He didn’t know what she was talking about. He saw her again, her eyes sparkling, their babe in her belly, and his hands, they were all over her now.
“What don’t you wish to worry me?”
“Your staying inside me is not a problem.”
“Spilling my seed inside of you isn’t a problem?” No, he thought, it was not a problem at all. He said, “Are you mad, woman? Of course it could be a problem. I have no bastards because I have always been very careful. With you, it’s been different, somehow.”
“I am barren.”
No, he thought, that wasn’t right. There she was, so clear in his mind, her belly pressing against him when she kissed him. The babe was due soon. “How the devil would you know that?”
“I was married, once, a very long time ago, when I had just turned eighteen. My father believed I was too young, but I was desperately in love and thus he gave me my way. My husband, a man of nearly your advanced years, wanted an heir very badly.” She shrugged. “He was killed when the war started again, just after the Treaty of Amiens collapsed.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Yes. We were only married for two years before he died. I came back to my father’s house and took my own name again.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Why should you? It isn’t common knowledge.”
“I remember I asked you if you had been married. You didn’t really answer me, now that I think about it.”
“I would not have told you now, except you are very scared that you have made me pregnant. Well, you haven’t. I am barren.”
She turned without another word and walked out of the study.
Lord Beecham slowly bent down to gather up the papers on the floor. He barely glanced at the translation he had managed so far. He laid the pages atop Helen’s desk, snuffed out the candle, and left the room.
It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. When he fell asleep, he saw Helen again, so very clearly, and she was naked and he was kissing her mouth, her breasts, as his hands stroked her big belly, then he was kissing her belly, feeling his babe kick against his cheek when he pressed his face against her.
He jerked awake and sat up in bed. He was not a superstitious man. He did not believe in visions or in portents. Then he thought, If Helen birthed a girl, she would be an Amazon, a beautiful sharp-tongued Amazon. And a boy? He would be a big man, confident, a leader of men.
He smiled fatuously into the darkness.
I am losing what few wits remain to me, he thought as he pillowed his head against his arms. Helen was his partner. The rest of it was lunacy. All right, so she was both his partner and his lover, and even she must accept that now. They would do their best to find this lamp, whatever the thing was.
But there was this madness with her. When he had been a randy boy there had been the fire in his gut, as lust was spoken of in young males. But he wasn’t a boy now. He was a full-grown man, a man of control and experience.
Only he had no control with Helen. It wasn’t what he was used to. Usually, sating himself with a woman sent him into sweet dreams almost immediately, but not this time, not with Helen. He had been beyond sated, nearly unconscious, yet, at the same time, he had a very strong feeling that if Helen were to stroll into his bedchamber right this minute, he would want her as much as he had the first, the second, the third time he’d taken her on the floor of her study two hours before.
When he fell asleep again, he didn’t dream of Helen. He dreamed of a man who held a gun in a very white hand. He could not tell where that gun was pointing, but he knew he was afraid. Then the man turned and Spenser saw that a black mask covered his face. He laughed, aimed the gun at Spenser, and pulled the trigger.
Spenser came awake abruptly and bolted straight up in bed, his heart nearly bursting out of his chest. There was Nettle, standing not two feet from him and he was screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Nettle, shut up. Good God, man, what’s the matter?”
“My lord, you must help me, quickly, quickly! That madman will be here in just a moment and I know he is carrying an ax over his shoulder and he wants to chop my poor head from my neck. Please, you must help me, my lord.”
And Nettle bolted under Lord Beecham’s bed.
Not two minutes later, Flock appeared in the now open doorway to Lord Beecham’s bedchamber. He wasn’t carrying an ax over his shoulder. However, he did have a gun in his right hand, and there was a very determined expression on his face.
“Where is the little rat, my lord?”
Lord Beecham said mildly, “Flock, do you know what time it is?”
“It is a good time for that little bastard you employ as your valet to meet his maker, whom I believe to be the devil.”
“Flock, get out of my bedchamber.”
“Goodness, Flock, you will stop this now or I will send you to my inn and discipline you with all my lads there.”
“Miss Helen,” Flock said with great dignity, which was difficult since Helen towered over him, “his lordship’s valet, a man of no moral fiber whatsoever, was kissing Teeny on the back steps. She was even carrying a bucket of hot water for you, Miss Helen. She even set down that bucket to return the bounder’s kisses. I must kill him, Miss Helen.”
“I don’t see him in here, Flock,” Helen said. “You have disturbed his lordship, who, I must tell you, was working very, very late last night.”
“It wasn’t all work,” his lordship said.
“In any case, you awoke him because of all this melodrama. Go away, Flock. Do you want me to discipline you, in a way you won’t like at all?”
Flock’s gun hand shook a bit. Finally, he whispered, “No, Miss Helen. Your stable lad at the inn told me what you did to him after he had started a fight with the butcher’s cousin and bloodied his nose.”
“Good. Worse will happen to you if you do not give me that bloody pistol immediately and go see about Lord Prith’s breakfast. You know how hungry he is by seven o’clock in the morning. If you don’t hurry, he just might be awaiting you to wring your neck.”
“Yes, Miss Helen, but I am not happy about this. I already warned that little codpiece, you know that. If he believes that he can seduce my Teeny without retribution, I am sunk.”
“I will speak to Teeny, Flock. I will find out what is going on here, and I will tell you when I have all the information I need. You will not be sunk. Go away now.”
Once Helen had closed the door behind Flock and set the pistol down upon a dressing table, she eyed Lord Beecham, who was sitting up in his bed, the covers coming only to his waist, his hair tousled, and she called out, “Nettle, you will show yourself immediately, or it will be the worse for you.”
Nettle crawled out from under Lord Beecham’s bed.
“An excellent hiding place,” she said. “Even Flock at his most ferocious would not have dared to peer beneath Lord Beecham’s bed. Come here and sit down.”
Lord Beecham had never before been awakened to such wonderful comedy. He settled himself back against his pillows, crossed his arms over his chest, and prepared to be entertained.
“That’s right, clean yourself off. I see that I will have to speak to Mrs. Stockley. Dirt and dust under the bed. She will likely chew on the maid’s ear about that. All right, now, Nettle, you look well enough. Sit.” She pointed to a chair not far from Lord Beecham’s bed.
Nettle sat, but he wasn’t looking at Helen, he was staring beyond her, at the bedchamber door.
“Why were you kissing Teeny on the back stairs when she was carrying a bucket of hot water?”
Nettle crossed his small white hands over his chest. He looked soulful, or bilious, depending on the eye beholding him. “I am in love, Miss Helen,” he announced then, having set his stage to his satisfaction.
Helen said, “What is your last name, Nettle?”
“Why, it is Nettle, Miss Helen.”
“Your first name, then?”
“Bloodworth, ma’am. Blood
worth Nettle.”
“You are jesting.”
“No, ma’am. It was my ma’s name before she married my pa and became a Nettle.”
Helen’s voice was faint. “That would make Teeny and Bloodworth Nettle. It curdles the belly.”
Lord Beecham rocked with laughter. The covers fell even lower. Helen looked resolutely away. She needed to solve this problem. “I try to use a bit of blood whenever I call for him,” said Lord Beecham.
“That’s right, ma’am. His lordship calls me bloody Nettle or bloody scoundrel or bloody baboon. Something along that line, you understand.”
“Yes, I quite understand.”
“It would be simply Teeny Nettle, ma’am.”
“No, Teeny is very sensitive. There is too much blood in the names. It will never do.”
Lord Beecham remarked to the room at large, “There is also the matter of Teeny becoming a small weed.”
She ignored that. “How old are you, Nettle?”
“I am only thirty-five, Miss Helen.”
“Flock is thirty-eight,” she said, and sighed.
“Not much difference there,” Lord Beecham said. “What’s a poor big girl to do?”
Helen said as she walked to the bedchamber door, “I am going to introduce Teeny to Walter Jones, the young man who works in his father’s mercantile shop in Court Hammering. He is only twenty-two, and there is no blood in any of his names.”
“Oh, no, Miss Helen!”
“Don’t do that, Miss Helen!”
Nettle leapt to his feet. Flock flung open the bedchamber door, nearly knocking Helen sideways against the wall.
Lord Beecham leaped out of bed, stark naked.
Helen whirled about to look at him, blinked, then resolutely turned away. “Lord Beecham,” she called out over her shoulder, “return to your bed. I have things well in hand.” She got herself together, straightened her skirt, and poked a finger at Lord Beecham’s valet and her father’s butler. “I have had quite enough of this. Neither one of you will ever win Teeny. Flock, your name simply will not do. Teeny Flock—it is impossible. She cannot be a small herd.
“As for you, Nettle, in addition to Teeny being a small weed, your first name will not do at all. As a couple, she would be Teeny Bloodbane, and you would be Bloodworth Nettle. It will not work.
“As I told his lordship here, there is just too much blood flowing about. Now, both of you might as well set your sights elsewhere. Teeny Jones sounds marvelous and that is the way it will be. Teeny and Walter Jones. I have also decided that both of you are too old for Teeny. Walter is just right. Now, both of you get out of here.”
“Er, Miss Mayberry, may my valet remain and assist me?”
“You are a grown man, Lord Beecham. I have never understood why a grown man can’t assist himself.”
“And your Teeny?”
“You, sir, have no notion what it is like to have buttons marching up your back. Now, out of here, Flock. You may remain for the moment, Nettle, but no more scurrying under his lordship’s bed. You will maintain a modicum of dignity.”
With that, Helen whisked out of his bedchamber, her pale-blue muslin skirts dancing around her ankles.
Lord Beecham crossed his arms behind his head. He eyed his valet, who looked to be on the verge of tears. “I don’t believe I’ve ever been quite so entertained at seven o’clock in the morning. Fetch me some bathwater, Nettle. Don’t cry, man, you’ll get over it soon enough. Didn’t you see the downstairs maid?”
“No, my lord. I doubt I could see her even if I looked directly at her, what with all the tears from my broken heart filling my eyes.”
Lord Beecham rolled his own eyes.
At the breakfast table with Lord Prith, Lord Beecham even managed to avoid sipping a noxious mixture of apple juice and champagne, but he watched Lord Prith vigorously down a glass. Lord Prith ruminated a moment, then admitted, “I must say, this concoction would send a warning to a man’s liver. What would you think of a mixture of elderberry wine and champagne?”
Lord Beecham nearly gagged.
13
THE ROOF OF THE CAVE was so low that both Spenser and Helen had to bend over. Helen, leading the way, holding a lantern in front of her, said over her shoulder, “The floor slopes down in a few more steps. Then we can stand up, barely.”
Spenser hated caves, avoided them like the plague, always had since the time when he was nine years old and a young neighbor girl had gotten lost in one and he had had to go in to find her. Her echoing cries, like dying breaths of tortured souls, overlaid with the cold, wet air of that cave, were forever imprinted on his brain.
“How big is the cave?” His voice sounded hollow, thinning as the echoes used the sounds until his words dissolved throughout the cave. He wondered if his voice would even be recognizable in a few more steps.
“Another twenty feet or so. It is like a long loaf of bread. There are no side chambers.” She sounded vastly disappointed. As for Lord Beecham, he was more relieved than he could say. The little girl had wandered off into a side chamber, and that was where he had found her all those years ago, huddled beneath a narrow ledge. Not two feet from the little girl lay a skeleton, something he doubted either of them would forget for the rest of their lives. The faded, tattered clothes, of excellent quality and at least one hundred years old, that still hung on those bones were so old they disintegrated completely when the men collected them for burial.
It wasn’t quite as damp and clammy in this cave because it was smaller, but still, inside, it was blacker than a villain’s dreams.
Helen paused a moment just ahead of him. He saw her tilt her head in the glittering light of the lantern as if she was listening to something. He stopped as well. He could hear his heart beat just as it had so many years before. The beat was deafening.
“It is nothing,” she called out, “just bats settling in.” She continued forward, the lantern held high.
Bats, he wondered, as he had always wondered about things for which man had no explanation. How did bats manage to see in the dark? He remembered that Sir Giles Gilliam had known the answer to many things, but he hadn’t known a thing about bats. No one at Oxford knew much about bats.
The ground was sloping downward now. Another two steps and he could stand straight with a good two inches between the top of his head and the ceiling of the cave.
Helen stopped. She went down to her hands and knees and carefully set the lantern on the ground beside her. “After that big storm, I was exploring in here. You can see that the wall there caved inward, spilling out a lot of dirt and the cask.” Her voice was low and deep, and the faint echo made her sound mysterious, perhaps not even of this world. It flashed cold over his flesh. He said aloud, “The echoes, even here, when we speak quietly, very close together, they spread throughout my brain. I believe I am becoming mystical, Helen. Perhaps soon I shall begin to chant in strange tongues.”
She looked up at him, the glow from the lantern making her face look like a white plaster death mask. “I know. Caves make me feel the same way. When I am by myself, I usually sing so I do not scare myself to death. When I am not shivering from fright, I am laughing at myself.”
“I will have to try that.” Lord Beecham came down beside her. “So the storm shook something loose and sent the cask spilling out of the wall. Look at this.” Pressed against the wall of the cave was a small ledge, no higher than a foot and a half off the ground. “It is perfectly flat, and that means that someone carved it this flat to hold something.” Now that he looked more closely, he added, “No, the ledge isn’t natural to this cave. I think perhaps some people built the ledge here specifically to hold that cask and then changed their minds. Too exposed, better to hide it, to bury it in the wall of the cave. And they left the ledge, why not?”
There were two narrow slabs of stone holding up the ledge.
“Goodness,” Helen said suddenly, nearly falling over with surprise. “I had not noticed this before.” She picked up th
e lantern and held it close. She pulled a handkerchief from her cloak pocket and began wiping down the stone. “Carvings, Spenser, or writing of some kind.”
He came down beside her. As she held the lantern, he took the handkerchief and finished brushing away grit and sand until the carved letters showed themselves to be deep and well chiseled. “Well, now,” he said slowly, “this certainly isn’t Pahlavi or Latin.” He turned to look into her shadowed eyes.
He said, “It’s Old French.”
“The French Edward the First spoke?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Just a moment.” Helen set the lantern down and reached into her cloak pocket. This time she pulled out some ribbon-tied papers and a chunk of charcoal wrapped in a white cloth.
“Are you always so prepared, Helen?”
“I sketch,” she said. She gave him a quick sideways look. “I had thought perhaps that later I would draw you on the beach, just over where the tide pool is.”
“I should like that,” he said. She looked down then. Was she mayhap embarrassed because her level of skill wasn’t sufficient? He was pleased, very pleased.
“Naked. Perhaps standing with your hands on your hips, staring out to sea, the tide pool flowing over your bare feet. What do you think?”
He stared at her, mesmerized. “Be quiet. I prefer you pulling off my boots.”
She was grinning as she smoothed out a piece of foolscap on the ledge. She held the charcoal, waiting for him to translate.
“The words are written on top of each other. This won’t be easy.” He read slowly, translating as he went, “ ‘It is blessed or it is nothing. It is here and yet it is not here. It is the light of his dawn.’ ” He paused, frowned.
“Yes,” he said, staring at that word, “it does say ‘his dawn,’ not ‘the dawn.’ ”
Helen was tugging on his sleeve. “Hurry, Spenser.”
“Let me think a moment. Oh, yes. ‘It is powerful but it cannot be proved. It is something other, but no one knows what. Whatever truths it holds we do not understand them. We fear its power. We bury it and pray that its spirit survives. If it is evil, withal, we pray it journeys back to hell.’ ”
The Courtship Page 12
