Princess Annie (35 page)

Annie closed her eyes. A month ago, she would have argued against Phaedra’s logic, but now she knew her friend was right. To Chandler Haslett and to Rafael, marriage was not a matter of love, but of contracts and bargains and exchanges of property.

“Who is this mysterious man you claim to love?” she asked, after a brief interlude of silence.

Phaedra looked down at her delicate hands, which were clasped in her lap. “I can’t tell you that just now,” she said.

“Don’t you trust me?”

“It isn’t that,” the princess insisted earnestly, tears spilling once again. “I know you wouldn’t tell on pain of death. But I don’t dare breathe his name—if someone were to overhear, word might get back to Rafael. And heaven only knows what would happen then.”

Annie was insulted on Rafael’s behalf. “You don’t mean you actually believe your brother would do the man some injury?”

Phaedra brought out her handkerchief and dabbed away her tears. “You wouldn’t question the possibility if you weren’t besotted with Rafael,” she accused, with a prim sniffle. “You don’t see his faults.”

That made Annie smile. She knew Rafael’s failings well enough; it was just that she accepted them as part of the whole person. “His insufferable arrogance, you mean? His stubbornness? Or perhaps you’re referring to the prince’s terrible pride?”

Phaedra subsided slightly. “You will help me,” she pleaded breathlessly, “won’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Annie said. “I have to think about this.”

“Since when do you
think
about things before you do them?”

Annie watched the maids at their work for several moments before answering. “A lot has happened to me since I came to Bavia,” she said finally. “Perhaps I’ve grown up a little.”

With that, Annie rose and walked out of the chapel, leaving the princess behind. She visited the dry and dusty rooms behind the castle kitchen where the sick had been taken. The three surviving rebel soldiers, wounded in the ill-fated attack on the castle, lay on cots next to the far wall. Two were asleep; one stared sullenly up at the ceiling.

Annie found a water pitcher and a clean cup and approached. “Hello,” she said.

The soldier glared at her with dark, insolent eyes, but Annie didn’t miss the slight, involuntary motion of his lips when he saw what she carried.

She poured, and he watched the progress of the water as it moved from pitcher to cup. “My name is Miss Trevarren,” she informed him. “What’s yours?”

“Why do you want to know?” he countered. “So you can have it carved on my tombstone?”

Annie smiled and held the cup to his lips, and he drank thirstily, almost desperately. “You won’t be needing one for some time, I think,” she said. “A tombstone, I mean. Are you hungry?”

He sank back onto his pillows, his brown hair as shaggy and matted as a wild pony’s mane, his skin pale beneath a layer of dirt. “No,” he said, even as his stomach rumbled.

“Your name?” Annie persisted, extorting the information by holding the cup near his mouth again, but just a little out of reach. “And don’t lie to me. There is no point in it.”

“Josiah,” he said, grudgingly. “Josiah Vaughn.”

Annie allowed him to drink his fill that time, though she urged him to sip slowly. When he’d finished, he was white with exhaustion. Blood was seeping through the dingy bandage someone had plastered to his right shoulder.

Josiah flinched as Annie lifted the cloth and looked beneath. He had been struck by shrapnel from a cluster shell, and the inflamed wound went deep. Annie thought she might have spoken too soon where the necessity of a tombstone was concerned.

“I’ll have to clean that for you,” she said. “There’s nothing to use but good Scots whiskey, and I’m afraid it’s going to hurt.”

Josiah was young, probably no older than seventeen, and Annie glimpsed abject fear in his eyes, though he quickly veiled it. He set his jaw for a moment. “His Highness the Prince will want his prisoners mended properlike, I suppose, before he chops us apart at the joints like rabbit carcasses.”

Annie shuddered, but her expression was wry. “Good heavens. That kind of thing was outlawed generations ago. Which is not to say that you aren’t in a great deal of trouble.” She left him long enough to collect a bottle of whiskey and a stack of clean cloths. Someone, probably Kathleen or one of her practical colleagues, had torn old linens into strips for bandages.

“Treason is punishable by death,” Josiah informed Annie, when she had dragged a stool over and sat down beside his cot with the liquor and cloth on her lap. “I could be shot for what I’ve done. Or hanged.”

Annie removed his old bandage and prepared to douse the wound. She’d heard her grandmother Lydia say, more than once, that alcohol sometimes staved off infection. “If I were you,” she said briskly, “I wouldn’t trouble myself, for the moment, with anything so spectacularly melodramatic as being shot or hanged. You’ve got problems enough already, it seems to me.” She sighed. “Now, brace yourself, Josiah, and be strong. As much as I regret the fact, this is going to hurt like the very devil.”

Josiah set his teeth and closed his eyes.

Annie poured.

Josiah screamed and then swooned.

Before Annie had recovered from that, the man in the next cot bolted to his feet, swayed and bellowed, “What have you done to him? What have you done?”

Fortunately, some of Rafael’s soldiers were still in the chamber, and the raving rebel was subdued before he could reach Annie.

“Don’t hurt him!” she cried, as two men flung him down with such force that his cot nearly collapsed. “He was only trying to help his friend!”

Somewhat reluctantly, the soldiers stepped back, but Annie saw the desire to do violence coiled in their eyes and straining in their powerful young muscles, and she was afraid. When they’d moved away, she turned back to Josiah and noted with relief that he was already coming around. She stepped close to the other man’s bed.

He was middle-aged, unlike Josiah, a squat, burly bear of a man with a wild red beard and bushy hair that was full of briars and straw. “The lad’s young,” he said, in a hoarse voice. He was breathing hard, and his chest was bandaged. “He didn’t know what he was about, joining up with the likes of us.”

Annie’s heart twisted with pity but, since she knew Josiah’s would-be rescuer wouldn’t appreciate the emotion, she kept it hidden. “He’s nothing to fear from me,” she said quietly. “I’m only a guest in this keep—I have no power.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and when he spoke again, it was in tones as ragged as his clothes. “You were only trying to help,” he said. “I heard him scream, and I thought—”

“You were disoriented and you thought I was hurting your friend. I won’t harbor hard feelings if you won’t.”

“Tom?” Josiah spoke weakly from the next bed. “Don’t let her pour that whiskey on you.”

Tom made a visible effort to sound hale and hearty. “Well, if she does, you sure as hell won’t hear me carrying on the way you just did.”

Annie smiled to herself and went about tending Josiah’s wound. Kathleen, in the meantime, came to look after Tom, and one of the village women tended the third soldier, who was just awakening.

It was a good morning’s work, and when Annie left the castle, intending to sit next to the fountain and enjoy the sunshine for a while, she was humming softly to herself.

The sound died in her throat when she stepped out of the great hall, however. Peter Maitland’s scaffold was already rising, a skeleton of timber, in plain sight.

CHAPTER 18
 

F
or three days, the sounds of hammers and saws pounded and clawed at the summer air, setting the meter for Annie’s pulse, screeching across her nerve endings. She worked doggedly in the new infirmary behind the kitchen, bathing faces, spooning soup and water into mouths, changing bandages and dressings. Nothing distracted her from the ominous din for long.

“Is that for us?” Josiah asked, late in the afternoon of the third day. “That gallows they’re building out there in the courtyard?” He was still gaunt, of course, but since Annie had cleaned his wound—Kathleen had later sutured it—he’d been on the mend.

Annie gave him the last spoonful of his chicken broth. “Of course not,” she said. “It’s for a man named Peter Maitland. He shot a student in Moravia, during a riot. He was tried and condemned and now he’s going to hang.”

Josiah narrowed his eyes. He and Annie were not friends, though a certain fragile bond had developed, and his attitude remained a grudging and wary one. “He’s a rebel, this Maitland?”

“No,” Annie said, returning the spoon to the wooden bowl with a slight clatter and reaching back to check the tie on her apron. “He was one of the prince’s soldiers. It was the murdered student who was a rebel.”

Josiah was plainly surprised, and still suspicious. “You’re sure you’ve got the straight of that, miss?”

I should have,
Annie thought.
I saw it happen and my testimony helped convict the man
.

“Yes,” she said simply. “Stop worrying and try to rest.”

“You might heed your own advice,” commented Tom, he of the bushy beard, from the next cot. Like Josiah, Tom was recovering fast, though the third man seemed to be losing ground moment by moment. “If you don’t mind my saying so, miss, you’ve got shadows under your eyes and you’re pale.”

“Who’s the nurse here?” Annie demanded, forcing a cheerful note into her voice and smiling at Tom, whom she’d come to like very much, despite his gruff manner and wild appearance. “You or me?”

Tom chuckled, but his eyes were kind and solemn. “You’re a regular Florence Nightingale, miss. If only you’d look after yourself the way you tend to us. You seem fit to drop and that’s the truth of it. Someone needs to do something about you.”

Annie cast a despondent glance around the large room. Most of the fever patients had recovered enough to be absorbed into the chaotic life of St. James Keep, but four remained. Besides them, of course, there were the three wounded rebels.

“I’m fine,” she lied. Her knees felt as though they might give out at any moment, and her stomach was so upset that she hadn’t been able to swallow a bite of food all day. The clamor from the courtyard jarred her very bones.

“Are you really so sorry for him,” Tom asked, with uncanny perception, “this soldier they’re about to hang?”

Bile surged into Annie’s throat and she swallowed. “Yes,” she said. “But I feel pity for the man he killed, too.” In her mind’s eye, she saw the marketplace in Morovia again, saw the earnest young student tumble with ludicrous grace into the fountain, his blood curling through the water like scarlet ribbons.

“She’s rich,” Josiah put in obstinately, addressing Tom. “And she’s one of them in the bargain. She probably wishes they’d take the poor bugger somewhere far away to do him in, so she wouldn’t have to watch and listen.”

Color flared in Annie’s cheeks, on a tide of fury so dizzying that for a moment she thought she would faint. She started to protest but before she could speak Tom broke in.

“Have you forgotten,” he demanded, eyes blazing in his sun-browned face, “that you’re speaking to the woman who saved your life?”

Josiah flushed, but his expression remained defiant. He folded his arms and glared. “No,” he replied. “And I haven’t forgotten that she nearly killed me in the process, either.”

Calmer now, because Tom’s intercession had given her a few moments to collect her dignity, Annie raised her chin and swept over to stand next to the third man’s bed. He was wretchedly thin, with old scars crisscrossing his body like a web, and between the network of marks his skin was a grayish blue color. His wounds were relatively minor, but he hadn’t rallied like his comrades.

The sudden hush that fell over the chamber distracted Annie and made her look toward the doorway.

Mr. Barrett entered and, without so much as a glance in Annie’s direction, strode across the room to stand between Tom and Josiah’s cots.

“It looks as though the two of you are well enough to answer for your act of treason,” he said. He acknowledged the unconscious man in the other bed with a brief nod. “Your friend isn’t so fortunate.”

Annie’s breath caught in her throat and she stood still, her fingers intertwined. “Mr. Barrett,” she said, with as much force as she could muster.

The strain of recent weeks showed in Rafael’s friend and advisor; he was thinner, and Annie saw tension in his jawline and in his eyes as he turned to her. “You may wish to leave us for a little while, Miss Trevarren,” he said, showing nothing but quiet good manners.

Annie felt the sting of dismissal all the same. “These men are still quite ill,” she said in a tremulous voice. “I want your assurances, sir, that no harm will come to them in the course of questioning.”

Mr. Barrett raised one eyebrow, and his expression was grimly wry. “Very well, Miss Trevarren,” he said, after a moment or two of deliberation, “I promise to show restraint, if not kindness.”

Annie hesitated, glanced at Tom.

Remarkably, Tom gave her a twinkling smile and gestured toward the door.

With reluctance, looking back over her shoulder as she went, Annie left the infirmary. Two village women who had been helping with the remaining fever patients followed silently on her heels.