An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition (53 page)

“No, Niall, no,” she protested. “It is dangerous. Anyone might come in. Besides, you have work to do.”

“I have nothing better to do than to swear that I love you,” Lord Niall answered.

“Not now,” Beatrice answered, and there was a sudden edge to her voice.

Slowly and reluctantly he took his hands from her and rose to his feet.

“Why are you like this?” he asked. “If I thought that you were tired of me, I swear that I would strangle you.”

Beatrice closed her eyes for a second, then she said with her voice deliberately weak.

“How can you be so unkind? I am not tired of you, Niall, but I am in truth very tired. I am not like a man, that I can journey from London to Scotland and not be fatigued by the weariness of the long drive. All I ask is a little consideration until I am strong again.”

There was a break in her voice – of frailty or of tears, and instantly Lord Niall’s attitude changed.

“Oh, my dear,” he said. “I am a brute, forgive me. It is that I – love you so desperately. I am crazed for you. There’s not a second passes but I yearn to the point of madness for the softness of your body. I am importunate, but patience was never my strongest virtue. Nevertheless, forgive me.”

“Of course I forgive you, Niall,” Beatrice said, holding out her hand to him, “but you must be sensible and conceal both your feelings and your impatience.”

Lord Niall took her hand and kissed it.

“I will try,” he promised, “but Heaven knows it will not be easy. When I see you smiling at Ewan, when I watch your eyes looking up into his, I am jealous beyond endurance. One day I shall murder him, not for his heritage but because I cannot bear you even to look at another man.”

“How foolish you are,” Beatrice scolded, “for it seems that nothing I can do or say is of particular interest to the Duke. If I attempt to entice him, you know it is but – for your sake.”

“Yes, yes, I know that,” Lord Niall answered, “but the mere fact that you must do so makes me hate him the more. If he were at all responsive, I doubt if I could control myself. Thank God that Ewan has always been a cold fish and, incredible though it may seem, remains so, even though you smile at him.”

Beatrice’s lips tightened for a moment, then she asked in a voice that was curiously icy.

“The Duke has not lost his heart to any other woman?”

“Not that I am aware of, though I assure you that I know very little about Ewan’s private affairs,” Lord Niall replied. “He has always been curiously reserved, hard as nails in some things and soft hearted as a woman in others. Look at last night – how, despite my express instructions, he had food and drink taken to the prisoner. A ridiculous gesture, but he made it, I believe, to please that red-headed chit because she said the fellow had befriended her.”

There was a sudden silence.

“Do you think it was to please her?” Beatrice asked slowly.

“As like as not,” Lord Niall said. “Did you not notice the way Ewan looked at her at dinner when she sat there dumb as a dog, white-faced and on the verge of tears? The man means a great deal to her, that’s obvious, and I know, as surely as I know my own name, that Ewan is intriguing with him.”

Beatrice threw back the ermine rug that covered her and rose to her feet. She walked across the room and the silk of her loose robe flowed gracefully around her, but the lines of her body were silhouetted clearly against the sunlit windows. She was as perfectly proportioned as a Grecian statue and as she turned Lord Niall went hotly towards her.

“Faith, but you intoxicate me!” he exclaimed thickly.

As he touched her, Beatrice pushed his arms aside with an angry, impulsive gesture which she covered almost instantly by putting her hands to her forehead.

“My head is aching, Niall, I must retire to bed. If I cannot come down to dinner, I will send my apologies to your stepmother. At the moment I feel ready to swoon with fatigue – the chatter of voices, would split my poor head open.”

“You must indeed rest,” Lord Niall said soothingly. “If you are not better tomorrow, I will send for the leech. But if I do not see you at dinner, may I come and say good night?”

“No, no,” Beatrice said, her voice almost shrill. “Can you not understand that I must be alone? I will talk with you tomorrow, that I promise, but tonight I want only rest and – privacy.”

As if he realised that further arguments or protestations of love would only annoy her, Lord Niall took both Beatrice’s hands in his, turned them over, and kissed them softly, his lips lingering in the soft hollow of her palms, then moving to caress her tiny wrists.

At last reluctantly he released her, watching her as she moved across the room to her bedchamber and standing immobile for some minutes after the door had closed behind her. She had not looked back or she would have surprised a look of unbridled savagery on his dark face.

All Lord Niall’s life strange fires had burnt within his breast, always he had hated the position he must endure of being the younger son, of having to take second place, of knowing that only the death of his half-brother could give him the authority and power that he craved almost to the point of madness.

It was a hate so strong, so virulent that it seemed at times as if it would consume him, but it enabled him to mask his feelings and to act a part day after day, year after year, because only through such a pretence would he ever gain his ultimate goal. A weaker man would have found such a role impossible. It required strength and an almost superhuman self-control to be courteous and polite to the Duke, to take second place in the household, to speak and behave as if he had no ambitions, no desires beyond a comfortable, luxurious existence as his half-brother’s guest.

Only his stepmother knew the truth, and perhaps a dozen or so of Lord Niall’s personal servants who had a vague inkling that one day their loyalty might be richly rewarded.

But now there was an ally, an ally so powerful, so influential that Lord Niall could hardly believe it possible that she should also be the woman he so ardently desired. With Beatrice in the castle, with the thought of her response to him personally like a weapon in his hand, Lord Niall knew that the hour had come in which he must strike to gain both a dukedom and a bride.

It was with an air of defiance that he walked boldly from the boudoir, pulled the door to behind him and walked down the corridor. He half hoped that he would meet his stepmother. For the first time for many years he was not afraid of her reproaches. He saw her for what she was, a middle-aged woman clinging to him pathetically because in losing him she lost the last vestige of her youth. Why had he even been hesitant and afraid of her finding him out? What a fool he had been! Lord Niall gave a little laugh and it was not a pleasant sound.

He went down the main staircase and into the Great Hall. He crossed it and a flunkey hurried to open the front door. Outside the castle his men were waiting, some on horseback, others on foot holding stout sticks in their hands. They were all of fine physique, but at the moment they were hot, dusty and fatigued, for they had been out since early morning searching the woods and moors for miles around in search of the escaped prisoner.

Lord Niall came down the steps. Sime detached himself from a group of men with whom he had been talking and went to meet him.

“Any news of the fugitive?” Lord Niall asked.

Sime shook his head.

“The last twa men hae just got bac’, my Lord. They hae seen naught o’ the prisoner.”

Lord Niall’s eyes narrowed.

“You are all either fools or knaves,” he said harshly. “He must be hiding somewhere near here. Is it possible for a man to vanish in such a manner and not be found?”

But even as he asked the question, Lord Niall knew the answer. Had not Prince Charles remained hidden for months with half the English Army searching for him? As if he guessed what his men were thinking, Lord Niall turned abruptly on his heel.

“I shall not forget your stupidity,” he snarled, and began to walk up the steps to the front door.

“Are we no tae search any maur, my Lord?” Sime asked from behind him.

Lord Niall turned.

“No,” he snapped.

“An’ Eachann, my Lord?”

“Release him,” Lord Niall said, “but keep an eye on him. If I thought that he deceived me, he would suffer for it as will anyone else who stands convicted of the same offence.”

He passed through the castle door and out of sight. A sigh of relief seemed to go up from the men outside. Three of them hurried off to release Eachann from the dungeon where he had been thrown after he had been flogged. His back was sore and bleeding, his wrists and ankles raw from the rope which had bound him. But he was smiling as they set him free.

“Didna I tell ye that ye wouldn’ find the mon?” he asked when he learnt that their search had been fruitless. “It was MacCraggan Mor himself who took him awa’, an’ the Chief wouldna hae dons tha’ if he hadna been an innocent mon.”

In the shadows of the dungeon one of the men crossed himself. The rest avoided each other’s eyes. Perhaps Eachann was right and they had committed a crime against someone under the protection of Heaven itself.

Upstairs in her bedchamber Beatrice Wrexham walked backwards and forwards across the room. Now that she was alone, her face showed no signs of fatigue, in fact her eyes were bright and alert, and there was something in her quick, lithe movements that betrayed an inner excitement.

The sun was sinking behind the mountains and the mist was rising on the lake, the shadows of the woods darkening to purple. Soon it would be evening and after that would come the night. Beatrice stopped her restless walking to stare at her own reflection in the oval mirror on the dressing table. She looked into it for a long time, her thoughts making her nostrils quiver and the pupils of her eyes dilate. Suddenly she put up her hands as if she would tear her robe from off her breasts.

“So this is love!” she said aloud.

She watched the way her lips curved over the words, lips that were suddenly parted with a sensual hunger.

“Yes, love,” she repeated, and put her elbows on the table to cup her face in her long fingers.

Thank God she was beautiful, so beautiful that never had a man been able to resist her, never had she failed to make one on whom she had set her heart her abject slave.

She knew now how ignorant she had been when other women had talked of love, when men had almost deafened her with their protestations of it. She had seen the suffering in their eyes and had not understood it – this ecstasy, this rapture, this pain, this torture! Love! It seemed to tear her apart, to make her feel weak and fragile, strong and resolute all at the same time.

She had never dreamt that like a tempest love would sweep over her in such a manner, to leave her utterly helpless and yet at the same time exhilarated and tinglingly alive with its very buoyancy. With an impetuous gesture she threw out her arms and flung back her head. She could feel the yearning of her whole body for this man who had suddenly entered her life.

Since the first moment when she had looked up into the Duke’s eyes as she curtsied to him on entering the castle, Beatrice had known what he must mean to her. She had known it when she felt her heart beating tumultuously against her breast, as she had felt a sudden fire consume her and felt faint at the touch of his hand.

Love had come to her for the first time in her life, for until now she had believed that love, as the poets wrote of it, was but an illusion. But this was real, this was something of which she was half afraid and yet ravished by the very pleasure it evoked within her. She thought of the Duke’s handsome face, of his square forehead and firm lips.

She thought of the strength of his body and the way he seemed to dwarf everyone else not only in height but in personality so that it was hard, when he was there, to remember even the existence of other people.

She wondered now how she could ever have thought Lord Niall attractive, how she could have ever countenanced even after a wearisome, boring journey his crude lovemaking. He bored her now to the point of screaming and yet she knew that it was not yet the time to betray him.

When the Duke was hers, she would reveal Lord Niall’s perfidy and have him flung from the castle. There would be no place for him or for any other man at Skaig once she and the Duke understood each other. They would want to be alone.

She pressed her hands against her face at the thought, and the tips of her fingers were sensuous against her soft skin. How handsome he was, how utterly desirable and together, yes, together, they could enter into all the fullness of life!

How much she could teach him! In her vast experience of men she knew how to tantalise them with her beauty until pleasure and pain were equally mingled in sensations denied to the common herd. She knew how to arouse passion to burning point and beyond it. She could play on the emotions as a musician on an instrument. She was an artist in her own sphere and her art was the oldest in the world, practised first in the Garden of Eden when Lilith tempted Adam and discovered both his weakness and her own.

This moment, Beatrice told herself, was what she had been preparing herself for since she was fifteen. She dismissed the Marquis with but a passing thought. He had never attracted her as a man, only as a personality whose power and prestige had brought her many things that her greed demanded. He might be angry, she thought, when he knew the truth, and yet he had some saving grace of humour which would make him perceive the justice of the situation.

Yes, that was how he would see it. That Beatrice, who had been loved by so many men, had at last been forced to surrender her heart, her soul and her whole being into the keeping of one.

Yet even the Marquis would not understand that she gloried in her humility.

“How could I have lived so long and not known that love was like this?” Beatrice asked herself.

She rose from the dressing table. The room was almost dark, a crimson glow in the sky the last glimpse of the dying day. She rang her bell imperiously. Her maid, who had been waiting for some time for the summons, came hurrying to the room.