CHAPTER 9
Lucianna slid her arms around Sir Balduin’s neck just in time to prevent her knees from succumbing to the pleasure that threatened to buckle them. How long had it been since she had allowed him to kiss her? Weeks only, yet it had begun to seem like a distant dream that he had ever held her thus. This was why she had fought so hard to evade him, fear that her body would betray her in his embrace, just as she felt it doing now. The urgent twining of her arms, her ardent return of his kiss, the way her heart thudded so fervently he must surely feel its driving beat against his breast—she knew she must stop herself somehow, but all her traitorous soul did was melt her deeper into the flame of his love.
She resisted a moment when his hands moved to her cheeks. If he broke the kiss, he would break the spell that she wanted to lose herself in forever. Reality would rush back in, and she did not know if she could claw back the strength that had brought her to this chamber, a strength that had flowed away like water in his caress. It did not bolster her to see the exultant curve of his lips as they pulled away from hers.
“Lucianna! I thought I had lost you forever with that clumsy song of mine, but that was no kiss of farewell you just dealt me. That you should come seeking me thus, that you should forgive me— Oh, my angel!”
Her lungs constricted painfully. How could she find the will to do what she must do when he gazed at her with so much adoration in his eyes? She struggled to find breath to check him, to strike away his illusions, no matter how she shrank from shattering that glow, but a voice rapped first from the doorway.
“Your angel. My sister. I am shocked, signore, truly. I presumed you a man of honor, but I see that I mistook your character.”
Lucianna tore herself from Sir Balduin’s clasp and stared in horror at Serafino standing on the threshold. It took a moment through her dismay to realize he was not alone. Siri’s diminutive frame stood at his side.
Siri jerked at Serafino’s sleeve. “Come away. They are not children. Let them be.”
“I am afraid I cannot oblige you, signora. My sister may be, shall we say, a little beyond the bloom of youth, but she is still a maiden whose virtue I consider myself honor bound to defend.”
Lucianna saw Sir Balduin’s face redden even as she felt her own grow cold.
“This is not what it appears, sir,” Sir Balduin said stiffly. “I did not lure your sister to my chamber. I had no notion I would find her here. Why, you saw me yourself come from below stairs. I passed you and Lady Siri on the steps—”
“Si, quite cheerily, if I recall, and in such a hurry that you scarce paused to say buongiorno. Which only makes your villainy more audacious, knowing you were on your way to seduce my sister right under my very nose.”
Despite his words, Lucianna observed that Serafino looked more smug than outraged. Sir Balduin fell into a spluttering defense, but before he could organize it into any coherence, Serafino added, “There is, of course, only one way to make this right. I trust I need not speak more plainly, signore?”
Sir Balduin’s gray brows plunged down at the implied ultimatum. “You have completely mistaken matters, sir. I would never insult your sister’s virtue. But if you mean you expect me to marry her, then you may put your mind to rest. That has been the greatest desire of my heart for months. Now that she has forgiven me—”
Sir Balduin reached for her nearest hand, the one she still had balled into a fist. She flung it behind her back in a panic. “I have not forgiven you. How can you think I would ever forgive the way you humiliated me in the hall?”
He turned his head to gaze at her in bewilderment. He said in low tones she knew meant only for her ears, “But the way you kissed me just now.” He shifted his entire body to face her. “You kissed me like that the day I asked you to marry me. The day you said you loved me.”
Despite the murmured words, she felt Serafino’s gaze fixed upon them and knew how he strained to hear. How could she lie when Sir Balduin had tasted the truth in her lips?
Si, I love you,” she said, tears starting again in her eyes, “ but it changes nothing. I cannot marry a man so insensitive, so selfish, so—so oafish.” Nothing but cruelty could drive the wedge irrevocably between them. She gestured at the clothing strewn about. “And see! He is a slob as well, I will forever be picking up after him.” In truth, the disorder of his chamber had somewhat dismayed her. “No. I cannot bind my life to a man who will only make me miserable. Nothing has changed. As soon as Donna Siri’s baby is born, I—”
“But I’m afraid things have changed, cara,” Serafino interrupted. “I really cannot overlook the fact that I stumbled upon you and Signor Balduin intimately entwined in the middle of his chamber. Or perhaps it is not Signor Balduin’s character I misjudged, but your own, and perhaps this is not the first time you have been—er—entwined in his chamber. Can it be that my maiden sister is no longer a maiden?” Serafino feigned shock at the thought, but rushed on over Lucianna’s angry denial and Sir Balduin’s heated defense of her, “The Fabio name is a proud one, and I cannot have it sullied. I am still your brother and responsible for your reputation. The two of you must marry, and that in all haste, before word of this day flies all over the castle.”
Lucianna saw Siri’s eyes grow wide, as though the possibility that Lucianna and Sir Balduin might already be lovers had never occurred to her.
Lucianna felt her face grow fiery with indignation at Serafino’s slur. “We are not—”
But Serafino flung up a hand and again spoke over her words. “Stay, cara. You are right to rebuke me. As Donna Siri says, you are not a child and how you choose at your age to live your life should, perhaps, be none of my concern. If only you had been more circumspect, I might have agreed, however reluctantly, to look the other way. But the damage has been done, and there is no rectifying it now. Marriage is the only way to remedy this reckless indiscretion. It really is no use,” he added, cutting off her renewed protest, “to try to persuade me of your innocence. What other reason could you have for being in Signor Balduin’s chamber?”
Serafino’s gaze flicked for the barest instant to her fisted hand before returning to her face. He knew. He knew she held the ring concealed in her palm, and worse, that she had come here to hide it where Sir Balduin would find it. This must always have been Serafino’s plan, to plant the idea in her mind, then maneuver Sir Balduin to find her here. No wonder Serafino had “conveniently” come upon their embrace. He looked so self-satisfied she wanted to hit him.
She hissed, “Think what you like. Shout my ‘shame’ from the rooftops. I will not marry Signor Balduin.”
Serafino crossed the floor and touched her balled hand. “No?”
She raised her chin defiantly. “No.”
Sir Balduin cleared his throat rather loudly, as if to force their attention back to him. “I believe I have some say in this matter, sir,” he said to Serafino with a fierceness(?) that startled Lucianna. “Nothing could bring me more joy than to marry your sister, but to force upon her a union against her will, compelled by a false accusation? I am not such a villain as to agree to that. Your sister’s virtue remains unstained and I will not disgrace her before the world by allowing your vile suspicions to drive us to the altar. She will marry me for love and of her own volition, with the honor that is due her, or we shall part as she says she wishes.” He gazed at Lucianna with misery in his eyes and whispered, “Even if it breaks my heart.”
Serafino said in dry tones, “Your sentiments are laudable, signore, more than my sister’s behavior deserves, for if she did not come to your chamber to seduce you, I can think of no other reason for her presence here.”
Lucianna tore her gaze away from Sir Balduin’s hurt to meet Serafino’s challenge. From the glint in his eye, she knew he was determined to force her hand, but nothing he could do or say would make her yield to his desire.
He blinked away the glint and shammed his face into a slow dawning misgiving. “Unless . . . ”
She struggled to squelch the quivering in her belly. He trailed off, giving her a chance to stop him. Nothing will make me yield.
His gaze, wide with chagrin, fell to her fist. “Cara, tell me you have not succumbed to your old temptations?”
Nothing. Not even this.
Serafino turned towards Sir Balduin, as she had known he would at her silence, and uttered in tones shot through with consternation, “Signore, forgive me, but if what I suspect is true, truly, I have maligned you. Cara—” he stretched out his hand to Lucianna “—what are you concealing in your grasp?”
That lift of his auburn brows, a stern query to the eyes of those who watched him, but to her a grim threat that she had crumbled before too many times before. She knew exactly what he would say next if she did not crumble again. Every word still stung clear as shards of broken glass in her heart. They had driven Vincenzo from her in the spring of her life. They would drive Sir Balduin away now in her autumn, leaving her a cold, bleak, empty winter of a future.
I will lose him either way. Better one swift, searing break than to watch the long, slow withering of his love.
She opened her fist and held out the ring on its chain.
Relief flooded Sir Balduin’s face. “I have searched for that high and low today, this bedroom, the hall, even the garden. Lucianna, where did you find it?”
She longed to seize upon the lie he offered her, but Serafino said, in nearly the same instant, shaking his head in condemnation, “Ah, cara! What else have you pilfered from your beloved?” to which she blurted out indignantly, “Nothing!” before she realized how the word sealed her guilt.
Serafino heaved a great sigh. “I had hoped—nay, I had prayed that you had changed. Signore,” he said to Sir Balduin, “my apologies. I cannot tell you how awkward this is, how mortifying to confess myself mistaken, for as distressing as my first suspicions would have been had they been true, this, I fear, is far worse. My sister, I fear, has a long habit of—ahimè (alas)! I know no way to put this delicately. The embarrassing fact is that my sister has a long habit of taking things that do not belong to her.”
Sir Balduin’s gaze grew more puzzled as he studied the object in Lucianna’s palm. The question Serafino hoped to plant clearly drifted into Sir Balduin’s head, though to her gratitude, she watched his struggle to dismiss it.
“That is absurd. She must have found it somewhere and come to return it to me.”
But even as he said it, his mouth turned down in a frown. Why had she not brought it to him somewhere in the open? The hall, the garden, or stood knocking on his chamber door rather than slipping surreptitiously into his chamber? She knew she guessed his thoughts aright when he lifted his gaze back to her face.
“Lucianna,” he said softly, “I do not understand.”
“Signore,” Serafino said, “it pains me to tell you of this, but my sister is not what you think her.” The sweep of his eyes encompassed Siri now. “She is not what any of you have thought her. Everything about her, even her name, is a lie.”
Siri stepped to Lucianna’s side and glared angrily at Serafino. “I will not listen to any more of this. You may think to deceive Sir Balduin with these slanders, but I have known Lucianna all my life. The only one lying is you. I cannot think what you hope to gain by defaming her in this way, but whatever game you thought to play is over. Brother or no, you are no longer welcome here. Gather your belongings and leave before nightfall, or I will have my husband turn you out. And believe me when I say you will not care to be on the receiving end of his temper.”
Serafino answered with a shrug of one shoulder. “Certainly, signora, I would not expect to remain beneath your roof after this. But I do not think I will be the only one suffering your husband’s anger when he learns how my sister has deceived you all.” He lifted his brow at Lucianna. “Do you wish to tell them the truth, cara, or shall I?”
Lucianna’s blood pounded with bitter grief. Sir Balduin continued to gaze at her with devotion and confidence through his perplexity, while Siri glared more vehemently still at Serafino. But Lucianna knew what she must say. There was too much spite in Serafino’s face to hope he might be driven from Vere Castle without exposing her. But this time, she would not be the only one disgraced by the truth.
“Si, I will tell them!” she flashed. “I will tell them how I am the daughter and the sister of a thief!”
That brought a rush of satisfyingly agitated color to Serafino’s face. “Speak carefully, cara,” he said with quiet menace in his voice.
”Why?” she demanded. “If I am guilty, then we are guilty together. You are the one who should have been careful, Serafino. This is not Venice. You have no friends here and I am not afraid of you anymore.”
“That I see,” he acknowledged, the dangerous glint returned to his eye. “However, I am not the one holding a stolen gem in my hand, and my father died at peace in his bed, while yours gasped his last while he swung from a hangman’s rope.”
She heard the sharp intake of Sir Balduin’s breath and whirled towards him. “I did not steal this.” She slapped the ring into Sir Balduin’s hand, snatching away her fingers before his could close over them, as they sought to do. “But Serafino speaks true of my father.”
She did not know how she found the strength to meet Sir Balduin’s eyes as she said it. The only expression she saw there was more bewilderment. It was Siri who once more protested.
“Lucianna, that is absurd. Your father was a merchant(?) who died when you were a babe. Mamma always said so, and so did Papà.”
Lucianna drew a breath that dragged painfully through her chest. She shifted her gaze to Siri, knowing that whatever she said next, she would find forgiveness there. She could not hope for the same in Sir Balduin’s eyes, and she could not bear to watch devotion shrivel into horror and disgust.
“Your papà believed it,” Lucianna said, “because your mamma told him it was so, carissima, as she had told her own father and everyone else we knew. But we made it all up together, she and I, in the nunnery, because we did not wish to be parted when her father summoned her home.”
Siri’s lovely mouth fell agape at these words. Lucianna wondered if Sir Balduin’s had done the same, or if disillusionment had begun to tighten his lips instead. She told herself that she hurried on for Elisabetta’s sake, that her daughter might not think too hardly of her.
“In your mamma’s defense and mine, we did not then know the truth. We knew only that I had been left at the nunnery as a babe, a nameless foundling. It seemed a harmless game to play, until Serafino found me.”
“I assure you,” Serafino said, “that I was shocked to discover I had a sister, and one moreover who was posing to a life her birth did not entitle her to. I kept mum only out of respect for your mother, signora. Again and again I turned my eyes when my sister—my half-sister—betrayed her father’s blood as she embezzled and defrauded to conceal her secret. I hoped she had changed, that an honest man—” he bowed towards Sir Balduin “—with his patience and love, might turn her to become an honest woman. But my hopes are dashed and once and for all, I wash my hands of you.” He struck his palms together twice in Lucianna’s direction, as though literally divesting them of something unclean. Then he turned to Siri. “I will be gone from here by nightfall. If my sister wishes to join me, I will escort her back to Venice. If not—well, I will attempt to defend her no longer. I leave her to the mercies of yourself and Don Triston.”
He spun on his heel, disdain jutting his chin in the air, and strode out of the chamber.
“I must go with him,” Lucianna murmured, “b ut not until I have told you the rest, carissima. May we—May we retire to your chamber?” Easier to confess it all to Siri and let her relay the story to Sir Balduin after Lucianna was gone. A coward’s choice, but one she grasped at all the same.
Siri flung her arms around her. “I do not care what your beastly brother says. You are my own dear Lucianna. That is all I need ever know. Nothing you could tell me could make me love you less.”
Lucianna had expected no less of Siri’s loyalty, yet her response swept fresh tears into Lucianna’s eyes. “Still, I must tell you, carissima.”
She thought she had whispered the words into Siri’s ear, but they must have rasped through the lump in her throat for Sir Balduin said, “I think I deserve to hear it, too.”
She winced at the sudden stiffness in his voice. She turned her head slowly to look at him. Ah! Just as she had feared. His lips were drawn tight in the depths of his well-groomed beard while his gray eyes no longer looked puzzled and devoted, but hard and grim. She wished Siri had been taller. She longed to shrink into the other woman’s embrace, nay, she wished she might vanish clean away! But she had no choice but to shake herself free of Siri’s protective love, wipe the tears from her cheeks, and nod her head. He was right. She owed him the truth before she went.
“Then let her sit as she tells us,” Siri said.
Lucianna had not realized that her face must be white until she felt Siri drawing her across the room to Sir Balduin’s bed and felt how weakly her knees gave way when Siri nudged her to sit on the edge. One more glance revealed that Sir Balduin had crossed his arms forbiddingly across his chest. After that, Lucianna kept her gaze fastened again on Siri.
Lucianna told her haltingly of befriending her mother in the nunnery, where Cosimo Gallo had sent his daughter to be educated in the hopes that some nobleman might overlook her origins as a merchant’s daughter and seek her hand when she reached marriageable age; of the sisterhood that had grown between her and Lucianna, and the plot they had woven to persuade Elisabetta’s father to welcome Lucianna into his home so that she and Elisabetta might not be parted.
“We were so very young and it seemed harmless,” Lucianna said again. “And as Elisabetta often said when my conscience stirred, we did not know that the story about my parents was not true, as we knew nothing about them at all. We chose the name Fabio from an itinerate friar who stopped briefly at the abbey when we were girls. He said he hailed from Abruzzo, a region so far from Venice that we thought the name could never be traced to anyone who could prove it false.”
She saw Siri toss a glance to one side—at Sir Balduin?—before she sat down beside Lucianna and reached out to hold her hand. Lucianna struggled to draw courage from the younger woman’s clasp, even as she shrank from the stark silence than stretched from where Sir Balduin stood to the side of Lucianna’s vision.
She forced herself to continue. “At first, Elisabetta said that we should never be parted, that when she married, she would take me for her companion to her husband’s house. So many men came to court her, for she was beautiful and spirited and intelligent, and her father had wealth enough to deck her out in the finest silks and jewels. As her father hoped, many of her suitors were rich and noble, but some of them were of her own merchant class, and when they saw that her father frowned on them, they began to turn their attentions to me. I had never dared think of marriage, for I had not a florin/denari(?) to my name, but one day Elisabetta exclaimed that it was not fair, that I was pretty and well mannered and well educated too, and why should I not have a husband of my own? I reminded her that I had no dowry. And then I am afraid I cried, for a handsome young man named Vincenzo Mirolli had begun to show particular affection for me, but I knew he could never accept a dowerless wife.”
She heard a stirring from Sir Balduin’s direction and paused to hold her breath, but he did not speak. The question of a dowry had never risen between them. Although she had puffed with pleasure when Triston’s household had taken to calling her “Lady” and knew she had a tendency to carry herself with some arrogance, she had always assumed Sir Balduin and everyone had known her dependent on Siri with no independent wealth of her own. Had she been mistaken? Had he misinterpreted the gowns that Siri had bought for her as a reflection of personal affluence? Then perhaps the rest of the story would be a relief for him, a release from an obligation he had offered her under a false belief.
Lucianna gave a doleful sniff and ran the back of her hand against her nose to hide her trembling lips until she stilled them enough to continue. “If I had known what your mother intended, carissima, I would have stopped her. But she disappeared for hours one afternoon, and when she returned she showed me a small wooden casket filled with gold. She had sold three of her jeweled necklaces, one strung with the finest pearls, and declared the coins she had received for them should be my dowry to marry Vincenzo. I protested. The jewels had been given her by her father, and though she insisted that made them hers to do with as she pleased, it felt like theft to me. I told her I would not accept the coins, but she laughed and said that it was too late, she had already shown them to Vincenzo and that he had agreed them sufficient to satisfy his father’s expectations for his bride.”
Siri sat listening patiently, but the silence from Sir Balduin grew unbearable. Lucianna bounced up from the bed, careful not to catch his eye, yet unable to stand still. She bent to pick up one of the tunics tumbled onto the floor.
“I was a foolish, foolish girl.” She laid the tunic on the bed and tried to smooth out its wrinkles, but her fingers shook too hard to succeed. “I thought myself in love, and so I let your mother convince me to accept her ‘gift.’ Vincenzo asked for my hand. Cosimo performed the role of my ‘deceased’ father and granted it to him, accepting Elisabetta’s explanation that the nuns had kept my ‘dowry’ in their own safe keeping until an eligible man wished to marry me.”
She folded the still creased garment in half, tucking the sleeves in skillfully so that the lines in the cloth should at least grow no worse, then scooped up a rumpled smock and repeated the procedure.
“But you did not marry Vincenzo,” Siri said as Lucianna allowed herself to slip into the increasingly soothing rhythm of gathering and folding Sir Balduin’s scattered clothes. Somehow the busyness of the motions helped keep more tears from her eyes. Siri gave a tiny gasp. “Or did you?”
Lucianna thought she heard a similar sharp indrawn breath from Sir Balduin, but she had bent down to snag a pair of his hose and could not have seen his expression from her position, even if she had wanted to.
“No, carissima, I did not for it was the very next day that Serafino revealed himself to me.”
She shook out the hose. How long had Sir Balduin been wearing these with a hole in the heel? She almost snapped a rebuke at him for enduring a flaw she could have mended in minutes, then caught herself with a pang. She was not his wife, nor ever would be. If he chose to deck himself out in an entire wardrobe full of rifts and rents, it was no longer her affair. Nevertheless, she folded the hose as tenderly as she had the other garments.
She took a pair of steps to reach for a tumbled surcote, then stumbled with dismay when Sir Balduin finally spoke roughly from the other side of the room.
“Serafino, who claimed the Fabio name so proud that I must marry you to preserve your reputation. But if the name is a lie for you, then I presume it was a lie for him, as well?”
She clutched the surcote to her breast as though it might prove some shield against his glare as she turned slowly to finally meet Sir Balduin’s gaze.
He was not glaring, though his eyes were very hard.
“Si,” she said. “His name is Amorosi. Mine I do not know, for I never knew my father and the records only noted him as NAME the thief.”
Sir Balduin’s lips parted as if he would say more, but she held up a hand to forestall him.
“No, let me tell the rest, then you may condemn me all at once.” She rushed on when Sir Balduin looked as though he meant to argue. “Serafino was a woolmonger’s son who sometimes did business with Elisabetta’s father. The day after my betrothal was announced, he cornered me outside a shop where Elisabetta and I had gone to buy some ribbons. He said he was my half-brother, and when I asked how that could be, he told what seemed a wild story.” Her fingers began to nervously pleat the cloth of the surcote she was holding. “When he was ten-years-old, he said, one of their servants stole some of his father’s property and ran away. The thief was caught by the city watch, tried, and hanged. All the property was recovered save for a ruby brooch, which they said he must have sold before his capture. There followed upon these events a round of terrible quarrels between Serafino’s parents, during which he claimed to have overheard such words as—” Lucianna’s breath shook on a pause “— ‘assault’ by his mother and ‘seduction,’ ‘thief’s brat,’ and ‘by-blow’ by his father.”
She felt a roil of sickened shame in her stomach and dropped her gaze to the pile of still ungathered clothes at her feet. “Then his mother shut herself away for a very long time. When next Serafino saw her, she had a baby in her arms and she bade Serafino accompany her to visit the nuns of NAME ABBEY. His father was just then away from home buying more wool for his trade. Serafino said his mother told him to stand watch while she spoke to the nuns, but he became frightened because it was dark and started after her. He saw his mother lay the baby gently on the doorstep of the abbey, then draw a brooch from beneath her cloak and pinned it to the baby’s blanket. Then she rang the abbey bell and hurried away, sweeping Serafino before her when she found him so near.”
Lucianna tried to smooth out the creases she had pressed into the rumpled surcote, and finally registered a shock of recognition. The green cloth with its swirling pattern of yellow and red embroidery—she held the surcote Sir Balduin had worn the night he had asked her to marry him. She turned and tossed it onto the bed as though it suddenly burned her. When she lifted her gaze again, it was to the safety once more of Siri’s eyes.
“My own unknown mother had left me a brooch when she abandoned me to the nuns. Even though the color of rubies has never suited me, I used to wear it and dream of who she might be. When Serafino saw it holding a mantle against my shoulder, he said he knew it at once. It was the brooch the servant-thief had taken that had never been found. I protested that that could not be, but he took the brooch from me, removed the ruby, and showed me the name Amorosi etched into the back of the stone. Serafino’s name. His mother’s name. My mother’s name.” Lucianna gave a sharp shake of her head, but her stomach continued to feel like heaving, molten lead. “I did not want to believe it, but what mother would abandon a legitimate child? Serafino said he would keep quiet if I would pay off a debt he had incurred. He had heard of my betrothal to Vincenzo and knew I must have obtained some kind of dowry to make such a marriage.
“I was frightened and angry and knew not what to say. I knew that Cosimo Gallo would not keep me in his house if he learned the truth, no matter how Elisabetta begged. Elisabetta knew it, too, and before I could stop her, she plucked a jeweled bracelet from her wrist and gave it to Serafino and told him to go away and never approach us again.” Lucianna longed to run her agitated fingers through her hair, but her veil prevented such disorder. She could not bear to stand here empty handed. She pulled free an auburn lock and began to twist it over her shoulder.
“Only he did come back,” she said, her voice laced with bitterness, “a mere week before I was to wed Vincenzo. He demanded more money, but this time he approached me alone. I had none to give him, save my dowry money, and how could I explain to Vincenzo what had become of it? I refused to tell Elisabetta and allow her to be further blackmailed. I said we had paid him to go away and away he must stay. He replied that if I did not give him something, he would tell Vincenzo that I was the baseborn daughter of a thief. I did not believe he would dare. I told him to go to perdition, for there would be no more jewels or gold.”
She wound her hair so tight, it pulled painfully against her scalp. She welcomed the spikey tingles as a distraction against the still stinging memories. “But he did it. Serafino told Vincenzo about my birth and Vincenzo shunned me. Elisabetta persuaded Vincenzo not to repeat the tale, but he severed our betrothal and I never saw him again.” Lucianna released her hair so that she could wipe away the tears her own rough treatment of her locks had brought to her eyes. “After that, we never dared challenge Serafino again. It shames me to confess, carissima, that I let your mother pay him off again and again.”
“Is that why you never married?” Siri asked.
Lucianna saw her eyes slide sideways, and knew she glanced again at Sir Balduin.
“Si.” Lucianna reached for her hair again, then checked herself. She must stop this pitiful quailing. However shameful the telling, she would finish the story with fidelity. Let him think her a liar, a thief and a misbegotten foundling, but she would no longer be a coward.
“After your mother married your father, who had not the wealth her own father had hoped for, I learned how to sell my embroidery to keep Serafino quiet, though once or twice when that was not enough, your mother sold some of your father’s paints without his knowing. Serafino strangely disappeared shortly after your parents died so near to one another. Perhaps he knew they did not leave you and your brother enough wealth to be worth extorting. But when you married Alessandro and became a donna, once more he appeared and the nightmare began again.” Lucianna did not expect Sir Balduin to believe her—the mere whiff of her sordid parentage had been enough to disgust Vincenzo and frighten him away—but she insisted, “Carissima, despite what Serafino said here today, I never, never stole from you or Alessandro—not directly. But you gifted me with so many fine gowns and jewels that those I sometimes gave to him to sell. You were so innocent and trusting, that when I told you I’d torn or lost them, you merely gave me more, then Serafino would come again and I would give him those. And each time I did, it felt like theft and I remembered that I was the baseborn daughter of a thief and I hated myself.”
Siri started towards her, but Lucianna extended both hands in a staying motion.
“It was weak of me, and dishonorable and contemptible. But I was so afraid of losing you, carissima.” Lucianna felt the sting of memory at her eyes. “You were all I had left of Elisabetta. I had helped her to run off with your father. I had stood at her side through every illness you and your brother bore. When she was gone, it was my arms that held and comforted you in your grief.”
“As you held me again when Alessandro died, and then my brother.” Siri’s eyes shone with a reflection of Lucianna’s tears. “I wish you had not been afraid to tell me. I would never, never have blamed you. You did not need to carry this burden alone.”
“If Alessandro had known, he would have cast me from his house.”
Siri’s eyes flashed at that. “He would not! I would never have let him—”
“You were scarcely more than a child, carissima, you could not have stopped him. I could not bear to be parted from you. So I let Serafino endlessly blackmail me. When your brother died and his will sent us here to Poitou, I thought infine! At last I will be free of Serafino! But somehow he found me even here.” Lucianna paused and balled her fists, thankfully empty now of any condemning ring. “He frightened me at first into giving him my blue gown, but then I said non più. No more. I would not let him wring so much as another denari(?) from me or someone I love. So now I will leave you, and take Serafino with me. You do not need me any longer, carissima—”
“I will always need you,” Siri cried, then checked herself and said, “I will always want you. Now that we know the truth about Serafino, he cannot threaten you any further. There is no reason for you to go now.”
There was one. Lucianna could not bear to remain in a household where she would be forced to see Sir Balduin and have the pain of his loss renewed in her heart every day. Even when he left Vere Castle to serve as castellan of NAME CASTLE, she would most certainly hear his name still spoken on Triston’s lips, would be required to avoid him when Triston summoned him back to report or counsel him from time to time. No, she could not live like this, grieving for a man she loved, knowing him still so near, feeling his revulsion for her stretching between their castles. And if he found someone else to love and marry, someone who would not bring disgrace to his name— Lucianna dug her nails into the palms of her hands to stop herself from crying out at the piercing vision.
She guessed that Siri had read her thoughts when the jewel-blue eyes slid towards Sir Balduin again. Lucianna plunged her nails deeper, trying to control her shuddering breath, then turned her head to gaze at him, too.
His grey eyes blazed as she had only seen them do once before, when anger had provoked him to draw his sword in a hallowed church to defend Siri from a baron who sought to abduct her. Lucianna had thought then, This must be the look he carries into battle. Only the fire sprang at her now, not an offending baron. She tried to speak, but what more could she say? She had too much lingering pride to beg for a forgiveness she knew herself unworthy and unlikely to receive.
Siri spoke in a pleading voice. “Sir Balduin—”
But he cut her off with brusque shake of his head. He looked down briefly at his grandmother’s ring. Then he yanked it from the chain, flung the latter on the bed beside the neat pile of clothes Lucianna had laid there, and crammed the ring onto his finger. Any lingering thread of hope that Lucianna had nourished snapped.
“Your pardon, Lady Siri.” He bowed to his young mistress. “I have a matter to attend to.”
He strode from the room without another glance at Lucianna, just as Vincenzo had walked out of her life nearly thirty years ago.