Suddenly, Evelyn stopped, looked down at Little Owen, who was now red in the face, and burst into tears. “Oh God, how I wish that Alice could be here. She would watch all the little ones. She loved little Eleanor and Little North so much. She never had the chance to know her own son. It’s not fair, just not fair.”
“Little Owen is here and he will grow up knowing his mother was a fine, fine girl,” North said.
“Her English was getting better and better,” Miss Mary Patricia said. “She was so proud when she spoke a complete sentence with no mistakes.”
Evelyn dashed her hand across her eyes. “No, this is a happy day. Alice would want us to be jolly, and just look what we’re going to do. We’re going to make a bloody difference.” She leaned down then and scooped Little Owen into her arms. “Let me feed the little master before he yells the bricks off the castle walls.”
Owen looked at Evelyn, who was patting Little Owen’s back. He said, “This is Christmas. It is a day for giving and laughter and obviously eating. I want to adopt Owen. I want him to be my son. He will live at Scrilady Hall, but he will be mine.”
“Oh, Owen,” Caroline said. “I think Alice would be so pleased. I also think you’ve grown a very strong chin.”
Little Owen shrieked. Evelyn laughed and carried him from the drawing room.
Later that evening, North and Caroline were finally alone, exhausted, sated with too much food, namely, Polgrain’s Christmas boned beef ribs with parsnips and oysters, prepared as he sang at the top of his lungs:
A wife, a steak, and a walnut tree—
The more you beat ’em, better they be.
She leaned back against him as they stood together in front of the fireplace in their bedchamber.
“I think I drank too much of that wonderful sweet wine,” Caroline said.
“Does that mean I can tie your wrists with my cravats and have my way with you?”
“That sounds interesting. Could you be a bit more specific, North?”
He kissed the nape of her neck, then let her hair fall again. He cupped her breasts in his hands and gently caressed them as he whispered in her ear, “It’s Christmas night. It’s a night of magic and a night when the unexpected just might leap into your lap. I shan’t tell you a thing. Just be tipsy and let me make you yell with pleasure.”
“All right,” she said, turned in his arms, stood on her tiptoes, and kissed his mouth, running her tongue over his bottom lip. “You may do as you please, but then it’s my turn. Oh, North, I do love you so.” The sweet warmth of her breath mingled with his.
“I think I rather love you too,” he said, and she became as still as a statue. “Don’t faint, love, it’s true. Do you believe me?”
She looked up at him, her eyes wide and questioning. She didn’t say anything, just stood there, pressed against him, her arms around his back.
“I didn’t give you your Christmas present. Just a moment.” He left her to go into his small dressing room. When he handed her a small box wrapped with bright red tissue, she again remained silent, taking the box, slowly unwrapping it. She opened the box. She could only stare.
“My God,” she said, then looked up at North. Slowly, she lifted out an armlet so old that she was afraid it would crumble in her hand. On it were etched the letters REX. “My God,” she said again. “Where did you find it? It isn’t fair, North. The Duchess and I searched and searched those damned barrows and didn’t find a single shard of pottery, a single bit of a tool, or a single sliver of a weapon. Where did you get it?”
“Actually, it was Marcus who walked by that wretched clock in the entrance hall when it was chiming. He stared at the thing, put his hands over his ears, and when it was done, he pried open the front casing. The reason the thing has sounded so bloody hideous for all these years is because someone hid the armlet inside. It’s been brushing against the mechanism for God knows how many decades. I thought you’d like it, Caroline. You know, of course, that REX stands for king.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said again. She gently touched her fingertip over the faint letters scored deeply into the gold by a deft hand. “My God, this means that your great-grandfather wasn’t lying after all about finding it. But who the devil hid the thing in the clock? Why didn’t anyone say anything about it when it disappeared?”
“Good questions. I haven’t any answers. Both Marcus and the Duchess thought it would be a nice present for you since you’ve spent so much time trying to prove that King Mark just could possibly be buried here.”
“But I never believed it, not really. Like you, I decided they’d woven the betrayal myth in with their own personal betrayal, mixing them together until they couldn’t tell one from the other.”
“Well, now perhaps all of us will have to believe it.”
Caroline’s present to her husband wasn’t at all serious until he looked into her eyes, saw the sparkling, utterly wicked excitement there, drew a deep breath, and said, “Forget what I said earlier about my cravats. You go first. How do you fasten these things?”
North was flat on his back, his arms tied over his head with the satin-lined leather wrist cuffs, fashioned, Caroline told him, by Pa-Dou. The old man had never uttered a word, never let on that he knew what the cuffs were for. North just lay there, grinning like a fool, until Caroline kissed his belly. He heaved at the cuffs, his blood pounding through his body, and just before he felt himself explode, he heard Caroline whisper against his hot flesh, “Happy Christmas, North.”
36
THE NEXT MORNING, everyone, including Tregeagle and Polgrain, simply sat about not doing much of anything. North was walking across the entrance hall to the library. He grinned at the sight of Tregeagle slumped down in a very old chair with a high lattice back, his shoes off, massaging his left foot. When there was a loud knocking at the front doors, Tregeagle looked toward the door with loathing. North just laughed, waved him away, and said, “Don’t bother, Tregeagle, I will see who’s here to see us. Perhaps it’s only the Prince Regent, here to see if there are any scraps left from Polgrain’s delicious Christmas dinner.”
He pulled the great doors open.
A tall woman stood on the steps in front of him, big-bosomed, as fair as he was dark. She was staring at him, just standing there, staring at him as if she couldn’t believe he was there, a flesh-and-blood man, then she said, and he noticed that her eyes were nearly as dark as his, “Frederic?”
He shook his head, frowning at her, and he couldn’t look away, odd, but true. He said slowly, “No, my name is North.”
“I named you Frederic. I called you Frederic after Frederic the Great of Prussia, you know. I admired him, as did your father. Your father must have changed your name after he brought you back to this house. No, it was probably your grandfather who changed your name to North.”
North felt his heart begin to pound deep, fast strokes. She was older, this woman who was standing there in the cold morning air. There were lines on her face, but still, he saw the sweetness in her dark eyes, the humor in her mouth, that firm jaw that denoted a very strong will.
She said now, “I know this will come as a shock to you, but I’m Cecilia Nightingale. I’m your mother.”
He shook his head even as he said, “There’s no portrait of you.”
“Your grandfather refused to allow it done,” she said, still not moving, still standing there, the dyed green feather in her bonnet fluttering in the stiff winter breeze.
North heard a gasp behind him, then Tregeagle said, “Madam! Oh good Lord, you’re here!”
“Hello, Tregeagle. You continue to age well. I suppose you will age well even when you’re dead.”
Caroline was there then, her head cocked to one side in curiosity. “Who is it, North?”
“This is your wife, Frederic?”
“Yes, this is my wife, Caroline. She’s going to have a baby.”
Cecilia Nightingale smiled. “You’re lovely, Caroline. Congratulations.”
?
??Thank you, ma’am.” She looked toward North. He said simply, his hand outstretched to the woman, “Caroline, this is my mother, Cecilia Nightingale.”
“Oh goodness,” Caroline said. “Oh my goodness. North thought you were dead. Oh my. It’s Christmas and this is the most wonderful gift North could ever have. Do come in, ma’am. Please, come in.”
North stepped back when his wife tugged on his sleeve. It was then he saw the female who had been standing behind his mother. She was young, not older than Caroline. He could but stare at her.
“Yes, Frederic, this is Marie. She’s your sister.”
Caroline stared from one to the other. They could have been twins. She blurted out, “You didn’t betray North’s father! I knew it.”
“Oh no,” Cecilia said. “Indeed I didn’t.”
“But how did you come now?” North said, trying to grasp what was happening, what was real, and the consequences of this meeting.
“I brought her, my lord.”
It was Coombe. He stepped forward, his shoulders thrown back, looking brave and defiant and scared.
Caroline threw herself at him, hugging him close. “I knew you couldn’t have killed those women, I just knew it, and we were all sure when someone tried to kill me after you left and then there was that note left in my bedchamber calling me a slut and saying I would die. And do you know that some people still said you were in hiding and still doing all those awful things and—”
“My lord,” Coombe said. “I gather there has been some excitement since I left?”
“A bit, Coombe. How would you feel to know that someone left a bloody knife in your room at Mrs. Freely’s inn?”
Tregeagle said quickly, “None of us believed it, Mr. Coombe. However, we were greatly relieved that her ladyship was thrown when someone stretched a wire between a tree and the old stone fence. Then there was that nasty note left in her bedchamber and we knew it couldn’t be you, unless, naturally, you were in hiding, and everyone knew you could get into Mount Hawke with no trouble at all.”
“This is all well and good,” Caroline said, “but North, your mother is here and your sister.”
North turned slowly to face the woman who hadn’t said a word once she’d stepped into the vast entrance hall at Mount Hawke. She said now, “How I wanted to belong here, but your grandfather wouldn’t allow it. I was allowed to stay only three days, and every hour of every one of those three days I listened to your father argue with your grandfather. Then your father took me away.”
“But I wrote to my father’s solicitor in London, asking him where I spent the first five years of my life. He wrote back to tell me it was the house on the Steyne in Brighton. He wrote that my father had told him that you died and thus he was bringing me back to Mount Hawke.”
“No, no, I didn’t die, North. I’ve been living in Surrey for twenty years. Actually, your father sent me a yearly stipend, I suppose you would call it. It didn’t arrive this year, so I knew he must have died.”
North just looked at her, then at his sister, who hadn’t said a word, who just stood behind her mother, silent and still. “I don’t understand.”
Caroline said quickly, “Why don’t we all go into the drawing room. Tregeagle, please have Polgrain prepare tea and cakes. There must be lots of good food left from yesterday.” She turned to her mother-in-law. “Please, won’t you and Marie come with me. It’s chilly today. You can warm yourselves by the fire.”
It was an uneasy silence until everyone held a cup of tea in his hand. Then Caroline said, “My mother died when I was eleven years old. I missed her dreadfully. I still miss her. North has believed you were dead since he was five years old. He has missed you dreadfully as well.”
Cecilia Nightingale gently laid her cup on its saucer. “It’s stopped, hasn’t it?”
“What?” North said.
“The legacy of betrayal to Nightingale men. Coombe merely told me that you’d run away from Mount Hawke when you were sixteen. He said you couldn’t bear your father’s bitterness and the rage. He said you didn’t turn out like your father or your grandfather wanted you to.”
“That’s right, I didn’t, thank God. My father had been poisoned utterly by Grandfather. But that isn’t important now. Why didn’t you write my father to tell him of Marie? For God’s sake, she’s the very picture of him; she’s my twin. He couldn’t believe that you betrayed him once he saw her.”
“He never saw her,” Cecilia Nightingale said quietly. She reached for her daughter’s hand and held it tightly. “I didn’t want to give up, for I loved your father, despite everything. In those early years, he was so torn, so uncertain, wanting to believe in my love for him, in my loyalty, then hearing his father carry on and on about how I would betray him and I would hurt him dreadfully. Your grandfather did poison your father—that is a good word for it—not just against me, for it would have been any woman who’d married him, any woman who had already birthed the precious Nightingale heir. I begged your father to come and see Marie. He didn’t come, but your grandfather did, when she was five years old, the image of him, the image of your father, the image of you when you were five years old. He looked at her, then at me, and said, ‘You are a lying slut. Never again write to my son. He didn’t want to see you. He asked that I take care of this for him.’ And that was that. Until Coombe came to see me.”
“But she is obviously North’s sister,” Caroline said. “Why would he have said that?”
Cecilia said as she looked at her son, “I think he couldn’t bear to end the legacy of mistrust. It was such a part of him, after a while, perhaps it was the main part, the only part he understood and accepted. It made him what he was, I suppose. And to be shown wrong in front of his son, I suppose it was too much for him. I felt sorry for him for a little while. Then I came to hate him and your father, Frederic. Oh, I’m sorry. It’s North. I shall have to adjust my thinking. During the past twenty years, you’ve always been Frederic to me, always. Oh, dear.” She lowered her face into her hands and began to cry.
Marie gave her brother a vicious look, then pulled her mother into her arms. She patted her mother’s shoulder, light little taps that brought Cecilia’s head back up. She sniffed. “I’m sorry. It’s just that—”
North rose and walked to her. He held out his hand. To his surprise, his sister pushed his hand away. She rose, standing in front of their mother, and then pushed at his chest. She looked fierce and strangely confused and quite ready to kill him to protect her mother.
“No, Marie,” Cecilia Nightingale said very calmly, drawing her daughter’s hand away. “No, little love. It’s not North’s fault. Look at me, that’s right. I never lie to you, you know that, don’t you? Of course you do. It’s not his fault. Do you understand?”
Marie looked perplexed, very worried, really, then suddenly she turned away and sat down, her hands in her lap, her eyes on her hands.
“What’s wrong with her?” North said.
“When she was born, the local doctor was nowhere to be found. The midwife, an old, half-blind woman, did her best, but she hurt Marie’s head. Marie was damaged. She is simple, North, but ever so sweet and, as you just saw, very protective of me. All of this is strange to her, indeed, she doesn’t really understand what is happening. Actually, I believe that is the second reason your grandfather didn’t want to recognize her. She was defective, and you weren’t. You were the Nightingale heir. You were whole. She would have just been an embarrassment to him. Also, if your father had ever seen her, he would have known your grandfather had lied to him. Perhaps your grandfather would have lost him. I don’t know. Maybe it didn’t matter by then. Maybe your father would have detested her for her simpleness. They’re dead so we’ll never know the truth.”
“That god-awful bastard,” North said. “Oh Jesus, and now I’ve frightened her as well.” He dropped to his haunches in front of his sister. Very slowly, very gently, he laid his hand atop her folded ones. “Marie,” he said. “Won’t you look at me???
?
Slowly she raised her head and he stared into his own dark eyes, his nose that was sculpted more delicately, his firm jaw that was softer and more rounded. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “You’re my sister and you’re beautiful.”
She cocked her head to one side, as if considering what he’d said, then, suddenly, without warning, she smiled, a wide dazzling smile that made North suck in his breath.
Cecilia said quietly, “No man has ever before told her that. She does know the word, as you can see. Actually, she’s learned a lot. I’m very proud of her.”
North remained on his knees, holding his sister’s hands, and said, looking up at his mother, “Why didn’t you come to me sooner? It’s been nearly two years since my father died. Why didn’t you come?”
“I had no idea that you were any different. When no money came I just assumed that you felt as your father had. I knew they began to fill you with hate from the moment you came to Mount Hawke. Your grandfather didn’t die until you were nearly twelve. I didn’t know until Coombe told me that you’d run away and joined the army.”
“I hated both my grandfather and my father,” North said simply. “I couldn’t bear my father’s venom, his bitterness, his rages. It is odd, though. When I was nineteen, he bought my commission. I became a captain, eventually a major. I sold out just last July. I never wrote to him, never thanked him, never acknowledged what he’d done.”
Caroline said loudly, “North, you know the man who is coming to restore all the paintings? I shall write him today and ask for his recommendation for the most prominent portrait painter in London so that your mother’s portrait can be done quickly. Yes, I’ll do that right now.” She jumped to her feet, then stopped suddenly at North’s burst of laughter. He rose and walked leisurely to her. He grasped her shoulders and pulled her against him. He kissed the tip of her nose. “Caroline Nightingale, come and sit down. Now that Mother and Marie are here, we have all the time in the world.”