An Earl for an Archeress

by E. Elizabeth Watson

  “The Earl of Huntington is dead. Slain for his crimes against the Sheriff of Nottingham and his crimes against me. I watched his blood soak the forest floor. Ye’re a widow, and despite spoiling yourself like the filthy wee trollop ye are, I can still find you a suit of my choosing, because of my rank and name. Until then, you will learn your place! And that place is in my prison for shooting me, if I do nay kill ye first myself! Now shut up!”

  He followed through on his strike, though thankfully it was an open-palmed slap and not his fist. Still, her face twisted sideways under the force and her head knocked into Teàrlach’s chest. It didn’t matter. His words had disrupted her anger. Robert was dead and she was frozen. She didn’t feel the sting of the slap smarting her cheek, didn’t feel the throbbing in her head she had been feeling moments ago. She felt like losing her stomach.

  Surprisingly, Teàrlach eased his grip, as if he could sense her shock. She doubled over the horse’s mane and felt a fountain of tears bloom in her eyes as Crawford turned his reins to regain the lead of his contingent. A mournful wail worked its way out of her throat. Her father turned to look at her and nodded once at her agony.

  “Good,” Crawford said. “Mayhap finally you’ll realize I control you and you’ll submit to my authority.”

  As the men lost interest in her and her sobs turned into silence, Teàrlach gathered her back in his arms and tightened his hold. Then she felt his face lean down to her ear. Disgust roiled through her. Did he think to start taking liberties with her now? She would never want another after Robert, and most certainly not her father’s hated head guardsmen who followed his orders without ever questioning the right of them. Except he whispered something, and in her growing rage, she missed it.

  She stilled, hoping he would repeat it. He did.

  “He lies, Lady Mariel. Robert was taken alive as Nottingham’s prisoner. Even Nottingham knows he’ll be in too deep a pit with their king if he kills the earl. Have faith.”

  She whipped her head around to beg more answers from him, but his head was back upright, facing forward, and he gave her a stern frown. “I said quiet, Lady.”

  Harold turned back around. “Is she still arguing? Does she need more than a slap?”

  “Nay, my laird. She was sniveling overmuch about her husband’s death. ’Twas annoying, ’tis all,” Teàrlach said. “She’s done well to silence her hateful speech.”

  Harold nodded and returned to the front of his men again.

  Mariel’s mind swirled. Was Teàrlach telling the truth? Robert had been taken alive? The relief that poured through her was euphoric, followed by the disbelief that her father could inflict such pain. It never failed to shock her that the man cared so little for her. Still, she could live in Crawford’s prison, knowing Robert was not dead. At least, not dead yet. And more the question, why was Teàrlach helping her? Why had he helped Robert before? What was it that drove him to do what he could to ease a bad situation?

  Mayhap he truly cared for Madeline. She had seen it in his eyes. The heartbroken Madeline’s sister… She could only hope. And the only bright light of returning to Ayrshire was that she might see her wee sister again. Guilt for abandoning Madeline sliced through her once more. She had been an imperfect sister, always impatient that Madeline was so timid. And Madeline had begged the opposite of her, that she quit rolling her eyes and tame her behavior so their father might spare her his anger. She prayed as their horses lumbered onward over the English countryside that she would find Madeline in one piece.

  …

  Nottingham Castle Dungeons

  One month later, December

  Robert sat in his dungeon cell, the dank walls threatening to madden him. Feeble torchlight held steady upon one wall. A barred window down the corridor was his only indication as to whether or not it was day or night. Upon waking now, it was light, and therefore day.

  He looked back at the walls enclosing him, at his feet shackled to the floor so that he only had a few feet of movement. His body ached less and less from the beating he had withstood at the hands of Nottingham’s men, but the soreness on his face and chest told him he had been badly bruised, and a gouge on his forehead indicated that either Nottingham or Crawford’s rings had sliced him during a punch.

  Everything had been stripped from him, short of his trousers and undergarments. His tunic had been removed to examine for hidden weapons, his codpiece removed and no doubt the contents added to Nottingham’s personal coffers, leaving him fairly exposed, if not for the thin shield of his undergarments, which were now dingy and gray. His boots, too, had been stripped, his stockings removed, no doubt in search of more weapons that could be used to pick the locks of his bondage. He took immature pleasure in knowing the finely-crafted codpiece would never fit Nottingham and his pea-sized bollocks, for only a man with an inadequate appendage lorded so heavily over others.

  His title had also been stripped. His castle and staff had been commandeered. But his woman…wife…Mariel. That loss stung the most, plaguing his restless mind. He had utterly failed her. And now she was gone.

  He knew the days came and went, but it was growing harder to keep track of them. His stomach hungered, though he was given water, bread, and a slimy slop of old vegetables once a day. He also knew when someone entered the dungeon, even if they never came to his cell, because the torchlight upon the corridor wall would give a telltale waver.

  I love him!

  He heard Mariel’s plea as Crawford had threatened to murder him right before her. The words rang through his brain like bells tolling the matins, constantly, without mercy, without pause so he could collect his thoughts. Dammit, but couldn’t King Richard abandon Jerusalem and take over the care of his people? They needed him more than the infidels in the Holy Land. Why could he not leave war-mongering be and return to his kingdom and right Nottingham’s atrocious wrongs?

  God, but there had to be a way out of this entire mess. He yanked against his chains. His thoughts were driving him mad. He loved Mariel. What he wouldn’t give for the chance to tell her. He had wanted to marry her, and he had wasted too much time pretending otherwise. He hadn’t married her to protect her. He had married her because he couldn’t imagine life without her. He had been too blinded by his aversion to the institution of marriage to see what a treasure it could be.

  Protection. He shook his head. How laughable was that? Protect her, indeed. He had protected her right back into her father’s angry custody. God, what he would give to know if she suffered or not, what he would give to grow old together and never miss another day of telling her how much he loved her.

  He thought of their wedding night. He thought of her in his bed made of furs, on the ground, in a hut, in his arms, and how content she had been, how much she had given to him. No lady he had ever met would have been happy to lie in an abandoned hut, deep in a forest, on the ground. No woman had accommodated the whole of him with such force as he used that night, so lost in his want of her, her nails scoring his skin that all sense of control, all sense of time, had fled. She had laid herself bare to him as he’d made love to her through the night. She had entrusted her heart to him and hadn’t shied away from the animal he’d become as he joined himself to her and made them one.

  He should feel ashamed for his primal rutting, and yet he knew she would have been offended had he denied them both his full fervor. It would have seemed dishonest. She had always been his equal. She had always loved a challenge. She had never settled for less when she felt there was more.

  I love him!

  He shook his head violently to clear away her anguished plea.

  He should have said it, should have said the words, I marry you because I want you, and want you always. It would have reaffirmed so much for her if she had only heard him say it, for she had asked him many times. Yet those simple words had been harder to say than any jest ready on his lips.

  He pull
ed against the shackles fruitlessly, frustrated, restless, the ability to steal her away from her father’s wrath looming so far out of reach, and he racked his brain for the thousandth time as to who within his walls had betrayed him. His thoughts kept settling on John. John was close to him. John had disappeared after David had returned with news of Crawford’s pending arrival. Though, in spite of Jonathan’s anger, he couldn’t reconcile that his favored man and good friend would betray him over Mariel.

  Yet the clues stacked up. Crawford had said he trusted those closest to him overmuch, and John was his closest friend, apart from Will. It was John who had been charged with posting soldiers in the woods that afternoon as Crawford and Nottingham were slated to arrive. And he’d never seen John again after that.

  It had bothered Robert then and it made sense now. John had gone to inform Crawford that he harbored Mariel. Nottingham had likely promised to reinstate John’s castle and lands in exchange for information on Mariel or on the band of thieves. John had been angry when he discovered Robert was going to marry Mariel. John had made a fatal decision to help the enemy in a moment of anger.

  There was no one else he could think of…Yes. There was. Wesley.

  The pompous bookkeeper he had done so well to continue to employ had hated Mariel from the beginning. And he had hated being punished for cheating at the tourney. Yet he, too, had remained loyal, probably because he loved his position. Huntington was the wealthiest estate in England, aside from the House of Plantagenet, and Robert paid his officials accordingly. Wesley would never receive such a generous salary elsewhere. And though he had remained loyal to Huntington, he had favored Robert’s father, not Robert. The accountant might very well have taken a gamble to get rid of Mariel and Robert while hoping to maintain his position at Huntington.

  John or Wesley?

  “Be damned!” he cursed.

  He shook his thoughts away again. Crawford was right. He had naively trusted his people too much, a sad but valuable lesson. He would never make that mistake again, if he ever got out of Nottingham’s prison alive, if he ever found Mariel again, if he ever saw his people again or held land and title again.

  Despair threatened to darken his heart. What would his father do in this situation? His father would ruthlessly root out the traitor and drag him into the bailey for all to see, tie him to a post, and slice his neck. And he felt anger such as that begin to well within him. Yes. He would escape, and he would find the traitor who had ruined him and worse, fed Mariel to the very wolf she had spent months escaping.

  The torchlight wavered on the wall. Like a hawk, his senses sharpened to the most banal of happenings and he focused on it, hastening the few steps he could to peer down the corridor and see who might be entering the dungeons. He stiffened. Jonathan was striding side by side with Nottingham.

  He couldn’t believe it. He had been right. John, his friend, his head guardsman, his former peer, had turned on him. Over Mariel. It wasn’t possible, he thought, and yet he had come to the obvious conclusion time and again over the sennights of his incarceration.

  John and Nottingham arrived in front of him.

  “Good God, man, what did you let them do to you?” Jonathan asked, ignoring the frown de Wendenal leveled on him.

  “Well, well. The traitor finally arrives,” Robert replied, standing tall, if not leaner, before his former guardsman.

  John crinkled his brow, staring into Robert’s eyes. Robert felt his gaze cool with hatred.

  “Has prison made you unwell?” John asked.

  “It will do that to the best of us…and the worst of us,” Nottingham drawled. “There must be something betwixt you to which I’m not privy.”

  “And you, a liar. I’m not surprised,” Robert said. If Nottingham would play daft to having turned John a spy for him, it didn’t really matter now. Neither man would live once he got his shackles off and lodged his hands around their throats.

  “Indeed…mayhap there is,” John remarked, though his eyes looked confused.

  In his most commanding voice, Nottingham continued, his dark hair framing his sallow face. “King Richard has finally returned and holds court. You, Robert, formerly the earl, now go before him to hear of your fate.”

  “Can I at least be afforded a tunic?” Robert growled. “I’d hate to impress the ladies with my cock swinging freely like a breeding stallion.”

  “Such cheek is unbecoming, Robert. You go as you are. If it humiliates you, more’s the pity.”

  Nottingham produced the keys and turned the lock, passing the keys off to a prison guard to do the unseemly task of bending at Robert’s feet to unlock his chains. If he was as confident as he was acting, Robert thought, then King Richard might already be tainted by Nottingham’s lies.

  “Why are you here?” Robert snapped, his attention returning to John.

  Jonathan, his brow still confused, stepped back as Nottingham’s guard walked him out, a hand clenching his upper arm. “I gained royal permission to accompany Nottingham, to determine your state of health. To ensure you had not been abused. I told the king that your former men-at-arms feared for your welfare. Nottingham agreed to let me come to inspect, in case he lied.”

  Robert wanted to laugh at the genuine lack of guilt John portrayed…unless he spoke the truth. Unless he, as a loyal man to Huntington, had truly begged to see his former lord, now fallen from grace. The possibility that it had not been John who betrayed him niggled. What if he was wrong? What if it had been Wesley? What if he had allowed the blackness of prison to seed mistrust in his heart?

  They walked as a group down the corridor, past the filth and stench of other men in other cells, and Robert was grateful for having had the use of his legs in his cell, no matter how limited his radius of movement, for he was able to walk with ease. They emerged into the light of midday, the sun peeking through rain clouds and piercing his sensitive eyes. He closed them as they watered, producing tears to glaze over the stinging.

  Nottingham’s inner yard was filled with the typical stench of waste, workers, and animal dung, and the air was frigid. His bare chest stung as icy winter wind lapped across him. Winter was truly arriving and Christmastide would begin soon. Huntington would have been festive this year had he been there to ensure it was celebrated with the proper traditions. Pine boughs, holly berries, Yule logs. More indeed was the pity.

  Thankfully, they rounded to the front of Nottingham’s keep to enter, blocking the wind, and Robert noted the royal red banners bearing the king’s three lions-passant, dressing a contingent of horses. Unstabled in this cold wind? Either Nottingham had a horrible groom or his stables were too small to accommodate the king’s horses. Interesting. Just looking around, he could tell Nottingham’s castle and lands were thinly stocked and pathetically run, despite the castle being proudly built. Huntington must have seemed like a treasure vault to the bloody urchin now strutting ahead of him like a peacock. Cock was to be certain. As was pea. That part of the comparison was correct. He was a giant cock of a man with a pea-sized appendage.

  His muscles felt weakened from the exertion and as much as he wanted to drag his escort down while simultaneously strangling Nottingham with the chain between his manacles, he knew the rest of the guards on the parapet and flanking the main doors would have him tackled once more. And with King Richard here to watch, the act might make him look guilty of Nottingham’s claims.

  The great hall of the keep was vast but poorly tended, and the rushes he trod barefoot upon appeared stale and in need of sweeping out. A cur in the corner, rummaging through the hay, eating bits of leftover food confirmed it. He would likely have worms or a festering sore on his soles by the time he left.

  A royal contingent filled the hall as well as Nottingham’s ladies, soldiers, and an unmistakable gaggle of whores. Crawford, draped in his red-and-green Scottish tartan, sat along the periphery with some of his guardsmen, though Robert no
ted that Teàrlach wasn’t there.

  And to his surprise, Will, Alan, and David, stood in attendance, too, luckily all with boots on to protect their feet from the cesspit within the rushes. And there was King Richard, sitting at the head of the main table at the dais, food and drink placed before him. His beard was a well-kempt ginger. He looked more mature than when he had left to fight in the Third Crusade. Still, the man was formidable, poised, and regal in his red surcoat trimmed with gold threading and bearing the three lions of the Plantagenet house. To his irritation, Crawford leaned forth, seething, as Nottingham walked to his side. Did he and Nottingham hope to skewer him together?

  The king watched as Robert was dragged down the aisle between the trestle tables, but waited until he reached the space before him.

  Robert bowed. “Your Highness. You return to a broken kingdom.”

  “That I can see, Robert. And imagine my surprise when Sir Jonathan Naylor delivered to me a missive all the way in Aquitaine, stating your duress,” King Richard replied.

  Nottingham’s head whipped up. Clearly, that was a fact unknown to him.

  “But…my king,” the sheriff said, “what missive did he bring to France? I thought you returned to England from war and traveled here so that I might brief you.”

  “Sir Wendenal,” the king said. “I might have let you think that. However, I wish to get to the bottom of this, and disclosing Sir Naylor’s plea to you would have compromised my investigation.”

  Nottingham’s face was white, shocked, and Crawford turned a glare on him.

  “Your Majesty,” Nottingham began again. “You heard all I had to say. You heard how he attacked me, how he stole from me, disguised as a robber of the hood—”

  “Silence!” boomed the king. “You are the one whom assumed I came to hear of the news of England since my departure, and you have had ample time to explain the dire suffering of my country. I left you in faithful charge, but you have overstepped your bounds! And included a Scottish lord in your schemes—who might very well be my cousin, distantly—with no more claim to any power in this country than a common beggar. I’ll have more from you when I ask it.”