Linda Barlow (46 page)

"Very pretty, Alix. Mourning for the poor innocents you helped to murder? To think I never realized what a skillful actress you were, what a mistress of duplicity and deceit. Come, you're a prisoner, not a refugee." He tore away the blanket she'd been huddled in, leaving her shivering in her drenched and sodden gown. "Like a prisoner you'll be treated. Hold out your hands."

She looked up at him in the light of the dawning day—Roger Trevor, the man she loved and would have died for. His beautiful eyes were cold as they regarded her. Dead. Whatever he had felt for her in the past—whatever passion, good fellowship, youthful affection or love—was gone, vanished as if it had never been. For the first time she began to fear that no explanation would ever be sufficient to undo the evil that had been wrought this night. He didn't believe she'd been tortured. He wouldn't believe anything she told him.

Her eyes dropped from his face to his hands. He was holding a short, ugly length of rope. Jesu. She had a horrific vision of being tied up and cast into some hole deep in the bowels of the ship with the rats and the roaches. "Is that really necessary?" she asked as he wrenched her slender wrists together and wrapped the cord around them, binding them tightly.

"Probably not. We're nearly at the mouth of the river now, and even you won't be able to swim the long distance to shore." His cold eyes moved over her body in a leer that was all the more humiliating because it was so entirely devoid of passion. "Besides, I believe I'm going to like you in bondage."

Then he ordered her imprisoned, not in a cell, but in the master's cabin. "When I have time, I will come to you. You can show me all the lecherous French tricks you learned from Geoffrey. They'd better be impressive, because the moment you cease to please me with your whoring ways will be the moment you meet your death. Unless I decide to turn you over to the crew first."

Feeling weak and sick and dizzy, Alexandra thought: This isn't Roger and the things he's saying to me aren't real. None of this is real. I am home in my bed at Westmor and when I awake my mother will be there comforting me. Then I'll get up and go over to Whitcombe Castle so Alan and I can study our Greek. In the afternoon Merwynna and I will sort herbs while she tells me stories of the Old Ones, and how they keep watch over their own. Why aren't they watching over me now?

"This woman is obviously ill, Roger, or exhausted," a voice rebuked the cruel man she loved. "Whatever she's done, she cannot answer for it now." Alexandra's eyes shifted to look blankly at the gaunt gray-haired man with blood on his shirt who had come up beside her. She had seen him bending over Francis Lacklin when they had hoisted him on board, tearing his clothes away, stanching his blood. He had a kind, infinitely patient face, and eyes that were sad and wise. His features swam, turning sharply familiar. "Merwynna?" she whispered as her legs gave way and the deck heaved up toward her face.

* * *

She recovered consciousness on a bed in small cabin that was surprisingly pleasant. Above her head was a diamond-paned window through which she could see the red sky of dawn. Across from her a mammoth desk was bolted to the floor in front of a veritable wall of books. There were Turkey rugs on the floor, maps and charts on the walls, and Oriental lamps and braziers, also bolted down, in the corners. And sitting beside her was the sad-eyed man.

"You fainted, mistress. When was the last time you ate?"

"I can't remember. Yesterday sometime." She shook her head slowly. "I never faint. But last night I did not sleep."

"Are you with child?"

"That would be a rare miracle, sir, since I'm still a maid." With a shudder she remembered Geoffrey. And Roger, that night in Merwynna's cottage. "Just," she added grimly, closing her eyes again.

"Does Roger know this?"

She shook her head. "What he thinks he knows and what is actually the truth are two different things." The man was sponging her throat with a damp cloth. She wondered why, and then she remembered that Roger’s knife had cut her there. It could not have been much of a cut, for it did not hurt and the cloth was not bloody. "Who are you?"

"I am Thomas Comstock, a physician."

Thomas Comstock. She remembered his name. Roger had mentioned him yesterday afternoon when he'd showed her the cellars. Yesterday afternoon? So recently? It seemed as if an age had passed since then.

 
"Do not worry; this is but a scratch," he said. "Does it pain you?"

"No. It is nothing."

"It bled very little, but I wanted to cleanse it for you. Your collapse worried me more. I wanted to make certain you were not dangerously ill."

"You must go to your other charges, then, sir. There are people aboard who need you more than I. I'm stiff and sore and heartsick, but Francis Lacklin, for one, is at death's door. Unless he has already died?"

"No, he lives. Whether he will survive this day, I am not certain, but I will do my best to save him, for Roger's sake."

She caught the tone in his voice and looked at him more closely. "You love Roger, don't you?"

"Aboard this ship, everybody loves him." He gave her his sad-eyed smile. "If you have injured him, they're not likely to have much love for you."

"No, I imagine not," she said dryly. "This is his cabin?"

"Aye."

"And I'm to be kept here, bound, in his bed?"

"Don't be afraid." Although he glanced a little doubtfully at the cut on her throat, he added, "For all his moodiness and passion, he is not violent toward women."

"He was violent toward Celestine de Montreau."

Comstock's eyes grew, if possible, sadder. "You know of her? It's true she and Roger were in constant conflict toward the end; they argued, but he was never violent, except in his language."

Thank God! She hadn't really believed Geoffrey, but she hadn't seen Roger so vicious a rage either, until last night. "How did she die, then?"

"She died of severe internal bleeding after the child she had conceived took root and grew not within her womb, but in the tiny duct beside the womb. Malplaced pregnancy is a rare condition, and one that few, if any, women survive."

"Oh my God." She knew it was possible that a baby could grow outside the womb, although she did not understand exactly how that could happen. She had seen it once in a shepherd's wife whom Merwynna had tried to treat. The woman had died bleeding and in great pain. "Celestine's brother told me Roger had beaten her, and Roger didn't deny it."

"Roger holds himself responsible for her death because they fought bitterly on the night she died. But he did not beat her. I was here and I saw. There was not a single mark upon her. As I repeatedly told him at the time, he did not cause her miscarriage or her death. Both were inevitable from the moment the child was conceived. No one was to blame."

Alexandra began to laugh somewhat hysterically. She wished she could cry. All night long she'd held back her tears, but now, when she wanted to cry, she laughed instead. No one was to blame for Celestine's death, and Geoffrey de Montreau had had no reason to demand revenge. All the deaths tonight, all the heartache, had been for naught.

Comstock waited until she had controlled herself marginally, then quietly suggested a drug to help her sleep. First he insisted that she change out of her wet garments, and found her a linen shirt from Roger’s chest that was much too large for her. He untied her wrists so she could undress, and bound them again much more loosely after she changed into the shirt.

"Yes, give me your potion," she said without hesitation. Temporary oblivion would be preferable to this soul-tearing pain.

She curled up on the cabin’s only bunk and drank the bitter draught he brought her. Within minutes she slept.

* * *

It was night again when Roger finally climbed the ladder to the captain's deck and unlocked the door to his cabin. During the day a summer storm had come up, battering the vessel with high winds and crushing waves. For most of the daylight hours Roger had been kept busy shouting the orders that would keep the ship and its crew members safe from the foaming power of the sea. It was a battle he'd fought many times before, a battle that always gave him a strange feeling of exultation as he matched wits with the mighty forces of nature. It was a clean fight, devoid of the malice and pettiness of human strife. On the day the sea won—and he knew that day might come—he would surrender gracefully and accept her victory with none of the bitterness he would have felt toward a human enemy.

The storm had been a mercy. It had given him an excuse to forget about Geoffrey, Francis, Alix. But it was over now, and he could no longer escape the thoughts and images that were flooding his brain. Francis, taking the blow that had been meant for him, bleeding, dying. Geoffrey, his feral face twisted with satisfaction. And, worst of all, Alix.
 
Let me hold her once more to my heart. How malicious were the gods.

For several hours he had sat beside Francis' bedside in Tom's makeshift infirmary below-decks. The physician was not hopeful. Francis' right lung had been grazed, he had bled profusely, and he showed no signs of regaining consciousness. "He's a strong man," Comstock had conceded, "but if putrefaction sets in, he is unlikely to survive."

"Isn't there anything more we can do for him?"

"We can pray."

Roger swore at that. "Aye, God is good, God is just. Where's the sense in this? Innocent, godly people have been slaughtered and Francis is dying after putting his body in the way of a sword intended for me. I'm as sinful as he, but I, as usual, am alive and unscathed. The Lord, in his mercy,"—his voice was a sneer—"never punishes me directly. Instead he tortures me by massacring everyone around me."

"Such thinking is the height of arrogance. You are responsible only for your own destiny, not for that of your friends. Besides, the good Lord undoubtedly knows that you're an expert at punishing yourself, and for far more sins than you've actually committed."

"Francis lies here dying because of me."

"What better way to die than in defense of somebody you love?"

Roger slammed his fist into the wall. He neither wanted nor felt he deserved that kind of love.

Later he had sat drinking with Daniel Bunty, his old friend and second-in-command. Bunty had been the master of the Argo since Roger had left it to return to England. Bunty had tried in his gruff way to ease his mind, urging Roger to tell him exactly what had happened. But Roger didn't want to talk about it. Talking only increased his grief and fanned his rage.

The aqua vitae he was downing should be lessening his misery, but it didn’t seem to be working, and he stopped before consuming too much. Francis didn’t like it when he drank.

As the ship rolled and his mind pitched with it, Roger began to imagine how he would punish Alix for her betrayal. The images were confusing. His violent emotions were eroticized as he saw himself forcing her into an assortment of sexual acts, many of which were painful and degrading. The fantasies troubled him, but he hadn't the will to stop them. Strangely enough, they all ended with her crying out in pleasure rather than pain.

Daniel Bunty must have noticed his preoccupation, for when Roger rose resolutely to his feet, his old friend put a restraining hand on his arm. "You're not going up to that young lassie, are you?"

Roger was aware by now that everyone on the ship knew of the woman he had imprisoned in his cabin. Rumors had been flying all day as to who she was and what crime she had committed. Roger had confirmed none of them. He had refused to talk of her. He'd even managed to ignore Tom Comstock's objections to the way he had treated her so far.

"Aye, that's exactly where I'm going," he said now. "She'll be missing me, no doubt."

"She is no light-o'-love, but a gentlewoman, and you're in no fit state tonight for such."

"Enough, Daniel. Don't interfere with something that is no concern of yours."

Bunty backed down, but he didn't look pleased about it. "I only wish to prevent you from doing something you may regret in the morning, my friend."

"My regrets, or lack of them, are no one's affair but my own."

When he entered the cabin, soaked to the skin with rain, and gritty-eyed from lack of sleep, he found Alexandra lying in his bed. Her slender body was partially covered by a blanket, her hair was spread in a fiery mantle over her shoulders, and her sleepy green eyes were apprehensive as they blinked and stared into his.

She looked artless and young lying there. She looked like the woman he loved. But she had spent months among the cats and spiders at court, and she had intruded time and again in places where she was not wanted, ignoring all his threats and warnings. Whether or not she had intended the harm she had caused, she was still responsible. How many good people were dead now because Alexandra Douglas could not bring herself to stay the hell out of his affairs?

"Good evening, Alexandra. No, don't get up. You are exactly where I want you—in my bed, at last."

She slowly sat up, encircling her upraised knees with her arms. She winced a little as she moved. Was she in pain? Or pretending to be in pain? Was anything about her real? He no longer knew what to believe.

She was wearing a man’s linen shirt. It must be one of his. It was big on her. The sleeves were too long and the fabric hung loose around her upper body. Her wrists were still bound together with rope. Roger stared at them, taking a twisted pleasure in the sight.