All the Sweet Tomorrows (83 page)

“Oh, I know about the wealth you inherited from your husbands, but I was not aware you knew how to manage that wealth. It is not something a woman usually does.”

“I have never been an ordinary woman, Gaby. When I was still a girl my father bypassed my five older sisters and their husbands to put his wealth and power in my hands. I am the O’Malley of Innisfana. I followed my father’s teachings and increased the holdings and the wealth of the O’Malleys of Innisfana considerably. At the same time I managed my son, Ewan’s, holdings, and later on the wealth left to me by my second husband for his daughter, Willow, and then all of Lynmouth’s
lands and goods, and finally the Burkes’. I was not so successful with the Burke lands, alas.”

“The Irish!” Gaby threw up her hands. “Forgive me,
ma fille
, but they are an impossible people. Charming, but totally mad!”

Skye laughed. “Indeed we are,” she admitted. “I regret that the Irish would rather destroy themselves than accept compromise and survive. Even I rebelled against the English in the end. Had I gone back to England instead of marrying Adam here in France, my son, Padraic, would still have his lands, and Adam would have Lundy.”

“Lundy?! Good riddance!” Gaby snapped. “A pile of stones upon a rock, but ah, before Adam’s father allowed his lust to control him so that he defied and insulted King Henry Tudor, ahh then,
ma belle
, Lundy and its castle was a most fantastic sight. I had my first glimpse of it when I arrived there as a bride over forty years ago. John de Marisco had come to Paris to wed me, and then brought me back to England. We stopped at Lynmouth to pay our respects to John’s liege lord, your Robin’s
grandpère
, and then we embarked from Lynmouth for Lundy across the water. It was early morning, and the fog was thick. Soon I could no longer see Lynmouth, and I could certainly not see Lundy. Then suddenly a light wind sprang up, and the dawn began to pour across the skies. Lundy appeared like a fairy-tale castle, seeming to float above the sea, streamers of mist swirling about its turrets. Ah, ’twas a glorious sight!” For a moment her face was soft with the memory, but then the practical Frenchwoman resurfaced. “Then that marvelous idiot I married managed to destroy my son’s inheritance, and left us with barely enough for me to bring my children home to France! Lundy! Pah! You are better off here at Belle Fleurs!”

“Excuse me, madame, but it is time for Mademoiselle Velvet’s feeding,” the nursemaid said, bringing the baby to her mother.

Skye took her little daughter, who was now six months old and growing more like her father every day. Her coal-black curls were already thick and tangled, her blue eyes were avid in their curiosity about everything.

“Ah, ma petite bébé!”
Gaby crooned. “Have you a small smile for Grandmère?”

Velvet’s eyes swept tolerantly over her grandmother, and then turning away, she grasped at her mother’s breast, thrusting the
nipple into her mouth. With a sigh she settled down to the business of food.

Skye chuckled. “Like her father and her mother, she will not be deterred from her desires.”

“You are still nursing her? Why?” Gaby demanded. “Surely you can find a wet nurse. I could find you one,
ma fille.”

“Adam prefers that I feed her myself,” Skye said, “and frankly I am enjoying it, Gaby. This is the first time in my life I have been able to enjoy being a mother. There was always something to take me from motherhood. This time there is not!”

“Will you stay in France, Skye?”

“I do not know, Gaby. There is nothing for me in Ireland any longer, and I would far prefer not to have to live beneath Elizabeth Tudor’s thumb. Still, Adam longs for England, and he says that it is Velvet’s heritage. Perhaps one day the Queen will forgive us for marrying without her permission, and then I know that Adam will return. We are his family, and we will have to go with him, but we shall keep Belle Fleurs even when that day comes, for I have been happier here than anywhere in my whole life.”

Adam returned from Nantes, and shortly thereafter they received word that his lordship, the Earl of Lynmouth, had reached England safely. Christmas, New Year’s, and Twelfth Night came and went, and the winter settled in around Archambault and Belle Fleurs. Willow wrote from the French court that the King was not well, and it was expected he would die soon. As for court, she wrote, “It seems very much as Robin has described the English court to me. There is much intrigue both serious and silly. Most people are terribly impressed by one’s title and/or pocketbook. The young men play a game as to who can seduce the greatest number of noble ladies. What they do not know is that these ladies are playing the same game. You need not worry, Mama,” wrote Willow, “for my stepsisters and I are shocked by such disgraceful behavior. Gwyneth and Joan, of course, are relatively safe, for they are neither overly pretty nor wealthy enough. As for me, I have my share of admirers, but I will not permit them to be alone with me, thereby avoiding any idle gossip that should destroy my good name.”

Skye smiled reading Willow’s letter. She had no fears about Willow, who was a practical little miss with ambitions to wed an important title.
Little?
No, Willow could no longer be considered
little. She would be fourteen in April, and it would soon be time, Skye realized, to seek a husband for her eldest daughter. Remembering Dom O’Flaherty, Skye prayed that her daughter would fall in love with a suitable young man and thus avoid the pain that she had suffered. She would not force her child to any marriage, as she had been forced by her well-meaning father.

The spring of the year 1574 was more promising, and Velvet de Marisco celebrated her first birthday. She was already walking, toddling about the château with so much zeal that Skye forbade the baby’s nursemaid to leave her alone for a moment, for she feared her daughter would fall into the moat. Velvet was also talking, making her demands, which were many and constant, known in a mixture of both English and French.

Adam was an appallingly doting father, but then Skye had expected it. Yet she worried when her big husband took their tiny daughter up on his horse and rode out into the forest. Velvet, however, was no more fearful of that than Skye had been of the sea at her age. Skye could simply not bring herself to chide Adam, for his great love and delight in his daughter were so painfully obvious. She could not spoil his fun, and so it fell upon her shoulders the task of disciplining their child.

“Non, non, méchanceté!”
Skye scolded her baby daughter one afternoon as Velvet attempted to stuff a sweetmeat into her mouth. She spanked the tiny hand gently, and wiped the stickiness from it.

Velvet’s enormous eyes grew moist, and she ran on fat little legs to her father, clutched at his leg, threw her mother an angry glance, and distinctly said, “Papa loves!”

Adam longed to laugh and pick his precious child up in his arms for a kiss, but seeing Skye’s warning look, he instead said, “Mama loves you too, Velvet, but you must always obey her.”

Outraged at this unpleasant turn of events, Velvet stalked away to her nurse, who took her from the hall.

“What a minx she is,” Skye said. “You realize that we are going to have our hands full with her? Could
le bon Dieu
not have given us a gentle and quiet child?”

He chuckled. “She is
our
daughter, sweetheart.”

Skye smiled back at him. “You will not feel so indulgent when she is older, and the men begin to crowd about her,” she teased.

“That’s a long time away,” Adam said smugly. “She’s just a baby, barely a year old.”

“The time goes quickly, Adam. Ewan is eighteen now, and I don’t know where the years went.”

“Madame, you are depressing me,” he said. “Let us go to bed now before we are too old, although I have been told by authorities on the matter that one never grows too old. Based on the wisdom of your vast age, what do you have to say on the matter?”

“Come to our bedchamber, monseigneur, and I shall explain my thoughts to you in detail,” Skye promised with a seductive glance at her husband as she went from the hall.

These were the times she loved the best; the times when they might retire to the delicious isolation of their apartment. In the big bed that he had had made specially for them—an enormous oak bed with its eight-foot-high headboard all done in linenfold paneling, its carved and turned posts, its natural-colored linen hangings with an embroidered design of grass green velvet—they could lie for hours in the nude, caressing each other leisurely, and making long, slow love until the fire burned down to nothing but glowing ashes and they were forced to retreat beneath the down coverlet.

For them the lovemaking grew better each time, particularly after Velvet was born. Adam could not love her enough, and Skye adored her giant of a husband when he lay his naked length against hers, pressing her deep into the mattress. She reveled in the firm flesh of his thighs against hers, the tickly feeling of his furred chest against her breasts, the hardness of his very maleness seeking to mate with her. There were times when she could not get enough of her handsome husband, and she would shamelessly awaken him with delicious kisses across his big, sleeping form. Several times Adam awoke to find she had roused him while he slept, and now sat astride him. Reaching up, he would caress her beautiful breasts until they thrust forward with taunting invitation. Yet with the incredible passion that blazed between them was also a profound sense of peace, as if both Skye and Adam understood that what was between them would be forever.

Charles IX died, and his next brother, Anjou, who had the previous year been made King of Poland, fled his adopted country like a thief in the night to return to his beloved France. Anjou, however, stopped in both Vienna and Venice to be royally fêted before finally gaining his native borders, where his irritated
mother awaited him. Elizabeth of Austria retired from court, and because her retinue was smaller now, Skye’s daughters came home to Belle Fleurs that summer. Ewan arrived from the university in Paris; Murrough appeared bronzed and taller, home from his first voyage; and even Robin appeared suddenly one day to surprise them all.

A great deal of fuss was made over the baby, although Skye begged her older children not to spoil Velvet. “She is already quite impossible,
mes enfants
,” their mother said with an indulgent smile.

After several months back in England, Robin was once more the perfect English courtier. “You should really let me take Padraic back with me in the autumn, Mother,” he said to Skye. “He will be close to six then, and should begin his education at the Tudor court. The Queen may have taken his lands, but my brother is still Lord Burke.”

“No!” Skye said. “As long as Adam and I are not welcome at the Tudor court then none of my children except you, Robin, shall go. A nobleman without lands is nothing, and until the Queen restores the Burke lands to the Burkes I want nothing to do with either her or England. Besides, Padraic is still a baby.”

“I am not!” Padraic Burke, his father’s image, glowered up at her.

Skye looked down at Niall’s son, and smiled at him. “In time, my darling,” she promised him. “Be patient for now.” Then she looked around the hall, and said, “I am so glad to have you all here again. This is how I like it best, my children about me, Adam by my side.”

“I can only stay a month,” Robin said. “I promised Her Majesty that I would rejoin the court in its summer progress at Hardwick Hall. I have given my word.”

“I’ll be returning to Ireland when Robin goes,” Ewan said suddenly.

“What?!”
Skye looked sharply at her eldest son. “This is rather sudden, Ewan, isn’t it?”

“I’ve been in correspondence with my Uncle Michael for over a year, Mother. He’s done the best he could, but he’s a priest. My other O’Malley uncles have not been interested in Ballyhennessey since they joined with Grace O’Malley to fight with the Queen. I have to go home, Mother. My lands need me,” he finished, then he looked at his mother. “I want to take Gwyneth with me, Mother. It is time for us to marry.”

“But she is just fifteen!” Skye protested. The twins had celebrated their birthday on June 4th.

“You were fifteen when you wed my father,” Ewan said quietly.

“I was too young!”

“No, Mother, you were not too young. You were simply wed to the wrong man. That is not the case with Gwyneth and me.”

“I cannot bear it if Ewan leaves me, madame,” said the quiet Gwyneth. “I am past ready to be a wife.”

“I, also,” Joan said.

“But Murrough has just begun to learn seamanship. If he is to make it his life, he cannot stay home to husband you, Joan.” Skye was beginning to feel besieged by her offspring.

“MacGuire is not sailing again for almost two months, Mother,” Murrough said. “His ship needs repairs. Joan and I can be wed, and even have time together before I must leave. Whenever she weds me she still has to get used to having a sailor for a husband. I will buy us a home in Devon, near Lynmouth.”

Robin coughed a bit, and looked a trifle uncomfortable. “All right, Robert Southwood,” Skye snapped. “What else is there?”

“I bring an invitation from the Queen for Willow. She is invited to join the maids of honor.”

“Ohhh,” Willow shrieked esctatically, and then she turned on her mother. “You promised me that one day I might!
You promised, Mama!”

“You’ve been to court!”

“A French court,” Willow scoffed scornfully.

“No!”

“Please, Mama! Soon I shall be too old to go! Please!”

Skye looked at the children all ranged in a row, and seemingly allied against her. Ewan, Murrough, Gwyneth, Joan, Willow, Robin, and Padraic. They all wanted to leave. Her hand flew to her mouth, and she cried, “But I have had you such a short time!” Then turning from them, she ran from the hall.

Adam watched her go, his own eyes saddened, and then he said, “Of course you must follow your own destinies,
mes enfants
. You are all quite old enough now, but it is hard for your mother to understand this. Leave her to me, and I will make it all right for everyone.”