Fascination -and- Charmed (83 page)

He hesitated, but did as she asked. “I am looking for Rachel,” he told her. “Do you know of her?”

Rather than answer, Sybel leaned across her table with its litter of cards and stones and crystal beads. She placed her hands flat upon the surface and stared at Calum. “You are a handsome man,” she said. “Life has treated you well. You are not at peace, but you have accomplished much. That is as it should be.”

“Rachel?” he repeated.

“There is no point in concerning yourself with Rachel.” So quickly that Pippa didn’t have time to flinch, the fortune teller touched Calum’s face, smoothed his high cheekbones and sharp jaw, ran a single finger the length of his straight nose. Then she drew his head toward her and rested her brow against his. She stroked his hair and said, very low, “Let go of the past.”

His sigh made Pippa hold her throat.

“I cannot let go,” he said. “You do not understand what is at stake. I must find Rachel. I thought I had found help with Milo and Miranda, who sold remedies, but they have disappeared.”

Sybel’s hands stilled in Calum’s hair. “What you seek is dangerous.”

He raised his face, pulling away from her. “If you know that, you can help me.”

She lowered her lashes and took both of his hands in hers. “I am assuming things I do
not
know. Let me see your palms.”

He turned his hands over.

Sybel supported them in her own and Pippa heard the woman moan, very low. “You use both of your hands as most men use only one,” she said.

“Yes.”

With a single finger she traced a wide, shiny scar on his left palm. “This destroys the lines.”

“It does not destroy my fortune,” he said. “I do not know how it happened.”

“When you were very young,” she said tonelessly.

“It was always there. I was abandoned in Scotland. I was very sick and needed care and I was left at Kirkcaldy Castle. They cared for me there. They have always cared for me.”

“Fire,” Sybel said under her breath.

Pippa put her hand on Calum’s shoulder and felt tension coiled in his rigid muscles.

“Fire,”
Sybel repeated.

“Fire!” Calum leaped up, all but overturning the table. “The handle of the pot had been heated by the fire and I picked it up.”

“I must go,” Sybel said. “What you know, you know. Do not press for more. There can be no changing what has happened.”

“It must be changed, I tell you,” Calum said, advancing on the woman.

Sybel held up a warning hand. “I am tired. I must sleep. Leave me now and do not return.”

“Tell me what happened,” he said. “Tell me how I came to the fair and why. Tell me who commanded that my life be stolen and given to another. I will not rest until I know.”

“What you want, you cannot have,” Sybel said. “Accept the life you have, Calum Innes. If you will not let the past die, it will kill you.”

The revelers at the fair had grown fewer in number. When Calum escorted Pippa to the place where the carriages had been left, he found that the duke’s had already returned to the castle. The remaining coachman, showing signs of having enjoyed a jug or two of the strong ale offered from leather bladders at the fair, gave a rambling account of his master’s departure “with his fine friends.”

The man, bleary-eyed and focusing with difficulty on Calum and Pippa, recalled that Lord Avenall had left much earlier with the boy.

“Stay here,” Calum told the coachman. “It’s a fine night and we find we are not tired. We’ll walk a while. Await our return.”

Pippa didn’t wait long before swinging to face him. “I cannot be silent any longer,” she said, her face white in the thin moonlight. “There is so much you have not told me, I am afraid to know it all.”

“You need know none of it,” he said, sidestepping her and going to lean on a fence overlooking a dark field.

She came behind him and rested against his back.

At the soft pressure of her body, he closed his eyes. “I should never have allowed you to be with me tonight.”

“It was for this that you came to Cornwall,” she said, rubbing his arms. “You made my acquaintance, then Franchot’s. You made certain there was reason for him to call you out. How did you intend to make certain he asked you here? What if he had killed you?”

“I did not plan for him to call me out. I did not plan to go this…I did not plan all this.”

“You did not plan to go this
far?
Was that what you almost said? But you have gone far, Calum. And now you do not wish to turn back. Am I right?”

She was too clever, his little betrothed who did not know she was rightfully his. “You are right. But I cannot explain further.”

“You must.”

“No. I must not.” He caught her hand and took it to his lips. “If you’ve a mind, you can reveal what you’ve witnessed tonight.”

“To the duke?”

“Who else?”

“I would tell him nothing. But why…Calum, please tell me what is happening.”

“When I can, I will.” If only he could truly believe that day would come.

“You are not the man you present yourself to be.” He held his breath.

“How could I not guess as much after what I have heard and seen tonight?”

Calum turned to face her. “Would you help me if you could?”

“You know I would. I will,” she said without hesitation.

“Then help me by trusting me and asking me no more questions.” She knew too much. “Will you show me the way to your hideaway as soon as possible?”

“Why? I have not even been able to return there since that first day.”

“You believe it is truly secret? No one knows it is there?”

“No one does.”

“I may need a place to hide. A place where I can still watch what goes on at the castle. If that time comes, I will ask you to be my eyes, Pippa.”

“Calum—”

“Please, my love. Say you will do this, and then I will pray we need never resort to such measures.”

She went into his arms and held him. “I will help you in anything. Only please tell me what is happening.”

He must appease her and make certain she would remain silent, for the sake of her safety—and for his own.

“Pippa,” he said, lifting her chin, “you are right. I am not who you thought I was. But I cannot tell you more now and I may never be able to tell you.”

“Did someone here do something to you when you were a child? You’ve said you were born in Cornwall.”

“We will return to the castle,” he told her. “Remember only what the fortune teller said. If I do not let go of the past, it may kill me.”

“She said,” Pippa whispered, “that it
would
kill you.”

Saber strained to hear any sound of footsteps on the stairs. He’d been wrong to tell Max to send Ella to him. He should pray she had the sense not to come. And if she did come, he must remember she was scarcely more than a child.

The space beneath the stairs in the wing that housed the nurseries was dark, and he could not see to read his watch. Surely an hour or more had passed since Max ran upward with Saber’s message.

There was something in Ella, something he felt, that made him want to protect her. In the blackness, he pressed a fist into a rough stone wall and swore a silent pledge that he would do no more than offer her his friendship—and he felt with his heart that she needed that more than anything else he might offer.

And he would wait until she was of an age for him to pursue her in quite another manner.

A year, two?

A lifetime.

Soft scratchings sounded, then stopped, then came again. Saber leaned out from his hiding place and narrowed his eyes to see.

A blue-white shape drifted down the staircase, stopping from time to time until it hovered just above him.

“Ella?” he whispered, knowing his own indiscretion.

“Yes.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“Max told me you wanted to see me.”

“I was wrong to ask you to take this risk.”

She descended further and with her came the scent of meadow flowers that seemed part of her. “I wanted to come,” she said, stepping to the floor in the small hallway. “I ’ad—I had looked forward to seeing you at the fair.”

“Then why did you come back to the castle?”

Rather than answer, she touched his arm.

Saber stood quite still. That simple touch was as if she had smote at something deep within him.

Her fingers felt their way until she could slip them into his hand.

She held onto him like a trusting child. She
was
a child. And he could be trusted with her.

“Who watches over you here?” he asked.

“The maids take turns,” Ella said. “But they sleep in a room separated from mine by a cupboard where clothes ’ang—hang. They never come to check on me before morning.”

He would not think of how many hours there might be until morning. “I wanted only to know that you are well and safe.”

“I am,” she told him.

Saber found that he held her hand very tightly, but could not make himself release her. “Should you care to come into the air outside? I have my cloak and it is pleasant enough.”

“I’d like that.”

And he should not take her from safety in the middle of the night.

He swung his cloak around her shoulders—and held her hand once more.

The nearby door opened into a small, walled courtyard where roses grew in heady, flamboyant profusion. Saber led Ella to a stone bench and seated her. The moon afforded him a shaded view of her astonishing face.

She was a child and he must wait.

“Why didn’t you stay at the fair?”

“Thank you for caring about me. I’m…Lady Philipa is teaching me to speak like a lady.”

He bowed his head. “To me you are a lady. You will always be a lady. Do not concern yourself with silly conventions. Soon no one will ever know you were not born a princess, at the very least.”

She giggled a little at that.

A child. “Think of me as the older brother you do not have,” he said, trying not to clench his teeth. Less than eight years separated them, but they were years that made him a man with a man’s urges. “I do not know the exact nature of what your childhood has been, but I have felt sadness in you. Your father isn’t here, and in his absence I would like to help if I can.”

“I trust you!” Her voice caught.

“Hush,” he warned. “We must not be discovered.”

“I wish I could tell someone all about us—Max and me. And I wish I wouldn’t have to worry that if I did, we’d be sent packing from ’ere—here—at once.”

“Whether you tell me or not, I shall protect you. If anyone troubles you, you are to come to me directly. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

With her head bowed, her hair shone blue-black. Hair restrained in childish braids.

Saber braced a foot beside her on the bench and rested his hand on top of her head. “There. I’ve said what I came to say. I’ll watch while you return to your chamber.”

“My mother was not married to my father.”

Saber frowned. “Viscount Hunsingore—”

“He’s not our father. He took us away from London when we were in terrible trouble.”

“I see.” He did not see at all.

“Max and me—we’re bastards.”

Saber smiled wryly in the darkness. “That is not so shocking, little one.”

“I don’t know who my father is. When Max and I were younger, we were kept by a family with a provisioner’s business. Our mother paid them and we worked. But they were kind enough and we were safe.”

He opened his mouth to say she did not need to tell him this, but decided he must be the listener she craved. “I’m glad they treated you well,” he said.

“Then our mother got sick. She didn’t have the money to pay for our keep, so she took me to live with her. Max was sent somewhere else. I didn’t know where he was for a long time. First we traveled around a lot, till my mother was too sick to travel anymore. Then we went to London, and…” She made a noise that was a muffled sob.

Saber stroked her hair and the back of her slender neck. “It’s all right now. You’ll never have to be unhappy again.”

“In London I was kept with my mother to help pay for what we needed. I found out poor Max was with an ’orri—a horrible man in Covent Garden who sent boys and girls out to pick pockets. If the viscount hadn’t been a kind man, Max would still be there, and I don’t know what would have happened to him.”

“Then I’m grateful to the viscount,” Saber said. “But what of you? How did you live?”

He felt her shudder beneath his hand. “In a house,” she muttered, so softly he had to strain to hear. “In a house with my mother.”

“Your mother’s house?”

Ella wrapped the cloak tightly about her. “No. It belongs to someone else what—who runs—who runs a business there. I had to do what I was told.”

With an effort, Saber stopped himself from taking his hand from the girl’s neck. “I see,” he said. God, he was so cold. He was cold to his bones—to his heart.

“I wanted to get away. Every night I ’oped—hoped I’d find a way to escape. Then the viscount came, and now there’s a chance for Max and me.”

A chance to turn from a life of prostitution and crime.

She was only a child, Saber intoned within his soul. A wronged child. He had offered to be a brother and he would not turn back from that. “Come, little one,” he told her. “Let’s return you to your bed before someone misses you.”

Shivering, she went with him back inside the castle. At the bottom of the stairs, she removed his cloak and gave it to him. “Thank you,” she said. “I thought all men were monsters. Now I know the viscount…You mustn’t let on that he’s not our papa!”

“I’ll never
—let on.
”

“I know you won’t. I know the viscount and Calum and now there’s
you.
There are good men, aren’t there?”

“Yes, there are good men.”

“My mother always said there weren’t—except for her brother. He was all right, but he only cared about my mother. They’ve stayed together forever. When I traveled with them, they taught me to help them.”

“Help them do what?” Saber couldn’t stop himself from asking.