A dim light from a handheld lantern bobbed below her window. Helena stepped back. It wouldn’t do for one of the servants to see her staring out the window with a baleful expression. Or hanging from her husband and stepchildren laughing, for that matter. Even if it meant she’d feel this alone for the rest of her days.
You deserve it, Helena. You deserve a lonely, empty life. Mama might never have said the words aloud, but her distant silence before Helena married had said enough. Helena was unlovable. She’d thought if she obeyed her parents and married, Papa would approve, Mama might forgive, and Helena would feel cleaner inside somehow, but marrying hadn’t changed anything, after all. Why should she have expected who she now was on the outside to change whom she was inside?
I thought You forgive, Lord. Was I wrong? What was that feeling of love at the church yesterday? Was it fancy, or is there more for me there if I return? Could You love me?
Then again, why would God love her? Papa, ill as he was, would probably never see her again, but after the wedding, he couldn’t get away from her fast enough.
Helena rubbed her cold arms. Tomorrow she must begin searching for a new governess, and she also had letters to write to her friend Frances Fennelwick and her sisters and Mama, but not her grandmother, who would be furious at Helena once she heard some made-up story from Papa that Helena had become enamored of Tavin’s neighbor and there was no stopping her headstrong ways. She would write of her new home, the weather and the village. She’d say nothing of her feelings.
She should sleep, but her emotions continued to churn inside her, making her limbs quiver. She paced to shake them out, but it only seemed to make the matter worse. Should she ring for Barnes and tea? She wasn’t thirsty. Mayhap if she had something to read, she’d relax. The library would have something tedious to dull her senses, no doubt. And it was far preferable to fretting over her thoughts. She took up the lone candle sputtering at her bedside and returned to the hall.
It was dark and empty—how long had it been since she’d escaped the nursery? Longer than she thought. Her candle cast grotesque shadows as she tiptoed down the hall and around the corner. Her sisters, Maria and Andromeda, would have clung to Helena had they been here, certain Comraich’s dark, damp stones held ghosts. Silly widgeons—
Another pang of loneliness tightened Helena’s stomach. Would her sisters ever be allowed to visit her here?
Of course not. There would be excuses based on the distance, but the truth was, her parents wouldn’t want the girls influenced by their wayward elder sister.
Did the Bible say anything about being lonesome? Wasn’t there a woman in its pages who had been uprooted from her home by marriage? Whither thou goest, I will go, too, or something like that? Had the woman’s husband loved her? Or had she been as alone as Helena would always be?
Her desire for a musty tome disappeared. Mayhap John had a Bible in his library.
A cry rent the hall’s stillness. One of the children.
She hurried to the nursery, where a single lamp cast a comforting, gold glow over the walls. The boys’ door was ajar, and Helena rushed inside.
One of the boys sat up in bed, his hands over his mouth. Iona whimpered at his feet, while Agnes patted his shoulder as one might thump the head of a large dog. “Go back to sleep, Master, ’afore you wake the others.”
Alex.
Helena had never ministered to a frantic child before. Perhaps she should leave.
Instead she rushed to Alex’s bed. “Poor dear.” She rested her hand on his miniscule knee. A quick glance assured her Callum slept on in his bed, which was no doubt for the best.
Agnes’s fists flew to her hips. “Now look what ye’ve done, Master, but gone and disturbed ’er ladyship.”
“Nonsense, Agnes.” Helena perched on Alex’s bed, her thumb tracing lazy circles over his kneecap. Did her touch bother him? She only did what she would have wanted done to her, but it was difficult to tell, the way he stared at her, gasping through his fingers.
“Now then. Does something ache? Or was it a bad dream?”
Alex hiccupped and nodded. Helena wiped his eyes with the lace-edged handkerchief she kept tucked up her sleeve.
“What happened in your dream?”
“I was in the water. There was a kee-ask who pulled me doon and I could nae breathe.” He lifted his knees and buried his head between them.
“A what?”
“Kee-ask.” Curled as he was, his words were muffled. “I knew I shouldna gone to her, but she looked like Mither. When I got closer I saw she was gray with the tail of a salmon and no’ like Mither anymore. She’d come to take me under the water.”
The creature sounded something like a mermaid. A kee-ask must be a creature of folklore, then. Poor boy, seeing his mother’s face turn into something horrible.
Helena smoothed Alex’s nightshirt over his shoulders. “I have nightmares sometimes, too.”
He peeked up at her. “What about?”
Frederick Cole’s handsome face flashed through her mind. Blue eyes, startling in their contrast to his near-black curls.
“Monsters. Same as you. But I know they cannot hurt me.”
“Because they are no’ real.”
In her case they were, but she smiled anyway.
“I don’ want to dream of my monster again.” Alex’s breath was shuddering and deep, a good sign he had cried himself out.
The sensation she’d experienced in the kirk—of peace and love and yearning—swelled in her bosom, and she cupped Alex’s damp cheek with her hand. “I’d pay all the gold and silver I possess to never dream of my monster again, either, and to save you from yours.”
Fabric rustled, and she turned to check Callum, but the boy slept on in his bed. Instead, her husband stood against the doorjamb, watching her.
Now it was her turn to cover her mouth with her hand.
* * *
John pulled the nursery door shut as softly as he could, glad for Helena’s candle to illuminate the hall. “I think Alex should rest well enough now.” The poor laddie had been drowsy when they left, with the comfort of Iona curling on the coverlet at his feet.
“I hope so.” She held her candle steady, but tension rolled from her. After their awkward parting earlier tonight, it was little wonder.
Mayhap her unease also had to do with the monster she told Alex she dreamed of, but he couldn’t ask her about that. Not now, perhaps not ever. Still, he wouldn’t ignore the opportunity to get back on even footing with her. “Would you care to join me for a brief moment? I was working in the library, and the fire is still warm in the grate.”
The strain eased from her mouth. “I was on my way to the library when I heard Alex.”
He released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
