Chapter 15 #3
The door opened and Rose peeked her head in.
She gave Gillian an apologetic grimace and hurried to the chair where she’d sat at dinner.
Her pouch was on the floor beneath it. “Here it is.” She stood and glanced at Nicholas.
He glared back at her. He looked demonic, black hair slipping loose to fall around his face, black whiskers stubbling his cheeks, standing barefoot in shirtsleeves before a stain of blood-red wine.
Rose took in the scene before her and said, “Did I mention I did the er . . . spell in the solar? Gillian had nothing to do with it.”
Nicholas gave her a tight and completely false closemouthed smile. “Aye, I believe you did.”
“Very well then.” She looked at Gillian with raised brows. “Need you anything, Gilly?”
Gillian managed a smile that matched her husband’s. “No, I’m fine. Good evening.”
When Rose was finally gone, Gillian braced herself for more of Nicholas’s rage. He stared down at the mess he’d made, hands on his hips and a rueful curve to his mouth.
“Nicholas?”
“You have a very brave and loyal sister. I think she believes I’m beating you in here.”
The tight set of Gillian’s shoulders relaxed. “Aye, she’s also overbearing and meddling . . . and she’s your sister now, too, since you married me.”
He crossed the room and put his hands on her shoulders. His grip was firm but not punishing. “No more spells. No more witchcraft. The servants are already whispering about you.”
His statement gave her an unpleasant jolt. “They are?”
“Aye, they’re saying you’re a witch and can’t be harmed.”
She looked away, a wave of anxiety washing over her.
“I had Evan remove the marks from the solar. No more witchcraft, Gillian. Promise me.”
Gillian stared at the rapid pulse in his throat. She couldn’t make that promise, especially now, when she was so close, when Rose might have actually broken the curse.
He tilted her chin up with his forefinger. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
She searched his dark eyes and saw that he was earnest. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to please him, so very badly . . . and yet she needed to please herself.
She licked her lips. “Very well . . . I can’t promise, but I will do my best. And if I must, I will be very careful.”
Nicholas dropped his hands from her shoulders in weary disappointment and crossed to the bed. “Let’s go to bed.”
They both undressed in silence. Nicholas helped her with her stays, then moved away, his fingers not lingering as they usually did.
When she turned back to the bed, he was beneath the bedclothes, candlelight gleaming off his bare chest. He leaned on an arm, watching her, his black eyes shadowed.
Gillian blew out the candles and slid into bed with him, but when he made no move to hold her, she turned her back to him, staring blindly into the darkness.
She felt sick with unhappiness. She closed her eyes tightly, knowing she would not sleep this night.
Finally, when the tension became nearly unbearable for Gillian, he slid down beside her, his knees behind hers, his arm around her waist so they fit together perfectly. His body warmed the length of her. He idly caressed the arches of her feet with his own. The tension flowed out of her.
After a time he lay still, and she thought that maybe he’d gone to sleep when he asked, “What was the purpose of the circle?”
Gillian’s heart began to beat very hard. His hand slid up between her breasts and lay against her chest, so that her heart seemed to hammer against his hand.
“Peace,” he whispered soothingly, “I’m just curious.”
Gillian let out the breath she’d been holding. “A spell, my lord . . . to remove the curse I told you about.”
He sighed deeply, his chest expanding behind her back, but said nothing more.
Gillian stared despondently into the dark and her eyes grew accustomed to the blackness. The faint, mist-shrouded moonlight from the open window showed her the darker shapes of furniture.
“You really don’t believe, do you, Nicholas?”
His hand pressed against her breast fractionally. “I have seen some very strange things in my life, so it’s not that I don’t believe.”
“You don’t believe me. You think I’m dotty.”
He chuckled softly behind her, and Gillian’s heart lightened. It was the first laugh she’d heard from him since Rose and Stephen had arrived.
“Perhaps.”
She pinched the hand that now cupped her breast.
“Ow!” He caught her miscreant hand and brought it firmly against her breast, trapped under his.
“What have you seen?”
She felt him lift a shoulder behind her.
“I visited Turkey and Africa when I was young . . . I saw some strange things there. The healers are very skilled. I saw a man eat fire and swallow a sword. Some held deadly snakes and came to no harm. But I’m not certain that is witchcraft, though some would argue it’s the devil’s work. ”
Gillian knew many noblemen and knights went to the Continent, but she’d not heard much about them visiting with the Turks. “Why did you go to Africa and Turkey?”
He was silent for a long time. “I thought I would see something in their faces that explained me. I thought that by being among them I would understand things . . . about myself. I understand less now than I did before.”
“What was it you hoped to understand?” He seemed disinclined to speak further, so she prompted, “Nicholas?”
His chest rose behind her as he took a deep breath.
“I became very ill when I was seven. I nearly died. Before then, and after, the servants had been forbidden to speak of what happened to my mother. So I didn’t really know I was different.
I wasn’t stupid; I saw how people looked at me and saw that my skin was different .
. . but I was to be an earl, after all, and a bit spoiled by my father, and so I attributed it to my being verra special, as my father always told me I was.
” He exaggerated his burr in what Gillian imagined was an imitation of his father’s voice.
“But when everyone thought I was going to die . . . their tongues became loose. I heard all manner of things while in a fevered state . . . servants recounting the story of my mother’s rape—embellished, I’m sure.
I had nightmares about it for a long time.
I also heard my mother tell her sister I was being punished by God because of the heathen in me—”
“You know that’s not true,” Gillian said quickly.
“Aye, I ken,” he said softly, a smile in his voice.
His fingers stroked hers, finding her mother’s ring and turning it on her finger just as she sometimes did.
“My father didn’t know at the time that these things were said, or there’d have been some floggings.
But later, when I recovered, I asked him about it.
He said there was no shame in my heritage.
He told me stories then about the Vikings invading Scotland and raping the women—and though it was very bad for the women, it brought strength to the people.
He said the same of the Normans.” He was silent for a moment, and she thought he was finished, but then he continued very softly, “He said my blood would make the Lyons’ strong and that I was his son no matter what anyone said.
That’s why it was so important to deny the truth—because Kincreag would be mine no matter what. ”
“I would have liked your father very much,” Gillian whispered into the ensuing silence.
Nicholas let out a soft breath. “Aye, I miss him.”
He still toyed idly with her ring. He slid it from her finger onto his pinky. “So I remember to fix it tomorrow.”
Gillian snuggled deeper into his arms and fell into a contented sleep.
It was dark when Broc’s cold nose and soft whine woke Gillian from a sound sleep.
Nicholas slept on behind her, his chest rising and falling against her back, his arm heavy on her waist. Someone moved silently in the darkness of her bedchamber, barely discernable, a shifting of shadows.
Gillian choked on her fear, too paralyzed to cry out.
She lay motionless, heart beating into the darkness.
Her eyes quickly adjusted to the dark, and she recognized the pattern of movement.
She let out her pent-up breath, her pulse slowing.
She shushed Broc and carefully lifted Nicholas’s arm from her waist. He muttered something incoherent, then rolled over and continued sleeping soundly.
She scooted off the bed and quietly lit a candle. When she turned to the fireplace, it was exactly what she thought: the maid endlessly cleaning the fireplace and drinking the wine. Rose’s spell had worked.
Gillian moved closer to the specter, holding the candle high to see her face.
It was Aileen. The suicide. She looked just as she had the last time Gillian had seen her, pale blond hair pulled back tight, wearing a dun brown gown.
She bent over the fireplace, sweeping ashes with an invisible brush into an invisible ash pan, her hand passing though the glowing embers.
Then she stopped, glanced surreptitiously around the room, picked up the goblet beside the chair, and drained it.
Gillian followed her to the basin, where she washed the goblet. Aileen was oblivious to her, doomed to repeat the same actions over and over and over again.
“What are you trying to tell me?” Gillian whispered.
But the ghost did not answer.
Nicholas did, however. “Gillian?” His voice was muzzy with sleep.
“I’m just adding wood to the fire.” She hurried back to the fireplace and tossed on a log.
“Who are you talking to?”
“No one. Broc. His nose is cold.”
Hearing his master’s voice, Broc bounded onto the bed. He stood over Nicholas, snuffling at his face.
“Bloody dog.” Nicholas pushed halfheartedly at the determined dog.
When Gillian returned to bed, Broc had taken her place, lying with his back against Nicholas, who had fallen back to sleep with his arm draped over the dog.
Gillian smiled and crawled beneath the covers on the opposite side of her vast bed, curling up against Nicholas’s back.
But sleep did not come to her. Much had changed now that the curse was broken, and she couldn’t help wondering, as she pressed against the warmth of her husband’s skin, if she’d been better off cursed.