The Nightingale Legacy (Legacy 2)

When he was caressing her, letting her feel the heat of his body and the wet heat of his mouth, he knew that he moved her every bit as much as she did him. When she screamed, her back bowed off the bed. He smiled and held her close and dear in those moments of shattering pleasure.

“Ah, Caroline,” he said, kissing her belly, his fingers still gently stroking over her, “you are more than a simple man deserves.”

And she said, her fingers stroking through his hair, “You’re the only simple man I want.”

Caroline hadn’t visited all the rooms in her new home. Since no one was demanding to speak to her just then, neither male nor female, she had some unaccustomed time to herself. She wore a wool shawl over her muslin gown, and stout warm boots. It was fall now, truly fall, with All Hallows’ Eve not far away. The mornings were heavy with fog more often now, the afternoon air usually crisp and cool, the sh

arp smell of the sea stronger, wafting even to Mount Hawke on some days when the wind was high and the clouds dark and roiling low in the sky. Caroline loved Cornwall.

Miss Mary Patricia was giving Evelyn and Alice lessons in her bedchamber, saying that the nursery struck her as silly given the fact that all of them were grown women, carrying babes in their bellies. Owen was at Scrilady Hall, meeting with Mr. Peetree from the mines, a man, Owen had told her who knew what he was about, and he appeared to like Owen. North was with Flash Savory, the two of them questioning all the people who had known Nora Pelforth, searching for any clue, any hint of who had killed her. It was such a pity that Bennett couldn’t have done it. He was such a rotten individual.

She also suspected North had Flash trying to find the boy who’d given Timmy the maid the note about her meeting her lover. Sir Rafael Carstairs was with them and Caroline imagined that the three men would end up in Goonbell at Mrs. Freely’s inn, drinking her excellent local ale.

Caroline walked to the third floor of the east wing. It was so quiet here it was unearthly. It was a bit nerve-racking, all that silence. Dust motes hung in the air, shining in the spikes of sunlight that managed to penetrate the closed window shutters and aged draperies. No one had been up here in quite a while.

She sneezed as she opened the door to yet another room that was at the very end of the long corridor. It wasn’t a bedchamber, rather it was some sort of storeroom. Heavy wooden-slatted shutters tightly covered the narrow windows. She unlatched them and let light flood into the room. There were very old wooden crates piled high against the walls. Also stacked against the walls were paintings. She pulled one of them toward her and took a step back.

It was a very stylized painting of a woman done early in the last century. She was very young, no older than Caroline was now. Despite the artist’s deficits, she was also pretty: dark eyes, dark hair, a wicked dimple deep in her right cheek. Behind her stood a young man, proud and tall very—no doubt he was a Nightingale man—his large hand resting lightly on her shoulder.

She pulled the other paintings out from the wall, turning them one by one so she could study each of them. They were all of ladies, going back well into the sixteenth century—one lady, older than most of the others, was pursing a very thin mouth and squinting too-small eyes. She wore a wide white ruff around her neck and three ropes of pearls. She looked like a harpy. Caroline wouldn’t have wanted her for a mother-in-law.

There were at least two dozen paintings, all of them, obviously, former Nightingale wives. All had been dumped here, removed entirely from the main living quarters of Mount Hawke and stacked in this out-of-the-way room to molder. At least they hadn’t been burned or destroyed outright. She found a lady with her hair powdered and puffed high on her head in the style of the mid and late last century. North’s grandmother, no doubt. Again, she was very young, no older than Caroline was now. But where was his mother? She couldn’t find a more recent portrait.

Who had done away with the portrait? And then she knew. North’s great-grandfather. He’d either destroyed it or refused to have her portrait done. After all, he’d been the one to teach all that bitterness to North’s grandfather, who’d bored her endlessly with his whining and carping and his frankly despotic view of the world and his place in it, a place with women as slaves, possessed and kept under the man’s thumb. It had been North’s great-grandfather who had started the belief that King Mark was really buried here at Mount Hawke and not in Fowey or in Brittany. Given his endless diatribes against women that were liberally interspersed amongst his writings of King Mark, he had to be the one who’d had all the female portraits removed. She wondered now, as she’d wondered several times before, why the great-grandfather hadn’t selected King Arthur—much more familiar and just as betrayed by his best friend and Guinevere. Why King Mark, who very few people even knew about? The perfidy of the woman was the same in both, after all. She shook away the thoughts. The Nightingale ancestors had been mad and their madness didn’t have to recognize reason and it obviously hadn’t.

She turned to study the portraits again. Most were in bad shape. They all needed some restoration except for the two painted in the last hundred years. She dusted her hands on her skirt. There was a militant look in her eye. Damn all those past Nightingale men. She managed to pick up the two portraits, one under each arm. She hauled them down to her bedchamber. She was still panting from her efforts when she rang for Mrs. Mayhew.

She then danced a jig, sending up clouds of billowing dust decades old from her filthy gown.

North looked at his wife, at her soiled muslin gown, her dusty boots. She was filthy, smudges of the blackest dirt he’d ever seen on her cheeks, her hands grubby, but she was smiling at him. “Come here, my lord,” she called out to him. “Do come here. I’ve a surprise for you.”

He realized that the other six female residents of Mount Hawke were standing behind his wife, all looking hopeful, and if he wasn’t mistaken, a bit frightened of him. On the other side were Polgrain, Tregeagle and Coombe. They looked ready to drag the women to an auto-da-fé. He had no difficulty at all seeing them lighting the fires with eager dispatch.

He focused on Caroline. “You look like an urchin. What have you been doing?”

She grinned at him, said nothing, simply pointed up to the wall. He stood beside her and looked up. He stared; he couldn’t look away. He felt his throat tighten. Beside the portrait of his great-grandfather was another portrait, one of that same long-ago Nightingale male painted when he was young, in his prime. He was standing behind a young lady who was obviously his bride and North’s great-grandmother. North said nothing, just continued to stare. God, she was beautiful and so very young. His great-grandfather looked like a man blessed, happy, full of hope, and quite pleased with himself and the lovely young lady seated before him.

North finally looked to see another single portrait of a lady, this one obviously his grandmother, this grandmother of his painted like his great-grandmother, when she was very young, newly wed. She looked gay and ever so filled with wicked humor. She looked ready to burst into laughter. She looked happy. There were no shadows in her lovely eyes, no hint of what was to come.

Suddenly he wanted very much to see his mother, wanted very much to see what she looked like, to try to remember, but there was no portrait beside his father’s, just the old man’s grim face, dark eyes narrowed, such anger and bitterness shining from them, and North quickly turned away. He said very quietly, “Where did you find them?”

“I was exploring in the east wing on the third floor. There are at least two dozen portraits, North, all of Nightingale women back to Queen Elizabeth’s time. Most of those are in frightful shape, but I hope, I pray, they can be restored.”

He said nothing, just stared hungrily up at his grandmother. “My mother,” he said, then stopped. “She’s dead, you know. You didn’t find a portrait of her?”

“I’m sorry. There was no portrait more recent than this one of your grandmother.”

“She looks so very young, so happy, as does my great-grandmother.”

“I know. It’s odd, but all the others—your ancestresses—are painted twice, once in their youth and again in their middle years. Yet your great-grandmother and your grandmother are painted only when they are surely newly wed.”

“It’s because they were booted out before they could have a chance to get old with their husbands. I just remembered. My mother’s name was Cecilia. I wonder, if she’d been painted very early on, if she would have been smiling and happy like my grandmother and great-grandmother.”

“My lord.”

“Yes, Tregeagle?”

“May I speak with you, my lord?”