No Sweeter Heaven: The Pascal Trilogy - Book 2 Read Free Page B

abbey to deal with without serious repercussions.
    Scandal threatened if the right thing was not done. It mattered not why the woman had been on the wall, nor that she had accidentally fallen. Since she believed Pascal had been about to defile het, then the right thing would have to be done regardless.
    Pascal’s blood ran cold when he contemplated what interpretation the abbot might put on “the right thing.” He closed his eyes and prayed in earnest.
    “Oh, Coffey, I’ve gone and done it now,” Lily wailed, falling into the arms of her faithful old companion, who had been waiting at the inn for Lily’s return as calmly as she could manage, her anxiety turning to panic as the hours had gone by with no sign of the girl. Now here Lily finally was, but badly disheveled, with streaks of dirt on her face and hands. Coffey shivered with a sense of foreboding.
    “What have you done, pet?” she asked, patting Lily’s back uncertainly. “Did you not find your monk, then?”
    “It’s far worse than that—there was a dreadful man who I thought could help me, and then when I fell, he attempted to—oh, Coffey … he attempted to ravish me!” Lily burst into tears, caused more by hunger and exhaustion than anything else.
    “No!” Coffey gasped, deeply shocked. “He didn’t take … take advantage, did he?”
    “No, he didn’t, because two monks arrived just in time, but I cannot think what might have happened if they hadn’t. I knew he was a rake, just by looking at his face, but then I never thought to fall.”
    “No, of course you didn’t,” Coffey said soothingly.
    “It was only because I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and my head spun.”
    “Oh, dear heaven, child! How dreadful for you!”
    Lily nodded in vigorous agreement. “It was. I never meant to get so close to him, I promise, for I know what you’ve always said about the wickedness of men, but I was at least ten or fifteen feet above his head, so what could he have done? And anyway, he was inside a monastery, for heaven’s sake, so being ravished was the very last thing I expected!”
    Miss Mary Matilda McCofferty, nurse to Lily from the time Lily had been an infant, and a good Scots Catholic, released her charge suddenly and crossed herself in horror. “You didn’t actually fall into the monastery, Lily? You don’t mean to say you were climbing about on the abbey wall?”
    “Well … there really wasn’t any other way to find my monk except to go looking for him from above.”
    Coffey paled. The deep sockets of her eyes seemed to have sunk even further, but her little button eyes blazed black against her white skin. “You are telling me that a monk tried to ravish you? And you expect me to believe you? A Benedictine monk, my girl, a man of God? Surely you must have misunderstood?”
    “But he wasn’t a monk,” Lily said, desperate to have someone believe her after the terrible experience she had just been through. “He was only a layman, a gardener who works for the abbey. Oh, Coffey, don’t be cross—I know I ought not to have been on the wall to begin with, and I don’t know exactly why I was, but it was all for Jean-Jacques, and anyway, you agreed to come along.”
    Coffey sat down on the one chair in the sparsely furnished bedchamber and folded her hands tightly together in her lap. “I agreed to come with you, my lady, because I would not see you chasing off across the French countryside on your own. Now look at what has happened. What did I tell you when you came up with this scheme of yours?”
    Lily swallowed. “It’s worse than you think. The abbot is coming to see me. He knows Papa, of course, for I made the terrible mistake of blurting Papa’s name out before I thought of the consequences…”
    Coffey passed a hand over her eyes and whispered a quick prayer to the Blessed Mother for help.
    “I know,” Lily said miserably, knowing exactly what her old nurse must be thinking. “Papa is bound to be told everything. I