At the Queen's Summons

by Susan Wiggs

  “Oooh.” She managed to infuse the exclamation with a wealth of wonder and yearning. “These are truly a gift from heaven.”

  They were no gift, but the castoffs of a maid who had run off with a Venetian sailor the week before. He heard Pippa bumping around behind the screen. A few moments later, she emerged.

  Haughty pride radiated from her small, straight figure. Aidan clamped his teeth down on his tongue to keep from laughing.

  She had the skirt on backward and the buckram bodice upside down. Her damp hair stuck out in spikes like a crown of thorns. She was barefoot and cradling the leather slippers reverently in her hands.

  Then she moved into the strands of sunlight streaming in through the kitchen door, and he saw her face for the first time devoid of soot and ashes.

  It was like seeing the visage of a saint or an angel in one’s dreams. Never, ever, had Aidan seen such a face. No single feature was remarkable in and of itself, but taken as a whole, the effect was staggering.

  She had a wide, clear brow, her eyebrows bold above misty eyes. The sweet curves of nose and chin framed a soft mouth, which she held pursed as if expecting a kiss. Her cheekbones were highlighted by pink-scrubbed skin. Aidan thought of the angel carved in the plaster over the altar of the church at Innisfallen. Somehow, that same lofty, otherworldly magic touched Pippa.

  “The clothes,” she stated, “are magnificent.”

  He allowed himself a controlled smile designed to preserve her fervent pride. “And so they are. Let me help you with some of the fastenings.”

  “Ah, my silly lord, I’ve done them all up myself.”

  “Indeed you have. But since you lack a proper lady’s maid to help you, I should take her part.”

  “You’re very kind,” she said.

  “Not always,” he replied, but she seemed oblivious of the warning edge in his voice. “Come here.”

  She crossed the room without hesitation. He could not decide whether that was healthy or not. Should a young woman alone be so trusting of a strange man? Her trust was no gift, but a burden.

  “First the bodice,” he said patiently, untying the haphazard knot she had made in the lacings. “I have never wondered why it mattered, but fashion demands that you wear it with the other end up.”

  “Truly?” She stared down at the stiff garment in dismay. “It covered more of me upside down. When you turn it the other way, I spill out like loaves from a pan.”

  His loins burned with the image, and he gritted his teeth. The last thing he had expected was that he might desire her. Pippa lifted her arms and held them steady while he unlaced the bodice.

  It proved to be the most excruciating exercise in self-restraint he had ever endured. Somehow, the dust and ashes of her harsh life had masked an uncounted wealth of charms. He had the feeling that he was the first man to see beneath the grime and ill-fitting clothes.

  As he pulled the laces through, his knuckles grazed her. The maids had provided neither shift nor corset. All that lay between Pippa’s sweet flesh and his busy hands was a chemise of wispy lawn. He could feel the heat of her, could smell the clean, beeswaxy fragrance of her just washed skin and hair.

  Setting his jaw with manly restraint, he turned the bodice right side up and brought it around her. As he slowly laced the garment, watching the stiff buckram close around a narrow waist and then widen over the subtle womanly flare of her hips, pushing up her breasts, he could not banish his insistent desire.

  True to her earlier observation, her bosom swelled out over the top with frank appeal, barely contained by the sheer fabric of the chemise. He could see the high, rounded shapes, the rosy shadows of the tips, and for a long, agonizing moment all he could think of was touching her there, tenderly, learning the shape and weight of her breasts, burying his face in them, drowning in the essence of her.

  A roaring, like the noise of the sea, started in his ears, swishing with the quickening rhythm of his blood. He bent his head closer, closer, his tongue already anticipating the flavor of her, his lips hungry for the budded texture. His mouth hovered so close that he could feel the warmth emanating from her.

  She drew in a deep, shuddering breath, and the movement reminded him to think with his brain—even the small part of it that happened to be working at the moment—not with his loins.

  He was the O Donoghue Mór, an Irish chieftain who, a year before, had given up all rights to touch another woman. He had no business dallying with—of all things—a Sassenach vagabond, probably a madwoman at that.

  He forced himself to stare not at the bodice, but into her eyes. And what he saw there was more dangerous than the lush curves of her body. What he saw there was not madness, but a painful eagerness.

  It struck him like a slap, and he caught his breath, then hissed out air between his teeth.

  He wanted to shake her. Don’t show me your yearning, he wanted to say. Don’t expect me to do anything about it.

  What he said was, “I am in London on official business. I will return to Ireland as soon as I am able.”

  “I’ve never been to Ireland,” she said, an ember of unbearable hope glowing in her eyes.

  “These days, it is a sad country, especially for those who love it.” Sad. What a small, inadequate word to describe the horror and desolation he had seen—burned-out peel towers, scorched fields, empty villages, packs of wolves feeding off the unburied dead.

  She tilted her head to one side. Unlike Aidan, she seemed perfectly comfortable with their proximity. A suspicion stung him. Perhaps it was nothing out of the ordinary for her to have a man tugging at her clothing.

  The idea stirred him from his lassitude and froze the sympathy he felt for her. He made short, neat work of trussing her up, helped her slide her feet into the little shoes, then stepped back.

  She ruined his hard-won indifference when she pointed a slippered toe, curtsied as if to the manner born and asked, “How do I look?”

  From neck to floor, Aidan thought, like his own private dream of paradise.

  But her expression disturbed him; she had the face of a cherub, filled with a trust and innocence that seemed all the more miraculous because of the hardships she must have endured living the life of a strolling player.

  He studied her hair, because it was safer than looking at her face and drowning in her eyes. She lifted a hand, made a fluttery motion in the honey gold spikes. “It’s that awful?” she asked. “After I cut it all off, Mort and Dove said I could use my head to swab out wine casks or clean lamp chimneys.”

  A reluctant laugh broke from him. “It is not so bad. But tell me, why is your hair cropped short? Or do I want to know?”

  “Lice,” she said simply. “I had the devil of a time with them.”

  He scratched his head. “Aye, well. I hope you’re no longer troubled by the little pests.”

  “Not lately. Who dresses your hair, my lord? It is most extraordinary.” Brazen as an inquisitive child, she stood on tiptoe and lifted the single thread-woven braid that hung amid his black locks.

  “That would be Iago. He does strange things on shipboard to avoid boredom.” Like getting me drunk and carving up my chest, Aidan thought grumpily. “I’ll ask him to do something about this mop of yours.”

  He meant to reach out and tousle her hair, a meaningless, playful gesture. Instead, as if with its own mind, his palm cradled her cheek, his thumb brushing up into her sawed-off hair. The soft texture startled him.

  “Will that be agreeable to you?” he heard himself ask in a whisper.

  “Yes, Your Immensity.” Pulling away, she craned her neck to see over his shoulder. “There is something I need.” She hurried into the kitchen, where her old, soiled clothes lay in a heap.

  Aidan frowned. He had not noticed any buttons worth keeping on her much worn garb. She snatched up the tunic and groped along one of the seams. An audible sigh of relief slipped from her. Aidan saw a flash of metal.

  Probably a bauble or copper she had lifted from a passing mercha
nt in St. Paul’s. He shrugged and went to the kitchen garden door to call for Iago.

  As he turned, he saw Pippa lift the piece and press it to her mouth, closing her eyes and looking for all the world as if the bauble were more precious than gold.

  From the Annals of Innisfallen

  I am old enough now to forgive Aidan’s father, yet young enough to remember what a scoundrel Ronan O Donoghue was. Ah, I could roast for eternity in the fires of my unkind thoughts, but there you are, I hated the old jackass and wept no tears at his wake.

  He expected more of his only son than any man could possibly give—loyalty, honor, truth, but most of all blind, stupid obedience. It was the one quality Aidan lacked. It was the one thing that could have saved the father, niggardly lout that he was, from dying.

  For certain, Aidan thinks on that often, and with a great, seizing pain in his heart.

  A pitiful waste if you ask me, Revelin of Innisfallen. For until he lets go of his guilt about what happened that fateful night, Aidan O Donoghue will not truly live.

  —Revelin of Innisfallen

  Three

  “So after my father’s ship went down,” Pippa explained blithely, “his enemies assumed he had perished.” She sat very still on the stool in the kitchen garden. The smell of blooming herbs filled the spring air.

  “Naturally,” Iago said in his dark honey voice. “And of course, your papa did not die at all. Even as we speak, he is attending the council of Her Majesty the queen.”

  “How did you know?” Beaming, Pippa twisted around on her stool to look up at him.

  Framed by the nodding boughs of the old elm tree that shaded the garden path, he regarded her with tolerant interest, a comb in his hand and a gentle compassion in his velvety black eyes. “I, too, like to invent answers to the questions that keep me awake at night,” he said.

  “I invent nothing,” she snapped. “It all happened just as I described it.”

  “Except that the story changes each time you encounter someone new.” He spoke with mild amusement, but no accusation. “Your father has been pirate, knight, foreign prince, soldier of fortune and ratcatcher. Oh. And did I not hear you tell O Mahoney you were sired by the pope?”

  Pippa blew out a breath, and her shoulders sagged. A raven cackled raucously in the elm tree, then whirred off into the London sky. Of course she invented stories about who she was and where she had come from. To face the truth was unthinkable. And impossible.

  Iago’s touch was soothing as he combed through her matted hair. He tilted her chin up and stared at her face-on for a long moment, intent as a sculptor. She stared back, rapt as a dreamer. What a remarkable person he was, with his lovely ebony skin and bell-toned voice, the fierce, inborn pride he wore like a mantle of silk.

  He closed one eye; then he began to snip with his little crane-handled scissors, the very ones she had been tempted to steal from a side table in the kitchen.

  As Iago worked, he said, “You tell the tales so well, pequeña, but they are just that—tales. I know this because I used to do the same. Used to lie awake at night trying to put together the face of my mother from fragments of memory. She became every good thing I knew about a mother, and before long she was more real to me than an actual woman. Only bigger. Better. Sweeter, kinder.”

  “Yes,” she whispered past a sudden, unwelcome thickness in her throat. “Yes, I understand.”

  He twisted a few curls into a soft fringe upon her brow. The breeze sifted lightly through them. “If you were an Englishman, you would be the very rage of fashion. They call these lovelocks. They look better on you.” He winked. “A dream mother. It was something I needed at a very dark time of my life.”

  “Tell me about the dark time,” she said, fascinated by the deftness of his hands and the way they were so brown on one side, while the palms were sensitive and pale.

  “Slavery,” he said. “Being made to work until I fell on my face from exhaustion, and then being beaten until I dragged myself up to work some more. You have a dream mother, too, eh?”

  She closed her eyes. A lovely face smiled at her. She had spent a thousand nights and more painting her parents in her mind until they were perfect. Beautiful. All wise. Flawless, save for one minor detail. They had somehow managed to misplace their daughter.

  “I have a dream mother,” she confessed. “A father, too. The stories might change, but that does not.” She opened her eyes to find him studying her critically again. “What about the O Donoghue?” she asked, pretending only idle curiosity.

  “His father is dead, which is why Aidan is the lord. His mother is dead also, but his—” He cut himself off. “I have said too much already.”

  “Why are you so loyal to the O Donoghue?”

  “He gave me my freedom.”

  “How was it his to give in the first place?”

  Iago grinned, his face blossoming like an exotic flower. “It was not. I was put on a ship for transport from San Juan—that is on an island far across the Ocean Sea—to England. I was to be a gift for a great noblewoman. My master wished to impress her.”

  “A gift?” Pippa was hard-pressed to sit still on her stool. “You mean like a drinking cup or a salt cellar or a pet ermine?”

  “You have a blunt way of putting it, but yes. The ship wrecked off the coast of Ireland. I swam straightaway from my master even as he begged me to save him.”

  Pippa sat forward, amazed. “Did he die?”

  Iago nodded. “Drowned. I watched him. Does that shock you?”

  “Yes! Was the water very cold?”

  His chest-deep chuckle filled the air. “Close to freezing. I dragged myself to an island—I later found out it is called Skellig Michael—and there I met a pilgrim in sackcloth and ashes, climbing the great stairs to the shrine.”

  “The O Donoghue Mór in sackcloth and ashes?” In Pippa’s mind, Aidan would always be swathed in flashing jewel tones, his jet hair gleaming in the sun; he was no drab pilgrim, but a prince from a fairy story.

  “He was not the O Donoghue Mór then. He helped me get dry and warm, and he became my first and only true friend.” Black fury shadowed Iago’s eyes. “When Aidan’s father saw me, he declared himself my master, tried to make me a slave again. And Aidan let him.”

  Pippa clutched the sides of the stool. “The jackdog! The bootlicker, the skainsmate—”

  “It was a ruse. He claimed me on the grounds that he had found me. His father agreed, thinking it would enhance Aidan’s station to be the first Irishman to own a black slave.”

  “The scullywarden!” she persisted. “The horse’s a—”

  “And then he set me free,” Iago said, laughing at her. “He had a priest called Revelin draw up a paper. That day Aidan promised to help me return to my home when we were both grown. In fact, he promised to come with me across the Ocean Sea.”

  “Why would you want to go back to a land where you were a slave? And why would Aidan want to go with you?”

  “Because I love the islands, and I no longer have a master. There was a girl called Serafina….” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head as if to cast away the thought. “Aidan wanted to come because he loves Ireland too much to stay.” Iago fussed with more curls that tickled the nape of her neck.

  “If he loves Ireland, why would he want to leave it?”

  “When you come to know him better, you will understand. Have you ever been forced to watch a loved one die?”

  She swallowed and nodded starkly, thinking of Mab. “I never felt so helpless in all my life.”

  “So it is with Aidan and Ireland,” said Iago.

  “Why is he here, in London?”

  “Because the queen summoned him. Officially, he is here to sign treaties of surrender and regrant. He is styled Lord of Castleross. Unofficially, she is curious, I think, about Ross Castle. She wants to know why, after her interdict forbidding the construction of fortresses, it was completed.”

  The idea that her patron had the power to decide
the fate of nations was almost too large for Pippa to grasp. “Is she very angry with him?” It even felt odd referring to Queen Elizabeth as “she,” for Her Majesty had always been, to Pippa and others like her, a remote idea, more of an institution like a cathedral than a flesh-and-blood woman.

  “She has kept him waiting here for a fortnight.” Iago lifted her from the stool to the ground. “You look as pretty as an okasa blossom.”

  She touched her hair. Its shape felt different—softer, balanced, light as the breeze. She would have to go out to Hart Street Well and look at her reflection.

  “You said when you met Aidan, he was not the O Donoghue Mór,” she said, thinking that the queen must enjoy having the power to summon handsome men to her side.

  “His father, Ronan, was. Aidan became Lord Castleross after Ronan died.”

  “And how did his father die?”

  Iago went to the half door of the kitchen and held the lower part open. “Ask Aidan. It is not my place to say.”

  “Iago said you killed your father.”

  Aidan shot to his feet as if Pippa had touched a brand to his backside. “He said what?”

  Hiding her apprehension, she strolled into the great hall of Lumley House and moved through gloomy evening shadows on the flagged floor. An ominous rumbling of thunder sounded in the distance. Aidan’s fists were clenched, his face stark and taut. Instinct told her to flee, but she forced herself to stay.

  “You heard me, my lord. If you’re going to keep me, I want to make sure. Is it true? Did you kill your father?”

  He grabbed an iron poker. A single Gaelic word burst from him as he stabbed at the fat log smoldering in the grate.

  Pippa took a deep breath for courage. “It was Iago who—”

  “Iago said nothing of the sort.”

  She emerged from the shadows and joined him by the hearth, praying he would deny her suggestion. “Did you, my lord?” she whispered.

  He moved so swiftly, it took her breath away. One moment the iron poker clattered to the floor; the next he had his great hands clamped around her shoulders, her back against a stone pillar and his furious face pushed close to hers. Though she still stood cloaked in shadow, she could see the flames from the hearth fire reflected in his eyes.