North wondered what Owen had been doing in Goonbell, but now wasn’t the time to ask.
Even Bess Treath didn’t try to make Owen move away when Dr. Treath pulled up her nightgown and pressed on her child-swollen belly. Owen never even looked away from her face; he simply held her hand and whispered to her, telling her it would be all right, that she wasn’t to worry, that he was here.
North said to Caroline, “This is very interesting.”
“Yes,” she said. “I hadn’t realized. I pray she’ll be all right.”
Dr. Treath told Caroline and North some time later downstairs in the drawing room that he didn’t believe she would miscarry the babe, which was his biggest concern.
Bess Treath said, “I don’t know, Benjie. Perhaps it would be better for her. She’s only a child herself and whatever will happen to her?”
Caroline smiled even though she wondered what kind of person Bess Treath thought she was. “Alice will be just fine, Miss Treath. Surely you never thought that my aunt Eleanor or I would turn her out after she birthed the babe? No, there will be no problem. Tell me what to do, Dr. Treath.”
Alice was asleep within moments of drinking the draught Dr. Treath had prepared for her. Caroline and North looked into her bedchamber before returning to their own, to see Owen sitting beside her on the bed, holding her small thin hand. Owen was lightly stroking his thumb over her fingers.
He looked up at them. “She’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll take care of her. Dr. Treath thought it was something she ate, perhaps the oxtail soup.”
“No one else ate very much of it,” North said. “It sounds like the culprit. Perhaps the mushrooms.”
Caroline yawned widely. “I’m sorry, but I’m just so tired. It seems we don’t ever have any quiet moments around here.”
“Oh yes, Caroline,” Owen said, “Mrs. Mayhew, Chloe, and Molly all came by. Mrs. Mayhew had more suggestions on Alice’s care than I can even remember. She’s very forceful. Sort of like my father.”
“Yes,” Caroline said, yawning again, but smiling with great satisfaction at the same time, “isn’t she ever?”
Sunlight flooded into the bedchamber when North came into her slowly and gently, all the while kissing her. She shuddered and moaned into his mouth when she reached her release.
“I like to see a smile on a woman’s mouth when she’s nearly asleep,” he said, and pulled her tightly against him.
“Tell me I’m a good sort again, North.”
He stared at her a moment, kissed her closed eyes, then her nose and her mouth. “You’re one of the best sorts, Caroline,” he said, then sighed softly when her hand stroked down his back. “All this badness, Caroline, we’ll get through it.”
“I know,” she said, kissed him, and pressed her cheek against his shoulder.
27
IT WAS VERY strange, the note he’d received that was right now crumpled in his breeches pocket, written by an unknown hand, given to Timmy the maid when he was out at the stables giving sugar to North’s bay gelding, Treetop. “ ’Twere a young duffer with squirrelly talk,” Timmy the maid had said, but he hadn’t recognized him, which was odd because Timmy the maid knew everybody, or so he’d thought. What was squirrelly talk? North had asked. And Timmy the maid had said, “The little nit couldn’t speak more than two words together without stammering hisself near out o’ ’is boots.”
North click-clicked Treetop toward the northeastern end of his property where the land softened and the gentle rolling hills were still green with lingering summer. There were about half a dozen of the hillocks, and learned men had said that beneath some of the hillocks, or barrows, as they called them, were tombs from long, long ago, even long before the Romans had lived here, even long before the Celts had swarmed over Cornwall. He remembered reading about Silbury Hill, a huge mound everyone had known was a burial mound, possibly hiding treasure. It had been the Duke of Northumberland who had launched a force of Cornish tin miners late in the last century to sink a shaft from top to bottom of the mound. They hadn’t found anything, more’s the pity, and most had stopped even remarking on the odd hills, so obviously placed there by man’s hand and not God’s.
Every once in a while villagers found strange things near these hills: pottery shards that looked to be older than the land itself, though on some of the pieces there were still spots of bright color, small bits of iron and steel that looked to be from long-ago weapons. And another mound would be dug into. Not long before, a mound had turned up a long, narrow burial chamber holding ancient skeletons, some pottery pieces, but nothing of value. He’d heard that in other parts of England, finding Roman coins and even Celt weapons was no great wonder.
Had King Mark been buried here, beneath one of those soft rolling hills? Had the gold armlet his great-grandfather claimed to have found come from near here? He sincerely doubted it.
He pulled Treetop to a halt atop one of the hills and looked around him. He forgot all about archaeology, forgot abo
ut King Mark and his lust-besotted nephew Tristan who’d betrayed him with the beautiful, treacherous Isolde.
The note said she would be meeting her lover close by to the northeastern boundary. Well, he was here. He looked toward the dense copse of oak trees older than the Druids, who had hung enemies in cages from the branches and then proceeded to roast them alive.
Where was she? It was a hoax, he had known that, he knew that, but still, he did expect to see Caroline here somewhere. Where was her mare, Regina?
When he saw her mare and another horse, a gelding, tethered behind a thick stand of trees, he felt his heart begin to pound, slow, heavy strokes. Her lover? Dear God, it was nonsense, that was all, just someone wanting to do them ill, probably one of his male martinets.
He wouldn’t spy on his wife of three weeks, it was absurd. Caroline adored him. She loved him, she’d told him that whenever she’d crested her pleasure, kissing him, telling him over and over how much she loved him. He’d found that he wanted to hear those words from her, that he wallowed in the pleasure those simple words brought him.
But how could she come to love him in such a short time? Surely love didn’t work with such dispatch. Was it just a woman’s release that brought such words from her mouth, lust fulfilled and thus it was love?