Inheritance （The Lost Bride Trilogy, #1）
Nora Roberts
For Benita
because I still hear your wonderful laugh
PART ONE
Betrayal
He was her man, but he done her wrong.
—“Frankie and Johnny”
Prologue
1806
I am a bride. I am a wife.
It thrills me to know my life began today, as today I am no longer Astrid Grandville.
I am Mrs. Collin Poole.
When we met, barely a year ago, I loved. I loved not just his handsome face, his fine figure, for his twin, Connor, has the same. I loved the smile in his deep green eyes, the tenor of his voice, the dogged intelligence of his mind.
I loved his fairness, his knowledge of the world, his quick laugh, his dedication to his family and the business they built.
He is a shipbuilder, my husband, as was his father before him. I knew Arthur Poole only briefly, but grieved for him when a fall from his horse took him from this world.
Now the brothers man the wheel of the business their father established.
But not today. Today is a holiday for all in Poole’s Bay, and in the home his father built there is music and dancing, food and wine, love and laughter.
On this wild cliff above the wide sea where Arthur built his sturdy stone castle, we make our home from this day, my beloved and I.
We will fill our home with children, children born of love. Perhaps we will create that first spark of light tonight. Our wedding night.
Arabelle, my dearest friend, a friend who will be a sister by law when she and Connor marry in the autumn, asked if I was nervous as I come—as she will in turn—to the marriage bed a maid.
No. Oh no, I am eager, eager to know what there is beyond the kisses that so heat my blood, so rouse my passions.
With my body I thee worship. I will keep my vows, one and all.
I look in the glass now in what will be our bedchamber, husband and wife, and see a woman so different from the girl she was.
I see the hair Collin calls sunlit silk worn up under a crown of roses with a short veil floating behind as my mother requested it. I see the white dress I worried so over. It floats as well, as I wanted, from the silk ribbon at its high waist.
I know I am not a beauty, whatever Collin tells me. But I am pleasing, especially today when the girl becomes a woman, and the bride becomes a wife.
I see the sparkle of the ring he gave me when he asked for my hand. When he said, I love you with all of my heart. My darling Astrid, I will never love another, but love you through all of my life, and love you even after death takes me.
Now that sparkle, that promise, that pledge is on my right hand, and the gold band, the circle that never ends, is on my left.
The woman I am becoming will love him throughout her life, and even after death takes her.
Now I must go back after this brief moment of quiet contemplation. Back to the music, the dancing, the celebration Collin insisted on to mark this day.
I will dance with my husband. I will embrace his family as my own, for so they are. As the pipers play, I will celebrate this first day of the long and happy life we will make together.
Or so I believed.
I turn to greet her as she comes into the room. I think she looks familiar, but before I can speak, she rushes toward me. I see the knife for an instant before she plunges it into me.
Oh, the pain! I will never forget it. The shock of it as the blade slices into my flesh, once, twice. And again, again.
I stagger back, unable to scream, unable to speak when she tosses the knife at my feet.
“You will never have him,” she says. “Die a bride, and know he’ll come to me. He will come to me, or by your blood on my tongue, bride after bride will join you in death.”
To my horror, she licked my blood off her finger. As I fall, she takes my wedding ring.
And this act is somehow worse than the pain.
“A marriage isn’t a marriage until it is consummated. Only a bride, forever lost. Be damned to you, Astrid Grandville.”
She leaves me there, dying on the floor near the marriage bed I will never share with my beloved. But my ring, my wedding ring. How can I leave this world without it?
The bloodstain spreads over the white of my wedding dress as that desperate need pushes me to my feet. In agony, I stagger to the door. My hands, slick with my own blood, are barely able to open it.
But I must find Collin. I must have my ring. With this ring I pledge thee. My sight dims; every breath is torment.
Someone screams, but the sound comes from another world. A world I am leaving.
I see him, only him as all else fades—the music, the pretty gowns and waistcoats, the faces blurring, the shouts going quiet.