Once Upon a Tower

Page 72

“Gowan.” He leaned back against the bar, and let her do as she wished.
“You’re the brooding type, aren’t you,” she breathed. “I like that. Big and brooding.”
Her fingers slid toward his groin and his hand shot out instinctively, stopping her caress.
“It is a bit public here,” she said, her smile widening. The smile had nothing to do with his rank, he noted dispassionately.
“Would you like to come upstairs for a bit of sport?” she said, leaning in and nipping his ear. Her large breasts brushed his chest. “I can take a wee bit of time to meself.” She turned her head to kiss him and he jerked back.
“No kisses.”
“Perhaps I can change your mind,” Elsa said with a giggle.
He stood up and took her hand.
“Like father, like son,” the man next to him muttered, just as the barmaid pulled Gowan away from the stool. Gowan gave him a look. The man snorted. “Aye, and he had a cracked look about his eyes, just like you.”
He hunched back over his glass, and Gowan followed the barmaid’s round arse through the crowd.
Thirty-seven
Edie was slowly coming to accept that Gowan might not come home for weeks. He didn’t want to see her. She represented a failure so absolute that he couldn’t bear to return. He understood that she would never be what he wanted in the bed. Or he had decided that he could never trust her to tell the truth.
Tears made her throat scratchy, she discovered. They took away her appetite. It was easier to just push it all out of her mind and play the cello for hours. She kept playing even when her bow arm was tired, not wanting silence because her thoughts were loud enough.
Her father would come in a week or so. Meanwhile, the servants moved back and forth from the castle and the tower like toiling ants. She grew unexpectedly fond of Bardolph. He never showed by the slightest gesture that he disapproved of her move, though—as Layla said—perhaps that was because he disapproved of everything.
He stationed a footman at the base of the tower during the day so that she could easily send a note to Layla or summon Mary. And he visited twice a day. One morning he told her that there had been a quarrel over the footmen’s two-hour rotations at the tower.
“Why on earth?” she asked.
Bardolph’s mouth pursed. “The Scottish are not philistines, Your Grace. They wish to hear you play.”
Later, Layla told her that there was often a group under the tower window, a group that grew every day.
So Edie had her first audience. They never made a sound, so she ignored them, working over and over on a few measures until she was satisfied with it before she allowed herself to play an entire piece.
One day she heard Layla calling breathlessly, and threw open the window. Her stepmother was running down the hill, hand on her side, waving a letter.
“What is it?” Edie called down.
“Your father,” Layla panted. “He’s coming!”
“Yes, I asked him to come.” Even as she said it, Edie’s heart plunged to the bottom of her feet. He would take her away, of course. That’s what she wanted.
“No—no, he doesn’t seem to know of your letter!” Layla cried, flattening the page out. “He must have already left by the time yours arrived. He says he’s coming because he wants—he misses me!” Her face was shining. “He’s only three or four days away.”
“How wonderful! He’ll be so happy to meet Susannah.”
“Yes,” Layla breathed. Then she glanced down at herself with horror. “I’ve grown even plumper!”
Edie laughed. “You look wonderful.” Layla looked like a rosy, curvy young matron who loved her daughter and her husband, and had no worries about mistresses named Winifred.
Layla was reading the letter again. “He’s coming to take me home,” she said, brushing away a tear. “He says he didn’t realize until I was gone how much he loved me.” Edie pulled her head inside the window and ran down the stairs.
“Oh, Lord,” Layla cried as Edie opened the tower door, “what if he changes his mind?”
“He won’t,” Edie said. “Father adores you, Layla. It may have taken him a while to realize it, but he does.”
“We can all go home together,” Layla said. “It’s like a dream.” She crushed the letter to her bosom. “I read the letter ten times before I came to find you, because I couldn’t believe it. But I know his writing. He meant it.”
“He did,” Edie said, nodding.
“He says there is no Winifred and there never has been one. It felt so terrible to be the only one who cared,” Layla said, sniffing. “There’s nothing worse than being in a marriage when the other person despises you, rather than loves you.”
Edie’s heart gave a terrific thump—and then started again.
“Oh, darling, I didn’t mean you,” Layla cried. “You’re so brave about everything!” They had spent many hours in the last days dissecting Gowan. Layla hated him. Edie felt more desperately in love with him than she had imagined possible. She spent her nights alternately crying and waking up in a sensual daze, reliving the night when she had played the cello for him and he . . .
He had kissed her in that intimate fashion. She could have kissed him in the same way. In her dreams, her fingers skimmed every inch of his body.
Her eyes had been closed a great deal of the time when they were bed together, but she’d seen enough. The memory of the way he looked in Nerot’s Hotel when he climbed from the bed and turned away from her kept coming back to her. The twist of his body, with its pure strength and beauty . . .
Inevitably, she would remember the way his dark eyes looked at her, as if she was everything he wanted in the world. And then she would dissolve into tears.
Just then Bardolph rounded the path and came to join them. “As I’m sure Lady Gilchrist has told you,” Edie informed the butler, “my father will be here in a few days. I expect he’s traveling with his valet.”
Bardolph bowed. “I shall prepare a room for Lord Gilchrist.”
“We will remain only a couple of days. When he is rested, we will all leave. We shall require two other carriages, one for my cello and another for our maids and Susannah’s nursemaid.”
It was the first time she’d seen a true reaction on the factor’s face. His eyes went blank and his entire face slackened. “What?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you quite all right, Bardolph?”
He bowed, recovering himself.
“I think we’ll need three more carriages, not two more,” Layla put in. “I have a good deal of luggage, and Susannah has a great many toys that she will not want to leave behind.”
Edie smiled at that.
“The village,” her stepmother said guiltily. “It is such a nice place to visit of an afternoon. And once I determined that Susannah needed new dresses, it began to be as easy to pay a visit there as to summon the seamstress to us.”
“Three carriages, if you can spare them,” Edie said, turning to Bardolph. “We will, of course, send them back directly once we reach London.”
Bardolph had turned an odd color, like a weathered piece of parchment. “Are you quite certain you’re all right?” she repeated.