“Perhaps we could even go to the one in Yorkshire and see your friends. Now, there’s something else I want to tell you, North. No, don’t kiss me again just yet, just listen to me.” She cupped his face between her palms. “You’re my husband. I love you and I will always love you, even when you’re old and haven’t a tooth in your mouth, and all bent over. I’ll still love you. Since I’ll probably be in the same condition, it shouldn’t prove too difficult. I will never, never betray you. I would kill anyone who tried to harm you. You are mine and what is mine I keep forever.”
His breath hitched. “Caroline,” he said, his hands coming up to clasp her.
Owen walked whistling into the entrance hall, saw them standing there, Caroline’s arms around her husband’s neck, and said, “What is so serious? Is something wrong? Oh, I say, who are those women? They weren’t there before, were they? No, there weren’t any portraits of women anywhere, and I thought that was quite odd.”
“No, Owen,” North said, dropping his hands as he turned to face Owen. “Caroline found all my ancestresses in a room on the third floor and brought these two down. We’ll see that the others are restored and hung in their original places.”
“Caroline always had her nose everywhere when we were growing up,” Owen said, staring at the portraits. “You wouldn’t believe the stories she told me about when she was at Chudleigh’s Young Ladies’ Academy. She was a terror, North, never kept her mouth closed and never minded her own business. She always wanted to fix things, even me. Oh, I got a letter from my father. You won’t believe what he’s done, or perhaps you would, given you know my father quite well.”
It was very late. Caroline was reading in the library downstairs, a small branch of candles at her elbow. She was wrapped warmly in a scarlet dressing gown that she hoped North would admire excessively and wish to examine closely, then perhaps remove. She missed him and yet he’d been gone only three hours. He was visiting Sir Rafael Carstairs at Carstairs Manor. It had rained hard the past three days and there was a cave-in problem at one of the tin mines. They were meeting with other owners and managers to solve the cave-in and equipment problems in three of the mines.
It was odd, but she’d discovered that she hadn’t wanted to stay in that big bed alone. It was cold and lonely and she hated it. No, she would wait for him to return, thus her presence in the library, reading Gottfried of Strasbourg’s version of the Tristan and Isolde story, written back in the reign of King John, that mangy and cruel fellow who’d finally been forced by his barons to put ink and quill to the Magna Carta. Good for the barons.
This story was darker and uglier than Malory’s later tale of doomed lovers, the only person worthy of compassion and respect being the dishonored King Mark. Ah, the patient and virtuous King Mark who only exiled his nephew Tristan and his own wife Isolde for their treachery, didn’t cleave Tristan in two and stick a knife in his young wife’s breast. Caroline knew that if she’d been King Mark, she would have gulleted the betrayers with great pleasure. Ah, but myth was more gentle and more lasting because it skillfully interwove all the classic themes of tragic love, betrayal, just a hint of triumph, but finally death.
This, then, was the portrait of all the Nightingale men since North’s great-grandfather. How noble they must have believed themselves, and how utterly conceited, comparing themselves to the mythical King Mark of Cornwall, going so far as to claim he’d held court here and not on the southern coast near Fowey, as legend had it.
At least they hadn’t touched King Arthur, leaving that richly magical king to live and die at Tintagel, a belief held fiercely by many Cornishmen. And, unlike King Arthur, whose legend lived on and on, few seemed to know or care about poor King Mark and his betraying wife and randy nephew. Caroline thought Arthur had been too strong a figure for the Nightingale men to take on, whereas the gracious King Mark, really a wilting ninny, was much easier prey, much more satisfying fodder for their fantasies.
She rather wished the Nightingale men had picked King Arthur for their idol, for he’d endured, unlike the weakly sweet King Mark. After all, he, too, had been betrayed, by his queen Guinevere and his prize knight, Sir Lancelot. She shook her head. She realized they’d picked King Mark simply because he was the more forgettable, thus not many folk would care enough to bother disagreeing with them and their claims. Where people were impassioned about King Arthur, they were tepid at most when it came to poor old King Mark.
Caroline settled into the story. It was very difficult to decipher in the medieval French, but she did make out that Tristan, once exiled with Isolde, or Iseult, as the French wrote, swore to be with her “one heart, one troth, one body, one life.” But good old Tristan proceeded to meet another Iseult and fall in love with her. So much for men and their constancy, she thought. Caroline yawned and went to search again through the references to Tristan, reverently collected by all those Nightingale men who had nothing better to do since they were such idiots with their wives.
Caroline read until the words blurred, her eyes felt gritty, and she yawned hugely. There was so much and it was all, she was certain, from the colorful imagination of Gottfried, whose work, however, was taken quite seriously back in medieval times, silly as it seemed to Caroline now. The book fell from her hands onto her lap, then slipped to the carpet.
She awoke to a scream that made her fall off the settee.
30
SHE WAS ON her feet in an instant, her skirts yanked up to her knees, running into the entrance hall. She skittered to a stop and stared. Owen was straddling Bennett Penrose, his hands fisted in his shirt, shaking him hard, then pounding his head against the pale gold-and-white marble. Bennett was fighting him but he wasn’t having much success. He was yelling like a man who knew he was in dire straits. Caroline felt immense pride in Owen at that moment.
“Owen! Goodness, I think you’re splendid, but you must stop it, you’ll kill him.”
“He deserves it, the bloody bugger!” And Owen smacked Bennett’s head again to the marble.
“Well, he does, true enough, but I don’t want you to hang for killing him.” She lightly touched her hand to Owen’s fist. She saw his rigidity, his utter fury, and realized she’d never seen him so out of control in all his life.
“I gather it was Bennett who screeched?”
“Oh yes, and that was even before I hit him the first time, bloody little weasel.” Owen looked down at Bennett Penrose, whose nose was bleeding profusely and who looked dazed and very pale in the dim candlelight cast by the wall sconces. He didn’t yell again. Caroline thought he realized it would cast him into a very poor light to be yelling like a demented goat.
Caroline ripped off a strip from her petticoat. “Here, Bennett, wipe your nose. I don’t want you bleeding on the beautiful marble. North wouldn’t like it.”
Owen got off him and stared down at the very handsome young man who was now struggling to sit up, dabbing his bloody nose. There was a wealth of dislike and, Caroline thought, of contempt in Owen’s voice. Well, he had beaten Bennett very satisfactorily. “Now, Penrose, you’ll tell us why you were sneaking about.”
Bennett continued to rub at his nose, without much success.
“Oh, goodness, let’s go to the kitchen and get some water,” Caroline said, and led the way to the nether regions.
Owen shoved Bennett into one of the chairs around the huge kitchen table where, Caroline realized, the three male martinets ate their meals with the three females. She wished she could be present at one of those meals. They probably gave each other severe indigestion. She could just hear Chloe and
Molly giggling at nothing in particular and see the pained look on Tregeagle’s face.
Caroline wet a cloth and handed it to Bennett. She wanted to smash it against his nose herself. “Keep cleaning yourself up and tell us what you were doing here.”
“Nothing, I wasn’t doing anything,” Bennett said finally. He sounded for the world like a sulky boy. “This stupid fool jumped me, caught me completely by surprise, and when I hit the floor the blow stunned me so this fool could gain the advantage on me, otherwise it would have been he with the bloody nose and the cracked skull.”
Owen snorted and rubbed his bruised knuckles with satisfaction.