Once Upon a Tower

Page 55

“How is the bath in the nursery?” Layla asked.
“There isn’t one. I have a tin tub.”
“Then you shall bathe here tonight,” Layla promised.
The far door, on the other side of the bathing chamber, led to the duchess’s room. It was blue. All of it: rugs, hangings, curtains. Just as she noticed that the ceiling was also blue, Gowan strode in from the corridor.
“This room looks as if someone vomited the sky,” Layla said.
Susannah burst into hoots of laughter until Gowan gave her a quelling look.
“It’s more efficient for the staff to carry out their duties if each room is known by its given color.”
Edie was fascinated by the uniformity of the furnishings. Even the fire screen was blue. “I gather blue was a particular favorite of your mother?”
“I have no idea what colors my mother preferred,” Gowan said, his face unreadable. “The room was refurbished a year ago.”
“And you directed the work? I finally found something you’re not good at,” Edie exclaimed, feeling rather relieved.
He aimed the family scowl in her direction.
“Could I see the gingerbread princess now?” Susannah said. She was jumping from foot to foot.
Layla drew a cookie larger than her hand from a gaily colored cambric bag. “We’ll save the princess for after supper. This is a gingerbread man, though it would be more accurate to call him a gingerbread gentleman, because he has gold buttons and a particularly elegant hat.”
Susannah took the treat carefully. “He smells good. What do I do with him?”
“Is he your very first gingerbread man?”
She nodded.
“You eat him.”
“Eat his head?”
“I always start with the feet,” Edie suggested.
Susannah kept her eyes fixed on Layla. “But if I eat him, he’ll be dead.”
“No, he’ll be in your tummy,” Layla said. “There’s a difference.”
“I think I’d better eat his head first,” Susannah said, just when the silence grew a second too long. “That way he won’t know what’s happening to him.”
“That’s a very kind thought,” Layla approved.
Susannah turned and climbed up on the bed. “This room is not pretty,” she said, nibbling on her gingerbread. “But the bed is nice. Mine smells like straw, but yours is soft.”
“It’s probably a feather bed,” Edie said. Gowan cleared his throat and Edie was suddenly, vividly aware of him—not to mention the proximity of the feather bed.
Layla glanced at them, strolled over, and said, “You promised to show me the nursery, Susannah love,” and held out her hand.
Susannah climbed down and they walked out without a backward glance.
Twenty-eight
Gowan had experienced emotions like this before. They were as profound as an atmospheric effect, as if sea pressure were bubbling up his legs. He had felt it when he was a boy, when his father was drunk . . . but rarely as a man.
But he felt it now.
The moment Susannah pranced out of the room with her gingerbread, holding Layla’s hand, Edie threw him a nervous glance, muttered something about the housekeeper, and fled. Clearly, she didn’t want to be alone in a bedchamber with him.
This emotion was a blinding, inarticulate thing that reminded him of days when his father would topple from his stool by the fire and sprawl across the floor, so filled with whisky that he sloshed as he rolled.
Every time Gowan looked at Edie, he felt a rush of possessiveness that felt as fundamental to his nature as being a Scot. But that emotion didn’t belong in the civilized world.
He had married Edie. He had put his ring on her finger. He had bedded her. And yet there was some part of her that eluded him. He felt it, more and more clearly, and it was driving him mad. He had wanted her the moment he saw her, so he’d arranged to marry her. And yet he didn’t have her. The truth of it made an animal howl threaten to break loose in his chest.
Perhaps it was the music. He loved the fact that his wife’s body was shaped like her instrument. But she played the cello, not his body. She hardly touched him in bed. Of course . . . what did he expect? He knew aristocratic women weren’t as lusty as barmaids.
Gowan had been eight years old when his father had told him the facts about what happened between men and women, grabbing him by the wrist and pulling him close. His reeking breath had struck Gowan’s nose like a blow.
“Ladies aren’t worth the straw they lie on,” he had said, his eyes lit with strange glee. “They lie as flat as a Shrove Tuesday pancake. Go get a lusty barmaid, my boy. Go down to the Horse and Poplar. Annie is the one to teach you what’s what. She taught me. And she’ll take you on as well.”
He must have shown revulsion, because his father had given him a hard shove, sending him across the floor and into the wall.
“Think you’re too good for Annie, do you? You’d be lucky to have a sprightly lass like her. She’ll do anything, she will. Can twist like a cat and eat you like—”
So that’s why this particular vile memory had come back. The barmaid would eat him—or so his father promised—like a gingerbread man.
The lurch of nausea in his stomach was like an old and unwelcome familiar. He hated whisky. He hated gingerbread.
Damn it.
Bardolph opened the door and walked in. “Your Grace, I bring—”
“Do not enter without first knocking,” he said harshly. “This is Her Grace’s bedchamber.”
Bardolph’s face was the pale yellow of a raw potato, his eyes a darker brown. Like the bruise on an old potato. “Her Grace is speaking to Mrs. Grisle,” his factor replied, with the injured air of a man used to knowing precisely what was happening in every room of the castle at any given moment. “I wanted to consult with you about arrangements for Lady Gilchrist’s lodging.”
In a house with this many servants, there were no secrets. Gowan had known when his father got the second housemaid with child, and he’d known when the poor lass lost the child, the same as he’d known when his own mother had insisted on riding after the hounds while carrying a child, and had lost it.
She had started drinking to excess after that, and that was no secret, either.
“Not the yellow chamber,” Gowan stated. He’d be damned if he’d have his stepmother-in-law next door, hearing . . . whatever there was to hear. He walked out the door and started toward his study, Bardolph on his heels. “Put her in the room closest to the nursery.”
“The nursery? The nursery is on the third floor. Your Grace offers the lady an insult.”
“You should be asking my wife these questions, not me,” Gowan snapped. At that very moment he knew that it would be madness to go to Edie’s bed after the meal. If he snarled at her, she would recede even further.
“As you wish, Your Grace. I have located a musician.”
“What?”
“Your Grace asked me to find someone who could teach music to the child. Miss Susannah’s French tutor, François Védrines, is a relative of the late Comte de Genlis, and professes to be a violinist. When we hired him, he was traveling through Scotland collecting tinker’s ballads.”