The Bride of Time (14 page)

“If only it were all that simple,” Giles murmured. “Well, at least now you know others believe in lycanthropy besides myself, and the child.”

“That does not make it so.”

“I cannot believe, after what you saw in the tapestry suite, that you could possibly doubt.”

“What I saw in the tapestry suite, sir, were the ravages of a disgruntled child in dire need of attention and affection entombed in a house where there is neither. What could you expect? You locked him away for the night. What sort of damage did he do after he continued his rampage in your studio?” Giles stiffened as if he’d been struck, and Tessa bit her lip. She hadn’t meant to bring that up.

“You went back to the studio?” Giles queried warily.

Tessa nodded, touching her Gibson coiffure. “You neglected to give me back my hairpins,” she said. “I could hardly disgrace myself by breaking my fast with the others in the servants’ hall with my hair undressed.”

“Ah!” he said, as if a light had just gone on in his brain. “I thought I was losing my mind altogether. I couldn’t remember returning them to you, and then when I saw you with your hair done up…well, I’m glad you have them back. Much to do over three tortoiseshell hairpins, I dare say.”

Anger pumped hot blood to Tessa’s cheeks and temples. The man was insufferable! So why was his closeness
such torture? Why was her heart beating so erratically, why was his musky male scent paralyzing her senses to all other aromas, and why was she longing to feel the fire of those hungry, sensuous lips upon her own again?

“These three hairpins are the sum total of my valuables, sir,” she snapped at him. “They are the only means I have of making myself presentable. And I am tenacious enough of my possessions to brave your sanctum sanctorum to have them back, since you chose to hold them hostage.”

“I forgot to give them back to you,” Giles defended. “I hardly held them hostage.”

“Well, as you say, I have them back. I must have arrived right after Master Monty revenged himself up there, because I saw him fleeing afterward…at least I believe I saw him. I saw…something running down the stairs, and then heard glass breaking. The oriel window, I presume?”

“Whether you choose to believe it or not, there is a serious problem with Master Monty,” Giles said. Why wouldn’t he meet her eyes? “That is why I’ve brought you with me today. Whether he is or he isn’t, the boy believes himself to be a werewolf. That belief alone could put you to the hazard. I want you to realize the dangers this position entails before we go further.”

Tessa hesitated, remembering the animal she’d seen streaking over the grounds in the moonlight. Could it have been coincidence, or could it be possible for one who believed himself to be a werewolf to actually take on the characteristics of one? She shook her head in denial. Preposterous!

“What?” Giles asked.

“N-nothing,” she responded. She wouldn’t tell him she’d seen that creature in the moonlight. “Look…she’s coming back,” she said of the Gypsy, who shuffled toward them, something shiny in her hands.

“Wear this,” she said, handing Tessa a silver chain. A round amulet hung from it in the shape of an inverted circled star. “The silver pentacle,” the Gypsy explained. “It is the sign of the wolf.”

“It is heathen!” Tessa cried, shunning the offering.

“And what is the wolf?” Moraiva responded. “Young woman, that amulet will repel the beast that rises when the moon is full. It will protect you.”

“If she is uncomfortable wearing the necklace, we shan’t force it upon her,” Giles said.

The Gypsy cast him a meaningful glower. Tessa only wished she could read the message in it, for it silenced Giles Longworth as if he’d been stricken dumb.

“I would speak with you privately,” Moraiva said to him.

Tessa rose from the log. “I’ll wait with the chaise,” she suggested, turning to go.

Moraiva held her back with a wrinkled hand on her arm. “Wear the necklace,” she said, crimping Tessa’s fingers around it. “If you do not believe in the pentacle, it cannot harm you to wear it. The wolf believes. It holds a power greater than his, and he will fear it. Thus it will protect you. Do not be foolish. Take it! Your God will not think less of you for arming yourself against His enemies.”

Tessa nodded, mesmerized by the glow in the old woman’s raisin-like eyes, and took the necklace. There was something almost desperate in the old Gypsy’s gaze that riveted her with chills, watching the woman turn back to Giles beside the campfire.

Giles kept a close eye upon Tessa, who made her way to the chaise. She had taken the necklace, but would she wear it?

Moraiva
hmm
ed. “You have been bitten,” she said. “Let me see.”

Giles hesitated. Tessa hadn’t seemed to connect his bite to the situation thus far. Not that it would matter in view of her obvious disbelief, but still, he turned away when he presented his hand for the Gypsy to view.

Moraiva
hmm
ed again. “The bite is deep and scarcely healed. When did it occur?”

“Last month.”

“When the moon was full?”

Giles nodded.

“Then it was
you
I saw on these moors last night,” Moraiva said. “I feared as much. I saw you in the wolf. I saw your spirit in it.”

“Tell me I harmed none of yours,” Giles pleaded.

“No, none,” the Gypsy assured him. “You looked me in the eyes and ran off. I was positive, when you reacted to the pentacle I gave your lady just now. If you were untouched, you would have insisted that she wear it, but you did not, did you? Instead, you tried to dissuade her. Why? Because you long to hold her in your arms, and when the moon rises, it will repel you. You realize, Giles Longworth, that your lady is in as much danger from you as she is from the child, if not more, because whether she knows it yet or not, she longs for your love, and she will let you near enough to corrupt her. She must wear the pentacle.”

“And what of me, Moraiva…is there no hope for me?”

“You know there is no cure.”

“There has to be
something
. There has to be.”

“Shhhh, lower your voice. You have captured her attention.” The Gypsy seemed to go into a trance then, swaying to some unheard rhythm, her eyes half-shuttered. “If whomever you savage survives your bite they will become as you are—a werewolf, just as you have become one from the bite of the child. It need not
be deep. It wants only for the skin to be broken and blood to flow to pass on the curse.

“She is safe with you all month until the moon waxes full and wanes again as I have described. Three days at the least each month she will be in mortal danger from you. You must separate yourself from her before the moon rises—before the moon madness takes you, for madness kills what it loves, and you will hunt her because she is your soul mate, young son.”

“How do you know that?” Giles asked, placing a coin in her palm.

The old Gypsy gave a patronizing smile. “I know much,” she said. “And I have seen more with these old eyes than you will see in a lifetime. Go! She grows restless, and time is short if you will have her back to the Abbey before nightfall. And there is one more thing. Beware! Your offspring may be tainted just as you are. There is no way to predict these things. The condition varies with each subject. You have only to look to your ward for the truth of what I speak. If you do naught else, persuade her to wear the pentacle. Her life may well depend upon it.”

Chapter Eleven

Tessa was dying to ask Giles what the Gypsy had said to him. He’d been silent since he climbed back into the chaise. It was none of her business, she told herself, but it really was. She was certain of it. Still, she held her peace. There was a look about him then that wouldn’t bear probing, as dark as a thunderhead, as volatile as a lightning strike. His was the face in the portrait now, brooding and tormented; the face that had somehow drawn her to this place.

The shops on Fore Street provided Tessa with the selections she wanted. Giles insisted upon advancing her stipend for her purchases. Tessa dug in her heels at that prospect until she saw the difference in the currency of the time. There was no question that she had to give in. She would have caused a brouhaha if she had presented turn-of-the-century money instead of 1811 blunt in the shops of Bodmin, even though it would have bought her twice as much.

Since she had no lady’s maid, she chose frocks without back lacing. These were high-waisted, made of fine muslin—serviceable stuff in shades of gray, befitting her situation—with tucked and pleated inserts to fill in the low décolleté fashions of the day, which she doubted she
would ever become accustomed to no matter how she tried. But that was a mild shock compared to what she suffered learning that bloomers were unheard of in 1811 England, while stockings were mandatory!

The sun was beginning to descend by the time she’d made her selections, which included a Sunday-best frock of robin’s-egg-blue muslin, an indigo pelerine with a matching bonnet, and a winter pelisse of gunmetal gray with
soutache
braid trim.

Giles was becoming increasingly agitated. He insisted she exchange the drab bombazine she was wearing for one of her new gray frocks, then after a brief respite at a local inn, they started back toward the moor and Longhollow Abbey beyond.

The day had been unseasonably warm, and as the sun slid lower, a thick ground-creeping mist began to carpet the moor, slowing progress, for the horse was reluctant to trot over ground it could not see, though Giles drove the animal relentlessly. Tessa seized his arm as they struck a rut. The muscles beneath her fingers were rock-hard, their corded strength like steel bands through the chocolate-brown superfine sleeve of his frock coat. His thigh pressed up against her was no less rigid, and the heat and constant pressure of it leaning against her in the little chaise sent shock waves of drenching fire coursing through her body—waves that had nothing to do with the fright she felt as the chaise bounced along over the narrow invisible path through the heath. The combined emotions were so overwhelming she feared she’d swoon.

“You’d best hang on,” he said, quickening the horse’s pace. “Needs must that we reach the Abbey by sundown, and the evening fog will bring it sooner.”

“Because of the child?” Tessa asked him. “What use if you kill us both in the attempt?”

“I’ve traveled these hills and moors since I was a
child,” Giles assured her. “I know every inch of these paths. This one is difficult, I’ll own, but it is the quickest way back to the Abbey, a shortcut through the hills.”

“The horse doesn’t seem to share your confidence,” Tessa observed, gripping the side of the calash hood.

Giles snapped his whip over the animal’s head. “He will feed off mine,” he replied.

Tessa wished she could feed off his confidence as well, but she was terrified. Tooling over the patchwork hills through the gathering mist at a gallop, with twilight approaching, was an eerie experience at best. What upset her more was his obsession over reaching the Abbey before dark. Whatever she believed, he believed them to be in real danger from werewolves.

“Please,” she pleaded. “I beg you, slow the pace. Whatever did that Gypsy tell you to set you off like this? You know as well as I do that they are a superstitious lot. You cannot take them so seriously.”

He didn’t reply. The light was failing and the mist thickening. Eerily, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Tessa had heard tales of the strange Cornish mists that seemed to pick and choose the dips and valleys they visited as if they had a will of their own. She’d heard how they would settle stubbornly in one valley and miss the next one right alongside altogether. This was one of those strange phenomena happening now, for off in the distance, the land was clearly visible. The carriage groaned like a living being as Giles drove the horse mercilessly, and the chassis had begun to bounce and sway on its frame, the leather strap suspension clearly taxed to its limit.

When the chaise struck a rut neither of them could see, the leather snapped on the passenger side, and the listing chassis plunged ground-ward, digging a trench in the spongy heath, pitching Tessa out into a thick clump of bracken and wild rosemary that hemmed in
the path, half-hidden in the mist. Tessa’s scream in concert with the horse’s frantic whinnies, and Giles’s shouts of command, filled the misty twilight with a racket that sent meadowlarks and lapwings soaring skyward from their safe havens in clouds of flapping, squawking frenzy. Dazed, Tessa tried to right herself, but the awkward position she found herself in prevented her. Giles was beside her in seconds, gathering her into his arms.

“Are you all right?” he pleaded. “You took a nasty spill, Tessa.”

She nodded against his shoulder. “I…I think so,” she murmured.

He crushed her closer still. “This is all my fault,” he said. “Able warned me not to take the chaise at a gallop. It hasn’t been used in a while, and the leather straps that hold the chassis in place have all dried out, despite a regular soaping and oiling. I’m afraid the Cornish damp wreaks havoc upon anything disuse will corrupt.”

“Can it be mended?”

“Able will have to be the judge of that,” Giles said. “Not in time to see us home, however. Damn and blast! I shall have to unhitch the horse and we shall have to ride the rest of the way.”

He ran his hand along her shoulder, along her arm and legs. “Are you sure nothing is broken?” he asked.

“Reasonably sure,” she said. “Nothing hurts overmuch. I expect the only thing wounded is my pride.” That was a certainty. With her frock hiked up in an indecent aspect—one, she noted, he made no move to correct—and the rest of her attire in dishabille, she had never been so embarrassed. Especially since his dark, hooded eyes were ravishing her through their sweeping lashes, and his lips parted, drawing nearer.

She could excuse her boldness as being a product of her dazed state, but it wasn’t. She wanted him to kiss her, wanted to feel the smooth, constant pressure of
those skilled lips opening hers beneath. When it happened, she leaned into the kiss, moaning as his tongue slid into her mouth, tasting her deeply.