Raised By Wolves 3 - Treasure (10 page)

“There will be nothing that you cannot defend us from,” he whispered quietly in French.

As we crossed the atrium, Pete and Striker watched us from a doorway on the lower level. I waved them off. The entry foyer was now blocked from view by a latticed gate. Sam led us to a door to the right of it. I thanked him, and told him we hoped to be along shortly for dinner, and then I turned to Gaston. He was regarding his clothes – our usual attire of dark kerchief, tunic, and breeches, and nothing else – with dismay.

“We are as we are,” I whispered kindly. “You are as you are. You are loved.”

He met my gaze with a grateful nod and took a deep breath. “I am calm,” he whispered. “See if it is him.”

I kissed his cheek and opened the door. The room was a sitting room with settees and a table. There was another entry from the foyer, and that door was closed. The chamber’s sole occupant was the Marquis de Tervent. He met my gaze levelly, no fox’s smile. I could read nothing but resignation in the lines and shadows of his face in the lantern light.

I looked over my shoulder at Gaston and nodded. He radiated nothing but fear, but it was not the Child’s fear, or the Horse’s. I stepped inside the room and he followed me.

They regarded one another with trepidation, not like men prepared to fight, but ones dangling on the precipice of fleeing.

And then the emotions flowed across the Marquis’ face and he opened his mouth to speak several times. “You have grown,” he floundered at last. “You are a man… now. You do not look… You do not look like her anymore.” He tilted his head and gave a self-deprecating snort. “There is a resemblance, to be sure, but… My God, you are…”

The sudden burst of energy seemed to leave him and he sagged onto a settee. “May we sit? I feel I must sit.”

Gaston nodded mutely and cautiously lowered himself onto the front edge of a chair. I remained standing near the door, which I closed.

“What… Why do you need a cane?” Gaston asked with a shadow of his physician’s mien. It was enough to compose his face, though, and not leave him looking so lost and fearful.

The Marquis nodded appreciatively at that raft of a topic, and swam to it. “I fell from a horse… five… was it five… about five years ago. I broke my hip. It healed well enough, I suppose, though it aches in the cold. It does not ache here.” He smiled awkwardly and quickly abandoned it. “Though I can walk, it gives way on occasion. I cannot rely on it.”

Gaston nodded. “So you are not ill.”

“Non, non, not in body.” The Marquis grimaced at that, and his eyes darted to the upper corner of the room as if he consulted the Gods. “In spirit, I ail,” he told Gaston sincerely. “And that is why I am here.” He glanced at me and gave a small sigh of resignation.

“Will stays,” Gaston said.

“I realize that,” the Marquis said with another glance at me: this one apologetic.

He sat the cane aside, and his hands, now free of that duty, moved in as mobile a fashion as his face.

“I have imagined this meeting so many times… and now here I am and I do not know…” He sighed and smiled at Gaston. The expression quickly left and wonder and sadness took hold of his face.

“I loved your mother,” he said at last. “Beyond all reason. I defied my father to marry her. I ignored the warnings from her family, and the nuns and… Her family kept her at a convent. They thought her possessed. There was a war and the convent she lived in was due to be overrun and the nuns were moved and many stayed on our estate and I saw her. I was sixteen and she was an angel. She was so beautiful.

She had the hair of a devil, yet she seemed to float in the grace of God.

She… The Mother Superior told me she was not always so. That she was possessed and that they had twice tried exorcism to no avail.”

He shook his head angrily and his gaze, which had retreated from the room to look upon his memories, came back to Gaston. “You do not believe your madness is a thing of the Devil, do you? God forbid you have been burdened with that foolishness.”

“Non,” Gaston said with wonder and surprise. “It is an ailment of the mind.”

The Marquis was relieved. He settled back a little in his seat and considered his memories again, though his tone was still angry. “Your mother always believed that. That is what they told her. I could not…

I thought I was rescuing her, and I suppose I was. There were no more exorcisms, and I never allowed some more enlightened fool, like that damn Doucette,” he spat, “to attempt to cure her. I gave her the best life I could. But… I could never free her from the things she was taught as a child. She thought the Devil rode her soul. She thought…” He gazed at Gaston guiltily. “She thought all things carnal were the work of the Devil and that… children, her children, you and your sister, were things of evil. We had to keep her away from you. She once tried to strangle…

you.” He looked away, his eyes welling with tears.

Gaston took a long shuddering breath. His gaze was now on the floor and his hands gripped the chair arms tightly. I laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

“She could be so… loving… and… passionate,” the Marquis said quietly to the carpet between his feet. “And then she would despise herself for it so the morning after. I had to… She once stabbed me.” He shrugged. “Well, she tried several times, but she succeeded the morning after she discovered she was pregnant the second time. She was intent on gelding me so that it would not happen again. We had to keep her restrained for a week because we thought she might harm herself.

“I could not help her; by God I tried. There were days when she was… sane, or appeared so. She would be like any other. I lived for those days.”

His words had been winding their way deep into my soul, and the last ones bit deep, such that I was compelled to give a gasping sob from the pain and surprise of it. Gaston looked up at me with guilty tear-filled eyes. “Non, non,” I gasped anew, and dropped to kneel beside him and take his face in my hands. “You are not that bad,” I whispered.

“I am sorry,” the Marquis said, his voice as thick as mine. “I do not say this to hurt you, either of you.”

I looked to him, our eyes met, and something passed between us, some deep knowing, a kinship of the soul. He nodded solemnly in recognition of it, as did I. Few walked where either of us had, and despite everything I could despise this man for, I found comfort that he was like me, because it meant I was not alone on this path.

I turned back to Gaston and found him pulling my hands away to regard his father. “Please,” he whispered, his voice so low I was not sure if the Marquis could hear him. “I need to hear these things. I have wondered for so very long… about them. Please continue.”

The Marquis nodded and looked away to wipe tears from his eyes.

“I am sorry. I have…” He sighed and turned back to Gaston. “When she died I was angry… no, furious, beyond reason… with God, and myself.

I blamed us for destroying her. I railed against the unfairness of it all.

And… By the time she died it was obvious you and your sister were her children in every way.” He shook his head with a sad and bitter smile.

Though he cried openly now, his words were angry. “I could not bear the sight of you. I hated you. There were moments when I felt that perhaps all her mad superstitious fears were true and somehow the Devil had gripped her soul and delivered her with two of His get. So I sent you away. I would have sent your sister away as well, but… she was sickly.

And I would not let the damn nuns have another child.

“I am sorry for that.” He slid off the settee to kneel before it. “I beg your forgiveness. I wronged you. And now I have heard from your man that I wronged you worst of all… that night. I had not realized your sister was so like her… I had not…”

“Will!” Gaston gasped and collapsed on the floor, his hand held out in warding against his father, his other arm hugging his belly as if he were being disemboweled.

I pulled him to me and gave his father a warning shake of my head.

The Marquis nodded and remained silent, slumping back against the settee to drown in his own tears.

I pulled Gaston’s face up so that I could see his eyes: they were desperate and sad.

“I am falling,” he hissed.

“I have you. I have the cart. Puppies?” I asked hopefully.

He nodded pitifully. “I cannot lose him… but…”

“I understand, trust me.”

He nodded with more assurance.

I kissed his forehead and helped him stand and make his way out the door, praying none of our well-minded friends came between him and his objective. I need not have worried: once out of the room, he ran across the atrium to the stable.

I turned back to the Marquis and closed the door. He was still on the floor, sunk in on himself, and looked to be in as much need of comfort as my matelot, but I could not bring myself to go to him. Despite his contrition and my kinship with him, he was still a monster in our midst.

I cast about and spied the sideboard and a bottle of something corked.

There were glasses, and I poured us each a draught of what turned out to be rum. I drank mine quickly, savoring the burn, and then gingerly approached him to offer the other glass.

“It is rum,” I said, as I tapped his shoulder. “Drink it slow or fast.”

He chose fast, and grimaced at the taste, but it seemed to help him regain his composure. He pulled himself back up to sit on the settee and proffered his glass to be filled.

I sat on the closest chair and poured again for us. We drank the second round just as we had done the first, and regarded each other with our teeth bared in a grimace.

“He is overwhelmed,” I said as I wiped my lips with the back of my hand.

“He is?” the Marquis asked and smiled wryly.

I gave a short bark of laughter and was not surprised when it was followed by another. The Marquis chuckled in kind. The dim room did not echo the sound of merry men.

“He does not wish for you to leave,” I said. “He would know you better.

I would… know you better as well. We… are all tangled in the past.”

He nodded solemnly. “I have spent too many years tangled in it.”

Though there was still some little part of me that did not trust him, I felt we were already laid bare to one another. “Gaston did not remember much of what occurred until… well, until right before the incident occurred with Doucette. He could not bear to remember that night.”

The Marquis shook his head sadly. “I could not think of anything else for many years. I thought I had descended into madness. Or perhaps, I realized I had.”

“I have had to change my definitions of madness since meeting Gaston. You should know, perhaps, that… I am not as sane as I appear.” I sighed. “Not that I may have appeared sane to you this day.”

He snorted with amusement and held out his glass again. “You have appeared to be a man who loves my son.”

I nodded and filled our glasses again. “Beyond all reason.”

He smiled and sipped the rum. “I heard he stabbed you.”

“Oui, but it was an accident: I got between Doucette and him. Not that… he has not pulled a blade on me.” I sighed. “Or I him.”

“Perhaps it is easier that you are both men,” he said thoughtfully.

I smiled. “Perhaps, or perhaps it is worse.”

His amusement transmuted to guilt. “I have never understood men who loved other men, but I will try and view the matter without prejudice.”

“I have hated you every time I see his scars,” I said quietly, “but I will try and view you without prejudice.”

He winced. “I understand.”

The rum had seeped deep into my heart so that it was drowsy in the aftermath of so much emotion. I wanted to speak more with the enigma before me, but not this night.

“Will you remain in port?” I asked.

He nodded. “Until…” He smiled quickly and brightly. “My son and I can converse without tears, perhaps.”

I chuckled, but my words were serious. “Give him time. He is…

doing well, but this is a great deal for him to swallow in one sitting.”

“I know. His mother…” He looked away. “She would not have survived any of the trials I put upon him.”

Tired as I was, I could not let that lie. “Was that your intent?”

He shook his head and frowned as if he were mulling over the matter. “Not by any design I was aware of. But… I have questioned the workings of my soul these last years, and occasionally it surprises me with…” He met my gaze, his eyes sincere. “Things I am both ashamed and proud of.”

Something rose from the depths of my soul, and I realized it was sadness. I could never speak to my father this way. I once thought we had come close to it, that Christmas morn when he told me he wished for me to go to Jamaica, but even then I had seen the clockworks of his wolfish mind behind his eyes. I saw none of that in the man before me, and I knew it was not because my vision was blurred by tears and rum.

“There is a great deal I would speak to you of,” I said.

He was surprised. “There is a great deal more I have to say too, but not tonight, non?”

“Non, not tonight.” I spied his cane, and how very dark the night was beyond the narrow, shuttered and barred window. “Did you come alone?”

He nodded and grinned with some satisfaction. “I escaped them.”

I grinned in return. “Good for you, but this is a dangerous town at night for a Lord who dresses like one.”

He nodded amiably. “So I have heard.”

“Do you wish for an escort back to your ship, or… would you choose to remain here? I believe, though I have just come to this house this night, that there are rooms for guests.”

He leaned forward and took the bottle from my hand. “I believe I would like to drink more of this rum and then pass into oblivion without laying eyes on another soul. I would be content to sleep on this settee.”

I smiled. Could the damn man now do nothing that I disliked? “I think we can do better than that, and thus assure that you will not be woken at an early hour, and if all goes well you will only have to suffer the brief attentions of the housekeeper.”

He grinned. “If you can arrange that, then I am pleased to be your guest.”