Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  He turned and stalked back to the house.

  Chapter 6

  West Minster

  “I don’t like it.” Hugh stood at a window in Richard de Luci’s chamber at the royal palace, looking down upon a courtyard flooded with morning sunlight. On a stone bench at the far end sat Phillipa de Paris, her nose in one of the little books she lugged about in that tooled leather case hanging from her girdle, biding her time until the justiciar was ready to see her.

  Lord Richard had called Hugh in first in order to debrief him—about his trip to Oxford, his impressions of the lady Phillipa and her suitability for espionage work—and and to sketchily outline in advance the assignment he’d mapped out for them. Upon hearing what his lordship had in mind, Hugh almost wished he’d left Phillipa back in Oxford.

  “I wouldn’t ask this of a wedded woman,” said Lord Richard from his desk behind Hugh, “or, God knows, a maiden. But, as you reported yourself, Lady Phillipa is known to be...rather unhampered by convention in her relations with men.”

  A fact that his lordship had clearly known before sending Hugh to Oxford, but had failed to mention. Had he deliberately withheld the information just to see whether Hugh would uncover it himself?

  “Damned convenient for us, her being so free with her favors,” said Lord Richard, “especially since we know her sympathies lie with the king. And, of course, there’s her history with the fellow we’re going after. She couldn’t be more perfect for this mission.”

  “I still don’t like it,” Hugh said, watching the subject of their conversation look up from her reading to observe two deerhound pups cavorting on the stone court nearby. Her smile made her look very young and very sweet. Was this really the same woman who’d returned his kiss with such heated abandon last night...only to cut him down to size when he sought to take their passion to its logical conclusion?

  “I don’t much like it myself,” the justiciar admitted with a sigh. “The point, however, is not whether the plan is likeable, but whether it will work. I believe it will. And I believe it to be our best hope for exposing the queen’s sedition while there’s still time to do something about it.”

  Turning away from the window, Hugh found Lord Richard perched on the edge of his desk, a thick slab of age-polished oak the size of a small room, yet dwarfed by the capacious grandeur of the surrounding chamber, with its high ceiling and spectacularly painted walls. The justiciar crossed his arms, scrutinizing Hugh with those scalding blue eyes of his. He cut an even more imposing figure than usual today, in a gold-trimmed black tunic, his silver-white hair combed back to expose the prodigious forehead reputed to be a sign of his whipcrack intelligence.

  “What if she won’t do it?” Hugh asked.

  “I’ll dare her. Didn’t you just tell me she can’t resist rising to a challenge?”

  Indeed he had, damn it all.

  Lord Richard called in one of the manservants loitering outside the door and sent him down to the courtyard to fetch Phillipa. “You’re clearly ambivalent about this mission, Hugh. That’s fine—I don’t expect mindless compliance from a man like you. However, I do expect you to execute your orders to the best of your ability, regardless of how they sit with you.”

  “Have I ever done otherwise?”

  “Not to my knowledge, but you seem particularly ill at ease about the lady Phillipa’s involvement this time round.”

  “It’s one thing,” Hugh said, a bit too stridently, “for her to take lovers of her choosing because of her intellectual convictions. It’s quite another to expect her to...to...”

  “If her participation weren’t critical to our cause, I would never presume to ask such a thing of her, regardless of her reputation—she is, after all, a lady of rank, not a common trollop. But, Hugh, there is simply no one who can take her place if she refuses to cooperate with us. I wish to God you hadn’t told her she had a choice in the matter. You wasted the threat about her uncle by telling her ‘twas just to get her to West Minster and then she could decide for herself. You should have let her think we’d have the old man eviscerated and quartered if she didn’t participate.”

  “Every so often,” Hugh gritted out, “even I reach a threshold as to how much of a bastard I can be.”

  “Really?” the justiciar said with a mild smile. “I wouldn’t have thought it.” More soberly he said, “All I ask—or shall I say, demand—is that you say nothing during this meeting to discourage her from helping us. After all, if she does agree to it, then obviously her sensibilities can not have been all that bruised.”

  Obviously? Hugh turned back to the window to find the bench at the edge of the courtyard empty. There was nothing obvious about it, or about her, nothing conventional or logical, and certainly nothing predictable, despite what he’d briefly thought...nothing that made any real sense whatsoever. She was a complete enigma to him, this delicate little creature in her silken cocoon who claimed to be so conversant in the ways of the world.

  “Lady Phillipa de Paris,” intoned the manservant as he escorted Phillipa through the door. Lord Richard approached her and introduced himself, all charm and wit, the consummate diplomatist. Hugh merely nodded to her from his place by the window.

  Sending the servant away with instructions to bring wine, the justiciar guided Phillipa toward a group of high-backed, intricately-carved chairs clustered near an arched fireplace neatly stacked with unlit logs. Her eyes widened as she took in the colossal jewel-toned depiction of the Seven Ages of Man painted on the smoothly whitewashed wall directly across from her. Twisting in her chair, she inspected the equally grandiose Twelve Labors of the Months behind her and the circular Map of the World over the fireplace. The rear wall, because of its many windows, had merely been painted green with hundreds of little gold stars and crescents.

  “I’ve a weakness for pictorial decoration,” his lordship explained as he gestured her into a chair and took a seat opposite her. “My one real indulgence.”

  “Ah. Yes...”

  “What do you think of the paintings?”

  Phillipa blinked, and in that moment, Hugh knew exactly what she thought of them, which was pretty much what he thought—that, as the saying went, too much of anything is nothing.

  “I...” she began. “That is, to be perfectly honest, my lord...”

  From across the room, Hugh caught her eye and shook his head infinitesimally, mouthing, “remarkable.”

  She glanced away, her mouth twitching. Looking the justiciar straight in the eye, she said, “I think they’re remarkable, sire.”

  He beamed. “I’m thinking of having something done on the ceiling. What think you, Lady Phillipa—the Vices and Virtues, or perhaps an immense Wheel of Fortune?”

  She glanced at Hugh, who cocked an eyebrow and shrugged.

  “Er...the Vices and Virtues, I should think. Ever so much more...instructive.”

  “Yes!” His lordship seemed pleased. “That it would be.”

  The servant arrived with a tray of wine and fruit, which he set on a little table before leaving. Lord Richard leaned back in his chair, his legs crossed, his cup cradled in his hand. After thanking Phillipa for coming all the way to West Minster from Oxford on such short notice, he called Hugh over, gesturing him into the chair next to his and diagonally across from Phillipa’s.

  “My lady,” the justiciar began, “do you recall, from Paris, a man by the name of Aldous Ewing? You would have known him when you were sixteen or seventeen—he was three or four years older.”

  Phillipa frowned. “I knew an Aldous of Tettenham—an Englishman.”

  “That’s the fellow.” Turning to Hugh, who knew only the man’s name and none of the particulars, Lord Richard said, “Younger son of a Middlesex baron. Entered minor orders at fourteen, moved to Paris a year later to study canon law. Erudite, charming...” He glanced at Phillipa. “And quite handsome, I understand.”

  Phillipa met his gaze steadily. “He certainly seemed to think so.”

  “Rather an
avid suitor of yours, was he not?”

  “Not through any encouragement of mine.”

  Lord Richard brought his cup to his lips, his searing gaze never leaving Phillipa. “Absolutely smitten with you, by all accounts. Begged you to marry him, despite...the circumstances of your birth, and even though it would have stymied his Church career by preventing him from taking major orders. I understand he was devastated when you refused.”

  Phillipa cast a speculative look toward Hugh, who dropped his gaze to the rush-covered floor.

  “He’s a lawyer now,” his lordship continued, “and a deacon of the Church.”

  “Really.” Phillipa looked surprised. “So he took major orders after all.”

  “It would seem since he couldn’t have you, he decided to settle for power and prestige. I don’t know what he was like in Paris, but my reports indicate that he’s become the quintessential canon lawyer—politically astute, self-serving, devious, and most of all rabidly ambitious. And, like most of his breed, he hasn’t let his ordination to the diaconate keep him from living a dissolute, even worldly, existence. He’s had numerous lemans over the years, although he’s taken great pains to be discreet about them. Deacons who flaunt their mistresses don’t earn appointments to the archdeaconry, and that’s something he wants desperately.”

  “Where does he live?” Hugh asked. “London?”

  “Aye, when he’s not abroad. He built a house across the river in Southwark.”

  “Southwark?” Phillipa interjected.

  Hugh knew why she was surprised. The London suburb was notorious for its public inns and bath houses, many of which were little more than glorified brothels. He said, “There’s more to Southwark of late than the stews, my lady. In fact, more and more noblemen are building their London town houses there rather than within the city walls. It’s become as stylish as it is disreputable.”

  “And Aldous Ewing is nothing if not stylish,” the justiciar commented. “They say he imports the finest wool from Sicily and silks from Florence for his clerical robes.”

  “He was...different in Paris,” Phillipa said pensively. “Not that he didn’t have his vices. He was self-centered even then, and vain, and far from chaste if you believed the idle talk—but so were many of the well-born young scholars who came there to study, regardless of whether they wore the tonsure. He was like the rest of them in that he never understood my interest in academics. I always thought of Aldous simply as young and—” she shrugged “—innocuous.”

  “Innocuous...” Lord Richard shook his head disgustedly and drained his cup. “Would that he were still innocuous, and I’d not have had to summon you from Oxford, my lady.”

  “What has he done?” Phillipa asked.

  Grimacing in a preoccupied way, Lord Richard reached out to set his empty cup on the table. “That’s what I’m hoping you’ll be able to find out.”

  Phillipa’s gaze flicked from the justiciar to Hugh and back again. “Is he involved in the queen’s rebellion?”

  “If such rebellion truly exists, aye—we think so. He’s been critical of King Henry ever since that business with Thomas Becket over curbing the powers of the Church. And since poor Becket’s death, he’s disparaged the king openly, even going so far as to say he ought to be charged with murder.”

  “Many others have said the same thing,” Hugh pointed out. “What evidence is there that he’s one of the conspirators?”

  Lord Richard sat back and steepled his hands. “Here’s what we know. Aldous Ewing is ostensibly attached to St. Paul’s in London, but his father’s donations to the Church have bought him the freedom to do as he pleases—and what he pleases is to spend most of his time abroad. He travels frequently to Paris, and is known to be a favorite in King Louis’s court. He was there at Eastertime, when there was reputed to be a great deal of seditious activity there. On the very same day he left Paris to return to England, his sister left Poitiers...but I’m getting ahead of myself. He has an older sister—”

  “Aye,” Phillipa said. “Clare of Halthorpe. I met her briefly when she came to visit Aldous in Paris. Squabbled with her brother constantly, as I recall. Made quite sure I knew she was a confidante of Queen Eleanor’s.”

  “Aye, that sounds like the lady Clare.” To Hugh, the justiciar said, “She’s the wife of Baron Bertram of Halthorpe, but she’d been a fixture in the queen’s circle for years.”

  “When I met her in Paris,” Phillipa said, “she told me she hadn’t seen England or her husband in over a year and didn’t miss either.”

  “Lady Clare is known to utterly despise England,” said Lord Richard. “Finds the climate cold and dismal and the people narrow-minded compared to the Continent—’drearily moralistic’ is how she put it in a letter to her sister.”

  Hugh saw Phillipa’s mouth tighten at Lord Richard’s casual reference to intercepting correspondence, but she kept her counsel.

  “She especially loathes Halthorpe,” the justiciar continued, “Could never stand being there. In fact, for the past two years, she’s made her home at the queen’s palace in Poitiers.”

  “I recall a lady Clare from Poitiers.” Hugh scratched his chin. “Fair-skinned, jet black hair, coldly beautiful eyes.”

  “That’s her,” Phillipa said. “She made me think of a marble statue that’s been polished just a bit too hard.”

  “She was always whispering in the corner with one of the young cavaliers,” Hugh said.

  Lord Richard nodded. “She’s been at the center of a number of romantic intrigues. At Christmastide she wrote to her sister that Poitiers was ‘a haven of warmth, elegance and delicious dissipation,’ and that she’d rather have her eyes put out by red-hot pokers than ever leave it.”

  “And yet, she did,” Phillipa noted.

  “Aye, and her departure was quite abrupt, though there’s no evidence that she’d fallen out of favor with the queen—on the contrary, they seemed especially inseparable right before she left. They say her husband barely recognized her when she showed up at Halthorpe with her retinue, it had been so long since he’d seen her. He immediately departed for the Continent with his mistress, leaving her in sole occupation of Halthorpe Castle.”

  “And Aldous Ewing left Paris at the same time?” Hugh asked.

  “Aye, but he wasn’t alone. He had a dozen armed men with him whom we took to be retainers of King Louis, and two carts filled with casks and chests, although we have no idea what was in them. A week later, they delivered this mysterious cargo into Lady Clare’s safekeeping at Halthorpe Castle. Aldous Ewing immediately returned to his home in Southwark, but the men-at-arms remained at Halthorpe.”

  Hugh leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands over his stomach. “Pretty fishy goings-on.”

  “That they are,” the justiciar concurred. “I wish I knew what was in those two carts.”

  “Why don’t you just send a contingent of men to search Halthorpe Castle?” Phillipa suggested.

  Lord Richard shook his head. “Any incriminating items would be destroyed or moved elsewhere before we could get our hands on them. But more importantly, the king is loath to go barging into an English castle with soldiers until he has proof that treason is underfoot. He wants the matter investigated, but with the utmost discretion, and he wants solid, unimpeachable evidence of the queen’s sedition.” To Phillipa he said, “That, my lady, is where you come in.”

  Warily Phillipa said, “You want me to...reesablish my acquaintance with Aldous?”

  “That and...” Averting his gaze, Lord Richard flicked a speck of lint from his tunic. “Ideally...insinuate yourself into his household, and possibly Halthorpe Castle as well.”

  Phillipa compelled the justiciar with the intensity of her gaze to look at her. “And how, my lord,” she asked tightly, “do you propose I do that?”

  Lord Richard’s expression betrayed both his embarrassment at having to spell it out and his irritation at being forced to. “At one time Aldous Ewing was very much enamored of
you, my lady. He was willing to sacrifice a Church career to be your husband. If fate were to throw you in his path again, and if you were to encourage him this time, well...I daresay he would jump at the chance to have now what he could not have in Paris.”

  “He can’t marry now that he’s a deacon.” Holding the justiciar’s gaze resolutely, Phillipa said, “Can I assume you’re asking me to become his leman?”

  Again, his lordship seemed unable to look Phillipa in the eye. “I...would never ask a woman to...violate her principles.” Which didn’t, of course, answer the question, especially given Phillipa’s rather iconoclastic “principles.” He picked up his cup and, finding it empty, set it down again with a frown.

  “Principles aside,” Phillipa said, “it confounds me why men always assume that if a woman wants something, her sexual favors are her only means of acquiring it. Do I seem incapable of using my wits to ferret out the information you seek?”

  Ever the cagey diplomat, Lord Richard said, “The extent of your acquaintance with the man is up to you, of course. I will say that the more...intimate your relationship with him, the more he will want you about and the more you will learn.”

  “His lordship is right,” Hugh said. “Keen though your wits may be, my lady, a beautiful woman’s most potent weapon is not, I’m afraid, that which lies between her ears.”

  Phillipa shot him a look of distaste.

  Lord Richard glanced at him with a baleful expression as he poured Phillipa a cup of wine. “I can’t emphasize enough how critical your cooperation is, and how grateful King Henry will be.” He set the wine cup back down when she refused to take it. “He would reward you most handsomely, my lady. He would make you a very wealthy—”

  “‘Twasn’t insulting enough to ask me to bed this man for his secrets,” Phillipa snapped, “you now propose to pay me, as if I were some street-corner tart? What will it be—tuppence every time I lie down and spread my legs for him?”

  Hugh couldn’t help admiring her outburst—and chuckling inwardly at Lord Richard’s obvious discomfiture.