Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  Phillipa breathed a monumental sigh of relief.

  Joanna smiled at Phillipa before returning her attention to her embroidery. “I can’t get over how much you look like your sister Ada. I became friends with her while she was living in London, you know. Of course, she was very ill then.”

  “Yes, she told me you took wonderful care of her. She’s so grateful for it—for everything you and Graeham did for her. As am I.”

  “Is she still abroad?” Joanna asked. Ada, although never as studious as her sister, had taken an interest in medicine while she was regaining her health at London’s St. Bartholemew’s hospital. Upon her return to Paris, she’d talked Lord Gui into sending her to study the diseases of women at the great medical school in Salerno, where scholars of both sexes could learn the healing arts.

  “Ah, you don’t know,” Phillipa said with a smile. “Yes, she’s still in Salerno, and there she will remain. She got married in March.”

  “Married!”

  “To another physician, an Italian named Tommaso Salernus. She writes that he’s very clever and completely devoted to her, and that he’s tall and has black curly hair and looks like a Roman god.”

  “A Roman god!” Joanna exclaimed laughingly. “She must be in love!”

  “I’m sure she wrote to you about her marriage, but it can take so long for letters to get here from Italy. She’s very happy there. She says the climate is temperate, and she adores her work almost as much as she adores her husband. She claims she can’t wait to start having children, but...”

  Joanna glanced up from her needlework. “But?”

  Phillipa squinted at the boys in the meadow, backlit by the blazing sky. “She takes great satisfaction in being a physician. I worry that if she has children, she won’t be as free to practice medicine.”

  “She won’t.” Joanna looked toward the meadow somewhat wistfully; Phillipa knew she was gazing at her son. “But there will be rewards enough to compensate.”

  Phillipa shook her head fervently. “Nothing is worth the loss of one’s liberty, even a small part of it.”

  Joanna smiled as she passed her needle in and out of the sky-blue silk. “My brother is much like you.”

  “Hugh?” Dubious laughter burst from Phillipa. “You must be joking.”

  “Not at all. He’s fanatically self-sufficient, insists on living by his own rules. You and he have that in common, I think.”

  “Aye, well, that’s all we have in common,” Phillipa said. “He’s not much for thinking things through, your brother. I’ve only known him two days, but not once has he bothered to sit down and analyze a situation thoughtfully, or plan a course of action and carry it through. Instead, he just sort of...well, for instance, around this time yesterday evening, when we were halfway here and should have been finding a place to spend the night, Hugh passed up a perfectly suitable monastery simply because there was no room for us in the prior’s lodge and we would have had to sleep in the guest house with the indigent travelers. I didn’t mind, but he was insistent that we carry on. We finally ended up in the prior’s lodge at Chertsey, but it was well after dark by the time we got there, and Fritzi and I were both exhausted. If it had been up to me, I’d have arranged our accommodations in advance, and then we wouldn’t have been at the mercy of...” Phillipa realized that Joanna’s mouth was curving into a lopsided smile reminiscent of her brother’s. “What’s so funny?”

  “My dear Phillipa...I’ve never known my brother to arrange anything in advance, or analyze any situation, thoughtfully or otherwise. He prefers to simply...deal with circumstances as they arise.”

  “Not very judicious,” Phillipa sniffed, thinking, How priggish I must sound; I must try to remember that I’m not in Oxford anymore. The undiluted opinions that were encouraged and expected in a university community, Uncle Lotulf used to counsel her, should be suppressed in the wider world, where diplomacy was prized over frankness. “What I mean is, considering the responsibility that Lord Richard has invested in him—”

  “Yes, I know,” Joanna said, “yet somehow everything always turns out all right with Hugh. Think about it—he did find you accommodations last night, and I’ll wager you slept better at Chertsey, where you presumably had your own bedchambers, than if you’d had to burrow into the straw in some monastic guest house amid strangers. And by covering so much ground yesterday, you arrived here all the earlier today and had more time to rest and refresh yourself before your meeting with Lord Richard tomorrow.”

  “Hmph.”

  “My brother may be brash and he may be impulsive—maddeningly so at times—but he’s not stupid.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that he was,” Phillipa said quickly. “In fact, I suppose he has a great deal of...native intelligence. A man can’t be entirely witless and survive fifteen of warfare.” Still, as a soldier, Hugh of Wexford’s cognitive abilities would be limited to those applications that were useful on the battlefield—such as improvising strategies as he went along, his apparent specialty. Most knights couldn’t even write their own names.

  A roar of boyish whoops and hollers erupted in the meadow.

  “Well done!” Joanna called out.

  “What happened?” Phillipa asked.

  “It’s over. Haven’t you been paying attention?”

  Paying attention? Having little interest in games of sport and no inkling as to how this particular one was played, Phillipa had pretty much ignored it. That Joanna had managed to follow its progress while talking to Phillipa and doing her needlework was quite remarkable.

  Joanna called out her congratulations to her son as he ran to her, grinning broadly. Laying her embroidery on the fence next to her, she wrapped him up in a hug as he hurtled himself into her arms.

  Joanna’s enthusiasm—and that of Graeham, when he joined them, and the other boys on young Hugh’s team, took Phillipa somewhat aback. It was only a game, after all, the manipulation of a little leather ball for the amusement of children. She felt that sense of detachment that often ambushed her when she ventured out of her academic refuge and into the greater world—the sense that, on the one hand, she had so much more perspective and insight that those around her, and on other, that they all shared in a vast and mysterious store of common knowledge that she would never be privy to.

  “Did you enjoy the game, Lady Phillipa?” Sending his son back to the house with an affectionate smack on the rump, Graeham straddled the fence to the other side of wife.

  “I... ‘twas...”

  “She had no idea what was going on.” Joanna squeezed Phillipa’s hand. “I wish you could spend the summer here with us. You could use some color in your cheeks. I could set up a net in the meadow and teach you to play jeu de paume.”

  Graeham smoothed a hand over Joanna’s prodigious belly, smiling indulgently. “I don’t think you’ll be playing jeu de paume this year, lady wife.”

  “Nay...I suppose not.” Sighing, Joanna closed her hand over his. “Why am I so often big with child in the summer, when I just want to frolic in the sun with everyone else?”

  With an intimate chuckle, Graeham said, “Because in the winter, you just want to curl up in some warm, snug place...” He lowered his voice, both arms encircling his wife. “With your husband.”

  Graeham whispered something in Joanna’s ear, prompting soft laughter from her. They kissed. Phillipa looked away, feeling uncomfortably like a voyeur...worse, an interloper.

  Feigning an air of nonchalance, she rose from the bench, smoothing down her tunic. “I think I’d like to take a little walk before the sun sets completely. After two days in the saddle, ‘twould be good to stretch my legs.”

  “Would you like us to come with you?” Graeham asked, although Phillipa sensed he was just asking to be polite. “We could give you a proper tour of—”

  “If it’s all the same to you, I wouldn’t mind being alone for a bit—that’s another thing I haven’t had quite enough of lately.”

  Graeham smiled. “I c
an certainly understand that. Enjoy your walk.”

  ‘Twill be a quick walk, she thought as she turned and wandered away from them, across a grassy field riffled by a warm, sweet-scented breeze. There’s not much light left in the day. Sprawling sheep pastures and cultivated fields formed a haphazard patchwork on the undulating land. To her right, in a sort of shallow valley, she could see the thatched rooftops of the village of Eastingham, painted gold by the setting sun. Just ahead of her was what looked to be an orchard, although she couldn’t say what kind; she’d never been good at identifying trees. Beyond the orchard was a fish pond, and beyond that, dense woods.

  Phillipa was an urban creature at heart, despite Linleigh, the Oxfordshire estate her sire had been generous enough to grant her seven years ago. She appreciated her holding for the income it produced, which allowed her the indulgence of collecting the books stacked from floor to ceiling in her little Oxford flat. Nevertheless, she rarely visited Linleigh, leaving its administration in the hands of her trusted bailiff. As beautiful as the countryside could be, pastoral pursuits bored her; they always had.

  The orchard drew her, perhaps because of the tidy rows in which the tall, mature trees had been planted, which appealed to her sense of precision and orderliness. She strolled down a tree-lined aisle, breathing in the earthy scents and listening to a soft, summer-evening refrain of chirps and trills from within the leafy canopy overhead. The sun, hovering low on the horizon, shot its dying rays through the rows of trees, casting the orchard into streaks of light and shadow.

  Several yards into the orchard, she turned and looked back the way she had come. Off in the distance she could see Joanna and Graeham facing each other on the fence—alone, all the villagers having gone home at the end of the game. Joanna took Graeham’s hand and placed it on her belly.

  Phillipa stepped behind a tree, lest one of them glance this way and find her watching them.

  Presently, Graeham started—at a movement of the baby’s? He laughed and said something to Joanna. She laughed too.

  Their foreheads touched. Graeham’s free hand rose to curl around her neck. He spoke to her. She nodded, smiling.

  Phillipa drew in a deep breath, which caught in her throat.

  It could be her, sitting on that fence, her fourth child curled up in her belly while her husband marveled at the wonderment of it, of them. Had things transpired as planned seven years ago, had Graeham not chosen Joanna over her, that husband would have been him. At the time, Phillipa had felt nothing but relief, even gratitude—she would get Linleigh and the chance to pursue her studies in Oxford, fast becoming the most forward-thinking center of learning in Europe, but without the burden of a husband. She would enjoy a life of extraordinary autonomy, the kind of life most women could only dream of, even women of her rank—especially women of her rank, who, bred to be marriage prizes, were discouraged from any pursuit more ambitious than fancy needlework. And, of course, she’d felt nothing for Graeham, whom she’d just met. Nor did she harbor any feelings for him now other than friendship, but she had to admit no woman could ask for a more attentive husband or devoted father. Fortune had smiled on Joanna when Graeham Fox had sacrificed everything—or been willing to—in order to marry her.

  Graeham gathered Joanna in his arms and kissed her again, only this time he didn’t stop. They kissed endlessly, while Phillipa watched, ashamed to be compromising their privacy this way, but strangely incapable of looking away.

  Of course, Phillipa had been as fortunate as Joanna, but in a different way. Some women were meant for marriage and children, some for...greater things?

  They still hadn’t stopped kissing.

  Different things.

  “Shame on you, Lady Phillipa,” came a man’s soft, amused voice from behind her.

  Chapter 5

  Phillipa whipped around with a harsh little intake of breath to find Hugh of Wexford standing in the shadows not two yards behind her. He looked different this evening, with a long shirt hanging loosely over gray chausses, his damp hair neatly combed away from his face and...there was something else that she couldn’t quite place. As always, he had his leather satchel slung over one shoulder and that ubiquitous wineskin looped across his chest, but he was beltless this evening, and therefore without that odd heathen dagger.

  Summoning her self-composure, Phillipa said, “You shouldn’t sneak up behind a person that way.”

  “How else to discover people’s secret foibles?” Grinning, he dumped his satchel on the ground and uncorked the wineskin. “I wouldn’t have taken you for the type to skulk about, spying on people unawares.”

  With a huff of scornful laughter, she said, “You’re a fine one to talk!”

  “I skulk for the good of the realm.”

  “For the good of your purse, you mean.”

  She heard him sigh. He took a step toward her, into a band of sunlight that glinted off his earring and turned his shirt of bleached linen blinding white. Holding the wineskin out to her, he said, “I don’t suppose there’d be any point to offering you some of this.”

  Phillipa’s instinct was to automatically shake her head—as he well knew, after two days in her company. Instead, she braced herself—against what?—and closed the distance between them, reaching for the wineskin. With a surprised little quirk of the eyebrows, he pulled it off and handed it to her.

  He stared at her as she drank, his gaze lighting on her mouth, her throat. His eyes were crystalline in the waning sun, his gaze unnervingly intent as always.

  She saw what it was that was different about him, and realized with dismay that she’d been staring at him, too. Handing back the wineskin, she said, “You shaved.”

  He ran a hand over his now-smooth jaw and that sturdy chin with its slight cleft—a feature he shared with his sister. “‘Twouldn’t do to show up at West Minster Palace looking like a raker.”

  Phillipa smiled inwardly to think of insolent, arrogant Hugh of Wexford cleaning streets and emptying privies.

  “You managed to shave at a stream in the middle of the woods?” she asked.

  “A soldier learns to shave anywhere, sleep anywhere, and eat anything.” His gaze focused over her shoulder; turning, she saw that he was looking at Joanna and Graeham, still embracing on the fence, although they were talking now rather than kissing. “Is it true you don’t believe in marriage?” he asked.

  She looked at him sharply, vexed at how much he knew about her—or thought he did. “Where did you hear that?”

  He shifted his gaze to her. “‘Twas a...” Seemingly discomfited, he looked away. “Someone in Oxford told me. Is it true?”

  Phillipa wondered what else he’d been told, and was all too sure she knew. “‘Tisn’t as simple as...just not believing in marriage. I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with it in theory, but in practice it can be stifling, especially to pursuits of the mind. There’s a reason clerics are discouraged from marrying.”

  “You’re not a cleric.”

  “Only because I’m a woman. All serious scholars take minor orders sooner or later. If I were a man, I’d have been tonsured years ago.”

  “Had you ever considered taking the veil?”

  She choked on a mouthful of wine. “I didn’t mean I had any inclination to bury myself away in some convent! Only that marriage and academics don’t seem to mix very well.”

  “Nor marriage and true love, if one believes in that amour courtois drivel—as you seem to.”

  “I never said I believed in it,” she said, thrusting the wineskin into his hand. “Precisely. That is, I have no reason to disbelieve it...”

  “Have you experienced it yourself, this thunderbolt of love they blather on about in Poitiers?” he asked, shrugging the wineskin back over his chest. “Dear God, you have, haven’t you? You’ve imagined yourself smitten by true love, helpless in the wake of its—”

  “Certainly not!” she said with a bit too much conviction. “I...I just find it...intriguing.”

 
He chuckled and shook his head. “How any thinking person could find it anything other than the most fatuous, sentimental, self-serving—”

  “Sentimental!” Heat rose up her throat. “You’re saying I’m sentimental?”

  He laughed outright at her indignation. “I think you’re susceptible to sentimentality, despite that image of cool intellectuality you like to project. How else to explain your being hoodwinked by this nonsense?”

  “I can explain my interest in courtly love,” she said. “And it has nothing to do with sentimentality. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of a woman named Hèloïse. She became notorious some fifty years ago in Paris for her love affair with a great philosopher and teacher named Peter Abelard—although she was famously brilliant in her own right.”

  Hugh leaned against one of the trees, eyeing her with an inscrutable expression as he raised the wineskin to his mouth. “Indeed.”

  “I’d taken an interest in Hèloïse even as a young child,” Phillipa said, “because I knew she’d been brought up, like me, by an uncle serving as a canon of Notre Dame—Fulbert was his name. Regardless of your contempt for the notion of a spiritual union, Sir Hugh, Abelard and Hèloïse shared a passion that was truly of the heart and mind. All of Paris celebrated their love, even though, as a cleric and teacher, Abelard was expected to be chaste.”

  “And he wasn’t?” Hugh’s smile struck her as just a bit too knowing. “So their union was more than spiritual.”

  Unaccountably flustered, she said, “I never said it was a platonic union—they even had a child, a son. Still, Hèloïse resisted Fulbert’s demand that she marry Abelard and salvage her reputation. She felt Abelard was the greatest thinker in Europe—as he was—and that marriage would destroy him as a teacher. In the end...” Phillipa sighed heavily. “It got complicated.”

  “Everything always does,” Hugh murmured, sounding almost melancholy.