Page 60 of The Mad Baron's Bride
Mrs. Styleman tilted her head, looking at Leda from beneath lowered brows. “What lord wants a canary in his nest? Especially if he’s some rust to scrub off the family name, after the last one dragged it about. Everyone told him to pick a girl who was true, so he could be sure that his heir was a Burnham. But she had a pair of fine eyes, hadn’t she, and that wisp-o’-the-will way about her. It was rather romantic, I suppose, like one of those tragedies in the books. He thought he could refine her with his love, andshe…” She shrugged, creasing the expensive lace tucked about her bosom.
“Left him,” Leda said, thinking it wise to remain delicate.
Mrs. Styleman lifted her brows. “Threw herself at every man within reach of Holme Hall, is what I heard. And then ended herself when no one else would carry her off, and she had to lie in the bed she’d made.”
Leda remainedquiet as Jack drove them home. He wondered what Mrs. Styleman had said to her. She watched, her lovely head tilted, as a harrier skimmed its way along the placid River Hun, which spouted deep in Hunstanton Park and meandered its way north to the town of Holme-next-the-Sea. She looked and nodded when he pointed out the old wooden lighthouse, cutting the air with unmistakable authority, a landmark for customs officials and smugglers alike.
“I spoke with the lodge keeper at Hunstanton Park,” Jack said. “He’s a heap of stone from the old deer keeper’s house that he’ll give me for my kiln. It’ll save me a great deal of time, and I’ll be able to fire my first set of bricks as soon as the mortar dries.”
“How lovely,” Leda said.
“Clever Judith,” Muriel, in the back, crooned to her doll. “Sweet, clever Judith. I’ll give you a swan to lead on a silver chain and more ribbons than you have hair.”
Jack paused Pontus next to the ruined chapel that stood at the edge of the sea. The footprint of a nave and chancel stood outlined in stone among the green lawn, grazed short by sheep, his sheep. Sweet violet and chickweed bloomed along a section of a brick wall that erupted proud and alone from the ground, a cluster of clunch and white chalk, its bricks undressed flint and carrstone and whatever the medieval builders had turned up onthe beach. An arched doorway led to nothing but empty air, as if the world beyond lay hidden to human eyes.
Leda roused as he held up his arms to help her down. Her weight in his hands was so solid, so real, the firm plump of her hips, the nip of her waist, her ribs a smooth line within her stays. His head swirled as she gained her feet, and he had to flex his fingers to loosen her, let her go. Her eyes were on the ruin, not him.
“That’s a witch’s doorway,” she said. “A fairy portal. You’ll step through that and disappear.”
“This is ground consecrated to Edmund the Martyr,” Jack said, a touch indignant. He turned to Muriel, noodling her doll along the stepstone of rocks left exposed in the ancient wall. “He landed here to be crowned King of East Anglia in 855, a proper Anglo-Saxon king, was Edmund. Fought with King Alfred of Wessex against the great heathen armies of the Norsemen. Of course, they captured and executed him when he wouldn’t renounce his faith. His remains are in Bury St. Edmunds, both his body and the head the infidels parted from him, which his followers found through the help of a talking wolf.”
Muriel looked up. “A talking wolf?”
Jack nodded. “Fluent in Latin, no less, who calledhic, hicwhen Edmund’s subjects came looking for him, if the life of St. Dunstan is to be believed.”
“Wolves in Norfolk.” Muriel appeared skeptical. “With the hiccups.”
“Hicmeans this, or here,” Leda said absently. “As inhic jacet, here lies.Hic jacet rosa mundi,the rose of the world.Hic jacet Arturus, rex quondamn, rexque futurus,Arthur, king once and king to be.Hic jacetso-and-so, beloved of someone else.”
“Hic jacetmy mother, beloved of me,” Muriel said.
Jack flailed. He wanted to ask Leda how she knew Latin, or at least bits of it. He wanted to know everything. He wanted thoseviolet eyes turned toward him again, with that look of delight she’d worn when she worked beside him shaping clay into his brick molds, sharing his work, his life. That look of admiration that made him feel ten feet tall and strong as a bear.
“Of course you know the tale of Arthur, but Norfolk too has a sleeping king who will rise again,” Jack said. “King Gurgunt, son of Belinus, who ruled Britain long before the Romans came. Gurgunt founded Norwich and built the castle to keep an eye on the pesky Danes, whom he invaded and subdued after they refused to render him tribute. Geoffrey of Monmouth said he was buried in Caerleon, because Geoffrey of Monmouth knew nothing of the world outside Wales. But Gurgunt came here and took his seat in his robes and crown on his great throne in a mound beneath Norwich Castle. He fell asleep there surrounded by his jewels and gold and all his treasure, and he will wake again when Britain has need of him and come to her defense.”
Muriel regarded him with great calculation. “And how do you know this?”
“I grew up in Norwich, pet. Do you want to hear of the Wild Boy of Bridewell Alley?”
“No, I don’t wish to hear of boys, wild or otherwise.” Muriel shook her head.
Leda stood as still as the lighthouse, face turned toward the west, where a frill of green shrubbery edged the blue sky, a faint darker blue line the only sign of the heaving, restless sea. The breeze threaded her dark curls. A redshank shot past her, flashing its white rump and bright legs, trailing a high, flute-like call as it dove over the edge and disappeared.
“It’s as if the earth simply falls away,” Leda said.
“These are the cliffs where my mother fell,” said Muriel.
There was little to say after that, and they drove in silence the short way to the hall, Pontus picking his way through the sheep lanes lined with comfrey and cow parsley. The skydarkened, as if someone had let down a shade. Mrs. Styleman was responsible, of course. She would have filled Leda’s head with all the tales, of how he was the mad baron, how he was cruel to Anne-Marie.
And Leda, sensible as she was, wouldn’t know what to believe, for what did she know of Jack, really? What had he allowed her to see, other than a man who had failed as a husband and father, as a landowner and a mason, failed in every part of being a gentleman or a lord of the realm?
He was nothing but a man who had woken to the needs of his body, to longings that he dared not name or frame a thought around, to the feverish wish to press his lips against hers and wrap her softness around him and lose himself in her body, sinking into her as if he could be carried away by the sea, enveloped, transformed, made new by her touch.
Holme Hall stood with its mouth tight shut and its eyes lidded, the windows a dull silver against the clouding afternoon, safe behind its curtain walls. Jack wondered if the brick and stone of his home would stand as long as had that one piece of wall from St. Edmund’s Chapel, five centuries old. How odd that the doorway had proved the strongest part, the curved passage through which worshippers came to draw strength from the saint before returning to their worlds without.
A woman stood at the cliff’s edge, in a posture just as Leda had assumed. Black tresses seethed between her straw hat, and the wind sucked her skirts against her legs, slender and strong. Behind him, Muriel hissed in her breath and lurched forward.
“Mother!” she screamed. Before Jack could stop her, or pause to make her hear reason, Muriel had cast herself from the cart like a leaping deer and was running toward the still figure.“Mama!”
