Beatrice sat up in her bed and, sighing, rubbed her tired, itching eyes. She had barely slept all night, her thoughts turning like a mill wheel as she tried to understand what Sebastian was about, if indeed he was about anything.
For five long years, they had been at odds, each slashing the other with taunts and gibes whenever they met for more than a moment or two. As soon as she had been promised to Thomas Manners, Sebastian had changed, acting as if she had betrayed him when in truth he had betrayed her in failing to claim her. He should have said, “You are mine,” if he had felt so, instead of standing silent and staring when she told him another man desired her.
She drew up her knees and rested her chin on them, staring at the faint light marking the gap between the bedcurtains at the foot of the bed. True, she had not said, “Am I yours or no? Do you wish to claim me? Or am I free to accept this man’s attentions?” Yet should he have needed prompting? There was no way to know the answer without asking him, and she did not have enough courage to do that. Sometimes she wondered, on nights when sleep slipped through her fingers, how different her life might have been if she had asked instead of keeping silence.
Now, after her foolish attempt to put things right between them, he returned from visiting his uncle with a heart that seemed changed. But was it changed? Had he truly decided to accept her apology? He behaved as if he did, but something within her doubted him. Why was that so? Why could she not believe the evidence of her eyes?
He wants something.
Those years she had spent among the foxes at Court had taught her about deceit and its many faces. Something indefinable in Sebastian’s manner made her think of every courtier who had smiled at her and spoken sweet words to her while attempting her undoing. The recognition made her heart ache. She had always believed Sebastian was different than other men, even when he had been so angry with her.
You were wrong about Thomas. Can you be sure about anything?
There was the rub. It had been a witling’s mistake to marry Thomas believing his appetite for her was so great that she could easily cozen him. If she could be so wrong about Thomas, how could she be certain of anything ever again?
You are certain this marriage will be as disastrous as your other one.
Other marriage? Disgusted memory crawled over her skin. Her time with Thomas had not been a true marriage, and all she had endured had been for nothing. She had suffered his slaps, pinches and incontinent rages, obeyed his command that she give up the stitchery and gardening she loved, borne his persistent, futile attempts to bed her and accepted his insistence that if she was a good wife to him his desire would rise for her. He had smelled of death; death had been in his cold fingers as he caressed her, in the bones that had thrust through his thinning flesh, in his failure to plant life in her aching, child-hungry womb. Thank God she need never again lie still while he touched her, parted her legs and lay atop her, breathing the scent of cloves and decay into her mouth as he tried and failed yet again to consummate their marriage. She shivered.
At least she would not suffer the same with Sebastian. Heat swirled from her throat to her breast and belly. When he had kissed her by the river, the heat of his mouth, the fervor of it, had spoken unmistakably of his appetite for her.
A hand slid between the bedcurtains and drew them open, revealing Nan. Beatrice had been so far lost in her thoughts she had not heard her maid rise and dress.
“It is dawn, my lady,” Nan said, pushing the curtains fully open. Beyond her, the rim of the sky showed pale through the windows, the heights still dim with night. After the darkness of the curtained bed, the shadowed room seemed bright. “What shall you wear today?”
“The black brocade skirt and bodice, the black brocade sleeves,” Beatrice replied as she swung her legs over the side of the bed. The question was the same every morning. Why should her answer have changed? “The black hood, the jet necklaces. Dress me in black, Nan, I am but a crow.”
“What of your white sleeves, my lady? Shall you not wear those instead, and white underskirt to go with them? Surely you must leave off some black, with you so soon to wed.”
Beatrice shook her head. “I shall wear black until I marry.”
Nan nodded, her merry face puckered with trouble. Beatrice sighed, feeling the pull of Nan’s regret and her own disgust of her weeds. Why did she persist? She did not mourn Thomas in the least and, betrothed already, no one could fault her for leaving off her sad colors. And she was sick of black.
“Nan, wait,” she said. “Dress me in blue.”
Nan’s face lit as if Beatrice’s change of heart was a gift to her. While Nan combed out her hair and put it up, and laced her into her clothes, she bit her tongue against the desire to cry, ‘No, take this off, dress me in mourning.’ By dressing in blue when Sebastian had said it would please him, she gave him leave to continue his new pursuit of her, a pursuit that might lead her to his bed long before they married.
Yesterday, he had reminded her that if they lay together, it was no sin because they had married one another. Fear had made her flee him, fear of her desire, fear of what he would later say to her if she let him seduce her. In his behavior after finding her with George, he had shown himself willing to believe ill of her without concern for the truth. Yet she had not been able to cast his words out of her mind: ‘You are my wife. You know that. There is no sin.’ They had kept her appetite for him from dulling and disappearing, so that when he had leaned toward her and spoken to her last night, it had taken all her will to listen to him through the dry-mouthed ache that burned through her.
How could she desire him so after just one kiss? And how could she contain her hunger until they married?
You need not. He is your husband and there is no sin.
Nor, as a widow, was she expected to prove her maidenhood. There would be no display of sheets this time as there had been the first, when Thomas had cut his own foot to hide his shame. She could lie with Sebastian any time during these weeks in safety.
Safety from what? Safety from death? Thomas would have killed her if she had ever lain with anyone while he lived, but lying with Sebastian was different. Safety from shame? As Sebastian had said, lying with him was no sin. Safety from recrimination?
Ah, recrimination. There was no safety from that, nor from regret. She could not be sure Sebastian would remember in the years to come that he had claimed there was no wrong in lying together. How could she be sure that she would not rue yielding to him, if indeed she yielded?
Can I trust him?
She was afraid of how he might hurt her, if she yielded up too much of her heart and soul to him. Yet she wanted him, her body crying out for him. Could she yield one and not the other? Could she lie with him and keep herself heart-whole and safe? Without risking her heart, she would never know and in risking it, she made herself vulnerable. Yet was not the chance to know contentment with Sebastian worth some risk?
“What jewelry, my lady?” Nan asked, breaking into her thoughts.
She opened her mouth to tell Nan to find the pearl carcanet her parents had given her when she married Thomas. The memory of Sebastian’s gaze passing across her skin when she offered him her bare throat, breast and arms as proof of her poverty checked her.
“None,” she said. Would he understand why she wore no jewelry? Did she? It did not matter; she could not put on any of her gauds.
When she was dressed, she went to the chapel and prayed; she had missed Mass. Her soul eased, she went to her mother’s solar. At the door, she hesitated, the enormity of her decision to put off widow’s black clear as it had not been in the safety of her chamber. What if her mother disapproved? However much the countess had disliked Thomas, she could well expect Beatrice to give her late husband’s memory its due.
I have given him his due and more. The defiance of the thought collapsed; woe betide the child who failed to meet the Countess of Wednesfield’s exacting standards. Beatrice swallowed to loosen the tightness in her throat and nodded to Nan to open the door.
The room, that had been humming with soft talk, fell silent. Sitting in her chair of estate, her mother looked up from her stitchery. Her brows lifted in surprise as she noted the blue brocade. Beatrice straightened her spine, torn between the wish that she had remained in black and the first stirrings of rebellion.
And then it did not matter. Her mother’s surprise melted into a smile, the expression as welcoming as an outstretched hand. Beatrice’s tight wariness eased. Since their return to Wednesfield, her mother had been kinder, revealing the softness beneath her prickly exterior, like a hedgehog who no longer rolled into a ball of spines.
“Come, child, sit with me.”
Beatrice went to sit on the stool beside her mother’s great chair. As she settled herself, her mother held out her needle case. “Take a needle and help me with this altar cloth. It is for the abbey church and I can I trust no one else to aid me. None of the maids sews as finely as you.”
Beatrice took the needle case, chose a needle and threaded it. Lifting one end of the cloth, she found the place to begin and started stitching, the old pleasure in creating beauty stealing over her. How much of her childhood had been spent in this room, needle in one hand, cloth in another, while she stitched and dreamed?
Her skill with needles had seemed small when compared to Ceci’s scholarship, even after her father had asked her to stitch a missal cover as a gift for the queen. Any woman could sew a fine seam, make pictures with needles and silk; how many could read French and Latin as well as English? As for the beauty that had drawn so much praise, it had been a gift; even when her vanity had been greatest, she had known that she was not as good as her face proclaimed her to be. She had not been made beautiful because she was good.
“My eyes are not what they used to be,” her mother said with an impatient sigh. “You will have to set these stitches.” She handed her end of the cloth to Beatrice, where the vine was delicate, its leaves tiny. Beatrice exchanged needles and brought the cloth close so she might see it more clearly.
“I shall miss you when you are gone,” her mother said softly.
“Because I can sew finely.”
“No, child. I will miss your company.”
Beatrice lowered her stitching and looked into her mother’s face. It had softened, her eyes shining as if she fought tears.
“I will not be so far away. Benbury is only three miles from here.”
“I know. But it is sweet to sit with you.”
It had always been sweet to sit in the solar, making beauty out of thread and cloth. She had dreamed of Sebastian over shirts for her father, her brothers. What had she dreamed? Perfect love, perfect harmony, endless days of sunshine filled with Sebastian’s smiles and the feeling that he would lay the world at her feet if he could.
Beatrice paused, her needle halfway through a stitch. She had taken him for granted, taken his love as a given, due homage to her beauty. Of course he had loved her. Who had not? She pulled the needle through the cloth and set the next stitch, her mouth twisted. No one had loved her the way she had thought. No one could. Her vanity had made her foolish.
Welladay, Thomas had cured her of that. Her beauty had mattered only in that it made men envy him; she had been a bauble, a pretty toy, less than that when he had been frustrated. He had forbidden her to sew, claiming it would ruin her eyes, reddening and swelling them; she had come to believe that he denied her because it gave him pleasure to do so.
It was a sin to thank God for a man’s death. If it had not been, she would have given thanks every day. Was it a sin to be glad she was free? Please God it was not; she did not know how to confess it, nor knew what penance might be asked for it.
She and her mother had sewn in easy silence for a good hour when a boy slipped into the room and bowed to the countess. “My lady, Lord Benbury asks if his betrothed wife, Lady Manners, might join him below in the hall.”
Beatrice raised her head. Sebastian, asking for her? Why? What did he want? To woo you, a voice murmured as if from her bones. Her stomach rolled over.
The countess looked at Beatrice. “That is for Lady Manners to decide.”
Go, she thought. Stay. If she was wise she would remain where she was...But Sebastian had never openly asked for her company before.
“If you have no need of me, madam, I should like to join him.”
“I have no need of you greater than your lord’s, child. Go.”
Beatrice pushed her needle through the cloth as if she would only be gone a moment. “I shall return anon.”
Mischief and mockery shone in her mother’s eyes, as if she knew how unlikely it was that Beatrice would return any time soon. “Go.”
Her heart beating in her throat, Beatrice left the solar and descended the stairs, emerging behind the dais into the jewel-bright brilliance of the hall. Morning sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows along one wall, scattering topaz, ruby and sapphire on the flagstones and rushes underfoot. Sebastian stood amid the glory, golden hair glinting, lozenges of color splashed against the blue of his short gown and doublet. When he saw Beatrice, he grinned.
“How now, my lady,” he said, coming forward to meet her. He took her hand and raised it to his mouth, pressing a warm kiss on its back. His thumb brushed over her knuckles. “What, still no jewels?”
She listened for mockery, but heard none. His blue gaze was innocent, as if he had never accused her of greed, and warm, as if he had never scorned her. She decided to answer the question as if he had asked it sincerely.
“Until my stepson returns what is mine, I shall wear none,” she said.
“Then it is as well that my uncle pursues this for both of us.”
She swallowed and looked more deeply into his eyes, seeking the truth and finding only the clear warmth that she did not wholly trust. Was it a lie? Or had he truly changed toward her? She would never discover whether or not she was right in her wariness if she did not risk a little.
“I will be glad of any aid.”
“It is my pleasure.” He turned her hand over and lifted her palm to his mouth, his breath hot against her skin. “Now that is settled, let us walk in your mother’s garden.”
“Why?” The question came out before she could stop it.
He smiled at her. “Because it will be pleasant to do so.”
“Your will is mine.”
He placed the hand he still held on his forearm and led her toward the pantry arches and the door that led to the gardens behind the house. As they passed into the sunlight of the garden, he turned, facing her. His smile was as sunny as the August morning, his eyes bluer than the summer sky above them. No matter how hard she looked, she could see no lie in him; his pleasure seemed genuine. She wanted very much to believe it was.
“I meant it when I said I wished there to be harmony between us.”
“I wish it also.”
“Good.” He led her onto the path.
Contained within the castle, the garden at Wednesfield was larger and older than the garden at the house outside London. Golden walls, not the turbid Thames, bounded it, their stone holding and reflecting the sun’s warmth so that this garden bloomed as the other could not. Wandering the knotted paths, Beatrice smelled green growth, the clean, complex scents of the herbs in their beds released by the heat confined within the walls. She would miss this place, these green beds. She did not know in what state the garden at Benbury had been left after Sebastian’s mother remarried, except that it could not match this verdant world.
“Can you make my gardens as wealthy as these?” Sebastian said, leaning close.
Her thoughts spun into meaninglessness. Was it his nearness or was it the way he seemed to have read her mind that made her head swim? She neither knew nor cared; she was growing to crave the way his breath, soft and warm, felt on her skin. “No, but I can make them richer than they are,” she murmured, “if that is what you desire.”
“It is.” He slowed. “Did you make Manners’s gardens richer?”
“No,” she said carefully, holding herself still to lessen the pain. “My lord said it was not meet for me to worry over herbs when he had gardeners to do so.”
He turned to face her, gold-tipped lashes shadowing his eyes. “Did it mean so much to you?” he asked, his tone a curious mix of gentleness and skepticism.
What to say that answered both? No soft answer that she could devise—only the truth would suffice. “Yes, it did. There is little enough I know how to do. To be forbidden to do those few things...”
“I will not forbid you to tend my gardens. You have my word on it.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I do not know how to repay you.”
“Smile for me. That is payment enough.”
Because she could not resist him when he was kind to her, her mouth lifted and with it, her heart. In answer, Sebastian’s mouth curved, one corner rising higher than the other in the tilted grin that had led her into mischief all those years ago.
“Is it so hard to smile?” he whispered.
Her heart jumped, as if it had missed a beat. “No.”
“Be happy, Bea.”
“Yes.”
She saw the kiss in his eyes before he bent his head and pressed his mouth to hers. His touch was gentle, with none of yesterday’s demand, yet heat still enveloped her, the earth still swung beneath her feet. He lifted his head, looked at her and bent to press a kiss to her brow. The tenderness of it caught in her throat.
“I want you to be happy.”
A strange note in his voice made her pull back and look up into his face. Something flickered in his expression that she would have named guilt in anyone else, but not in Sebastian. He had no reason for guilt. Even his condemnation of her, that seemed to have burned away like morning mist, had been warranted. How could it be wrong to call her a whore when she had behaved like one?
“If you are kind to me, I shall be, Sebastian,” she said.
He brushed the backs of his fingers along her cheek. “Then you shall be the happiest woman alive.”
Blindly, unable to stop herself, she leaned into his hand as it caressed her. He turned it and cupped her cheek. Gently, so gently that the slightest hesitation on her part would break her free, he drew her close again, tilting her head up. She followed his lead, drifting towards him as if his touch had somehow dissolved her doubts and worries. But for all the gentleness of his approach, when he kissed her heat flared, blinding and red, as soon as his mouth brushed hers. Her lips parted, welcoming him; his free arm encircled her waist, pulling her hard against him.
The fire that had burned her yesterday afternoon by the river roared back to life as if it had only been banked, not quenched. She gripped his arms, the weight of his strength under her palms. If George had made her feel such burning sweetness, would she have been able to keep him from her bed? No, never; she could not have resisted the temptation to sup more of this delight. Sebastian nipped her lower lip; the scrape of his teeth setting her mind a-whirl, spinning with pleasure. Somewhere, in the drowning depths, a small voice whispered, How shall I resist him? and then it was gone, swept away in a flood of desire. He shifted, or she did, so they pressed more tightly, bodies fitting neatly together, as if made for it. We are married. There is no sin.
As if he heard her thought, Sebastian lifted his head, pressing kisses, gentle as rain, on her sensitive mouth. “You are sweeter than I dreamed, Bea,” he said, “but this is not the place for such things.” He nodded at Wednesfield’s windows, bright as eyes.
She pulled herself free of his hold and backed up two steps, putting distance between them. To keep him away? Or to keep herself from reaching for him? She did not know who she feared would be tempted.
“I beg your pardon.”
“No, Bea,” he said, bridging the distance between them in a single step. “The fault is mine.”
All her fearful wariness leaped up. “Can you mean that?” she asked and heard her own plea for reassurance. She longed to believe he did mean the words he spoke, that he claimed the censure their behavior warranted.
“Yes,” he said. “I can. I do.”
She waited for something within to tell her if he lied, listening for the little voice that had aided her toward the end of her marriage to Thomas. The voice had warned her when his fury was brewing, warned her when to tread softly and when to clothe herself in the remnants of her pride, but now it was silent, leaving her to gauge the sincerity in Sebastian’s bright, deep blue eyes as best she might.
I want to believe you, but I am afraid, sore afraid, of being mistaken in you. Prove yourself to me, Sebastian, please.
She could say nothing; she must hold her doubts close, as if they were gold and she a miser. If she did not trust him easily, how could he trust her? That was the rub, the niggling heart of her worry. She did not know what had prompted his change of face; until she did, she could not believe that the change in his behavior truly betokened a change in his heart.
He took her hand and drew it through the crook of his elbow. “Let us walk. I will not kiss you again.”
Together, they resumed moving along the paths, but now the silence between them was charged, as if lightning might strike at any moment. She could not think of anything but the tension in Sebastian’s arm under her fingers, the way his legs brushed her skirts, the heat of his body so close to hers.
“What will you need to make the garden at Benbury as fine as this?” he asked suddenly, as if their proximity troubled him, as well.
She took a deep breath and let it go on a sigh, trying to clear her head. “I shall need time, more than anything else. This is not made in a year or even two.”
“You will have the time. We will not be at Court.”
Thank God. To know she was free of the wolves and the foxes, the staring eyes and the bitter, malicious tongues... “I am glad.”
“Do you not care for Court?” he asked, sudden tension in his voice.
“Court was my undoing,” she said. “How should I wish to return?”
The path crunched beneath their feet. As her relief subsided, she considered Sebastian. Why did he turn his back on Court? As far as she knew, he had been well-thought of, rising higher and higher in royal favor, his feet firmly on the path to preferment.
“I have no desire to return either,” he said suddenly, as if he had heard her unspoken question. It was the second time he had replied to an unsaid remark. She shivered. “Are you cold?”
“No,” she answered softly. “I am well.”
“You must tell me if you grow chilled.”
“I shall.” They walked a little further. “Why do you not desire to return? Surely you did well there.”
“It costs too much and returns too little,” he said.
She thought of her own sorry career. “So it does.”
“Then we are agreed,” he said, putting his free hand over hers and pressing it. “A quiet life for us.”
“Yes,” she said.
They walked in silence for some while longer, Sebastian apparently at his ease. Beatrice could not relax, a skeptical voice in the depths of her mind murmuring questions she would not ask—Why are you so kind to me now when you were so scornful a fortnight ago? What do you want of me that you cannot command?—and underneath the voice there was the memory of fear, as if Sebastian was like Thomas, playing a game to shame her.
Sebastian would not be so unkind, the voice of her heart said, but would her heart not speak what it wanted to believe? She did not know, she could not tell. She had thought she could see, but had found she was blind; she dared not trust her judgment when it had betrayed her so badly in the past.
“What ails you, Beatrice?” Sebastian asked, his voice quiet.
“Naught ails me,” she said. Even if he had wanted to hear them, she could not speak of her doubts.
“You walk as if you might cringe at any moment. Do you fear me?”
“No.” It was not a lie. Above all else, she feared her own foolishness.
He halted. “Then what do you fear? For you do fear something. I can see it in your face.”
Could he? If he could read her now, why had he not been able to read her in the past? He had been wrong in so many ways about her—how could he be right now? Perhaps it was a shot aimed in darkness, in the hopes it might strike true. If so, he had been lucky in it.
“Beatrice.”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Can not? Or will not?”
“We have spoken of this before,” she said, lifting her eyes to his, expecting anger.
She found calm and patience. “I know. But this time I will not upbraid you. Can you not tell me?”
She shook her head. “I do not have the words.” The words she did have must not be spoken.
“If you fear me, it is without cause. I shall not harm you.”
There is harm and harm, she thought, remembering the cut of scorn and cold words, the red battery of fists. She remembered Ceci’s certainty that Sebastian’s kindness toward his animals, the way he did not beat either his horses or his dogs, meant he would show equal gentleness toward his wife.
“I fear grief and disillusionment,” she said quietly.
“You can trust me,” he said as quietly.
“I cannot.”
She caught her breath. The words had slipped out, eased into breath by his gentleness. She waited for his offended anger, for the kindliness and calm to vanish. How not, when she had said he was not worthy of her faith.
“Then I must win your trust,” he said and lifted her hand to his mouth.
“How can I trust you when you leave London so angry you cannot look at me and then return to me as if we never quarreled? I cannot help thinking of those men at Court who prey on unwary maids, all smiles and sweet words to cover deceit and knavery beneath. When they have gained what they sought, there is no longer any kindness or flattery, only japes and mockery.” She stopped, breathless and tense, waiting again for the storm to break over her head.
He did not release her hand, holding it loosely in a clasp the was strangely comforting. “I am sick of fighting with you, Beatrice, that is all. If we are to spend the rest of our lives together, I wish for there to be pleasantness between us, not anger and bitterness. Is that so hard to believe? And if I wish to smooth the way with a little flattery, a smile or two, how does that harm either of us?”
“It frightens me,” she said simply. Pain rose in her chest and her eyes filled with tears. “I can believe your anger. I cannot believe your kindness.”
“Give me time to prove I mean you no ill.”
She blinked her tears away. “Oh, Sebastian, I am yours to command. You do not have to win me. I will always do as you bid.”
Something shivered across his face, gone before she could read it. He sighed. “We will come to no agreement today. I do not want to speak and then watch you weigh what I say for truth and falsehood. I want you to believe what I say because it is the truth. That you cannot give me out of obedience, however perfect.”
There was no answer to that. If he did not want her obedience and obedience was all she had to give, where did that leave them? Yet she had to say something. She could not leave his last statement hanging between them.
“I pray you, give me time.”
He touched her face, light as swansdown. “You shall have it.”