[Barbara Samuel] Night of Fire(Book4You) (31 page)

But there would have been none of the joy, either. The joy that had made life seem so precious he nearly could not bear it. The joy that had lit her face, and shone from her limbs. Even now he could see that knowing him had transformed her—she was stronger, braver, more alive. He had taken away her demons, given her the courage to reach for true freedom.

So, then, was he only a pawn in some game God played? Had he been only an instrument on her path?

No. For there had also been poetry born of those days. Perhaps that, too, was part of God's plan: to allow him to write beautiful things, to take him farther than he had gone before. Cassandra had been his muse.

But what now? What now?

When he arrived at his townhouse, he saw with surprise that a brace of lights still burned in the sitting room Analise favored. He stopped at the door to find her bent over her sewing in the poor light. Her hair was caught in a long black braid that fell over her shoulder, and it occurred to him that he had never seen the full wealth of that hair. He imagined it was beautiful.

She did not look happy to see him—or perhaps only did not look happy. Her features were pale, and shadows lay under her eyes. "Is something wrong?" he asked.

"No. Should there be?"

He smiled slightly. "It is very poor light for sewing. You'll squint like a witch as an old woman."

"I was only thinking. Sewing helps me to think."

He sat in a chair nearby, relieved to have something else to put his mind on. "Think of what?"

"Many things." She let the sewing drop into her lap. "How I came to be sitting here, instead of my little room at St. Catherine's. How I never dreamed I should speak to a queen." She paused and looked at him intently. "I was wondering, too, what you think of. I never ask you."

A nudging of warning edged into his chest. "Many things. Did you have a subject in mind?"

"The arrangement between us."

He leapt up. "I do not think on that." He crossed to a sideboard, where a decanter of port sat. He poured a measure. "Are you displeased?"

"No." The word was slightly surprised. "I suspect you are."

He drank the liquor, letting it hurt his throat, burn away his guilt. "Perhaps we should return to Italy," he said, and filled the glass again recklessly. "Would you like that?"

"Of course. But are you ready to return so soon?"

"Yes." He would remove himself from tempta-tion. In a year's time, when things had mellowed, when they could bear it, he would begin writing letters to Cassandra again. They did not have to forget everything. He would stay safely in Tuscany and she would remain in England, and their love could transpire entirely on paper.

He closed his eyes. He did not hear Analise move, and he started when she put her hand on his arm.

"Basilio?"

There was a note in her voice that he'd not heard. He opened his eyes to look at her, seeing now the hesitant offering in her eyes.

She raised on her toes and pressed a kiss to his mouth. A dry, chaste, cold kiss. The kiss of a child.

And although he felt the wealth of her breasts, the invitation in her small, ripe body, the only emotion it engendered bordered on horror, as if a sibling had kissed him.

He pulled back sharply, and saw the hurt in her eyes. He reached for her, but it was too late. She slid away, humiliation in the bend of her neck. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I thought I might…"

What a beast he was! Urgently, he took her arm and enfolded her body into a tight embrace, resting his head on her hair. "Oh, Analise, it is I who should be forgiven. I did not mean to hurt you."

She began to weep, and it shredded him. "Forgive me."

He put his fingers beneath her chin and raised her face. He thought he should kiss her, but while her lips were pretty and he felt the womanliness of her form, he could not bear it. He chastely kissed her cheek.

A soft little sound came from her, relief or sorrow, he couldn't tell. She pushed away from him. "No, I am the one who is wrong in this, Basilio. I wish I wanted to, but I do not. It feels horrifying to me." Her blue eyes were bruised and wild looking. "It feels wrong. How can that be?"

"I don't know." He shook his head, turned to pour some port into a glass for her, and gestured for her to sit down. "Listen to me for a little while."

She took the offering, sat straight in her chair and met his gaze. "You are in love with a woman you are denied," she said. "I see it in your eyes. I hear it in your work."

"Is that why—"

"No." With an odd little gesture, she raised her hand and looked at her palm. "No."

Basilio bowed his head. "It is true, what you suspect. But it is an impossible situation. You and I must return home. And soon or late, we must make peace with what our fathers have arranged for us. We need only mate enough to have a child or two."

She only stared at him with those great, blue pansy eyes. "I do not think I can."

He smiled. In this, at least, he knew better. "Do not think on it now. We need not rush."

"Basilio, what of your love?"

Grimly, he looked at the ruby colored liquid in his glass, watching a candle flame shine in the depths. "I cannot speak of that. Not now. Not ever."

Her expression was troubled. "But I wish for you to be happy."

"What is happiness, Analise? And do we not each choose happiness or sorrow?" He lifted a shoulder.

"We will find a way to be happy."

Her grave expression did not lift. She nodded, but there was no conviction in it.

At dawn, Analise set out early in the carriage to find a church. All night her conscience had tortured her, and she could not sleep at all. Over and over, she saw herself reaching up to kiss Basilio, saw over and over the horror in his face when she did it, felt again the relief his horror had given her.

Relief, not embarrassment.

Her instincts said there was more here than met the eye. She felt a sense of great urgency about the events that had been building the past few weeks, a warning of some tragedy in the offering, but could not pinpoint where it lay.

Perhaps that was only her own pride again, though; pride in thinking she knew what God had in mind for her. It was a terrible sin of pride to aspire to knowing God's wishes, was it not? Yet if one did not earnestly seek that will, wasn't that an even greater sin?

Did she simply accept what path had been given to her, or—as she had begun to suspect in the depths of night—had she been a coward when it came to her calling? Perhaps she had been called to fight for her right to choose to be a nun, and in doing so, fight for others who might long for the same path.

All night she thought of the lives of the saints she most admired: Mary and St. Catherine and even Magdalena. What would they have done? Young girls and strong women, all of them. All of them fighting for their faith.

Analise had not struggled at all; she'd only given in and fallen to weakness and despair. Despair, too, was a sin.

Pride, despair, lack of courage. She was riddled with conflict, and could not make her way through the maze alone.

In the church, she knelt in an empty pew and began to pray earnestly. Even kneeling there gave ease. The smell of dust and candles and a faint lingering hint of incense surrounded her gently, smoothed away the tightness in her shoulders. When she heard a step on the stones of the nave, she raised her head and saw the priest, a slim man with a head of white hair and a kind face.

She bowed her head again at some inner prompting, and there came what she thought of as the "Great Opening." She was no longer simply Analise, on her knees in a church in England. Once again she belonged to the great vastness, the great eternity, where there was no beginning and no end. She felt herself filled with light, with love, and she saw again the thing that had drawn her to this when she was only a small, small child: she saw the world, and all the people in it, as shards of that same, great light.

Each burning with a rainbow of possibilities, each as perfect as the next.

It was more than she had words to express, and she clung to the sense of peaceful, immeasurable immenseness that was God and His Kingdom, for as long as it was granted to her.

In time, there would be answers.

When the vastness began to fade, Analise raised her head and found the old priest standing by her, a brightness in his blue eyes that she thought might be tears. With a gnarled hand, he touched her head in benediction. "Such a holy light surrounds you, child. Bless you."

Analise smiled, wholly at peace. In some way, she had the power to heal this rift, to prevent whatever tragedy was brewing. She saw clearly that this was a tangle of loves, like a mismatched tangle of flowers in the garden—all beautiful, but none able to thrive until they were properly divided and transplanted.

She had work to do today.

Basilio had not wakened until late, with a strange, urgent energy in his limbs. He might well be mad—but he could not, would not, give in so easily. And this morning, there seemed a host of possible solutions to the dilemma.

He breakfasted heartily, discovering that Analise had gone early to church and not yet returned, then ordered a horse and took it out on a hard ride, letting the wind blow away the heat of conflict, blow away the cobwebs of his tangled thoughts.

The facts, when examined coldly, were quite simple: Analise required protection. Cassandra would not be his mistress. He would not live his life without her.

So what answer existed that did not betray anyone? The thought gave him a headache. It seemed there had been no other question in his mind for months and months, and he circled it endlessly, finding no answer. The heedless youth in him wanted to annul the marriage posthaste. The man he had become knew it was simply not a possibility. His obligation to his family, to his line and his history, had been washed into his flesh since birth. The line ended with him, and his obligation to that land and that name was too great to turn his back on.

His mother, his brothers, Analise, his obligations, Cassandra. Over and over, with no end.

What did Cassandra want? He believed that she loved him, but if he were free, would she marry him?

Would she wish to tie herself to a man who had nothing but his heart and his pen to offer her? For if he annulled the marriage, he would have nothing. His titles would remain since his father could not take them, but he would be penniless, aside from what he could earn from his writings.

As he rode in the clean sunlight of an English midday, he decided he must find out her heart before he acted rashly.

To do that, he would have to discover where she'd gone.

Cassandra retreated from the giggles and noise and chatter of her sisters by going to her father's old study. She was glad she'd come to Hartwood Hall, but her melancholy mood had already drawn several comments. Brushing them off with pleas of a headache, she had come here.

The room still smelled of her father a little, in a lingering hint of old tobacco in the heavy velvet drapes.

His books lined the shelves. A portrait of Cassandra's mother, painted when she was twenty-two and astonishingly beautiful, hung between two long shelves. As a girl, back on English soil after four years in Martinique, Cassandra had often wondered if Monique minded that the portrait hung where James St.

Ives could look at it every day.

As she rounded the room, touching the books her father had loved, brushing her fingers over the edge of his heavy desk, she found herself thinking again of Monique, Gabriel and Cleo's mother. She had been the earl's mistress, off and on, for more than twenty years, and had not seemed to mind it. Cassandra had understood from a very young age—even when she was grieving the loss of her mother—that Monique had somehow saved her father. She'd also understood that he loved her.

And in all, they'd appeared quite content with the arrangement, neither of them asking something of society that it simply could not give. Cassandra wondered, broodingly if she were being churlish.

But there had been a difference: Cassandra's father had not had a mistress while his wife still lived. It was true he had loved two women, and loved each of them with the whole of his generous, stalwart heart, but not at the same time. Before he met his wife, he'd loved Monique and given her a son, and he'd granted them both their freedom. When he'd returned to England to take up the title upon the death of his brother, James had given up Monique for Cassandra's mother, his beautiful wife. Only when he'd had to bury that wife, distraught and sorrowing, had he turned again to Monique.

Cassandra flung herself into the leather chair and stared at the picture of her mother. Ophelia, she thought distractedly, really was a spitting image of her.

A knock came at the door. "Cassandra?" Adri-ana poked her head. "Are you all right, my dear?"

Cassandra brushed a lock of hair from her face. "Only ill-tempered. I did not wish to mar the day with my poor humor."

"I see. Well, there is someone here to see you."

"Me? Who?"

Only then did she see the gleam in her sister's eye, the mischief and curiosity. A cold hand squeezed her heart before Adriana said, "A very dashing Italian poet."

Cassandra jumped up, looking for escape. Her heart thundered in her chest and her limbs screamed at her to run, but where? "I am not in," she said. "Tell him to go away. I will not see him."

"Too late," he said from behind Riana.

Cassandra bolted. She dashed through the door into the servant's hall, ran past the kitchen, and dashed into the corner stairwell, lifting her skirts to take the winding, old stone steps quickly. At the third level, she dashed into a tiny anteroom, yanked on the door, and found it stuck. With a cry of frustration, she kicked it, yanked again, and it opened into a dark supply room that now sat empty save for a forgotten trunk.

Gasping for breath, her flight instinct burned clean by the vigorous climb, she collapsed on the trunk and leaned her head back against the wall to catch her breath.

It was only then that she realized how insane it was to run from him. And right in front of Riana, who would no doubt have plenty to say about that. She had been acting impulsively quite often since he'd appeared in her life.