Veil of Lies (20 page)

He released her head and waist to run his hands along her shoulders to the back of her neck, fingers working at the laces of her gown.

“What are you doing?” she asked drowsily to his moist cheek.

“I’m undressing you,” he rasped. “Any objections?”

She gave a breathy laugh. “No.”

The word barely left her lips when the gown slipped to her feet.

18

Crispin lay for the second time that night with his face under Philippa’s chin. His cheek rested comfortably on the softness of her bosom and he inhaled the muskiness of bedded woman.

“Tell me who you are, Crispin,” she said again. He silenced her the first time with kisses that turned to more. Now he was weak and drowsy and all he could do was angle his face upward and kiss her jaw. It tasted of him.

“Must we speak of such things?” His voice mumbled against her skin. “Are there not better topics of conversation when lovers are abed?”

She smiled. He could tell because the shadows and angles of her jaw changed. “Are we lovers now?”

“If you would have it so.”

“Does that mean,” she said with a false coquette in her voice, “that you would lie with me again?”

“And again and again. When a job is worth doing—” He nuzzled her until she pulled away.

“Then you should tell me.”

“Hmm?” He found a better spot to nuzzle, flicking his tongue.

She squirmed away and gathered the bedclothes over her breasts. “About your past. You don’t belong on the Shambles. Why are you here, Crispin?”

He stopped.
Women!
Sighing, he rolled off of her and lay on his back to stare up at the cobwebbed rafters. “Why is my history so important?”

She rolled onto her belly. Propped up on her elbows, she gazed down at him. Her locks fell softly over one eye. “Because it makes you so secretive and mistrusting. And I would know and share your pain as you shared mine.”

“No one can share this.”

“Yet I would still know.”

He looked at her. “Stubborn.”

She frowned playfully. “Determined.”

Her face was, in fact, determined, and he shook his head at it. “‘I was shipwrecked before I got aboard,’” he sighed.

“What?”

“It’s a quotation. From a philosopher I favor.” He hoped it would distract her, but he saw from the corner of his eye that she was not deterred.

“Very well.” He settled his interlaced hands on his bare chest and stared upward. “Eight years ago, I was a knight.”

“A knight! You?”

He nodded, his head sliding on the rough cloth of the pillow. “I fought great battles, I warred in France, in Germany, fought the Turk, and went on a crusading pilgrimage in the Holy Land. I owned fields, flocks, woodlands, villeins. I dressed in the finest clothes, drank the finest wines, ate course after course in my great hall at my barony in Sheen not far from the king’s own residence. I served and was served in the great hall in Westminster Palace—when Edward of Windsor was king.”

“What happened?”

“I did a stupid, foolish thing. I wagered on the wrong horse.”

She cocked her head charmingly. He took her hand and stroked it. “You see, I was the duke of Lancaster’s man. He fostered me in his household. Made me a knight. But that gratitude blinded me to my duty. I felt that he should have been heir when his brother Edward of Woodstock died. I could not imagine this great realm ruled by Edward’s son Richard when the duke lived and breathed.”

“Hush, Crispin.” She looked to the shuttered window in fear, but he had long since stopped worrying over speaking treason.

“There were others who did not share my view of Lancaster,” he went on. “They wanted to bring him and his men down. They hatched a plot, intimating that Lancaster was ready to move against Richard and take the throne for himself.” He shook his head, still amazed he believed it. “It was not true, of course, but I—brash, young fool that I was—thought it was so, and I joined my name to the conspirators.”

She said nothing. Her hand went to her lips.

“The treasonous plot was soon unmasked and many were executed. I should have been among them, but my liege lord Lancaster pleaded for my life. By then, Richard was crowned and he only ten years old. Though he did not yet have the rule of the country, he had a say in my fate.” He nodded ruefully. “I remember the day well. Richard called his court and I stood before them all. He announced in his clear, young voice that I was a knight no more. And further, that all my lands and my wealth were forfeit to the crown, and that my title was abolished. I was stripped of my armor, my shield, and my sword, and left with nothing but the clothes on my back.” He smiled at her sadly. “Sound familiar?”

“Oh, Crispin.”

“He told the court that any lord who succored me would see the same fate or worse, and I was set loose on the road as I was.”

“But what of your kinsmen?”

“The male line had died out. I have some female cousins in the Marches, but after I was degraded, well. I’m certain they prayed I would disown them. I was utterly alone. But I managed to survive as you see me now.”

She glanced about the small room she once called a stable. “It’s very cozy here.”

He kissed her hand before releasing it. “It’s dismal, but it’s all I can afford.”

Philippa glanced away before rolling on her back to join Crispin in contemplating the ceiling. She pulled the covers lightly over her and turned to smile at him. “Poor dear. Me? Well, I can be a chambermaid again, maybe even a chatelaine. But you—”

He frowned, realizing how much he had revealed. “Don’t worry over me,” he said brusquely.

“Doesn’t anyone worry over you?”

“Jack does.”

He felt her stare at him before she said, “Is there no
woman
to care about you?”

He closed his eyes. “Once or twice. Briefly.”

She turned over onto her belly again, rolling herself in the sheet. She ran her fingers lightly over his sable chest hair. “If I had been a chambermaid in your manor in Sheen and I had caught your eye, would you have married me?”

Crispin opened one eye to look at her and just as quickly shut it.

Only a few short moments ago he felt drowsy with languor, but now he was wide awake. He knew he should answer her, but the time stretched so long that she squirmed beside him.

“It’s a simple question,” she said. “Or is it?”

He snapped open his eyes. He shuffled himself up to a sitting position and lay his hands on his thighs over the covers. His head rested against the plaster wall. The wall felt cold. “You want the truth?” Her only acknowledgment was her intensely concentrated stare down her nose. He suspected that the truth she said she wanted wasn’t the one he was about to give her. “The answer is ‘no.’ Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. I was a lord of the court. A knight. I would never have married my chambermaid. No such man would have done.”

She folded her arms over her ample chest and pouted. “I see. Well then, you answered that right well.”

Women! Their pouts were such sharp weapons. And they wielded them well. Her hurt look was almost as good as its equally quick change to a pixie smile. He couldn’t trust that kind of smile. Especially when it hid behind that sleepy way of hers, drooped lids that so easily enticed him to her will. “You aren’t a lord now,” she purred.

He studied her, somehow able to resist her allure. “It’s in the blood.” He chuckled at the memory of his conversation with Eleanor. “This is my ‘true image’ you see before you. But I was betrothed once.”

“What happened?”

He rolled his eyes and closed them again. “You can guess.”

“She broke the betrothal because you were no longer a knight? And yet, if it is ‘in the blood’ as you say, what should it matter?”

He opened his eyes and fixed them on her. It wasn’t hard to do. The sheet wound tightly about her chest and hid her charms, but only tantalized by creating depth and darkness between her breasts. Her hair teased her white shoulders and caressed her face in soft curls and shadow. He was surprised by the regret tingeing his words. “This is no fit place to bring a wife.”

She looked at him a long time. A sigh eased over her pert lips before she snuggled against him and cast her arm across his chest. In spite of himself, he liked the feel of it.

“It’s no good, you know,” she said softly. He felt her breath tickle the hair on his chest. “I’m falling in love with you.”

Crispin felt a stab in his heart. A not entirely unfamiliar feeling, but not a welcomed one. He thought to keep silent and drift off to sleep again, but instead his lips unaccountably parted. “I think I love you, too.”

He searched the rafters. Maybe something heavy would fall on him. “Funny,” he said. “I never intended to say that aloud.”

Philippa’s warm body rested against his for another pleasant moment. But suddenly, as if the house were afire, she scrambled out of bed.

“It’s here, ain’t it!”

Her naked body gleamed in the waning firelight but she clutched her breast as if enduring chest pains. His heartbeat thrummed before he understood what she was talking about.

“The Mandyllon? Don’t be a fool. Of course it is, but—”

She rummaged for her clothes and drew on her shift. “You must get it out of here! I won’t spend one more moment in its presence. It made you say all those things. Don’t you remember? It made
me tell the truth to the sheriff
!”

Crispin dismissed it. Hysteria. And confession was good for the soul. Although he, too, had acknowledged love for her he had no intention of voicing. But he owed that to his sleepiness and a certain amount of shared vulnerability. All easily explained.

Wasn’t it?

“Philippa, it is the middle of the”—he glanced toward the shuttered window and noted light creeping through—“morning,” he finished lamely. “Come back to bed.”

She cowered near the opposite wall looking down at her feet. Nothing could convince her, so he dragged himself from the tangle of bedsheets and stood naked on the cold floor. His stockings, lying across the floorboards like a skinned snake, were still tied to his under braies, so he pulled on each one and slipped the braies up. He shrugged into his shirt and when he grabbed his cotehardie, the Mandyllon fell out of it onto the floor. She gave a little screech and he quickly tucked it beneath his cote as he pulled it on, snorting at himself at the freshly torn-off buttons.

“Put yourself at ease,” he said, buckling his belt. He patted the lump the Mandyllon made inside his coat. “I will find a suitable hiding place until I can decide what’s to be done with it.” He leaned toward her to kiss, but she backed away, pointing to his chest. He scowled instead and pulled open the door.

Jack stood on the landing wearing an expectant smile.

Crispin closed Philippa in the room behind him and rubbed his unshaven jaw. He didn’t know why he felt embarrassed. “Look Jack, this was all unexpected.”

“Course.”

“Stop looking at me like that. Do you need to be cuffed to remind you who is master here?”

“Oh, I know right well who the master is here. She is.”

Crispin’s anger drained away and he leaned limply against the closed door. “I fear you are right. I suppose I must tell you what transpired.”

The boy tucked his hands behind his back and shuffled his feet. Under his breath he said, “I know what transpired—”

Crispin cuffed him lightly. “Not
that
! I mean yesterday. Walcote’s brothers came calling, and they declared that the dead man is not Nicholas Walcote.”

“’Slud! Who is he, then?”

“No one seems to know. But Philippa knew he was an imposter. She tried to suppress it. Then the sheriff interceded and, well, it was determined that she should be cast out. It wasn’t even a lawful marriage, and so she is left with nothing.”

“Oh, Master! It’s just like what happened to you!”

“Yes, and perhaps that is why I’m sympathetic. Or—” He turned toward the door as if he could spy her through the wood. “I, uh…” Taking in Jack’s expression, he decided he didn’t have to share all his thoughts and suspicions with the boy. “I have an errand to run. Watch over her while I am out.”

“Aye, Master. With pleasure, sir.”

Crispin rambled down the stairs and swore into the wind. He glanced up the Shambles one way and down the other. Animal carcasses hung from great metal hooks near the shop fronts, hallowed, skinned, and bereft of head and forelimbs. He felt a little like that himself.