When she still did not speak, he prompted her. “You had something unexpected to tell me?”
“Aye, quite unexpected. At least to me.” Her gaze came back to rest on him for a moment and then flitted away again. “I thought you would want to know. That you would want to help me. You see…” She paused to lick her lips. “You see…”
It hit him like a thunderbolt. Jesus and all the saints protect him. Linnet was with child. His child. A swell of joy and wonder rose up in his chest, almost lifting him from the ground.
“This changes everything,” he said, because it did. “You see that, don’t you?”
He never thought he would be a man who would keep his wife under lock and key, but he would do what he must to keep her safe until the child was born. Surely she would settle down once she had a babe in her arms?
“Aye, it changes all,” Linnet said, wringing her hands. “The difficulties are boundless.”
She took a step toward him. Her soft blue eyes were full of worry.
“A child should not be cause for despair, but of hope,” he said.
Her fine-boned shoulders relaxed a bit, and she graced him with a tentative smile that lanced open all his wounds.
“That is what the queen says,” she said. “But how did you guess the reason I came to you?”
“You told the queen about the child before telling me?” This hurt more than he could admit to himself.
She furrowed her brows and examined him. A moment later, her eyes flew open wide.
And they both knew the mistake he had made. It was not Linnet who was with child, but the queen.
Jamie rubbed his temples, trying to roll back all the thoughts and plans that had suddenly formed in his head.
“Could you be with child?” he asked, because he needed to know.
She bit her lip and shook her head. His chest tightened as he thought of the children he would never have with her. He looked away; he could almost hear that door close forever.
“Your future wife would not have been pleased with such a surprise,” she said in a tight voice.
His wife? God help him, he had forgotten all about Agnes. He never could think of another woman when Linnet was near.
“A man takes care of his children,” he said, his anger with himself making his voice hard. “Lady Agnes would accept that. As an obedient wife, she would respect my judgment.”
“Hmm.” The sound she made conveyed disagreement, which he chose to ignore.
“You were right to come to me,” he said, trying desperately to focus on the problem she had brought to him. “ ’Tis no simple matter to find a place where Queen Katherine can have the child without anyone discovering her secret.”
“Hertford is among the properties the Council granted the queen for her own use,” Linnet said. “She says it is out of the way and too small to accommodate many visitors. She could be left alone there.”
He nodded. “That might do. An even more difficult task will be finding someone trustworthy to raise the child.”
“The queen will not give up this child,” Linnet said. “She and Owen intend to marry.”
“God’s beard!” Jamie ran his hands through his hair. “That Owen has bollocks, I’ll say that for him. I pray we don’t see him drawn and quartered before the babe is christened.”
“ ’Tis the queen who surprises me,” Linnet said in a soft voice. “She believes that if she has children with someone as lowly as Owen, she will be allowed to keep them.”
“ ’Tis an awful risk for her to marry without the Council’s permission,” he said. “But now that there is to be a child, one can hardly blame them.”
“Her confessor has agreed to marry them in secret at Hertford. She wants you to be a witness to their marriage.” Linnet dropped her gaze to the dirt floor. “It is dangerous, but one day they may need someone to attest to it whose word will be trusted.”
Dangerous, indeed. He could be accused of treason.
“I have business in Northumberland that cannot be delayed,” he said. “But I will come directly to Hertford as soon as it is concluded. It should take me no more than a week.”
She startled him by touching his arm. It was just a light touch, but it sent a rush of hot lust through him.
“Pray, do not wed Agnes Stafford,” she said, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “There is no lack of women who could love you. Yet, you seem bent on marrying the one who cannot.”
It was so hard not to believe she cared enough to change for him when she was looking at him with so much warmth and longing in her eyes. She was so close he could smell her skin and hair. His fingers itched to touch her.
Linnet had taken hold of him as a young man—heart, body, and soul. So long as they both lived, he would want her. He understood that now. But once he gave his vow to another, he would not succumb to the temptation. By the Virgin, he needed to get himself wed as soon as possible. He would send Martin home to visit his mother and leave with Stephen on the morrow.
“Is it not enough to punish me?” she asked, her touch scorching through him again. “One of us should be happy.”
He took one last look at the face that could make him forget every other thing that mattered to him in this world.
“Tell the queen I shall join her at Hertford.” He lifted his gaze to the trees on the far side of the river. “I shall be betrothed when next we meet.”
Chapter Thirty-one
“Praise God you are here.” Linnet threw her arms around Francois���s neck as soon as he walked through the door of her London house. “I could not live through this without you.”
Francois patted her back and asked, “What has happened?”
“Jamie is getting married,” she said into his neck. “To someone else.”
Francois blew out a deep breath. “I feared as much.” He unhooked her arms from around his neck. “ ’Tis your own fault. Twice now you have tossed out the best man you will ever have.”
“I did not toss him out.” Indignation helped her fight the sting of tears at the back of her eyes. “Jamie left me. Both times.”
“Christ above, Linnet,” Francois said, raising his hands into the air. “You had to know Jamie would not stand for what you did with Gloucester.”
“I was trying to get information, nothing more.”
“Just because you can dangle men from your fingers, does not mean you should do it,” Francois said. “And did it have to be Gloucester, second in line to the throne? What was Jamie to think?”
She crossed her arms and tapped her foot. “He should have trusted me. I can manage Gloucester.”
“You can manage Gloucester? Then how is it that Jamie found the two of you grappling in the duke’s damned bedchamber?”
She should not have told her brother that part.
“You are supposed to be on my side.” She turned away, angry that her lower lip was trembling.
Francois heaved a sigh and put his arm around her. “Sorry, sweetling.”
She swallowed. “I cannot let him marry Agnes, truly I cannot. The woman has no spark at all.” ’Twas simply wrong for Jamie to be with a woman who would not appreciate his passion. If only…
“Come, I have news of my own to share with you,” Francois said. “You’d best sit down for this.”
The grave expression on Francois’s usually cheerful countenance sent a tremor of foreboding through her. Once they were sitting side by side on the bench under the window, he pulled a thick stack of folded parchments from inside his tunic. The edges were curled with age.
“I’ve arranged them with the oldest on top,” he said as he flattened them on his knee.
She touched his arm. “But what are they?”
“Letters.” Francois cleared his throat. “Letters from our father to our grandfather.”
The breath went out of her. She looked into her twin’s face, unable to form the question.
Francois pressed his lips together and nodded. “Aye, he did not forget us as
we thought.”
All these years, she had believed they did not merit the slightest consideration from their father. But here was proof to the contrary—proof that he had at least remembered them from time to time. Tears streamed down her face. From the time she was little, she had told herself she did not care that he had forgotten them. But it had always been a scar upon her heart.
“What does he say in the letters?” she asked. Francois set the stack in her lap. “The ink has faded, but you can read most of them.”
She untied the twine that held them together and picked up the first one. As soon as she unfolded it, she recognized Alain’s seal and signature at the bottom. The parchment was torn along the fold, and her eyes blurred when she tried to make out the words.
“Tell me, Francois.”
“He asks Grandfather to send us to him,” Francois said in a quiet voice. “He also writes that the messenger carries enough money to pay for our journey—or for our upkeep, should Grandfather refuse again.”
“Again?”
“Apparently, these are not all of the letters,” Francois said. “Only the ones he sent to London.”
Francois pulled a bulging leather bag out from under the bench and untied the strings that held it closed. Gold coins glimmered and clinked as he poured them onto the low table in front of them. Two or three lone coins spilled over the side and rolled across the floor.
“Grandfather had this much gold here in London?”
Francois nodded, his expression grim.
“But… we could have paid our debts. We would not have had to flee in the middle of the night. We…” She closed her eyes and touched her fingertips to her forehead. All that suffering for naught.
“Grandfather was a wealthy man and did not need our father’s money—not for a long time, anyway,” Francois said. “By the time we did need it, he likely forgot he had it.”
She nodded. “His memory grew worse and worse those last two years.” After a long moment, she said, “But why did Alain never tell us he did this?”
“Pride, perhaps.” Francois shrugged. “He may not realize we did not have the benefit of the funds.”
Linnet rested her hands on the letters scattered in her lap. If she had known, how would her life be different? She had been angry for as long as she could remember. Angry that her father left their mother pregnant without a backward glance. Angry that he did not deem his bastard children worthy of his notice, much less his support.
She would not trade her early years with her grandfather for the constrained life of a nobleman’s daughter. But if she had known about the letters, surely she would have made different choices these last years. If she had known of his attempts to support them and to bring them into his household, she would not have felt compelled to punish him for failing her.
Perhaps she would not expect everyone important to her to desert her. Everyone except for Francois, of course. He was the one person she had always believed loved her enough not to leave her.
Perhaps she would have trusted Jamie.
“He told me he tried to find us after Grandfather died,” Francois said. “When he could find no trace of us, he assumed we died during the siege.”
“Where did you find the gold and the letters?” she asked.
For the first time since he gave her the letters, Francois grinned. Eyes twinkling, he said, “Do you recall that curly-headed little girl you found in Mychell’s house?”
“Aye, his daughter Lily.”
“Well, Lily and her sister Rose appeared at your door while you were in Leicester,” he said. “They had your ring.”
Linnet laughed. “Lily found the letters, didn’t she?”
“Aye, she did. They were hidden in a hollow in the wall of the shop, behind a brick.”
“What a sharp-eyed girl.” Linnet shook her head. “How did she know they belonged to us?”
“Her sister can read, if you can believe it.”
“Not half as surprising as her thieving father naming his daughters after flowers.”
“Lily, the little scoundrel, wanted to return the letters and keep the gold. She tried to convince her sister that you had so many coins you would not miss these.”
Linnet laughed and clapped her hands. “Is she not wonderful?”
“Rose, however, insisted that all be returned.”
“I hope you rewarded the girls.”
He nodded. “I gave them half.”
“Half? That seems more than generous…” She narrowed her eyes at her brother. “This Rose is not a little girl, is she?”
“I would call her petite,” Francois said, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“Nay. Do not tell me. Let me guess. This Rose is eighteen and as pretty as her younger sister?”
Francois looked off into the distance and rubbed his chin, as if considering the question. “Nineteen. And prettier than her little sister.”
“Did she take the money you gave her?”
He shook his head. “The lovely Rose kept two coins as a reward, one for herself and one for her sister, and insisted I take back the rest.” He paused. “But I slipped the rest to Lily, who hid them under her cloak.”
“This Rose has enough trouble having Mychell for a father, without you adding to her grief.”
“Me?” Francois said, slapping his hand against his chest. “Add to a young woman’s troubles?”
“That is what you do,” Linnet said. “Have a care, Francois; this is an unsophisticated girl. You cannot—”
“You’ve no cause to chide me. I’ve done nothing,” Francois said, holding up his hands. Then he added, “But I cannot help it if she wants me.”
She rolled her eyes.
Francois’s expression turned serious again. “I am sorry, love, but I have more news to give you.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “ ’Tis unhappy news, this time.”
“So long as you are safe and here with me, the tidings cannot be too unhappy.”
“I must return to France at once.”
“To France? But why?”
“An urgent message came three days ago from our father’s steward.”
Her heart began to beat faster. “From the steward, not Alain?”
“Alain was not well when I left a few months ago,” he said in a gentle voice.
“Why did you not tell me?”
He raised an eyebrow but did not answer. If he had told her, she likely as not would have said she wished Alain were already burning in hell.
“I am sorry, sweetling, but the steward wrote to inform me of Alain’s death.” He patted her knee. “He was nearly sixty, you know. He had a long life.”
“I am a wicked, wicked person.” Linnet covered her face, overwhelmed by guilt and an unexpected sense of bereavement.
Alain had made mistakes from the moment they met—constantly correcting her behavior, attempting to make her conform to his notion of how a protected young lady of noble birth should act. But she had not been protected, and she could not fit that mold.
She would have refused to conform in any case, simply because it would have pleased him. Anger and resentment had gripped her soul; her burning need to punish him had blinded her to aught else.
And now, it was too late to make amends. Too late to attempt a reconciliation. Too late to ever truly know her father.
“I was bitter about the time you spent with him,” she said, wiping a tear away with the back of her hand. “Now that we know the truth, I can see how very wretched that was of me.”
“The fault lay with him as much as you,” Francois said. “He’d no notion of how to treat a daughter, especially one like you. You weren’t raised to be a simpering lady—and living in Sir Robert’s household those last two years did not help matters.”
When Stephen and Isobel left for England, they had put the twins in the care of Sir Robert and his wife. The couple had imposed no rules and delighted in Linnet’s independent nature. Linnet had adored them.
“Though you drove him mad, our father was fond of you, in his way. When I saw him last, he asked a hundred questions about you.”
She sniffed. “That makes me feel both better and worse.”
They sat in silence, listening to the sounds of carts passing in the street below.
Finally, Francois said, “I must leave at once to take over the estates.”
“At once?” She swallowed.
“I thought you would be with Jamie, that you and he would…” Francois’s voice faded. “I hate to leave you here alone, especially now.”
She covered her face with her hands. “Now that Jamie has abandoned me, you will do the same?”
She was being childish and unfair, but she hated being parted from him so much she could not help herself.
“You forget you left me first to marry,” Francois said. “That made no difference between us, and you know it.”
Francois put his arm around her and patted her back. “I am sorry to be horrid about it.” She wiped her face on her sleeve and attempted a smile. “I know it is ridiculous, but I thought I would always have you, that we would always be together.”
“You can come with me.”
She ran her hand over the letters that still rested in her lap. “I missed my chance to reconcile with our father. It may be too late for me with Jamie, as well, but I cannot leave England until I am certain.”
“I thought that was what you would say,” Francois said, then he gave her one of his broad winks. “Jamie is the one who will not have a chance. What man could refuse you?”
She thought of Jamie’s last words to her: I shall be betrothed when next we meet.
“Pray I am not too late,” she said, gripping her brother’s arm. She would see Jamie at Hertford soon, and she would know then.
“The day Jamie weds another, I will board a ship for France.”
Chapter Thirty-two
“’The Lady Agnes cannot be the cold fish she seems to be,” Stephen said, putting his arm around Jamie’s shoulders as they walked out of the Staffords’ hall. “When you get her alone, ’tis a different story, aye?”
Knight of Passion Page 23
