She inhaled sharply.
Will took a step towards John, then fell back as the man whirled on him.
“How lovely is she really, Will?”
“Sire,” Will said with a note of apology. “You see for yourself.”
“I do, Will. I do!” John strode to confront his man. “But you are the one who chained her to you. You are the one she ran from. You are the one who has spent weeks with her.” He grinned now, a lecherous smile curving his full lips. He lifted a finger at one of Will’s retainers. “You there, come here.”
The man took four steps forward and knelt before his king. “Sire.”
“Your name?”
“Roland Gilbert of Cam, Sire.”
“How long have you served your lord Greystone?” John demanded, his gaze on Will.
Blanche schooled her features to show nothing. The hair on her arms stood up. But the look on Will’s face was all serenity and she marvelled at his control.
“Since I was eight, Sire. I fostered with him and he kept me.”
“Fortunate for you, eh, Gilbert?”
The young man agreed.
“Tell me then, Gilbert, how did the four of you travel here?”
“On horse, Sire.”
“Gilbert, look at me! I know my lord Greystone does not keep fools in his retinue. Describe to me how you came here, man.”
The knight told the tale with the same severity that Will had her swear to. Truth, bald and simple.
“And you slept in inns and monasteries,” John mused. “No troubles in the shires? Hospitality abides, does it?”
The young knight affirmed it was so.
“And you slept with your knight in arms here?” John pointed to the other retainer.
“We did, Sire.”
“And these two?” John waved a hand towards Blanche and Will.
“In the same inns and monasteries, Sire.”
John glared at Will, but spoke to the retainer. “I do hope so! Tell me where they slept. How they slept.”
“In rooms,” the knight cleared his throat. “The same rooms.”
“Together!”
“I do not know, Sire.”
The king hovered over the wincing man and bellowed, “In the same bed?”
“I did not see them, Sire. I cannot say.”
“Ah, but you have a mind, do you not, man? Look at me! What of their manner together?”
“Friendly. Respectful.”
At his words, Blanche zeroed in on Will’s face. Unaffected still, he watched the exchange of his man and his king, while he himself stood straight as a rod, serene as a statue of marble. She gathered some courage from his indifference. After all, Will must have taught his men to speak honestly as well.
“And the chains, young Gilbert?” John inquired. “What do you make of the necessity for those?”
“My lord Greystone applied them after we chased down Lady Bergeron.”
The young man stopped. Blanche’s heart did, too. If he said more of her escape, he might implicate her brother. She should have thought of that possibility before she ran to her kin but she had been too blind to see that no flight was possible from this coil. She opened her mouth to try to explain herself when Will coughed and called to John.
“Sire, Gilbert here is a true and loyal retainer of mine. He lives to serve. And he does so well. He lives a life of my choosing and no, he was not invited to share a room with the lady and myself. Why would I do that? It was my duty to preserve her safety as well as her honour. The chains became a necessity and Gilbert knew my reasoning. That he did not share our room, nor did my other man here, is routine and of a pattern fit to their station. The Lady Bergeron is well aware of her miscalculation to flee from me and from your largesse. She is most apologetic. Are you not, my lady?” Will’s one–eyed demand penetrated her intention to explain herself.
Patience, she told herself, won over irrational men. Had she not learned that from Will. “Sire, I am most sorry for my mistake to flee my fate. I know now I should have paid my taxes. Paid them promptly. And saved us all the results.”
“What a cool number, you are, Madame,” John cooed. “Did you possess that trait all your life or did Greystone teach you that each night alone in your bedrooms?”
She deflected her gaze once more to the floor. Truth, bald and simple. “Greystone taught me.”
“Ha! She admits it!” John whirled towards Will. “You are a magician, I always said it. What else did you share with her?”
Will stared his sovereign in the eyes and batted not one lash of his one good eye.
“Nothing?” John prodded.
“My life’s story,” Will responded. “Tales of my services to your brother, King Richard. To Saladin and the Doge in Venice.”
“That’s all?”
“That is enough.”
“Bored you, did he?” John turned on Blanche again.
“Nay, Sire.”
John narrowed his gaze at her. “I had heard tales of you, my lady.”
Blanche did not move for fear to scratch this man’s eyes out.
“I heard tell you were a big, handsome woman. Brusque and opinionated. Happily widowed. Were you, Madame, happily widowed?”
“I was, Sire.”
“Your husband was no match for you?”
How was she to answer that one? Truth, bald and simple. “No, Sire.”
“But now you seem like no happy widow to me. Nor a happy bride. Nay, you have a different look about you, Madame.” John crossed his arms, tapped one finger against his mouth as he took to circling her again. “Why is that?”
She shook her head, not knowing what he wanted of her. “I do not know, Sire, what you mean.”
John planted himself in front of her. Arms akimbo again, he examined her as if she were a dead bug in his trencher. “Your cheeks have a rosy hue. The colour in your eyes is brilliant. The moist look of youth lies upon your skin. Is this the way a woman of thirty years grows older?”
She licked her lips. “I do not know any other women of thirty.”
“Well, I do,” he whispered in a heathen’s hush. “And I daresay I know why you look this way, too. Madame, are you breeding?”
She sucked in air. Her eyes flew wide at the insult. Ready to fling back one at him, she bit her tongue.
“Sire!” Will flew to her side and grasped her elbow, his nails biting down in her flesh. “This is unseemly.”
“Tell me!” John threw up a hand and reclaimed his dais and his chair. “Guard, come forward!”
Will reached a hand out to John and withdrew it. “Do not do this!”
John sneered. “Take her away, guard.”
She panicked. “Will?”
“Take her away!” John demanded. “You,” he thundered at Will, “remain!”
Chapter Nine
As the doors closed on Blanche and her two guards, Will pivoted to face John. “That was unnecessary,” he said, fighting to tamp down his temper.
“You are arrogant, Greystone.”
“Unnaturally so,” Will pointed out and marched up, an arm’s distance from this man he wished to God he respected. “And you know that to be true.”
John mused on that. “I do. So?”
“She is worthy of kinder treatment.”
“Is she? How worthy, we must discuss. First of her offences, she did not pay my taxes. She showed her own power in a land that could as well favour the Welsh.”
“Nay. You and I know her serfs speak their own mix of Saxon and Norman French. A mix of Celtic, aye, but not the garbled Welsh. They show no signs of harbouring Llewleyn any time this century.”
“You know so well? You were there one day or two before you had to track her down like a deer!”
Will flowed closer, his mind more stern against this man than ever it had been before. “I know her people very well. I studied them and had my men do the same. Plus, you do know, I am a good judge of character. You have said so yourself many times. Else I would
not have helped you—and you would not have allowed me to do so.”
“True. Still, the lady commits a grievous error against me and mine to sully herself before her wedding.”
Will inhaled at the affront. “You have no proof she did.”
John narrowed dark and beady eyes at him. “I know a woman well fucked when I see one.”
“I know you do, Sire.” Will seethed inside at the knowledge that John, having taken countless women to his bed willingly or not, counted twelve bastards. Meanwhile, from his second wife, a much younger comely girl whom he’d kidnapped from her family, he’d sired five children.
“And I know the glow of a woman who has conceived.”
“But you could be wrong.” Will prayed, for Blanche’s sake, she did not carry a child. If he did not win here, a pregnancy would go badly for her. And he cursed himself that he had assumed, as she said, that she was too old to bear more babes and the chances of her survival few. Plus, it was too soon to know. Wasn’t it?
“I could be,” John replied, “but I’m not. What I really want to know,” John crooned, leant forward in his chair, a hand to his chin, “is why, with all the women you could choose from, that you would take this woman to you and make her love you?”
Will surveyed him with a jaundiced eye. “Aye, to what end would I do that?”
“Ach! You and your silver tongue! How the hell do I know why you did it? I’ll tell you this though, Greystone.” John wrinkled his nose. “You’ll not change my mind. If my physicians find she is with child, I will conclude you are her seducer. And I will cry no tears to have you strung up and castrated for your stud to her.”
Will fisted his hands and let the anger go. He had to show this man his limits. “After all these years of my service to you, you would kill me.” He shook his head, incredulous. “I stand by you, solve your challenges to your power and your decisions, and you would kill me?”
“You took my will and turned it into yours!”
“Nay, Sire. I never did. Not until this moment. Not until now when you’ve shown me that I have no merit with you for all my loyalty.”
“I valued what you’ve done. But not this!”
“I valued serving you. But not in this.”
“Well then, another reason you must die!”
“Sire,” Will knowing his next words might mean the prompt end of his love affair and his life, “you kill me at your own risk.”
John rose from his chair, his nostrils flared and his eyes wide with anger. “You threaten me?”
“I do as I have always done. I inform you.”
“Pretty words. I tire of your politesse.”
“My politesse has saved you many a time, Sire. This time it can as well. If you will listen.”
“You vex me sorely, Greystone.” John resumed his chair. Crossing one leg over the other, he looked more like a petulant child waiting for a sweetmeat than a king reproving his most renowned counsellor. “Inform me, then!”
“Arranged marriages make no one happy.”
“God’s nightshirt, man! Arranging marriage is the way rulers keep their minions in order.”
“I say they don’t. My marriage didn’t. Made by my father for my bride’s land, my wife was a spoilt child, sickly and demanding. A real hellion to live with. Look at your own first marriage.” Will extended a hand. “Forced to wed a woman you did not want. Required for political reasons. Land, too. Did it make you happy?”
John scowled. “I am the king. I have a right to be happy in something. And she was no true wife to me. I had it annulled.”
“Aye, and then you had the Earl of Essex buy her up for twenty thousand marks!”
“‘Twas a good deal. He’s still not paid it all, you know.”
Will sighed, fully aware of the sorry state of John’s treasury. “I know. But she does love him and he her, so he is pleased to pay the fee to have her. But why pay you for that right?”
“Because I am the king!”
“With rights to declare how men and women should live together?” Will persisted.
“Of course.”
“Phillip Augustus of France has given up the right to marry off daughters and widows against their will. Can you do any less?”
“That bastard! He’s an idiot. If I don’t do this, how do I fill my coffers for the lack?”
“If you do this,” Will said softly, moving in on his quarry, “how do you collect from more and more unhappy nobles like Lady Bergeron?”
“She did not pay the beer tax. I was unhappy! I must be kept happy!”
“But who will pay any tax to a king who cares more for his prosperity than for their welfare?”
John glared at him. “Do you dare to stand there and tell me that by marrying off a woman to a man, I will have unhappy subjects?”
“Aye, my lord.”
“How many unhappy subjects?” John pursued this.
Will rejoiced at how well John followed his lead. “Many. Would you care to hear from a few?”
“Now?” John looked at him out of the corner of one eye, the wicked look that told of the man’s manic distrust.
Will nodded.
“Here? How many, Greystone?”
“Two.”
“Who?”
“Simon de la Poer, the Earl of Atherton, and Geoffrey St. Clair, the Earl of Winton.”
“The two most landed nobles of the north and south. How came they here now? I did not summon them.”
“Nay. I did.”
“Cunning son of a bitch, you are.”
Aye, Sire. Takes one to know one.
“Bring them in! Let us be done with this!”
Will glanced at the guard at the far door. “They wait in the bailey,” he said. The man nodded, then went in search of the two men whom Will had known since he had nearly died with them more than two decades ago on the shores of the Holy Land.
As they waited, John picked at his tunic and looked everywhere but at him. Will stood, hands at his side, so that by his stance, John might deduce no physical harm was intended to him by these visitors who’d come at Will’s behest.
When the doors opened, and Will turned, he knew he’d never valued any two men more than these friends. The tall dark one—Simon—had saved him from the thrust of a Saracen’s scimitar and certain death twenty years ago. Will had returned the honour last year when Simon would have died in his attempt to save his beloved from men who would oppress her and marry her off against her will. The second man, Geoff, was part Irish, an auburn–haired warlock who had once served as personal guard to the emperor in Constantinople.
The protocol observed, the men paid homage to John and he got right to the issue.
“Why are you here, de la Poer?”
Simon lifted his silver gaze to look upon John. “I bring you word from the northern barons, Sire. They are of a mind on issues of taxation, fees and marriage rights of their women.”
“Why bring me this now, de la Poer?”
“The barons of the north, eight in all, have spoken of this often together this past year. The intended marriage of my wife, who was then a widow, to a man you seemed to prefer, has been much on their minds. The fact that we paid you in silver and jewels to allow her to marry me offends my noble friends. They have heard too of this marriage you intend for Lady Bergeron and they are concerned you will dictate the fates of their own daughters and widows.”
John drummed his fingers on his armrest. “And you, St. Clair? What say you?”
“I come to remind you of the fate of my cousin, Lady Esme Montague and her intended. Both were well loved in our climes. Both died in horrible ways. Many who are Lady Montague’s kin wish to never see such sacrifices demanded of a young woman and man again. We are fourteen barons united in this, Sire. No more young women should die for loving a man other than one you decree. We will fight for this, Sire. We prefer to do so with words but we will resort to more forceful means, if we must. We await your decision.”
John grimac
ed. Will could see that the king now understood how grave this threat to his security truly was. Rebellion was no small consideration and Will fought back the urge to bellow at the man to give in. Yet John fumed and muttered and stared at the ceiling for many torturous minutes.
Will knew John could think himself into fits, if this went on too long. Finally, he stepped forward, “Sire?”
John stirred and looked at Simon. “How came you here today?”
“We come at the request of the retainers of the Earl of Greystone,” responded de la Poer.
John bit the inside of his cheek. “The same for you, St. Clair?” he asked and received the same answer.
John features fell. He peered at Will. “What do you want, Greystone?”
“Lady Bergeron as my wife.”
* * * *
That evening, the sun drifted to the horizon and Blanche’s solitude gnawed at her nerves. She sat on a wooden bench in an unfurnished tower room, huddled in her gown against the chill.
Footsteps in the winding stairs had her girding herself for whatever her new fate would be.
The door swung open and banged against the far wall.
“Will!” She sprang to her feet and would have run to him, but his two friends flanked him.
“Come, my dear Lady Bergeron,” Will summoned her. “We must leave quickly.”
“Leave?” She could scarcely think, let alone put one foot in front of the other. “But how?”
The dark giant behind Will chuckled. “She does have a will of her own.”
“I dare say she does,” Will laughed, as he gathered her round the waist and led her to the stairs.
“But—how?”
“Questions, later, Madame,” the red-head urged them on. “We must leave before John reverses his decision.”
“And—and what is that?” she demanded as she caught Will’s tabard in one fist and yanked him round to face her. “Tell me, damn you!”
The dark one growled. “Tell her, for Christ’s sake and let’s be gone!”
For Her Honour (Swords of Passion) Page 7
