Читать книгу The Dutiful Wife - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 6

THE SIGNS OF MOURNING grew as they drove towards the capital city of Arezzio: black flags bearing Aldo’s crest at half-mast on every lamppost, as well as hanging from the windows of so many of his people. It brought a lump of emotion to Giselle’s throat. She turned to Saul to tell him so, and then stopped.

Saul was not looking at her. He was looking away from her. She had known that Saul would be affected by his cousin’s death, but since he had returned from Russia at the beginning of the week, after their initial fierce and joyous reunion lovemaking, Saul had seemed to retreat from her into his own thoughts. At first she had put it down to his natural grief, but now she was beginning to feel that Saul was deliberately excluding her from his thoughts and feelings about the loss of his cousin. Whenever she tried to talk to him about Aldo he cut her off and changed the subject, as though he didn’t want to share what he was feeling with her. Why? Didn’t he understand that his refusal to talk about Aldo to her was making her feel shut out and rejected?

She reached for his hand, her movement causing him to turn and look at her.

‘Something’s wrong,’ he guessed. ‘What is it?’

Relief filled her, and with it gratitude for Saul’s perceptive awareness.

‘You’ve seemed so guarded and withdrawn since you got back from Russia, I was beginning to worry.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ve been struggling to come to terms with what Aldo’s death is going to mean. It never crossed my mind that he might die so young, or to consider how that might impact on the future of the country.’

‘Aldo’s people will miss him,’ she said quietly. ‘I know that neither of us really approved of the way the country was run, with Natasha having such a strong influence on Aldo and when we both feel so strongly about democracy, but Aldo tried his best to be a good ruler. Natasha liked to complain that he put the country first, before her.’

‘That wasn’t true, of course, but Aldo did try his best to do his duty. It wasn’t his fault that Natasha was so determined to have her own way. Also, he believed sincerely in the right of the people to expect him to put his duty to them before everything else—just as he believed in the importance of the tradition of that duty being passed down through the generations.’

‘Your strong sense of duty and loyalty to those you care about is something you and Aldo share…shared,’ Giselle amended quickly, relieved when Saul squeezed her hand rather than looking upset because she had referred to Aldo in the present tense.

She felt much better now that they were talking about Aldo, about Saul’s feelings. Her childhood had left her with a fear of being excluded from the emotions of those she loved, and she suspected that it sometimes made her over-sensitive on that issue.

They had reached the palace now, where the Royal Guard was on duty, their normal richly coloured uniforms exchanged for mourning black, their tunics, like the flags, embroidered in scarlet and gold with the royal house’s coat of arms.

Tradition, like pomp and ceremony, could have a strong pull on the senses Giselle recognised as they were met from the car by one of Aldo’s elderly ministers, who bowed to Saul and then escorted them up the black carpet and into the palace. She tended to forget that Saul carried the same royal blood in his veins as his cousin—principally because Saul himself had always made it so clear to her that he had distanced himself from the whole royalty thing.

Saul had his own apartment within the palace, and Giselle was relieved that he had it, so that they could retreat to it after the ritual and ceremony of the public declaration of mourning that naturally dominated the atmosphere. Even the maids were dressed in black, and all the household staff looked genuinely upset by the loss of a ruler Giselle knew had been much loved, despite the fact that his gentle nature had made it next to impossible for him to stand up to both his wife and those who had wanted to use Arezzio for their own profit via a series of schemes that Giselle knew Saul had tried to dissuade Aldo from adopting.

‘Things will be very different here now for the people,’ she commented when she and Saul were finally alone in his apartment.

‘Yes,’ Saul agreed.

He felt relieved that, even though she had not said so directly, Giselle’s comments about the future of the country meant she was aware of the role he would have to take. He was grateful to her for not insisting on discussing it, and so giving him the space he felt he needed to come to terms with what lay ahead.

When he had given his promise to Aldo his behaviour had been instinctive and emotional. It had only been afterwards that he had truly recognised what that promise meant. Then he had balked at the burden Aldo had deliberately placed on him. He had even felt resentful and angry with his cousin, since Aldo had known that he had always been glad that his father had been the younger brother and he would not inherit either the title or its responsibilities. Those feelings had tormented him whilst he had been in Russia, and he had longed for Giselle to be there so that he could unburden himself to her.

Coming back here today, he felt that sense against hostility to the burden Aldo had placed on him burn very strongly in him. The weight of his responsibility to his cousin and to their royal blood weighed as heavily on him as the mourning that clothed the palace and its inhabitants.

Now, just by walking into his own apartment with Giselle, he could feel that burden lifting, the pressure of the decision he knew he had to make easing. Giselle’s calm and wise words about his inborn sense of duty had helped to guide him in the right direction.

‘The changes that will have to be made will benefit the people—even if right now they might not be able to see that,’ said Giselle. “We all loved Aldo, but the reality is that the country needs a strong and motivated leadership. Perhaps his death was fate’s way of saying that it is time for things to change.’

Saul was even more convinced that she had realised the impact Aldo’s death must have on their own lives. The knowledge comforted and strengthened him.

‘Have I told you how much I love you?’ he asked.

Giselle smiled at him in relief. He had seemed so preoccupied and distant, but now she could see that he was her beloved Saul again.

‘It was here that we first made love.’ He smiled at her and slid his hand beneath the soft weight of her hair to draw her closer to him. Giselle smiled back at him, but their movement towards one another was halted by a firm knock on the door.

Releasing her, Saul went to answer it. Giselle could see the black-garbed major-domo standing outside in the corridor, and Saul was inclining his head towards him to hear what he was saying, before nodding and then closing the door to come back to her. The warm intimacy had been stripped from his expression, and in its place was a shuttered grimness.

‘Aldo’s body will be lying in state in the cathedral from tomorrow morning. The major-domo says that I may pay my last respects privately now if I wish.’

‘I’ll come with you—’ Giselle began, but Saul shook his head.

‘No. I…It’s best if I go alone. You and I will be expected to open the official lying in state tomorrow. We can go together then.’

He had gone before Giselle could make any further objections. The door closed behind him with a sharp click, like an axe falling between them and separating them, Giselle thought uneasily.

There was a private underground passage that led from the palace to the cathedral, hewn out of the rock on which the city was built. The tunnel might now be illuminated by electric lights, but as he followed the major-domo Saul admitted that it wasn’t hard to imagine it lit only by torches as those using it moved down it with a potentially more dangerous and even sinister purpose at a time when the country had been besieged by its enemies and those who coveted it.

The country had broken away from the Catholic church at the same time as Britain’s Reformation, and now its religion could best be described as Protestant high church.

The Archbishop was waiting to receive him, his formal robes a touch of bright shimmering colour after the darkness of the tunnel and the mourning-shrouded castle.

The cathedral reminded Saul of a smaller version of Westminster Abbey. Above the high altar was a stained glass window, depicting the brave deeds of his ancestors before they ascended to heaven escorted by winged archangels.

Aldo’s white-silk lined coffin was in the centre of the cathedral. Aldo himself was dressed in the ceremonial robes of rulership. The smell of incense hung on the air like the words of prayer the Archbishop murmured before he and the major-domo retreated to leave Saul alone with his cousin.

In death, Aldo’s features had gained a stark dignity that made him look more severe than he had been. Such a gentle man, who had not deserved the cruelty of his fate. A man to whom Saul had given his word, his promise, that he would take up the yoke of rulership that Aldo had been forced to cast down.

Silently Saul knelt beside Aldo’s coffin. It was too late for him to change his mind. He had given his word. With that acceptance came a sense of relief and release, a lightening of the grim mood of resentment that had been gripping him.

Giselle had been right when she had said the country needed a strong ruler. There was so much that such a ruler could do for his people. He could provide them with the schools needed to give them a better education. He could make money available for them to study at the world’s best universities and then bring what they had learned back to their country. He could in time endow their own university, where those people could pass on to others their knowledge. He could turn his country from inertia and poverty into a powerhouse of creative energy. It was a project he knew would appeal to Giselle.

He could be the ruler Aldo had wanted him to be, the ruler he had promised he would be, but to do so he would have to turn his back on the life he and Giselle had created together. They would have to sacrifice its freedoms of choice for the onerous burdens of state and expectation, of tradition and ceremony.

Saul stood up.

The first thing Saul did when he got back to his apartments was take Giselle in his arms and hold her tightly.

He smelled of cold air and incense, Giselle recognized, and she felt his chest expand under the deep breath he took before he exhaled heavily.

She lifted her face to look at him, but he shook his head and then kissed her, a fiercely passionate and demanding kiss of such intensity that Giselle’s own emotions immediately responded to it.

He couldn’t trust himself to talk to Giselle about Aldo’s death, Saul recognised. The pain he felt at losing his cousin so unexpectedly and so shockingly held unwanted echoes of the despair and anger he had felt at the deaths of his parents, and with it came an awareness of his own vulnerability through those who mattered to him. If there was one thing Saul found hard to handle it was the thought of being emotionally vulnerable.

It was easier to act than to speak—easier to lose himself in a physical expression of the need he felt for Giselle’s proximity, for the comfort of her living, breathing presence. Easier to hold her and love her than to tell her how he felt. A man did not show his weakness, after all—not even to the woman he loved. Because she surely needed him to be strong for both of them.

It was like being new lovers again, or lovers who had been parted for too long, Giselle thought. Saul’s hunger for her was that of a man who had suppressed a need he could no longer control. It was arousing her and disarming her too, making her feel that nothing mattered other than their love. The sympathy she had wanted to show him, the comfort she’d wanted to give him, was expressed best via their physical commitment to one another. There was a wildness, a fierceness, almost a savagery about the way he touched her, groaning his pleasure against her mouth when he cupped her breast. His desire ignited her own, so that the silence of the room quickly became broken by the sounds of their need, the harsh gasped breaths, the rasp of hands on fabric, the moan of triumph or despair when a new intimacy was gained or denied by the barrier of clothes that their growing passion not only wanted but needed to cast aside.

This was not the lovemaking of a gentle, accommodating lover. This was the mating of a man’s most basic predatory sensual need, and a woman’s—his woman’s—hunger to meet that need, Giselle recognized, as Saul bared her breasts to his gaze and then his touch with a raw sound of triumph.

His hands on her flesh, his fingertips stroking, shaping and then erotically tugging on the flaunting arousal of her nipples, made her shudder convulsively in wanton pleasure. This was their desire for one another stripped bare to its most raw and sensual elements. This was need brought to a pure boiling point of intensity that was just this side of dangerous and starkly shocking.

A woman would have to trust a man completely to give herself over to such a consuming conflagration of desire. And she did, Giselle acknowledged, as she felt its heat burning inside her just as the heat of Saul’s touch burned her flesh.

‘Kiss me,’ she commanded him, knowing that she was walking into the heart of the fire, giving herself over to it and to him to do as he wished.

They were no strangers to the intensity of their own passion, their hunger for one another, but now there was another element to their lovemaking—or so it seemed to Giselle. As though death had honed and sharpened Saul’s appetite for life, and for her. There was an urgency, a need, a driven and heightened edge to their intimacy as Saul anointed and worshipped every sensual part and threshold of her body until he had tightened the sharp spirals of her desire to the point where she could bear it no longer, and she had to beg him to end her torment, to fill the aching, longing emptiness within her.

Her initial climax was sharp and immediate, but Saul drove them both on with deep passion-filled strokes within her that took her beyond her own experience to a place where her flesh clung to his for support during their shared journey just as she clung to him.

The cry that Saul uttered in the final seconds of their shared release seemed to Giselle to be wrested from the very heart of him.

Lying holding Giselle, whilst his heartbeat slowed back to its normal rate, Saul felt his own relief fill him. They were alive, and they were together. They had climbed the heights and plunged down from them together, their journey driving the dark bleakness of Aldo’s death from his heart and restoring to him his strength and self belief. Their lovemaking had touched his soul. But he couldn’t talk about how he felt. He didn’t want Giselle, whom he loved so much, to think of him as emotionally weak and unable to deal with everything Aldo’s loss meant.

Instead he must be strong. He must forge a future for them both out of the funeral pyre which would consume the plans they had previously made. He must prove to Giselle that he was strong enough to make that future for them. He must show her that she could trust him to take the burden fate had dropped onto his shoulders and lift it high enough to enable them to live a life as close to the one they had originally planned as possible whilst at the same time carrying the weight of the promise he had given Aldo. Until he had fathomed out for himself how best that could be done—until he could stand before Giselle and show her how it could be done—he wasn’t going to discuss the situation with her.

The last thing he wanted was for her to be burdened by anxiety and worry about the change in their circumstances. He might owe it to Aldo to keep his promise to him, but far more important was the duty of love and protection that he owed to Giselle.

Aldo’s death had changed their lives completely, Giselle herself would be aware of that, knowing as she did that he was Aldo’s closest living relative. She would know and understand that he was duty-bound to step into Aldo’s shoes, of course, since they had both always known that he was Aldo’s heir. Technically, yes. But neither of them had ever expected that Saul would be called on to fulfil his responsibility towards that duty. Why should they have done, with Aldo younger than Saul, and married to a woman who had made no secret of the fact that she wanted to bear the future Grand Duke? Fate, though, had had other ideas, and now it was his duty to take up the responsibility Aldo’s death had thrust upon him. With Giselle at his side, he would build a new life on the foundations his ancestors had set in place—not just for themselves, but for all those his promise to Aldo had brought within his care.