Once Upon a Tower

Page 58

Layla guessed her thought. “You’re wrong, Edie. He would love her—will love her—because she’s bold and fearless, quite like you.”
“I am not fearless.”
“Most English ladies would have been terrified to marry a stranger and head off to the wilds of Scotland. And your duke is no milksop. Yet you are not in the least afraid of the marriage, or of Gowan, are you?”
“I probably should have been. I was thinking earlier that I feel as if I’ve married a tornado.”
“But you’re not afraid of him, are you?” Layla looked at her quite sharply.
“How could I be afraid of him after growing up with Father? Father pretends that everything he sees is logical, but underneath he’s all emotion.”
Layla sat with her arms wound around Susannah’s little body, her toe still pushing the chair back and forth. Then she said, “Yes, he is, isn’t he?” And she put her cheek down on Susannah’s tangled hair.
So Edie sneaked away, back down all those stone steps, and wandered through the orchard before climbing back up the hill, following the path around all the way around until she could see the opening in the castle gates. Then she stopped and looked back at the tower. It looked very squat, if tall, from this height.
Gowan was right to preserve it. And he was right to say that they needed to talk.
If she and Gowan talked seriously, she would have to confess that she had only pretended to achieve pleasure, rather than truly feeling it. But if she tried Layla’s ideas for a romantic evening, perhaps she wouldn’t have to confess. Ten days had passed since they last tried, and she was hopeful that it wouldn’t hurt any longer.
Either way, there would be no more pretending.
Cow parsley grew in the shelter of the wall. The stems were very long, and had grown sideways and tangled with one another before erupting into spangled white flowers.
She knelt down and began gathering flowers until she had a great armful of twisty, spare blossoms. They didn’t have the beauty of flowers bought at Covent Garden, in London, those with straight stems and regular petals. These were wild and unruly. Her first Scottish flowers.
At first she thought they were odorless, but very close up, they had a faint sweetness, a windy scent. With one final look at the tower, she came back to her feet.
She walked under the portcullis, thinking hard. In truth, she wasn’t brave, as Layla believed. A brave person wouldn’t have left it to Gowan to acknowledge that something was wrong, when the problem stemmed from her failures.
Bardolph was passing through the entry—heading, no doubt, for Gowan’s study. He stopped and said, “Those are not flowers, but weeds, Your Grace.”
Edie let a silence build precisely long enough to suggest that he had overstepped. “I would be grateful if you would send a maid to me with several vases. I shall be in my bedchamber. Oh, and Bardolph, my room needs to be completely redecorated.”
He bowed, so rigid that his back looked like a tabletop. “I will summon Mr. Marcy, who directs renovation in the castle.”
“Was Mr. Marcy responsible for the blue room, and the yellow room, et cetera?”
“Yes, he was.”
“In that case he will not do. I’m sure you can find someone else. Thank you, Bardolph.” She began climbing the stairs, aware that small white flowers were brushing off on her clothes and falling to the ground.
Once in her room, she managed to get the flowers wrestled into vases. The stems curled madly in different directions before blossoming into tight little white flowers. They brought a touch of welcome wildness to her sterile, blue room.
Mary had removed all her clothing from the trunks. And it seemed that she had encountered Susannah’s French tutor, who was now being recruited to teach music as well.
“He’s pretty as a picture,” Mary said. “He wears his hair quite long and tied back. He is the son of a marquis, or so they said.” The maid folded a frilly petticoat into a neat square with brisk flicks of her wrist. “He should not work. He should not be living here at the command of a Scottish duke, ready to teach music to a child of five.”
She glanced at Edie. “And no one thinks that Miss Susannah will be able to learn to sing, let alone to play an instrument, Your Grace. She’s an ill-tempered little thing, by all accounts. She spilled her milk on purpose, more than once, or so they say. What will you wear to supper?”
“The sea-blue one,” Edie said. She had left all her white gowns behind.
“The pongee silk,” Mary said, lifting the evening gown reverently from the wardrobe. “Your hair is a disaster. I shall put it up again and weave pearls through it.”
Edie sighed and sat down. The whole day was lost.
“Tomorrow I shall practice all morning,” she told Mary. “No interruptions after breakfast.”
Mary nodded. “His Grace said that you were to have a footman outside your door to ensure you are undisturbed.”
“No need for a footman,” Edie said. “I shall practice in the tower.”
Mary wrinkled her nose. “Bardolph said that no one is allowed near that tower.” Then she started unbuttoning, and all the while, Edie looked at her flowers, thinking about how their curling stems resembled an intricate stave of music.
It was as if Scotland had wild music growing just outside the castle walls.
Thirty
Supper was hellish.
Edie and the Frenchman kept laughing at Layla’s gossip—which Gowan thought was rather coarse, though her stories never edged over into pure vulgarity.
“From what I heard,” Layla was telling them, “being married to Lord Sidyham was like finding oneself a Christian in the Colosseum, whisker to whisker with a large tiger. I mean to say that he was absurdly primeval. Rabid. I was at a dinner party once when he accused his wife, in front of all of us, of being infatuated with anyone wearing a clerical collar. She was merely enjoying a conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and anyone who has met him knows that one would have to be truly devoted to the cloth to find him attractive.”
“His was a quite unkind attack,” Edie said, adding, “though oddly specific.”
“My thought precisely. As it turned out, Lady Sidyham had indeed allowed her respect for the priesthood to prevail over principle, because a few months later she and the local vicar disappeared and were last heard of in the Americas, where I believe they are quite happy.”
Gowan couldn’t bring himself to look even slightly interested, not with coals heating the base of his stomach and bitter acid coating the back of his throat. He had taken one look at Edie as she walked into the drawing room, wearing a gown whose design emphasized the line of her legs, and then celebrated her breasts with a burst of ribbons and frills . . .
And she had turned to him with a smile in her eyes. It was like being tossed on a rough sea, being married to Edie. One moment she was incalculably elusive, and the next she was within reach. One moment there was complete awareness in her dark emerald eyes, and then she turned to greet Layla, and all he could see of her face was the delicate curve of her cheek.
For the first time he considered that perhaps madness was hereditary. Perhaps his father felt the same for his mother, and when she strayed, he had no recourse but to drink himself into a stupor and sleep with barmaids.