Fairest Of Them All (19 page)

Turning, she clasped the old man’s gnarled hands in her own. “Father Rhys, would you care to help me?”

He nodded eagerly, the slant of his smile tugging at her heart with its familiarity. A gust of wind parted the lingering clouds as they both fell to their knees and began clawing the ivy away from the cairn.

Holly sank back on her haunches to rub a smudge of soil from her cheek. Dirt encrusted the abbreviated crescents of her fingernails. Her lower back ached.

The wind had chapped her face. She grinned, as delighted as she was exhausted by her afternoon’s labor.

Her shawl lay abandoned on the grass beside her. A tangle of weeds and ivy was heaped a few feet away, begging the touch of a torch. A profusion of transplanted anemones crowded boldly around the neatly piled stones of the cairn. As Holly gently poked the last plant in the dirt, Austyn’s father marched over the crest of the hill, cradling a freshly cut armful of red hyacinths. They were to be Holly’s special gift to her husband—a fragrant blanket to guard Gwyneth of Gav-enmore’s eternal slumber.

Between one step and the next, the old man’s eager smile faded. His feet faltered. The flowers fell from his arms in a crimson shower.

Holly turned to gaze behind her, shading her eyes against the lowering sun. The earth beneath her knees vibrated with the thunder of approaching hoofbeats. Her heart began to race, beating in time to the frantic rhythm.

Austyn slid off his destrier before it could come to a complete halt, stalking toward her with deadly grace. She came to her feet in instinctive defense. Twould seem her efforts to coax a response from her husband had succeeded beyond her wildest hopes. He was in nothing less than a murderous rage.

He stopped less than a foot from her, his broad chest heaving, his nostrils flaring with each ragged breath. “How dare you? Is there no corner of my life you won’t scrub or sweep or befoul with your childish attentions, your ridiculous flowers?”

A bellow of rage would have been less wounding than his low snarl of contempt He was gazing at her as if she were a vile thing—a profanation of the holy S ground on which they stood.

Holly could do nothing but summon the queenly composure Nathanael had taught her. Clasping her hands in front of her, she tipped back her head and said, “I sought only to please you. Your father told me his beloved Gwyneth was buried here.”

“Gwyneth,” he spat As if seeking a fresh target for his fury, he stormed past her and grabbed his father by the front of his tunic. “Did you tell her, old man? Did you tell her what your beloved Gwyneth did? Did you tell her what you did to your beloved Gwyneth?”

At seeing a helpless creature so abused, Holly’s fear was supplanted by reckless anger. She snatched at Austyn’s arm, tugging the rigid muscles with all of her strength. “Stop it’ You’re frightening him!”

Austyn freed his father and wheeled on her. For one terrible moment, Holly thought he would strike her. She recoiled, not in anticipation of physical harm, but of the irreparable damage such a careless blow would do her heart At her blatant flinch, shame flickered in his eyes, so intense as to be almost self-loathing.

Holly reached for him, this time in tenderness, but he jerked his arm out of her reach and strode back to the cairn. Dropping to his knees, he dragged off his gauntlets, then began to tear up the tender anemones with his bare hands, hurling the ripe gobbets of earth as far as they would go.

Holly felt as if her heart was being wrenched from her chest with each snap of the fragile roots. She came to kneel on the opposite side of the grave, not bothering to wipe away the tears trickling steadily down her cheeks.

“I don’t understand how you could defile her memory,” she said softly. “She was your mother.”

Austyn’s eyes blazed cold blue fire as he threw back his head and roared, “She was a faithless whore!”

“Aye, a more treacherous harlot never lived! As cunning as Eve. As wanton as Jezebel. Enticing decent, God-fearing men to her bed like bees to a honey pot” It took Holly a dazed moment to realize the damning denouncement had come not from Austyn, but from his father. The old man waved his arms for emphasis as he strode toward the grave, all traces of uncertainty banished from his step. The fire had been restored to his rheumy eyes. Sanity flirted with their depths, somehow more dangerous than the vague madness that kept him occupied most of the time. Having never heard him utter more than two words at a time, Holly could only gape.

“A weak, willful woman my Gwyneth was, given over to sins of the flesh. She could never be satisfied with only one mortal man to quench her insatiable lusts. Nor with two. Nor with . . .”

Twas as if the floodgates of silence had parted to loose a river of virulence. As he ranted on, Holly became aware that his impromptu sermon was collecting an audience. Emrys, Carey, and a white-faced Winifred clustered at the garden gate. Nathanael watched from the chapel door. Other castle inhabitants came creeping out from the brewery, the mews, the smithy, their curiosity overcoming their trepidation. Holly kept her eyes averted from Austyn, fearing he would judge her just another leering witness to his anguish.

Twas Carey who came forward and gently took the old man by the arm. Holly suspected it was not the first time he had done so. Nor would it be the last

“Come, sir,” Carey said. “ Tis time for your evening meal. Pickled lamprey, you know. Your favorite.” The others retreated as abruptly as they’d appeared, as if Carey’s simple act of kindness had shamed them.

Rhys of Gavenmore pointed a condemning finger heavenward as he marched alongside the man-at-arms. “Strumpets, every last one of them! Panting for a man’s rigid staff like bitches in heat. Only too eager to spread their thighs and milk him of every last drop of God-given vigor—”

A door thudded shut, mercifully cutting off the vivid recital. If Holly could not look at her husband before, she certainly couldn’t look at him now.

“I’ve never seen you blush before. Tis quite becoming.”

Austyn’s quiet words confused her. They gazed at each other over the chasm of his mother’s grave. Unnerved by his steady perusal, Holly ducked her head, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. Since he’d began to stare through her instead of at her, she’d grown rather careless about mangling her appearance.

Tve never seen you throw flowers before, sir. Twas quite unbecoming.”

“I should have warned you. All the Gavenmore men are cursed with”—he hesitated, as if uncertain how much to reveal—”unpredictable tempers. By Gavenmore standards, that was but a mild tantrum.”

“Then I should hate to see a severe one.”

“As would I.” Austyn rose and wandered to the crest of the hill. He stood with hands on hips, gazing over the crumbling curtain wall to the swollen river. The bruised lavender of twilight framed his rugged profile.

“My father’s Welsh loyalties weren’t always as pure as he pretends them to be,” he said. “When he heard the English king Edward was attempting to ensure peace with his contentious neighbors by building several castles along Welsh rivers and strategic byways, he volunteered Gavenmore as a site. He knew the king would bestow extravagant rewards of land and wealth to each lord who swore his fealty to such an undertaking.”

“Nathanael taught me of such castles.” She did not add that Nathanael had also taught her that Edward’s dream had never been fully realized. That the Welsh continued to stage sporadic rebellions against the sovereignty of Edward’s son to this very day.

A wistful smile played around Austyn’s lips. “ Twas a magical time to a boy of nine. The place swarmed day and night with master builders, carpenters, diggers. Carey and I managed to get ourselves into some abominable mischief. You can imagine our excitement when we learned that Edward himself was to honor us with a royal visit We’d never seen a real king before.”

Austyn’s expression darkened. “ Twas a rainy autumn eve when he and his entourage arrived. Edward was getting on in years, but he was still a virile man. I was a rather plump lad, but he lifted me as if I weighed no more than a feather.”

Holly could not help but smile at the image. There was certainly no hint of lingering baby fat on Austyn’s well-honed physique.

“They sat up late into the night—my father, my mother, and this English king. Laughing, talking, jesting with one another. The king was charmed to distraction by my mother’s singing.”

Holly shivered as the ghostly echo of some long forgotten melody seemed to play across her nerves.

“ Twas almost midnight when they retired. My father awoke later to find the bed beside him empty.”

Suddenly, Holly didn’t want him to go on. Would have done anything to stop him. Even thrown her arms around his neck and smothered his words with her mouth. But she was paralyzed, her limbs weighted by dread of what was to come.

All emotion fled Austyn’s voice, leaving it cold and distant. “He searched the castle for his Gwyneth, just as he still does. But that night he found her. hi the king’s bed.”

“What did he do?” Holly whispered.

Austyn shrugged. “What could he do? Twas not uncommon for an ambitious lord to permit his liege the pleasure of his wife’s favors. He simply closed the door and returned to his own bed.

“At dawn the next morning, he bid Edward a gracious farewell, swearing his eternal fealty. Then he climbed the stairs and strangled my mother to death.”

The stark beauty of Austyn’s profile was stripped of humanity, so impenetrable it might have been carved upon a tomb. “I found them there on that bed, on the same rumpled sheets where she had lain with another man. Father was cradling her lifeless body in his arms, rocking back and forth and weeping. He kept kissing her face, begging her to wake up. All the while her limp neck was swollen and purple with the marks of his fingers, her face black with death.”

Holly clapped a trembling hand over her mouth, appalled that she had come to Rhys’s defense. Had allowed him to follow her about the castle like a harmless puppy. Had gently clasped his frail hands in her own, those very hands that had squeezed the life from Austyn’s mother.

“When Edward heard of her death,” Austyn continued, “he withdrew his builders and his favor. He stripped my father of his title and all his holdings, drove all of his finest fighting men to desert him until only the most loyal of his peasants remained.”

Holly understood now why she’d witnessed no squires or knights training in the list Why the castle was guarded not by skilled men-at-arms, but by farmers and bakers and beekeepers.

“Edward’s son continues to hound us, seeking to tax us until we have no choice but to surrender even this barren rock. All because of the treachery of a woman. Because she betrayed us.” Holly heard in his bitter whisper the echo of a wounded child, a child forced too soon to bear the somber responsibilities of manhood. “Abandoned us.”

“Abandoned you?” She shot to her feet, her compassion smothered beneath a maelstrom of churning emotions. “I think not, sir, for ‘tis you who have abandoned her.”

Austyn would not have been surprised had he been forced to endure his wife’s pity. Or had she shrank from him in disgust. Or bowed her head in shame at his family’s disgrace. But he was flabbergasted by the petite virago who leaped to her feet to challenge him. He’d faced less daunting opponents on the jousting field. Had she been a cat, he had little doubt she would have been hissing and spitting in his dumbfounded face.

“Abandoned you?” she repeated. “The way I see it, the poor woman had very little choice in the matter.”

The sheer volume of her attack jolted Austyn out of his brooding. He raised his voice to match hers.

“She could have chosen to remain in her husband’s bed! To honor her wedding vows!”

“And your father could have chosen not to choke her to death! I can’t help but notice that he didn’t strangle his precious king.”

Austyn fell back a step at the well-placed blow. Every soul at Caer Gavenmore had been tiptoeing around the subject of his mother’s death for decades. The incident had stained all of their lives the color of blood, yet no one dared to speak of it Until Holly. Ugly, courageous little Holly.

She was without mercy, his Holly. “Was your father’s crime a less terrible transgression than your mother’s infidelity? You coddle him as if he were an invalid, yet deny her even a humble flower to honor her memory. She has only cold rocks to mark her resting place.”

Austyn strode over to Holly and snatched her up by the shoulders, dragging her rigid body against his own. “Every one of which was placed there by my hand!”

Her violet eyes blazed with a passion that surpassed his own. Instead of hanging limp in his harsh embrace, she clung to his arms, refusing to be cowed. Her fierce expression betrayed not even a hint of a flinch. Austyn could not have said how much that pleased him.

“How generous of you,” she said, softening her voice to a scathing rebuke. ‘Tell me, did you truly hate your own mother so much?”

“I adored her!” The declaration, pent up inside of him for twenty years, burst from his chest with the force of an explosion. He dropped his gaze to Holly’s lips, suddenly so soft, so inviting, and whispered, “I adored her.”

Holly was only too willing to bear the brunt of Austyn’s anger, but the bewildered yearning in his eyes threatened to dissolve her. She wanted to melt into his arms. To draw his head gently down to her breast and . . .

She remembered with a painful shock that his head would not encounter the nurturing softness of her breasts, but the stiff strips of her bindings. Panicked by the realization, she pushed against his chest. For a dizzying heartbeat, he held her as if he would refuse to let her go, then his arms fell away without protest.

She backed away from him lest she fall prone to some other, even more dangerous, temptation. “So your mother was not the harlot your father painted her to be?”

Austyn’s frown reflected his conflicted memories. “She was a beauty, aye, but she was also modest, devout. She could bear no more children after me, so she knew I was to be her only son and my father’s only heir. She taught me to read and write, encouraged me to develop the manly skills that would make me worthy of becoming a knight and lord of these lands. She taught me to pray.” His dark thicket of lashes swept down to veil his eyes. “I haven’t prayed since she died.”