He heard and felt her intake of breath. “You are?” she whispered.
He moved his lips, still lightly touching her face, from her forehead, down the length of her nose, and kissed the tip of it. “I am,” he said, his lips hovering over hers.
“Don’t you think you ought to ask her first?”
Still a mere inch from kissing her, Nickolas grinned. He stepped back enough to look into her beautiful, deep-brown eyes. He took her hand in his. “Gwenllian ferch Cadoc ap Richard—”
“Oh, Nickolas,” she said, wincing, “that was horrible. I barely even recognized that as my name.”
“Perhaps I should stick with my dearest love,” Nickolas suggested.
“I do like that.” She smiled almost dreamily.
“Then, my dearest love”—he pressed her hand to his heart, holding it there with his own hand—“will you marry me and love me all of our lives? Will you teach me to speak Welsh and rid me of my horrible tendency to be very, very English? Will you allow me to simply hold your hand every single day so I can be certain you are truly real? Say yes, Gwen. Make me the most fortunate and excessively happy man in all the world.”
Her eyes grew a little misty. “I do love you, Nickolas,” she whispered, her smile gentle and loving. “Of course I will marry you and gladly do all those other things. Though I am not certain I am capable of the miracle of teaching you Welsh without your English tendencies destroying the entire thing.”
“Aggravating wench.” He laughed, pulling her to him once more. “That mouth of yours has been torturing me from the moment I first saw you.”
“I do have a tendency to speak my mind.” Gwen shrugged inside his embrace.
“Oh, it has very little to do with talking, I assure you.”
Her little gasp of surprise was completely absorbed by his mouth pressing hungrily to her own. The horrors of the night before were set aside for the time. The weight of separation that had hung so heavily on him for weeks lifted. The world around them disappeared until all that remained was the feel of her in his arms, the sweetness of a kiss so long hoped for but so seemingly impossible, and the promise of a love that would endure across time.
Epilogue
October 31, 1806
It isn’t every day a grand estate, widely reputed to be haunted, hosts an enormous festival and ball on Nos Galan Gaeaf. Scores of people claimed to have seen Y Ladi Wen, herself, at the previous year’s gathering, despite only a handful of guests having been present at the time. The local population had conceived of the idea of a recurrent celebration, encouraged in their plan by the mistress of that very estate. Such a festival was sure to bring travelers and their overly plump pocketbooks from all over the kingdom. The idea had worked marvelously.
Overawed individuals followed the outline of the ancient walls of Y Castell, delineated by a line of carefully laid stones, and ended their guided penny-a-piece tour at a small monument.
“This monument marks the place where the east tower of Y Castell once stood. May all who stand in its ghostly shadow remember what was done here,” the monument declared in both English and Welsh.
Speculation was rife as to what precisely was “done here.” The carefully scripted tour guide speculated that during the brief Welsh uprising, a young man’s act of bravery and love saved the life of an innocent young lady. Though, he assured them with the appropriate look of sorrow, such things could not be confirmed. For a vicar, the man was a decidedly good actor.
Elsewhere on the sprawling estate, revelers paused before a painting hung in a place of honor above the fireplace in the drawing room. Speculation as to the talented artist was rife, though all agreed it was surely the work of a master. The subject matter could not be mistaken. There, come to life on canvas, was Y Castell bathed in the colors of spring.
Whilst the visitors, who were rather unabashedly hoping to be scared out of their wits, rambled the estate, purchasing wares from local craftsmen and generally making life economically better for many a Welshman, the vicar, finished with the day’s tours, and his wife smiled at one another as they too wandered the grounds of Tŷ Mynydd.
Across the way, the master of the estate, one Mr. Nickolas Pritchard, a one-time impoverished gentleman, and his ladywife, known to her nearest and dearest simply as Gwen, watched the goings-on with smiles of amusement.
Such apparent happiness was expected amongst newlyweds who are terribly in love with one another and have found it necessary to fight off evildoers and centuries-old curses in order to be together. Their staff oohed and ahhed at their obvious affection.
The Pritchards, after countless hours spent in expressing profound gratitude at the happy outcome of the struggle nearly to the death that had brought Gwen back to life and the two of them into each other’s arms, had settled between themselves that life was excessively good. Gwen was still plagued on occasion by nightmares of her harrowing experiences and had the unfortunate tendency to walk into walls when not paying attention. She was, however, so inarguably happy that all who saw her were immediately convinced of her contentment.
The Tower and a certain anguished angel in the churchyard had both been toppled within days of their life-and-death struggle. Nickolas instructed workers to set the stones of the demolished Tower in the outline of the once-fortified castle as a lasting reminder of the life Gwen had known. More touching even than that was the painting he had commissioned of Y Castell as she chose to remember it—peaceful and alive.
And there they stood, a year to the date that the ancient curse on the estate had been broken, scandalously wrapped in each other’s arms.
“This has worked even better than I anticipated,” Gwen said, leaning into her husband’s embrace as best she could, considering the ever-expanding nature of her waistline, a condition she was nearly as overjoyed about as was her husband. “I am amazed so many have come. We did not write to that many people.”
“Ah, but it was not the quantity of messages that made the difference, my dearest love,” her husband answered, showing more open affection than was strictly proper out in the open and surrounded by hordes of humanity.
Gwen gave him a look of reproof he completely ignored, in response to which she muttered an imprecating evaluation of his manners as they related to his English heritage. She did so in Welsh and, watching the amused grin on his face, once again rued the fact that she’d taught him to be relatively proficient in her native tongue.
“Then what was the ingredient that made this day such a rousing success?” Gwen asked.
Nickolas shrugged. “The postscript.”
She didn’t dare ask. Gwen had learned over the eleven months she’d been Mrs. Nickolas Pritchard that such obvious traps were best left alone, though she smiled despite herself.
Nickolas, knowing his wife was too experienced with his wit to take the bait he had so temptingly dangled before her, simply answered the question she had not asked.
“I concluded my letters by telling the recipients that, though I am by all accounts still rather too English to truly understand such things, I was quite certain no Nos Galan Gaeaf celebration in all of Wales was quite as teeming with ghosts and mysteries and heroic opportunities as here at Tŷ Mynydd. And I may also have mentioned the child-eating sow.”
Gwen gave her husband a look of amused surprise.
He shrugged as though he’d said nothing unusual. “I strongly suggested to those I wrote that they’d not want to miss a celebration so rife with specters. Unless, of course, they lacked the required courage to endure such a thing.”
It was, if one was being technical, a touch misleading. The house and grounds were not rife with ghosts and would not be, despite the fact that it was Nos Galan Gaeaf. Tŷ Mynydd no longer housed even a single specter.
The curse was broken.
The master of the estate had inherited wealth and property and had found a loving and beloved wife. And, as Nickolas could have told any of his friends or acquaintances, of all he had gained in the pa
st year, she was the true treasure.
About the Author
Sarah M. Eden read her first Jane Austen novel in elementary school and has been an Austen addict ever since. Fascinated by the English Regency era, Eden became a regular in that section of the reference department at her local library, where she painstakingly researched this extraordinary chapter in history. Eden is an award-winning author of short stories and was a Whitney Award finalist for her novels Seeking Persephone and Courting Miss Lancaster. Visit her at www.sarahmeden.com.
Other Books by Sarah M. Eden
The Lancaster Family
Seeking Persephone
Courting Miss Lancaster
Romancing Daphne
The Jonquil Family
The Kiss of a Stranger
Friends and Foes
Drops of Gold
As You Are
A Fine Gentleman
Stand-Alone Novels
Glimmer of Hope
For Elise
An Unlikely Match Page 20
