Fairest Of Them All (32 page)

She sought to dry her eyes by offering up a prayer for Nathanael’s poor unshriven soul. But each time she closed them, ‘twas not Nathanael’s pallid face she saw, but Austyn’s—Austyn sprawled in a puddle of his own blood, his dark lashes feathered against his cheeks. Austyn the hapless victim of another man’s obsession. Was Eugene’s treachery to be the fulfillment of the dreaded Gavenmore curse? Was her beauty truly to be her husband’s doom?

Holly had no more time to ponder before her horse was snapped to a halt and she was dragged off its back by the clumsy paws of Eugene’s personal giant As he heaved her over his beefy shoulder, she caught a chilling glimpse of their destination.

She should have known Eugene would be too cunning to risk taking her to his own castle, where word of her captivity might spread to her papa’s ears. He had chosen for his den a crumbling ruin of a watch-tower so shrouded with ivy that from a distance ‘twould be nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding trees. Here in this isolated glade, there would be no curious villeins, no prying servants, no chattering pages or squires to spread gossip or intervene in whatever diabolical revenge he had planned. Here she and Austyn would be completely at the mercy of de Legget and his henchmen.

Holly shuddered.

She knew Nathanael would have frowned upon appealing to the capricious mercies of a pagan faerie, but as she bounced along over the colossal shoulder, she pressed her eyes shut and whispered fiercely, “Please, Rhiannon, you may be a faerie, but if you’ve a woman’s heart, keep him far, far away from this place.”

Sir Austyn of Gavenmore was a haunted man. He stood on the battlements of his ancestral home, blinking rain from his eyes to gaze toward the eastern horizon. His crimson surcoat was plastered to his skin. The frivolous border of ivy embroidered along its back weighted his shoulders like fetters of iron.

Rhiannon’s revenge was naught but a mild scolding compared with his wife’s retribution. The faerie queen’s shade could only bedevil one place at a time. Holly’s ghost was everywhere.

It waddled along the riverbank, strewing marigolds in his path. It patted anemones into place around his mother’s grave, glancing up at him to reveal sparkling violet eyes and an impish nose smudged with dirt He passed it on the stairs, lugging a tub of scarlet poppies up to the battlements.

Austyn reached out and brushed a raindrop from the withered petals of one of those poppies.

The first manifestation had occurred only hours after Carey had escorted Holly from the castle. Austyn had been in the solar with Winifred and Emrys, packing away his plans for completing the castle and calculating how much of Holly’s dowry had already been spent on ordering slate and sandstone. He intended to return every penny to the earl as soon as he could recover it

Twould be only a matter of weeks, Austyn supposed, rolling a scroll into a neat tube with methodical hands, before the king’s tax collectors would be pounding at the door, threatening to seize the castle and its meager lands if they could not pay. The prospect no longer distressed him as it once had. Without HoDy, the keep was naught but an empty shell. A tomb for his dreams.

Ignoring Winifred’s worried glance, he rested his aching brow in his hands. A discordant jangling drifted to his ears. He lifted his head, a crazy hope sputtering to life in his heart

“Did you hear that?” he inquired of Emrys.

“Hear what, sir?”

Shoving his way past his puzzled steward, Austyn flew from the solar. He skidded to a halt in the south corridor, fully expecting to find the iron candelabrum bobbing up and down on its tarnished chains.

The candelabrum hung silent and still, its rusty music playing only in his head.

Austyn slid down the wall to a sitting position. Twas of little import that Holly’s ghost had made itself invisible. He could still hear the echo of her merry laughter.

He crouched in that darkened corridor until nightfall, finally rising only to have his dazed steps carry him to the door of the north tower. When he realized where he was, he turned and resolutely sought the barren confines of his own bed. After tossing and thrashing for hours, he shot bolt upright from a fitful nightmare to the angelic strains of his wife’s singing.

He bounded from the bed and pelted up the winding stairs. But when he threw open the door of the tower, hollow silence greeted him. Surrendering any pretense of sleep, Austyn spent the remainder of the night in the window seat, gazing at the bed and remembering how Holly had so generously shared both it and her warm, loving body with him. When Winnie discovered him there the following morning, he refused to allow her to tidy the chamber, fearing her efforts might banish the scent of myrrh that still clung to the rumpled sheets.

He understood why his grandfather had forbidden anyone to disturb the tower after his grandmother died. Twas as if the man never relinquished his hope that the woman who had once inhabited it might someday return.

Austyn’s final glimpse of Holly had assured him that his hopes were no less vain than his grandfather’s. He would never forget the proud set of her shoulders, the haughty cast of her features, the wounded look in her beautiful eyes. He had sent her away to protect her, yet she seemed to believe he had broken faith with her in some irredeemable manner.

After his fourth night in the window seat, Austyn decided ‘twould be best to have Emrys brick up the tower door to ensure that never again would any Gav-enmore man be tempted to punish a woman for his own sins. Twas only then that he remembered there would be no more Gavenmore men after him. The curse had not only robbed him of his wife, but of his children as well.

Austyn’s hands clenched on the rain-slicked parapet as he imagined what magnificent sons Holly would have given him.

He had yet to give the order to seal the tower, for he knew that he would be walling up his heart as well, this time forever. Then there would be nothing left for him to do but spend the remainder of his days wandering the castle in search of his wife’s ghost and rattling his own invisible chains.

Shaking the rain from his hair, Austyn turned away from the parapet, driven by loneliness to seek the one man who shared his exile.

Austyn slid his knight across the chessboard, then watched his father’s pawn pick it off, feeling nary a sting of regret Rhys had been almost placid since his attack on Holly. Twas as if the ugly spell of violence had exorcised some dark demon from his soul. Compassion had tempered Austyn’s first urge to cast him into the dungeon. Instead, he had committed him to Emrys’s reliable care, determined that his father would never again harm another woman.

Emrys poked at the fire he had built to ward off the damp while Winifred plucked and cleaned a chicken with efficient hands, striving to conceal her fretful glances at the door of the great hall, but failing miserably. Austyn’s own concern was mounting. Carey should have returned more than two days ago. Perhaps he had chosen to linger at Tewksbury until the rain cleared, Austyn told himself. He refused to humor his own impulse to glance at the door between every move, not wanting to reveal his pathetic eagerness to hear news of Holly.

His father’s muteness suited his own brooding temper so well that he flinched with surprise when Rhys snapped, “Check.”

Stealing a glance at the door from beneath his lashes, Austyn slid his king out of the path of his father’s bishop, carelessly leaving his queen unguarded.

Rhys captured her, cornering Austyn’s king to cement his victory. “Checkmate.”

“It seems the best man won,” Austyn said, forcing a half-hearted smile as he began to rearrange the pieces for another game.

“I think we both know that’s not true, son.”

Austyn jerked his head up. His father’s blue eyes were as clear as Austyn had seen them in years. The sight pained him. Reminded him of a time when his father had been his only hero. A time when they’d all been happy.

“I was in the courtyard,” Rhys said softly.

Austyn lined up his pawns in a precise row, struggling to keep the anger from his tone. “Holly told me. Twas rather boorish of you, don’t you think? Eavesdropping on your own son and his”—he clenched his teeth against a pang of anguish—”bride.”

Rhys shook his head. “Not then. The night my mother jumped.”

Austyn’s hands stilled. This time when he met his father’s gaze, he found he could not look away.

“I hadn’t seen her since I was a small boy,” Rhys said, “so I slipped up to the tower to visit her. I was the one who told her that Father was with his doxy. She started to cry. She hugged me very tightly and told me I was a good lad and she loved me with all of her heart Then she sent me away.” He stared at the chesspiece in his hand. “Perhaps if I had stayed . . . if I hadn’t told her about Father’s woman . . .”

Austyn was surprised to learn his barren heart still had any forgiveness to offer. He held up one of the smallest chessmen. “ Twas never your fault You were naught but a pawn in your father’s game of jealousy and revenge.”

“She loved me, you know. She was a loyal and devoted wife.”

Austyn fought to keep his own bitterness at bay. “ Tis fortunate you can remember your mother with such charity.”

Rhys blinked at him. “Not my mother. Your mother. Gwyneth.”

Austyn was baffled. Twas the first time he had heard his father speak well of his mother since her death. Perhaps Rhys had retreated to the past, to the golden days of summer before that fateful autumn had shattered their lives.

Rhys caressed the carved queen with his thumb, his hand oddly steady. “She begged me not to send her.”

Austyn frowned. “Send her where?”

His father gently placed the white queen on the square next to the black king. “Edward did not come to Gavenmore to bestow his blessing on the new castle. He came to inform me that he was withdrawing his support That he’d decided the Welsh were a savage and ungrateful lot and their petty rebellions had convinced him his castle strongholds were naught but beautiful follies. Oh, he clucked his regret and praised me for my loyalty, but he refused to relent Not even when I begged . . .”

Austyn became aware that Emrys had ceased stirring the fire. Winifred was gaping at his father, a bloody chicken bone clutched in one hand.

“I believed that I might yet sway him. Appeal to his sense of honor. When I saw how he fancied Gwyneth—”

Austyn came to his feet, overturning the chessboard. He heard the pieces scatter across the flagstones through the dull roaring in his ears. “You sent her? You sent your own wife to lay with another man?”

Tears began to trickle down Rhys’s papery cheeks, but his voice was still the voice of a man, not the whine of a petulant child. “She cried so prettily and pleaded with me not to ask such a thing of her. I told her that if she truly loved me, she’d be eager to make such a small sacrifice for our common good. Then the next morning when Edward bade me a regretful farewell and I realized it had all been for naught . . .”

The roaring in Austyn’s ears reached his lips. He snatched his father up by the shoulders, shaking him like a rag doll. “You murdered her for doing your bidding? You strangled her for sacrificing her virtue to further your own greedy ambitions?”

Through a crimson haze of rage, Austyn heard Winifred’s shrill pleas, felt Emrys tugging frantically at his arm, but his eyes were locked with his father’s in a mortal battle of wills. What Austyn saw in those pale blue orbs was not fear, but grim satisfaction. Rhys wanted his own son to kill him. He wanted his wife’s death avenged, but lacked the courage to do it himself. A ponderous burden rolled off of Austyn’s shoulders as he realized the sins of the father were no longer his own to bear.

His hands slowly unclenched. Rhys crumpled into the chair.

Austyn gazed down at his bowed head with genuine pity. “Sorry, old man.
Ill
not send you to hell. Tis a far greater punishment that you should live with what you’ve done.”

Shaking off Emrys’s hand, Austyn squared his shoulders and started for the stairs, eager to escape the hall and all of its haunts.

“And can you live with what you’ve done?”

His father’s voice rang with an authority that froze Austyn in his tracks. Time swept backward. He was nine years old again, bracing himself to receive a scolding for carving his name into the wet mortar of the moat. He spun around, half expecting to find his father straddling the chair, his face flushed with the vigor of youth.

The old man had cocked his head to the side and was watching him like a bright-eyed bird. “You were only too eager to believe the worst of your mother.”

“I was a child! I thought that she’d abandoned us!”

Holly’s ghost tapped him on the shoulder. Abandoned you? I think not, sir, for ‘tis you who have abandoned her.

Austyn whirled on Winifred, eliciting a gasp of alarm and a drifting blizzard of chicken feathers. “Did you hear that?”

“N-n-nay, sir. I heard nothing.”

“Nor did I.” Emrys exchanged a nervous glance with his wife.

His father laughed, a dry rasp that grated on Aus-tyn’s raw nerves. He was beginning to wish he’d killed the old rogue when he’d had the chance.

“Don’t mock me,” Austyn snapped. “ Twas naught but that infernal witch Rhiannon. Her sole delight is in plaguing me witless.”

His father nodded knowingly. “She used to badger me as well until I realized her taunts were only the echo of my conscience.”

“I never knew you had one.”

Austyn’s sarcasm failed to ruffle Rhys. “Aye, ‘twas my conscience that tortured me because I knew in my heart that your mother didn’t betray me. I betrayed her. Nor did my mother disgrace the Gavenmore name. Twas your grandfather who shamed us all by imprisoning an innocent woman and depriving her of her only son while he committed adultery with a castle whore. Old Caradawg’s young bride was probably equally blameless, burned at the stake because of her husband’s wretched lack of faith in her fealty.”

Holly’s ghost twirled a curl around a graceful finger with saucy defiance. If a man refuses to trust a woman he claims to love, then tell me, husband, who between them is the faithless one?