Awaken My Fire (25 page)

"I take it"—Bogo's voice rose with unconcealed sarcasm, as he was now all attention—"you have no proof of these crimes either?"

The man looked both confused and alerted, as if he'd been asked a question in a foreign tongue and had to listen carefully to catch a phrase or two that he understood. "Don't need proof," he decided to explain. "We all knows she done it. Why, all the lady does is puff up the lazy, no-good townsfolk, bad-talkin' 'er betters and gettin' 'em as riled up as a hornet's nest on fire. And what for? For this rebellion she sprung on us, that's what—"

"The court will hear no more of these unsubstantiated claims against the accused," Bogo said with sudden impatience, if not exasperation. "Let us move on to the night in question. Restrict your speech to the specifics of that night."

"Aye, the night in question," Miles began. "That night meself and a half dozen of the men are walkin' up the staircase with 'is lordship. The windin' one right behind ye." He pointed. "Well! The lady was hiding in the shadows for us, and when we least expect it like, she springs forth and hits Lord Edward hard over the head—"

"Hits him over the head with what?" Bogo asked.

"Ah . . . with, with—"

"Yes? Did you not see the weapon?"

"Ah, well, methinks 'twas a rod iron or a cooking pan—"

"Which was it? A rod iron or a cooking pan?"

"Twas dark—"

"It was dark? How dark? Were there no torches on the stairway?"

"Oh, aye, but, well, it all happened so fast, ye see. And the point of the matter be she hit Lord Edward so hard, he fell to his death!" Lowering his gruff voice, he explained, "Suddenly all her guards appeared with swords drawn for the kill. The fight was on." His narrowed dark eyes turned from Roshelle to meet Vincent's. "A fight that, like yourself, your Grace, I lost me dear little brother in. Killed, slaughtered like a pig at Michaelmas. Because of her—the witch!"

The viciousness with which his last words were uttered shocked the crowded hall into a stunned silence. All gazes turned to Vincent as if for the guidance on how to respond. Vincent stared unkindly at the man for several long moments afterward before at last he turned his gaze to Roshelle. Not with the accusation, but rather with pity.

Had Roshelle seen this, she might have felt a moment or two of hope, but as it was, the accusation of witchcraft—though rarely taken seriously by the church these days—could strike fear in the bravest of women. For in the not-too-distant past many an innocent girl had been burned for the offense. And with Papillion's training in alchemy and herbal medicine, she felt especially susceptible to accusation. The guillotine was frightening enough, but at least that was said to be quick and painless—though really, Roshelle oft wondered of late, who would know?—but few doubted that the stake was the slowest and most painful way to die.

Roshelle shivered from the heat of many gazes upon her. She kept her own on the plain tips of her worn slippers until she heard, "I would hear how the lady replies to the accusation."

"Yes," Bogo said, now quite interested, laying the large Bible on the table. "How does the lady reply to the accusation?"

She looked up to meet Bogo's gaze, sensing the unfaltering intelligence behind the man's misleading appearance, an intelligence that no doubt revealed the duke's perspicacity in choosing his people. Very well. Intelligence was a quality she was fully capable of answering.

In a moment’s span, she had gathered her courage. "Which of this man's fallacious exaggerations and misleading accusations would you now have me answer?"

A gray brow rose. "Why, any that the lady feels is deserving of an answer."

"Very well," she said in her clear yet soft musical voice, knowing there was no doubt now mat she had captured the full attention of these men. "I plead guilty to the accusation of ruining several of the English guards' boots, including the deceased Lord Edward's boots. I did so in retaliation for his raising the hearth tax as well as the mill fees by nearly half, which threw the already desperate townsfolk, villagers and farmers in Reales even further into debt. Few, if any, families will survive."

Roshelle tried desperately to state it as fact, without emotion, but this was not possible. Somehow each word she uttered communicated her pain, her compassion, her anger.

Miles Hartman shouted, "If Frenchmen worked half as hard as an Englishman—"

"An oft-heard cry from the Goddamns!" Roshelle cut him off. "I ask you, though, why should a Frenchman work when he gets nothing for his labors but an aching back and sleepless nights listening to his children wake for want of food? Why should he?" She turned and without realizing it, she pleaded with Vincent for his understanding. "The number of freemen left among the farmers and villagers is but a handful after all of the duke's and your deceased brother's rents, taxes, fines. And furthermore, I took this form of protest only after my appeals to Lord Edward's sadly wanting sense of justice fell, as ever, on deaf ears. Yet Phillips, the goodly shoemaker of Re-ales, never had anything to do with my indiscretion— though, as you have just heard, he was made to suffer much for it." Before Vincent might have responded, she added quietly, "And as for the question of Edward's manhood, I did indeed fix a potion to make him impotent."

"I knew it!" Miles jumped to his feet, shaking an accusing finger at her. "We all knew she did it. That hair of hers and this curse business, why, she fools people with all her talk of starving children and all—"

"You what?" Vincent's aristocratic, incredulous voice cut straight through his inferior's speech. The outburst silenced Miles. Vincent stood up and, bracing his weight on his long, outstretched muscular arms, fastened his gaze on Roshelle. "Do you expect me to believe you made a potion that affected my brother's, ah, meandering?"

"Nay." She shook her head, her eyes wide and luminous, and fixed with a determination to make him see she'd had to do these things. "I do not expect you to believe anything I say. Tis nonetheless true. I had to. After my second maidservant came to me with stories of his raping, I thought it my only way of protecting my dependents—"

"She be lying through her teeth!" Miles Hartman pointed at her. "The witch be lying!"

Vincent just stared, his mind slowly absorbing the magnitude of her words. Powerfully sensing the lady’s honesty, he wondered if those blue eyes could hold a lie, any lie.

He did not think so.

"Remove him," Vincent said with quiet authority.

Guards rushed to the place where Miles Hartman stood. Hands came upon the burly man. He shoved them off and marched out furiously. "She be lying! She be bent on blinding ye with another spell—"

The great wide wood doors shut.

Roshelle studied the emotion the accusation had put in the duke's eyes before, as if penitent, he lowered them in a pause. The silence lengthened, confusing her. She might have accused the duke of the heinous deeds! The abbot, too, just stared, frozen, as if uncertain how to proceed all of a sudden. She didn't understand, understood even less as the great red giant placed his hand over Vincent's as if to try to calm or soothe him. Then Wilhelm asked quietly, "Do you swear that this be true? That Edward forcibly raped two of your maidservants?"

"Aye, tis true," Roshelle answered in a subdued tone. "One of the women was four months with child. She was bleeding when she came to me. The child was lost."

This was absorbed in another steely silence. The very same solemnity weighed on the faces of all who heard. These sober faces exchanged glances, shakes of heads and murmured disapproval. The exploited, half-starved people of Reales were only the beginning, it seemed. Bit by bit, ever more of Edward's abuses were coming to light, painting the picture of a small-minded and cruel despot—a man bad enough as a simple head of a family, a disaster as lord of the land.

The doors opened again. All heads turned to see a nervous servant rush into the hall, approaching Roshelle. The anxious maid curtsied before her lady and said in an audible whisper: "A thousand pardons, milady, but the woman Josephine, in Reales, asks ye to attend her immediately. Tis her time—"

"Oh, no! Tis weeks early! Oh, my—" Roshelle looked at Vincent. "I shall have to leave for the good woman Josephine. As you heard, she has just passed into her time—" She stopped, abruptly cautioned by how he stared. An expression of taxed amusement marked his handsome features, as if he had caught a child's sticky fingers in the sugar trough. Praying her intuition was wrong, knowing it wasn't, she quickly plunged ahead. "I, I must leave to attend a birth—"

She started forward.

"Well! A midwife among all these other unexpected talents! I don't know why I'm so surprised. And of course a village woman would come into her time in the middle of your trial!" The duke's smile was all condescension. "Of course you will not mind if, ah, Tyrone leaves ahead of you to confirm the, ah, exact nature of this emergency? So many women have false starts, do they not?"

With unmasked apprehension, Cisely and Roshelle exchanged glances. How, dear God, did he know? How? They had counted on the masculine tendency to defer to women on matters of childbirth. "This is hardly necessary!" Roshelle protested.

"I'm afraid it is."

"Would you jeopardize a newborn's life? An innocent woman? I cannot abide it—"

"Yet you have no choice, milady. Tyrone, follow this servant to the place in question and discover the exact nature of her need, if indeed there is even a need. The lady will await your return here."

"At once, milord."

Her bright blue eyes sparkling with heated antipathy and her heart hammering, Roshelle knew full well she was doomed now. “'I suppose I should be shocked that an English lord has no mind or care for a Frenchwoman and an innocent child, but I confess I am not. Tis only yet another of your endless abuses reaped upon my people—"

"I believe I have instructed you to restrict your speech to those questions put to you. You have been twice warned. Enough now." He ignored the impotent fury trembling visibly through the girl, and motioned to Bogo to proceed.

Wilhelm observed with a chuckle, "If looks could kill, Vince, ye would be down and buried."

"Well, now." Bogo cleared his throat. "These particularly vicious crimes of Lord Edward's. Is that why you murdered him? You did murder him?"

Breathing heavily, she could hardly respond at first. For all her fury and violence, her mind began yielding to the threat of a guilty sentence and death. Fear, the close companion of death, began pounding in her breast. She could hardly listen, let alone think to save herself. "I—" She drew a deep breath, her pause filled with her struggle to compose her racing heart and pulse. "Aye," she said in a soft whisper. “In a manner of speaking, twas me who laid Edward to his grave, though not with malicious forethought—despite all the many reasons I had for doing so."

"How did you?"

"That eventide I was up late working on a particularly difficult medicine for one of the villagers. My servants and women were all asleep. I needed a smidgen of lard and, well, not wanting to wake anyone, I set off myself.

"I know not whether he lay in wait for me or if twas a terrible chance meeting—fatefully, I think, the latter. All I know is that Edward accosted me in the upper hall, jumping out from the shadows. He startled me. I asked him what he wanted. I could not believe my ears, but, but he meant to, to harm me—"

"You mean rape?" Bogo made himself inquire.

She nodded, her gaze cast down to her hands, which tightened into fists as she remembered. "At first I thought twas a sick jest, that he teased me, but no. He truly meant it. He said he didn't believe in the curse, you see, that he had a wager with his men that he would live to see the sun rise the morning after he lay with me, that the whole curse had been fabricated by my guardian to protect me without affording me the proper number of guards." She looked up suddenly. "Of course, I knew he would die if he tried! I tried to fight him off. I beat at him, I even tried to wound him with an anlace, but I had neither his strength nor his size. I could not deter him! I could not!"

Vincent tensed, confused by these words, though not by the emotions. She had uttered the last in some agony, as if it were somehow her fault she was no match for a knight bent on harming her. He did not want to hear more, because he felt alarmed by all the emotion her tale evoked in him. He was overwhelmed by violent feelings directed at an already dead man.

''He carried me down the stairs, meaning to take me to his chambers, when we met his guards coming up. I was calling—nay, screaming—for my own guards, even though I knew twould probably mean their death. I still tried to fight him off. He held me still and threatened to make his raping in front of others, and he molested me in view of his men. That’s when, when the curse, oh, God, the curse!" Her blue eyes swept the high ceiling, as if in appeal to the heavenly fate. "I felt something strange and awful—like hot, charged air as it is struck by lightning—and it threw him down the stairs, he somersaulted over and over until, until that awful sound! His head hit the cold stones and, and the captain pronounced him dead before turning an accusing finger to me."