“I have what I need,” she told him, holding up her hand to stop him. She blushed, hoping he didn’t ask her if she was saving her coin for anything in particular. Could she tell him that she was saving her coin to find him? That finding him was her goal?
They talked more about his brothers. The more she heard of them, the happier she was for Nicholas. She wished the English had left his family alone that night so that he could have grown up with his brothers. What a different life he would have had. She still would have had Berengaria. Nothing much would have changed for her save that she would never have known the little boy who grew to a man before her eyes. The one who was better than all the other boys she’d known, and then, better than all the men. She wouldn’t have had hope in escaping Phillip.
But she would have given William up for a chance for him to have his proper life with his family as Nicholas.
“What about you?” he asked her. “I wanted to hear about your life, and here we are talking all about mine.” He waited while she wrung her hands together. “What tore the spark of life from you, Julianna?”
She looked at him and her practiced smile grew dim. “You think I do not possess a spark of life?”
“Not the same spark you once had,” he corrected with a repentant dip of his eyes.
Had he always dipped his gaze when he spoke to her? She hated it. “Nicholas…”
He looked up the instant she spoke his name. She didn’t want to tell him who she had married.
“Come, lass,” he tempted like a siren, “tell me of your life. You have grown up.”
This was the best place to tell him, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t kill her here, would he? She wasn’t sure she could do it. She stumbled over a few words before she found the right ones. “As you said,” she paused to breathe in and try to summon her courage. “I have grown up. I have lived a less privileged life.”
He nodded as if he understood. “You married beneath you?”
She had married beneath a cellar rat’s shite. “I married…I married the Gov…the Governor of Alnwick.”
Her eyes filled with tears as her words and her reaction to them dawned on him. His expression grew bleak for a moment then hard as steel. “You married one of the DeAvoys?”
She nodded and held her fist to her chest as if it could keep her upright. “Aye.”
She closed her eyes as he asked, “Which one?”
Knowing how much her words were going to hurt him, she let her tears flow. But she did not sob or weep bitterly.
“Julianna, who?”
She wiped her eyes. “Phillip.” There. It was out. It was done. She felt a slight sense of relief from it. The rest of her wanted to look away from his shock and utter dismay.
He stood up from the polished bench as if it were on fire and raised his hands to clasp them behind his head. “Julianna, no. No. You did not marry that scum…” For a moment he seemed too angry and brokenhearted to go on. “How could you marry him?” he asked finally.
“I was penniless. He was the only one who wanted me.”
His eyes darkened like a storm billowing forth in the distance. “I wanted you.”
Lord, help her, this was no time to react to such a declaration. He spoke of the past. How heusedto feel. She’d known it back then, even under the watchful eyes of her father’s guards. His servant was in love with his daughter, and she with him. As a child, William had taught her that the “haves” and the “have nots” were the same by always inviting her to play with him and his friends. She had grown up among them, hating their different statuses for keeping them apart.
“I have been haunted by you, my lord,” she confessed when he moved to leave her—and likely, the castle. “Not Lord Nicholas MacPherson, Earl of Rothbury, but humble William Stone.”
“William is gone, my lady,” he answered. “And that was not humility, ’twas subservience.”
Even to her?Even to me?She wanted to shout at him in the quiet chapel. She had never used her position to order him around or treat him hatefully. Aye, there was a period of time when she was no longer a child and not yet an adult, when she allowed the popular fear of the day to grip her. When her friends, including Phillip, laughed at him. She had laughed with them. She hadn’t always told the boys to stop when they struck him or threw things at him. But she would never have let it go on if they were hurting William too much.
She looked down at her hands. No matter what she said now, it wouldn’t ease what the end result had been. She had refused to leave the abbey and go with him.
“I did not choose you because I was a fool and a coward, and I have paid for that decision since the day I made it. But I never forced you to submit to my will. You are hurtful to suggest it.”
He looked sincerely stunned and he didn’t apologize, though she gave him a few extra moments. He sat down again and faced her. “How bad was it?”
“What?” He hadn’t heard a word she’d said!
“What did you mean earlier when you said you remained at the abbey? Had you been there while you were married, Julianna? Had you fled your husband?”
