Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  Joanna strode swiftly toward the cottage; once inside, she could bolt the door, locking him out. She passed the sack of chicken feed lying on the ground, and automatically bent to retrieve it. As she straightened up, a resurgence of her former dizziness made everything whirl slowly.

  Please, God, not now, she thought as dark spangles filled her vision and her knees gave out. Not now.

  “Joanna?” Strong arms banded around her, lifted her off her feet. She felt herself being cradled like a baby against his chest, felt the steady reverberations of his footsteps as he carried her, limp and half-senseless, in the direction of her cottage.Graeham kicked open the door, paused for a moment, and then she felt him walking again. He lowered her gently; she heard the crackle of straw beneath her, felt the scratchy woollen blanket that covered her little bed, the soft feather pillow beneath her head.

  He stroked her forehead, her hair, and then he was gone. Feeling suddenly bereft, she forced her eyes open and saw him, clawing his hair back with his hands, looking wildly around the little one-room cottage. Spying her wash stand, he crossed to it, dipped a wash rag in the bowl of water, wrung it out and returned to Joanna’s side.

  “Joanna, what’s wrong?” he asked, sitting next to her on the bed and wiping her face with the damp cloth. He looked stricken. “Are you ill? Do you need a physician?”

  She shook her head slowly. “I’ve had a bit of a rough time with the pregnancy,” she said listlessly. “It’s getting better.”

  His gaze lit on her stomach. He rested a hand there in a way that struck her as endearingly protective. “Is anything wrong? The baby’s all right, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “The midwife says everything’s fine.”

  “You need a physician, not some—”

  “There are no physicians around here, and Claennis is a very good midwife.”

  He smoothed his hand over her abdomen, shaping its roundness, his expression troubled. “It’s been hard for you. I hate to think of what you’ve been through since I left.” Looking around the tidy little cottage, with its whitewashed walls and jars of fall flowers scattered about, he said, “You’ve made the best of things, though. You always did persevere in the face of adversity. Your strength is one of the things I most love about you.”

  She snatched the wet cloth from his hand and pressed it to her suddenly throbbing forehead. “Don’t say that.”

  “Don’t say what?” He leaned over her, his arms braced to either side of her head, looking almost amused, the arrogant bastard. “That I love you?”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “It’s true, Joanna. If I had any sense at all, I’d have told you months ago. Let me tell you now.”

  “Why? So you can try to sweet-talk yourself underneath my skirts?”

  “Ah, that again.”

  “I may be foolish and gullible and all too susceptible to handsome, charming devils like you—”

  “I’m handsome and charming?” he asked with a delighted smile. “You love me, too. I know it.”

  “‘Tis your vanity speaking. How could I love a man who used me so ill?”

  “I did use you ill,” he admitted. “I let you give yourself to me without telling you about Phillipa and the estate in Oxfordshire. I didn’t know what to do. I loved you so deeply, and I wanted you desperately, but I couldn’t imagine giving up that land. Like an idiot, I kept trying to figure out how I could have you and the land, but of course, there was no way. I’m a flawed man, and I made unforgivable mistakes, for which you suffered dearly, but you still love me. I know it. I felt it when you kissed me.”

  “‘Twas you who kissed me.”

  “You returned the kiss. Now tell me you love me.”

  “I don’t.”

  He leaned closer, his eyes scaldingly blue. “You do. Tell me. Say it.”

  “I may not have a lick of sense when it comes to you, Graeham Fox, but I do know better than to return the endearments of a married man.”

  “I admire your noble stand,” he said dryly, “but it really isn’t necessary. I’m not married.”

  She narrowed her gaze on him. “Yes, you are. Lord Gilbert told me you were. Lord Gui wrote him all about it.”

  “Lord Gui wrote him that he’d set a date. I never married Phillipa.”

  She blinked at him. “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t love her. I love you.”

  She regarded him in nonplussed silence for a moment, and then handed him the wash rag. “Help me to sit up, please.”

  Setting the rag aside, he scooped an arm under her shoulders and eased her into a sitting position on the edge of the bed next to him.

  “What happened after you left for Normandy?” she asked him.

  “All I could think about during the journey from London to Dover was you. Ada kept asking me what was wrong, why I was so preoccupied. I told her I felt ill. I did. I was sick at heart over what I’d done to you, over the prospect of losing you. ‘Twas eating me up inside. The worst part came when our boat set off across the Channel. All I could think, as we pulled away from the dock, was that I might never see you again. It started raining, so they put up an awning and all the passengers crowded under it. Except for me. I stood alone at the railing and watched the cliffs of Dover disappear in the rain and wept. I don’t think I’ve done that since I was a child.”

  Joanna found herself reaching for his hand.

  “Lord Gui was at his brother’s house in Paris when I arrived there with Ada,” he said. “Phillipa was there, too. By then I knew what I had to do. I took Phillipa aside and told her I couldn’t marry her, that I loved someone else and would always love her, and that I’d make a perfectly insufferable husband for anyone else.”

  “You did?”

  “I did.”

  Joanna bit her lip. “How did she take it?”

  “At first she was disappointed, because she’d been looking forward to studying at Oxford. Lord Gui couldn’t bear to make her unhappy, so he decided to deed the Oxfordshire estate directly to her. Once she realized she could live there without being saddled with a husband, she was thrilled. The baron told me I was a fool to give up such a grand estate. I told him I was even more of a fool than that, because I was resigning from his service and returning to England.”

  “My God,” Joanna whispered, astounded at what he’d sacrificed for her.

  “Lord Gui asked me to remain with him long enough to escort Phillipa to Oxfordshire in October. ‘Twould take that long to get the manor house ready for her and staff it properly, he said. I felt I owed it to him after everything he’d done for me. I spent a few weeks in Paris with him, helping him attend to business there. When we returned to Beauvais, we found Lord—” He caught himself; his mouth quirked. “We found my father waiting there for us.”

  “It must have been something of a shock,” she said, “finding out you were the son of Gilbert de Montfichet.”

  “It took some getting used to. On reflection, though, I should have suspected him—or someone of his rank. Why else would Lord Gui have been willing to betroth his beloved daughter to a baseborn serjant? In his eyes, I was Graeham fitz Gilbert, the son of a baron.”

  “I imagine ‘twas a bittersweet meeting between you and Lord Gilbert.”

  “More sweet than bitter...until he gave me your letter.”

  “Ah. My letter.” She squeezed his hand.

  “You gave no indication of where you might have gone off to. I had to find you. I immediately returned to London.”

  “Really?”

  “The fellow who bought your house told me I’d only missed you by a few days. He had no idea where you went to, and neither, of course, did anyone else. I questioned Olive and Damian, Robert of Ramswick, Brother Simon, all your neighbors...I was at my wits’ end. I left London and spent a fortnight just riding from one village to another, asking if anyone had seen you.”

  “Oh, Graeham.”

  “Finally I had to return to Beauvais so I could take Phi
llipa back across the Channel. When I got there, I discovered that Lord Gui had a houseguest who’d shown up unexpectedly a few days before—one Hugh of Wexford.”

  She gaped at him. “Hugh?”

  “He’d come looking for me while I was in England searching for you.”

  “Hugh? But...but he vowed that he wouldn’t seek you out.”

  “Actually, what he swore to—as he tells it—was that he wouldn’t separate me from my privy parts. And, indeed, he made no attempt to do so. He did try to beat me to a bloody pulp.”

  She reached up and touched the scars on his face. “He broke your nose.”

  “I returned the favor.”

  “You broke Hugh’s nose?”

  “I wasn’t about to just stand there and let him pummel me to death, even if I did admire his motives.” Graeham grinned. “He thanked me for it afterward. Said he’d been too damned handsome.”

  “That sounds like my brother. I take it you two came to some sort of an understanding.”

  “Aye, after I finally managed to explain to him what I’ve just explained to you. He cheered right up, slapped me on the back and told me where to find you. Then he set off for the Rhineland.”

  Joanna laughed. “He told me he’d stay angry at you till he drew his dying breath.”

  “Hugh said that? He could never hold a grudge.”

  “I know.”

  Graeham trailed his callused fingertips lightly over her face, stroked her lips. “God, it’s good to see you smile, Joanna. I’ve missed your smile. Please tell me you don’t hate me anymore.”

  “I don’t hate you anymore. I don’t think I ever did, not really—although I tried very hard to.”

  He searched her eyes, his penetrating gaze seeing right through to her soul. “Tell me you love me. Please.”

  “I love you,” she said, her throat suddenly tight, her eyes burning with impending tears. “I love you, Graeham, I do.”

  He grabbed her and kissed her, hard.

  “I never wanted you for my mistress,” he whispered hoarsely against her lips. “You know that, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “I want you for my wife,” he said.

  She nodded again; hot tears spilled from her eyes. He brushed them away with his thumbs.

  “I don’t deserve you,” he said, “not after the way I’ve mucked things up. And I know you must be concerned about my prospects. There’s the baby to think about, and—”

  “We can live here,” she said, curling her hand around his neck and kissing him. “It doesn’t matter where we live. I’d live in the humblest mud hut with you. I’d sell eggs and take in laundry. It doesn’t matter, Graeham. I love you. I want to be your wife.”

  “Truly? Even if I could offer you nothing?”

  She touched her stomach. “You’ve already given me so much. I can’t imagine anything better than to live with you right here and fill this little cottage with children. That’s all I want—I swear it.”

  He rested his forehead against hers and grinned. “Then I suppose you’ll want me to turn down the holding my father has offered me.”

  She felt herself gaping at him. “Lord Gilbert, he...”

  “He said it was high time he did the right thing by me. He granted me the manor of Eastingham, not far from London. It’s twenty hides of some of the best farmland in the area, with a charming little village right in the middle of it. And there are orchards, ponds, woodlands, sprawling pasturage for sheep and cows—”

  “This...this is all going to be yours?”

  “Ours. It already is. I’ve been there. They call me Lord Graeham.”

  “Lord Graeham,” she said softly, disbelievingly. “Graeham of Eastingham.”

  “And you, my lady, are now Joanna of Eastingham. Or you will be as soon as I can find a priest to marry us. Oh, and best of all, there’s a ridiculously huge manor house—a stone manor house, with room for lots more children than we could ever fit in here.” He adopted a look of mock gravity. “But if you’d like, I’ll tell him we don’t want it.”

  “There’s no need to do that.”

  “No, really.” He rubbed his scratchy jaw against her cheek. “If you’d rather stay here, it’s perfectly all right with me. I only want to please you.”

  “You do, do you?” She kissed him, took him in her arms.

  “Oh, yes.” He trailed a hand from her throat to her chest, closing it over a breast straining the confines of her kirtle. “Pleasing you is all I’ve been able to think about of late.”

  “Do you know what would please me right now, my lord?” she murmured in his ear.

  “God, I hope so,” he said, lowering her onto the bed.

  And as it happened, he did.

  ~ THE END ~

  Contents

  THE SUN and THE MOON

  “The Sun and the Moon is a real page turner. I really wish I hadn’t started it so late at night. It kept me up way past my bedtime and there is no stronger recommendation than that.” Jean Mason, The Romance Reader

  The alchemical operation consisted essentially in separating the prima materia, the so-called chaos, into the active principle, the soul, and the passive principle, the body, which were then reunited in personified form in the coniunctio or “chymical marriage”...the ritual cohabitation of Sol and Luna.

  Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, an Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy

  Chapter 1

  June 1172, Oxford, England

  “That’s her,” the young man whispered, pointing toward a bench in the rear of the candlelit church, packed this evening with scholars listening intently as an earnest young lector held forth on the application of reason to faith. “That’s the one you’re looking for.”

  “Which one is she?” Hidden in the shadows of the nave, Hugh of Wexford squinted toward the bench, on which sat a handful of women amid a sea of males clad in identical black academic robes, most with tonsures shaved into the crowns of their heads, some in clerical skullcaps.

  “The pretty one,” said the young man, a mendicant scholar judging from the shabbiness of his black cappa and his eagerness to earn the tuppence Hugh had offered in exchange for pointing out his quarry. “The one without the veil.”

  Seven women occupied the bench. Four looked to be nuns, if their wimples and black tunics were any indication. Two, also veiled but not quite as severely attired, were probably local matrons whose husbands indulged them by allowing them access to Oxford’s studium generale, a loose association of students and masters still in its infancy but already renowned throughout Europe for its enlightened scholarship.

  Then there was the unveiled woman. “That’s Phillipa de Paris?” Hugh frowned as he studied her. He’d been told she was five-and-twenty, but with her petite stature and enormous, dark eyes, she looked far younger. Clad in an unadorned but well-made blue tunic, her black hair plaited in two long braids falling over her chest, she more closely resembled an unworldly young girl than a self-sufficient, free-thinking woman scholar—or what he’d imagined such a creature to look like, this being his first encounter with the rare breed. The only real indication of her scholastic calling was the document case of tooled leather that hung from her girdle.

  “Aye, that’s her,” the youth said. “She comes to most of the arithmetic and geometry lectures, and all the disputationes on logic. Sometimes she even gets up on her bench and argues points along with the others. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes!”

  “Indeed.” Hugh rubbed his jaw, coarse with nearly a week’s growth of beard. He’d expected her to be not only older-looking, but plainer, perhaps even mannish, given her immersion in the male domain of academia. And, too, she defied convention by living so independently. For a maiden of noble birth to make her own way in the world, with neither father nor husband nor overlord to guide and protect her, was remarkable even in broad-minded communities like Oxford. That this delicate waif had managed such a feat was downright ext
raordinary.

  It didn’t sit right, his having been sent for the likes of her. Still, he had an assignment to fulfill, and fulfill it he would.

  The boy’s gaze lit on Hugh’s unkempt, overgrown hair, on the wineskin and worn leather satchel slung across his chest, and finally on the sharply curved Turkish dagger sheathed in its ornate silver scabbard on his hip. “You mind my asking what business you’ve got with the lady Phillipa?”

  “Nay.” With his good left hand, Hugh dug two silver pennies out of the kid purse hanging on his belt and handed them over. “As long as you don’t expect an answer.”

  “It’s just that...well, I don’t often see your kind here in Oxford.”

  “Nor did you tonight,” Hugh said, extracting two more pennies from his purse. Hugh gave the boy a meaningful look as he pressed the additional payment into his hand.

  “Ah.” The young scholar nodded nervously as he slid the coins into his own purse. “Right. Of course. I under—”

  “Carry on,” Hugh said dismissively, returning his attention to the woman on the bench.

  “Aye, sir. Good night to you, sir.”

  Hugh lurked in the dimly lit nave until the young lector switched from Latin to French—proper Norman French, not the anglicized common tongue spoken in less rarified circles—to announce that he was done with his presentation and that anyone who cared to debate these matters was welcome to return for a disputatio at terce tomorrow. A drone of conversation filled St. Mary’s Church as the scholars rose from their benches and filed out into the night.

  Hugh ducked behind a pillar as the lady Phillipa passed by him, pinning a gray mantle over her shoulders as she chatted with two lanky young men about what they had just heard. “Ah, but is it really so critical to understand the nature of universals,” she was saying in a soft, girlish voice, “if one accepts the nominalist position that universals are but one element in the realm of logic, which is really more about words, or how we express concepts, than about absolute reality, which is to say matters of metaphysic...”