An Unlikely Match (27 page)

Nickolas stroked Gwen’s hair, trying not to think about the fact that she was gone just as all the others connected to the night’s horrors were gone.

“It was Latin.” Dafydd rose to his feet with some difficulty; what he’d seen and experienced had obviously deeply affected him. “The priest’s words. They were sacrificing her life for . . . for preservation. Nothing in this room should have remained intact as long as it has. The curse preserved it all.”

Preserved it all.
Including Gwen. Nickolas looked down into her beloved face one last time, determined to memorize it just as she looked then. Her face was rosy and real, not the pale, ghostly imitation he’d only ever seen before. Her hair shone a vivid shade of red.

So close! He’d come so close!

“At least now she can be properly buried.” Griffith’s tone indicated he knew the thought was hardly comforting.

“She deserves that.” Nickolas brushed his fingers once more along her soft cheek and followed the line of her jaw, resting his fingers gently on her neck. “No one, let alone a lady, should have to endure what—”

He stopped. Immediately.

“What is it?” Dafydd asked, still leaning against the wall for support.

Nickolas pressed his fingers harder against the side of her neck. “Gwen?” he asked, anxiously, desperately. He had felt a pulse. “Gwen!”

“Good heavens! She’s alive?” Dafydd crossed toward them but stopped in shock when Gwen began to move. “How is this possible?”

Griffith struggled to his feet as well. “She must have still been alive when the curse was broken, her body and soul still united.” He stood leaning against the wall. “You broke the curse in time.”

“Gwen?” Nickolas tried again.

She stirred only slightly, as if her limbs were too heavy and stiff to be maneuvered.

“Oh, Gwen,” Nickolas whispered, hardly able to speak for astonished joy. She lived!

She was still lying in his arms when her eyes flew open. Deep-brown eyes, Nickolas noted. Brown and beautiful and, he realized with a jolt, completely and utterly terrified.

He tightened his hold on her to offer support. Was she still reeling from the ordeal with her father?

She struggled against him, her eyes wide with fear and focused on his face. Unable to tolerate holding her captive when she only just escaped such a situation, Nickolas released her. He could offer reassurance verbally, from a slight distance if necessary.

There was no softening in her eyes, no relieving recognition. In fact, she scooted across the floor, farther distancing herself from him. She looked like a frightened fox cornered by a pack of hounds. Gwen spoke, but not in English.

Griffith’s eyes grew wide at whatever it was she’d said.

“She asked, ‘Who are you?’” Dafydd interpreted, sounding as surprised as Nickolas was by the question.

“Who am I?” Nickolas gaped. “I am Nickolas, Gwen.”

“
Sais
,” she whispered, her tone obviously one of confusion.

“
Englishman
,” Dafydd translated again. He spoke directly to Gwen in Welsh. Nickolas knew for certain then that the spell had been broken. Unlike before when he had instinctively understood both Welsh and Latin, he was now completely at a loss.

Griffith joined in their rushed and frantic conversation. Nickolas’s eyes jumped between them. He had no idea what was being said. Gwen motioned to him more than once, uncertainty and fear in her expression.

Gwen pulled herself to her feet, but her legs faltered. When Nickolas moved to help her, she darted away from him, the frightened look in her eyes seeming to grow by the minute. She moved anxiously to the window and looked out then turned back to face the room. Her face had gone nearly as white as it had been during her time as a specter.

Her eyes, those beautiful, haunting eyes, turned to Nickolas, simultaneously pleading and accusing. “Where are your fellow Englishmen?” she asked in heavily accented English. “Where are the soldiers?”

“There are no soldiers here,” Nickolas answered, baffled.

Her brows drew closer in a look of overwhelming confusion. She turned back to the window, threw open the heavy leaded glass, and put her head out into the cold, dark night. “It is gone,” she said. “Y Castell is gone.”

Again, Dafydd spoke to her in the Welsh Nickolas increasingly wished he knew. Gwen turned to look at Dafydd, tears beginning to well up in her eyes. Nickolas had never once seen her cry. He discovered in that moment that the sight was painful for him to watch. He instinctively reached out for her again, needing the reassurance of her in his arms.

She jerked out of his reach, throwing Welsh words at him, words that did not feel welcoming in the least.

Griffith spoke to her again. His tone was precisely what one would expect to hear from a person trying to calm another in the face of overwhelming worry.

She shook her head at whatever Griffith had said. Her eyes shot around the room, and Nickolas saw her shiver. He moved toward her, ready to wrap her in his warm embrace, to whisper words of reassurance, to offer her his strength and support. But again, she moved swiftly away from him. She backed toward the door, her eyes snapping between him and the other two men, her look one of alarm and confusion.

Gwen turned, her skirts swirling around her, and fled the room. Nickolas was certain he heard her call out for taffy.

“Taffy?” he asked, perplexed, bewildered, feeling alone and very confused.

“It is an old Welsh nickname,” Griffith said. “I believe she is searching for her friends.”

“What?”

“She doesn’t remember, Nickolas,” Dafydd said. “She doesn’t remember any of it. She thought you were one of King Henry’s soldiers. She thought that Y Castell still stood. In her mind it is yet four hundred years ago.”

“She doesn’t remember anything that happened while she was a ghost?” Nickolas asked, his stomach knotting.

“It doesn’t seem so. She didn’t recognize any of us, nor understand what had happened to the walls of her home. She found our odd style of dress almost as alarming as the rest.”

“She doesn’t remember me,” Nickolas whispered, the realization painful.

“I’d best follow her.” Dafydd moved toward the door. “She is frightened and lost. She will need—”

“I will go after her,” Nickolas insisted.

“Nickolas.” Griffith stopped him with a firm grip on his arm. “
You
have a fiancée waiting at the house. A gentleman who is engaged to one young lady cannot go haring off after another. Let Dafydd go after Gwen.”

It was like a dash of cold water. His love lived, truly lived. And he was promised to another. He could not, with any degree of honor, back out of the engagement. And he could not, without utterly disrespecting his future wife, see to Gwen’s welfare. That would, by necessity, be left to Dafydd.

“Come along, Nickolas.” Griffith urged him out of the room after Dafydd had gone. “No need to stay here torturing yourself.”

They took the steps slowly, both of them faltering.

Griffith kept at Nickolas’s side as they left The Tower behind. The atmosphere, Nickolas noticed, with what little of his brain still functioned, had grown less oppressive, less frigid, less
evil
. The grip the centuries-old curse had over The Tower was gone. It was over.

And yet, there wasn’t the happy ending he had wanted. “She didn’t remember me.”

Griffith had no soothing words to offer as they step-by-step made their way toward the house.

“And she was afraid of me.” That hurt even more than the lack of recognition. There’d been something like hatred in Gwen’s eyes.

“You are a
Sais
, Nickolas. An Englishman. In her time, there was ample reason to fear your countrymen, ample reason to despise them, even.”

His heart dropped. “But I love her.”

Griffith gave him a look of empathy. “I know. You may have to resign yourself to being grateful she is alive, even if you must be a stranger to her. If she never regains the past four hundred years of memories, she might never allow you near her.”

He
did
rejoice for Gwen. She lived and had escaped the cruel machinations of her father and the priest. But in giving her that gift, he’d lost her. The woman he loved saw him as nothing more than a sworn enemy. She might never learn to forgive him. Even in his relief at her release, he felt utterly desolate.

* * *

Nickolas awoke near dinnertime the next evening. He’d returned to the house exhausted and physically spent. He had gone to his rooms by way of Gwen’s but allowed himself only a fleeting glimpse. He knew if he went inside, the weight of all that had happened, the feeling of loss, would overwhelm him. He would simply collapse in there, unable to summon the strength, physically or mentally, to leave her place of solace and refuge.

He had reached his bed and fallen on top of it, fully clothed, and slipped into a fitful sleep. Again and again, the night’s events replayed in his dreams. He felt Gwen in his arms once more, relived that moment of euphoria when he realized she was alive, that he hadn’t lost her after all, only to come crashing back to the moment she fled.

He dressed with care and shaved before making his way with reluctant determination to the drawing room to face his guests. There was much they would need and want to know. He would do his best to tell them what he could. He decided before entering the room that he would not tell all. Mr. Castleton, at the very least, could be counted on to dog Gwen’s heels if he knew a
former
ghost, something Nickolas doubted anyone had ever heard of, was in the vicinity. He would have to tell them something though. Nickolas wished he’d thought to consult Dafydd and Griffith first so they could concoct the same story.

He came across Griffith not long after emerging from his room. Did he look half as tired as Griffith did?

“I wondered if we’d see you at all today,” Griffith said. “How are you getting on?”

“Terribly.” But he managed a halfhearted smile.

Griffith walked with him a pace or two. “I spoke with Dafydd this morning.”

“And?” Nickolas was anxious for news of Gwen.

“He is busy with a houseguest at the moment.” The comment was pointed enough to be clear. Dafydd had found Gwen, and she was safe at the vicarage.

Nickolas breathed a sigh of relief as that weight lifted from his mind. “How is his houseguest adapting to . . . everything?”

“He said she is overwhelmed and confused.”

Poor Gwen.

“But he also told me she seems less terrified. She is coming to trust him a little.”

Gwen was learning to trust Dafydd, but could she ever trust him, an Englishman like those who’d attacked her home? If she never remembered him, would she give him a chance to show her he was different?

“I thought you would like to know she was safe,” Griffith added.

Nickolas nodded and thanked him.

“For what it’s worth to you,” Griffith said, “I’m holding out hope that everything will work out for the best.”

“I am attempting to do the same.”

Griffith tipped him a laughing smile. “This
is
Wales. Extraordinary things happen here every day.”

Nickolas was grateful for the reason to smile, if only briefly. He felt minimally better as he continued, alone, down the corridor.

Several doors before the drawing room, the sound of quiet weeping caught his attention. He peered inside the room and saw, to his surprise, Miss Castleton with her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking with sobs.

“Miss Castleton?” he asked, disturbed by her obvious suffering. He may not have felt a passionate love for the young lady, but he did care about her feelings.

She looked up at him. Nickolas could see this was no minor distress. She had the look of one who was weeping her very heart out.

“Oh, Mr. Pritchard!”

Nickolas crossed to where she sat wringing a thoroughly drenched lacy handkerchief. He offered her one of his larger, more utilitarian squares of linen. “What has upset you, Miss Castleton?” he asked, disturbed by the sudden realization that he was not entirely sure what her first name was. Carol? Charlotte?