By Possession (32 page)

“You will come with me, Moira. Sleep where you wish tonight, but you will come with me now.”

Rhys shot her a look of warning. She returned one of reassurance. He means it, she tried to convey. Trust me. I know him. Rhys's reaction displayed neither understanding nor acceptance.

Her gaze swept back to Addis. He looked away from Rhys and their eyes met. His expression almost stopped her heart. Anger still, but also a pain that she never
thought to see in him again. A deep, soulful awareness of loss that matched her own fierce grief.

Rhys ceased to exist. There were just the two of them looking at each other, acknowledging what had been and what must end. The declarations never spoken now flowed inaudibly between them. She knew that whatever his reasons for following her here, it had not been to force her back to him. She ruefully admitted to both gratitude and disappointment in that.

She stepped toward the door. A quick movement made her turn in time to see Rhys lunge for Addis. His arm swung and Addis answered the challenge, landing a blow on the mason's face that sent him stumbling back against the table.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her into the street. With long strides he dragged her into the main lane. She stumbled after him, struggling to lift her skirt so she would not trip.

“You did not have to hit him,” she snapped.

“I'm glad he gave me the excuse. He got off lightly. I almost took his head when I saw him embracing you.”

She resisted his pull, but to little avail. “You lied then. You said that I could go where I would.”

“I did not lie. When I am done you are free to go back to him. But knowing he has you is different than seeing it, Moira. I can be excused some jealousy, I think.”

He hauled her along, never slackening his determined pace. She realized that he did not head back to the house.

The street disappeared into an open square. She looked up in confusion at the high towers rising in its center from the huge mass of the cathedral. Addis pulled her across the stones toward the portals, through the remnants of vendors closing down their stalls.

Inside the nave he paused, surveying the tables at which
scribes and lawyers offered their skills. He gestured for a cleric passing nearby. “Go and ask one of the priests to come.”

He led her over to a table against the east wall. The man working there had begun to gather his parchments.

“You know the law?” Addis asked.

The balding, plump man nodded. “I do.”

“I want some documents. Legal and binding.”

The lawyer hurriedly set out his quills again. “Certainly, sir. What must the documents convey?”

“I am Addis de Valence, Lord of Darwendon, and this is Moira Falkner, a bondwoman of those lands. Write the language that gives her the freedom.”

The lawyer began scribbling. “You will need three copies. One for each of you and one for the Church.”

“Do it then.”

The cleric returned, leading a member of the cathedral chapter. The priest advanced with curiosity. “I am giving this woman the freedom,” Addis explained. “I would have a priest witness it.”

They all waited silently for the half hour it took the lawyer to pen the documents.

“It will be legal this way,” Addis muttered at one point.

“Aye. Best if it be legal,” she mumbled back. She avoided his eyes and carefully studied the cathedral decorations. Being near him kept chipping away at her fragile hold on her battered self-control. She had known many partings from him, but this final voluntary one promised to be the worst. A horrible sensation filled her, similar to what one experienced during a death watch.

The lawyer presented the copies for Addis's acceptance. He read every word on each one, then put his name to them. The priest and lawyer witnessed and Addis rolled one and placed it in her hands, formally declaring the end of his hold on her.

She stared at it and the tears wanted to flow so badly that she dared not move. The priest drifted away, but Addis turned to the lawyer again.

“I need another document now. A charter this time, for property. It is to transfer ownership of a house in London from me to Moira Falkner in return for a jewel, a ruby, which she has given me.”

Her mouth fell open. “That was for—”

“The price was cruelly high and even so its purpose failed. I sought an amount you could not find. Since you found it anyway, there is no point in insisting on it.”

“Still, it was yours to set. You need not give me the house.”

“I could just return the jewel, I suppose, but it will be easier to sell than the house, and for you the property makes a better dowry.”

“They are both your right to keep.”

“I will not take a single pence for your freedom, Moira. If I had not forced you to resume the bonds you would never have known them again. And I will not see you go to him with less than other women could offer. The house will be yours to keep or sell.” He turned back to the lawyer. “Write.”

It seemed that they waited a long time for this document. The lawyer conferred with Addis on occasion and she waited to the side, awed by an anguished melancholy that refused to permit any other emotion. She looked at his face as he bent over the parchment, and thought that she saw sorrow in him too. That only made it worse. He was giving her the freedom and her inn and a freemason waited to take her to wife. Everything she had planned and wanted would come true soon. Instead of satisfaction she knew only nostalgia and heartache.

Finally it was done and she wished it were not. She would live in this nave forever if it meant not having to
walk out those doors and have it truly end for good. In some ways his death had been easier to absorb than this.

He walked beside her to the portals. She tried to revel in the reality of him one last time, but the awareness was so colored by pain she could not bear it. They paused on the porch, standing so close that their bodies touched, holding the scrolls of parchment that documented the ties he had severed.

He looked down at her. She saw his face through a wash of tears. So handsome. Not a cruel mouth at all, but kind and generous and gentle in its kisses. If only … She sighed. So many if onlys stood between them.

“You do not have to go to him,” he said. “You need not if you do not want it.”

“It is time to make a life for myself. To start anew.”

He looked around them with a blind, frustrated expression. Something broke in his face, as if an internal battle had just been decided and he was relieved for the victor.

“Start anew with me then. Say the words and make your life with me.”

She looked at him in confusion.

He smiled and gestured to the portals. “This is where it is done, isn't it? By the peasants and townsmen. At the church door. There is a priest inside if you want his witness, but we do not need it. We only have to join hands and say the words that make the sacrament.”

She thought that she would break apart from the love and sorrow that ripped and clashed through her. The tears flowed, rivers of saltwater streaming down her cheeks.

He gently brushed their wetness with his hand. “Say the words with me, Moira.”

She clutched his hand to her, turning her face to taste her tears and his skin. “You know it can never be. It means turning your back on your place, your blood, the means to regain it all.”

“I will live with it.”

“I will not let you. The regrets will be a weight all your life. You could not be satisfied with Darwendon any more than I could be satisfied in bondage.”

He began to argue. She placed her hand on his mouth to stop him. “It is impossible, Addis. But I will love you forever for asking.”

She turned quickly. Her feet moved beneath her. Somehow her body followed. She tore herself from the portal and from the steps. From him.

She wandered for some time before seeking the way back to Rhys. She licked at the love filling her, savoring both its quiet joy and poignant sorrow. She immersed herself in it while she blindly walked the lanes. Finally, when the evening grew old and the buildings cast long shadows, she kissed the sweet memory and then carefully placed it in a chamber of her heart and closed the door.

Rhys was not alone. She entered his house to find a blond woman dabbing at his face with a wet cloth while he sat at the table. She paused in the threshold and they both noticed her. With a sharp look in Moira's direction, the woman handed Rhys the cloth and walked toward the back of the house.

“She is a widow who lives next door,” he explained blandly, pressing the cloth to his face. “She heard the argument.”

Moira decided to accept that, although the woman's look had implied more than a wall existed between the neighbors. She sat beside him on the bench and placed the parchments on the table. “He would not accept any payment for the freedom. He gave me the house in return for the price I had paid.”

“It must have been a very high price.”

“It was.”

He put the cloth aside and fingered the parchments. The blow had raised a bad swelling on his face.

“I am sorry that he hit you. You only sought to protect me.”

“You keep giving me more credit than I deserve. I did not go for him only to protect you.”

They sat in a stretching silence that unsettled her. She began to feel like an unwelcome intruder in a stranger's home. He looked at her in an intent, hard way that made her even more ill at ease.

“Why did you come back here?”

The question startled her. “I thought we …”

“So did I. But I saw the way that you looked at him, Moira, and now I do not think that we can. When I asked you what was between him and you, you did not answer as precisely as I thought. I had not seen you with him much, and that was a mistake I think.”

She began emptying out, as if everything between her neck and her toes started to disappear. “It is over. Completely.” She held up the parchments in a crushing grip. “I have the freedom! I have more property than any of those fathers ever offered. He is gone from my life and has no hold on me!”

“Is he? Doesn't he?” He rose with a disturbingly cool deliberation and stepped behind her. She felt his warmth close to her back and then his hands on her shoulders. She stiffened against the intimacy. He caressed down and cupped her breasts and she gritted her teeth.

“Doesn't he? The wrong man, Moira. The wrong hands.”

He spoke the words that her heart felt. She broke. Collapsing with a horrible misery, she buried her head in her arms on the table and succumbed to the sobs that vanquished her exhausted control.

He sat beside her and patted her shoulder and said something soothing which she did not hear. The flood of emotion began retreating. She straightened and wiped her face with her hands.

“You are not being fair. With time I am sure—”

“Perhaps, but I am not inclined to take that chance. I did not expect love, but I would prefer to marry where it is at least a possibility. It is a lifetime that we speak of. I am not so foolish as to wed a woman whose heart is owned by another man.”

She wished that she could refute him. She could not. He was right. Addis did own her heart. He had for half her life. Eight years of being dead had not loosened those bonds and she could not claim that time would destroy them now.

A crushing bleakness immobilized her empty body. She foresaw a future of existing half-alive, of moving and eating and tending her inn while a part of her, the part capable of love and joy, slept an eternal rest. Rhys was right. Even if she made a marriage and gave some man her body, a part of her would never be touched again.

“I do not know what to do,” she mumbled.

He shrugged. “You are free and you are wealthy. You do not need a marriage to secure your future. You need no man to feed you. You can do whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want.”

“I cannot imagine you ever being more unhappy than you are right now, Moira. If I were to know such pain, I would want it to be for a reason.”

For a reason.

Footsteps treaded on boards back in the kitchen. The sounds of the widow moving a pot clanked in the silence.

She turned to him, her lips still trembling from the tears that wanted to spill. But slowly the emptiness began filling with a peaceful, glorious possibility.

He smiled kindly at her. “If you find yourself with child, you can support it. This city takes such things in stride. You will not be the first woman living thus.”

A spot of wetness snaked down her cheek. She wanted to weep still, but for different reasons. A wonderful lightness suffused her as she closed the door on her pain for a while, and reopened another that would give the grief reason and meaning when it emerged again. A shared love, at least for a while. Memories to complete the others. Maybe enough happiness to sustain a lifetime.

He placed the documents in her hands and rose. He walked to the passage leading to the kitchen where the widow waited. Stopping, he spoke without looking back at her.

“Go home, Moira.”

CHAPTER 17

I
JUST TOLD THE MEN
to come in one by one over the next few days, and now you are saying that we leave and go to them. You are not making any sense,” Richard said.