Heart of Vengeance

by Cooper-Posey, Tracy

  “I am ready,” Helena said. Her eyes were twin pools of deepest midnight, like the evening skies over the desert he carried in his heart.

  Stephen reached for the ties of the bandage and Helena lifted her arm to allow him easier access. It created a sweeping curve of flesh from her arm down to the point where her fingers held up the barrier of green velvet. The graceful shape of the curve reminded him of some of the sinuous lines of dunes he had walked. Even her skin was the same creamy white.

  Stephen swallowed. He narrowed his focus down to the task at hand, concentrating on each step. First, remove the old bandage, carefully lifting it off the stitches, which would be raw and tender. Clean the wound, remove all dirt, blood and anything that might irritate or work its way in past the stitches. Then check the sutures themselves.

  Helena appeared to have the recuperative powers of a cat. Already most of the inflammation had gone and a scab had formed.

  Then on to the new dressing. Remix the preparation. Spread it on the bandage and lay a lining over the top to absorb the seepage the concoction would draw. Wrap and fasten the bandage.

  “I am done,” Stephen said and sat back on his heels.

  “Thank you.” Her voice was extraordinarily low.

  He dared to look at her face once more and was disappointed to find she had looked away.

  Helena eased her arm back into the sleeve. Stephen picked up the neck of the gown to save her removing her other hand from its position at her breast.

  She smiled up at him as a thank you and instantly dropped her gaze again. “Could you fasten the ties?” she asked, presenting her back.

  Drawing the ties closed was far easier, for Stephen was able to avoid contact with Helena’s flesh. He finished and turned quickly back to mundane matters. “Leave the bandage in place for two days and then remove it altogether. The wound must dry after that and the herbs will have lost their virtue.”

  Helena glanced at him and then away again. “You will not dress the wound for me?”

  “There is no need. It is already healing well. In four or five days’ time you should remove the stitches. That is all that is needed, now.”

  Although her expression did not change, nor her shoulders move, Stephen felt her spirit droop like a wilted leaf.

  He packed the bowl and twists of herbs back into the small pouch. “We cannot risk continuing to meet. You profess your company is dangerous. We both know mine is the least desirable for one of your claimed rank and station.”

  “I do not dispute you.” Helena’s voice was low again.

  “You do not need to, ’Elen. Helen. Helena.” The pestle would not fit into the pack, so he rammed it in without regard to the fragile dried herbs beneath—herbs he had brought back from the lands east of the Holy Land.

  “Why are you angry?” she asked, reasonably.

  The pestle at last fitted into the pack. Stephen threw it from him and pushed his hand through his hair, searching for an answer that would satisfy her. None came, for the truth dominated his mind, blanketing any other thought. Yet Helena deserved an answer. She watched him patiently, curiously. He opened his mouth and the truth tumbled out. “I am angry because until this moment I had not counted the true cost of losing the king’s favor.”

  “Richard excluded you from war. You found that a heavy burden.”

  “Two days have passed since then. Two days…and an entire lifetime.” He looked away, unwilling to watch wariness, or worse, appear on her lovely face. Stephen picked up the pack again. “We cannot be gone too long, or your absence will be noted.”

  He stood. After a moment, he heard her dress rustle as Helena too, rose.

  “Come,” he said, struggling to keep his voice even. It came out in a flat monotone. Stephen turned and trudged toward the trees, eyes ahead. His ears told him she followed, although she did not speak.

  Then they were among the trees and their footsteps were muffled. Still she spoke not a word. Let her be angry with me. That is best. Stephen carefully avoided speculating on what might happen if they continued to meet. Such contemplation would surely drive him mad. He closed his mind against the possibilities and let down the portcullis to bar access to them. He would not bring her into the shadow of the king’s disapproval. Nor would he draw her within range of the court’s fear-driven malice.

  He repeated the declaration to himself all the way back to Oxford.

  They came across the road to Oxford earlier than Stephen had planned, so he turned and walked parallel to the road, well back from where the trees abruptly halted a spear’s throw from the road. He would bring her as close to the town gates as he could before abandoning her to her own devices.

  Helena had yet to speak and Stephen had not dared to look at her. She followed him a half step back and to one side, not even commenting on his abrupt change of direction.

  Stephen heard the rumble and creak of a wagon on the road, coming up behind them, and high, sweet voices. Women. They could only be heading for Oxford. An idea occurred to him and he angled for the edge of the trees. Just inside their border he paused. The wagon was visible now, doing little better than walking pace along the rutted road, pulled by an old farm horse. It was filled with market produce. Peasants walked alongside and behind it.

  He turned to Helena. She stood silently, the trailing hem of her gown held in one hand, watching him.

  “Go with the wagon,” he said. “You know their tongue. Ask them for safe passage to the town. You can enter unremarked if you’re with them.”

  “I will.” Helena stepped closer to Stephen and gazed into his eyes. “In this new lifetime you have arrived at these past two days, you have a friend you did not have before. Do you know that?”

  “’Elen…”

  “I am not asking a boon, my lord. I am offering what you most want. Do you understand?”

  He looked into her eyes and he did understand. He did not think it strange or absurd that a woman, of all creatures, might have the power to fulfill this need. What she offered was more than friendship. It was an alliance of two people who had found themselves on the outside.

  Stephen bowed his head in acknowledgment and put his hand to his chest. It was a knight’s gesture of oath. “If you ever need me, I will come. You have but to call.” Then he waved toward the wagon. “Go. Go now, or it will soon be gone.”

  Helena stepped out from the trees, walked toward the wagon, lifted her hand and called out in English. The peasants’ heads turned and Helena called again. They laughed and several of them waved her toward them welcomingly.

  Helena turned back to Stephen. Her eyes were again that dark, midnight blue he remembered from the desert. They were the color of the night sky he had walked beneath and learned to welcome as a haven from the dangers of the cloudless, white sky of the day, with its punishing sun.

  “Go,” he told her again. The wagon had passed them.

  But instead Helena hurried back to Stephen. She lifted her hand and laid it against his cheek. Her touch was firm, her hand warm and gentle. The touch of a well-known lover, his treacherous mind whispered.

  Helena’s thumb caressed the skin over Stephen’s cheekbone, a gentle sweep of flesh that left a swathe of tingling skin across the bone. Then, suddenly, she was gone, as abruptly as she had been in the forest yesterday. She had picked up her skirts and run for the wagon with the grace and fleetness of a deer. There was no ladylike shortening of her gait. She ran using the full length of her legs, like a man, or like someone who’d learned to gain maximum speed through harsh need.

  She gained the wagon. The people walking alongside it helped hoist her onto the rough planking. She talked and laughed and Stephen stepped around the last tree to watch her as the wagon pulled farther away.

  At the last minute Helena looked back but she was too far away to properly see her expression.

  Even after the wagon had disappeared from view, Stephen remained where he was. There had been no simple comradeship in her final touch. That caress acr
oss his cheek…

  Suddenly Stephen was afraid, for he knew he would not have the strength to turn her away again. “God help us,” he murmured to the trees.

  They rustled their agreement as a chill wind blew, heralding the coming of the evening.

  Chapter Eight

  Catherine pushed the badly cooked meat about her greasy trencher. The food held no charm for her. Instead she glanced toward the entrance to the hall.

  Where was Isobel? What took her so long? She had simply sent her to her room to fetch the bag of herbs Catherine used in her nightly drink. The herbs warded off headaches and she already felt the dull throb at the back of her eyes that heralded the onset of another. Tomorrow she would wake with the pain fully-grown, unable to move her head without the most nauseating booming reverberating through her. Just the memory of it was enough to turn her from her meal.

  Yet she must sit here until Prince John rose from the table. It wasn’t wise to upset the man. He had his family’s quick temper and evil genius for retribution. Besides, she was so close now to achieving her ambitions. Just one more strategic alliance and she would be there. Or rather, her son would be there. William would be safely established, his inheritance assured, with the most powerful allies in the land to support his claim.

  Catherine knew she was an oddity among women. She found no joy in gossip or discussions of childbearing and household management. She found more interest in the affairs of men. She more easily understood the true ebb and flow of power than many men, including her gentle, muddleheaded husband.

  She fully appreciated the treacherous waters in which they all swam. There were too many shoals, reefs and rushing tides to navigate for anyone not to plan their course carefully. Catherine had made such a plan five years earlier.

  It had been in Worcester castle, on a damp, dripping afternoon while she sat in a cold turret, keeping vigil over the body of her oldest son. It was the eve before he would be buried in the family crypt and Catherine was totting up her life to that point. Married at twelve to a man twenty years her senior who had sought her hand in marriage only for her dowry—the castle she now occupied as a wife and mother. She had quickly given birth to five boys and a stillborn girl. Two of the boys had died in infancy.

  Of the three who survived early childhood, the two oldest had lived long enough to ride to war with their father, fighting for King Richard even before he set sail for the Holy Land on his mad, expensive crusade. John, the younger of the two and named for his royal sponsor, had died of some strange disease on board the ship and never sighted foreign shores. Henry, her eldest, had lived to fight the Saracens and return to England with his father, only to find himself facing Richard’s men in siege, for Prince John had tried to take the crown for himself while Richard languished in his Austrian prison.

  It was there her oldest son had met his death, facing childhood friends and comrades from the Holy Land, still too young to understand the swiftly changing currents of power in which he had been caught.

  As she prayed over Henry’s body, Catherine could think only of her remaining son, William. What was to become of him? Must she send him to war too? How could she preserve a place for him where he would be safe?

  She had no illusions about her husband’s ability to provide that place. Hubert was a stoic, unimaginative servant to John, convinced that unswerving loyalty would win him the security and comfort he craved.

  Catherine knew that loyalty to the devil’s spawn Plantagenets was a slippery tool at best. Barons fell into and out of their favor at regular intervals, often with no apparent cause. Depending on the Plantagenets’ goodwill would not work unless there were defenses in place. She needed strong allies who also had the king’s ear and were able to act in concert to sway the king from an ill-advised path, if necessary.

  Over Henry’s body Catherine had laid her far-reaching plans. A series of alliances. Nothing formal, no treaties, no written agreements. But the steady, rock-solid formation of friendships with key men who stood closest to the crown. But not circling this king, already entrenched behind a rampart of lieutenants and allies of his own. No, Catherine settled for the man whom she believed would next be king. John. Not the babe Arthur, son of King Richard’s deceased brother Geoffrey, who was most favored as heir right then. Nor did she consider the possibility of Richard siring his own heir upon the luckless Berengaria, for his preference in bed partners made that outcome most improbable. John was the most likely and she gambled everything upon that outcome.

  It helped that Hubert was already John’s man, made so when King Richard first granted John the lands he so badly wanted. Worcestershire had been one of those boons Richard had scattered disdainfully at John’s feet.

  Over the next few years Catherine had slowly built her ring of alliances, all for William when he was old enough to come into his inheritance. She had started with the marcher lords, Worcester’s neighbors. Later she moved on to those barons who wielded the most influence over John. The process had been slow and subtle, for she was but a woman with no real place in the court. All her influence had to be channeled through her husband, who was a reluctant courtier at best. Through coaxing, praise and suggestion, she had placed Hubert and therefore herself, in positions where she could work more directly—a feast-day guest here, a tournament entrant there, a lonely baron hosted for a month or so, a grand hunt and feast at the height of summer. All clothed in the finery of social events that brought Catherine into direct contact with these men. Once she had the opportunity to speak to them, she quickly had the measure of them. An understanding was sure to follow.

  Despite her successes, Catherine was not quite finished. It did not help that she had no daughters to marry off to conveniently placed men, for marriage alliances were far more solid and dependable than those built on friendship and cordiality.

  “You do not eat, my gentle wife. Why not?”

  Catherine looked up at Hubert and smiled. “I await Isobel, my lord. She was to bring me my herb box.”

  His forehead wrinkled. “Another one, Catherine?”

  “Not if I take the drink the wise woman prescribed. It curbs them, if I rest for the evening.”

  “Then you must,” he said firmly, looking relieved. Her headaches always made him flutter uneasily around her, for he knew no cure and could not aid her through the pain. He was a gentle man and had never treated her with less than respect. For that, Catherine was grateful. The fates had treated her kindly.

  He nodded toward the door. “There is your wandering ward.”

  Catherine looked. Isobel walked to their table, her hands empty. Where were the herbs Catherine wanted?

  Isobel slid onto the stool opposite Catherine.

  “Where have you been?” Catherine demanded. “You have been an age about your task.”

  “Peace,” Isobel whispered. “Rather than declare your ailment to the world, I selected the necessary herbs and brought them without their box. Here.” She pulled a crumpled kerchief from her sleeve. “I prepared them for you. You have but to pour them into your wine.” The small handful of crushed, dried herbs was twisted in the center of the kerchief.

  Catherine took the cloth with a hand that trembled. “You have my gratitude,” she said quietly. “I forget your skill for catering to more than most pressing needs.”

  “Here, let me do that for you,” Isobel said and slid the cloth from under Catherine’s fingers.

  “Excuse me, my lord,” came a quiet voice at Catherine’s shoulder. She turned to see one of John’s liveried pages standing at Hubert’s shoulder, bent low to speak in his ear.

  “Well, what is it lad?” Hubert asked with a nervous bluster.

  “His Highness, Prince John, requests the Lady Isobel join him and Lord Savaric at the head of the table.” The page lifted his gaze to Isobel.

  Isobel sat frozen, eyes wide, hands held over Catherine’s goblet. In that moment, all of Catherine’s final plans fell into place. This was the key. The page’s simple message sp
oke volumes that everyone at the table understood completely. This was the way marriages had been formed for generations. Savaric had declared his interest in Isobel. The potential match had been approved by John, for he had issued the invitation on Savaric’s behalf.

  An alliance between her ward and John’s most trusted advisor and constant companion? Catherine’s heart beat harder and she felt a swift rush of excitement. This was the last move of her game, sliding into place with unexpected ease. Oh, the perfection of it!

  Hubert laughed. “Savaric, hey? Certainly, certainly. She will be pleased to join the count.”

  The page stepped around the table to stand at Isobel’s side. But Isobel had not moved, except her eyes, which widened even more as Hubert accepted the prince’s invitation on her behalf. Her face might have been carved from alabaster, so still and white was she.

  Alarm twitched in Catherine. Surely Isobel wasn’t about to refuse? Merciful heavens! She could not hand out such an insult when John himself had issued the invitation!

  Under the protection of the tabletop, Catherine prodded Isobel’s thigh. “Rise!” she hissed. “Do you want John’s anger upon you?”

  Isobel looked at her. In her eyes, Catherine saw fear and dismay.

  “Rise!” Catherine whispered again. She must get up and go to the prince. She had to.

  Sluggishly, Isobel rose to her feet. She turned to face the top of the table, standing tall and straight. Slowly, she walked toward it.

  “Hell and damnation,” Hubert whispered. “The woman looks like she’s on her way to the gallows!”

  “At least she is going,” Catherine said placidly, relaxing. “She won’t be the first woman to face climbing that particular gallows.”

  * * * * *

  The count requests the Lady Isobel join him and Lord Savaric at the head of the table. The words wouldn’t go away. Such simple words. Such earth-shattering words. No, no! This couldn’t be happening. Not now! Not when Stephen was here.