Once Upon a Tower

  “This room looks as if someone vomited the sky,” Layla said.

  Susannah burst into hoots of laughter until Gowan gave her a quelling look.

  “It’s more efficient for the staff to carry out their duties if each room is known by its given color.”

  Edie was fascinated by the uniformity of the furnishings. Even the fire screen was blue. “I gather blue was a particular favorite of your mother?”

  “I have no idea what colors my mother preferred,” Gowan said, his face unreadable. “The room was refurbished a year ago.”

  “And you directed the work? I finally found something you’re not good at,” Edie exclaimed, feeling rather relieved.

  He aimed the family scowl in her direction.

  “Could I see the gingerbread princess now?” Susannah said. She was jumping from foot to foot.

  Layla drew a cookie larger than her hand from a gaily colored cambric bag. “We’ll save the princess for after supper. This is a gingerbread man, though it would be more accurate to call him a gingerbread gentleman, because he has gold buttons and a particularly elegant hat.”

  Susannah took the treat carefully. “He smells good. What do I do with him?”

  “Is he your very first gingerbread man?”

  She nodded.

  “You eat him.”

  “Eat his head?”

  “I always start with the feet,” Edie suggested.

  Susannah kept her eyes fixed on Layla. “But if I eat him, he’ll be dead.”

  “No, he’ll be in your tummy,” Layla said. “There’s a difference.”

  “I think I’d better eat his head first,” Susannah said, just when the silence grew a second too long. “That way he won’t know what’s happening to him.”

  “That’s a very kind thought,” Layla approved.

  Susannah turned and climbed up on the bed. “This room is not pretty,” she said, nibbling on her gingerbread. “But the bed is nice. Mine smells like straw, but yours is soft.”

  “It’s probably a feather bed,” Edie said. Gowan cleared his throat and Edie was suddenly, vividly aware of him—not to mention the proximity of the feather bed.

  Layla glanced at them, strolled over, and said, “You promised to show me the nursery, Susannah love,” and held out her hand.

  Susannah climbed down and they walked out without a backward glance.

  Twenty-eight

  Gowan had experienced emotions like this before. They were as profound as an atmospheric effect, as if sea pressure were bubbling up his legs. He had felt it when he was a boy, when his father was drunk . . . but rarely as a man.

  But he felt it now.

  The moment Susannah pranced out of the room with her gingerbread, holding Layla’s hand, Edie threw him a nervous glance, muttered something about the housekeeper, and fled. Clearly, she didn’t want to be alone in a bedchamber with him.

  This emotion was a blinding, inarticulate thing that reminded him of days when his father would topple from his stool by the fire and sprawl across the floor, so filled with whisky that he sloshed as he rolled.

  Every time Gowan looked at Edie, he felt a rush of possessiveness that felt as fundamental to his nature as being a Scot. But that emotion didn’t belong in the civilized world.

  He had married Edie. He had put his ring on her finger. He had bedded her. And yet there was some part of her that eluded him. He felt it, more and more clearly, and it was driving him mad. He had wanted her the moment he saw her, so he’d arranged to marry her. And yet he didn’t have her. The truth of it made an animal howl threaten to break loose in his chest.

  Perhaps it was the music. He loved the fact that his wife’s body was shaped like her instrument. But she played the cello, not his body. She hardly touched him in bed. Of course . . . what did he expect? He knew aristocratic women weren’t as lusty as barmaids.

  Gowan had been eight years old when his father had told him the facts about what happened between men and women, grabbing him by the wrist and pulling him close. His reeking breath had struck Gowan’s nose like a blow.

  “Ladies aren’t worth the straw they lie on,” he had said, his eyes lit with strange glee. “They lie as flat as a Shrove Tuesday pancake. Go get a lusty barmaid, my boy. Go down to the Horse and Poplar. Annie is the one to teach you what’s what. She taught me. And she’ll take you on as well.”

  He must have shown revulsion, because his father had given him a hard shove, sending him across the floor and into the wall.

  “Think you’re too good for Annie, do you? You’d be lucky to have a sprightly lass like her. She’ll do anything, she will. Can twist like a cat and eat you like—”

  So that’s why this particular vile memory had come back. The barmaid would eat him—or so his father promised—like a gingerbread man.

  The lurch of nausea in his stomach was like an old and unwelcome familiar. He hated whisky. He hated gingerbread.

  Damn it.

  Bardolph opened the door and walked in. “Your Grace, I bring—”

  “Do not enter without first knocking,” he said harshly. “This is Her Grace’s bedchamber.”

  Bardolph’s face was the pale yellow of a raw potato, his eyes a darker brown. Like the bruise on an old potato. “Her Grace is speaking to Mrs. Grisle,” his factor replied, with the injured air of a man used to knowing precisely what was happening in every room of the castle at any given moment. “I wanted to consult with you about arrangements for Lady Gilchrist’s lodging.”

  In a house with this many servants, there were no secrets. Gowan had known when his father got the second housemaid with child, and he’d known when the poor lass lost the child, the same as he’d known when his own mother had insisted on riding after the hounds while carrying a child, and had lost it.

  She had started drinking to excess after that, and that was no secret, either.

  “Not the yellow chamber,” Gowan stated. He’d be damned if he’d have his stepmother-in-law next door, hearing . . . whatever there was to hear. He walked out the door and started toward his study, Bardolph on his heels. “Put her in the room closest to the nursery.”

  “The nursery? The nursery is on the third floor. Your Grace offers the lady an insult.”

  “You should be asking my wife these questions, not me,” Gowan snapped. At that very moment he knew that it would be madness to go to Edie’s bed after the meal. If he snarled at her, she would recede even further.

  “As you wish, Your Grace. I have located a musician.”

  “What?”

  “Your Grace asked me to find someone who could teach music to the child. Miss Susannah’s French tutor, François Védrines, is a relative of the late Comte de Genlis, and professes to be a violinist. When we hired him, he was traveling through Scotland collecting tinker’s ballads.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Gowan asked, walking into his study and turning about.

  “You wish to hear details of all significant appointments in the household,” Bardolph said, his mouth tightening into a pucker that looked like a potato’s eye.

  “Inform Her Grace of his credentials,” Gowan said. Then he remembered that Edie would wish to practice rather than listen to Bardolph. “Never mind, just get the man here as soon as possible.”

  “He’s already here,” Bardolph said, “in the capacity of Miss Susannah’s tutor.”

  After luncheon Gowan retreated back to his study and was working well, having managed to push Edie from his mind, when she poked her face around the door. Her hair was curling around her face and the sun coming in the windows lit a strand as brilliantly as gleaming gold. “There you are!” she cried. “I’ve been touring the castle with Mrs. Grisle. Layla, Susannah, and I are about to walk down and see the river. Will you join us?”

  The moment he saw her, his body sprang to attention. “Of course,” he said, standing and pulling his coat down in front.

  “Would you mind if Susannah left off her blacks after today?” Edie asked as they
made their way through the castle’s maze of rooms, all connected to each other rather than to a corridor.

  “Not at all.”

  “I see that you yourself are not observing that custom.”

  Gowan glanced at Edie and then looked away, shocked by his reaction to a mere glimpse of her rosy lips. “I made a decision not to wear mourning for my mother,” he said, pulling himself together.

  “I suggest that we view Susannah’s three months of mourning garments as sufficient.”

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Even thinking about his mother made the inarticulate feelings of anger and possession in him gather force. The last thing he needed was to crack apart. Somehow he had to make Edie understand that the mere mention of the late duchess felt as if a torch had fallen on kindling.

  They made their way to the entry hall to find Layla standing in the middle of the cavernous space, holding Susannah’s wrists tightly and spinning as she swung his sister around and around. Susannah’s legs were parallel to the ground, her skirts billowing. And her red hair was flying around her shoulders in a tangled cloud.

  Needless to say, she was shrieking with pure joy. Layla was laughing, too, and so were the six footmen ranged along the walls, though their mouths snapped shut when they saw Gowan.

  It appeared that Layla had managed a miracle, and in no time at all: she’d won over his half sister. As Layla brought her gently back to the floor, he saw that Susannah’s peaked little face, ordinarily pallid, was flushed with color and her eyes were radiant. It made him feel guilty.

  Susannah had not noticed their arrival; she was hanging on Layla’s hand and demanding to be swung again. Gowan strode forward. “I must be back at work shortly; we shouldn’t delay.” Two footmen sprang to attention, pulling open the great doors.

  “What do you know about the tower?” Edie asked as they walked through the courtyard toward the open portcullis in the wall. Her voice was utterly calm; she hadn’t responded to his irritability at all. He didn’t know what to make of that.

  “It’s a freestanding tower, much older than the castle we live in,” he said.

  Susannah ran past them, her thin legs scissoring like a black-legged sandpiper, if such a creature existed. I should have visited the nursery more often, Gowan told himself. I should have put it on my list, made it a priority.

  They took the long, gently sloping path that led down and around the side of the hill on which the castle stood. “The tower is likely all that remains of a castle that stood there in the thirteenth century. If so, it would have been the castle keep.” They rounded the hill. “Over the years it’s gained a reputation for being unclimbable among some of the more foolish local people.”

  “And Susannah says there are ghosts?” Layla prompted.

  Gowan snorted. “Bollocks. Three fools climbed the tower in order to impress their ladies, only to fall to their deaths. I fail to see why their failures should cause them to recur as apparitions. Needless to say, I’ve never seen any ghosts.”

  Below them flowed the Glaschorrie, placidly making its way through the fertile land of the Kinross estate and then out to the Atlantic, far in the distance.

  “It’s rare to have a plain of this sort in Scotland, isn’t it?” Edie asked, looking over the fields of wheat.

  “It is. That’s probably exactly why an ancestor built a castle, or at least a tower, here on the river. He wanted to protect what was his.”

  “It must have a lovely view.”

  “He was a fool,” Gowan said with a shrug, “because the plain floods every spring and often in between. The Glaschorrie becomes a raging torrent heading downhill all way from here to the sea.”

  “Yet the tower has survived.”

  He nodded. “Flood and fire both.”

  They had walked far enough that they entered the orchards that lay around the base of the tower. Layla and Susannah now trailed them, walking hand in hand and pausing now and then to look at a butterfly or an interesting stone in the path.

  “Aren’t these trees injured when the river overflows?”

  Gowan reached out and pinched a leaf from an apple tree. “They seem to manage. Once, when I was young, I remember looking down from the castle and seeing only the smallest branches above the water. A day later all that water was gone, drained off to the ocean.”

  “It sounds ferocious.”

  “We’ve lost men to this river, though I’ve put in place evacuation orders. Last year we lost only three goats, and that was due to a fool of a tenant who thought it would be enough to put the animals on the second floor of his house.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  Gowan shook his head. “The flood took the house, and the goats with it. The land here is so flat that when the Glaschorrie rages, she often cuts a new route for herself. What is safe one year is no longer safe the next.”

  Edie walked beside him silently; he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. They reached the broad base of the tower, into which was set a small but very stout oaken door, and Gowan pulled the great iron key from his coat pocket. After he’d set workers swarming over it for months, the stonework and mortar looked as good as new.

  When he opened the door, they were met by the sultry sweet odor of ripe apples. Up above were the attics, where the apple harvest was stored every autumn, allowing his household to enjoy apples all year round.

  Gowan pushed the door all the way open, stooped a bit in order to pass under the lintel, and entered the small dark room at the tower’s base. He took a quick look around, making certain all was well before stepping back so Edie could enter. Susannah slipped past and began trotting up the narrow uneven stairs, her black skirts disappearing around the corner.

  “I am not fond of small spaces,” Layla said, hovering on the threshold.

  “The upper floors are far more commodious,” he told her.

  Layla started to climb the stone steps but Gowan caught Edie’s arm, holding her until her stepmother turned the corner.

  He looked down into her face, and the yawning chasm in his chest cracked open a little wider. Edie was so beautiful. She was everything he’d thought on the very first night he met her—an ethereal, glowing creature who danced to music only she could hear—but she was also a musician, a prodigy, a woman whose musical ability would have had the world at her feet, had she been born a man.

  Being Edie, she didn’t seem to care. She lived for her music . . . and he wanted her to live for him.

  “You’re mine,” he growled, the words coming out with all the force of jealousy and possession that he felt.

  Her eyes widened and then she did an unexpected thing. She put her arms around his neck. She hadn’t touched him voluntarily since the first days of their marriage.

  And now . . .

  She rose up on her toes and brushed her mouth across his. “Then you are mine, as well,” she breathed, a smile dancing on her lips.

  He was at her feet and had been since the moment he saw her. She knew it; hell, the whole world knew it, at least those people who had attended Chatteris’s wedding. Still, there was a trace of uncertainty in her eyes. So Gowan kissed his wife, pouring everything into that kiss: his love, his obsession, his dominance, his uncertainty, his ruthlessness, his . . .

  Everything.

  Edie murmured something unintelligible and tightened her arms around his neck. Her tongue met his and set his heart pounding at a hectic pace in his chest. Her hair fell from its bun and slid through his fingers as if it was water from the river outside. For a moment he was perfectly happy, as if merely by holding stands of her hair he could keep her close.

  Then Edie pulled away. “Oh no!” Her hands flew up a second too late; loops of hair began tumbling down below her shoulders.

  “I love your hair,” he said, satisfied with life for the first time all day. “Even in this dark room, it shines like moonlight.”

  “You’ve pulled it down again,” she said, wrinkling her nose at him. “I had to sit still for nearly
forty-five minutes this morning, and I am not patient when it comes to my toilette.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gowan murmured. He captured her mouth again . . . but then he realized dimly that he was trying to impress his seal upon her by kissing her, as if that would make the difference.

  It wouldn’t, and he pulled back, his soul filled with disappointment. She made a little sound of protest. He’d kissed her lips until they were cherry red and swollen. Just two weeks ago, he would have caught fire at that sight, imagining her lips caressing his body. But now he couldn’t quite imagine her on her knees before him.

  It wouldn’t happen. She wasn’t present enough for that sort of love play. She wasn’t . . .

  He was missing her, even though she stood right in front of him, though he wouldn’t be caught dead voicing such a half-assed idea. That ache in his chest? It was idiocy.

  “I must talk with you,” he said abruptly.

  Edie swallowed, and his heart sank. Some small part of him had hoped that it was all in his head, and that in reality she was perfectly happy with him.

  But that tiny convulsive movement in her throat told its own story.

  “We’ll have a private dinner in my bedchamber,” he said, rapidly turning over the possibilities. “I’ll banish all the footmen.”

  Her eyes clouded. “We can’t, not on Layla’s first night here. Bardolph mentioned that he believes Susannah’s French tutor would be able to teach her music, and he eats with us as well.”

  “Tomorrow evening, then.” He couldn’t stay with her now, or he’d make a worse fool of himself by falling on his knees and begging her to love him. “I must return to work. I am late for an appointment.”

  Far above them they could hear little squeals of laughter as Edie and Layla explored.

  Edie nodded. Her eyes were the green of the wild heart of a Scottish forest. He gave her the key, turned, and walked away.

  In that moment, he hated the fact that men waited in his study. He wanted to scoop up his wife and carry her somewhere, to a place where there wasn’t a little sister to make him feel guilty.