Suzanne Robinson Read Online Free

ablaze. Claude’s chateau was much smaller than those of the king or great princes, yet it contained all the beauty of decoration in the Italian manner—foliated scrollwork, scalloped shells, pilasters, and fluted columns abounded.
    Castle La Roche, his English home, seemed a monstrous cavern when compared to this enchanted place. Mayhap his view of it was distorted by the past. Although there were whole chunks of his childhood shrouded in the blackness of lost memory, what he remembered had been sufficient to send him to France as soon as he’d been able to go. He remembered incessant battles. He remembered always living in fear that some unsuspected offense by his mother or him would ignite his father’s fury. He remembered taking refuge in study, only to find that gradually he himself had fallen prey to a demon rage.
    At first he struck out in anger at his tutors when they criticized his work. Then he began to dream. He dreamed of killing someone, a faceless man who evoked such rage in him that he attacked the man with fists and feet, beating him until he lay dead. After such a dream he woke in a sweat, his chest heaving as though he’d ridden fifty leagues. Terrified, he would spend hours begging God to forgive him for his own nightmares. Even more of his time was devoted to controlling his temper. He swore a vow to God that he wouldn’t strike out at others for his own shortcomings, as did his father.
    As he grew older, the nightmares changed. The faceless man turned into one of his tutors. Then one day when he was sixteen, he was killing his tutor in the dream, his hands squeezing into the flesh of the man’s neck, when he blinked, and the tutor transformed into his father. He woke screaming. That night he vowed to leave Castle La Roche.
    Two years later he succeeded in convincing his father to send him to Oxford, only to be captured by the highwayman Jack Midnight along the way. He’d been struck on the head and had lost his memory During this time, he joined Midnight and his band. When he regained his memory, his greatest concern had been to conceal from those who knew him his father’s monstrous nature, and his own secret rage. His French inheritance had come as a blessing from heaven.
    He gripped his reins tighter and shifted in the saddle. He’d allowed himself to drift into memory—a dangerous luxury when he would encounter Claude soon. Putting old unhappiness aside, he stared at the spires of the chateau and recited proverbs in French to keep his thoughts from straying.
    It wasn’t long before he rode beneath the chateau gate. Soon he was inside and shaking frost from his hair. A servant murmured that madame awaited him in her chamber, and he followed the man up the spiral staircasein the east tower. The stair was a graceful curve of white marble with a central support carved with foliage and panels that reached high above his head. As he mounted the steps, he could see the underside of the flight of stairs above, seemingly afloat in the air.
    On the second floor he entered a withdrawing chamber. The servant paused before a door and knocked, then opened it and bowed. Blade ducked through the entryway, which was a bit low for his height, and found himself in a chamber hung with great tapestries depicting hunting scenes and scenes from Greek mythology. Claude awaited him, having contrived a pose beside a table laden with food and wine. A gilded and velvet-covered canopy bed rose behind her. The whole effect of woman and chateau was one of luxurious fecundity, warmth and sensuality layered over with an elegance of presentation that concealed a preoccupation with physical pleasure. Claude waited for him to take in the full measure of her beauty before calling him and coming to him with arms outstretched.
    “Ah,
mon chèr
Nicholas, you have taken so long to come to me. I have been desolate.”
    White, plump arms surrounded him, and Blade kissed her. The scent of lilacs nearly smothered him, and he scraped