The Maiden's Hand (23 page)

A baby’s garment. Too late, she realized her error.

“Oh, drudgery!” Oliver snapped. He snatched the chemise from her and balled it in his big fist. “How many times must I tell you, Lark, I don’t want you laboring over menial chores.”

It was a labor of love, but she could not tell him that. She stared in horror at his fist, wondering when he would realize what he held in his hand. He had eased the way for her to avoid telling him about the baby. Her initial reluctance was fast turning to deception.

Just as she gathered breath to blurt out the truth, he tossed the wadded chemise into the basket without another glance. Then he knelt in front of her and took her hands. “Talk to me, Lark. You’re hiding something.”

She hesitated, frozen with surprise and fear. She had no idea he was so sensitive to her moods and nuances. “I never meant to hide it. H-how long have you known?”

He held her gaze with his. “Since our wedding night.”

She pleated her brow in a frown. “But that can’t be. I—”

“Lark. The fact that you were not a maiden is nothing to me. You’re mine now. That’s all that matters.”

Her head began to throb, her heart to pound. It wasn’t the baby at all, then. This, though, was infinitely worse.

He caressed her hands lightly. “It would hardly be fair for me to condemn you, given my own adventures. Yet you seem troubled.”

The color dropped from her face. Memories roared out of the past, and her heart seemed to shrivel in her chest. Like a fool, she thought she had escaped the shadows.

She could not find words to form a lie, so she merely drew her cold, shaking hands away from his and clenched them into fists on the book in her lap.

“Lark?” The very gentleness in his voice broke her heart. “I did mean what I said. Some men put great stock in virginity. In you, there is so much more to treasure.”

“No,” she managed to whisper at last. Her eyes drowned in tears of shame. “There you are wrong.” Her vision blurred from the tears, and she was back in that place again, that shadowy room where the dark, masculine voice called to her, taunted her, never ceasing until she yielded. “I should have stood firm, but I—he—”

Oliver’s hands captured hers again. “Stood firm? But Lark, Spencer was your husband.”

“Not Spencer!” She snatched her hands away and stood. The book fell with a thud to the floor. She hurried to the tall, narrow window and pressed her burning face to the glass as sickness rose in her.

“Wynter.”
Behind her, Oliver spat the name like an oath. Then, with calm, deadly intent, he added, “I’ll kill him.”

“You will not!” She spun around, her hands clasped as if in prayer. “I beg you, Oliver, don’t harm him.”

For the first time he looked at her with suspicion. Eyes narrowed, lips taut. “Why not?”

“Because he is dangerous. Because I don’t want to lose you.”

He stood unmoving, his eyes bluer than the summer sky
and bright with fury. “Tell me the truth, Lark. Is your concern truly for me—or for
him?
”

“That’s vile. You know I hate him.”

“Then let me avenge you. He took your honor. He treated you like dirt beneath his heel. He deserves to be punished.”

She sank to her knees before him. How could she explain what had happened that one night, what she had said, what she had felt? She could not, for she barely understood it herself. “Oliver, I beg you. Leave this be. It is over. We never even see Wynter anymore.”

He grasped her shoulders and yanked her up to face him. “You would beg me on your knees to spare him?”

“You’re not a violent man. Why sully yourself with the blood of someone like Wynter?”

“Because he hurt you. Because you cringe whenever he walks into a room.”

“It would hurt me more if you attacked Wynter. Don’t you see, Oliver?
No one knows.
If you seek revenge, all the world will know.”

“I see. And the world is not as forgiving as I am.” He let go of her and stepped away, backing toward the door. “I should have been prepared for difficulty,” he muttered, and she could see the barely contained rage in the color of his cheeks. “You accused me of loving you too easily, so I suppose I should not be surprised that you are making it difficult. If not impossible.”

In the weeks following their quarrel, they never spoke of Wynter again. Lark passed many hours in the sloping, shady gardens. She remembered the first time she had come here to seek help for Spencer. Not in her most mad fantasies had she imagined that within a year she would be married to the de Lacey heir and expecting his child.

She certainly hadn’t imagined falling in love with Oliver.

Or had she?

One of the first things he had ever said to her was to ask if she would have his child. His query had been impertinent, improper and wholly inappropriate. Yet she had not been able to deny the thrill that had eddied through her like the first breath of spring after an endless winter. Had it started even then?

On a warm afternoon, she stood in the ornate river garden and watched the constantly flowing river. Barges and lighters, tilt boats and ferries, slipped past, their hulls gilded by the sun, tillers scoring the surface of the water with their wakes. It was an idyllic, peaceful scene, viewed from the rose-decked garden.

How odd to know that just a small distance downriver, the severed heads of traitors and heretics leered from the gates of London Bridge. Or to imagine the queen, fighting constant illness, still trying desperately to govern her squabbling councillors. Or to picture the hidden mews and alleyways, rife with squalor.

London festered with secret sores. Lark did not blame Queen Mary. The problems were too many and too deeply rooted to be solved by one woman—a woman who probably had no idea how much her subjects despised her Spanish advisers and chief ministers, Bishop Edmund Bonner in particular.

It was odd to think of Queen Mary pining for her absent husband, pining for a child.

Odd indeed. Mary yearned for a child she could not have. Lark had never dared to dream of having a child, and yet in five short months she would give birth.

And she still had not told Oliver. She had come so close, that night he had made her confess about Wynter. If
Oliver had only stayed silent, had only listened, she would have told him.

“Froth and bother,” she muttered under her breath. She plucked a daylily and ripped the delicate blossom to shreds. Oliver had taught her a few choice oaths. From time to time she would let one loose, revel a moment in the delicious wickedness of it, then repent.

It was a strange, waiting time. She had expected her growing body to give away her secret much sooner, but she retained her slim shape, save for a gentle roundness easily concealed by her gown.

The weeks had flown by at a furious rate, like leaves blown before a stiff wind. At first the excitement of being in London, the private thrill of harboring Richard Speed, had been amusement enough. She drank it all in like a parched tree in a soft rain, and time passed, and she did not notice the days drifting by.

Until lately.

Oliver still smoldered about their quarrel, still watched her with hooded suspicion and hurt. Although he was affectionate and caring, he held part of himself at a distance. He left her much to herself, even at night, and she missed him. Ached for him.

A gloomy restlessness blanketed the entire household. Richard Speed was about to go mad from the isolation. He was not allowed to leave the house. No one was allowed in to see him. He was a man accustomed to walking out among people, to talking and preaching of great matters. Hiding for so many weeks was beginning to wear on him.

Lark marked the changes in herself, as well. As each day passed, she glowed brighter with high health. At the same time, Oliver drifted farther away.

The changes were subtle, yet she could no longer deny that he stayed out later at night, drank more, laughed louder and brooded longer when he thought she wasn’t looking.

At first she attributed his mood to his anger about Wynter. After several weeks she began to think it was only an excuse. He longed to go back to his bousing and carousing, to the dark dens of Bankside and Southwark, where no one judged him, no one expected anything of him, no one cared.

Grumbling another borrowed oath, she told herself to cease her moping. The garden was fragrant with late roses and borage, and the lowering sun turned the river to a ribbon of amber.

The day held a peculiar magic for Lark. For whatever else was happening to her life, she knew unequivocally that a miracle was taking place inside her.

This morning, while lying in bed and wishing Oliver were beside her, she had felt
something.

Low in her belly. A flutter. A lifting sensation. A quickening.

It was her baby.

Even now, hours later, the memory had the power to touch her soul with wonder. The child had sent her a message.
I am here. Love me. Acknowledge me.

Lark tipped back her head and let the breeze cool her face. “I promise you,” she whispered as a barge nosed up against the water steps at the end of the garden. “I swear to you I’ll tell him.”

Oliver kept a false, teeth-gritting smile on his face as the barge pilot guided the craft up to the water steps. In sooth he felt nigh to dropping like a felled tree. The sickness was on him, worse than it had been in years.

All summer long he had passed terrible, restless nights, barely able to expel the shallow breaths he dared to draw. Each day he struggled to deny the tightness in his chest.

He tried to pretend he was as hale as any Hog Lane meat cutter. Though he yearned to spend every spare moment with Lark, he distanced himself a-purpose, using their quarrel over that jack-dog Wynter as an excuse.

The truth was, he couldn’t bear for her to guess he was ill. He did not want her to know he was afflicted with the murderous lung ailment.

He hoped none of the occupants of the barge would see him clutching at an iron loop behind him to steady himself. “Fare you well,” he told his friends. “We shall lift a toast again tomorrow.”

Egmont Carper laughed. “I’d welcome it. Your skill at primero has weighted my purse.”

Oliver gave him a self-deprecating grin. “And lightened mine.”

Samuel Hollins doffed his cap. “Until the morrow, then.”

Oliver sent them a hearty salute and stood on the water steps, cocky as any dockside dandy, until the barge departed. Only then did he allow himself to sink back against the stone bulkhead, drop his head into his hands and force out a long, labored breath.

“Are you quite well?”

He nearly jumped out of his skin. Scrambling to his feet, he looked up and saw her. Lark. His wife, who had grown so confident, so wise and so radiantly lovely that she scared the hell out of him. These days he wondered if he knew her at all.

“I didn’t see you standing there.” He bounded up the steps and vaulted the garden terrace. “Of course I’m well.” He grasped her shoulders and kissed her, those soft pink
lips, and when she kissed him back, he thought for the thousandth time, She cannot truly be mine.

And yet she was. Or at least she had been, until their quarrel. She’d been warm and willing in his bed, night after night. Taking his love, yet holding hers back. If she learned of his illness, she might never again offer the splendid comfort of her body.

She pulled away and smoothed a tumbled lock of hair back from his face. “Where have you been?”

As if she didn’t know. The ale and tobacco and tavern smells clung to him like a dark aura.

“Out working for the cause, of course.” That, at least, was not wholly a lie. The authorities still sought Richard Speed, and Oliver was anxious to get him out of England. He took Lark’s hand and strolled up through the garden. He needed a draught of Nance’s special tea, the one the Gypsies had taught her to make with the twigs of the ephedra shrub.

“Were you?”

“I was. Reverend Speed is going to pine away to nothing if we don’t get him out of England soon.”

“I know. Is there news of the
Mermaid?
”

“Aye, she made port a week ago.”

“Oliver! Why did you not tell me?”

“She’s being careened and readied to sail. I’ve told the ship’s master to expect a femme sole bound for the Continent.”

“Oh, Oliver—”

“Not to worry.” To cover his breathlessness, he drew her down next to him on a wrought-iron seat. It was another of his father’s inventions, a swing worked by a rope pull. It hung from a branch of the tallest tree in the garden. Nearby, a brass sundial thrust up from a clump of flowers. “I was painfully discreet.”

“So you told no one.”

“None save Dr. Snipes.” He tugged at the rope, and the swing began to move. What he did not say was that something was not right with the plan. He could not put his finger on it, but an ominous premonition prickled at the edge of his awareness. He kept thinking of Snipes with his useless, twisted arm and his fearful eyes.

“We can trust him,” Lark said, clearly relieved.