At the Queen's Summons

by Susan Wiggs

  “So that is how she kept her virtue all these years,” Donal Og said thoughtfully.

  “I wondered that as well,” said Iago.

  A barked oath burst from the back of the crowd. While Temple Newsome gasped and flailed, his manservant grabbed Pippa by the arm. She pulled away from him. The movement was too abrupt. Her arms made wide circles in the air as she toppled into the river.

  For a moment, the skirts spread around her like a bell. “You bean-fed, braying ass,” she yelled in a coarse accent, then sank out of sight.

  In a heartbeat of time, Aidan experienced a raw sense of panic and loss unlike anything he had ever felt. Neither losing his father in such a horrible manner nor Felicity’s betrayal could even approach this sense of dread. He had not realized what having Pippa in his life had given him—until now, when he was in danger of losing her.

  In one swift motion, he stood and dove cleanly into the water. He swam straight past the drowning Newsome, who grasped at him, and when he reached the spot where Pippa had gone under, he dove deep.

  Sunlight shone through a blurry filter of silt and river weeds. He saw the vague outline of a waving arm. He grabbed at it; missed. Hurry! his mind screamed. Hurry! Not until this moment had the survival of another person mattered so much to him. With a strong, scissorslike kick, he surged to the surface, taking mere seconds to gulp air before diving again. A flow of skirts caught his eye. Knowing now the full meaning of wordless, heartfelt prayer, he reached for her. His hand closed around fabric. He tugged, the fabric rent, and she slipped away. He surged toward her, and when he touched her hand—the hand of an Englishwoman, a stranger, a commoner, his heart nearly burst with gladness. He hauled her to the surface.

  Pippa gagged and then coughed, spewing river water and vile oaths. He hooked his arm around her and took her to the watersteps. When he reached the shallows, he caught her around the waist and under her knees, sweeping her up into his arms. She clung to his neck and swallowed great gulps of air. He climbed the watersteps with care, for they were green and slimy.

  “You’re carrying me,” said Pippa.

  “Aye.”

  “I can’t believe I needed saving.”

  “Again,” he reminded her.

  “Well, at least I am consistent.”

  He reached the landing. The crowd moved back to give them a wide berth, and he set Pippa on her feet. He tried to pretend it was not happening, but he could not hide the truth from himself. He was trembling.

  “Utterly hopeless,” she said.

  He looked into her eyes, seeing anguish and hope and the thing he dreaded most—a love so sweet and clear that it pierced him like a sword thrust.

  “We’re both hopeless,” he said huskily, thinking of Ireland, of Felicity, of all the countless reasons he could not return her love.

  Richard de Lacey stood in his boat. Aidan expected derision, but Richard began to clap his hands slowly. Others joined in, and applause rang across the river.

  Shaking off her brush with disaster along with bits of river weed, Pippa immediately pulled away from him. She adopted her showman’s stance, plucking her sodden, torn skirts and dipping in an elaborate curtsy. Lord Temple Newsome struggled on hands and knees up the slippery watersteps.

  “Next time you decide to pinch a lady’s arse,” she called, “be sure your victim is either too helpless to resist or too stupid to mind.”

  “You are a common trollop.”

  “Thank you, my lord Noisome,” she shot back with a false obeisance.

  “Charming,” he said, spitting on the ground.

  “You have the charm of a closestool,” she retorted.

  Newsome glared at Aidan. “Where did you find this—this piecemeal maid?”

  “Did the first dunking fail to clean up your mouth, Newsome?” Aidan asked, advancing on him.

  He said nothing, but squished along a garden path toward the house.

  Aidan bent forward and peeled off his tunic and shirt. He straightened, shaking back his wet hair, to find everyone staring at him. Again.

  Female whispers swept the goggling throng. Pippa wore an expression that raised his vanity to new heights. Her eyes were misty, her mouth slightly open; her tongue slipped out to moisten her lips. He held the tunic lower to conceal his body’s reaction.

  “What are those scars?” she asked with quiet awe.

  “That,” he said, feeling a flush creep up his neck, “is a long story. We had best get ourselves dry.”

  “And so you had,” said a laughing, friendly voice. Richard de Lacey clambered up to the river landing. “Come with me to Wimberleigh House. It’s just there, at the top of the garden.” He pointed at a beautiful, turreted mansion bristling with finials, with great bays of oriel windows facing the river. “It would be an honor to play host to such singular company.”

  Two hours later, Pippa stood at the top of the grand staircase of Wimberleigh House and frowned down the length of steps. The residence was not as big and rambling as Lumley House and Crutched Friars, nor was it as opulent as Durham House.

  Yet she felt immediately comfortable here. They had given her clean clothes, and a bashful maid had helped her dress. She inhaled the aroma of beeswax and verbena polish, alien scents to her, so why did they seem so familiar and evocative? She studied the paneled walls and painted cloth hangings. She could imagine Richard de Lacey growing up in this place, a lovely golden child racing through the galleries and halls or cavorting in the garden.

  As she leaned on the top newel post, the wooden orb bent to one side. Pippa gasped and jumped back.

  “Don’t mind that,” said a cheery voice.

  She spun around to see a smiling maid bustling toward her, holding a lit candle in her hand. “I be Tess Harbutt, come to light the chandelier.” She bobbed her coiffed head at the newel post. “There used to be a series of pulleys here to help my own dear grandmum up and down the stairs when she were getting on in years.”

  Tess clumped down the stairs and slid back a wooden panel to reveal a system of ropes and hooks. While Pippa watched with keen interest, the maid paid out the rope, which caused the chandelier to lower slowly.

  “The old Lord Wimberleigh—he be the Earl of Lynley now, Master Richard’s grandsire—was quite the inventor,” Tess explained. “Always dreaming up this or that convenience.”

  Pippa hurried down the stairs to get a closer look. The chandelier hung at eye level now, a great, heavy wheel of candles, each with a chimney of cut glass.

  “May I?” She took Tess’s candle and touched its burning head to each candle in the fixture. They were thick and white, not all smelly with tallow like the ones she was used to.

  “That’s him there.” Tess pointed to a portrait on the wall along the stairway. “His name is Stephen de Lacey.”

  She looked up. Ah, there was where Richard got his golden good looks, she noted.

  “That next one is Stephen de Lacey’s second wife, the Lady Juliana.” The matronly dark-haired lady held a fan to her bosom and was surrounded by children. An unusual, long-haired dog lay curled at their feet.

  “Juliana,” Pippa said. “Pretty name.” She was almost to the last candle.

  “Some as say she is Russian royalty,” Tess explained, warming to her tale. Dropping her voice to a gossipy whisper, she added, “Others as say she was a Gypsy.”

  Pippa jerked her hand in startlement, oversetting the last candle. The glass chimney fell, but she caught it before it shattered. “What did you say?” She put the glass back.

  Tess’s face flushed. “Idle gossip, is all. I misspoke, ma’am.”

  Yet as she lit the last candle and Tess used a crank to raise the chandelier, Pippa frowned up at the portrait.

  Juliana. A Gypsy. Some elusive thought hovered at the edge of her awareness, then flitted away. It must be her own encounter with the old Gypsy that jogged her memory, she decided. She pointed to two rectangular shadows on the paneling. “What portraits were removed?”

  “T
hose would be Master Richard’s parents, Lord and Lady Wimberleigh. They was taken down for packing. Master Richard’s got himself a military commission, he does. He has some miniature limnings of his brothers and sister—Masters Lucas, Leighton and Michael, and of course Mistress Caroline, the family favorite.”

  Pippa stared a moment longer at the portraits. A family. How alien the notion was to her. Discomfited by both longing and a sense of awkwardness, she plucked at her skirts. She was ever the misfit, ever the odd man out. “Do I look all right?”

  “Oh, aye, ma’am. That’s one of Mistress Caroline’s old ones. Perfect for you.” The maid eyed Pippa’s cropped hair, started to say something, then looked away politely. “You’d best be off to the dining hall. I think they’re waiting for you.”

  Pippa crossed the antechamber, flanked by grand archways, and went through the doors on her right.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t realize you’d been here before,” said Tess.

  “I haven’t.”

  “Then how do you know the way to the dining hall?”

  Pippa stood still in her tracks. Again she felt that prickle, that chill. Thoughts teased at her and disappeared, unformed. She looked helplessly at the friendly maid. “A lucky guess, I suppose.”

  From the Annals of Innisfallen

  I am a Christian as well as a Celt, which makes for some awkward moments in the confessional. I am not supposed to feel the dark prescience of disaster deep in my bones, for that smacks of paganism and is an affront to He who made us all.

  Still, there are times when I am forced to admit that the ancients do whisper secrets in my unsuspecting ear, and of late the secrets disturb me.

  There is mischief afoot in Killarney town and at Ross Castle. I have no reason to know this except that the chill in my brittle old bones tells me so. That, and the shifty way the bride of the O Donoghue refused to look at me when I went up to the keep to lead the rogation processional. Our “pagan” ceremonies do offend her Puritan sensibilities, but she displayed more than her usual hatred and distrust.

  The bishop has promised, at last, to help. It was a marriage that never should have been. In point of fact, it is no marriage at all. I shall send good news to Aidan regarding the annulment.

  Meanwhile, the rebellion of which I wrote so urgently to the O Donoghue Mór has been suppressed by Lord Constable Browne; I shudder to think how ruthlessly. A few stray rebels managed to take hostages, including that fat warthog Valentine Browne, nephew of the Constable. It is an unfortunate situation that reeks of deception. I think it is a little too convenient that the rebels seized only men unfit to fight or even govern. The rebels themselves are not Kerry men, but outsiders, masterless men who serve no cause save their own profit.

  A dark, dastardly and entirely awful suspicion overtakes me when I think about who was truly behind the hostage-taking, and whom the English will blame when they hear of it.

  If the she-king in London finds out about the mischief, she will lock up the O Donoghue Mór and throw away the key.

  —Revelin of Innisfallen

  Seven

  They dined in a lofty hall with a hammer beam roof. A small army of servitors conveyed sumptuous dishes to a table that was so long, Pippa could hardly see Donal Og and Iago. Those two were engaged in an animated, if halting, conversation with Richard’s foreign companions.

  She discovered two things immediately. She hated eels in mustard, and she adored being waited on. More gradually, she discovered the delights of blancmange and dried figs, the feel of a real silver wine chalice against her bottom lip. Having dining companions who spoke to her politely, in complete sentences, was an unforeseen boon.

  “I am expecting my parents from Hertfordshire,” Richard explained, “and my aunts and uncles and cousins. I’ve a large family and they’re all quite endearingly mad. We’ve had wild times together, always have.”

  Aidan watched him with a charming smile. Pippa suspected she was the only one who knew the meaning of the flinty look in his eyes. He said, “And will you and your family have wild times in Ireland, my good friend? You’d not be the first English family to do so.”

  “I assure you, my lord, if any of my family were to come to Ireland, it would not be to lay waste to the land,” Richard said soberly.

  A wave of wistful longing came over Pippa. The very idea of a family filled her with a bittersweet yearning for that warm, unknowable sense of belonging. “Hold fast to them,” she murmured. “A family is a blessing some fail to appreciate until they lack one.” She blushed and ducked her head. “I reveal too much of myself,” she said.

  A servant placed a platter of salad greens before her. She stared at them blankly, uncertain how to eat them.

  “Use a fork,” said Richard.

  “Don’t speak to a lady like that,” Aidan snapped.

  “Fork, I said. Use your fork.” Richard held up a three-pronged device that resembled a tiny pikestaff.

  “Oh.” Aidan relaxed against the back of his carved chair. “Sure and I thought you were being impertinent.”

  Richard threw back his head and laughed, and then he demonstrated the use of a fork.

  “Stirrups and forks,” said Aidan with his customary rich chuckle. “I have found two useful things among the Sassenachs.”

  Pippa experimented with her fork and found it much to her liking. In spite of the tension between Aidan and Richard, she found the company much to her liking, too. At the far end of the table, Donal Og and Iago continued to regale their uncomprehending listeners with tales recounted in English, Spanish and Gaelic. There was an undeniable appeal in watching a group of men in high spirits. The sight of all that lavish handsomeness struck her silent with wonder. She felt as if she had dropped into the very lap of heaven, where God in Her infinite wisdom made every man perfect to behold.

  One among them was too flawless. Here she sat in the house of the most beautiful man in England, yet she felt no breathless attraction to him. Instead, her gaze kept wandering to Aidan, with his long hair, his craggy features, his piercing eyes and the mouth that made her shiver when she remembered touching it with her own. She pictured him just out of the river, his hair streaming like black ribbons over his shoulders, his shirt peeled off to reveal his magnificent chest. She pictured the mat of inky hair arrowing down over a ridged stomach. The scars, fanning outward, must have been inflicted long ago and caused him untold agony.

  Was it a Catholic matter? she wondered. She would ask him about them soon.

  “I think she is smitten with you,” Richard remarked laughingly to Aidan.

  She sniffed, hoping she would not blush. “Are you unhappy that I’m not smitten with you?”

  “No.” Richard grinned. “Just surprised.”

  Her jaw and her fork dropped. “I gather self-love is another of your myriad virtues.”

  He roared with laughter. “You are a breath of fresh air, is she not, my lord of Castleross?”

  Aidan regarded her with such warmth and tenderness that she wanted to weep. “It is,” he said, “a privilege to know her. And sadly, I doubt any of us fully appreciate the gift of her.”

  She tried to counter with some bawdy comment, but for the life of her, she could not. Saucy words had never before failed her, but they did now. It was as if her tongue would not allow her to pour acid on the sweetness of his comment, to destroy the moment with a flippant remark, to render meaningless his gentle regard.

  Just those few words, spoken in Aidan’s deep, melodious voice, fired her skin with a blush that blotched her cheeks, her neck, even her bosom. She wished she had worn the ruff the maid had brought with her borrowed gown.

  She felt a prickling in her throat, a hot dewiness in her eyes, and at last she realized what had come over her. Somehow these two men, Richard with his humor and godlike good looks, and Aidan with his majestic and mystical Celtic spirit, gave her a sense of belonging.

  As soon as the thought struck her, she recoiled from it as if she had been singe
d. She knew well the price of affection, and it was a price she was not willing to pay. Drawing a deep breath, she became again Pippa the wandering juggler, a clown hiding the tears in her eyes.

  “A privilege indeed,” she blurted out, jumping to her feet, snatching up three forks and tossing them in the air. “It is not every table that boasts a resident juggler.”

  Richard leaned forward with his elbows on the table and his ruff mingling with his salad.

  “Are you all right?” Aidan asked.

  Richard stared at Pippa until she caught the forks and sat down, certain he had examined her to the last eyelash.

  Then he blinked. “My apologies. I am not usually so gauche.” He flashed his world-brightening smile. “Just for a moment there, you reminded me of someone. But I cannot think whom it could be. Now, never let it be said that at Wimberleigh House we make the guests provide the entertainment.” He clapped his hands, and three musicians appeared, one with a gittern, one with a reed pipe, and a singer. “Perhaps this will be more to your taste than the noise at Durham House,” he said.

  The singer, an effete young man who wore a look of artistic intensity, pinched out most of the candles on the table, plunging the room into moody half-light. A subtle chord rippled from the gittern, and the singer closed his eyes and swayed slightly, then began to sing in a perfect tenor. The reed pipe played a haunting countermelody, and the two blended with a plaintive splendor that was piercing in its beauty. The mingling of tones made Pippa feel raw and vulnerable, as if some part of her had been bared against her will.

  She sneaked a glance at Aidan. He was watching her, not the musicians, and not with the mild, polite interest with which one listened to a performance. Despite the dimness she could see him clearly, for the single candle left burning in the middle of the table threw a gleam of antique gold across his face. He sat forward, his face expressionless and his mouth set, yet the frank passion in his regard was unmistakable. Despite his unmoving pose, there was a turbulence deep in his eyes that enraptured her. She was his spellbound victim, open to him and helpless to resist, every inch of her flesh burning with the need to touch him. While she looked across the table, she remembered every moment they had shared, from the day she had knelt at his feet and stolen his knife to this afternoon when his strong arms had yanked her from the river. Her thoughts lingered on the night he had kissed her, a night of candleglow and drumming rain when she could hold none of her secret dreams inside her. It was as if they had lived a lifetime together rather than mere weeks.