“Buckingham will not be pleased.” She was not referring to her perusal of Harry’s book.
“Nor will I if he says aught to distress you.” Miles wandered across to the window, where he made himself comfortable, his back against the casement and a boot upon the sill, and stared unseeing across the thatched roofs; straw turning to gold beneath the rose-soused, blowsy clouds. “Today may have changed the course of the river,” he murmured, wondering if Stillington had divulged his secret to Gloucester, “and there may be a babe to grow beneath your girdle, mistress mine.”
“You would be pleased? Truly?”
His grin was roguish. “Why should I not? I can see you like a little fluffed-up wren, all belly.” Before she could land a fist on him, he had her by the elbows, lifting her off the tips of her toes. “Faith! Not much heavier than thistledown.” Laughing, he held her back from his shins. “Are there no bones in you?”
“I cannot possibly hold a conversation with you suspending me in midair.”
“That is because between the elements of earth and air I have the greater power than yours, lady sorceress. And between the sheets.”
“His grace may come in at any minute.” Heloise’s nerves were jangling like folly bells—this was the duke’s demesne and they were traitors.
“Let him.” Miles slid her down the length of him back to the floor and his strong fingers stroked down her arms and fastened her fists behind her back. His mouth teased hers before he freed her. “We never shared a trothcup, you and I.” Selecting a key from his belt, he unlocked the catch of Harry’s ambry and let down its door to make a shelf. “Choose what you will.”
The muster of lidded goblets, brought up from Brecknock, twinkled at her in the fading light: bloodred Venetian glasses, a Russian pewter with a bear entwined about its stem, an ancient horn set in a pattern of golden hounds, a silver fluted cup of Persian craftsmanship, and a dozen more. Recklessly, to test him, she pointed to a jeweled mazer. Without a comment, he set aside the lid with its golden pinnacle and picked up the wine flagon from the small table. Like a high priest, he poured sufficient in, studying her solemnly over it as if he had not yet fathomed her. The amber liquid quivered against its encircled reflection as he set his hands over hers, forcing her fingers to find comfort in the gilded valleys between the cabochoned gems.
“Still having doubts, Heloise? Until death sever us?”
“No, I am sure,” she answered huskily and felt the great cup lifted for her to taste. The touch of lips to wine at this instant was now a commitment, a sacrament between them. She urged it towards him. He drank, watching her with intensity over the rim of gold, and then set the mazer back upon the board and drew her across the moat of air once more into the bailey of his arms.
“It will take more time,” he warned, setting his forefinger beneath her chin and tilting her heart-shaped face like a mirror.
“I know it.” Better to sup with Miles Rushden than any other, though words of love should have garnished the repast. She surrendered this time as his lips, tasting of mead, came down to claim her and shyly crept her hands up the velvet of his doublet to knot behind his neck, and feel his hair tickling her wrists.
“Why, Heloise.” The silver look was roguish. “How very compliant you are.”
“I am only humoring you,” she teased.
“By God, what goes on here?” Harry, glinting with gold thread, too ruddy with wine, came through the doorway and halted, swaying somewhat with drink slopping his soul. Heloise broke away, straightening her skirts.
The duke was not looking at her. “Miles?”
Miles’s common sense lurched. Within the loyal speechwriter, drinking companion, and official sycophant—no, that office had fallen upon Nandik—something rebelled. The resentment in Harry’s face, the duke’s blatant irritation at seeing him with Heloise in his arms, jarred. He might revolve around the Buckingham sun but he had acquired a moon of his own now.
“Have you met my wife, Heloise Ballaster?” It was brittle, cruel, not how he had planned to break the tidings. Beside him, his freshly bedded wife sank into a curtsy.
Not a ducal muscle twitched in the handsome face. It was not politic to see in the third most powerful man in England a stunned fish out of its element, but for that moment Miles did not care a jot. My wife. It sounded right, righter than ever before.
“If you say so.” Harry dumped a leather bottle upon the table and, pulling off his cream gloves, dropped them beside the cup. That did not escape him either. Heloise rose from her obeisance but he ignored her. “I may be in my right wits come dawn, Rushden, but you, unfortunately, will still be a married man. Here!” The words were bitter as he pushed the mazer at him. “Take it as a wedding gift.”
Miles held his gaze, tears suddenly threatening to unman him. This was not how it should be. Harry had deserved better of him. “I do not want to do that.”
“Nevertheless, it is yours. Take it! Tomorrow you will perhaps explain why you disappeared without leave.” He stood back curtly so their way to the door was free.
Miles bowed. “Come, madam.”
But Heloise lingered. “The demoiselle at Crosby Place,” she began. “I think you should know that—”
Buckingham stretched and yawned. “Do they all have addled wits where your wife comes from or is it an effect of making crossbows?”
“She was not a gardener but—” Heloise continued stubbornly.
“We shall cross that bridge if need be, madam,” cut in Miles. Outside the door he stopped and looked at her sad face, his heart troubled. “I am sorry.” Sincere, yes, but she understood that she was an interloper.
“He needs you. Make your peace.”
“Then wait for me in the solar. I shall see you back to Baynards before curfew.” Closing the door behind him, Miles leaned against it. This was not how it should be.
Harry was sitting at his small table, biting his thumb. “Go away and enjoy her!”
“I can explain if you will listen.”
“I do not feel like listening.” With a sneer, he knuckled the goblet and the flagon aside as though both stank of pestilence.
His feelings visored, Miles picked up the leather bottle, broke the seal, and took a swig. “Not bad. Your taste has surprisingly improved since you acquired Wales.” The jest failed but he shoved the bottle at Harry’s chest. With a defiant sniff, the duke drank, wiping his mouth with his wrist. “What ails you, your grace? You have thriving sons and Gloucester has given you a principality to scrape your boots on—more power than you know what to do with, for God’s sake—so what have I done wrong?”
The corners of the ducal mouth were down like a dog’s that had been denied a bone. “You hid the truth away from me at Brecknock, God damn you, letting her loose on my son, and now you have done it again, deceived me.”
“Why should you complain? Ned adores her and he has learned how to say please and thank you at long last.”
Fingernails nakired the table menacingly. “Do not goad me, Miles.”
“Why not? I was wed to her at swordpoint. It simplifies matters if I keep her and I am sure you will find someone else suitable for Myfannwy.”
“Christ, Miles. You knew that alliance was important.” Harry violently struck the mazer from the table.
“Then you wish me to find good lordship elsewhere?” A violence hung upon each word.
“All right, I apologize,” Harry snarled, blinking sullenly at the paneled ceiling. “Go and tumble the Ballaster girl. But do not forget she is a filly from Gloucester’s stable and may have deeper loyalties branded into her hide.”
Miles swore, flung the bottle down, and stormed towards the door. “So be it, my lord.” God ha’ mercy, why did Harry have to shove him down a staircase of insults? Heloise was Lady Rushden now and deserved some respect.
“No! Miles!” The duke recanted and struggled to his feet, his expression maudlin. “By our sweet Christ, I was looking forward to chewing today’s cud and enjoying a
drink with you but no matter.” He slumped back down at the table. “You should have left me to die on Pen-y-Fan, Miles.”
So it was not just the drink afflicting him. Miles let go the latch. “I thought you had the salacious Nandik to light your candles now.”
“Pah!” Harry winced and, glancing sideways, cheered a little, his voice strengthening. “Why did you not tell me you had changed your mind about Mistress Ballaster? I deserved that of you at least.”
It was an effort to find the real truth in his own maze of logic. “Because she needs my protection against fools like Dokett. And do not tell me I am bewitched!”
Harry swallowed, plucking at his gloves. “Are you lunatic with lust then? Or debilitated by love? I do not know how that feels. Tell me!” Plantagenet’s fingers manacled Miles’s sleeve and were stonily unpeeled. “What, no answer, damn your soul! No better than wine, women are,” Harry sneered venomously. “Bodies bought with baubles. I am envious, can you not see that? I wish to Heaven I had a woman I cared for.”
Miles did not have one jot of patience tonight to lard Harry’s self-esteem. “I will bid you good night. Tomorrow—”
“A piss upon tomorrow!”
“So Stillington has divulged nothing?”
“No, Devil take it! Gloucester did not even visit him.”
Miles’s smile was tight. “And if I attend the prince’s court, smell out the gossip, and invite Catesby to dine?”
“Oh yes, most excellent.” Harry rallied. “That will needle Hastings no end.”
“And in return . . . you will apologize to my wife.”
The duke pulled a sour face. “Lord, if I must.” He rose and held out his arms to Miles. “Pax vobiscum. But promise me you will not go panting after her like a dog on heat the whole time, not now when we have our shoulders to the wheel.”
“I know my duty.”
“I just hope that your witch knows hers.”
HOW DID ONE ENTERTAIN A BISHOP? HELOISE WAS TRYING HER best the next day. Piers the Plowman was not to her taste—too much labored wisdom, but one could not read a French romance or a list of herbal remedies to a bishop.
Then there ran a rout of rats, as it were,
And small mice with them, more than a thousand,
And they came to hold council for their common profit;
For a cat of a court came whenever he liked
And pounced on them easily and caught them at will.
God’s rood, she had put Stillington to sleep. With a sigh, she rose from her footstool at the bishop’s feet and tucked a fur around the old man, knowing he was prone to aching joints. June had turned fickle, the early sun had left the chamber, and a dull day stretched tediously ahead.
Playing nursemaid to a creaky bishop was not her notion of being a married woman. She needed her own demesne to bustle in and a husband who did not spread himself like liver paste, but at least she was fully a de jure wife and in a state of grace. After hearing Heloise’s confession when she arrived back last night, Stillington had agreed that since the marriage was now consummated, Miles’s betrothal with Myfannwy was void. This morning he had kindly consigned his decision to parchment—signed, witnessed by her grace of York and Father William, and endorsed by sealing wax. They also spooned prayers over her head about obedience, fertility, and other conjugal virtues. Thinking of which, she wondered whether Miles would find time today to spirit her off to another hired four-poster like a toy to take to bed.
A fanfare sounded down below in the courtyard. Heloise opened the window then ducked in swiftly, for it was Gloucester come with his entourage. God forbid he had come to chastise her. No, he must be calling on his mother, or maybe Stillington. With housewifely care, she quickly twitched the bed coverlet straight and turned to the bishop’s chair to gently pat him awake.
And then her mind began to weave a cruel tapestry of Gloucester prostrate upon a bed weeping into his shirtsleeves like a lost child. Heloise recoiled with a gasp, trying to slam the shutter on the sight, only to look on helplessly as the duke raised his head, his expression the most haunted she had ever glimpsed on any man.
“My child, are you ill?” The bishop, awake now, was squeezing her hand.
“I . . .” Her mind still spinning like St. Catherine’s wheel, she swallowed. “I—I think the lord protector is come to visit her grace.”
“No.” Stillington was alert now, smiling like a crocodilus with its mind on dinner. “I sent for him.”
The sudden display of vanity was repulsive, like glimpsing a filthy shirt beneath a glistening cope. She should have guessed his tired exterior still nested a cunning brain—he had once been chancellor of England.
“D-did you, my lord bishop?”
“Yes, to offer him an apple from the Tree of Knowledge.” The old man’s smile was leavened unpleasantly by power.
“I—I want no part of this,” Heloise protested, her instinct screaming withdrawal. The rapport with this wafer cleric, begun in Northampton, made her an accessory.
“My clever child, it is too late. His foot is already on the stair.”
Gloucester was laughing as he followed his dark-robed mother into the antechamber to the sickroom. “Ah, Heloise, good morning to you, I have been hearing it was a cockatrice that abducted our worthy bishop.”
“And yales and gryphons,” exclaimed the Duchess of York, folding her hands upon her pectoral cross. “Not to mention Lord Rushden’s son.”
“Well, I am waiting.” The duke folded his arms.
Waiting? Heloise, still dazed from the contrast between her imagining and the real Gloucester, rose from her curtsy and threw a puzzled glance at the bishop’s door before realization dawned.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, her cheeks starting to burn. “I . . . regret to say—”
“Regret already?” The fur-edged sleeves she was staring at shifted.
“No, I . . .” Why was Rushden not here to share the blame? “My most noble lord,” she exclaimed, sinking to her knees. “It seemed the right thing to do.”
“A politic answer,” threw in the duchess dryly, “and there was tenacious Dr. Dokett hoping to make a nun of her.”
“Mother, hush,” muttered Gloucester, unknotting his arms to raise his badly behaved ward to her feet. “You would have been well advised to ask my permission, Heloise. Let us hope it was not just your fortune that Sir Miles was courting.”
“It was my decision, my lord.”
“Was it?” he exchanged a meaningful glance with his parent. “The only thing that acquits you and Rushden is that it is one less problem that needs resolving. Thank your husband for tardily informing me. How did my cousin Buckingham take the tidings or is he still in the dark?”
“Like an ill-tasting medicine, my lord.”
“Indeed. So Harry’s shadow can detach himself at times. Well, show me to the bishop, my lady Rushden. Mother?”
“No, I shall be downstairs, my darling. Shall you stay for dinner?”
He shook his head and turned to find Heloise stubbornly blocking his way.
“Please,” she whispered, “do not go in, your grace.”
“Why, is he contagious?”
“No, but . . .” With all her power, Heloise willed Richard of Gloucester to think again. He did, bronze lashes blinking, the cheerfulness sheathed, but curiosity can be as great a vice as all the other deadly sins. His gloved hand pressed her arm in reassurance. Whatever this is, I can manage it, his light brown eyes told her, I need to know. And he went in alone.
But he was like a beaten servant when he emerged, his straight shoulders slumped and his face— Dear God! Her vision! What secret had the bishop told him?
***
AT CROSBY PLACE THAT AFTERNOON, MILES WAS RESTLESS, itching like beggar’s scabs to know the outcome of his scheming with Harry. Something had happened; not only had Gloucester forsworn dinner on his return from Baynards, but he had spent an hour in swordplay, slashing at Huddleston, his combat partner, in the hopes of spending
some of the pent-up misery that was so obvious in his face. Now instead of attending his inner council, his grace curtly dismissed everyone and disappeared into his sanctum, slamming the door.
It was left to Huddleston, sweaty from the swordplay, to fend off questions from Gloucester’s other henchmen. “By Christ’s blessed mercy, I do not know what gadfly has bitten him,” he growled, mopping his brow, glancing down in irritation at Lord Lovell, who was making a tabor of the table where the morning’s correspondence lay unanswered. “A cursed pity my lady duchess is not yet arrived to ferret out the cause.”
“God’s nails, what’s the pother?” exclaimed Lord Howard, hugging his naval dispatches to his chest as he stood up. “He only went to a bishop’s sickbed.”
Huddleston, loosening his swordbelt, turned suspiciously towards Harry, and Miles, flanking the duke, found his face also reconnoitered. “Is there something about Stillington we should know, my lord of Buckingham? I hear you, too, have visited.”
Knyvett cleared his throat. “Tell them, your grace; mayhap it is relevant.”
Harry was as good as any holy day mummer. “It may be nothing, my lords, a sick man’s ravings.” His shoulders rose apologetically. “But Stillington believes the queen was trying to poison him.”
“Who? Gloucester?” barked Lord Howard.
“No, Stillington. And that is all I can tell you. The bishop beseeched right desperately to speak with Gloucester and I merely played the messenger. They are old friends, the bishop tells me. So”—he took up his gloves—“I shall leave you with that conundrum and be off to Baynards.”
Gloucester’s good men and true were at a loss. They had been heading happily towards the coronation like courtiers on a royal barge; now the morrow seemed as hazardous as shooting London Bridge.
Harry ran down the steps to the courtyard. “I think the hammer has struck the right anvil at last,” he exclaimed to Miles and Knyvett, stealthily veeing his two fingers in an Agincourt salute. “We may yet have Gloucester as our king. That to the Woodvilles and their prince! Now get you to the Tower of London both of you, talk to our agents there, and invite Catesby to supper tonight. I have some unfinished business before I go to Baynards—I saw a rose I thought might do well at Thornbury.”
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