Microsoft Word - Jenny dreamed (38 page)

"Now, I only heard the last sentence she spoke, lad, 'bout a promise. I should very much like to hear the rest while 'tis fresh in ye'r memory." So that she would not influence what he told her, Mara kept the reason for her inquiry to herself and then, when he was through, rvealed what she'd earlier told her granddaughter. "This proves it, ye see," she insisted in a tone of suppressed excitement. "Jennifer's ne'r seen the diary. She had nae way of knowin'

about the promise Elainn did make to her love that they'd be reunited!" She glanced at Dev's face and saw the doubt in his eyes. "Pshaw! Men're always so accursed logical, always believin' only after proof's been gi'en them! Well, lad, come back wi' me to the house and I'll show ye the chronicles ... then ye decide for ye'rself how close ye'r Jenny came to quotin'

Elainn."

But later, when he and Mara were in the solar and trying to pass the long hours of waiting together, Dev was still only partially convinced. Obviously Jenny'd had some kind of vision, imagined or real, but he'd never dreamed of anyone named Elainn or felt that he was anyone other than Devlan Cantrell. Now, as he tried to give his attention to the backgammon game Mara had suggested to pass the time, Shiona peeked through the door as she had several times in the past few hours to give a report on Jenny's progress.

Dev's face again lit with expectation and hope; after nearly eight hours, this nervous, interminable waiting had worn him down to the weakness of a kitten, and he wasn't even experiencing the pain Jenny was subject to ... how could she bear up under it? "Wel ?" he heard Mara ask.

"Na' yet, m'lady," Shiona reported, giving Dev a quick, sympathetic glance. "Janet says another six hours at least, but she was able to turn the babe from the breech, so at least the poor girl does na' have to go through tha'!"

"And Jenny," Dev asked, pale at the idea of so long a wait, "how's she doing?"

"Hoidin' up better'n ye, but tha's to be expected!" came the pert reply. "All fathers look like they been through a siege o' two winters' length when 'tis the mother who bears the brunt of it all." Mara gave her a stern look, disapproving of the observations at such a time, and Shiona blushed. "The lady is exhausted, sir, but holding up well. Between the pains she slips off to sleep for a few minutes."

"And has she said anything …unusual during the times she is na' awake?" Mara asked quietly, expecting to hear that Jenny'd spoken Thomas's name or mumbled more of the phrases from the diary.

"Nae, m'lady, she did but cry out several times when the pains woke her, but 'twas na'

unusual wha' she said."

"Which was, girl?" Mara snapped impatiently, tensely leaning forward in her chair.

"Why, she called out Master Devlan's name, Lady Mara." Shiona tilted her head, her large cornflower-blue eyes a bit wounded by her lady's sharpness. Dev grinned, vastly relieved that it had not been Thomas Jenny'd called for, and his expression was a bit smug as he sat back, folded his arms, and sent a significant look toward Mara.

Mara gave in gracefully enough, thanking the girl and dismissing her before she lowered her head and smiled at Dev. "We'd have both been a bit surprised if she'd spoken Rodrigo's name, ah, m'boy?"

"Not a chance in the world, Mara," came Dev's confident reply, and he grinned again as he nodded toward the board. "I believe I'm headed for a gammon unless by some miracle you throw nothing but doubles from here on."

Mara returned his grin, picking up the dice. "Oh, I believe in miracles, Devlan, so I'll na' bow t'defeat yet." And amazingly enough, Mara rolled the dice in eight consecutive doubles, robbing Dev of his gammon and the game.

Many hours later, when the two of them had both nodded off at the table, Fiona came to announce that the lady had "finally" been delivered of her child, implying in a rude way that Jenny had purposely disrupted the household with her labor. "A boy, a red and howlin' lad wi' a lusty pair o' lungs to his credit," she answered to her grandmother's question, jealous of the pride in Dev's face as well as the congratulations Mara gave him. She'd earlier heard an account of what had happened in the crypt and now brought up a point she had grappled with all night.

"Lady Jennifer is asleep now, she but saw the bairn once. Have ye gi'en thought, Granddam, to the threat she'll be once she takes the bairn back to the castle? Ye're convinced she's Elainn and so must have her powers of propecy and sight. Wha' would ye think to be her reaction if she saw our plot afoot in the crystal? Would she gi' us away?"

"Nae, haven't I spent enough time wi' her to know she'd na' betray us?" Mara retorted in rising anger. Fiona was going to continue to be a problem, that much was clear. "The girl does na' have it in her heart to do such a thing. Y'r envy of her is showing, lass, and it does na' look nice!"

"Envy, is't? 'Tis na' envy tha' guides m' tongue, but a wonder at wha' ye'd do in her place."

Fiona had set this up deliberately, drawing her grandmother into a verbal trap from which there was no escape. "If ye were the mother of a newborn and faced wi' a threat from wicked Rodrigo tha' ye'r bairn would come to harm, where would ye'r loyalty lie, m'Iady?"

Mara looked stricken, and inwardly she cursed the fact that she'd been too tired to consider that aspect. Dev was still groggy with sleep, though his pale brown brows were furrowed at the problem Fiona had laid in their laps. "Much as I hate to admit it, Fiona's right, Devlan. If we allow the child t'fall into tha' divil's control, who can tell what may come of it?"

"Jenny wouldn't tum me ... or any of us in. I know her too well," Dev insisted, but Fiona saw, and pounced upon, the vague flicker of doubt in his eyes.

"Ah, but do ye know her as a woman or the new mother she now is? A woman will do much tha' goes against the grain when out to protect her own, Dev."

"So what are you suggesting," he asked with an irritated glare, "that we ask Jenny if she wouldn't mind leaving the boy here, because we just don't happen to trust her?"

Fiona's smile was sly. "Nae, I suggest we tell her, when at last she comes awake, tha' the babe was too weak to live. She will be sleeping for hours and hours yet, aware of nothing.

Meg, our steward's daughter was delivered of a stillborn bairn na' more than ten hours past.

She can wet-nurse the lad and her boy can be carried, most sorrowfully, to the castle and buried, proof to Rodrigo tha' Jennifer's child didna live."

Mara had held her breath, listening with a kind of horror to the callous recital, a detailed plan that must have taken her granddaughter many hours to perfect. She was seeing a side of Fiona that grieved her and wondered to herself whether it was a new twist of her personality, or whether it had always been there and she'd been too blind to see it.

Dev came to his feet, equally angry with Fiona's attitude. "You have it all laid out so neatly,"

he said, "but have you thought of explaining this to Jenny, trying to get her to see it's for the baby's welfare that he stay here?"

"Nae," Mara answered for Fiona, and she saw the shock in Dev's face and regretted it. "Fiona would have an answer for that, too, and I'm afraid I must concur." Dev slid back into his seat.

"If ye try and persuade her, and she does na' agree, ye have spoiled the chance to succeed wi' a charade. I find this distressingly cold-hearted and a brutal thing t'do to a girl I've come to love; but for Rodrigo to be vanquished, Jennifer must suffer a short while of misery so tha'

others do na suffer interminably!" She reached out to touch Dev's arm and he looked up, scowling at her gesture. "She will have her child back safe once we have succeeded against Rodrigo. She may someday thank us for savin' the lad physical harm through tha' tyrant."

"All right, I'll agree," Dev growled, "but I can tell you one thing right now." He looked up at Fiona's smug, satisfied expression and grimaced in disgust, then turned to face Mara. "She'll never understand any reason you give her and never forgive the deception." He stood up, determined to have a look at his new son and take a peek at Jenny while she slept. "And I'll be damned if I'll blame her for feeling that way!"

And four doors away, down the hall, Jenny slept peacefully on, freed now from pain and resting tranquilly in the knowledge that her son was sound and 'healthy, that she'd held him once before exhaustion claimed her. She was; as yet, spared the aching sorrow that would be worse than her labor pains, and the despair and disbelief that would be hers when, upon waking, she was informed by a distraught Mara that the baby had died and already rested in a tiny grave in the castle gardens, escorted there by herself in a rare departure from her island home. Of course, Jenny would, after the first shock, believe Mara ... for she trusted her, and Mara had no reason to fabricate such a tale.

Twenty-Two

It had been over a month since she'd given birth, and Jenny still could not accept the fact that her little boy had died. After the two weeks she'd spent recuperating on the island, she'd come back to the castle and a solicitous Rodrigo who had offered his condolences, then left her alone to mourn her loss in privacy.

Lady Mara had come once for a visit and had held Jenny close as she wept out the pain and utter frustration of losing a child she'd cradled only once in her arms before awakening to be told the baby had not survived. Now Jenny knelt and placed a bouquet of wildflowers she'd picked on the painfully small grave. A simple cross marked the spot where Lady Mara had insisted they bury him, a secluded, tree-shaded section of the garden near the postern gate of the castle. Even now the stonecutter from the town was at work on a gravestone, a thin slab of granite that would read, as Jenny requested, Nicholas, beloved son of Jennifer, and the date of September seventh, eighteen seventy-four. Nothing else, for Rodrigo had refused to let her put the name of Cantrell on the stone and Jenny had rejected using his surname.

For a second her eyes were closed, as she said a prayer for the repose of his soul, for the peace of little Nicholas who had not the time to know his mother's love Shiona, the perfectly formed daughter of the dwarf, Gilliam, who served the court as jongleur, jester, acrobat, and mime, stood back, respecting her mistress's need for solitude. She had been part of Lady Mara's staff until Jenny had returned from the island and now she was an almost constant companion to her.

Shiona tilted her head to one side, puzzling over lady Mara's decision to keep her baby from this young, obviously maternal, woman. Her father had explained that it was not her place to question Lady Mara's wisdom, but such seemingly unnecessary grieving when the babe was well and thriving at the manor seemed cruel to his soft-hearted, golden-haired daughter. To separate a mother and child ... 'twas an inhumanity Shiona would expect of someone like Rodrigo, but not the kind and just Mara.

Shiona's sad reverie was interrupted now as Jenny rose from the graveside and brushed away a tear, then asked, "Do me a favor, Shiona dear, and gather fresh flowers for my room.

I ... I would like a quiet walk by myself for a while." With Shiona staring after her, Jenny took to the path that wound through the garden to the cliff and had soon disappeared among the trees that bordered the walk.

The scent of tropical blossoms surrounded Jenny; the flowering trees and shrubs were ablaze in a riot of colors, but they made no impression on her numbed senses. The mist that forever seemed to surround Beann Gowd'en was curling inland now as Jenny took her customary seat on a granite bench some ten yards from the cliff's edge and listened to the gentle roar of the waterfall that erupted forcefully from the mountainside almost three hundred feet below the peak. She had come to love that sound. It was constant and powerful, yet as much a prisoner of the mountain as she.

Suddenly there was a scream-a cry of terror that was sliced off abruptly-then another muffled cry in a voice Jenny recognized as Shiona's. In a second she was up and racing in the direction of the garden, nearly stumbling as she cut across a row of bushes. Breathlessly she arrived in a small clearing formed by a circle of amapola trees, to find her servant in the clutches of the guard Rodrigo had insisted accompany them. He had ripped the bodice of the young girl's kirtle and even as Jenny shouted furiously for him to stop, his hands were pawing at Shiona's exposed breasts.

"Let go of her!" Jenny screamed, and the mercenary, a bear of a man with a shaggy beard and broken, yellowed teeth, reluctantly released his captive, still leering as the girl stumbled back in shock, too dazed to cover the trembling, rose-tipped buds of her breasts. Then, suddenly aware, Shiona clutched at the tom material of her gown, racing for the protection of her lady.

"If you ever dare to touch one of my attendants again," Jenny warned, her head high as she stood her ground intrepidly against the man's towering, animal-like menace, "I will see that you are stripped of that which spurred you on to such a crude assault." Jenny was staring at him with such intense fury that Cuchillo, the guard, looked sullenly away. "You understand me," Jenny pressed, "if once more you try to take another woman, any woman, against her will, you will lose your manhood." Jenny held her arm protectively around Shiona's shoulders and, in a voice hardened by the girl's shame, she added, "And it will be done with a very dull knife, Cuchillo, and slowly!"

The threat struck home, but the mercenary refused to let Rodrigo's woman know it. With a show of cocky insolence, he shrugged his shoulders and swaggered off, swearing to himself that he would have revenge. No woman, not even Rodrigo's, could threaten him with gelding and get away with it!

When he was out of sight, Shiona fell upon her knees and kissed Jenny's hand. "I am in ye'r debt,

m'lady! What ye did ... 'twill ne'r be forgotten. If tha' brute had forced me, I would've died for shame!"

Jenny was embarrassed by the display of her attendant's appreciation. Pulling the girl to her feet, she dried her tears, then told her, "I recognize no debt, Shinoa, for if our circumstances had been turned about, you would have done the same for me."