Castle of the Heart Read Free

turning her head to look
Selene full in the face. When she did, she met a pair of wide
emerald eyes, challenging and scornful, before the girl dropped
shadowed lids over their green fire. Isabel, taken aback, said
nothing, and Selene spoke first.
    ‘The Lady Aloise has told me of your
proposition, madame, that I should marry your son.” The voice was
surprisingly low-pitched to come out of so small a body, and it was
charged with an anger most unsuitable to this occasion. Isabel
noted that the girl had said “Lady Aloise,” not “my mother.”
    “You sound as though you do not like the
idea. But you must,” Isabel said. “You have been raised, as all
noble girls are, with the knowledge that one day you will be wed to
a man chosen for you by your parents, and that you must obey them.
I assure you, my son Thomas is young, handsome, kind-hearted, and
in good health. He has a great future before him.”
    Somewhere in the back of Isabel’s mind rose
the memory of her father saying something remarkably similar to her
before her own marriage to Sir Lionel. How disastrously wrong her
father had been. Isabel pushed that thought aside. This was
different; this was Thomas she was speaking of, and all the
information she had been able to garner about him indicated that
what she had just told Selene was true.
    Selene, though outwardly meek, apparently had
a spark of defiance in her. Those remarkable emerald eyes glared at
Isabel, and her low voice was husky with emotion when she spoke
again.
    “I do not wish to marry. I want to become a
nun.”
    “You would be wasted in a convent.” Isabel
shivered a little, not wholly from the damp draft coming through
the imperfectly fitted window beside her, for her own permanent
incarceration in a convent was too near a threat for Isabel’s
comfort. No, this girl would do as Isabel wished. Selene, and
therefore Isabel, would remain outside conventual walls. “You are
beautiful, and I suspect you are intelligent,” Isabel added. “You
would be much admired at the English court.”
    “Beauty is a snare,” Selene replied loftily.
“And a royal court is a place of deadly temptation to vanity and
worldly ambition.”
    “Ah, yes, I forgot for a moment that Aloise
foolishly sent you to a convent for schooling.” Isabel had not
forgotten a single piece of the information she had obtained about
Selene before choosing her for Thomas’s wife, but she wanted to
hear what the girl would say next.
    “I am not my mother’s favorite child,” Selene
said, her low voice cold with self-control. “I know it, and it
matters not at all to me. She was glad to be rid of me, and I happy
to leave her domain, where I have never been welcome or at ease. A
convent is the proper place for me, madame. I beg you, do not
pursue this plan of marriage that you and my mother have
concocted.”
    Isabel digested this a moment. Then she tried
another approach. “I suppose you have learned to read and write
while in the convent? Well, so can Thomas. He has been trained in
an abbey. You two will have much to talk about.”
    “I do not expect that I will ever speak to
your son at all, madame, for I do not intend to marry him – or
anyone.” Selene’s voice held a note of desperation. She seemed to
have realized that her plea had been dismissed by Isabel and would
probably be equally disregarded by those others who were planning
her life’s course.
    “Sit down, Selene.” Isabel waved a hand
toward the window seat opposite her own place and tried not to
laugh at this too-serious girl. Selene obeyed her, cloaking herself
once more in the air of meekness with which she hid her frightened,
yet still defiant, spirit. Isabel sat appraising her future
daughter-in-law, amused and pleased with her. Selene would serve
her purposes well.
    “The marriage is not yet arranged,” Selene
said at last, apparently becoming impatient with the silence which
Isabel had deliberately let go on and on. “When I see my father
again,