When Gods Die

Sebastian met her hard gaze. “What I seek is the truth.”

She gave an unexpectedly bitter laugh. “The truth? How often do you think we ever really know the truth?”

“According to Lady Quinlan, her sister Guinevere grew up expecting to marry Varden.”

Lady Audley pressed her lips together, then nodded almost reluctantly. “In some ways it was my fault, I suppose. There was only a year between them. I always thought of them much as brother and sister. I never imagined for a moment that Guinevere saw them as something else entirely. But it was a child’s dream, nothing more. They were children. Why, Varden wasn’t even up at Oxford yet when Guinevere married.”

“That was four years ago. Much has changed since then.”

Her head drew back, her eyes sparkling. “I know what you’re implying, but you’re wrong. Guinevere had a passionate nature, but she was also fiercely loyal. She would never have played Anglessey false. Never.”

He wondered if it was significant that her anger flared in defense of Guinevere’s honor and not that of her son. Or was she simply reflecting her society’s very differing attitudes toward male and female sexual adventuring? “I’d be interested to hear what your son has to say.”

Isolde sucked in a deep breath, and for one telling moment, her mask of calm control slipped. He realized that behind this woman’s concern for the laboring collie at her feet lay another fear, deeper and far more troubling.

“My son isn’t here,” she said, suddenly looking tired and much, much older. “I’m afraid he has taken Guinevere’s death quite badly. I haven’t seen him since Thursday morning, when we heard what had happened to her.”

Chapter 20

Late that night, sometime after the watch had called out Two o’clock on a fine night and all is well, an unexpectedly cool breeze sprang up, carrying with it the promise of rain before morning.

Sebastian lay in Kat Boleyn’s silk-hung bed and listened to the wind set the branches of the nearby chestnut tree to tapping against the front of the house. Rolling onto his side, he let his gaze drift over the sleeping woman beside him, following the strong angle of her jaw, the gentle curve of her breast just visible beneath the tumble of her hair.

The wind gusted up again, rattling the windows and setting the bed curtains to shifting in the sudden cold draft. Reaching out, he drew the coverlet over Kat’s bare shoulder and smiled. His love for this woman swelled within him, filling him with a warm feeling of peace and the same stunned awe that he’d known for seven years now, ever since the day he’d first held her in his arms and tasted the intimation of heaven that was her kiss.

He wondered where it came from, that comfortable conviction Lady Audley shared with so many in their society, the belief that the passions of the young are insignificant whirlwinds, temporarily intense, perhaps, but never enduring. He’d been one-and-twenty when he and Kat first met, while she had been barely sixteen.

She stirred beside him, as if disturbed by his wakefulness. Moving carefully so as not to rouse her further, he slid from her side and went to stand, naked, at the window overlooking the front of the house. Drawing back the drapes, he stared down at an empty street lit only fitfully by a half-moon already disappearing rapidly behind a scuttling of clouds.

He heard a whisper of movement as she came up behind him. “Why can’t you sleep?” she asked, slipping her arms around his waist.

He turned in her embrace, holding her close. “I was thinking about Guinevere Anglessey. About the life she must have known growing up in Wales.”

“It can’t have been easy,” Kat said softly, “losing her mother so young.”

Sebastian drew her closer, his cheek resting against her hair. They were all marked in an unseen but hurtful way, he thought, the motherless children of the world. Guinevere had been little more than a babe when she lost her mother; Sophie Hendon had sailed away to a watery grave the summer Sebastian was eleven, while Kat had been twelve or thirteen when her own mother and stepfather had been killed. He knew some of what had happened on that dark day, but not all of it. “At least she still had a home,” said Sebastian, thinking of all Kat herself had lost on that misty Dublin morning. “And her father.”

“He doesn’t seem to have concerned himself overly much with her.”

Sebastian was silent for a moment, remembering his own father’s bitter withdrawal on that long-ago summer of death. “Perhaps. Yet he cared enough not to want to see her married to a penniless young man.”

Kat tilted her head to look up at him. “Yes. But for her sake? I wonder. Or his?”

“Morgana claims Athelstone didn’t force her sister to marry Anglessey. That the Marquis was Guinevere’s own choice.”

“Perhaps she decided that if she couldn’t have the man she loved, she might as well marry for wealth and a title.”