The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles (13 page)

The play of hands and mouths grew more intense. Soon he was crouching above her, gazing down at her tumbled beauty through the green haze that seemed to surround them. Her upper lip was moist with perspiration. Her garments all a-tangle around her slim hips—the silken drawers had been cast aside—showed him a delicate golden place above her white stockings and her garters.

She looked at him with wide, almost alarmed eyes. She started to speak. He laid his fingers gently on her lips.

“Shall I stop, Alicia?”

“What’s fair for me is fair for you. Only—only if you’re just attacking Roger—”

“I’ve forgotten all about Roger,” he said, and wrapped his arms around her so violently that her head accidently struck the tree trunk.

She let out a low exclamation of pain, then another, sharper one a moment later when he forced his entrance. The lark rilled. The stallion clopped his hoofs. The green darkness seemed to light and glow with a fire that might have been kindled within Phillipe’s own flesh—

At first, it was awkward; her body was still not prepared for him, although it had already received him. And something said over and over that, despite her talk of it, she’d never had a lover. That excited him even more. He kissed her eyelids, her cheeks, stroked her back—

Until finally the awkwardness passed in favor of a matched steadiness whose speed increased and increased like their breathing until she was hugging him convulsively and crying softly for him to press her even harder.

She clung to his neck with both arms, driving herself as close as she could to meet flesh with flesh. He gasped—and her answer was a strident, lingering moan of joy that slowly faded under the lark’s singing.

Dressed, reasonably composed and ready to ride away on the rested horse, Alicia looked at him differently. She tried to smile and play the courtesan but her eyes betrayed her.

He asked quietly whether he’d in any way hurt her.

“No,” she murmured. “Oh dear God—no. I—” A little gasp when she tried to laugh. Another brush at a stray lock of tawny hair. “—I found my answers about Frenchmen, too. And I think, I do think the Amberlys have finally met an adversary worthy of them.”

“What a strange way to form a judgment,” he teased.

She shook her head. “Not really—” All pretense seemed stripped away as she leaned forward to let their mouths touch quickly, passionately.

He experienced strange feelings. He knew she was still a creature of skills and deceptions. Yet he hadn’t the heart to force her to admit whether she had ever lain with a man before. He wasn’t sure—but asking was a cruelty he couldn’t perform. A half-hour ago, yes. But not now.

Nor did he care much whether, at the start, she’d been goaded into this game of love by a desire to secretly spite the man who had hurt her.

“I want to see you again, Alicia.”

“I don’t know—”

“While the spring lasts—while I’m here—I want to see you.”

“It will be so difficult—” She mounted, steadying the restless black. “I told you how I’m watched.”

“You must find ways to get around that. Dammit, you must! Unless you were lying to me, and just wanted to revenge yourself—”

Her voice turned husky:

“No!”

“Then come to Quarry Hill when you can. I’ll be here as often as I can. You can do it if you want to badly enough.”

“I suppose,” she said, sounding uncertain. Their eyes met again. “I meant to say I suppose I can do it. I’ll try. I want to come again, Phillipe, even though I think having met you could prove—very dangerous.”

“For whom?”

“Both of us.”

“Tomorrow? The same time?”

“I don’t know for certain.”

“I’ll be here.”

“But if it’s not possible for me to leave Kentland—”

“Then I’ll be here the next day. And the next.” His voice was low. He was as shaken as she was, because he too sensed that they were plunging into something far more entangling than a casual liaison—

“All right,” she said suddenly, leaning down again to caress his cheek. “At the first possible moment.”

She wheeled her black stallion away, cropping him savagely all the way down the hillside.

T
HE END OF MAY
brought a spate of changes to the south of England—and to Phillipe, who was growing aware that he was not the same person who had stepped so hesitantly off the lugger at Dover.

He fretted about the dwindling supply of money Marie kept hoarded in her casket. Even at Mr. Fox’s modest rates for bed and board, it would not last much longer.

On top of that, every few days Clarence reported that some servant or other from Kentland dropped by the hostelry—and did not depart without making an inquiry about the French woman and her son.

Though Phillipe still had not explained the reason for this unusual interest, he had gained Clarence’s confidence to the point of convincing the boy that it was important Clarence keep him informed about the watchers. So Clarence kept a wary eye out, and an ear open. Phillipe had hoped the spying would stop. Apparently that was not to happen.

Blended with the anxiety these circumstances produced was the hope and the joy he felt each morning at the prospect of perhaps meeting Alicia.

Assignations had proved difficult, as she’d predicted. Somehow, though, the protracted periods of waiting between their furtive meetings on Quarry Hill only intensified his emotions—and the shattering satisfaction when a rendezvous did take place.

After that first tempestuous afternoon, he’d gone to the hill four days in a row—and no sign of her.

The third and fourth days were agony. On the fifth, he slipped back to the grove convinced he would never see her again, save perhaps at Kentland—and there she was, tearfully clinging to him, overflowing sweet, sad apologies.

She would never be able to ride off alone oftener than every three or four days, she told him after they made love. However, she believed she had found a system to at least minimize the potential danger to herself—and, she quickly reassured Phillipe, to him.

By paying close attention to household gossip— closer attention than she usually paid, she was frank to say—she could pick up hints of plans for the next day or the day after. Would Roger be off hunting? Lady Jane entertaining the bishop between prayers? When such situations developed, Alicia would now employ the services of a girl named Betsy.

Betsy was the one lady’s maid Alicia had brought with her from home. She felt she could trust the girl—particularly when a few extra coins were supped from hand to hand.

After Alicia had outlined her plan, she and Phillipe searched and found a felled oak with many rotted places in its lightning-blasted trunk. Phillipe scooped out one such place, which was designated the message spot. Here Betsy, sent on some fictitious errand, would leave a slip of paper with a crudely printed word or two on it—
Tuesday twilight
—so Phillipe might better know when to expect the tawny-haired girl.

After their third rendezvous, Phillipe noticed that she looked drawn, weary. He questioned her about whether the strain of outwitting and eluding dozens of people, from Lady Jane and Roger down to the pantry and stable help, was too taxing.

“Taxing, yes,” she replied. “But worth it, my darling. And after all, haven’t you told me I do exceeding well at games?”

She kissed him with lips parted. But not before he saw the shadow in her eyes, the shadow that said she was meeting him at the price of raw nerves.

One mellow evening when she brought a bottle of her favorite claret in a hamper—she drank twice as much of it as Phillipe—she speculated aloud that it might be amusing to let Roger know she’d acquired a lover.

Her eyes twinkled with hard merriment as she said it. Then she saw Phillipe’s scowl, touched him.

“Though you know I wouldn’t—ever.”

“That first time, Alicia—”

“Yes?”

“You did let me make love to you because he hurt you, isn’t that right?”

“You know me too intimately, Master Frenchman!”

“But you did.”

“Partly.” Her voice was thickened by the wine. “Only partly—” She kissed him.

The suppressed streak of cruelty in Alicia was an aspect of her personality he intensely disliked. But it was an aspect that dwindled to insignificance alongside the overpowering reactions she produced in him, mind and body, when he was away from her, anticipating their next stolen moments together.

The message-tree system worked reasonably well. Yet there remained occasions when he would wait hours past the appointed time, then trudge back to Tonbridge when she failed to arrive. On those lonely walks, he experienced what he realized must be one of the first signs of full manhood. He knew the full meaning of sorrow.

During one such frustrated return to Wolfe’s Triumph, he came close to losing his life.

In the mist of early evening, he was passing a copse when a blunderbuss blasted. He dropped instinctively, flattening in the tall grass—

Balls hissed through the tops of the nearby grass stalks, spending themselves. A bad shot, he decided. With a weapon of too short a range.

Still—

Who had fired?

Hunters? Yes; he heard them hallooing in the copse as he raised himself cautiously to hands and knees.

Rooks cawed their way into the sky’s yellow haze, flushed from the thicket by the shot. Phillipe remained still, presently saw four riders emerge from the trees and canter away toward Kentland. As the figures vanished, he identified the livery of the Amberlys.

He doubted the attempt had been deliberate. He had seen no one following him earlier, and he was always careful on his walks now, surveying in all directions as he moved. More than likely the servants had spotted him by chance while pursuing the bird among the trees.

But the very fact that they’d fire at all said much about Roger Amberly’s feelings. How pleased the Duke’s son would be if there were a report of a fortuitous accident—!

Phillipe reported nothing of the incident to his mother or Alicia. But his apprehension deepened.

There was another change in him as well. His conscious decision to keep the affair hidden from Marie. He didn’t want to flaunt the conquest of the heiress of Parkhurst, drag it into the open for his mother to examine as another twisted proof that her son rightfully belonged among his so-called betters.

When Marie asked questions about his frequent walking trips, he gave evasive answers. Excuses: Boredom: no work to be done at Wolfe’s Triumph. The deception was but one more signal that his feelings for Alicia were growing more serious than he’d ever intended.

It was, all in all, a May of changes.

Thunderous weather struck the Kentish countryside. Swift-flying spring stormclouds blackened the sky. The world did not glow. That seemed appropriate, because he knew his time with Alicia would pass all too soon.

“Alicia?”

She answered with a sleepy murmur. They were deep in a dell they’d found, two days after the first of June.

They lay together on a mossy bank, Alicia with her bodice unfastened, Phillipe with his head resting between the pink-tipped hills of her breasts. Across the dell, bluebells nodded in the oppressive air. High up in the sheltering trees, raindrops patted tentatively on leaves just beginning to stir in the wind. Thunder boomed in the north.

When he didn’t speak immediately in reply to her murmur, she stroked his forehead, as if to soothe away the hesitation she sensed. He rolled onto his stomach, touched the coral tip of her left breast and watched it rise. At last he said:

“Lovers shouldn’t have secrets, isn’t that so?”

“That’s so.” She pressed his caressing fingers against her body. “Secrets are only for husbands and wives. I’m not even wed to Roger yet, and think of the bagful I’ve hidden from him.”

Completely true. By now there was no intimacy Phillipe and Alicia had not practiced.

“Go on, speak your mind,” the girl urged softly.

“All right. Do you know what I thought of you that first day we met?”

“Tell me.”

“I thought you were a fine lady—and a proper slut.”

“What a horridly truthful young man you are, Phillipe! Of course you’re perfectly right. Earls’ daughters are taught to practice feminine wiles. How do you think I got Roger to agree to the match our parents arranged? Still, isn’t knowing the art of love a good thing—for lovers?”

“For lovers,” he agreed. “But what about those who fall in love?”

She sat up as thunder echoed along the river valley. “You mustn’t say such things, Phillipe.”

There was no reproof in her remark. Only sadness. She avoided his gaze. He pulled her head around gently, stared into her eyes.

“You mustn’t,” she insisted. “We have no chance together.”

“What if Lady Amberly was finally forced to acknowledge my father’s pledge?”

“It will be a long time happening—if it ever does. You see how skillfully she resists. Letting you sit and sit, wait and wait, cooped up in the village—”

“Damme, how I hate her for that!” he exploded, jumping up. “Then other times, I have doubts—”

“About what?”

“Doubts that I don’t know my proper place.”

“Lady Jane would concur with that opinion,” Alicia told him, though not with any malice. She tried to gesture him back to her side. But he stalked across the dell, scowling. She let her hand fall back to her side.

A moment later she began to lace her bodice. The mood was broken; they had strayed onto perilous ground.

“In my opinion, Phillipe, the reason you feel doubt is just because you’re still trying to decide who and what you are. I’ll admit my own feelings are tangled, now that we’ve started—well, you understand. I don’t care for Roger, although I should, since I’ll marry him. I love to be here with you like this, although I shouldn’t.”

Phillipe went back to her, kneeling and closing his hand on hers. “Alicia—”

“What, dear?”

“I’ve wondered since the beginning whether you’ve said similar things to other lovers.”

Her blue eyes never blinked. “And I’ve wondered when you might ask me that.”