Luckstones Page 6

  “Whose business is it, then?” Nyana stood on guard, circling warily. This man looked far more comfortable with a blade than his companions had done.

  “More none of yourn.” He stopped and held his arm and blade straight out, pointing at Nyana’s neck as if in warning. “You’d be wise to go home to your Mammy.”

  “Haven’t one.” The man appeared nonplussed by her air of unconcern. “If it’s not my business, might it be Jass’s?”

  That startled him. The leader glanced from side to side as if the tall red-headed woman might appear from nowhere. “How d’you—”

  ”Who else would have known that Col ha Vanderon had the jewel?” she said. Nyana beat his blade away. “I thought she’d sold the thing to him?”

  The man grinned. “When we take the sparkle home, Jass’ll turn it in for reward.” He feinted broadly at her hip.

  “Clever.” Nyana parried again. “The problem is that I’m charged to bring the jewel home to its right owner.”

  A yelp from the left drew the leader’s attention for a second; Col ha Vanderon had pinked Cheevie in the arm and taken his sword from him. As Cheevie ran down the street, the soles of his boots flashing in the torchlight, the leader turned back to Nyana.

  “The odds have changed,” she noted. “I think you should go home.”

  “And face Jassie without nothing to show for it? Not likely.” The leader brought his sword up in a circling motion, cutting for Nyana’s shoulder, but she had already dropped to one knee and thrust her point deep into the man’s underarm, the blade reappearing just below the shoulder. His sword dropped, he screamed, and it was the work of several minutes to disentangle her blade, wipe it down, confiscate the sword and bind the man’s shoulder up so that he did not bleed to death on the way home.

  “There. You have something to show Jassie. Now, will you please go?”

  Nyana and ha Vanderon watched as the leader walked heavily away into the darkness. Then she turned to him.

  “My dagger, sir?”

  He handed her the dagger, which she slid at once into its hanger.

  “And the Archangel.”

  Col ha Vanderon paused, calculation written upon his face.

  “A man who comes into the Dedenor without so much as a penknife to defend himself is not the man who can best me in a fight, particularly with an unfamiliar sword.” She nodded at Cheevie’s blade, which dangled in his hand. “I think the necklace simply fell off, was discovered by the maid at the Bronze Manticore, and offered by her to you. An unexpected gain, but not worth dying for. Give me the Archangel, sir. Or raise your weapon.”

  A moment more calculation, then Col ha Vanderon shrugged. “Right on every count.” He slid his hand into his pocket and produced from it the Archangel, large, blue, glittering. Nyana put it into her own pocket.

  “Well. Good night, sir.”

  ~o0o~

  Velliaune me Corse had chattered throughout dinner in hopes of distracting her parents from the subject of the Archangel and now found herself in the parlor, singing, “So Gently Dies the Woodland Doe,” for their pleasure. At the song’s end, her maid whispered that Nyana me Barso was waiting.

  As soon as she could depart from her parents’ beaming presence, Velliaune joined Nyana in her bedchamber. The moment the door closed behind her, she wheeled round.

  “Do you have it?”

  “It took longer than I had expected, but—” Nyana held the Archangel out to her, “here.”

  Velliaune snatched the thing to her breast and held it there. “Praises!” She vanished from the room. This time, Nyana had to wait only a few minutes.

  “I have given the wretched thing back to my mother, and hope never to wear it again!” She threw her arms around Nyana extravagantly. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! You have—I cannot tell you—if my parents had learned . . . I can breathe again!” Indeed, she felt as light as a breeze.

  “Well, then, there’s the matter of my payment.”

  Velliaune drew her head back. She had rather hoped Nyana would forget the question of payment, but her expression suggested that this was not likely. Gracelessly, she stepped away from Nyana, took up her purse, and counted out twenty senesti.

  “Is that sufficient?” she asked sullenly.

  “Almost.” To Velliaune’s astonishment, Nyana me Barso stepped forward and kissed her. It was no trivial embrace: her lips were soft and seeking, and one hand tangled itself in Velliaune’s curls. After a moment of surprise, Velliaune relaxed, and returned the kiss, her insides fluttering.

  It was Nyana who broke off the embrace.

  “There. Your debt is paid. All through school, I wanted to do that, and now I have.”

  “All through school? But—” Velliaune held out a hand as if to draw Nyana back. “You’re not going to kiss me like that and leave!”

  “I believe I am, Vellie. Have you learned nothing about the wisdom of leaping into action you may later regret? If you want more, you may always find me in the Dedenor. But remember that price may be more than even the Archangel could buy you.”

  Nyana smiled, not unkindly, bowed, and was gone. Velliaune me Corse sank down to sit upon her bed, staring after her schoolmate in wonder and alarm.

  Copyright & Credits

  LUCKSTONES

  Three Tales of Meviel

  Madeleine Robins

  Book View Café 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-527-4

  Copyright © 2015 Madeleine Robins

  Acknowledgments:

  “Virtue and the Archangel,” Lace and Blade, ed. Deborah J. Ross, Feb. 1, 2008

  “Writ of Exception,” Lace and Blade 2, ed. Deborah J. Ross, Feb. 1, 2009

  “A Wreath of Luck,” The Feathered Edge, ed. Deborah J. Ross, Sky Warrior, February 22, 2012

  Cover illustration by Francesco Hayez 1791-1882

  Production Team:

  Cover Design: Amy Sterling Casil

  Proofreader: Phyllis Irene Radford

  Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Digital edition: 20150512vnm

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Publishing Cooperative

  P.O. Box 1624, Cedar Crest, NM 87008-1624

  About the Author

  Madeleine Robins has been a nanny, an administrator, an actor, and a swordswoman; has trafficked book production, edited comics, and repaired hurt books. She’s also the author of five Regency romances available through Book View Café, the New York Times Notable urban fantasy The Stone War, Daredevil: The Cutting Edge, and three Regency-noir mysteries, Point of Honour, Petty Treason, and The Sleeping Partner, starring the redoubtable Sarah Tolerance, agent of inquiry. Sold for Endless Rue, an historical retelling of Rapunzel set at the medieval medical school in Salerno, was published in 2013. She is a founding member of the Book View Café.

  A native New Yorker, Madeleine now lives in San Francisco with a dog, a husband, and a hegemonic lemon tree. And as always, she’s working on another book.

  Ebooks by Madeleine Robins

  Collection

  Luckstones: Three Tales of Meviel

  Novels

  Althea

  My Dear Jenny

  The Heiress Companion

  Lady John

  The Spanish Marriage

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  About Book View Café

  Book View Café is a professional authors’ publishing cooperative offering DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats to readers around the world. With authors in a variety of genres including mystery, romance, fantasy, and science fiction, Book View Café has something for everyone.

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m your favorite authors at a reasonable price.

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  THE SPANISH MARRIAGE

  Sample Chapter

  A Regency Romance

  Madeleine Robins

  Book View Café Edition

  May 22, 2012

  ISBN 978-1-61138-172-6

  Copyright © 1984 Madeleine Robins

  Chapter One

  Despite the heavy layers of her borrowed novice’s habit—black gown and scapular, long white veil—Thea shivered slightly in the cool dimness of the Superior’s sitting-room. The motion, slight as it was, must have caught Doña de Silva’s eye: she looked up, frowned reflectively, and scolded: “You are pale as a ghost, Dorotea. Go walk in the garden.”

  “I am perfectly fine as I am, Silvy,” Thea protested. Since their arrival in Spain, Dorothea had chafed under her duenna’s increasing tendency to condescend, to speak as if Thea were a schoolgirl, instead of a young woman of nearly nineteen years. At the convent matters had only gotten worse.

  “Doña de Silva is right, child,” Mother Beatriz said. Thea clenched her hands in frustration: everyone addressed her as “child.” “You have been too much inside,” the Superior went on.

  That made Silvy wince and flush unhappily; she was well aware that it was her illness that had kept Thea indoors in the first sunny days of spring. Thea could have struck the Superior for her well-intentioned words; she and Silvy had become fiercely protective of each other in the last months of their journey, and, with Silvy still weakened from her long fever, it was all Thea could do to distract her from fretting over their future. It was bleak enough, inarguably. Neither Dorothea, nor Mother Beatriz, nor Sister Juan Evangelista, the convent Infirmarian, saw any point in Doña de Silva’s undoing the hard work of her cure with worrying.

  “Do you hear me, Dorotea? Go walk in the orchard. Your blessed mother would never forgive me if I were to let you fall ill, and besides that, you make such a muddle of that linen it hurts me to see it,” Silvy added with heavy humor.

  That was that. When Silvy invoked the memory of her mother Thea understood that capitulation was the wisest course. She rose, made her curtsy to Mother Beatriz, kissed Silvy’s narrow, dry cheek, and left the room. She managed the awkward weight of the habit as best she could. After three months it was still unfamiliar and cumbersome to her; to a girl raised in the muslin dresses of an English schoolroom, the heavy layers of the borrowed habit were not only a sorry trial but, at times, an absolute menace. She had tripped over her skirts more times than her dignity permitted her to admit.

  Once she had closed the door behind her she was unable to keep from stopping for a moment, hovering near the door, listening for what they would say. They would be speaking of her. Not vanity, but an absolute comprehension of her situation and of the trouble she posed to her guardian and to the nuns made Thea think so. There was Silvy’s long sigh, the inevitable, unanswerable question: “What am I to do with her? If only her father were still alive, if only she had a vocation. . . .”

  “Clara,” she heard Mother Beatriz begin. Then old Sister Ana came shuffling down the hall; she eyed Thea knowingly.

  “None of that, Señorita,” the old woman admonished. “Mother and your duenna will talk, if they must; you have no business to be listening. What sort of manners do the English teach their daughters, after all? Go play in the garden like a good child.” To ensure obedience Sister Ana settled herself heavily on the bench by the doorway, took her rosary in her hand, and began a mumbled Ave. Left with no choice, Thea gathered up her skirts and swept down the hall to the garden stair.

  She emerged from the cool and the damp of the hallway into the full noon glare of the courtyard and waited for a moment until her eyes could adjust; she picked out the darkened doorway of the kitchen to her left, the little pathway beyond leading to the Chapel, the scuttling shapes of chickens wandering across the yard. She paid no attention to what she saw: her mind was still on Silvy and Mother Beatriz in the dimness of the sitting-room; she wondered if they would come up with a new solution to the problem of her future. She doubted it.

  “I will not take vows,” she muttered to herself. “Silvy cannot ask that of me, and Mother won’t take me without a vocation. I hope.” For a moment Thea had a vision of herself: a member of the order, subject to the perpetual, sighing goodwill of the sisters—one of them herself. Feeling ungrateful at the same time, she shuddered. They had been kind—more than kind—since she and Silvy had arrived seeking refuge. In these days, to take in an Englishwoman, no matter if half-Spanish, was beyond kindness: it was bravery. After the months when she had realized that none of her own people, neither her father’s family in England nor her mother’s people in Spain, wanted her, Thea was grateful to these women who had taken her and her duenna in—strangers—and treated them with such open kindness.

  It was bitter to realize as well that she was a danger to them. Angrily, because she was so deeply aware of her obligation to them, Thea refused the only option that might have made her and the convent safe again: membership in the community.

  One of the kitchen sisters was sitting on a stool by the orchard gate and shelling beans. Thea smiled stiffly at her, dipped a curtsy as she passed through the gate, and started off for the orchard and the field beyond it, her steps as long as her height and the weight of her habit would permit. Silvy wore her own gowns, grey and black—sober enough for a nun, Thea had always thought. It had been decided when they arrived and were granted sanctuary that Thea should wear a novice’s habit, both as a disguise to cover her short, feathery, blond hair, and as a practical measure. Her day dresses were not suited to conventual life or to nursing.

  She was hoping to walk off some of her anger and worry; she was ashamed as always of the feelings every kindly-meant whisper and glance occasioned in her. A damnable sort of kindness that made her ever more aware of what a nuisance and trial she was to everyone. Especially Silvy, she thought miserably. That was hard: Silvy had practically raised her, had been the affectionate, worrying counterpoint to her father’s easygoing, neglectful presence. Silvy had come to England when her cousin Celia married Sir Henry Cannowen, and, on Celia’s death seven years later, she had stayed to raise Celia’s daughter, Dorothea. Thea had always known that Silvy disapproved of her father and that Sir Henry disliked her cordially. Privately, Thea had always enjoyed her blustery wastrel father, as she would a delightfully foolish companion, but she understood Silvy’s distress at him and the way he held household. Thea had never realized, until her father’s death, that Silvy’s dislike went beyond Sir Henry to include all of England and all things English. Watching Silvy as she spent weeks closeted with Sir Henry’s man of business, Thea saw the worried frown on her long, somber face deepen and heard increasingly bitter remarks about “this country,” “these people,” “this place.”

  None of Sir Henry’s family, which had been as little pleased by his marriage to Celia Ibañez-de Silva as her family had been, vouchsafed any assistance or advice after his death. It was a shocking thing for Henry to have died so young, and was it not fortunate that, while the Baronetcy had passed on to a cousin, Sir Henry’s estate was not entailed. The fact that Grahamley Hall was the only thing of value left to Dorothea, and that her father’s debts nearly outweighed the value of the estate, did not soften anyone’s heart. Dorothea’s grandmother, her aunts—Susan and Eliza—her uncle Edmund, all sent polite condolences. None was willing to attend Sir Henry’s funeral, let alone to take in his daughter.

  Silvy and Thea had stayed on at Grahamley as long as they could; they watched the slender monies of Dorothea’s inheritance disappear, as if by magic: servants’ wages, m
ourning clothes, food, stable expenses, a thousand minor, damning things. In the end, it had been a neighbor, Mrs. Haddersleigh, who provided a solution to their slow impoverishment. “What I don’t see,” she had said, her plump, mittened hands clutching at the thin china teacup, as if she suspected it were capable of flight, “What I do not see is why you do not simply sell this place and go to your mama’s relatives in Spain. Surely they would be delighted to see you?” Then she added, lest Thea think her unneighborly, “You know, dear Miss Cannowen, that I would invite you to stay with us; only, Mr. Haddersleigh was saying just the other day that his cousin Sophy must needs come to us again this summer. Besides, my dear, I am afraid he has the most gothick objections to foreigners. Not that you are foreign, of course, but. . . ..” She glanced at Silvy’s impassive face with insensitive meaning.

  Dorothea had hastily ushered Mrs. Haddersleigh from the house; she heartily wished her at Jericho and returned to the drawingroom full of apologies. Silvy was smiling.

  “That one,” she began disdainfully. “That Mrs. Haddersleigh is an imbecile, but she is right. Niña, we will go to Spain! Your aunts and uncles there will take us in; your grandfather, the Barón, he will arrange a marriage. . . .”

  “Wonderful,” Thea said dryly. Silvy was not to be stopped. For days, while their debating and considering went on, Thea was overwhelmed with stories of Spain, of sunshine, and of gracious, happy people. “The English are like frogs!” Silvy pronounced baldly. “I never wanted your mama to come to this place, niña. Now, when we go back, you will see what real people are.”

  The more that Dorothea had considered the matter, the more it seemed the solution to their problems. There was no future for her now in England but to go as governess, and Silvy would never have countenanced that. “You are Ibañez-de Silva,” she protested when Thea first offered the idea. “Even, you are Cannowen. Your papa would never have allowed such a thing!”