The Wedding Night (9 page)
Authors: Linda Needham
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General
"I don't need you to coddle me, Rushford."
"I wouldn't dare." The sconce hissed, and the room darkened completely, shadowing him against the pale light from the foyer.
"I've walked the
heathlands
alone in the dead of winter, sir, and I've rowed myself across the
"Not through mine. Not until you know them better. I have no intention of losing you in the duck pond."
"I can swim."
He laughed broadly. "I'd have bet my last farthing on that, Miss Faelyn, my very last."
Mairey fumed all the way to the lodge, blazing a trail ten feet in front of him.
At the lodge door Rushford lifted her hand, turned it, and kissed her palm. "Sweet dreams, Mairey Faelyn."
But sweet dreams were no longer possible, for a stone-hearted dragon had just overrun her life, and it seemed that he planned to stay.
Chapter 6
"
T
he
The assistant to the Keeper of the Records offered his apology to Jack as they stood in the inner ward of the
"I mean to say, sir, what with the Public Record's staff in there twelve hours every day, sorting and cataloging, preparing for the transfer to
"No need to explain further, Mr.
Walsham
," the woman said, dragging her gaze from the tower and cutting Jack a precisely pointed frown. "Lord Rushford and I are very familiar with spring-cleaning, aren't we, my lord?"
Her hair was drawn off her lovely neck, its pale curls caught in a loose plait and wound beneath the brim of that god-awful hat, which she had to clamp down with her hand to keep it from falling off as she stared up at him with those sparkling eyes.
"Indeed," Jack said at last, refusing to be baited in front of the meddlesome keeper. "
Proceed
, Mr.
Walsham
."
Miss Faelyn took off after the man, her sensible beige skirts flying in her wake.
An ordinary woman would have taken Jack's arm and begged his guidance down the grassy slope and around the flotsam of irregular stone blocks that marked the remains of the Tower's ancient, innermost ward. But he was fast learning that there was little about Mairey Faelyn that was ordinary.
Least of all that she didn't wear stays beneath her shirtwaist—a fact that had raised a callow sweat and a bullish erection that morning when he found her shelving more books in the library. She wriggled where a proper woman shouldn't, at least not outside the bedchamber. She bobbed. Swayed.
Holy hell, she was a good deal of marvelous.
It had taken two days to arrange this visit to the Tower. He had chafed at the delay, but Miss Faelyn had used the time to nest herself into a corner of his library—a process that she claimed would take another week. He was useless to her, useless to himself when he tried to simply read while she was in the same room. He did a lot of staring.
Jack followed after Miss Faelyn and the Keeper's assistant at his own pace, and caught up with them as the woman stopped to admire a vine of just-blooming roses that had affixed itself to a crumbling wall.
Walsham
cut a flower with his penknife and shyly handed it to her, a schoolboy pink
blushing
his already sunburned face.
"When was
Walsham
?" The woman brushed the furled petals past her nose and
sniffed,
a gesture so simple and yet so provocative that Jack felt it like her kiss across his mouth. The shock of it traveled like a bolt of lightning to his groin.
"Some historians say William Rufus began it back in 1093. But recent theories—my own included—lean toward 1220, about the time Henry Three began redesigning the entire complex."
Walsham
seemed to be in his element now, guiding a lovely woman on a personal tour of his tiny kingdom. He spread his weedy arms and legs like a stickman, then crossed the width between the grass-bordered stones and the nonexistent walls. "By the end of Henry's reign, he had rebuilt the Great Hall on this very site."
Miss Faelyn listened to the fatuous little fellow with every part of herself, leaning toward him on her toes, smiling, those clear eyes catching every nuance as though she were committing the entire performance to memory.
Jack knew a courting dance when he saw it.
Walsham's
was ridiculous. Misplaced entirely. Miss Faelyn couldn't possibly be interested in the dullard.
"You are a font, Mr.
Walsham
." She blinked back at Jack. "Isn't he, Lord Rushford?"
She was bobbing, or would certainly be if he could see beneath her jacket to the linen. He could only stare, as much a mooncalf as
Walsham
, who continued his gamboling.
"Henry next connected the hall to the
"How long have the records been kept there?" She was still bright-eyed with interest, still making maddening love to the rose and its copious petals.
"Since the first Edward, we believe. Thirteenth century."
Miss
Faelyn's
face fell, and she gazed up again at the tower. "That's a lot of paper."
His patience at an end, Jack scooped the woman's fingers through his and fixed them into the crook of his elbow. "And we've so little time."
She scowled at him but held fast around his arm as
Walsham
scurried ahead of them to the thick door. He unlocked a massive lock with a key from a crowded ring that must have weighed a full stone.
"Here we are, then."
Walsham
shoved open the door, and Miss Faelyn followed the sunlight into the round room as it spilled onto the floor, leaving her rose scent to swirl around Jack's bead.
The room was scattered with tables piled high with wooden file crates, loose-sheeted books, and safety lamps. In the middle of the room, a thick post strained under the weight of whatever was pressing down on the floor above.
"Well now, my lord, if you can tell me what record you're looking for, perhaps I can point you in the right direction."
"Royal letters written in the autumn of 1642." Miss Faelyn spared the man a patient smile, but she was already eagerly leafing through the papers in the boxes. "You see, Mr.
Walsham
, I'm the one who is looking for a record. My father's family has always claimed a blood connection to Charles the First, through his queen's cousin."
Jack nearly laughed at the baldness of the woman's lie.
But
Walsham's
eyes grew large and his voice conspiratorial. "Ah, and you're looking for proof! Is that it?"
"Indeed." She lowered her thick lashes,
then
proceeded to unravel her impossible story. "Though I am sure I'll find that proof on the … well, on the wrong side of the bedclothes."
The man looked scandalized. "How dreadful!"
"A royal peccadillo."
Preposterous woman. She was a practiced mountebank, and
Walsham
was falling for her sleight of hand. Jack would have seen it from twenty paces—at least he hoped he would—but the defenseless little man was beguiled.
"The woman in question was the daughter of the king's chamberlain. Once her transgression began to show itself—" Miss Faelyn demurely mimed a bulging belly, and Jack's heart skipped, then barrel-rolled. The splendor of filling that space with himself struck him like a ball of blue thunder.
Waisham's
jaw was hanging loose.
Miss Faelyn was oblivious to the head-butting that was passing between the two men in this very crowded room.
"As you can imagine, Mr.
Walsham
, the poor girl was married off to a yeoman of the guard, a man whom, according to family legends, the queen trusted with the transfer of the royal treasury whenever the king's army needed weapons. If I could locate the name of that yeoman, then perhaps I could discover where the young woman went, and follow her branch of the family to my own."
Jack's head was spinning from lack of air.
"Fascinating."
Walsham's
cheeks were blazing. "Indeed, Mr.
Walsham
. To that end, I'm looking for Queen Henrietta's private letters here in the Tower, where I might find mention of the names of her guards."
"Queen Henrietta?"
Walsham
clicked his tongue and scrubbed at his chin. "Not good. Not good at all."
"Why?" She stopped her paper rifling, a ruthless cant to her brow.
"William Prynne, to put a pinpoint on it. One of my predecessors. A staunch Puritan: hated the queen and her papist ways."
"Do you mean that he destroyed her papers?"
"More wretched than that—he purposely neglected them when he took office. 1662, it was. Cromwell's papers were protected to the fullest, but according to Prynne's
logbook,
he dropped Henrietta's into a barrel and sealed the lot with tar."
"So her papers
are
here?"
"Possibly."
Walsham
rolled his eyes skyward, to the sagging ceiling of the floor above. "Up there," he said. "What's left of
them.
"
He motioned them to follow and disappeared up the curl of stairs.
Miss Faelyn grinned at Jack, obviously pleased, or at least used to this labyrinth of shifting fortunes.
He preferred looking for outcroppings of coal. It was there, or it wasn't.
"It's going very well, my lord." She stuck her nose in the middle of that damned rose. "Thank you."
"You're welcome, princess."
She gave Jack a mocking curtsey and hurried up the stairs in a flounce of skirts and trim ankles.
Jack followed and emerged in the darkness of an octagonal room that smelled sharply of damp rags. The ceiling was vaulted and ribbed, and the plaster was cracked, its paint long ago flaked off. The floor sagged dangerously and was indeed supported by the timbered post from the story below.
The rest was a rabbit warren of iron-bound chests, crates, and barrels. Miss Faelyn looked right at home amid the clutter, smoothing her hands across every surface as though she could read its history with her touch.
She was in a windowed alcove, staring up at the water-stained ceiling, her hat in her hand, her hair twisted and fastened as always by a pencil.
"Henry
Six
was murdered right there where you're standing, Miss Faelyn,"
Walsham
said as he lit a sconce lamp beside the door.
"Here?" A proper woman would have scurried away in fear, but Mairey Faelyn knelt and spread her fingers against the planking. She closed her eyes. "Does he haunt these rooms?"
"Never heard it said. I hope not. As soon as all these records are gone, the plans are to fix up the
Wakefield
to display the crown jewels to the public. Can't have a ghost scaring off paying customers."
"Where do you keep the queen's barrel,
Walsham
?" Jack asked, done with the man's endless tour.
"A very, very good question. This quarter of the chamber to the left of the stairs would be about right for Charles the First. I'm afraid it's all badly labeled, and of course, not all of it's here."
Jack glanced at Miss Faelyn, and his heart gave a sharp thud against his chest. Tears were starring her lashes with bright points, and there was
an unsteadiness
about her chin. Changeable woman.
"Leave us,
Walsham
." Jack caught up the man's elbow and turned him toward the stairs.
"But, my lord, I was told to be at your service for the entire day. To see that you got whatever you needed—"
"I need you to leave us. Immediately."
"Well, all right. Here's a key which should fit nearly every lock. But do come for me should the lady ask. I'll be at the
Jack listened to the man scurry down the stairs, and stayed to hear the door close before he turned his attention to this partner of his, who was swabbing tears from her cheeks. Great puddles of sorrow, and he could do nothing about them. He had felt just as helpless whenever his sisters had cried, and even more so when his mother had. He didn't need this from a business associate.
"What the devil's gotten into you, madam?"
She snuffled and touched her finger to the softly arching bow of her lip as she looked around at the mass of records. There was a smile there, too, rueful and turned inward.
"Treasure, Rushford. Piles of it."
Jack snorted and handed her a kerchief. "If there's treasure here, Miss Faelyn, you'll have to point it out to me. I see broken-down chests, sprung barrels, and damn me if I don't smell a… Christ, I don't care to know what that is."
"I'm a weeper, Lord Rushford." She pocketed his kerchief. "Pay me no mind."
Like hell
. "What now, my dear?"
She paged through her field book, passing the rose stem that now stuck out from the binding. "I brought a map."