Knight of Passion (5 page)

“The stool, m’lady?” The clerk looked up from the sheet of vellum he carried and raised his thin white eyebrows. “ ’Tis in
very poor condition.”

At her nod, he put his nose to the sheet and scratched another note. She left him in the solar to step into the adjoining
bedchamber.

Her throat closed, and she could not breathe.

Suddenly, she was eleven years old again, hiding under that heavy, dark oak bed with her brother. Hearts racing and holding
hands, she and Francois had watched the men’s feet move about the bedchamber. Sweat broke out on her palms as she remembered
the men’s voices, arguing over who would take what, and the silver end of a cane pounding on the floor.

She turned around so quickly that she jostled the old clerk and had to catch him by the arm. “Why don’t you rest here in the
solar, Master Woodley, while I go up to the attic? ’Tis unlikely there is anything there worth keeping, and the stairs are
steep.”

“Thank you kindly, m’lady,” he said, bobbing his head.

She left quickly, knowing he would not sit in her presence.

The walls and low ceiling closed in on her as she climbed the narrow steps to the two tiny rooms under the roof.

None of this was turning out quite as she’d expected. For five long years, she had worked diligently to achieve her goals.
First, she married Louis to gain the funds and independence she needed to restart her grandfather’s business. Working through
her brother, she had gradually built her trade in cloth.

Then she was ready. Her first attack was in their home city of Falaise, where they had retreated after losing everything in
London and Calais. In half a year, she destroyed the trade of the “dear old friends” there who had taken advantage of her
grandfather in his long illness.

As she had suspected, the men in Falaise were not the ones who had orchestrated the demise of her grandfather’s business.
They were merely the vultures who picked at the remaining pieces left in Falaise.

From Falaise, she followed the trail of guilt to her grandfather’s former business partners in Calais. Those men were more
sophisticated and clever. It took her four years to grow her business sufficiently to take them on one by one. Each of the
Calais partners had taken a share of her grandfather’s trade and property. None of them, however, received the lion’s share.

When she finally had one of them in debt to her up to his ears, he confessed. A London merchant had been behind the scheme
to ruin her grandfather’s business. The men in Calais never knew the London merchant’s name; all communication had been through
intermediaries.

The queen’s letter asking Linnet to visit had come at an opportune time. The two of them had formed an unlikely friendship
during the months Linnet spent in Paris before
she escaped her father’s care. From the start, she felt protective toward the naive princess who came to the decadent court
straight from the convent.

Linnet would do her best by her friend. But while she was here in London, she also intended to discover the identity of the
shadowy figure who was her greatest enemy.

Finding him would be difficult, of course. London merchants resented foreign merchants and would protect one of their own.
But she had the very finest Flemish cloth to be found in London. To get his hands on it, a London merchant might be willing
to forget that she was both a foreigner and a woman.

Mychell was one of the men whose voices she heard from under the bed that awful day. But he was only a lackey, a bit player
in the scheme. He was not clever enough to plan the demise of a business with interests from Normandy to Flanders. This house
had been Mychell’s reward for the part he played. She should feel triumphant throwing him out.

But she did not.

Mychell did not know who had driven him into debt until yesterday, when they met to sign the deed. She swallowed back the
bile in her throat as she recalled her meeting with the greasy-haired rodent.

“If you just give me a little time,” he had said, sweat breaking out on his brow, “I shall be able to pay.”

“Time will not help you.” She leaned across the table and pounded it with her fist. “Do you not know who I am?”

Startled by her outburst, Mychell sat back in his chair and stared at her. She could tell the moment he recognized her, for
his eyes widened with surprise—but not a trace of shame.

“Shall I leave you as much as you left two orphaned children?” she asked him.

“ ’Tis not my fault your grandfather died in poverty,” the man protested.

But she knew better. She had a gift for figures. It took her years to piece it all together, but she knew exactly how much
had been stolen from them and how. They started with shorting payments and claiming goods were not delivered and moved up
from there. The death knell came when they intercepted her grandfather’s huge annual payment to the weavers in Flanders, which
ruined relationships he had built over a lifetime.

Even as a child of ten, she had known something was wrong with the accounts. When she shared her suspicions with her grandfather,
he was too good-hearted to believe his friends would steal from him. The theft grew more and more blatant. But by then, her
grandfather was far too confused to understand.

“Do not bother to deny it,” she spat at Mychell. “I heard you dividing up the spoils. You could not even wait for us to leave
London to do it.”

Linnet looked around, startled to find herself on the small landing at the top of the stairs. How long had she been standing
here? She shook her head to clear it of the wretched man.

On either side of her, the doors led to the matching rooms that she and Francois had slept in. She pushed open the one on
the right and ducked under the low frame to enter her old bedchamber. The same narrow bed filled most of the cramped space
under the sloping roof. How often had she opened that shutter to watch the stars as she
made up stories of knights and princesses? Back then, she never expected to meet a princess, let alone befriend one.

She shook her head again. What was wrong with her today? She did not come up here to dream, but to find something. In their
hurry to leave London that night, she had forgotten her most prized possession.

There was little chance of it still being where she hid it, but she had to look. She dropped to her knees beside the bed and
slipped her hand between the mattress and the ropes. Nothing. The musty smell of the straw made her sneeze as she reached
farther. Grunting, she pushed her arm in all the way to her shoulder. Still nothing.

She got down on all fours and stuck her head under the bed. It was too dark to see a thing under there. She sat up coughing—and
nearly choked when she heard the sound behind her.

C-r-e-a-k.

The thin blade she kept up her sleeve was already in her hand as she jerked her head around to look. The top of the old chest
at the end of the bed slowly lifted to reveal a girl with a headful of springy red curls.

“Saints above,” Linnet said, slapping her hand against her chest. “You startled the wits out of me!”

Apparently, Mychell had forgotten one of his belongings when he moved out this morning. The girl, whom Linnet guessed to be
seven or eight, pushed the trunk lid all the way back and stepped out.

“Are you the one who has taken our house?” the girl asked.

What was she to say to that? Linnet sat back on the floor and wrapped her arms around her knees. Finally, she said, “This
used to be my house.”

“Was this your bedchamber as well?”

Linnet nodded.

Tilting her head, the girl asked, “What are you looking for?”

“A polished steel mirror.” After a pause, she added, “It was all I had of my mother’s.” Odd, that she felt she needed to justify
herself to this little girl.

The girl held her gaze and then walked around to the other side of the bed.

“I moved it,” she said as the top of her red curls disappeared from view. A moment later, she popped back up with the long-lost
mirror in her hand.

“Thank you,” Linnet whispered when the girl brought it to her. She ran her finger over the familiar bumps of the flowered
pattern on the back, which was black with tarnish.

She took a deep breath and gathered herself. Attempting a smile, she asked, “What is your name?”

“Lily.”

“You are a remarkable girl, Lily.”

“ ’Tis what my sister says.” The girl’s bright smile faded, and her gaze drifted to the side. “My brothers call me other names.”

“How many brothers do you have?”

“Lots.” The girl made a sour face that made Linnet suspect the boys took after their father. The poor thing.

Linnet reached through the slit in her gown to fish out a coin from her pouch. “I can see you are good at hiding things, so
keep this safe from your brothers.”
And from that filthy, moneygrubbing father of yours.
“It is payment for returning the mirror.”

When she took Lily’s hand and placed a gold florin in her palm, the girl gasped.

“And here is my ring.” Linnet twisted it off her little finger and put it in Lily’s other hand. “If you are ever in trouble,
show this to my clerk, Master Woodley. He will find my brother or me, and one of us will help you.”

Lily closed her fingers over the ring and nodded. Clearly, this was a girl who had learned to expect trouble. Linnet gave
Lily directions to her clerk’s rooms and made her repeat them twice.

“Your family will return soon,” Linnet said as she got to her feet. “Wait for me downstairs, and I will take you for a meat
pie while we wait for your father.”

When Linnet entered the solar, her clerk’s eyes flew open and he fumbled to his feet.

“Tell Mychell to meet me in an hour to hear my offer,” she told him. “If he gives me what I want, I will forgive the debt
and let him keep the house.”

The clerk put his hand to his chest, as if her words pained him. “But the man has nothing left of value.”

She smiled at him. “I did get the stool.”

“How should I have known the thieving maggot would breed like a rabbit?” she complained to her brother that evening. “I cannot
throw his wife and children out onto the street.”

She and Francois were relaxing with her best wine in the house on the Strand she had purchased the week before.

“Revenge is proving more complicated than you anticipated.” Francois lifted his glass to her with a sparkle in his eyes. “Perhaps
now you’ll have the sense to leave justice to God.”

She smiled at him over the brim of her cup. “You know me better than that.”

He gave a long-suffering sigh. “Linnet, you are good at business. If you were not set on using your trade for revenge, you
could make a fortune.”

“I intend to do both,” she said. “ ’Tis difficult here in London because of the lock the guilds have on trade. But I have
a plan now.”

“I beg you, do not tell me yet,” Francois said, putting his hands up. “Let me enjoy one more hour of peace.”

They grinned at each other, then Linnet squeezed his hand. “How lucky I am to have you for a brother.”

They sat in comfortable silence, their feet propped up on their grandfather’s stool, watching the burning coals in the brazier.

After a while, Francois said, “I hear Jamie Rayburn is in London.”

“He is.” Linnet took a long drink of her wine. “I have seen him.”

“More than once, I hear tell.”

She rolled her eyes. “What do you do, bribe the servants? Sleep with the queen’s ladies-in-waiting?”

Francois winked and shrugged one shoulder. “Whatever I must.” He picked up the flask from the small table between them and
poured more wine into their cups. “How is he?”

“Vile.”

Francois threw his head back and laughed. “I take it he did not fall at your feet this time.”

Linnet slapped her brother’s arm.

“He did play the dashing knight, braving a violent horde of Londoners to rescue me from the bridge,” she
said, fighting a smile. “I was managing quite well without his help, but he did look magnificent.”

Francois sat up straight. “You were on London Bridge the day of the riots?”

“As you can see, I am none the worse for it,” Linnet said with an impatient wave of her fingers. “But you should have seen
Jamie—
Sir James
, rather. He charged across the bridge like Saint George toward the dragon.”

“That does not sound too vile to me,” Francois said. “He was horrid afterward. And even worse when he came to Eltham.”

“Poor man,” Francois said, shaking his head. “After all his effort to avoid you in France, he comes home to find you here.”

When she failed to laugh, Francois turned and gave her a penetrating look. It could be both good and bad to have a twin who
could read you like a book. She turned her face away to make it more difficult for him.

“I am sorry if he was unkind to you,” Francois said in a soft voice. “The two of you tore each other apart. By the saints,
I could never see the cause for it.”

“Well, ’tis clear he places all the blame on me,” she said.

“Five years gone, and he is still that angry.”

“Aye, he will hate me forever.”

“Nay, he
wants
to hate you,” Francois said, raising his forefinger and smiling. “That, my dear sister, is not the same thing at all.”

P
raise God, the queen had agreed to leave for Windsor in two days. Jamie would rather fight a dozen battles than remain at
Westminster Palace.

From morning till night, he traversed the dangerous no-man’s-land between Gloucester and the London merchant guilds on the
one hand, and Bishop Beaufort and the Council on the other. The two camps were locked in a struggle for control over the kingdom—and
a child-king not yet four years old.

Jamie felt out of his element in this palace fight. Give him a sword in his hand, any day. Still, he was doing his best to
keep the queen from being trampled in the melee.

If that was not more than enough trouble for any man, Linnet was here. She moved between the camps with ease, courted by men
from both sides of the conflict. And Jamie had to watch it.