Portia heard only a question mark. “Whose else would it be?” she snapped, aware of a thickness in her throat. “Or did you imagine I’d been consorting with the entire Decatur village?”
There was a moment of silence, when it seemed as if all three of them held their breath in the encroaching darkness.
Then Rufus said quietly, “I deserve much, gosling, but not that.”
Portia turned away with an inarticulate little gesture.
“How long have you known?” Rufus asked, laying a hand gently on her shoulder, asking, not compelling, her to turn back to him.
“Since the siege… just before, I think. But I don’t know much about these matters, so I wasn’t sure.” She half turned toward him again, but her voice still had an edge.
“Why didn’t you tell me, love?”
“First I wasn’t sure… and then when I was, you weren’t exactly receptive,” she returned, wondering why she couldn’t quell this bitterness; why, now that everything was going to be right between them, all the pain of the last two weeks came up to overwhelm her with hurt so that she felt it afresh and she needed to give it back. “You wouldn’t have listened to me that night. Would you?”
“No.” The single word carried a lifetime of remorse. He wanted so badly to hold her, to smooth the hurt from her brow, to wipe the bitterness from her eyes, to beg her forgiveness, but she was holding herself away from him, sharp spurs of pain and anger like a protective fence around her.
“I went into the castle because I wanted… needed… to talk to…” Portia stopped, ran her hands through her hair, pushing it off her forehead. She had run out of anger, and the protective walls tumbled down in shards at her feet.
“Olivia?”
Portia nodded.
Rufus had no words to express his sorrow, but he knew that now he could hold her. He drew her against him, his hand once more clasping her neck in the way that she knew, that brought her so much peace and contentment. “Forgive me,” he said, his voice hoarse with guilt for what he had done to her in his blindness and his bitterness. “I did not know what it was to love until I met you.”
Cato had been standing silently to one side, motionless as he listened. There was much he didn’t understand about the way things had happened between these two, but the power of emotion that connected his brother’s daughter and Rufus Decatur was almost palpable. He sheathed his sword, breaking the intensity with a calm question. “Am I to understand that my niece is carrying your child, Decatur?”
“So it would seem, Granville.” The vivid blue Decatur eyes were slightly mocking as they regarded the marquis of Granville over the bright orange halo surrounding Portia’s head. “It would appear that more than spilled blood will join us.”
“Portia is her father’s child.” Cato’s own smile, slightly sardonic, met the earl of Rothbury’s. “And, like her father, seems to have carved her own destiny without regard for the usual forms and customs. I would like to wish you both joy of each other, Decatur, but I doubt you’d accept the sentiment…” He shrugged and now felt for words.
“My father was not a pleasant man. He believed in doing his duty without consideration for emotion or the ties of sentiment. Your father took a stance against the king… my father accepted the king’s commission to visit justice upon your father.”
Cato gave a short laugh. “It seems ironical in our present circumstances. My father would have had no compunction in delivering me to the headsman for the stand I now take against the king.
“But I do know that every sovereign of revenue from the Rothbury estates is accounted for, from the moment of your father’s death. I ask you to believe that. I cannot undo whatever wrong my father did your father, whether it was real or perceived. But I can forget their feud in the name of this coming child, if you can do so.”
His tone was blunt, the sentiment generous. Rufus felt Portia move against him. He felt the ripples of her skin, the quick little breaths she took. And finally he understood that the demons who had ruled him were not his, they belonged to his father… a man of rash and hasty temper, quick to see insult where none was intended, and as quick to suspect treachery.
Two inflexible temperaments had collided close to thirty years ago, but the detritus of their collision no longer needed to litter the lives of their children and their grandchildren. It would be hard to cut out of himself those aspects of his father that had contributed to the tragedy of so many lost and wasted lives. But he would do it.
Rufus took Portia’s hand. “Will you give your niece in marriage to the earl of Rothbury, Granville?”
“I’m not sure it’s my place to do so.” Cato smiled and his face was transformed, giving him an almost mischievous expression. He reached for Portia’s free hand. “The lady has a mind of her own. Do you wish for this union, Portia?”
“Yes.” The one word seemed quite sufficient.
Rufus felt as if this was the moment toward which all the previous moments of his life had been leading. He felt as light as air. “Then we’ll do it now,” he said decisively. “Granville, will you fetch a chaplain?”
“A drumhead wedding,” Cato mused with that same puckish grin. “Seems appropriate enough for a bride in britches.” He strode toward his horse. “I’ll be back within the half hour.”
“But we can’t get married here!” Portia protested. “I don’t wish to be a bride in britches.”
“My darling gosling, I am not prepared to let another hour pass before we put this ramshackle union of ours onto a proper footing,” Rufus said, his tone as decisive as before. “Apart from the fact that you always wear britches anyway, I fail to see that it matters a damn what you wear.”
“But I’m not the stuff of which countesses are made.” Portia didn’t know why she was still making objections, but somehow she couldn’t help herself. “I’m the bastard daughter of a Granville wastrel! How can I possibly become countess of Rothbury?”
Rufus swung her toward him. He took her face in both his hands and regarded her closely in the gathering dusk. “What nonsense is this, Portia?”
She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.
“Arrant nonsense,” he affirmed. “And it will be very much better for both of us if you never indulge in it again.”
“Of course, you’re not exactly the stuff of which earls are made,” Portia observed with a sudden smile.
“Very true.” He stroked her face, his gloved fingers tracing the curve of her jaw, and when he spoke again his voice was very soft and intense. “You are the very breath of my life, love. I cannot bear to think of the hurt I have done you, but I swear to you now that I will honor you and love you and cherish you to my dying day.”
And
She passed her wedding night with Rufus searching for the men who had fought beneath the Decatur standard, and as dawn broke she fell asleep on Ajax’s saddle, held securely by her husband, with Will leading Penny as had happened once before, on a cold winter night when the king’s cause had still been strong.
Rufus led his depleted force back to Decatur village, and there, in renewal and inexpressible gratitude, he took his bride for his own, possessed her and was in turn possessed. And when she lay against his chest in the glorious space between sleeping and waking, her skin damp with passion, her body limp in the aftermath of joy, Rufus knew a joy and a certainty that he would never have believed possible.
He smiled in the darkness, smoothing the damp curls from her forehead.
“Why are you smiling so smugly?” Portia murmured, burrowing her cheek into the soft red-gold pelt of his chest.
“How do you know I am?” He stroked the length of her back, reaching down to cup her bottom in his palm.
“I can feel it in your skin.” She kissed his nipple, moving one leg over his in a gesture both languid and inviting. “I’ll always know what you’re thinking.”
“That ought to terrify me,” Rufus said, sliding a hand between her thighs. “But for some reason, it doesn’t.”
“Because you’ll never again have thoughts that you won’t wish me to hear,” Portia predicted with a throaty little chuckle. She moved indolently against his hand, and her chuckle deepened.
Epilogue
Caulfield Abbey, Uxbridge, England, 1645
“B
“Where?” demanded Phoebe, her step slowing.
“Behind us.” Olivia’s hand on Phoebe’s arm tightened. “I can feel his eyes.”
Portia glanced over her shoulder, toward the cloister they had just left. “Oh, yes, there he is,” she said cheerfully. “Dung-stinking whoreson.”
Brian Morse was standing in an arched doorway opening onto the cloister. He was leaning against a stone pillar, his arms folded, his eyes following the three young women as they walked arm in arm across the smooth grassy quadrangle.
“What’s he doing here?” Olivia murmured.
“The same as everyone else, I imagine,” Portia replied as they entered a circle of rosebushes in the center of the quad. “He’s probably hanging around the edges of the peace talks. I can’t imagine he has any kind of important role to play.”
“He can’t see us in here anyway.” Phoebe bent to smell one of the great yellow roses climbing a trellis within the little garden. She jumped back with a cross exclamation, licking a bead of blood from her finger where a thorn had attacked her.
“Now there’s blood on my gown.” She brushed ineffectually at a smear of blood on her gown of white dimity.
“It’ll stain,” Portia said, somewhat unhelpfully, standing on tiptoe to see over the rosebushes. “There’s Rufus and your father, Olivia. In the far cloister.” She frowned. “Who’s that with them?”
Olivia, now as tall as Portia, looked across the bushes. Phoebe, rather shorter, was obliged to jump to see over.
“It’s the king,” Phoebe said with awe. Her sojourn at the king’s court in Oxford gave her a familiarity with the sovereign that the other two didn’t have.
“Let’s go and greet them.” Portia licked her fingertips and smoothed her eyebrows. “Is my hat straight?”
“We can’t just b-burst in upon them,” Olivia protested. “They’re in private discourse. It would be improper.”
“My husband is holding my baby, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Portia said sweetly, adjusting the wide brim of her straw hat. “If that’s not unconventional, I don’t know what is.”
“That’s true,” Phoebe agreed. She was much struck by the sight. Rufus Decatur was deep in conversation with King Charles and the marquis of Granville. Not an unusual event during these uneasy days of peace talks, except that he was holding a baby in the crook of his arm. A round-cheeked, green-eyed infant with a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose and a soft, downy cluster of strawberry blond curls. The child was sucking her fist and gurgling; her other fist was tightly embedded in her father’s hair. And the earl of Rothbury appeared to be completely at his ease, completely unaware of the extreme oddity of the picture he made.
