exhaled a long hard breath, a fleeting cloud of dragon’s smoke into the night. Oh, very well. He’d take pity on the fellow if he must. Let Harold scurry away if he wanted to.
“An excellent notion. Make haste, Harold. You may leave the girl to my care. I’ll see her safely back to the keep.”
Flashing a broad smile of gratitude, Harold turned and fled, leaving Anselm to deal with the maid by himself.
Like everyone else in Edgeway, Effie usually avoided Anselm like a nasty dose of cock-rot. Tonight, however, she seemed much too distracted to recall Anselm’s innumerable sins. Instead, she stared up at him, her bright trusting eyes brimming with yet more tears that reflected the flickering orange glow of the torchlight.
“Is there any hope, sir?” she asked in a small voice. “Any hope at all?”
What in the name of the Dark Lord was she asking him for? Anselm was as clueless as the rest of them. But to his surprise, he heard himself saying, “While life endures, hope remains.”
“I fear all the h-hoping and praying in all of Edgeway town will not be enough to s-save my poor mistress. Oh, there was so much blood, sir. So… much… blood!” More tears trickled down Effie’s thin face and dripped in a steady stream from the point of her chin. “P-Poor Lord Edgeway. He loves her s-so much. And as for those two sweet little babies. What will become…?”
She could not go on. Overwhelmed by a combination of sorrow and exhaustion, Effie covered her face with her hands and broke into great shuddering sobs.
“There, there now.” Cautiously, Anselm slipped an arm about the maid’s quivering shoulders and gave her a gentle squeeze. “Come now, my dear. Your mistress is not dead quite yet.”
But his words seemed to give Effie no comfort for with a startled squeak of “Oh, sir!” the wretched creature turned and buried her face into Anselm’s chest, weeping uncontrollably.
Standing rather stiffly, Anselm sheltered Effie within his arms. Now he knew how Harold must have felt. Really, this was most unsettling. Most unsettling indeed! The ferocity of all those tears would be staining his tunic beyond all hope of salvation. All those nasty damp patches. Ugh. He could almost feel them, spreading by the second.
In distinctly unfamiliar territory, he patted the maid’s back in, what he hoped was, a comforting manner. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d held a female without the intention of tupping her. This whole situation with Effie was something unique.
“There, there,” he said again for want of something better to say. He wasn’t used to chits weeping all over him. How the hell was he supposed to proceed?
The man he had once been might have tried sweet-talking the girl into his bed. That would have stopped her weeping in no time. Alas, that option was out of the question. Besides, though Effie was pretty enough in her way, he’d never viewed her as a potential bed-mate. She simply wasn’t to his taste. Then again, he was beginning to think no woman was, for his cock barely bothered to rouse itself at all anymore—n
ot even first thing in a morning when it had ordinarily stood so firm and strong to greet the dawning of each new day.
Perhaps it would be best not to dwell too deeply on the almost dormant state of his member, particularly while Effie was sobbing so profusely against his costly tunic. He grimaced as he heard her thick snotty snufflings.
He had better make haste and stop her tears before the damage was too great! But what could he possibly say to give her comfort?
News of a positive nature would certainly hearten the girl, but for once The Sight remained stubbornly silent. Hellfire! Perhaps if he tried he might be able to encourage it? There was only one way to find out.
Fixing his gaze upon one of the torches burning in its sconce by the sentry point, Anselm looked deep into the heart of the flames. Slowing his breathing, he stared at the ever-shifting fire and forced himself to relax. Slowly, he felt his mind begin to ease its grip on reality.
The colors in the flame suddenly intensified, and time itself seemed to slow, dancing at half speed.
Anselm exhaled a long slow breath and allowed his mind to fall silent.
Nothing else mattered. Only now.
This very moment.
The whispering fire seemed to envelop him, swirling before his eyes in a crackling riot of red, orange, and vibrant golds.
Unblinking, Anselm continued to stare until the clarity of his vision blurred.
Suddenly, deep within the depths of his mind’s eye, something new began to form. Gradually, the vision shifted into a sharper focus.
Something? Or someone.
Martha?
Anselm gasped when he saw her, for the image was so distinct. Lying in bed as motionless as death, her face etched with suffering.
So pale. So still.
Vadim was at her side. Desolate and wretched, he knelt in the bloody straw at her bedside. Tightly clasping his wife’s hand, he kissed her fingers fiercely, over and again, as if by doing so he could will his woman to life.
A Scruple of Saffron. (A novella) Page 9