Читать книгу At The Queen's Summons - Сьюзен Виггс, Susan Wiggs - Страница 13

“So after my father’s ship went down,” Pippa explained blithely, “his enemies assumed he had perished.” She sat very still on the stool in the kitchen garden. The smell of blooming herbs filled the spring air.

“Naturally,” Iago said in his dark honey voice. “And of course, your papa did not die at all. Even as we speak, he is attending the council of Her Majesty the queen.”

“How did you know?” Beaming, Pippa twisted around on her stool to look up at him.

Framed by the nodding boughs of the old elm tree that shaded the garden path, he regarded her with tolerant interest, a comb in his hand and a gentle compassion in his velvety black eyes. “I, too, like to invent answers to the questions that keep me awake at night,” he said.

“I invent nothing,” she snapped. “It all happened just as I described it.”

“Except that the story changes each time you encounter someone new.” He spoke with mild amusement, but no accusation. “Your father has been pirate, knight, foreign prince, soldier of fortune and ratcatcher. Oh. And did I not hear you tell O Mahoney you were sired by the pope?”

Pippa blew out a breath, and her shoulders sagged. A raven cackled raucously in the elm tree, then whirred off into the London sky. Of course she invented stories about who she was and where she had come from. To face the truth was unthinkable. And impossible.

Iago’s touch was soothing as he combed through her matted hair. He tilted her chin up and stared at her face-on for a long moment, intent as a sculptor. She stared back, rapt as a dreamer. What a remarkable person he was, with his lovely ebony skin and bell-toned voice, the fierce, inborn pride he wore like a mantle of silk.

He closed one eye; then he began to snip with his little crane-handled scissors, the very ones she had been tempted to steal from a side table in the kitchen.

As Iago worked, he said, “You tell the tales so well, pequeña, but they are just that—tales. I know this because I used to do the same. Used to lie awake at night trying to put together the face of my mother from fragments of memory. She became every good thing I knew about a mother, and before long she was more real to me than an actual woman. Only bigger. Better. Sweeter, kinder.”

“Yes,” she whispered past a sudden, unwelcome thickness in her throat. “Yes, I understand.”

He twisted a few curls into a soft fringe upon her brow. The breeze sifted lightly through them. “If you were an Englishman, you would be the very rage of fashion. They call these lovelocks. They look better on you.” He winked. “A dream mother. It was something I needed at a very dark time of my life.”

“Tell me about the dark time,” she said, fascinated by the deftness of his hands and the way they were so brown on one side, while the palms were sensitive and pale.

“Slavery,” he said. “Being made to work until I fell on my face from exhaustion, and then being beaten until I dragged myself up to work some more. You have a dream mother, too, eh?”

She closed her eyes. A lovely face smiled at her. She had spent a thousand nights and more painting her parents in her mind until they were perfect. Beautiful. All wise. Flawless, save for one minor detail. They had somehow managed to misplace their daughter.

“I have a dream mother,” she confessed. “A father, too. The stories might change, but that does not.” She opened her eyes to find him studying her critically again. “What about the O Donoghue?” she asked, pretending only idle curiosity.

“His father is dead, which is why Aidan is the lord. His mother is dead also, but his—” He cut himself off. “I have said too much already.”

“Why are you so loyal to the O Donoghue?”

“He gave me my freedom.”

“How was it his to give in the first place?”

Iago grinned, his face blossoming like an exotic flower. “It was not. I was put on a ship for transport from San Juan—that is on an island far across the Ocean Sea—to England. I was to be a gift for a great noblewoman. My master wished to impress her.”

“A gift?” Pippa was hard-pressed to sit still on her stool. “You mean like a drinking cup or a salt cellar or a pet ermine?”

“You have a blunt way of putting it, but yes. The ship wrecked off the coast of Ireland. I swam straightaway from my master even as he begged me to save him.”

Pippa sat forward, amazed. “Did he die?”

Iago nodded. “Drowned. I watched him. Does that shock you?”

“Yes! Was the water very cold?”

His chest-deep chuckle filled the air. “Close to freezing. I dragged myself to an island—I later found out it is called Skellig Michael—and there I met a pilgrim in sackcloth and ashes, climbing the great stairs to the shrine.”

“The O Donoghue Mór in sackcloth and ashes?” In Pippa’s mind, Aidan would always be swathed in flashing jewel tones, his jet hair gleaming in the sun; he was no drab pilgrim, but a prince from a fairy story.

“He was not the O Donoghue Mór then. He helped me get dry and warm, and he became my first and only true friend.” Black fury shadowed Iago’s eyes. “When Aidan’s father saw me, he declared himself my master, tried to make me a slave again. And Aidan let him.”

Pippa clutched the sides of the stool. “The jackdog! The bootlicker, the skainsmate—”

“It was a ruse. He claimed me on the grounds that he had found me. His father agreed, thinking it would enhance Aidan’s station to be the first Irishman to own a black slave.”

“The scullywarden!” she persisted. “The horse’s a—”

“And then he set me free,” Iago said, laughing at her. “He had a priest called Revelin draw up a paper. That day Aidan promised to help me return to my home when we were both grown. In fact, he promised to come with me across the Ocean Sea.”

“Why would you want to go back to a land where you were a slave? And why would Aidan want to go with you?”

“Because I love the islands, and I no longer have a master. There was a girl called Serafina….” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head as if to cast away the thought. “Aidan wanted to come because he loves Ireland too much to stay.” Iago fussed with more curls that tickled the nape of her neck.

“If he loves Ireland, why would he want to leave it?”

“When you come to know him better, you will understand. Have you ever been forced to watch a loved one die?”

She swallowed and nodded starkly, thinking of Mab. “I never felt so helpless in all my life.”

“So it is with Aidan and Ireland,” said Iago.

“Why is he here, in London?”

“Because the queen summoned him. Officially, he is here to sign treaties of surrender and regrant. He is styled Lord of Castleross. Unofficially, she is curious, I think, about Ross Castle. She wants to know why, after her interdict forbidding the construction of fortresses, it was completed.”

The idea that her patron had the power to decide the fate of nations was almost too large for Pippa to grasp. “Is she very angry with him?” It even felt odd referring to Queen Elizabeth as “she,” for Her Majesty had always been, to Pippa and others like her, a remote idea, more of an institution like a cathedral than a flesh-and-blood woman.

“She has kept him waiting here for a fortnight.” Iago lifted her from the stool to the ground. “You look as pretty as an okasa blossom.”

She touched her hair. Its shape felt different—softer, balanced, light as the breeze. She would have to go out to Hart Street Well and look at her reflection.

“You said when you met Aidan, he was not the O Donoghue Mór,” she said, thinking that the queen must enjoy having the power to summon handsome men to her side.

“His father, Ronan, was. Aidan became Lord Castleross after Ronan died.”

“And how did his father die?”

Iago went to the half door of the kitchen and held the lower part open. “Ask Aidan. It is not my place to say.”

“Iago said you killed your father.”

Aidan shot to his feet as if Pippa had touched a brand to his backside. “He said what?”

Hiding her apprehension, she strolled into the great hall of Lumley House and moved through gloomy evening shadows on the flagged floor. An ominous rumbling of thunder sounded in the distance. Aidan’s fists were clenched, his face stark and taut. Instinct told her to flee, but she forced herself to stay.

“You heard me, my lord. If you’re going to keep me, I want to make sure. Is it true? Did you kill your father?”

He grabbed an iron poker. A single Gaelic word burst from him as he stabbed at the fat log smoldering in the grate.

Pippa took a deep breath for courage. “It was Iago who—”

“Iago said nothing of the sort.”

She emerged from the shadows and joined him by the hearth, praying he would deny her suggestion. “Did you, my lord?” she whispered.

He moved so swiftly, it took her breath away. One moment the iron poker clattered to the floor; the next he had his great hands clamped around her shoulders, her back against a stone pillar and his furious face pushed close to hers. Though she still stood cloaked in shadow, she could see the flames from the hearth fire reflected in his eyes.

“Yes, damn your meddling self. I killed my father.”

“What?” She trembled in his grip.

Aidan thrust away from her, turning back to face the fire. “Isn’t that what you expected to hear?” He clenched his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. Sharp fragments of that last, explosive argument came back to slice fresh wounds into his soul.

He spun around to face Pippa, intending to carry her bodily out of the hall, out of Lumley House, out of his life. She stepped from the gloom and into the light. Aidan stopped dead in his tracks.

“What in God’s name did Iago do to you?” he asked. As if to echo his words, thunder muttered outside the hall.

Her hand wavered a little as she brought it up to touch her hair, which now curled softly around her glowing face. “The best he could?” she attempted. Then she dropped her air of trembling uncertainty. “You are trying to change the subject. Are you or are you not a father-murderer?”

He planted his hands on his hips. “That depends on whom you ask.”

She mimicked his aggressive stance, looking for all the world like a fierce pixie. “I’m asking you.”

“And I’ve answered you.”

“But it was the wrong answer,” she said, so vehemently that he expected her to stomp her foot. Something—the washing, the grooming—had made her glow as if a host of fairies had showered her with a magical mist. “I demand an explanation.”

“I feel no need to explain myself to a stranger,” he said, dismayed by the intensity of his attraction to her.

“We are not strangers, Your Loftiness,” she said with heavy irony. “Wasn’t it just this morning that you undressed me and then dressed me like the most intimate of handmaids?”

He winced at the reminder. Beneath her elfin daintiness lay a soft, womanly body that he craved with a power that was both undeniable and inappropriate. Shed of her beggar’s garb, she had become the sort of woman for whom men swore to win honors, slay dragons, cheerfully lay down their lives. And he was in no position to do any of those things.

“Some would say,” he admitted darkly, “that the death of Ronan O Donoghue was an accident.” From the corner of his eye, he saw a flicker of lightning through the mullioned windows on the east side of the hall.

“What do you say?” Pippa asked.

“I say it is none of your affair. And if you persist in talking about it, I might have to do something permanent to you.”

She sniffed, clearly recognizing the idleness of his threat. He was not accustomed to females who were unafraid of him. “If I had a father, I’d cherish him.”

“You do have a father. The war hero, remember?”

She blinked. “Oh. Him. Yes, of course.”

Aidan slammed a fist on the stone mantel and regarded the Lumley shield hanging above as if it were a higher authority. “What am I going to do with you?” The wind hurled gusts against the windows, and he swung around to glower at her.

“‘Do’ with me?” She glanced back over her shoulder at the door. He didn’t blame her for not wanting to be alone with him. She wouldn’t be the first.

“You can’t stay here forever,” he stated. “I didn’t ask to be your protector.” The twist of guilt in his gut startled him. He was not used to making cruel statements to defenseless women.

She did not look surprised. Instead, she dropped one shoulder and regarded him warily. She resembled a dog so used to being kicked that it came as a surprise when it was not kicked.

Her rounded chin came up. “I never asked to stay forever. I can go back to Dove and Mortlock. We have plans to gain the patronage of…of the Holy Roman Emperor.”

He remembered her disreputable companions from St. Paul’s—the portly and greasy Dove and the cadaverous Mortlock. “They must be mad with worry over you.”

“Those two?” She snorted and idly picked up the iron poker, stabbing at the log in the hearth. Sparks flew upward on a sweep of air, then disappeared. “They only worry about losing me because they need me to cry up a crowd. Their specialty is cutting purses.”

“I won’t let you go back to them,” Aidan heard himself say. “I’ll find you a—” he thought for a moment “—a situation with a gentlewoman—”

That made her snort again, this time with bitter laughter. “Oh, for that I should be well and truly suited.” She slammed the poker back into its stand. “It has long been my aim in life to empty some lady’s slops and pour wine for her.” The hem of her skirts twitched in agitation as she pantomimed the menial work.

“It’s a damned sight better than wandering the streets.” Irritated, he walked to the table and sloshed wine into a cup. The lightning flashed again, stark and cold in the April night.

“Oh, do tell, my lord.” She stalked across the room, slapped her palms on the table, leaned over and glared into his face. “Listen. I am an entertainer. I am good at it.”

So he had noticed. She could mimic any accent, highborn or low, copy any movement with fluid grace, change character from one moment to the next like an actor trying on different masks.

“I didn’t ask you to drag me out of St. Paul’s and into your life,” she stated.

“I don’t remember any objections from you when I saved you from having your ears nailed to the stocks.” He tasted the wine, a sweet sack favored by the English nobility. He missed his nightly draft of poteen. Pippa was enough to make him crave two drafts of the powerful liquor.

“I was hungry. But that doesn’t mean I’ve surrendered my life to you. I can get another position in a nobleman’s household just like that.” She snapped her fingers.

She was so close, he could see the dimple that winked in her left cheek. She smelled of soap and sun-dried laundry, and now that her hair was fixed, it shone like spun gold in the glow from the hearth.

He took another sip of wine. Then, very gently, he set down the cup and reached across to touch a wispy curl that drifted across her cheek. “How can it be enough to simply survive?” he asked softly. “Do you never dream of doing more than that?”

“Damn you,” she said, echoing his words to her. She shoved away from the table and turned her back on him. There was a heartbreaking pride in the stiff way she held herself, the set of her shoulders and the haughty tilt of her head. “Goodbye, Your Worship. Thank you for our brief association. We shan’t be seeing each other again.”

“Pippa, wait—”

In a sweep of skirts and injured dignity, she strode out of the hall, disappearing into the gloom of the cloister that bordered the herbiary. Aidan could not explain it, but the sight of her walking away from him caused a painful squeeze of guilt and regret in his chest.

He swore under his breath and finished his wine, then paced the room. He had more pressing matters to ponder than the fate of a saucy street performer. Clan wars and English aggression were tearing his district apart. The settlement he had negotiated last year was shaky at best. A sad matter, that, since he had paid such a dear price for the settlement. He had bought peace at the cost of his heart.

The thought caused his mind to jolt back to Pippa. The ungrateful little female. Let her storm off to her chamber and sulk until she came to her senses.

It occurred to him then that she was the sort not to sulk, but to act. She had survived—and thrived—by doing just that.

A jagged spear of lightning split the sky just as a terrible thought occurred to him. Hurling the pewter wine cup to the floor, he dashed out of the house and into the cloister of Crutched Friars, running down the arcade to her door, jerking it open.

Empty. He passed through the refectory and emerged onto the street. He had been right. He saw Pippa in the distance, hurrying down the broad, tree-lined road leading to Woodroffe Lane and the eerie, lawless area around Tower Hill. A gathering wind stirred the bobbing heads of chestnut trees. Clouds rolled and tumbled, blackening the sky, and when he breathed in, he caught the heavy taste and scent of rain and the faint, sizzling tang of close lightning.

She walked faster still, half running.

Turn back, he called to her silently, trying to will her to do his bidding. Turn back and look at me.

Instead, she lifted her skirts and began to run. As she passed the communal well of Hart Street, lightning struck.

From where Aidan stood, it looked as if the very hand of God had cleaved the heavens and sent a bolt of fire down to bury itself in the breast of London. A crash of thunder seemed to shake the ground. The clouds burst open like a ripe fruit, and it began to rain.

For an Irishman, Aidan was not very superstitious, but thunder and lightning were a clear sign from a powerful source. He should not have let her go.

Without a second thought, he plunged into the howling storm, racing between the rows of wildly bending chestnut trees. The rain pelted him in huge, cold drops, and lightning speared down through the clouds once more.

He dragged a hand across his rain-stung eyes and squinted through the sodden twilight. Already the ditch down the middle of the street ran like a small, flooding river, carrying off the effluvia of London households.

People scurried for cover here and there, but the darkness had swallowed Pippa. He shouted her name. The storm drowned his voice. With a curse, he began a methodical search of each side alley and path he encountered, working south toward the river, turning westward toward St. Paul’s each time he saw a way through.

The storm gathered force, belting him in the face, tearing at his clothes. Mud spattered him to the thighs, but he ignored it.

He went farther west, turning into each alley, calling her name. The rain blinded him, the wind buffeted him, the mud sucked at his feet.

At a particularly grim-looking street, the wind tore down a painted sign of a blue devil and hurled it to the ground. It struck a slanting cellar door, then fell sideways onto a pile of wood chippings.

He heard a faint, muffled cry. With a surge of hope, he flung away the sign and the sawdust.

There she sat, knees drawn up to her chest, face tucked into the hollow between her hugging arms. Thunder crashed again, and she flinched as if struck by a whip.

“Pippa!” He touched her quaking shoulder.

She screamed and looked up at him.

Aidan’s heart lurched. Her face, battered by rain and tears, shone stark white in the storm-dulled twilight. The panic in her eyes blinded her; she showed no recognition of him. That look of mindless terror was one he had seen only once before—in the face of his father just before Ronan had died.

“Faith, Pippa, are you hurt?”

She did not respond to her name, but blurted out something he could not comprehend. A nonsense word or a phrase in a foreign tongue?

Shaken, he bent and scooped her up, holding her against his chest and bending his head to shield her from the rain as best he could. She did not resist, but clung to him as if he were a raft in a raging sea. He felt a surge of fierce protectiveness. Never had he felt so painfully alive, so determined to safeguard the small stranger in his arms.

Still she showed no sign of recognition, and did not do so while he dashed back to Lumley House. A host of demons haunted the girl who called herself Pippa Trueheart.

And Aidan O Donoghue was seized by the need to slay each and every one of them.

“Batten the hatches! Secure the helm! There’s naught to do now but run before the wind!”

The man in the striped jacket had a funny, rusty voice. He sounded cross, or maybe afraid, like Papa had been when his forehead got hot and he had to go to bed and not have any visitors.

She clung to her dog’s furry neck and looked across the smelly, dark enclosure at Nurse. But Nurse had her hands all twisted up in a string of rosy beads—the ones she hid from Mama, who was Reformed—and all Nurse could say was Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary.

Something scooped the ship up and up and up. She could feel the lifting in her belly. And then, much faster, a stronger force slapped them down.

Nurse screamed Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary…

The hound whined. His fur smelled of dog and ocean.

A cracking noise hurt her ears. She heard the whine of ropes running through pulleys and a shriek from the man in the funny coat, and suddenly she had to get out of there, out of that close, wet place where the water was filling up the floor, where her chest wouldn’t let her breathe.

She pushed the door open. The dog scrambled out first. She followed him up a slanting wooden stair. Loose barrels skittered all through the passageways and decks. She heard a great roar of water. She looked back to find Nurse, but all she saw was a hand waving, the rosy beads braided through the pale fingers. Water covered Nurse all the way to the top of her head….

“No!” Pippa sat straight up in the bed. For a moment, the room was all a pulsating blur. Slowly, it came into focus. Low-burning hearth fire. Candle flickering on the table. High, thick testers holding up the draperies.

The O Donoghue Mór sitting at the end of the bed.

She pressed her hand to her chest, hating the twitchy, air-starved feeling that sometimes seized her lungs when she took fright or breathed noxious or frozen air. Her heart was racing. Sweat bathed her face and neck.

“Bad dream?” he asked.

She shut her eyes. Like a mist driven by the wind, the images flew away, unremembered, but her sense of terror lingered. “It happens. Where am I?”

“I’ve given you a private chamber in Lumley House.”

Her eyes widened in amazement, then narrowed in suspicion. “Why?”

“I am your patron. You’ll lodge where I put you.”

She thrust up her chin. “And what do you require of me in exchange for living in the lap of luxury?”

“Why must I expect anything at all from you?”

She regarded him for a long, measuring moment. No, the O Donoghue Mór was certainly not the sort of man who had to keep unwilling females at his beck and call. Any woman in her right mind would want him. Except, of course, Pippa herself. But that did not stop her from enjoying his strikingly splendid face and form, nor did it keep her from craving—against all good sense—his warmth and closeness.

“I take it you don’t like storms,” he said.

“No, I…” It all seemed so silly now. London offered far greater perils than storms, and she had survived London for years. “Thank you, my lord. Thank you for coming after me. I should not have left in such haste.”

“True,” he said gently.

“It is not every day a man makes me question my very reason for existing.”

“Pippa, I didn’t mean it that way. I should not have questioned the choices you’ve made.”

She nodded. “People love to manage other people.” Frowning, she looked around the room, noting the wonderful bed, the crackling fire in the grate, the clear, rain-washed night air wafting through a small, open window. “I don’t remember much about the storm. Was it very bad?”

He smiled. It was a soft, unguarded smile, as if he truly meant it. “You were in a bit of a state when I found you.”

She blushed and dropped her gaze, then blushed even deeper when she discovered she wore only a shift. She clutched the bedclothes to her chest.

“I hung your things to dry by the fire,” Aidan said. “I got the shift from Lady Lumley’s clothes press.”

Pippa touched the sheer fabric of the sleeve. “I’ll hang for certain.”

“Nay. Lord and Lady Lumley are at their country estate in Wycherly. I’m to have full use of the house and all its contents.”

She sighed dreamily. “How wonderful to be treated like such an important guest.”

“Often I find it a burden, not a wonder.”

She began to remember snatches of the storm, the lightning and thunder chasing her through the streets, the rain lashing her face. And then Aidan’s strong arms and broad chest, and the sensation of speed as he rushed her back to the house. His hands had tenderly divested her of clothes and placed her in the only real bed she had ever slept in.

She had tucked her face into his strong shoulder and sobbed. Hard. He had stroked her hair, kissed it, and finally she had slept.

She looked up at him. “You’re awfully kind for a father-murderer.”

His smile wavered. “Sometimes I surprise myself.” Leaning across the bed, he touched her cheek, his fingers skimming over her blush-heated skin. “You make it easy, colleen. You make me better than I am.”

She felt such a profusion of warmth that she wondered if she had a fever. “Now what?” she whispered.

“Now, for once in your life, you’ll tell the truth, Pippa. Who are you, where did you come from and what in God’s name am I going to do with you?”