Once Upon a Tower

Every day his longing for her grew worse. He craved her like a drug, like opium, and it wasn’t all about the bed. He wanted her to hear the haunting calls of the rain geese in their endless mating conversations. He wanted to bring her an armful of dripping water lilies and hold the creamy petals up to her skin.

One morning, he didn’t head for the loch until he set up a chain of command whereby he would hear only the most significant reports. By the next day it was clear that one secretary and two bailiffs would be unable to carry their own weight without his constant guidance. He dismissed them.

Since he’d inherited his title, at age fourteen, he had never allowed himself more than an hour of angling; there were too many important things to do. Now he understood that almost nothing was important except perhaps regaining control of his emotions. But every day it seemed a bit more possible that restraint wasn’t an option, not when it came to Edie.

Perhaps love was the only choice.

He had to go back and make it work—not the bedding, though that was important. The rest of it. They needed to talk, really talk. It wasn’t something that came easily to him. He’d never had anyone to talk to, for one thing.

He was standing on a promontory, watching his line drift on the surface of the loch, when a ray of sunshine struck something gold, the gold of Edie’s hair. His body went taut, his mind dark with lust. A moment later a bird sang, not half as beautifully as the music Edie coaxed from her cello as her left hand rocked on the strings, making notes float from her instrument.

His heart clenched, and her name choked in his throat. She was the only thing that mattered in the world. Not this loch, not Craigievar, not the servants . . .

They were nothing.

Edie was—

He had to go home. He strode out of the loch and back to the house, shouting for a bath. Before he returned to the castle, he had to deal with a backlog of complaints relating to his position as justice of the peace. That afternoon he strode into Great Hall, cursing the fact that he’d stood around in the loch when he should have dealt with these cases and returned to his wife.

He doled out justice—more or less—for the first four to five cases. Then a brewer and his wife, who found themselves unable to live in harmony and had decamped to separate houses, appeared in front of him. Her dowry had been a number of pigs, and now she wanted them back.

The brewer’s wife had no chin. Her husband had a chin that came to a point. They glared at each other as if the pigs were there in the room, rootling about in front of them all.

What right had he to sit in judgment over these two? He wanted nothing more than to leave, but he couldn’t leave the pigs—who were blameless—in metaphorical limbo.

“Half and half,” he barked. “Five pigs to you, and the others to you.”

The brewer turned plum-colored. “She’s me damned wife and what’s hers is mine,” he shouted. “Them’s me pigs and I’ll pickle them before I let her have a single trotter.”

Gowan walked over to him, knowing that he looked like a man emerging from the gates of hell. He couldn’t sleep; he couldn’t eat; he couldn’t take a damned piss without thinking of Edie.

“You do not own your wife.” His voice boiled with barely suppressed rage.

The brewer fell back a step.

“No man owns a woman. You’re lucky she tolerated you for five minutes, you shriveled excuse for a fool-born ruffian!”

“Here!” came an indignant voice behind him. “You hasn’t the rights to say that!”

Gowan turned his head.

The brewer’s wife was on her feet, hands on her hips, scowling at him. “He’s no ruffian. He may be a clotpole—and I say that he is—but you’ve no right to call him names just because yer a duke.”

Gowan glared at her until she paled, but she didn’t back down. The brewer’s mouth was half-cocked. Gowan took him by the collar and gave him a shake. “There’s a chance she might take you back, you useless, witless clotpole.”

The man gulped.

Gowan shoved him away. “The pigs are confiscated until these two idiots work out their marital problems.”

A babble of protest rose instantly. Gowan looked at the brewer. “Do you love her?”

He gulped, and then nodded.

Gowan turned to his wife. “He don’t act so,” she said shrilly. “He stays at the pub till all hours.”

“No pigs,” Gowan told the man. “Not a single pig until you learn to keep your arse in your own kitchen.”

Then he left.

Thirty-five

By the third day of Gowan’s absence, it was clear to Edie that he wasn’t coming back. The first night and the second, she woke at every sound in the castle, certain that he would be home any moment. On the morning of the third day, she took a walk outside the castle walls for the first time since Gowan had left. Standing amidst the cow parsley that she thought of as her own, staring down at the tower, the idea came to her.

The tower was essentially abandoned. And yet it had everything she so desperately needed: time and space, silence, a place to practice.

If she moved there, Gowan could not surprise her by walking into the room and savaging her heart. She went back into the castle and found her maid. “Mary, will you ask Bardolph to attend me? I have decided to move to the tower, and I need him to make arrangements.”

“The tower!” Mary’s eyes rounded. “I thought it was dangerous or the like. The kitchen maids say it’s haunted. There’s a black knight who walks the top with his helmet under his arm, and his head is in that helmet, if you take my meaning!”

“I will risk the black knight,” Edie stated.

“His Grace put the tower right off limits,” Mary said earnestly. “The place is probably cursed, my lady. All sorts have died trying to climb it. Please don’t do anything so dangerous.”

“You wouldn’t mind coming down there a couple of times a day, would you?”

“As if I’d let you go somewhere alone!” Mary said indignantly. “I shall move to the tower as well.” Her face took on the harrowed but brave look of a martyr facing an angry mob.

“There’s no room for you,” Edie pointed out.

Mary gasped and dropped the pillow she was holding. “You’re leaving the duke, aren’t you, my lady? You’re moving to the tower because of him.”

“I’ve already sent a letter to my father; I plan to return to London once he comes to fetch us,” Edie said. “I expect it will be something of a shock for the household.”

“A shock? They won’t believe it. They act as if that man is God himself, come down to walk among mortal men.”

Edie managed a laugh, as if it wasn’t something she’d thought of herself.

Whether or not he was shocked (Edie couldn’t tell), Bardolph pressed into service a large number of men, who began carrying furnishings back and forth down the hill, while an army of maids with mops and buckets attacked the dust and cobwebs.

That afternoon, after the plates were cleared from luncheon, Layla announced that she simply had to lie down for a bit; Susannah had woken her the moment the sun peeped over the horizon, and she was desperate for a nap. Asked if she wanted to return to the nursery or stay with Edie, Susannah pointed at Edie.