The Rose at Twilight (35 page)

She opened her eyes wide at that. “But I told you what it was like at Drufield,” she said. Wrinkling her nose at him, she added, “I spent many a night in misery there, sir, but I warrant that you approve of Lady Drufield’s methods.”

He did not smile as she had expected, or disclaim. Instead, seriously, he said, “Do you truly know what you deserved tonight, madam, or were all your words rehearsed merely to unman me?”

She touched his face. “I do know, Nicholas, and I am sorry. I was wickedly undutiful, just as the lord abbot said I was.”

“’Twas more than lack of duty,” he said, turning toward the door. “Those last words you shouted were downright treasonous. Should I allow them to go unpunished, not only would it be wrong, but such leniency would seriously undermine my authority over my men. They are not all law-abiding fellows,
mi calon.
We breed as many rascals in Wales as you do in England, and some of mine, you will recall, are Scots. It would not do for them to think me too weak to control a mere female, and my own wife, at that.”

“Aye, sir, I know that.”

He was silent, concerned for the moment with the task of opening the door without having to put her down.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To my chamber. Tom will be comfortable enough down in the hall on a bed of rushes. I’ll not need him this night.”

“But my clothes!” she cried, recalling that it was necessary to go to the ground floor and up a second stairway to reach the gentlemen’s side of the house. She clutched her robe tightly across her breasts. “You cannot mean to carry me through this house in naught but my robe and petticoats, sir!”

“Certainly I can. By rights, I ought to strip you bare and carry you over my shoulder for all to see, with your backside as red as fire.” He paused significantly, then added in a gently provocative tone, “Do you wish to discuss my husbandly rights any further this night?”

She held her tongue until he began to descend the stairway to the hall, when she gathered her dignity and said, as though she were merely conversing to pass the time, “What was that you said? It was a new phrase,
mi … mi calon
?”

To her surprise, he did not answer as readily as he usually did, and when he did there was new color in his cheeks. He said only, “Is that what I said?”

“Aye. What is it?”

He shrugged. “’Tis merely a term for one’s wife. In Welsh the word for ‘wife’ means prudence and discretion, but it also means cunning, and that suits you well enough, does it not?”

She was learning to hear more in his voice than the words he spoke, and she knew he was not being entirely truthful. He had never, to her knowledge, lied to her, but she thought he might be capable of shading truth if truth made him uncomfortable, or if he thought he might betray vulnerability of a sort he thought unmanly. She did not tax him with her knowledge, however, for she was too grateful to be spared the full force of his temper that night to ponder at any length over his possible deception.

If she had hoped he would carry her quietly down one stair and up the other, she was disappointed, for when they reached the hall, they discovered that not only were Gwilym, Madeline, Jonet, and the lay brothers present, but also Hugh Gower and several other men, including Tom and Ian. The men were sprawled before the fire, casting dice and drinking spiced ale that had been heated with a poker, now lying with its tip in the embers to stay hot. The women sat talking as they plied their needles. No one looked up when Nicholas reached the foot of the stair.

“You there, Tom!” he bellowed to his squire. “You sleep down here tonight, lad, but see that you wake me when the brothers have begun to sing matins. And, Hugh, you have the men ready to ride as soon as they have broken their fast.”

Everyone was staring now, just as he had wanted them to do.

“Ladies,” he said, “you may have your chamber to yourselves. My wife will bear me company in mine own. But first,” he added sternly, setting Alys on her feet, “she wishes to apologize to you all for her unseemly behavior in the courtyard earlier.”

Caught off guard, Alys clutched her robe tightly across her breasts, glanced uncertainly up at him and then back at the others. “I … I do apologize for my … my unseemly behavior,” she stammered. “I ought not to have spoken so.”

Nicholas hooked his thumbs in his belt and said, “Do not be shy, wench. Get it all said. You ought not to have shouted in a manner so unladylike as to embarrass the holy brethren. Go on, now,” he added, removing one hand from his belt to gesture impatiently, “say all of it.”

“I ought not to have shouted,” she said obediently. “’Twas most unmannerly.”

“And undutiful,” Nicholas murmured behind her, “to speak so disrespectfully to your lord and master.”

“And undutiful,” she repeated.

“Continue with the rest,” he said gently, “as I bade you.”

She glared at him, and then at the others when she saw laughter in Madeline’s eyes and approval in Gwilym’s. Although she was certain they could not hear Nicholas’s words, they could tell he was pressing her to say more than she wanted to say. She muttered, “I was undutiful to speak so rudely to my husband.”

Nicholas shook his head and said in a normal tone, “Your attempt to show proper humility bespeaks a lack of practice, madam. You have not yet mentioned your sincere regret at having uttered words that, to those who do not know your mischievous tongue, might have sounded a trifle treasonous. What say you?”

She looked at him again, her emotions a mixture of anger and uncertainty. She would have liked very much just then to snatch up one of the bone goblets and dash hot spiced ale in his smug face, but she did not dare, knowing he might well retaliate by baring her backside before them all. The worst of it, she acknowledged grimly to herself, if not to him, was that he was in the right. If the things she had shouted were ever repeated to the king or to Elizabeth, she could well be accused of treason.

Straightening her shoulders and raising her chin, she said clearly, “My husband is right to remind me that foolish words shouted in a fit of temper might be misunderstood, might even be given more weight than they deserve.”

“I wish the king no ill,” Nicholas prompted for her ears alone. When she did not respond at once, his hands gripped her shoulders from behind, and he said insistently, “Say it.”

“I wish the king no harm,” Alys said.

“I pray he will defeat his enemies,” murmured her prompter.

Instead, she said, “And now, having made my apologies to you all, and having made it clear that I am no enemy to the king, I do beg you all to forgive us if we leave you now. My husband has expressed a wish to retire. Have you not, sir?” she inquired sweetly, turning toward him.

“I have,” he agreed, his undertone grim. “We bid you all good night.” And with that, taking her by the arm, he hastened her toward the second stairway, adding, again for her ears alone, “You would be well served if I did put you over my knee, madam.”

“I am no puppet, sir,” she snapped, hoping the minute the words were out that she had not spoken too loudly, but determined nonetheless to make him understand. “I do not speak words others put in my mouth if those words do not express my feelings. ’Twas bad enough, in faith, to have said I wished no ill to the king. He has not business to be king, and while I do not wish him harm, precisely, I do want him off the throne of England, and therefore will I cry victory when my Lord Lovell’s men defeat him!”

“And me, madam? Will you cheer if I am killed by that damned outlaw, while I attempt to defend my king? Or if Hugh is killed, or Ian, or Tom? Will you cry victory over our graves?”

His words halted her on the stair, her hands clutched at her breast, for it seemed that her heart had ceased to beat, that her breath had died in her throat. Her knees quaked with the dread of the images he had forced into her mind, and for a moment she was afraid she would faint where she stood.

“I never meant such a thing,” she whispered, her gaze begging him to believe her. “I would never cheer your death, or any of theirs. And in faith, sir, you did promise that Ian should go with me to Wolveston Hazard.”

“Oh, aye, the lad will thus be spared, will he not? And perchance, wench, if you should write him a safe passage in your own hand, your hero Lovell will spare you Ian even if he should chance to be caught with me.”

Reaching a hand toward him, she said, “Prithee, try not to be angry with me, sir. Once again I spoke hastily and without thought. I never meant harm to you or them. In truth, had I my own way of things, I should ordain an end to war and violence altogether. No good ever comes of such.”

Taking her outstretched arm in a bruising grasp, he turned her abruptly on the stair and urged her upward, saying curtly, “Have done with your pleadings, madam, and get yourself up those stairs. I have had my fill of female blandishments for one night and would see you serve me in your proper place. I have been patient and most merciful, I believe, and my thanks is that you would wish my king dead on a field of battle. Nay, say no more,” he added angrily when she stopped again, “You have said enough.”

She knew she had pushed him too far again, that to argue more would only put her in danger of what she had so recently averted. Knowing no way to make him understand her feelings, she gave it up for the moment and hurried up the stairs.

His chamber was much the same as the ladies’ chamber on the opposite side of the house. A fire burned brightly on the hearth, and the hangings at the windows were of the same velvet cloth. Only one detail was very different. There was but one bed, a huge one, with a small truckle bed pulled out at one side, where Tom clearly had thought he would be sleeping. Nicholas, seeing it, shoved it back under the big bed with his foot.

“I would retire at once,” he said. “It will be a long, wearisome day tomorrow if we are to make the forest by dark.”

The mood she had created earlier was broken, and for that she was sorrier than for all the rest. She did not think he would be killed defending the Tudor. Nicholas was too big, too competent to fall. And he would have Hugh at his side, and all his other men besides. Still, the images he had drawn in her mind lingered there, and when he got into the big bed beside her, she wanted him to hold her close, to make the visions go away. Instead, without even drawing the bed curtains he moved swiftly to take her, apparently without concern that he might hurt her.

When she stiffened beneath him and cried out in alarm, however, he paused, looking down at her, his face in the fire’s glow radiating first his annoyance, then dawning guilt. “By the holy rood, I ought to have beaten you,” he muttered gruffly.

“I am glad you did not,” she whispered. “You are so big, sir, that when you are angry, you frighten me witless. I have tried to be a good wife to you, but I have never learned to control my temper as I should, and when I lose it, I seem to lose my senses altogether. I did not mean to be a bad wife.”

He shifted his weight to lie on his side with one hand propping up his head, the other resting idly on her hip. “You are not such a bad wife,” he said, “but you do arouse all the furies of hell in a man when you behave as you did tonight. Methinks your foster parents would have done us both good service had they thrashed you soundly once a sennight.”

“At Drufield they nearly did so, but my Lady Anne did train me to manage a large household,” she said quietly. “You gave my home into your brother’s charge, sir, ignoring the fact that I am better trained to manage it than he can be. That made me angry.”

His expression hardened, and for a moment she feared she had stirred the coals of his anger again. He said, “It is enough that I decided to put Gwilym in charge at Wolveston. I need not explain my actions to you or to anyone. Do you understand that?”

“Aye,” she muttered, “but ’tis most unfair.”

“Mayhap.” He was silent, but the hand on her hip began to move slowly down her thigh and back again, almost as though he did it unknowingly while his thoughts were elsewhere. Then, just as she had begun to give herself up to the sensations he was stirring, he said, “’Tis one thing to have training,
mi calon,
another to have experience. And just now, with the world in turmoil around us, and rebellions sprouting up hither and yon, while the country adjusts itself to Henry’s rule, Wolveston is not safe under a woman’s command. The place was ravaged by the sweat. I have no knowledge even of how many men are left there, how many tenants. I have seen only one village, the one time, and it was no concern of mine when I did so. The villages may have been overrun, or they may be deserted. It is also possible, in view of the fact that your father’s sympathies were with the Yorkists, that his people now support Lovell and the Staffords.”

“The Staffords?”

“Aye, we have heard rumors since we passed through Worcester that Sir Thomas Stafford and his brother Humphrey are trying to raise the Midlands against Harry, just as Lovell is raising the North. I forbade the men to say anything in your hearing because I did not want you or the other women made uneasy. ’Tis safe enough, I think, for you to travel betwixt here and Wolveston, but with the whole of England unsettled, it is no time to leave an estate the size of Wolveston Hazard in the hands of a woman.”

She was silent. His hand trailed now to her waist and upward to her breasts, toying with her, still idly but with tenderness, and the feelings coursing through her body were impossible to ignore. Turning more toward him and putting a hand to his cheek, she said, “Perhaps you are right, sir, I had not thought of that. Our people will accept a man’s hand on the reins more easily than mine at such a time as this, but I should prefer that the hand be yours, Nicholas, not Gwilym’s.”

“I, too, but that is not possible.” Catching hold of her hand, he silenced her with kisses, forgetting their arguments as his need to quench his passions grew. But when he slept, she lay beside him, sated but wide awake, thinking for a long while.

She thought she was beginning to understand him better. Men were difficult to know. Women were easier. She knew she had enraged him and was surprised that her tactics to mollify him had worked so well. At best, she had hoped only that her woman’s weapons would get her off with a whole skin. But then, having spared her, Nicholas had grown distant again, almost angrier than before. She began to suspect that his pride had been touched, that his anger had turned inward, toward himself. She was nearly certain that he still thought he had been weak not to punish her.