Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  Joanna inclined her head to the older woman. “Good morrow, Mistress Elswyth.”

  Elswyth pointed to the phial in Joanna’s hand; her fingernails were ragged and black with ingrained dirt at the tips and edges. “That’s ours.”

  Joanna set the phial atop the others. “Yes, mistress. I know.”

  Elswyth speared her daughter with her half-mad gaze. “Why is the shop not open?”

  “‘Tis early still, Mum.”

  “Open the shop.”

  “But I never open it this—”

  “Open it, you lazy girl, or I’ll take the paddle to you.”

  Olive sighed. “Yes, Mum.” She looked bleakly toward Joanna.

  “I’ll help you with the shutters,” Joanna offered, stepping outside.

  “Thank you, mistress.” Olive unlatched the big shutters from inside and then joined Joanna on the street. By the time they got the awning buttressed and the countertop braced, Elswyth had retreated into the house again.

  Joanna took Olive’s hands in hers. “Come see me when you have the chance,” she said—softly, lest Elswyth was listening from behind the deerskin.

  Olive squeezed Joanna’s hands, her eyes filled with turmoil. “Thank you, mistress. I will.”

  * * *

  “Anybody home?” bellowed Hugh’s voice from beyond the curtain drawn across the storeroom door.

  “I am,” Graeham called out, sitting on the edge of his cot to pull on his braies.

  Hugh ducked through the curtain and entered the storeroom, looking a bit less like a paid soldier today, in a gray tunic trimmed in black braid. He still wore his sword on his hip, but so did most men of his rank, whether they had any use for it or not. Only that incongruous gold earring hinted that he might be something other than an ordinary young nobleman. “Where’s Joanna?”

  “I’ve no idea. I haven’t seen her since I woke up.” No doubt she’d been avoiding him. Graeham worked the braies over his hips and tied them. “She isn’t here?”

  “Nay.”

  “She must have just stepped out for a moment. I know she means to go to the Friday fair with you. Would you fetch that shirt off the peg for me?”

  Hugh tossed him the shirt, then rubbed his forehead. “Where does she keep her wine?”

  Graeham pulled the big shirt down over his head, breathing in its freshly laundered scent. “Suffering from the ale passion, are you?”

  “Aye, I spent most of the night at the White Hart, throwing the devil’s bones. Now all I’ve got to show for it is a blinding headache and an empty purse. I could use a bit of the hair of the dog, if you know where she keeps it.”

  “In the cupboard in the salle.”

  Hugh left and returned a minute later with a ewer and two cups.

  “Don’t pour any for me,” Graeham said, thinking it best to keep his wits about him until he’d had a chance to apologize to Joanna for last night. “I haven’t broken my fast yet. Wouldn’t want to start the day off sotted.”

  “Why the devil not?” Hugh poured himself a cup of wine and swallowed it down in one tilt.

  From the alley there came a faint clacking that grew steadily louder. “That’ll be Thomas Harper, looking for his breakfast.” Graeham hauled himself to his feet. “Do you know Thomas?”

  “A rather monstrous-looking leper?”

  Graeham nodded.

  “I met him the last time I was in London. Poor, wretched basard.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that.” Graeham unshuttered the alley window just as Thomas came into view, shuffling along with his walking staff in his black cape and straw hat. “Good morrow, friend.”

  “Serjant!” Smiling, Thomas looked from Graeham to Hugh. “I know you. You’re the brother.”

  “I am indeed.” Hugh maintained a neutral expression in the face of Thomas’s disfigurement, Graeham was gratified to note. “‘Tis a pleasure to see you again, Master Thomas.”

  Laughing raspily, Thomas pointed a gnarled finger at his ravaged face. “A pleasure to see this?” His one good eye seemed to focus in on the cup in Hugh’s hand. “Where there’s wine, Sir Hugh, I’m afraid there’s little wisdom.”

  Hugh grinned and raised his cup. “If we’re to quote old adages, I prefer in vino veritas.”

  “If Alcaeus really did write that,” Thomas said, “I suspect he did so while he was stinking drunk.”

  Hugh made a little bow. “No doubt you’re correct about that.”

  “Are you looking for Mistress Joanna, Thomas?” Graeham asked.

  “That I am, but the shop window’s still shuttered.”

  “She’ll be back presently, I’m sure.”

  “I’ll go wait for her out at the kitchen, then.” Thomas turned and started making his way back up the alley toward the croft. “She keeps a barrel for me to sit on—I must get off these worthless feet.”

  When they were alone, Hugh turned to Graeham with a knowing smile. “How’d you like her?”

  “Who?”

  “Leoda. She was here last night, was she not?”

  How could he know? “Have you seen her already this morning?”

  Hugh snorted with laughter as he refilled his cup. “I’ve rarely seen any whore before nones, unless it was one I’d spent the night with. The morning hours are when they get their sleep.”

  “Then how...”

  Hugh nodded toward the window. Graeham cursed inwardly when he saw the string still tied to the window bar; he hadn’t thought to remove it. He hobbled on his crutch to the window and plucked one-handed at the knot in an attempt to untie it.

  “I’m glad to see you finally accepted the wisdom of my advice,” Hugh said from behind him. “You should put that string out at least once a week—’twill keep your bodily humors balanced.”

  Graeham grunted noncommittally, but he knew he would have no more use for this string, except as a bookmark. Far from balancing his humors, last night’s aborted little tryst had left him in as agitated a state as he’d ever been plagued with.

  He winced at the memory of Joanna walking in on them last night, grateful only that she had made her entrance before Leoda had had a chance to go to work on him. Unperturbed by the interruption, Leoda had still been eager to service him after Joanna fled upstairs, but Graeham had retied his drawers and sent her packing.

  He was ashamed of himself for having summoned Leoda. It had been both dishonorable and foolhardy, a rash act born of a deep and restless hunger. In fact, no sooner had the whore left than Graeham found his thoughts straying inevitably to the woman asleep upstairs. What would it be like, he’d wondered, to feel Joanna’s hands stroking him as Leoda’s had, to feel her mouth on him, hot and sweet and coaxing, to feel her writhing beneath him as he filled her with his aching need...Before long, he was murmuring his Latin drill once again and cursing his unruly passions.

  “So, how’d you like her?” Hugh repeated. “She’s not as tight as some of the younger ones, but her moves make up for it, I think.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Graeham said over his shoulder as he struggled ineffectually with the stubbornly knotted string.

  “You tupped her, didn’t you?”

  “Nay.”

  “Then what—”

  “Your sister came downstairs and walked in on us just as—”

  “God’s bones!” Amusement warred with horror on Hugh’s face. “She can’t have been very pleased.”

  “I don’t imagine she was.”

  “Did she make Leoda leave?”

  “Nay, I sent her away myself.”

  “Before she could tup you?” Hugh asked incredulously.

  “I never even intended to tup her—not strictly speaking. I was going to have her in the Frankish manner.”

  Hugh grinned salaciously. “I’ve had her that way. Too bad you didn’t get the chance to enjoy that talented mouth of hers. She could suck a spear head off its shaft.” Abruptly he cleared his throat. “Good morrow, sister.”

  Graeham wheeled around to
find Joanna standing in the doorway, holding a tray laden with half a loaf of black bread, a hunk of yellow cheese, two pitchers and a cup. She stood motionless, regarding Graeham in dreadful silence, her face stained red.

  Graeham closed his eyes and raked a hand through his hair.

  He heard the rustle of silk and opened his eyes to find her setting the tray on the chest next to his bed. She was more incandescently beautiful than ever today, in a gleaming tunic the same sumptuous golden brown as her hair. “This is for you to eat while I’m gone, serjant,” she said tonelessly.

  Hugh, damn his eyes, was chuckling noiselessly, as if it were all some great jest.

  Graeham swallowed, not knowing what to say, but knowing he must say something. “Mistress...”

  “We should be going, Hugh.” Joanna turned and swept out of the storeroom, leaving the tantalizing scent of wildflowers and spring grasses in her wake.

  * * *

  “I’ve never seen so many people here,” Hugh said as he guided Joanna by the arm through the cacophonous throng that had gathered in Smithfield for the Friday fair.

  “Nor I. Must be the weather.”

  A diverse assortment of Londoners—nobility, merchants, clerics, peasants, and scores of darting schoolboys in monastic habits—mingled in the grassy field among foreigners speaking exotically accented Latin, continental French and their native tongues. The Tower of Babel must have sounded much like this. One section of the huge fairground was a forest of merchants’ stalls beneath boldly striped awnings. Another was set aside for the horse races and attendant wagering. Roughly in the center of the irregular field was the horsepool, a sizable pond around which were grouped the various classes of horses for sale.

  Hugh led Joanna to an area devoted to farm implements and various livestock in makeshift pens—blooded bulls, mares with their foals, pigs, oxen, spring lambs, geese, even a peacock. Squinting against the bright sunlight, he looked this way and that. “I thought perhaps Robert might be here. He takes a rather keen interest in farming.”

  Joanna stopped in her tracks. “You mean to say you didn’t arrange a time and place to meet him?”

  “I’ve never been much for planning, Joanna—you know that.” He gave her that boyishly crooked grin before continuing on. “Watch where you step.”

  Wrapping her trailing sleeves around her arms, she followed him past displays of sickles and scythes, wheelbarrows and felling axes. “Look at me.” She held out the skirt of her fine silken tunic, the hem of which was already suspiciously stained. “I went to all this trouble to look presentable for this fellow. I even left my shop closed on a Friday, and for what? This entire day will go to waste.”

  Hugh sighed. “You’ve been prickly as the Devil all morning, Joanna. Does it have anything to do with...that business about Leoda?”

  She looked past him, her gaze falling on the tidy cluster of stone buildings on the perimeter of Smithfield that housed St. Bartholemew’s hospital. Graeham Fox would be recuperating there if she’d refused his four shillings; perhaps she should have.

  Hugh cleared his throat. “They never actually—”

  “I know that.” She’d heard Leoda leave by the back door shortly after she’d gone upstairs. “That doesn’t make it all right.”

  “You must understand,” Hugh said, “that Graeham is a healthy young man, with the needs and appetites of any—”

  “I understand that perfectly well,” she bit out. “What I don’t understand is how he could have had the gall to bring that woman into my home. Whatever could have possessed him?”

  “Well...”

  “It shows exceedingly poor judgment, if you ask me.”

  Hugh rubbed his jaw in that way he had when he was uneasy. “Yes, well, I suppose it does. Certainly it does.”

  “You put him up to it, I assume.”

  A gasp of nervous laughter escaped him; his ears pinkened.

  “Don’t try to deny it, Hugh.”

  Contritely he said, “All right, I did encourage it, but only because...” He shook his head. “Two months is a damnably long time for a man to go without...release of that sort, Joanna.”

  “If he’s such a slave to his...his carnal drives, then perhaps he should have boarded somewhere else. I’m a respectable widow. I can’t have him bringing loose women into my home.”

  Turning on her heels, she strode away to watch woman in a clay-spattered kirtle throwing cooking pots on a kickwheel.

  Hugh came up behind her. “Are you going to make him leave?”

  Frowning, she lowered her gaze, discovered a smudge of manure on the tip of one of her gold slippers, and rubbed it off on the grass. She should make him leave, despite the money she’d lose. The house would feel empty without him, but she was used to being alone. There were worse things than loneliness.

  She gravitated toward a table on which were stacked willow baskets, pots of honey and freshly pressed cheeses wrapped in leaves. A bored-looking young girl swept a branch back and forth over the cheeses to discourage flies from settling.

  “Joanna?” Hugh persisted. “Are you going to make him—”

  “I don’t know,” she said sullenly. “I think so. Probably.”

  Sighing, Hugh offered her his arm again and led her to the horsepool, circling it at a distance to watch prospective buyers poke at the horses’ hooves and pull back their lips. The smell of horseflesh competed with the savory aroma of sausages grilling in a pit nearby. One of the men inspecting the horses turned to look at Joanna, his gaze crawling over her elegant attire with all-too-penetrating interest.

  “God’s bones, it’s Rolf le Fever.” She turned away.

  “Who is Rolf le Fever?” Hugh asked.

  “A man whose nose I almost cut off once.”

  “That fellow over there in the scarlet and purple? From the looks of him, you should have finished the job.”

  “Sometimes I wish I had. They’d have hanged me, but at least I would have enjoyed some measure of revenge.”

  “Revenge for what?” Hugh asked, spearing le Fever with a chillingly black look—a reminder to Joanna that her good-natured brother had, deep down inside, the heart and soul of a warrior.

  “He’s the reason I can’t sell silks by the yard anymore.”

  “I thought that was because you couldn’t join the Mercers’ Guild.”

  “Of which Rolf le Fever is guildmaster. After Prewitt died, I worked out a way to import silks without traveling abroad—by employing other silk traders as agents for me. I went to the silk traders’ market hall—le Fever has an office there, behind the merchants’ booths—and I told him I was going to petition to join the guild. He told me the decision would rest with him, and at first he seemed...sympathetic, congenial. But as we spoke, he kept moving closer to me. I didn’t like the way he looked at me, like Petronilla when she’s toying with a mouse, and once or twice he found excuses to touch me...”

  A feral little growl rose from Hugh’s throat.

  “He said that women could do quite well in trade if they understood that it’s simply an exchange of one thing for another, that there’s no such thing as true generosity in business. If, for instance, one party grants a privilege to another party, he naturally expects some sort of repayment.”

  “Naturally,” Hugh gritted out.

  “He wasn’t so bold as to come right out with it, not at first, but I knew what he was up to—he’d sniffed around me before, while Prewitt was still alive. He complimented my beauty, said he’d admired me for years. He asked me to remove my veil so he could see what color my hair was.”

  Hugh swore under his breath. “Did you?”

  “Of course not—and it seemed to provoke him. He backed me against the wall, looking me up and down as if I were standing out in front of some Southwark stew.”

  “Did you cry out for help?”

  “‘Twas midday, the dinner hour. There was no one else there. But I got away before he could do anything.”

  “How?”

/>   “He put his hand on my breast. I put my dagger in his nostril.”

  “Ah.” Hugh grinned approvingly. “Good choice. A man as vain as that strutting peacock would sooner lose his...privy parts than his nose.”

  “I walked away unviolated from the market hall that day, but he saw to it that the guild rejected my request for membership.”

  “Little surprise in that. There—that’s the horse Graeham is selling.” Hugh pointed to a petite chestnut tethered with the other palfreys—docile creatures suitable for ladies or children.

  “Why on earth was he riding a palfrey?”

  “He wasn’t. His mount was a fine sorrel stallion.”

  “Why did he have two horses?” she asked. “And one of them a lady’s horse?”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out, given that you’re sending him back to St. Bartholemew’s.” Excusing himself, Hugh paused to admire the destriers—brawny creatures bred for size and trained to remain steady in the face of battle cries and volleys of arrows.

  Joanna claimed a nearby tree stump, slipped off her shoes, and flexed her stocking feet in the cool grass. Resting her chin in her hand, she gazed at the little chestnut palfrey as it drank from the horsepool.

  I’d take off my clothes, Graeham had said, and wade in, and let the water envelop me. ‘Twas heaven.

  Closing her eyes, Joanna tried to envision the boy Graeham, swimming in this pond all alone in the middle of the night. Instead she saw Graeham the man, stretched out on her storeroom cot with the whore Leoda leaning over him.

  “Just like Prewitt,” she whispered, opening her eyes. A young woman passing by with a basket full of flatcakes cast her a curious glance. She closed her eyes again.

  This time it wasn’t Graeham she envisioned with the black-haired whore, but her husband. Not that he’d ever bedded Leoda, but he might have. He’d bedded everyone else.

  For the hundredth time, she wondered how she could have succumbed to Prewitt Chapman’s calculatedly smooth charm. Granted, she’d been young, and terrified at the prospect of being cast away from Montfichet for refusing to marry Nicholas. Her father would kill her, he’d said—and from the savagery of some of his past beatings, she’d believed he was capable of doing it.