Chapter 11
CHAPTER 11
“Good Lord, man, can’t you make her stop?”
Even if Austyn had a reply for Carey’s plea, which he did not, Carey would have had to pry his hands away from his ears to hear it. Austyn and his companions sat paralyzed on their mounts, gaping at his bride with varying degrees of horror and disbelief. The horses shifted restlessly, desperate to bolt.
Austyn could hardly blame them. He was tempted to do the same. He had entertained the naive hope that his new wife might be a helpmeet, someone who would share his cares and responsibilities, thereby lessening them. But it seemed he had only earned himself another burden. And a deafening one at that.
She had thrown back her head and was bawling like a newborn calf. Fat tears streamed down her face. Austyn would have wagered it impossible that human skin could flush brighter than her sunburned cheeks, yet her nose had deepened to a ripe cherry red. She resembled nothing so much as a homely little troll having one hell of a temper tantrum.
Her childish display should have enraged him, but Austyn could not dismiss the plaintive note in her wailing. ’Twas as if she’d hoarded a lifetime of misery for just such a moment
“For bloody’s sake, Austyn, do something,” Carey pleaded. “Comfort her. Offer her a kerchief. Go pat her on the…on the”—he fumbled for an appropriate body part—“shoulder.”
Austyn was more than ready to take action. He swung one leg over his horse, dismounting with unmistakable resolve. “Take the others and ride ahead. Don’t turn back no matter what you may hear.”
The priest and nurse broke into a dismayed clamor.
“Oh, please, kind sir,” Elspeth said, appearing dangerously near tears herself. “Ye mustn’t be too harsh on her. My mistress is quite delicate.”
Austyn cocked a skeptical eyebrow. Her delicate mistress was presently beating at the brook with both fists, sending great gouts of water spraying into the air.
“What she means to say,” the priest shot Austyn’s gauntleted fists a nervous look, “is that our lady’s constitution is such that she might not survive a beating; therefore, we implore you—”
“Enough!” Austyn roared.
They all recoiled, even Carey.
“The only person I’m going to beat around here is the next one who dares accuse me of beating someone. Now go as I bid you.” He turned to Carey. “If either of them tries to turn back, put an arrow through them.”
Carey and the nurse scrambled to obey him, driving their mounts up the steep slope toward the ridge. Only the priest hung back, shooting a pensive look over his shoulder. Austyn glowered after him. The man’s proprietary attitude toward his wife was beginning to gall his temper.
Determining that her howls showed little sign of ceasing without intervention, Austyn drew off his boots and gauntlets, waded straight into the brook and squatted down a few feet away from her, resting his elbows on his knees. The cool water lapped at his hose.
Holly had squinched her eyes shut and drew breath for a fresh howl when she sensed someone nearby. Not just any old someone, she realized, sniffing a wintry breath of mint through her clogged nose. Her husband.
Her exhalation dwindled to a strangled hiccup as she peered through puffy eyelids at the curious sight of Sir Austyn of Gavenmore squatting placidly in the middle of a rushing brook.
He smiled encouragingly at her. “Feel better, Ivy?”
His unruffled composure insulted her beyond bearing. Her misery flamed to rage. “My name is Holly, you dolt! Holly! Are you so stupid you can’t remember your own wife’s name?”
Too incensed to ponder the consequences, she hurled the contents of her hand, which happened to be a fat gobbet of mud, directly at his smug face.
Holly was immediately surprised to realize that she did feel better. Immensely better. ’Twas as if she’d just shoved the crushing weight of a stone gargoyle off her chest. But her recovery came at a very inopportune moment. She might have muffled her giggle at the sight of her husband’s forbidding visage spattered with mud, but his confounded expression as he blinked the stuff from his eyes undid her entirely. She pointed at him, her sobs rising to shrieks of laughter.
He erupted from the water, striding toward her with lethal intent. Although alarmed to realize a fifteen stone Welshman with murder glittering in his eyes was a more substantial threat than an imaginary gargoyle, Holly was as helpless to stop laughing as she’d been to stop crying.
She skittered backward like a freshwater crab, fully expecting him to throttle her as she deserved.
Instead, he swept her up into the cradle of his arms. Her weighted skirts streamed water and she was forced to coil her arms around his neck or risk plunging right back into the brook.
Her shock grew as he sank down on a flat-topped rock on the bank, his implacable grip binding her to his lap. She thought to wiggle away, terrified he would discover the sodden lumps of cloth padding her skirt, but quickly realized that squirming only increased such a risk. She had no choice but to relax against his chest, his lap a cozier perch than she cared to admit.
In stoic silence, he retrieved a dry kerchief from his tunic and dipped it in the brook. Holly expected him to wipe the silt from his own brow, but instead he bathed her face with surprising tenderness. She closed her swollen eyes with an involuntary moan of pleasure, the cool water a heavenly ablution to her sun-scalded cheeks.
When she opened them, Austyn was drawing a leafy herb from a small leather bag. He held the pinch of green to her lips.
She drew back, eyeing his offering with a suspicion she didn’t bother to hide. “Is it poison?”
His crooked smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Poison’s a bit subtle for the Gavenmore tastes.” He bit off a leaf of the herb, chewing with obvious relish. “Try it,” he challenged, brushing the stalk against her parted lips.
Holly would have tried hemlock itself to put a halt to his disturbing teasing. She snapped off a leaf, barely missing his fingertips. As she chewed, a foreign tingling besieged her mouth. Foreign, yet hauntingly familiar. As familiar as the scent of this man’s breath on her throat. As familiar as the tickle of his mustache against her upper lip. As familiar as the taste of his kiss, the beguiling contrast of warm tongue and cool mint.
Plunged into confusion by the memory, Holly dropped her gaze to his lips, wondering again what manner of face lay beneath the mask of his beard.
“’Tis wintergreen. For purifying the breath and teeth.”
His matter-of-fact words snapped her back to reality. She was not the same woman he had kissed in the garden. Her teeth were no longer the snowy steeds of Eugene’s ode, but a herd of mottled nags.
She clamped her lips together, driven to mute shyness by her appearance for the first time in her memory.
“So your name is Holly, eh?” he asked, wiping the mud from his own face with the damp kerchief.
“Aye. ’Tis whispered that I was conceived beneath the hollyhocks in the castle garden.”
Austyn grinned at his wife’s prim bluntness. It seemed he hadn’t been the only man to succumb to the garden’s enchantment. “From your prickly disposition, I thought it might have been the holly bushes.”
She shot him a sullen glance. “Better to be spawned from thorns than hewn from unfeeling oak.”
The beauty of her eyes startled him to silence. It was like tipping over a moss-encrusted rock to find a diamond beneath. He doubted she even realized it, but she had kept one arm draped around his neck for balance and was now toying with his hair, twirling first one strand, then another, about her slender fingers. The intimacy of the act sent a strange shiver across his nape.
“Why do you find me unfeeling? Because I didn’t drag you out of the water, bend you over my knee, and give you the sound thrashing you deserve? Or is it simply because I haven’t granted you the attention you’re so desperately craving?”
She stared straight ahead, her delicate jaw set at a mutinous angle. “You are a most churlish man. I care nothing for your attention.”
“And you are a most dishonest girl.” Something odd flickered in her eyes. “Now why don’t you tell me what made you so wretchedly unhappy?”
She bowed her head. Austyn almost wished she hadn’t. With her face hidden, he had only her naked nape to contemplate. Unlike the blotchy skin of her cheeks, her nape was pale cream dusted with baby fine hair. He was distracted by the overwhelming desire to feather his lips across it. He shook off the disturbing urge, making a mental note to order some fine silks for wimples and veils.
“I was unhappy because I wanted my mother,” she confessed softly.
Austyn frowned. He could hardly fault her for grieving at being wrenched so abruptly from her mother’s arms. “I saw no sign of the countess yesterday. Was she ill?”
“No. She was dead. She’s been dead since I was five.” Holly fixed him with those stunning eyes again. “So you must find me utterly ridiculous to be carrying on so over nothing more than a ghost.”
Austyn found her much less ridiculous than he would have conceded. “Do you remember her?”
“Not as well as I’d like. Sometimes it seems as if time were melting my memories.”
“Time hasn’t been so kind to me. My mother’s been dead for almost twenty years yet I remember everything about her. Her voice. Her smile. The angle at which she tilted her head when she was singing.” He lowered his eyes before they could betray the full measure of his bitterness. “Would to God that I could forget.”
Holly continued to weave her fingers through his hair, her touch dangerously near a caress. “She was unkind to you?”
There were some delusions Austyn could not allow himself, no matter the solace they would give. He met Holly’s gaze squarely. “Never.”
He would have found her pity abhorrent and her compassion suspect, but he could hardly resist the offhand grace with which she drew the kerchief from his hand and dabbed a missed speck of mud from his temple. He found himself gazing not at her ravaged hair or sparse lashes, but at the pursed temptation of her lips.
He had believed there to be no surer cure for his unabated ardor than his bride’s presence on his lap, but at the tenderness of the wifely gesture, his loins surged as if galvanized by a jolt of lightning.
Austyn scrambled to his feet, catching her elbow before she could tumble back into the brook.
Fearing his conflicting urges would attract her notice, he started toward the horses at a brisk stride, hauling her along beside him. “Let us dawdle no longer, my lady. We must make haste if we are to reach Caer Gavenmore before nightfall.”
“Very good, sir,” she replied, the haughty bite restored to her voice. “Perhaps we shall yet reach your keep before I waste away to skin and bones for lack of sustenance.”
If anyone was surprised when Austyn and Holly emerged from their private parley with Holly mounted behind her husband and the mare plodding after them on a rope, they were wise enough to keep their opinions to themselves. Since twilight was fast approaching and they’d left the shelter of the forest for a windswept slope, no one thought it unusual that Nathanael would draw up his cowl to shield his face.
Holly discovered that her husband’s broad back provided shelter from any number of unpleasantries. Since she rode sidesaddle behind him, her arms secured around his lean waist, she no longer had to fret about revealing her padded skirts. Her papa had forbidden her the pleasures of hunting, hawking, or simply cantering across the countryside, and the rustic charm of the breeze ruffling her cropped hair was impossible to resist. She found she could even allow herself to doze by resting her cheek against Austyn’s back.
She awoke to discover the soothing rocking of the horse had ceased. She sniffed the air, intrigued by its metallic bite. They must be nearer to a river than she realized. The sun had dropped, tinging the air with a violet haze and mellowing both shadow and substance to muted shades of gray.
She leaned around Austyn’s shoulder for a clearer view, realizing that it was not the river’s ripe tang that had jarred her from sleep, but the tension flaying her husband’s body. His dark hair whipped in the wind, revealing an expression as remote as the crag of stone on which they stood.
She followed his gaze to a jagged promontory jutting out over the silvery belt of water. She widened her eyes, then blinked rapidly. Surely only a dream could conjure such a majestic vision! She might have sought to rub the Stardust of sleep from her eyes had Elspeth’s astounded expression not echoed her own.
A castle crowned the promontory, separated from thin air by a vast curtain wall of mortared sandstone. Crennelated towers flanked its mighty ramparts with a lithe grace that belied their defensive purpose.
“Your home?” she croaked, her throat inexplicably dry.
“Aye,” he replied grimly. “And yours as well, my lady.”
Holly swallowed, dumbfounded anew. ’Twas hardly the crude fortress she had expected.
“My God,” Nathanael breathed, too awestruck to repent or even notice his lapse into blasphemy. “’Tis one of the concentric castles the king’s father ordered built a generation ago in the vain hope of taming the muleheaded Welsh savages—” He subsided beneath Austyn’s level gaze, possessed by a sudden compulsion to polish his crucifix with the hem of his cloak.
Holly could not fathom how a lowly knight had come to possess such a wonder. Snatches of gossip from the tournament floated back to her ears on wings of malice— once incredibly wealthy…stripped of their earldom…murder .
“Hie!” Austyn cried without warning, driving the destrier into a gallop with a dig of his golden spurs.
Holly clung to his waist, petty gossip forgotten in her consuming desire to remain mounted. The others were forced to break into a jarring canter to match their pace. She would have almost sworn ’twas not eagerness that spurred her husband toward home, but the resolve to have done with something distasteful.
Unexpected exhilaration seized her as they thundered through the gathering twilight. Perhaps ’twas only the intoxicating hint of mist in the air or the stirring cadence of the beast’s gait, but Holly found it difficult to imagine being anywhere else but pressed to her husband’s back, her hands locked over the cool steel links of his hauberk. With Austyn to shelter her, she could turn her face to the wind without fear.
They descended the slope, approaching the promontory from the landward side. The wind stung tears from Holly’s eyes, but she blinked them away, reluctant to tear her gaze from Caer Gavenmore, perched like a celestial palace on a cloud of limestone.
Halfway around the promontory, she realized something was wrong. Terribly wrong. Rather than circling to protect its treasure, the massive curtain wall tapered into rubble at the fore of the castle, leaving it defenseless to attack. Half a tower jutted in ghostly silhouette against the darkening sky.
It seemed the castle was not an impregnable fortress after all, but a dreamer’s folly, abandoned long before completion. Holly’s heart wept at its wasted beauty.
Austyn slowed their party to a walk as they traversed the long hill toward the hollow maw that should have housed an iron gate. A lopsided half of a gatehouse watched them pass over a drawbridge that spanned a parched moat, its empty windows gaping like sightless eyes. Chilled by its abandoned air, Holly tightened her grip on Austyn’s waist without realizing it.
’Twas only fitting that the first thing she should see after they passed into what should have been the inner bailey had the outer bailey been completed was a grave. A mantle of weeds and ivy choked the stony cairn. Austyn did not spare it even a glance, but Holly twisted to stare, curious as to who might have been buried in such a prominent spot, yet denied eternal slumber in the family chapel.
She longed to ask Austyn, but his rigid posture made him seem as forbidding as their surroundings. He bore little resemblance to the man who had cradled her on his lap and tenderly sponged the tears from her face.
She was gathering her courage to ask him anyway when an arrow whizzed past her ear and something slammed her to the ground with the force of a catapulted stone.