The Regency Romances

by Laura Kinsale

  Senach only waited, with something old and implacable in his face. There was no pity there. No sorrow for what might come of what he asked. He understood, well enough. And still he asked.

  She licked her lips, tasting tears. Below her the green land and the sea shimmered. A dark blot took shape on the road to the mansion, a rider—two riders: the dowager countess on a dainty gray, and another, bareback, on a seal-brown mount. It was Fionn who cantered ahead into the court and slid to the ground with her pale hair blowing and a laugh like distant bells.

  Though Senach’s presence drained Roddy’s talent, she saw the countess’ look of unease in the company she kept. At first, the older woman refused to dismount. “I only came to see the house—” she began, but Fionn tossed her hair back and laughed again.

  “Do stay,” she said, the mildest of invitations, and the dowager countess stiffened as if she’d been slapped. Senach moved forward and offered his wrinkled hands. The countess stared at them, and then slowly placed her palms on his shoulders.

  Her feet touched the ground. Fionn giggled and flicked her mount on the nose, playful, but both horses seemed to take exception. The gray barb skidded back, and the earth-brown steed with the liquid eyes pawed the courtyard slate, sending sparks. The day that was bright grew gloomy as clouds rolled off the mountains. In the greenish storm light, Fionn’s solid presence seemed to fade. The odd sunbeam broke through, lighting Fionn and skittering away across the pavement, making her seem cobwebby and transparent with her hair of gold and her mantle of moss and misty white.

  The air was still, brittle, with the waiting quality of thunder about to break.

  Roddy looked at the dowager countess. The older woman was staring up at the house. There was such a strange horror in her face that Roddy turned, too. But it was only the mansion…

  …the mansion, whole and unscarred, with a roof and sash bars and glazing at the windows, with a grand door and heavy draperies…

  …and then, on a blink, a ruin again, with only imagination and the blackened walls to hint at what it once had been.

  “Madame.” Faelan’s voice was chilly. He stood in the gaping doorway, a dark, insolent devil-figure leaning against the gray stone frame. “I never thought to see you here.”

  “Faelan,” the dowager countess said, and no more—breathless and uncommonly tongue-tied.

  He stood a moment. His glance rested on Roddy, on Senach, and then moved to Fionn. The scorn in his expression wavered, shadowed to something painful, and he looked away as a man might turn from a light too bright.

  “What do you want?” he asked hoarsely, in a tone no friend would use.

  Fionn smiled. It was a look without softness. Without humanity. She seemed to grow older before Roddy’s eyes. “Justice,” Fionn said. “Only that.”

  Fine, pale lines of tension gathered around Faelan’s mouth. He stared at the steps before him.

  “I must be going.” The dowager countess gathered, her skirts and stepped quickly toward her horse. “Senach,” she said imperatively. “Help me mount.”

  Senach made no move to do so. The countess reached for the gray’s reins, but the horse eluded her with a snort. She grabbed again, and missed. The barb danced just out of her reach, with arched neck and nostrils flaring.

  “Senach!” She stamped her foot. A note of hysteria quivered in her voice. “I want to go.”

  “Let her,” Faelan ordered, with a touch of his old imperative. “’Tis myself you want, if there’s justice to be done.”

  But Senach only stood, silent in a strange reversal that made it seem the master pleaded with the servant.

  Faelan said, louder, in a less steady voice, “The crimes are mine. You’ve no quarrel with the others.”

  The wind rose and howled through the blank windows, a sound like an eerie laugh.

  He glanced at Roddy. “Go with my mother. Now.”

  “No.” Fionn spoke before Roddy could gather her wits. “Never think we are so kind.”

  Faelan stood straight in the doorway, his hands gripping the frame. He had a cornered look, a wolf-look, his eyes bright blue and dangerous and wary. “I know what you are. Why you come. ’Tis late—years late for vengeance for my father’s murder.”

  “Is it? Call it years, then, if you please. The guilt grows greater with each passing.”

  “’Twas I who killed him. Seek your justice with me, and let these others go.”

  Fionn shrugged and stroked the nose of the seal-brown steed. “Easily said. Easy to call down our curse on your self. Have you considered? He was our friend, your father. Do you know what we ask in return for his life?”

  “I can guess,” Faelan said roughly. “Let my wife go.”

  Fionn smiled, her sly smile, bright and somehow terrible to look upon. “Ah. You think to bargain. Your wife. Do you care for her so much?”

  He wet his lips. He seemed about to speak, and then did not.

  Fionn laughed, merry and cruel, and the wind blew hard and the clouds grew low and dark and roiling green. Faelan stood like a man in chains, as if his hands were bound to the stone that framed the door. Fionn’s voice came again, soft now, and chill as falling snow. “How much does she mean to you?”

  Faelan looked at Roddy, and suddenly in the force of that look she knew his mind—felt his love that was almost desperation, a tangled, driving, aching need. Everything. The thought came clear…his thought. He closed his eyes on it and turned his face away, leaving her weak with the knowledge.

  “That is what we ask, then,” Fionn said, “in payment for this guilt. Everything.”

  “No.” The word broke from him. He opened his eyes and looked at Roddy again with new fear.

  “She always belonged to us.” Fionn’s words were gentler than before. “You knew that.”

  Roddy blinked, not understanding. Faelan took a step toward her. She saw him stumble, and felt the weakness in his limbs that drove him to his knees. He cursed and looked wildly in her direction.

  She frowned at him, finding mist in her eyes, a slow fading of the hill and the house and her husband into white light, as if the mist claimed them. “Damn you!” Faelan’s despairing roar came from a distance. Fionn and Senach and the brown horse grew more real and solid as the others dimmed. “Don’t take her!”

  She looked wide-eyed at Senach, saw him changing: ancient eyes in a young man’s face, the twisted hawthorn staff leafing and exploding into green. It was like a dream—like a nightmare—as the brown horse took on wolf-shape, and seal-shape, and horse-shape again, and Fionn grew in brightness until Roddy could not bear to look.

  “Faelan,” she said, confused and frightened. “Faelan.”

  She saw herself through his eyes, the day turning night around her, the wind strengthening, a ground mist flowing in the fading light. She lost way to the wind, staggered back, and the paleness began to rise around her.

  Mad, he thought, watching her go to wavering light. This is a dream.

  And she felt the heart-deep fear that grew in him, that he would awaken from this with nothing, not even the memory of her face, but only the echo of light and laughter that had plagued him all his life. He had been afraid of that since the day he’d first seen her—strange and lovely under a lad’s cap, with that fall of sun-gold hair. To find luck and love so suddenly, so easily—

  But he had known it for what it was. In his heart, he’d known. She was a dream, and he was waking now…

  She raised her eyes. “No,” she cried. “Don’t let them make you believe that.”

  “Roddy—”

  “I love you.” She moved toward him, but the wind rose and moaned, and her skirt billowed, plastered against her. She fought a step, and another. “I love you. Help me. Faelan…Faelan…help me. Believe me.”

  She strained, trying to reach. But there was no anchor, nothing but a hazy outline that appeared and then faded. She felt herself slipping, losing even that contact in spite of all her strength. She cried out in dismay, but there w
as nothing to hold, nothing to cling to but his thoughts—

  “I love you.” He heard her voice, thin and distant. Desperate. “Faelan!”

  She loves me.

  He did not believe it. He had never believed it. How could she love him? Murderer, blackmailer, cheat. Lunatic. He’d held her with his passion, pleasured her and burned for her, worked the land until he ached to his bones to build something that would hold her. And it all turned to mist before his eyes. To nothing.

  She loves me.

  Is this a dream? Was it all a dream? Little girl…

  Will I forget you?

  He fought to stand against the weight and weakness in his knees. That one thing he refused to yield…mad or sane, dream or lost reality—he would not forget her.

  He tried to see her image in his mind—her face and eyes—but they seemed to shimmer and flow, at one with the strange light and the blowing wind. It was the memory of her smile that came clearer.

  Stay with me. He’d said those words before—somewhere else—where?

  But he could not remember; he only thought of how she’d lain warm and trusting in his arms, an heiress in a bed of straw. His wife…a sidhe gift, but there was more to her than moonbeams. There was what he’d come to love—plain stubborn guts and a lavender-scented pig, and faith enough to keep her with him through a countryside in flames.

  Roddy, Roddy. Little girl. Stay with me.

  “Leave him,” Senach said. “Stay here in the light, and leave him in the dark.”

  “No.” Roddy sobbed. “Faelan!”

  “’Twas your choice. He would hate you, you said.”

  “He loves me!”

  “He always loved you.” On Senach’s head a crown of budding green leaves shone bright in the mist. “Too late, Lassar. Too late to cling to that.”

  “It’s not too late!” She stared at Senach and Fionn, felt the world receding, slipping away and away in the mist, and Faelan…she could not even hear him now; it was all silence and white shimmer; it was sliding from her, everything she’d loved…

  “No,” she screamed, and squeezed her eyes shut to gather her talent, to draw into herself the gift she had despised. She did what she never done—called on all her power, the part of herself she’d been afraid to touch, deep and silent, that suddenly seemed to have been waiting for this day, this moment, when the discipline she’d learned from suffering cities and crowds made a focus and a forge, turning mist to weapon and bending it to her will.

  She sent it out, across the distance, and for a moment it was enough. For a moment she saw the house through the light, saw MacLassar on the steps and the dowager countess with her hand on her mouth and her eyes blank with horror. But the door—at the door the mist was too bright and thick, obscuring Faelan from Roddy’s sight.

  Fionn smiled at Roddy—friend and enemy—shining beautiful and terrible in the vapor. She always belonged to us, Fionn had said, and Roddy knew now what it meant. Her talent and her strangeness had been echoes from another world, a world that touched reality only in the green and empty places of the earth—the faint remnant of a dying song on the brooding moors of Yorkshire and a burst of living magic here at the edge of humanity’s reach, where the wild land swept down and fingered with the sea.

  She was a bridge between, belonging to neither, and to both.

  Faelan.

  She was losing him. A crowd of memories engulfed her—MacLassar with his bandaged foot, a mare with her newborn foal…Faelan’s hands, sweat-grimed on a pitchfork; his face in the firelight, and in an open field with the play of sun and shadow on his glistening chest…the funny half-wry twist to his mouth when he threw a morsel to MacLassar…“Damned pig,” he would say. “Worthless beast.” And throw another bite.

  Faelan, she thought in anguish. She would not lose him, not like this, as some fey punishment for an ancient crime. Whatever he had done—it did not matter. She put her whole self, her whole soul, into reaching him. All the love that had lit those winter days of work and laughter, all the dreams she had learned to share…

  The light grew blinding, but she felt him in it, touched him with her gift, drove deep, gathering all of him—everything, what he was now, what he had been—love and dreams and memories, and a dark place…

  Suddenly he fought her, resisting that, struggling away from the shadows she would bring to light. I don’t remember, his mind howled. I don’t want to remember. She felt his panic and overrode it, gathered him close as if something threatened and she could protect him…I’m here. I love you. No matter what…while the white dimmed to shadow and shape…

  Chapter 26

  It was dark in the hall. Mamá had told him to wait, and he waited, far too old at ten years to admit that the black shadows still scared him a little. But not as much as the voices—not nearly as much. He swallowed and shifted uneasily, hearing through the closed door his mother’s tone grow shrill.

  “I’ll not suffer it,” she cried. “I tell you, Francis, I won’t live like this—branded with your Popish ways. We might as well be animals, shut up in this godforsaken place while you mouth your mumbo jumbo and traffic with foreign priests. I live in fear, Francis. I lie awake at night and think of it, that any moment we’ll be informed upon and everything taken—the house, the land—the very rug wrenched from under our feet. Do you hate me? Do you hate me so, that you wish me cut off from every friend—”

  “I don’t hate you,” his father shouted, with that frightening tremor in his voice. “Don’t say that.”

  “Yes! I say it! You don’t care what I feel; you don’t care what I suffer for this. Married to a Papist. I daren’t touch my own fortune, daren’t show my face in a decent drawing room. I can’t go to the capital, or to London, or to any civilized place, for fear you’ll expose yourself—crawling off to some mass-house like a drunkard crawls off to a tavern. And why, Francis—”

  “Because it’s what I am,” his father roared. “Because this family has kept faith for six centuries, and I’ll not be forgetting that we’re Irish, or let my son forget. There’s change coming—we’ll live to see these damnable penal laws repealed. I’ll see it, and I’ll be certain that Faelan knows his father didn’t bend to every wind that blew. Not as my own did.” Disgust tinged the bitter words. “I’ll keep my family’s land, and my family’s honor before God.”

  “Honor,” his mother spat. “You call it honor, I suppose, that you no longer come to my bed for fear that I’ll conceive another child!”

  “Great God, Christina—”

  “Oh, yes—look shocked, if you will! I know your mind, Francis. One son, and you think to keep this miserable stretch of rock and mountain undivided under the law. Lord knows, you’re right enough—no more than one paltry country squire could make a living off of it. But the Dublin leaseholds—you’ve income enough to be adding to them, to be building something substantial for your precious son, so he won’t be scratching like a plowboy in the dirt. But you can’t do so, can you? A Papist,” she sneered. “You can’t purchase anything.”

  The sound of her footsteps made angry thumping toward the door. She flung it open and candlelight rushed into the shadowed hall.

  “Faelan,” she snapped, imperative, and waved him into the room.

  He went slowly, hating the violence in their voices, the way his mother breathed fast and uneven beneath the heavy braiding and shiny blue silk of her gown. His father looked tall and furious, barricaded behind the great polished width of his desk. He only glanced at Faelan and then back at her, his dark brows drawn down and his mouth fierce.

  “For God’s sake, woman, do you think I’ll have him subjected to our quarrels?” He came out from behind the desk and reached for the bellpull by the fire. In a kinder tone, he said, “To bed with you, son. ’Tis late—”

  “He has something to say.” His mother stepped between her husband and the dangling velvet, holding herself erect, trembling. “Listen to him, Francis.”

  His father’s hand dropped, a
fall of white lace against his blue velvet coat. There was a look on his face that made Faelan’s fingers curl into nervous fists.

  “Faelan,” she said. “Tell your father what you told me this afternoon.”

  Faelan looked from her to his father, his throat too tense to manage words.

  “Go on,” his mother said. “The lines you bespoke me.” Her face was very white, her eyes bright and feverish as they had been that afternoon when she had consented to sing while he had practiced on his harp. She had even hugged him hard at the end of his performance—a thing she never did, a thing that made him feel hot and giddy with pleasure—though he knew she hated the instrument and his lessons, as she hated all of his father’s ideas. Faelan thought he must have played with particular excellence to deserve that attention, and in a burst of pride and confidence he had been eager to please her again by learning the catechism she’d brought him.

  In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, he had memorized, I recant the Roman Catholic religion, for that is the way of damnation.

  It had been easy enough to learn. It sounded much like the things Father O’Coileain taught him—damnation being familiar enough, and “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” having the same awesome ring as “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” although “recant” was not a word he knew yet.

  He looked at his mother, and she smiled at him with that same quivering, nervous eagerness—that look that his fine new pony had when he restrained it before a challenging fence.

  He took a shaky breath, and began to recite.

  He faltered halfway into it, letting the huge silence swallow his thin voice as his father’s face grew flushed and terrible.

  “Do you know what you’re saying?” His father’s whisper was hoarse. Outraged. “Do you understand this?”