Keeper of the Dream (60 page)

Arianna’s voice cracked with frustration. “When is he expected back?”

The nobleman looked around him, then leaned into her and his round, florid face creased into a wreath of smiles. “Well, he’s hunting more than roe and buck, you see. ’Tis Cumberland’s eldest daughter he’s really after.”

Amidst chuckles and more smiles, the man went on his way, leaving Arianna staring dumbly after him. Nearby, the abbey bells began to ring compline. It would be dark soon. She knew she ought to think about getting some food and finding a tavern for the night, but suddenly it all seemed such an effort just to draw breath. She felt so tired. She had concentrated all her strength on first getting into the Tower to see Raine and now on having an audience with the king.

“What do we do now?” she said, unable to keep a tremble out of her voice.

When she got no answer, she looked behind her. The wretched squire had disappeared.

“Damn you,” she whispered as tears of defeat crowded her eyes. For the first time she began to doubt if she would ever win Raine’s freedom, if she would even see him again. “Damn you, damn you, damn you—”

She heard a shout and whipped back around. A man stood frozen at the top of the steps, a man whose hair
glinted bright gold even in the drizzle that fell on the courtyard.

“Arianna!”

Arianna turned away from the window with its view of the cathedral spires. She dropped down onto a stool before a brazier, holding her hands over the red-burning coals. Her wedding ring glinted in the firelight, and she twisted it around and around her finger.

Oh, Raine …

Her wound throbbed and her whole body ached with the effort it took to keep from giving way to tears and despair.

A sound at the door brought her head up. Earl Hugh of Chester entered, looking relaxed and elegant in a willow green bliaut and fur-trimmed pelisse. He seemed to have gotten over the shock he’d had on seeing her. His finely sculptured mouth was curled into one of his mocking smiles.

“Arianna … you make a beautiful Lazarus.” He shook his head, his smile deepening. “You must have superlative leeches in Wales.”

Arianna stood up, curtseying. “My lord earl—”

He waved a languid, heavily ringed hand at the table filled with platters of untouched cheese-filled wafers and tiny, crescent-shaped pork pies. “You weren’t hungry?”

“Nay. Thank you … My lord earl—”

“Hugh, my dear. You must call me Hugh.” He flashed another insouciant smile. “We’re family, after all.” He poured her a glass of wine, pressing it into her hands. It was verney and its sickly sweet smell caused her stomach to heave.

She set the cup back onto the table. “You have said you will help to get me an audience with the king.”

He sucked on his lower lip. “Well, actually, seeing the king will do you little good, I’m afraid. He flies into a fit of
temper at the mere mention of my brother’s name. You haven’t said what you think of my town house.”

“It is very beautiful,” Arianna answered, though in truth she’d paid little heed to her surroundings since he’d brought her here this evening.

“I am really a very rich man,” Hugh was saying in a voice that reminded her of cod oil, smooth and slick. “And money can gratify a lot of desires. For instance, if I desired to see my brother escape from the Tower, doubtless I could arrange it.”

Arianna’s heart began to thump unevenly and she struggled to keep her face blank. She refused to let herself hope, for she didn’t trust Earl Hugh of Chester. She could not forget that this was the same man who had shot an arrow at his brother’s chest.

“You will do this for Raine?”

The earl came to stand before her and his handsome mouth curved into yet another smile. “Nay, I do it for you. And for myself, of course. I never do anything unless it is for myself.” He traced the length of her collarbone where it protruded through her bliaut. “But there is a price.”

The bone jumped beneath his fingers. “A price?”

“Ah, Arianna, sweet, sweet, Arianna. There is always a price.”

There was a price, Hugh thought, for everything.

The price, for instance, for loving the wrong woman too much, could bring you to a cell in London’s White Tower, chained to a wall.

He thought of this now as he followed the gaoler down the rotting wooden stairs that led to the subcrypt, deep in the earth below the chapel of the keep. Although the rain had stopped during the night, the walls still dripped water. Hugh suspected they probably seeped moisture even during the dry summer months. But then perhaps the
dripping walls were a blessing, if that was all a man had to drink.

Arianna had warned him that the gaoler would accept no bribe, but it had been laughingly easy to get in—all he’d had to do was trot out his title. There were some benefits, he’d told her, to being the Earl of Chester.

They followed a narrow, low-ceilinged passageway that seemed to be leading into the very bowels of the earth, and stopped before an oak door with a massive iron bolt. Hugh felt Arianna shiver beside him. He wondered whether it was from the cold or the superstitious dread all humans got at the thought of being in a dark hole in the ground that was so much like the grave.

“Let me go first,” he said, and his voice bounced hollowly off the stone walls. “We’re not sure what we will find.”

“It’s worth my life to be lettin’ ye in here,” the gaoler whined. “The king said—”

“Shut up,” Hugh growled. “Or your life won’t be worth the spit it takes to say your name.”

The gaoler’s breath came out in another wheezing whistle, clouding around his face. But his keys clanked against the bolt of the door. A grating sound echoed, and then the door groaned open.

Hugh stepped inside the tiny cell.

It was like walking into the darkness of death. The air was fetid and damp, with a smooth feel to it, like velvet. The very walls seemed to shiver with the cold, but it was an old cold, of a place that had never known the sun. He beckoned to the gaoler to pass him the torch.

The man inside lay on a pile of filthy straw against a wall that oozed black slime. His eyes had squeezed shut at the sudden flare of light and he flung his arm over his face. Hugh stuck the torch into a bracket on the wall, then turned to study his brother.

Raine sat up and then got slowly to his feet. He moved stiffly, like an old pair of bellows, and the heavy chains
that bound his ankles to the wall clanked and clattered against the stone. His eyes, glinting silver in the flickering torchlight, stared at Hugh out of a gaunt, bearded face. There was a resigned look in those familiar gray eyes, the look of a man quietly waiting to die … wanting to die.

“Raine … big brother,” Hugh said, and to his shock his voice sounded unused, as if he had been the one locked in a hole for the past two months. “I’ve a surprise for you.”

Raine stared at him, saying nothing. In the dim light it was hard to see his face, but Hugh thought it bore the look of a man for whom there were no surprises left.

Hugh motioned at the door where the gaoler still stood and the man ushered Arianna inside.

She made a tiny mewling sound when she saw him, like a lost kitten, and Raine’s head snapped up. For a moment he simply stared at her—stiff, unmoving, as if he could not let himself believe. Because to believe and then to be disappointed was more than a soul could bear.

With a stifled sob, Arianna threw herself into his arms.

His head fell forward and he rubbed his face in her hair. His head fell back again, and his lids squeezed shut. Hugh, suddenly embarrassed for him, thrust the gaping gaoler from the cell, shutting the door.

Raine’s fists were clenching and unclenching in her hair. His cheeks were wet with tears. She pulled his head down, and their mouths came together. He drank of her mouth the way a man dying of thirst would suck on a costrel of water.

He shuddered hard, and held her tightly against him. “Arianna …”

They stayed that way a long time, moving back and forth in a slow rocking motion. She leaned back within the circle of his arms and stared at his face. She ran a finger along the scar Henry had given him, now a thin red line beneath the curve of his cheekbone. “I didn’t die,”
she said, and there were both tears and a smile in her voice. “And my scar is uglier than yours.”

“Oh, God …”

His fingers rubbed her cheeks as if he were gathering up her tears to save them. “What a babe you are,” he said, and she gave him a watery laugh that cracked on a sob.

Again she touched his face, the scar. “You have not lost your land, Raine. Father has taken back Rhuddlan, but he only keeps it for you. Do you mind this?”

Raine shook his head, but Hugh suspected he hadn’t really heard, didn’t really care. He was running his fingers over her face again and again, as if to assure himself that she was real. “What of—” His voice cracked and he had to start again. “What of our babes?”

“They’re with my mother on the Isle of Môn. They thrive, Raine.”

“This is all very touching,” Hugh said suddenly. Christ, it was damn near making
him
cry. “But we have some important matters to discuss and there isn’t much time. I have devised a plan, big brother, whereby tomorrow night you will escape from this tower.”

The announcement hung there in the dank air of the cell. Then Raine said, “Why?” as Hugh had known he would. For his brother knew, better than anyone, to expect no charity from the Earl of Chester.

“ ’Tis very simple really,” Hugh drawled, lifting his elegant shoulders in a lazy shrug. “Because I want a night with your wife. She has agreed to give me the use of her delectable body for one sweet night, in return for which I will put all my considerable resources to bear on seeing that you escape. Of course, neither in nor out of the Tower are you welcome any longer in England. You’ll have to spend the rest of your life in dreary little Wales, I fear, but in a manner of speaking you were near enough to done as doing that anyway …”

He let his voice trail off, pleased with the results of his little pronouncement.

Arianna hadn’t expected him to blurt their agreement out like that—he could see by the stunned shock on her face. And Raine … his brother had that look he always got as a boy when he was about to be given a beating. Rigid and gathered into himself, all prepared to take something that was going to hurt, to hurt like hell.

He pushed his wife away from him, holding her at arm’s length. “You have agreed to this?”

“Raine—”

He shook her slightly.
“Have
you?”

Her head bowed. Raine let go of her and Hugh began to smile. He watched the change come over his brother, saw his eyes turn empty, his face harden. He had counted on this—that Raine had always been too damn proud for his own good. How quickly, Hugh thought, we revert to what we are.

“I forbid it,” Raine said to Arianna’s bent head, his voice hard and flat as well.

Her head snapped back up. “You have nothing to say to it. It is my decision and I have made it.”

She started to turn away from him, then she whipped back around, reaching for him. “Raine—”

He jerked out of her grasp, his chains clattering.

She stood before him, stiff as a lance, her hands fisted at her sides, and tears wet on her face. “Damn you, Raine. I want you with me again, I want you to live! I would do anything, anything—”

“Don’t whore for me!”

She flinched as if he’d slapped her. Head held rigid, she turned to Hugh. “I’m ready to leave now,” she said, and she started for the half-open door. Raine watched her go, a wistful yearning leaping into his eyes before he shuttered them again.

Hugh turned Arianna over to the gaoler and then came back for the torch. Raine was sagging against the wall,
and Hugh realized to his shock that his brother must be weak. From hunger probably, and from being shut away from the light for so long. Hugh removed the torch from the bracket, holding it over his head. He could see more of the cell now, and he shuddered. It really was a vile place. Some unspeakable filth covered the dirt floor, and the slime on the walls was not black, it was a strange iridescent green. His skin began to itch. When he got back to Winchester, he thought, he would soak for an hour in a hot bath and throw away everything that he was wearing.

“Hugh …”

Hugh turned back from the door.

“Don’t do this to her,” Raine whispered softly.

“I’m not doing it to her, I’m doing it to you. I owe you this, Raine. I’ve owed this to you for years. I want you to spend every night of your marriage as I have spent mine. From now on when you lay between your wife’s slender white thighs I want you knowing that another has been there before you.”

Raine’s head fell back against the wall, his eyes closing. “Do you want me to beg?” he asked.

Hugh laughed. “I must admit the image of you on your knees before me does have a certain appeal. But I prefer to picture you as you will be tonight, lying on your miserable pile of straw and imagining Arianna being pleasured in my bed.”

Raine’s eyes came slowly open. “I will kill you for this.”

Hugh cocked his head, his golden curls sliding softly over his shoulder, as he thought about it. “No, you won’t,” he finally said. “Because I will never fight you. And you are much too honorable a knight for murder.”

Hugh, Earl of Chester, paused with his hand on the latch to his bedchamber door. He thought about knocking, then didn’t.

She had been standing before the window, and she
whirled, her hand going to her throat. She stared at him, her eyes wide, then she smoothed her hand down over her breasts. It was an unconsciously nervous gesture, but it caused a stirring in Hugh’s groin.

She wore only a scarlet robe of soft vair. She was naked underneath.

“Take it off,” Hugh said.

She undid the sash at the waist and let the robe slip back over her shoulders, to fall into a scarlet pool, like blood, at her feet. Moonbeams spilled through the window of fine translucent linen, bathing her with a silver light. It was so quiet he could hear her breathe.

She was too thin and the scar on her chest showed mean and red. Yet, still, there was a ripeness about her. She is a creature of the earth, earthy, he thought. Lusty. She would probably scream and claw a man’s back when she peaked. His sex responded, swelling and hardening.