Sleep would not come. The thought of that invisible circle, closing in its unrelenting arc, spawned a sense of urgency that had made me increasingly restless. That same urgency had brought me now to this spot, outside the house, and I knew better than to question it.
Behind my back the poplar shivered as the clouds passed over the midday sun, and a faint breath of anticipation went rippling through the grass at my feet, and out across the wide fields.
This was the garden where the Green Lady stood. Not the dovecote garden that Iain had created among the rubble, but the original old kitchen garden, long grown over, where Mariana's ghost had lingered all those years. Until the moment of my birth. It was a fitting place, I thought, to finish things.
I squared my stance and clenched my fists, lifting my face toward the sun with my eyes tightly closed. The light breeze ruffled my hair while I waited, forcing all thoughts from my mind but one....
There was no dizziness this time, nor noise. Time flowed smoothly backward like a river to the sea, and drew me in its sure and golden wake.
'Mariana.'
I opened my eyes, and turned to face the lad who came now across the yard toward me. He was a tall youth, tall and square and solid, with bright fair hair and eyes as blue as the autumn sky.
I had searched often for his father in him, hoping to find some part of Richard still preserved, but he was not there. Which was as well for John, I reasoned. No one had ever called him less than Jabez Howard's rightful son, and no one ever would while I had breath to deny it.
'Cousin,' he called me, halting his approach a few yards distant. 'It is done. I have left the fastening loose—if you do change your mind, I can reverse it.'
I smiled at him, resolute. 'I shall not change my mind.'
'It seems a terrible waste," he said, with a shrug of his broad shoulders, 'but you must do as you will.'
My smile held steady as my gaze moved past him to the abandoned dovecote. The birds had gone just that morning, taken in sacks by the servants of Sir George Staynor, new lord of Crofton Hall and all its lands. Sir George was a retired military man, and had set upon his new estate with true campaign vigor, seeking to restore wealth to the noble manor that Arthur de Mornay had despoiled.
Declaring the old dovecote ill repaired and inconvenient, Sir George had ordered the construction of a new and larger pigeon house nearer the Hall, with a fish pond and warren close by, and had sent five men to relocate the birds. I was not sorry to witness their departure. When the last squab had been bundled off, I had sent John to nail the trapdoor closed.
Perhaps, I reasoned, the birds would not nest easily in the new dovecote. And if, in trying to return to their old nests, they found their entry barred, they might perhaps choose freedom as a better way. Perhaps. At any rate, I would not have them back again, imprisoned in my yard to wait for death. The trap would work no more.
There was only one occupant remaining in the dim and dusty nesting holes: a single key, and that placed there by my own hand. All else was silent, dead and empty.
John came across the grass to stand beside me, looking down into my face with a serious, critical eye. 'You did not sleep last night,' he said.
'I dreamed.'
'They were waking dreams, I think,' he accused me, gently. 'I heard you walk the floor. My mother had such dreams, when she did live, but then she was a nervous woman.'
'You make too great a fuss, John. 'Tis only the one night.'
'Ay. The same night every year. Perhaps one day I'll learn the reason for it.'
I smiled and touched his cheek. 'Perhaps. But not today.' Something fell jingling from my upraised wrist, and he caught it deftly in his hand.
'You ought to have this clasp replaced,' he told me, 'or else you'll lose this bracelet, and I cannot imagine you without it.'
I looked down at the timeworn birds of paradise that had ringed my wrist for sixteen years—John's entire lifetime—and smiled sadly. 'I cannot afford a new clasp.'
'Nonsense.' He closed his hand around the bracelet. 'I'll see to it myself, this afternoon. The goldsmith is a decent man, and will offer me good trade, I think. I would not see you lose a thing you treasure so.' My heart swelled with love unspoken. I yearned to tell him that, of the gifts Richard had given me, I treasured him above all ... but the words would not, could not, form themselves. 'You take good care of me, John,' I said.
'We take care of each other.'
They had been good years, I reflected, lean but peaceful, and filled with roses more than rain. The house that had once held me prisoner had come to be my home, its angry shadows gentled by the passing years. We were just the two of us, now. Caroline had lasted seven winters, but she had not the will to live for long, and her passing was as that of a shadow upon the wall, when the lamps are all extinguished.
Together John and I had worked the land and kept the house, and through it all I'd watched him grow to manhood.
The manor had not fared so well. Arthur de Mornay had plundered the house of all its riches, and let the rest fall into ruin while he diced and whored and played at cards. I had been glad to see him sell the Hall. But I was gladder still to know Navarre was not among the things he sold.
The great gray horse had languished after Richard's death. When I had returned to Exbury in the spring, after giving birth to John, I had chanced to see Navarre afield, and the change in the beast had shattered me. He had looked gaunt and close to death, his noble head bent low and listless, his great legs weighted to the ground.