Ah, but surely that would be a foolish ploy. Pieter read English passably well. Killian had only to hand these letters over to his son to have them translated.
Unless . . . there was something in the letters that he did not wish others to see.
But why then, would he allow them to be delivered to Clothilde? He certainly had the power to stop them, and if they were from a lover—even a lover of long ago—Killian would rage with jealousy to see those letters arriving in a tongue he could not understand.
Charity carefully replaced the letter where she had found it. She whirled around at a small sound.
Annjanette, with her black eye and sulky face, stood in the doorway surveying her.
“You have read it,” the French girl said challengingly.
Charity bit her lip. It was not a good thing to admit.
“I came to see how you were, Annjanette,” she evaded. “I knocked and called your name—”
“I know,” interrupted Annjanette impatiently. “I heard you and tiptoed through Killian’s room into the hall. I have been standing here watching you. Do not lie to me—I saw you reading the letter.”
“Very well,” agreed Charity coldly. “I read it.” She started to brush by the French girl.
“Tell me what it said,” entreated Annjanette, clutching her arm. “I cannot read English—indeed I can barely read French—but when Killian saw me with that letter in my hand—he struck me. I must know what it said!”
Charity thought of Clothilde’s sad vacant eyes, and how she had stumbled about in a daze since this letter had arrived three days ago. She wanted to protect Clothilde. But Annjanette knew she had read the letter and could report that fact—and Annjanette’s avid blue eyes were fixed on her, waiting.
“It was just a letter of pleasantries,” Charity said in what she hoped was a casual voice.
Before Annjanette could press her further, they heard the front door open and close below, heard footsteps coming up the stairs.
“They are coming,” whispered Annjanette. “They must not see us here. Quick, into my room.”
She seized Charity by the wrist and almost dragged her into the small dressing room where she slept. A dainty embroidered nightdress had been tossed on a chair. It was savagely torn. Annjanette looked at it and for a moment she blanched. She put a finger to her lips, snatched the torn nightdress from the chair and motioned Charity to sit down.
They heard the patroon and his lady enter their separate rooms, heard them moving about.
Abruptly, the door that led from Annjanette’s sleeping quarters into the patroon’s room was jerked open and Killian van Daarken’s square stolid form stood there.
His face darkened when he saw Charity, and Annjanette half rose as if in protest.
Charity felt that she must cover for the frightened French girl.
“I came up to see how Annjanette was,” she said carelessly, rising. “Since she was ill at breakfast, I thought someone should look in on her. But I will take my leave now. I’ll see you at dinner, Annjanette.”
The patroon studied Charity. Though it was difficult under that heavy scrutiny, she gave him back an easy look. His face cleared a little. “Cousin Annjanette is very awkward,” he observed. “She will have to change her ways if she is to avoid these unpleasant falls.”
Annjanette paled.
Charity made her escape. She hurried along the hall and went downstairs. Pieter saw her and asked her why she was shivering. Was she cold? Why didn’t she seek the warmth of the fire? Jochem had just built one in the library. They could put some more wood on it if it was not warm enough.
Charity insisted she wasn’t cold but Pieter pulled her into the deserted library, sat her down before the hearth and chafed her hands. He smiled ingenuously into her eyes, for all the world like a lover.
Why should he not love her? she asked herself rebelliously. Just as long ago—no, it was not so long ago really; it just seemed light years away—she had asked herself at Stéphanie’s school why she should not have what the other more fortunate girls had. Was she not just as pretty, just as bright? And now—why should Pieter not love her? And if he did love her, why should she not marry him? Why should she not some day replace Clothilde as the patroon’s lady here at Daarkenwyck?
She stared at Pieter, so bent on pleasing her.
Pieter, she was convinced, did not love her any more than she loved him, but he wanted her—oh, how desperately he wanted her! And perhaps that was as much as she was going to get. Was she like Annjanette, that men would want her only for her pretty surface— and never really care how she felt about them, so long as she was warm in their arms?
Pieter was sitting beside her and now he moved his leg over so that it touched her leg. Letting go of her hand, he laid a careless hand on her thigh.
She stiffened.
“Why not?” he murmured. “After all, we are to be married, aren’t we?”
“Your father would never permit it, Pieter. I—I have no dowry.”
“But you said you would marry me if—”
“Yes, I said that. If you were allowed to do so. You will not be.”
The word “yes” in her answer was all he seemed to comprehend. He pressed his advantage. “Why should we not live here at Daarkenwyck together?” he demanded in a low fiery voice. “This part of the river will be mine one day. I—and only I—will rule it. If I wish to marry you, who is to gainsay me?”
“Your father,” she said ruefully again.
“He cannot live forever,” muttered Pieter. He brightened. “He will come to it,” he said. “When I have told him that I cannot live without you.”
“Would you really do that, Pieter?” she asked soberly.
“Yes, of course I would do it. If I believed you loved me. . . .” His hands found her shoulders and he stroked them caressingly.
Charity sat very straight. “But you are going away....”
“But I will return, Charity. And with money. You will see. It is only for a year. I will return and I promise you that we will be man and wife. Wait for me and we will live together here at Daarkenwyck.” His young voice had a hypnotic quality, born of the intensity of his emotion. He toyed with a lock of her hair. “So why,” he pleaded, “should we wait?”
Charity looked at him uncertainly. I promise you, he had said. Now his hands wandered over her back, her neck. He grasped the back of her head and bent his face down to kiss her, his other hand slipping nimbly into the top of her dress.
Charity pulled away from him. “No,” she said, “I have listened to the soft words of men before. I do not believe you, Pieter—and I am not to be had without marriage.”
His face darkened. He flung away from her and went crashing out of the library, giving the door a hard swing that nearly tore it from its hinges. She knew she had made him furious, and at dinner he turned his back to her and held an animated conversation with a surprised Annjanette.
Charity sat silently picking at her lobster, her brooding topaz eyes fixed on her plate. But she hardly tasted her food. It was possible—just possible—that Pieter meant what he said. And she who had put aside the thought of love, believing it would not come to her, now saw dangled before her the bright future of a rich marriage . . . wife to the future patroon of Daarkenwyck.
After dinner Annjanette managed to get her aside, and asked her again what the letter contained. Charity answered morosely, “I have forgotten. Nothing important.”
Annjanette pouted, then shrugged and turned away, smiling and fingering a new coral brooch.
Pieter made a great show of his displeasure. He ignored Charity so pointedly that the patroon smiled behind his hand. His wife, silent and downcast, her melancholy gaze fixed on the walls, appeared to notice nothing. Soon, with slow laboring footsteps, Clothilde went up to bed.
Charity said she was tired too and went upstairs, feeling Pieter’s indignant gaze follow her.
That night she stood a long time and stared out through the sm
all panes of her window at the land, stretching far away, the bouweries where men and women like Jan Peter and his wife labored long hours. She could still hear the woman’s soft voice saying wistfully, It was all so different from what we expected.
So too had this new world been different from what Charity had expected. And it had treated her cruelly.
But now surely she was being offered a new chance, a new life. Pieter was spoiled. His parents had denied him nothing. Perhaps in the end they would not deny him the woman of his choice.
In which case, she would become mistress of Daarkenwyck, in fact if not in name, for shadowy Clothilde was no real mistress of this manor. It had no mistress, and Pieter’s dynamic young wife would assume that role.
She stared into the darkness. Was it wrong? Would she regret it? Should she refuse this marriage which offered her so much that she had never had, merely because she did not love Pieter?
CHAPTER 18
When Charity woke the weather had changed overnight. An icy wind howled around the chimneys, bringing gusts down into the fireplace, and cold crept in around the window panes. Charity shivered and looked out into a gray sky. By mid-morning snow had begun to fall, at first in light flakes and then hard-driving, pelting snow. It fell heavily all day and by the next morning it had drifted in great sugary piles around the house and its weight was bending down the branches of the trees.
That night was even colder and the bitter cold persisted. Ice crept out from the river bank and before the week was out the river had frozen from bank to bank and sleighs pulled by horses were charging merrily up and down it, while the crisp cold air rang with the clash of skates.
The cold spell with its winter sports sent Pieter off to a sleighing party at the van der Doonck’s, and Charity, who refused to accompany him, was left to her own devices.
Growing restless one evening, she walked downstairs, intending to get a book. But at the library door she stopped. Clothilde sat inside rocking in misery, her face in her hands, an unopened book upon her lap. Charity stole away not wanting to intrude upon such grief.
On her way back upstairs, as she passed Clothilde’s room, Charity saw that fat Gerda, the old Dutch servant who always made up the van Daarkens’ rooms personally, was thumping Clothilde’s pillows.
Charity went in. “I see that you got her to go down-stairs,” she said, shrewdly guessing that Gerda had insisted Clothilde get out of the room for a while. “It will do her good to try and forget her sorrows.”
Gerda turned, still upset, and seeing sympathy in Charity’s face, nodded. “It is that letter,” she said simply.
“I know,” said Charity, pretending to knowledge she did not have in an attempt to draw Gerda out. “It’s very sad, isn’t it?”
Gerda nodded gloomily, obviously assuming Charity to be in Clothilde’s confidence.
Charity strolled around the spacious bedroom, examining the handsome furnishings imported from Holland, the windows richly hung in rose damask that looked out upon the broad lawns and the river. Clothilde’s perfumes, her vanity articles, her silver comb, all lay daintily spread out upon her dressing table. Charity fingered the delicate coverlet on the tall carved fourposter bed. It was a mass of embroidery—a magnificent piece.
Charity sighed. How different from her own cramped little room! How wonderful it must be to live like this!
“How did it all start?” she asked with feigned indifference, sitting down on a rosewood chair and studying Gerda. “She never told me the whole story.”
It was not exactly a lie, but could cause her trouble if exposed. She guessed, correctly, that Gerda was so worried that she would not stop to think, but would eagerly pour out the story to a sympathetic ear. Although Charity’s newly acquired knowledge of the Dutch language sometimes caused her to miss a word or two, most of the time she understood Gerda very well.
“It started when Mistress Clothilde were but a fourteen-year-old,” sighed Gerda. “Her Cousin Johannn, you see, were six year older than her, and he did quite turn her head. Johann he were tall and dark and thin with eyes that flashed like lightning, and he were a wild young man, always fighting duels or getting into scrapes with women.” Gerda smiled fondly.
Charity had no difficulty imagining the type.
“She did plan to marry him when she were of age, but her father thought otherwise. I was with the family even before she were born, so I did try to tell her that he would never consent, but she would not listen. They were too close-related to marry, her father did say, but she would set her head and frown, and later she would write a note to Johannn and tell him all was well—which it were not.” She shook her head sadly. “When Mistress Clothilde learned that her father had promised her to another, she did run off with Johann, but her father caught them two nights later at an inn. When he learned they had married against his will, they do say he killed Johann.”
Charity flinched.
“I did think she would die of it,” said old Gerda pensively, pausing in her work, remembering. “She were near out of her mind for a spell. Then the man her father had promised her to said he would have no wife who was not a virgin in his bed and did marry a girl from Austria. It was then Killian van Daarken spoke to her father and the marriage was arranged.”
“Didn’t she have anything to say about it?” asked Charity pityingly.
“La, no! A young girl such as her? Twas her father decided who she’d be marrying—and her already a widow. And he did choose Killian van Daarken, though all were surprised when-he did it—and so sudden like. And after they married, they did travel to Brussels—I went with them even then—and it were there Mistress Maria was born.”
“Maria? Oh—you mean the child who died?” Charity remembered now that Annjanette had mentioned a daughter who died.
“Miss Maria were her firstborn. Mynheer Pieter he were not born for a year after that.”
“How did Maria die?” asked Charity. “Was she ill?”
“She did drown on the way to America. Fell overboard, she did, when that young nurse wasn’t looking. I was watching over the baby, for he were so little. And lucky it were he’d been born, for it did seem my poor lady would throw herself over the side of the ship to join her little Maria. She never left her cabin for the rest of the voyage and when we landed she were so weak they did have to carry her ashore.”
Charity pondered that. “What did Maria look like?” she asked curiously.
“Oh, she were a tall, thin, dark-haired child with eyes that flashed and a terrible temper, but she were sweet too and her mother did so dote on her.”
Tall, thin, dark-haired with eyes that flashed . . . not like the thickset peasant Clothilde had married, nor yet like short, graceful, small-boned Clothilde herself. Not Killian’s daughter—Johann’s daughter. Killian had recognized his opportunity and seized it, and for this hasty marriage of convenience he had been rewarded with a patroonship and the manor of Daarkenwyck.
But . . . the child had perished. For a moment Charity felt she heard the soft whirr of bats, flying around her head, brushing her with their dark wings.
She tried to shake off her fancies, to tell herself that the marriage had been one of convenience—surely common enough—that the child had died because of a nurse’s inattention—that was all.
“Tis the letters from Mistress Joanna, Johann’s sister, that break her heart,” mused old Gerda. “I remember the first one, which came shortly after we had arrived here, and I remember how white her face went, and how she stayed in her room and cried all day. That evening when she came out, she told me that she had received a letter from Johann’s sister, who would now be writing to her regularly, and that reading about Johann had made her sad. Then she went and stayed with little Pieter, had her bed moved into his room. And Mynheer Killian asked me why, and I told him truthful she’d had a letter from Johann’s sister, Mistress Joanna.”
And that was the beginning of the separate bedrooms, mused Charity. A letter from the grave. . . . How
stunned poor Clothilde must have been to learn that Johann had not died. Charity surmised that he must have been dreadfully hurt but had survived the attack to live out his life as a cripple in a monastery under the care of the monks. From the monastery he wrote sad letters to the woman who had loved him too well, now an ocean away and married—bigamously, of course—to another man. And the woman wept when she received his letters, wept bitterly for a girlhood and a lover forever gone from her. For Charity realized Clothilde’s problem. Maria was dead, and if Clothilde returned to Holland and claimed Johann as her legal husband, then Pieter would become illegitimate and perhaps would not even inherit his grandfather’s wealth under Dutch law. Clothilde loved Johann—but she loved Pieter too and could not bring herself to destroy his future.
Charity was certain that Killian van Daarken had pushed little Maria overboard. He had rid himself forever of a “firstborn” who was not his own.
And in Holland, had the grandfather really cared?
Poor Clothilde, trapped forever. No wonder she had vacant eyes. No wonder her gaze passed over Annjanette as if she did not see her. What a small annoyance Annjanette must seem to her. Clothilde had scars so deep that Killian’s dalliance must seem trivial indeed.
Charity wondered, did Clothilde suspect? Did she know in the dark reaches of her heart that Killian had killed Maria? Perhaps she did, because the letter had said “You can then return to Holland and visit your kin without fear.” Pieter had said something about his father keeping Clothilde with him although she longed to visit Holland. Was Killian afraid that once in Holland, Clothilde would refuse to return? That she would run to the arms of her former lover, no matter in what condition she found him? And the bigamy thus be discovered? Charity knew Killian to be a shrewd man, and guessed that he would have made inquiries about a sister “Joanna”; perhaps there was no sister.
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