Chapter 16
CHAPTER 16
Austyn rode.
The thunder of a man’s rebuke. Fierce, impassioned words, pitched too low for his ears to decipher. A woman’s response, her plea unintelligible, but trembling with fervent conviction. The unmistakable crack of a hand striking human flesh.
He had rushed forward then, prepared to do battle for his lady’s sake, only to discover Holly, his Holly, with her palm pressed tenderly to a man’s cheek. His Holly, begging prettily for a man’s forgiveness. A man of God perhaps, but first and always, a man.
A veil of darkness had descended over his eyes. And he had flung himself on the bare back of his horse and rode.
Austyn rode until the silent bellow of rage trapped in his lungs subsided to ragged pants. He rode until his fists unclenched from their primal need to do harm. Until they surrendered the seductive temptation to smash and maim and utterly destroy the wall of sanity he’d labored upon for a lifetime, one heavy stone at a time. A wall so thick and so high that it was already completed before he realized too late that he had enclosed himself inside.
He rode until he could do nothing but slide off his winded mount and drop to his knees in the tall, coarse grass at the edge of the river.
The rising wind whipped his hair into a frenzy, stung his burning eyes, sang a mournful refrain over the rushing in his ears. Gray clouds scudded in from the west, bringing with them a wistful hint of the sea that had birthed them. Austyn remembered laying on this very bluff as a small boy, his head pillowed by his mother’s skirts as she recited from memory one of the epic poems he adored. Tales of battle. Tales of valor. Tales of honor.
She had raked his hair from his brow and smiled down at him, her eyes alight with love. “Someday, my son, you’ll be such a man as these. A knight. A hero. The pride of the Gavenmores.”
Austyn doubled over, sickened by the memory. Sickened by the poison festering in his soul. He had thought Holly—his funny, homely little Holly—to be the one who would purge him of it. ’Twas utterly ludicrous that she would be capable of provoking even a shadow of the debilitating jealousy that had scarred the hearts of the Gavenmore men for generations.
He pressed a hand to his heart, feeling beneath his tunic the outline of the token bequeathed to him so grudgingly by the beauty he’d encountered in the Tewksbury garden. Now there was a woman to incite madness in the heart of a man! he thought. There was a woman worth surrendering his soul for! But when he closed his eyes to conjure her face before him, her exquisite features melted, reforming into a puckish grin and a pair of animated violet eyes. Her mane of sable curls vanished, disintegrating into springy tufts that bobbed like a nest of baby snakes, yet felt surprisingly silky to his touch.
Austyn groaned. What in God’s name was he to do now? Rush back to the castle, drag that snide priest from the chapel by his cowl, and demand to know the nature of the man’s impassioned quarrel with his wife? Corner Holly and bully her into a confession of wrongdoing?
He came to his feet, setting his lips in a grim line of determination. He wouldn’t give that treacherous witch Rhiannon the satisfaction of doing either. ’Twas but a single stone of the wall around him that Holly had crumbled with her clumsy affections and artless attempts to please him. It could be easily enough repaired with the mortar of indifference. And what man would dare to judge him for refusing to count the terrible cost of that indifference?
As Austyn swung himself astride the horse and drove it back toward the castle, the first cold beads of rain struck his face like a baptism of his mother’s tears.
···
Thunder rumbled over the black mountains like the purring of a giant cat. A cool breeze drifted through the oriel window of the solar, carrying with it the gentle pattering of the rain on the balcony. ’Twas the seventh day of rain and the gloom and damp were beginning to sorely vex Holly’s nerves. She paced the cozy chamber, the defiant crackling of the fire on the hearth only heightening her restlessness.
Carey sat sharpening his arrows on the windowsill while Emrys, Winifred, and Elspeth played a muffled game of dice in the corner. Two yellow hounds drowsed before the fire. They lifted their broad heads to give Holly a doleful look as she swept past.
She stopped abruptly before the table, planting her palms firmly on its freshly polished surface. “Sir, I have strewn the floor of the great hall with new rushes and dried herbs—sweet-smelling tansy and lavender, basil and winter savory, even a sprinkling of wintergreen.”
Her boast earned her only a taciturn grunt from the man behind the table. A man nearly buried behind a mound of ledgers and scrolls. A man who’d barely spoken to her for a sennight and who only endured her company when he could devise no escape from it.
Holly wracked her brain for more achievements to recite. “I’ve scrubbed the rust from all the manacles in the dungeon.”
“Very industrious of you,” he said, refusing to grant her even the boon of a glance. His voice was as cool and distant as the silvery web of lightning arcing over the river.
Elspeth crooked a sympathetic eyebrow. Winifred and Emrys stared fixedly at the dice. Carey scowled at Austyn’s back.
Holly straightened, her back rigid. If she could no longer please her husband, perhaps she could anger him. Any stamp of emotion upon the impassive beauty of his countenance would be a welcome variation.
She reached up to tug a lengthening curl, her eyes narrowing with a hint of temper only Elspeth recognized. “I’ve asked Winifred to prepare pickled lamprey for your supper tonight.”
Nothing. Not even the threat of pickled eel could induce a shadow of his crooked grin, a petulant twitch of his chiseled lips. Lips that had once praised even her smallest effort with extravagant charity.
Holly folded her arms over her chest and tapped her foot on the floor. “I fear I accidentally spiced your porridge with hemlock this morn. You should succumb to the throes of a convulsive death by nightfall.”
“That’s very nice,” he murmured. Snapping a ledger closed, he rose in one crisp motion, directing his words at Carey. “I’m off to the north fields to see how long the rain will delay the haying. I shall return at eventide.” He brushed past her as if she were invisible, leaving her standing empty-handed and hollow hearted before the table.
Carey unfolded himself from the windowsill. “My lady, you mustn’t take his brooding to heart. The Gavenmore lords have always been prone to black moods. They harden their hearts and—”
Holly lifted a hand to silence him, forcing a tremulous smile. “I fear that one must first possess a heart before one can harden it.”
Terrified that Carey’s compassion would entice her hurt and frustration to spill over into tears, she turned and fled blindly from the solar.
Holly wandered the castle like a restless wraith, pondering how she was going to endure the next thirty years of Austyn’s indifference. Had he treated her with such callous apathy from the beginning, she might have been left the comfort of blaming her unsightly appearance or her churlish behavior. She might have resigned herself to a marriage between two strangers who were destined to remain thus until death parted them.
But Austyn had given her a taunting glimpse of something more. Of stories shared before the fire after an exhausting, but exhilarating, day of labor. Of a crooked smile and a deep rumble of laughter, made all the more precious because they were bestowed with such rarity. Of a strong masculine hand that reached to rumple her butchered hair as if it were yet a cascade of sumptuous curls. He had given her all that, then snatched it away without even a clue as to what terrible transgression she had committed to lose his favor.
Had she known what sin to confess, she might even have humbled her pride to seek Nathanael’s ear. The priest had apologized for their quarrel, vowing that it was only concern for her soul that had prompted his outburst, but relations between them remained strained and guarded. He spent most of his days poring over the musty Gavenmore histories he had discovered in a chapel vault.
As Holly passed an arrow loop, a watery swath of sunlight informed her the rain had ceased at last. Too late, it seemed, to dispel the gloom of her spirit. Each time she rounded a corner, her pathetic attempts to prove herself a fit wife for Austyn mocked her: the fresh coat of whitewash covering the cracked plaster of the buttery walls, the pungent aroma of the herbs crunched beneath her shoes, the tubs of scarlet poppies perched along the battlements. She had left her cheerful stamp on every chamber of the keep, abandoning only the north tower to its cobwebs and ghosts.
Holly could bear it no longer. She snatched up a woolen shawl and fled the castle by an outside staircase. Escaping the enclosed courtyard, she trudged through the wet grass of the inner bailey, paying more heed to the clouds scudding across the sun than to the shy footfalls behind her.
“Gwyneth.”
Holly sighed wearily. She was not in the mood to be mistaken for anyone’s wife, dead or otherwise. “No, Father Rhys,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder at him. “I’m not Gwyneth. I’m Holly.” She could not quite banish the wistful note from her voice. “Austyn’s Holly.”
He shook his head. “Gwyneth,” he repeated with stern conviction, pointing at the knoll just beyond her.
A phantom of a shiver caressed her nape. The breeze teased gooseflesh to her arms as she drifted toward the stone cairn nearly smothered by a blanket of ivy and weeds.
She stopped at the edge of the unmarked grave. “Gwyneth?” she whispered, hugging the shawl tight about her.
The wind bore the echo of Austyn’s baritone, its gruff timbre softened by an edge of yearning. I remember everything about her. Her voice. Her smile. The angle at which she tilted her head when she was singing .
Gwyneth . Rhys’s wife. Austyn’s beloved mother. Holly swallowed around the lump that rose unbidden to her throat.
She glanced back at the keep, frowning in bewilderment. She could understand why the castle had fallen to neglect without a mistress to maintain it, but she could not fathom the disgrace of this untended grave. Her own mother’s tomb was kept dusted and polished, lit day and night by costly beeswax tapers, decorated with armfuls of fragrant yellow jonquils each spring on the anniversary of her death.
A stray beam of sunlight slanted full across Holly’s face, warming her for the first time in days. Perhaps ’twas not too late to win her husband’s favor, she thought. Perhaps she had sought to impress him with trivial domestic accomplishments when all he really required was a simple gesture of her devotion. A gift from the heart.
Turning, she clasped the old man’s gnarled hands in her own. “Father Rhys, would you care to help me?”
He nodded eagerly, the slant of his smile tugging at her heart with its familiarity. A gust of wind parted the lingering clouds as they both fell to their knees and began clawing the ivy away from the cairn.
Holly sank back on her haunches to rub a smudge of soil from her cheek. Dirt encrusted the abbreviated crescents of her fingernails. Her lower back ached. The wind had chapped her face. She grinned, as delighted as she was exhausted by her afternoon’s labor.
Her shawl lay abandoned on the grass beside her. A tangle of weeds and ivy was heaped a few feet away, begging the touch of a torch. A profusion of transplanted anemones crowded boldly around the neatly piled stones of the cairn. As Holly gently poked the last plant in the dirt, Austyn’s father marched over the crest of the hill, cradling a freshly cut armful of red hyacinths. They were to be Holly’s special gift to her husband—a fragrant blanket to guard Gwyneth of Gavenmore’s eternal slumber.
Between one step and the next, the old man’s eager smile faded. His feet faltered. The flowers fell from his arms in a crimson shower.
Holly turned to gaze behind her, shading her eyes against the lowering sun. The earth beneath her knees vibrated with the thunder of approaching hoofbeats. Her heart began to race, beating in time to the frantic rhythm.
Austyn slid off his destrier before it could come to a complete halt, stalking toward her with deadly grace. She came to her feet in instinctive defense. ’Twould seem her efforts to coax a response from her husband had succeeded beyond her wildest hopes. He was in nothing less than a murderous rage.
He stopped less than a foot from her, his broad chest heaving, his nostrils flaring with each ragged breath. “How dare you? Is there no corner of my life you won’t scrub or sweep or befoul with your childish attentions, your ridiculous flowers?”
A bellow of rage would have been less wounding than his low snarl of contempt. He was gazing at her as if she were a vile thing—a profanation of the holy ground on which they stood.
Holly could do nothing but summon the queenly composure Nathanael had taught her. Clasping her hands in front of her, she tipped back her head and said, “I sought only to please you. Your father told me his beloved Gwyneth was buried here.”
“Gwyneth,” he spat. As if seeking a fresh target for his fury, he stormed past her and grabbed his father by the front of his tunic. “Did you tell her, old man? Did you tell her what your beloved Gwyneth did? Did you tell her what you did to your beloved Gwyneth?”
At seeing a helpless creature so abused, Holly’s fear was supplanted by reckless anger. She snatched at Austyn’s arm, tugging the rigid muscles with all of her strength. “Stop it! You’re frightening him!”
Austyn freed his father and wheeled on her. For one terrible moment, Holly thought he would strike her. She recoiled, not in anticipation of physical harm, but of the irreparable damage such a careless blow would do her heart. At her blatant flinch, shame flickered in his eyes, so intense as to be almost self-loathing.
Holly reached for him, this time in tenderness, but he jerked his arm out of her reach and strode back to the cairn. Dropping to his knees, he dragged off his gauntlets, then began to tear up the tender anemones with his bare hands, hurling the ripe gobbets of earth as far as they would go.
Holly felt as if her heart was being wrenched from her chest with each snap of the fragile roots. She came to kneel on the opposite side of the grave, not bothering to wipe away the tears trickling steadily down her cheeks.
“I don’t understand how you could defile her memory,” she said softly. “She was your mother.”
Austyn’s eyes blazed cold blue fire as he threw back his head and roared, “She was a faithless whore!”