“Then your father was a romantic.”
He said nothing. The silence hardened between them, not a good, comfortable sort of silence, but one that was fraught with dark undercurrents. What sort of undercurrents, she had no clue. She said quickly, “Thank you for coming to my rescue so quickly. You were here in a veritable instant.”
“You’re welcome. Come back to bed.”
He helped her climb onto the dais, then into bed. He pulled the covers to her chin, then tucked them securely around her shoulders, as if he were her father or an uncle, or someone who looked at her as one would a child. It was both galling and comforting.
“You know, Caroline, I will see that Mr. Ffalkes doesn’t do foul things to your fair person.”
“That’s nice of you, North, but I really can see to myself. I did before and I will again.”
“That’s fine,” he said mildly. “But don’t think I’m going to walk away from you. I will continue to keep an eye out for him. He will come, you know.”
A thick tendril of hair had fallen over her forehead and he smoothed it back. He lightly cupped her cheek in his palm, then smiled down at her. He then smoothed her eyebrows with his fingertips. It was soothing, it moved something deep inside her. Suddenly, without warning, she burst into tears.
North froze over her, feeling more helpless than he ever had in his life. He sat beside her, fidgeting a moment, then pulled her up against his chest. “It’s all right,” he said against her hair, rocking her back and forth against him. “It’s going to be fine, I promise you. I didn’t mean to frighten you with the talk of Ffalkes.”
“No, no, it’s not him,” she said, her voice low and liquid with tears. “He’s a worm, nothing more. I’ll kill him if I have to. I’m sorry. It’s when you pulled the covers up—the way you did it—it was like my mother did it. And you pushed back my hair and patted my cheek and smoothed my eyebrows. So very long ago. When I was a little girl. So long ago.” She cried harder and he just held her now, feeling the loneliness in her, and now there was more pain and tragedy she had to face. Again, she pulled back, sniffed, and said, “Forgive me for wetting you down. So silly of me. I don’t cry, really, not at all, because it’s a vast waste of time.”
“Don’t be a fool, Caroline. Tears cleanse the mind and the body and make us see the sense of things. Life is chaos, you know. It’s only right that we cry now and then. It brings things back into proper perspective.”
She was silent. Then she said on a sigh, “You’re right. There doesn’t seem to be any way to halt memories when they hit you just right. They simply overwhelm you. But still, I thank you, North.”
“Are you all right now?”
“Quite all right, thank you.”
This time he didn’t pull the covers back up, just left them at her waist when he laid her back down again. He did, however, lightly pat her cheek; why, he didn’t know.
After he had left her, closing the door quietly behind him, Caroline rose and removed her gown. It was hopelessly wrinkled and she didn?
?t have another one. She smoothed it the best she could and laid it over the back of a chair. She lay down again on her back, her arms crossed under her head. She felt tears stinging her eyes and closed them tightly. Just the way he’d tucked those covers just under her chin, it had broken her, brought back her mother, whose face she couldn’t begin to picture anymore in her mind. And those memories didn’t really matter, not in the face of Aunt Ellie’s murder. Who could have killed her? Nothing seemed to make any sense anymore, particularly when she was lying in bed in the house of a gentleman she’d met barely a week before.
What was she going to do?
She knew she looked a fright, but at least she was fairly clean. She’d awakened to find a bowl of still-warm water on the round commode table. She’d stripped off her underclothes and scrubbed herself. Four days without a proper bath was too many. She wished the phantom servant who’d brought the bowl had brought instead a regular tub for her to bathe in. However, after the greeting she’d been given the previous night, she supposed a bowl of warm water was quite a concession all in all.
She walked slowly down the grand staircase, wide enough for at least three ladies dressed in full regalia to walk side by side. There was an immense chandelier that hung from the floor above down two floors to come to a stop some twelve feet above the entrance hall. It looked to have quite a lot of gold in its ornately curved holders that were not only sparkling clean but held candles that gleamed so brightly they looked as if they’d even been polished.
She stopped a moment on the staircase, looking around her. It was a magnificent old house. No, rather she supposed, it was more of a castle that had been reshaped in the direction of a huge manor house over the centuries. But it was still a castle with a castle’s grandeur. Its cavernous entrance hall, which must have been built many centuries before the great hall, was long and narrow, but narrow only in the sense that it wasn’t as wide as an average manor house. She’d never seen its like before. She felt something quite odd as she gazed about her, a sort of recognition, a sort of wistful longing, which surely couldn’t be right. She shook her head, but the feeling didn’t go away as she continued looking around her.
The walls of the vast entranceway below were very nearly covered with portraits of men—no women, just men—and they seemed to stretch back well into the sixteenth century. She looked more closely. No, there were no women at all. How very odd.
Why weren’t there any paintings of women? Surely women had to have given birth to all of those men, and they were, she imagined, legitimate. Surely they had lived here at least part of the time. It was very strange.
“Good morning.”
Her host stood at the foot of the stairs dressed in buckskins, beautifully polished Hessians, and a white lawn shirt open at the neck and covered with a pale brown coat. For the first time she looked at him as a man and he looked quite lovely. His dark hair was long, too long for fashion, but on him, here in the wilds of Cornwall, master of a huge edifice that would be a castle until time itself came to its end, it looked just right. It surprised her to realize that he was quite handsome. It was also disconcerting. She saw him suddenly holding her while she’d cried—both times, like a blubbering ninny—then she saw him leaning over her, tucking her into bed.
“Er, hello,” she said.
“Did you bathe your foot?”
“My foot? I bathed all of me, though there was but a small basin of water. Not that I’m complaining, North, it was really quite thoughtful. Was it Timmy the maid who brought me the water?”
He waved away her question. “Your stocking is torn and your foot is abraded, obviously from rubbing against your boot for many days. Did you bathe it? How bad is it?”
“Oh. It does hurt a bit. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. You see, I had to leave my valise in Dorchester. What I’m wearing is all I have, torn stocking and all.”