“How long has it been so?” Lady Alicia asked Gaston as Pip took her cloak and gloves.
Gaston replied with a crooked grin. “For my lady, I think it has been close to four hours. For your son here, it seems much longer.”
“Eternity,” Guy moaned.
“Pull yourself together, Guy. Babies are born every day.”
Lady Alicia dropped a kiss on the top of his head as she swept toward the stairs. “Thomas,” she called to her husband over her shoulder, “do something with him.”
Guy stared at his father. “Was it thus with Mother when she had us?”
Thomas stretched out his hands to the blaze. “How should I know? I was a-hawking when you were born, and hunting the stag when Brandon came.”
Guy’s jaw dropped. He bit back the disrespectful words to his father that bubbled to his lips. His parents were a most loving couple. How could his father have abandoned his wife so cruelly?
Sir Thomas smiled at his son. “Hunting was invented for fathers-to-be, I think. You did not plan this babe well, son. Night is a terrible time to go thrashing about in the woods. You should have done it like me—labor pains at dawn, and ’twas off with the hounds an hour later. By the time I got back with a buck—and an eighteen-pointer, I confess—Brandon was all cleaned up and howling for his supper. And speak of the devil...” Thomas turned as his eldest son staggered into the hall under the weight of a keg.
“Greetings, little brother!” With a great heave, Brandon placed his burden on the floor. “I see I’ve come in good time with medicine for you.” He winked at Gaston and his father.
“Medicine for me?” Guy repeated dully. Had Brandon gone horn-mad, as well? Was he, Guy, the only sane man among the lot of them? Just then, another one of Celeste’s cries pierced the air. Guy winced.
“’Tis killing her,” he groaned.
“Nay.” Brandon pulled the bung from the keg and poured a stream of amber liquid into Guy’s empty wine cup. “But methinks ’twill kill you. Here, drink this.”
“I’ve had wine enough,” Guy muttered.
“Wine? Wine is for children. This is a man’s drink—whiskey, straight from a goodly shop in Edinburgh. I’ve had it laid by since August, just for this occasion.” Brandon grinned at his own foresight. “Father? Gaston?” He offered to fill their cups.
“Just the thing—if you can’t go hunting,” replied Sir Thomas. Gaston shook his head and mumbled a number of foul things in his best gutter French. Celeste cried out again. The four men shuddered as one.
“There’s no sound quite like it, is there?” Brandon remarked in the silence that followed.
“By Saint Luke, if Celeste lives through this, I swear it will never happen again.” Guy balled up his hands into fists and drove them into his eyes, as if that action could blot out the unearthly, horrific sounds from above. “I will never let her bear another child.”
“Oh, truly?” Brandon poured his brother another drink. “And do you plan to renew your vow of chastity? Forgive me, little brother, but methinks you are moonstruck. I have seen the look in your eye when Celeste smiles at you. You have about as much control as a bantam rooster in a well-stocked henyard, and—”
Before Brandon could continue his observations, Guy leapt at him, hurling them both to the floor. They rolled about on the flagstones, trading blows. Sir Thomas looked on his sons with fond amusement.
“Always thought a little exercise was good at a time like this,” he remarked to Gaston. “If you can’t go a-hunting, that is.”
Night waned, and the new day broke with a rare show of crystal blue sky. Only Guy remained awake, every cry of Celeste’s ripping him apart. The whiskey had only made him chilled, not numb. Brandon, sporting a split lip, slept on the floor in front of the low-burning fire. Gaston and Sir Thomas snored in company on the settle.
Like a terrier sniffing the wind, Guy lifted his head and listened. Nothing but silence. She’s dead! He dropped his head into the crook of his elbow. Tears stung his eyelids. He cried as he had not done since he was ten.
“You are a grand sight.” Lady Alicia’s voice chided him through the haze of his grief. “Drunk and blubbering.” Guy looked up at his mother, waiting for the final blow—her confirmation of what he knew was the truth. Instead, she smiled at him.
“What is your poor little daughter to think, if the first sight of her father is a red-eyed, unshaven giant—with a black eye, no less? How now, Guy?”
Only the word daughter penetrated Guy’s consciousness. He moistened his dry lips. “What say you, Mother?” he croaked.
Lady Alicia stroked his hair, as she had done all the years he could remember, when he was in need of comfort. “I say you have sired a fine baby girl this new day,” his mother crooned. “Forsooth, she’s the first dark-haired Cavendish, and—”
“And Lissa?” Guy could barely whisper her name. Sweet angels, be kind.
“Safe, but tired, as well she should be.”
With a war cry last heard some five years ago, Guy leapt up, grabbed his mother with him and twirled her about the hall, waking dogs, servants and, finally, her husband.
“Unhand my wife, you rascal!” Laughing, Sir Thomas joined in their mad capering. “I take it we have a Cavendish heir?”
“Girl,” Guy blurted out as he kissed each parent in turn. Then he bolted for the stairs, giving Brandon a brotherly kick en route.
“She needs to sleep,” his mother cautioned him as he took the stairs two at a time.
Inside the stifling chamber, Celeste greeted him with a wan smile.
“Have you seen our daughter?” she asked softly, gazing up at him with those huge purple eyes he loved so well.
“Nay,” he murmured, kissing her again and again, each kiss not half enough to slake his thirst for more. “I can only concentrate upon one lady at a time. How fare you, sweetest Lissa?”
Celeste sighed with contentment. “Most marvelously sleepy, and very happy.”
“My lord.” Mistress Conroy nudged him. “Will ye look upon your child?” She held out a small, tightly wrapped bundle to him.
Guy looked from the housekeeper to his smiling wife. “In there?” he asked, pulling back the edge of the swaddling blanket. His new daughter regarded her father with solemn eyes that hinted at a lavender color. A halo of fine black silk crowned her head. Without a doubt, the youngest Cavendish was the the prettiest, tiniest creature he had ever seen.
“Ye won’t break her, my lord.” Mistress Conroy smiled widely, showing a loss of several teeth. “Just hold her head thus.”
Without quite knowing how, Guy found himself cradling his child.
“You’re not disappointed, I hope?” Celeste asked, watching him closely.
Guy glanced at his wife. His poor sweetheart must still suffer some of the madness from her pain. “Disappointed? Nay! She’s a beautiful miniature of her mother.”
“Aye, an’ healthy too,” Mistress Conroy put in. “Has all her fingers and toes. I counted.”
“We’ll have a boy next year.” Celeste yawned.
Guy trembled at the thought. He couldn’t put her through that hell again. He knew for certain, he couldn’t go through it again. “One girl is enough. No more, my darling.”
Celeste’s eyes grew larger, then sparked with a glimmer of fire. “Then you are displeased with me, oui? You don’t want any more of my children, oui? Who blackened your eye, eh? I must reward him well. Perhaps I will blacken the other.”
Mistress Conroy rescued the baby when Guy almost dropped her. She tactfully withdrew, for which privacy he thanked assorted saints. The whiskey began to take its delayed effect. He could tell he was due for a monstrous hangover.
“Not so, my sweet. ’Tis only that I cannot bear to be the cause of such pain for you.” He knelt beside her and slipped one hand under her, gently drawing her closer to him. “I love you too much to lose you. I think I died a thousand times this night.” He buried his face in her damp hair.
Celest
e said nothing, but stroked the back of his neck in the way she knew would send shivers of pleasure down his spine. “You let me be the judge of what I can bear and not bear,” she murmured in his ear. “I say next year a son. Tonia will need a playmate soon.”
“Tonia?” Guy looked at her and tried to focus his whiskey-soaked brains. What sort of a name was that? “You want to call her Tonia?”
“Oui,” Celeste purred, still stroking his neck. “For short, of course.”
“Short for what?”
Celeste ran her pink tongue across her lips, a sign Guy had come to recognize when his wife was up to something. “Tonia is short for someone who has never had a child and who craves to be a godfather. One who is very dear to me—Gaston. But Gaston is a boy’s name, so she must be Gastonia, oui?”
Guy answered her beguiling smile with a broad one of his own. “You have just doomed that poor man, my sweet. He will be as wet clay in her little hands—and she’s not yet a day old. Aye, Tonia it is.”
Celeste pulled his face closer to hers. “And do you know what you are for suggesting we have no more children, my archangel?”
Guy brushed his lips across hers and chuckled when she sputtered at the bristles on his chin. “Nay, my heart, what am I?”
“You are the most peench-’potted raw-beet sucker I have ever met,” she pronounced, drawing him into a deeper kiss. Guy had neither the breath nor the desire to debate the matter.
ISBN : 978-1-4592-7552-2
SILENT KNIGHT
Copyright © 1996 by Mary W. Schaller
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