by Meg Cabot
“I did. An elder brother. He was my father’s heir. Anything he wanted, he got. Me, I was the younger son. I was expected to enter the church—”
Finnula’s bark of laughter was so explosive that Hugo’s mount laid back his ears and whickered questioningly. When the girl had calmed down sufficiently, Hugo continued. “Yes, amazing as that may sound to you, Finnula, my mother’s fondest wish was to see me a monk.”
Finnula, he realized, had been laughing so hard that she was now dashing tears from her eyes. “You!” she giggled. “A monk! Oh, God have mercy!”
“Amusing, isn’t it?” His mouth twisted sardonically, Hugo gripped Skinner’s reins in one white-knuckled hand. “Nevertheless, that was her intention. I begged her to reconsider, and my father, too, but they wouldn’t listen. A monk I was to be, and they wouldn’t fund any other endeavor, least of all my ambition to become a soldier.”
Finnula said, a little more warmly than she’d ever spoken to him before, Hugo thought, “Well, that’s wrong. If you wanted to be a soldier, they ought to have let you. After all, it was your life.”
“My sentiments exactly. So I appealed to my brother, who by that time had come of age, and asked him to take my part, and explain to our parents that I could not possibly take the vow. And do you know what he did?”
Finnula shook her head, a droplet of rain flying off the end of her nose.
“He hired a couple of footpads to sneak into my chamber late one night and spirit me away to a local monastery.”
Finnula gasped. “Nay, but that isn’t so!”
“’Twas so. When I overpowered the cads, they told me. I packed my few belongings and left for London that very night. And I haven’t returned home since.”
Finnula’s face was grave. “Your brother did you a grievous wrong, but it’s well that you leave the past behind and make peace with him now.”
“I’m not making peace with him,” Hugo said. “He’s dead.”
“Oh.”
“They’re all dead. My mother and brother fell to a fever years ago, and my father died just last year.”
Finnula said quietly, “So now you are alone.”
“Yes. And heir, despite my brother’s best efforts. So do not tell me that siblings are incapable of doing one another harm. Your sister is using you, and you are allowing her to do so.”
Finnula was staring down at her hands, upon which she’d pulled a pair of close-fitting leather gloves. She looked so miserable, so unhappy and cold, that Hugo felt sorry for having spoken to her so harshly.
“What happened to your sister’s dowry?” he asked, in what he hoped was a kindlier voice.
“She spent it,” Finnula said sorrowfully. “On gowns and trinkets. I suppose ’tis true that Robert does not watch her as closely as he ought.”
Brother Robert, Hugo thought, is a fool who might just join Reginald Laroche in the stockade when I return to the manor house.
“But,” Finnula said, looking up at him with eyes that were as large as the emerald she still wore between her breasts. “But whether or not she is using me, Mellana is my sister, and I’ve got to help her, if I can.” A simple shrug. “And I can. So I will.”
Hugo stared at her. She looked so small perched atop her spotted mare, engulfed in a cloak that was too large for her, her red hair plastered to the sides of her skull. It amazed him to think that such a tiny vessel was capable of containing the passion he’d sensed kissing her the night before, but it was there, all right, and suddenly he knew he’d be damned before he’d let some other man tap it.
“I don’t see why you can’t continue holding me hostage,” he said, his voice carefully toneless. “I think I made a very fine prisoner.”
She glanced over at him, and the smile she flashed was so sunny, yet so brief, that it dazzled him.
“Aye,” she said, turning her eyes back to the road with a studied frown. “You had your moments.”
“I never tried to escape, did I? I could easily have overpowered you, and yet I restrained myself—”
“Most of the time,” she corrected him.
“And I don’t remember that you particularly minded the one time I did overpower you—”
Again the smile, not directed at him this time and accompanied by a blush. She said, with obvious reluctance, to her hands, “I suppose, since you won’t leave me be…”
“My sense of chivalry won’t allow it,” he said quickly. “I will see you to your very door.”
She winced as though that was something she’d been afraid of. “Well.” She sighed. “I suppose that since we are traveling in the same direction—”
“Caterbury is but a half day’s ride beyond Stephensgate,” he pointed out.
“I suppose it only makes sense—”
“And ’twill save you a good deal of time. Not to mention that fact that if you were to disrobe in this weather, in order to catch yourself another hostage, you might very well catch a cold—”
“All right.” She laughed. “I’ll keep you as my prisoner, then. But you must promise not to be so…irritating…this time.”
“I never meant to be irritating at all,” he said, with a sly grin. He knew what she meant by irritating. “I was only being myself.”
She sighed heartily. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“If it makes you feel better, you can bind my wrists,” Hugo offered, holding up both his hands. “Only then I won’t be able to guide Skinner, so you’ll have to ride with me…”
“No.” Finnula laughed. “That won’t be necessary, I’m sure.”
Hugo shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him one way or another, but he could not help feeling self-satisfied with the turn of events. It had taken him nearly two hours, but he’d finally goaded her out of her anger with him. A woman who could stay angry at a man for no longer than two hours was a rare find indeed. He deliberated over the meaning of this discovery.
Something was very wrong. Normally, if a woman expressed no interest in him—and that, though rare, had occurred once or twice in Hugo’s past—he promptly lost all interest in her as well. But this girl, with the big gray eyes and the very sharp knife, intrigued him as much as she frustrated him. He’d had a perfect opportunity to leave her, and yet he’d stayed. Why had the thought of her taking some other man prisoner angered him so irrationally? He wasn’t normally a jealous man—he’d shared women in the past, happily. Why did the thought of sharing this one annoy him so much, when she wasn’t even his to begin with?
He had a lot of time to mull over these topics, since the mud on the road was deep, and the rain in their faces pelting at times. The way was slow, and even Finnula, determined as she was to be at Dorchester by sundown, began to look longingly at the smoke curling from the chimneys of the small farms they passed.
It wasn’t until they were riding past a field that was undergoing tilling by an ox-pulled plow that a voice broke through the steady hissing of the rain, and Finnula jerked on her mount’s reins and looked about, startled.
“Your Ladyship!”
Finnula, Hugo saw, sat so stiffly in the saddle, her eyes so wide, that she looked a statue. He turned his head and saw that the man operating the plow and his ox-crier were hurrying toward them through the thick mud, the man waving his hat.
“Your Ladyship!”
The rough-shod farmer stumbled upon the road before them, and, clutching the rim of his hat to his chest, peered up at Finnula. He was a young man, Hugo saw, no more than twenty, and though his garments were soiled—no small miracle for farming in this weather—they were of good quality, neither threadbare nor much patched.
“I thought ’twas you, m’lady,” the farmer cried, giving a stunned-looking Finnula a toothy grin. “I said to Evan ’ere, Evan, I says, Like as not that’s t’ Lady Finnula, the Fair Finn, passin’ by—”
Finnula’s astonishment had ebbed enough for her to smile graciously at the farmer and his assistant, who could not seem to lift his head, he was so cowed with embarrassment.
“Good day to you, Matthew Fairchild,” Finnula said, with a graciousness she’d never exhibited toward Hugo. “And to you, too, Evan. ’Tis a sorry day for plowing.”
“And for ridin’,” Farmer Fairchild pointed out, laying hold of Violet’s bridle like a man who knew he might. Hugo glared. “I says to Evan, I says, If’n that’s t’ Lady Finnula passin’ by, my Mavis’d ’ave me ’ead if’n I don’t invite ’er inside for a bite—”
Though the man’s rough dialect had Hugo’s head spinning, Finnula seemed to understand it perfectly. She had already begun shaking her head before the invitation—for that’s what it seemed to be—was fully out of the peasant’s mouth. “Oh, Matthew, ’tis kind indeed for you to ask, but I must be in Dorchester by sunset—”
“What sun?” chuckled Matthew. “You’ll make it in plenty o’ time. Come inside, warm yourselves, ’ave a cuppa—”
“A cuppa?” Hugo inquired, since this sounded promising.
“Aye, a cuppa my Mavis’s cider. My Mavis brews t’ best. An’ like I said, she won’t take kindly to knowin’ you passed an’ didna stop to see the wee one—”
Finnula, drenched to the skin, looked sadly at the road before them, and Hugo could almost see her making the swift mental calculations necessary to determine how long they could stay and how soon they’d have to take their leave. Then she sighed, though her smile was bright.
“Thank you, Matthew,” she said. “Sir Hugh and I would be honored to join you and Mavis.”
Matthew chuckled happily and, hitting Evan lightly in the head with his cap, cried, “Run an’ tell your mistress to expect company, an’ be sure an’ tell ’er it’s Lady Finnula. I’ll just bring in Goliath. You know the way, surely, m’lady?”
“I know the way,” Finnula said, with a smile, and she turned Violet around with a gentle tug on the reins, and headed toward a dirt track leading off the main road that seemed to be made up of nothing but mud.
Hugo followed on Skinner, a crooked grin twisting his mouth. “Your Ladyship?” he couldn’t help calling. “Oh, Your Ladyship, I’m sorry to trouble you, but is there something you haven’t been telling me?”
Finnula’s lips, he saw, when Skinner caught up with the girl’s mare, were set grimly. “Mind your own business, sir,” she suggested, with a sneer.
Hugo was unruffled by her disdain. “Had I known I was traveling with a noble personage, I’d have insisted upon your putting me up in an inn, instead of that hayrack—”
“They use the title as a courtesy,” she said, with a sigh, keeping her eyes on the mud, through which Violet picked her way daintily. “I’ve asked them not to, but they persist. ’Tis really quite silly. Matthew is very sweet, though—”
“This Matthew seems to know you quite well,” Hugo said, and he was amazed at the testiness in his voice. “Was he ever one of your prisoners?”
Finnula glared at him, the anger in her gaze hot enough to warm his hands by. “I told you, you’re the only man I ever—”
“And so what’s this Matthew to you? An ardent suitor, from the looks of it.” His tone was sharp, and Finnula raised her eyebrows at him. Cursing to himself—why could he not act disinterested where it concerned this girl?—he tempered the accusation by adding, ungraciously, “If you don’t mind my asking, that is.”
Finnula shook her head. “For a knight, you have a rather active imagination. Matthew is a freeman, a farmer who works that plot of land you saw by the road. Last year, he fell in love with the daughter of one the Earl of Stephensgate’s serfs, Mavis Poole. When he asked for her hand, Laroche demanded that a ridiculously high tallage be paid before he would release her from the earl’s service—”
“Let me guess the rest,” Hugo said, holding up a hand. “You scraped the necessary amount together by selling off meat poached from the earl’s demesnes.”
Finnula looked haughtily away. “I don’t know what you mean,” she sniffed.
“Ha!” Hugo snorted, in disgust. “No wonder they m’lady you. You’ve done more for them than any chatelaine Stephensgate Manor’s ever seen…”
Finnula ignored him. “Mavis gave birth to her first child not too long ago. ’Twould have been rude to have passed by without pausing to look at it.”
Hugo shook his head. Was there no end to this girl’s talents? She reminded Hugo of the stories his childhood nurse had told him of the legendary outlaw Robin of Loxley. Only this particular criminal was not only a perfect shot, a provider to the poor, but also apparently a matchmaker. And all encased in that delectably slender frame and topped by that amazing mass of auburn hair.
Hugo was surprised when the Fairchild home appeared before them. Instead of the rough hovel he’d expected, he saw a cheerful cottage with a thatched roof and swept yard, circled on three sides by tall pine trees. Smoke curled promisingly from the chimney, and the strong odor of baking bread sent Hugo’s stomach churning in anticipation. It had been a long time since the rabbit soup, and he was ravenous.
Matthew Fairchild, freeman, appeared to be doing quite well for himself. He even had a structure other than his own home in which to keep his livestock, a rarity in farming communities. Usually a farmer and his family shared the same floor as their pigs and sheep.
Finnula dismounted, and led Hugo toward the small barn, through the muck into which the yard had turned. Once in the meager shelter provided by the enclosure, they rubbed down their mounts in companionable silence, filling the feed trough and making sure the horses had fresh water to drink. It wasn’t until their mounts were comfortable that Finnula took her dripping cloak from her shoulders and shook it, sending a cascade of rainwater in Hugo’s direction.
Throwing up an arm to ward off the unexpected shower, Hugo barked, “See here!” When Finnula smirked at him, he lowered his arm and glared at her. “You did that apurpose.”
“I?” Finnula’s gray eyes widened in feigned innocence. “You are my prisoner, remember? I can treat you however I see fit. And you looked to me like a man in need of a dunking—”
“I’ll show you a dunking,” Hugo declared, and he lunged for her—only she was too quick for him. Ducking, Finnula ran laughing through the rain to the cottage’s front door, where she stood hugging her arms to her chest and grinning at his lumbering attempt to follow her, his large feet at odds with the sucking mud of the yard.
Perhaps hearing all the ruckus outside her door, the matron of the house flung open the portal and let out a glad cry. “Lady Finnula!”
Mavis Fairchild was an apple-cheeked woman no older than Finnula herself, with dark hair and eyes and a blissful expression. She flung her plump arms around a startled-looking Finnula and hugged her soundly.
“Oh, ’tis a delight to see you, m’lady, and on such a gray an’ barren day. Oh, but you’re wet through, m’lady. Come in, you must come in, and get yourself dry—”
Spotting Hugo loping toward her doorway, Mistress Fairchild paused, her expression revealing all too clearly how unrespectable Hugo looked, with his wild hair and beard and mud-spattered cloak and boots.
“Mistress Fairchild,” Finnula said, with a smirk Hugo did not miss. “This is Sir Hugh Fitzwilliam, of Caterbury. He is lately returned from being imprisoned in Acre.”
Mavis Fairchild’s face brightened. “Ah! A knight returned from the ’Oly Land! Well, that explains it.”
Hugo stood in the rain, glaring at the two women who gazed pityingly at him from the dry doorstep. Mavis Fairchild bit her lower lip and said, “Well, if you cleaned ’im up a bit, ’e might not be so bad, m’lady.”
Finnula looked dubious. “I suppose so.”
“I mean, ’e’s terrible large, but wi’ a ’aircut, an’ rid o’ those awful clothes an’ that beard, ’e might look presentable, anyway.”
Finnula wrinkled her nose. “You are a generous woman, Mavis.”
Mistress Fairchild whispered, loud enough for her words to be perfectly audible to Hugo, “Is ’e simple, that ’e just stands there in t’ pourin
’ rain like that?”
Finnula sighed. “I’m afraid so.”
Hugo took umbrage at that. Throwing back his broad shoulders, he cleared his throat. “Mistress Fairchild,” he said, in his most impressive voice, “I am neither simple nor uncouth. Might I enter your abode and warm myself by your fire, as your husband suggested I may?”
Mavis Fairchild’s eyes went round as eggs. “Of course, sir.” She stood aside, and a giggling Finnula slipped past her into the cottage.
Hugo followed, nodding politely to his hostess as he passed her. He had to duck his head to enter the cottage, but when he straightened, he saw that the home was neat and more prosperous than he’d expected. The Fairchilds had a wooden floor, a rarity in Shropshire, and their cottage was divided into two small rooms, the common living space in which Hugo stood, and what was probably a bedroom beyond it. They even possessed a few sticks of furniture, including a solid table, upon which cooled several loaves of bread.
The fire on the hearth was a large and cheerful one, and Finnula had gone to it at once, spreading her wet cloak before it and, removing her damp gloves, warming her hands before the leaping flames. There didn’t appear to be much hope for the rest of her; her leather braies were damp, and gave off the smell only wet leather created, and her white lawn shirt clung moistly to her skin.
The sight was quite appetizing, actually, and as Hugo joined her at the fire, warming his own hands, he couldn’t help stealing glances at her. Traveling with a female companion was proving to be far more interesting than Hugo would have ever thought.
“Here, you must be chilled to t’ bone.” Mavis Fairchild pressed steaming tankards into their hands, and when Hugo brought his to his lips, he found the promised hard cider, hot and spiced with cloves. He sucked at the liquid greedily, and felt it warming his insides at once.
Finnula was a little better mannered. She thanked the housewife before tasting the mulled drink, and inquired after the health of the baby. This brought a stream of excited jabber from the plump Mistress Fairchild that Hugo could hardly follow, though when she bent over a rough wooden cradle he hadn’t previously noticed off to one side of the hearth, he assumed she was waxing poetic about her progeny. A glance told him that the child in question was large and healthy, all anyone could ask for of an heir, and he lost interest immediately and stared instead at his fair captor.
