Shana Abe (29 page)

He hadn’t noticed
.

There was a blush stealing over her now, making the scars stand out further, thin dashes and dots of white against the rose of her arm. She let him take her other arm and examine it as well, no longer fighting him, but quiet, almost trembling in his grasp.

The other arm was marked almost identically. He wanted to see more, he wanted to follow the lines up her arm, but the sleeves of her gown wouldn’t let him.

Her eyes were calm and light, detached as they met his. He couldn’t think of what to say, the horror filled him up.

Solange ended the silence. “He had a very sharp knife,” she said, and nothing more.

The rage that took him was like nothing he had known before. All the anger, all the frustration and hurt he was familiar with were now dwarfed by this new feeling, the blackest part of him he had never touched before. He wanted to kill, and kill and kill, he wanted to destroy the thing that had done this to her,
and the fact that the thing was already dead left the anger growing wildly, without recourse.

He didn’t know what he was doing; he was carrying her to the bed, pushing up her skirts around her ankles, and she was saying,
no, no
in a tearful voice, but he gently pushed her hands away and examined her legs, her thighs, for the marks, feeding the blackness with every new one he could find, a dot, a dash against the purity of her skin, thin, faded lines that marked him as permanently as they did her.

His own hands were broad and dark against her, tracing the lines, and a part of him noted this, the broad contrast between the rough, marked skin of his hands against the pearly, marked skin of her legs. She appeared so helpless, God, even next to his own hands.

Solange couldn’t bear to watch his abhorrence of her, to see the disgust grow on his face, so she lay back against the feather mattress sedately, trying to remove herself from this awful moment, trying to imagine what she would do now, after he was going to make her leave. He wouldn’t be able to bear to be with her after this, she knew.

She would find a convent, yes, just as she had planned. She would find a remote place to hide forever, and when the papal papers came announcing the annulment, she would be glad, and wish him wholeheartedly to the devil for throwing her away like this, for valuing her on just her looks alone, when looks were such a fragile thing and Solange was sure that the heart of her was not fragile at all.

Damon stood up and crossed to the door. She didn’t watch him go but heard the click of the latch as he
shut the door behind him. Part of her still expected to hear the sound of a lock turning after that, but all that reached her were his footsteps going away down the hall.

So that meant she was welcome to leave on her own. Fine. She sat up and brushed the white skirts down to their properly modest fall. She would change into her own clothing, gather what she needed, and then go, and no one would stop her, no one would dare enough or care enough to.

That’s what she would do.

But instead, she sat on the bed. The room was surprisingly warm, cozy even, with bright diamonds of sunlight falling through the window, and a very pleasant scent wafting about. It smelled like—Solange frowned, trying to place it. Like roses, perhaps. Like lavender. Something sweet and summery, something out of place in this winter season.

A drowsy feeling stole over her. She decided to rest a little before leaving, they wouldn’t begrudge her that, and so she lay down on the bed with her face to the sunlight, letting the rays warm her body and the smell of summer surround her.

From far away she heard low feminine voices, kind, not talking to her, but still comforting somehow, almost indistinguishable from the regular sounds of castle life. They were familiar in some indescribable way, familiar enough to tease the back of her mind yet not be worrisome. Soft, loving voices that were well matched with the warmth of the room, the perfumed air …

Probably some women in a sewing circle, talking about life and the weather. Something normal and
sane, Solange thought languidly; they would be discussing something women were supposed to discuss, something happy and light and trivial. The color of thread, the taste of a pudding, the toddling steps of their children …

The steps grew louder outside, then paused. She heard the door open and shut again.

Damon came and knelt beside her, bowing his head to her on the bed, placing an arm around her waist to pull her into him slightly. The sunlight picked out the rainbows of black in his hair, melting into the fall of curls that escaped the queue.

She extended her hand and placed it on his head lightly, still in a drowse, wanting to feel what he thought if she could. He kept his head bowed but reached up and grabbed her hand, pulling it beneath him to his lips.

She felt his tears. A singular solace came over her. He still cared. If he was sad, then he did still care. If he cared, then she could stay. It might work.

“What did you mean when you said you were misled?” He kept his head down. She felt the words against her hand.

“Father promised me that he would support you in front of Edward if I married Redmond. That’s what he told me that morning.”

He held her hand tighter.

“He also told me he would throw you out with nothing if I didn’t marry him. He said he would do it that very morning.” She took a deep breath of the summer air in the room. “And a storm was coming, you see.”

“Aye, the storm came and went, and I made it safe out in spite of your father.”

“I know. I know that now.”

She didn’t seem inclined to speak further to him, and it was just as well. He wasn’t ready to handle much more. The emotions in him were tearing him apart, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

She hadn’t wanted to leave him! She hadn’t wanted to marry Redmond, and that night before the wedding when they had planned to be together had not been a sham after all! He couldn’t seem to take it in, this new reality that laid waste to the old one that had tormented him all those years.

But what he felt right now, more than any other thing, was relief.

He was half ashamed that this would be his first reaction, but there it was, the relief that coursed through him that he had not been wrong all this time, that his love for her had not been some simpleton’s dream, or some madman’s folly. For years he had held her close to him in spite of the deep, festering wound she had created, and now he saw the wound had been false, his anger at her had been based on a horrible misconception.

She had made the choice to abandon him because she had thought it would save him; she had not wanted him to suffer. It had been a sacrifice, an act so generous he could scarcely believe it. This new knowledge soaked up that old anger, transformed it into a humbleness that brought him to his knees.

And yes, what he felt was relief.

He struggled to focus on that, because he knew now
what lay behind that selfish feeling was a black pit, and Damon could not see the bottom of it. That pit threatened to suck the rest of him down into it, and he didn’t honestly know if he could climb back up.

She hadn’t wanted to leave him, but she still did. What had happened to her after that, after he had allowed her to go so easily, was what created the pit.

Retribution
, whispered the blackness,
you must pay for the consequences of your pride.…

He fought that voice by speaking again.

“Henry sent me to you, after all that. Maybe he felt remorse.”

“I don’t know.”

Damon lifted his head. “He said he tried to reach you, every year. He said you turned away his men at the gate.”

Of course, Redmond would see to that, she thought sadly. “I never knew. I thought—I thought he no longer cared about me.”

“I am trying,” Damon said through a locked jaw, “to understand something. I am trying to understand how you could stay with a man who did these things to you.”

“I didn’t stay with him,” she pointed out soberly. “I’m not with him now.”

“But you were with him until he died.”

“All of that is the past. In truth, after that first year at Wellburn, I hardly saw him at all. He sent me to France after I—”

“Stop. I don’t want to hear anymore.” The string that held him together was about to break; he couldn’t stop it from breaking if she told him one more thing.
He thought he wanted to know the whole of it, but he had been mistaken, he didn’t really want to. He couldn’t bear knowing more right now than what he had already discovered.

The pit yawned beneath him, mocking him.
Retribution
 …

Solange, his beautiful, sensitive Solange, had been brutalized in a way he would not have allowed the most base of animals to be treated. He couldn’t stop the images now, and they left him gagging in the blackness, a deep wound in his heart that screamed and screamed in pain.

He was appalled for her, he was in a fury for her, but underneath all that was the guilt. Aye, there was his punishment.

The guilt told him he should have sought her out, he should have made an effort to find out what happened to her. He should never have let her go as he did, nor been so late to help her. The guilt said he could have stopped this atrocity somehow, that he had been honor bound to do so, but all he really did was fail her, when she had given everything to help him—

Solange read him again, easily guessing where his thoughts were going. “Damon, it’s over. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

The greasy mixture of the anger and guilt clogged his throat. He was falling, falling down forever into the blackness.

He had failed her. Not the other way around.
He had failed her
.

Everything he had built himself to become had hinged upon his honor, the one thing that he had
thought he could never lose. But now it seemed that base was a false one, something that had been tainted by his pride and carelessness from the beginning without his even knowing it.

The misery was so great, it blinded him. He was unable to stop his descent into the darkness. But then Solange sat up and pulled him up to sit beside her, and he felt a tremulous hope.

This time it was she who held him close, rocking him peacefully, warm in the sunlight, tasting fragrant lavender on her tongue. She pressed her lips to his temple. “There’s only the present now, and the future to nourish.”

The hope quivered and sustained, a single cord to pull him to safety. She had sacrificed herself for him, but now she was with him again. Whether he deserved her or not, she was there.

Her arms around him were sure and strong. And so perhaps the pit could wait.

A
nd this, my lady, is the second buttery.”

“A second one?”

Godwin nodded. “This one is used primarily for the preparation of cold foodstuffs in the winter and warm in the summer, since it was attached at a later date than the original castle keep, and therefore is prone to, er …”

“Drafts,” contributed the cook, a blunt woman with flour dusting her face. She was surrounded by a gaggle of kitchen maids who nodded enthusiastically at the assessment. “The whole room is as windy as an open sea in a storm come winter.”

Solange glanced around the room, which was admittedly colder than any other part of Wolfhaven she had visited, even with a fire roaring in the enormous hearth. “Well, then, perhaps I could speak with the marquess about shoring up some of those chinks in the stone—”

“Oh, nay, my lady,” interrupted the cook. “For this is the most pleasant room of all come summertime, what with the nice breeze ablowing in.”

Since this was the longest sentence any of the inhabitants of Wolfhaven had spoken to her yet, save Damon and a few of his men, Solange merely smiled and nodded her agreement, then allowed Godwin to lead her out to the next chamber, or hall, or wherever the tour led next. Even into her second week as the new marchioness, Solange had not seen the entire castle. This was mainly due to the fact that Damon insisted she not go exploring alone, since more than a few areas of Wolfhaven had not yet been entirely restored, and also to the fact that the man he had assigned to escort her had been busy all week.

And indeed, whenever Godwin did manage to find time for her, they were inevitably interrupted by someone seeking him to tally up a harvest payment, or supervise a masonry dispute, or something else that only the castle steward could work the kinks out of.

It had meant she was left to her own devices for a goodly portion of her time, even though Damon would have had it otherwise. He had seemed truly torn: wanting to be with her more but knowing his duties had been neglected for over a full month already, and there was much to prepare for the winter stretch. If Godwin was busy, then Damon was ten times that as the overlord, even though for the first time since taking over Wolfhaven he wished it otherwise.

Solange had insisted he go do what he needed to do, she would be fine, she would meet a few of the women, she would begin her wifely chores, whatever those may be.

But it appeared she had no chores. Wolfhaven had a very capable chatelaine, a brisk, harried woman who
commanded the legion of servants in cooking and cleaning. Although she listened courteously to Solange’s request to help, and had even gone over the list of duties she fulfilled, neither of them could think of what the marchioness could do that was not already being done. The cook, also, had made it quite clear she needed no guidance from the new mistress.