Liana sat back down. “True,” she said, and picked up her wine goblet again. “He said, in front of his men, that he couldn’t bear my ugliness.”
Iolanthe stared at the blonde woman. So, she thought, it wasn’t the money. It was that Rogan had insulted his wife’s looks. Rogan and Severn were such divine-looking men that it was easy to see how a woman could feel intimidated by them. Every morning Io studied her own reflection in the mirror and, at her age, she was teaching herself to smile without crinkling her eyes. She lived in terror of the day when Severn no longer believed her to be beautiful. She couldn’t imagine how she’d feel if Severn said that he wanted her husband’s money and not her person.
“I see,” Io said at last.
“Yes,” Liana said. “And I see, too. I thought I could make him love me. I thought I could make myself indispensable to him, but he never wanted me. Nor did anyone else want me here. It’s ironic. My stepmother tried to tell me this, but I wouldn’t listen. I thought I knew more than a woman who’d had two husbands. She was right. Even my maid Joice was right. Joice said men didn’t want wives. In my case not only my husband didn’t want me, but his brother didn’t, his mistresses, his men—no one wanted me except the Lady, and now even her door is locked against me.”
Iolanthe listened to this speech of self-pity and understood it very well. As long as a woman felt desirable, she could feel confident. She could set his bed, with him and his mistress in it, on fire; she could dare to make a wager that he would lose; she could tempt his wrath by countermanding his orders for the castle staff. But when a woman felt undesirable, much of her strength left her.
Io had no idea what to do. Never in all of time could she hope to get Rogan to go to Liana. Rogan was a stubborn man who had no idea what was good for him. He wouldn’t like thinking any woman had ever had any influence on him. “Who is the Lady?” Io asked, stalling for time while she thought about this problem.
At first Io barely listened to Liana’s explanation, but something in her words caught her attention. “She lives above the solar?”
“In a single room that is almost always locked. But she seems to sense when I’m troubled, for then the door is open. She has been my greatest friend since I arrived. She told me about Jeanne Howard. She told me that men do not fight battles over timid women—or over ugly women,” Liana added.
“Is she an older woman, quite pretty, with soft brown hair?”
“Yes. Who is she? I’ve meant to ask her, but every time I see her—” She broke off as she watched Iolanthe ring a little silver bell. A maid appeared, Io whispered something to her, and the maid disappeared.
Iolanthe stood. “Would you mind if we went to this room and met your Lady?”
“The room is locked. It has been since I…since I went to supper with my husband.”
“I have sent my maid to fetch the key. Shall we go?”
Liana’s lone appearance earlier had slowed movement in the courtyard, but when Io and Liana appeared together, everyone came to a halt and stood gaping at the two women. Iolanthe was a rare enough sight, but her with another woman was impossible to believe.
Liana ignored the staring people both inside and outside the castle and led Iolanthe to the locked door above the solar. “When she doesn’t want to be disturbed, she keeps the door locked. I think we should respect her privacy.”
Io didn’t say anything, but when her maid reappeared, a big key in hand, she inserted it into the lock.
“I don’t think—” Liana began, but broke off. The room, which had been the one clean place in the castle when she arrived, was bare. No, not bare, for she could see, under years of cobwebs and rodent droppings, the Lady’s furniture. There was the cushioned bench Liana had sat on. There was the Lady’s tapestry frame. The windows that had had sunlight streaming through them were broken, and a dead bird lay on the floor.
“I don’t understand,” Liana whispered. “Where is she?”
“Dead. Many years ago.”
Liana crossed herself even as she denied this. “Are you saying she’s a ghost? That’s not possible. I talked to her. She’s as real as you or I. She told me things, things other people didn’t know.” Her eyes widened.
“I’ve heard she does. I’ve never seen her, nor has Severn, and I don’t know if Rogan has or not, but several other people have. She seems to love helping people in need. Years ago a maid who was pregnant was about to throw herself into the moat when she heard the Lady, as you call her, singing and spinning. The Lady talked her out of suicide. Didn’t you wonder why no one lived in these rooms? Half the men refused even to go into the solar to fetch the birds, and no one would come up here.”
Liana was trying to take this in. “No one told me. No one so much as hinted.”
“I guess they thought your cleaning would do away with her. She never harms anyone. As ghosts go, she is benign.”
Liana walked through the thick dust on the floor to the tapestry frame. On it was an old, unfinished piece of work of a lady and a unicorn—what the Lady had been sewing when Liana had visited. Liana suddenly felt as if she’d lost a very dear friend. “Who is she? And why does she haunt the Peregrines?”
“She is Severn’s grandmother, Rogan and Zared’s too. She was Jane, the first wife of old Giles Peregrine. Their son was John, Severn’s father. After Jane died, Giles m
arried Bess Howard and it was her family who said Jane had never been legally married to Giles and therefore her son and his children were bastards. This castle and Bevan belonged to Jane’s family; she grew up here.”
“And so she comes back here to haunt.”
“Years after her death, she was in this room when her son John arrived home after the king declared him illegitimate. He locked the door on her and never unlocked it again. Only she unlocks it now. Some people say John was a fool, that his mother came to tell him something and he wouldn’t listen.”
“She probably wanted to tell him to stay away from the village girls,” Liana said bitterly.
“No,” Io said. “Everyone believed she wanted to tell him where the parish registers were.”