Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  “You’ve got her keys?” For the first time, Phillipa noticed the chain around Edmee’s neck, with the cluster of keys on the end. Rubbing her wrists, sore from the friction of the cord they’d been tied with, she said, “Oh, Edmee, I don’t believe it! Good for you!”

  “I excused myself and run down here quick as a rabbit. I haven’t got long, though. Her ladyship’s still in her bath, and she’s expectin’ me back right a—”

  “You can get me out of this!” Phillipa exclaimed. “The collar unlocks with one of those keys—the small iron one with a square top.”

  Edmee sorted through the keys on the chain, her frown deepening. “A square top?”

  “Aye—I saw it,” Phillipa said, growing uneasy. “It’s very little.”

  Edmee squatted next to the lantern, scrutinizing the keys by its yellowish light. Shaking her head, she said, “I’m sorry, milady, it isn’t here. Would she have taken it off for some reason?”

  Phillipa groaned. She had assumed that, when Clare was ready to let Aldous come down here, she would take the key to the cellar off the chain and give it to him. But perhaps, worried that he would misplace it, she’d removed the key to the sachentage instead, so that she could give him the entire chain without risking Phillipa’s escape.

  That meant it wouldn’t be long before Aldous paid her his visit—all the more impetus to secure her freedom.

  “Listen to me, Edmee. Hugh said if I ever needed help, I should go to Raoul d’Argentan. I want you to find him and tell him what’s happened. He might be able to get the key from Clare, or perhaps...perhaps there’s something else he can—”

  “He’s gone, milady.”

  “Gone?”

  “Aye, yesterday he upped and rode away, leavin’ that shrewish little wife of his behind. I heard her sayin’ as how it was all Sir Hugh’s fault, for tellin’ him he should get their marriage annulled, which is what he’s aimin’ to do.”

  “Oh. Oh, no...” Phillipa couldn’t deny that Raoul had made the right decision, under the circumstances, but why couldn’t he have waited one more day? “There’s no one else,” she said despairingly. “No one else I can rely on...except you.”

  “Tell me what to do,” Edmee said, “and I’ll do it. I can’t bear to see you like this, milady.”

  “Did you see those devices back there on the table? And the others, in the cage? You did—I saw you looking at them.”

  “Aye—what the devil are they?”

  “Awful new weapons of terrible power. They have a black powder in them that explodes when it gets hot. The ones in the cage—what Orlando calls bombe—they burst apart like those little parchment tubes Istagio showed you, but with far more violence. They can destroy whole buildings, kill scores of people at once.”

  “My word.” Edmee turned to look back toward the laboratory end of the cellar, now shrouded in darkness.

  “The hand weapons on the table,” Phillipa continued, “what Orlando calls his armi della mano, they shoot little iron balls very fast when a hot wire is stuck in the hole on top. It doesn’t sound very dangerous, but one shot can be deadly. I want you to take one of the armi, the one next to the brazier.” It was the one Clare held on her when she came down here, so Phillipa was confident that it wouldn’t explode when fired. “There are tongs next to the brazier for handling the hot wire. Take it upstairs to Lady Clare’s chamber and aim it at her and demand the key to the sachentage. It’s good that she’s in her bath, because she’ll feel all the more vulnerable and more likely to—”

  “Oh, God, milady, ask anything else of me,” Edmee pleaded, wringing her big hands. “Taking them keys was one thing. I can’t go up there and aim that thing at Lady Clare and...and even if I did, she’d see it in my eyes that I could never shoot it at her.”

  “Edmee, I’m begging you. I need you. Please.”

  “I can’t, milady. Please—ask me anything else, anything, and I’ll do it!”

  Phillipa sorted through the possibilities, or tried to, but she was so exhausted, so traumatized. “Without the key, I can’t get out of here. I’ll never get out of here.”

  “If only Sir Hugh was here. He’d get you out of that thing.”

  “Thank God he’s not here. They’d light a fire under that—” Phillipa looked toward the iron chair “—and strap him into it until he told them whatever it is they want to find out. He once told me he’d never known a man to be tortured who didn’t eventually talk. And then they’d kill him. I’d rather die here like this than have that happen to him.”

  She was going to die here, Phillipa realized with a sense of numb inevitability. There didn’t seem to be any way to prevent it, other than luring Hugh back here, and that wasn’t an option. She would give up her life, but not without one last effort to avert another ruinous civil war.

  “Do you know how to ride a horse, Edmee?” Phillipa asked.

  “If it’s anything like ridin’ a mule, I can manage well enough.”

  “Fritzi’s a tame little mare—you’ll manage fine. You’ll find her in the next to last stall on the right in the stable. Tell the stableboy to saddle him up for your mistress...”

  * * *

  “Unca Hugh sad?”

  Hugh smiled down at his niece, happily ensconced on his lap at the dinner table. It was the first time he’d smiled since his arrival at Eastingham four days ago, and it was a herculean effort. “No, Nelly,” he said, “I’m fine, just tired.”

  “Don’t lie to her, Hugh,” said Joanna, sitting next to him. “She’s got eyes and ears, just like the rest of us.”

  “That’s right.” Graeham reached across the table to refill Hugh’s wine cup. “I’ve never seen you so melancholic. I’ve never seen you melancholic at all.”

  “I’m just tired,” Hugh said testily.

  “You don’t get tired,” Joanna observed with a crooked smile as she cut up a slab of stag meat for little Hugh.

  “Everyone gets tired,” he retorted.

  “When was the last time you were well and truly fatigued?” she challenged. “I mean, tired enough to take to your bed and sleep like a stone?”

  It was when he and Phillipa had been staying at Aldous’s house in Southwark, Hugh reflected, thinking about those nights he’d ridden to the point of exhaustion in an effort to forget how desperately he wanted her. If he could only have her once, he’d thought, then his ravenous hunger would be appeased and he would be free of her spell.

  What a fool he’d been. He would never be free of her, never. For the rest of his life, whenever he inhaled the scent of lavender, or heard girlish, high-pitched laughter, or touched something achingly soft, like his niece’s cheek, it would remind him of Phillipa.

  And it would hurt. It was not the type of hurt he could rise above; it was too much a part of him, too insidious. He would hurt for the rest of his life because he had turned away from her, because he had stabbed her with his words, cruel words meant to harden her heart to him, and walked away, not looking back.

  ‘Twas for the best, he told himself for the hundredth time. Perhaps someday he would believe it.

  “Sir Hugh.”

  Hugh blinked and looked up to find Joanna’s elderly cook addressing him. “Yes, Aethelwyne?”

  “There’s a woman come ‘round back askin’ for ye. Says she rode all the way from Halthorpe. I said I’d fetch ye.” Aethelwyne turned and walked stiffly away.

  Hugh’s first thought was of Phillipa, but if she had come to Eastingham, she would have made her entrance through the front door; servants and villeins came in through the back.

  “Made a new conquest among the serving wenches at Castle Halthorpe?” Graeham asked with a knowing smile. “Can’t say as I’m surprised.”

  Hugh kissed Nell’s silky hair and handed her to her mother. “Let me go see what this is about.”

  Out back, sitting in the harsh midday sun on the stone fence enclosing the kitchen garden, he found the thick-boned Poitevan wench who had served Phillipa at Castle Ha
lthorpe. “Edmee,” he said, bewildered. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, sir...” Edmee rose, clutching the skirt of her humble brown kirtle. “The lady Phillipa sent me. She sent me with a message, but...”

  “But?”

  Edmee’s brow furrowed. “First the message, just as she told me to deliver it.” She took a deep breath. “She says as how you should ride to West Minster and ask...Lord Robert?”

  “Lord Richard,” Hugh supplied.

  “Aye, that’s it—Lord Richard. You’re to ask Lord Richard to send as many armed men as he can spare to Halthorpe Castle right away, because she’s seen what Master Orlando’s been inventing in the cellar and it’s got to be stopped. It’s weapons, Sir Hugh—terrible weapons. I saw them.”

  “Yes, but if Clare and Aldous see the detachment of soldiers approaching, they’ll destroy or hide these weapons before we can—”

  “Nay, she said to tell you they can’t get to them because I’ve got the only key to the cellar.” Edmee pulled a chain from beneath her kirtle; it was Clare’s chain of household keys.

  “God’s bones! How’d she manage to get that away from Clare?”

  “I’m the one who managed it,” Edmee said proudly.

  “Well done,” he praised, and held his hand out. “Give the keys to me, then, and I’ll set out for West Minster as soon as I can get my horse saddled up.”

  She shook her head grimly, her hand fisted around the keys. “That’s not the whole message, sire. She said I was to tell you that you yourself are to stay well away from Halthorpe Castle. ‘Twould be riskin’ your life to go anywhere near it. I’m to tell you they’re onto you, and that the Frankish soldiers will torture you in that horrible chair and kill you if you come anywhere near there.”

  “Indeed.” Hugh rubbed his chin, studying Edmee with interest as she chewed her lip and wrung her hands. “Why did Lady Phillipa send you? Why didn’t she come herself?”

  “She’d be furious if she knew I was tellin’ you all of it. She said under no circumstances was I to let you know—”

  “Out with it.”

  Edmee drew in a breath and exhaled shakily. “That...thing in the cellar next to the iron chair, that iron collar thing—” she wrapped her hands around her throat in illustration “—with the spikes...”

  “The sachentage?” No. Please, God...

  Edmee nodded. “She’s been in that for three days and four—”

  “Jesu!” Hugh clawed his hands through his hair. “Christ! Why didn’t you come to me before—”

  “I didn’t know till this morning,” Edmee said, looking very distraught. “Please, sire, I didn’t know! They’ve had her in that thing, Lady Clare and Master Aldous, since the day after you left Halthorpe. They’re onto you, like I said. They told her they’d let her go free if she wrote to you and got you to come back, but she won’t do it, ‘cause she knows what they’ll do to you if you show your face there.”

  Hugh groaned and sank his head in his hands. Phillipa, Phillipa...

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you, but if you could see her...” Edmee made a tremulous sign of the cross. “I can’t bear to let her waste away like that and not do anything to stop it.”

  “Are they letting her have water?”

  “Nay.”

  Hugh swore rawly.

  “I gave her a little this morning, but she’s...” Edmee looked down. “She’s not doin’ too well, sire. I can’t imagine she’ll last another two days. And I think she knows it.”

  It would take longer than that for Lord Richard to mount an effective assault of Halthorpe Castle, given how many soldiers would be defending it. Phillipa knew that, because they’d discussed the military particulars. She knew she would be dead by the time Lord Richard’s men got there.

  But Hugh would be alive, and safe. Which had, of course, been Phillipa’s objective when she’d ordered Edmee not to tell him of her plight. She’d chosen to die in agony so that he might live, despite the way they’d parted, despite the hurtful things he’d said in response to her earnest, heartbreaking declaration of love...Perhaps tupping Aldous will take some of the mystery out of sex and help you to stop mooning over me.

  Hugh cursed himself in a roar that scattered the sparrows chattering on the stone fence.

  This was his doing. He’d abandoned Phillipa, left her to her own devices, a defenseless woman, after smugly assuring her that Clare and Aldous were harmless—something he’d wanted to believe, so he’d convinced himself of it—simply because he couldn’t handle the feelings she’d spawned in him. He couldn’t rise above them, so he’d ridden away, resigning her to her fate.

  That she should make the ultimate sacrifice for him after all that...

  Hugh scrubbed his hands over his face. Dear God, what have I done?

  “Hugh?” Feeling a hand on his shoulder, Hugh turned to find Graeham behind him. “Was that you I heard bellowing like a bear out here?”

  “It’s Phillipa. She’s...” Hugh raked a shaky hand through his hair. “She’s in trouble. Edmee, if I went back to Halthorpe with you, do you think you could spirit me down into the cellar without my being seen?”

  “You’d have to dress so you wouldn’t be recognized right off,” she said. “In a laborer’s clothes, maybe, with that hair covered. And you’d have to ride something other than that stallion of yours.”

  “That’s not a problem.”

  “What can I do?” asked Graeham, sober now, a soldier ready for battle.

  “Get some men together, as many as you can, and follow me to Halthorpe as soon as possible.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “Oh, and Graeham? Good men, and well-armed. I’m hoping to slip in quietly and handle this without any trouble, but if I can’t get Phillipa out of there by myself, I’m going to need some muscle at my back.” Gravely he added, “This time, I’m not leaving without her.”

  Chapter 24

  The door squeaked.

  Phillipa started, moaned at a pain in her neck, looked around her. Where was she?

  Oh, God, the cellar.

  The sachentage...

  Someone was entering through the door. Clare? No, it couldn’t be Clare, because Edmee had kept the keys when she went to Eastingham to warn Hugh to stay away from here. By now, Clare would be beside herself, having found both her keys and her maid missing.

  Phillipa grabbed onto the sachentage’s iron frame to help support herself, grateful that her hands were now free. She couldn’t make out the identity of her visitor because that end of the cellar was now immersed in darkness—the lantern was on the floor near her, where Edmee had left it—but the shadowy figure was tall, much taller than Edmee, and broad of shoulder.

  Please don’t let it be Aldous, please...

  But of course it couldn’t be Aldous, because without the keys, he had no way of gaining access to the cellar.

  “Phillipa?” It sounded like Hugh. She must be imagining things; she’d been doing that a lot.

  Someone else came through the door and closed it behind him. Her, Phillipa realized, when she saw that this person was wearing a skirt. Edmee?

  The man who came toward her out of the darkness wasn’t Hugh. He had on rough homespun trousers and a tattered woollen mantle—peasant garb.

  “Who...who’s there?” Phillipa asked, her voice raspy again; she’d had no water since Edmee had left.

  Her visitor paused at the well and lowered his hood, revealing a head of flaxen hair and a stricken expression. “Oh, God, Phillipa...”

  “Hugh...no...” What was he doing here? Why had Edmee brought him? “You shouldn’t be here. You must go. Now!”

  “Phillipa...” He started toward her again, taking long strides. “How could I—”

  “Please, Hugh! Leave now! Louis’s men will kill you.”

  “No, they won’t,” said Edmee from behind him.

  Hugh turned toward the maid, striding into the lamplight with her arms extended stiffly before her,
holding something in Hugh’s direction...

  “No!” Phillipa screamed as a flash emerged from the arma in Edmee’s hand, accompanied by a thunderclap and a cloud of smoke.

  Hugh jerked backward, landing with a thud on the earthen floor, his forehead a burst of crimson. He groaned once, rolled his head to the side, and went horribly still.

  Edmee stumbled backward, but stayed on her feet. Regarding Hugh’s limp form, she said, “Louis’s men won’t have the chance.”

  “No!” Phillipa wailed, rage and grief roiling inside her, stinging her eyes. “Oh, my God, Hugh! Hugh! Hugh!”

  He didn’t move. With his face turned away from her, she couldn’t see the wound, but the earthen floor on that side was dark with blood.

  Clutching the iron frame with white-knuckled fists, Phillipa screamed Hugh’s name, over and over until it wasn’t his name anymore, just raw, wrenching sobs. Her cries of anguish filled the undercroft; hot tears streamed down her face, her throat.

  Edmee strolled closer to Phillipa, studying the arma in the corona of lamplight that surrounded her. “Remarkable.”

  “Oh, God, Edmee,” Phillipa choked out through her tears, “Oh, God, how could you? Why would you?”

  “You haven’t figured it out yet? And you’re supposed to be so clever.” Edmee’s voice had changed, its coarse Poitevan inflections replaced by the refined speech patterns of proper Norman French. “I suppose your confinement may have affected the workings of your mind. But no, even before, there were things you missed, conclusions you drew because I led you to them...like your conclusion, on the basis of four black stockings and a whip, that it was Marguerite du Roche who executed that blundering oaf Istagio.”

  “Oh, God,” Phillipa sobbed. “‘Twas you all along.” It was Edmee—or whatever her name really was, for she was no Poitevan peasant—whom Queen Eleanor had sent to Halthorpe Castle to ensure that discretion would be observed, control maintained. “‘Twas you. How...?”