“Do you think he fled the realm? It is not unusual when borrowing from Peter to pay Paul brings a man to ruin.”
“My brother would never run away from his debts and leave me to reckon with the consequences.”
The hell he wouldn’t.
His expression must have spoken the silent words, because her eyes glinted with belligerent lights.
“He has not left the realm, I tell you. In fact, a messenger came from him two days ago.”
“Then where is he? What message did he send you?”
She bit her lower lip and occupied her hands with brushing pie crumbs into a little pile. “The message was not exactly from him.”
Andreas knew her expressions very well. He had learned to read her moods and worries years ago. He had memorized the nuances that revealed joy and sadness, dreams and disillusionments. Rarely, however, had he seen what he saw now.
She was afraid.
“Tell me, Giselle.”
“A man came. Reginald is being held by brigands, who will kill him if I do not pay a ransom. I asked where Reginald is now, but he refused to say. I am to have the coin in five days, when the man will come for it or send word of where to bring it.” She blurted the explanation with annoyance and, it seemed to Andreas, also a bit of relief.
“Am I correct that the amount he demanded was one hundred pounds?”
She nodded. “It is such a huge sum. I tried to get it from some merchants who Reginald knows, but they would not help me. Small wonder. They were there today, with their tallies and pledges. In seeking that coin, I brought all of London down on our heads.”
“Your brother’s extravagance and carelessness brought the city down on you.”
“Stop blaming him. He is in danger. He might be killed. I will not sit here and listen to you speak badly of him.” She scooted to the end of the bench and began to rise.
Andreas caught her wrist.
She resisted his hold, but he did not let go. He was not about to let her face this alone, but he also held on because the feel of her frail bones and warm skin entranced him.
He had never before touched her.
He knew that for a fact, because he had wanted to—ached to—many times.
Her indignant gaze met his. Her vexation slipped away, and astonishment took its place. They stayed like that for a long count, her half risen and him grasping, keeping her in place. During that deep pause the noise of the tavern was obscured by a spiritual silence in which all that existed was their connected flesh and gazes.
He would have gladly spent eternity in that stillness.
It affected her as much as him. He knew it as he looked into her eyes. This touch had been too long in coming. Too long denied.
The silent admission of that seemed to surprise her.
“Sit, Giselle.”
Flustered, she obeyed. He reluctantly released her. She tightened herself into a noble, formal column and kept her gaze on the table.
“You said that the man gave you five days. How many has it been thus far?”
“This is the third. It took one to learn that no London lender would help me, and I wasted yesterday at your house.”
“I think that we should try to find your brother. He may even be in the city.”
“If we do find him, then what? We attack with swords and lances and rescue him?”
“I do not think it will come to that.”
He suspected they would find Reginald hale and fit and not in danger at all.
This story sounded like a ploy. Reginald had finally come to the end of the rope he had been climbing down for years. No one would lend to him, but they might take pity on a desperate, beautiful sister trying to save his life.
“I will look for Reginald, Giselle. If he is truly in danger, or if I cannot find him by the fifth day, I will give you the money to pay the ransom.”
She appeared to agree to it. At least, she did not disagree. She just sat there, staring at the table planks, distraught and resigned and vulnerable. And afraid.
Her fear was not just for Reginald. Her quick glances said that their reaction to that touch occupied her concerns now, too.
He pushed the last meat pie closer to her and called for more ale.
Maybe he would not kill Reginald. Perhaps he would thank him.
Three
“If I knew where he was, I’d be taking what he owes me out of his hide, not settling for a few bits of bent, pitted plate.”
John Hastings pointed his greasy, fat finger derisively at the two cups lying on the scales in his counting room. As one of the few merchants with a pledge older than Andreas’s, John had been allowed to remove the cups from Giselle’s house.
He went back to tearing the flesh off the joint of lamb in front of him. His hat formed a long beak in front, and its tip kept touching the meat. The table groaned with an abundance of food. He appeared intent on consuming it all.
Giselle fumed at the way he dismissed the remaining pieces of plate that she had carried from her ancestral home. “The silver exceeded the amount of the tally,” she reminded him. “Your own scale proves it.”
John shot Andreas an exasperated glance with his pale, owl eyes. It was obvious that he resented having a woman participating in this conversation.
Giselle did not care that one of London’s leading citizens found her too outspoken. This was the fifth merchant they had visited today, and it appeared he would be no more help than the others. One of her precious five days was leaching away, and she was getting more worried by the minute.
“She is correct, John. You can have no complaints on the payment.”
“You know damn well I am not speaking of that measly old tally, Andreas. Reginald cost me ten times that silver, and I’ll never see it now. There should be laws against such things.”
“There are,” Giselle snapped. “Usury is a sin, and you have now reaped the rewards.”
The owl eyes pierced her. “I do not speak of tallies and pledges. I was stupid enough to join your brother in a partnership to bring in timber from Norway. Four years ago, it was, and I’ve not seen a stick of wood nor a bit of coin from it yet.” He turned his annoyance on Andreas. “I only agreed because he said you were behind it. We all knew how you lived in that house back then—”
Andreas interrupted. “Do you have any ideas of who might know what has become of him?”
John pondered that while he clawed at the meat. “About a year ago he got involved with a trader from Genoa who came to London, a bastard son of the Comini family. Sandro, his name was. I never learned for sure what they cooked up. If Reginald crossed one of those traders from the south, he is probably at the bottom of the sea.”
“Is this Sandro still in London?”
John scoffed. “He left after two months and never came back. However, since the galleys are here, you might ask the Venetian, Narni, about him. Narni’s nephew married a woman of the Comini, so he might know about Sandro. You waste your efforts, though. I still say the knave just ran away.”
“My brother is no knave, you gluttonous, discourteous—”
Andreas cut her off with polite farewells. Taking her arm, he hauled her out to the lane.
“We had better speak with this Narni,” she said.
“I will. You are going home.”
“I told you in the tavern that I am coming with you. He is my brother.”
Arms crossed over his chest, he assumed a pose of displeasure. “You did not tell me that you intended to insult every man we spoke with.”
“I only gave back what I got.”
“You have been getting the truth, which is why I did not want you with me. I will take you home now, so that you do not have to hear more of it.”
“I am not going home. I am going to find out if this Narni knows who holds my brother.”
“Then behave yourself, or I will turn you over my knee later. I trade with these men, and if you speak to Narni the way you just did to John, it will take me years to
regain his favor.”
The walk to the galleys was a long one. Andreas kept touching her as he guided her through the crowds. His hand took her arm when the bodies got thick. His fingers occasionally tapped her shoulder to remind her it was time to turn down another lane. Courteous and protective, there was nothing insinuating about any of it.
She noticed every single time, however. The warm pressure would jolt her out of her worries. For an instant she would be totally alive and vividly aware of the handsome man at her side.
The long walk gave her time to think about what she had learned today. No one could say where Reginald was, but all those merchants had known her brother very well— better than she had. The image they had revealed was not a good one.
She had been blind to her brother’s faults and had found excuses for his behavior. She debated whether she had done that because she wanted to believe his dreams.
They were hers, too, after all.
People and wagons crowded the area by the docks. The visits by the Venetian galleys always created a mercantile chaos. Workers swarmed everywhere, unloading the holds of their wares. Vendors of food and drink added to the confusion.
Lost in her reflections about Reginald, Giselle absorbed the noise through a daze. Wagons rolled past, people shouted, and the smells of food and dung filled the breeze.
Suddenly, almost everything on the street froze. The head of a horse came toward her, growing quickly in size. The sounds of wheels penetrated her ears and then those of shouts.
The world swirled. Colors flashed. She flew.
She found herself up against a shed, surrounded by a masculine wall. She peered out of her sanctuary and saw a wagon hurtling past while its driver fought to regain control over the galloping horse that pulled it.
The sanctuary tightened. The scent of the man who held her filled her head, and the comforting warmth of his protection absorbed her shock.
She looked up.
Andreas’s face was very close to hers. The earlier annoyance was gone from his expression. All the warmth of their past was in the way he looked down at her, and the old joy sparkled in response. The dangerous intensity of the last two days was there, too, however.
He appeared very handsome. Compellingly so. He had the kind of face that one stared at. She never had before, but when he had sat in her house or garden, she could look all she wanted and not even notice that she did so.
Without any movement, his protective hold became an embrace. She could not find the voice to object. It felt good being in his arms. Safe and deliciously risky, all at once.
“That was close,” he said.
His quiet voice, so close that his breath warmed her cheek, made her skin tingle from her scalp to her breasts. “Thank you. If you had not grabbed me, I would have been trampled. I was lost in my thoughts and did not see the danger until it was too late.”
He broke the embrace but not the touch. With his arm resting along the back of her waist, as if it had a right to now, he guided her toward one of the largest galleys.
“He used you, didn’t he? Reginald used your name, without your permission, to lend legitimacy to his plans. That is what John meant, and that first merchant we spoke with, Harold, alluded to that, too.”
She voiced the suspicions that had been distracting her. The intimacy that the danger had created permitted such frankness. There had been so much of the old Andreas in the way he held her, even if the physical connections were completely new.
He did not respond. She guessed that doing so would reflect badly on her brother. It touched her that he wanted to spare her.
“It was terrible of Reginald to do that. Small wonder that you broke with him upon hearing of it.”
“That is one of the reasons.”
“There are others? Tell me now, so that I do not receive more sad surprises as I listen to these men.”
“No man whom we will meet knows the rest of it.” He began handing her up the gangway to the long, sleek ship. “Do not speak when we are with Narni, Giselle. He will accept your presence because these Venetians understand family bonds very well, but he will find any intrusion on your part impertinent.”
Andreas did not have to wait like the other merchants crowding the galley’s deck. A clerk recognized him, rattled out an effusive greeting in his foreign tongue, and disappeared into the cabin.
It had been thus with every man today. They had been received because of Andreas’s power, not her aristocratic blood. The English merchants had tripped over themselves to make Andreas happy. Giselle had almost heard their minds calculating their good fortune that a powerful member of the Hanseatic League had decided to visit, ask a favor, and thus place himself in their debt.
It seemed that even the richest Venetian traders regarded Andreas the same way. Signore Alberti wanted a marriage alliance and, as the clerk soon announced, Signore Narni would see them at once.
Signore Narni was as skinny as John had been fat. Short and wizened, with closely cropped white hair under his satin scull cap, he appeared far too old to be making long journeys on his galley. Despite his small stature, however, danger emanated from him. The eyes of a hawk peered out from his wrinkled face.
Giselle thought of John’s words, about a man who crossed these traders ending up at the bottom of the sea.
Andreas donned armor of inscrutable reserve as soon as they entered the cabin. Neither merchant displayed deference in their greetings, but both showed respect. Andreas spoke in Narni’s language, and Narni responded in Andreas’s.
Andreas introduced her, and Narni switched to English out of courtesy for her. “I did not expect you for two days, Andreas.”
“I will be back then. This visit is on another matter.”
“So long as the salt in your ship’s hold is still mine and not diverted to Alberti to win his daughter’s hand, I can wait two days.”
He bid them sit in lovely, carved chairs and arranged his sapphire brocade robe into satin folds as he settled into a third one. He offered wine poured by his servant into bejewelled silver cups. Another servant passed a plate of dried figs and nuts.
Giselle barely managed not to gawk. This merchant lived more luxuriously in his galley’s cabin than most barons did in their castles.
“What is this other matter?” Narni asked.
“Lady Giselle’s brother, Reginald, is missing. We have been told that a year ago he had some dealings with Sandro Comini. We are wondering if you know about this?”
“I can tell you about Sandro. An impatient young man and a great trial to his father. He got it into his head to form a commenda contract. No man in Genoa would back him, so he decided to look farther afield. He came here.”
Andreas must have noticed her curiosity. “A commenda is a way of financing trade, Giselle. The project is backed by a man of wealth, and another makes the journey. It is common south of the Alps.”
“Except that no man south of the Alps would risk his coin on Sandro’s plan,” Narni explained. “Furs from Russia and the Baltic, I think it was. He had a ship, but he had never sailed those waters and knew no traders in Novgorod or Riga.” He smiled knowingly at Andreas. “Nor would the Hanse appreciate such incursions in their arena. So, Sandro came to London to find his commenda. It was said that he paired up with a wealthy young nobleman, who brought together several other barons to provide the money. The lady’s brother, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” Andreas said. “When did Sandro return to Genoa?”
“Never. Perhaps his ship wrecked. Or maybe those Baltic pagans sold him into slavery. His father prays for his return, but without much hope.”
“Did you hear any name attached to this venture?”
Narni’s eyes narrowed to slits as he searched his memory. Giselle did not doubt that if any name had been given, at any time, this man would remember it.
“Does the name Wolford mean anything to you? I recall hearing it amidst the talk about Sandro, and it sounds English.”
Gisel
le’s heart flipped, and not with relief. She had been desperate for any tidbit of information, but she could have done without hearing this morsel.
If Reginald was mixed up with Wolford, he might be dead already.
Four
It was a long walk back to the house. Andreas revelled in every moment of it.
It did not matter that a worried frown marred Giselle’s forehead. He took ridiculous joy in merely walking beside her and shameful pleasure that her distraction gave him excuses to touch her shoulder or arm as he guided her through the lanes.
He bought some food on the way so she would feel obliged to invite him to share it with her, and thus prolong the day. When they arrived at her house in the early evening, she seemed to accept that he would not leave and went up to her chamber to wash.
A low, weary groan drifted down to him, followed by a barely muffled curse.
He went up to see what the problem was.
Giselle stood in her little chamber. The boards and ropes of her bed lay strewn on the floor. An upturned bucket rested in a damp corner.
“I had forgotten that those men took apart the bed,” she muttered, giving one of the boards a little frustrated kick.
Come sleep at my house. He almost said it. God knew he wanted to. Over the years he had learned to forget how much he wanted her, but this day had unleashed the old desire. It burned low in his awareness, constantly, a fierce point of heat in danger of roaring out of control and consuming him. Come sleep at my house, with me. Let me hold you all night.
Somehow he swallowed the impulse to blurt it, but he admitted that soon it would be said anyway. He was not a youth anymore. He no longer had the time or patience for hopeless fascinations and half measures.
Giselle picked up the pail. “I must go and get some water, since they spilled that, too. I will return soon.”
“I will rebuild the bed while you are gone.”
He worked at it while she went to fetch water at the city fountain. As he set the boards together with their pegs, he remembered that during his first visit to this house there had been a woman servant who did chores like hauling water. By his third visit, however, she was gone.
An Interrupted Tapestry Page 3
