Once, in the Peninsula, Sebastian’s colonel had ordered a Portuguese peasant tied between two horses and then had the horses whipped in opposite directions. Just for fun. He blinked away the memory. “You were fortunate to make it back to England.”
“Fortunate? Yes, I suppose we were. One does what one must.”
At their feet, Cloe went about the task of severing the umbilical cord and cleaning her pup. Lady Audley was silent for a moment, stroking the bitch’s head. Then she said, her voice flat, “I married Audley the following year.”
Sebastian watched the elegant woman before him help with the collie’s birthing. Lady Audley was beautiful even now in middle age. Twenty years ago she must have been stunning as a young, grieving widow. Did marrying the late Lord Audley fall into the category of things one did because one must?
“Tell me about Lady Anglessey’s mother,” he said aloud.
“Katherine?” The question seemed to surprise her. “She looked much like Guinevere, although she was a tiny thing, whereas Guinevere was tall, like her father. They had the same blue-black hair, and those eyes that made you think of a fern-filled mountain glen in spring.” She smiled softly. “And the same passionate, not always wise nature.”
“I’ve heard it said Lord Athelstone lost four wives in childbirth. Is that true?”
“Not exactly. I believe the first died of consumption when her daughter, Morgana, was a year or two old. But the other three died in childbirth, yes. Lord Athelstone was a bear of a man. All three of his daughters were unusually tall, and one assumes the sons would have been even larger. I gave it as my opinion that it was like mating a Yorkie bitch to a Great Dane. His boy babies were so big they were literally killing his wives. And it’s certainly true that he only succeeded in getting a son when he finally had enough sense to take to wife a woman nearly as big as he.”
Cloe was cleaning her pup now, licking it roughly, nudging it with her muzzle. It would be another hour, perhaps more, before a second pup was born. Sebastian said, “Why did you want to see me?”
Lady Audley wiped her hands on the apron she’d tied over her muslin dress and stood. There was a sudden fierceness about her, the aura of a mother willing to do battle to protect her young. “Varden was here with me, all last Wednesday afternoon. If you seek to deflect suspicion from the Prince Regent onto my son, I will not allow you to succeed.”
Sebastian met her hard gaze. “What I seek is the truth.”
She gave an unexpectedly bitter laugh. “The truth? How often do you think we ever really know the truth?”
“According to Lady Quinlan, her sister Guinevere grew up expecting to marry Varden.”
Lady Audley pressed her lips together, then nodded almost reluctantly. “In some ways it was my fault, I suppose. There was only a year between them. I always thought of them much as brother and sister. I never imagined for a moment that Guinevere saw them as something else entirely. But it was a child’s dream, nothing more. They were children. Why, Varden wasn’t even up at Oxford yet when Guinevere married.”
“That was four years ago. Much has changed since then.”
Her head drew back, her eyes sparkling. “I know what you’re implying, but you’re wrong. Guinevere had a passionate nature, but she was also fiercely loyal. She would never have played Anglessey false. Never.”
He wondered if it was significant that her anger flared in defense of Guinevere’s honor and not that of her son. Or was she simply reflecting her society’s very differing attitudes toward male and female sexual adventuring? “I’d be interested to hear what your son has to say.”
Isolde sucked in a deep breath, and for one telling moment, her mask of calm control slipped. He realized that behind this woman’s concern for the laboring collie at her feet lay another fear, deeper and far more troubling.
“My son isn’t here,” she said, suddenly looking tired and much, much older. “I’m afraid he has taken Guinevere’s death quite badly. I haven’t seen him since Thursday morning, when we heard what had happened to her.”
Late that night, sometime after the watch had called out
Sebastian lay in Kat Boleyn’s silk-hung bed and listened to the wind set the branches of the nearby chestnut tree to tapping against the front of the house. Rolling onto his side, he let his gaze drift over the sleeping woman beside him, following the strong angle of her jaw, the gentle curve of her breast just visible beneath the tumble of her hair.
The wind gusted up again, rattling the windows and setting the bed curtains to shifting in the sudden cold draft. Reaching out, he drew the coverlet over Kat’s bare shoulder and smiled. His love for this woman swelled within him, filling him with a warm feeling of peace and the same stunned awe that he’d known for seven years now, ever since the day he’d first held her in his arms and tasted the intimation of heaven that was her kiss.
He wondered where it came from, that comfortable conviction Lady Audley shared with so many in their society, the belief that the passions of the young are insignificant whirlwinds, temporarily intense, perhaps, but never enduring. He’d been one-and-twenty when he and Kat first met, while she had been barely sixteen.
She stirred beside him, as if disturbed by his wakefulness. Moving carefully so as not to rouse her further, he slid from her side and went to stand, naked, at the window overlooking the front of the house. Drawing back the drapes, he stared down at an empty street lit only fitfully by a half-moon already disappearing rapidly behind a scuttling of clouds.
He heard a whisper of movement as she came up behind him. “Why can’t you sleep?” she asked, slipping her arms around his waist.
He turned in her embrace, holding her close. “I was thinking about Guinevere Anglessey. About the life she must have known growing up in Wales.”
