At the Queen's Summons (30 page)

“So you're saying you can't stay at Ross Castle?”

“And be the pet spaniel of the Sassenach, performing for scraps?” With a sense of icy certainty, Aidan realized that every day Pippa stayed with him would sink her deeper into peril.

Revelin hesitated, then cleared his throat. “At least it would be a way to keep Philippa.”

Aidan clenched his jaw. He had to force the words out. “Why would she even want me then?”

Revelin touched his shoulder. “Sometimes the most courageous thing is to know when to surrender, when to let go.”

He threw off the comforting hand. He stalked past Revelin and rowed with savage strokes back to Ross Castle. Taking the stairs two and three at a time, he climbed to the highest parapet and burst out onto the walkway just as dawn was breaking.

This castle was the glory of the clan O Donoghue. It should represent the very pinnacle of his achievement.

How he despised it. He had from the start, when it had only been a minor peel house on the shores of Lough Leane. His father had been determined to turn it into a monument of defiance.

“You left me a legacy of hate,” Aidan said between his teeth. He stepped up between two merlons and gazed outward from a dizzying height.

The dawn was bloodred. The bellies of the clouds beyond the mountains were heavy and swollen with a coming storm. But for now, the morning was clear and crimson. Already he could see the corrosive power of the
English landlords. Fields that used to roll on forever were becoming enclosed into neat, cold parcels. Churches stood empty except for the wind howling through them. Sacred images had been smashed, priests put to the sword or exiled to sea-scarred islands. Smallholdings and crofts disappeared like dust on a breeze.

For a moment the landscape parted like a curtain, and he saw the perfect oval face of Felicity as clearly as if she stood before him. She had died, and no one had paid the price.

How had she felt, falling all that way to her death?

Aidan imagined it was the way he felt now—wild, out of control, flung toward a destiny so certain it seemed almost preordained.

He took a last long look at the red dawn, and in his heart he knew there could be only one choice.

 

Pippa smiled in her sleep as Aidan's arms went around her. With her eyes still closed, she took a deep breath. The scent of the lake winds lingered in his hair.

She blinked herself awake and saw that it was barely dawn. “Where have you been?” she asked.

“Out on the parapet. Looking. Thinking.” He reached past the bed hanging and handed her a cup of cold water. She drank deeply and gratefully.

There was no reason she should have felt it, but she sensed an edge of desperation. She put down her cup and hugged him, pressing her cheek to the warm hollow of his chest.

“I love you, Aidan,” she whispered.

He plunged his fingers into her hair and turned her face up to his, kissing her thoroughly and hard. Within moments they were making love with a fervor that filled her with a strange sense of panic and joy.

He was not tender with her; she did not want him to be. He was intense and restless, like the waves pounding on the rocks at the shore. His love was a storm of raw emotion, and she wanted it, all of it, no holding back, no shielding her from its ruthless power.

There was a harsh beauty to his lovemaking. He turned her this way and that, his mouth and hands finding places of agonizing sensitivity. His excitement seemed to fill the entire room. The sky through the open window was on fire, and he was on fire, and his touch set her on fire.

He stroked her, and his mouth and tongue seared her until she cried out, first begging him to stop and in the next breath imploring him to go on.

When at last he mounted her, the sun had risen fully and the light glowed behind him, outlining his untamed, long hair and the raw desperation on his face.

“Now, yes, now,” she said, lifting herself against him and sweeping their bodies together, completely engulfed by the maelstrom of his passion.

They clashed and separated, clashed and separated, loving enemies locked in loving battle, one that had no outcome save total surrender for both. He bent his head and kissed her neck, then kissed lower, harder, his teeth biting her. Some remote, observant part of her looked on in surprise. It was as if he wanted to brand her with the stamp of his passion. As if he wanted to mark her with an image that would never fade.

And ah, she wanted it, the rough pleasure, and she told him so with a harsh whisper in his ear. She crested higher and higher like a feather on the wind, and each time she thought he could not take her farther, he did, sweeping her so far she was afraid to look down, so high she was afraid the fall would kill her.

And then it didn't matter. She looked into his eyes and saw a flame of devotion that would never die, and her fear dissolved.

She cried out his name and flung her soul to the wind.

The fall was long and fast, and it ended with a strange crimson darkness that only later she discovered was created by her tightly closed eyes.

“Ah, Aidan.” Her own voice sounded alien.

“Aye, beloved?” His did, too.

“I thought after all the times we've made love, you had shown me everything.”

“And now?” A smile lightened his tone.

“I was wrong. It is new every time you make love to me. But particularly just now.”

He kissed her, carefully settling his mouth on hers, gentle now and tender. “Did it disturb you?”

“No.” Yet she could not deny a slowly awakening sense that something between them had changed. “I love you. Part of my love for you has to do with times like this. But—”

“What is it?” His gaze pierced her.

“It's silly. Never mind.”

“Just tell me.”

She hesitated, struggling to deny the thought. Finally she forced herself to speak. “You made love to me as if it were the last time.”

I
reland is more beautiful than I had ever imagined a place to be. The reports we heard in London concerned only the burned fields, the painted, shrieking warriors, the starving populace driven to violence.

Perhaps it was good fortune alone, for we saw only blue and green vistas, towering cliffs, sapphire lakes and emerald mountains. Ireland is a place where the unexpected comes true, so I suppose this is as good a place as any to face what I must face now.

Though Oliver pleaded with me to stay back in England and wait for word from him, I insisted on coming. The contessa was good company during the voyage, and she did her best to prepare me for the events to come.

Aye, she did her best.

But can a mother ever truly be prepared to meet, face-to-face, the daughter she had given up for dead twenty-two years before?

—Lark de Lacey,
Countess of Wimberleigh

“T
here is no easy way to tell you this,” Aidan said. After breakfast, he had brought her to the most beautiful spot encompassed by Ross Castle. It was a lakeshore garden, wild with cattails and reeds, ducks and terns darting in and out of the marshes.

She looked up at him with the sweet, lazy smile of a woman who had been well and thoroughly loved and had, without regret, been awakened by a kiss before dawn.

A woman who had no idea she had been deceived.

“What is it, my love?” She bent and plucked a flower and tucked it behind her ear.

He hesitated, giving himself one last look at her while she still loved him. After he spoke, she would never regard him with such adoration again. It was like knowing he was seeing her for the last time. The total, open trust and acceptance would be gone in a few moments, so for now he gave in to selfishness, taking time to bask and indulge in her affection.

As he watched her watching him, he reflected that there was a sort of magnificence about their doomed
love. A majestic, sweeping scope to it. Their passion was too huge and all-consuming to last as long as his dreams.

“Aidan?” She tilted her bright head to one side. “Why do you look at me so?”

“I have news,” he said. “It concerns your family.”

She sent him a melting smile. “You are my family.”

“I mean the family you have been seeking.”

An odd distress flickered in her eyes. He realized it was denial. “You are all I want or need,” she said.

“Nay, it was your search for yourself that led you to me. Long ago, you asked me to help you find out just what occurred, how you happened to be lost at such a vulnerable age.”

She paled. “What have you learned?”

He became very aware of the cool shadows, the blue scent of the lake and the way the morning light gilded her.

“I believe you are Lady Philippa de Lacey,” he said. “Daughter of Oliver and Lark de Lacey, the Earl and Countess of Wimberleigh.”

She made absolutely no movement. After several moments passed, he feared she had not heard.

Then finally she spoke in a dull, quiet voice. “Philippa de Lacey.”

“Aye, my love.”

“My parents are the Earl and Countess of Wimberleigh.”

“Aye.”

“And Richard?”

“Your younger brother.” Now that he knew the truth, he wondered how he had failed to see the resemblance earlier. In looks, Richard de Lacey was a model of golden perfection, with an angelic smile and laughing eyes and a deep, unexpected cleverness. Donal Og was right. Pippa—or Philippa, as he should think of her now—was Richard's female equivalent.

“How did you find this out?”

“It started with the brooch you have. After you first showed it to me, I made a copy of the markings on the back. With the help of the contessa, I learned they were letters in the Cyrillic alphabet. The words are Russian. They mean ‘blood, vows and honor.' It is a family motto.”

He raked a hand through his hair. So much time had passed since that revelation.

Her breath caught. “That's a lie!”

“The words are the same as those spoken to you by the Gypsy woman.”

“How did you decide it's a motto of the de Lacey family?” she inquired, her voice growing stronger.

“I saw a similar brooch in a portrait of the Lady Lark. It was painted twenty-five years ago. It had the ruby and twelve pearls, just as you told me.” He wanted to pace but forced himself to stand still and continue. “The contessa learned that Lord and Lady Wimberleigh lost a daughter—their first child—in a storm at sea. They gave her up for dead.”

“When did you find this out?”

“The day I was arrested and taken to the Tower.”

“You've known since then.” Her voice lifted in wonder. “How perfectly evil of you not to tell me.” She pressed both hands to her stomach as if to quiet its churning.

“Pippa—”

“Of course you couldn't tell me,” she went on, speaking in deadened tones. “Just as you couldn't tell me about your wife. You needed me to help you escape the Tower of London. You had to keep me in a helpless state of slavish devotion so I would do your bidding.”

Her words, though spoken quietly, lashed out at him. He accepted their sting, absorbed it like the burn of a hot
brand. “I deserved that. But truly, I was concerned for you. I wanted to be certain, so you would not raise false hopes. I wanted to be sure the de Laceys would accept you, not accuse you of being a fraud. And by the time we got here, I saw no point in telling you. For all I knew, you would never have the chance to meet your mother and father.”

“Because after I helped you escape, I became an outlaw who can never return to England.”

“True,” he said.

“You made me an outlaw.”

“True again. Pippa—”

“No!” For the first time, she shouted at him. “I want no more excuses. You found the answer to my dreams, and you didn't tell me.”

“I'm sorry, beloved. I wanted to shield you from hurt.”

A bitter laugh escaped her. “I find that odd, for I have never suffered such hurt as I have since meeting you. Tell me, why have you decided, all of a sudden, to reveal this to me now?”

It was almost too dramatic that, just as she spoke, a cloud obscured the sun and plunged the morning into a yellow-gray haze.

“They want to see you,” he said. He had to trust that Lark and Oliver were as kind and loving as the contessa claimed. “They are in Killarney, waiting to meet you.”

She shuddered. “My parents have come for me.”

“Aye, my love.”

“They gave me up for dead, and now they want to see me. To see if I am worthy of them. To see if my blood is blue enough.”

He took a step forward, reaching to comfort her. His hands touched her shoulders. She pulled away, making an agonized sound in her throat.

His prediction that the revelation would destroy her love for him had come true. There was only one thing left to do to sever the ties completely.

“I think you should go to them.”

Her head snapped up, and she gasped. Aye, that was the killing blow. The coup de grâce. Her love for him was dying before his eyes.

“Sweetheart,” he said softly, “Oliver de Lacey has brought an army large enough to put all of Kerry to the sword. I am forced to come to terms with him.”

“Am I part of those terms?”

“He would not be so crass as to state it.”

Of course, she would know as well as Aidan did that it was one of the unspoken demands.

“Would you do something for me?” she asked in a small, cold voice.

“Yes, my love?”

She flinched at the endearment. “Would you please leave me be? Would you please today get out of my sight?”

He understood all too well what she needed. Her manner and countenance brought to mind a battle-shocked warrior, so emotionally devastated that thinking and feeling were dulled to sensation or constructive thought.

He watched her for a moment longer. She looked the same, yet not the same. She was his beloved golden Pippa, but something was different. The spark that lit her soul had died. She looked hollow, empty. A cold, beautiful vessel.

“Goodbye, my love,” he said, and turned and walked away.

 

“I'm beginning to believe there's no such thing as dying of a broken heart.”

It was much later that day, and Pippa had rowed herself to Innisfallen to seek sanity and wisdom from Revelin.

He handed her a linen cloth to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. More than a dozen such handkerchiefs lay at her feet in the garden in front of the island sanctuary.

“Why do you say that, my child?” he asked.

“I have tried several times to die of a broken heart, and each time, I just have to live with it.”

“Then no doubt you were not meant to perish,” he said. “You were meant to heal and go on.”

“Ah. How noble that sounds. How simple.”

“The words are simple. Not the deed.” A strong breeze blew back his cowl to reveal the snow-white fringe of his tonsure.

She forced a weak smile. “You're good to me. I have no right to expect you to make up my mind for me. I suppose there is no decision. I must go to the de Laceys.” Speaking the words aloud sent a shiver coursing through her.

“By the sound of it, they won't reject you.”

Fresh heat came to her eyes, and she blinked back another onslaught of tears. “I don't suppose they will, since they came so far and brought an army with them. It is Aidan who cast me off,” she added bitterly.

“Do you think he wanted to, lass?”

“He made it so neither of us has a choice.”

“There is a choice to be made,” the old canon said. “The choice of whether or not to trust. You have to be the one to make it.”

He left her alone then, in the garden beneath the gray sky, breathing the heavy air. Very deliberately, aware of every movement, she got up and walked to the rocky shore of Innisfallen. She stepped into the light rowboat
and cast off the rope, then sat back and closed her hands around the oars.

She did not row but drifted, lost in thought. She was in no hurry to go anywhere. Her gaze touched the bag containing all her belongings. She had dragged it along through all the years of her life, along all the miles she had traveled, filling it with objects that had meaning only to her. With a shaking hand, she took out the ruined brooch and pinned it to her shoulder.

How often she had imagined this day. The day she would meet her family. How different it had been in her imagination. Her heart skipped a beat, and she took a deep breath.

Steady. Think of things one at a time. Think of Richard.

The family connection explained much about him—why he appealed to her, why she was so comfortable with his servants, why she had understood a warning in Russian about a falling candle, why she seemed to know his house on the Thames.

A wave of wonder hit her as she realized the red-haired lady from her dreamy memories, her godmother, was Queen Elizabeth herself.

And Richard de Lacey, the most beautiful creature in the world, was her brother.

A pity he was the enemy, she thought with a sting of regret. Or was he? If she went to the de Laceys in Killarney town, would she be joining the English cause? Would she be any better than the Sassenach, the outsider come to invade the district?

Nay, she would always be like this boat, churning aimlessly, swept up by a storm of happenstance. Perhaps, she thought with a glimmer of hope, something good could come of this. She could appeal to the powerful
de Laceys, possibly win sympathy for the Irish. She seized the oars and began to row, thinking harder.

The de Laceys were strangers to her. She had only other people's evidence that she was Philippa de Lacey. She could never know the truth for certain until she felt it in her heart.

Fat droplets of rain pelted her and pocked the surface of the lake. At first she felt no fear, only annoyance at being caught in the chilly rain. The weather, she thought bleakly, seemed somehow tied to the state of her heart. The weeks following her marriage to Aidan had been the golden days of high summer, days of sailing clouds and bountiful sunshine, nights of moonlit splendor in his arms.

Then the wind picked up, raising whitecaps on the surface of the water. She shrank from remembrances of how they had loved one another—deeply, with complete sureness…or so she had thought. In sooth their love had been built on his lies. She had been blissfully oblivious, a wanderer in the sunshine, unaware of a gathering storm in the distance. Ignorant of the destruction it could wreak.

A spear of lightning cleaved the sky, briefly illuminating the majestic, cloud-draped heights of Macgilly-cuddy's Reeks. The rain came faster, harder, in dense, icy sheets that blew her sideways and caused the boat to list.

“No. Oh God, no!” Her teeth chattered; she clenched them and prayed through them. “Please God, no…Hail Mary…”

She plunged into the chaos inside her head.

Hail Mary…Nurse's words pounded through her, even though Nurse was gone, sucked under the rushing river of seawater belowdecks. The dog kept barking and whimpering and staggering, but he was the only one left alive, so she clung to his soggy neck.

The ship bobbed, a little cork spilling this way and that. But after a while came a great cracking sound like the time the oak tree had fallen in Grandfather Stephen's garden.

When the lightning flashed again, she could see why the boat had stopped. A great sharp rock, tall as a church spire, had punched a hole in the hull. She clung to a fat, wet rope until another big wave came. When the next lightning struck, she could see another wave rising like a mountain of black glass.