Wicked

by Jill Barnett

  The Novels of Jill Barnett

  The Novels of Jill Barnett

  Now Available Or Coming Soon In Ebook

  From Bell Bridge Books:

  JUST A KISS AWAY

  BEWITCHING

  DREAMING

  IMAGINE

  CARRIED AWAY

  WONDERFUL

  WILD

  WICKED

  THE HEART'S HAVEN

  SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

  THE DAYS OF SUMMER

  Visit Jill at www.jillbarnett.com

  and www.bellbridgebooks.com

  About Jill Barnett

  Jill Barnett sold her first book to Simon and Schuster in 1988 and has gone on to write 19 novels and short stories. There are over 7 million of her books in print, and her work has been published worldwide in 21 languages, audio and large print editions, and has earned her a place on such national bestseller lists as the New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Barnes and Noble and Waldenbooks—who presented Jill with the National Waldenbook Award. She lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest.

  Wicked

  By

  Jill Barnett

  Bell Bridge Books

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright 1999 © by Jill Barnett

  2010 Electronic publication - Bell Bridge Books

  eISBN: 978-1-935661-68-9

  Originally published 1999 by Pocket Books, mass market edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers. You can contact us at the address above or at BelleBooks@BelleBooks.com

  Visit us at www.bellbridgebooks.com

  Cover Design: Debra Dixon

  Interior Design: Hank Smith

  Artwork Credits:

  Knight (manipulated) © Vladimirs Poplavskis

  Floral & Lettering (manipulated) © Jaguarwoman Designs

  Texture © © Irinaqqq | Dreamstime.com

  :M0:01:

  Dedication

  To the mistakes we made,

  To the fools we were,

  To young love.

  Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to

  account for the curious attractiveness of others.

  —Oscar Wilde

  BOOK ONE

  She sat in a tower room. Alone. Perhaps forgotten with the hubbub going on inside the castle. Her hand rested on a heavily carved table where a clock sat, a whimsical water clock that counted minutes and hours in single, clear drops of water. ’Twas an odd-looking contraption with a metal and glass globe and birds that flapped their wings when enough water dropped to form an hour. She had bought it many years past in a moment of fancy at a small May fair, where it had been quite the spectacle.

  On that warm spring day when the farmers and villagers of Kent had gathered around a hawker’s brightly striped booth, Sofia had stood nearby, watching and listening while he showed them all how time was truly passing right before their very eyes.

  Count the water drops! See the courses of time!

  Like the rest of the crowd she had been drawn in, had stepped even closer, amazed that someone had actually trapped time inside that globe. She left the May fair that day with the wondrous water clock hugged tightly to her chest and her purse empty.

  Perhaps it was her wishful thinking or youthful ignorance, but owning that clock made her believe she had gained some sliver of power over time, and thereby, over her own future.

  But when winter came that year, one day the water inside the clock froze as if time itself was suddenly standing still. Day after day, hour after hour passed in spite of the frozen clock, until Sofia saw the plain truth: she never did have the secret of passing time tucked safely away inside her chamber.

  Now she needed no clock to see time pass. In the mornings when she awoke and looked into the polished glass, she saw the changes time had made on her face— the small lines above her lips and on her neck and brow, the creases in the corners of her eyes. Her face had changed as much as her life. Like single drops from a water clock, time passed by in seemingly minute increments.

  When she was young and so anxious to grow up, she had rushed headlong into life. She had lived her feckless youth in the same manner as one of the castle goats, stubborn, blinded to reason by the need to butt anything that by chance or by purpose got in her way. But now she realized that for all of her headstrong determination, for all of her need to race toward the future, none of it had made time move one single drop faster.

  Time, death, life, they were all on her mind this day. Because it was on special days, days that marked your life, when you always dreamt backwards.

  She rose from her chair near the window, then crossed her chamber in the tower, over the flat, painted floor tiles where amber sunlight coming through the leaded-paned windows formed a scattering of diamond patterns. She opened the heavily carved doors of a cabinet and took out a birchwood box, a gift from a merchant who wanted favor with the lady wife of the Earl of Gloucester.

  Inside the box were two manuscripts. One was made up of thick pages of old paper so soft that they almost felt like cloth. Those pages were bound together with covers cast of solid silver inlaid with copper from the hills of Castile, Queen Eleanor’s childhood homeland. The covers were secured with a small lock shaped like a swan with its head tucked sleepily under its wing.

  The other manuscript was plain; it had no expensive silver covers, no finely crafted locks that kept the contents from prying eyes. Its covers were made from a soft brown leather and tied together with rough laces of rawhide.

  Sofia took out the ornate manuscript. A moment later, with the twist of a small iron key on a chain around her neck, the silver cover was unlocked. She turned back the heavy metal plate and the rich, exotic odor of cinnamon and anise rose from inside, the same familiar scent that had always shadowed Eleanor into or out of a room.

  It had been so long since she looked at these books, for it was no easy thing to see yourself from someone else’s eyes.

  She picked up the book and moved to a seat nearby, a beechwood bench with a tapestry pillow that had a tourney scene depicted in the small, colorful stitches Queen Eleanor had tried and dismally failed to teach her.

  She set the book in her lap and again flipped open the covers, skimming through a few pages until she found a page marked with a pressed rose. At the top of the page, gilt letters formed her name, ornately inscribed and pigmented with color the shade of the rich wine Eleanor had loved. Then Sofia began to read.

  Sofia

  Since the age of four, Lady Howard has been ward to My Husband, Edward Plantagenet, her cousin, who is the King of England. Sofia was a lovely child, cherubic and striking but willful and full of mischief. As each year passed, she grew lovelier, and more stubborn.

  By the age of two and ten, one glimpse of her fair face would cause grown men to stop and stare open-mouthed, for her black hair had grown thick and long, her skin was like snow in the meadows. But it was her eyes, those light purple eyes, that make you look at her and think there could be nothing lovelier. She is tall in stature, so all are aware that she is in a room as surely as if she were the King Himself.

  Brave lords and knights
who have caught only mere glimpses of Sofia’s profile in My Carriage claim they must have her to wive. As the King’s Ward, she comes heavily dowered, which combined with her exquisite beauty makes her a prize of the Land.

  Until those same foolish men meet her.

  Many times over recent years, the sound of Edward’s bellowing has echoed off the castle walls. “She has burned my brain with her foolery and now no hair will grow from my head that is not white!” Once my Edward called in Italian physicians to examine Him. He claimed that His Brain was boiling and the next hairs on His Head would grow in the color of the flames of Hell. This was after a spurned betrothal between Lord Geoffrey Woodville and Sofia. She was four and ten at the time of the match, which was considered by all to be a splendid one.

  Sofia considered nothing about the match splendid. When the bright-haired young lord came to seriously court Sofia, she rubbed pork fat in her hair so it hung in dirty shanks. She scoured her face with what she later confided to me were willow leaves to make her skin turn sallow and a greenish color, then she wore a gown of a murky saffron yellow that seemed to blend with the putrid tint on her skin. Watching her entrance into the Great Hall was most amusing for she made her footsteps slow and shuffling like the mad old hag who begs for buckets of gold at the castle gates.

  Upon first meeting Lady Sofia, I remember that Lord Geoffrey asked if the girl was not in truth very ill. Whenever Edward was looking elsewhere, she would cross her eyes and stick food in her ears and nose. Lord Geoffrey Woodville and his entourage left in a rush before Matins and under cover of night, for he did not want to displease the King. But word came back that even for royal favor and blood bond, he vowed he would not marry and breed sons with the castle idiot.

  There have been others, sons of all the noble families in Court, even a Castilian prince. Sofia has continued to refuse her suitors . . . all of them, until Edward threatened to force her hand. I have been able to keep him from doing so. But there have been no more offers, so the only thing to plague Sofia is boredom, something she can never tolerate for long. Just this morn, the day of the Miracle Plays, she said to me that she almost wished for another suitor if only to keep time from moving ever so slowly.

  I have prayed, beseeching God in Heaven to please, please send someone, the right someone, for my willful Sofia.

  Sofia closed the book and she was overcome by that old feeling you get when you remember something from long ago. Amused. Embarrassed. A little sad. All at the same time.

  She knew she was still the same woman written about on those pages. She still had the same black hair, the same purple eyes, that same wide mouth from which spouted those unexpected comments that kept her husband from growing complacent and thinking he knew her all too well.

  She was the same inside, but she had mellowed from life and love.

  How odd it was that now when people met her and her husband for the first time, they saw the tender way he would look at her, and she at him, their gentle manner, how they were unafraid now to show the world that they loved each other. Those same observers often said, “Ah! Your marriage was a love match! Love at first sight, no doubt.”

  Then her husband usually glanced at her, amusement in his clear blue eyes. His answer was always the same: “Love at first sight? ’Twas more like war at first sight.”

  While all laughed at his wit he would give her a teasing wink. But he did not know that those strangers spoke the truth. Even now, all these years later, whenever she looked at him her breath still caught in her throat just like it did on the very day that Eleanor wrote those words, the day that she was in Queen’s prayers, for that was the first time Sofia ever truly saw Sir Tobin de Clare.

  Chapter 1

  All Fools’ Day,

  Leeds Castle in Kent, England

  It was the time of year for the Miracle Plays, which was good, because she needed a miracle to break the boredom of her feeble existence. She moved listlessly across the battlements. The sun was unusually hot that spring day, even hotter than the King’s temper.

  Edward was her guardian, and guard her he did, particularly since he had somehow discovered her plan to ride in the squire races that were scheduled for after the play. Since the day before, she’d had little freedom. She had been forbidden to go near the stables and banished to her chamber for the whole evening while the King raged on about her faults.

  She exhaled a huge sigh, then crossed her arms in frustration and continued to pace the stone wall. She might as well have had her ankles chained together and been locked in the bottom of the donjon. Or . . . fed only bread and water like the German and Welsh captives the King kept for ransom.

  She reached the end of the battlements and spun around swiftly. Her braids came loose from their tight knots above her ears and she impatiently slapped them out of her face, then paced back in the opposite direction.

  Women were supposed to be content only sitting in the stands watching, while they waved their silly silken favors. A woman was supposed to wait until some knight chose to honor her with his attention.

  Sofia hated to wait for anything. She truly believed that if one stood around and waited for something special to happen, it never did.

  After her mother’s death from desperately trying to bear a son and heir, Sofia waited for her father to come home. He was all she had left; she was all he had left. She was not yet four at the time, but she could remember it clearly, almost as if twelve years had not passed. She remembered the way she stood at the creneled walls, then at the arrow slits in the tower. Her ankles had rubbed together and been bruised after standing on her tiptoes for so long. Her neck had ached from the strain of stretching her chin high enough to be able to watch the horizon, to search the green hills for the first glimpse of her father’s pennant waving over the crest of the hill.

  She waited all those long and lonely hours for him to come home.

  He never did.

  Word finally came to Torwick Castle that he was too distraught to come home to a puny daughter when death had so cruelly taken his newborn son. His heir. And his wife.

  So while she was frightened and lonely and waiting futilely for him to come home to her, he rode farther north, farther away from her.

  A fortnight later he was mortally wounded in the siege at Rochester. He lived for only a few days, long enough to send messages to Edward, then Crown Prince.

  But not long enough to send words of any kind to his only child. No good-bye. No deathbed wish. Nothing. Sometimes Sofia wondered if he had even remembered that she existed.

  She learned early, and in the cruelest of ways, the true value of a woman. She also learned that sitting around and waiting was much more painful, more futile, than seeking out what she wanted. She could stomach failure. She could not, however, watch the world and all she wished for pass her by.

  She stood still, frustrated and tense, because there was so little she could truly do. She turned and propped her elbows on the wall that was so far above the rest of the world. She rested her chin on her damp palms and gazed heavenward as if there were magical answers waiting for her there.

  But there were no answers. Only a sky so brilliant blue it hurt your eyes to look at it and a few puffy clouds that moved as slowly as the hours of the day, almost as slowly as her long and boring existence.

  After a moment she pulled the silver ribbons from her hair and tucked them into the bodice of her blue silk gown, then she began to unweave her braids because it gave her something to do with her hands other than to tap impatiently on the stone. Soon her hair was loose and fell heavily down past her shoulders and over her back. It was free. Free. The way she was not.

  She looked down below her because there was nothing else to do. Immediately she spotted the King and Queen taking their seats in an awning-covered dais near the stage erected for the Miracle Plays.

  One could not miss the King because he was so very tall. His golden hair caught the sun and shone so brightly sometimes it made people think he was
some kind of god. But Sofia knew he was not a god.

  The people called him Longshanks; she called him merciless.

  His whole purpose on this earth seemed to be nothing more than to make her life truly miserable. She watched the Queen sit there serenely because the poor sweet woman had no idea she was wed to an ogre of the worst kind.

  She loved Queen Eleanor, who was kind and did not raise her voice at Sofia even when she was not pleased with something she had done. Certainly it was not poor, dear Eleanor’s fault that she was married to a tyrant with a will as strong as a castle wall and a head that was probably just as thick. Marriages were made for reasons of politics. Her cousin was fortunate that Eleanor was so good and kind she could not see his vile faults.

  Sofia glared at the King and hoped his scalp burned from it. Her pride was aching and her memory echoed with his angry words from the night before, when Edward had scolded her in front of his guests.

  You, Sofia, are bound to drive me mad with your foolishness. What you need is a husband to teach you humility and obedience!

  In recent years she had heard that speech too many times to count. ’Twould be like trying to count the grains of salt in a cellar or the number of angels that could dance on the head of pin.

  As if a husband could make her obey him. She was no slave. She was Sofia, and someday they would all know she was worthy of being called more than just a woman.

  Later, when she’d had her ear pressed to their chamber door, she heard him lamenting to the Queen:

  Eleanor, Sofia’s antics are a disgrace. Tell me why in God’s name she cannot spend her days stitching tapestries or at some other female entertainment.

  As if sitting around listening to women’s chatter while she was poking a needle into a piece of cloth was entertaining.

  When Edward had suddenly opened the door and she had rather inconveniently fallen inside, caught once again eavesdropping, she’d asked him if sewing were so entertaining, then why did she never see men doing it? Edward’s neck had turned the color of blood before he bellowed that sewing was not men’s work. For merely a breath of a moment, she had actually thought his liver might go up in flames.