Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  Phillipa chewed on her lip. “Turstin de Ver is an intimate of the queen’s, is he not?”

  “Turstin?” Could the genial old troubadour be Eleanor’s mysterious agent? Of course he could. Anyone could. “There’s also that priest, Nicolas Cappelanus. He came from King Louis’s court in Paris—perhaps he was sent at Queen Eleanor’s behest. There’s Robert d’Ivri, Simon de Saint-Helene...”

  Phillipa looked at him. “Raoul d’Argentan.”

  “Raoul? Nay—never.”

  “I thought you said it could be anyone.”

  “‘Tisn’t Raoul.”

  “He seems very much under the thumb of his wife,” Phillipa said, “and isn’t she a confidante of Eleanor’s daughter, Marie de Champagne? And we know he can kill—he was a soldier.”

  “Raoul is as gentle off the battlefield as he is ruthless on it. Even at Isabelle’s bidding, I can’t believe he’d—”

  “What about Isabelle?” Phillipa asked, turning to face him. “Why can’t it be a woman? After all, Eleanor has created an entire world in Poitiers that revolves around women.”

  Little wonder, Hugh reflected, after King Henry turned his back on their marriage—which had been a love match, after all, not a political arrangement—to form an alliance with another woman. Hugh’s low opinion of marital infidelity had been formed at the age of seven when his father, finding his wife’s labor with their second child to be wearisome, joined his mistress in London—a girl named Eglantine who was fourteen but looked about eleven. When he returned home a week later, Elizabeth of Halthorpe was in her grave and Hugh and his new sister were motherless. Hugh could not have been more sympathetic to Queen Eleanor’s rage over her husband’s betrayal, nor could he help being impressed with the magnitude of the revenge she sought; for if the rumors were true, she intended to strip him of the English crown and give it to her son. But treason was treason, and orders were orders. If he could thwart her, he would.

  Phillipa was ticking Clare’s female guests off on her fingers. “Then there’s Marguerite, of course. We mustn’t rule her out simply because she’s such a good friend of Clare’s.”

  Hugh shook his head. “She’s too busy playing the evil temptress to take an interest in political intrigue.”

  “Aye,” Phillipa said, “but she’d probably love having an excuse to kill. ‘Twould be just another dark thrill to her, a new and higher form of sensual gratification.”

  “Hmm...you may be right about that.” Hugh yawned again. “I’m too tired to sort this all out tonight.” He scooted over on the bed to make room for her. “Why don’t we get some sleep and think it through tomorrow?”

  She yawned, too. “All right.” After hiding her pages away in a secret compartment of the big iron-banded trunk Lord Richard had had made especially for her and visiting the garderobe, she blew out the candle and joined him in the small bed. She faced away from him as she always did, her body curled against his, where it fit perfectly. He draped a companionable arm around her, tucking her up close. The straw in the mattress crackled as they shifted and settled in together.

  After Aldous moved to the chamber above the great hall, Clare had offered Hugh and Phillipa his former chamber, with its more luxurious furnishings and larger bed. Hugh had been game, but Phillipa had protested that she couldn’t even look upon that bed without thinking about what had transpired there between Aldous and Marguerite. She had told Hugh how she’d found them that night after she’d engineered her little ruse to lure Marguerite to his room, and asked Hugh to explain what they had been doing, and why. Although sorely tempted to answer glibly, as he had when she’d questioned him about Aldous and Elthia, he managed instead to deliver something of a dissertation on sexual idiosyncracies, which she had absorbed with wide-eyed fascination. Some of the activities he’d described had repulsed her; others had seemed to intrigue her, which in turn had intrigued him, which was when he had concluded the conversation, reasoning that she’d learned enough—and that, given their present situation, perhaps it was best if they didn’t talk too much about sex.

  Sharing this small bed with Phillipa was frustrating, hence his feverish dreams of her, from which he often awoke with a ferocious cockstand and no way to ease it. Two nights ago, he’d awakened thrusting against her, which had not, thank God, seemed to rouse her from her sleep. The warmth of her delicate little body against his, her womanly scent, the way her silken strands of her hair sometimes tickled his face...

  Sleeping with her like this, as if they were a contented old married couple, did have its trying moments. But it was also deeply satisfying in a way that Hugh wouldn’t have anticipated, having never in his life spent the night in bed with a woman unless he’d had her first. Instead of sharing their bodies, Hugh and Phillipa shared their thoughts, their feelings, their observations of the day, talking late into the night as sleep overtook them.

  Astoundingly, they actually had become friends—even if part of him still longed for them to be more.

  “How did you come to be so knowledgeable about codes?” he asked her, his voice barely above a whisper; they always spoke softly in the dark.

  “‘Twas a special interest of my uncle Lotulf’s,” she said, “a way to pass the time, to occupy his mind when he wasn’t serving the bishop of Paris. King Louis’s cipher secretary taught him about encryption, and he in turn taught Ada and me.”

  Hugh nodded. During their late-night conversations, she had told him all about her curious childhood on the Isle de Notre Dame, immersed in the rarified world of academia with no children for company save for her beloved twin sister. He had, however, dodged her inquiries about his own upbringing, the more miserable aspects of which he had never told anyone. Dwelling on past difficulties was pointless enough; why share them so that someone else must dwell on them as well?

  “Ada and I found cryptography absolutely enthralling,” Phillipa continued. “‘Twas a way to create our own secret languages, to communicate with each other in complete confidence. We soaked up every cipher Uncle Lotulf taught us, then invented some of our own. We were obsessed with codes from about the age of six.”

  “Six?” That seemed awfully young to be immersed in such an analytical pursuit.

  “Well, we started out with the most elemental ciphers—mirror-image writing, transposing letters, simple alphabet substitutions, grouping words together or separating them into blocks... Then we figured out how to apply mathematical patterns to create a secret message within a seemingly innocent message. We came up with several methods of assigning number values to characters, and then there were piral ciphers, compass ciphers, map ciphers...”

  “Map ciphers?”

  “That’s where you draw a seemingly ordinary map, except the clusters of trees or mountains actually spell out a message. One can do the same thing with any sort of picture.”

  Hugh was laughing softly.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “‘Tisn’t really funny, just...” He nuzzled her hair, which always smelled faintly of lavender, and tightened his arm around her. “I’m very pleased to have gotten to know you. You really are a most singular woman.”

  She lapsed into silence.

  She was more than singular; she was extraordinary. Yesterday morning, when she’d told him he could stop worrying about whether he’d impregnated her the night of his arrival, he’d been weak with relief. Phillipa had professed to feel the same, but there’d been something in her eyes, a certain wistfulness, as if part of her were disappointed. Was it possible, he’d wondered, that the self-sufficient, learned Phillipa de Paris felt the same innate longing for motherhood that other women felt? That she clearly did made her seem even more remarkable in his eyes, more complex and surprising.

  Wanting to hear her voice again, Hugh said, “I take it you and Ada eventually lost your interest in ciphers.”

  “Not at all. Even now, our letters to each other are always encoded. We invent the most complicated code we can, and the recipient must de
cipher it in order to read the letter.”

  “I’m curious. If Canon Lotulf knew so much about codes, why didn’t he encrypt his letters to you, especially the ones about the plot to dethrone King Henry?”

  He’d been afraid she might react badly to his introducing the subject of those letters, but she seemed to have set aside her ire over that, for she merely chuckled and said, “If you think I’m a creature of the mind, you should meet Uncle Lotulf. He’s the quintessential academic, always walking about with his nose in a book and no notion of what’s going on around him. To him, cryptography is naught but an amusement for the intellect. ‘Twould never occur to him to apply it to any practical purpose.”

  “When I met you,” he said, “I thought you were the same way.”

  With a little huff of laughter, she said, “I was. It’s changed me, being with you, being of the world like this. I do feel like a butterfly that’s broken out of its cocoon.” She threaded her fingers through his, making his chest ache with a longing that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with this strange new intimacy of the heart and mind. “Thank you.”

  He kissed her hair, the only part of her he ever touched his lips to anymore, thinking how gratifying it was to know that she cared for him—so gratifying that he was almost tempted to strip away the armor around his own heart and hold it out to her as she’d held hers out to him.

  Chapter 17

  “Methinks,” intoned Clare from her thronelike chair on the dais at the north end of Halthorpe Castle’s great hall, “that I am prepared to render a judgment in the matter that has been so eloquently argued before me this evening.”

  Clare’s face was a chalky mask in the yellowish torchlight, her tightly-laced gown the color of dried blood. On her gauntleted left fist sat her favorite hawk, the kestrel Salome, wearing a ruby-studded leather hood festooned with a jaunty tuft of red-dyed feathers.

  Hugh, standing in the shadows at the south end of the hall, looked toward his friend Raoul d’Argentan, sitting with his wife Isabelle among the audience that had endured tonight’s interminable court of love. During the eight days that Hugh had been at Halthorpe Castle, Clare had staged four of these travesties. Normally Raoul, who had as little patience for them as Hugh had, would slip away early in the proceedings to join Hugh for a summer evening’s stroll along the river that meandered through Halthorpe, during which they’d reminisce about their years as mercenaries while passing the wineskin back and forth—although Hugh never had more than a cup’s worth of wine, having cut sharply back on it after his drunken ravishment of Phillipa the night he arrived here.

  Raoul, although he normally disdained Clare’s courts of love, had had reason to stay and listen tonight, for the subject under consideration had been him—specifically, whether he’d had the right to punch Robert d’Ivri in the nose yesterday evening for having kissed Isabelle on the mouth rather than the cheek at the conclusion of the dance of the chaplet.

  Isabelle, through her advocate, Marguerite du Roche, had argued that Raoul had acted barbarically and with no regard for her feelings; indeed, he had humiliated her before all who’d witnessed his savage display. Raoul, through Turstin de Ver, had maintained that his jealousy was, in fact, proof of his deep and abiding love for Isabelle, and that his actions, although uncalled-for, were forgivable in that context.

  Hugh, who’d seen it all yesterday—Isabelle’s shameless flirtations with Robert, no doubt calculated to torment her husband, and Robert’s lingering kiss on the mouth, during which he had, in fact, caressed her bottom—felt that Raoul had, if anything, been too restrained in his reaction. Hugh would have taken the man outside and cracked a few ribs, perhaps reshaped his nose for him. In fact, his “friendship” with Phillipa notwithstanding, every time he glanced over to find Aldous holding her hand, as he was doing now, or whispering in her ear, as he had done all evening, Hugh’s hands twitched with the urge to do that and more. This drive to stake a claim and punish interlopers was, as Marguerite had correctly pointed out in her arguments tonight, a uniquely male urge—primal and brutish—but it was an undeniable force of nature, and as such, undeserving of reprimand unless it was taken too far.

  Turstin, standing and facing the dais along with Marguerite, bowed deeply toward his patroness. “I eagerly await your judgment, midons.”

  “And I, as well,” said Marguerite, dressed tonight in a gleaming yellow tunic perforated with dozens of round openings to display the transparent kirtle beneath. “Perhaps, when the gentleman in question is forced to confront your righteous censure, he will come to understand that civilized men do not snarl and snap at each other like hounds fighting over a bitch in heat. Indeed, by rights, ‘tis the bitch who should do the choosing, is it not?”

  Marguerite turned her stinging gaze on Raoul, sparking much laughter from those who knew about her infamous List of Twenty, and that Raoul had had the temerity to rebuff her when she’d set her sights on him. Even Isabelle laughed, although Hugh wondered how she would have felt had Raoul capitulated to Marguerite. Although the couples who aired their grievances before courts of love usually did so without revealing their identities, there was no possibility of anonymity in this case, since nearly every guest at Halthorpe had witnessed the punch in question.

  “Is it possible,” Marguerite asked, still spearing Raoul with her merciless gaze, “that the gentleman’s truculence is due not so much to jealousy as to frustration with—and shame over—his own amorous inadequacies?”

  There came a buzz of interest from the audience as Marguerite hunkered down, preparing to pounce. Raoul looked around in pink-faced confusion, clearly unprepared for this tactic. Hugh cursed under his breath, wondering whether to intervene.

  “For it is my experience,” Marguerite continued, “that a man who is a true lover of women, who desires them and knows how to satisfy them, doesn’t feel as threatened by other men as does a man who doubts not only his ability to please women, but his very interest in them...”

  She was drowned out by a chorus of hoots, laughter and applause. Raoul, who got it now, sprang up from his bench, crimson-faced, and looked around in wild mortification. Hugh stepped forward, but stilled when he realized it was too late. In the wake of his public humiliation at Marguerite’s hands, Raoul wrenched himself away from Isabelle, who tried vainly to grasp his tunic, and stalked out of the hall, to jeers and guffaws.

  Hugh turned to follow him when something caught his eye—the door to the corner stairwell opening and Istagio emerging from the cellar, flushed and sweating as always. Orlando had already come upstairs and gone out to the kitchen for some late supper. Hugh knew, because he and Phillipa had made a covert study of their routine, that whichever of the Italians was last out of the cellar at night would immediately fetch Clare, who locked the door to the stairwell with one of her many keys.

  Closing the door behind him, Istagio looked toward Clare on the dais—only to have his attention instantly snagged by the maid Edmee walking toward the assembled guests with a tray of sweatmeats in each hand. He called to her, raking damp hair off his face; she saw him and adopted a look of weary disinterest. Seemingly unperturbed, he sprinted heavily after her and snatched at her skirt. “Edmee...you and me take walk, yes?”

  Hugh looked toward Raoul, storming out through the front entrance, then toward Clare, holding forth from her throne to much laughter, then toward Istagio, beseeching Edmee as he leered at her breasts...and finally toward the unlocked cellar door.

  Do it. But quickly.

  On swift, silent feet, Hugh crept along the perimeter of the hall to the door, which he opened to a slow grind of rusty iron hinges, and slipped through, closing it carefully behind him. He sprinted down the narrow stone stairwell, lit by a single torch on a wall bracket, only to find a second door at the bottom.

  “Please be unlocked,” he muttered, before he noticed that there wasn’t even a keyhole on the door. He turned the handle; the door opened.

  So did the door at the top of t
he stairs; Hugh heard those rusty hinges groan. “Hugh?” It was Clare’s voice.

  Shit. Hugh whipped the door open and peered in as her footsteps descended the stairs, knowing this might be his only chance to see the laboratory where Orlando and Istagio spent their days and most of their nights, doing whatever it was they did that produced those intermittent thunderclaps.

  It was black as pitch in there, save for the faint glow of banked coals in a wall hearth, the air stifling hot and poisoned with a rotten-egg stink. By the meager light from the stairwell torch, Hugh could make out what looked like a work table cluttered with flasks and tools, and on the far end of it something round and with the dull gleam of iron. A helmet? No, it was too large.

  A bell? Istagio...he make the bells.

  Except it was too round to be a bell. What the devil...

  “Ah, that was you I saw coming down here.” Clare squeezed past Hugh to pull the door closed, her cloying scent mingling with the resinous fumes from the torch to make the gorge rise in his throat. She still held that fancily hooded hawk on her fist. “Doing a bit of exploring, are you?”

  “I suppose you could say that.” Look her in the eye, he thought when he caught himself averting his gaze. Don’t give yourself away. “I was just a bit curious as to what’s down here.”

  She fiddled with her keys, which Phillipa had told him was an indication of nervousness. “If it’s those noises you’re wondering about, they’re just barrels of wine—”

  “Yes, I know. As I said, I was just curious. I’m a bit restless, if you must know. I’m afraid I’m not too keen on those courts of love.”

  “You’re restless?” Her tone changed abruptly, becoming overtly flirtatious. “I could do something about that, if you’d let me.”

  “I’m certain you could,” he said with a smile that he hoped didn’t look too forced.

  “Then why won’t you let me?” There was an edge to the question, a brittleness.