“For which of your multitudinous sins?” Villiers asked, the sardonic bite back in his voice.
“For stealing your Bess those years ago…for turning my back on you.”
“Oh no,” Villiers said. “I’ll mourn the loss of my barmaid until death.”
Elijah blinked.
“You always were a fool,” Villiers murmured, closing his eyes again.
“Be careful,” Elijah warned.
“Or what?”
“I’ll leave you a note as well.” He laughed aloud at Villiers’s revolted expression.
Chapter Sixteen
That afternoon
“Where are we going?” Elijah asked, handing his wife into the carriage. It couldn’t be a fashionable destination because as far as he could tell, Jemma was wearing small side panniers if any, and she certainly wore no wig.
She must have forgiven him for the tempest of the previous night because she smiled teasingly. “It’s a secret. I’ve already instructed Muffet as to our destination.”
For the last nine years he had punished himself for having no wife—or rather for having a wife in France. He had ignored the pleasantries of women who sought his company, avoided the eyes of women who sought money…satisfied himself alone, in his room. Infrequently and unhappily.
Now he felt like tinder about to flare. The curve of Jemma’s lower lip, the faint scent of roses that clung to her skin…
“You never used to like perfume,” he commented, climbing into the coach after her. He thought of sitting beside her, but even without large panniers, her skirts still filled most of the carriage seat.
“I rarely wear scent. I did today only because when I’m naked, I feel more protected with perfume.”
Her words seared Elijah’s body and he heard his own hoarse voice as if it were another man’s. “We’re going to be naked?”
She smiled, the eternal smile of the Sphinx. Obviously, she had said all she intended. He spent the rest of the journey tormenting himself by imagining her soft and smooth, creamy white and delicate…
“Don’t look at me like that!” she said crossly just as the carriage stopped.
“I can’t look at you any other way,” he said to her back as she descended from the carriage.
Elijah descended onto a cobblestone street in a part of London he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t even a part of London whose smell he recognized. He knew the smell of coal that hung around the Inns of Court, and the smell of cloth dyes down by the Thames. Hyde Park’s sooty poplars had no odor, and so the park smelled mostly of dust and sweaty horses. He knew when he was in Smithfield from the odor of dung that spread from it like a fetid gift. Limehouse, where the riots didn’t take place…Limehouse smelled like the sea and the cheerful poor, like baking bread and buckets of urine thrown into the street at night.
But this street smelled like lilacs in a country garden. They were standing before a wall with a small door. An old wall, made of round stones and sand that looked old enough to date to the days of Henry IV, or even earlier than that.
He looked at Jemma but she wasn’t going to tell him anything, obviously. So they stood there in the street and smelled lilacs drifting from somewhere, while a footman rang the bell hanging by the door.
A little monk in a rough-woven white robe opened the door. That was interesting, and not what Elijah expected. He hadn’t thought clearly, but the question of nakedness jostled in his mind into a pleasant anticipation of sin, skin, pleasure…
A witch’s brew of sensual experience that monks had no part of.
“As you requested, Your Grace,” the man said, bowing. “The baths are ready.”
Jemma stepped forward. “We are most grateful, Frater.” His grizzled head quickly disappeared back through the door.
Elijah grabbed Jemma’s arm. “There are no monks in England,” he hissed. “I’m quite sure that Henry VIII did away with them.”
She smiled. “That wasn’t a monk. He just looked like one.”
“Then what is he?”
She drew him forward. Inside the old walls there was a great muddy courtyard made of ill-kept pavement though which poked blades of grass and stunted weeds. Lilacs grew in a tangled mess against the wall, pale flowers opening in the first signs of spring. Wild garlic had sprung up around the lilac, adding a touch of pungency to the air.
The door closed behind them. Across the courtyard, square-cut pillars rose to the level of a second floor. Most of the roof was still there, but to the right there was nothing but rubble. Ahead of them the “monk” vanished into the maze of pillars. For an old man, he was remarkably nimble.