“Then I’m going to her.” Kit stood.
“I don’t think so.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“The queen can, and she will.”
Even while Burghley was speaking, Kit shoved his way out the door, into the corridors that would lead him to Anabel’s chambers. Burghley followed, trying to hold him back.
“Lord Christopher, if you would only listen—”
He wouldn’t listen and he wouldn’t slow. Two guards stood outside Anabel’s door. At Burghley’s resigned signal they allowed Kit through. He stepped into Anabel’s presence chamber and hesitated, disoriented. The high-ceilinged chamber, usually flooded with light from the windows overlooking Clock Court, was shrouded in gloom. Heavy velvet curtains of emerald green gave the space a claustrophobic feel, as though one were trapped underwater. At any given time Kit would have expected to find a dozen or more clerks and courtiers waiting upon Anabel, but today there were only two people—Queen Elizabeth and Lucie’s husband Julien.
Without a word, Kit strode across the presence chamber toward the inner door that would lead him nearer to Anabel. By the time he reached it, Julien blocked his way.
“Sorry,” Julien said.
Kit whirled on Queen Elizabeth. “She wants me,” he said flatly. “I’m going in.”
“Lord Burghley,” she ordered, “summon Lucette to speak to her brother.”
“Lucie can’t stop me any more than you can,” Kit warned. “Burghley told me she’s scared and seeing things—if she wants me, why in God’s name won’t you let me in?”
“Because you haven’t had scarlatina,” Lucette said, easing through the privy chamber door to stand next to her husband. “It’s contagious.”
“I don’t give a damn. And if it’s so contagious, why are you in there? Didn’t your husband try and stop you?”
“I have had scarlatina,” Lucette answered calmly. “So have Stephen and Pippa. I was nine years old—you were five. It was the spring you broke your ankle, remember? You stayed at Tiverton with Father and Carrie while Mother took the rest of us to Wynfield Mote. While the three of us were there, we all had scarlatina together. There’s little danger to me now, but quite a lot to you.”
“I don’t bloody care!”
Not unkindly, Lucie said, “When Mother and Father are here, you can take it up with them. But not now, Kit. I’m sorry. And honestly, I don’t think Anabel would even know you were there.”
Kit looked from his sister’s compassionate and weary face to Julien, who stared back at Kit as though daring him to make a move. Julien’s loyalties were entirely with Lucie—he would keep her brother out by force if she wanted him to.
“Fine.” He forced himself to speak. “I should change anyway after the ride. But the minute Mother and Father arrive, I’m going in there. Is that clear?”
He had forgotten that Queen Elizabeth was in the room until she said, rather drily, “You make yourself very clear.”
“Kit?” Lucie looked as though she wanted to touch him but wouldn’t because of whatever risk she imagined. “Scarlatina is not smallpox or the plague—so long as we can keep her fever controlled, she should recover just fine.”
“ ‘Should’ isn’t good enough.” He whirled on his heel and left the presence chamber without making any obeisance to his queen, and stalked furiously away to bathe and change. His family should be here within two hours. He would wait that long. Then, if he had to, he would fight his way into Anabel’s room.
In the end, he didn’t have to. Surprisingly, it was not his gentle, softhearted mother who decreed he be allowed in, but his father. They were all gathered in Anabel’s presence chamber—the queen and the entire Courtenay family save Stephen.
His father took one look at Kit’s furious, fearful face and said, “Let him go in.”
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “Do you really want three of your four children in there? Even if the girls have had scarlatina?”
“There was a night,” his father said slowly, eyes locked on the queen, “many years ago in this very chamber, where I would have cheerfully sold whatever remained of my life to be allowed into a sickroom.”
“I remember. And that is what frightens me.”
“It’s too late for that, Elizabeth.” Kit had never heard his father speak to the queen so personally; that was generally reserved for their mother. “They must find their own way.”
Elizabeth’s expression tightened as she turned away from Dominic’s burning gaze. “Go in,” she told Kit.
He didn’t trouble to decipher all the undertones of that cryptic exchange, but shot through the privy chamber with its physicians and nursing ladies and on into Anabel’s bedchamber.
At the threshold of the open door he halted. He’d never been in here before. But there was Anabel on the bed and protocol didn’t matter.
Kit ignored everyone else, including his sisters, who’d followed him, and went straight to the bed. From behind he heard Lucie say, “It’s not a good idea to touch her.”
He wasn’t afraid of infection—but he was afraid of people changing their mind and forcing him from the chamber. So he refrained from touching.
Her cheeks and forehead were covered in a bright red rash, with a ring of white skin left around her mouth. Her lips were dry and cracked, and her hands and her eyelids moved restlessly as though dreaming. Most shockingly, her hair had been shorn.
Pippa, reading him with her usual ease, murmured, “It’s to help with the fever, Kit. It will grow back.”
He had never seen Anabel vulnerable. Even as children, she’d had an innate self-possession that marked her as much as her red hair. She looked very young and very ill indeed.
Her eyelids in their fluttering opened enough to look at him. He wasn’t sure she was aware of anything until she whispered, “Kit?”
“I’m here,” he said, smiling a little, as though that would have the power to heal her.
“I always think you’re here.” She sounded deeply drugged, and profoundly weary. “But it’s just a dream. You’re not here. You left me.”
To hell with warnings. Kit leaned over and cupped her fevered cheeks in his hands. “I am here now, Anabel. It’s really me. And you’re going to be well. I promise.”
Remarkably, she managed to move her right hand and touch his arm. “You came back,” she said.
If his sisters hadn’t been standing right behind him, he might have kissed her then. Instead, he leaned closer and murmured in her ear, “I will always come back for you, mi corazon.”
The summer weeks passed for Stephen in a blur of activity, punctuated by the clarity of his time alone with Ailis. He hadn’t lost the ability to think—he knew this interlude couldn’t last, and not just because he was lying to her about his identity. From the day they’d returned from their stolen hour at the Rock of Cashel, Diarmid mac Briain had tracked their every movement with a resentment that was all the more dangerous for being swallowed. The captain of the guard only refrained from open hostility because of his own deep feelings for Ailis. But the rest of the guards were not so disciplined. With every evening that Stephen and Ailis went off alone, the restlessness of Clan Kavanaugh increased.
One mid-August night, the air cool and damp with days of rain and fog, Stephen lay stretched full-length on Ailis’s bed. Since she also used the chamber as her study, they could preserve the illusion that they were only talking strategy behind closed doors. They did talk strategy—the scattered maps and reports across the table bore witness to it—but it was never long before the bed beckoned.
Tonight, Stephen wondered aloud, “Are we taking too many chances with your household’s trust?”
“They will hold,” Ailis assured him, trailing one hand down his chest beneath the unlaced doublet and open shirt. “I have led them to successes enough over the years to have earned their trust.”
Rolling onto his side, Stephen pondered her exquisite face, framed by the black hair falling over her shoulders.
She wore a sleeveless gown dyed madder red, ribbons loosely laced so the shift beneath was all that covered her in places. Stephen resisted the impulse to remove the gown completely.
“But they do not trust me,” he pointed out. “And what happens if Father Byrne and Diarmid decide to withdraw their support from your leadership? It could get ugly.”
“I know what I’m doing,” she said confidently, leaning in to kiss him as a reminder that she did, indeed, know what she was doing.
They were not lovers, whatever the rest of the household assumed. Near enough, but Stephen would not go that far while lying to her, and Ailis seemed happy to take her time with a man she liked. He didn’t press and neither did she. But that did not make their time alone any the less joyful. Ailis seemed capable of endless delight in discovering that not all men thought only of their own pleasure.
The only one in the household who didn’t seem to mind the change in Stephen’s status was Liadan—mostly because she hardly seemed to remark upon it. Maisie did, though, and Stephen would have bet that behind her careful face was a mind whirling through the possible complications. But he wasn’t worried about Maisie.
He was worried about Diarmid. Stephen didn’t pass entire nights in Ailis’s chamber—even she would not press Father Byrne’s principles so far—but she had long since removed any pretense of keeping him guarded. He spent his nights with the other men in an outbuilding, wishing he had a dagger to sleep with. How long before Diarmid’s patience snapped and he found himself at the end of an unfriendly blade?
He and Ailis did not spend all their time exploring their growing passion. They also made plans for Oliver Dane. And one month after Askeaton’s fortification with the hundred Spanish soldiers, they were ready to put those plans in motion.
The council summoned was a small one—only Ailis herself, Stephen, Father Byrne, Diarmid and his second-in-command, and Maisie. Stephen listened with admiration as Ailis laid out the deceptively simple operation. They knew that Dane, like all English landholders, was in constant need of money. Thanks to Maisie’s merchant connections and constant letter-writing, they knew precisely how bad that need currently was. So, from the shadows, the Kavanaughs had arranged a meeting for him with a banker in Limerick. Maisie possessed not only a copy of the banker’s seal—Stephen didn’t ask how she’d obtained it—but a surprising talent for forgery in imitating the man’s handwriting. The forged letter instructed Dane to travel with no more than four men, so as not to draw the attention of rebels.
“And we,” Ailis announced in her cool, decisive manner, “will be waiting near Tipperary with five times that number of men and sweep him off the road.”
“Killing?” Diarmid asked. Beneath his black mustache and beard, he seemed as pleased as he ever did. Which meant a small loosening of his tightly held mouth.
“No. At least, you can kill his men if they make it necessary. But Dane is to be taken alive—and brought here.”
“Why?” Again it was Diarmid who asked. Father Byrne shot a look at Ailis but did not otherwise intervene. It was her choice how much to tell.
She was ready. “It is time Oliver Dane was brought to answer for his crimes in Kilmallock twelve years ago.”
As her meaning sank in, the reaction around the table varied. Father Byrne studied his linked hands. Diarmid’s quiet second-in-command opened his mouth, then shut it firmly. To Stephen’s eye, Maisie looked inscrutable as always. He wondered if she had already guessed it. She seemed to have a store of unguessable knowledge.
“Dane is Liadan’s father.” Diarmid’s voice had lost all inflection.
Ailis lowered her head in acknowledgment. Diarmid rubbed his chin, clearly trying to control his immediate—probably violent—reaction.
At last he jerked his head, as though deliberately placing that information behind him. “Right, then. I’ll get the men ready. We should ride out tomorrow to make sure we’re in place near Tipperary well ahead of Dane.”
Ailis had one final command to issue. “Take Stephen with you.”
Stephen’s jaw dropped. So much for believing he knew everything in Ailis’s mind. How the hell was he supposed to get out of this? He could not possibly risk being seen by Oliver Dane.
Diarmid seemed nearly as shocked. “I don’t think so!”
“I’m not asking.”
“May I speak to you alone?” Diarmid ground out.
“No need. Everyone here can guess what you are going to say.”
Diarmid said it anyway. “He is English. No way in hell I’ll trust him with a weapon in my company. Nor do I trust him here without me. You must lock him up while my men and I are gone.”
“Absolutely not!” Ailis snapped.
Maisie’s voice was like a dash of cold water in the overheated room. “May I make a suggestion?”
Diarmid almost growled at the interruption, but Ailis kept visible hold of her temper and narrowed her eyes. “What?” she asked.
“I suggest allowing them to settle the matter as they’re both clearly dying to do—with violence. Controlled, naturally, in a fair fight.”
Once again Stephen’s jaw dropped. He shut it with an audible click as Diarmid laughed nastily. “Englishmen aren’t interested in fair fights.”
Stephen bared his teeth in a smile. “Afraid I can’t handle myself?”
“Afraid you’ll stick a blade in my back,” Diarmid spat back.
“I think we all know it’s the other way round.”
“Enough!” Ailis ordered. She was still angry, but thoughtful with it. “Diarmid, since you seem determined to come to blows with Stephen, have at it. An hour from now in the courtyard. Blunted daggers and hand-to-hand. Pummel each other until your aggression is spent. If you win, Stephen remains at Cahir. Locked up. If he wins, he rides with you. Unless you don’t like your chances against him?”
Diarmid could hardly admit to that. And no doubt the thought of getting to hit Stephen mollified him enough to agree. “One hour it is.”
He shoved his way out of the room as if the door were a personal enemy. Stephen watched his furious retreat, and caught Maisie’s dry murmur next to him. “Who says that women are the dramatic sex?”
The courtyard fight was as vicious and drawn out as the two of them could make it. Diarmid was clearly surprised by Stephen’s unorthodox tactics, but the Irishman had been fighting unconventionally since he was fifteen and they were well matched. Stephen had cause more than once to silently bless Julien for training him to take a hit as well as give them out.
Stephen had gone into the fight planning to let Diarmid win, despite the fact that he did not relish being locked up while the men were gone. He hoped Ailis would be pliable on that point. Losing was certainly the sensible thing to do. But once in the thick of it, sensible flew out the window. All he knew was that here was a man who not only despised him, but underestimated him, and it gave Stephen enormous satisfaction to prove Diarmid wrong.
In the end, the damage they were doing to each other proved too much for Ailis to ignore. Her voice carried high and clear above the practice yard as she ordered them to stop.
Stephen bent over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. His knuckles were split and bleeding and his mouth was already swelling. As he straightened, it gave him pleasure to note the damage he’d wrought in return to Diarmid’s face.
“Satisfied?” Ailis said drily to the two men. “We shall call it a draw. Stephen does not ride out with you, Diarmid, but nor is he locked up in the interim. He has proved himself and I trust him. That should be enough for every man here.”
And that smote Stephen with the sharpest pain yet. All his relief at avoiding Oliver Dane for now was swamped by the knowledge that he continued to betray Ailis with every day that he lied to her.
—
For three days the entirety of Cahir Castle lived on a knife’s edge of anticipation and fear. Ailis knew the word had spread from the council chamber, and when their two dozen best men—a third of thei
r force—rode out armed to the teeth, there was a distinctly Irish fatality in the minds of those left behind. What if Dane didn’t come? What if he came but in greater force than he’d been cautioned to bring? What if, worst of all, he’d seen through their ruse and waited only to slaughter the Kavanaugh men?
Knowing how swiftly word would spread through the household—and the nature of Bridey, Liadan’s gossipy nurse—Ailis had summoned her daughter and told her herself who Oliver Dane was and why she was bringing him to Cahir. Liadan behaved as her mother had hoped: no tears, no curiosity except the most basic, and no arguments. She asked only one question.
“Will I see him?”
“For a moment. With me and whatever guards you choose. You will not need to speak to him or listen. And afterward, you will never need to think on him again.”
The only difference in Liadan was that she left that conversation thoughtful and a little subdued. It could not be helped. Maisie would see to it that the child had whatever comfort she required.
Ailis hardly slept the nights her men were gone. Without Diarmid in the household, she took to keeping Stephen with her most hours of the day. She wanted him at night, as well—wanted him in a manner she thought Oliver Dane had destroyed before it could bud—but Father Byrne was watching. She did not think the priest would challenge her, but she couldn’t risk it. Without the support of Byrne and Diarmid, Ailis knew she would have a difficult time keeping control. But once Oliver Dane had been dealt with? That success would give her a stature no one would dare challenge.
Stephen was excellent at reading her moods, or perhaps he was merely suffering the same agonies of waiting as she was. In the late morning of the fourth day, he suggested that she ride. “Perhaps you’ll meet them as they return,” he said.
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