The Rose Of Lorraine Part 24

"...it is better to marry than to burn."

1 CORINTHIANS, 7;9. -23.

John Chandos stepped out from behind the monolith. Startled, Bella jumped and caught her throat. She wasn't able to stop her scream, but followed that outburst with, "Chandos, you scared me half to death!"

He didn't yield an inch of ground, saying, "Answer me. What do you here?"

Since she was well and truly found out there was no point not stating the obvious. Bella did nothing to mask the bitterness coating her voice. "I am looking for the Well of Souls."

"The Well of Souls?" he repeated, c.o.c.king his head to the side. His eyes narrowed intensely. "Who

struck you?"

Her heart still hammered from the fright he'd given her. Talking stones, sweet Mother Macree, what was her fetid brain going to imagine next? Bella thought as she backed away from him. "What makes you think anyone struck me?"

"How else do you explain a swollen lip and a goodly bruise on your cheek?" "Easy," said Bella. "I fell." Sir John's hand rose, as if to touch her face. Bella twitched away from any touch at all. She remembered that when she'd done that on the crowded allure the day the king had come, Sir John had reacted badly. He didn't like public displays of rejection. They were private now. Yet, the furrow between his black brows told her he didn't like her avoidance of his touch at any time.

"If you don't mind, Sir John. I'm busy right now."

Bella s.n.a.t.c.hed up her skirts and stalked around him, by-pa.s.sing the stele and climbing up a mound of

freshly packed dirt. Her weight caused the topmost crust to break and mud oozed out from under her shoes.

"Is this the well? You filled it in, didn't you? This is freshly laid dirt, isn't it?"

Bella watched John's hand make a slow descent back to his side. His sleeveless jerkin bore evidence that he'd been in on the major kills of the hunt, but his hands and arms were clean. His hair was wet, finger combed away from his face.

In answer to her question, John nodded. He stretched his right arm out, flattening his palm on the stele.

"You're standing on it."

"No!" Bella looked down at her feet, at the black earth that squished with water when it was pressed.

She turned back to Chandos. "How could you? I told you how I got here. How am I supposed to get back where I belong? I want to go home!"

"Fine!" He jerked his hand away from the upright stone and straightened, waving that arm at the sky.

"Fly away. Go! Cast your spell and begone. No one's stopping you from doing your wicked magic."

"My wicked magic!" Bella choked. "I don't know any magic, d.a.m.n you. Why did you have to mess with it? You don't need me here. You'll be perfectly happy to have a dead wife. I'm ent.i.tled to a life, too."

"That's not true." Chandos shook his head. "You brought the dog back to life. Henri told me the angels had come for him, but you wouldn't let him go. You gave him your breath and filled him with the will to breathe again. What are you?"

Bella took her fists off her hips to fold her arms tightly together under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "I'm just an ordinary woman of the Twentieth Century, Chandos. I'm not a witch. I'm not magical. I can't cast any spells. I can read and I can write and I can cook and I can love with all my heart.

"But I don't hurt children. And until the day I met you, I've never deliberately hurt anyone in my life. Not like you and your people have hurt me. I am not Isabella Chandos. You ought to know that by now. How can you have made love to me and not admit the truth? I am not the cold-blooded, hateful, selfish woman you married."

Bella picked her way off the muddy mound. She turned back to Chandos and pointed at the soggy earth between them.

"Your Bella is on the other side of that pit. Where ever it goes...to the future...to the past...to Heaven, purgatory or h.e.l.l, I don't know the answer to that. Had you left my body where you found it none of this would have happened. I died June the twelth, nineteen-hundred-ninty-five. Your touch gave me the will to live again. I know that and you must know it, too. How can you be so cold, so callus as to want to divorce me?"

Black water seeped from the soil.

Sir John lurched forward on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, then caught himself before stepping on the cursed well. He came around it instead, his dark brow furrowed. "Why do you ask that?"

This time the tone of his question demanded an answer and Bella was certainly of a mind to tell him. "I went in your room for the first time, today. By the way, the window is lovely. Your Bible opens automatically to St. Matthew, chapter five."

She tossed her head, shaking back her hair, frustrated.

"Why did you put brackets around verse 31 and 32? Why have you underlined 'Whoever puts away his wife, let him give her a written notice of dismissal?' In the future where I come from that smacks of divorce."

"It is also called divorce here," John replied.

"Answer my questions! Do you plan to lock me away in some convent--as a madwoman--and unenc.u.mber yourself?"

This time it was Chandos who folded his arms across his chest. His feet were firmly planted on stable earth. He looked about as moveable as the stele thrusting skyward at his back. "I take it you have availed yourself of Robin's skills as a reader."

"Robin's skills?" Bella replied testily. There was no point arguing she could read when he clearly thought that was impossible, too. "Look, just answer me, please? It's important that I know your intentions."

"Why?"

That was spoken so softly Bella really didn't hear it said, and would have missed it entirely if she hadn't seen the way his lips moved. Oddly the word why looked just like a kiss the way he said it. Don't you dare start reacting to him, she warned her libido.

"Why?" Bella reacted instead to the question. She gulped in a deep breath, concluding on the spot it was time for truth or consequences. "Because John, it's like this. You've got a very lovely castle over there...and to tell you the truth, you've got three really nice kids. I could love each one of you at the drop of a hat. It wouldn't take much more cosseting by your army of servants to turn me into a complete hedonist, but that doesn't fill up the emptiness inside me. I've got to know where I stand. Or else maybe I can go back...to my own world. Things weren't working out for me there like they should have, but I have family, people that love me, friends that enjoy my company. I could make a life for myself teaching school."

Sir John said nothing. Beneath the droop of black handlebars, the corners of his mouth twitched...such a tempting mouth, too. Bella frowned, fearing the curl of s.e.xual reaction igniting like a fire inside her more than she feared an incipient outburst of laughter.

No man had the right to be so d.a.m.ned beautiful. His tanned bare arms looked like polished oak. She tried again to stay on course with reason and logic.

"Sir John, I am not normally haunted by vacillating moods and violent tempers. I have always been a peaceful sort of soul, given to much introspection. My greatest fault, so I've been told, was that I was a bit of a bookworm. I guess that means I live in a dizzy sort of perfect world of my own making. I would rather compromise than argue. If you give me a fair chance, I could be a good mother to your children and I could be a good wife to you."

The flute in his brow smoothed. She heard him exhale audibly, saying with resigned exasperation, "Bella, you are their mother."

"You still haven't answered my question. Are you looking for some way to get rid of me?"

"And you have not answered mine. Who struck you?" Sir John repeated.

"Well, G.o.dd.a.m.nit, here we are talking apples and oranges again!" Bella crisply vented her own exasperation. "I told you--I fell!"

"Now, woman, do you tempt me to violence. Dare you tell me that the age you come from has no concept of simple virtue and honor? Had you no father to train you in the way of truth?"

"Of course I did," Bella stiffened.

"Then why do you lie to me? You did not fall. A hundred witnesses have told me what happened in the castle ward. But you, Isabella Saint Pierre from the year nineteen ninety-five stand on holy ground and tell me lies. And with the same breath you ask, nay, you demand I believe the impossible. You cannot have it both ways, woman."

Bella tucked in her chin. "I don't want to talk about that," she admitted.

"I see." John stepped back to more solid ground. He forced his gaze to leave Bella's downturned face and glared at the filled in hole in the earth. "So. Here is the well. I ordered it filled. But as you can see as easily as I, the earth does what it will do in this haunted place. Leave me. Go back to this world you say you came from. Go to these other people who can give you a better life. I'll not stand in your way or stop you."

Bella scowled, the muscles of her face tightening. She felt on the verge of tears. She believed he was telling her the truth. That this eerie place was the Well of Souls. She shook her head. "I don't know how to go back."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I mean, well. It was weird. I wasn't here inside the priory." Bella turned to Offham Hill and pointed at the hollow of land below it. "I was over there where Simon de Montfort captured King Henry. Ari and I were arguing. He'd just told me he wanted a divorce. I mean, it was final. I knew we were at the end."

She shook her head and tears spilled over the edges of her eyes. She quickly wiped them away. "There was a storm coming...from the south...it was still far away, but we could see the lightning and heard the thunder...over there."

Bella raised her hand and pointed toward the channel.

She swung back, looking at the hollow beyond the priory's crumbled walls. "I heard voices. Iain called to me, cried out from the grave, 'Momma, where are you?' and I heard a command, 'Bella, come to me.' Then the earth ripped apart...forming a hole and I was tettering on the edge of it. Ari thought it was funny and laughed. All I could hear was the wind, my own scream and his laughter following me. It was evil...cold blooded and evil. I think he wanted to kill me."

She looked up from her reverie and saw pain deepening the brackets surrounding John de Chandos' mouth.

"Oh, John, I'm sorry." Bella stumbled to him, embracing him. "I don't mean to hurt you. Maybe I am crazy. That's what you're stuck with--a mad wife. There's no way for me to go back there. There's nothing there anymore. Iain was all I had and he's dead."

John laid his hand on the back of her head and tilted her face toward his. "Who is Iain?"

"My son. He died four years ago. An accident. Remember those cars I told you about? Iain got run over by one. He was killed instantly."

"Why couldn't you have saved him...like you did Henri, today?"

"It was worse, much worse. Iain's chest was crushed. His ribs...his heart. The damage was too severe. I never got to tell him good-bye." Tears welled in Bella's eyes.

His hand hovered near her cheek and his eyes darkened, but she leaned her face into the cup of his hand wanting to comfort him. She dashed the tears away then laid her hand over his and put a kiss in his callused palm.

"I'm sorry I'm so foolish. I'm going to cry. I can't stop myself."

When had what he felt become so important to her? She lurched away, stumbling past the stele to evade

his touch. She came up against a stonewall that was impossible to climb in a dress. Bella jerked around, discovering Chandos had followed her. She hastily dashed more tears from her eyes.

"Just believe me when I tell you it wasn't the same thing. Anyone could have saved Henri. It's common

sense to know to help a drowning person breathe again." "It has never been done that I know of. It is not possible." Chandos had never been more gravely serious.

Bella flattened her back against the rock wall. "Did you not grieve for this Iain of yours?"

"Oh, yes. That's all I've done for years."

"But you still carry the sorrow in you. You never let it go."

"Well, when you only have one child...it's very hard to let go. Geoffrey looks very much like Iain...I mean so much that when I first saw Geoffrey...I thought he was Iain."

"If that is true, Bella, why are you running away?"

"I beg your pardon," Bella said stiffly. He was so close she recognized each scent that clung to him...a foreign erotic mixture of wood smoke, blood, leather, and manly sweat. It was earthy--crazily appealing--pure, so unlike any man's scent of the Twentieth Century. She sought some frantic means to turn her response to that off.

"Look, let's get this straight, okay? I'm not running away. I'm running to where I belong. I don't want to stay here where the next thing that probably will happen is I'll be accused of pulling some deadly Lucrezia Borgia ploy."

Sir John flattened both his palms against the rocks on either side of Bella's shoulders, granting her the small s.p.a.ce afforded by the stretch of his arms, but penning her just the same. "Am I supposed to know what a Lucrezia Borgia is? Why do you lie to me? Who hit you?"

Bella blinked. "I don't want to answer that. Look, can't you figure it out? It's my fault. I struck the first blow. Just like I hit you, well not like that. I punched you with my fist and you deserved it. I slapped Sir...well, he deserved it. Can't we just forget the whole d.a.m.n thing ever happened?"

"We could." He brought his right hand off the rock, brus.h.i.+ng Bella's single braid from her shoulder and turned back the edge of her surcoat below her collar bone. "There is always hope that peace can be instilled where there has been war. Have you other injuries?"

"I most certainly do not!" Bella exclaimed righteously, batting away his hand. "Are you certain?" Undaunted by her denial, he continued to examine her in his proprietorial way. "As certain as I need to be. Stop trying to look inside my dress. That hasn't got anything to do with the here and now."

"Oh, doesn't it? What shall we do, Bella? Stand on the spot where King Henry surrendered his sword to Simon de Montfort? Wait for the next storm? It doesn't look like there will be rain this eve."

"No, it doesn't," Bella had to grudgingly admit that as she jerked her shoulder out of his grip and righted her neckline.

"Your words confuse me and cause many questions, Bella. Am I going to have to come here looking for you everytime it rains? Will you run away everytime something happens that displeases you? Is this how you resolve all your troubles, by refusing to face them?"

"No, of course not. There do just happen to be some things that you can't do anything about. I don't go looking for confrontations all the time. I tell you I am a peacemaker by nature."

"I would not be able to testify to that, my lady. You have been at odds with me since the day we met," Sir John said with grim authority. "Be that sixteen years ago or last week."

Bella jerked her head to the side, her chin almost touching her right shoulder, glaring at taut skin covering his arm. He was deliberately examining both of her palms. "Listen, Chandos, I don't have any other injuries, period!"

"Odd that you should say that when I can clearly see your hands are badly blistered...as if you have recently climbed down a heavy rope. Pray, do not tell me you escaped the castle in broad daylight by dropping down the wall from your tower on a rope and no one noticed?"

Bella clenched her hands into closed fists. "Do you think I'm an idiot?"

"Possibly," John mused. "Since you will not tell me how these injuries occurred I must continue with my own investigation."

"Don't," Bella pleaded.

"You have the power to stop me at any time by telling me the truth."