Awaken My Fire (17 page)

Vincent watched her response carefully. Surprise lifted on her lovely face and he knew before she answered that it was a false accusation. Then just as quickly the name produced some unspeakable fear, and for a long moment he was lost trying to imagine what that man had done to her to produce that fear...

"I do not speak his name, much less of him. Cisely"— she turned to her woman—"Where is Joan now?"

Cisely alone knew why Joan's name always followed the mention of the Duke of Burgundy. For Roshelle had told her of the day he had threatened her and bent her to his will, keeping Roshelle in this place called Reales and from Charles and the court of Orleans, where she belonged.

Someday I will come for her, Roshelle. The day you leave Reales, for instance. The day she leaves Reales would certainly be another instance...

"Joan is safe in the kitchen now, with Damara," Cisely reassured her.

The anxiety left Roshelle's eyes and she turned back to her antagonist. "Besides, as you well know, there being no limits to his depravity, the Duke of Burgundy has fallen to his knees to your Henry!"

The sincerity with which she uttered this almost made Vincent laugh. "Your grasp of politics is limited indeed. If only that were half true."

"Has he not joined Henry against us?"

"Aye, he has sworn fealty to Henry, but I fear his oath lacks the necessary credibility of his actions. And speaking of actions, milady, the particular act of murder—"

"I did not kill your brother!"

"The common cry of murderers and, I suppose, murderesses, not that these last are very common, and thank God for that. Most of your sex have the good sense to keep home and hearth, minding children and underlings. And speaking of these things, madame, why the devil are you unmarried still? Leaving three sizable fiefdoms without a lordship."

The question first confused her. Why was she not married? All the world knew why she was not married. No man, be he highborn or low, would have her.

"Do you mean to taunt me with that question?"

"Taunt you?" His thick dark brows drew together with his own confusion at this response. For a long moment, he was lost in the strange sadness that had sprung into her eyes. He could hardly explain the effect, just what it was and how it displayed itself. Perhaps a faint veil of tears changed the light in those bright pools, making a brief though haunting manifestation of some carefully suppressed grief. "How might my simple question mock you?"

Innocent blue eyes widened; she could hardly believe this. "You must know how! If you think these barbed comments pain me, think again." And she lied. "They do not! I am resigned to my dire fate."

"Your dire fate?" Vincent questioned, glancing at Wilhelm, who shrugged with the same confusion. All he knew was that the tangemont before him had been widowed twice and land-rich to start; she was one of the richest women on the continent. By law she should be married. By title alone, her issue would stand to inherit a goodly portion of this wretched country.

Unless what she meant by her dire fate was that Henry wanted—nay, demanded—her head. Which was, of course, a problem. Rodez Valois's correspondence to the good captain of the garrison, John of Suffolk, had made it very clear that the entire Burgundian court thought it wildly amusing that a young girl held off an entire English garrison for two months, despite their forsworn fealty to Henry. What was far worse, those carefully penned words left little doubt that Rodez Valois would not intercede to save the girl's head from the sharp, exacting blade of the guillotine.

The question was why Rodez Valois wouldn't intercede for the girl. Moral obligations aside, if Roshelle de la Nevers died before she was married again, the church would gain her lands. Rodez would lose everything. And why hadn't the church forced Rodez to get her married again?

"Milady," Vincent began with a pretense of diplomacy, "I will ask again. All I want to know is why the Duke of Burgundy hasn't married you off.''

Roshelle's blue eyes widened slightly, as if he had raised an angry hand to her face. As if he had insulted her.

Slowly, with mounting ire, she replied, "You would make me say it! Why? To amuse yourself at my expense? To make tired masculine jests about it? Do you not think I have not heard these poor joke all these years? And I daresay anyway"—she lowered her eyes—"the duke is content to collect his outrageous rents and tithes from my land, leaving me to God's will."

The words made little sense and he stared as if she were daft. Indeed, Wilhelm leaned toward him and whispered just out of the girl's hearing, "The lady makes as much sense as a drunken beggar at dawn . . ."

"Aye," Vincent agreed, then of Roshelle, he asked, "What be this God's will? Do we have a language problem?" The question was asked in French, as if she would make more sense in her own tongue. "Even if the duke is greedily raping your land, why does the church let him? I have never heard of the church contentedly watching such a dowry waste away like this."

"The church is as impotent as he is! My fate belongs to God, His will be done—"

Two guards entered without knocking, approaching Vincent to confer in whispers. Just like that, she was for gotten. A red-hot fury took hold of her; she had never felt violence as she did now. It was all so unfair! The sheer injustice of the situation seized the whole of her, worse with her utter damnable helplessness to change the reality of his presence: the very idea that he, the Duke of Suffolk, lord of the English realm, stood in her private chambers insulting her, then again with his maddening, capricious inattention!

"Tsk, tsk." Wilhelm leaned toward her, confiding intimately, "Mind thy manners, milady. You already have too much of his attention, and trust me, you want no more of it."

Her blue eyes flew to his face in outrage.

“
Playing with the duke is not just playing with fire, but, well"—Wilhelm only laughed—" 'tis playing with fire when your own flesh is but made of straw."

The great big man chuckled heartily, and she half expected to feel the palm of his hand on her back, as if 'twas a fine jest indeed. For a moment she was speechless, utterly speechless. No mortal soul had ever spoken to her so... so familiarly—

She stared in disbelief as Moonshine, one of her favorite cats, curled around the duke's legs. The traitorous feline! The capricious, no-good traitor—she would string him up and hang him out her window!

Fascinated, Roshelle watched as Vincent bent down, picked the cat up and stood again, his fine, strong hands gently coaxing a loud purr from the fellow as he leveled a series of quick orders. He then dismissed the guards and at last turned back to Roshelle. He started to speak, but a small voice stopped him. His darkly intelligent eyes found Cisely, noticing her for the first time as she said, "Please, you must withdraw now so that milady may digest the sorrows of our day."

He started to object, but Wilhelm's hand on his shoulder cautioned him, and Cisely was thankful for the intervention. All she knew was the way the duke stared at Roshelle scared her to the depth of her soul. As if he would devour Roshelle where she stood. All they needed now was two dead lords of Suffolk.

“
Gathering all her courage, she added, "Milady hath been through much. She needs to rest."

Wilhelm looked at the slight, petite woman with new respect. Vincent considered her words and finally nodded. "Very well. We shall save this, ah, less-than-enlightening conversation for later." He turned to Wilhelm, suddenly speaking in a strange tongue Roshelle had never heard. An animated conversation ensued. She still watched the cat in his arms--vaguely grasping Henry's name, and mortis, which meant death, but she could hardly pay the strange English patois a piece of her mind, the intensity of his stare so unnerved her, somehow fueling the fury she felt. Then with an equally maddening, boyish kind of grin, he remarked, "Saints alive, look at the girl's eyes—like bright blue flames, they are! Ah, Wilhelm, I am in trouble this time." He chuckled. "The fates have played me a cruel hand indeed."

"I tried to warn the lass, but I might have saved my breath—Adam being the first man, though God knows not the last, to realize there's no talking sense to a woman."

With chuckles and nods, they turned to leave. "Ah." Vincent turned back with an afterthought. “'Until your noticeably negligent guardian can be summoned to appear at your trial to speak for you, you will be confined to these chambers."

Every last semblance of decorum and indeed sense fled as her chest filled like a sail caught in the wind. Cisely, shaken to her bones, dropped to her knees in distress, missing the quick reach as Roshelle picked up the largest thing nearest her. A large, thick book hit Vincent square on the head. He swung back around, and before she managed to take aim with the large vase she clutched in both hands overhead, a booted foot flew through the air, knocking it against the open window. A crash sounded as it hit the ground.

Roshelle cried out in pain, ducking his arms. Too late. He had caught her back up against the overwhelming strength of his body, no consideration in the harsh hold. Until that moment she had not realized the extreme gentleness with which he had dealt with her; she noticed it now only because it was gone. "I hate you! I hate you! Your detestable English presence—I hate you—"

"Hate me all you want; I care little for the adolescent sentiments of a misbehaving young lady, but be forewarned: the very next time you raise a violent hand against me, I will let you feel the consequences of doing so." Then he thought to remind her. "Husband or no, guardian or no, only by my grace do you now draw breath. You, milady, would do well to remember it."

Shaking his head, Wilhelm followed Vincent down the hall. The situation seemed so much worse than Vincent's words. Received just that morning, Henry's message, full of sound and fury, commanded Vincent to set the girl on her knees beneath the blade of a guillotine. Henry cared not at all if her death made her a martyr, so long as it also suppressed any last idea of rebellion. That assurance was enough for him. No doubt Henry also sought to punish Rodez, the Duke of Burgundy—this for withholding the revenues and men that Henry claimed as King of England and Wales and now Brittany, Harcourt and Calais.

Henry wanted the girl's head.

The trouble was that Henry always got what he wanted.

"God Almighty!" Rob of Manchester cursed as he sat down at the white-clothed table on the dais in the great hall. "How can a man eat with this stench?"

"Only the wretched French could live with such a foul odor—hell, it permeates their very skin from the day of birth-"

"I am hungry enough to ignore it," Thomas of Suffolk said, adding, “'For now.''

"Five pounds sterling 'tis the first thing his Grace sets right in the dung heap called Reales."

The older man's hands trembled with rage and humiliation as he set goblets in front of these men, forced to serve the twelve men of the Duke of Suffolk's personal guard. Never had he heard of extending the privilege of sitting in a hall to one's personal guard: only the titled landed class reserved that right. At least in the civilized countries. The duke's order that put these men at the table upset his sensibilities to no end, more when no maid in all of Reales felt brave enough to serve them—"They are like giants! They look so mean and war-worn, as if they had never touched a soft thing in their life! I feel faint every time one casts his gaze my way!"

A common sentiment around Reales. Now he, Lance of Reales, ward of the kitchen, had to serve these savages, and he did so only for Lady Roshelle. Only for her. Roshelle had said to the people, "We have been beaten but we have not lost. As long as we keep the courage to dream, we have not lost/" He began pouring watered-down ale into the goblets, not bothering to hide his animosity. Why should he? When the duke kept Lady Roshelle prisoner in her rooms, preparing to try her for a crime she had not committed?

The man Bryce looked up to notice him. He sat tall and looked menacing, with his thick beard and long hair, unnaturally proud of the plaited tail it made halfway down his back. What Lance noticed were the battle scars on his arms, more battle scars than on the blessed Saint Sebastian himself. "What goes here?" Bryce wondered. "Are there no women in Reales to serve our table?"

Tight-lipped, Lance managed, "The women are engaged elsewhere." He moved on to the next, motioning to Peter, a weary young page, to place the rye bread out, wanting this over.

"A pity for sure, a sorrowful pity," Bryce replied, "France, this land of the dying and the damned, has only one redeeming issue, and that is the comeliness of the wenches. No finer-looking women in the world."

The great long table of men agreed heartily to the observation. "Aye," Thomas added, nodding. "Though their faces be plain and lead the eye to roam elsewhere, how the roaming is thus rewarded!"

The men laughed uproariously; Lance's face reddened as he listened to the increasingly ribald comments about Frenchwomen from these beastly men. "Though say," Thomas asked the group at large. “Did you not see the Lady Roshelle?"