Page 67 of While Angels Slept
Gillywiss seemed reluctant to answer but he did. “Nay,” he replied. “No boy. Just girls.”
“A wife?”
“She is dead.”
He turned his attention back to the bag and Hunt joined him. The little boy reached into his mother’s bag and pulled forth a beaded belt, handing it to Gillywiss. The man slowed his digging, meeting Hunt’s gaze with some reluctance. It was clear that he was having some difficulty ignoring what was going on around him. Arabel’s weeping was pathetic and sorrowful, and Gillywiss was feeling it.
“I am not a bad man,” he finally said, looking over at Arabel and Cantia. “There are those in this village who would slit a man’s throat as easily as speak to him, but I am not one of them. You have nothing to fear from me.”
“Please take my offer,” Arabel sobbed. “I want to go home. I want to see my father.”
Gillywiss looked at the frail young girl, his sense of remorse growing. He wasn’t any good at fighting off his feelings, torn between knowing he shouldn’t care yet inherently caring. A sick child’s tears were not to be ignored.
“You would do this?” he finally asked her, some disbelief in his tone. “You would give me everything you own just to go home?”
Arabel nodded vigorously. “Aye, I would. Will you not accept, sir?”
Gillywiss pondered her words before letting his gaze move to Cantia and then to Hunt. He knew about the nobility of this country. He knew they were all arrogant and greedy, men and women included. They sucked the peasants dry and still hungered for more. He’d spent his entire life knowing these facts, yet when he looked at Cantia and the children, he did not sense greed or arrogance.
In fact, he sensed a good deal of compassion, of intelligence, and of kindness, especially from Cantia. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, to be sure, and he knew he could sell her to the highest bidder for a great deal of money. But the truth was that he had no desire to sell her. She intrigued him greatly. The whole family did, and he wasn’t exactly sure why.
“Tell me something,” he sat back on his bum, Cantia’s fine things still on his head or in his hand. “You have a desire only to see your father?”
Arabel nodded firmly. “Aye, sir.”
“Why not your mother? I do not understand the relation of this woman to you. She says she is the viscount’s wife, yet she is not your mother?”
He was pointing at Cantia, who looked at Arabel as she thought ofan explanation. “Arabel’s mother abandoned her when she was a baby,” Cantia said softly, hoping that if she divulged personal details, the man might feel more of a connection to them and, therefore, more sympathy in his decision to let them go. “She knows no mother.”
Gillywiss lifted an eyebrow. “But you are the viscount’s wife?”
Cantia hesitated a moment before shaking her head. “Not in the eyes of the church,” she whispered. “But we are married in our hearts. That will never change.”
Arabel hadn’t heard of the true relationship between her father and Lady Cantia when she had been at Rochester, but in truth she wasn’t surprised. She had seen the way her father looked at Lady Cantia and, if she thought on it, she wasn’t all that upset about it. She liked Lady Cantia and she wanted her father to be happy. He was, in fact, a very lonely man, and Lady Cantia was very kind. More than that, she understood why her father could not marry Cantia. She was young, but she wasn’t ignorant in the least. Like her father, she was exceptionally bright.
“My mother left me when I was born,” she said. “Although my father told me that she had to go away, I know it was because she did not love me. I was born sick and I must have chased her away and made her ashamed. My father cannot marry again because he is still married to my mother even though she ran away from us.”
Gillywiss was listening seriously to a rather tragic, and very personal, story. His dark gaze found Cantia. “Is this true?”
Cantia couldn’t look at him. These were thoughts and situations that she had only discussed with Tevin. Now a stranger was hearing them and she was uncomfortable.
“Aye,” she murmured, looking at Arabel and stroking the blond head. “Arabel’s mother ran away fifteen years ago and no one knows what has become of her. Tevin… Viscount Winterton… has every intention of hunting the woman down, or at least finding out what has become of her, so that we can be married.”
“Do you know where the woman has gone?”
“Paris, he was told, but that was many years ago.”
“Her name?”
“Louisa,” Arabel said before Cantia could reply. “Louisa Berthilde Solveig Hesse. I am named for her. She is from the House of Hesse. Do you know where that is?”
Gillywiss smiled faintly. The young girl sounded as if Hesse was perhaps at the ends of the earth.
“Germanic,” he said, looking to Cantia again. “Then you are the viscount’s mistress.”
Cantia had told Tevin once that she would be his mistress even if they could never be married simply because she loved him. It was usually a shameful title, but she was not ashamed, not in the least. She looked Gillywiss squarely in the eye.
“Aye,” she answered without reserve. “I am very proud of it, and of him. He is a remarkable man.”
