Pippa rested her hand on his chest. “Do you think you could adore me?”
He pretended to consider the matter a moment and then confessed, “I already do.”
No words could be sweeter to her. She swallowed and then took a risk. “I think I love you,” she answered.
“I know I love you.”
His words hadn’t been a mistake. He cared for her. Truly cared for her. This strong, noble, honorable man loved her. She finally found words to speak. “Is making love always like it was with us, William?”
“It’s never been like that before,” he answered. “Only with you.”
Only with her. Magic words. “Can we try it again, just to be certain?”
His response was to laugh, and then they did try again. Their lovemaking wasn’t as good as it had been the first time.
It was better.
Chapter Six
THEY MARRIED VERY early the next morning.
William roused a priest who objected that the banns had not been read. William’s response was to cut two of the silver buttons from his uniform to offer as payment, and the priest kept his silence. The padre did not even question the bride marrying while wearing breeches.
Pippa knew that they would have to remarry in the Church of England, but that morning, in the shadowy knave of a Catholic church, she spoke her vows and meant them with all her heart.
Together they rode to join William’s men. Her maid, Lilly, was furious over her running away and had a few words for William when she learned they’d married. But they were happy ones.
“She will make you dance to a merry tune,” she predicted.
“I pray that she does,” William answered.
The rest of the trip to Lisbon was uneventful and yet perfect. William had sent Sergeant Larson back to his superior officers with a report on the French supply train.
Pippa and William rode beside each other for the trip, talking about everything and talking about nothing. They didn’t dawdle. William was anxious to return to his company before the fighting, but they didn’t waste this precious time together, either.
All was good… until they reached Lisbon’s port—where Pippa found her father waiting anxiously for her in the British port office.
He rushed up to her. “Pippa, my God, I have been worried to the point of illness over you.”
“Didn’t General Wellington or someone on his staff tell you where they’d sent me?” she asked, a bit overwhelmed. She hadn’t yet thought of how she would break the news of William to her father. She wasn’t certain how he would react. He could be so possessive.
“They said they sent you here with an escort.” Her father looked past her shoulder. “Thank you, Captain, for seeing her safe. You are done here. Carry on.”
Pippa drew a deep breath. “Father, there is something I must tell you. This is Captain William Duroy—”
“Duroy?” her father repeated, interrupting her. “The nabob? Up in Yorkshire?”
“My sire, sir,” William answered. She was grateful that he was letting her handle this, although she sensed his impatience in her breaking the news. It was as if he understood her concerns.
In such a short time, they knew each other that well.
“Father, William is my husband.” She took William’s arm. “And he is the best, most wonderful, bravest man I know, except for you, Papa.”
Her father took a step back as if she’d struck him. The color left his face. “No.” He shook his head. “You cannot have married. Not without my permission.”
William spoke. “I would have asked it, sir, if there had been time…” And that was when the story of her running away and blowing up French ammunition wagons was shared.
Her father did not take it well, and even though Pippa didn’t speak of the lovemaking, he seemed to understand that more had happened than just a bit of fighting the French.
When he did find words, his voice was dark, guttural. “I shall have this marriage annulled. Immediately. And I shall see you stripped of all command and rank, Duroy. Come, Pippa, to the ship.”
In the past, Pippa would have hurried to obey.
She didn’t this time. She couldn’t. She realized she was no longer the same woman who had left Wellington’s headquarters.
“I can’t,” she said, quietly. Suddenly, Pippa saw her father not as Sir Hew, the British envoy, but as a man who’d been hurt by love.
She’d never understood that before. She did now. Loving William had opened both her heart and her mind. Her world was no longer black and white, correct and incorrect. She now saw the nuances of life and how not releasing the pain of her mother’s abandonment had hurt both her and her father.
“I don’t want you angry,” she said to her father, placing a hand on his arm. “My care and devotion for you is as strong as ever, but William is my husband. I chose him, and I beg you to consider him like a son.”
For a moment, she thought her father would soften. In the end, he turned and walked out the door.
Pippa took a step after him and then stopped. She turned to William.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“He doesn’t understand yet that a heart can hold love for more than one person. He’s shut that part of him off.”
“Do you want me to talk to him?” he asked. “I will, for you.”
Her William, always so ready to take up a cause. “It would be of little use. I just pray you don’t hold this against him. I do want him in my life.”
“As he should be.”
William made the arrangements for her then. He booked passage for her and Lilly to England and prepared a letter introducing her to his family.
Their parting was the worst moment of Pippa’s life. She didn’t want to let him go.
She also knew he had to go to battle. It was what a soldier did.
JUST AS WILLIAM had predicted, his family welcomed her with open arms. Pippa and his mother became great friends. Mrs. Duroy was more outspoken than any woman Pippa had ever met, and she adored her.
She also liked his father, brothers, and their wives.
What was interesting was that she discovered that the women in her own family—such as her aunt, Lady Romley—were more caring of her than she had originally imagined. Pippa wondered if her father’s distrust had carried over to her, so she didn’t see other women as they really were.
One thing she did not like about her new life was making the trip after major battles to the center of York to read the rolls of the dead posted on the Cathedral door. And every time William’s name was not on the list, she went into the church and knelt in prayer.
She wrote him every day. He wrote her when he could, and she valued every connection to him.
She also wrote her father at least twice month. There was no response.
It was during this time when books once again became her allies. Reading was not a way to stave off living, but to help blunt the edges. True to his word, William had seen that her library left behind at Wellington’s headquarters was sent to her. She hated to think how much transporting them had cost him.
And then one day, William returned. Colonel William Duroy.
Pippa was so proud of him. In a very private service, and with a special license, Pippa and William married in the Church of England. That very night, they conceived their first child.
William had to return to the fight, but he promised he would be home for his son’s birth—and he was.
Holding her baby in her arms for the first time, Pippa felt a sense of completeness she had not known could exist. And in that moment, she pitied her mother. The woman who had abandoned her husband and her child had given up so much. Pippa could not, and would never be able to understand her.
Her only sadness was the loss of her father.
Christian Nelson Duroy was christened on the third Sunday of October.
The sky was clear and blue, the wind brisk. The church was filled with the Duroy family, all proud to welcome this newest me
mber to their number.
As the priest began the ceremony, William leaned over and whispered, “Look in the back of the church.”
Pippa turned, and there was her father. He looked older, sadder.
And she was glad he was there.
Afterward, father and daughter didn’t waste time discussing the past. To Pippa, all that mattered was the present, the here and now. A soldier’s wife learned to think that way.
Yes, William would be leaving again. There would be many times she would fear for his life, but now she understood how full and encompassing love was. It defied the simple explanations of poets, and no novelist could ever give it full justice. Not with mere words on a printed page.
No, living life fully was the only way to understand love, and so she loved well.
Author’s Note
COLONEL WILLIAM DUROY retired from the military after the Battle of Waterloo. The time had come for him to be a man of peace. He ran for Parliament from Yorkshire and was elected as a representative of the Tory party. He was knighted for his service to his country in 1827. He and his wife, Pippa, enjoyed a long and fruitful marriage. They were the parents of eight children, three sons and five daughters, all of them redheads.
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When a Chattan Male falls in love, strike his heart with fire from above…
They call him Lord Lyon, proud, determined—and cursed. He is in need of a bride, but if he falls in love, he dies. And so he wants a woman he cannot love. His fervent hope is that by marrying—and having a son—without love, perhaps he can break the curse’s chains forever.
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Or will the power of love be enough to overcome all obstacles?
The Curse
Macnachtan Keep
Scotland, 1632
A MOTHER KNOWS. ’Tis the curse of giving birth.
She feels life enter this world, a knife-sharp pain and one gladly borne for the outcome. She nurtures, protects and prays for her child’s safekeeping with every breath she draws… and so is it any wonder she would also sense, know, the moment that precious life is cut short?
Fenella, the wife of the late Laird Macnachtan, was in the south gallery where the sun was best, plying her needle when terror seized her heart. She looked to her kinswomen, all gathered around for an afternoon chat as was their custom. These were her husband’s cousins, his sisters, and her daughters Ilona and Aislin—
“Where’s Rose?”
A mother should not have a favorite, but Fenella did.
Her other daughters were merry and bright, but Rose was special. She shared her mother’s gift of healing. Fenella had delighted in the realization that the powers of her mother and her nain—her grandmother—now flowed through her to her youngest. Rose would be “the one” to receive the Book That Contained All Knowledge.
Of course, Rose’s golden beauty was the stuff of legend, and that set her apart as well. The suitors for her hand had formed a line across the land, but there had only been one man for Rose—Charles Chattan of Glenfinnan.
Rose’s love for Charles reminded Fenella so much of her younger self, that self who had challenged and won the heart of the handsome Macnachtan. That self who was willful and bold.
But Chattan had proved a faithless lover. He’d handfasted himself to Rose and then accepted marriage to another—an Englishwoman from a family with power. Sassenach power.
With a jolt, Fenella realized today was Charles and the Englishwoman’s wedding day. She should not have forgotten the fact. No wonder Rose had been so quiet this morning and was not here amongst the chatter of women this afternoon. Fenella’s worry eased a bit.
Rose had loved Charles hard and well. Her heart hurt, but Fenella would see that Rose would recover. Thank the Lord, Macnachtan was not alive to witness the Chattans’ dishonoring of his daughter. It had been all Fenella could do to keep her sons from calling Charles out. She refused to spill her family’s blood over the traitor.
She could not see Rose’s future—her gift failed her when she attempted to discern Fate—but there would be another love for Rose. There must be. The powerful gifts handed through accident of birth from one ancestress to another needed to take seed in Rose’s womb… .
Suddenly a scream rose from the courtyard, an alarm of shock and grief.
In that instant, Fenella’s foreboding gained life.
The other women scrambled to their feet and ran to the window overlooking the stone courtyard. Fenella didn’t move. Her whole being centered on one whispered word. “Rose.”
There were more shouts now. Fenella heard her son Michael call his sister’s name, heard weeping, wails of distress and mourning. Her kinswomen at the window threw themselves into shocked grief. They turned, looked at Fenella. Ilona, her face contorted, stumbled toward her mother. Aislin knelt, bowled over in pain.
Fenella set aside her needlework.
She did not want to go to that window.
Tears burned her eyes. She held them back. She didn’t weep. Not ever. She’d not shed one tear for Macnachtan’s death. Death was part of life… that’s what Nain had said. One didn’t grieve for life.
Fenella stood.
It was hard to breathe.
She walked to the window. Ilona held out her arms and then dropped them, as if knowing she could not stop her mother.
Leaning forward, Fenella looked out upon the courtyard below.
Rose’s body was sprawled there, her golden hair mingled with a stream of blood flowing from her head.
Her dear daughter. Her darling, darling daughter.
She’d thrown herself from the tower wall.
She’d taken her own life.
Michael looked up and saw his mother. Tears flowed freely down his face.
He was so like his father—
In that moment, Fenella’s legs gave out beneath her. She fell to the cold stone floor.
Nain was wrong. Grief could not be contained. It started as a small flame that grew larger and stronger until it consumed her.
THERE WAS NO doubt Rose of Loch Awe had taken her life because of Charles Chattan’s perfidy, no saving her memory from the disgrace of suicide.
Fenella longed for the magic to reverse time and bring her daughter back to life.
For the next three days she poured over her nain’s book. Certainly in all these receipts and spells for healing, for fortune, for doubts and fears, there must be one to cast off Death.
The handwriting on those yellowed pages was cramped and in many places faded. Fenella had signed the front of the book but not referred to it often, at least not once she’d memorized the cures for fevers and agues that plagued children and concerned mothers.
She’d been surprised to discover Rose had also been reading the book. She’d found where Rose had written the name Charles beside a spell to find true love. It called for a rose thorn to be embedded in the wax of a candle and burned on the night of a full moon.
They found a piece of the burned candle, the thorn still intact, its tip charred, beneath Rose’s pillow.
Fenella held the wax in the palm of her hand. Slowly, she closed her fingers around it into a fist and set aside mourning.
In its place rose anger.
’Twas said the Chattan kin had run for England. The rest had scattered to other clans. They feared Fenella of the Macnachtan, and well they should. Grief made her mad.
They thought themselves safe. They were not.
There was no sacred ground for a suicide, but
Fenella had no need of the church. She ordered a funeral pyre to be built for her daughter along the green banks of Loch Awe directly beneath a stony crag that looked down upon the shore.
On the day of Rose’s burial, Fenella stood upon that crag, waiting for the sun to set. She wore the Macnachtan tartan around her shoulders. The evening wind toyed her gray hair held in place by a circlet of gold, gray hair that had once been as fair as Rose’s.
At Fenella’s signal, her sons set ablaze a ring of bonfires she’d ordered constructed around Rose’s pyre. The flames leaped to life.
“Rose.” Her name was sweet upon her mother’s lips.
Did Chattan think he could hide in London? Did his father believe his son could jilt Rose without penalty? That her life had no meaning?
That Macnachtan honor was a small thing?
“I want him to feel my pain,” Fenella whispered.
Ilona and Aislin stood by her side. They nodded.
“He will not escape me,” Fenella vowed.
“But he is gone,” Ilona said. “He has become a fine lord while we are left to weep.”
Feeling the heat of the bonfires. She knew better.
At last the moon was high in the sky. The time was right. Nain had said a witch knows when the hour is nigh. Tonight would be a night no one would forget. Ever.
Especially Charles Chattan.
The fires had drawn the curious from all over the kirk. They stood on the shore watching her. Fenella raised her hand. Her clansmen and her kin on the shore below fell silent. Michael picked up the torch and held it ready.
She brought her hand down and her oldest lit his sister’s funeral pyre as instructed.
’Twas the ancient ways. There was no priest here, no clergy to call her out—and even if there was, Fenella’s power in this moment was too strong to be swayed. It coursed through her. It was the beating of her heart, the pulsing in the blood in her veins, the very fiber of her being.
She stepped to the edge of the rock and stared down over the burning pyre. The flames licked the skirt of Rose’s white burial gown.
For Love and Honor Page 4
