by Jane Feather
Chapter Twenty-Five
THE DEATH—THE shocking random suddenness of such a death—sent the crowds slinking away, melting into the smoky shadows. Ralph stood held fast by two of the cadre. His eyes were bemused, his expression sullen, like a small boy kept from the playground.
“Ravenspeare, I want your brother arraigned for murder,” Simon said steadily.
“He’s a Ravenspeare. Not a common criminal!” Ranulf declared, but much of his bluster had vanished. He had been defeated in passage of arms by the Hawkesmoor, and his idiot young brother had finally gone too far.
“He killed in cold blood,” Jack Chauncey said. “Before witnesses. He will stand trial.”
“And he will hang,” Ariel said with soft vehemence, looking up from Sarah’s body. She stood, drawing Jenny up with her. “I am shamed by my blood.”
Men were lifting Sarah’s body from the cobbles, bearing her into the castle. Ariel slipped her arm into Jenny’s and guided her after them.
“You would pursue this through the courts, Hawkesmoor?” Roland asked, his voice alone of the three brothers calm, dispassionate. “The scandal will benefit no one.”
Simon rested on his sword point. He was anxious to get to Ariel, and suddenly he knew he had had a lifetime’s worth of the Ravenspeare brothers. “Well?”
“Banishment,” Roland said succinctly. “We’ll send him to the colonies to make his fortune there. One of our ships is leaving for Virginia from Harwich at the end of the week. Let him go.”
Ralph began to bluster but both of his brothers swung round on him and he collapsed, seeming to lose all his stuffing as he hung from the hands holding him upright.
“You expect me to trust your word?” Simon’s eyebrows lifted incredulously.
Ranulf took a step forward, but Roland raised an arresting hand. “Steady, Ranulf. The man has cause enough to doubt when he’s been set upon in the back by that cub.”
“We’ll see it done,” Jack said. “If that’s what you want, Simon.”
Simon looked down at the cobbles, where Sarah’s blood glistened fresh and red. He raised his sword. “Ravenspeare. Swear before these witnesses, on your sword, over the blood of the woman your brother killed, that there will be no more blood shed between our two families. We may not live as friends, but we will live in peace. You will swear on your sword oath that your sister’s children will be the currency of truce.”
Ranulf glanced at Roland. Roland’s nod was almost imperceptible, but it was the cool word of wisdom that the elder had learned to accept. He stepped forward, his face grim, his eyes dark burning holes of rebellion. He raised his sword and repeated the words the Hawkesmoor dictated. Each word was wrenched from him as if with red-hot pincers, but not even Ranulf, earl of Ravenspeare, would be forsworn on such an oath before so many witnesses.
Simon remained in the stableyard, somehow unwilling to leave the small patch of earth where the woman Sarah had given her life for his. He leaned on his sword, gazing down at the cobbles, feeling a great sense of peace invade him. Despite the blood and violence of the last hours, he felt purified in some inexplicable way. The woman’s smile, the touch of her fingers, had been a benediction, had conveyed something . . . a feeling of love . . . that filled him with warmth and peace and strength.
And he thought that she had not died in vain. That from her death had come the first seeds of peace.
Ariel’s soft steps brought his head up from his rapt reverie. He held out his arms to her and she came into his embrace, her tear-wet face resting against his shoulder.
“Why do I feel that Sarah wanted to die . . . was ready to die?” Her words were muffled. “It’s wicked to think that, but I can’t help it.”
Simon stroked her hair, pushing the tear-sodden streaks away from her cheeks, where they were stuck. “I was thinking that she didn’t die in vain,” he said.
“She gave her life for yours.”
“Yes, but much more than that.” Gently he told her what Sarah’s death had brought about. “Maybe it’s fanciful to believe that she intended such a thing.” He smiled, tilting Ariel’s face to kiss her mouth.
“No, I don’t think it is,” Ariel said. “No one knew Sarah, not even Jenny, but everyone knew that she never acted without reason, or without thought for the consequences.”
“And you, my love? Have you given proper thought for the consequences of marriage to a Hawkesmoor now?”
Ariel’s smile was rueful. “Long since,” she said. “And I will not have my horses. It’s almost frightening that something once so important should now seem so trivial.”
“And if I say that of course you may have your horses?” he asked gravely. “Your horses and your independence. What do you say then, my love?”
Ariel looked up at him, a flash of wonder in her eyes. Then she said consideringly, “I would only want my independence for me, not because of you.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Of course. Such a simple distinction, but so vital.”
He walked with her back to the castle and into the kitchen, where Jenny was sitting beside the fire, her hands lying loosely in her lap.
“Jenny, you must come with us to Hawkesmoor,” Ariel said, kneeling on the flagstones beside her, taking her hands. “You will come and live with us.”
Jenny shook her head and smiled. “You will be needed in Hawkesmoor, Ariel, but someone must stay here to help the people in these parts. But I had an idea. Something that came to me while I was with Mother a minute ago.” She looked up at the earl, standing at Ariel’s shoulder. “I hope you will help, my lord, because my mother had . . . had some feeling for you that I don’t understand. But—”
“My dear Jenny, you have only to ask.”
“Well, I was thinking that perhaps we could train other people to help the sick . . . the way Mother trained me and Ariel. We would perhaps have to pay people if we’re to take them away from their regular work, but Mother would live always in the hands of others.”
“Oh, yes,” Ariel breathed. “How perfect, Jenny. I will help you. I can use the money from the racing stable, and we’ll set up a school for midwives and herbalists.”
Simon ran a somewhat distracted hand through his hair. Somewhere between breeding racehorses and running a training program for would-be midwives and apothecaries, his wife might find time for him.
He cleared his throat a mite plaintively and Ariel looked up immediately, her eyes on fire with her enthusiasm. “Oh, yes,” she said with instant comprehension. “I must be a wife too, of course.”
“I shall be eternally in your debt, madam wife.” He offered a mock bow and proffered his arm. “Perhaps now might be a good moment?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JANE FEATHER is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of The Least Likely Bride, The Accidental Bride, The Hostage Bride, A Valentine Wedding, The Emerald Swan, and many other historical romances. She was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in the New Forest, in the south of England. She began her writing career after she and her family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1981. She now has over five million copies of her books in print.
Be sure to read the final book in Jane Feather’s remarkable “charm bracelet” trilogy . . . The Emerald Swan, on sale now.
Read on for a preview. . . .
Prologue
Paris, August 24th, 1572
The tocsin rang at midnight. The streets, hushed and empty, now filled with men, gathering quietly at first, as if for a moment awed by the enterprise that drew them from their houses, white crosses in their hats, arquebuses, swords, and knives in their hands.
They moved through the narrow lanes and cobbled streets surrounding the grim dark citadel of the Louvre. A week before, the citadel had blazed with light, music pouring from the narrow barred windows, and crowds of drunken revelers had thronged the streets of the city celebrating the marriage of the French King Charles’s sister Marguerite to the Huguenot King Henry of Navarre. A marriage that was intended t
o unite the Catholic and Protestant factions in France.
But on this St. Bartholomew’s night, the marriage served as the bait to entrap and destroy the Huguenots who had arrived in Paris by the thousands to support their young king.
As the tocsin continued to peal, men moved down the streets, knocking on the doors that bore the white cross. The inhabitants slipped out to join them and the huge army of assassins grew, a great wave billowing and surging toward the mansions of the Protestant leaders.
The first shots, the first brilliant scarlet flares, the first long-drawn-out screams, were the signal for mayhem. The mob developed heads like a Hydra, plunging through the the white cross, hurling the inhabitants from windows and balconies, to be torn to pieces by the screaming throng in the street and courtyards below.
The air reeked of blood and gunpowder; the sky was red with the flames of burning houses and the garish flares of the pitch torches seemingly disembodied, weaving their way through the narrow streets; the jubilant yells of a mob running down a half-naked bleeding fugitive were like the nightmare shrieks of pursuing devils.
The woman stood trembling, breathless, on the corner of a narrow fetid lane running up from the river. Her heart was beating so fast that every dragging breath was an agony. Her bare feet were bleeding, cut by the jagged stones along the quay, and her thin cloak clung to her back, wet with sweat. Her hair hung limp around her white, terrified face, and she clutched her babies to her, one in each arm, their little faces buried against her shoulders to stifle their cries.
She looked wildly up the lane and saw the first flicker of the pursuing torches. The voices of the mob rose in a shrill shriek of exultation as they surged toward the river. With a sob of anguish, she began to run again, along the river, clutching the babies, who grew heavier with each step. She could hear the footsteps behind her, a thundering pounding of booted feet growing closer. Slowly, inexorably, the despair of resignation deadened her terror. She could not escape. Not even for her babies could she run faster. And the crowd behind her grew, augmented by others who joined the chase simply for the pleasure of it.
With a final gasp of despair, she turned and faced her pursuers, the babies still pressed to her breast. One of them wriggled, trying to raise her head. The other was still and quiet as always. Even at ten months, they were so different, these twin daughters.
She stood panting, a hart at bay, as the crowd with their mad glittering eyes surrounded her. Every face seemed filled with hatred, lips drawn back from bared teeth, eyes reddened with blood lust. Their swords and knives dripped blood, their hands and clothes were smeared with it. And they moved so close to her that she could smell their sweat and their wine-sour breath and their hatred.
“Abjure . . . abjure . . .” The chant was picked up and the words battered against her like living things. The mob pressed against her, their faces pushed into hers as they taunted her with a salvation that she knew in her heart they would deny her. They were not interested in a convert, they were interested in her blood.
“Abjure . . . abjure . . .”
“I will,” she gasped, dropping to her knees. “Don’t hurt my babies . . . please, I will abjure for my babies. I will say the credo” She began to babble the Latin words of the Catholic credo, her eyes raised heavenward so that she couldn’t see the hateful faces of the men who would murder her.
The knife, already reddened with Huguenot blood, swiped across her throat even as she stammered to an end. The words were lost in a gurgle as a thin line of blood marked the path of the knife. The line widened like parting lips. The woman fell forward to the cobbles. A baby’s thin wail filled the sudden silence.
“To the Louvre . . . to the Louvre!” A great cry came over the rooftops and the mob with one thought turned and swept away, taking up the clarion call, “To the Louvre . . . to the Louvre,” like so many maddened sheep.
The black river flowed as sluggishly as the woman’s congealing blood. Something moved beneath her. One of the babies wriggled, squirmed, wailed as she emerged from the suffocating warmth of her mother’s dead body. With a curious kind of purpose the little creature set off on hands and toetips like a spider, creeping away from the dreadful smell of blood.
Ten minutes passed before Francis found his wife. He broke from the lane, his face white in the sudden moonlight. “Elena!” he whispered as he fell to his knees beside the body. He snatched his wife against his breast, and then gave a great anguished cry that shivered the stillness as he saw the baby on the ground, gazing up at him with almost vacant eyes, her tiny rosebud mouth pursed on a wavering wail, her face streaked with her mother’s blood.
“Sweet Jesus, have mercy,” he murmured, gathering the infant up in the crook of one arm as he continued to hold her mother to his breast. He looked around, his eyes demented with grief. Where was his other daughter? Where was she? Had the murdering rabble spitted her on their knives, as they had done this night to babes all over the city? But if so, where was her body? Had they taken her?
Footsteps sounded behind him and he turned his head with a violent twist, still clinging to the child and his dead wife. His own people, wild-eyed from their own desperate escape from the massacre, raced toward him from the lane.
One of the men reached down to take the child from the duke, who yielded her up wordlessly, bringing both arms around his wife, rocking her in soundless grief.
“Milord, we must take milady and the child,” the man with the baby said in an urgent whisper. “They might come back. We can take shelter in the chatelet if we go quickly.”
Francis allowed his wife to fall into his lap, her head resting on his knee. He closed her open eyes and gently lifted her hand. A gold pearl-encrusted bracelet of strange serpentine design encircled the slender wrist. A single charm swung from the delicate strands and his tears fell on the brilliant emerald cut into the perfect undulating shape of a swan. He unclasped the bracelet, his betrothal gift to Elena, and thrust it into his doublet against his heart, then raised his wife in his arms and staggered to his feet with his burden.
The baby wailed, a long-drawn-out cry of hunger and dismay, and her bearer hoisted her up against his shoulder and turned to follow the man and his murdered wife as they vanished into the dark maw of the lane leading away from the river.
Chapter One
Dover, England, 1591
It was the most extraordinary likeness.
Gareth Harcourt pushed his way to the front of the crowd watching the troupe of performers who had set up their makeshift stage on the quay of Dover harbor.
Her eyes were the same cerulean blue, her complexion the same thick cream, and her hair exactly the same shade of darkest brown, right down to the deep reddish glints caught by the sun. There the resemblance ended, however. For whereas Maude’s dark hair hung in a cloud of curls teased daily from curling papers and tongs, the acrobat’s crowning glory was cut in a short, straight, fringed bob that owed more to a pudding basin than the more sophisticated tools of feminine coiffure.
Gareth watched with enjoyment as the tiny figure performed on a very narrow beam resting on two poles at some considerable height from the ground. She was treating the six-inch width as if it was solid ground, turning cartwheels, walking on her hands, flipping backward in a dazzling series of maneuvers that drew gasps of appreciation from the audience.
Maude’s frame was similarly slender, Gareth reflected, but there was a difference. Maude was pale and thin and undeveloped. The acrobat, standing on her hands, her bright orange skirt falling over her head, revealed firm muscular calves encased for decency’s sake in skin-tight leather leggings, and he could see the strength in her arms as they supported her slight weight. She released one hand and waved merrily, before catching the beam again with both hands and swinging sideways, tumbling over and over the beam, her hands changing position at lightning speed, her skirt a blur of orange as she turned herself into something resembling a Catherine wheel.
At the top of the arc, she flung he
rself backward, turned a neat somersault, landed on both feet, flipped backward, her body curved like a bow, then straightened, her skirt settling around her again as she swept into a triumphant bow.
Gareth found himself applauding with the rest. Her face was flushed with exertion, her eyes alight, beads of perspiration gathered on her broad forehead, her lips parted in a jubilant grin. She put two fingers to her mouth and whistled. The piercing sound produced out of nowhere a small monkey in a red jacket and a cap sporting a bright orange feather.
The creature dragged off his hat and jumped purposefully into the crowd of spectators, chattering in a manner that sounded vaguely obscene to Gareth, who tossed a silver penny into the out-thrust cap, receiving a simian salute in response.
The girl began to turn cartwheels as she waited for the monkey to return from his fee collection. Whether it was merely to encourage the crowd’s generosity or simply for her own pleasure, Gareth couldn’t decide. She radiated exuberance and energy, and when the monkey finally bounced back onto the makeshift stage, she tipped the contents of the hat into a leather pouch at her waist, blew a cheerful kiss to the crowd, crammed the cap back onto the animal’s head, and backflipped her way off the stage.
It was the most uncanny resemblance, Gareth thought again. In everything but personality, he amended. Maude had less energy than anyone he had ever come across. She spent her days lying on a cushioned settle reading religious tracts and applying smelling salts to her small and generally pink-tipped nose. When she could be persuaded to move, she wafted, trailing scarves and shawls, surrounded by a pungently medicinal aura from the endless remedies and nerve tonics supplied by her old nurse. She spoke in a faint reedlike voice that had her listeners holding on with bated breath in case the reed should fade into muteness before the sentence was completed.
