“Nay! You don’t understand! She doesn’t understand!”
“Much as I’d love to hear how you’re going to explain it to her—I really would—I did clearly instruct you not to speak.”
Pressing a knee into his back to subdue him, she pried his mouth open and stuffed the wadded-up cord into it, passing the fourth and last cord between his lips and tying it behind his head to hold the gag in place.
Tears of futility and shame pricked his eyes; he blinked them back.
“Let them flow,” Marguerite softly urged as she reached once more for the whip. “There will be many more before this night is over.”
Chapter 14
It was nearly a week later, as Phillipa and the rest of Clare’s guests were enjoying an open-air Midsummer’s Eve feast at trestle tables in Halthorpe Castle’s outer bailey, that Clare caught the eye of Marguerite du Roche and said, “What do you know...a real man, coming here to Halthorpe. Must be some sort of mistake.”
Clare nodded toward something over Phillipa’s shoulder. Marguerite, raising a hand to shade her eyes against the low, early evening sun, smiled slowly. “Perhaps he’s lost.”
“I feel certain,” Clare said silkily, “that I could help him to find his way.”
Phillipa turned and tracked their gazes to the drawbridge that spanned the moat outside the castle’s high stone curtain wall. Squinting, she made out the silhouette of a tall, broad-shouldered man on horseback riding through the double-towered gatehouse. When he emerged from the shadows of the gatehouse and into the sun, her heart skittered in her chest.
He came.
Hugh looked much the same this evening as when she’d first met him, his golden hair disheveled, his jaw dark with stubble, and that intriguing glimmer of gold on his right earlobe. He was dressed the same, too, in the grubby leathern soldier’s tunic that he preferred for long rides. Were it not for his magnificent dun stallion—a nobleman’s mount—one might almost think him a freebooter come to rob and pillage. There was an aura of savage masculinity to him, especially as compared to the other men at Halthorpe, with their fanciful costumes and affected manners. No wonder Clare and Marguerite were so entranced.
Even at this distance, she could see his eyes, translucent as glass, focus in on her and hold her gaze. She smiled almost timidly, remembering the last time she’d seen him, fast asleep in their bed at Aldous’s house, his mouth slightly parted, a lock of hair across his eyes, looking like a young boy in the silvery dawn light. It had taken every bit of strength she’d possessed to leave him there.
He nodded to her, not smiling exactly, but looking at her so intently that she felt a shivery warmth all up and down her spine, as if he were stroking her there with his big, callused hand.
“I saw him first,” Clare told her friend. “You may have at him when I’m done.”
“Must we take turns?” asked Marguerite. “He looks as if he could take us both on together without too much trouble.”
“I’d ask to join in the revelry, midons,” said the troubadour Turstin de Ver, seated in his usual spot at Clare’s right hand, between his patroness and Marguerite, “but I suspect that’s one boy who prefers to play with girls.” Turstin was the type of older man who had managed, over time, to grow into the awkward features with which he’d been cursed at birth—in his case, an oversized nose and equally conspicuous ears. Lean and somewhat craggy, with sandy hair turning to silver and a perpetually amused glint in his eyes, he struck Phillipa as oddly handsome.
Aldous turned to see what everyone was looking at. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he growled.
“Do you know that man?” Clare asked.
“Yes, damn it all. He’s Phillipa’s husband.” Aldous muttered something under his breath that sounded downright sacrilegious, in contrast to his saintly black clerical garb and skullcap. No wonder he was vexed. His relationship with Phillipa had been strained enough since the night she’d walked in on him with Marguerite. Hugh’s presence here would only serve to chill it further.
The morning after that sordid little incident, Aldous had sought her out and offered a litany of contrite apologies, explaining that Clare had played a trick on him by delivering to Marguerite the notes he’d written to Phillipa, and that he was just a man, after all, with any man’s base drives, but that he adored her and was immeasurably sorry for what she’d seen. What she’d seen had, in fact, so bewildered and shocked her that she couldn’t even manage the display of outrage she’d so carefully rehearsed in her mind...Aldous, how could you? You said your love would stay pure for me, your body chaste... Instead, after gaping at them like a carp in a barrel, she’d turned and fled, with the image seared in her mind of Aldous and Marguerite engaged in some form of carnal congress so deviant that Phillipa simply couldn’t fathom it—and didn’t care to.
Claiming to be hurt and humiliated by Aldous’s faithlessness, Phillipa informed him that he would have to work hard at wooing her back into his good graces—not to mention his bed. He had done just that this past week, smothering her with amorous attention even in front of the others—his concern for discretion evidently less critical than his need to win her back—and meekly accepting it when she refused his kisses. As a result, she got to remain at Halthorpe and continue her investigation, fruitless though it had been so far, but without the burden of sharing Aldous Ewing’s bed—although she was still obliged to encourage his pursuit of her. If he knew she had no intention of bedding him, ever, he would cast her off instantly.
Interestingly, last night, unable to sleep because of the heat, Phillipa had risen from bed to stand in front of one of the arrow loops in the hope of catching a stray breeze. What she caught instead were sounds from Aldous’s chamber next door—a low, masculine groan that trailed off into a kind of sob, then a woman’s voice—Marguerite’s voice—soft, cajoling, a little breathless. “...don’t tighten up like that...that’s right...give in to it and it won’t hurt so much...I know you like it...” It would be unwise, Phillipa had decided, to let Aldous know she’d caught wind of his ongoing liaison with Marguerite. Any self-respecting woman would walk away from a man who treated her so shabbily, and walking away from Aldous right now was not an option.
It was a credit either to Phillipa’s shrewdness or Aldous’s gullibility—or perhaps both—that he never suspected that it was, in fact, she who had slipped the first note under Marguerite’s chamber door that morning. He blamed himself entirely—himself and Clare, who naturally denied having passed the note to Marguerite, although she said she wished she’d thought of it. Aldous didn’t believe her, of course, and their relations since then had been testier than ever.
Ogling Hugh as he dismounted by the stables, Marguerite said, “He’s married to the Brilliant Little By-blow?” She exchanged a look of amused astonishment with Clare.
“How absolutely extraordinary!” Clare exclaimed. “What fun this will be! And just when you were all starting to bore me witless.”
Edmee, assisting the other house servants this evening in serving a monumental mince and pigeon pie, the seventh of the twenty courses that Clare’s Poitevan cooks were busily concocting in the nearby cookhouse, looked from Hugh to Phillipa, her expression pensive. Was she thinking about Phillipa’s supposed love affair with Aldous Ewing?
Aldous, on Clare’s left, leaned toward his sister, hissing, “Send him away.”
Orlando paused in the act of lifting his silver wine cup to scowl at Aldous. “Why you wanta send him away? Sir Hugh, he is the lady’s Phillipa’s marito, her husband. She want him here, no?” Because he spent his days and most of his nights closeted in the cellar, Orlando was relatively oblivious to the tangle of romantic intrigues at Halthorpe, including Aldous’s ongoing campaign to seduce Phillipa.
Ignoring Orlando, Aldous told Clare, “I want him out of here! Do whatever you must to get rid of him.”
“You are mad as a ferret,” Clare spat out, pinning her brother with a fixed glare that made her look like one of her birds of prey
, “if you think I’m going to turn a man like that out of my home just because he happens to be married to the woman you’re trying to fuck.”
Orlando frowned in evident puzzlement. “Sono spiacente, but my speaking of your language is so poor. What means this word...”
Istagio, sitting next to Orlando, let go of Edmee’s skirt, which he had grabbed as she walked past, to whisper in the older man’s ear. Orlando’s eyes widened and then narrowed on Aldous. “But you are...how you say...a man of the cloth, no? And she is wedded lady. For shame.”
Well, at least one person at Halthorpe still knows what shame is, thought Phillipa. Loath for Orlando to think so poorly of her—aside from Edmee, he was the only person at Halthorpe she could really talk to—she said, “‘Tisn’t what you think, Orlando.”
“Yes it is!” Grasping Phillipa’s hand too tightly, Aldous said, “You don’t want him here, do you?”
“I...” Everyone at the table turned to stare at her.
“But you see, Aldous,” Clare said with weary impatience, “it really doesn’t matter what she wants. I’m mistress of Halthorpe, and I want him to stay. So, stay he will.”
Marguerite pressed a finger to her crimson lips. “He’s coming.”
Phillipa turned on her bench to find Hugh striding toward them across the lawn of cropped grass. She tried to extract her hand from Aldous’s, but he held on tight.
Pausing, Hugh inclined his head to her. “My lady.”
“My lord husband.”
Hugh’s gaze lit on Aldous’s hand clutching hers. His eyes turned opaque, the set of his jaw rigid, although Phillipa doubted anyone else noticed. Turning, he aimed a courtly little bow in Clare’s direction. “Lady Clare, I presume.”
“Clare,” Phillipa said, “This is my husband, Hugh of Oxford. Hugh, I’d like you to meet Clare of Halthorpe.”
Clare surveyed him from head to toe, and back again. “Now that you’re close up, I can’t help but think that I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
“Poitiers,” Hugh said. “I was there about a year and a half ago.”
“Verily?” She leveled her cool, heavy-lidded gaze on him and smiled. “Then you should fit right in here at Halthorpe.”
“The gentleman to Clare’s right,” Phillipa told Hugh, “is Turstin de Ver, who writes verse for her, and next to him is Clare’s friend Marguerite du Roche. You know the signores Orlando and Istagio, and then we have Father Nicolas Capellanus—”
“Hugh?” Raoul d’Argentan rose and came forward, arms outspread. “It is you! Good Lord, man! How long has it been?”
“Raoul? Is this what you look like off the battlefield?” Hugh and Raoul exchanged a hug and a battery of backslaps. “You’re pretty enough to kiss!”
“Damn, but it’s good to see you, Hugh!” Raoul was a robust, dark-haired fellow with a hearty manner unlike that of most of the other men at Halthorpe.
“Same here, Raoul, but what the devil happened to you? Where’s that beard? You used to look like a bear and smell like a boar, but now...” With a lopsided grin, Hugh lifted the long, trailing sleeve of Raoul’s opulent tunic and let it fall, then ruffled his carefully coifed hair.
Raoul rolled his eyes, his ears pinkening.
“He’s been domesticated by marriage,” said Turstin with a dry chuckle. “True love tends to tame the most feral of men.” This observation was greeted with knowing laughter by the assembled guests.
Hugh wasn’t smiling anymore. “You’re married?”
Raoul introduced Hugh to Isabelle, his pretty little chestnut-haired wife. She gave Hugh a cursory smile, then lowered her voice and said, “Raoul, your hair.”
“What’s that, lamb?”
“Your hair. Fix your hair. He’s messed it all up.”
“Ah.” Finger-combing his hair back into place, Raoul said, “Darling, you’ve heard me speak of Hugh. This is the fellow I met in Milan when we were fighting Frederick Barbarossa, before Strongbow recruited us for the Irish campaign.”
“Oh!” Isabelle’s gaze fastened on Hugh’s right hand. “The one who left his thumb in Ireland.”
Silence enveloped the gathering as everyone stared at the puckered wound on Hugh’s right hand.
“How did you lose it?” asked Marguerite, her voice as husky as if she were inquiring about someone’s first sexual exploit.
“Ireland’s very big and very wild,” Hugh said lightly. “It’s easy to lose things there.”
Amid the chuckles that greeted this statement, Clare said, “Aldous, why don’t you move and let Hugh sit next to his wife?”
And next to you as well, thought Phillipa, feeling a little twist of jealousy tighten her stomach. Was this the way Hugh felt about her and Aldous? Did he assume she was his leman by now? Did it trouble him or was he just relieved?
“Perhaps Hugh would rather sit with his friend.” Aldous stabbed his sister with a look that oozed venom.
“Excellent idea.” Hugh took a seat on the bench next to Raoul. “‘Twill give me a chance to relive old battles.”
“Speaking of old battles,” said Turstin, leaning on his elbows, “How did you lose that thumb? Or is it too grisly a tale for the ladies’ ears?”
“Too boring, actually.” Hugh accepted a cup of wine from Edmee, but waved away her offer of pigeon pie.
“Boring!” Raoul exclaimed. “I was there, and I’d hardly call it—”
“You were there?” Marguerite sat forward, eyes glittering.
Clare turned her cool, imperious gaze on Raoul. “Tell us.”
Yanking her hand out of Aldous’s grip, Phillipa said, “I don’t think Hugh wants the story told.”
Hugh raised his cup to his mouth, meeting Phillipa’s gaze over the rim. She saw something in his eyes that she fancied was gratitude, but it vanished when Aldous draped his arm familiarly around her shoulders. She shrugged him off.
“Lady Clare wants the story told,” said Isabelle. “Tell it, Raoul.”
“But...” Raoul glanced uneasily at Hugh, grimly sipping his wine.
“Tell it,” Isabelle ordered in an exasperated whisper.
Phillipa was about to object again when Hugh caught her eye and, grimacing, shook his head fractionally. Clearly, he would rather grit this out than let her antagonize Clare, the right decision if their priority was to be their mission.
Raoul sighed heavily. “Yes, well. Let’s see...’twas three years ago that we went to Ireland with Strongbow.” He frowned. “But no, the story begins long before that. Hugh, when was it that you fought for Donaghy Nels? ‘Twas your first campaign as a mercenary, was it not, so you would have been...eighteen?”
“I was never that young.” Hugh signaled a serving wench for a refill of his cup.
With a roll of his eyes, Raoul said, “‘Twas his first campaign, at any rate. He went to Ireland with a company of Scots and Northmen from the Hebrides to fight for a chieftain from Meath named Donaghy Nels. Something to do with Donaghy’s kin having some claim on his holdings, wasn’t it, Hugh? Or was it stolen cattle?”
Hugh shrugged as he brought his cup to his lips. “It’s your story, Raoul. Tell it however you like.”
“In any event,” Raoul continued, seeming to warm to his recitation now that he had a rapt audience hanging on his every word, “after Hugh was finished winning back the land or cattle or whatever it was, Donaghy paid him and sent him on his way, but not before making him swear on the relic in the hilt of his sword that he would never take up arms against him, Donaghy, for the rest of his life. Because he knew, of course, that a mercenary will fight for whoever pays him the most, and he was always battling one of the other chieftains over something. What was it in that hilt, Hugh? A bit of the baby Jesus’s manger hay, wasn’t it?”
“Sounds good.” Hugh swallowed down some more wine.
“After that,” Raoul said, “Hugh headed north and helped take Finland for Eric of Sweden. Then it was...Kiev? Nay, the Elbe-Oder campaign, then Kiev, then the Holy Land, Egypt, Saxony...
That’s where I met him, about five or six years ago, fighting for Milan and the cities of North Italy. When we were done there, we heard Richard Strongbow was gathering mercenaries to go to Ireland on behalf of the king of Leinster, a fellow named Dermot Mac Murrough, who’d been exiled by the high-king, Rory O Connor of Connacht. Strongbow was offering more gold than either one of us had ever been paid, so we went.”
Hugh was staring at nothing, Phillipa saw, his gaze unfocused and a little melancholy. She wondered what he was seeing.
“We reinstated Dermot,” Raoul said, “which was no easy task, let me tell you. Rory had some of the most ferocious chieftains in Ireland fighting for him—they’ve got swarms of them there, each with his own little kingdom. We captured Waterford before moving on to Dublin. ‘Twas during the fighting around Dublin that Hugh realized one of the war-bands allied with Rory O Connor was headed up by none other than Donaghy Nels. In other words, Hugh was wielding his sword against the very man he’d vowed never to take up arms against.”
After a moment of dense silence, Turstin asked, “What did he do?”
Hugh spoke up before Raoul could. “I did what any man would do who knew all that really mattered was a purse full of gold.” He met Phillipa’s gaze fleetingly before tossing down some more wine. She had said that to him at the Red Bull the night they’d met in Oxford. Those had been her words, her smug, glibly self-righteous words of condemnation. She wished she could take them back.
“Hugh did what any soldier worth his salt would do when he was expected to stand and fight,” Raoul said heatedly. “He stood and fought. He’d have you think ‘twas an act of dishonor for him to have done battle with Donaghy Nels—”
“Once I knew he was the man I was fighting, it damn well was. But I was so used to taking the money and unsheathing my sword that...” Swearing under his breath, Hugh lifted his cup. “It’s your story, Raoul. You tell it.”
“It happened that some of us got taken hostage during the battle for Dublin, including me and Hugh. We weren’t worried, because we knew we’d be exchanged for cattle if our captors won and released outright if they lost. But when Donaghy heard that Hugh was one of the captured enemy, he came to the keep where we were being held and...” Raoul glanced at Hugh, who was gesturing for more wine.
Lords of Conquest Boxed Set Page 53
