stood. “Let us talk no more, Sebastian. I am weary and say what I ought not. If you will excuse me, I shall retire now.” She walked toward the door.
His anger died as if it could not survive her absence. He scrambled to his feet and followed her. “Do not go, Beatrice.”
She turned to face him. “Why not? We only brangle whenever we meet. Perhaps, given time, we shall be able to live together without quarrel. But that time has not come.”
He held out his hand, no longer clenched in a fist. “I do not want us to part like this.”
She sighed. “Nor I, but I do not see how else we may part.”
He moved closer to her, his hand still outstretched. “If I say I believe you…”
“Do not lie for so small a reason, Sebastian. It does not matter enough.”
His hand dropped; the two feet that separated them might have been twenty. “You are changed.”
Her chin went up. “Perhaps I was never who you thought I was. Perhaps what you see now is the truth.”
“Is it?”
Her mouth curled in a bitter smile. “You cannot leave anything alone. I cannot answer that question, I cannot allay your fears. I can offer you no comfort. This is what we suffer for our sins.” She turned away from him and crossed the distance to the door. Opening it, she turned to face him. “Good night and God be with you.” She disappeared, shutting the door behind her.
Without her, the chapel walls crowded around him, the air chilly and damp. The light on the altar flickered and danced, spilling shadows and golden light against the dark stone walls. Sebastian returned to the altar and knelt, casting about in his empty mind for a prayer, any prayer.
If he could, he would release Beatrice from this marriage. Not because he wished to marry any woman but her, but because she was right when she said they did nothing but brangle when they met. He did not want a turbulent marriage. Like Beatrice, he wanted peace, but when he was with her he could not find it for himself nor would he leave her be to discover it for herself.
Yet however much he wished otherwise, he could not be free, nor could Beatrice. They were bound to one another, tied before God. Some men might, for expedience, discard their wives like outworn shoes, discovering a convenient precontract or fortuitously remembered consanguinity. Unlike them, Sebastian would not dishonor himself, even to undo this marriage. Whether he wished for it or not, in a way he would never have chosen or imagined, he must marry the woman he had loved since childhood.
God help them both.
Chapter Four
B eatrice closed the chapel door and leaned against its panels, waiting for her heart to still its riotous hammering. The encounter with Sebastian ought to have alarmed her, proving as it had that she would not find the peace she sought as Sebastian’s wife, but instead of dismay, there was exhilaration. Against all sense and wisdom, the same rushing excitement that had surged through her when she had faced down Sebastian’s stare drove her heart now. Why was that so? What ailed her that she did not fear to meet or to defy him?
She straightened. She could not linger here, outside the chapel, while she puzzled it out. She hurried through the dark house to her bedchamber. After the waiting maidservant had helped her out of her clothes and into her night rail, she dismissed the girl, unwilling to have company while her thoughts churned and bubbled as if her head were a cauldron. Alone, she paced the room, too restless to be still.
Something had changed this night. Before Sebastian disturbed her she had been praying, mere hours after telling Ceci she no longer could. How had that happened? What had opened the stops in her soul?
Growing up at Wednesfield, she had often imagined that in early spring she could feel the earth quicken to life long before the green shoots thrust into sight, as if the sap moving once more in the trees moved through her, as well. That tingling awareness flooded her now, the sensation of sleeping things stirring awake. Somehow that feeling had to do with Sebastian and this garboil she found herself in.
She shook her head. Fear stirred, murmuring, If you trust this feeling it will be the worse for you. Fear? Or plain sense? She had thought she could trust Thomas and he had proven her wrong. So, for that matter, had Sebastian and George Conyers. No, better she should keep her counsel and bend herself to being a perfectly submissive, perfectly obedient wife. Tonight was the last time she would come so close to quarreling with Sebastian.
The door creaked open. Beatrice turned her head in time to see Ceci, holding her lute, slip into the room and check on the threshold as she saw that Beatrice was alone.
“Where is Mary? Edith?” Ceci asked.
“Mary was not here. I dismissed Edith.”
Ceci’s eyes narrowed briefly, but all she said was, “Will you attend me then?”
“Gladly.”
They did not speak while Beatrice helped Ceci as the maid had helped her, but she was aware of her sister watching her, those dark eyes no doubt seeing more than Ceci let show. Beatrice knew she was no fool, but when she compared her wit to her sister’s cleverness, she felt like one.
While Ceci braided her hair and put on her nightcap, Beatrice sat down. She ought to plait her own hair, but she did not want to. Not yet.
Ceci tied the strings of her cap. “Are you going to go to bed like that? Your hair will be a tangle in the morning.”
“I cannot seem to find the will,” Beatrice confessed. “Today is a day I should want to leave behind, but I fear tomorrow will be worse.”
“Let me.”
Beatrice nodded and drew the stool away from the wall. Ceci picked up the comb from atop the bed where she had put it and went to stand behind Beatrice. Her fingers threaded through Beatrice’s hair, their touch light. Pleasure, or the anticipation of pleasure, washed over Beatrice. She had always loved it when Ceci or Mistress Emma combed her hair; both had the kind of touch that soothed.
A waving strand of hair drifted over her shoulder, glittering gold in the candlelight as it moved into her line of sight. Ceci’s hand, lute-string calluses on the pads of the fingertips, reached forward and drew the strand back.
“I always wished I had hair like yours,” Ceci said, and drew the comb through Beatrice’s hair from hairline to the ends brushing the small of Beatrice’s back.
The touch of the comb loosened every remaining knot of tension in Beatrice’s body. It took her a moment to form the words to reply.
“Because it is fair?”
“And curly.”
“But you have hair like satin!” True, Ceci was dark, but her hair was heavy and glossy, cool and silky to the touch. “I always wanted hair like yours.”
Ceci chuckled. “You cannot have wanted to be a sparrow like me.”
“Papa has dark hair.”
“Ah.”
As Ceci had always been closer to their mother, so had Beatrice been
