Call Down the Moon Read Free

suggestion that he pay a social call to the madwoman. “I am pleased to hear it. From what I understand, she gave little pleasure in her life in the outside world. It is good to know she is not creating problems here as well.”
    He rose and walked over to the elongated window behind Sister Agnes’s desk, gazing out over the manicured lawns. Everything looked perfectly normal.
    A frown creased his brow as his gaze wandered yet farther. It drifted up over the tops of the bare trees to the high walls that ran around the perimeter of the property, once built to keep the public out, but whose purpose now was to keep the demented in.
    “Lady Kincaid causes no trouble,” the nun agreed. “Her former life is now forgotten. We do not judge our patients for their prior behavior, Lord Hugo. Many of them had no control over their actions, and those who did … well, as I said, we do not judge. We only seek to support and to heal where God shows us that healing is possible.”
    Hugo only dimly heard her. A young woman had appeared out of thin air, walking directly past the window where he stood. She was dressed all in white, her uncovered hair as fair as corn silk in midsummer, falling down her back in a loose braid. The sun, on a lowering westward arc, caught her from the far side, backlighting her profile and casting a nimbus about her head. Hugo drew in a sharp breath between his teeth.
    The girl looked like a bloody angel straight out of a church frieze, complete with halo.
    He raised his hand and reached out to touch her and to determine if she was flesh and blood or just a product of his fevered imagination. His fingertips met only cool glass.
    The illogical disappointment that flooded through him made him feel like a fool. What had he expected? That his hand would magically pass through the windowpane? And yet he refused to lower it, pressing his palm against the glass.
    At that exact moment her step slowed and she glanced to her left, as if she had sensed not only his presence but his frustration. Her eyes met his full-on.
    Hugo wasn’t prepared for the piercing jolt that he felt, as if God had deliberately aimed a bolt of lightning at him for presuming to stare at one of His own. Hugo was mesmerized by the young woman’s astonishing eyes.
    Her eyes were light gray and as translucent as starlight—so translucent that he felt they had seen straight through him and out the other side, as if he were nothing more substantial or significant than a cloud.
    She held his gaze for the space of a few heartbeats, and then she calmly looked away and continued on her way. A moment later she disappeared from sight.
    Hugo blinked. And blinked again, his heart pounding furiously in his chest. He wanted to call after her, tell her to return, to explain herself to him. He’d never had any experience with angels—he didn’t even believe in their existence. So if she wasn’t an angel, then what was she?
    She wasn’t an ordinary woman, he was certain of that. He’d never been affected by a woman in this way, nor had he ever seen a face like hers before. It was so clear and tranquil, as if the cares of this world had never touched it. It was as if she didn’t exist in this world at all.
    As if she didn’t exist in this world at all…
    Hugo’s eyes widened in horror.
    How could he have been so stupid? She was one of them. He had been exactly right, but in the worst sort of way. She didn’t exist in this world in the least, but in some different world of her own making, the world that lunatics inhabited.
    An angel indeed, he thought cynically. Obviously the air in the asylum was contagious, for he’d clearly caught some form of dementia for even thinking such things, even if she did resemble something out of a blasted Byzantine fresco.
    It seemed a hell of a waste that Mother Nature had bestowed such bounties on a madwoman, but he supposed that couldn’t be helped.
    On the other hand, the tightening in his groin he most certainly