Chapter Thirty-Two
January 22, 4:07 a.m.
Sebastian stood outside staring at the lighted windows of Pennhyll. Hew Willow’s suicide put a quick end to the party. Most of the guests had gone once the word got out, taking advantage of the break in the weather to go home. By now, he imagined, only Ned and Egremont remained. James and Diana, too, of course. He walked to the right of Pennhyll’s gated entrance with its doors permanently open, portcullis forever raised. The rooms on the north side were darkened. A few upper floors in the servant’s wing. A parlor. Olivia’s tower was darkened, of course. Soft light shone from his window. Strange he’d never noticed before just how close their rooms were. One story and a hundred yards at most. He shoved his hands deeper into his coat pockets. The storm had long since blown itself out. New snow covered the ground, drifts piled high along the walls. Despite the chill, his head didn’t feel any clearer.
Somehow, he thought, as he stared at the castle, Pennhyll had become home. His wife was there. His future. He crossed the courtyard, the sound of his boots on the snow-covered cobbles a comforting sound. Olivia was his now. His wife, and the future mother of his children. The thought of facing her filled him with a dreadful anticipation. He’d made a lifetime commitment to her. He was not a God-fearing man, or hadn’t been in some time, but he found the vow he’d made meant something.
He reached an outcropping of the granite that formed the foundation of the most ancient towers of Pennhyll. If he picked his way around the side, he’d be at the back entrance, not far from where he and Olivia had nearly plunged down the mountain. He put a hand on the rock to steady his footing, and he could swear he felt something, some flow of energy pass from the granite to him. Olivia was right. Pennhyll had changed him. He wasn’t the man he’d been when he came here.
Today, he’d begun as an unmarried man and ended a married one and few changes were more life altering than that. He had his commission and more, command of a fleet. The sort of responsibility and challenge he’d dreamed of, had lived for. Not that he had it, his heart lay like a boulder in his chest. Cold. Lifeless. What if something happened to him? He might die, and she’d never know how he grateful he was for the gift of her heart and her passion.
“You’ve been a low and scurvy craven,” he muttered. He drew his coat closer. The moon dipped behind the clouds and blurred the distant details of wood and bramble. He turned the corner that would take him to the door and found he’d walked into a wall of gray. His outstretched hand disappeared into the mist.
In the blink of an eye, darkness and fog reduced visibility to less than the length of his outstretched hand. The moon reappeared, scattering light in all directions. He looked behind him and saw the indistinct shape of the granite outcrop he’d passed. He took a step forward, then another. Mist swirled around him. He could taste and smell the thick fog with every breath. Now, if he looked over his shoulder, he couldn’t even see the rock. Pennhyll, he knew, stood to his left. Too much to the right, and he well plunge down the hillside.
He heard something. A whisper? The faint sound of metal moving against metal. He waited. Another moment later and the fog swirled, but low to the ground. Pandelion emerged from the mist, and he bent to pat the hound’s head. The dog whined and nudged him. “Have you brought him with you?” he asked. The dog barked once and turned its muzzle toward its tail. The mist swirled again and for a moment, he was convinced he’d seen someone. He slowly walked. Ahead of him, the fog swirled. The sound of metal moving rang gently as Pandelion dropped back and kept her muzzle at the level of his knee. He stared at the shape materializing before him. Pandelion whined and then trotted to the very limit of Sebastian’s sight. The hound sat, staring forward into the fog and he joined the dog, peering ahead, trying to pierce both dark and mist. “Are you there?”
The reply, if any there was, could have been nothing more than the wind that sometimes howled over the ramparts of Pennhyll. He’d reached the door to the tower. The moon illuminated a man wearing a tunic emblazoned with the sigil of the earls of Tiern-Cope. His eyes were blue beneath dark and unruly hair. The hilt of a broadsword poked over his shoulder. Fresh from his haunting of Hew Willow? “Are you going to tell me what the bloody hell to do about Olivia?” he asked.
The man shook his head and took a step toward him and then another and another. A blaze of cold shot through him, a jolt that shook him with the force of a blow. His head snapped back, and then the sensation was gone. He shook his head but for the space of two breaths he feel the dizzied by the sensation of someone else looking out his eyes. Then, the separation was gone. His head swam and he thrust out an arm to keep his balance. Pandelion nudged his hand.
By the time he opened the tower door, he knew what to do. The stairwell was pitch black, but the hound knew where she was going. Had he ever climbed these narrow twisting stairs? He had, with Olivia cradled in his arms. He touched the wall and other memories crowded behind his recollection of Olivia. Swirling impressions from a different time, from different men. Andrew, too, had walked the stairs. He felt his brother, his father, and all the earls Tiern-Cope.
He stopped at a wooden door even though the stairs continued upward. He opened it easily, and found he was, indeed, in his suite of rooms. Not the bedroom, but the anteroom he used as a private office. The door to his bed chamber was ajar. He slipped off his coat but did not go to Olivia because he had one thing yet to do. Pandelion padded in and lay down by the fire.
When he returned, he went straight to his bedroom. She was dressed in her black velvet, sitting on a chair by the fire. Pandelion had come in and had her head on Olivia’s lap while she scratched her ears.
“Olivia,” he said.
“My lord.”
“Sebastian.”
“You got what you wanted.”
He faced her, keeping his hands behind his back. “What are you talking about?”
“My head. You got what is in my head.”
“I did at that.”
Her eyes flicked over him and then settled on the floor to the right of where he stood. “What now?”
“We make a life together.”
“Do you think we can?”
“Yes.” He rocked back on his heels.
“Is Hew dead?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill him?”
He grimaced. For a moment, the wall between them seemed as high and vast as the towers of Pennhyll. “No. Olivia, no, don’t cry. Please do not cry. I cannot abide women who cry.” He brought his hands from behind his back. Feeling ridiculous and annoyed that he’d spoiled his grand gesture, he stared at the disordered bouquet of roses and orange blossoms he’d gathered from the conservatory. “Price will to have my head for this.”
When he looked at her, her eyes fixed on the roses.
“They’re for you,” he said. What a clod he was. A bumbling display worthy of the likes of Mickey Twilling. “Bugger it,” he muttered when a thorn jabbed his thumb. He walked to the washstand and plunked the flowers into the ewer. He faced her. “They’re for you, Olivia, and wish I had words to go with them.”
She walked past him to the washstand and bent her head over the ewer. “They smell heavenly.”
“Olivia.” He reached for her, pulled her close, burying his fingers in her hair, well aware that though she stood close, she was quiescent in his arms. “Olivia.” Her hair smelled of verbena. He took a deep breath and the world wasn’t big enough for his feelings and he didn’t give a tinker’s curse how big they were. They came out because they had no place else to go but to the woman in his arms. “Olivia, please don’t turn away from me. I couldn’t bear it if you did. I love you, Olivia.”
“I love you, too,” she said. Slowly, very slowly, her body relaxed against his. Her arms crept around his shoulders and then his neck. “When do you leave?” she whispered. “How long do we have?”
He broke their embrace in order to fetch Egremont’s packet. He tapped the parchment before handing the papers to her. “I have many duties. To my title, my King and to you. Until today it seemed they diverged and there was no resolution to satisfy them all.”
“You must go,” she said. “If it’s command of a single ship or of a fleet makes no difference, you must go. You cannot do anything else.”
“I suppose not.”
“Besides, it might be weeks before you sail. I could come with you as far as Falmouth.”
“I should like that.” He touched her shoulder. “But read these first.” He watched her open the packet. “Read.”
She unfolded the pages and held them flat. There were several sheets inside, and after a bit she stopped reading. “Command of a fleet. Your brother would be so proud.”
“He would be.”
“I’m proud of you. A fleet.”
“If I want it.”
“Of course you do.”
He could not help smiling. “There’s more,” he said.
She returned to the papers and gasped when she reached the page covered with seals and ribbons. “Oh, my. You’ve been raised to the peerage. A Viscount. An hereditary peerage. An estate and an income. Twenty thousand a year. You must have been brave indeed to merit this. Well, I know you were. You’re the bravest man I know.”
“The petition,” he said while she scanned the letters patent, “was made before Andrew died. There’s another letter in here hinting at raising me farther in the peerage than viscount, but I expect they’ll think that unnecessary now.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Keep reading, Olivia.”
He knew the moment she found the letter because she drew in an outraged breath, God love her. “A position in the Admiralty.” She scowled at the papers. “Give up command of a fleet? Never. This you cannot possibly accept.”
“Why not?”
Letters Patent clutched in one hand and the rest of the packet in the other, she stared at him. “I won’t let you. Unthinkable. You have the command of a fleet. It’s everything you’ve wanted. What your brother knew you would have. What you’ve wanted all these years.”
“What if I don’t want it after all?”
“Of course you do.”
“I’ve been a sailor twelve years, Olivia. And I think—I think that’s enough. Oh, you’re right, I’ve loved the sea. I let the Navy consume me. But since I came to Pennhyll, I’ve felt something missing in me, and for too long I thought it was the sea. I thought if I went back to the ocean everything would be the way it used to be, but I was wrong.”
“You want to go back. You know you do.”
“I don’t. Not any more. You were what was missing, Olivia. You’re what I needed, and now I have you, I won’t leave you.” He took the packet from her, letting the papers scatter to the floor as he hauled her to her feet. “I can’t leave you. More to the point, I don’t want to. Now I don’t have to.” He pulled her into his arms. “Besides, my love,” he whispered into her ear, “the bloody dead Black Earl told me he’d never stop haunting me if I did.”
Neither one of them felt the draft or heard the embers pop in the fireplace. The next day in Far Caister anyone up at dawn swore he or she saw the Black Earl pacing the ramparts, but by evening, there wasn’t even one tale of disaster or misfortune to be boasted of in the Crown’s Ease.