Linda Needham

by The Wedding Night

  Anna scooted out of bed. “Lord Jack went to Canada without us? Without you, Mairey?”

  “He wants us to live in the country while he’s gone. You remember our old village—the one we used to visit sometimes when Papa was alive. We’re going to wait for him there.”

  “He’ll come and get us?”

  Oh, how this wicked knot had tangled their lives!

  “Of course, he will. Come now, sweet. Dress in these.” She helped Anna into a pair of knickers and a shirt that were miles too big but would serve as a disguise. Jack wouldn’t be looking for three little boys and a young man in a stableman’s hat; he’d be tearing up the world for his wife and his child, for three little girls whom he loved. He’d said it plainly enough: that he’d lost one family to his carelessness; that he wasn’t going to lose another. Because he loved too deeply, and without end.

  “Should we wake Aunt Tattie now, Mairey? She takes hours to dress.”

  “No, Anna.” She couldn’t risk Tattie’s questions. She wasn’t a Faelyn; had never heard of the village that was tucked away beneath the Willowmoon glade. Tattie would never accept Mairey’s story of Jack’s drowning at sea. She would return to him at Drakestone, very much alive and seething in his anguish, and he would descend on Mairey and her village with all the devices of hell.

  Her heart broken to bits, Mairey fumbled with the buttons on Anna’s coat and sniffed back tears that clung to the insides of her chest. “Auntie’s staying here at Drakestone to look after the lodge while we’re gone.” Jack would surely take care of her; he’d need her support, her devotion.

  “For a whole week?”

  “Maybe a little longer.” How long was a lifetime? And how long could a heart grieve? Mairey wound Anna’s hair into a knot, then settled a woollen cap onto her head.

  They roused Caro, who had great fun dressing up in lad’s short pants and coat, charged with adventure and caught up in the whispering.

  Poppy slept on, completely unaware, as Mairey dressed her and carried her past Aunt Tattie’s dear snoring and down the stairs. They took little with them, just enough for a long day’s ride on the train. They would make the village by sundown and begin a new life, but a far lesser one, without Jack.

  Mairey and her three little loves left Drakestone through the quiet woods, following the deer trails and leaving new, trackless ones as they went, Jack’s child and the Willowmoon hidden close against Mairey’s heart.

  I’ll love you always, my valiant dragon. My Jack.

  “Mairey!”

  Jack woke in a blind, groping panic, a biting fear gnawing in his gut and his heart trying to tear out of his chest.

  He was in his room, their room, in their marriage bed. But something was vastly wrong.

  Mairey was gone. Her scent, her clothes. He slid his hands over the mattress and into the hollow of her pillow, but even before he’d felt the chill of long-empty sheets he knew that she had left him hours ago.

  For the lodge, surely. Out of habit—to check on her sisters. They rose before the sun to do their mischief. Jack’s pulse settled as he counted up the reasons why Mairey would have slipped out of bed.

  To study the Willowmoon was the very first—the most probable. She had seemed so unaffected by it last night. He’d presented her father’s legacy to her on a platter, and all she could do was to stare at it as though it bored her. A testament to the intensity of their lovemaking, he supposed, to the newness of their marriage—and the child.

  He looked around for the disk, but it was gone from where it had fallen the night before.

  That was the answer, then. She’d awakened with the birds and was now in the library, hard at work deciphering the bewildering tracings—her wedding gift to him, an equal exchange.

  Such diligence. He nearly laughed at her timing. He pulled on trousers and a shirt and then left the bedroom for the library mezzanine, intending to entice her back into their bed. He would lock the door this time and never let her go.

  “Mairey! Have you unraveled it yet? Have you found me my silver mine?”

  But there was no answer as he descended the spiral of stairs to the main floor, not even an echo of his own voice. The library looked just as it had for the past few months: a harmonious blend of stuffy mining baron and eccentric antiquarian.

  But Mairey wasn’t there, nor was she in his office. Sumner hadn’t seen her, and neither had cook. He set off toward the lodge, trying to balance his growing anger at having to chase her down again with the baseless panic, the paralyzing fear that had settled in his bones when he’d found her missing from his bed.

  He arrived at the lodge to find the door standing forlornly open and Tattie flying down the stairs in her night-robe and curl rags.

  “Tattie, have you seen—”

  “Your lordship, my little ducks are gone!”

  Jack’s heart stopped. “What do you mean, gone?” He raged up the stairs and went from room to room, Tattie on his heels, but found only empty beds and a terrifying loneliness.

  “We have to tell Mairey, sir! She’ll know what to do.”

  Jack caught the woman’s arm. “You mean she isn’t here? You haven’t seen her?”

  “Not since you took her off to your honeymoon last night.”

  “Christ!” Jack tore apart Mairey’s bedroom and the library looking for clues, then roused the household to search the grounds and the woods.

  It wasn’t until midafternoon that he put all the pieces together. They glittered and danced before his eyes, blinding him with their dazzling clarity.

  Silver. It had been the treasure all along. A brilliant hoax, concocted by him, but executed to the finest detail by the very talented Mairey Faelyn.

  Tales of fairies and giants and dragons. Enigmatic riddles. Kings and loyal queens and caravans of jewels.

  All for his benefit. Whatever it took, she had been ready for him. Costumed in scholarly innocence, bountiful with her false love and her practiced tears. She even dangled her little family in front of him—his family, too—long enough to distract him from her artifice.

  And he had believed every part of her tale—because she had made him love her.

  But she would get nowhere with her dreams of silver. Let her study her Celtic map and sell its secrets to the highest bidder. He would know the moment that ground was broken on a new mine.

  And she would soon discover that she had stolen one treasure too many.

  She had stolen his child.

  “I’ve never seen so many trees, Mairey!” Caro threw great handfuls of willow and maple leaves into the air and let them rain down on her head.

  “I thought you’d like it here, Caro.”

  Once upon a time, the glade of the Willowmoon had been Mairey’s favorite place in all the world, with its seasons of high color and brilliant drama as the silver-trunked willows’ leaves turned from fresh green to gold.

  But now her peace felt like a gray-walled prison with too much sky. Though her sisters frolicked and the sun shone down on the cusp of summer and fall, these three days away from Jack had been bleaker than she could bear.

  What a terrible price she had exacted from the man she loved. Dear God, the mess she’d made of his life and hers. She’d left not a note nor a hint of where they had gone. He was a good man and would only suspect betrayal at the very end, denying it in his heart as he employed every resource to track her down. She was exhausted, weary from running, her energy sapped by the baby’s need to make her sleep all the time and by the grief that overtook her constantly.

  “When is Lord Jack coming to get us, Mairey?”

  Sweet, Poppy, you’ll have to settle for a less dizzying height than our Jack’s broad shoulders.

  “I don’t know, Poppy.” Oh, what an unblinking liar she had become.

  “I want him to come home today.” Poppy’s lower lip stuck out wretchedly as she ambled from tree to tree, giving each of them a hug, as though she thought her Lord Jack might feel her embrace from across the phantom
sea.

  “I’d like that more than anything.” Here was a fairy tale that needed telling: the dragon come to rescue his princess from the malevolent treasure she was guarding. The world gone topsy-turvy and magically right.

  “Will he come by Christmas, do you think, Mairey?” Anna had found one of their grandmother’s flower presses in the attic of the old house and was collecting an assortment of leaves to start a specimen book.

  “It’s a very long way to Canada,” Mairey said, sitting down on a low outcropping of shale, “and an even longer way across the country.”

  She would have to tell the girls some day that he wasn’t coming for them—fabricate some agonizing tale about a shipwreck and their beloved Lord Jack drowning at sea. What a horrible day that would be! Killing Jack to make them forget him, so they wouldn’t go looking for him one day. Wicked lies and tender hearts.

  She had buried the Willowmoon Knot the morning before; had come here to the glade and found a perfect and lasting place to hide it. She had prayed for her father and mother and given thanks for all the Faelyns who had gone before, who had sacrificed so much. It was over now, and her village was spared the fate of a crushing mine works.

  There was no turning back on this promise—no returning to her husband to beg forgiveness. She would find her joy and contentment in raising Jack’s child, and live out her days in the peace of the village, where she could watch her sisters grow to womanhood and then leave her to seek the wide world.

  “What are you doing, Poppy?”

  Her sister was spinning like a top, her arms outstretched and her chin lifted to the sun. “I’m wishing for Lord Jack to come home from the sea.”

  “Wish him home for me, Poppy.”

  I love you, Jack.

  The girls began throwing handfuls of leaves at each other and then turned the barrage on Mairey, until everyone was squealing and laughing and falling all over each other.

  “Not fair! Three against one!” Well, two, Mairey thought, touching her hand to her belly.

  I’ll take care of your child, Jack. He’ll know what a fine man his father was. No better man in the world.

  Mairey scooped up a skirtful of leafy ammunition, ready to toss it at her sisters, but they had stopped, frozen in their battle stances and staring at something in the woods behind Mairey.

  Something wonderful, by the looks of wide-eyed awe on their little faces. A heron perhaps, pausing in the treetops.

  “Lord Jack! Mairey, it’s him!”

  “Jack!” He’d found her, here in the glade! A sob of relief and joy and absolute terror wrenched from her chest; made her turn and stare, and gather her sisters close. He was her world, her life, and he’d come to destroy her.

  He was framed in the gray trunks of the willows, huge in his fury, silent and flinty as the winter, capable of tearing the trees from the ground with his bare hands. The sharpness of the sun pierced the canopy and dappled his shoulders and his greatcoat in emeralds, turned his black hair to ebony. His eyes gleamed with demon fire, possessive and hot, and made her heart yearn for him.

  The willows shook as he started toward them, a hunger in his gait, a bloodlust. Mairey tried to hold the girls back, clutched at arms and hands, but they wouldn’t be held as Jack approached.

  “Take us home, Lord Jack!”

  “Don’t ever go away again!”

  She watched them stumble over each other in their headlong dash to meet him. He lifted them into his arms as he walked, took their kisses and their hugs, and returned them fiercely, but all the while he was looking at Mairey, the glint of obsidian in his gaze.

  “See, Mairey!” Poppy laid her cheek next to his and squeezed him in delight. “Lord Jack came back when I wished him! I told you he would.”

  You wished too hard, Poppy. He hadn’t come for them, but for his bloody silver. She had stolen his treasure, and dragons didn’t like that. He was danger and delight. The end and the beginning of her happiness. The father of her child, a man whose duty to family ran as deeply as hers.

  She had long ago lost her fear of looking into his eyes; she had found so much splendor there. But now they were searing black and his gaze as unrelenting as his long strides that brought him deeper into the glade. She backed up a few steps, seeking a place to take her stand against him, where she could better gather her sisters behind her—once she’d disentangled them from him.

  “Did you go to Canada already, Lord Jack?” Caro was rifling his pockets as she hurried to keep up with him. “Did you see a bear?”

  “You didn’t go, did you, Lord Jack?” Anna had captured one of his hands and looked up at him with her heart in her eyes, a lamb taking comfort in the arms of a lion. “It takes more than three days to sail to Canada and back, doesn’t it?”

  He stopped two yards from her, a seething dragon come to feast upon her heart. Little hands had rumpled him, from his dark hair, to the smudge of dirt on his waistcoat, to the leaves in his trouser cuffs.

  “Is that what you told them, Mairey?” His voice came from somewhere distant, filled with bitterness. “That I had sailed to Canada?”

  “Jack, I—”

  “Kiss him, Mairey!” Caro was behind Mairey, shoving her closer. “We already did!”

  He was waiting for her answer, his chest rising and falling in his unleashed wrath. Nothing she could say would mitigate the situation between them. He would have his silver now, and she would do her best to thwart him in his ravaging. A great storm was brewing here in the glade; she couldn’t allow the girls to suffer its fury.

  She gathered Anna away from Jack. “Anna, sweetheart. Would you take Caro and Poppy to the house and help Mrs. Russell with lunch?”

  “Oh, yes! Can we have a picnic?”

  What a fitting tribute before Jack could turn the beauty of the glade into a slag heap. “Of course you may. But later, Anna.”

  “Oh, goodeeeee!” Poppy scrambled out of Jack’s arms and ran after her sisters, their skirts and their laughter flying out behind them, kicking up a flurry of leaves.

  Mairey’s stomach churned as she watched them run down the path that led through the woods and across the wheat-golden fields beyond, past the winding glint of the Stoney to the slate-roofed cottages of her village.

  How long would it take Jack to befoul it as he had Glad Heath? The unstoppable mining magnate—he owned the world; why not her village? Resentment flared and sizzled down her spine and she swung around to glare at him.

  “How did you find me, Jack?”

  “Madam, if you believe that I wouldn’t track you to the ends of the earth, then you misunderstand your worth to me.”

  “My weight in silver? How flattering.”

  “Damn you, Mairey! I want the Willowmoon Knot.”

  It was such a devastating echo of a long-ago time—before he’d stolen her heart; before she’d stolen his, and his baby and all his dreams.

  “What does it matter now?” Shamed to her soul that she had failed both her father and her husband with the same duplicity, Mairey took two steps backward but met a fat maple tree and had to look up at him. “You already have it all.”

  “All?” His eyes glittered with molten fury, were red-rimmed and haggard. And still he was her coiling dragon, sinuous and unbridled, advancing on her, no sense of propriety to keep him from pressing his hardness against her belly, his mouth against her temple and then the hollow of her neck—an intimacy she craved and met, a richly scented memory that swept her along with the beating of his heart.

  “Whom did you sell the Knot to, madam? Tell me, damn you!”

  It was the silver he wanted. What did he need with the map when he was standing on top of his bloody treasure?

  “I didn’t sell the Knot, Jack.”

  “It’s mine, Mairey. You’re mine. My faithless wife.” He cradled her head with the greatest of care, though his anger shook him. “Whatever is yours belongs to me. Your books, your collections, and the goddamned Willowmoon Knot.”

  “Jack, pl
ease!”

  “You remember the Knot, Mairey: I found it and gave it to you on our wedding night.” His mouth came down roughly on hers, made salty by his grief, filling his throat with a desolated moan that made her weep. “You took that from me too, Mairey. All my love, my trust. So I’ll have the bloody map from you—as I will have the mine and all its silver when I find it.”

  When he finds it? Mairey’s heart battered at her chest, her thoughts flying backward through the last few minutes. That meant he didn’t know that they were standing right on top of his damnable mine! If he would only give her a clear moment to think, maybe she could lead him away from it.

  Oh, love, we have a chance!

  “How did you find me, Jack?”

  Jack had wanted nothing more than to hate her, had determined to shut her out of his heart as easily as she’d shut him out of hers. He had expected to follow her glittering path to the Savoy, and from there to the fashionable salons of Paris, to a woman ablaze with diamonds and laughing at her success, at him. The antiquarian who had bested the mining baron at his own game.

  But he’d found his Mairey standing in a sylvan glade, magnificent in her simplicity, her eyes bright with a pain that echoed like thunder in his heart. She had leaves clinging to her hair, harrowing tears pooling in her eyes.

  “You taught me too well, wife. I followed a trail of births, marriages, and deaths. Your father is buried in the churchyard below us, in the parish of Lynne, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Your mother is here, too.”

  She pushed lightly against his chest. “Please, Jack—”

  “And who couldn’t follow the trail of three little girls and an overly protective young woman, all of them dressed up as stable hands?” Sweet God, she smelled of the autumn, of smokey resins, spicy and vibrant, caught up in the curls at her temple. “It’s difficult to hide such gilded tresses as yours, my dear. They make men think of climbing impossibly tall towers, and slashing through forests of thorns to impress you with their great love for you. Well, I have such a love for you, Mairey.”

  She was sobbing, clutching her arms around her waist and shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Jack. You can’t know how much I love you. I didn’t want to hurt you.”