She leaned over the page. "Gigue."
Alex blinked. "Gigue? It says gigue?"
Nicki laughed, clearly recalling King William's advice to Alex on how to busy himself during his furlough. The sound was so sweet and silly and unrestrained that it touched off his own laughter.
"It makes a most mellifluous sound," Nicki intoned, in an uncanny imitation of Berte.
"I'm quite sure it does," Alex said, chuckling. "And I'm quite sure I haven't got the slightest interest in learning how to play it." Sobering, he said, "I'm sorry about all the idiotic things she said to you that day. All that blather about...men's work disrupting your vital humors."
She nodded, her own mirth subsiding. "Thank you, but I've learned to disregard most people's theories about..." She shrugged with contrived indifference. "It didn't bother me."
He fingered the end of her braid as it rested on the blanket. "You do want children, though."
Her voice, when she answered, was low and raw. "More than you can possibly imagine." She cleared her throat. "But it wasn't meant to be."
"But if you could—"
"'Tisn't possible. Milo..." She looked away deliberately. "He doesn't want me that way."
He doesn't want me that way. Not He can't. He won't. She was concealing Milo's inadequacy, a kindness that Alex found quite unexpected and moving.
"If I were your husband," Alex said softly, his hand closing around her braid, "I would have been eager to see my child grow in your belly."
"I thought you disliked children."
He shrugged noncommittally.
She watched his hand as it caressed her plaited hair. "Do you have many of your own?"
"Me?" He released the braid in surprise. "I've never been married."
Her arched eyebrow spoke more clearly than words. Most men who'd been with many women had many illegitimate children.
"The last thing in the world I want is for the women I bed to bear my bastards. There are...techniques," he said, heat rising in his face, "to prevent a woman from quickening."
"Those vile potions that expel babes from the womb?"
"Nay. I mean before. That is, during..."
"Ah, yes. Edith told me about them. A woman can wear against her skin the womb of a she-goat that's never conceived. Is that the sort of thing you're talking about?"
"Aye, well, not that precisely."
"She also told me about certain herbs a woman could wear in a bundle around her neck, or preparations she could put...inside the opening to her belly, that will keep the man's seed from curdling into a baby." Nicki laughed delightedly. "You're turning quite purple."
"Let's talk about something else."
"Nay." She sat cross-legged with the book in her lap and addressed him squarely. "I want to hear about the techniques."
"'Tis hardly a proper topic of conversation."
She laughed again. "And you think I'm priggish. Come. Tell me. Are those the types of methods you use?"
He turned away from her, incapable of discussing this while looking her in the eye. "Nay. There are...other means."
"Such as?"
He sighed in resignation. "The man can...uncouple. Before."
"Before?"
"Before."
"Ah. Is that what you do?"
"Sweet Jesus." Alex rubbed his neck. "Sometimes. Most of the time."
"And the other times?"
He cleared his throat. "It's possible to make love...using portals, two in particular, other than the one intended by nature."
She was quiet for a long moment. "The mouth?"
God help me. "That would be one."
"And...hmm..."
"That would be the other. Can we stop talking about this now?"
"Aren't those forms of sodomy?"
He looked away again. "I don't think of them as such." Not the first one, at any rate; he rather liked that one.
"It sounds terribly sinful to me. Not the uncoupling necessarily, but the other. Do you actually enjoy—"
"You know, I think you were right." Alex made a show of peering at the sky. "It's going to rain soon." He stuffed the tablet, stylus and book into her saddlebags and rose, offering his hand. "We should really be getting back."
She baited him some more as they gathered their things, and enjoyed great laughter at his expense while they rode back to the castle. He shared in the laughter once his embarrassment receded, ridiculing his own chagrin and teasing her for her unladylike curiosity.
It reminded him a little of being with Faithe, and it occurred to him with a small shock that he and Nicki were talking and laughing like friends. But then, hadn't they been friends in Périgeaux, when they'd shared their afternoons together in that little cave? Not that his feelings for her had stopped there—they'd become far too complicated—but the notion that they could actually be friends in addition to everything else struck him as extraordinary and wonderful.
It could be like this between us, he thought. If she were my wife, we could laugh together every day, and make love in the afternoon beneath the rustling trees, and grow fine, fat babies, lots of them...
If she were his wife and not Milo's. And if he hadn't sworn that blasted oath.
Fool! No attachments, remember? He should be coldbloodedly seducing her, for pity's sake, not dreaming of laughter and babies.
As they dismounted in front of the keep Alex realized he'd hustled them back without kissing her. How would he manage it before matins in that crowded castle?
You won't. Give it up. And don't make any more middle-of-the-night promises to yourself.
"Are you all right, Alex?" Nicki took his hand, the first time she'd done so since Périgeaux. It filled him with a ridiculous sense of elation.
"I'm fine," he said, gripping her too tightly, so gratified that she'd reached out to him. "I've just spent the afternoon with you."
"Back so soon?"
They turned to find Gaspar standing in the entrance to the keep, eyeing their clasped hands. Nicki yanked hers out of Alex's grasp, recoiling from him. "We...we thought it was going to rain."
"Oh, the weather's turning bad, all right," Gaspar said blandly, raising his gaze to the murky heavens. "There's quite a hellish tempest brewing. Just you wait and see."
* * *
Gaspar placed the goblet carefully in Edith's hands and closed her gnarled fingers around it. "Here it is. Now, you must make sure her ladyship drinks all of it, remember?"
The old hag stared into the goblet with that vacant expression that meant she didn't remember at all, even though Gaspar had explained it to her after supper. "What's this, then?"
"Raisin wine," he ground out with ill-feigned patience while glancing over his shoulder to make sure there was no one else in the torchlit staircase to overhear. Most everyone had retired for the night, but still...
There was little risk in using Edith for this mission. By tomorrow it was unlikely she would recall having brought the adulterated wine to her young mistress.
"Raisin wine," the old women murmured, frowning in confusion.
"With something in it to help her sleep," he reminded. "She's had trouble sleeping of late."
"That she has, poor lamb. Aye, but she'll be in her own bed tonight. She'll sleep like a stone." She tried to hand the goblet back, but Gaspar pushed it toward her.
"Sleeplessness can linger long after the cause for it is gone," he said. "She needs something to relax her. 'Twill be good for her."
Edith pinned him with a sharp look that reminded him of the mulish creature she'd been years before. "She doesn't know what's good for her, that one. Never did."
"There. You see? She needs you." He patted her hands, closing her cold, twisted fingers more firmly around the goblet, lest she drop it. "You must make her drink it—all of it. She won't like the taste, but that's just the sleeping herbs. She mustn't leave a drop. I made it extra strong, so don't be alarmed if it takes effect quickly. Can you remember all that?"
"What do you think I am?"
she demanded irately. "The town idiot?"
"Not at all, but her ladyship can be stubborn at times. And since she doesn't always know what's best, you must help her by making her drink all of it. Watch her and make sure she does it. Don't leave until—"
"Yes, yes! She'll drink it. Now leave me be." Steadying herself with a hand on the stone wall, Edith turned and began her torturously slow progress up the winding stairs. "I must go to my lamb. My lamb needs me."
Gaspar waited in the stairwell while Edith went through the motions of readying her mistress for bed. If anyone could get that doctored wine into Nicolette, it was her beloved maid, from whom she'd been inseparable since coming to Peverell as a child. Old age had long ago stripped Edith of her faculties, but Nicolette was unwilling to hurt her feelings by taking on another maid. The result was that the mistress more or less served the maid, coddling her like an old grandmother and indulging her every whim. She'd drink the wine just to make Edith happy.
"Well?" Gaspar said as the doddering old creature shuffled tediously down the stairs toward him.
"Who the hell are you?"
"I'm Gaspar," he said between clenched teeth. "Remember?"
"Oh, you." Grimacing as if she'd just smelled something rancid, Edith tried to push past him, but he blocked her path.
"Did she drink it?" Gaspar noted with dismay that Edith's hands were empty. Wouldn't she have brought the empty goblet back down?
Edith blinked at him.
"The raisin wine," he said slowly. "Did she—"
"I said I'd make her drink it, and I did. She always does what I tell her, because she knows I know what's good for her." She tried to squeeze through, but he held firm.
"Are you sure she drank it all?" He must remember to retrieve the goblet when he departed the solar later tonight, so there would be no evidence of his handiwork.
She let out an exaggerated huff of impatience. "Every last drop. She was swaying on her feet by the time I got her into her night shift, if it's any comfort to you."
This time, when she elbowed him aside, Gaspar let her go. "A great deal of comfort," he said softly.
Just before she disappeared around the bend of the curving staircase, Edith turned and glared up at him. "I don't like you."
"I don't like you either, you loony old bitch."
* * *
Chapter 16
Gaspar paused in the entrance to the great hall, letting his eyes get used to the dark and the drumming of rain on the shutters, listening for sounds from behind the closed curtains of Milo's bed. All he heard was a soft, rattling snore. Beal, curled up on the floor at the foot of his master's bed like some faithful dog, was snoring as well. Presently Gaspar could make out the shapes of the servants sleeping in the rushes. Adjusting the burlap sack on his shoulder, he stole quietly across the hall, stepping carefully over the somnolent bodies.
He opened the door of the pantry slowly, lest it squeak; it didn't. Creeping inside, he closed the door behind him and let out a pent-up breath.
It was black as hell in this little room, what with no windows to let in the moonlight. He lit the lantern hanging from the ceiling, and by its dull yellow glow shoved aside the bags of grain and meal blocking the door to the service stairwell.
Extinguishing the lantern, he ducked through the small door and ascended the narrow stairway in pitch blackness, his heart thudding with nerves and anticipation. This is it. This is really it.
At the top of the stairs, he peeled off his tunic and stuffed it into the sack. That left him in a nondescript shirt and braies—nothing that she could recognize as his. From the sack he retrieved the mask he'd fashioned out of an old black woolen hood by sewing up the opening and cutting holes for his eyes and mouth.
He pulled the mask over his head, filled his lungs with air, and let it out slowly. And then he turned the door handle and opened the door a crack.
He stilled then, unsettled by the golden light illuminating the big chamber, indicating that Lady Nicolette had not yet retired. Steeling himself—she drank the whole bloody goblet, for pity's sake, and it was extra-potent—he slowly eased the door open, smiling at what he found.
Nicolette lay on her bed, the curtains on the side facing him wide open, clad only in her night shift, writhing deliriously. The covers had been turned down, but she hadn't gotten under them. He could see all of her.
The goblet—completely empty save for a tell-tale crystalline residue—lay in the rushes next to the bed.
How perfect. How utterly perfect.
Closing the door behind him, he walked up to her and dumped the sack on the floor, loudly. She started, a low moan rising from her as she clutched at the mattress.
Gaspar took a moment just to look at her. The shift was nearly identical to the one he'd swiped in Rouen—a wisp of white silk that left her arms and lower legs completely exposed. Her hair was loose, like a young girl's. She opened her eyes, but seemed to have trouble focusing on him. "Who's there? Oh, God. Alex? Is it you?"
Gaspar nodded. Wouldn't that be delicious, to have Alex de Périgeaux convicted of raping his cousin's wife? Gaspar almost hoped she did remember her ravishment tomorrow. Milo was in no condition to challenge Alex to a duel, so most likely he'd simply be mutilated, but given Nicolette's rank, he might even be hanged. Gaspar wished he could tell her, yes, it's your Alex, come to show you a thing or two, but to speak would be risky; she might recognize his voice.
Gaspar leaned closer, relishing her look of horror when she saw his mask. He cupped her face, pressed his thumb between her lips; their slick heat made him hard. She whipped her head to the side. "Y-you're not Alex." Frantic now, she tried to sit up, but her body began to quake uncontrollably, and she collapsed under the wrenching spasms.
Her breasts pressed irresistibly against the silk of her shift as she thrashed. Gaspar covered them with his hands and squeezed. She cried out and he slammed a hand over her mouth.
Her eyes went wide as the seizure subsided. Gaspar grew stiff as a cudgel thinking about her helplessness, his power, her abject terror. Now he'd show her who was the master. Now she'd do his bidding, like it or not. And he'd make damn sure she didn't like it.
With his free hand, he began to raise her shift, but she went berserk at that, flailing at him with her fists. One caught him in the nose, jolting him with pain.
"Bitch!" He let go of her mouth and whipped his open hand across her face, hard.
That dazed her for a moment. "Mama?"
"Not even close." He rummaged in his sack for the rope and rags he'd brought. When he turned back, she was trying to crawl off the bed. "Not so fast." Grabbing her shoulders, he slammed her back down, immobilizing her with a knee in the stomach. She punched him in a mad frenzy, so he grabbed the rope and swiftly tied her hands to the headboard.
He'd have to gag her, too, but not right away. He had plans for that silky mouth of hers.
"Nay!" She gasped as he knelt over her face, tugging at the drawstring of his braies. "Oh, God, help! Somebody—"
Shoving a hand over her mouth again, he slid his dagger out of his boot and press it to the bridge of her nose. "Have you ever seen a woman without a nose? I have. 'Tisn't very pretty." Leaning close so he could savor the panic in her eyes, he said, "Just you shut up and do everything I tell you to do, exactly like I tell you to do it, and I might let you keep that lovely little nose of yours." An empty threat, of course, since he had no intention of drawing attention to what he'd done by disfiguring her, but she'd have no way of knowing that.
"G-Gaspar?"
Damn it to hell! In his excitement, he'd forgotten himself and spoken. That was careless. Now he might be forced to kill her—after he'd had his fun, of course—unless... "Nay, it's Alex."
Her brow furrowed. "Alex?"
"Aye." Keeping the dagger to her nose, Gaspar fumbled with the cord securing his braies. "It's Alex. You've been teaching me—now I'm going to teach you a thing or two."
There came a soft knock, and then a muffled v
oice. "Nicki?"
Bugger me, it's him!
Swearing under his breath, Gaspar sliced the rope off her hands and crammed it, along with the dagger and the rags, into his sack.
Alex knocked again, and this time Gaspar realized the sound was coming not from the turret, but from the service stairwell. Sneaky bastard. He's probably been diddling her since he got here.
The door handle turned. With no time to get to the turret, Gaspar secreted himself behind the closed curtains on the other side of the bed just as the door creaked open.
"Nicki?"
"Alex, don't," she groaned. "Don't do this."
Swift footsteps in the rushes. "Nicki. Nicki, what's—"
"Don't touch me! Don't—"
"Nicki, it's me, Alex. I'm not going to hurt you. Nicki?"
She whimpered. The leather strips supporting the mattress squeaked under the convulsive movements of her body.
"Nicki? Oh, God. Oh, no."
Alex spoke fatuous words of comfort until she quieted. "I'll be right back." He sprinted across the solar, whipping open the door to the turret staircase and pounding down the stairs.
Gaspar strode quickly to the service door while, from below, Alex shouted for Beal to ride into town and bring back the surgeon. Turning for one last, frustrating look at her before ducking through the door, Gaspar spied the empty goblet in the rushes. Hissing an oath, he went back to retrieve the incriminating item as Alex's footsteps raced back up the stairs. Gaspar made it back to the little corner door and pulled it closed behind him just as Alex returned.
Well, that's just fine, Gaspar growled as he stomped down the narrow little stairwell. He knew having that bastard underfoot would spoil everything. Just bloody marvelous.
* * *
"He's here." Beal ushered old Guyot into the solar, crossed himself at the sight of his insensible mistress, and fled back down the stairs.
"She caught the contagion from her husband, I see," remarked the surgeon as he walked toward them, his satchel in one hand and his bucket in the other.
Alex, kneeling at the side of Nicki's bed, nodded bleakly. "She insisted on tending to him. I tried to stop her. I should have tried harder." It should have been him, stricken down with this awful malady. He wished it had been. To see her this way, alternating between delirium and shuddering spasms, pained him to his very soul.
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