Darkwitch Rising by Sara Douglass

Thornton sighed. “How can we now explain that—”

“Explaining now will take a greater skill at diplomacy than either you or I possess, I think. What should have happened, the moment Leila mistook me for your wife, was to set her to rights, not to stand there like a lovelorn donkey and say, ‘She is my life. I cannot imagine existing without her’.”

“And that was the truth, Noah,” Thornton said quietly. “To have said anything else would have been a lie.”

Noah’s shoulders slumped, her anger draining away. “Gods,” she said, “how I have mismanaged this.”

She turned away, walking to the bed and stroking the beautifully embroidered coverlet. “Here we are, arguing as if we are, truly, a married couple.”

He said nothing, and she looked back to him.

“John, what will you say when one day Thomas and Leila meet your true wife? And what shall Sarah say when she knows you have stayed here a night with a strange woman in your bed who you passed off as her?”

Thornton shrugged. “I shall think of some explanation.” In truth, Thornton did not like to think what would happen once his new wife heard of this. He hadn’t meant to say what he had when Leila called Noah his wife…but the words somehow had slipped out and, as he had just said to Noah, they were the truth.

Noah rubbed a hand over her forehead, as if her head ached. “Well, at least we shall be gone in the morning.” She studied the bed once more. “And thank the gods the bed is wide enough that we may keep fully half an acre between us during the night.”

Thornton had noted not only Noah’s hand rubbing at her forehead, but her slight wince as she had turned to the bed. “Your back, Noah? Does it pain you.”

“A little.”

“I shall ask Leila for some soothing water and—”

“For sweet Christ’s sake, John, you cannot let her see the welts. She will think you one who prefers to take his pleasures through pain rather than gentle caresses!”

“I shall wash your back myself,” Thornton said, “and how could I manage this, if Leila did not think me your husband? You can afford no one else to see those wounds if you do not want them calling the sheriff so that your attacker might be taken into custody.”

“Catling—” Noah stopped short, and Thornton wondered why she could not rely on Catling to wash her back for her.

“Catling is a wondrous child,” said Thornton, “but those wounds need more care than she can give.”

Noah sighed, and sat down on the bed. “I have no concern for myself with these lies in which we have enmeshed ourselves, John, but for you. When the Thanets—when your wife—discover the deception you have played—”

“Then I shall live with the consequences,” said Thornton. “Now, rest, for I am going to ask Leila for the water with which to soothe your back.”

Eight

Langley House, Hertfordshire, Idol Lane, London, and The Hague, the Netherlands

Thornton knew almost as soon as he rose the next morning that they would not be riding anywhere that day. Selfishly, he was glad. Once he’d stepped from the bed, Thornton had opened one of the shuttered windows, expecting to see bright sunlight.

Instead all he saw was the unrelieved gloom of rain lashing against the panes of glass. He recalled the strength of the westerly wind of yesterday. A late spring gale had blown in from the Atlantic and, if his experience was any judge, would take all day to blow itself out.

No one but a fool would try to ride in this.

“John?” Noah was sitting on her side of the bed, shivering in her thin linen nightgown. She reached for a shawl and wrapped it about her shoulders as she stood and walked over to join Thornton.

He nodded to the storm outside. “We’ll be staying here this day.”

“I have to keep moving, John.”

There was a terrible tightness in her voice, as if she were frightened, and Thornton put an arm about her shoulders and drew her in close.

Noah’s eyes were fixed on the rain pelting against the window, and she didn’t object to his touch.

“Noah,” he said, “no one should ride in this rain and wind. If you don’t kill yourself then you’ll kill your horse…and, by God Himself, you couldn’t want to take Catling out in this?”

She shivered again, and Thornton pulled her a little closer. “What are you frightened of?” he said.

To that Noah gave a small shake of her head. “I have to keep moving.”

“Why? Will your friend Jane Orr pout and sulk if you be delayed a day?”

“Not her,” Noah whispered, and before Thornton could ask her Who, then? there came a knock at the door, and it opened before either Thornton or Noah could respond.

It was Thomas Thanet, wearing a thin, loose coat over his own nightgown. He grinned at the sight of Thornton and Noah standing so intimately close at the window.

“You’ll be staying a while, then,” he said. “Poor weather in which to be travelling.”

Thornton’s arm tightened about Noah as he felt her start to move away. “Aye,” he said, smiling easily. “Shall we stretch your hospitality to breaking point?”

“We’ll be glad of the chance to keep you a while longer,” said Thomas. “Leila was saying to me last night that she regretted not having the chance to know Noah better. Why, my dear,” he said, his eyes now on Noah, “before dinner she’ll have pried from you every secret you harbour, I swear.”

Noah smiled wanly, and Thornton felt her shiver once more.

It was, all in all, a dismal day.

Despite Thomas Thanet’s initial cheerfulness, by the time everyone had breakfasted the grey, frigid rain had affected the mood of the entire household. Catling retreated into a sullen silence, Noah responded only grudgingly to every question Leila asked, and Thomas Thanet himself descended into a fug not unlike the outside weather.

“Your wife is most reticent,” Leila Thanet confided to Thornton in the mid-afternoon. Noah had just taken Catling to the bed in the chamber she shared with one of the Thanet girls.

“She has had ill news regarding a friend,” Thornton said, now regretful that he’d put Noah in this position. He hadn’t realised how greatly Leila would pester her with questions, and over the course of the day had noticed Noah’s posture becoming stiffer and stiffer. He thought it might partly be due to annoyance at Leila’s probing, but knew too well that her back was most likely paining her. The welts had gone down from when he first saw them, but they were obviously still extremely painful. Noah wore the bare minimum of clothing needed for modesty—her figure was good enough for her to manage without the corsets that most gentlewomen wore under their tightlylaced bodices—but even the soft linens of her chemise and light material of her bodice must cause constant chafing against her back.

Not for the first time this day, Thornton thanked God that at least Noah was being removed into the relative safety of London from whoever it was at Woburn who had caused her injuries.

Weyland paced back and forth in the kitchen of his house in Idol Lane.

“She’s not moving,” he said.

“Dear God,” Jane said, and lifted a hand from where she rolled out pastry on the table to wave it at the window, “look at the weather. This storm has enveloped half of England…no one is moving!”

“But I require her to move,” Weyland said. His face was working, as if he battled something within himself. “She can’t think she can get away with this. She can’t!”

He lifted a hand—

“No!” Jane cried, starting away from the table to where Weyland stood. “Don’t—”

She stopped, then dropped to the floor, clutching her belly, her face screwed up in agony, a single whimper escaping her opened mouth.

“Don’t speak so sharp to me,” Weyland hissed at her, then his eyes lost his focus, and he spoke a single word.

“Noah.”

And that single word was followed in Weyland’s mind by a single, simple, telling phrase.

I’m sorry…

Thornton saw her go rigid, saw her face go bloodless, saw the panic and terror in her eyes, and, while he did not know the specifics of what was happening, knew he had to get her to their chamber as fast as he could.

Noah gave a terrible groan, then went rigid, her head straining backwards, her back arched.

Both Leila and Thomas lurched to their feet, each exclaiming, but Thornton almost threw himself across the space separating Noah’s chair from his, and grabbed her to him.

“Her head,” he said. “She has the most profound attacks of brain ague.”

It was the best he could think of on the spur of the moment, but it seemed to satisfy the Thanets’ immediate question.