by Kris Kennedy
“Now then, Mistress Thread, you mentioned business…?”
“Yes. The business of paying me for work past done.”
His face dimmed ever so slightly. “Past payments, Mistress Thread?”
“Yes. For the hosen order I sent to you at midsummer?”
His head tipped back. “Hosen, hosen,” he murmured, as if the word was new to him and he needed practice with it. “I don’t recall….”
“For Lord Ionnes, here in town?”
He smiled blankly at her and spread his hands wide to illustrate the overwhelming emptiness of his memory.
She stared at him. How many times had she been treated thusly, with no recourse? A great, great many. Far too many to count. From the moment of her birth right up to yester eve, when Bayard had said, “I want this thing” and the soldiers had said, “Give it to me,” and Sherwood had said, “You have no choice.” But she did, in fact, have a choice. She did have recourse.
She had Tadhg.
She smiled at Edwin. “My apologies, master, I do not think I have introduced you.” She gestured to Tadhg. “My new collection man.”
Silence, then leather creaked as Tadhg turned and stared at her.
“Your…collection man?” Edwin said uncertainly.
“Yes.” She intercepted the level look Tadhg directed her way, but ignored it. After all, he had abducted her… Turnabout should be expected. “You may not believe this, Master Edwin, but I’ve had many troubles of late with unpaid bills.”
A few beats of uncomfortable silence passed as Edwin stared at Tadhg. “I’m shocked,” he said weakly.
“I’m sure you are. Now, perhaps if you cast your mind back to midsummer, you will recall the order?”
He stared at Tadhg, who, the stubborn beast, finally took his gaze off Magdalena and turned it to Edwin.
A bead of sweat seemed to trickle down Edwin’s temple. Then he clapped his pudgy hands together. “Yes, of course, of course, it is all coming back to me now. Rushing back.” He gave a hearty, false laugh. “Twenty hosen, for Lord Ionnes’ knights, if I recall?”
“I should hope you would, as I just mentioned it.”
“Well, it was wonderful work, mistress, wonderful.”
“Yes, I know.”
He cleared his throat. Her calmness seemed to be as unnerving to him as Tadhg’s silent stare. “Well, Lord Ionnes went a-hosting soon after your order arrived, joined the king’s men down south he did, and what will all the warring…and the weather… They were successful you know, praise God, and…” He cleared his throat. “Did I not send word?”
“No.”
“Ah. It must have slipped my mind.”
“It was delivered over six months ago, payment due upon receipt.”
“Has it been that long?” he inquired brightly, then tugged at his collar. “My, how the time passes.” His glaze flicked to Tadhg. “And now you are here to…collect?”
“Yes.”
The silence was thunderous.
Edwin began sweating in earnest. “Of course, of course, just give me a moment, let me see.” He reached beneath his counter for a ledger, then began fumbling through it, thumbing page after page. “I don’t believe I have record of…but certes, I must…. Let me see, perhaps an older ledger—”
Tadhg laid his hand atop the pages, smashing them gently down. Edwin stopped fluttering and stared down at the hard, calloused hand spread across his ledger.
“The money won’t be in your book, merchant,” Tadhg told him softly.
Edwin’s face washed entirely pale. “No, it won’t,” he agreed in a weak voice. “Well, truth to tell,” he wiped his hand across his forehead and dragged his panicked gaze to Maggie’s. “Truth to tell, mistress, I…I don’t have it.”
“I presumed,” she said mildly. Tadhg stared. Edwin sweated.
Without looking away from Edwin, Tadhg said to Maggie, “How’d you want me to handle him? Take him out back?”
Edwin made a little strangled sound and wobbled on his stool.
“I do not think ‘out back’ will serve,” she said. Crossing one arm across her belly and resting her other bent elbow atop it, Magdalena considered Edwin as she paced the front of his shop. “After all, what would ‘out back’ get us but a few broken bones?”
A whistling sound started coming out of Edwin as his breathing both accelerated and thinned.
“No,” Magdalena went on. “I believe he speaks the truth. Master Regrator has not pocketed my money, he’s simply not been paid for it himself.”
Edwin nodded vigorously. “Yes, not paid at all. Nobles. I always say you can only trust them so far as you can—”
Tadhg moved very slightly and he stopped talking. Maggie went on.
“And as Edwin has earned a very hearty sum off other work I have done for him, having resold it for ten to twenty times what I charged him”— more nodding, silently this time— “he is surely aware I could go to another regrator for my commissions, and take those profits elsewhere.” He started shaking his head. “So perhaps we have all learned in a valuable lesson today?”
He nodded even more emphatically. “Yes, indeed, very valuable.”
“And yet, I still do not have my coin for the hosen order.”
He started whistling again. “But what can I do?” he exclaimed, wringing his hands together as his eyes flicked to Tadhg’s much larger, more calloused hands, one still splayed stop his ledger, the other dangling near the hilt of his sword. “If they do not pay me, how can I pay you?” It was a plaintive wail accompanied by emphatic hand gestures.
“It would be difficult,” she agreed. “Perhaps you would be able to settle your debt in some other manner.”
He paused almost eloquently. “Other manner, mistress?” His voice was pitched in the high, pleasant tones of innocent confusion.
Magdalena smiled at him. “Yes. Your other trade.”
“I confess myself baffled. Entirely baff—”
“Writs of safe passage.”
Master Edwin’s jaw fell, then a bright red color suffused his face from the chin up. “Well I’m sure I don’t know—”
Tadhg leaned sharply forward. “Let the lady finish.”
He choked back the rest of his words. Maggie’s cloak brushed Tadhg’s mailed arm she leaned across the ledger, closer to the merchant.
“Pass portes, Edwin,” she said softly, almost successfully denying how marvelous it felt to, just once, have the power to make the right thing happen. All it had taken was an outlaw. “The writs of safe passage you forge, that allow one to get in and out of towns and cities all along this northern coast, from Brittany to Dieppe.”
“How do you know of this?” he sputtered. Then, realizing he’d just admitted guilt, he shook his head. “What I mean to say is—”
“What you mean to say us how appreciative you are that I have not shared my knowledge with anyone.” He stared, his mouth still open. “In authority,” she added.
He shut his mouth and swallowed hard. He licked his lips. He looked at the ceiling. Then he said, “How many?”
“We shall require two,” she said serenely, folding her arms under her cloak. “For every town west of here.”
Edwin’s eyes narrowed, then drifted ceilingward, as if making computations in his mind. He wiped his chin, then his fleshy thighs, then crossed his arms and squinted at Magdalena. When he finally spoke, his voice had taken on a shrewd tone.
“Well, now, mistress, that is a great many writs. An order on such a large scale would usually cost in the neighborhood of—”
“There are no neighborhoods here, tailor,” Tadhg said softly. “There is only what Mistress Thread wants, and how quickly you deliver it.”
He immediately began nodding. “Of course, of course, and glad I am to do it. Very glad.” Edwin hopped off his stool with alacrity.
He stopped short when Tadhg’s arm thrust out in front of him like a tree branch. He looked up slowly, up the length of Tadhg’s mail-encased body,
to his eyes.
“Sir?” he whispered.
“Dame Thread shall also require repayment for the shipment last Epiphany.”
Magdalena opened her mouth, then shut it again. With lowered jaw, Edwin gave a swift nod.
“Plus interest.”
Another staccato series of nods.
Tadhg smiled. “Good.” He stepped back, letting Edwin pass by, which he did, keeping as close to the far wall as possible.
“Well then, go on, settle in,” the merchant said once he was safely past. “This shall take a moment, but only the one… I’ve a few writs on hand, as you might imagine.”
“Indeed I might,” Magdalena murmured.
“It will require just a bit of touching up, and some wax…” He began bustling about in an officious manner, now on his mission and much more certain of himself.
Tadhg stepped back, drawing Maggie to the back of the shop as Edwin flung open a small chest and took out a pen and ink.
“I’m fascinated by this turn of events,” Tadhg murmured.
“He is an excellent regrator,” she agreed.
They watched Edwin dig through a second chest, flinging papers overhead. “Do you know anyone not involved in an illicit trade?” Tadhg asked companionably.
She turned to him with a delicately arched brow. “No, I am entirely surrounded by them.”
That earned a grin from the rogue. It quite softened the resolute lines of his face, the lethal glint in his warrior’s eye. Tadhg was hard and endlessly capable, but he was not made for darkness, for all that it enshrouded him. He was made for the things he’d told her about under her counter, for springtime and fey magic and dallying with laundresses.
And tailors.
Her heart gave a hard little pinch.
“You will soon be done with my iniquity, lass,” he reminded her, the grin fading.
“Yes, and that is all I wish for,” she assured him with a sniff and stepped forward to oversee Edwin—he really was a terribly slippery eel—but she felt Tadhg’s attention alternating lazily between her and the outside, his muscled arms crossed over his chest, his shoulder to the wall, one boot crossed over the other, a moment of ease for this hard man who would soon be out of her life, thank God.
At one point she touched Edwin’s shoulder softly to ensure he included Cherbourg in his writs, a correction he acknowledged with a wave of his pudgy hand, not looking up from the parchment. Outside the windows, shoppers moved and soldiers stalked. But all Magdalena felt was Tadhg’s gaze on her. And the faint, very faint smile he watched her with.
She had not been watched, and approved of, in such a long time. Sooth, Tadhg could cause a nun to feel warmth in unspeakable places, but it was the sense of hope that spread through her, in tiny, spark-like bubbles, that was entirely unwarranted.
She’d been abducted. He was an outlaw. There was no cause for sparking bubbles.
Edwin sat up straight with a snap, startling her out of her reverie about unwarranted hope. He turned to her, a sheaf of folded, waxed parchments in hand.
“Here. Here you are.” He shoved them at Magdalena, and Tadhg pushed off the wall. “They are all done, for Cherbourg, a few more—that’s all I’ve have on hand, you know—but God knows writs of safe passage to five towns should serve whatever purpose you’ve in mind.” He adamantly did not look at Tadhg, just smiled broadly at Magdalena. “Well then,” he exclaimed, doing one of his annoying hand-claps. “I suppose that settles us up—”
“Epiphany,” Tadhg reminded him quietly.
Edwin closed his eyes. Without a word, he bent forward, dipped his hand into a chest at his feet, and came up with a pouch of coins. Turning his face to the wall, as if he couldn’t watch himself do this thing, he extended it without counting.
“For the Epiphany order,” he said thickly.
She smiled as it fell into her hands. “Thank-you,” she said softly, but it was not meant for Edwin.
Tadhg stepped to her side, put his fingertips on her back, and whisked her out the door.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
THEY MOVED OUT INTO THE TRAFFIC of town, people here and there, shopping, bustling in and out of the town square for the small market there. Tadhg kept his hand on Maggie’s back, not because it was necessary—Maggie was heading directly for the gates—but because he found his hand would not release her. It was as if his fingertips had been affixed by otherworldly means to anything he could touch of her, in this case, her worn wool cloak, and he could not let go.
“That was clever of you,” he said as they headed for the gates.
She nodded. “Yes, I am very clever.”
Tadhg smiled as he surveyed the crowds with unending visual sweeps. “I thank you for settling your debt on my behalf.”
She gave a small little shrug, very Gallic. “I could not wait to be done with you.”
“Aye?”
“Aye,” she said, bending her sweetly French mouth around his Irish phrase. It made him smile again. “I am breathless for you to be gone from my life.”
“Breathless, is it?” he repeatedly slowly. “Then why did you ask for two writs? To every town?”
She stilled, then cleared her throat. “Obviously this was done in case you were clumsy one afternoon, in a river or upon a windy hilltop, and lost one of them.”
His smile faded, but he couldn’t look away from her face. He tugged her to the side of the road, under the eaves of a building. “You do not want to come with me, Maggie. Trust me.”
She looked at him fiercely, her eyes telling him everything her mouth was denying. “Who said I ever would want such a thing? Pah, to be with an outlaw, running always to new lands, every day with the unexpected or unforeseen, who would want such a thing? The coin you left on my mantle was worth many times the amount of these little forged papers Master Edwin has given us—you—and far exceeds what I was due for the hosen. That is why I did it. Nothing more.”
He felt the cut of pain through his chest, like a burning sword. He reached out, hooked a finger beneath her chin and tipped her face up, so he could look directly into her complicated, beautiful eyes.
“You are owed more than I can ever repay, lady,” he said softly.
Her eyes grew exceedingly bright. He could almost see himself reflected in their unshed tears.
“Then leave me to my simple life, outlaw,” she whispered.
“I vow it,” he promised, but his body turned traitor again, and although his mind was pushing her away, his head was bending, his mouth lowering, and he was kissing her.
Her lips met his, pressed back, then with a soft cry, she broke away, turned her head, for a moment allowing it to rest against his chest.
“Maggie,” he said hoarsely, meaning to kiss her again, but her hands splayed across his chest, stopping him. Her body stiffened.
“Sherwood,” she whispered.
He ripped his head up and saw the first of Sherwood’s men at the end of the street. Sherwood stood behind him. Their heads were turned the other way, and the baron was pointing.
Whirling, he looked up the other end of the street. Two more soldiers appeared there.
He looked down at Maggie.
“Alley,” she whispered even as he was reaching for her hand to tug her into the little angular pathway, more gutter than street, that ran behind the well-kept wine tavern and other shops, and connected two larger, bustling streets.
He pushed her in, turned his back to the opening and gripped her elbows. “Maggie, heed me: circle around, go back inside your merchant’s shop. He will keep you safe, and get you home again.” He could see the shadow of soldiers now, barely a dozen feet away now, at the end of the alley, turning to peer down its length. “For God’s sake, run.”
“I am not running.”
He reached for his sword. “Maggie—”
“Kiss me.”
He stilled.
“Swords will not serve here, Tadhg,” she said softly, and put her hands on his face. Her fingertips we
re cool against his hot neck. “We must do what we are best at. It is our only hope. Now kiss me as you did the first time we met.”
Cursing softly, his hand dropped from the hilt of his sword and swung to cup the small of her back. He hauled her up against the length of him. “You are mad,” he growled in a low voice.
“Pull up my gown,” she whispered in reply.
He pressed his groin to hers and yanked her skirts up the side of her thigh, then bent his head to deliver a hard, demanding kiss. Her arms clasped around his shoulders and she pressed her body to his, bending her head back to receive the bruising kiss. His hand traveled up her skirts, his mouth hot on hers.
He dragged his mouth away, brutalized her neck as he went down it with hot, open-mouthed kisses. “You should run,” he whispered.
“You should stop talking,” she whispered back. “You must be as convincing as you were the last time. You would not whisper sweet endearments to a whore. Be rough with me.”
With an angry, guttural growl, he cupped her hips in his hands and pushed her back to the wall, hard. The breath burst from her in a little gasp, then she lifted her knee, let him clamp it to his hip.
Her breath was coming hot against his as their mouths crossed each other’s in hot, vicious kisses. Tadhg slitted his eyes open and saw her face, flushed, her mouth being ravaged by his, then he turned her slightly, away from the wall, and arched her spine, which allowed him to look down the alleyway while he still kissed her.
One of Sherwood’s soldiers stood there, grinning in at them. Tadhg’s blood ran hot and cold as fury and fear flooded him.
He turned them away and pushed his booted foot between Maggie’s, shoving her leg to the side. She made a sound of desire.
The soldier smacked the chest of his companion, who’d appeared beside him, and they stood there, grinning.
Christ on the cross, was he going to have to take her, to save her?
The second soldier punched the first in the arm and said something, then turned and walked away. Reluctantly, the first followed and the alley opening was clear again, broken only by an occasional shopper hurrying past.