AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I will abide, sir,” she replied.
“Good.” He shook her off, shaken himself, but showing it little. No one in the room would understand his mood except Charlotte, and she was quickly returned to the tower.
Charlotte spent the next month high inside the castle turret as though that might be her permanent home. However, the drafty and cavernous room was not suitable for the harshest months of winter. If she were to survive, she needed a room in the castle below.
Mountbane, realizing that he could no longer keep her so imprisoned, had a room provided for her in the servant’s quarters. There, her life began to take on a routine that she hoped would grant her some peace. Other than the strict penalty she paid with her crotch so firmly harnessed, she was granted a good deal of freedom to move about the castle. As long as she stayed clear of her husband—which she took great pains to do—he seemed to forget her, and she could lead a life without his mocking presence. She dressed normally in simple clothes, spent some hours in the kitchens—not laboring as a slave, but happily preparing food along with the cooks. She embroidered linens, recalling the painstaking crafts that she’d dispensed with once coming to Ilusia. She gave herself to any activity that would keep her mind, heart and body away from the dangerous thoughts of love and lust and physical pleasure. She forbade herself to think of Tristan as he was the most dangerous of her mind’s musings. Having resolved not to let Mountbane’s punishment break her, Charlotte was determined to live her life without her passions—and perhaps, too, find some ease in it. After nearly four years of turmoil, she needed this enforced rest.
Charlotte’s days were long to prevent even longer nights when her body roar might rise up and swiftly unsettle her fragile equilibrium. She worked herself until she tired each day, hoping to fall asleep as soon as her head fell to her pillow and her eyes closed.
The only wrinkle in Charlotte’s resolve came during her first weeks. She was in the kitchens, seemingly lost in her labor of kneading loaves of bread when one young maid whispered in her ear, “You must have heard the rumor, Lady Charlotte.”
“And what is that?” she asked. Gossip was common in scullery.
“That Sir Tristan escaped.”
Her entire body quickened at the very idea. “No, I had not. How so?” she asked.
“It was said that his escape came early, in the first hours of his capture. While you were wrestled back to this castle, he was to be taken to a northern fortress and put to death. But Sir Tristan is too much a warrior to allow that.”
“Indeed he is,” Charlotte agreed.
“No one has seen him since, and there has been no word. Disappeared, utterly vanished off the face of the earth.”
“And how did you come upon this information?” Charlotte wondered.
The maid smiled shyly. “I have a friend,” she whispered sweetly.
“Oh? And who is this fellow?”
“Did I say he was a fellow?”
“Your blush does, my dear.”
“Yes, ma’am. He sometimes attends Lord Mountbane. Two weeks ago he overheard this conversation with one of the aides who’d captured your lover.”
“Shush. I would advise you to watch what you hear and what you turn into gossip,” Charlotte warned her. “This castle isn’t safe for a wagging tongue.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
That night, Charlotte suffered as her thoughts rained with pictures of Sir Tristan. She shook them off only to have them return, and her body raged in anxious fits. In the morning, she determined her future path—resolved that she would not suffer like this again. She refused to live with thoughts of sex and must put an end to her fantasies. Should Tristan return to the province, he would be killed and there was no thought of her own escape. It could be no other way. What luck, that fate took hold their lives to split them apart, she brooded unhappily. For surely, fate would win.
Five months into her celibate life, Charlotte found herself working industriously in the gardens one sunny afternoon. The season being so fair, she relished the fresh air and the labor both, for they seemed to have a more settling effect on her than anything she did inside the castle. As long as the weather held, she’d do as much as she could where she could breathe the free air and have it fill her lungs with the smells of earth.
When she heard the sounds of someone’s voice calling her, she turned, but found no one. Hearing her named called again, she turned again, and then a third time with the same empty results. Was she going daft? A fourth time, Charlotte stared in the direction of the sound, peering into a thick hedge to see a form arise inside the briar.
“Tristan!” she almost spoke aloud, but bit her tongue.
“Shush,” he spoke as softly, covering his lips with a finger. A second later he seemed to make himself invisible, slipping deeper inside the hedge. Charlotte followed him with a circumspect glance around her, wondering if anyone had seen her suspicious move. But she was alone. Dropping to her knees, she began working the ground near the hedge with a small shovel while waiting to hear more from the man inside the thicket. “How have you fared, my darling,” she heard his voice again.
“Not well, sir,” she whispered. Her heart was pounding so furiously she thought it would fly rig
ht from her chest. “And especially poorly now that you’re here,” she went on anxiously, trying not to stare his way.
“And why would that be?” he wondered.
“You have always been a scoundrel but never a foolish one. You are foolish now.”
“Because I’m visiting you?”
