Читать книгу Secrets at Court - Blythe Gifford - Страница 12

Chapter Three

The next day, before dawn, Nicholas was mounted and recalculating the miles between the New Forest and Canterbury. His squire, Eustace, had arrived late in the day with the recovered horse. All was packed and ready, the steed beneath him as impatient as he.

Light seeped through the trees.

Prince Edward did not come.

Instead, he sent a page with the news. The pestilence, that murderous giant, still lumbered in the land. The King forbade the journey, it seemed, until some other hapless soul could travel the route and return to pronounce it safe for his son and heir to traverse.

Biting his tongue, Nicholas swung off the horse and left it for the squire to stable. Strange, the things men feared. Neither Edward the father nor the son had hesitated to face death on the field of battle, but the King had turned timid when he lost the last friend of his youth to The Death. Now, the monarch cowered in a forest, as if death could not find his family here.

Nicholas would not run from death.

It would come for him, as it came for all men. He had survived the war with the French, but there would be other wars to come. In Italy, or even the Holy Land.

Deprived of his journey, Nicholas snapped at all around him like a hungry dog deprived of his bone. Restless, he left the hunting lodge, too small to comfortably hold even a temporary court, to prowl the grounds. He pulled three cloth balls from his pouch, juggling them to keep his hands busy, recalculating the miles to Canterbury and back.

Eyes on his hands, mind on his task, he nearly tripped over Anne sitting on a small bench that caught the morning sun.

Her needlework fell to the ground. She bent over, but he was faster, snatching it from the dirt more quickly than she could.

Dusting her work off, he handed it back to her. ‘It seems that fetching your dropped items has become a habit of mine.’

After the words had left his tongue, he realised how ill chosen they were.

She took it without touching his fingers. No smile sweetened her sharp expression. ‘My thanks.’ Words without feeling.

Now that the embroidery filled her hands again, her fingers flew in a way her feet never would and she bent to her work, ignoring him. A beautiful piece, though he was no judge of such things. Silver on black. Then, he recognised it. The Prince had used such a badge.

He slipped his juggling balls into his pouch. ‘You prepare for their wedding.’ She did not look up from her stitches.

‘Do not tell the Prince. Lady Joan plans a gift to celebrate the wedding.’

‘I can be discreet,’ though he realised he had not been so with her last night.

‘I’m glad of it,’ she said, still bowed over her needle. ‘All will be as it must.’

Strange words. ‘And how must it be?’

Laughter escaped again. So unexpected. As if all the beauty and ease denied her body was lodged in her throat. ‘It must be as God, or my lady, wishes.’

His life, captured in the words. All must be as the Prince, and the King, wanted. Horses to Calais. Wine across the Seine. Documents to Avignon. Always leave a way out. Always have an alternate route.

He would have no more of the wishes of others.

‘And do God’s wishes align with those of the Countess?’

A smile teased her lips. ‘Thanks to the Pope and to Sir Nicholas Lovayne, yes.’

He could not help but smile. Yes, he was ready to be free of such demands, but as long as they were his, he would fulfil each one. Including this last. ‘So is there to be a magnificent wedding ceremony in Canterbury?’

Anne shook her head and looked back at her needlework. ‘She wishes it to be done quickly.’

‘No pomp? No circumstance?’ No huge celebration of all his work? ‘She is of royal blood and marrying the future King. There has been no such wedding since...’ When? Before he was born.

She looked at him sharply. ‘Appropriate to their station, yes, but she is wedding the man she wants.’

‘She wants?’ A much more urgent and earthy word than loves or even needs. One that conveyed a stiff staff and a welcoming hole. One uncomfortably like what he was feeling for the woman before him. ‘I persuaded the Pope to bend the laws of God for what she wants?’

Words he should not have said. Her wide eyes told him so.

‘You were sent,’ she said, as if teaching a child, ‘because you could accomplish the task. You should feel humbly grateful for the trust placed in you.’

‘Grateful?’ No, that was not what he felt. Instead, it was that most serious of the seven deadly sins: pride. ‘I only hope it is worth the cost.’

‘To you?’

A sharp tongue, this one. Sharp enough to puncture his moment of desire for her. Despite her lectures, she seemed no more humbly grateful than he.

He cleared his throat and collected his wits. ‘To me it is, yes.’ Well worth it. Now, he would be free. ‘I meant worth the cost to them.’ The cost of the chapels alone was more than Nicholas would see in his lifetime.

Her needle paused, for the first time, and she gazed beyond him, as if he had disappeared. ‘To be able to look at someone that way...?’

‘As if they cannot wait until darkness?’ His words were more than reckless, but, in just weeks, he would no longer be the Prince’s thrall.

She shook her head. ‘It is more than lust.’

That, he could not argue. It was madness. ‘The Prince is...’ Every word he tried sounded like an insult. The Prince acted like a man bewitched. His own father had looked so, when he married his second wife. Bewitched and blind to the truth of her.

Anne gazed up at him, as if she understood the meaning he could not find words for. ‘Blissful. He is blissful. She is the same.’

He shook his head. Bliss would not last. His father’s had not. ‘I have never seen him so before. But then, he has never been wed.’

Now she looked at him, her eyes—what colour would he name them?—unwavering on his. ‘And she has? Is that your meaning?’

As if she knew thoughts he easily hid from others.

Did the woman speak so bluntly to the Countess? If so, she would not be a comfortable companion. ‘Have you recently come to her service?’ If so, perhaps she would not be there long.

‘No. I have been with her for a long time.’

Perhaps through all the marriages, official and otherwise. Perhaps she could save him a trip to Canterbury. ‘Were you there when she and Thomas Holland wed?’

She pricked her finger and popped it in her mouth. His gaze lingered on her lips longer than it should have. He was thinking of wants, of needs...

‘You are right,’ she said, finally, glancing down at the Prince’s badge, fallen again to the earth. ‘I seem to be ever dropping things at your feet. Could you hand it to me again?’

For a moment, he could not look away from her lips. Thin, yes, but finely drawn, an apology from the Creator for what he had done to her leg.

Nicholas forced his eyes away and picked up the needlework again, glad of the excuse to break his gaze, struggling to remember his thoughts.

‘Are you a juggler, Sir Nicholas?’

He thought she had not noticed. ‘Only to amuse myself.’ He remembered now, as he returned her stitchery to her, his question. Had she wanted him to forget? ‘Her marriage to Holland. Were you there?’

‘Yes, of course. It was a quiet affair.’

‘I meant the first time.’

She looked away. ‘The first time? Her marriage to Salisbury, you mean?’

‘No. Her first marriage to Holland. The secret one.’

She pursed the thin lips. ‘I was but four. They did not have a babbling babe present.’

He thought of her at four and smiled.

She did not. ‘Now, as you have reminded me, I have duties to perform in the here and now.’ She put the needlework in a pouch and reached for her walking stick.

‘Let me...’ He reached to help her, still not knowing why, again resenting her for his discomfort.

She turned a frigid gaze on him. ‘I have lived twenty-five years without your help. I do not need it now.’

He gritted his teeth to hold back sharp words. ‘Then I shall not offer it again.’

He watched her hobble away, anger mixing with guilt for thinking ill of her when he should be filled with pity.

Yet pity was the last thing he felt. She wore her limp as proudly as a knight might wore his scars earned by prowess in war.

No, he was feeling something else even more surprising.

Want.

He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. He had been too long without a woman. On his trip to Canterbury, he’d make a detour to Grape Lane and find a woman with fair hair and lush lips and blue eyes who did not hurl prickly insults at him.

Strange, he puzzled again, watching her stumble back to the lodge, for Lady Joan to keep such a woman with her, and not only because of her tart tongue. Typically, such persons were shunned, or discreetly kept out of sight. This woman, on the other hand, was ever close to her lady. And while she could not agilely leap to perform tasks, she seemed to be in charge of others who did.

Well, he was not here to wonder about a lady-in-waiting. He was here to make sure the Prince could wed his lady love.

After that, he’d be gone.

* * *

‘Come, Anne,’ Lady Joan said, patting the bench beside her as Anne returned to her chambers. ‘Where have you been? We must speak of all that is to be done before the wedding.’

Anne hobbled over to the bench and sank onto it, more tired than usual. Her first thought was to tell her lady that Nicholas had asked dangerous questions.

Her second thought was to keep that secret to herself.

But her lady, speaking of the wedding, did not question further, so Anne pulled out her needle and thread and settled in to listen.

Her lady demanded all her attention and more. She was as jumpy as a cat, Anne thought, prowling the chamber, speaking of one idea, then another, her fabled calm shattered.

Lady Joan was unaccustomed to being without a man. When Thomas Holland had been gone to war, well, that was one thing. But he died late in December, in Normandy, she by his side. It had been a blur, those next weeks. Packing, moving back across the Channel. Anne had expected peace and mourning when they returned.

But her lady was not a woman who could live for long without a husband. How many weeks had it been after they returned before she was looking for her next companion? Barely enough to mourn the man. And Joan was not only the most beautiful woman in England, she was also the most wealthy. She had her pick of men, clustered, pleading their cases.

But she had waited for the best catch of them all. And a man she had known in the nursery.

Anne had no opinion about Edward of Woodstock. She couldn’t afford to. Some tongues had wagged. The lusty widow. But if it had been Anne, the Prince would not have stirred her lust.

Unbidden, she thought of Nicholas. He of the strong brows and the rugged nose and the lips that...

She shook her head. The man’s lips were no longer of any interest to her unless they were speaking of something of interest to her lady.

‘We must craft the celebration carefully,’ the Countess was saying. ‘It must not be so gay that it dishonours those taken by the pestilence, yet it must be grand and appropriate to a future King and Queen.’ A perplexed pout quivered on her lips. ‘And yet, it is a ceremony for two who are already married.’

‘Not in the eyes of the Pope.’ Anne swallowed, wishing she could recall the words. She knew better than to speak so bluntly to her lady. Sparring with Sir Nicholas had made her tongue tart.

Lady Joan blinked, as if her pet monkey had suddenly nipped her. ‘The Pope will get his chapels. All will be as it must.’

‘If Sir Nicholas obtains the proper blessing from the Archbishop.’

Now, the Countess turned her full gaze on her. ‘You assured me there was nothing to fear. Have you spoken to him again? Has something changed?’

Yes. He was asking questions, the very questions neither she, nor her lady, wanted to answer. But to say so would be to admit she had whiled away a few minutes in the sunshine with a handsome knight who actually looked at her. To admit that instead of avoiding him, she had spoken to him of wants...

She cleared her throat and shook her head, looking at her stitches instead of at her lady. ‘I only mean that if he is looking into the past, he might become curious. He might ask more questions.’

Reassured, the Countess waved her hand. ‘He will find little.’

That, of course, was what she was afraid of. And what would Nicholas Lovayne do then? No doubt he would be loyal to his Prince, just as she was to her lady.

‘I know!’ The Lady Joan stopped her pacing. ‘After the wedding, we’ll have a celebration. A tournament before all the people to prove that we have triumphed over the death that haunts our land.’

Anne smoothed her fingers over the silver stitches, holding back a pointed reply. Only Jesus Christ triumphed over death.

But her lady was speaking of dresses and colours...

‘Shall he come to the wedding?’

‘Who?’ Her lady returned to the bench and placed cool fingers on Anne’s forehead. ‘Are you ill? You are not like yourself today.’

No, she was not. She was still dizzy with confusion. ‘I meant Sir Nicholas. Since he helped to make it possible.’

A shrug. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Then how am I to avoid him? Until he leaves for Canterbury, I cannot refuse to speak to him without creating questions.’

The smile, always the smile that disguised the workings of her lady’s mind. Anne tried to compose her face so, but she was not good at lies.

‘No, no. I see. You are right. He has done us a great service.’ She patted Anne’s hand. ‘Stay close to him. Treat him as a close friend.’

She had wanted only forgiveness for the sin already committed, not an obligation to seek him out again. ‘I am not a woman to capture a man’s attentions.’

The look of pity on Lady Joan’s face made her wince. No. Her lady had not thought so either. ‘I only meant you should keep him amused. Diverted. Men without war must be kept busy.’

‘Perhaps that would be better left to someone who could dance with him.’ The thought of deliberately getting close to Nicholas Lovayne unsettled her. As if she might, like the moth, singe her wings on the flame.

‘A woman need not dance with a man to keep him entertained.’

Anne knew that as well as anyone. She knew enough how to distract people so they would not notice...other things. She made the final stitch on the Prince’s badge, glad to lay it aside. Black and silver were dreary colours. ‘This one is finished, my lady.’

‘Good. Now, show me how the aumônière is coming. Will it be ready next week?’

Anne put aside the Prince’s badge to show her lady the needlework that would become an alms purse. Because her feet did not work, her fingers worked even harder. How many pouches had she created in her time? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? Each one given away for a man to give to his lady, or for a lady to entice her man.

This one showed two lovers, standing side by side in a garden, the lady fair and smiling.

‘Your stitching is as expert as the guild’s work, Anne. This looks just like Edward and me.’

‘Thank you, my lady.’

And because she pleased the Lady Joan, Anne did not have to beg for alms from men and women with purses such as these.

‘I know! Make one of these for Sir Nicholas to give to his lady as a thank you from me. Find out who she is. That will keep his thoughts away from other things.’

His lady. Of course he must have one. ‘But what if it doesn’t?’ Anne knew enough of him to know he was not a stupid man. ‘What if he asks of things he must not know?’

Lady Joan paused, staring at Anne as if she had not understood the question. ‘Why, then, you will lie,’ she said, as if she had said Anne might sup on beef stew.