Once Upon a Tower

Page 62

Her mouth tightened.
“And if he doesn’t pay a visit in the near future, I will send the papers to him,” Gowan added.
Something eased in Layla’s eyes and she embraced him. “We are family now. This simply binds us closer together.”
“Of course,” Gowan said. “I am certain that Edie will feel the same.”
The smile fell from Layla’s face. “You did speak to her before you asked me to care for Susannah, didn’t you?”
He didn’t like the tone of her question. “I assure you that Edie will not disagree with my choice for Susannah’s guardian. Your affection for my sister is obvious.”
“Edie should have been consulted. Just yesterday, she was to be Susannah’s mother, and now you are giving the child away?”
“I think we can both acknowledge that Edie showed no great aptitude when it came to mothering Susannah. She had already informed me by letter that she didn’t welcome the role, so I did not find it surprising.”
“Edie will be a wonderful mother!” Layla snapped.
“But a person would have to be blind not to see that you and Susannah belong together,” he offered.
Her face eased into a smile. “She is the child of my heart. Not being able to conceive a child has been heartbreaking. But now I can only think how glad I am that it never happened.” A haunted look crossed her eyes. “If I had my own children, I wouldn’t have come to Scotland. I would never have met Susannah.”
Gowan was not a demonstrative man, but even he could tell when something other than a bow was required. So he allowed himself to be enfolded in Layla’s perfumed embrace once again. It wasn’t as unpleasant as he would have thought.
She drew back. “I have a present for you.” She put a book into his hand. “Love poems. These collections are quite the rage at the moment; everyone is reading them. I thought that, because you quoted Romeo and Juliet in that entirely outrageous letter you sent Edie, you would appreciate them.”
Poems . . .
His head snapped up. “Are you suggesting that I need to write poetry to my wife?”
Layla frowned. “Why on earth would I suggest that you write poetry? With all due respect, Duke, you don’t strike me as having a poetic soul.”
“I apologize,” Gowan said, turning the book over. “Of course you weren’t saying that.”
“In any case, Edie has a tin ear when it comes to poetry.”
“She has?”
Layla nodded. “Her governess tried to drum some into her head, but she is a proper dunce about the written word.”
“She is?”
“I think it must be concomitant with her aptitude for music. Edie does not read with pleasure. But she does love to listen to poetry read aloud.”
“Of course. She prefers sound.” The book was leather-bound and embossed in gold. On the cover it said Poetry for a Lonely Evening.
“You could read some to her.”
“All right,” Gowan said, thinking that he scarcely had time to kiss his wife, let alone read poetry to her. He put the book to the side and went back to work. But when the bailiff from the Highlands estate missed his appointed hour, rather than attend to the hundred items awaiting his attention, Gowan picked up the book again.
He skipped Shakespeare’s sonnets; he’d memorized all those in his youth. There was a great deal of verse written by a man named John Donne, who seemed to have a sense of humor, at least. I am two fools, he read, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry. Gowan gave a bark of laughter, and turned the page.
He read the next poem four times . . . five. It begged the sun not to rise and call lovers from their bed. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
The element that was missing from his marriage was printed here in black and white. The bed gave no center to their lives. She’s all states, Donne wrote, and all princes, I. Nothing else is.
Gowan looked around himself with a bleak sense of futility. If he was a prince, Edie was not his state, nor his dominion. He was a prince of land and soil, of small villages and wheat fields.
Not of a woman as elusive as the wind. He had failed. He had failed in their bed, and his heart squeezed with the pain of it.
Later that afternoon, he looked out the window and saw the recital. Layla and Susannah were sitting on a blue blanket, looking like bright flowers. Edie sat in a straight-backed chair, her back to the castle, and Védrines stood to her right, a violin tucked under his chin.
Even from this distance, he could see Edie’s body sway as they began playing. And he could see that Védrines was standing at an angle, facing away from her, his eyes presumably on the music stand before him. He had probably concluded that his employer was stark raving mad, but he was keeping to his word.
Gowan’s heart began hammering in his rib cage. One of his bailiffs was talking, but the words made no sense. He snatched up the legal papers Jelves had prepared with regard to Susannah’s upbringing.
“Gentlemen,” he said, pivoting on his heel. “If you will please excuse me for a few moments, I will deliver these papers to Lady Gilchrist myself.”
He was down the hill a moment later, but he skirted the trees so no one saw him. Védrines’s face had the same transcendent joy on it as Edie’s had while playing, damn his eyes. Just then the Frenchman lifted his bow and said, “A C-sharp is quite different in the open air.”
Whatever that meant.
But, of course, Edie knew. She plucked a string, and one note quavered before dying away. “I hear just what you mean.”
Védrines turned a page on the stand before him—which Gowan recognized as the one that usually stood in the library, supporting the Kinross Bible—and nodded. Then they were off. Edie’s slow, sweet notes played beneath the violin’s, sounding like the wave of the sea. Her sound would die just as the violin picked up and yet it was never subdued: a moment later it would rise up again. In contrast to her lines, the violin bounced like a nursery rhyme, childish and thin.
The look on her face . . .
He turned and walked back up the path before the piece was finished. For the first time, he understood that a man could just give up his life and walk away from his wife. He could put his back to his castle and cease to be a duke. He could walk until the jealousy in his heart was silenced, and a woman’s face didn’t wring his heart’s core.
Back at the castle, he handed the papers for Lady Gilchrist to Bardolph, telling him to get them signed. It didn’t sit well with him to know that Susannah would grow up an Englishwoman. But their mother had not shown the slightest interest in mothering either him or his sister; nationality surely mattered less than Layla’s clear love for Susannah.
Later that afternoon the butler informed him that Her Grace had requested they dine privately in her bedchamber. And shortly thereafter, the bailiff from the Highlands estate finally arrived; he had been delayed by a broken axle. At some point Gowan asked Bardolph to inform the duchess that he would be late.
But even he was astonished when he raised his head and discovered it was ten o’clock.
Bardolph had an uneasy flicker in his eyes when Gowan emerged from the study, the book of poetry tucked into his pocket. His factor had apparently been hovering outside the door for some time. “I fear the meal is cold, but I believe Her Grace would not have wished me to intrude with warmer food, as she is playing her instrument.”