“Can you play the songs Mistress Emma sang to us when we were children?” Let me be a child again, if only in memory. Let me return to the time before I threw Sebastian away.
“If you wish it, dearling, I can.”
Out of the lute’s strings flowed a simple round Mistress Emma had used to sing when she was mending and teaching Beatrice and Cecilia to mind their needles. Beatrice had loved needlework from her first stitch, while her sister had fought the cloth, needles and thread as if they were her mortal enemies. Insubstantial memories came on a wave of peace, as if the mellowness of innumerable afternoons mingled with the song flowing into the room. The tumult churning in Beatrice’s breast slowed, smoothed and finally faded, ugly memory giving way to gentle recollection.
She remembered sitting beside Ceci on a bench in the old solar at Wednesfield, trying to smock a shirt for her father while Ceci, muttering curses and whining in frustration, wrestled with hemstitches that would not feather neatly. She could not recall a time when she and her sister had sewn together that did not feature an irritable, sweaty Ceci smudging her linen and knotting her thread.
The music shifted and changed to another of Mistress Emma’s sewing songs, and Beatrice’s recollections shifted with it. Now she was sewing alone, hiding in the old tower so no one might see the herons she stitched in elaborate blackwork on a linen shirt. Benbury herons…a shirt for Sebastian. How old had she been? Fourteen, perhaps? He had promised her he would always keep it.
“Play something else, Ceci,” John said.
Cecilia looked at her, eyebrows raised in a question. Shall I?
Warmth stole over Beatrice. Growing up, John’s word had been law to Ceci, never questioned. Now her sister held him at bay for Beatrice. “Play what you wish,” she said, the warmth overflowing in a smile.
The darkness inside her did not lift so much as it crumbled, like a wall collapsing after it had been undermined. Little things chipped away at it, from the thoughtfulness of lavender and roses in her washing water to the way her sister seemed determined to please her. Smiling seemed to damage the darkness still further. Could blessings, not blows, fall down on her?
Ceci grinned back at her. “I shall play to please myself then.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I had just learned this for the queen when I left Court, so have patience. I am not well practiced.”
She launched into a lively tune, playing with no missed note that Beatrice could hear. After playing the melody once, she began to sing in her silver-pure voice. The words of the song were a little bawdy, as Court songs usually were; the chorus was plain nonsense. “And a hey nonny, hey nonny nonny no!”
The third time Cecilia began to sing the chorus, John joined in, the darkness of his deeper voice shading the bright clarity of hers. Beatrice listened, wishing she did not croak like a rook and could join in, as well. The rollicking rhythm of the tune set her toes to tapping and when John began to clap his hands in time she joined in helplessly. Lucia, sitting on John’s other side, followed suit, laughing as she did so. John had said she barely knew any English, but she seemed to understand English music well enough.
Her father joined Cecilia in singing the fourth verse. Here was the source of Ceci’s music; her father’s voice was as smooth and golden as honey in the comb. Beside him, her mother clapped her hands, her face shining in the candlelight. Her voice had no more beauty in it than Beatrice’s but, like Beatrice, she loved music.
“And a hey nonny, hey nonny nonny no!”
Beatrice would have known Sebastian’s voice if he sang with the choir at Westminster. Not as dark as John’s nor as honeyed as her father’s, it had the golden-brown clarity of water slipping over stones. Certain he would not be looking at her, she stole a glance at him.
She was wrong.
Even at this distance, the cornflower-blue of his eyes glowed. Surely those were the bluest eyes in England. She waited for his mask to clamp down, for the shifting, unreadable expression on his face to disappear, frozen into frightening stillness. Instead his expression coalesced into a scowl as he stared at her through narrowed eyes. An hour ago that frown would have unnerved her. Now, after Ceci’s kindness and the joyous sound of “Hey nonny no!” she had a small store of courage to spend.
She lifted her chin and held his stare. It took every ounce of will not to look away; it had been far too long since she had tried to stare anyone down. A chill prickled her when she remembered that within weeks she would be entirely in his power, to use as he pleased, but a portion of Coleville obstinacy had come with the courage and she could not yield to him. She would have to have faith in the small voice that had said Sebastian would not harm her.
Sebastian looked away.
Beatrice sank back against the wall as if he had unhanded her. She had not outfaced anyone since marrying Thomas. How long had it been? Three years, four? She could not remember, not exactly, only that it seemed like a lifetime.
Her heart, which had lain quietly while she confronted Sebastian, took up a fierce battering against her breastbone, as if to register its protest, and she could not quite seem to catch her breath. How had she dared? Why had she been such a fool? He would be furious and rightly so. Worse, however much she hated and feared the knowledge, he was her husband, with the right to correct her with his hands. She ought to be terrified; surely the pounding of her heart was fear?
No, what she felt was not fear. Fear did not rush, sparkling, through her veins; fear did not make her sit straighter on the bench beside Ceci. The emotion driving her heart and catching her breath was excitement, excitement that was familiar and alien at once.
Why? Why was she excited when she should be afraid?
Through a supper of duck and goose, good English beef and capon, she puzzled over it. She knew her family spoke to her and she answered at random, absorbed in trying to penetrate the gray wall of empty knowledge. She could not remember why her act of daring felt familiar, nor understand why it did not leave her cold with terror. Could it be that Sebastian was not Thomas? She looked down the table at him, sitting just beyond John on her father’s side. Candlelight glinted gold and honey-brown in his waving hair, limned the lean line of his cheek and glittered in the faint stubble of his beard. He seemed almost to have been washed in gold himself, even to the tawny orange of his short gown and brocaded doublet. Like a saint in a manuscript.
No, he was nothing like Thomas, least of all to look at.
Servants came to remove the cloths from the table and to lay out the cheese and fruit. Beatrice selected an apple and began cutting the peel off with her eating knife. She had always loved apples, especially when they were new, their flesh firm and full of juice. This one was particularly juicy; her hands were damp and sticky with it. She carved a sliver of apple and slid it into her mouth, nibbling it between her teeth.
She glanced at Sebastian. He stared at her, his mouth a thin, hard line, and then turned his head away from her, one more move in their dance of looking and looking away. How he must hate the thought of marrying her.
She could not blame him for wishing for another wife than she. What man would want a woman with a soul as black as hers, even if she had tried to clean the stains with confession and penance? She sighed and set the apple down. What either of them wanted had become meaningless. Without list or leave, they were married, bound together in the sight of God if not yet in the sight of man.
If she could not undo this madness, she could try to be the wife he must want. Meek, obedient, scrupulously honorable. How meek would he expect her to be? Would she need to be obedient only to spoken desires, or would she once again have to obey commands unspoken, and suffer the punishments for unwitting disobedience?
She glanced at Sebastian’s end of the table again. Her father had claimed his attention. Sebastian frowned as he nodded while her father spoke, but he did not look angry, merely intent on her father. But anger did not matter, did it? A man might pretend to anger, so poorly she knew it for mummery, and still inflict bruises big and black as plums. A blow given with a cold heart hurt just as deeply as one