Stormfire (15 page)

Her assurance slipped a
notch. "I. . .
I don't remember that night. The actual—"

"Ha!" Culhane's tone was scathing, but he watched her keenly. "There's the flimsiest excuse in history! Half of creation's females missing a maidenhead have had convenient lapses of memory." Wiping his face, the Irishman turned and his tone became lightly threatening. "Were my efforts so tame that they left no impression on your mind?"

Catherine's fingers locked into the chain links, her eyes the dark pools of desperation he remembered from the night he had first taken her. "I. . .
you . . .
I don't remember! I don't know!" The last was a defensive cry.

Relentlessly he goaded, "Come, girl, you must remember. Was it rainbows and roses?"

Eyes widening, she began to tear hysterically at the collar. "Take it off! It's choking me! I don't remember anything!"

Culhane swiftly crossed the room, took her by the shoulders, and shook her roughly until he dislodged her hold on the irons. She sagged away from him, dazed. "All right, Catherine. Well let it go . . . for now. Be still." Noticing she had already badly bruised her neck, he released her abruptly and unlocked the manacle from the bed clip. She watched, unable to suppress the hope in her eyes, but it quickly died as he made no further move to free her.

"Peg will give you new duties, less pleasant than your current ones, although many of them will be outside the house."

Catherine felt a faint surge of relief and bewilderment. Nothing could be more unpleasant than monotonous confinement, but to let her range abroad after an escape attempt? Another thought struck her. "I . . . have no shawl."

"Peg will take care of that. As far as your personal service to me"—he dropped the chain—"you'll present yourself at my door each night. If I see fit to answer your knock, you'll enter and be prepared to bed me. That means you'll be clean and in a civil temper. If I'm otherwise occupied, return to your own quarters."

Catherine listened with rekindling rage. "If you expect me to play whore to your
grand seigneur,
you're much mistaken! It will be a cold day in hell before I come to service you!"

Culhane's eyes narrowed. "Service me or service my men, but take your choice here and now. I've no taste for overused women."

She paled. "But last night you threatened to hang a man
if he. . ."

"Trespassed on my preserve. Off it, you're fair game. I'll not lift a finger if Rouge Flannery spreads you at my table with your toes twirled about my wine goblet." He watched her slim shoulders sag, and read defeat in lusterless eyes. "What's your decision?"

"There's nothing to decide. Whore to one or many, it makes no real difference, does it?" Her voice grew bitter. "I choose you. Better to have the loathesome act done with as quickly as possible. Shall I be permitted to return to my cell after you've spent your filth in my body?"

Culhane whitened and, catching the chain, wrenched her face up to his. "Be careful, Countess. If you don't please me, the barracks is a short walk."

Her eyes were black with hate. "If I die, it's no walk at all, neither to your lecherous bed nor their flea-ridden cots, so perhaps you do leave me a choice!"

His teeth bared an inch from hers as his fingers caught painfully in her hair. "Hear me, girl. Do anything so foolish as to die without my permission and I'll have your father's head within the day!"

Her resolution faltered. "If. . . if I please you, will you spare him?"

Loosening his grip on the chain, he shook his head. "You can but delay the time." Her eyes went dead. "The prospect may seem less bleak by and by." He disliked the turn of the conversation. Her compliance was too much like that of a sacrificial maiden bravely offering herself to a troll. Her body, yet unawakened, might too easily become frigid. Still, did it matter what she became once he had had his fill of her? Why not take a revenge that would prove endless? Why did he want only to kiss that vulnerable mouth and brush away her cobweb terrors?

Abruptly he scooped up his shirt and pulled it on. Not until he had dressed completely did he look at her again. The rain-hazed light bathed her nude body in a weird, cold glow that limned her features like those of a da Vinci Magdalene, both pure and profane. The mothwing lashes were shuttered, the iron collar harsh against the shadowed hollow of her throat. Her fingers, caught in the chain, gave it intermittent little tugs. Deriving scant victory from her hopelessness, Sean left her.

When Peg came into the bedroom, Catherine, clutching her torn clothing together, stood on the balcony. She neither turned nor spoke, but gazed fixedly downward at the terrace below.

" 'Twould be twice a messy end, lass. Sean can hardly have perfumed the flaggin' with his upheaval."

Catherine turned, her eyes dark with desperation. "He means to make me his whore!"

Peg's eyes softened. "Ah. The young ruffian's told you it's either him or the dogs, eh?" At Catherine's bleak nod, the Irishwoman patted her hand. "Most of his black rage is spent on himself. I truly don't think he would hurt ye."

"It's not
that
I most fear! I cannot bear him. I cannot bear his touch. But he swears to kill my father if
I. . ."

"You don't want to die. Terrifyin' as he seems, he's not Rouge Flannery. He's young and strong and clean as a whistle, not to mention he looks more than passable. It could be worse, lass." Peg patted her shoulder. "If ye meet him halfway, who
knows . . ."

"I'll not be his whore!"

"Then hold strong. Don't let him best ye. 'Twill take more than an ordinary woman's wiles to tame him, I'll warrant ye."

"You're surely not suggesting I learn to
love
that brute!"

Peg began bustling about the room picking up bedding. "That's strictly yer affair, lass. Likely he's too hard and too much a man for a soft, gentlebred thing to handle. Ye'd want a manageable sort that never throws up in the peonies, who never wants ye so bad he tears yer clothes off—she looked pointedly at Catherine's torn blouse—"but says please afore he tops ye without darin' to lift more than the hem of yer nightgown." She began to make up the bed. "Love Sean Culhane?" Peg looked at Catherine appraisingly. "Ye couldn't, lews. Ye could never love him enough. Ye're too stubborn, too stiff-necked, maybe too cold." She whacked a pillow into place. "That man's heart has an achin' empty hole all the love ye're capable of couldn't heal. He's near wild with the pain of it, lashin' at anyone who comes too close. Even Brendan—"

"Brendan?" Catherine interrupted, eager to take up any topic in order to leave the uncomfortable subject.

"His father," Peg said briefly,

"What of his mother?" Catherine persisted.

"Dead when he was a boy. Megan O'Neill Culhane, she was. Proud as Lucifer of the O'Neill," the housekeeper added pointedly.

"What was she like? She must have been beautiful."

"Beauty is as beauty does." Peg bustled around the end of the bed. "Sit here, lass, and let me sew that up. No need givin' the lads a view."

Now genuinely curious, Catherine was not diverted. "You mean to say Megan Culhane was less than she ought to have been?"

Peg jabbed the needle into the cloth as if it were her former mistress. "She took Sean off up the coast while Brendan was in Dublin's Newgate Prison. And she never came back, even after he was home."

"Is that why Sean Culhane is so bitter? Because of his parents?"

"The rift hurt him enough; Liam, too. But Liam grew up with a home and inheritance while Sean wasn't acknowledged as Brendan's legal son until he showed up here when he was ten."

"But Megan was his wife! How could he let his son be viewed as a bastard?" Catherine blurted, shocked. "What a horrible man!"

"No, not horrible. Hurt. He loved the lad better than his life, better than Liam, and in that he was wrong. In his eyes, Megan stole the son he should have had by his side."

"I still don't understand why he waited to recognize his son unless . . . Sean Culhane is
not
his son."

"A good many folk hold that notion, but none can say a thing against Megan. She was wild, but an open affair she never had. If ye could have seen Brendan and Sean together, ye'd know it an't likely. They were a like height, black Irish with an easy way of movin'. Brendan didn't have Sean's sinful good looks, but I an't never seen another man who did. Sean gets his
moods from
his mother. And his eyes. Those green eyes are Megan's."

Peg bit off the thread at the knot, then drifted on. "Maybe the lad was still too much Megan's or perhaps 'twas his coldness, but in all those years, he was never more than polite to his da. Megan deliberately filled Sean's life, leavin' no room for anyone else. When she died, 'twas like she tore out his heart and took it to the grave."

"You still hate her, don't you?"

Peg's chin lifted and she stared into Catherine's eyes. "Aye, I hate her. She's like an evil dream that comes back night after night, bringin' no good and no peace. In life, she was no better." Peg looked abstractedly past Catherine's shoulder, as if someone were there, then shook herself and glanced out the window. High overhead, the sun edged from behind rain clouds. "For pity's sake, we've wasted the mornin' entirely! Come along, girl. There's work to do."

Shortly, the countess de Vigny was in the kitchen courtyard, up to her elbows in a .steaming vat of water so hot it reddened her skin. Rebellious tendrils of hair were plastered to her perspiring face as she shifted heavy, wet clothing with a long paddle, then wielded a washboard in gray water scummy with oil from the woolens. The first hour was the worst; after that the body achieved a monotonous, indefinitely sustainable rhythm. The two sturdy, ruddy- faced laundresses said nothing to her or each other.

Now I'm to be a mindless, hopeless drudge, she thought. The other women, who sneered at her efforts to wring out bulky woolens, put her to filling lines with dripping, wind- whipped wash that buffeted her. Her bare feet, bruised by loose flagging pebbles and the dragging weight, grew mercifully numb. The morning drizzle eased long enough to make line drying barely possible, but Catherine was too tired to be thankful, and as the sun sank, she dropped her laundry basket with the others in a storage room. Her whole body protested when she straightened, yet she still had to perform another duty that weighted her soul far more than chains.