Chapter One #4
Thomas shook his head. “It is not,” he said.
“But I have tried to be kind. I have tried to notice you, but it is never enough or it is never the right kind of notice. What have you ever tried to do for me except bleed all over my walls or make demands of me? You have never once shown any of the kindness you profess to want in return.”
Adelaide turned to look at him, frowning as she wiped her face.
She wasn’t an unattractive woman. In fact, she had pretty eyes and a nice smile.
Her dark hair was always well-groomed and she dressed in fine clothes.
But her behavior, from the very first day she arrived at Wark Castle, had been an abomination.
Thomas knew, in hindsight, that he should have suspected something was wrong those months ago when Northumbria brought her to Wark and then left within the hour. He didn’t even stay for supper.
Aye, Thomas should have known something was terribly wrong.
“No one understands me here,” Adelaide said. “No one understands anything about me.”
“What are we to understand, my lady?”
Her eyes flashed. “There is no respect for my skills or knowledge,” she said. “I can do many things, my lord, but you have never respected anything I have done.”
He folded his enormous arms across his chest. “What have you done?”
Adelaide was turning from tears to fury. She pointed to the bright day beyond the window. “I am tempestarii,” she hissed. “I control the weather. The fine sky – I did this. But you do not believe me!”
Thomas could only shake his head. They’d had this conversation before.
The woman believed she was a witch capable of controlling the weather – a tempestarii, as they were known.
She was convinced that everything that happened with the sky was something she had brought forth with her divine spells.
He’d discovered that belief about a week after she’d arrived, sometime around the first instance of her cutting herself.
There was something in her blood, she said, that controlled the weather.
Every time she cut herself in her dramatic, attention-seeking fashion, she expected the weather to change.
It didn’t.
“I told you not to speak on such things,” Thomas said. “There are superstitious people about and if they believe a storm witch lives at Wark Castle, they may blame you for failed crops and famines. You put yourself in danger every time you say that.”
Adelaide was wiping at her bloodied arm with the long sleeve of her shift; the cuts had been shallow, just enough to smear blood and make the situation look dire. But now that Thomas was no longer reacting to them, Adelaide cleaned herself up.
“What do you care?” she said, sniffling. “You will not protect me.”
He lifted those big shoulders again. “I do not want my castle razed simply to punish you,” he said, watching her pale cheeks flush with rage.
Before she could retort, he held up a hand.
“I will say no more on the subject except for this – my parents as well as your father are coming to visit today and you will behave yourself. If you do not, I will send you back with your father and I do not care about the betrothal. I will take my chances with his anger. I will no longer tolerate your foolish, irrational behavior and I will not permit you to embarrass yourself in front of my family any more than you already have. Do you understand me?”
Adelaide was defiant. Having grown up with no one to deny her or set boundaries for her, she rebelled against anything of that nature that Thomas had ever tried to do. “I will not be silenced,” she said. “Mayhap your parents would like to know that you want me dead. I will tell them, I swear it!”
Thomas had enough; one couldn’t argue with a mad woman, and that was exactly what Adelaide was – mad.
Without another word, he turned on his heel and marched from the chamber.
The weeping nurse was still out in the hall, still smeared with blood, and he grabbed the woman by the arm, tossing her into the chamber where she fell to her knees.
As her cries resumed in earnest, Thomas slammed the chamber door shut and bolted it from the outside.
“And that is how you cage a rabid beast,” he hissed to Desmond, still standing outside the door.
“Pass the word to all of the servants. No one opens that door and I do not care how much those two scream. I am at an end with my patience. I will have to release them when de Vauden arrives for tonight’s feast, but not before. ”
Desmond was particularly approving of that order. “Aye, my lord,” he said. “I will ensure they do not make it out alive.”
He muttered the last word inaudibly and Thomas turned to look at him, curiously. “What did you say?”
Desmond shook his head quickly. “Nothing, my lord,” he insisted. “I will ensure no one opens that door until you give the command.”
Thomas’ gaze lingered on the man a moment, still trying to figure out what he had said that he wouldn’t repeat. He suspected what it was, but he didn’t ask again.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t agree with the man.
Listening to the weeping and screaming on the other side of the chamber door, Thomas descended the stairs, mentally preparing for the arrival of his parents and Northumbria.
He had a feeling that tonight would be an interesting night.