“Leave it, Francis. I trust her.”
“If you prove wrong on this one, it will break you, I fear.”
Roger raised his eyebrows interrogatively.
“There’s something between you and that girl. I don’t know why you bother to deny it. I think you’re in love with her.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“Am I?” There was a pause; then Francis asked the question he never asked about Roger’s women: “Have you bedded her?”
“That’s none of your concern. May we drop the subject, please?”
“You desire her, of that I have no doubt. But do you love her? Can you love her? What will become of her if you do?”
Roger was in no mood to have his feelings for Alix analyzed by Francis. Neither did he wish his friend to be so certain of the truth. In the most basic and direct terms, he feared Francis’ jealousy. So far, the older man had ignored his various women, knowing perhaps that none of them had ever been closer in spirit to him than Francis was himself. But now that had changed. Now he would put her first, before anyone or anything. That was a fact he preferred Francis not know.
And so he said callously, “Your brain’s rotting with all this talk of love. I’m fond of the chit, but I’m not in love with her. As for lusting after her, the thought has occasionally crossed my mind. She is female, after all. But I’ve no great yearning for a skinny, red-haired harridan in my bed.”
Francis had dropped the matter then, but Roger sensed he hadn’t convinced him. Now, huddling with his charges in the cold of a June night that felt more like chill October, Roger wished he had taken Alix to bed. Just once. He wanted to know what it would have been like to lie with a woman he truly cared for, a woman who loved him too, a woman with whom he felt at peace. Once, just once, in his life.
*
The climb down was easier than it had looked. Within ten minutes Alexandra was on the ground, her legs scratched and her hands scraped, her shoulder and thigh joints aching, but otherwise in fine spirits. Hands on hips, she looked back up at the wall she had scaled and congratulated herself. “So there, you scurvy blackguard,” she said out loud, with an accompanying obscene gesture in the direction of Geoffrey’s window.
A bark of laughter greeted her as she turned toward the cobbled streets. The bright light of a torch blinded her, and applause sounded in her ears.
“Bravo!” said the scurvy blackguard himself. “I thought for a few minutes that I might have to pick up the pieces.”
Alexandra sagged against the stone wall of the house. Geoffrey and six horsemen surrounded her, all of them staring insolently at her hiked-up skirts. I will not cry, she reminded herself, only just managing to stop the tears that threatened to overwhelm her. Fortune was certainly working against her tonight.
“Come, amazing lady,” said her nemesis, bending over, and with little apparent effort, lifting her up in front of him against the horse’s neck. “Let me assist you, since you’re obviously so determined to be in on the capture. We’ve just missed your lover at the quayside, but the wind is against him, and with swift horses we can ride to his rendezvous spot before he can make it by water. I’ve notified the queen’s guard. He won’t get away.”
“He will get away,” she said, shivering as Geoffrey’s arms came around her body. “Despite you, despite everything. And when her Grace learns what you’ve done to me, she’ll have you disemboweled!”
“On the contrary, your mistress will reward me for having saved her from a vicious little witch who’s in league with the heretics. I’m not the first person you’ve tried your diabolical hexes on, am I? ‘Tis common knowledge that you’ve fed the queen your evil concoctions, pretending they had the power to restore her beauty. She’ll be most distressed to learn that you were actually trying to poison her.”
Alexandra opened her mouth to protest, then abruptly shut it again. Despite all that had happened tonight, she found she was too awestruck by this further evidence of Geoffrey’s malice to be capable of uttering a word.
*
The Argo lay at anchor, a dark shadow against a dark sky. It had been a slow journey downriver. The stiff wind had buffeted the overcrowded barge almost to the point of foundering. But at last they had reached the agreed-upon meeting place on a stretch of deserted riverbank, where, Roger was thankful to see, the longboat awaited them. They couldn’t all fit into the longboat, though. He and Francis quickly divided the passengers into two groups, sending the larger group, including mothers with young children, the sick, and the elderly, off first with two sturdy oarsmen rowing. The remainder of the bedraggled band huddled on the bank among the cover of a few shrubs and boulders, staring out across the foggy river and listening for the sound of the longboat returning.
It was not the first sound they heard.
“Horses,” Francis said in a deceptively calm voice. “Somebody’s coming.”
Roger blasphemed, to the dismay of several of his more devout charges. “How many?” he asked as they both craned their necks to see.
“Five or six, maybe more.”
There was the splash of an oar. The longboat had returned. “Hurry,” Roger ordered. “With the fog, we might just have a chance. Get the rest of the people into the boat, Francis. I’ll hold them off.” He drew his sword from its scabbard. “Run!”
There was no time to think, no time even to be afraid. “Keep your heads down and jump into the boat,” Francis directed the eight or nine souls who were left on the riverbank. “The oarsmen will row you to the ship and to freedom.” His tone was bracing, his face grim as, with sword drawn, he took up a position a few yards from Roger, poised to fend off their attackers. The dissidents were already running.
“Go with them. They need you.”
“And leave you? Never.”
“Francis, for the love of God—”
“Don’t argue. Even you, my friend, might find it difficult to deal with five or six armed men. But between the two of us, we’ll easily manage it.”
Roger laughed with the strange euphoria that sometimes came just before battle. “We will, I think, at that,” he said, and then the riders were upon them.
Chapter 24
The battle was brief but bloody. The five or six riders proved to be merely a vanguard. A dozen armed men were soon upon them. Too many, Roger realized, reeling after being set upon by two swordsmen, one of whom had nearly taken him down. His head was throbbing; he heard cries coming from the longboat, which had gone no more than a few yards from the bank before being set upon. “God in heaven, they’ve brought archers,” he heard Francis say, his voice strangely calm as he deflected the swordplay of the three men who had leapt from their mounts to attack. Francis forced them back so he could move in closer to Roger. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” Archers. Roger heard a woman’s voice cut off in mid-scream. At least it was a quicker death than the stake. He hoped, as he turned to face the half-circle of men-at-arms who were closing around them, that he and Francis would die as easily.
“Watch your back,” he said to Francis as a man with an axe took a swing at them from behind. A split second later the man was dead on Francis’ expert blade, and the other attackers hesitated briefly before advancing again.
Francis shot Roger a grim but recognizable smile. “I thank you, but we’re only staving off the inevitable; it would be unrealistic to think we’re going to get out of this. What an ignominious end to our adventures together.” He paused, parrying effortlessly. “I have loved you ever.”
“And I you.” He had never really loved Francis as much as the other man had loved him; the only person he loved so wholeheartedly was Alexandra. Oh Christ, Alix. Rebellion kicked through his entrails. Yesterday at this time he would have accepted death, but not today. He wanted to hold her again. He wanted to love her. Just once, he pleaded with God, even as his sword arm was violently parrying and thrusting. Let me hold her once more to my heart, then you can do whatever you want with me.
&
nbsp; Even as the wild, impossible thought crossed his mind, another flashed—an old saying Merwynna the witch had taunted him with one day when he was still a lad. Be careful what ye pray for, boy, lest the gods see fit to grant yer prayer.
The soldiers closed. Because Francis seemed to be the more dangerous of the two, they tried to hold him off while directing most of their energy toward Roger. His heart pounded, his weapon slipped in his sweat-sticky fingers, his arms and legs grew leaden. There were too many of them. He was skilled and clever in his own defense, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. It is no dishonor, he told himself, for two men to be defeated by so large a troop.
He felt a monumental wrench and knew they’d succeeded in disarming him; he saw a blade flash in quarte, his vulnerable line of defense, the line that guards the heart. Quick. Aim true, you bastard, and my death will be gentle, easy, as effortless as sleep.
All within the space of a moment, he heard Francis yell, and he felt an even stronger wrench than before. There was a groan, and the sensation of a body falling, but strangely enough, it didn’t seem to be his. Then somebody was commanding the swordsmen to put up their weapons, and the attackers reluctantly fell back. When the dust cleared, Roger, though wobbly, was still standing. Francis lay on the ground, bleeding badly from a wound in the right side of his chest.
Roger fell to his knees in the dirt, seizing Francis’ shoulders between his two hands. He shook him gently. “You took the thrust that was meant for me, didn’t you?” He shook him harder, enraged, although his eyes were moist. “Francis! Don’t you dare die, damn you! Lift your eyes and look at me.”
Francis Lacklin obeyed, summoning the strength to gaze around them in what appeared to be amused contempt. “Why aren’t they hacking us to pieces?”
“Someone told them to stop.” Roger tried in vain to stanch the alarming flow of blood. Francis’ face was graying rapidly, his skin growing cold. “Blast you! Couldn’t you let me get killed my own way for once? I’m not bloody fifteen years old any longer.”
Francis coughed, spitting out a bloody froth that scared the dickens out of Roger. His attention was directed somewhere over Roger’s shoulder. “Forgive me. Your death, I fear, will be crueler than mine. Look, my foolish friend. Behind you. It was your lady who betrayed us.”
At first the words made no sense. Then as Francis’ eyes drifted shut, Roger raised his head and saw her. She was there, perhaps five yards away, watching, staring, not moving, not protesting. And beside her, his arm possessively encircling her waist, was Geoffrey de Montreau, who had promised to be present at his death.
“I should have killed her,” said Francis in a considerably weaker voice. “May God forgive me for all the ways I’ve failed you. Roger? Hear me…”
But Roger could no longer hear him. His head was buzzing, his nerves screaming. He couldn’t believe it. Not Alix. It couldn’t be Alix. And yet her hair was flaming in the stiff sea breeze—foaming all red and feathery against Geoffrey’s throat, and he was smiling, pulling her closer, caressing her. It could not be, and yet it was. Other women, he reminded himself, had proved false. All his life, the people he’d counted upon had, one by one, abandoned or betrayed him. Was it so impossible that this time it would be Alix—the cruelest betrayal of them all?
Let me hold her. Well, there she was, nearly within touching distance. She wasn’t an apparition; she was there. She was the only outsider who had known their plans, the only possible source of a breach in their careful security. Had she gone to Geoffrey with the details of tonight’s planned escape? Geoffrey, with whom she had been seen conferring on numerous occasions? Had the handsome and elegant Geoffrey, serpent that he was, tempted and corrupted her? It seemed impossible… unless… were they both in league with her father, Sir Charles, Queen Mary’s devious spymaster? Was it as he had feared, that torn between her duty to the Queen and her loyalty to him, she had chosen Charles Douglas and Mary Tudor?
He remembered her own words of earlier today: You, for all your noble-minded motives, are a traitor and my enemy. And Francis telling him a few months ago, You don’t acknowledge that devotion itself can wither and rot. For nearly a year Alix had been proclaiming her love, but he had rejected her, over and over. I don’t deserve the way you have treated me, she had said just a few hours ago. Did that mean she finally given up? Had he been too blind to see it because he thought, in his arrogance, that she was his to toy with in whatever way he pleased?
All this flashed through his brain in moments; then a rage blinded him, a colossal black rage. He turned back to Francis, who was still trying to tell him something. Bending over to put his lips near his friend’s, he whispered, “No blasted last words, Francis! You’re going to live. Do you hear me? Live!”
Then, surging to his feet, Roger seized Francis’ sword and fell upon the men who had attacked them, the men who had so grievously wounded his friend. The soldiers were driven back as Roger exploded into a frenzy of brilliant, deadly swordplay. One died quickly, two. He’d kill them all, damn them. Alix was the only woman he had ever ventured to trust, much less to love. Yet in that mad, bloody moment, had she been close enough, he would have driven his blade through her heart.
*
Alexandra knew nothing but the sight of the man she loved with all her heart and spirit—he was alive, alive! She was drawing breath to call to him when she heard the serpentine hiss of Geoffrey’s voice in her ear: “Every word out of your mouth will add a full minute to the time it takes him to die. Do you understand? If you contradict anything I say, I will have him slowly and exquisitely tortured.”
“You’ll do that anyway.” The thin, reedy voice that issued from her lips did not sound like her own.
“No. The mental torture of believing you’ve betrayed him will be enough.”
“He won’t believe your lies.” But even as she spoke, Roger looked up and saw her, and she understood that he would. For one dreadful instant their eyes met, and his scream of disbelief seemed to echo inside her own head. No, no, she whispered, trying in vain to reach him without words. But somewhere a red tide surged and the gates to his mind slammed shut.
“Restrain him,” Geoffrey snapped as Roger began so ferociously to fight again. He waved more of his men into the fray. “Do what you must, but I want him alive.”
And Alexandra, to her own horror, was thinking: No! Kill him. Let him die cleanly, fighting on the strand with the smell of the sea in his lungs. Let him not be tortured, in body or in mind. And yet she feared his death with far more terror than she feared her own, and when she saw that although they had disarmed him and clubbed him to the ground, he was rising again to his knees, still breathing—Oh God, still alive!—she cried out in thankfulness and blessed relief.
But the next few minutes were hellish. Geoffrey forced her closer to the bloody bank where the battle had been fought. Francis Lacklin lay on his back, not moving, his eyes rolled back in their sockets. She couldn’t tell whether he was dead or alive. A few yards behind his body on the riverbank, a small boat had been drawn back to the shore, loaded with murdered heretics, victims of the archers’ arrows. Men, women, a beardless youth—all appeared to be dead. Geoffrey’s soldiers were callously pulling them out of the longboat and dumping them on the rocky strand. Alexandra made a sound in her throat as her stomach rose.
Roger was on his knees surrounded by men-at-arms who held their blades to his heart and his throat while brutally twisting his arms behind his back. He was panting from exertion, and a mixture of sweat and blood was running down his face, but, miraculously, he seemed unhurt. In body, at least. His mind, she could tell, was reeling.
“One word,” Geoffrey warned her while they were still out of earshot, “and I’ll have them start with those big brown eyes of his. We’ll gouge out the left, and then the right.”
She believed him. His voice was high-pitched with excitement and bloodlust, his arm was tight around her waist, his French perfume sickened her. She thought for a moment she might f
aint; she wished she could. But such an escape was not granted her.
“How do you like your Mistress Douglas now?” Geoffrey taunted his helpless enemy. “Not that I need employ so formal an address with her, n’est-ce pas, cherie?” One of his hands slipped up to caress her breasts. She scarcely felt it. Her eyes were locked with Roger’s and she was pleading with him silently: Don’t believe him, please. I love you. No, Roger, don’t look at me like that!
She hardly heard as Geoffrey said, “It was really too reckless of you, Trevor. A worthless bunch of heretics. I knew you were up to your neck in something, but I expected treason more colorful than this. ‘Tis unworthy of you, truly. I almost doubted your lady when she reported the details of this remarkable venture.”
Roger’s eyes pierced hers. She could see the grief and rage burning in him. “Geoffrey de Montreau would lie to the priest on his deathbed. Tell me he’s lying now.”
Alexandra stared in to those beautiful eyes, soft, brown, mocking; the eyes she had loved all her life. There was a man with a knife just beside him; he was watching Geoffrey for the order to plunge it into Roger’s eyes. She swayed slightly and said nothing.
Roger’s gaze shifted to Geoffrey. “What have you done to her? Torture? It must have been torture, for she would never have betrayed me otherwise.”
Geoffrey smiled. “Does it matter?” Geoffrey’s serpentine voice hissed like the sea. “She’s still speechless with wonder, no doubt, from the pleasures I taught her in bed.”
“Have you been in his bed?” When she merely stared, without words, he snarled, “Answer me!”
“Yes,” she whispered, unable to lie but equally unable to explain the truth of the matter. What was the truth? Geoffrey had violated her, if not completely, and his hands were all over her now, his intimate touch filling her with shame and revulsion.
Roger’s expression grew even darker, if such was possible. “Then I shall kill you.”
Linda Barlow Page 31
