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  “I don’t know. Does it not concern you that no one questions our existence? Or, rather, your existence. According to the story, after we were born, a fire burned us. I heard that the bodies of two babies were found in the fire. If we were burned, how are we alive? And what happened to my mother? Dorothy said she was small and dark, with black hair and eyes. If that is so, then why do I have brows and lashes like a rabbit’s?”

  “I am not a storyteller like you. Perhaps there are things those women do not know. They were babies themselves then—I think. They are not old enough to remember then, are they?”

  “No,” she said tentatively. “It is all a puzzlement. But, whatever the truth, there is a feeling here that frightens me.”

  “What do you fear will happen?”

  She turned in his arms, her face to his. “I am afraid of losing you. I would die if I lost you. I do not want to live without you.”

  Talis thought it was unmanly to say the same things to her, but he felt them. Holding her tightly, he said against her lips, “No one can take us away from each other. We are one, do you not know that? Do you not sense it?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, oh yes, but I am afraid. I am afraid people will not allow us to stay together.”

  “Callie, my love, why would anyone want to separate us? Do either of us have great estates? Are either of us the child of a king and stand to inherit a country?”

  “No,” she said, smiling. “We are not important.”

  “True,” he said, holding her close to him. “We are not important at all and tomorrow I shall tell this man my father that you will stay with me always. If he tells me you cannot be with me, then we will go back to the farm.” Sometimes Talis had trouble thinking of John as his father; Will Watkins was his father and always would be.

  For a moment Callie held her breath because she knew that Talis would keep this promise, and she knew what he would be giving up if he left this rich house for her. Talis hated farming. He did his chores but he had no interest in growing the best turnips in the county as Will hoped to do. Market days bored him. Talis was born to ride a horse and wear armor and he had always known that is what he was meant to do.

  She could not, could not, allow him to give up what he was meant to do on earth. She had no doubt that, given the chance, Talis would become the greatest knight who ever lived.

  “Why do you look at me like that?” he asked, his voice husky.

  He didn’t wait for an answer; if she didn’t quit looking at him that way, they’d be on the stone floor in another minute. His head knew they should get back to Hadley Hall, but there were a few more hours until daylight and he couldn’t bear to leave her. It had been so very, very, very long since he had last seen her.

  “Act as though you have some manners and turn round,” he said firmly, and when she was facing away from him, he said, “Tell me a story. I have not heard one of your silly old stories in a long time.”

  “If they are silly, I will not bother.”

  “All right then.” He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Did you know that there is a man who lives here who does nothing but tell stories? I have been told that he is very good. Very interesting stories.”

  Immediately, Callie began to talk. “There was once a princess with five very jealous sisters. They were all very ugly but the princess was so beautiful. She had long golden hair, glorious golden hair. The most beautiful hair ever put on a human being.”

  “And the most vanity,” Talis added.

  “No, no, she was good and pure. Only others saw her beauty. She thought of herself as plain.”

  “Humph.”

  “And there was a prince,” Callie said.

  “A handsome prince?”

  “Oh no, not at all. Ugly as a toad.”

  At that Talis started to get up.

  “All right,” she said, “perhaps he was a little handsome.” For a moment she put her cheek against his chest, held his arms close to her body. “He had black, glossy curls, thick black lashes, and a mouth as soft as a baby’s. But his nose was too long and thin.”

  “I am sure he had a perfect nose.”

  “Perhaps. One day the princess—”

  “No,” Talis said, “tell me more of what this divinely handsome prince looked like. Was he tall and strong?”

  Callie’s first impulse was to tease him but then she smiled and picked up his hand and said, “He had beautiful hands, long fingers, very strong hands…”

  27

  Sir,” Talis said, his shoulders back, his head up. “I should like your permission to marry Callasandra.”

  John was taken off guard at this. His son was just a boy. Why, just yesterday he had been in swaddling clothes. How could he think to marry?

  Slowly, he turned from the table where he was inspecting the accounts his chamberlain had left with him. When a boy married, it changed him, made him put his energies into something other than what was at hand.

  Never in his life would John have admitted to himself that he was jealous. He had just found his son; he did not yet want to share him with anyone. But at the same time he did not want to disappoint the boy. There was an independence about Talis that frightened John. His other children belonged to him, belonged to him body and soul. He could demand what he wanted of them, dismiss them or congratulate them as he felt and he knew they would be near him the next day.

  But this Talis was something that John had not experienced before. He did not feel gratitude coming from the boy for having saved him from a life of poverty. John often felt Talis’s delight in his new life, but never gratitude. John wasn’t sure, but he thought that if Talis did not like what his father did, the boy might well take the girl and leave Hadley Hall forever.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” John said, not wanting to directly tell the boy no. “I must of course speak to your mother first.”

  “Yes, sir,” Talis said, his face breaking into a radiant grin, his happiness fairly lighting up the room. Then, trying to calm himself, he left the room, running down the stairs. In his exuberance, he practically knocked the prim, proper Edith to the floor, but, easily, he caught her in his arms, and kept her from falling. Then, to her disbelief, he kissed her hard on the mouth. A kiss, to him, of brother to sister, but to Edith a kiss such as she’d never had from a man.

  Talis continued his run down the stairs, making one leap to hit the bottom of a tapestry hanging above the stairwell, then running out the door.

  On the stairs, Edith’s sisters Dorothy and Joanna were open-mouthed in their astonishment at the way Edith was staring after Talis. Edith considered herself above any man. According to her, the reason she was twenty-nine years old and not married was that she had never found a man to her liking. But now, judging by the look on her face, she certainly did like Talis!

  When Joanna gave way to a giggle, Edith pulled herself to her full height and started up the stairs, trying her best to regain her dignity. But at the top of the stairs, she could not keep herself from looking out the window to see that glorious creature run across the courtyard.

  Turning back, she tried to keep her face straight. “Come, there is work to do.”

  “Yes, Edith,” Joanna said, and behind her back, she exuberantly kissed the back of her hand, then mocked Edith’s straitlaced walk down the corridor.

  “Of course he should marry your daughter,” Alida said to her husband. It took all her willpower to remain calm. She must not allow her husband to see that her heart was pounding in her throat, that her breath was wanting to come rapid and harsh.

  “My son,” John said sternly, his brows knitted together, emphasizing the point that Talis was his.

  Alida knew that she had to tread carefully, but she also knew that she could not be a coward. If ever she had to think quickly, this was the time. It did not matter about her, but her children’s future depended upon what she did in the next few minutes. Her first instinct was to laugh at her husband. What an old fool he was to think he could