Awaiting the Moon (27 page)

Though Frau Liebner listened to the story stiffly, Elizabeth had soon learned the depth of the woman’s friendship. Frau Liebner marched from the room, confronted the master of the house, told him what she thought of him, and then commanded and oversaw the packing of Elizabeth’s trunks. Together they had retreated that day to Frau Liebner’s rented house, and preparations began to travel to Germany.

She had not had time to think, after that, nor to ponder the decision she had made in haste.

Crouching on a settee, she stared at the frosted panes of leaded glass and traced out her initials. She was cold, but perhaps she had become accustomed to it, for she barely thought of that anymore.

She might never see England again, she truly realized in that moment. Her life had taken a different path, and if she was very fortunate she would find similar work to this position with another German family, and then another. She might, perhaps, travel, to Italy or Greece. But England—dear, misty England—was in her past, as surely as her childhood.

Finally she wept. She covered her eyes and sobbed, admitting her fear of the future, her desperate need to succeed in her task, and all of the loneliness for an almost forgotten way of life. And for a part of herself—trusting, naive, and sweet— that she had lost along with her innocence.

“Miss Stanwycke… Elizabeth, what is wrong?”

It was the count! Elizabeth wiped at her eyes, but she knew there was no hiding the tear trails and damp cheeks. She met his gaze as he crossed the room, not knowing what she would find there after the night before, but seeing only concern on his darkly handsome face. “It is nothing, sir, please don’t worry…”

“No, Elizabeth, it is something,” he said, sitting down on the settee beside her and taking one of her cold hands in his large warm ones. “You are so cold,” he said, rubbing her hand. “I… I came looking for you, and…” He stopped and frowned. “Are you unhappy? I know things are unsettled, and I know Charlotte is difficult…”

Half laughing and half weeping, Elizabeth said, “Difficult? She is a paragon compared to the children I taught before I came here. You’re too hard on her, sir. Charlotte is a lovely girl, and she is never rude to me. She is unhappy, yes, and I fear something is troubling her, but I… I like her very much.”

“Then why do you weep,
Liebchen
?” he asked, touching her face and gently wiping one tear trail with his thumb.

She turned her face into his warm palm for one second, but then drew herself up, trying to regain her composure and some iota of her fractured dignity. “I… I miss England… I miss life there, the rain, the mist, the countryside.”

He looked stricken, but once she was started it was like a bubbling spring—it would not be capped. “Oh, I miss hearing English all day, and I miss being warm, and walking in the woods, watching the birds.”

“Do you… do you wish to go back?”

“You don’t understand! This all happened so quickly,” she said, taking a deep, shuddering breath as she began to understand her own tears. She gazed out the window and felt him take up both of her hands and caress them. It was a comforting gesture that required nothing from her in the way of response. “I’m mourning the loss of my childhood, I suppose, and my country, and my former life. I’m like a plant, uprooted, searching for a place to grow again.

Once I thought I might eventually have a home of my own, a settled place, a husband, children, a life. I thought I would have a place to let those roots grow deep and strong.” She was stricken by the thought that she was certainly saying too much, being too honest, but it was too late to turn back now. She had come to this place thinking she would be able to fit herself into some narrow definition of womanhood, retiring and reserved, but it seemed that impetuosity would not forever be stifled.

She needed to explain to him, though, so he did not think her hopelessly ungrateful. Aware that he still held her hands, and trying to decide if she most felt stirred by his touch or wary, she said, “I have accepted that my life will be different from what I once envisioned. But when you lose something, even if it is just the chimera of what you think will be your future, you mourn, and then… and then you take a deep breath and move forward.” She did, indeed, take a deep breath, feeling a calm enter her, strength reasserting its dominion.

“So… you don’t wish to go back?” he caressed and squeezed her hands, now warm from his solicitude.

She searched her heart. This life she was living, though fraught with difficulty and turmoil, was invigorating and fascinating and she had come to genuinely care for some of these people, even though she was doomed to leave them, probably just when she had come to love them. It would be hard, but with that knowledge came the additional knowledge that she would survive. She always would, and she would gain strength.

“No… no, I am mourning the past, but I would not go back. I was weaker then. I couldn’t go back to being that insubstantial girl that I was.” When she met his eyes, it was to see shining in their dark depths some fierce emotion, and she quailed before it, not knowing what to make of him.

He reached out and touched her cheek, his other hand still holding hers. “So strong, you are, and I thought I was bringing a mild, mousy Englishwoman. Instead I bring Boadicea to my home.”

She took a deep breath. “Sir, what was going on last night? Who was that you were carrying into the house? And why?” She had blurted it out before she thought, but she would not take it back. She needed to know. He seemed so forthright, so strong, so honest, and yet there were so many secrets in this cold castle.

His eyes shuttered and he withdrew his hand, drawing back from her physically as he pushed away her queries. “I can’t tell you that, Elizabeth.”

“Yes, you can. What is going on in this house?”

“Nothing that need concern you,” he said, standing. “You must just believe in me, Elizabeth. I am involved in nothing sinister… trust me.”

“I’m trying,” she said, gazing up at him, wishing she dared ask how he felt he had earned trust. “But you’re not making it very easy.”

He gazed steadily at her. “I know.” He bowed, his expression remote again, and said, “I hope you are feeling better, and that. :. and that you are happy here.”

She watched him stride from the room and let out a long, exasperated sigh. He was so far from what she had thought he would be from Frau Liebner’s description of him. And yet what she sensed at the core of his soul was a man devoted to his family, and willing to make any sacrifice for their happiness. Even in his treatment of Christoph, as misguided as it appeared to her, she could see his exasperation and desperate want to help his nephew.

Strangely, she did believe that what she saw the night before had not been sinister from his aspect, though she still could not fathom why he could not just tell her the truth, if it was nothing to be concerned about. She shook her head and rose, thinking to go see if she could speak to Charlotte, or even Melisande.

Her curiosity would just not allow her to leave the family turmoil alone until she got some inkling of what was going on that had them all so agitated.

“I AM not quite sure what to do about Miss Stanwycke,” Nikolas said to his secretary, as Cesare stacked some papers in front of him.

“She is far too intelligent and much too curious,” Cesare said, pointing to a spot that needed a signature. “She is bound to make discoveries. I think you should send her away, and Charlotte, too.”

Nikolas dipped his quill into ink and signed, then sanded the signature. “Charlotte is not yet to be trusted away from Wolfram Castle. And I won’t send Miss Stanwycke away.”

“How do you know
she
is to be trusted? What if she finds out too much? She’s English; the English are easily shocked by anything… out of the ordinary.”

Nikolas looked sharply up at his secretary, but the fellow’s eyes were obscured by the firelight glinting in his glasses. He relied upon Cesare and felt sure of his loyalties, but there was always, behind his brown eyes, a hint of the shrewd and devious Etruscan mind. “This is more than just shocking, Cesare, and more than just out of the ordinary. My entire life encompasses that which is more than just out of the ordinary.” He dismissed his secretary with a curt word and bent over his paperwork. He could not get out of his head the sight of Elizabeth weeping, and then her talking about all she had left behind, and all of the hopes she had of her future, dashed.

He didn’t know much about her past but what his aunt had told him, but it seemed that if she truly wanted a husband, there must have been some fellow willing to marry her in England.

She was, after all, beautiful, desirable, intelligent—combined with an elegant bearing and regal manner. Even penniless she had to have captured someone’s eye.

She had certainly dismissed her future possibilities too easily. In German society there would be many men eager to wed her, he thought, dowry or no. Her family background was more than adequate. So why was she so sure that that was an impossibility?

Or was it that she wanted more for herself than life as wife to someone she could not love?

Just any husband would not do for someone so full of life and passion and intelligence. He thought back to his sister-in-law Anna and how difficult her adjustment had been to life at Wolfram Castle; her marriage to Johannes had been arranged for them, but for Nikolas’s brother it had been a love match from almost the first moment. And yet he had to admit that as much as Johannes had loved Anna, he had not made her life any easier, demanding from her obedience when he should have given her compassion. Was that what finally drove her into Hans’ arms? It was far too late for answers to the questions that still plagued him fifteen years later, but he didn’t suppose he would ever stop wondering.

He worked on for a long while in silence, realizing some hours later that he had forgotten about dinner and no one had come to get him. His usually efficient household was preoccupied and scattered. He left the library, roaming the house, but it was much later than he had even thought and all were gone, even from the drawing room. Or perhaps, given the events of the last few nights, all were absenting themselves on purpose. Charlotte had been told to keep to her room until the next day, and Melisande, a fast friend, would likely keep her company. His Aunt Katrina had pledged to spend some time with her to try to convince her that England—and English men—were not so bad. But there was something more to her abysmal behavior of late than just Charlotte’s resistance to his plan for her. If he only knew what it was. She and her brother both were becoming more and more distant, lost to him as he never thought they would be.

But he had even more pressing worries. He gazed out the drawing room window and saw the moon rising, casting a silvery glow over the snowy landscape. Beyond the drive to the castle were the dark woods, their deep green depths full of danger for the unwary. A chill ran down his spine, a superstitious dread stealing over him at the thought of what it all meant to him, to his family.

He heard a stealthy step in the hall and raced to see who it was, alarmed that he had so lost track of time that it was moonrise, but it was just Mina. He gestured to her and whispered his wishes into her ear. She nodded and slipped down the hall past the bend, her night just beginning, watchfulness her duty.

About to retreat to his library, Nikolas heard another stealthy step, and by instinct he faded back into the shadows. He watched, and across the silvery trail of the moon, down the carpeted center of the hallway, stole Miss Elizabeth Stanwycke. Stifling a muttered curse he waited, and when she was about to pass him he reached out of the shadows and grabbed her arm.

She shrieked and fought him, thumping her fist against his arm with all her might, but he held on and pulled her back into the moonlight, letting her see his face.

“Why do people keep grabbing me from behind?” she muttered. She shook off his hand.

“What are you doing, grasping me so tightly and frightening me like that?” Her face was as pale as the moonlight, and her dusky hair, streaming down her back and over her shoulders, gleamed with a bronze sheen.

“I should ask you what you are doing creeping around my castle after you are supposedly gone to your bed for the night?” He grasped her arm again and roughly pulled her across the gallery and into his library, his anger at her intransigence making him harsher than he was in the normal course of dealing with any woman.

“I… I was going to go visit… Frau Liebner,” she stuttered as she stumbled after him. “For I was worried about Charlotte and thought we would have a conversation about the girl, and what I can do to help.”

She was making it up as she went along, he could tell, though she was a quick thinker, for it was a plausible enough explanation and she was headed in the right direction. He was still holding her arm tightly and she disengaged herself, pointedly rubbing her upper arm. She was infuriating, he thought, and at the same time entrancing… gloriously beautiful and fascinatingly independent. If an alliance with her weren’t dangerous to his duties, he would be tempted to seduce her into his bed. She was not indifferent to him, and his blood coursed at the thought of feeling her under him in his enormous bed, brought to passion again and again.

But given her questing nature, she would abuse the intimacy, no doubt, and try to get him to reveal all his secrets. And that, he thought, brought back to cold reality by the idea of it, would end all converse between them, for she would shun him if she learned the awful truth of the lengths he was forced to go to protect his family from the poison that saturated it.

“I apologize,” he said stiffly, “if I hurt your arm, Elizabeth.” He was treading a fine line, he knew, for he wished to frighten her enough to keep her in her bed at night, and yet if she became too frightened, she would leave the castle, and he didn’t want that. He couldn’t bear the thought of it, though he knew it was more for his own sake, for the pleasure of seeing her and talking to her daily, rather than for the benefit she was undoubtedly giving Charlotte. It was a dangerous self-indulgence.