by Karen Harper
“That is not true!”
“—and so I put the whole wretched puzzle together. You are trying to punish me for your father’s death and the king either besotted of you or guilty because he too wanted your father out of the way—”
“No! Oh, no, but I knew it!”
“Did you? Then you should have tried to ruin his life because you are going to pay dearly for ruining mine.”
“Let me go,” she brazened calmly, her mind on reaching the Château to be certain the children were safe. “You have made your point. I see your side of it now.”
“You little liar! All those with blue Plantagenet blood in their veins are liars. Here, let me show you.”
He squatted before her, his knife blade instantly pressed to her throat before she could shift away. “Your father, by the way, Plantagenet whore, deserved his wretched death and I only regret I was sent on a fool’s errand by Mortimer to deliver your meddling mother back to Kent the day he died. Just like you, your parents were meddlers. Edmund of Kent—faugh! The fond fool tried to investigate the death of King Edward’s royal sire, even to dare to whisper perhaps the old king was not truly dead at all. Obviously, that was treason against the rightful new King Edward III and it was clear he had to die. I hear your crazy mother is dead now and both your brothers too with no heirs. And so, I only have to settle this with you, the most treacherous of all the treacherous, arrogant fools with blue Plantagenet blood in their veins.”
He pressed the edge of cold blade to her throat but she was not certain if he had cut her or not. This could not be happening—the peasants, this assault, the children in danger back at the Château.
“Get your skirts up for me and let us have this over,” he hissed close to her face. She could feel his breath on her cheek and the knife surely must be cutting her throat. For the first time since he had torn the bodice of her kirtle downstairs she realized the tops of her breasts were exposed.
“Not in a church,” she whispered.
He acted as if he had not heard her and yanked her skirts up to bare her legs. “It is almost a pity,” he breathed heavily. “Holy Mary, I can see, of course, why the prince did what he did for the pure madness of possessing this tempting body. Such a pity it belongs to one so treacherous. How much I shall enjoy your dismay that one who indeed helped the king dispose of your father possesses you now.”
She stared almost mesmerized into his deep-set, glittering eyes as he fumbled with his belt and breeches. His eyes like a cold snake’s eyes: all her nightmares of her father’s murder, all her promises to her dying mother of revenge, all that pinned down, devoured by this man’s cold, glittering eyes. Then, instinctively, with all the strength of her agony and fury, she lifted both hands to claw at his eyes.
The sheer shock of her sharp movement threw him back and the pressure of his blade slackened. She hit at his face, shoved him back, surprised at a quick bite of pain along her arm. She shrieked, kicked, stunned at the sight of her bared legs smashing into his stomach. One hand over his eyes, he stumbled to his feet, the bloody knife held now to stab.
She scrambled, rolled away from the first thrust, amazed to see blood soaking the green cloth of her sleeve. The big bell silent over its cavern in the belfry floor framed John de Maltravers as he towered over her with dagger raised. As he moved toward her, she threw herself shrieking against his legs; he thudded, gasped, hit his skull back into the huge, iron bell which rang once dully. He stood stupefied; his face contorted in pain, ran with blood from deep scratches near one eye. He frowned, shook his head as though the blow on the bell had utterly dazed him. He dropped the knife and grabbed at his chest gasping for air. His face turned livid, blue, then deathly pale. Against the bell, he slid heavily to his knees and collapsed on the edge of the void.
Amazed, she scrambled for the knife. Her arm throbbed with pain now, and her sleeve felt warm and sticky with her own blood. She threw the knife at the hole in the floor and it rang the bell once as it dropped away. Her legs trembling, she stood at last.
The man on the floor looked so small, so pitiful now, crumpled and unmoving. One little shove with her foot and he would fall over the edge forty feet to the floor below. But she knew he was dead and she could not bear to touch him.
She turned away, her hand on the stone ledge as she gasped for air, and saw the lovely reach of countryside and sky outside. Her children, her Château—she had to get home now to warn them. What if de Maltravers had meant it—had sent the peasant mob there?
Assailed by a wave of stomach-wrenching dizziness, she moved carefully around the body to stare in the direction of the Château. Although the view was blocked by the thick surrounding forest, there was still no one in the town below and the Château was but a mile away, the closest noble household if the peasants did go on a rampage after that riot at the fair.
At the top of the narrow steps down she glanced back at the man to be sure he would not leap up to pursue her—now, through her life, and haunted dreams. “Murderer!” she said and started down.
She leaned heavily against the wall for balance. Just a little cut surely, but the excitement and the shock—She could make it—find de Maltravers’s horse and hurry home. In the fierce glare of sunlight outside, she spotted the waiting horse immediately and mounted it with some difficulty. She had only started out of the quiet town when she saw an old woman holding a goose on a settle before a cottage hemmed in by taller buildings.
“Back in the church,” Joan called to her, amazed at the faintness of her own voice when she thought she was shouting. “There is an old deaf man hurt in the church. Send someone to help him!”
“Ol’ Tom?” the crone said. “None to help hardly. Merchants at the fair, serfs gone to rioting in the countryside—”
But the woman’s words blended to nonsense as Joan had already forced the horse away at a faster clip, and she concentrated all her wasted strength on merely hanging on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The edge of town, orchards, ponds, the thickening trees of the countryside rolled by in a blur. Only a mile, only a mile, she told herself, but after the last bend in the country road before the Château, her worst fears began to take on a terrible reality. Ahead of her, down the road, with scythes, pitchforks, staves, or glinting hatchets on their shoulders straggled a line of field workers with a much larger crowd raising dust ahead.
“Oh, dearest saints, preserve us,” she breathed. Her dizziness cleared instantly; the racking pain in her arm ebbed. She pulled de Maltravers’s horse off into the forest to skirt past the people on the narrow road.
Within the cool, silent woods she could hear their cries as she hurried on abreast of the ragged march. She would close the gates for siege if she got there before they did. How many guards? Thomas had four with him, two perhaps were trapped at the fair, only four at the Château and perhaps caught unawares on such a fine, fair market day with the mistress gone.
Or if the peasants had gone inside, she would brazen it out, mayhap buy them off. Or if they began looting, she would take the children and flee to the woods. The children!
She pushed the horse harder as the outer walls of Château Ruisseau loomed at her through the forest fringe. Branches whipped at her as if to seize her skirts and hold her back. The horse was lathered, exhausted, but who knew how far, how hard that fiend de Maltravers had already ridden it on this tragic day. Her last thought before she rode into the clearing at the edge of the moat was that if worse came to worst, she would go in through the secret passage near Marta’s grave to get the children out. They could hide in the forest, or all get on this horse to ride for help!
She slumped in her saddle when she took in the scene before her. The drawbridge was down, and there was no evidence of struggle. But worse, mounted on a skinny rake of a horse, clad in boiled, tooled leather for makeshift armor, the rabble-rouser, Pierre Foulke, motioned for the earliest marchers of the straggling peasant band to cross the drawbridge to enter the Château.
&
nbsp; Her heart pounding, she assessed the dire situation, and rode boldly forward.
“Master Foulke!” she called out. Her voice sounded strong now, her own voice again. She sat erect in the big man’s saddle and noticed for the first time that her long blond tresses had pulled free in the fray with de Maltravers and rippled in the breeze over her shoulders. She remembered to close her torn bodice with her wounded arm and held the reins firmly in the other.
“Master Foulke! May I ask what you are doing here at the Château of the Holland family?”
The black-haired tanner turned toward her, and nearly fell off his horse in obvious dismay. “You, lady! But I saw you get hauled off back there. I thought—”
“I do not know what you thought, Master Foulke, but that was just a friend of my husband’s who saved me from that—that trouble at the fair. He has gone to get a large force of armed men to join me here. Now, I ask you to take your men and go back to town. There has been enough trouble for one day.”
She faced him on the narrow wooden drawbridge only a horse’s length away. His wily brain obviously raced, and his heavy features seemed glazed over in barely controlled fury. For one tottering second this man’s face blended to that of de Maltravers, and to stand for all she cherished she confronted that warped, contorted face again. Only, oh blessed saints, she knew this exploding danger of a violent peasant rebellion could hardly be taken away by heaven’s gift of one man’s sudden collapse into gasping pain in a belfry tower.
Joan’s eye caught sight of her maid Vinette mounted behind one of the other two peasants she saw ahorse. She had to make Foulke back off quickly before the growing mob swelled to wild riot again.
“I see Vinette Brinay is here with you, Master Foulke. Thank you for bringing her back, for we were separated in the trouble at the fair. I will take her in now and, if you will just bid your people rest on the bank of the moat here, I will send out food to refresh you before you head back to Pont-Audemer.”
Pierre Foulke’s dark eyes over the hawklike nose showed a flash of indecision as they darted from her to the road, then shot up the open drawbridge toward the castle gatehouses.
“No,” he yelled. “Vinette be going in all right, but with the Jacquerie as master. Your two men inside who fought are already dead, three locked up for later. Simon!” he bellowed to a burly mounted man clad in the same leather armor he himself sported. “This lady here be our prisoner, prisoner for the fair and just cause.”
“My children,” Joan interrupted him. “Give me my children then and I will go.”
Foulke urged his horse closer and apparently noted her bloodied arm and torn gown for the first time. “This Château, this area, those bastard noble brats of yourn—even you if I says so—be all mine now, lady, for the Jacquerie and fair and just cause. And that so-called friend of your lord what you said rescued you at the fair and gone to get help—it looks you two had a knockups with blood and all. Hell, lady, he be the one told us this Château be waiting here for the taking like a ripe peach, and he was telling true. Simon, get her inside, I says!”
The big-shouldered, unshaven oaf seized her reins and dragged her horse at a good clip along the hollow-sounding drawbridge. She considered resisting only for one moment, but the children were inside, left in the care of two maids and who knew what had happened to them all if Foulke had already secured the castle and actually killed two of the Holland guards.
Her heart kept up its pounding as she saw the peasant rabble stream into the inner ward behind her. She dismounted unaided, flanked by Foulke and his loutish guard Simon.
Lynette, the castle’s chief cook, appeared instantly on the doorstep with a peasant man Joan had never seen behind her. “Oh, milady, they kilt two men and says the Château is all theirs now. They says I am to cook them a fine banquet, milady.” The woman wrung her floured hands on her apron, and it was obvious she had been sobbing.
“It is all right, Lynette. Aye, fix them a fine banquet. Where are the children?”
Pierre Foulke’s voice cut in from close behind. “Hell’s bells, she will fix a banquet for us and we gonna see to that wine cellar too, aye, rogues? As for your noble brats, lady, upstairs all three of ’em and likely all right as long as their mother behaves.”
Joan lifted her head and fixed the hawk-faced man with a steady stare. “I will if you will, Master Foulke. I am sure you can control your men—I expect that of you as their leader. I would like to have Vinette come with me now as I go up to see my children. Please ask her to come to me.”
With a steely aplomb she hardly felt, Joan turned her back and started away, a mistake, she soon realized, to stand up to the nervous Foulke before his men. He jerked her around by her wounded arm and a wave of pain crashed over her so she nearly toppled against his grimy, leather-covered chest.
“Not hearing too good, eh, high and mighty lady? Pierre and the Jacquerie do not care hellfire for what some foolish maid tells me of your kindness to her. I know you been warning her, you and the lord too, telling her keep clear of Pierre Foulke. You have. You have!”
He shook her like a rag doll until her head bobbed, then thrust her back at the burly Simon whose hands grabbed her roughly. “Carry the new yaller-haired serf upstairs and lock her in ’til I see to the men, rogue. And if’n Pierre says he wants table cleaned, boots cleaned, my bed warmed later, lady—all our beds, eh?—Simon here will see you do it with a sweet smile on that pretty mouth. Now get her away!”
Simon half-dragged, half-carried her down the corridor outside the Great Hall and up the stairs. She did not fight him and she could see no dagger in his belt to seize. Already in the ward outside, she heard raucous cheers and chants much like those which had roused the serfs to unbridled violence at the fair today.
At the top of the steps by the solar door, the powerful man propped her up against the wall with one hand hard on her shoulder. His fat cheeks and crooked nose, broken repeatedly in forgotten brawls, his puffy lips came closer as he leered into her face.
“In the Jacquerie, noble ladies be not so high and powerful no more,” his voice lisped obscenely low. “Be sweet to Simon now real quick an’ maybe I can help, eh? Ladies learn to lift their pretty skirts and beg for favors from a man like Simon in the Jacquerie.”
“Please let me just go in to my children. Have you children, Simon? Do you not worry about them?”
The ogling stare turned to a frown and she realized too late she had goaded him. “Children, a course. Children starvin’ under taxes and new tithin’ laws to keep the nobles livin’ high like you, fancy, sweet-smelling lady!”
His avid brown eyes dropped to the torn bodice she held in place, and she saw his new plan clearly as though he had spoken it. A dirty hand lifted to yank her arm down and he peered lustily at the bared tops of her bosoms and even licked his puffy lips.
“Take your hands off me, Simon,” she began low, but in one quick pull he had completed what de Maltravers had merely started: her dress tore down to the waist to expose her naked, full breasts. He leaned his bulk hard into her, crushing her back to the wall. The agony of her injured arm, pressed between them, flashed colored waves of pain before her eyes and she thought she would faint. His big, greasy head pressed under her chin to nearly strangle her as his hot mouth licked at her breasts.
“No! No!” she got out and managed to lift a quick knee between his legs where he tried to straddle her against the wall. He doubled over in pain, gasping—a second miracle today, her dazed mind shouted at her. She moved to the solar door and fumbled with the fastened lock while Simon moaned, apparently now oblivious to her existence. She shoved the door inward and her fearful eyes drank in the precious sight: both her sons sat fidgeting at the table and her maid Renée, who often helped Vinette, held Bella.
“Oh, my dearest loves!” Joan cried as the boys jumped up and cheered. They ran together and Joan shot the bolt on the door with the two of them clinging to her filthy skirts.
“It is all right, my loves. Ev
erything will be fine now. Mother is here. Renée, is Bella all right? Oh, thank the saints you stayed here with them! I can never thank you enough!”
“Aye, milady. That tanner friend of Vinette’s, he told me to. He said a man would be up to watch us, but no one came.”
Joan cuddled her daughter to her as her eyes skimmed the untouched room. Now, while Simon was temporarily locked out in the hall, she had to act. With this girl and the children she could be down into the tunnel before they were missed.
The wooden door shuddered under the blows of a powerful fist. “It is your Master Foulke, Duchess! Open this damn door or it will get chopped down and Pierre will feed you and the brats to that crowd!”
She seized little John’s hand to run to the tunnel entrance in the garde-robe even as the thwack of an axe shuddered the wood. “Now, lady, or I swear to you the nice handling is all over.”
At Joan’s nod, the trembling Renée scurried to unlock the door even as the second blow of an axe reverberated in the room. Foulke with a white-faced Simon behind him filled the doorway. He seized Renée’s arm and shoved her past him out into the hall where she fled.
“No locked doors, milady duchess,” he mocked, his voice dripping sarcasm at her title. “And no disobeying Pierre’s orders, no more!”
“Your man Simon tried to attack me, Master Pierre.”
Foulke’s big head pivoted back to the sheepish Simon. “I told you, rogue—for later. Now get in here and tie this fancy bitch down.”
Foulke swaggered in while Simon ransacked the nearest coffer and came up with a handful of silk scarves. “Please, Master Foulke. Take what you want, but do not harm the children.”
“We are all right, my lady mother,” little Thomas assured her. “I will be with you, and Father will come soon.”
“Ha! A brave little rogue,” Foulke taunted. “Going to grow up a fine knight like your sire, eh, and run your serfs to death and raise their taxes higher and higher, little rogue, eh?”