At the Queen's Summons (9 page)

He brought her hands to his lips and kissed her fingers softly, all the while holding her gaze with his. She made him uncomfortable with her lost, needy look, because it reminded him of what he could never give her.

She needed the constant, unconditional love of a man to heal her and help her learn to love and value herself. He could not possibly be that man.

Ah, he could love her passionately and well.

But not forever.

E
ven now, weeks after sending my missive to London, I flay myself for heaping woe upon the right brave shoulders of the O Donoghue Mór. I had hoped to soften the blow with the news that the Harridan—that is to say, his lady wife—is gone from his life, but the bishop equivocates and wrings his fat hands and procrastinates. Sometimes I think he fears the Sassenach more than the O Donoghue Mór, which is a grave mistake.

Although I felt it was my duty to inform Aidan about the insurrection, I hope he will not stray from his course in London. An agreement with Elizabeth, she-king of the isles, is our last, best hope. Especially now, and may the dreadful Almighty bless and preserve us.

All his life, my lord of Castleross has been most cruelly buffeted between forces that claim his loyalty, his energy, his love. His father taught him naught but hatred and war, raiding and reiving. I think I am the only one who sees him for what he truly is—a man torn between desire and duty, a son bound to fulfill the dream of a
despised father, a chieftain struggling to meet the needs of his people.

Sometimes, in those half-awake pagan dreams that get me in such trouble with the abbot, I see the O Donoghue Mór striking forth unfettered like Fionn Mac Cool along the Giants' Causeway, walking not into the nest of vipers his district has become, but away, far away, toward a freedom earned with the sweat of his brow and great blessed pieces of his too generous heart.

—Revelin of Innisfallen

“Y
our Vast Abundance,” Pippa announced in the voice she affected to cry up a show, “fortune favors you today.” She smiled eagerly as Aidan looked up from the table where he, Donal Og and Iago were deep in conversation.

Donal Og sent her his customary “go away” scowl. Unwilling to let him dampen her plans, Pippa stuck her tongue out at him. “I was going to invite you along as well, but I might not.”

Iago shot up from the table. “Where are we going?”

She beamed at him. Unlike Donal Og, Iago was always game for an adventure.

With Aidan, she could never tell.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose in a way that spoke of a sleepless night. She wished she could alleviate his worries, but he would not even share the nature of his concerns. Didn't he realize how much she cared? How much she longed to take his beautiful, weary face between her hands and ease the frown from his brow with kisses?

“Come along, my lord Reluctance,” she urged, embarrassing herself with her own thoughts. “Even Atlas
had to let go with one hand to scratch his arse every once in a while.”

Aidan rolled his eyes. “How can I refuse such a charming offer?”

“She bestows more titles than the queen herself,” said Donal Og.

“Ah, but I give them much more cheaply, Sir Donal of the Small Wit.”

“To what do we owe this honor, Mistress Trueheart?” Aidan asked.

She felt an itchy flush creep up her neck to stain her cheeks. Blushing.
She
was blushing. How ridiculous. She was becoming as soft as a wool merchant's wife.

“You seem to need a diversion, my lord. In the past two days you have done nothing but write letters and yell at your men and pace and swear. And drink sack like it was rainwater.”

“The perils of being a chieftain,
pequeña,”
said Iago.

She dipped a brief curtsy in his direction. Wearing decent clothes suited her better than she ever would have thought. “I have decided to take you to the public theater.”

Iago clapped his huge hands. “Capital!” Then his thick brows clashed in puzzlement. “What is the public theater?”

Pippa spread her arms, wanting to embrace all three of them. “It's anything you want it to be.”

 

An hour later Pippa stood in the stableyard, staring at a saddled horse as if it were a fire-breathing dragon. “I don't see why we can't walk.”

“Ah, it'll be quicker,” Aidan said. “You're not afraid, are you?”

“Afraid?” Her voice squeaked up an octave. “I? Pippa Trueborn, afraid of a—a midge-witted beast of burden?”

Aidan regarded her with laughing blue eyes. “I thought your first ride might frighten you, and I was right. I suppose we could both mount Grania—”

“Ha!” She poked a finger at the front of his doublet. “Watch me.” In a whirl of skirts and indignation, she seized the saddlebow and attempted to hoist herself on the back of the tall bay. The horse's nostrils flared, and it sidled. “Come here, you flap-eared pestilence.” She grabbed the saddle and managed to shove her foot into a dangling loop. The midge-wit chose that moment to trot across the yard. Shrieking, Pippa hopped along with the horse. “Oh God, the evil carrion's going to kill me,” she yelled. “By all that's holy, save me!”

She had just taken a huge breath, readying herself for another shriek, when a pair of strong arms grasped her around the waist. It was Donal Og, laughing so hard she could feel his vast bulk trembling against her. Iago caught the bay's reins and guffawed. She treated them to a prodigious stream of oaths, which only increased their mirth, while Aidan, equally amused, disengaged her foot from the stirrup.

She staggered against him, then pushed back from his chest to glare at them all. “Braying clog-brains,” she said. “I will ride this horse, even though I have scambling clowns for teachers.”

To her surprise, it was Donal Og who proved to be most helpful. Though the big man took pains to appear gruff, he failed to hide his air of good-humored patience. It was he who showed her the proper way to hold the reins. He helped her hook one leg over the sidesaddle to keep her balance. Iago calmed the horse with a steady patter of lilting nonsense. Before long she sat proud and beaming, certain she had mastered the art of riding.

As the four of them left the yard, she asked, “My lord, what is this horse's name?”

“Didn't I tell you?” The O Donoghue Mór winked. “He is called Midge.”

They rode out into Woodroffe Lane, leaving the narrow byways behind and trotting across Finsbury Fields, scattered with windmills. They passed Holywell, teeming with holidaymakers and their picnics. In the distance, the playing flag of the theater fluttered on the wind, and she gave a whoop of gladness.

Making a loud, urgent noise proved to be a mistake. The gelding surged out of its bearable trot into a full gallop. Pippa hollered in terror and clung, her fingers twining in the horse's flying mane. She looked down to see the ground racing past at a furious rate. Aidan shouted something, but she could not understand.

The knowledge that she was about to die a violent death was unexpectedly and intensely liberating. Acceptance stripped away the terror, and she found that the emotion building inside her was no longer fear, but joy. Never had she moved so swiftly. It was like flying, she decided. She was a feather on the breeze, rising higher and higher, and nothing else mattered but the speed.

Twin shadows encroached upon her. Aidan and Donal Og. They came up on either side, forcing her horse to slow. Like the feather, she settled slowly back to earth, her white-knuckled hands relaxing, her mouth widening in a grin of pure delight.

“We made it, my lord,” she said, her voice trembling. “Look.” Ahead of them loomed a rambling barn and a horse pond, and beyond that, the theater rose like a citadel.

Still exhilarated from the thrill of the ride, she slid to the ground. With a shaking hand, she gave the reins to a
waiting groom. Aidan and his companions did the same, tossing coppers to the grooms and admonishing them to look after the beasts.

“Mind his mouth, then,” she called after the boy leading her gelding away. “And give him a good long drink.” The very idea of someone actually doing her bidding was heady indeed.

Beneath the playing flag gathered an audience of all manner of persons—nobleman, merchant, beggar and bawd. She tugged at Aidan's sleeve and led them toward the penny gate. “If you don't wish to pay, we can go stand in the yard, but for a penny each, we can—”

“I want to watch from up there.” He pointed to the stairway leading to the curving rows of seats.

“Ah, my lord, it's a higher fare, and besides, the seats are for gentry.”

“And what are we?” Iago asked with a haughty sniff. “Groundlings?”

She laughed. “I've always been perfectly comfortable with the penny public. Actors love us, for we laugh and cheer in all the right places. The Puritans hate us.”

“Speak to me not of Puritans,” Aidan said. “I have had my fill of such people.”

“Ah, have you encountered your share of black crows, Your Reverence?”

Donal Og's reply, in Irish, seemed to indicate concurrence, possibly empathy, but before she could demand a translation, Iago hastened them toward the stairs.

“Wait,” she said, balking. “I haven't a mask.”

“You have now.” Aidan held out a black silk half mask. “It is a curious practice, but the English are a curious race.”

As she tied on the mask, she wished he had not spoken like that, pointing out how very foreign he was in the only world she had ever known.

But as she climbed the steps with her remarkable escorts, a sense of wonder filled her. As many times as she had come to stand with the penny public, she had never bought a seat at the theater.

The magnificent building was designed in circular fashion like the bear garden in Southwark. The sloping stage jutted out into the center of the arena. Paint and paste brought to life a colorful world of the imagination.

As they emerged onto the seating tier, people stared at Aidan, Donal Og and Iago. Flushed behind her silken mask, Pippa tilted up her chin in self-importance, enjoying the slack-jawed looks of awe and admiration. Iago, with his dark skin and colorful garb, was the most striking of the three, but Donal Og and Aidan, towering head and shoulders above the prosperous merchants and gentlemen, also garnered their share of admiring looks.

“Diablo!”
Iago exclaimed, jumping and turning. “Someone
pinched
me.”

Pippa smothered a giggle. A plump woman in a cherry-colored gown winked from behind a feathered mask at Iago. But then another woman, whose bosom all but erupted from her bodice, turned her attention to Aidan, lowering her eyelids halfway and running her red tongue over her lips.

Pippa grabbed Aidan's sleeve and pulled him along the riser. “Stay away from such as that one,” she warned.

His eyes danced with merriment. “And why should I be doing that?”

“She is a wanton pestilence. You mark my words.”

“I mark them,” he said, laughing.

Pippa took a deep breath. “She might give you something you can't wash off.”

He made a choking sound. Then he put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Painted cows have little appeal for me.”
His voice was low and intimate. “I much prefer the charm of innocence.”

She felt wingbeats of joy fluttering inside her. Then he winked. “Not to mention a talent for juggling.”

A thrill of excitement chased up her spine. She clung to his arm, so proud to be the favored partner of the O Donoghue Mór that she did not even feel the floor beneath her feet. Like a dry sponge, she absorbed the ways of the nobility, learning to flutter a fan in front of her bosom, to crook her finger daintily as she sampled the fare, to cover her mouth as she laughed at some jest on the stage.

The play concerned a thrice cuckolded husband and his insatiable wife, and Pippa enjoyed it thoroughly, though the drama was not what she would remember that day. Nor would she recall sampling the pies and nuts and comfits Donal Og bought from the trays of the concession men.

What she would remember was being with Aidan. Hearing the rich music of his laughter. Stealing glances at his magnificent profile. Mimicking the manners and expressions of the noble ladies, even though he protested that such posturing moved him not.

Pippa forgot to perform the ritual she had always done in the past. Every time she found herself in a crowd of people, she searched each face for something vague yet familiar—a tilt of the head, a lift of the mouth, something to mark her connection with another human being; something that would make her a member of a family.

Yet today her usual obsession lay quiet inside her. She wondered why, and answered the question in her heart.

When she was with Aidan O Donoghue, she did not
need
a family, for she belonged, heart and soul, to him.

 

He wondered how old she was. Some women wore their age like a coat of arms, this or that detail announcing plainly, whether she liked it or not, that she was eighteen, or twenty-six, or thirty-two.

Not so Pippa, bouncing at his side, laughing and squealing in delight at the farce on the stage. One moment he was certain she was no more than sixteen, girlish and breathless and fresh as the dawn. Then the melancholy would sweep like a mist over her, and she would make some observation that was so wise and world-weary that he would swear she was as old as time.

A troupe of clowns scurried out on stage, conking each other on the heads with mallets. Pippa threw back her head and guffawed, slapping her knees and forgetting she was amid noble ladies.

“How old are you?” Aidan finally asked. In the same moment that he spoke, he cursed himself for an idiot. He should not care.

Still laughing, she turned to him, then slowly sobered to that piercing earnestness against which he had no defense.

“I don't know,” she said.

“How can you not know?”

She ducked her head. Laughter and applause masked their conversation so that he had to put his head very close to hers in order to hear. “You forget, my lord,” she said. “I was not born, I was
found
. Who can say what my age was then? Two? Three? Four?”

He guessed that she was born out of wedlock and abandoned by a mother who couldn't afford to keep her, or perhaps she was orphaned when the mother died. The golden brooch and the expensive frock in which she had been found were intriguing clues. Yet even if she did
come from noble stock, that did not change her circumstances now. She was utterly alone in the world. All Aidan knew for certain was that she had been wounded by a horrible force—the wound of abandonment.

The pain in her eyes made him want to flinch. “My lord, I can never keep from wondering. Was I
meant
to be found, or to lie there and die?”