Lord Sebastian's Wife

The third time Cecilia began to sing the chorus, John joined in, the darkness of his deeper voice shading the bright clarity of hers. Beatrice listened, wishing she did not croak like a rook and could join in, as well. The rollicking rhythm of the tune set her toes to tapping and when John began to clap his hands in time she joined in helplessly. Lucia, sitting on John’s other side, followed suit, laughing as she did so. John had said she barely knew any English, but she seemed to understand English music well enough.

Her father joined Cecilia in singing the fourth verse. Here was the source of Ceci’s music; her father’s voice was as smooth and golden as honey in the comb. Beside him, her mother clapped her hands, her face shining in the candlelight. Her voice had no more beauty in it than Beatrice’s but, like Beatrice, she loved music.

“And a hey nonny, hey nonny nonny no!”

Beatrice would have known Sebastian’s voice if he sang with the choir at Westminster. Not as dark as John’s nor as honeyed as her father’s, it had the golden-brown clarity of water slipping over stones. Certain he would not be looking at her, she stole a glance at him.

She was wrong.

Even at this distance, the cornflower-blue of his eyes glowed. Surely those were the bluest eyes in England. She waited for his mask to clamp down, for the shifting, unreadable expression on his face to disappear, frozen into frightening stillness. Instead his expression coalesced into a scowl as he stared at her through narrowed eyes. An hour ago that frown would have unnerved her. Now, after Ceci’s kindness and the joyous sound of “Hey nonny no!” she had a small store of courage to spend.

She lifted her chin and held his stare. It took every ounce of will not to look away; it had been far too long since she had tried to stare anyone down. A chill prickled her when she remembered that within weeks she would be entirely in his power, to use as he pleased, but a portion of Coleville obstinacy had come with the courage and she could not yield to him. She would have to have faith in the small voice that had said Sebastian would not harm her.

Sebastian looked away.

Beatrice sank back against the wall as if he had unhanded her. She had not outfaced anyone since marrying Thomas. How long had it been? Three years, four? She could not remember, not exactly, only that it seemed like a lifetime.

Her heart, which had lain quietly while she confronted Sebastian, took up a fierce battering against her breastbone, as if to register its protest, and she could not quite seem to catch her breath. How had she dared? Why had she been such a fool? He would be furious and rightly so. Worse, however much she hated and feared the knowledge, he was her husband, with the right to correct her with his hands. She ought to be terrified; surely the pounding of her heart was fear?

No, what she felt was not fear. Fear did not rush, sparkling, through her veins; fear did not make her sit straighter on the bench beside Ceci. The emotion driving her heart and catching her breath was excitement, excitement that was familiar and alien at once.

Why? Why was she excited when she should be afraid?

Through a supper of duck and goose, good English beef and capon, she puzzled over it. She knew her family spoke to her and she answered at random, absorbed in trying to penetrate the gray wall of empty knowledge. She could not remember why her act of daring felt familiar, nor understand why it did not leave her cold with terror. Could it be that Sebastian was not Thomas? She looked down the table at him, sitting just beyond John on her father’s side. Candlelight glinted gold and honey-brown in his waving hair, limned the lean line of his cheek and glittered in the faint stubble of his beard. He seemed almost to have been washed in gold himself, even to the tawny orange of his short gown and brocaded doublet. Like a saint in a manuscript.

No, he was nothing like Thomas, least of all to look at.

Servants came to remove the cloths from the table and to lay out the cheese and fruit. Beatrice selected an apple and began cutting the peel off with her eating knife. She had always loved apples, especially when they were new, their flesh firm and full of juice. This one was particularly juicy; her hands were damp and sticky with it. She carved a sliver of apple and slid it into her mouth, nibbling it between her teeth.

She glanced at Sebastian. He stared at her, his mouth a thin, hard line, and then turned his head away from her, one more move in their dance of looking and looking away. How he must hate the thought of marrying her.

She could not blame him for wishing for another wife than she. What man would want a woman with a soul as black as hers, even if she had tried to clean the stains with confession and penance? She sighed and set the apple down. What either of them wanted had become meaningless. Without list or leave, they were married, bound together in the sight of God if not yet in the sight of man.

If she could not undo this madness, she could try to be the wife he must want. Meek, obedient, scrupulously honorable. How meek would he expect her to be? Would she need to be obedient only to spoken desires, or would she once again have to obey commands unspoken, and suffer the punishments for unwitting disobedience?

She glanced at Sebastian’s end of the table again. Her father had claimed his attention. Sebastian frowned as he nodded while her father spoke, but he did not look angry, merely intent on her father. But anger did not matter, did it? A man might pretend to anger, so poorly she knew it for mummery, and still inflict bruises big and black as plums. A blow given with a cold heart hurt just as deeply as one given in heat.

She would drive herself mad if she stayed here, unable to keep from looking at Sebastian even when the sight of him sent her thoughts into places she did not want to go. He was a wound she could not help prodding. She would have time enough to prod it once she began to live with him as his wife, but not now.

She rose. All heads at the table swiveled to face her. Her mother looked irritated at this breach of manners, Ceci worried, John thoughtful. Sebastian’s fist curled on the table as her father turned toward her, but that was all he revealed. His composure let nothing else escape.

Her father rose to his feet, as well. “Well, mistress?” he asked quietly.

“I beg your leave to retire, sir,” she said softly.

He eyed her thoughtfully, the silence in the room stretching tightly. Her father could reprimand her, deny her permission to go, humiliate her before Sebastian and her family. She had acted without thinking.

He shoved his chair aside, creating space between his chair and her mother’s. “Come here.”

She went to him and knelt at his feet. Even if he shamed her, it would be nothing to her other humiliations. She had endured so much already; she could surely endure a little more. He surprised her by laying his hand on her forehead in a blessing, then, when she rose, saying, “Come closer, puss.” She stepped closer, her forehead still warm where his hand had been. He kissed her cheek, patting the other with a gentle hand at the same time. He had kissed her that way when she was a tiny girl. She pressed her cheek against his rough one.

I wish I were the woman you raised me to be.

“You have my leave to go.”

Her mother said in a very soft voice, “My lord.”

Her father put his hand on her mother’s shoulder. “No, Pippa.”

Her mother sat back. They never quarreled in public nor before their children. Whether they quarreled at all had been a favorite topic of speculation for their children while Beatrice was growing up.

“Go, child,” her father said.

She took a candle to light her way to her bedchamber, but it cast more shadows than light, and the dark quivered as if full of demons. No, not demons; she saw the shadows cast by her jumbled, unruly thoughts.

She stopped outside the door of the bedchamber, unable to lift the latch. Today had been the one of longest days of her life but she was not weary. A fretful energy twitched in her limbs, the kind of energy she had used to absorb with riding and walking at Wednesfield. She could not go walking or riding now, in the dangerous, deadly dark. Nor could she be still. Where to go? Where might she find a haven, a sanctuary against her fears and the demons within?

Sanctuary…

Blowing out her candle, unwilling to be accompanied by its unsettling shadows, she turned on her heel and began walking to the chapel at the other end of the house.

Chapter Three

S hortly after Beatrice left the solar, Sebastian rose and made his bows to the earl and countess. With Beatrice gone, all who remained in the solar—John and his wife, the earl and countess, even Cecilia—reminded him of what he would never have: a sweet, serene married life. The reminder was more than he could endure.

From the solar, he went down to the great hall. Night had fallen and it was past time to go to bed, but he was too edgy to sleep. If he returned to his chamber, he would lie awake, unable to stop thinking about wool prices, his rents, income that covered less and less of his expenses…and Beatrice.

Around him the house was silent, as if all its occupants, even those he had just left, slept without dreams. He envied them. He remembered how heedless he had once been, assuming that because no harm had ever come to him or his, no harm ever would. If it had not been for his uncle’s aid, he might well have lost everything. Since then, he had taken fear for Benbury’s future to bed with him.

At the far end of the hall a white blur moved into sight, gleaming faintly in the low light cast by the fire-place to one side. Sebastian stepped deeper into the shadows. Who was this creeping through the hall when most of the household had retired? And why did he only see the white oval of a face?

She came closer and firelight glittered on her jet ornaments, smoldered on the velvet of her skirts. Dressed in widow’s black, she had melted into the shadows, barely discernible even to his sharp eyes.

Beatrice.

She passed him without seeing him—or at least without betraying that she had seen him—and slipped through the arch that led to the chapel stairs. He crept after her, wondering why she went to the chapel at this hour, and hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. She had to have gone to the chapel; there was nowhere else. But why? Of all her family, she was the least pious, not the kind of woman to pray in the middle of the night.

Intrigued, and more than willing to let curiosity distract him from the weary round of worry, he followed her up the stairs.

The chapel was located at the top of the stairs. Faint light from within the room revealed that the door was half open. Resting a hand on its panel, he paused to reconsider entering. If Beatrice was praying, he could only be an unwelcome intrusion—and no matter what she did within, he would have to speak to her if he joined her. He had nothing to say, nothing that he dared say.

He imagined himself turning and going back down the stairs, crossing the hall and seeking his bed. Rest would only aid him in his meeting with the earl; staying here with Beatrice was folly. The days when he could follow every impulse were long past.

He pushed the door open.

The chapel was dim, illuminated only by the sanctuary light, a brave, weak show against the blackness of night. Beatrice knelt in the middle of the chapel floor, her head bent over folded hands. The gabled hood she wore concealed her face, but even if he had not seen her climb the stairs, he would have known her by the graceful bend of her long neck. In truth, he would know her anywhere, under any circumstance. When he had discovered her with Conyers, he had recognized her even though she had been enveloped in Conyers’s arms.

Tension tightened his shoulders, the too-vivid memory of Beatrice embracing George Conyers sparking fury as if he faced it anew. He fought both anger and memory, pushing them down, beyond reach, and swung the door shut. It slipped from his hand to bang softly against the frame, the latch rattling.