‘Not this time.’ Louve flexed his hand and gave her a look she recognised from years of friendship. ‘I dare you.’
‘That won’t work on me.’ And no such childish challenge would influence the mercenary who had strode out of the Great Hall. ‘Nicholas has gone, and maybe he’ll keep on going.’
‘You know where he went. And, despite his aim, it’s you he needs to talk to. He’s been gone a long time, but from his reaction...’ Louve placed his hand on her arm. ‘He didn’t know about Roger, Matilda. You can’t leave him like that.’
She could. ‘He left us.’
‘He’s returned to find his friend dead. Not only a friend, but Roger. For all he knows, Roger could have been gone for years.’
‘The time of Roger’s passing makes no difference. Nicholas chose his path years ago—as I chose mine. He left first. He holds no more importance to Roger’s death than to any other friend. In truth...’ In truth she saw little of the man she had once called her betrothed. ‘You don’t know if he thinks of any of us as a friend. He never answered our letters.’
‘You think he feels nothing over Roger’s death? He struck me in his home—in front of his people. That’s some indication of where his heart is.’
She didn’t want to think of Nicholas’s heart. He didn’t deserve it. Yet Roger had been her friend and her husband. And in that she knew she was the one to answer whatever questions Nicholas might have.
Dares didn’t work, but she always faced her challenges.
She knew the path towards the chapel’s graveyard all too well. Her mother and her husband were buried here, and she visited them every day. However, instead of taking the well-worn path she turned left towards the other side. The one that wasn’t lit by the villagers’ fires and lanterns, but only by moonlight and stars.
Still, she could see Nicholas—exactly where Louve had said he’d be. No statue or grave marker, no matter how grand, was as dark or forbidding as the man towering amongst them.
Two hands gripped a statue’s base, and his head was bowed between his arms. To anyone else he’d look to be praying next to his father’s grave. However, his father was buried inside, under the chapel’s great stones, not outside, battered by the elements.
It could be freezing here at night, with nothing to buffer against the wind. Nicholas, bent against his father’s memorial, looked like a man braving harsh weather. To her, he looked like a man shoving a broken plough through rocky ground.
‘You shouldn’t have come here.’ Nicholas’s resonating voice, tinged with pain, reverberated across the cold stones.
Refusing to feel pity, she ignored his grief. Still... ‘We sent you a message.’
He raised his head, but did not stop gripping the statue’s base. As if he held it up...or maybe it supported him. Whatever the reason, the tightness of his hands was visible to her, but not his expression. It took a moment longer for her eyes to adjust and then she realised it wasn’t only the darkness making his gaze unreadable...it was something of himself that was unknown to her as well.
‘I don’t want to talk of Roger,’ he said.
Conflicting emotions seemed to be battering him. There was pain there, and anger, confusion and something else. She ignored all that at his words. There was only one reason he didn’t want to talk about Roger. Because he didn’t care.
‘Of course you don’t.’
‘Your meaning...?’
‘You don’t deserve to know my meaning.’
He pushed himself off the statue and rose to his full height. His will seemed to reach out to her and she brushed it aside.
Turning away, she said, ‘It seems colder here than anywhere else.’
She only made a few steps before he said, ‘How many more are there?’
Ignoring him, she took a few more steps. Her reason for coming out here was to talk of Roger, but Nicholas had made it clear that wasn’t what he wanted.
His standing next to his father’s memorial and not the new headstone of his friend should have been an indication of how futile her coming here was. He obviously still worshiped his father’s desires above anyone else’s...even his own.
Or maybe she had never really known what Nicholas’s desires were. She’d always argued that he followed his father’s desires and never his own. Maybe his desires were his father’s, and it was she who was blind.
It was an old argument, and one that she’d thought was put to rest after she’d married Roger. It should have been put to rest—and yet here she was walking through the night to face him again. It hadn’t yet been a full day into his return.
Another step away, and still Nicholas’s gaze collided against her. She ignored him, but couldn’t ignore her own curiosity. What did he mean by how many? How many deaths?
Biting back a sound of frustration, she pivoted to face him. ‘How many what?’
Nicholas was only a few steps away. She hadn’t heard him following her and wasn’t prepared for him to be so close.
It didn’t matter that it was only moonlight illuminating them because he was no longer in the monument’s shadows. So when she turned she surprised him, and glimpsed his expression before he shuttered it.
‘How many other children, Matilda?’ he asked.
There was a whirling darkness in his gaze, a furrow between his brow. His shoulders hunched as if he’d taken a fist to his guts. She’d thought the emotion gone before he’d uttered his question, but it wasn’t. He was in agony.
His pain had to be feigned. For the last three years his correspondence had been only perfunctory and infrequent. He had never enquired about his tenants or his friends.
He had never answered her letter to him.
Trying to gain distance, she wrapped her arms around her stomach and watched his lids flutter closed for a moment, as if her action affected him. She wouldn’t let him affect her.
‘You want to talk of my baby?’ She wanted to shout. ‘Are you concerned that a widow with children will deplete Mei Solis resources? Or, more precisely, that I won’t be able to do my duties as bailiff? That your linens won’t be clean enough or I won’t be able to settle disputes for you?’
The wind buffeted them, but his words pounded against her. ‘Isn’t it you who is concerned with linens and the depletion of precious Mei Solis resources?’
Like some spoiled, selfish shrew? Not her. She wasn’t his stepmother, Helena. She’d begged him to stay, to tear down Mei Solis and live a simpler life. Instead he’d left to bring more riches, making it very clear to her what he deemed important. So she had married another.
And yet he accused her of this?
‘After all these years...’ She only just
