She brought a heel down on his instep, but it was heavily booted and she was in kid slippers; he didn’t even seem to feel it. In desperation, she aimed a punch at his throat. He stumbled backward.
Run. Lifting her skirts, she turned to race up the alley, but he was on her in a heartbeat, his arms banding around her as they toppled together to the hard-packed dirt.
He twisted as they fell, landing on his back with her on top. Wrenching one arm free, she grabbed his right hand and groped for his thumb to yank it back...only to find it missing.
No thumb?
Taking advantage of her momentary bafflement, he pinioned her arms and rolled her facedown, immobilizing her with the solid weight of his body.
“Be still, for pity’s sake,” he said as she thrashed beneath him, or tried to, for struggling against him was like trying to budge granite.
She spat out a blistering oath—the first time such a word had ever passed her lips.
Again he laughed, a throaty chuckle that tickled her ear and shook his leather-clad chest against her back. “Shame on you, Lady Phillipa. I hardly think the good Canon Lotulf raised you to curse like a dockhand.”
She stilled beneath him, contemplating this unexpected development. He knew her name.
Not only that, but he knew about her beloved uncle Lotulf, a canon of the Church who had brought her up, along with her sister, near the Cloister of Notre Dame in Paris. All anyone in Oxford knew about her was that she’d begun her studies at the University of Paris before moving here seven years ago. To have revealed that she’d been raised from birth in that city, rather than at her father’s barony in Beauvais, would have raised prickly questions—questions she would just as soon avoid after a childhood of being called, even to her face, “Gui de Beauvais’s Brilliant Little By-blow.”
“How do you know me?” she demanded. “What is this about?”
“Perhaps this will help to explain things.” Shifting on top of her, he reached on the ground behind them for the thing he had dropped, bringing it close to her face so that she could inspect it. It appeared to be a letter.
“It’s addressed to you.” Tucking the letter into her hand, he levered himself off her and stood. “From Richard de Luci.”
“Richard de...” Phillipa sat up, peering at the document in a vain attempt to make out the writing on the parchment or the image on the enormous seal, which was of lead, not common wax. “The king’s justiciar?”
“The same.” He offered her his hand, but she rebuffed the gesture, coming as it did from a man who, just moments ago, had held a knife to her throat and threatened her virtue. Whether that threat still existed, if it ever had, remained to be seen; perhaps he’d just been having a bit of mean-spirited sport with her. In any event, attempting to run from him was clearly futile, so she may as well try and get to the bottom of this little mystery.
Gaining her feet unaided, Phillipa dusted off her tunic and mantle. “I don’t believe this letter really is from Richard de Luci. I’ve never even met the man, and he has no idea who I am.”
“You underestimate your notoriety,” he said, amusement in his voice. It was a deep voice with a rusty edge to it and a certain quality that marked him, despite his disreputable appearance and bearing, as a man who had been born into the ranks of the English nobility. He had backed off from her a bit, she noticed—to put her at ease?—and was uncorking that wineskin again. “Care for some?” he asked, holding it out to her.
Ignoring him, she ran her fingers over the silken ribbons woven importantly through slits in the parchment and the huge dollop of lead that prevented their being tampered with. “What on earth would Richard de Luci want with me?” As Justiciar of the Realm, Lord Richard served as King Henry’s chief minister and de facto regent during the king’s frequent travels.
“I’ve some notion, but I’m not yet privy to the details. Perhaps his lordship will enlighten you in the letter, but I doubt it. Most likely you’ll have to wait until your audience with him at West Minster.”
She blinked at him. “I have no audience with—”
“You do, actually. He’s expecting you Thursday morning, in his chambers at the royal palace. I was sent to escort you there.”
“Thursday...” Phillipa shook her head. “That’s two days from now. West Minster’s just outside London. It must be fifty miles from here.”
“Sixty, more like. If we get an early start tomorrow and the weather holds up, we can make it there in two days. We can find accommodations at a monastery tomorrow night—there are lots of them on the way—and the following night we can stay with my sister and her—”
“I’m expected to travel with you? Share accommodations with you? This is outrageous!”
“Lord Richard needs to speak with you as soon as possible.” Peering at the sky, he said, “We ought to get indoors before it starts raining. Perhaps we can find someplace where there’s enough light to read by, and then you can see for yourself what he expects of—”
“I don’t care what he expects of me, or who he is. Does he honestly think I’m going to drop everything and set off just like that, with...with...Who the devil are you, anyway?”
“Hugh of Wexford, at your service, my lady.” Her assailant-turned-envoy executed a courtly little half-bow that she suspected he intended as a mockery. Straightening up, he raked his unkempt flaxen hair out of his face and squeezed some more wine into his mouth. He was a tall man, long of limb and square of shoulder, lean but sinewy.
There was something familiar about his name, but she would have remembered having met such an insufferable cur. “How do I know you?” she asked.
“You don’t. That is, we’ve never met, but we do have a mutual acquaintance. Graeham of Eastingham is my brother by marriage.”
“Graeham of...Graeham Fox, you mean?”
“Aye. He’s lord of Eastingham now, and married to my sister. We’ll be staying with them Wednesday night. Eastingham’s to the east of London and just a bit out of our way, but I think we’ll both be more comfortable there than at an inn or monastery—and Graeham is eager to see you again.”
Formerly her sire’s most trusted serjant, Graeham Fox had at one time been promised to Phillipa, sight unseen, as a husband, but had become enamored of an Englishwoman named Joanna—presumably this Hugh of Wexford’s sister—and had married her instead. It was a development that had troubled Phillipa little, since she had only agreed to the union for the Oxfordshire estate that went with it, an estate her doting papa deeded to her outright when Graeham declined the marriage.
Graeham’s last duty for Lord Gui had been to escort Phillipa across the Channel and see her safely settled in Oxford. She got to know him well during those weeks, and came to like and admire him.
“I thought you were a mercenary knight,” she said. “I seem to recall Graeham saying you fought for foreign princes in return for gold—that you were a master swordsman who could name his own price.”
“My sword hand isn’t what it used to be,” Hugh said, his careless tone tainted by a hint of something...bitterness?
Phillipa’s gaze sought out Hugh’s right hand, but it was too dark to make out that missing thumb. “So now you’re a member of Lord Richard’s retinue. A sergeant-at-arms, something of that sort?”
“More of a...wraith,” he said, shoving the cork back in the wineskin. “A thing you find creeping in the shadows when you turn around quickly.”
“You’re a spy,” she concluded.
“Lord Richard simply calls me an agent of the crown. My duties are varied. They’re generally investigative in nature, but anything that requires a quiet footstep and a sharp blade might fall into my lap.”
“Do your duties include accosting innocent women in dark alleys and—”
“The dark alley was your idea,” he said, taking a step toward her as she automatically recoiled, “and not a particularly shrewd one. You allowed yourself to get trapped in a remote, confined space by an armed opponent of obviously sup
erior strength.”
“I had my dagger,” she said, sounding callow even to herself, “and I was well-hidden.”
“I’m the type of man one should run from,” he said soberly, “not hide from. Your instincts will have told you that, but you chose to ignore your gut and listen to that all-too-clever little brain of yours, which insisted that this–” he scooped her dagger off the ground held it up “—would protect you.”
Phillipa felt heat rise in her cheeks, and was grateful for the concealing dark; she hated to be seen blushing, especially by the person who had made her blush.
“But how could it protect you,” he continued, “when you didn’t even think to aim for the throat? You let me trick you into backing against the wall, which should have been the one thing you avoided at all cost, and then, of course, you had no idea how to keep from being disarmed.”
“Perhaps not,” she said testily, “but I was able to disarm you, or rather, convince you to disarm yourself.”
“That you were.” He inclined his head in a little show of concession. “You weren’t entirely inept, and for the most part your missteps were merely due to inexperience—you’re certainly intelligent enough.”
“You were...you were testing me! You deliberately set out to terrify me just to see how I would react.”
“Lord Richard will expect me to offer some sort of assessment of your strengths and weaknesses for this type of work—”
“What type of work? What are you—”
“—so, I suppose I was testing your mettle, trying to see what you’re made of.” He turned the dagger over in his hands, studying its jewel-encrusted handle. “You mucked it up in most respects, of course, although I have to admit you didn’t succumb to panic, so there’s hope for you yet. Keeping a cool head is half the battle in these situations—that’s how you were able to trick me into putting my weapon away. And you seem to have keen powers of analysis, even if you rely too much on them and not enough on intuition. In short, you’re trainable. Perhaps Lord Richard isn’t entirely mad in wanting to recruit you.”
“Recruit me for what? He can’t seriously intend to use me as a spy!”
Hugh grimaced. “‘Spy’ is such a lurid word, not to mention simplistic. But yes, it would seem Lord Richard does have you in mind for some sort of service of that nature to the crown. You really ought to read the letter before you start hammering me with questions.” With a hint of impatience, he asked, “Isn’t there some place we can go that will be lit at this time of night? Not the bookshop—a place where we can sit and talk. A public house of some sort?”
There was the Red Bull, right around the corner, but Phillipa hesitated to go there with him—to go anywhere with him. It was not that long ago that this man had been pressing a knife to her throat. Her wariness of him had eased in light of that business about testing her—and it certainly helped that he was Graeham Fox’s brother-in-law—but it had not entirely abated. All she really knew about him, knew for sure, was that he was a dangerous man.
A very dangerous man.
Phillipa held out her hand and said, with as much authority as she could muster, “I’ll take my dagger, if you don’t mind.”
“I shouldn’t return it to you. ‘Twill only continue to put you at risk.”
“‘Twas a gift from my uncle Lotulf,” she said archly. “For you to keep it would be steal–”
“But if it makes you feel safer in my company...” He handed her the dagger, which she slid back into its little sheath on her girdle. With a smile, he unfastened his own dagger from his belt, scabbard and all, and held it out to her as well. “Here. ‘Twill double your false sense of security.”
After a moment’s nonplused hesitation, she accepted the peace offering—if that was really what it was and not some trick or jest on his part. The scabbard was of heavy, ornately worked silver, and crescent-shaped, like the knife it held; she shoved it awkwardly beneath her girdle.
“Here it comes,” Hugh said with a sigh.
She looked up to feel the sting of raindrops on her face. Thunder growled as the heavens opened up, saturating the thatched roofs all around them with a cold, steady hiss.
Phillipa hurriedly slipped the letter into her document case, next to her wax tablet and well-worn copies of Aristotle’s Logica Nova and Logica Vetus. When she looked up, she found Hugh suddenly very close. He pulled her hood up as lightning flared, pulsing over the planes and ridges of his face, highlighting a broad forehead and well-hewn cheekbones, deepening the shallow cleft in his beard-darkened chin. His eyes looked almost gentle in the quiver of white light—an illusion, surely, but one that made it easier, when he reached for her hand, to let him take it.
“Come,” he yelled over the droning rain as he urged her back up the alley, toward the bookshop.
“Nay. I know a better place.” She pointed in the opposite direction. “This way.”
They sprinted hand-in-hand down the alley, across the street and around the corner, rain drilling into them, thunder rumbling. His grip was unyielding, his strides lengthy—although it seemed he moderated his pace so as not to end up dragging her like a sack of turnips.
By the time they reached their destination, an iron-banded door with the silhouette of a bull painted on it in red, Phillipa was drenched and shivering. “The tavern is downstairs,” she told Hugh, who guided her with a hand on her back down a torchlit stairwell to a vaulted stone undercroft furnished with long tables and benches.
Around the largest table sat a dozen or so black-robed scholars, one of whom was reciting some bawdy verse that had been making the rounds in Oxford of late. Two townsmen talked quietly at another table; otherwise the tavern was empty save for its proprietress, the doughy, ruddy-faced Altheda.
“Got caught in the rain, did you, milady?” Ushering the couple to a quiet corner, Altheda appraised Hugh with a cursory flick of the eyes. “Oughtn’t to let that happen,” she scolded as she took Phillipa’s sodden mantle, draping it over a peg in the stone wall. “You could catch a rheum of the chest and be gone just like that! You’re that clever, Lady Phillipa, but you’ve got to stop thinkin’ all them lofty thoughts and get yourself indoors when it looks like it’s fixin’ to pour.”
“How very refreshing to encounter a bit of common sense in this city filled with deep thinkers.” Hugh turned an engaging grin on Altheda as he raked his wet hair off his face. “I do love a woman who knows to come in out of the rain.”
Altheda actually blushed; Phillipa smirked to herself as she sat at the scarred oaken table Altheda led them to.
Hugh of Wexford had the air of a man who’d always found it just a bit too easy to beguile the fairer sex. Phillipa supposed there were women who were all too susceptible to a head of tousled golden hair and a too-charming grin, especially when accompanied by a certain measure of height and brawn—but she’d never been one of them. It was those deep thinkers Hugh sneered at whom she admired, but she wouldn’t expect a creature like Hugh of Wexford—part hired bully, part self-proclaimed “wraith”—to appreciate the appeal of intellect over muscle.
Taking a seat across from Phillipa, Hugh ordered a jug of claret, which Altheda brought promptly, along with two battered tin goblets, an oil lamp and—bless her—an iron brazier filled with hot coals, which she set on the chalk floor next to Phillipa’s feet.
“The proprietress knows you well,” Hugh observed as he filled their goblets. “You must come here often. I’ve never known a lady of rank to set foot in such an establishment, much less make a regular practice of it.”
“Frequently a disputatio will spill over into the alehouses and taverns,” she said. “‘Twas the same in Paris. That’s when I first realized that I must be willing to frequent such places if I intended to participate in the lively exchange of ideas that makes a university community so exciting.”
He smiled crookedly. “You find Oxford exciting?”
Phillipa stiffened at his tone. “It may not be as thrilling as prowling dark alleys i
n search of innocent women to terrorize, but it suits me well enough.”
Chuckling, he lifted his goblet to his mouth, his gaze all too direct—and amused—as he contemplated her over the rim.
His eyes were translucent in the muted amber glow of the oil lamp, reminding her of the costly glass that her Uncle Lotulf had installed in the window of his study back in Paris. As a child, Phillipa used to like to sit on its deep sill while her uncle worked at his desk behind her, and observe the bustling street life of the Rue Saint-Christofle through the thick, bubbly panes of pale green glass. It was like gazing through seawater at another world, a world quite unlike the hushed scholastic haven that she and Ada inhabited, a world whose children scrambled about like puppies, working hard but playing harder, and laughing—always laughing.
“Is something wrong?” Hugh was frowning, his eyes searching hers.
Finding his candid scrutiny unnerving, Phillipa looked away, her gaze lighting on something glinting on his right earlobe...an earring?
Yes, and a rather curious one, a small gold loop engraved with a design that looked vaguely heathen. Phillipa had never seen a man wearing an earring before—no man of her own world, that was. Several times in Paris, and once in Oxford, she’d seen dark-skinned, exotically-attired men wearing earrings like that.
When Hugh lowered his goblet, Phillipa noticed that his nose was reddened and sported a slight bump about halfway down.
“Did I do that?” she asked, suddenly appalled. “I...I’m sorry for lashing out at you like that, but I thought—”
“Don’t be sorry. ‘Twas one of the few sensible things you did back there.”
“Is...is it broken?”
“Aye, but don’t flatter yourself into thinking you’ve got that good a punch. ‘Twas Graeham Fox who did the honors, some six or seven years past, though he was only giving as good as he got. ‘Twas a fairly savage pummeling we gave each other, as I recall.”
Lords of Conquest Boxed Set Page 37
