Читать книгу At The Queen's Summons - Сьюзен Виггс, Susan Wiggs - Страница 11

“I can’t believe you brought her with us,” said Donal Og the next day, pacing in the walled yard of the old Priory of the Crutched Friars.

As a visiting dignitary, Aidan had been given the house and adjacent priory by Lord Lumley, a staunch Catholic and unlikely but longtime royal favorite. The residence was in Aldgate, where all men of consequence lived while in London. The huge residence, once home to humble and devout clerks, comprised a veritable village, including a busy glassworks and a large yard and stables. It was oddly situated, bordered by broad Woodroffe Lane and crooked Hart Street and within shouting distance of a grim, skeletal scaffold and gallows.

Aidan had given Pippa a room of her own, one of the monks’ cells facing a central arcade. The soldiers had strict orders to watch over her, but not to threaten or disturb her.

“I couldn’t very well leave her at the Nag’s Head.” He glanced at the closed door of her cell. “She might’ve been accosted.”

“She probably has been, probably makes her living at it.” Donal Og cut the air with an impatient gesture of his hand. “You take in strays, my lord, you always have—orphaned lambs, pups rejected by their dams, lame horses. Creatures better left—” He broke off, scowled and resumed pacing.

“To die,” Aidan finished for him.

Donal Og swung around, his expression an odd mix of humanity and cold pragmatism. “It is the very rhythm of nature for some to struggle, some to survive, some to perish. We’re Irish, man. Who knows that better than we? Neither you nor I can change the world. Nor were we meant to.”

“But isn’t that what we came to London to accomplish, cousin?” Aidan asked softly.

“We came because Queen Elizabeth summoned you,” Donal Og snapped. “And now that we’re here, she refuses to see you.” He tilted his great blond head skyward and addressed the clouds. “Why?”

“It amuses her to keep foreign dignitaries cooling their heels, waiting for an audience.”

“I think she’s insulted because you go all about town with an army of one hundred. Mayhap a little more modesty would be in order.”

Iago came out of the barracks, scratching his bare, ritually scarred chest and yawning. “Talk, talk, talk,” he said in the lilting tones of his native island. “You never shut up.”

Aidan said a perfunctory good morning to his marshal. Through an extraordinary chain of events, Iago had come ten years earlier from the West Indies of the New World. His mother was of mixed island native and African blood, his father a Spaniard.

Iago and Aidan had grown to full manhood together. Two years younger than Iago and in awe of the Caribbean man’s strength and prowess, Aidan had insisted on emulating him. Gloriously drunk one day, he had endured the ritual scarring ceremony in secret, and in a great deal of pain. To the horror of his father, Aidan now bore, like Iago, a series of V-shaped scars down the center of his chest.

“I was just saying,” Donal Og explained, “that Aidan is always taking in strays.”

Iago laughed deeply, his mahogany face shining through the morning mist. “What a fool, eh?”

Chastened, Donal Og fell silent.

“So what did he drag home this time?” Iago asked.

Pippa lay perfectly still with her eyes closed, playing a familiar game. From earliest memory, she always awoke with the certain conviction that her life had been a nightmare and, upon awakening, she would find matters the way they should be, with her mother smiling like a Madonna while her father worshipped her on bended knee and both smiled upon their beloved daughter.

With a snort of self-derision, she beat back the fantasy. There was no place in her life for dreams. She opened her eyes and looked up to see a cracked, limewashed ceiling. Timber and wattled walls. The scent of slightly stale, crushed straw. The murmur of masculine voices outside a thick timber door.

It took a few moments to remember all that had happened the day before. While she reflected on the events, she found a crock of water and a basin and cupped her hands for a drink, finally plunging in her face to wash away the last cobwebby vestiges of her fantasies.

Yesterday had started out like any other day—a few antics in St. Paul’s; then she and Mortlock and Dove would cut a purse or filch something to eat from a carter. Like London smoke borne on a breeze, they would drift aimlessly through the day, then return to the house on Maiden Lane squished between two crumbling tenements.

Pippa had the attic room all to herself. Almost. She shared it with a rather aggressively inquisitive rat she called, for no reason she could fathom, Pavlo. She also shared quarters with all the private worries and dreamlike memories and unfocused sadness she refused to confess to any other person.

Yesterday, the free-flowing course of her life had altered. For better or worse, she knew not. She felt no ties to Mort and Dove; the three of them used each other, shared what they had to, and jealously guarded the rest. If they missed her at all, it was because she had a knack for drawing a crowd. If she missed them at all—she had not decided whether or not she did—it was because they were familiar, not necessarily beloved.

Pippa knew better than to love anyone.

She had come with the Irish nobleman simply because she had nothing better to do. Perhaps fate had taken a hand in her fortune at last. She had always wanted the patronage of a rich man, but no one had ever taken notice of her. In her more fanciful moments, she thought about winning a place at court. For now, she would settle for the Celtic lord.

After all, he was magnificently handsome, obviously rich and surprisingly kind.

A girl could do far worse than that.

By the time he had brought her to this place, she had been woozy with ale. She had a vague memory of riding a large horse with the O Donoghue Mór seated in front of her and all his strange, foreign warriors tramping behind.

She made certain her shabby sack of belongings lay in a corner of the room, then dried her face. As she cleaned her teeth with the tail of her shift dipped in the water basin, she saw, wavering in the bottom of the bowl, a coat of arms.

Norman cross and hawk and arrows.

Lumley’s device. She knew it well, because she had once stolen a silver badge from him as he had passed through St. Paul’s.

She straightened up and combed her fingers through her hacked-off hair. She did not miss having long hair, but once in a while she thought about looking fashionable, like the glorious ladies who went about in barges on the Thames. In the past, when she bothered to wash her hair, it had hung in honey gold waves that glistened in the sun.

A definite liability. Men noticed glistening golden hair. And that was the last sort of attention she wanted.

She jammed on her hat—it was a slouch of brown wool that had seen better days—and wrenched open the door to greet the day.

Morning mist lay like a shroud over a rambling courtyard. Men and dogs and horses slipped in and out of view like wraiths. The fog insulated noise, and the arcade created soft, hollow echoes, so that the Irish voices of the men had an eerie intimacy.

She tucked her thumbs into her palms to ward off evil spirits—just in case.

Several yards from Pippa, three men stood talking in low tones. They made a most interesting picture—the O Donoghue with his blue mantle slung back over one shoulder, his booted foot propped on the tongue of a wagon, and his elbow braced upon his knee.

Donal Og, the rude cousin, leaned against the wagon wheel, gesticulating like a man in the grips of St. Elmo’s fire. The third man stood with his back turned, feet planted wide as if he were on the deck of a ship. He was tall—she wondered if prodigious height was a required quality of the Irish lord’s retinue—and his long, soft tunic blazed with color in hues more vivid than April flowers.

She strolled out of her chamber to find that it was one of a long line of barracks or cells hunched against an ancient wall and shaded by the arcade. She walked over to the wagon, and in her usual forthright manner, she picked up the hem of the man’s color-drenched garment and fingered the fabric.

“Now, colleen,” Aidan O Donoghue said in a warning voice.

The man in the bright cloak turned.

Pippa’s mouth dropped open. A squeak burst from her throat and she stumbled back. Her heel caught on a broken paving stone. She tripped and landed on her backside in a puddle of morning-chilled mud.

“Jesus Christ on a flaming crutch!” she said.

“Reverent, isn’t she?” Donal Og asked wryly. “Faith, but she’s a perfect little saint.”

Pippa kept staring. This was a Moor. She had heard about them in story and song, but never had she seen one. His face was remarkable, a gleaming sculpture of high cheekbones, a bony jaw, beautiful mouth, eyes the color of the stoutest ale. He had a perfect black cloud of hair, and skin the color of antique, polished leather.

“My name is Iago,” he said, stepping back and twitching the hem of his remarkable cloak out of the way of the mud.

“Pippa,” she said breathlessly. “Pippa True—True—”

Aidan stuck out his hand and pulled her to her feet. She felt his smooth, easy strength as he did so, and his touch was a wonder to her, in its way, more of a wonder than the Moor’s appearance.

Iago looked from Pippa to Aidan. “My lord, you have outdone yourself.”

She felt the mud slide down her backside and legs, pooling in the tops of her ancient boots. Last winter, she had stolen them from a corpse lying frozen in an alley.

“Will you eat or bathe first?” the O Donoghue asked, not unkindly.

Her stomach cramped, but she was well used to hunger pangs. The chill mud made her shiver. “A bath, I suppose, Your Reverence.”

Donal Og and Iago grinned at each other. “Your Reverence,” Iago said in his deep, musical voice.

Donal Og pointed his toe and bowed. “Your Reverence.”

Aidan ignored them. “A bath it is, then,” he said.

“I’ve never had one before.”

The O Donoghue looked at her for a long moment. His gaze burned over her, searing her face and form until she thought she might sizzle like a chicken on a spit.

“Why am I not surprised?” he asked.

She sang with a perfect, off-key joy. The room, adjoining the kitchen of Lumley House, was small and cramped and windowless, but the open door let in a flood of light. Aidan sat on the opposite side of the folding privy screen and put his hands over his ears, but her exuberant and bawdy song screeched through the barrier.

“At Steelyard store of wines there be

Your dulled minds to glad,

And handsome men that must not wed,

Except they leave their trade.

They oft shall seek for proper girls,

And some perhaps shall find—”

She broke off and called, “Do you like my song, Your Worship?”

“It’s grand,” he forced himself to say. “Simply grand.”

“I could sing you another if you wish,” she said eagerly.

“Ah, that would be a high delight indeed, I’m sure,” he said.

She took his patronage seriously. Too seriously.

“The bed it shook

As pleasure took

The carpet-knight for a ride…”

She belted the words out unblushingly. Aidan had never seen a mere bath have this sort of effect on anyone. How a wooden barrel half filled with lukewarm water could make a woman positively drunk with elation was beyond him.

She splashed and sang and every once in a while he could hear a scrubbing sound. He hoped she was availing herself of the harsh wood-ash soap.

Pippa’s singing had long since driven the Lumley maids into the yard to gossip. When he had told them to draw a bath, they had shaken their heads and muttered about Lord Lumley’s strange Irish guests.

But they had obeyed. Even in London, so many leagues from his kingdom in Kerry, he was still the O Donoghue Mór.

Except to Pippa. Despite her constant attempts to entertain him and seek his approval, she had no respect for his status. She paused in her song to draw breath or perhaps—God forbid—think up another verse.

“Are you quite finished?” Aidan asked.

“Finished? Are we pressed for time?”

“You’ll wind up pickled like a herring if you stew in there much longer.”

“Oh, very well.” He heard the slap of water sloshing against the sides of the barrel. “Where are my clothes?” she asked.

“In the kitchen. Iago will boil them. The maids found you a few things. I hung them on a peg—”

“Oooh.” She managed to infuse the exclamation with a wealth of wonder and yearning. “These are truly a gift from heaven.”

They were no gift, but the castoffs of a maid who had run off with a Venetian sailor the week before. He heard Pippa bumping around behind the screen. A few moments later, she emerged.

Haughty pride radiated from her small, straight figure. Aidan clamped his teeth down on his tongue to keep from laughing.

She had the skirt on backward and the buckram bodice upside down. Her damp hair stuck out in spikes like a crown of thorns. She was barefoot and cradling the leather slippers reverently in her hands.

Then she moved into the strands of sunlight streaming in through the kitchen door, and he saw her face for the first time devoid of soot and ashes.

It was like seeing the visage of a saint or an angel in one’s dreams. Never, ever, had Aidan seen such a face. No single feature was remarkable in and of itself, but taken as a whole, the effect was staggering.

She had a wide, clear brow, her eyebrows bold above misty eyes. The sweet curves of nose and chin framed a soft mouth, which she held pursed as if expecting a kiss. Her cheekbones were highlighted by pink-scrubbed skin. Aidan thought of the angel carved in the plaster over the altar of the church at Innisfallen. Somehow, that same lofty, otherworldly magic touched Pippa.

“The clothes,” she stated, “are magnificent.”

He allowed himself a controlled smile designed to preserve her fervent pride. “And so they are. Let me help you with some of the fastenings.”

“Ah, my silly lord, I’ve done them all up myself.”

“Indeed you have. But since you lack a proper lady’s maid to help you, I should take her part.”

“You’re very kind,” she said.

“Not always,” he replied, but she seemed oblivious of the warning edge in his voice. “Come here.”

She crossed the room without hesitation. He could not decide whether that was healthy or not. Should a young woman alone be so trusting of a strange man? Her trust was no gift, but a burden.

“First the bodice,” he said patiently, untying the haphazard knot she had made in the lacings. “I have never wondered why it mattered, but fashion demands that you wear it with the other end up.”

“Truly?” She stared down at the stiff garment in dismay. “It covered more of me upside down. When you turn it the other way, I spill out like loaves from a pan.”

His loins burned with the image, and he gritted his teeth. The last thing he had expected was that he might desire her. Pippa lifted her arms and held them steady while he unlaced the bodice.

It proved to be the most excruciating exercise in self-restraint he had ever endured. Somehow, the dust and ashes of her harsh life had masked an uncounted wealth of charms. He had the feeling that he was the first man to see beneath the grime and ill-fitting clothes.

As he pulled the laces through, his knuckles grazed her. The maids had provided neither shift nor corset. All that lay between Pippa’s sweet flesh and his busy hands was a chemise of wispy lawn. He could feel the heat of her, could smell the clean, beeswaxy fragrance of her just washed skin and hair.

Setting his jaw with manly restraint, he turned the bodice right side up and brought it around her. As he slowly laced the garment, watching the stiff buckram close around a narrow waist and then widen over the subtle womanly flare of her hips, pushing up her breasts, he could not banish his insistent desire.

True to her earlier observation, her bosom swelled out over the top with frank appeal, barely contained by the sheer fabric of the chemise. He could see the high, rounded shapes, the rosy shadows of the tips, and for a long, agonizing moment all he could think of was touching her there, tenderly, learning the shape and weight of her breasts, burying his face in them, drowning in the essence of her.

A roaring, like the noise of the sea, started in his ears, swishing with the quickening rhythm of his blood. He bent his head closer, closer, his tongue already anticipating the flavor of her, his lips hungry for the budded texture. His mouth hovered so close that he could feel the warmth emanating from her.

She drew in a deep, shuddering breath, and the movement reminded him to think with his brain—even the small part of it that happened to be working at the moment—not with his loins.

He was the O Donoghue Mór, an Irish chieftain who, a year before, had given up all rights to touch another woman. He had no business dallying with—of all things—a Sassenach vagabond, probably a madwoman at that.

He forced himself to stare not at the bodice, but into her eyes. And what he saw there was more dangerous than the lush curves of her body. What he saw there was not madness, but a painful eagerness.

It struck him like a slap, and he caught his breath, then hissed out air between his teeth.

He wanted to shake her. Don’t show me your yearning, he wanted to say. Don’t expect me to do anything about it.

What he said was, “I am in London on official business. I will return to Ireland as soon as I am able.”

“I’ve never been to Ireland,” she said, an ember of unbearable hope glowing in her eyes.

“These days, it is a sad country, especially for those who love it.” Sad. What a small, inadequate word to describe the horror and desolation he had seen—burned-out peel towers, scorched fields, empty villages, packs of wolves feeding off the unburied dead.

She tilted her head to one side. Unlike Aidan, she seemed perfectly comfortable with their proximity. A suspicion stung him. Perhaps it was nothing out of the ordinary for her to have a man tugging at her clothing.

The idea stirred him from his lassitude and froze the sympathy he felt for her. He made short, neat work of trussing her up, helped her slide her feet into the little shoes, then stepped back.

She ruined his hard-won indifference when she pointed a slippered toe, curtsied as if to the manner born and asked, “How do I look?”

From neck to floor, Aidan thought, like his own private dream of paradise.

But her expression disturbed him; she had the face of a cherub, filled with a trust and innocence that seemed all the more miraculous because of the hardships she must have endured living the life of a strolling player.

He studied her hair, because it was safer than looking at her face and drowning in her eyes. She lifted a hand, made a fluttery motion in the honey gold spikes. “It’s that awful?” she asked. “After I cut it all off, Mort and Dove said I could use my head to swab out wine casks or clean lamp chimneys.”

A reluctant laugh broke from him. “It is not so bad. But tell me, why is your hair cropped short? Or do I want to know?”

“Lice,” she said simply. “I had the devil of a time with them.”

He scratched his head. “Aye, well. I hope you’re no longer troubled by the little pests.”

“Not lately. Who dresses your hair, my lord? It is most extraordinary.” Brazen as an inquisitive child, she stood on tiptoe and lifted the single thread-woven braid that hung amid his black locks.

“That would be Iago. He does strange things on shipboard to avoid boredom.” Like getting me drunk and carving up my chest, Aidan thought grumpily. “I’ll ask him to do something about this mop of yours.”

He meant to reach out and tousle her hair, a meaningless, playful gesture. Instead, as if with its own mind, his palm cradled her cheek, his thumb brushing up into her sawed-off hair. The soft texture startled him.

“Will that be agreeable to you?” he heard himself ask in a whisper.

“Yes, Your Immensity.” Pulling away, she craned her neck to see over his shoulder. “There is something I need.” She hurried into the kitchen, where her old, soiled clothes lay in a heap.

Aidan frowned. He had not noticed any buttons worth keeping on her much worn garb. She snatched up the tunic and groped along one of the seams. An audible sigh of relief slipped from her. Aidan saw a flash of metal.

Probably a bauble or copper she had lifted from a passing merchant in St. Paul’s. He shrugged and went to the kitchen garden door to call for Iago.

As he turned, he saw Pippa lift the piece and press it to her mouth, closing her eyes and looking for all the world as if the bauble were more precious than gold.