For three days Liana and her maids worked at cleaning the solar. And for three days she was afraid to go belowstairs. She couldn’t bear to show her face to the people of Moray Castle. They all knew that she had been rejected by her husband, that he not only refused to sleep with her but that he refused to give her power over his servants.
So Liana stayed alone, never seeing her husband, never having any contact with the people of the castle. So far, she thought, not only wasn’t she winning her husband’s love with her meekness, but he wasn’t even noticing her, meek or otherwise.
It was on the afternoon of the fourth day that she dared to venture up the wooden stairs. The upper floor was as dirty as the solar had been, except there were no signs that anyone had been here for years. She wondered where the people of the castle slept and instantly pictu
red them altogether in a heap.
She walked along the hall and looked into one empty bedroom after another, scaring rats as she went along, creating little dust storms behind her. When she was about to leave to go downstairs again, she thought she heard a spinning wheel. Lifting her skirts, she ran to the far bedroom and pushed open the heavy door.
Sitting in a stream of sunlight was a very pretty older woman with dark hair and brows, working at a flax wheel. The room was clean, there was cushioned furniture here, and the windows had glass in them. This had to be the Lady who Lord Severn visited. Perhaps she was an aunt or some other relative.
“Come in, dear, and close the door before we both choke on the dust.”
Liana did as she was bid and smiled. “I didn’t know anyone was here. What with the state of everything, that is.” She felt very comfortable with this lovely woman, and when she nodded at a chair, Liana took it.
“It is awful, isn’t it?” the lady said. “Rogan wouldn’t notice the dirt even if it were so deep he had to swim through it.”
Liana quit smiling. “He wouldn’t notice me if I were drowning in it,” she said under her breath to herself, not meaning for the lady to hear.
But she did hear. “Of course he wouldn’t notice you. Men never notice the good women who see that their clothes are clean, that their food is well cooked, and who bear their children in silence.”
Liana’s head came up at this. “What women do they notice?”
“Women like Iolanthe.” She smiled at Liana. “You haven’t met her. She’s Severn’s greensleeves. Well, not an actual greensleeves. Actually, Io is the wife of a very wealthy, very old, very stupid man. Io spends his money and lives here with Severn, who is neither old nor wealthy and not at all stupid.”
“She lives here? She chooses to live in this…this…”
“She has her own apartments over the kitchen, quite the best apartments in the castle. Io would demand the best.”
“I demanded help from the servants,” Liana said bitterly, “but got nothing.”
“There are demands and there are demands,” the lady said, spinning her flax into a fine, smooth strand. “Do you love Rogan very much?”
Liana looked away and didn’t even question her intimacy with this woman. She was so tired of having only maids to talk to. “I think I could have loved him once. I agreed to marry him because he was the only man who was honest with me. He didn’t praise my beauty then look at my father’s gold.”
“Rogan is always honest. He never pretends to be what he is not, to care about what does not matter to him.”
“True, and he does not care about me,” Liana said sadly.
“But then you do lie, don’t you, dear? The Liana who hides from the laughter of maids is not the Liana who ran her father’s estates, the Liana who once faced a mob of angry peasants.”
Liana didn’t ask how the woman knew these things about her, but she felt tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t think a man could love that Liana. Joice says men like—”
“And who is Joice?”
“My maid. Actually, she is somewhat like a mother to me. She says—”
“And she knows all about men, does she? Raised by one, married to one, mother to many?”
“Well, no, actually, she grew up with me. She was an orphan before that and lived in the women’s quarters. She is married, though, no children, but then she only sees her husband three times a year so…Oh, I see what you mean. Joice has not had a great deal of experience with men.”
“No, I thought not. Remember, dear, it isn’t the woman who cleans a man’s house who has battles fought for her, it is the woman who sometimes wields a whip.”
That made Liana laugh. “I can’t imagine taking a whip to Lord Rogan.”
“Only a muddy shirt,” the woman said, eyes smiling, then her head came up. “Someone comes up the stairs. Go, please. I don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Yes, of course,” Liana said and left the room, closing the door behind her. She almost went back into the room to ask how she’d known about the muddy shirt, but Joice came to the head of the stairs and said Liana was needed.