Katy Cooper - Lord Sebastian's Wife

Please, sweet Mary, let me be happy again. Blessed Jesú, grant me the strength to survive my trials and let me know peace.

The prayer was over before she recognized she was praying. She straightened slowly, waiting for the renewal of desolation that always followed her attempts to pray. Water dripped on her bosom, startling her. She felt no better for having prayed, but she felt no worse. Could that be an answer? She did not know and had no time to ponder the mystery. If she did not hurry she would be the last to arrive.

When she entered the solar, it appeared at first glance that her family had gathered around Sebastian. He sat near her father, watching John as he talked, the corners of his mouth quivering as if he were about to smile. Her heart hurt to see him so nearly happy, knowing that she could no longer bring him what had once been a simple gift. He would no longer smile when he saw her, for he despised her—rightfully so.

Cecilia rose from her corner to one side of the men and came forward. “Come sit with me,” she said quietly. “I shall play for you.”

For so long she had been unable to feel much more than pain and shame; other emotions had to force themselves past the darkness in her soul. Now the anxiety Cecilia hid behind her quiet solicitude pressed against Beatrice, demanding a response, crying out for reassurance she could not give. “I should like that,” she said, taking her sister’s hand. Cecilia squeezed her hand gently, her fingers firm and warm.

Crossing the room drew Sebastian’s eyes to her. His shadow smile vanished as all the muscles in his face stiffened, his eyes as black in the candlelight as holes punched in a mask. John leaned close and said something in Sebastian’s ear; Sebastian looked away, a muscle jumping in the angle of his jaw. Her heart pattered against her ribs like a trapped thing, suffocating her. She was alive today because she had learned in a hard school how to read a husband’s tiniest flicker of expression, yet she could not interpret Sebastian’s with any certainty. If she could not read him, how was she to survive?

A little voice in the back of her head whispered, Sebastian has never harmed you.

Sebastian had never had power over her. Thomas had been all that was kind and courteous before she’d married him; afterward— She flinched. She never remembered afterward if she could help it.

She settled herself on the bench beside Cecilia, arranging her skirts until she remembered that no one here would care if they were not just so. How long before she stopped trying to please Thomas? She folded her hands in her lap to still them and then, unable to prevent herself, she glanced out of the corner of her eye at Sebastian. He grinned at John. One corner of his mouth lifted higher than the other when he smiled; the unevenness made his smile mischievous. The pattering of her heart was submerged in a wave of longing and pain that made her breath hitch.

Smile at me the way you used to. While he still loved her, he had tempted her into more than one act of harmless folly with the wayward charm of that grin. She would have done anything for him.

I loved you so.

She swallowed and dropped her gaze to her hands, clenched in an angry, white-knuckled knot. She had thrown him away because she was a coward. Worse, because she had been a coward choked with vanity and pride.

“What shall I play for you, sister mine?” Ceci asked quietly.

“Can you play the songs Mistress Emma sang to us when we were children?” Let me be a child again, if only in memory. Let me return to the time before I threw Sebastian away.

“If you wish it, dearling, I can.”

Out of the lute’s strings flowed a simple round Mistress Emma had used to sing when she was mending and teaching Beatrice and Cecilia to mind their needles. Beatrice had loved needlework from her first stitch, while her sister had fought the cloth, needles and thread as if they were her mortal enemies. Insubstantial memories came on a wave of peace, as if the mellowness of innumerable afternoons mingled with the song flowing into the room. The tumult churning in Beatrice’s breast slowed, smoothed and finally faded, ugly memory giving way to gentle recollection.

She remembered sitting beside Ceci on a bench in the old solar at Wednesfield, trying to smock a shirt for her father while Ceci, muttering curses and whining in frustration, wrestled with hemstitches that would not feather neatly. She could not recall a time when she and her sister had sewn together that did not feature an irritable, sweaty Ceci smudging her linen and knotting her thread.

The music shifted and changed to another of Mistress Emma’s sewing songs, and Beatrice’s recollections shifted with it. Now she was sewing alone, hiding in the old tower so no one might see the herons she stitched in elaborate blackwork on a linen shirt. Benbury herons…a shirt for Sebastian. How old had she been? Fourteen, perhaps? He had promised her he would always keep it.

“Play something else, Ceci,” John said.

Cecilia looked at her, eyebrows raised in a question. Shall I?

Warmth stole over Beatrice. Growing up, John’s word had been law to Ceci, never questioned. Now her sister held him at bay for Beatrice. “Play what you wish,” she said, the warmth overflowing in a smile.

The darkness inside her did not lift so much as it crumbled, like a wall collapsing after it had been undermined. Little things chipped away at it, from the thoughtfulness of lavender and roses in her washing water to the way her sister seemed determined to please her. Smiling seemed to damage the darkness still further. Could blessings, not blows, fall down on her?

Ceci grinned back at her. “I shall play to please myself then.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I had just learned this for the queen when I left Court, so have patience. I am not well practiced.”

She launched into a lively tune, playing with no missed note that Beatrice could hear. After playing the melody once, she began to sing in her silver-pure voice. The words of the song were a little bawdy, as Court songs usually were; the chorus was plain nonsense. “And a hey nonny, hey nonny nonny no!”

The third time Cecilia began to sing the chorus, John joined in, the darkness of his deeper voice shading the bright clarity of hers. Beatrice listened, wishing she did not croak like a rook and could join in, as well. The rollicking rhythm of the tune set her toes to tapping and when John began to clap his hands in time she joined in helplessly. Lucia, sitting on John’s other side, followed suit, laughing as she did so. John had said she barely knew any English, but she seemed to understand English music well enough.

Her father joined Cecilia in singing the fourth verse. Here was the source of Ceci’s music; her father’s voice was as smooth and golden as honey in the comb. Beside him, her mother clapped her hands, her face shining in the candlelight. Her voice had no more beauty in it than Beatrice’s but, like Beatrice, she loved music.

“And a hey nonny, hey nonny nonny no!”

Beatrice would have known Sebastian’s voice if he sang with the choir at Westminster. Not as dark as John’s nor as honeyed as her father’s, it had the golden-brown clarity of water slipping over stones. Certain he would not be looking at her, she stole a glance at him.

She was wrong.

Even at this distance, the cornflower-blue of his eyes glowed. Surely those were the bluest eyes in England. She waited for his mask to clamp down, for the shifting, unreadable expression on his face to disappear, frozen into frightening stillness. Instead his expression coalesced into a scowl as he stared at her through narrowed eyes. An hour ago that frown would have unnerved her. Now, after Ceci’s kindness and the joyous sound of “Hey nonny no!” she had a small store of courage to spend.

She lifted her chin and held his stare. It took every ounce of will not to look away; it had been far too long since she had tried to stare anyone down. A chill prickled her when she remembered that within weeks she would be entirely in his power, to use as he pleased, but a portion of Coleville obstinacy had come with the courage and she could not yield to him. She would have to have faith in the small voice that had said Sebastian would not harm her.

Sebastian looked away.

Beatrice sank back against the wall as if he had unhanded her. She had not outfaced anyone since marrying Thomas. How long had it been? Three years, four? She could not remember, not exactly, only that it seemed like a lifetime.

Her heart, which had lain quietly while she confronted Sebastian, took up a fierce battering against her breastbone, as if to register its protest, and she could not quite seem to catch her breath. How had she dared? Why had she been such a fool? He would be furious and rightly so. Worse, however much she hated and feared the knowledge, he was her husband, with the right to correct her with his hands. She ought to be terrified; surely the pounding of her heart was fear?

No, what she felt was not fear. Fear did not rush, sparkling, through her veins; fear did not make her sit straighter on the bench beside Ceci. The emotion driving her heart and catching her breath was excitement, excitement that was familiar and alien at once.

Why? Why was she excited when she should be afraid?

Through a supper of duck and goose, good English beef and capon, she puzzled over it. She knew her family spoke to her and she answered at random, absorbed in trying to penetrate the gray wall of empty knowledge. She could not remember why her act of daring felt familiar, nor understand why it did not leave her cold with terror. Could it be that Sebastian was not Thomas? She looked down the table at him, sitting just beyond John on her father’s side. Candlelight glinted gold and honey-brown in his waving hair, limned the lean line of his cheek and glittered in the faint stubble of his beard. He seemed almost to have been washed in gold himself, even to the tawny orange of his short gown and brocaded doublet. Like a saint in a manuscript.

No, he was nothing like Thomas, least of all to look at.

Servants came to remove the cloths from the table and to lay out the cheese and fruit. Beatrice selected an apple and began cutting the peel off with her eating knife. She had always loved apples, especially when they were new, their flesh firm and full of juice. This one was particularly juicy; her hands were damp and sticky with it. She carved a sliver of apple and slid it into her mouth, nibbling it between her teeth.

She glanced at Sebastian. He stared at her, his mouth a thin, hard line, and then turned his head away from her, one more move in their dance of looking and looking away. How he must hate the thought of marrying her.

She could not blame him for wishing for another wife than she. What man would want a woman with a soul as black as hers, even if she had tried to clean the stains with confession and penance? She sighed and set the apple down. What either of them wanted had become meaningless. Without list or leave, they were married, bound together in the sight of God if not yet in the sight of man.

If she could not undo this madness, she could try to be the wife he must want. Meek, obedient, scrupulously honorable. How meek would he expect her to be? Would she need to be obedient only to spoken desires, or would she once again have to obey commands unspoken, and suffer the punishments for unwitting disobedience?

She glanced at Sebastian’s end of the table again. Her father had claimed his attention. Sebastian frowned as he nodded while her father spoke, but he did not look angry, merely intent on her father. But anger did not matter, did it? A man might pretend to anger, so poorly she knew it for mummery, and still inflict bruises big and black as plums. A blow given with a cold heart hurt just as deeply as one given in heat.