The Maiden Bride (10 page)

Christ. A green-willow boy—a highwayman—for a constable. He held back his protest, though; the boy was, in truth, the only option at the moment. Trainable, perhaps. He'd raised up many a squire to knighthood; it might be possible to raise a thief to a constable.

Huh—easier to raise the dead.

"Then get yourself and that dagger of yours to the gate, lad, and take your watch."

The boy bristled. "Milady wants the armory put to rights first. Don't you, milady?"

"I do. Perhaps, steward, since the barbican
and the armory are nearly in the same place, Dickon may keep his post and make sense of the chaos there at the same time." She was wearing a fiercely motherly frown now, ready to pounce on him if he dared take another swipe at her cub.

But he had a point to make here, a clarification of his power to streamline his efforts to secure Faulkhurst for his wife all the sooner.

All the sooner to be gone.

"I doubt that, madam."

"I could." Dickon stamped his foot on the stone floor. "I bloody well will. I've given my word to my lady to do just as she orders."

Nicholas looked across the table at his wife, feeling himself on trial, with more to lose than he'd imagined. Her respect, for one, and her trust—and that surprised him.

"As you should, boy, but would you give your life in her defense?"

His wife charged in his direction. "Master Nicholas, that's enough."

But the boy pushed past her and barred her way. "I'd fall on my dagger right now, if I she
asked me to."

She nearly threw herself in front of the boy and wagged a terrifying finger at him. "You'll do nothing of the sort, Dickon." Then at Nicholas. "And you, Master Nicholas will end this."

He would indeed, just as he'd planned. "Aye, my lad, your lady has chosen well in you."

Dickon's mouth had been open to protest, but he was quick and managed instead a squawking, "Has she? I mean, aye! She has."

"That I have, steward. And you should remember that the choice is mine to make." Eleanor was appalled, unable to understand this baiting Dickon. It was unfair, unseemly, and out of his character—or so she hoped. The boy looked to her with pleading eyes, as though he were defending his soul, not knowing if his judge was devil or angel.

Nicholas was circling the pair of them, glaring first at Dickon, then challenging Eleanor with a gaze that heated her nape and drifted like silk across her lips and made her touch them with her tongue.

"You'll do well, lad, to remember that a castle is a place of defense and constant danger."

"I know that, sir!"

"Doubly so, Dickon, because our lady seems bound to trust anyone at all without cause." The blackguard stopped and stepped closer to Dickon. "Have you noticed that?"

The boy, once her eager champion, was now
agreeing fiercely with Nicholas, his brows beetling and his head bobbing. "She won't listen to me. Never has."

"Nor to me. Not a word, lad. Dismisses entirely the idea that someone might wish her harm."

"I never said that, steward."

He cast her a negligent nod and put a confederate's arm around Dickon's shoulder, patting it companionably. "We've trouble on our hands, Master Dickon."

"Aye, we do, sir. Big trouble." The boy had caught up Nicholas's gravity completely and mirrored it gesture for gesture, even shaking his head in masculine sympathy for their entire gender.

"If you mean that I am trouble, gentlemen, you haven't seen the sort of trouble I can be." Oh, but why bother with the pair of them. Next they'd be marking out their territories and telling daring stories of their greatest battles.

"As our lady's seneschal, lad, I am her deputy in all the matters of her estate." Nicholas groaned broadly, as though all his teeth hurt him. "Do pity me for that."

The bloody lout.

"Oh, I do, sir," Dickon said, his loyalty now shifted entirely to her steward. "A pissy chore. I've held it myself for more than a year."

"Aye, Dickon. You've done an admirable job getting her this far safely—considering."

"Considering nothing, steward."

But the man only lifted his wily gaze to hers and spoke to her solely, making her wonder if he knew just how badly she wanted to thump him.
"'Tis my responsibility to guard and defend her rights and her person from here on. But I can't be everywhere, Dickon."

"No, sir?" The lad was in total thrall.

With sudden clarity, Eleanor saw Nicholas's purpose. How artful this steward of hers could be, so expertly politic when it suited him. She'd seen Edward do the same many times, patch over an outrage that he had caused himself through his ruthlessness, merely by changing sides to that of his opponent and becoming an accomplice.

A worthy skill and a highly treacherous one, to be guarded against at all times.

Thank God the man was so transparent.

"As constable, Dickon, you are my eyes and ears when I can't be there to watch over the lady Eleanor."

Dickon's cheeks glowed in the light of Nicholas's praise. "I'll be your nose too, sir, if you need me to be." He was nearly singing.

"Indeed." The man had a gregarious smile
locked down tightly in his eyes, one that drifted to her briefly and made her wonder how often and how deeply she would fall for his cunning herself.

"What about me, sir?" Fergus had been watching with wariness, and now struggled to his feet like an old soldier. "I'm a carpenter, you know.
"

"A carpenter, Fergus?" Eleanor could hardly believe their good fortune. "There you see, Master Nicholas? I prayed for a carpenter last night, and here he is. Have you done any smithing, Fergus? We need a blacksmith as much as we need a carpenter."

Fergus's brows knitted as he frowned and chewed on the end of his moustache. "Well, my lady—actually, I never actually been a carpenter. Though it's always been my wish to take up the trade."

"Ah."

Oh, blast. Eleanor hid her disappointment behind a huge smile that she was trying desperately to feel. "Good then, Fergus."

Nicholas asked evenly, "What
was
your trade, Fergus?"

Eleanor hoped for some craft that had required at least some knowledge of a hammer: a cobbler, a wainwright, an apprentice to either.
Please, God.

"I was a nightman, sir. All my life." Fergus scratched at his chin, then braved the stony severity of Nicholas's jaw, some foot and a half above him. "A cleaner of privies and cesspits."

Eleanor caught the wholly out of proportion laughter in her throat, amazed at her steward's outward patience and grateful that he didn't crush Fergus with the derision that was so plainly in his thoughts.

"Then you are well ahead of your wishes, Fergus," he said, "as my lady needs a carpenter just now." He turned all of that dark-eyed irony on her, lifted a brow and her spirits all in that single gesture. A partnership. "And if she has no objection, you and I and Dickon here will see to inspecting her castle for creaking timbers and precarious walls. If my lady so orders."

The mutinous blackguard, using her own words against her. Yet an odd feeling engulfed her, warm and embracing, of being wholly and steadfastly protected.

"Aye, go then, sir."

"As you wish, milady." He bowed only slightly, but with all the courtly nuances of any lord at Westminster.

Aye, and more lordly than most.

"Oh, and we are in sore need of a blacksmith, Nicholas. Do let me know when one comes though the gate."

She felt altogether tousled by his scowl, by the fierceness of it that seemed to lift her hair and brush at her neck and the ties on the front of her chemise.

"And you, madam, stay out of passages beneath the west curtain wall."

That made her smile, way down deep in her heart.

He was a mystery, someone else's wandering knight, to be sure. But hers to tame now, however briefly.

However magically.

Chapter 9

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E
leanor began an accounting of the contents of all the storage rooms that she'd opened so far. But the clutter was so widespread and haphazard, with sacks of dried peas stored next to threshing forks, and those on top of fine linens, the only way to ensure a thorough accounting was to put everything in one room and sort through it.

And the only room that would begin to hold the contents of Faulkhurst was the great hall.

"A treasure hunt!" Lisabet's shouts and Pippa's squealing followed the pair of them into the undercrofts, and soon they were racing up and down the tower stairs, their arms filled with a mix of cups, shoes, and brooms.

Eleanor sectioned off the hall for kitchen goods, for linens, for furniture and chests, setting aside the odd hammer or harness for the stables. It would be a weeklong endeavor at the least to find everything, even if she could spare everyone in the castle for this single task.

"Please let me know immediately, Lisabet, if you find any books." Eleanor rescued the pail of candle bits out of the girl's arms and set it with the two jugs of lamp oil. "They'll be very large. Heavy, too."

"Books to read?"

"Only the estate records, sweet. Inventories and accountings, the harvest schedules."

Lisabet wrinkled up her dust-smudged nose. "What kind of reading is that?"

The most valuable kind of all: information. "Faulkhurst's best kept secrets, Lisabet."

"A real treasure! Pippa! There's a book somewhere with a secret inside!" Lisabet dashed up the tower stairs.

"Where did you hide your black heart, husband?" The records had to be in the castle somewhere, and with any luck she'd find the estate office at the same time, behind one of Bayard's hundreds of locked doors.

She hurried down the stairs to the undercroft beneath the great hall, armed with her lamp, her faithful picklock, and a sledgehammer for good measure.

She hung the lamp on a peg and fit the pick into a rusted lock, certain that God completely understood why she'd learned to pick locks with such ease: to open the herbalist's cabinet at the deserted Priory of St. Oswald, to free Dickon and Lisabet from that horrid jail at Bristol. The skill was an uproarious source of humor for Dickon.

She did her level best with the small picklock, but still the rusted hasp just hung there.

Like so many of her husband's locks, it was impregnable. An overlarge hunk of rusted iron, corroded by the salted air of the sea, encrusted with his villainy. But hopefully, no match for a simple sledgehammer and a chisel.

She hoisted the long-handled thing over her shoulder, fit the chisel blade against the hasp, raised the hammer above her head, inhaled a breath of suddenly familiar, altogether intoxicating coolness, then put every ounce of her weight into a downward swing.

But the hammer went nowhere. At all. It hung with a magical weightlessness in the air just above her head.

"What—"

"Are you trying to take your fingers off at the wrist, madam?"

"Nicholas!" Furious that he could so easily thwart her—that he could sneak up on her like a shadow, as though he owned every passage, she kept a firm grip on the handle and turned beneath his arm, only to come face to chest with his frozen-frowned fury. "Let go this instant. I order you."

Nicholas decided then and there that the only way to save the woman from herself was to lock her up and toss away the key. "And I refuse, madam." He plucked the sledgehammer out of her hand and tossed it aside, well out of her reach.

"On what grounds, sir?"

"On the grounds that you are being careless with your well-being."

"I'm perfectly capable of breaking a few locks. I've been doing it this way all morning." She rapped on the panel with the heel of her hand, then leaned back against the door.

"This way?" Holy hell. "Wild swings with a sledgehammer and a chisel?" He took the chisel out of her hand.

"Lacking a set of keys to my husband's castle, I have no choice. You haven't seen any, have you, Nicholas? Keys to any of the doors?"

He nearly laughed. There was a whole ring of them rusting beneath the waves where he'd tossed them over a year ago. But she didn't need to know that. He would open the damned locks himself.

He'd never in his life had to lie about anything. He'd never needed to—he'd always taken what he wanted by force or coercion,
had spoken his own brand of truth and to hell
with the opposition, royal or otherwise. Now, speaking one falsehood after another to his wife didn't set at all well.

"I've seen no keys, my lady," he said, adding to his tenancy in hell. He wanted to press her up against the door and make love to her mouth, because she'd caught up her glistening lower lip with her teeth in her exasperation at
him—and at her husband, that ghost that was
forever hanging about.

"How about gunpowder? Is there any?"

She was utterly mad, and beautiful, the ends of her hair scented with cinnamon at the moment.

"Gunpowder,
madam?"

"Never mind; I suppose a sledgehammer will have to do me. Now stand aside; I have loads of work to do, and you're in my way." The woman picked up the hammer again, nearly clubbing his knee with it before he caught the handle and took it from her.

"Allow me, before you damage one of us." He took a swing and the lock popped easily and clattered to the ground. She made an ap
proving little noise
in her throat that made his
heart swell like a knavish fool's.

"Thank you, Nicholas."

She flipped the remains of the latch off the hasp, swung the door wide, and carried her lamp into the blackness. He followed her uneasily, not remembering what he'd left in here or in any of the other storage rooms when he'd locked the doors so long ago.

He'd prepared well for a long siege, at the beginning. He'd kept rigorous accounts in the estate records until it hadn't mattered anymore, until everyone had just slipped away.

"Nothing," she said, glaring into the single barrel that stood lidless in the center of the small and otherwise empty room. "I wish my husband were here beside me just now.
"

"Do you?" He was standing as near to her as he dared, close enough to see more than he ought to of the small, rounded ripeness of her breasts, their peaks hidden completely from all but his imagination, from the delight they would be to hold, to nuzzle.

His heart skipped along his ribs and his mouth was dry when he finally asked, "Why do you say that?"

"Because then, sir, I could curse him to his face, just as I constantly do under my breath for leaving me such a mess of his stores."

The urge to defend himself shoved at his pride, nudged him to say, "Your opinion of your late husband seems overly strong, considering that you never met him."

"I didn't have to meet him to know that he was a wicked man. Great heavens, his legends told me so, long before I was wed to him—even if only half of them were true."

True as it was, her indictment struck hard. It made him want to demand a list of all of his flaws in detail, so that he could at least dismiss the falsehoods and repair some of himself in her eyes. "Bayard was wicked in what way?"

"In every way imaginable. You must have known his reputation—the worst being that he was too cowardly to care that his tenants were dying by the score, too busy raiding and debauching or tallying his plunder, or outright hiding from the calamity, instead of sending help to Faulkhurst or coming himself."

Cowardly.
He didn't want her to believe that of him, not cowardice. It hadn't happened that way at all and he wanted her to know, somehow. "You're sure that your husband abandoned Faulkhurst so heartlessly?"

"If not him, then his steward did so on his behalf and then locked the gates."

"Perhaps it was a mercy, my lady, to send them all away. To someplace better."

"Ballocks! William Bayard never did a merciful thing in his life—except for his neglect of me. I've never known a man so practiced at abandoning his obligations at the first hint of trouble. Whether castle or village …
or wife."

He hated that she could believe that of him. He hadn't abandoned her; he had believed absolutely that she was dead with the rest of her family.

Aye, but not in those first months of their marriage. He could have sent for her then, but he had been too busy sacking churches and razing farmers' crops, overrunning villages for their plunder. No time for a wife while he was despoiling his soul. Damnation. If he could just explain that she had been better off without him—that she still was.

She was just picking up the lamp when he realized with a stinging shock to his pride that her fingers were entirely barren of rings.

Even his.

A battering surge of possession threatened to swamp him, and he took her left hand and turned her palm upward in the cradle of his own, threading her fingers lightly between his own.

"He gave you no ring?" he managed.

He'd sent one to her at the time of the wedding, some little nothing, though he'd never even seen it himself. It was chosen by his ambassador to put a seal on the marriage contract. John Sorrel—a bastard soul himself—had stood for him as groom while he'd tended to his other interests. He'd never spared the ring or the wedding or even the woman he'd married a single thought.

Yet now it angered him to the marrow that she wasn't wearing his ring, alleged widow or no. Worse—that he had allowed some other man to place it on her finger.

"Do you mean my husband?"

He swallowed hard, cleared his throat. "Who else would I mean? He must have given you a ring."

"Yes, but it's gone."

"Gone how? Did you lose it?" He could easily imagine what it must have meant to her by the sound of her derision: little enough to make her toss it into the nearest gutter on principle alone.

"I sold my wedding band in Doncaster a year ago, to buy boots for Dickon and a new kirtle for Lisabet; she'd outgrown hers. I also bought three loaves of bread with the proceeds, I believe. Yes, and carrots. And an onion."

A negligible amount for what the band of gold and garnets must have cost his treasury, and what it cost her pride. "Your wedding ring fetched all that?"

Her eyes narrowed. "It was fashioned of al
chemist's gold, Nicholas."

"I doubt that." He bit the edges of his tongue, sorry that he'd ever mentioned the damned ring, sorry that it
made his gut ache
to think of it placed on her hand in his absence.

"I never wore the horrid band after that
travesty
of a wedding ceremony."

Travesty?
Sorrel had said nothing of any problems.

"It gained value in my heart only when I used it to buy food and shelter for the people I love. I don't miss it at all."

A
belly-kick would have winded him less.
"Well, good then. Fine."

"Did you need me for anything, Nicholas?"

Damnation. He couldn't very well tell her that he'd come because he didn't trust her to stay out of trouble for more than an hour, that he planned to keep a closer eye because he was terrified of her coming to harm. "Merely to report the
progress
on the armory."

"Why the armory?" She crossed her arms below her breasts and tapped her booted foot. "I told you specifically to start with the bakehouse. We need bread, Nicholas."

"Not until the forge is running again, which can't happen until the armory roof is secure.
One step before the next, in their proper order."

She looked wary but willing to listen. "How long do you think?"

"Two days, no more than three." When she frowned at that very reasonable estimate, he added, "Hannah can bake for the few of us
in
the kitchen ovens till then."

"There'll be many more than a few of us by then, Nicholas."

He would have scoffed aloud at her moon-eyed fantasies, but she stalked out of the chamber with her lamp, only to turn back to him in the doorway, the light of her escapades dancing in her eyes. "Which reminds me, Nicholas. I'm looking for my husband's estate office. Have you seen it?"