by Jane Feather
Robin drew his sword and slashed his way through the bushes, cursing as branches snagged his clothes. He stepped out onto the lawn, dark now under the moonless sky. A magnificent oak tree stood in the middle of the lawn, a circular bench around its massive trunk.
A white-clad figure glimmered faintly in the darkness, sitting on the bench.
“Luisa?”
She jumped up at the whisper, looked around, then saw him. “Oh, I was so afraid you would not come. I believe it is going to storm.”
“Yes, I think so, too.”
She was standing very close to him, looking up at him, her eyes glowing black ovals against the darkness around them.
“Perhaps we should postpone our adventure tonight,” he said. “It would not do to get caught in the storm.”
“But there are places we can shelter, are there not? I would visit a tavern. Drink some wine, listen to the talk.” Her voice was eager, cajoling.
Robin laughed softly. He could not possibly disappoint her. “Aye, we can do those things.”
“Did you bring me clothes?”
He handed her the parcel.
“I'll be but a minute.” She plunged into the shrubbery.
“Oh, what are these?” The disconcerted tones floated out from the shrubbery. “I thought I was to dress as a boy.”
“I told you I would bring what I considered suitable,” Robin replied. “Can you manage the hooks at the back, or would you like some help?”
“I can manage.” She didn't sound too happy about it and Robin smiled to himself as he waited.
“This is not at all what I had had in mind.” Luisa spoke as she emerged from concealment, brushing at the simple dull brown holland gown she now wore. “There is not even a touch of lace at the neck.”
“The less conspicuous you look, the more exploring we can do,” Robin pointed out. “My idea was that you should not be noticed at all. Fade into the background . . . if you understand me.”
Luisa turned up her aristocratic nose. “I am a Mendoza. I would have you know, Lord Robin, that Mendozas do not fade into the background.”
“No, I'm sure they don't,” he agreed with a grin. “But tonight you are not a Mendoza, you're a young servant girl. One who will draw no remark.”
Luisa considered for an instant, then shook her head as if casting aside her disgruntlement. “I suppose you know best. But this is a very ugly cap. I think I will not wear it.” She turned over in her hands the plain, coarse linen cap Robin had provided. “I will leave my hair unbound.”
Robin decided not to press the point. He picked up her cloak from the bench under the oak tree and handed it to her. “At least you won't need to wear this to cover the roundnesses,” he observed with another grin.
Luisa took the folded garment over her arm. “'Tis certainly too hot for it.”
“Aye.” Robin nodded. “But bring it in case of rain. Come now, my horse is saddled in the lane.”
“But I have to fetch Crema.”
“No, you ride with me. We don't want to risk raising the entire stable block.”
Luisa pursed her lips. “Yes, I think that is good,” she said with a judicious nod. “Malcolm might be awake.”
“Malcolm?”
“Don Ashton hired him as my groom, but I think he's more of a bodyguard.”
“Then we most certainly don't wish to waken him,” Robin declared. He led the way to the thick screen of bushes at the rear of the property. “Take hold of my cloak and keep close to my back while I forge a path through,” he instructed. “I'd not return you to your duenna with a scratched face.”
Luisa did as she was told, burying her face in the folds of the ochre velvet cloak, stumbling on his heels as he cut his way through the sharp tangle of twigs and thorns to the lane beyond.
Once there she shook out her hair, picking out leaves and twigs. “Did you not get scratched?” Her voice was concerned as she came close to him, peering up into his face. “Oh, there is blood on your cheek.” She licked a finger and dabbed at his cheek.
It was a gesture so artlessly intimate that Robin's breath caught. Once again he couldn't decide whether she acted out of pure innocence, but whatever the motive she was stepping close to a very dangerous brink. She was safe enough with him, but she couldn't assume that all men were as honorable as he was.
He took her wrist and pulled her hand away from his face. “For God's sake, Luisa! Be more discreet.”
Luisa glanced around. “But why? There's no one here.” Her tone was all innocence, her eyes all anticipation.
“Don't play games.”
Luisa laughed. “Why not? It amuses me, Lord Robin. Come, let us start our adventure.”
Robin found it very easy to accept defeat. He was no duenna, Luisa's social indiscretions were not his responsibility. He had no authority over her and desired none. He had simply promised to show her something of the world, and if by amusing her he amused himself, all well and good.
He lifted her onto the pillion pad briskly, trying to ignore the soft warmth of the curvaceous waist between his hands. Then he mounted in front of her.
Luisa settled onto the pillion and clasped his waist. “I should hold on to you, should I not?”
“It would perhaps be advisable.”
“Yes, so I thought.” There was more than a hint of complacency in her voice.
Robin ignored it. “So where shall we go first?”
“To see a cockfight or a bearbaiting,” his companion responded promptly. “They have them in Spain but ladies never watch them. I would see them for myself.”
Robin shrugged. “So be it.”
If Luisa had strong nerves perhaps she would enjoy such spectacles, but he seriously doubted it. He remembered Pippa when she was about ten begging her stepfather to allow her to go to a bearbaiting. Lord Hugh had overridden his wife's objections and taken her himself. He had brought her home long before it was over, a sickened and wretched child who had been miserable for days. Robin was inclined to follow his father's example. Pippa always needed to find things out for herself and Luisa seemed to him to be struck from the same mold.
Luisa gazed around her, entranced, as they passed through the nighttime streets of London. There were many people around, drunks tumbling out of taverns, groups of young courtiers exchanging half-serious sword passes on street corners. Watchmen carried lanterns to illuminate the wider thoroughfares and Robin avoided the dark narrow alleys that ran off them.
He pointed out the landmarks as they went. Luisa showed little interest in St. Paul's at the top of Ludgate Hill, but she was fascinated by London Bridge, still decorated with the hideous remnants of Wyatt's rebellion, scraps of flesh clinging to the skulls, strands of dried hair hanging limp, eyeless sockets gazing into infinity. The massive edifice of the Tower of London hulked in the darkness farther along the river.
The ghastly frieze did not however disconcert her. She had seen that and worse at an auto-da-fé in her native land. “I would like to come to the bridge when the shops are open,” she observed. “'Tis like a town in itself. All those houses and shops.”
“Our way lies across it,” Robin said. “If your heart remains set on a cockfight?” He glanced over his shoulder at her, eyebrows raised.
Luisa slipped a hand into the bodice of her maid's gown and pulled out a purse. “I would have a wager,” she said. “The Mendozas are known for their skill at gambling, but I have not yet had the opportunity to see if 'tis in my blood.”
“Ah.” Robin nodded. “Maybe you shouldn't try to find out. Gaming can be the very devil if it gets its hooks into you.”
“Oh, I don't think so,” she replied with an insouciant shrug. “We Mendozas have very deep pockets. More than one fortune has been won and lost in my family.”
Robin said no more. He dismounted outside an insalubrious house so crookedly crammed between its neighbors that it looked as if they were holding it up. He lifted Luisa down and gave his reins to one of the eager crowd of urc
hins who pressed close in upon them.
Luisa felt the first faint tremor of doubt. The smells were powerfully unpleasant and the boys were too close to her, their hands touching and pulling at her gown and apron, feeling her all over, she realized with a shock. She slapped out at them in a flash of outrage. Two of them danced closer, dodging her hands, chanting something at her that she couldn't understand but guessed from their expressions was obscene.
Robin caught them both and with rough justice knocked their heads together. They collapsed, wailing, to their knees on the mired cobbles and the others fell back as the lord's angry gaze swept over them.
“I thought you said I wouldn't draw unwelcome attention,” Luisa demanded as he hurried her through an ill-fitting door and into a malodorous passage.
“I was wrong,” he said grimly. “But if you'd been dressed as yourself they would have slit your throat.”
“But you would have protected me!” she exclaimed.
“I would have tried,” Robin agreed. He continued rather brusquely, “But I don't have an inflated sense of my own powers, and neither should you. I'm no guardian angel, Luisa. You too need to keep your eyes and wits about you and behave with circumspection.”
“But they were just children. No match for you, surely!”
“There are children, and children,” he pointed out. “And there were quite a number of them, a number that would have grown in the blink of an eye.”
Luisa, somewhat chastened, allowed him to take her arm and lead her down the passage to where the sounds of shouting and cheering bellowed from behind a closed door. When Robin opened the door she thought she would faint. The stench of blood, ale, filthy bodies, made her head reel.
She stared, sickened at the circle of red, greedy, glistening faces; their mouths all seemed to be open, shouting at once, as they leaned forward towards the makeshift ring where at first she couldn't see what was on the blood-clotted sawdust and then couldn't bear to.
She turned her head into Robin's broad chest, her stomach heaving.
His father was always right, Robin reflected, merely turning away, holding her head against his chest as he ushered her back outside where the vile air in contrast seemed to Luisa to be as fresh as a meadow of daisies.
“Bearbaiting now?” he questioned calmly, retrieving his horse from the urchin who still held him.
Luisa shook her head. “No, I don't think so. I think you should not have brought me here.”
“No, quite possibly not,” Robin agreed. “But had I not done so, your curiosity would never have been satisfied, and you most probably would have accused me of acting like a duenna.”
“I expect I would.”
Her voice was very small and Robin, without thought, bent and kissed the corner of her mouth. “We all make mistakes,” he said. “I cannot count the number I've made in my time.” He lifted her onto the pillion pad.
Luisa touched the corner of her mouth where his lips had brushed. “You have the advantage of experience.”
“Yes, you could say that.” He laughed up at her. “Don't look so disconsolate, Luisa. Take advantage of my experience, it is entirely at your disposal.”
He swung up in front of her just as a great rumble of thunder rolled across the river. His horse threw up his head and sniffed the wind, shifting uneasily on the wooden bridge.
“Let's get the hell out of here.” Robin nudged the animal's flanks with his booted heels.
Luisa clung on tight as the horse broke into a canter. The bridge was suddenly very quiet, the crowds of urchins melted into the darkness of doorways. Lightning forked into the river.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere dry and warm, where I can drink some porter and you can try your hand at dice,” he called against the rushing wind, the sound of the river throwing itself against the high banks.
The rain came. Great sheets of it, falling straight from the black sky. Lightning flashed, thunder bellowed, and the horse galloped as if frenzied, through the rapidly clearing thoroughfares of the city.
Robin turned into a cobbled courtyard surrounded on three sides by a galleried tavern. Rain pelted, hitting the cobbles and springing up in a ceaseless fountain. He rode under the protection of the gallery; the rain fell behind them like a waterfall from the edge of the gallery. Light poured from the doors that stood open on the ground floor and the sounds of merriment warred with the thunder and the rain beyond.
Robin rode his horse straight through one of the doors and into a stone-flagged passageway from which a wooden staircase rose to the upper floor. Pitch torches were sconced along the smoke-blackened lime-washed walls and the huge shadow of the horse with its two riders struck Luisa as an image out of Dante's Inferno.
She shivered in her soaked gown, the coarse material clinging unpleasantly. Her unbound hair dripped down her back.
“Take yer 'orse, m'lord?” a small voice piped from somewhere around the animal's nether regions.
“Aye, rub him down and there'll be a farthing in it for you,” Robin said as he swung down in the narrow space.
Luisa slid down unaided. “'Tis so cold,” she said. “I didn't think I would ever be cold again.”
“We'll soon warm you up.” He propelled her ahead of him into a low-ceilinged taproom where a massive fire burned what seemed like a whole tree trunk. At long deal tables and benches men and women sat in various stages of intoxication amid the click and clack of dice.
Luisa sniffed. There was a wonderful smell coming from somewhere that set her juices running. She was hungry. Famished. She obeyed the pressure on her shoulder that pushed her towards the fire, and then into the inglenook, so that she was sitting on a brick bench almost inside the fire. The heat was intense but for the moment she was only grateful as her gown steamed and she stretched her wet boots and stockings towards the blaze.
“You won't be able to stand more than five minutes,” Robin said with a chuckle. He was drying his head with a piece of rough and none-too-clean toweling that he'd found somewhere. His clothes were ruined, he reflected, but without too much dismay.
“Something smells wonderful.”
“Oh, Goodwife Margery makes the best hot pot this side of Lancashire,” Robin told her. “I'll fetch you a bowl when you come out of the fire.” He turned aside to take two mugs of porter from a potboy. He held one out to Luisa. “Here. This'll put heart in you.”
Luisa took a tentative sip, and then another. “Oh, 'tis good!” She beamed at him in her haze of steam. “I am enjoying myself, Lord Robin.”
He nodded, a smile on his lips and his eyes. He thought how radiant she looked in her bedraggled state. As if she'd come alive suddenly. He thought of his sisters, of the variety and interest that had always informed their lives, and he thought what a wretched existence this cloistered Spanish aristocrat had led thus far.
Luisa felt her body still under his intent gaze. She couldn't read his thoughts but she could read his interest, his sympathy, and something else that her woman's intuition translated accurately as rather more than liking. She felt herself opening under that look, blossoming in some way. It filled her with warmth and anticipation, as if she was about to discover things about herself that she had not yet even guessed at.
“Come out now,” he said. “You're beginning to look like a boiled lobster.” He held out his hand to her.
She took it, despite the unflattering comparison, and allowed him to pull her out of the inglenook. Her fingers closed tightly over his, but instantly he dropped her hand.
He called, “Goodwife, bring us a bowl of hot pot.”
Luisa decided not to press her advantage. She sensed that Robin was not sure at all about what was going on here, whereas she was absolutely certain. But she didn't wish to scare him off. He needed gentle handling.
She sat down at the long bench in front of a large bowl of meat and vegetables in a rich broth. They shared the bowl, ladling it onto bread trenchers with the common spoon. She toyed with a seco
nd mug of porter but had no desire to feel any more light-headed than she did already. Her companion drank deep but seemed unaffected by it. Around them the noise rose, competing with the beating of the rain against the thatched roof. The fire was hot at her back.
“So, are you ready to try your hand at the dice?”
Robin's voice startled her out of the warm, satisfied trance that enveloped her. “Oh, yes. Yes, please.” She scrambled off the bench and followed him to the table where the dice were being rolled.
A few curious glances were thrown at her, but when Robin merely indicated her with a careless inclusive nod as she straddled the bench beside him, whatever explanation the nod contained was accepted. She watched for a few throws, observing how the wagering went. Robin offered her no advice, indeed didn't even look at her, and it dawned on her that as far as the men at the table were concerned she was Lord Robin's doxy for the evening. A lady of the night.
Laughter bubbled in her throat. This was so much better a disguise than men's clothes. She could play this part to perfection.
She pouted at him. “A few pennies, my lord? I would try my hand.”
“I thought you had your own money,” he retorted, his eyes narrowing.
“Oh, but 'tis for you to entertain me, my lord. In exchange . . .” she added meaningfully.
Robin kept a straight face with some difficulty. He tossed her a small pile of pennies. “See what you can do with those.”
Luisa propped an elbow on the table, picked up the dice in her free hand, shook, and rolled with an expert twist of her wrist that surprised her, it was so natural.
Two hours later she had cleared the table, sending her fellow players grumbling out of the door. She gathered up the little pile of coins and dropped them into the pouch in her bosom. “A profit, I think?”
“Aye, except that it was my stake.”
“Oh, should I repay you?” She reached again into her bosom.
Robin shook his head hastily. The neck of the gown seemed to be lower, slightly out of alignment, probably as a result of its wetting, but her breasts as a result rose in quite unashamed plump curves of a startling creaminess.