He would have caressed Norah's hand a moment longer, but the gypsy captured Norah's fingers in bony claws, turning her palm to the sunlight. The hag bent so close her coarse mane of hair obscured that tender palm from Aidan's sight, and he could almost feel Norah squirming with discomfort as those gnarled fingers traced the lines that marked her hand.
"You have journeyed far," the woman said, "far and alone, sent off by an ill wind from the isle across the waves."
"She guessed you are from England!" Cassandra enthused breathlessly.
"She knows I am English by my accent," Norah protested resolutely. "It would be obvious to anyone who heard me speak."
"Would it now, doubter of the mysteries? And perhaps your accent would also have me knowing that your papa died when you were... four?"
Norah gasped, and Aidan felt a strange prickle at the back of his neck.
"'Twas as though your heart was torn from your breast, dearie. Gone. Everyone gone. Alone." The gypsy clicked her tongue, shaking her head. "Poor little one... abandoned in a room of... blood?"
Aidan's brow furrowed as a sick feeling stirred in his stomach. The gypsy was speaking about Norah Linton's past—her past, not the chamber Aidan had put her in the night before. Yet could he ever walk through that door and not wonder if indeed he had blood on his hands?
"You will be torn by the thorns of three great trials," the gypsy continued. "Great love. Great pain. That and... betrayal at the hands of... of a man."
Aidan stilled, the words seeming a portent of doom—a whispered warning about the price to be paid should he wed this woman. Love—she would never have it as his wife. Pain—that she could suffer in plenty. Betrayal—in that the Kanes of Rathcannon were masters.
"Pah!" The other gypsy shouldered her compatriot aside. "She thinks she tells the fortune, she does! See into the future, handing down a sentence that the poor bonnet lady will be betrayed by a man? And what woman hasn't been, a dozen times or more? You, my fine sir, give me your hand, and you shall see true into tomorrow."
Aidan felt an absurd urge to jam his hands into his pockets, to walk away, laughing, scorning the gypsies' arts. But a niggling fascination stirred inside him. Silent, he stripped his own glove from his hand, then held it out to the conjurer as if he half expected the old woman's touch to burn him.
"Tragic is the babe born on Whitsuntide, fine sir." Aidan hated the chill that crept down his spine at the woman's quavering purr.
"He was born on Whitsuntide!" Cassandra gasped. "Miss Linton, he was! Mrs. Cadagon told me so! How remarkable!"
"'Tis nothing to rejoice in, cailin," the gypsy warned. "A fatally dangerous time to be born is Whitsuntide. The babe born on that day is destined to die a death o' violence, or"—the woman's voice fell, hushed—"to send another dancing into death's arms before 'tis their time."
Cassandra's cheeks lost their bloom. "Dancing into death? What does that mean?"
"Murder, child. The babe born on Whitsuntide is destined to kill another."
Aidan felt his blood chill, heard a tiny sound from Norah—the merest breath, as if the gypsy had touched a place that was raw.
"My papa wouldn't hurt anyone!" Cassandra exclaimed, most put out by such dire predictions. "He's brave, and good, and—and he was a hero in the war!"
Aidan shoved aside his own discomfort, forced his voice to be light, teasing, in an effort to soothe his daughter. "Cass, I'm certain Madame Gypsy doesn't want to hear tales of my exploits. Besides, my nurse made certain she broke the curse."
"Your nurse?" Norah was gazing up at him with wide eyes—eyes a little frightened, as if someone had just walked over her grave.
"She was stuffed to the top of her kerchief with superstition. Warned my mother that I was foredoomed, and that there was only one way to break the spell."
"What could it possibly be, Papa?"
"Dig a grave and lay me in it."
"Merciful heavens!" Norah gasped.
"Oh Papa, how awful," Cassandra said, wide-eyed.
"My mother was understandably hesitant about the whole procedure, but considering the tendency to devilment already cast upon me by my ancestry, she thought it wise to take the precaution. So Nurse Dunne whisked me out when I was but three days old and made her magic over me. Of course, it remains to be seen if I was saved that night or if all I got was an extremely dirty backside. Now, it seems to me we've all had enough of this deviltry. I saw some lovely pastries down the way—"
"But 'tis not all I saw upon your palm, sir," the gypsy said, barring his path. "'Tis a devil pact I see marked upon your skin. A wager with Mephistopheles himself that you entered into long ago."
Aidan looked into those dark eyes, strangely transfixed, and tried to infuse into his voice a lightness he didn't feel. "That wager has already been lost."
"Or perhaps the battle is just being joined, the prize to be won your immortal soul."
Aidan forced a laugh. "And I suppose, Goodwife, that you have some cure amongst all this rubbish that will prove my salvation? Some posset—at a very dear price, of course. No, I must insist on no more graveyard visits, no rowan branches over my cradle—or, er, bed. Dashed uncomfortable when the things begin to shed their leaves. I'm afraid the devil and I shall have to wrestle this out alone. And if it's hell I'm bound for, well, I am certain that the Kanes will have a torture chamber set aside in Lucifer's palace for their exclusive use."
He gently but firmly took Norah's arm. "Come along, Cass. We can't tarry here all day."
"But Papa, she—she hasn't read my palm yet." There was a note of doubt in the girl's voice, as if she were no longer certain she wanted those glittering black eyes to peer into her future.
"We are leaving, Cassandra. Now." Aidan dug into his pocket and removed a few guineas. "I'm not certain what the going rate is for predicting a man will go to the devil," he said, dropping the coins into the gypsy's withered hand, "but I assume you think some payment is due. However, if you would allow me to give you a bit of advice?"
The crone nodded.
"I would suggest that from now on you foretell wealth and happiness, true love and great honor, no matter what the scribbles on a person's palm say. I am quite certain your grateful patrons would be much more generous with their pay than if they walked away feeling a cloud of doom hovering above their heads."
"I say what I see. The truth. 'Tis no gift to mock, having the sight. You would do well to heed my warnings."
Aidan merely laughed, yet whatever luster had been on the day seemed to have evaporated. Taking Norah's arm, and shooing Cassandra before him, Aidan tried to tease away the strange shadows that had circled about them beside the table of the gypsies' mystic wares.
It was nonsense. Absurd. The gypsy could have plucked any generality out of the air, given such broad meanings to her predictions that any fool could twist happenings about until it seemed they had come true.
Then why was it that each time he looked at Norah Linton's face he heard the whispered warning? Why did he see the reflection of her betrayer every time he peered into her eyes?
CHAPTER 7
Aidan drove like a madman. Norah gripped the brace of the carriage seat as the tension that had coiled her stomach into knots during the hours since breakfast tightened even more ruthlessly inside her.
Every muscle in her body ached with the effort it cost her to keep from bumping that hard masculine shoulder bare inches from her own, the steely length of thigh stretched out with suicidal negligence beside her.
The insane pace Kane set would have been terrifying enough on its own, the spirited team of grays seeming bent on hurtling the carriage to its destruction. But more disturbing still was the sight of Sir Aidan Kane's face—his eyes intent on something she could not see, hazed with secrets she couldn't begin to guess at.
He had barely spoken after they'd left the gypsy fair, and even Cassandra seemed strangely preoccupied, restless, a disturbing light in those angel-blue eyes, as if the gypsy magic still hovered ab
out them in an iridescent haze of gloom. Even the arrival of Gibbon Cadagon and his mischievous brood of children hadn't been able to restore the gloss to the day. When Sir Aidan had suggested it was time to leave, Cassandra's mood had shifted with the swift fury of a summer storm, the sunshiny girl displaying a formidable stubbornness, the fierce determination of one unused to having her wishes denied. She had insisted that if Sir Aidan and Miss Linton were weary, she was not, and there was no reason her fun should be spoiled when she could remain behind with the Cadagons.
Norah could think of a dozen reasons why the girl should not be given her way. Not the least of which was her suspicion that Cassandra was up to something—an instinct Norah had honed during the years she had helped with the younger children while attending Miss Valentine's Academy for Young Ladies.
There had been something in the girl's face that Norah couldn't help but mistrust, and yet, when bolstered by the pleas of a dozen little Cadagons and the troll-like groom himself, Aidan had finally given his grudging consent.
It was none of her concern, of course, how he chose to discipline his daughter. Yet Norah couldn't help but feel he would come to heartily regret giving in to Cassandra in this instance.
By the time she and Sir Aidan had reached the carriage, it seemed he already did regret his actions. He guided the elegant equipage onto the road with skilled hands. But it seemed as if he had left the last bright pieces of himself behind, in Cassandra's care. It was as if he were yet another man, another enigma, far too complex to be unraveled.
Here, with the soft, moist breeze tousling his dark hair, his eyes misty, and his mouth strangely vulnerable, the hardened scoundrel who had come to her bedchamber the night before seemed to have vanished. The bedeviling tease of that morning had also melted away, leaving a man who looked daunted, not dangerous. Lonely, not reckless. Angry, yes, still angry. But mostly at himself.
Norah had tried once or twice to comment on something in the ever-changing landscape but at last had lapsed into silence, sensing that a battle was waging inside Aidan Kane. She knew that he was not a man to share his pain. No, she thought with sudden insight. He would not share his pain, only his darkness, his flaws, his shortcomings.
He had made certain she'd witnessed every one of these the night before.
She pressed one hand to her bonnet, as the strings had come loose yet again, and tried to gauge exactly how far it was to Rathcannon. But none of the landmarks were familiar. It seemed as if they were going astray somehow, listing to the west.
"Is this the way we came?" Norah cried above the wind when she could bear her confusion no longer.
He slowed the carriage just a bit, his stormy gaze slashing to meet hers. "No. This isn't the way we came. I thought I would take you someplace where we can be alone."
Alone? Norah felt a shiver of nervousness and glanced up into that implacable face. "Surely Rathcannon has a dozen rooms—"
"A dozen rooms stuffed with servants whose wagging tongues cannot be trusted," Kane cut in. "Every man jack of them doubtless with their ears pressed to the wall. Nothing quite so entertaining as watching the grand folks make fools of themselves, you know."
"But I don't know—I don't understand what this is all about," Norah said helplessly. But then, did she truly understand anything anymore?
It seemed that Kane was in no hurry to enlighten her. That sensual mouth merely hardened, the lines carved at its sides deepening as the carriage crested the hilltop.
In that instant, Norah's questions were swept away by a glory beyond imagining as the sunset's magnificent paintbox spilled into the valley below. Red, orange, gold, the impossibly vivid hues glittered on hedges and piled stone fences and dyed the wool of sheep nibbling on green grass. The land tumbled, vale over stone, a symphony of lushness, of untamable majesty melting down to where the sea cast foam upon its shore.
These beauties alone would have elicited a gasp of pleasure from anyone who saw them, but it was the structure that stood in the valley's heart that made Norah's fingers loosen their grip on the seat brace, numbed with awe.
Gray stone battlements soared in stark majesty against the sky. War had shattered the front of the castle ages before, but time had healed the ugliness of the wound with the tenderness of a lover, until it seemed as if a fairy's hand had peeled back the wall to reveal what lay within.
Empty windows shaped the light into gingerbread patterns. Stone stairs spiraled through lovely archways, their landings high above the ground seeming like jumping-off places to the stars. The floor on the upper stories and the walls that had sectioned the castle into chambers were only ghostly imprints in the stone, but the fireplaces remained, lovely carvings surrounding them.
Encircling the base of the entire ruin was a wreath of grass, darker green than any other, a ring of ancient stones showing beneath, as if the site had been marked somehow, blessed by the Old Ones from the mists of time.
Norah had seen so little of Ireland. In Dublin and on the journey west, she had been so anxious about the meeting with her prospective bridegroom that she'd spent the whole trip rehearsing what to say to him, trying to imagine his face, his form.
On the trip to the fair, she had been unnerved by the sudden change in Aidan, continually glancing over at him as if he were a wolf that might decide at any moment to turn about and snap off her head.
But as she stared at the desecrated loveliness before her, her throat closed, her eyes stung.
Magic and mist, soul-deep sorrow and heart-shattering beauty—was it not the lifeblood of this fey and lovely land? Where the ravaged dreams that clung to the hillsides in gray stone ruins seemed more searingly beautiful than dreams come true anywhere else on earth?
Yet trapped within the beauty were skeins of tragedy, of simmering violence, of passions dark and bright, just as the same wild traits were caught in the man beside her.
"What is this place?" Norah breathed, as Aidan drew the carriage to a halt beside the vivid cascade of a fuchsia hedge.
"In Gaelic it's called Caislean Alainn. Castle of Beauty."
"It is beautiful. It seems almost... enchanted." Norah's cheeks stung with embarrassment at words that might have come from Kane's starry-eyed daughter.
But he was already leaping down from the carriage, and his strong hands were tying the team to a branch bowing under the fragrant weight of magenta and purple blossoms. "Enchanted, is it? No wonder Cass was taken with you. From the moment Cassandra first discovered the castle, she populated it with fairy folk and dragons. There were times I could almost see the fairies through her eyes." His fingers were still for a moment as an unaccustomed wistfulness clung to Kane's careless words.
Norah looked down at him, attempting to picture this devastatingly handsome rogue watching his daughter cavort among a myriad of playmates only she could see, bright-winged, beautiful playmates painted by her imagination.
How many pretend worlds had Norah created for herself as a child? Safe places, protected from the bitter winds of reality that buffeted the tender hearted too harshly.
What would happen when Sir Aidan's princess stepped beyond the boundaries of her dream castle and into the real world? It was a world Sir Aidan had already admitted would be waiting for her, not with the praise and love and open-hearted kindness she was accustomed to, but rather with cruel talons, clutching at scandal a decade old, long lists recounting the sins of her father and mother.
The knowledge broke Norah's heart all the more, for she understood what it was like to step from such a haven into a cold realm where no one could help you, not even the papa you believed was invincible. The empty ache was an aftermath she remembered all too well.
She was jarred from these troubling thoughts as Sir Aidan circled the carriage to help her down. She stood up and started to step down, but he caught her about the waist, his hands hard and hot pressed against her, his fingers so long they nearly spanned her waist. For an instant, that hard, sun-bronzed face was so close to her that she could see
the lines carved about his eyes and mouth. A shiver skated through her at the realization that this Sir Aidan could be far more dangerous than the angry man who had charged into her bedchamber the night before.
She started to protest, but before she could pull away, he lifted her high into the air, then drifted her to the ground, as if she weighed no more than a flower blossom plucked from the hedge.
Of course, it was only gentlemanly that he should aid her. But did she imagine it, or were those hands clinging a heartbeat longer than necessary? Were those eyes clouded with an odd uncertainty?
Unable to bear the weight of those compelling eyes another moment, Norah whisked away from Sir Aidan's grasp and started toward the castle ruin, searching for something, anything, to fill the sudden, pulsing silence. "Who did this place belong to?"
"Cassandra would tell you it belongs to the Tuatha de Daanan, the fairy folk who made the circle of stone. The fortress itself was built many centuries later, an Irish chieftain's gift to his bride in the years before Strongbow and his Normans came to conquer Ireland."
"The chieftain must have loved her very much to give her such a beautiful gift."
"I'm afraid their tale is about as cheery as that of Tristan and Isolde." He shrugged one broad shoulder. "But then I suppose it would have to be when the lady in question was called Maire of the Ten Thousand Tears. They claimed she was both the most beautiful and the most virtuous woman ever to set foot upon Irish soil."
"Why was she so unhappy? Because the castle was destroyed? I can see why that would have broken her heart."
"No. Caislean Alainn withstood the tragedy that befell Maire and her chieftain. It wasn't until Cromwell scourged Ireland that the place was destroyed." He grimaced.
"The tale of Maire of the Ten Thousand Tears," Norah found herself prodding him, alive with curiosity about the woman for whom the Castle of Beauty had been built.