Bethany sat on the other side of Miranda. “Miranda, try it slowly. Ka-mis-ka-wa.”
“Ka-mis-ka-wa.” Miranda immediately looked at her father. “Is that right, Papa?”
“It is, very good.” Owen gave the girl a squeeze. “Thank you, Miss Frost.”
“My pleasure, Captain Strake.” Bethany, clad in a modest dress of grey with a white collar visible from beneath, tucked an errant wisp of blonde hair under her grey bonnet. “I would have expected to find you at the Cathedral for the trial.”
“I’d much rather spend time with Miranda.”
“I can see why. Miranda, you are a very pretty little girl.”
“Thank you, Miss.” Miranda, all of a sudden, became very shy and buried her face against Owen’s side.
“And why are you not at the trial, Miss Frost?”
“Caleb forbid me to go.” Bethany shook her head. “Normally I should not obey, but I believe he has some deviltry in mind. My mother would wonder why I did not stop him.”
Owen laughed. “Your brother doesn’t seem to mind getting himself into trouble.”
“The same can be said of you.” Bethany glanced toward the ocean. “I set the type for the story my brother published about Colonel Rathfield. The battle with the dire wolves was quite harrowing.”
“The Gazette story livened things up a bit.” Owen stood and took Miranda’s hand. “Come, let us walk, shall we?”
They began to stroll through Temperance, with Miranda between them, holding her father’s hand. Owen thought back to a similar walk he had taken with Bethany, before he’d gone on his first expedition. The recollection brought a smile to his face.
She glanced sidelong at him. “The story might have been hyperbolic, but it sounded as if you got away without injury.”
“Not entirely, but mostly.” He shook his head, understanding the question implied by her comment. “We got gnawed more than bitten. I truly don’t remember a single scar from the incident.”
“But that reddish line beneath your ear, that’s new.”
“We ran into trouble in Happy Valley.”
Miranda looked up. “Becca is from Happy Valley.”
Bethany smiled. “Is she your friend?”
“Yes. She is almost grown up. I let her play with my dolls.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“You could play with them, too.”
Miranda’s offer broadened Bethany’s smile and pasted a similar one across Owen’s face. In an instant he could see the three of them walking along, not a man, his daughter and a friend, but as a family. For just a moment his heart sloughed off the melancholy of the fight with his wife.
“You are very kind, Miranda.”
Owen gave his daughter’s hand a squeeze. “Miss Frost, once the Prince is finished with them, I would appreciate your transcribing my journals of the last expedition. Whilst I was in the wilderness, I noted a number of things that I thought you might find interesting.”
“It would be a great pleasure, Captain, and an honor.” Bethany held her head up a bit. “I have always found your stories enjoyable.”
“My Papa tells me stories, sometimes, when I go to bed.” The little girl marched along happily. “Not scary ones. Well, except the one about wolves on the night I was born. But he rescued me and Mama.”
“I should be scared of wolves unless I had someone brave like your father around.”
“And yet, Bethany Frost, you never seem to attract a man, brave or otherwise.”
Owen turned and found his wife not six feet behind them. “Catherine, there you are. We chanced across Miss Frost by the docks.”
“Waiting for a ship full of sailors to come in, was she?” Catherine held her hand out. “Miranda, come here, this instant.”
Miranda looked up at her father. “She has her angry voice.”
“It was nothing you did, Miranda.”
“No, Miranda, nothing you did at all.” Owen’s wife glared at Bethany. “You failed to steal him once, dear. I tolerated your editing his dreadfully boring prose before, but I am not of a mind to be so tolerant this time.”
Bethany bowed her head. “Believe me, Mrs. Strake, when I tell you that the last thing I should wish to do in this world would be to cause you or your family any discomfort.”
“Then perhaps you will just find yourself your own man, Miss Frost.”
Owen reached out a hand. “Catherine, Bethany is a friend, an innocent friend.”
“A friend. Interesting use of the word, husband. You might protest your innocence, but I already know you to be a liar, Owen Strake.” She glanced hotly from Owen to Bethany and back, then snorted. “You have made it plain that you are not going to honor your word. At least now you have abandoned the pretense of hiding behind the Prince in this regard.”
“Catherine…”
“No, Owen, I do not want to hear it. Miranda and I shall use the apartment this evening, then return home tomorrow morning. I should appreciate advanced word when you will be coming to Strake House so I can make proper arrangements.” His wife spun on her heel and dragged Miranda around with her. “Come, Miranda, we are leaving.”
Owen covered his face with a hand. He said nothing as Catherine stalked away. Shame burned through him, first at how his wife treated Bethany, and second at his relief when she departed. He sighed heavily, then looked toward Bethany. He found her hand extended hesitantly toward his shoulder. “Please, Bethany, forgive, forget that. She did not mean…”
Bethany’s hand returned to her side. “Captain Strake, she meant every word of it-the words spoken and unspoken.”
“She’s angry.”
“Apparently.”
Owen glanced toward the sky. “I promised to go to Norisle. After the trip west, I can’t.”
Bethany regarded him with cool, blue eyes. “Captain Strake, if you believe that is all which prompted her words, you are far too kind and far too naive. For her, being in Mystria is being made to lay down in a bed of nettles. She has been here going on four and a half years. She has hated every second of it. Each year she has wanted to return, and each year she has been thwarted.”
“I know.” Owen shook his head. “But there is nothing I can do about it, Bethany. My home is here. My life is here. She may have left her heart in Norisle, but for me to go back would be to tear my heart out and leave it bleeding on these shores. She thinks she will die if she stays. I know I will die if I leave.”
“Have you told her that?”
Owen half-laughed, throwing his arms open and letting them flap limply to his sides. “How could I? When could I? When she is angry, even acquiescing does not make her listen. And in those times she is calm, to address this would set her off. When I take her down to the river, where we can watch the water flow and moose grazing, all I see is beauty. What she sees are all the ways in which our home is not a Norillian estate.”
He glanced down, pressing his hands together fingertip to fingertip. “Perhaps she is right. Perhaps I do have a mistress.”
“Owen…”
“She thinks it’s you, I know, and I am sorry her suspicions threaten your reputation.” He shook his head. “What she doesn’t understand is that Mystria is my mistress. Where she sees a primitive, uncivilized land, I see unspoiled majesty. As Catherine offers me less and less, Mystria offers more and more. When the Prince prepared the expedition west, and I agreed to go, he asked if I was doing it for my duty, or to get away from my wife. I guess now I know that I was doing it to spend time with my mistress.”
As Owen shaped his emotions into words, he felt as if he was uncovering a treasure which had lain buried for eons. His father had been Mystrian, born of a family cast out of Norisle ages ago. A sailor, he met and married a Norillian noble’s daughter. Owen had been born in Mystria, but when his father died at sea, he and his mother had moved back to Norisle, and she had been wedded to Lord Ventnor’s youngest son, a wastrel. Owen had grown up thinking that all Norisle hated him for the land of his birth, and in returning he recaptured the life he had been
