Awaken My Fire (22 page)

And stared. Over a skin-tight undergarment of pale rose, whose long sleeves reached her knuckles, she wore a tight-fitting gown of pink and maroon. This had elbow-length sleeves and a low neckline. Too low, he realized as he stared too long at the fabric tightly drawn over her full breasts before noticing the pink belt tied snugly at her waist. The maroon color was striking against her pale skin and rich auburn hair. A small gold cross hung from her neck, and like a cloistered nun, she clasped it tightly with one small hand. Her hair was braided and wrapped into two large round circles on either side of her head toward the back, not unlike a halo. A small wisp of red-brown hair escaped the delicate curve of her hairline, the russet color vivid and rich against the ivory of her skin. Her breaths came quick and shallow. Two red streaks spread, like the strokes of a careless painter, across her cheeks. She was hardly oblivious of his appraisal.

Desire struck him like a sharp shaft in his chest. He tried to banish it, but success proved as elusive as a dream upon waking. He settled for ignoring it.

"I see you've recovered from your ordeal.” A wave of his hand dismissed her guards and servants. The four anxious men and her hesitant servants left. Cisely came to stand timidly behind Roshelle, her eyes widening as she took in the scope of the work being done all around her and the sheer force of the masculine presence surrounding them.

"No thanks to you. A lesser person would have floundered in there." Thanks to a devout upbringing, she knew how to put the full force of her mind into prayer—prayers, to her shame, that were interrupted only with maddeningly persistent thoughts of Vincent de la Eresman. Thanks to Papillion, she knew how to keep unwanted creatures from trespassing too close—a relatively simple trick. Any other woman would have gone mad with terror.

The girl's frank arrogance made him smile. "No doubt true," he said, and in the same tone of voice, "Samson, fetch some water." A man shouted to another, and within the space of a minute, the cask appeared before him. He splashed some over his face, then set it to his lips and drained it.

Roshelle abruptly realized the idiocy of her stare. As if his every movement were a source of fascination! She looked away, gathering her tumultuous thoughts as she cleared her throat. "What do you mean by this?" Her hand swept the area in the way of an indictment.

"This? I assume you mean all this laboring, yes? I'm having the gatehouse taken down."

"What madness makes you do this? Has Reales not suffered enough destruction at English hands?"

To her surprise, the question seemed to anger him. "Indeed. And I am astonished by how much."

She was suddenly staring at the wide width of his back as he walked away. Confusion hit her hard. What did he mean by that? A confession?

The men returned to work. With a lift of her skirts, she rushed to catch up to him. Cisely nervously followed.

Roshelle practically had to run to keep pace. "You must stop! You must—"

As if her words were a command, he stopped and turned to face her again. She nearly ran into his towering frame.

"You must stop! The gatehouse is a perfectly sound structure and—"

He took her arm to move her from the path of a cart. “'Twas a sound structure, but if you use your mind at all, milady"—he brushed her nose with his finger as if she were a young, ignorant child—"you can easily see it will be useless once the moat is filled in."

No sooner had the words been uttered than she caught sight of the men dumping dirt into the water. "The moat? Oh, not the moat, too! You cannot!" He had started walking again and she raced again to catch up. "We need the moat! ‘Tis the primary defense at Reales! The first defense!"

He rejoined Bogo at the platform, immediately inundated with questions and news from the half-dozen men waiting for him there. Ignoring her cries for the moment, he alternately listened and issued orders. One by one, the men left, until only his small, hawkish steward, the man Bogo, Wilhelm—lending a hand and a smile to Cisely—Roshelle and he stood there. Roshelle noticed nothing and no one. All she knew was, "You cannot fill in the moat! Without it we shall be the unhappy victims of any army or brigands who pass through here—"

"Are you expecting an army, sweetling?"

The taunting reference to the deplorable lack of a viable force to fight him pressed her lips to a hard line. "You cannot do this to us!" She clenched her fists at her side, not even noticing until his amused gaze dropped there. "You cannot! The English"—she spat the very word— "shall not be here forever, and when you leave, we will need our defenses intact. You must see this!"

“
'Quite the contrary. I have no intention of leaving. Now or in the future. As to what I see"—his gaze brushed intimately over her figure again—"all I see is a young lady whose presence is disturbing, to say the least."

"As I find your-presence more than disturbing!"

He laughed, and leaned over to whisper, "And believe me, I am fully aware of how much.''

Her blue eyes shot to his face, trying to assess the exact meaning of his words, but he only chuckled again, while Wilhelm thought to try and distract Lady Cisely from Vince's brass ridicule. He pointed to the river, and though he knew very well, he asked the fair maid if she could tell him its source.

Roshelle did not understand how this man could taunt her when all the world seemed to be crumbling at her feet. When his fist pounded the world to make it crumble. He was worse than his brother! Worse!

Then Vincent drew closer to explain, and his sudden nearness made her breath waver uncertainly, her gaze filled with the same. "And if it were just us, you and I, I do not think I would mind very much. However, it seems your presence has much the same effect on all men. Look."

Startled eyes lifted over their surroundings, where a number of men had stopped working, coalesced into small groups, nearly all of them smiling, chuckling, staring in her direction. Since the day she was born and her mother had held her over the castle tower for everyone to view, she had solicited the interested stares of people: it was a fact of life as common as drawing breath. That he thought it worthy of comment brought a surprised lift of her brow. "You would blame me for the sloth of your men?"

"Sloth?" He chuckled. "Sloth is not what you are inciting."

She ignored this comment as best she could. "We stray far from my point and purpose. I implore you to stop at once. The moat is our primary defense—"

"Ah, rest easy, milady." Wilhelm tore his gaze from a blushing Cisely and said in a more conciliatory tone. "We have more than enough men to defend this place, me-thinks, even in the worst of circumstances."

"This," Roshelle told them angrily, "is the worst of circumstances! These men cannot stay here forever, can they? Even you cannot hope to pay them for much longer."

"You demonstrate a surprising want of imagination," Bogo said, and with humor. "First, in possibly imagining this to be the worst of circumstances, and secondly, in assessing the limits to his Grace's fortune."

Her eyes locked with Vincent's as the others talked, and what she saw there caught her breath, holding her still and transfixed. Again. There were no limits to what her imagination saw in those darkly intelligent pools and what she saw as, peering thoughtfully over the rim of a goblet, he arrogantly brushed his gaze over her figure. Her face grew hot again. She covered her cheeks with her hands. He grinned at this, chuckling when she swung around in a transparent pretense of examining the work around her.

Wondering about that blush, Vincent motioned to a draftsman approaching with newly laid plans held reverently in his hands. "Bring these to me at supper. I will have a look." He turned behind him to call over to the place where the foundation for the new mill was dug. "Hanson, get two more dozen men there on the morrow. I want it finished in a fortnight." He pointed to where the foundation was being dug for the mill, turning back to find her staring at him, and came to the point. "I will not live with this foul odor a day more than I have to."

"Is that your reasoning? If you would give it but a week or so! That is all it takes before one learns to ignore it."

"Huh!" Wilhelm scoffed. "Look at Lady Cisely at your side, milady." All gazes turned to Cisely. "And how long has your very own sweet lady been here?"

Bogo and Vincent laughed as Cisely, blushing with embarrassment at having injured Roshelle's cause, slowly lowered the mouchoir she held at her nose.

"Well, well," Roshelle hastily tried to explain, "Cisely is, is, well, delicate! Very delicate. She always has been. I mean—"

"What a selfish brat!" Vincent said with a warm chuckle ending in an amused grin. The smile’s boyish levity and ease caught her full attention. It held her transfixed, and in that space of a moment, there were no wars, countries, kings or blood between them. "Because you are the only one in all of Reales who has escaped the stench of this moat, you expect all others to suffer with it."

"Escaped? What can you mean?"

The words were said haltingly, the last one uttered with a small gasp, as he took her hand in his and brought it palm-up to his face so he could drink deeply of the sweet perfume of her skin.

"My senses fill with the proof, milady."

She forgot to breathe. He could not touch her with impunity. For a thousand tiny shivers raced up her arm, tingling down her spine. And the look on her face announced the sensations for all the world.

Bogo rolled his eyes and returned to the scroll, while Wilhelm chuckled. They had both witnessed Vincent's effect on the fairer sex too many times to be surprised, though it was still a source of endless amusement, and all the more because of the lady’s endless profession of animosity for Vincent. Bogo often said he could hear women tremble with desire as Vincent passed, while Henry's comments were far more bawdy, and more to the point.

"Again we stray from the point," Roshelle said. "If 'tis just this odor, then I can fix you with sachets that will make the air in your chambers fine and sweet—"

"Do we have a hearing problem, sweetling? Even if you made the air sweeter than the heavens, that hell pit is still a breeding ground for disease. I will not—"

"What can you mean?" Her mind stopped on the issue of disease.

"Foul waters breed disease."

He might have just said the moon was made of sponge cake. "Water breeding diseases? I have never heard such a thing!" This was said as if proof of its existence depended on her knowledge of it. "What lunacy! Diseases are bred by the unbalanced phlegms. All the world knows this."

"All the ignorant know it," Bogo corrected her, his mind leaping to the explanation as it always did; he didn't know yet that he had at last met his match in the unlikely form of Countess Roshelle de la Nevers. "The learned hath discovered that foul water breeds diseases. The theory was first postulated by none other than the great and controversial Venetian physician Raphael de Lago, of course, and now supported not just by all learned physicians, but by all Venetians as well, anybody really who lives where waterways turn foul. For within a week after foul water is noticed, not only are insects many times multiplied, but so is the disease, both in types, severity and sheer numbers of those who succumb—"

"A spurious coincidence—no doubt the erroneous idea owes itself to the fact that the very factors that make water foul can also affect a body's balance of phlegms. And having studied with the wisest of all physicians, a mind far more knowledgeable of diseases and their ill effects than the next ten wisest physicians and surgeons in all the world, I can say with authority, 'tis simply not true."

"Indeed! And who might this highly revered authority of disease be? The town's midwife, mayhap?"

With eyes full of spite and venom, Roshelle stared. 'Twas no use talking to these men. They would not listen to reason. Their purpose was to ruin the castle and the land it supported. They did not care a farthing for the people, her people, the good and simple folks of Reales.

"The name of my teacher was Papillion, and if you think I will let you slander—"

"Papillion?" Shock changed Bogo's face. "Why, I do know that famous name," he exclaimed, his voice changing from scorn to wonder with its sound, drawing Vincent's sudden attention before answering it. "I have personally heard a series of lectures by the famous man at the Sorbonne. I am even a correspondent with one of his followers. The man was once a Franciscan, a counselor to the Orleans court and, some said, a seer as well, though he himself dismissed that claim, standing against his own personal experience, which was one of his most widely discussed ontological points—"

"Oh, he stood for this and then for that," Roshelle said, dismissing the idea. Actually, she got few of Papillion's philosophical points straight, his philosophy always seemed so complicated and irrelevant, though it was the only part of his wisdom she dismissed.