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Hal blinked
A few moments ago this woman could have blended very well into the gray shadows of the night; now she was brilliant with color. A Spanish grandmother would explain that shade of hair color, and the ripe mouth. Her figure, too, undisguised by her ill-fitting gown, was seductively proportioned and her skin, so creamily pale, also declared her ancestry. But how to explain those eyes—the color of autumn-touched beech leaves—or the clipped English voice?
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From her place by the fire, Jane Maidstone had fixed her eyes full on him. She had been chasing him for a full month now and always seemed to be at any gathering he was part of. She was attractive and no shrinking virgin, but Hal had resisted her thus far. Not because he was in the habit of refusing such open invitation but because…why? Because for some time lately he had had the strangest feeling. That there was something tremendous coming right to him out of the unknown. If asked, he would have found it impossible to explain this feeling, but it was affecting his every action at the moment. He felt strongly that a dalliance with Jane Maidstone, however pleasant, would distract and divert whatever it was. All nonsense of course! But so…insistent. Yesterday, he had begged leave to be absent from the court and taken a wild, half-broken horse from the stables and ridden out into the wind on an impulse to rid himself of the unaccountable feeling.
Instead of outrunning it, it had stayed with him for every league. He knew his family had a curious tradition of being “fey”. His mother, a reluctant inheritor of this gift, believed it had entered the Latimar family through her father’s Celtic mother, who had come out of Ireland to wed her father. One of each succeeding generation had had the uncanny facility to see or feel that which was denied ordinary mortals. Pausing to water his unruly horse yesterday, Hal had been glad to remember that his brother George carried the honours in this particular field. And thank God for that! George was a balanced personality, well able to deal with such unfathomable matters. He, himself, Hal felt would be the reverse. All the same, the extraordinary premonition of stirring events to come stayed with him.
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