“Then what?”
“I said ‘goodness.’ I don’t remember anything else.”
He realized then that she was afraid to tell him she loved him again because it would be like being the dangling white handkerchief in front of the enemy. No, no, surely he wasn’t the enemy. Perhaps she’d just forgotten, or hadn’t meant it. He took her mouth, tasting her, nipping her lower lip, all the while feeling the pleasure begin to flood through him. He pulled back, his back arching, his throat working madly, and he knew she was looking at him when his release hit him, holding him there for an endless moment of the most exquisite pleasure he’d ever felt in his life. She whispered into his neck again that she loved him. Then she whispered, “I love to see you in the throes of your release, North. It excites me and pleases me.”
She drew him down on top of her, her hands stroking over his back as she lightly kissed his shoulders and arms. He fell asleep before he came out of her and that feeling
was the sweetest he’d ever known in his life.
Caroline tried to be philosophical, she truly did. All right, so she’d blurted it right out there and all he’d ever said to her was that she was a good sort and he liked her. Actually she’d told him twice that she loved him. It was all right.
There was nothing wrong with being a good sort. It was quite nice to be liked by the man she adored more than any other human being in the world. Surely a good sort was a fine thing to be for the next month or so, perhaps even for the next year or so.
She couldn’t help it that she wanted to sing and dance and shout to the world that North Nightingale was a hero, that
dour, dark, menacing
—and all those odd things he’d believed himself to be—were nonsense. He was a hero and he was hers and she would do anything for him. It was that simple and that final. Caroline kissed his shoulder and he reared up just a bit, stared down at her with vague satisfied eyes. “That was very satisfactory,” he said, leaned his head down, kissed her mouth, then rolled off her. She drew the covers over them, spooned herself against his back, and smiled into the darkness.
She wasn’t smiling the following morning. Evelyn woke her up just after dawn. Alice was sick. She was vomiting in her chamber pot, her hair hanging in wet skinny ropes around her pale face.
She sent Timmy the maid for Dr. Treath.
She went back to her bedchamber and quickly dressed. When she returned to Alice’s room, North was holding Alice, wiping her face with a wet cloth. She was shuddering with the force of the spasms racking her thin body. Caroline wondered if Alice even realized that a man was holding her.
Bess Treath was on her brother’s heels as she always seemed to be. She shooed them all away as her brother examined Alice. Evelyn was standing in the shadows
wringing her hands. “My poor baby, I heard her crying, then she cried out. When I got to her, she was vomiting, looking like death. My poor little Alice.”
Owen came running into the bedchamber. “My God, what’s going on here? Alice is sick? Oh no! I just knew something was wrong, I just knew it. When I saw Dr. Treath coming out of his house, I knew he was coming here.”
North wondered what Owen had been doing in Goonbell, but now wasn’t the time to ask.
Even Bess Treath didn’t try to make Owen move away when Dr. Treath pulled up her nightgown and pressed on her child-swollen belly. Owen never even looked away from her face; he simply held her hand and whispered to her, telling her it would be all right, that she wasn’t to worry, that he was here.
North said to Caroline, “This is very interesting.”
“Yes,” she said. “I hadn’t realized. I pray she’ll be all right.”
Dr. Treath told Caroline and North some time later downstairs in the drawing room that he didn’t believe she would miscarry the babe, which was his biggest concern.
Bess Treath said, “I don’t know, Benjie. Perhaps it would be better for her. She’s only a child herself and whatever will happen to her?”
Caroline smiled even though she wondered what kind of person Bess Treath thought she was. “Alice will be just fine, Miss Treath. Surely you never thought that my aunt Eleanor or I would turn her out after she birthed the babe? No, there will be no problem. Tell me what to do, Dr. Treath.”
Alice was asleep within moments of drinking the draught Dr. Treath had prepared for her. Caroline and North looked into her bedchamber before returning to their own, to see Owen sitting beside her on the bed, holding her small thin hand. Owen was lightly stroking his thumb over her fingers.
He looked up at them. “She’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll take care of her. Dr. Treath thought it was something she ate, perhaps the oxtail soup.”
“No one else ate very much of it,” North said. “It sounds like the culprit. Perhaps the mushrooms.”
Caroline yawned widely. “I’m sorry, but I’m just so tired. It seems we don’t ever have any quiet moments around here.”
“Oh yes, Caroline,” Owen said, “Mrs. Mayhew, Chloe, and Molly all came by. Mrs. Mayhew had more suggestions on Alice’s care than I can even remember. She’s very forceful. Sort of like my father.”
“Yes,” Caroline said, yawning again, but smiling with great satisfaction at the same time, “isn’t she ever?”
Sunlight flooded into the bedchamber when North came into her slowly and gently, all the while kissing her. She shuddered and moaned into his mouth when she reached her release.
“I like to see a smile on a woman’s mouth when she’s nearly asleep,” he said, and pulled her tightly against him.
“Tell me I’m a good sort again, North.”
He stared at her a moment, kissed her closed eyes, then her nose and her mouth. “You’re one of the best sorts, Caroline,” he said, then sighed softly when her hand stroked down his back. “All this badness, Caroline, we’ll get through it.”
“I know,” she said, kissed him, and pressed her cheek against his shoulder.
I
T WAS VERY
strange, the note he’d received that was right now crumpled in his breeches pocket, written by an unknown hand, given to Timmy the maid when he was out at the stables giving sugar to North’s bay gelding, Treetop. “ ’Twere a young duffer with squirrelly talk,” Timmy the maid had said, but he hadn’t recognized him, which was odd because Timmy the maid knew everybody, or so he’d thought. What was squirrelly talk? North had asked. And Timmy the maid had said, “The little nit couldn’t speak more than two words together without stammering hisself near out o’ ’is boots.”
North click-clicked Treetop toward the northeastern end of his property where the land softened and the gentle rolling hills were still green with lingering summer. There were about half a dozen of the hillocks, and learned men had said that beneath some of the hillocks, or barrows, as they called them, were tombs from long, long ago, even long before the Romans had lived here, even long before the Celts had swarmed over Cornwall. He remembered reading about Silbury Hill, a huge mound everyone had known was a burial mound, possibly hiding treasure. It had been the Duke of Northumberland who had launched a force of Cornish tin miners late in the last century to sink a shaft from top to bottom of the mound. They hadn’t found anything, more’s the pity, and most had stopped even remarking on the odd
hills, so obviously placed there by man’s hand and not God’s.
Every once in a while villagers found strange things near these hills: pottery shards that looked to be older than the land itself, though on some of the pieces there were still spots of bright color, small bits of iron and steel that looked to be from long-ago weapons. And another mound would be dug into. Not long before, a mound had turned up a long, narrow burial chamber holding ancient skeletons, some pottery pieces, but nothing of value. He’d heard that in other parts of England, finding Roman coins and even Celt weapons was no great wonder.
Had King Mark been buried here, beneath one of those soft rolling hills? Had the gold armlet his great-grandfather claimed to have found come from near here? He sincerely doubted it.
He pulled Treetop to a halt atop one of the hills and looked around him. He forgot all about archaeology, forgot about King Mark and his lust-besotted nephew Tristan who’d betrayed him with the beautiful, treacherous Isolde.
The note said she would be meeting her lover close by to the northeastern boundary. Well, he was here. He looked toward the dense copse of oak trees older than the Druids, who had hung enemies in cages from the branches and then proceeded to roast them alive.
Where was she? It was a hoax, he had known that, he
knew
that, but still, he did expect to see Caroline here somewhere. Where was her mare, Regina?
When he saw her mare and another horse, a gelding, tethered behind a thick stand of trees, he felt his heart begin to pound, slow, heavy strokes. Her lover? Dear God, it was nonsense, that was all, just someone wanting to do them ill, probably one of his male martinets.
He wouldn’t spy on his wife of three weeks, it was
absurd. Caroline adored him. She loved him, she’d told him that whenever she’d crested her pleasure, kissing him, telling him over and over how much she loved him. He’d found that he wanted to hear those words from her, that he wallowed in the pleasure those simple words brought him.
But how could she come to love him in such a short time? Surely love didn’t work with such dispatch. Was it just a woman’s release that brought such words from her mouth, lust fulfilled and thus it was love?
North shook his head. He kicked Treetop in his muscled sides but he didn’t gallop forward, announcing his arrival. No, he kept Treetop to a slow canter until he could see her and the man.
It was Benjamin Treath and he was standing close to Caroline, something in his outstretched hand. Ah, he was showing her something, nothing more, nothing less.
This was no clandestine tryst. But what was he showing her? And why here? She wasn’t like all those former Nightingale wives who had betrayed their husbands, wives who had been faithful to the Nightingale men until they’d birthed the heir, then fallen into a whore’s ways and birthed bastards, or were kicked out like North’s mother was, and died. No, Caroline was loyal—to him and to no one else. He would wager everything he owned, all that he valued within himself, that she was loyal to him, only to him… yes, only to him.
Then Dr. Treath leaned toward Caroline and he placed his hand on her shoulder, a big hand, North saw, that covered a lot of her and he didn’t like it. They seemed to be speaking very seriously about something. North felt himself freeze when Dr. Treath kissed Caroline’s cheek, his big hand still on her shoulder, no, now it was moving down her arm. He watched the doctor straighten finally and walk away from her, back to his gelding. He gave her a small wave
and another smile as he settled into the saddle.
What the hell was going on here?
In that moment, every word North had read in those damned diaries Tregeagle had forced on him came back with raw clarity. Women weren’t to be trusted. His mother had betrayed his father, had left him and died. His grandfather had also been betrayed and his father before him. Both his father and grandfather had written about the perfidy of women, the dishonor bred into them throughout the ages, the wit of Nightingale men not to trust them beyond the birthing of their heir.
No, he thought, he’d escaped Mount Hawke and his father, escaped this damning legacy because he couldn’t bear the bitterness and emptiness of it, his father’s continual ranting about his mother—a whore, a bitch—who had betrayed him; ah, and there was justice, for the damned trollop was dead. He remembered then that as a boy he’d had no idea what all those words meant, but he did now, and again he felt an instant of surprise that there were so many terrible words to describe a woman a man disapproved of. His hands clenched on Treetop’s reins.
Thank God he’d had the good sense to leave ten years before, as soon as he’d been able to make his own way. It had been difficult but he’d believed anything had to be better than remaining at Mount Hawke with his father. He knew in his bones that if he’d stayed, the next thing his father would have done would have been to force that damned diary down his throat and tell him it was his duty, once he’d bred an heir off a likely female, to toss her out and begin his own entries about what sluts women were, wives in particular. And yet when Tregeagle had given him the diary, he’d read some of it, not all, certainly, for he wasn’t that far gone, but still, some of the poison had seeped into him. And now he hated himself for it.
He wasn’t like his father nor was he like his grandfather or his great-grandfather, and he would never accept that he was. The Nightingale legacy to its sons would end with him. As he rode Treetop straight to where Caroline was standing, he wondered what she was thinking. Surely she wasn’t thinking of Benjamin Treath, surely not.
It was a lovely copse of trees, Caroline was thinking, and she much enjoyed the gently rolling hillocks, and the vastly romantic stone fence that stretched some hundred yards in either direction. The stones had been hand-placed, of course, and fitted together so tightly and with such care that there were still few places where they’d broken free and fallen to the rich earth. When had the stones been so carefully and skillfully made into this fence? Who had done it? And those hillocks, works of art, all of them, but why? What was the purpose? She looked up then and saw him.
She gave a shout and ran toward him. Her riding skirt was narrow, hampering her, so she simply jerked it to her knees, never slowing.
He pulled Treetop to a halt and jumped off his back to catch her in his arms just as she threw herself against him, lifting her high to twirl her around.
“Hello,” he said, lowering her slowly, kissing her mouth as his hands molded her hips to him. “I missed you. It took me long enough to find you.”
She kissed him again and yet again a third time for good measure. “By the by, how did you find me?”
He kissed her again and said, “Someone wrote me a note that you would be meeting your lover here.”
She stared at him, so surprised she almost forgot to kiss him back, but then she did, loving the feel of him, the taste of him, and when she finally spoke, she was breathless. “You’re jesting, aren’t you?”