A Kiss in the Night (16 page)

"Aye. Why, I even gave 'em a grandson!"

There was a truth to it. Linness spent a good deal of time wondering which truth was greater: the shared love between Lord and Lady de Beaumaris and herself, or the deceit on which it was built. She prayed it was the first.

"You're impossible," Linness decided. "Well, come. Help me write back.”

From the start they had devised a system for writing to Lady Belinda's parents. Lady Belinda could not write; apparently this had been just one of her numerous faults. She had trouble reading, as well; letters appeared as indecipherable blurs to her eyes. The convent she had spent several years in had given up trying to teach her shortly before the sisters had sent her back home. "Because," Clair had explained, "the lady's less than shining personage disrupted the peace and sanctity of the convent just as she did in her good parents' home..." So Linness simply wrote the letters herself, while the baron and baroness naturally assumed the words were penned by a scribe, and instead of signing them, she drew a big heart, which Lady Belinda's dear mother said had brought tears to her eyes when she first saw it.

Sometime later another letter to Lady Beaumaris was sealed.

With her hair still wet from a swim, Linness, shivering, lifted the pitcher of goat's milk and poured it into the wooden bowl, intending to bring it up to her apartments for her cats. She drew close to the great wide oven where venison hung on a spit. The kitchen boy, Oscar, turned the spit, while Edwin, his brother, stood washing the ladles and brushes for the basting. Unlike older kitchens, the chateau's kitchen had two more baking ovens, and Linness savored the delicious scent of Vivian's fresh bread that sweetened the air.

She caught sight of Michaels trying to sneak away with a hot piece of bread. This was her cue to start the game. Normally she would point out his shenanigans to Vivian, who would scold him, often threatening him with the ever-present spatula or spoon, and as the elderly cook was so engaged, she would slip the loot of food into her apron pockets and later meet Michaels outside to share in the bounty over laughter.

Not so today. Today she was distracted.

So Vivian caught Michaels at once, moving her great girth in front of the hot baked bread protectively. She pointed not a spatula, but the long-handled rake that was normally used to clean the ovens. "No dirty hands on me bread till I set it on the table!"

Michaels waited for Linness to save him. Instead he heard her curiously subdued voice request, "Vivian, I need some scraps of meat for my cats—"

"Do ye now? Those cats will be the end of meat on Gaillard's tables, they will," the woman complained even as she began heaping a wooden plate with scraps. "Over a half dozen living up there now, and with Maid Belle's lot coming soon, ye will be needin' a wheelbarrow to bring up these precious scraps..."

Despite her complaints, the eider woman had a soft spot for the creatures. Linness had won her affection the day she refused to move a mother cat and its kittens from the comfort of the linen closet. They had been allies ever since, an allegiance that grew stronger with the friendship between Jean Luc and Vivian's grandson, Pierre.

Michaels winked at Linness conspiratorially before he reached over to the tray and quickly stuffed his pockets with hot bread. Linness was looking past him. Vivian held out the plate of scraps, but she, too, stopped as she saw the change in Linness's gaze as Bonet stepped inside the kitchen, warmly greeting everyone.

He held three plucked chicken carcasses in his hands, preparing to wash them in the big basin before he hung them on a spit over the lesser oven. Linness stiffened visibly as the strange and awful dream came back to her. The crowded room went suddenly white.

She opened her eyes to see the familiar faces staring at her. Michaels's hands had caught her up when he saw her stumble. "Milady, did you faint?'

"Nay." She shook her head slowly, staring still at the chicken carcasses in Bonet's hands.

The concerned gazes of everyone were upon her. "Milady, are you well?"

"Aye...I am fine. I—" A chill raced up her spine. She turned to see Michaels's kind face. "Michaels, would you come with me? There is something I must see."

"Of course, milady. Where to?"

"The chicken coop."

The chicken coop sat alongside the dovecote, and the mews. She hated the mews, where the hooded merlins and one prized falcon lived in large wired cages. She loathed the caging of the winged creatures. It seemed the cruelest fate for flying birds who were meant to make their home in the blue sky, to know freedom as no man ever could, to live out their lives in foul-smelling, dark cages. She sometimes had dreams wherein she slipped inside the mews, opened the cages, and watched joyously as the creatures took flight into the night heavens.

The chicken coop was another story. Michaels and she had to bend to enter the smaller space. The afternoon sun lit the space from a window above. A hen led a half dozen chicks across the straw-covered floor, pecking obsessively for specks of leftover grain. Hens sat cooing contentedly on nests while the ducks and geese generally preferred the yards outside. A basket of freshly hatched eggshells lay discarded at her feet. Four roosters preened about, occasionally flying up to the nests. Unlike the hens, the roosters were assured a long life. The Gaillard children had given them names.

Michaels stood, hands on hips, surveying the place. "What is it milady wanted to see?"

A reasonable question, but she had no answer. Her sight did not always, or even often, come through dreams, but she recognized it those few times it occurred. Mary was trying to warn her about a chicken. Something about a chicken. "I do not know really. I had a bad dream about these creatures."

"About chickens?"

"I am trying to make sense of it, too," she replied. "I thought if I came here and looked at them—" She sighed and shrugged. "Ah well. Perhaps it was no more than the nonsense made of any dream." She shook her head and smiled at her apparent madness. "Somehow I felt 'twas trying to warn me of something—"

They turned at the sound of the trumpet outside. They stepped back into the brighter light of the courtyard space. At first they didn't see anything, then the sound of flying hooves was followed by Paxton and Jean Luc riding Tasmania at full speed toward them.

Linness was about to scream, but stopped herself. Like all mothers of boys, she had considerable practice at catching her screams, so as not to burden his irrepressible courage and boyhood fun with her own fear for his safety. She exercised this prodigious fear cautiously, like a precious medicine, using it only when absolutely necessary. Not now.

Jean Luc was safe with Paxton.

Paxton drew back on the reins. The horse lifted into the air, then crashed back to the ground. Her son's wild peals of laughter joined with Paxton's. She stood very still, watching, as he lowered the boy to the ground and swung off himself.

Jean Luc's face flushed with excitement as his uncle embraced him. Paxton's laughter stopped as his eyes came to hers. Morgan and the rest of their party rushed in on horses behind them. Paxton stood up slowly.

She wore a work dress of green and gold stripes and a white apron prettily embroidered with green flowers. 'Twas cloth a peasant might wear, but he understood it hardly mattered what she wore; tattered rags or a colored silk, the effect was the same. The wet hair told him of what he had just missed. His gaze fixed on her breasts, where his ring hung, and he remembered their fullness against his chest long ago, the lush temptation of her nudity against his hot skin...

He suddenly cursed this uncharacteristic boyish agitation; it was irritating, to say the least. He pointed her out to Jean Luc.

"Mother." Jean Luc ran to her. "Mother, did you see me? My uncle let me ride his horse again! We went so fast! The wind blurred my eyes and I thought we were flying. My uncle says he will help me train my pony, that he will get me a saddle finer than any in all of Gaillard! Mother, are you listening?"

Michaels looked curiously from Linness to Paxton and back again. Their gazes had locked across the distance; she seemed unable to look away. She finally looked down at her son with a start as riders crowded into the courtyard. "What? Oh, aye, I saw you. It gave me such a start!"

Paxton removed his gloves as he stepped toward them. Then she knew how much trouble she was in, for his nearness caused her blood to rush from her head, giving her a brief wash of dizziness, which she quickly recovered from. Only to find a slight shake in her knees.

Oh, Paxton, Oh Lord...

"So," Paxton began in a pretense of indifference. "Are you anxiously awaiting your husband's return, milady?"

The words were like a slap to the face.

Paxton, do not do this to me.

She wanted to say it out loud, not realizing the pain on her face said exactly that. The truth was she never anxiously awaited her husband. Ever.

Jean Luc was talking to her, and she realized he, too, had asked her a question. Without having a clue as to what plot or scheme she agreed to, she replied, "Aye, go on now."

The boy ran off to the stables.

Paxton's attention shifted to Michaels as he struck a conversation with him on the subject of horses. She realized she could leave, that she should leave but somehow her mind had focused on his hands; his large, beautiful hands holding the suede gloves at his waist. Without warning, she was remembering the unholy pleasure of his touch...

They were forbidden thoughts.

Her cheeks flamed with color and she forced these thoughts from her mind. Morgan and the others approached, greetings were exchanged, and then the whole group turned toward the stables. She watched their retreating backs. Paxton had not wanted an answer to the question. He only meant to torment and punish her because she had slept with his brother. If he only knew...

A chicken wandered at her feet.

She thought of Father Gayly...

* * * *

Linness sat at her small table working on Jean Luc's knights. Over the years she had found a strange comfort in carving wood, chipping at it bit by bit to make something useful or pretty or amusing. At first she had carved only tools: brushes, combs, the handles for hammers. Then a bow, a doll for Tera, a cottager's little girl, a pretty frame for an embroidered prayer. Talent had aided her growing skill. This year she felt capable enough to make Jean Luc a set of toy knights for the gift giving on his birthday.

The room had darkened and four candles lit the table where she finished one of the pieces. She had already made one good knight and one bad, a princess and a magician. She wanted the magician to be good, for the fun her boy would have finishing off the bad knight. Yet somehow the form emerging in the carved wood kept having an ominous shape. This was her third attempt.

She refused to join the household for supper in the hall. She claimed fatigue and told Clair to tell Morgan she was asleep, that if he pressed, to say she had a fever. She needed to find the necessary armor in which to breathe in the same room as Paxton. So far she did not have this strength.

She felt like the sleeping princess in the child's tale. She felt as if she had been in a deep slumber all these long years of his absence, her slumber interrupted only by her dreams of him. Then he had returned and had touched his lips to hers, awakening her to a new world where miraculously he lived and breathed alongside her, a world of bright colors and acute sensations, a world where each moment belonged to him. Only him.

Paxton…

She found herself examining each breath and gesture and stolen glance, evaluating it for hidden meanings and subtle allusions, as if she and Paxton lived in a secret world known only to each other. The secret world of forbidden desire…

She had to find strength to overcome it. Perhaps over time the effect he had on her would wear away; she prayed fervently for this to happen. She suspected it would not.

The noise from the hall drifted up.

A chill raced around the room like a menacing spirit. The fire did not chase it away. She found herself staring at the face emerging on the carved figure of the magician in her hand. Abruptly it took shape in her mind. 'Twas somehow familiar to her. Who did it remind her of?

With a start she saw it resembled Bishop Peter Luce.

The wooden figure fell with a clamor to the table. She rose in horror and backed away. How stranger. Why was he haunting her now? After all these years?

She closed her eyes and remembered all the fury seething inside the man, Peter Luce. His anger was a thing so painful, he had buried it deep inside where it had grown; monstrously, it had grown. Now as a man, this monster had to be fed the pain of others. She had sensed all this at a tender age long ago. She had known he was a man to be feared.

She would never see him again. He might even be dead now.
Praise God that it be so and forgive me the sin.

She impulsively picked up the doll, rose and rushed to the fireplace. The figure was tossed into the flames. Fire lapped around its hateful form before the fire went suddenly white. And on the white canvas before her she saw Father Gayly choking.

Her silver eyes opened in fear. She remembered Bonet carrying the chickens. The chickens were for supper. Father Gayly would be eating them.