Jennifer Horseman (26 page)

Tonali suddenly hissed. At that exact moment Garrett stopped, and within the fraction of a second, Garrett's dagger manifested itself from nowhere and flew through the air. Juliet caught her scream in a gasp as her eyes flew

to the curved leg of the sitting chair where Garrett's knife had struck a large rat.

Silence came over the table as Leif and Gayle stared, not at the dead rat but at Garrett's changed face. Garrett said in a quiet yet unmistakably threatening tone, "Get it the hell out of here."

She first thought he ordered Gayle, but no. She had never seen Tonali obey a command, but then she had never heard Garrett actually give one. It was the subject of many jokes among his men, Leif in particular; how the great cat made Garrett treat him as not an equal but as a being of obvious superiority, this great god of the cats who for reasons still mysterious to her chose to be Garrett's companion. Yet upon hearing Garrett's command, Tonali stalked quietly to the place. The mouth of the cat never touched the rat. As if trained for a carnival trick, the panther took the dagger's handle in his jaws and obediently stalked from the room.

"Where the hell is Renegade, anyway?" Gayle broke the silence. "I haven't seen him around for months."

"He's hibernating in my bottom drawer. He should be waking anytime now. Ah, love," he touched her hand, "I didn't scare you, did I?"

She shook her head. "I'm just . . . well, surprised. You have such love for all animals—not eating their flesh and so forth-"

"A love that stops with the rodents."

"Garrett's afraid of the pitiful things, if you can believe that."

Juliet's gaze dashed from Garrett to Leif and back again, waiting for him to deny it. She could hardly imagine Garrett afraid of anything or anyone. She suspected he would be guilty of hubris; she imagined him meeting the devil himself with a condescending laugh and a toss of his hair; and no doubt, he'd emerge victorious.

Yet she was wrong; Garrett would never commit the sin of hubris and his next words told her so: "Aye, they scare the hell out of me. You're surprised, love? Trust me, there are stranger things aplenty. You see, evil takes the form of rats in my dreams and the fear spills over to my waking state ... ."

As he spoke she watched Tonali enter through the open door, moving to Garrett's side. The knife was in his mouth; the rat was gone. How did the cat clean the blade? She watched Tonali position the knife at Garrett's side, Garrett ignoring or perhaps not even realizing the miracle taking place as Tonali, using only his mouth, slipped the knife back into the leather strap attached to Garrett's belt.

The cat's eyes turned to her, catching and reflecting the candle and lantern light, so that she saw only two gold stars, for a moment blinding in intensity. She thought of the place Gayle had told her Garrett found the cat: a magical place in the central part of the new Americas, north of that great river where the jungle melts into the arid, dry land above, a place, he said, where dreams and reality merge. He never did tell her the story.

Or anything about himself for that matter. Of course, she had heard from Gayle and Leif of various bits and pieces of his adolescence spent indentured—indentured when he was a titled member of the aristocracy! —to Captain Gainsport, then to Chein Lee. Prince and Gayle told her he had also been to a place called Tibet and had spent two years traveling in India before finding Tonali in the Americas. That was really all she knew.

None of it made sense. How could a member of one of England's first families be indentured to a sea captain or to anyone for that matter? He referred to his mother often, and always with reverence, but how could his mother permit him to be taken away like that?

"Garrett?" she heard herself ask for his attention, which came immediately, joined by a surprised Leif and Gayle, too. She could hardly meet their faces, as with some horror she realized she had interrupted Leif midsentence. She apologized softly, when no apology was needed, then gathered courage. Only because she could not now turn back, she put the most benign question to him: "Gayle told me your family resides mostly in the northern lake district. Worcester?" The question was asked as if they had just met at a tea, which made Garrett smile. "Is that where you were raised?"

This was exactly what Gayle hoped for, and he waited, hoping Garrett would honor her interest despite his well-known reluctance to talk about himself or his unusual life.

A strange light came to his eyes as he met hers. "No, not for the most part. My first five years only, then I was separated from them."

"Oh? Why was that? What happened?"

A strange smile lifted on his face and he sighed, Leif and Gayle laughed, though. "Well, love, it's neither a pleasant story nor a flattering one. I'm not sure you'd want to hear it."

The simple statement prepared her to hear the worst. "I think I would, though."

"If you tell her, Garrett, start at the beginning," Leif suggested before Garrett could pull one of his clever dances, escaping Juliet's inquiry by changing the subject. "I've only heard the end from your mother."

"The beginning," he repeated. "Well, the beginning is this: I was a firstborn son to one of England's oldest and most respected families, with a first son's status, title, and position, to say nothing of an enormous fortune. Despite their backgrounds, my parents were good and gentle people. I don't think they understood what was happening until it was too late. Too late by many years. Edric and my sister Jane were born later, and my father died when I was six. Aye," he noticed Juliet's expression, "it was a sad thing in our house. My mother married again and bore my youngest sister, Elsbeth, but that was much later, for in between husbands I became the head of a great, grand house, arriving at my full title and privilege yet left completely without guidance. My mother still didn't notice what was happening to me, lost as she was to her grief, the burden of her new responsibilities to see our properties managed, and so on. Then, too, I always loved her dearly and my . . . ah, problem was rarely obvious in her presence."

Juliet forgot how strange it was to speak to him as if they were normal, how strange it was to know the madness brought by his kisses but to know almost nothing else about him. "What didn't show?"

"The fact that I was not fit to live in her house. She didn't realize it until my eighth year. It happened upon my return home from my third and last expulsion from the schools. I — "

"You were expelled?"

"Love, don't look at me like that. You must know that a boy's expulsion from school is not the moral equivalent of homicide, and certainly, you know better than most, it's not the worst I've done."

"Well ... yes ... I've never been to school, but I always thought conformity was insisted upon."

"They insisted but I resisted. Their punishments were punitive and depended solely on a lad's aversion to expulsion, which for me was the goal. All my disruptive and incorrigible behavior is secondary to the point, however. The greatest trouble derived from those very things I named—my family's title and fortune. By my eighth year I owned more self-assured arrogance and conceit than a king—I suppose I saw myself as such. Condescending to obey the headmasters was far, far, beneath me—they were, after all, according to the rigid hierarchy of the English class system and an eight-year-old's mistaken notion of the world, considerably beneath my station, rank, and title, 'Not fit,' I told my mother, to polish my boots, yet alone instruct me.'"

"Oh, my," Juliet said, staring at him, effortlessly replacing the handsome face with an eight-year-old version of pride and arrogance, the idea not surprising to her somehow, and yet—

"Aye, I try now but fail to imagine how hard that would be to stomach in an eight-year-old. I was—to put it bluntly—an unmitigated terror. One has only to imagine a lad with a loving and doting parent, an army of servants at his beck and call, not just a nursery but an entire floor filled with toys and diversions for my amusement. By the time I was eight, I had not just a horse but one of the finest stables in England. My parents did manage to impart a great love and respect for the creatures, at least those with four legs, these horses particularly. I don't remember the exact incident, my mother tells me the story. Apparently I was finding fault with one of my grooms for a minor infraction. My mother overheard me as she passed in the garden, overheard me telling a grown man that he was, 'a dim-witted imbecile, who would henceforth refrain from soiling my horses with his hands.' And to this day, she says it was even less the outrage of what I said but the way I said it: as if the poor man was not just a pathetic imbecile but a soul hardly classified as a person, a creature not worth a second of my contemplation except as he elicited my scorn."

Leif and Gayle chuckled at the idea, never having heard this part before, and Garrett sighed with a bemused, though strangely sad, smile as he thought of the boy he had once been. "Ah, Leif, how can you laugh? Imagine if Gayle did that, if you had realized too late the monster you had made of your own flesh and blood?"

"I'd like to think I would be as smart as your mother, Garrett, but I'm afraid I'd just have kept boxing his ears. Though, God knows, Gayle has always been only the pride of my life."

Juliet wanted to know: "Well, what did your mother do?"

"Juliet, she sent me away, and where she sent me reflects on my mother's infallible character as well as her wisdom. She was horrified by me, this tyrant created not just by our title and fortune but probably more by the extremities of my particular character. I won't go into the details of how she forced me but she did; she took from me my natural position as her son, took my title and my fortune, and for four years she indentured me to an impoverished Welsh family, the Merrills, a family of seven who carved the barest living from an isolated area in the northernmost region of England. With no way to contact my family, I was forced to stay there. The adjustment was hard. For four years I knew these people's poverty, I knew the backbreaking toil of the fields from dawn to sunset, how it felt not just to go without shoes or a coat in winter but the torment of being without decent food most of the time."

Juliet kept perfectly still, mesmerized and quite speechless at hearing this story. "Aye, love," Garrett said, seeing her expression, "I was humbled. I cannot begin to tell you how, except that I remember that first cold winter when John's back left him crippled. Dear God, I was frightened. The family would soon perish, I knew, and I began having terrifying nightmares of death and burial, nightmares in which I would see Mary, the mother, crying as one of her children was laid to the ground. Ah Mary, sweet, kindhearted Mary," he said in a soft, saddened voice, "whose goodness and simplicity were still new and strange to me ..."

"Well, I remember the point where the nightmare would come true. I was starving and bone tired, facing the awful dark of the night when the children would wake for want of food, knowing they, like their poor mother, could not last many days longer without. I suppose I saw, without ever thinking on it, that it would be easier to die myself than to witness Mary's grief. So I left. That night I walked twenty miles in the snow with cloth wrappings around my feet to reach our nearest neighbor, where I begged for just enough to keep death from our small house. I was told that nothing would be given to a beggar, that I had to work for my food. I remember working twelve hours fixing a roof, then the doors on their barn, feeding their animals and cleaning the stalls, collapsing twice with a need for sleep more intense than the hunger. And oh, love, I remember my joy when the man finally handed me my pay: a basket that had six puny potatoes, half a bread loaf, and a small slab of pork fat. For in that basket was the power over death. Life for five small children. And I knew a gratitude then that made me drop to my knees on the snow-covered ground and kiss that poor, bewildered farmer's feet."

Juliet did not at first understand why the room was blurring as she stared at him, until his hand came to her face. She covered his hand with hers and for one long moment she held its warmth against her cheek, because for that moment it was the hand of a young boy who was cold and starving and frightened, yet a boy who was given God's own will to travel a hard road on a dark winter night to discover, finally, God's mercy. As if this hand were a precious thing, she set it carefully on the table and rose, the revelation of who Garrett really was brought a shake of her head as she left the room.

For a long while no one spoke. Leif, too, could only wonder. He only knew this part of Garrett's life from Lady Evelyn, who had a completely different version. In order to survive it, she had arranged that she should hear no news of her son or his hardships for the duration, no matter what, with the single exception of a threat to his life. So it was, until the day his four-year tenure was up and she saw for herself what this most desperate move had reaped.

Garrett was changed beyond her wildest dreams. John Merrill had died the second winter, leaving the entire family's welfare on Garrett's young shoulders. Had Evelyn known, Garrett would have been removed immediately. She had known her son was inventive and sharp, but it was hard to believe a boy had changed this poor family's circumstances in so many ways. He invented a small mechanical windmill device, one that allowed for irrigation of the fields, so that half the day didn't have to be spent in watering the crops; he was then able to almost double the output of the soil, experimenting with and finally deciding on a combination of fish and manure as the best fertilizer; he built a better plow; he won a number of county races at various fairs, finally accumulating enough to purchase a better plow horse; he had the queer idea that chickens were so stupid that a light shining at night would trick them into making more eggs, and he was right. The list of Garrett's deeds was endless, and finally included a new, larger house he had built for the mother that very last spring ....

To this day, Garrett still took care of what he considered his second family. The mother lived at his family's London residence. Garrett made certain each girl married well—to one of his own people—while her two sons managed his properties.