The Widow's Kiss

by Jane Feather

  Guinevere looked up to where a yellow half moon hung like a cut lemon in the brilliant night sky. She could smell wood smoke and pitch from the bivouac beyond the gatehouse. Slowly she turned to the man standing as still as she behind her.

  “It's a beautiful night.”

  “Aye,” he agreed.

  “ ’Tis a pity to spoil it.” She sighed, the long fingers of her right hand twisting the rings on her left. “But that's as it must be. I am going to look in on the girls, then I will await you in my apartment. You will find it above the north entrance.”

  She turned without another word and Hugh watched the tall slender figure, her rich skirts swaying gracefully around her, cross the lower court and go back into the house. He could scent her perfume lingering in the soft air, but then he wondered if perhaps it was just the fragrance of the rose garden.

  He was unaware that he echoed her sigh as he went to check on his men in their bivouac beyond the gates.

  4

  The clock in the chapel tower chimed ten as Hugh crossed the lower court. He looked up above the north entrance to the window that overlooked the court. The wooden shutters were fastened back and the soft glow of candlelight filled the window space. A shadow passed across the light, a tall, graceful shadow.

  He entered the house through the small door set into the larger one. Sounds came from the kitchens to the left of the passage; presumably the servants were cleaning up after the feast. He turned aside through the opening in the wooden screen into the banqueting hall. There was no residue here of the evening's festivities; the cloth had been removed from the table on the dais, the long trestle tables folded and put away with the benches. The floor had been swept clean of debris and the torches in the sconces extinguished except for two to light the stairs that rose from the far end of the hall.

  Hugh mounted the stairs and took the long galleried corridor that led to Lady Guinevere's apartment. He paused outside the heavy oak door listening for the sound of voices. She would have her tiring woman with her. But there was only silence from within. He raised a hand and knocked.

  “Pray enter, Lord Hugh.”

  He raised the latch and opened the door. Guinevere was seated at a table above which hung a small Italian mirror of silvered glass in an elaborately carved and painted wooden frame. Tall candles burned on the table to either side of the mirror. The wicks were scented, filling the air with the delicate perfume of verbena.

  Guinevere rose from her chair, turned, and smiled at him as he stood in the doorway. “Pray close the door, sir.”

  Hugh put his hand behind him and pulled the door softly closed. She was smiling that damnable smile again and her eyes were luminous, her skin creamy and glowing in the candlelight, her mouth so warm and full and sensuous.

  It was very still in the large chamber, the only light coming from the candles on the table. The walls were paneled in a pale oak, the ceiling ornate with gilded moldings. His eye went involuntarily to the great bed where the pillars were carved in sinuous lines, the bed hangings and coverlet of a rich turquoise tapestry embroidered with great yellow suns. The pillows and the edge of the sheet where it was turned over the coverlet were of whitest lawn. There was no fire in the stone hearth but a copper jug of tumbled golden marigolds brought the scents and sense of summer into the chamber.

  “Be seated if you wish.” Guinevere gestured to a wooden settle beside the hearth.

  Hugh, instead, perched upon the deep stone seat at the window that looked out over the countryside. His voice was harsh, masking his inner turmoil, as he stated, “So Stephen Mallory fell from a window.”

  “Yes. From that one.” Guinevere gestured to the window overlooking the court. “He was drunk at the time as anyone will tell you.” She sat down before the mirror again and began to take off her rings, hanging them over the branches of a silver filigree orange tree that sat on the table. Her hands were perfectly steady.

  Hugh rose and crossed to the opposite window. He stood looking down at the cobbles below. “I can’t imagine how a man could have unintentionally tripped over this sill. It's too deep.”

  He glanced over his shoulder to the woman sitting before the mirror. Guinevere shrugged slender shoulders. “He was a big and heavy man. Clumsy with drink.” Her tone was indifferent as if she cared neither one way nor the other whether he believed her.

  She opened a silver box on the table and reached behind her to unclasp the chain of the diamond pendant that nestled between her breasts. She placed the jewel on the black velvet shelf within the box. It winked in the candlelight.

  Hugh watched, mesmerized in the soft shadowy light of the chamber, his questions stilled upon his tongue. She unfastened the diamond-studded arc set atop her black silk hood and placed it on the table. All her movements were languorous and deliberate as if part of an elaborate ritual where each step was sacred.

  She unclipped the pomander and the tiny watch from the chain at her waist and placed them in the box with the pendant. She rose to her feet and very slowly unclasped the gold chain itself, drawing it away from her body, curling the delicate links into the open palm of her hand.

  Hugh felt he was losing touch with reality, as if his purpose for being in this fragrant chamber of soft light and shadow was suddenly irrelevant. He pushed his way through the sensual tendrils she was weaving, thrusting aside the dreamlike quality of the moment.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” His voice rasped in the quiet. He was not asking for the literal answer she gave him.

  “ ’Tis late, my lord, and I wish to uncoif,” she said, sitting at the table again. “Don’t let me distract you from your investigation.” Her eyes darted up to the glass, catching his still-riveted gaze as he stood behind her. For a moment there she had had him; for a moment she had succeeded in deflecting his questions about Stephen's fall. Would he ask them again?

  She bent her head and slid off the black silk hood, then reached up to remove the long golden pins of her white coif beneath.

  It was too much for Hugh. “God's blood! Where's your tiring woman?”

  “In the inner chamber,” she said, gesturing to a door in the far wall. “I had thought you would prefer it if your questions to me were asked and answered in private. I’m sure you’ll wish to talk with Tilly yourself. You wouldn’t like her evidence to be affected by what she’d heard me say. Would you, my lord?” She smoothed the folds of the coif and stretched sideways to lay it over a stool.

  He found he couldn’t answer her. Her hair was parted and braided, drawn back over her ears and coiled at her nape. Little tendrils escaping from the braids wisped tenderly over her ears and curled on her forehead.

  With the same unhurried movements she drew out the long pins that held the plaits in place, her eyes still fixed on his in the glass. “You have seen a woman uncoif before, my lord?” She raised a chiseled golden eyebrow in faint mockery.

  He found his tongue. “There are times when such bedchamber intimacy is appropriate and times when it is not, madam. This I deem to be an inappropriate time,” he declared harshly.

  Guinevere's soft laugh chimed. “Be that as it may, Lord Hugh, ask your questions of me now. You’ll wish to question my household at your leisure, and they will be obliged to answer you as they can, but I will give you this one opportunity to hear me.”

  Her braids fell unloosened to below her shoulders and she began to unplait them, her long white fingers twisting deftly in the shining white-gold mane. She shook her head and the shimmering mass swung out around her. She reached for an ivory-backed hairbrush and began to pull it through her hair.

  Hugh didn’t know what he was doing. He moved a hand and clasped her wrist, his brown fingers dark in the mirror against her white blue-veined skin. She released her hold on the brush and he took it from her, beginning to brush her hair with long smooth rhythmic sweeps. Their eyes held in the mirror and for long minutes they were contained in a silence broken only by the soft swish of the brush and the occasional elect
ric crackle from the pale river of her hair.

  “You have some skill as a tiring woman, my lord.” Guinevere broke the silence, her voice low and husky as she bent her head beneath the rhythmic strokes.

  “It's been many years since I’ve done this for a woman,” he replied, his voice as low as hers.

  “Robin's mother?”

  He nodded.

  “She must have been very dear to you.”

  His hand stilled. He stared at the woman's face in the mirror and as he stared Sarah's face came back to him. A round freckled face with a snub nose and merry brown eyes. So different from Lady Guinevere's sculptured beauty. He had never heard Sarah mock, or taunt, or say an unkind thing. She had not been learned except in the ways of kindness and motherhood, schooled only in the management of a household, but he had loved her.

  He dropped the hairbrush and it clattered to the table. The chamber came back into focus and he remembered why he was here, who this woman was. He spun away from her, away from that bewitchingly beautiful face, the brilliant, intelligent eyes.

  “So Stephen Mallory fell from that window. Where were you when he did so?”

  She turned slowly in her chair to look at him as he stepped away from her. What had happened to break that connection between them? It had been so strong, so real. But now he was regarding her with all the old antagonism and a very real and personal hostility.

  “In the garderobe,” she said slowly, aware that her palms were clammy, her cool composure reduced now to a facade.

  “You didn’t see him fall?”

  “No.” She had almost come to believe it herself, but as she told the lie she felt her foot twitch the way it had as he’d lunged for her. Her ankle tingled as it had after Stephen had caught his foot against it. She resisted the urge to bend and rub it.

  “Did anyone see him fall?”

  She shook her head. “Not as far as I know. The torch men came running when he cried out, but he was on the cobbles before they reached him.”

  “He was drunk?”

  “He was always drunk. Viciously drunk.” She said it simply but there was no disguising the bitterness of her tone.

  “Was that why you don’t mourn him?”

  “Among other reasons.” She turned back to the mirror, her hands falling into her lap as she watched his reflection. It was easier somehow than watching him in person.

  “And what of your other deceased husbands? Did you mourn them? Or were they also unworthy of such respect?”

  “You consider my feelings towards my husbands to be relevant to your inquiry, my lord?”

  “I am inquiring into the circumstances of their deaths. Your feelings could provide a motive for those deaths,” he observed dispassionately, his shoulders propped against the wall behind her, hands thrust into the deep pockets of his gown. He was master of himself once more, his expression cold and hard.

  “A motive for what you intend to prove,” she threw at him. “If you discover that indeed I had little love for any of my husbands that will give you a motive and you need look no further. Is that how you and your masters reason, sir?”

  “I doubt your motives were as simple as dislike, madam. I believe them to be more venal,” he stated.

  “You talk as if my guilt is already an established fact. We have not as yet discussed the deaths of two of my husbands.” Her tone was sweet as the marchpane on Pen's birthday cake, but her eyes were shrewd and cold. “Don’t you wish to question me about those, or is it not worth going through the motions since you’ve already made up your mind?” She kept her back to him, her hands still lightly clasped in her lap.

  “You will have a fair hearing,” he said tightly.

  Guinevere shook her head. “I know the facts of life, my lord. If Privy Seal intends to find me guilty for his own gain he will find me so. I assume you’re merely his instrument … the cat's-paw you might say.” Now she had really hit home. His vivid eyes burned and he pushed himself off the wall. For a minute she thought he was about to lay hands on her, then he strode instead to the open window over the courtyard. He put one foot on the low sill, resting a hand on his upraised knee.

  He said with icy calm, “Be careful, madam. You talk treason. Such statements about Privy Seal impugn his master, the king. Were they to come to Lord Cromwell's ears, he will have your head.”

  Guinevere shrugged. “If he intends to have it, sir, he will have it on one pretext or another.” She turned sideways on her chair to look at him fully. “However, I can see only one way in which they might come to Privy Seal's ears. Only one person heard me. Will you tell tales, Hugh of Beaucaire?”

  Somehow she had forgotten in the crisp satisfaction of besting him that she had intended during this encounter to distract him with charm, to try to confuse his responses to her. At the beginning she had begun to do that, but once again the bright knife of antagonism cut the frail accord. And now she didn’t care. Anger would distract him as well as sensual temptation.

  But Hugh was not to be provoked again. He observed with a mocking amusement, “You have an asp's tongue, my lady. Poisonous enough, I dare swear, to do away with any number of self-respecting husbands. However, if you will accept a piece of advice, when you are questioned in London, you would do well to leave such venom behind. It will not find favor, I assure you.”

  “On what subjects am I to be questioned?” Guinevere inquired, striving to maintain her own air of mocking indifference despite the fear crawling down her spine at this reminder of the journey that lay ahead if she couldn’t hit upon some desperate means to avoid it. It was all very well to play word games and rejoice in a well-placed dart, but it was an empty puerile triumph in the face of the real danger in which she stood.

  “That is for them to say.”

  “And who is it who wishes to question me?”

  “The king, for one. The Bishop of Winchester for another. Privy Seal for another.”

  Guinevere's laugh was low and humorless. “God's grace! Such marked and august attention for a mere widow from the northern wilds!”

  “A very rich widow,” he emphasized softly. “A lady four times widowed. Most conveniently widowed.”

  “And you are here as Privy Seal's cat's-paw,” she reiterated with a bitter scorn fueled now by desperation and fear. “You are here to find what evidence will support the facts that suit you? You think you will gain the deeds to my estate by such means? Good God, my lord! Is your greed such that you would trump up charges against me and bring about my death to get your hands on land that does not belong to you?”

  The mocking amusement died. Hugh's expression darkened, his mouth hardened. “My son has legitimate title to that land. If you are innocent of your husbands’ deaths, then I will find you so. But if you are guilty, believe me, I will find you so.”

  “You will find me so because it will suit you to do so,” she repeated in the same low and furious voice. “You think I do not know your kind, Hugh of Beaucaire?”

  A cool breeze springing up from the Derbyshire hills set a candle on the table flickering. Guinevere leaned forward, cupping her hand around the flame to steady it. Her fingers shook slightly.

  “There was an unmarked arrow that killed Lord Hadlow,” Hugh said after a pause. “Do you have an explanation for that, my lady?”

  She remained with her hand cupping the candle flame. “There were peasants hunting the woods that day. On the first Wednesday of every month, Tim …” Her voice caught for a second, then she continued, “Lord Hadlow made his tenants free of the forest to catch what they would for their own larders. He and I and Greene, our huntsman, believed that one of them let loose an arrow by mistake. No one would have deliberately killed Lord Hadlow. He was universally beloved by his tenants. But no one would come forward after he died two days later. Justice is rough, Lord Hugh, as I’m sure you’d agree.”

  It was true that the penalty for killing a lord and master, regardless of intent, was vicious and absolute. But the explanation struck Hugh
as too easy, too pat to be believed without corroboration. He would need to visit the Hadlow lands and question the tenants himself.

  “My first husband fell from his horse during a stag hunt,” Guinevere said tonelessly. “I doubt he was sober at the time either. I was confined in childbed on that day. A stillborn babe,” she added without inflection. “I doubt even Privy Seal could lay that death at my door, unless, of course, I am to be accused of witchcraft.”

  Hugh said nothing and after a second Guinevere swung round on her chair and her eyes now were frightened. “Am I to be so accused, my lord?”

  “The Bishop of Winchester has some interest in discussing such issues with you.” He saw the fear in her eyes and despite his hostility he felt compassion for her. There were few accusations harder to refute and few crimes more grimly punished.

  “I see,” she said in a low voice, turning away from him. “Murder is not sufficient it seems.” Her hands lifted from her lap and then she let them fall again. “I bid you good night, Hugh of Beaucaire. I have nothing more to say.”

  “If you are innocent I will find you so,” he repeated. She made no answer, merely sat still on her chair facing the mirror, and after a minute he turned and softly left her.

  Guinevere let her head drop into her hands. She gazed into the mirror, her eyes fixed upon her reflection as if she could lose herself in it. How was she to fight them?

  Then she raised her head and stood up slowly. She would fight them. She would find a way.

  The door to the inner chamber opened and Tilly came in. She was in her night robe. “Lord, chuck, I thought you’d never be finished. Such talking at this time of night. Here, let me unlace you.”

  Guinevere gave herself up to Tilly's deft ministrations and climbed into bed. “Bring me a cup of hippocras, Tilly. I’ll not sleep else.”

  “What is it that they want?” Tilly's eyes were sharp, belying her age. “Those armed men at the gate. This Hugh of Beaucaire. What's ’e after, chuck?”