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We’d carried on with our activities, fallen asleep naked in our exhaustion, so I put on my pajamas, shrugged on Ian’s big, navy velour dressing gown that was on a hook, but I’d never seen him wear it, and walked out.
I stopped this time to see through the moonlight he’d turned to his back, covers up to his pecs, and he was asleep.
He was still lord of the manor in his slumber.
Sheer beauty.
He was no longer secretly being dosed with Valium, but I knew why he slept now, and since I didn’t want to be gone from him long, I walked out.
I found her in the Sherry Room, a light lit by her side where she sat in the corner of the sofa, another one lit on the table between the two chairs facing it.
“There you are,” Lady Jane said, setting her phone aside and smiling beatifically at me. She floated an arm before her. “Sit with me.”
I went in and sat.
She had a tall stack of leatherbound books at her side on the couch. She picked them up and I knew their heft with how she did it. She put them on the low table sitting between us.
“I believe these are yours now,” she said.
“Is the house talking to me?” I asked.
She did that head tipping thing and replied, “I believe it knows. I also believe that’s fanciful. But you did arrive on your first day with us at three oh three.”
Oh God.
Here we go.
“What does that mean?”
She sat back. “It is true that Wolf was not pleased he was going to be saddled with their sworn enemy’s daughter as a wife. It’s also true that Alice felt the exact same thing. Wolf and his father went to the castle on the cliff for the betrothal meeting fully expecting to be slaughtered when they reached the bailey. They weren’t. They were treated to a generous banquet. Alice was presented to her future husband, and it wasn’t that they hated each other on sight. It was they hated each other before they saw each other. This meeting, Daphne, did not go well.”
“How do you know this?”
“Women were often discounted in history, but the women of this place,”—she reached forward and laid her hand on the books—“told their own stories.”
I looked to the books.
I looked back to her when she spoke again, and she’d returned to being ensconced in the corner of the couch. The better to be comfortable while she answered all the lurking questions I had about Duncroft House.
“Wolf may not have wanted his bride, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t beautiful. So he would find to his frustration that he wanted something else from her. Unfortunately for him, she wasn’t keen on giving it. Furthermore, she had a radiant smile and a gentle soul she showed not to him, but to others, thus his servants and vassals quickly fell in love with her, and he quickly became enraged they had from her what he did not. They clashed. Arguments and miscommunications and misunderstandings. Wolf, too, was a fine specimen. Alice didn’t want to be taken with him, but she was. She found his honesty and disdain for courtly gestures refreshing. His men adored him, and she discovered it was his hearty sense of humor, generosity and loyalty that made it so.”
She hesitated.
I nodded to tell her I was listening, though she couldn’t miss it, since I was listening avidly.
She went on.
“One night, during a rather passionate argument, they both discovered why they fought so much. And for the first time in their marriage, they made love. This was such a momentous occasion. She couldn’t know, because there were no clocks at the time, but it’s understood by countesses since, from her retelling of her recollections of that night, this event put a lasting mark on this place. And it occurred very early in the morning. At three oh three.”
I felt a whoosh as my breath left me.
Lady Jane kept talking.
“From then, every earl and countess has been married at three oh three. Because, and this was lost from record, except for what the countesses knew, but back then, Alice and Wolf’s love was known as unrivaled, even by Paris and Helen, Antony and Cleopatra. It’s the fate of the time and lack of resources that the minstrels’ favored story of Wolf and Alice wasn’t written down for all to know.”
She took in a breath, and then continued.
“She despaired every time he went to war. She rejoiced when he came home. She gave him five children. They mourned the loss of two. The bones of a pretender are not buried under the foyer of this house, Daphne. Forever entwined, the bones of Wolf and his Alice are there. He died, at what was an old age back then of seventy-three. The next day, she simply didn’t wake up. Everyone said she loved him, and her body understood she couldn’t live in a world without him. So it coaxed her spirit to join his.”
