Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

And now look at her, bent over this bed, weeping silently in the wake of her ravishment.

  With a muttered curse, he pulled out of her. She flinched and cried out in obvious pain.

  “Phillipa?”

  Shoving her skirt back down, she braced her hands on the bed as if to rise, but he caught her around the waist. “Phillipa, did I hurt you?”

  She sank into the rushes and curled up with her hair cloaking her like a mantle, strands of it sticking to her wet face. She was shivering. “You said the...the second time it wouldn’t—” Her voice caught. “It wouldn’t hurt so much.”

  Second time? Feeling suddenly all too sober, he stared at her in incomprehension. “But...you and Aldous...”

  She shook her head, tears trickling down her cheeks. “Never. I couldn’t. Not after...” She lowered her face to her updrawn knees. “Not after you and I...” A little sob rose in her throat. “I couldn’t.”

  “Oh, God, Phillipa.” It had meant something to her, she had cared. He gathered her in his arms, pulled her onto his lap, buried his face in her hair. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Did I hurt you badly? Are you all—”

  “I’m all right. I’m fine. Just...” She shook her head.

  Just shaken that he would treat her so shabbily. He cupped her head to his chest. “Phillipa, how did you manage... I mean, Aldous brought you here to...”

  “Lies, trickery... I’ve been stalling him, but he still thinks I meant to...to sleep with him.” She rubbed at her tears as fresh ones welled in her eyes. “I knew I couldn’t, though—not after being with you. ‘Twas...so...”

  So perfect. Sweet and fiery and passionate and perfect—an exquisite memory that he’d tainted forever by using her so ill tonight. “I shouldn’t have done this.” Hugh dabbed at her tears with the hem of his shirt as she wept. His throat tightened as if it were being squeezed in a fist. Rise above it. He hadn’t shed tears since his first flogging at the age of seven; to do so now would just make this situation that more wretched.

  Softly, haltingly, she said, “I told you once that I would never lose my heart to you. I was wrong.”

  Oh, God. He closed his eyes and held her tight, struggling against the urge to blurt out what was in his own heart. All that he was, all that he ever wanted to be, depended on his being alone, apart...free. He’d spent seventeen years undoing the damage wrought by the first eighteen, molding himself into his image of who he wanted to be—a man who wrote his own rules and answered to nobody but himself, a man who would be destroyed by an attachment to anyone.

  Even Phillipa.

  “I wasn’t going to tell you how I felt,” she said. “I wanted to deny it, to sweep it aside—but it’s no good. I can’t fight it.”

  “Perhaps,” he said gently, “you should try.”

  Phillipa gazed morosely across the room. “You don’t feel it. I was hoping perhaps...” She drew in a shuddery breath. “But I can’t fault you. You never led me to think you really cared.”

  “You shouldn’t want me to.” He threaded her hair off her face. “What about Hèloïse?”

  “I was wrong to let what happened to her fill me with fear. I’m not Hèloïse.” Phillipa looked up at him with her heartbreakingly tearstained face. “And you’re not Abelard. It needn’t destroy me just because I feel—”

  “But it would,” Hugh said, knowing that it was he who was being called on to be strong, he who must transcend his unruly desires and put a stop to this before it was too late. He could do it. He’d been trained since infancy to seal himself off to his feelings, and especially to pain. It was what he knew; he was good at it. He would draw on that strength now, for both of them. “‘Twould destroy me, too,” he added, “if I...” If I gave in to my feelings for you, if I admitted what you meant to me. “If I felt the same thing.”

  Phillipa closed her eyes, her chin quivering. She nodded.

  Hugh kissed her hair. “‘Twould be best if we had never...” His gaze took in her rumpled tunic, the bed with its fur throws askew. “This has made things...more complicated between us.” Loathing himself for laying this all at her feet, but knowing it was for the best, he said, “It’s made you imagine more between us than really exists.”

  Meeting his gaze, she asked quietly, “Is it really only my imagination, Hugh?”

  He looked away abruptly, hearing Lord Richard’s voice. Looking elsewhere will give you away every time. “I’m afraid so. ‘Tis only natural, of course, for a woman to indulge in such fancies about the first man she lies with. Over time, the feelings will diminish and you’ll see them for what they are. In the meantime, because things have gotten so out of hand...” He rubbed the back of his neck, hating this. “‘Tis best, I think, if we don’t sleep together.”

  Her brows knitted, carving that inexplicably beguiling little furrow between them. “But there’s only the one bed. Won’t they be suspicious if we ask for another?”

  He gritted his teeth. “Perhaps you should just sleep in Aldous’s bed from now on. This castle is like a brothel—no one will look askance.”

  “But Aldous and I...we don’t—”

  “You should,” he managed. “For the good of the mission.”

  She pushed away from him, her expression grim. “I already told him I wouldn’t share his bed while you’re here.”

  Stealing himself, Hugh said, “Then I’ll leave on the morrow.”

  “No!” She shook her head frantically. “No, Hugh. I told him...he thinks...if you leave, I’ll have to sleep with him. Please, Hugh, I can’t.” Fresh tears swam in her eyes. “I can’t!”

  “Even for the good of the mission?”

  “That’s just it!” she said, reminding him once again of a small, cornered creature drawing upon its wits to extract itself from danger. “It’s for the good of the mission that you must stay here. I need you to help in the investigation. I’ve made very little progress on my own.”

  “Only because you won’t bed Aldous. If you were his mistress, he’d tell you everything you wanted to know.”

  “There are other ways. Please, Hugh,” she implored, grasping his shirt. “I can’t...I can’t be with him like that. I can’t.”

  Hugh wiped her tears away, gathered her in his arms. “All right,” he said, “I’ll stay.”

  She sagged against him in relief.

  “I’ll sleep on the floor,” he said.

  “Nonsense. You’ll sleep in the bed, with me.” She glanced up at him, her expression lightening. “Are you afraid I’ll ravish you in the middle of the night?”

  He smiled at the notion of guileless little Phillipa de Paris turning sexually aggressive. It felt good to smile, after what had just transpired between them. “Phillipa, I am sorry for...using you as I did just now. Terribly sorry. You don’t deserve such treatment.”

  “You were provoked.”

  “I was a monster. Tell me how to make it up to you.”

  She sighed and settled against him. “You can make it up to me by forgetting it happened. If we’re not to...be together like that anymore, if we’re not to make love, then I want to remember how it was in Southwark, that first time.”

  He nodded, kissed her head, held her close. “So do I.”

  “You’re not a monster,” she said softly. “You’re a good man making do under trying circumstances. Knowing you has been...” She shook her head against his chest. “It’s opened up a whole new world, it’s changed me.”

  “It’s changed me, too.”

  “I don’t want to squander this...connection between us, just because...just because we can’t be lovers. I haven’t had very many friends in my life. Except for Ada, I haven’t had anyone who was truly a friend of my heart, someone I could let down my guard with, and talk to, and...”

  “If you’d let me be your friend—a real friend—after everything that’s happened between us, I would be immeasurably grateful. ‘Twould mean more to me than you can imagine.”

  She looked up at him and smiled a watery little smile
. “Let’s be friends, then.”

  He kissed her forehead, held her tight. “Friends.”

  Chapter 16

  Hugh drifted out of another dream about Phillipa to feel her fingers, cool and soft, stroking his face. “Hugh...”

  “Mmm...” Covering her hand with his, he rubbed his beard-roughened jaw against her palm. Half-asleep, he could still see her, sitting up in bed and pulling her shift over her head, the moonlight kissing her naked flesh...

  With wakefulness stealing upon him, he knew it was just a dream—that’s what came of sharing this bed with her every night as “friends”—but the arousal coursing through him was very real.

  “Hugh, wake up.”

  He slitted his eyes open, expecting to find the room awash in morning sunlight, only to discover that it was still nighttime. The chamber was dark, save for a candle guttering on the little writing table next to the bed. Phillipa, in her voluminous linen sleeping shift, sat cross-legged on the bed next to him holding a sheaf of parchment pages with ink-stained fingers.

  “I’ve done it,” she said, spreading the pages out on her lap.

  He rubbed his eyes. “What have you done, love?”

  She glanced up from the pages, then quickly down again. The endearment had slipped out only because he was bleary from having just awakened. While he was pondering whether to explain that, she said, “I’ve deciphered the code.”

  He stared at her. “You haven’t.”

  She smiled winsomely. “You know how I am about challenges.”

  During the four days he’d been at Halthorpe, Hugh and Phillipa had explored the castle and questioned its residents, with meager results—until this afternoon, when Phillipa had asked Clare to take her and Aldous hawking in order to get them out of the way while Hugh searched their bedchambers. Aldous now slept in a richly appointed chamber above the great hall, where he’d relocated when it became clear that he had no chance of bedding Phillipa while Hugh was at Halthorpe. Hugh found nothing of interest there save a book identified on its tooled-leather cover as Prayers for the Canonical Hours, but which actually contained a collection of grossly obscene verses and pictures.

  He had better luck in Clare’s room, where he pulled aside a tapestry to find an almost invisible gap between two stones in the wall. Tucked into it, folded up small, was a sheet of thin, velvety-soft calf parchment heavily inked in Hebrew, which was a language Hugh could read passably well, along with Latin, French and Greek. But when he tried to read it, he realized that it was gibberish.

  Increasingly, sensitive communiqués were being translated into code; obviously this was just such an encrypted message. Hugh painstaking re-searched Clare’s and Aldous’s chambers for the key with which to decipher this code—a table or grid of some sort—but with no success. Clare had probably hidden it somewhere else, as a safeguard. Given the size and complexity of this castle, Hugh despaired of ever finding it. Nevertheless, he penned a duplicate and returned the original to its hiding place.

  It wasn’t until they were ready to retire for the night that Hugh had the chance to show the document to Phillipa, who maintained that, given enough time, she could unravel the code—even though she didn’t know Hebrew, a gap in her scholarship that Hugh was ashamed to find immensely pleasing. At her request, Hugh wrote out the twenty-six letters of the Hebrew alphabet before talking her into coming to bed so that she could tackle the job with a fresh mind on the morrow—although he cautioned her against getting her hopes up. Codes could be devilishly tricky to crack, he told her; he’d long ago given up trying. There was a lay brother at Bermondsey Abbey who used to decipher intercepted dispatches for Lord Richard—curious, since the fellow was otherwise so feebleminded that he could barely speak or feed himself—but he died last year of a stomach ailment.

  Phillipa had come to bed with him, but apparently she had arisen during the night to work on untangling the code.

  “What time is it?” Hugh asked around a yawn.

  “Well past matins. Look!” she said excitedly, holding up a sheet of parchment inked in her elegantly tidy hand.

  “What’s that?” He punched up the pillow under his head.

  “The document you found, decoded into Latin.”

  “You mean you really did it? How on earth...”

  “‘Twasn’t that hard,” she said. “Just time-consuming.”

  “But you don’t even know Hebrew!”

  “I didn’t need to know the language, just the alphabet. You see, I assumed that the Hebrew letters were just symbols for Latin or French letters—probably Latin, since it’s mostly clerics who devise these codes.” She was speaking very rapidly, and with a childlike zeal that he found greatly endearing. “Any sort of symbol might have been chosen to stand in for the plaintext.”

  “Plaintext?”

  “That’s the actual message, the words that are being encoded. The code needn’t have been in Hebrew letters—in fact, it’s usually Latin. But to make it more difficult to decode, Greek letters are sometimes used, or numbers, or signs of the zodiac...but the person who encrypted this probably wanted it to look like an ordinary letter written in Hebrew. Not that Hebrew is often used for correspondence, but that would be just the point, wouldn’t it? The casual observer might recognize the language, so it would look like a real letter, but most people, even learned people, can’t read Hebrew. With the occasional remarkable exception.”

  Phillipa punctuated that compliment by reaching out to touch his arm through the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt, just briefly, before continuing with her discourse. She went on to discuss the method by which she had puzzled out this code, which involved constructing “frequency tables” of the most common Latin letters and arrangements of letters and using them to detect patterns in the cipher, from which she picked out words by trial and error until a message materialized out of the chaos...

  There was rather more to it, but much of her explanation was lost on Hugh, not only because he was groggy from being roused from slumber to listen to this incomprehensible decryption analysis, but because she had touched his arm and said something about him being a remarkable exception, and when she’d done that, something welled up in his chest and crept into his throat and stole his senses and made him realize—oh, God—that this was it, this was what those fools meant when they wrote about larks and starlings, only they shouldn’t have been writing about larks and starlings, they should have been writing about a small, exhilarated woman sitting cross-legged in her nightclothes reaching out to touch a man’s arm.

  “...so once I had my final draft of the alphabet circle—” she sorted through the pages on her lap to produce one on which she had drawn a circle inscribed around the inner edge with Hebrew letters and around the outer with Latin “—I had my key and could simply transpose each letter of the message until I had translated it completely.”

  Hugh took the page from her to blink dazedly at the “alphabet circle,” which must be identical to the key that Clare had secreted somewhere in Castle Halthorpe. Laying it down on his chest, he regarded her with sleepy wonderment. “You are a very remarkable woman.”

  Even in this dim candlelight, he could see the heat rise in her cheeks. She lifted the sheet of parchment on which Hugh had transcribed the document he’d found in Clare’s chamber. “Don’t you want to know what it says?”

  “By all means.” He tucked an arm under his head and yawned again. “Why don’t you read it to me?”

  “‘Tis a letter addressed to Clare.” She cleared her throat and began to read. “‘From Eleanor, Countess of Poitou, Duchess of Aquitaine and Queen of—”

  Hugh bolted upright. “It’s from the queen?”

  Phillipa laughed like a little girl.

  “Give me that!” Hugh yanked the letter out of her hand and began reading. Phillipa set aside her other pages and shifted so that she sat shoulder to shoulder with him, reading along.

  “God’s bones,” Hugh muttered after he’d read it through a second time.
<
br />   “Indeed.”

  The letter, dated a month ago, began by mentioning a previous letter from Clare to Eleanor, in which Clare promised that certain arrangements had been made and that their victory would be swift and decisive—assurances that the queen professed to find appallingly indiscreet...It is deemed treason simply to contemplate such matters, yet you have written of them as if gossiping about your latest tedious little liaison. The cipher you were given before you left Poitiers was meant to apply to your communications to me as well as mine to you. That you did not understand this greatly diminishes my confidence in you and your brother.

  Eleanor went on to assert that she had been hesitant right from the beginning to entrust so much responsibility in Clare and Aldous, given that they were both “greasy little court rats” who liked nothing more than to scheme and seduce and bluster about it afterward. But as regards the matter in which you are serving me at present, rest assured that if you two cannot manage to still your tongues on your own, they will be stilled for you. Do not make the mistake of regarding this as an idle threat. I have installed at Castle Halthorpe an agent of my own, charged with safeguarding my interests against the ineptitude and imprudence of you and your brother. If it begins to look as if the situation there is becoming more than you can handle, you will be removed from the world and it will be handled for you.

  “Eleanor has planted a spy here,” Hugh said.

  “So it seems.”

  Hugh rubbed his jaw. “One of Clare’s guests. They all came here either from Poitiers, which is Eleanor’s domain, or from Paris, which is that of her ally, King Louis. It could be anyone.”

  “Not anyone,” Phillipa corrected. “If we’re to believe all that about stilling their tongues and removing them from the world, then it’s someone who’s capable of cold-blooded murder. That’s got to rule out...well, virtually everyone.”

  Hugh couldn’t help chuckling at her naivete. “No one is better at playing the innocent than a cold-blooded murderer. ‘Tis impossible to point them out by demeanor alone. I say again, it could be anyone.”