Swords and Shields (Reign of the House of de Winter) (25 page)

Drake saw no harm at all in that request. Even if Elizaveta didn’t like her mother, which she clearly seemed not to, at least she was still respectful to the woman, which he felt was a good representation of her character. Perhaps someday he would find out why she didn’t like her own mother, but not today. They would have all the time in the world for things like that once he returned from Scotland.

“Of course you may send her a missive,” he said. “But they are traveling home now. Would it be better to wait until they arrived?”

Elizaveta shook her head. “They were traveling south to London to take a boat back to France,” she said. “When traveling to Thetford, my grandmother was fond of an inn where we found lodgings called The Black Goose. It is outside of London in a town called Romford and I am sure they will stay there before taking the boat back to France. Mayhap we can send the missive there to be given to them.”

Drake nodded. “If they left Thetford the day we departed, then they should be very close to Romford by now,” he said. “You should write your missive tonight so that we may send it out in the morning. We do not want to chance missing them.”

Elizaveta looked at him, her stomach knotting up once more with guilt.
He is speaking of a missive that will betray his own king
, she thought. The man seemed so trusting and accommodating, and that magnified her guilt. He believed she was good and kind and benevolent, not a snake waiting to betray him.
Tell him the truth!
Something inside her suddenly screamed.
Tell him the truth and pray he believes you!

But no
, she told herself firmly.
I cannot take the chance that he won’t!

“Then I shall do that now,” she said, pulling gently from his arms. “Will you go into our chamber and wait for me? I shan’t be long.”

Drake didn’t sense her turmoil, her inner strife. There was no way he could have known the chaos that was in her heart and had been since their wedding, a chaos that was eating her alive from the inside-out. Nay, he didn’t sense any of that. There was no way he could have. He was simply focused on his lovely bride and how she was attempting to leave him. He did not want to let her go.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

She pointed to the floor above. “To my ladies’ chamber,” she said. “It is where my writing things are.”

“Shall I come with you?”

She didn’t want him coming with her, perhaps even to see what she was writing. Nay, he could
not
come. Forcing a smile, she peeled his hands off of her arms.

“If you come with me, I have a feeling that there will be no missive written this night,” she said, watching him laugh. “I promise I will only be a few moments.”

Drake reluctantly let her go, watching her as she moved for the spiral stairs. “Then I shall go into our chamber and wait for you like an impatient bridegroom,” he said, backing up towards their chamber door. “Is there water in our chamber? I should probably clean the stink off of my body before my wife joins me in bed and then we … well, I can hope for such things, can I not?”

She knew what he meant, blushing at the suggestion and excited by it at the same time. This was all so new to her, this flirtatious rapport she and Drake had developed, and she enjoyed it very much but she wasn’t very practiced in her responses. The suggestion of sexual contact left her giddy and uncertain.

“There is water in there, but it is cold,” she said, trying to be coy. “And you may hope for such things all you wish. Such things have a way of coming true.”

He stood in the doorway, watching as she disappeared up the stairs. “Will it come true tonight?”

“If you do not stink too badly, it should.”

Her voice echoed from the upper floor and he grinned, disappearing into their chamber but leaving the door open should she call for him. He was, indeed, an eager bridegroom, looking forward to sampling his wife and knowing it would be the last time for many months. He prayed it would not be the last time ever, for there was something in his heart now that had never been there before. The reluctant groom, the man who did not want to tie himself down to one woman, was now coming to understand what his father had been trying to tell him about marriage.

A wife may be the greatest experience yet.

Later that night, after making love to Elizaveta twice before she felt into a deep sleep, Drake was starting to think his father had been right.

Westleton Manor, Suffolk

Seat of the House of de Mandeville

Three days after the siege of Spexhall – Early October

Edmund de Mandeville had never been entirely sane.

Since he had been a small child, the only son of the bereft House of de Mandeville, something in his mind had never been entirely right. As a lad, he had killed small animals, beat his playmates, ate earthworms when it suited him, and pissed wherever he pleased. Since he was the only son, his weak-willed mother and apathetic father let him do whatever he wished and the result was a grown man, now of forty-four years, who knew no boundaries and had no sense of reality.

Edmund de Mandeville was a man steeped in madness.

But he did not see it that way. He saw it as being more brilliant than anyone else in England and he certainly saw himself as a man who should be the Earl of East Anglia. He’d always fancied himself the earl even if Christian du Reims held the title, but after the events at Spexhall with the death of Julia and her husband, Edmund’s madness only grew.

His daughter had been murdered by the man who married the East Anglia heiress so, as Edmund saw things, it was now his right to exact revenge against East Anglia personally. For decades, the grievance against the House of du Reims had been a family grievance and not a personal one but the moment Julia was returned to him, murdered by the husband of the du Reims heiress, Edmund’s grudge against them became personal.

They would pay.

Even now, in the hall of Westleton Manor, a chamber of horrors filled with rubbish, old food, carcasses of dogs that had died and were just never taken away, and dog and human feces piled up in the corners, Edmund sat with most of his senior soldiers around him, plotting the downfall of Christian du Reims. It was time, he had decided, since his daughter had died at the hands of a du Reims. Now, the ages-old grudge against the House of du Reims became his battle.

Now, Edmund would finish it.

“I know Thunderbey Castle,” Edmund was saying to the group supping on nearly-rotten mutton and thick, cheap ale. Some were still sporting bandages from the skirmish at Spexhall days earlier. “When I was a child, my mother asked if I could visit Thunderbey, and I did for a time. Christian du Reims’ father, Godfrey, allowed that I should stay for a time. He was trying to help relations between our families but that did not end as he had hoped. He sent me home when I killed his favorite dog because it bit me. But I was there long enough to know the castle. It is a castle that has a town built up right to it and the gates are almost always open to trade. There is much trade at Thunderbey. I remember this.”

The collection of bearded, smelly human beings stood around Edmund and listened to him speak. Toothless mouths sucked on the ripe mutton and downed the bitter ale. These were the men who raided the countryside and stole from anyone with anything of value, raiding into small villages and taking what they could. Sometimes they even took women. These were the men that all of the villages within a ten-mile radius of Westleton Manor feared; men without honor or the capacity for reason.

Men, most of them, who had learned everything they knew from the seeds of Edmund’s twisted mind. Therefore, they thought the same way he did, especially his sons, Glenn and Bruis. They were facing their father across the table, eager to hear the plan that would finally reclaim Thunderbey Castle and their legacy because the defeat at Spexhall and the death of their sister had been both a humiliating and infuriating experience.

They were ready for action, but not necessarily against de Winter again. They had already been beaten by the man. Therefore, it was time to turn their hatred back where it belonged, back to the entire root of the issue.

Back to the House of du Reims.

“Then we can ride straight into Thunderbey’s inner bailey,” Glenn said. He was a thin man with gnarled red beard. “If the gates are open, we can ride in and take Thunderbey out from beneath du Reims. Who is to stop us?”

Edmund held up a quieting hand to his eldest son. “East Anglia has at least six hundred men at Thunderbey, mayhap more,” he said. “Thunderbey has two sets of walls and two sets of gates. The troop house is in the outer bailey. If we were to get into the inner bailey and shut those gates, they would not be able to enter. We could take the keep from there.”

The men grumbled their comments to each other, some agreeing and some not. “Then if taking Thunderbey is so simple, why have we not done it before?” A younger man with a shaved head, who was not part of the family, wanted to know. “You have always spoken of your legacy in the hands of Christian du Reims but you have never moved against him. Why now?”

Edmund turned his sallow, venomous gaze on the young man. “Because I was concerned about my children and how du Reims might retaliate against them,” he said, thinking everyone thought the way he did, which meant in the realm of vengeance both parents and children were fair game. “But now du Reims has killed my daughter and the man must pay. I will take my legacy once and for all and make Christian du Reims suffer as my own daughter suffered. I will take his life as he took hers!”

It was a twisted view of the situation that some of the more rationally thinking men understood. “Christian du Reims did not kill Julia,” Bruis de Mandeville, tall and shaggy-haired, pointed out to his father. “She was killed by a de Winter.”

Edmund slammed his cup down to the table. “They are all the same!” he roared at Bruis. “De Winter is a usurper. He has no right to Thunderbey. I shall kill Christian du Reims and take Thunderbey, and de Winter cannot have it!”

His men looked at each other, perhaps a bit nervously. “The de Winter army will come to Thunderbey,” the young man with the shaved head spoke again. “If we take the castle, de Winter will send all he has to regain it.”

Bruis, standing next to the young man who also happened to be his friend, slugged him in the arm to quiet him. He mostly did it because Edmund had been known to throw a dagger at those who questioned him so Bruis wanted to shut his friend up. But Edmund merely grunted in response, tossing out the chaff and sediment in his cup onto the floor and reaching for the pitcher to pour himself fresh ale.

“De Winter cannot have it back,” he said flatly. “We will bottle up the inner ward and the keep and they will not be able to take it back. I will hold that castle and regain my legacy and kill anyone who tries to take it from me. The House of de Mandeville has waited long enough to regain what the House of du Reims stole from us. We will wait no longer. Let Julia’s death not be in vain. It is time to take back what is ours!”

He began to bang on the table, roaring approval for his own scheme, and the men around him reluctantly took up the cry. After the battle at Spexhall, the de Mandeville army only numbered around four hundred because they’d lost almost two hundred men when Edward’s troops had arrived in the nick of time. But no one was willing to point that out, fearful of Edmund’s insanity, so as the night wore on, Edmund’s madness was allowed to run unhinged as he planned the fall of Thunderbey and declared how unafraid he was of the de Winters and the strength that they would bring. He vowed to take Thunderbey away from Christian and throw the man’s body over the walls.

Trouble was, he was right.

Two weeks later, in the early morning hours, the de Mandeville army approached Thunderbey Castle in groups, pretending to be farmers or travelers. Some had the wagons between them while still others carried baskets or quivers filled with weapons. Edmund might have been insane but he wasn’t stupid. He knew he could not attack Thunderbey head-on. He knew that whatever they did had to be covert, so his men became farmers or errant travelers, and approached Thunderbey’s gatehouse as men preparing to trade or simply seek shelter. They mingled with the farmers and tradesmen already moving in and out of the castle, coming in waves, until most of them were in the outer ward. Being that Thunderbey was a big castle, no one seemed to notice the overabundance of strangers.

It would be their undoing.

Once most of his men were inside the outer bailey, Edmund pretended to collapse in front of the gate leading to the inner ward and when a pair of du Reims soldiers opened the man gate in the massive inner gate to see what had happened, they were rushed by Bruis and Glenn and several other men, who quickly slit their throats. Huge waves of de Mandeville men rushed in through the man gate, quickly silencing those du Reims soldiers who tried to raise the alarm. In fact, the entire inner ward was taken as soldiers on the outer walls patrolled their posts, more focused on the land beyond the outer wall and not paying attention to what was going on inside the inner wall.

It had been, in truth, a brilliantly executed operation by Edmund, and one that moved surprisingly quickly. The first sign of trouble to the soldiers on the outer wall was when the body of Christian du Reims suddenly landed in a heap in the outer bailey. Shocked, the eyes of the du Reims soldiers, and the four hundred men that were in or around the troop houses in the outer bailey, turned to the inner wall of Thunderbey only to see it manned by men they did not know, men throwing projectiles at them, and a crazy bearded man screaming of a de Mandeville victory.

Then, and only then, did they realize something terrible had happened, but by that time, the de Mandeville soldiers were bottled up in Thunderbey’s inner ward and bailey, and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it.

The du Reims army spent a month trying to regain access to the inner ward before taking the embarrassing step of sending word to their allies but by then, Edmund de Mandeville was dug in to the keep at Thunderbey and had no intention of leaving it.

Ever.