by Susan Wiggs
To his chagrin, he felt his face redden. “If that’s true—and I sincerely doubt it is—I do not consider it a necessary virtue.”
“Of course not, but …” She shrugged. “You have a glow of contentment that appeals to me.” Her hands, light as bird’s wings, pressed against the front of his jerkin. “Stephen?”
“Aye?” Just for a moment, he indulged his urge and touched her sable hair. Satin, but softer. Smoother. And redolent of summer herbs. Jesu …
“Stay with me after supper tonight. Do not go away as you always do.”
The old fear leaped upon him then, and snatched away the last vestiges of mirth. Her request merely proved he could not live like other men.
And Juliana, with her laughing eyes and her heart-catching smile, was a threat to his necessary isolation.
“No,” he forced himself to say, knowing he was hurting her. “You had a good idea, Juliana. You gave me a moment or two of mirth. And—God’s teeth—you are a comely lass.” He stepped back, out of her reach. “But do not think to weaken me into bedding you.”
If someone had set fire to her backside, she could not have looked more outraged. “Bedding!” she shouted. “You think that is my purpose?”
Her show of temper made her more attractive than ever, heightening the color in her cheeks and intensifying the sparkle in her eyes. “When a woman begins groping at my clothing,” he said, “I generally assume that to be her purpose.”
She lunged like a striking adder. Even before he was aware that she was moving toward him, he felt the prick of the tiny blade at his neck. “And what,” she said, “do you think my purpose is now, my lord?”
He wanted to swallow but feared the movement of his throat would do him injury. “Seems to be,” he whispered, “murder.”
“You should learn to tell the difference, my lord.” With that, she put away her dagger, turned on her heel, and disappeared through the garden gate.
“Never,” Rodion said to Juliana, thrusting out his bearded chin. “You’ll not use this horse to haul and draw. He’s made for show.”
Juliana’s heart sank. She had engaged the gypsies as laborers in the Malmesbury endeavor, and she desperately needed both Rodion and the horse to clear debris from the abandoned abbey.
“I’ll pay extra wages for the horse,” she offered, blowing a stray lock of hair off her damp brow.
“No, you won’t,” blustered Jillie Egan, walking toward them and turning back her sleeves. She planted herself in front of Rodion, standing nose to nose with him and glaring into his eyes. “You’ll do the work, gypsy man, and so will your horse, else I’ll … I’ll …”
“You’ll what?” Rodion asked.
Jillie leaned forward to whisper in his ear, then reached around and pinched the young man’s backside. His scowl eased into a huge grin.
Five minutes later, the horse was harnessed and drawing a cartload of broken stonework out of the building. Juliana watched, bemused. What had Jillie said to him? Her familiar touch made Juliana suspect that Jillie and Rodion had become lovers. Was it that easy, then, to bring a man to heel?
Her mind full of intriguing possibilities, Juliana went into the church.
“Did so!” came a tiny, squeaking voice.
“Did not!” came the answer.
Juliana turned to see Sima, Mandiva’s daughter, and Tam, the village chandler’s lad, arguing in the apse.
“What is amiss?” she asked, lifting her skirts to hurry toward them.
“She stole my nest,” said the lad, shoving out his lower lip.
“Did not!”
“Did so!”
“What nest?” Juliana asked in exasperation.
Tam said, “Master Stumpe told me I should climb up to the belfry, see, and ’twas there that I found a most wondrous bird’s nest. I brought it down to take home, but when I turned my back, ’twas gone!” He poked a grimy finger at Sima. “She took it. Everybody knows gypsies are thieves.”
“What do you know, you Gajo scutch-brain? I never even saw your stupid nest.”
“Did so!”
“Did not!”
“Niddy noddy!”
“Bast—”
“Peace, I beg of you,” said Stephen in a weary, half-amused voice. With athletic grace, he dropped the last few feet down from the rope that hung from the bell tower and strode toward them. “I took the nest.”
The youngster blinked. “You did?”
“It wasn’t yours to take.” Stephen went down on one knee and gently squeezed the lad’s thin shoulders. “ ’Twas a rock dove’s nest, and the birds return to the same spot every spring. How would you feel if you tried one day to go home, and your house was gone?”
Tam caught his breath. “I’d not like it in the least, my lord.”
“I thought not.” Stephen extracted a pouch from his belt and held out his hand. “Sugared almonds,” he said, handing one to each child. “Now, I think Master Stumpe needs a pair of good workers to sort shuttles for him. Run along.”
The children scampered out, holding hands, their mouths stuffed with sweets and their argument forgotten. Juliana said, “Since when does the baron of Wimberleigh carry sweets in his pocket?”
He shrugged. “Thanks to your plan to put both the gypsies and the villagers to work, there are plenty of children about.”
She looked down the apse, through the wide-open doors at the end of the building. The villagers rushed back and forth with flywheels and battens, rollers and ratchets, the gypsies hauling stonework, and Laszlo at a makeshift forge, hammering out hinges and latches.
“It is a good plan,” she stated.
“Aye,” he said, and she was surprised, for she had expected an argument from him. “It’s a very good plan indeed, Juliana.” He reached out and touched the tip of her nose. “You’ve a smudge of plaster here, my lady.”
Juliana was so startled by his whimsical mood that she simply stood with mouth agape as he strode back down the aisle and walked out into the sunlight.
This project consumed her. Distracted her from pursuing her goal. Sometimes she went for days at a time without thinking about Novgorod and that horrible night.
It was most confusing, finding her heart divided by duty and revenge. On the one hand, she wanted to stay and help the insular but good-hearted people of Lynacre. Yet her soul still burned with the fire of her Romanov pride and the searing grief of her loss.
A most unexpected dilemma, and one further complicated by her increasingly ardent feelings for her husband. Sometimes he seemed accepting of her, grateful for her help and pleased by her abilities. In his more unpleasant moods he accused her of trying to entrap him into a permanent marriage.
Juliana sniffed. As if she, a princess from an ancient line, would even consider such a thing.
And yet she did consider it when she lay alone at night, her body in flames as she remembered his touch, his kisses, the breeze of his breath on her neck, and the yearning that coursed through her veins. One moment he was the skeptic, jaded by a past he refused to reveal. The next he was tender and encouraging, working at her side, challenging her.
“Not a wise thing,” she muttered, wiping her hands on her apron and hurrying to the high altar. “One does not challenge a Romanov.”
To bring light into the abbey, the workmen had to remove the boards from the jewel-toned glass windows that flanked the apsidal chapels and blossomed high above the altar. Cromwell’s iconoclasts, in their fit of reformatory zeal against Papists, had neglected to smash the windows.
Juliana was glad. When she looked at them, she saw not the evil trappings of popery, but relics of a forgotten age.
Using a system of ropes and pulleys, the workmen removed the boards from the last and highest window—a lovely cinquefoil allegory of Saint Agnes.
Stephen strode up the aisle, his pale eyes blank and cold. “That one’s to be removed at once.”
“But it’s the prettiest of all.”
“I want it gone.” H
is voice was low, resonating with anger.
“It’s too high up to reach,” she protested.
Without sparing her another glance, he picked up a large chunk of limestone and held it over his head with both hands.
“Stephen, no—”
The stone smashed through the window, wrenching the frame. Glass and lead and bits of mortar exploded outward in a shower of ruby and sapphire, emerald and topaz.
The shattering sound echoed and died, and the ensuing silence was deep and ominous, punctuated only by the heavy rasp of Stephen’s breathing.
He seemed so remote standing there, his eyes glazed with chilling hate and his big hands flexing and fisting as if he wished to wring someone’s neck.
“Oh, Stephen,” Juliana whispered.
Her voice seemed to snap the cord of his patience. A foul oath burst from him and he turned on his heel, stalking out of the church. She heard him bellow for his horse, and she knew he was lost to her, gone on another of his frequent, unexplained journeys to a place she could not follow.
She felt shaken as she looked at William Stumpe. “Why?” she asked simply. “Do you know?”
He caught his breath, then let it out loudly. “The window was a gift to his lordship’s first wife.”
“A gift? Then why would he destroy it?”
“Because it was given to the lady Margaret by the king.”
A chill licked at her spine. “I see. I think I see.” She had always known Stephen and King Henry hated each other. Now she knew why.
They had been rivals for Lady Margaret’s heart.
One week later, uneasy villagers and wary gypsies stood at opposite sides of the greensward in front of the old abbey of Malmesbury. From the church porch, Juliana surveyed the people gathered for the celebration and wished Stephen would arrive. The sun had sunk to a single gold sliver on the horizon. What on earth was keeping him?
William Stumpe, who had responded to her idea first with slack-jawed disbelief and finally enthusiastic determination, sat in his wheeled cart beside her, uneasily cracking his knuckles.
“Think the bonfire be high enough, my lady?” he asked. The pile of wood and rubbish looked to be twice a man’s height. The acrid scent of pine tar wafted from the heap, and on either side, tall torches awaited to spark the fire.
Juliana nodded absently. She looked to her left at the gypsies, who, for five years, had been her family. They had taught her woodcraft, storytelling and dancing, and the wisdom of their ancient way of life. In time, they had taught her to laugh again.
To her right stood the tenants and villagers, sturdy and forthright as the land they tilled, the prayers they said, and the vows they made. Since arriving at Lynacre, she had come to know them, had seen their children grow, had watched them marry their young and bury their dead.
And she realized, in the fever pitch of activity during which she had worked on turning the abandoned abbey into a weaving house, she often forgot about her vow.
Muscovy seemed like a fantastic dream shrouded in silvery cobwebs, viewed through a distant frost. Lynacre was real and immediate.
“Oh, Will,” she said, feeling the weight of the silent suspicion emanating from both factions. “Now that the work is done, they are strangers again. Even after laboring side by side, they do not trust each other.”
“Nay,” he said, thumping his fist on the arm of his cart, “they simply don’t know each other. Say a few words in a toast, my lady. They’ll come around.”
With a tremulous smile, she turned and directed a nod at Kit, who waited at a trestle table set up on the lawn. He poured a cup of ale and brought it to her. His eyes shone at her for a moment, then strayed down to Catriona, the gypsy girl, who looked boldly back.
Juliana wished Stephen would arrive, but since the matter of the window he had been absent even more often than usual.
With sudden, bitter resolve, she decided not to wait. She lifted the cup of ale and said, “Let this drink celebrate the work we have all done. May the blessings of wisdom and courage be shared by all, and may God be with us.”
The brewer thumped his wooden mug on the head of his barrel and then, unsmiling and hesitant, he raised his cup.
Laszlo responded to Juliana’s pleading look by clapping together the heels of his boots and lifting his own tin mug. Smiles appeared on faces one after the other, like the first stars of evening winking on.
Kit and Catriona each took down a torch and touched the flaming heads to the base of the bonfire. The tar-soaked wood caught with an airy roar. The sun-yellow flames rolled up to the sky, painting the twilight in deep, rich gold.
Lyle, Stephen’s chief musician, blew a fanfare on his trumpet. Not to be outdone, Troka, the gypsy piper, echoed the melody with his reed pipe. Then both Rom and Gajo joined in, creating a wildly spontaneous cacophony of pipes, drums, trumpets and gitterns.
Feet began to tap out the irresistible rhythm. Sima, the little gypsy girl, stepped boldly across the greensward and twirled elaborately in front of Tam, the lad who had stolen the nest from the bell tower. He caught both her hands and together, laughing, they danced down the length of the greensward.
Both of the bells in the tower began to ring, the deep brassy sound reverberating across the land. Stephen had designed special wheels for the bells so that the tolling went on unceasingly, underscoring the sound of music and laughter.
“I thought this project would be impossible,” said William Stumpe. “And you made it happen, my lady.”
She swallowed past an unexpected heat in her throat. “No. They all made it happen, Will—”
With a hearty laugh and a swift, powerful motion, he tugged her onto his lap and aimed his chair down the ramp constructed especially for him. Juliana shrieked and clung to his neck as William Stumpe, once declared useless by small-minded men, led her in a most singular dance of glad triumph.
“Do you see what I see?” Algernon Basset asked his companions.
Jonathan Youngblood rubbed his eyes as if to make certain he was awake. His jaw dropped as he gazed at the roaring bonfire with flames and sparks climbing high into the night, the wheeling dancers caught up in a storm of motion, the milling crowd drunk on ale and good cheer.
Stephen alone showed no surprise. He was growing accustomed to the changes his wife brought about in all that she touched. Juliana had worked her magic once again. Had turned an abandoned abbey into a place where men and women could prosper, had drawn villager and gypsy together with a unity of purpose that had seemed impossible to everyone else.
“Stephen,” Jonathan said as they rode closer to the abbey, “your wife is a wonder.”
Stephen gave a snort of derision even as his gaze caught and clung to Juliana. “My wonder of a wife has been moonstruck.” He tried to ignore the feeling that jolted through him at the sight of her. Tried to swallow the thickness in his throat and still the clamor in his heart.
He could not. God help him, he could not.
She was like a summer rose brought to full flower by the heat and light of the sun. She sat in Stumpe’s lap, one arm hooked behind his neck, her feet in the air and her bare ankles and legs shamelessly displayed.
While Stumpe wheeled himself about to the quick pace of the dance tune, Juliana threw back her head, hair streaming down, her full-throated laughter riding the night wind.
“God, she is lovely,” said Algernon, sending Stephen a sidelong glance. “Though I suppose you consider such hurdy-gurdy beneath the dignity of a baroness.”
“To Juliana, it matters not at all what I consider.”
Jonathan chuckled. “Too much woman for you, Wimberleigh?” With a deep belly laugh, he spurred his horse. He and Algernon galloped into the midst of the revelry.
Stephen sat for a moment absorbing the sting of Jonathan’s words. The full moon showed its mottled face in a purple sky pierced by stars. It was the sweetest of nights—bright and clear, the air cool yet tinged at its very edges with the latent warmth of summer.
&n
bsp; Too much woman for you?
The words pounded at the wall of reserve Stephen had built around himself, his sole defense against his strange and captivating wife.
Even as he told himself he should go back to his hall and get quietly drunk in the dark, he felt his blood stir, felt a devil of knavery leap to life inside him.
Ten
Stephen’s heels dug into Capria’s velvety sides. The mare surged forward, thundering across the field to the abbey. Pavlo barked madly, and Juliana left William Stumpe and walked to the edge of the firelit greensward. Despite the pumping motion of the galloping horse, Stephen could see her with remarkable clarity.
Though clad in simple, workaday homespun, his wife made an elegant figure—slim and strong, lit from behind by the bonfire, with loose tendrils of her hair lifting on the breeze.
He slid his horse to a stop in front of her. For a moment, words failed him. Then he uttered the first inanity that occurred to him. “Isn’t the fire a bit grand, Baroness?”
She tossed her head and planted her hands on her hips. “ ’Tis said a bonfire keeps away dragons.”
He slapped the reins on his palm. “Idle nonsense.”
“Do you see any dragons about, my lord?”
“No. Of course not.”
“See?” Laughter danced in her eyes. “It works.”
A man could only endure so much. There she stood, laughing up at him. He felt drawn into the glittering depths of her eyes, spellbound by her subtle enchantment.
As if in a dream, he watched her gesture with her hand and call out a command. A Romany lad brought forth one of the gypsy horses. The animal’s muscular flanks gleamed bloodred in the firelight. Her nimble bare foot found a stirrup, and in a flutter of layered skirts she landed high astride the horse’s back. She leaned across to Stephen and whispered, “Ride with me tonight. I want to go very fast and very far.”
Ride with me.
She used no spurs. The jab of her naked heels and the low, guttural command in an alien tongue were all the encouragement the stallion needed.
