At the Queen's Summons (25 page)

 

Pippa lay awake that night, fuming about Felicity. At Richard's insistence she had been given a private chamber as a guest of honor.

Deep down, she reluctantly admired Felicity. Being married to the O Donoghue Mór and staying chaste was an exercise in greater willpower than Pippa could ever hope to possess.

“He has but to crook his finger, and I come running,” she muttered, punching her pillow. “At least the intolerant bitch has the courage of her convictions.”

Meanwhile, Aidan was trying to negotiate a treaty with Richard. His men wanted war. Pippa had heard them arguing in the guardroom. They spoke in Irish, but she could glean some of what was said. She understood enough to know how desperately Aidan loved his country and his people.

“Felicity, you foolish, foolish woman,” she whispered to the windy darkness. “You have no idea what you are missing.”

 

If he put Felicity aside, Aidan reasoned, then the terms of surrender she had signed as Lady of Castleross would be null and void. There would be no agreement with the Sassenach. But he knew the power of the Browne clan. Their rage could set a torch to wholesale slaughter.

Standing at the window in an upper-story room he had occupied since boyhood, he felt a lifting of his heart. The battle would come to a head whether he kept Felicity or not, and according to Revelin, he had permission from
Rome to set her aside. He should send her to her father in Killarney.

The shame would slay her. But she was the one who had betrayed her marriage vows and barred him from her bed.

The thought of being free intoxicated him. Free to show Pippa what was in his heart. It was like a blessing from heaven. God, how he wanted her!

He would tell Felicity first thing in the morning. She might have driven Revelin away, but she would not deter Aidan from carrying out the annulment.

A latch clicked and the chamber door swished open. He turned, reaching for his shortsword.

A cloaked and hooded figure entered the room. “Stay your hand, my lord,” said a soft, female voice. “Please, I beg you.” She sank to her knees in a pool of pale moonlight.

“Felicity?” His hand relaxed. “What are you doing here?”

She dropped back the hood and opened the cloak to reveal that she was wearing naught but a translucent linen shift beneath.

He froze, transfixed. For the first time ever, he saw her unbound hair, sleek and rich as polished wood. He saw the dark tips of her generous breasts thrusting against the thin garment. He saw the ivory skin of her throat, with the pulse beating gently beneath the surface.

She raised her perfect face to his, and he saw the disquieting turbulence in her eyes, more pronounced than it had been earlier.

She took a deep breath. “I came here to do what I should have done the very night we were wed. I should have given myself to you then. But the Lord spoke to me and told me I must wait.”

“I see. And now the Lord tells you it is all right to spread your legs for me?”

She flinched at his crudeness. “It was wrong for me to refuse you. I know that now. I realized it the moment I saw you tempted by the evils of lust for another woman.”

“Nay, Felicity. You realized it the moment you knew I would set you aside and invalidate your treaty with the English.”

Her expression remained serene, empty of emotion. He lauded her self-possession, though there was a quality about it that discomfited him.

“I think not at all of the treaty,” she insisted. “Greater matters are at stake. Matters of the soul.”

“Madam,” he said, “you are a huge and constant liar.”

“No!” She glided to her feet. The gown wafted against her as she rushed to him. Her figure was outlined in silver moonlight. “I want you, my lord, my love. I always have. Surely you know how hard it was to keep from begging you to take me. I am begging now, Aidan. I can give you children—”

“Felicity,” he said softly, regretfully, “you will never get the chance.” Before she could protest he went on. “Life is short, and life does not wait for us to decide when and how to live it.”

He had a bleak, fleeting thought of how dazzled he had once been by her beauty, her purity. And by the idea that their union would also unite their two peoples. “We both made the mistake of trying to seize control of something that is out of our grasp.”

She flung herself at him and covered his face with kisses. Taken by surprise, he stepped back. “Felicity, please. Don't make this worse than it already is.”

“All will be well,” she whispered huskily. “Aidan, you are my husband!”

She moved nearer, and to avoid her, he stepped through the doorway to the stone-railed balcony. The cold air of a clear night blew over him. She followed and clung to him, whimpering and kissing his mouth, his chin, wherever she could reach.

“You never understood,” she said, her voice a chilling whisper in his ear, her grasping arms curving around behind him. She was clumsy yet insistent, and again he felt a pang of regret that any sweetness they might have shared had been doomed from the start.

“I did love you much, my lord,” she said.

“Nay, Felicity, nor did I ever truly love you.” Her arms still imprisoned him; he wished she would let go. “We must end this. Now. Tonight. Revelin has the papers all ready.”

“I will not let you shame me!”

At first he felt nothing; then a searing, sharp pain stung him. He froze, too amazed to move. The bitch had stabbed him in the back. She raised her arm to stab him again.

He gave a wordless cry and thrust her away. The wound sent icy tingles of shock and agony down his back. She lifted the small knife and rushed at him.

He caught her by both wrists. Images skipped past his blurring vision, and he realized he was on the verge of falling unconscious. “Don't do this, Felicity. It's mad, do you hear me?”

She tried to thrust down with the knife, but he tightened his grip. “You're destroying yourself, woman, not me,” he said through his teeth. With a little more pressure, he could snap her wrist, but he did not want to hurt her. “Just go back to your family. Blame it all on me. Tell them I'm an ogre, tell them I beat you or made you say the rosary. We can claim our barren state is my fault, we can say anything—”

“Never! You papist bastard!” The blade quivered in her hand.

He pressed his thumb into her pulse point, finding the nerve. She dropped the knife and went limp against him. Hot blood seeped down his back. He felt airy, without substance, as if he could float away. He needed to sit down, put his head between his knees, call for Iago to dress the wound.

But first he had to deal with Felicity. “It's over,” he whispered. “The whole ugly farce is over. Let us end it now before we hurt each other any more.”

She gazed up at him. “But I love you. And you love me.”

He was certain she missed the irony of the words she had said to the man she'd just stabbed in the back. “I wanted you in order to anger my father and please yours,” he explained. “You wanted me in order to further your Reformed crusade. We were wrong, both of us. It's over.”

“No,” she said, stepping back. She leaped up onto the stone railing. The wind caught at the hem of her cloak and tossed her beautiful long hair in a dark nimbus around her tormented face. “Not quite over, Aidan.”

“God, Felicity!” He took a stumbling step forward. “What are you doing? Please come down.” He heard himself repeating words he had said to Pippa just a short time ago. But Pippa had not been determined to destroy him no matter the cost to herself. Pippa's eyes had not shone with that silvery, manic light.

A grating sound came from somewhere above, the creak of hinges, perhaps. He ignored it and held out his hand. “I didn't mean any of it, darling,” he cajoled. “I'll take you to bed tonight, make love to you, make you so happy.”

“Your lies come too late.” She grasped the front of her shift and rent it asunder so that her pale breasts spilled out. She raked a hand across her chest, scoring her flesh with ugly red stripes. “Your lies will not save either of us now. Your lies will damn you to hell. By morning, they will all know you killed me.”

He lunged for her, but she was quicker, stepping back and then falling, falling, her hair and cloak billowing, her face a stark, white oval that disappeared into blackness.

Aidan clung to the railing and vomited. Sweat beaded his forehead as anger built in his chest. Even in death, she controlled him. By morning they would call him a murderer.

Unless he left now, in secret, and did not return until he had an army at his back.

 

Richard de Lacey handed Pippa a handkerchief. She dried her eyes and glanced up at him. “How many of these do you have?”

“Four more, I think.”

She gave a long, miserable sniff. “I shall need more than that.”

The sun had not shown its face. A dull rain drummed on the eaves of the small corner office where she sat with Richard and a woman named Shannon MacSweeney.

Shannon had come at dawn to see if the rumors that flew about Killarney were true. With her vivid red hair and tall, proud bearing, she resembled a flaming torch as she patted Pippa's shoulder and watched Richard with sharp green eyes.

“So she is dead for certain,” Shannon said.

“She is.”

“And did the O Donoghue attack her and fling her over the wall? That is what her father claims, and that is what
her cousin, Valentine Browne, announced at the village well.”

“Completely untrue,” Richard said furiously. “I saw it all. I heard voices, and looked out my window, which is directly over the terrace. She stabbed Aidan, then leaped up on the rail, rending her gown to make it look as if he had attacked her.” Richard's voice thickened with horror and grief. “He tried to get her to come down, but she jumped.”

Pippa crushed the handkerchief to her eyes, wishing she could scrub away the image his words made. “Why did he flee?” she whispered. “That only makes him look guilty.”

“He was right to flee,” Shannon MacSweeney said. “He'd be hanged by sunset if he stayed.”

“I would speak in his defense,” Richard insisted.

Shannon gave a bitter laugh. “Do you think that would matter? Fortitude Browne is looking for any excuse to be rid of Aidan O Donoghue.”

 

Filled with cold fury, the O Donoghue Mór swept down the Iveragh peninsula, mustering rebels from every hamlet and town. It was not hard to find violent, discontented men to follow him on his quest to take back Ross Castle. For a generation now, English rule had bowed their backs beneath greed and injustice. The recent hanging of rebels by Fortitude Browne in retaliation for Felicity's death had pushed them to the breaking point.

Willingly they took up arms, and within a month a formidable army was camped on the far shores of Lough Leane.

Pippa, who had spent most of the time at Innisfallen in the company of the canon Revelin, arrived by rowboat
at sunset. She spied Iago working with a company of archers. Watching their arrows
thunk
into straw, man-shaped targets made it all chillingly real. They meant to kill every last Englishman.

“Where is Aidan?” she asked Iago.

Iago's eyes widened. “You should not be here.”

“Just answer me, Iago.”

He looked at Revelin, who had come with her. “She should not be here.”

“Sure and who's going to stop her?” Revelin asked in his thick brogue. “Like a battering ram, she is, pounding away at a man's good sense until he all but begs her to do as she wills.”

Grim humor flashed in Iago's smile. “I see you have gotten to know our Pippa.”

“Well?” she demanded, speaking brusquely to cover her nervousness. “Where is he?”

Iago pointed. “Just there, at the edge of the woods, at the source of the spring.” He touched her shoulder and regarded her with troubled brown eyes. “There's a shrine to his mother there. And
pequeña,
he has been at the poteen, I fear.”

She tossed her head and struck out for the spring. “I've seen drunken men before.” Yet anxiety pounded in her chest as she passed through the encampment. The soldiers were silent, their anticipation palpable, like invisible taut threads strung across the camp.

The past weeks had been a turbulent time for the whole district, the English crying foul in the death of Felicity Browne O Donoghue, the Irish passionately proclaiming Aidan's innocence, and Richard de Lacey himself, still entrenched at Ross Castle, strangely silent. No doubt preparing for war.

She climbed a short, muddy pathway to the spring. A
beautiful stone Celtic cross stood beside the burbling waters.

Aidan did not seem to hear her approach. He sat upon a large rock, his elbows resting on his knees, a deerskin flask dangling from his fingers, and his hair, longer than ever, falling forward in unkempt hanks.