The Heiress Read online

  “Yes,” Jamie said calmly. “I think it is time we remembered what we are about.” With his back rigid, he walked around the table to escort Berengaria from the room.

  It was only minutes later that he was alone with his sister.

  “Why did someone not tell me?” Jamie asked, standing before the tiny, crumbling window in Berengaria’s room. Reaching out his hand, he broke a piece of stone away. Water damage. Years ago, while he’d been away, the lead gutters had been sold off the old stone keep, so the water seeped into the stone.

  Turning, he looked at his sister as she sat serenely on her cushioned chair, a chair more suited for a peasant’s hut than what had once been the keep of a proud and glorious estate. “Why did no one tell me?” he asked again.

  Berengaria opened her mouth to give the explanation she’d planned to give, but instead, she told the truth. “Pride. That great Montgomery curse of pride.” She hesitated, then smiled. “That pride that is now making your stomach churn and bringing out the sweat on your brow. Tell me, are you toying with the dagger Father gave you?”

  For a moment Jamie didn’t know what she was talking about but then realized that he was indeed holding the beautiful golden-handled dagger his father had given him long ago. The jewels in the hilt had been replaced with glass years ago, but if the dagger were held just so in the sunlight, one could see the gold that still coated the steel handle.

  He gave a laugh. “I had forgotten how well you know me.” With one easy movement, he sat on a cushion at her feet and leaned his head against her knee, closing his eyes in pleasure as she stroked his hair.

  “I never saw any woman who could compare with you in beauty,” he said softly.

  “Is that not a vain thing for you to say as we are twins?”

  He kissed her hand. “I am old and ugly and scarred, whereas you are untouched by time.”

  “Untouched is true,” she said, trying to make a joke about her virginity.

  But Jamie did not smile. Instead, he put his hand up before her face.

  “It is no use,” she said, smiling sweetly, catching his hand. “I cannot see lighted twigs before my face. There is no sight for me, and no man wants a blind wife. For all the use I am to the world, it would have been better had I died at birth.”

  The violence with which Jamie arose startled her. “Oh, Jamie, I am sorry. I did not mean—It was thoughtless of me. Please, come sit down again. Let me touch you. Please.”

  He sat down again, but his heart was pounding. Pounding with guilt. He and his sister were twins, but Jamie had been quite a bit bigger than his sister and so had taken hours to be born. When Berengaria was finally allowed out, the umbilical cord was found to be wrapped around her neck, and it was soon discovered that she was blind. The midwife said it was Jamie’s fault for taking so long to be born, so all his life Jamie had lived with the guilt of what he’d done to his beautiful sister.

  And all their lives he had been close to her, never once losing patience with her or tiring of her company. He helped her in everything, encouraging her to climb trees, to walk miles into the hills, even to ride a horse alone.

  Only their brother, Edward, thought Jamie less than a saint for helping his blind sister. Whenever anyone remarked on how good Jamie was to give up time with his rowdy boyhood companions to take his blind sister berry picking, their older brother would say, “He stole her sight, didn’t he? Why shouldn’t he do what he can to give it back to her?”

  Jamie took a deep breath. “So no one told me what Edward was doing out of pride?” he said, coming back to the present. Guilt still weighed him down. Guilt over leaving his sister who needed him so much, guilt for what had happened after he left.

  “You must cease this flagellation of yourself,” Berengaria said, pulling Jamie’s thick black hair with both her hands, making his head come back so he looked up at her. It was difficult to believe that those perfect, lushly lashed blue eyes of hers could not see.

  “If you give me a look of pity, I shall snatch you bald,” she said, pulling harder.

  “Ow!” He laughed as she released his hair, then he pulled one of her hands to his chest and kissed it. “I cannot help the guilt I feel. I knew what Father and Edward were like.”

  “Yes,” Berengaria said with a grimace. “Father never took his nose out of a book if he could help it, and Edward was a pig. There wasn’t a village girl over the age of ten who was safe from him. He died young because the devil liked him so well he wanted him near him forever.”

  In spite of himself, Jamie laughed. “How very much I have missed you these months.”

  “Years, my dear brother. Years.”

  “Why do women always remember the most inconsequential of details?”

  She tweaked his ear and made him yelp. “Now stop telling me of your women and tell me of this task you have taken on.”

  “How kind you are. How you make escorting a rich heiress across the country sound like a knight’s holy quest.”

  “It is if you are involved. How Edward and you could be brothers bewilders me.”

  “As he was born five months after our parents’ marriage, I sometimes wonder who his father was,” Jamie said with great cynicism.

  Had anyone else said this, Berengaria would have defended her dear mother, whose mind had long ago slipped away. “One time I asked Mother about that.”

  Jamie was surprised. “And what did she say?”

  “She waved her hand and said, ‘There were so many lovely young men that summer I’m afraid I cannot remember who was what.’ ”

  The maleness in Jamie reacted first, making anger surge through him, but he knew his mother too well to take offense and so relaxed and smiled. “If her family found she was pregnant, who better to marry her to than Father? I can hear his mother, ‘Come, dear, put down that book. It’s time to get married.’ ”

  “Do you think he read on his wedding night? Oh, Jamie, do you think we are … ?” Her eyes widened.

  “Even scholars put down their books at times. Besides, look you at us and our cousins. We are alike. And Joby is the mirror image of Father.”

  “Yes,” she said, “so you have thought of this, too?”

  “A time or two.”

  “Perhaps every time Edward pushed you into a pile of horse dung? Or tied you to a tree branch and left you? Or destroyed your possessions?”

  “Or when he called you names,” Jamie said softly, then his eyes twinkled. “Or when he tried to marry you to Henry Oliver.”

  At that Berengaria groaned. “Henry still petitions Mother.”

  “Does he still have the intelligence of a carrot?”

  “More of a radish,” she said bleakly, not wanting anyone to see her despair that the only honest marriage proposal she’d ever had came from someone like Henry Oliver. “Please, no more talk of Edward and how he decimated what little we had. And definitely no more talk of—of that man! Tell me of your heiress.”

  Jamie started to protest but closed his mouth. “His” heiress had everything to do with the gambling and whoring and general depravity of his “brother” Edward. In Jamie’s mind no one as degenerate as Edward deserved the title of brother. While Jamie had been away fighting for the queen, performing tasks for the queen, endangering his life for the queen, Edward had been selling off all that his family owned so he could afford horses (whose legs or necks he broke), fine clothes (which he lost or destroyed), and his never-ending gambling (where he invariably lost).

  While Edward had been rapidly bankrupting the family, their father had imprisoned himself in a tower room to write a history of the world. He ate little, slept little, saw no one, spoke to no one. Just wrote day and night. When Berengaria and Joby confronted their father with proof of Edward’s excesses, including deeds of land he’d signed over to pay his debts, their father had said, “What can I do? It will all be Edward’s someday, so he may do what he likes. I must finish this book before I die.”

  But a fever had taken the lives of both