by Meg Cabot
“Verily,” Finnula replied. “I trust you slept well.”
“Like a stone, madam. So hard, in fact, I do not recall you mentioning that you intended to turn the house out this morn.”
“Not the entire house, my lord,” Finnula said, darting out of the way as a wench Hugo didn’t recognize traipsed past, her arms full of his late father’s clothing. “Only Lord Geoffrey’s solar.”
Hugo nodded. “I can see that. And might I ask, madam, what you intend to do with the items you’ve collected from there?”
Finnula, in a gesture Hugo instantly recognized as nervousness, pushed a few loose tendrils of red hair from her forehead. “Burn them, my lord,” she called up to him.
Hugo oughtn’t to have been surprised. Knowing how much she despised the late earl, it was a relatively mild gesture. Still, the fact that she had neglected to mention the matter to Hugo beforehand was rather irksome.
“I see,” Hugo said, and he could not keep the disapproval from his voice. “I shall be down presently, Lady Finnula, to discuss this, er, bonfire with you.”
As Hugo turned away from the window, Finnula’s hoarse voice beckoned him back. “Might I suggest, my lord,” she called up to him, a slight teasing note in her tone, “that you dress before coming down?”
Quickly glancing down at himself, Hugo realized he’d been addressing his wife—and, indeed, nearly his entire household staff—in his altogether. Grimacing, he stalked away from the window, only half conscious of the astonished cry that the sight of his naked backside elicited from Mistress Laver below. The cook, crossing the courtyard in order to consult with her new mistress concerning the evening meal, had to sit down and be fanned for several minutes before she recuperated from the shock.
Hugo was shaved and dressed in a matter of minutes, a skill he’d acquired during the Crusades, where sneak attacks by the enemy had necessitated rapid toilettes. Running a hand through his damp hair, he hurried down the stairs, observing that nearly all signs of the previous evening’s festivities had been cleared away. New rushes had been laid upon the flagstones, and those had been doused with something sweet-smelling. The long tables were gone, with the exception of the one at which he and Finnula would partake of their regular meals. Because the day was fine, no fire had been laid upon the massive stone hearth. Instead, all the flowers from the night before were piled where a log ought to have been, making an eye-catching and pleasant-scented arrangement.
Hugo was so intent upon reaching the back courtyard, in which Finnula’d had all his father’s belongings piled, that he didn’t see the four-foot-tall impediment with which he collided as he came down the stairs.
“Hey there!” cried a pile of bed curtains at the base of the stairs. “Look where you’re goin’!”
Hugo, backing up with alacrity, saw that the bearer of the brocade material was none other than his son, Jamie, who looked mightily indignant at being trod upon. Scrambling to his feet, the lad gave his jerkin a tug and said, “Just because I’m small don’t mean I ain’t here a’tall, you know.” And then, grudgingly, “My lord.”
Hugo looked down at the sulking little cuss and wondered how he could not have noticed the resemblance before. Though his memory of the boy’s mother would probably never be much more than dim, his own features he recognized quite well. Particularly, he noted, the hazel eyes.
“Well, there, Jamie,” he said, reaching down to help the boy get a firmer grasp on his load. “I apologize for that. Have you got hold of it, now?”
“Right enough,” Jamie admitted. “Now if you’ll ’scuse me, Lady Finn wants all this stuff out back—”
“Hold a minute there, Jamie,” Hugo said, drawing the boy back with a hand upon his slim shoulder. “I believe there’s something you and I need to get straight.”
Obediently, the boy faced him, waiting with only the slightest expression of impatience on his face as Hugo settled himself on the bottom step.
“When I asked you, yesterday,” Hugo began, hesitantly, “to whom you belonged, Jamie, you said—”
“You, my lord.”
“Yes, that’s right. You said that you belong to me, meaning, I assume, that you are my vassal—”
“Aye,” Jamie said. “That I am. Like Mistress Laver.”
“Well, yes, Jamie.” Hugo stroked his chin. “But what I really meant was…Jamie, do you know who your father is?”
“I should think so,” Jamie declared. “You.”
Hugo nodded, relieved. “Yes, that’s right. Me. Now, I’ve been away for quite a long time, and I realize that perhaps you’ve had things hard—”
Jamie looked as if his patience was wearing thin. “Lady Finn’ll have my hide if I don’t get back with these curtains.”
“Well, stay a moment. I’ll go with you and explain to, er, Lady Finn. What I want to say, Jamie, is that if there’s anything, uh, anything that you need—”
“I need to get back to Lady Finn afore she kills me,” Jamie asserted.
“Yes. Well.” Seeing that there was no use pursuing the subject at the moment, Hugo rose and, taking the bed curtains from the boy, said, “Let me help you with that, anyway.”
Jamie’s face was a picture of delight. “Oh! You take that, my lord, and I’ll run back up and get the others! Lady Finn’ll be right pleased!”
Watching the boy scamper back up the stairs, Hugo shook his head. Somehow or other, Hugo was going to have to impress upon Jamie that he wasn’t one of the servants. Though Hugo could not, in fairness to Finnula, name the boy as his heir, he could see the child properly—and prosperously—raised. The lad was going to have to be educated and apprenticed somewhere. Though what household would take him, filthy as he was, Hugo couldn’t imagine. Mayhap Finnula, whom the boy seemed to worship, could induce him to bathe.
Gathering up the bed curtains, Hugo headed for the back of the house, carefully dodging scurrying chambermaids and frantic-looking laundresses, none of whom acknowledged his presence except by gasping and hurrying away. He could hear Mistress Laver barking orders at some hapless scullion, and if the aroma wafting from the kitchens was any indication of what awaited him for breakfast, he thought the cook hardly needed to scold anyone.
But he himself had some scolding to attend to before breaking his fast, and accordingly, stepped outside to find his wife instructing old Webster’s newly hired assistant to hitch up the farm wagon, since she wanted all His Lordship’s furniture carted to the south field where, she sweetly explained, it would be burned to the ground. Finnula was quite unconscious of Hugo’s looming presence and didn’t even turn around until the groom, gulping, pointed over her shoulder.
“I’m thinkin’ ’Is Lordship is wantin’ ye, Lady Finn,” the rough-looking lad said.
Finnula spun around, spied the bed curtains in Hugo’s arms, and cried, “Oh, lovely! Put those there, will you, my lord?”
Hugo dropped the material, then snaked out an arm and anchored it around his wife’s waist. “Finnula,” he said, through gritted teeth. “You and I need to have a talk.”
“Not right now,” Finnula said, squirming against him. “I’ve got work to do.”
“I can see that you’ve been working very industriously indeed this morning, my love.” Hugo’s grip on her was inexorable, and she finally gave up twisting within it and eyed him, her gaze wary but her chin thrust out obstinately.
Glimpsing the fleeting surrender in her gray eyes, Hugo bodily hauled his wife out of earshot of the servants, depositing her on the far side of the courtyard, near the well. Once her feet touched solid ground, Finnula, catlike, set about adjusting her attire, tucking the ends of her white shirt back into her braies and flicking suspicious glances in his direction.
“You said at the millhouse,” she began haughtily, “that Stephensgate Manor was mine, to do with what I chose—”
“But to burn all my father’s belongings?” Hugo glowered at her. “Weren’t you even going to consult me about my feelings on the matter?”
> “Your feelings on the matter?” Finnula stamped a booted foot, her cheeks pinkening with anger. Her normally gentle gray eyes suddenly snapped fire as she jabbed a finger into Hugo’s broad chest. “Your father was a miserable weak man”—she emphasized each word with a jab of her finger—“who allowed that leech Reginald Laroche to suck out his life’s blood until all that was left was a half-crazed shell. Your father let that man rob and starve the very people he was sworn to protect, and then, to top it all off, he forced me to marry him against my will, died, and left me to be accused of his murder!” Drawing breath, Finnula dropped her hands to her hips and glared at him. “And you stand there and protest your feelings!”
Hugo frowned down at his obstreperous wife. His anger, if truth be told, was mostly feigned. What did he care about a lot of old furniture? But he couldn’t allow Finnula to think that she, not he, was lord of the manor.
“And burning all of his belongings is going to remedy my father’s mistakes?” he demanded, with what he considered intimidating gruffness.
Not very surprisingly, Finnula hardly looked cowed. “Burning all of Lord Geoffrey’s belongings will make me happy,” she informed him tartly. And then she added, with a sly glance at old Webster, who’d come stumbling into the courtyard bearing the late earl’s saddle, “And ’twill make his subjects happy, as well. I’m sorry to say there wasn’t much love lost between Lord Geoffrey and his vassals toward the end. Your allowing them to throw something of his onto an enormous bonfire just might make some of them forgive and forget. That, and the fact that you’ve dismissed Monsieur Laroche, will make them more accepting of you…”
“You think so, do you, wench?” Hugo couldn’t help grinning at her. “And do you care whether or not my subjects accept me?”
She lifted her nose. “Certainly not. But ’twill make my role as chatelaine easier—”
Looking up at him, Finnula suddenly bit her lower lip, and laid a slim hand on his arm. Finnula so rarely touched him of her own accord—at least, without a knife in her hand—that Hugo raised his eyebrows, surprised by the gesture. He didn’t have the slightest idea what caused Finnula suddenly to soften toward him, but all at once, she was looking up at him with something almost like sympathy in her eyes.
“I’m sorry to malign your father in this way, Hugo. I know that toward the end of his life he was…ill. But even before that, he was rather horrid—”
Hugo shrugged, amused. “I told you myself he was rather horrid, remember?”
She blinked up at him, and he saw the tenderness leave her face. “Oh, yes. That story about how your mother and father tried to force you to join a monastery.” She laughed shortly, a laugh without mirth, and dropped her hand from his arm. “’Twas stupid of me not to have realized then who you were in truth. That’s quite a famous story round these parts.”
Hugo frowned again. So she was still sulking about Hugh Fitzwilliam, was she? Christ’s toes, but he was beginning to hate that fictional knight. It seemed incredible, but he honestly believed the girl would have preferred to be wed to that lowly knight than to himself. What was he going to have to do in order to win over the ungrateful chit? True, he had her body, but her heart seemed to belong to someone Hugo himself had invented!
“Have your bonfire, then,” he said, ungraciously and through gritted teeth. “Throw my own chair on it, if that will make you happy. I care not.”
Turning, he strode away, and Finnula, to his chagrin, made no effort to stop him. He knew he was being foolish, sulking as if he were no older than Jamie, but it irked him that his wife, who was so demonstrative in bed—and in the bushes, for God’s sake—should be so cold at all other times. It had not been so when he’d been her hostage. Why was it so now that he was her husband?
Hugo went inside to seek out some breakfast, and it was as he was eating it—not quite alone, for Gros Louis, seeming to have given up on his dislike of him, had joined him with a bone at his feet at the head of the long table in the Great Hall—that Peter approached, sweaty-faced and dirty from his exertions in the late earl’s solar, to announce that John de Brissac was waiting outside the manor house gates for a word with His Lordship. Swallowing a last mouthful of pork and egg, Hugo rose to follow his squire, who seized the opportunity to complain of his treatment of late.
“I didn’t leave London so I could haul furniture,” Peter whined. “I’m not used to dirtying my hands performing common char labor. When am I to begin my training as a knight, my lord? I don’t even have sword of my own—”
Hugo, who was in a foul temper, snapped, “You have a decent bed to sleep in, don’t you?”
“Aye, my lord…”
“You didn’t have three meals a day, and fine clothes, and a horse of your own, and a decent bed to sleep in when you were in London, did you?”
“Nay, my lord…”
“Those things are more important than swords.”
“But I thought I was to be trained to fight.” Peter was huffing from his attempt to keep up with Hugo’s long strides across the stable yard. “I thought I was to learn swordplay in order to battle the enemy—”
Hugo snorted. “The enemy doesn’t engage in swordplay, my boy. The enemy’s weapons are considerably more sophisticated.”
“My lord?”
“The enemy uses winsome looks and swishing hips…”
“My lord?” Peter looked understandably confused. “Are you saying…Are you referring to women, my lord?”
Hugo had reached the gates by then, and he only shrugged. “Get thee gone, boy. I’ll train you another day. For now, do as your mistress bids.”
Peter, muttering darkly beneath his breath, hitched his shoulders and turned back toward the house.
John de Brissac, high upon his mount, looked surprised to see Hugo standing in the yard. “Ho, there, my lord!” he cried, dismounting with surprising quickness for so heavy a man. “Didn’t mean to disturb you. Asked the boy to see whether or not you and your lady were receiving callers.”
Hugo leaned against one of the useless stone turrets that guarded his home, enjoying the feel of the sun upon his face. “I suppose we are,” he said. “At least I am. The Lady Finnula is otherwise engaged.”
“Ah.” The sheriff smiled knowingly. “Too modest to show her face after last night, eh? ’Tis the way with pretty brides.”
Hugo snorted. “Not exactly, Sheriff. Modesty is not a virtue my wife seems to hold in much esteem. She is currently directing a team of laborers in removing my father’s furniture from his solar, with the intention of burning it in a massive bonfire in the south meadow tonight.”
“Is she?” There was no mistaking the glee in the sheriff’s voice. “Good girl!” Then, with a cautious glance at Hugo, who was frowning, de Brissac amended, “What I meant was—”
“No, no, John.” Hugo waved aside the older man’s apology. “I can see by your enthusiasm that you think the idea a good one. I have been too long gone from here to know what is what. So you think it a wise plan?”
“’Tis a sure way to show the Matthew Fairchilds of this community that you mean to be a different sort of leader than your father,” the sheriff thoughtfully observed.
“And all the wine and roasted pig I served last night was not proof enough?” Hugo asked, with a flash of humor.
“Ah, well, that was well and good, but this bonfire…” The sheriff chuckled, shaking his head. “’Twill be like bidding good riddance to bad rubbish, if you’ll excuse the slight to your family, my lord.”
Hugo, rubbing his jaw, frowned. “I think I see what you mean. ’Twill allow my vassals to feel as I did yesterday, when I closed the gates upon the Laroches.”
“Precisely!” Noticing that Hugo was still frowning, John de Brissac slapped the reins he held against his side and whistled, low and long. When Hugo lifted an inquiring brow, the sheriff said, with a lopsided grin, “Well, my lord, to look at you, I’d hardly think you were a man newly wedded. I’m hoping that frown is from a headache b
rought on by too much wine last night, and not by your bright young bride…”
Hugo’s frown lifted only slightly. “How did you guess?”
It was Sheriff de Brissac’s turn to snort. “You forget, my lord. I was the one who was bid to stop the Fair Finn from poaching on your lands. That was like telling a man to stop the wind from blowing. Oh, yes, your Lady Finnula and I had many a long chat…”
“She hasn’t chatted with me very much since she found out who I really am,” Hugo growled. He slumped against the sun-warmed bricks, crossing his legs at the ankles. “Tell me, Sheriff. What is a man, returning to his home after a long absence, to do when he finds that he has a ten-year-old son by a woman he barely remembers, subjects who despise him, and a wife who will only admit to being ‘fond enough’ of him, despite the fact that he’s made an honest woman of her?”
“Ah,” John de Brissac grunted. “You’re asking the opinion of a landless, childless bachelor, my lord?”
Hugo stared at the dirt. “I have no one else to ask.”
The sheriff gave his horse a pat. “Be kind.”
“Sheriff?” Hugo’s eyes glowed almost gold.
“Be kind,” John de Brissac repeated. “Be kind to the boy. Kind to your subjects. And kind to your wife. They’ll come round. All of them. You forget.” He gave Hugo a stealthy wink. “I know them all quite well. And there isn’t a one who won’t come to appreciate you, in time.”
As he spoke, the sheriff lifted his head, distracted by some small noise coming from above them. Glancing up at the merlons that surrounded the rim of the turret against which Hugo leaned, John’s face suddenly changed, and he barked out a warning even as he lunged forward. Throwing all his enormous weight against Hugo, John de Brissac shoved the younger man to the ground. Hugo, taken off guard, tumbled to the earth, the sheriff’s larger body landing heavily across his…
…but not as heavily as the foot-long slab of solid rock that embedded itself into the dirt exactly where Hugo had been standing would have.