“Don’t. I mean, the Amazon bit. I’m not a warrior.”
“You fought to preserve Boxstall.”
“Foolishly. I discounted love.”
She wanted to ask about Seraphina, but that was forbidden territory. In any case, she might not want to know.
A one true love.
Was there only one for each person? If he was her one true love, and his heart had been buried with Seraphina—ah, there was tragedy.
She refilled her tankard with the cooling punch, and sipped. Could he really be without any image of his beloved?
“Do you have a picture of your first wife?” she asked.
After a moment, he took out his pocket watch and flipped open the back cover. Inside was a miniature of that face Ariana had seen before in the portraits Lady Cawle had preserved.
She affected surprise. “Heavens, she’s very like that picture on the mummy case! No wonder you were shocked.”
“Yes.” He considered the miniature again and then snapped the case shut and returned the watch to his waistcoat pocket.
“But that picture was of a woman thousands of years dead,” Ariana reminded him gently.
“I know that. You probably know all about such pictures, but I consulted an expert. Those mummy paintings date from the time when Egypt was ruled by Italians. Seraphina was Italian, from a town near Naples, and she’s buried in a lead casket.”
“It’s painful for you to speak of it. Don’t.”
“It’s painful whether I speak of it or not. I should have buried her peacefully at Delacorte, her and the child, but I took the need to return her to her home and family as an excuse to escape. So she was bound in linensoaked with resin, sealed in lead, and transported a thousand miles. Have you ever heard of Mad Queen Joan of Castile?”
“No,” Ariana said, not wanting to hear these grim details, but awed by his sudden willingness to speak them.
“She was born a princess of Castile, but was married to Philip the Fair, ruler of the Low Countries. She fell insanely in love with him, and when he died ten years later, she refused to have him prepared for burial, insisting that he was merely ill and would revive. When he was finally embalmed and sealed in a coffin, she opened it daily to be sure he was still there and still dead. She would caress his corpse.”
“How tragic, but perhaps that is part of the power of love.”
“If so, it’s a vicious one. I didn’t go so far, but I should have let my wife rest peacefully in England.”
“Perhaps her family was pleased to have her to bury in Italy?”
He shrugged. “I told myself that, but she had only grandparents there, and some cousins. Her parents had moved to England before she was born.”
“You were driven by a noble desire.”
“I was driven by a desire to delay her burial, for that would be final. And perhaps I was trying to flee the pain of her death.”
“Which didn’t work.”
“Instead, the journey etched it deep. We buried her in a rocky place beneath olive trees, close to an ancient Catholic church. It had a kind of beauty, but it wasn’t her soil. She’d been born and raised in Middlesex, and was a Protestant. She should rest in a green place beneath oaks and elms where thrushes and nightingaleswould sing to her.” After a moment, he added, “She was a singer.”
“You sang together.”
“Often. Even as she labored. She said it helped. She asked me to play the lute in the next room. She hardly made a sound. I had no idea.... Don’t say anything.”
Ariana wasn’t sure she could have forced words out of her tight throat.
“Did my playing help?” he asked, staring down at his glass. “Or did my being there make her hold back her screams? Would shouting and screaming have helped? They said there’d never been any hope. That the baby was stuck in such a way that he could never have been born. Why is nature so cruel?”
She reached out and covered his hand with her own.
