The Wolf in the Cloister (The Wolf and the Nun Book 1) Page 8

  Finally, she wound her way back to his rooms, his private quarters. She laid her hand on the doorknob. She should go back to her room and study. She had wasted most of the day.

  Then again, if she’d already lost most of the day, what was the harm in losing it all? And he had been very clear that she was allowed anywhere except through the mysterious door in the tower—the only way, she noted, that her tower room did not mirror his.

  She turned the knob and entered.

  The window curtains were closed, and the room was dim. She shut the door behind her and then crossed the room to open the curtains. Light spilled in, but the room faced east, so the sun had already passed overhead. The room was neat—the bed made, no clothes out or strewn about, as it had been the first night she had seen it. The same opulence, the same red and gold. The bedposts, though, seemed out of place. She ran a hand over them. Smooth oak carved to look like rose briers winding their way up to full blooms at the top. Over the center of the bed, on the headboard, was carved a set of doves, lovely, sweet, and even romantic. They didn’t align with the other elements.

  The vanity itself had little on it save a brush and a bowl and pitcher, none of which looked recently used. She sat. The mirror was delicate and fine—her reflection was clear, and it startled her some. The abbey did not have many mirrors, and none in the cells. She hadn’t looked at her own face—really looked at it—since she had arrived. Her skin was less pale for her time in the gardens, and her freckles had darkened a bit, too. Her hair, which she had left free, had picked up highlights from the sun. Though the brightness of her eyes and flush in her cheeks made her look healthy, she could tell she had lost weight, too. The bones at her collar were a touch more visible, and her face thinner.

  “Oh, well,” she whispered. “Shaftesbury is my home, and I shouldn’t ever have to concern myself with appearance there, so what does it matter?”

  Asta chittered in response.

  “It isn’t a waste, little girl,” she scolded. “It is my calling.” She smiled sadly as she stroked Asta’s back. “We both know the abbey was the right choice for us.”

  The ferret seemed less than convinced.

  “Anyway, let’s get back to snooping.” She tugged open the drawers and found mostly the obvious. Handkerchiefs, razors, a few bits of jewelry he likely often wore. Not much else until she got to the bottom drawer. In it, face down, was a frame. She picked it up.

  The frame held a picture, not quite a miniature, but close. A woman and a man. The man was clearly Lord Clavret, though he was painted smiling—a sincere expression of joy that went all the way up to his eyes. The lady next to him smiled, too, but Marie thought that the painter had caught some small glimpse of uncertainty in her face. She was truly beautiful. The kind of woman whose loss could turn a man into something very different indeed.

  Marie gently returned the frame to its spot and closed the drawer. She shut the curtains before she left and quietly closed the door behind her. Rachel would soon be at her tower door with dinner, and Marie had done enough exploring for the day.

  Chapter Nine

  Marie woke in the morning the next day, having finished the book of romances somewhere around dawn. Her early dreams overflowed with knights riding off on adventures, but later, they shifted. The romances she read were touched with magic, but in her dreams, magic ruled the land. The stories from her Celtic mother, from Lord Clavret’s octavo, and from fairy tales of her childhood swirled in her unconscious mind, creating tales she had neither read nor heard.

  She sat bolt upright in bed, the stories still dancing in her mind.

  She hurried to her desk and took out her own small book and began to scribble. Asta joined her, watching the quill dart along the page. Marie was rather proud of her handwriting most of the time. It wasn’t strong and bold, like so many men she knew, but it was clear and easy to read, with a pretty touch to most of the letters. Though not today—instead, it leaned toward the end of the line as she rushed along, her hand desperately trying to keep up with her mind. The lines were legible, yes, but only to her, and that was fine—they were her ideas, her stories.

  Hours later, she paused long enough to eat and refresh herself. Only then did she go back over her notes. She marked places, scratched out lines, recopied ideas into the later pages of her book as stories took full form in her head.

  “Twelve, Asta,” she said to the now-snoozing ferret. “That seems a good number. And I will start them soon, but not tonight.” She tapped her quill on the page, leaving small dots of ink. She was no saint; she was no mystic. She dreamt, but not of God, and neither He nor His Son nor the Virgin Mother had bothered to speak with Marie.

  “No one will take us seriously,” she said, scratching Asta’s head. When the animal squeaked back, she laughed. “We are women. That is true.” She drummed the fingers of her free hand on the table. How to possibly situate such stories that they would be acceptable, not brushed away as rubbish, or worse, condemned for having been written by a woman.

  She toyed with writing as a man but gave up that idea. The point was that she was a woman, and some of these stories, at least, would give that point of view.

  Thinking back to the romances, she noticed how all of them mentioned some kind of source—some kind of origin of the story outside the writer himself. A woman creating? No. Never. A woman recording? That was a different and much easier thing to take. She had often copied the works of others into new volumes. How would copying from her memory be any different?

  The goal then, would be to reveal to others the gifts she had been given.

  Now all she needed was a patron—someone who would appreciate her stories.

  A wide smile spread across her face. She might be a nun now, but she had once been a princess. And her brother was the king. She would dedicate these to her dear and loving brother.

  She turned to a new page in her book and stared at the blank vellum for a time. She began to write:

  Ki Deus ad duné escïence

  E de parler bon’ eloquence,

  Ne s’en deit taisir ne celer,

  Ainz se deit volunters mustrer.

  Quant uns granz biens est mult oïz,

  Dunc a primes est il fluriz,

  E quant loëz est de plusurs,

  Dunc ad espandues ses flurs1.

  Guilt got the better of her, and she put her own work away. There would be time for that later. For now, she needed to return to her purpose there—the blank book. She returned to the book that mentioned charms and resumed her place. The dialog structure was dry and didactic, but the information was useful. Almost any static object could be made into a charm—blessed or cursed. Some could be quite powerful. Powerful enough, Marie wondered, to reveal a demon and send him packing back to Hell? They could be enchanted in pairs—like keys and locks, or a wax seal on parchment only to be broken by a particular touch. No doubt her mother’s gifts were charmed; everything she read here bore out that instinct. And Marie had only barely touched the depth of the magic used to make them.

  She glanced at the book—perhaps the book itself wasn’t enchanted at all. Perhaps the magic lay in the cross stitched to the cover. She ran her fingers over it to see if her own particular magic made anything pop like other books often did, but she got nothing.

  The day of her wedding, her mother had given her the gifts. That had been the last time Marie had seen her. She curled her fingers around her rose. When she clutched the rose and concentrated, she could feel her mother still—a faint presence, comforting and frightening at the same time. She didn’t know—not for a fact—that her mother was dead, and yet, if any word described the presence she felt, it was ghost. Marie knew that there was more power in the rose—there was no way it simply reacted to things. But try as she might, she could not figure out how to make it work, let alone what it could do. Not that banishing demons wasn’t wonderful. It was just that, the more she thought about her mother, the more she knew this gift was meant to be used in the world,
not hidden away in a convent. Marie hoped that the same was true for her.

  The reading and writing had left her eyes tired and her hand sore, but the rest of her body was restless, and her mind, too, wanted for something. Leaving Asta curled up and sleeping, she wandered back up to Lord Clavret’s room and his mysterious forbidden door.

  As the full moon rose on this her third evening alone in the castle, Marie stared at it from the window in Lord Clavret’s room. The moon was so bright it might as well have been daylight. She had abandoned her habit for a comfortable, plain dress. Tomorrow, when his lordship returned with his lovely face and piercing eyes, she would don her habit again, the baggy, rough cloth a solid barrier between them.

  But tonight, she wanted to be outside—the abbey, this castle, every place she went she felt hemmed in. By walls, by rules, by authority. Giving herself to the church had been the right thing to do. Her intelligent, reasonable mind knew that she was in the right place—right for her family, right by God—but damn if her heart didn’t feel otherwise. She drummed her fingers on the stone sill. There were gardens around the castle. She’d seen a glimpse coming in and could see a bit from both tower windows. All she would have to do was wander unattended in the middle of the night through the castle and find a way out. She crossed her arms. Neither nuns nor ladies behaved that way.

  She stepped back from the window and sat on his bed.

  The door—the unlocked and tempting door—was still unopened. She stared at it. Surely if there was anything truly bad behind it, it wouldn’t open. He was a smart man, and cunning. There were tales, folk tales and whispers, about husbands who laid traps for their innocent wives. Marie snorted. He was no husband; she was no wife; and, above all, she was no innocent. She stood. The room behind the door couldn’t be that big. She’d studied the layout of her tower, and clearly it was a twin to his. It was probably nothing more than a closet—a teasing joke on her.

  Very still, holding her breath, Marie stood and listened. No sounds came from within the castle, and few from outside either—nothing more than the typical night noises of wind and summer birds still singing love songs. She grabbed the handle, turned it, and opened the door.

  A solid wall of darkness struck her. A cool breeze wafted against her face, fresh with the scent of damp earth. She inhaled deeply. It was too dark to investigate. She returned to the bedside and took the candle, lighting it from the embers in the hearth. She leaned into the open space and peered into the shadows. This was no room, not really, only a few steps to a narrow, spiraling staircase.

  She bit her lip and stepped in, thrilling at the knowledge that she shouldn’t be there, and wishing a bit that Asta was with her. She would be back up the stairs long before dawn. There was, she suspected, nothing exciting at the bottom. As she pulled the door shut behind her, her heart sped up. The candle sputtered slightly, but the flame held. She rested one hand on the inside wall for balance and descended the stairs.

  Down they wound for a while, and then they broke into a short hall, only to wind again. Over and over, until she had lost any sense of direction. She tried to count steps but lost track as her mind wandered to the lays she was composing. She shook her head and scolded herself for being such a silly girl. This was probably a back hallway used by servants doing something delightful like emptying the privy.

  She hit a door—heavy, wooden, reinforced. A strong bar held it closed from the inside. She tried to raise it with one hand but couldn’t. So she carefully set the candle on the stairs, hoping it was far enough from the door that any breeze wouldn’t leave her in absolute darkness. She heaved up the bar and shouldered the door once, twice, and it gave, silently swinging on well-oiled hinges. The moonlight hit her, and she blinked for a moment. The stairs had led her outside, as she suspected, but not to any kind of place to dispose of refuse or even to a servants’ area.

  She stepped out of the castle into a garden where she faced three arches. She let go of the door, and it swung shut behind her. She spun and snatched it, right before it closed, almost catching her fingers. The outside of the door was smooth, and the bar would have fallen when the door closed. There was no handle on this side—none that she could see anyway. What good was a secret stair to a private garden if you had to yell for help to be let back in? She glanced down and found her answer—a rock, big and solid enough to bear the weight of the door, sat right next to it. She wedged it between the door and the wall.

  The moon was high, and she guessed that it wasn’t yet midnight. She had a few hours, should she want them.

  The garden had clear paths in three directions. Each disappeared under wooden arches covered in roses. It only took a moment, peering into the left arch—white roses—and the right—pink roses—to realize that this was a maze, a puzzle to be solved. She took the center arch, decked in red roses. She took care to leave markers, a snapped branch here, or some scattered petals there, to remind herself on the way back. The end of her journey was a seemingly dead end: a thick, stone wall. No doubt the edge of the estate. Outside of it, she saw the forest.

  All the other dead ends had been impenetrable barriers of roses, so this wall must be something else. Especially considering all the effort it took her to find it. The wall was pristine—not a weed growing up it or from it. A feat in the verdant summer. She ran her hands down the stones—they were smooth, worn. Whatever this place was, it was often used. Perhaps Lord Clavret liked the outdoors, the peace and quiet.

  She traced her finger around the separate stones, along the lines of the mortar. That’s how she found the small gap. She slipped her finger into it and pressed the stone. A click and a block of stones moved, swinging back. A door. She examined the outer side of the door and found the matching trigger, and when she was satisfied that she could get back in, she let it close.

  Rolling her toes on the soil and grass of the path reminded her that she had made the same mistake as she had those months ago. She’d gone off without her shoes. She had spent so much of her childhood barefoot and now grass felt more natural without shoes. Besides, the night was warm, and the moon showed the path wasn’t treacherous. When would she get another chance to stroll alone in the night, under the full moon, without fear?

  As she followed its winding course through the woods, the path narrowed and faded but never vanished completely. There weren’t clear footprints, not that she could see, but the dirt and grass had spots where they were pressed down, blades of grass broken. That had been a thing her father had pointed out—more to her brother than to her—when he taught them how to hunt. She had never enjoyed it—especially the killing. Her brother had teased her, called her timid. She had shoved him hard enough that he’d fallen, and then rolled down an embankment. Her father had laughed even as her brother seethed. But they made up quickly, as they often did. She could hunt, and track, and shoot a bow and arrow as well as any man, but she never shot an animal.

  Marie had just about decided it was time to turn back—the moon was setting. She had to be back and out of Lord Clavret’s room before he returned home. Though she imagined Lord Clavret would return several hours after dawn, she didn’t want to risk it.

  She stepped into a clearing and saw the crumbled remains of a church. A cross still stood on the frame, though much of the roof had collapsed inward. In the fading moonlight it was beautiful, full of enchantment—at least in her imagination.

  She entered.

  At the center, bathed in moonlight, was a beautiful Rowan tree in full bloom.

  Behind the tree, the original altar still stood. She walked to it and found several black candles, their wax droplets scattered across the old stone.

  Black candles in a crumbling church.

  At the foot of the tree, growing from the rubble of the fallen roof, was a rose bush, filling the room with its scent. The same roses that grew in Lord Clavret’s garden. She leaned and plucked a few, a small memento of the strange place, and found the hollow. She tucked the roses into her hair, behind her ea
r, before reaching in.

  She evaded the clawing thorns and took out a bundle. It was a clean cloth, with no dirt or crumbled rock—it couldn’t have been there long. She rose and took it back to the altar, where she set it down. A wolf’s head cloak pin held the bundle together. The same pin Lord Clavret had worn when he left. She held her breath and opened the bundle.

  The clothes that the viscount had been wearing that morning had been neatly folded, including the cloak and wolf’s head pin. Perhaps he disguised himself and became a bandit. The image made her smile but also struck her as nonsense. The parties might be for show, but the ancient church was ripe with potential blasphemy.

  Deep in thought, she started when a noise caught her attention. It was low and soft, almost too soft to hear, and sinister. She turned.

  A black wolf watched her from the doorway. His green eyes glittered.

  Marie stepped back onto a loose rock and almost lost her balance. She steadied herself on the altar and saw the wolf had crept closer, the low growl continuing.

  “Hello,” Marie said. She kept the altar between them, her eyes on his. She reached for a fallen branch from the tree. If she picked up a weapon, it might see her as a threat. On the other hand, if she didn’t, it might see her as dinner.

  It crept closer.

  “Aren’t you handsome?” she blurted out. She didn’t know what possessed her to say that, though it was true. The wolf was true black with only a few white hairs near his ears. “Is this your church?” she asked and felt even more foolish. Not every animal was like Asta. The creature stopped. “I didn’t mean to trespass,” she said. “I was having a nice walk in the woods and came upon this place. It’s lovely.”

  The wolf cocked its head to the side.

  She moved toward the tree, keeping some of the fallen rubble between them. She crouched down and stretched her hand out toward the wolf. “I’m Marie.”