“I am not afraid.”
“Perhaps that is your failing, dear. I have learned that it is wise to proceed with one’s eyes wide open, especially if you are about to walk into darkness.”
“I can take care of myself in the dark.”
Mrs. Simpson’s tin-gray gaze gentled. “Is it family for which your heart searches, Rose? Or something else? Are you not beloved and needed everywhere you go? Are you so eager to leave us?”
Rising to her feet, Rose folded her arms and walked to the window to look outside. ’Twas not family for whom she searched. How could she explain her heart when she did not understand the thing herself?
She closed her eyes. “I have only a vague memory of my mother. Her softness. The way she smelled—like lilacs. I can almost see her face when I look at my own in the glass. Perhaps I am merely searching for myself.”
She laughed at the maudlin sentimentality. “All I know is that ever since I found the puzzle box, the need to be free of the walls surrounding my life has grown into something ... something almost violent inside me whichI am unable to control. You have lived your life unafraid of who you are. I want ...”
What? To rid herself of the darkness in her heart? To be loved for herself? Despite herself? To seek retribution against the man ultimately responsible for her mother’s death and forcing Rose into hiding for seventeen years? Justice?
The mere thought smoldered inside her like a hot ember burning away at the edges of her soul.
She had never told Mrs. Simpson who she was. Never spoken her father’s name aloud. Her very safety had always depended upon secrecy. Friar Tucker had hammered vigilance into her mind from a very young age, so she had lived in silence, never seeking answers to her questions for as long as she could remember, until her father’s return to England a year ago.
Most people knew him as the son of an aristocratic family who had made their names as captains and admirals serving in His Majesty’s Navy. He had sought the appointment as the king’s warden upon his return. The English respected him, while the Scots had great cause to fear and hate him. He showed no mercy to suspected rebels and no tolerance to suspected thieves and lawbreakers. He’d hanged a hundred men in the past year.
Only last month she had asked Friar Tucker why her mother had wed him, why she had been running from him, but the priest had no answer. Rose had wanted to believe that her father could not be so evil. That he could have once loved her mother. That the blood running through her veins was not his.
Rose touched the sorcerer’s puzzle box, disturbed by the undeniable shame and need that welled within her. Shame because of who she was.Needto be someone whowas more than nameless and forgotten by the one to whom she should have held importance.
Once she had dreamed of being an explorer of worlds as her father had been. Now she dreamed only of being free.
By summer’s end, she would reach one and twenty. Sister Nessa had once told her that it was not a woman’s prerogative to choose her own destiny, but Rose would do exactly that. She refused to be like the other girls at the abbey, confined by the social boundaries of their birth, accepting that their parents had chosen to give them to the church. She accepted nothing.
A part of her felt foolish for believing in such nonsensical rubbish as magic wishing rings. After all, she was an educated woman of twenty. She’d never believed in hobgoblins, fairies, witches or gremlins.
Yet she believed in the legend of Merlin, and if his power had helped guide and protect Arthur, and made him invincible to his enemies, then the ring would be her own Excalibur. Three months and she would change her life forever, break free and make of herself what she would be.
Jack burst through the door at that moment with a basket of eggs, chattering how he had fixed a hole in the coop to keep out the foxes. Mrs, Simpson took him into her kitchen, divided the bounty as she always did to give half to the abbey. Jack devoured a plate of pastries sloshed with strawberries and cream. Rose listened as he recounted his activities of the past week, which included tales of Lord Roxburghe’ssecretvisit.
Rose wondered what part ofsecretthe boy did not understand. “He came to see Friar Tucker,” Rose said when Mrs. Simpson lifted her gaze.
“But Friar Tucker is gone. Vanished!” Jack anxiouslysaid. “Probably murdered by highwaymen. Orarrestedand thrown into the gaol for smuggling. Sister Nessa thinks we’ll never see him again.”
“We need to go,” Rose finally said as Jack finished a third glass of milk. “We have more rounds to make on our way back to the abbey.”
After Jack hurried outside to tend to the cart and pony, Rose said, “Sister Nessa worries. Friar Tucker has never been away from the abbey for so long. His departure was sudden.”
Mrs. Simpson smiled. “He is alive and well in Carlisle. Perhaps ’tis this hostage business that has taken him there. Lord Roxburghe’s brother is rumored to be there.”
“How do you know this?”
“The mountebank passed through here yesterday. He always stops here to let me look over any tomes he might have picked up.”
“You gossip with the mountebank? He is a miscreant.”
“But a well-traveled one, dear. He speaks to everyone. ’Twould not be unusual for Friar Tucker to seek some form of mediation between Roxburghe and Hereford, though little good ’twill do.” Mrs. Simpson stood with a swish of soft muslin. “So you met the new earl of Roxburghe and you were not going to tell me? Most are curious what kind of man he has turned out to be.”
“He is a freebooter,” she managed as indifferently as possible, as she walked to the chair to retrieve her hat. “Quite at ease with his sins.”
“Most powerful men are, dear. And I assure you, he is not a whimsy to feed a young girl’s imagination. His sin goes deeper than most. He once tried to kill his own father.”
Rose paused in the middle of stuffing her hair beneath her cocked hat.
