He had every intention of locking the miscreant in the gatehouse cellar until midnight, then setting him out to sea in a leaky boat at high tide.
"I do apologize, Master Mullock," she said, brushing at the man's elbow, glaring at Nicholas. "We've gotten off to a bad start. But I assure you that you're quite welcome here." She'd sent that as a challenge to him, as though he still couldn't comprehend her logic—total reformation of souls, all because she wished it so.
She gave a gentle push against the center of Nicholas's chest to set him away a step, her palm and soft, cool fingers on the place above his heart, for the space of a breath. He nearly covered her hand to keep it there, but she had already moved past him to apply her balm elsewhere.
"Where do you come from, Master Mullock?"
Exactly Nicholas's question, but for an entirely different reason. Three people happening upon an abandoned castle in the course of a day wasn't a coincidence. It was the work of deliberate calculation.
Or the devil.
Or his very devious wife.
"I come here direct from Greenwich town." Mullock's eye darted from his wife upward to Nicholas, where he stood guard behind her, a place that felt all too fitting. In the full light of the cloudless day her hair gleamed a fiery copper, strewn liberally with gold, barely captured in a plait.
"Greenwich?" She retrieved the man's hat, brushed it off, and gave it back to him. He crushed it like a callow boy suddenly shy with his favorite lass. "What did you do there to get a living wage?"
"I was a—" he glanced at Nicholas, as though he might sense some uncomfortable truth, scoundrel to scoundrel "—well, I was a merchant."
And I am a monk. "Have you been praying for merchants, my lady?"
"Truly, Master Mullock?" She ignored Nicholas but for that hand again, reaching backward to touch his chest. He captured and held it bundled in his, because he could, and she couldn't do much about it, but tug and then relax. "What kind of merchant?"
Beads of sweat sprang up on Mullock's half brow, dampening the filthy green band. A brigand, about to confess his venal sins in his wife's court of charity toward even the lowest.
"Bought and sold a bit of everything, milady. Ship's cargo, private cartage, movable chattel, the like."
"I can guess whose chattel, Mullock." Nicholas knew exactly what kind of business the man was in. A land pirate, a dealer in stolen goods.
"'Twas mine, sir. Whatever anyone wanted to buy, I was ready to sell."
"Or steal." Nicholas received a pair of scowls for that and a light poke from his wife, too near his tarse for her own good, for his. He let go of her hand and hoped to hell she hadn't noticed more than she should.
"Then you must be very good at knowing the worth of things, Master Mullock."
Mullock stalled, his eye roving between her and Nicholas. He obviously wanted insight into this illogical inquisition before he answered. "Aye. I did a fair lot of business in Greenwich and London."
"If your business was doing fairly, Master Mullock, whatever made you leave?"
"My bloody storehouse burned down a few months back, and everything in it. There was nothing left to me but these clothes."
"Then where did you get all this, Mullock?" Nicholas upended the rucksack onto the ground, disgorging plateware, a harness, a distaff, shoes, and an orange that had hardened to brick.
"Hey! That's mine." Mullock fell onto the pile, just long enough for Nicholas to pick him up again, for Eleanor to shoulder him aside and level a finger at Mullock
"Is that how you came by your treasures?" The question was so piercing and unexpected it made the little man shift his weight. "Well, did you?"
He stubbed his heel into the ground and mumbled, "I collected the stuff as I come here."
"I think you stole it," she said, and Mullock's shoulders sagged.
"Of course he did, madam."
"Aye. I suppose I did."
"Because…?" she asked in her perverse inquisition that could lead nowhere.
"Because it were there for me to take."
She glanced up at Nicholas, as though she'd proved her point once again. "Well, then, Master Mullock, you'll be glad to know that you'll never have to steal again. That is, if you choose to stay with us."
"What d'ya mean?"
Bloody hell, she was going to keep him, to cosset a housebreaker. In his castle!
"You'll find the work here backbreaking, but well worth it, a chance to be an honest merchant—for there are such creatures in the world. You'll have a tidy cottage in that piss-poor village, land to till, and your pride to cultivate. There's no reason to be looking over your shoulder for the law anymore. It all comes down to freedom, sir. I find it the most satisfying thing in the world. Yours for the asking."
Nicholas never would have credited it, but Mullock had the grace to blush a stark crimson, leaving him stammering.
"If it's all as you say, lady—" Nicholas had never seen such doubt strangled by hope "—I'll count myself lucky for having come here after all."
"Well, then, Master Mullock," she said, kneeling to pat the sow and to help the startled man stuff his rucksack with the stolen goods, "I've got just the job for you. And you start right now."
Nicholas knelt as well and tipped her chin toward him so that she'd listen clearly for once, so that she would understand that he forbade her ever being alone with Mullock.
"If he stays, madam, he'll work for me. At my side, never out of my sight for an instant. Do you understand? For me alone."
He'd never seen a pair of eyebrows that could so quickly change aspects; from softly soaring to a deadly, hawk-winged dive that would end in bloodied feathers and a whole flock of squawking.
"No," she whispered—only out of deference to the bastard's sensibilities, as though they were perishable and his were not.
"He works with me, my lady."
"I appreciate your advice, steward. But I've an important task for Mullock. If I can spare him next week, you can have him."
You'll stay clear of him, wife, because I'm lord here; and I say so, because I can't have you risking yourself.
"What task, madam?" Whatever it was, he'd take care of it later.
"He shall be the keeper of the wardrobe."
"Him?" Confounded, Nicholas glared at the man, who looked equally astounded. Spooked, and ready to run.
"Me?"
"Exactly you, Master Mullock." She stood up between them, set the stuffed rucksack upright against her knee, and tied it off at the neck. "I need someone to make sense of the mess that my husband and his steward left behind for me. The storage rooms and the undercrofts are a jumble. And have you thought, Nicholas, of how we'll sort through all the chattel that will come out of the village? Someone needs to do something with it all. I can't spare the time. Do you read, Mullock?"
The thief's mouth gaped still. "No, milady."
"Then I'll find you a clerk. Somehow." She handed the man his rucksack.
"And you want me to manage this wardrobe?"
"If you please." She waited patiently for Mullock's assent, while the man twitched his eye and ran his filthy finger along the neck of his tunic.
"I do please, my lady," Mullock finally whispered, as though he feared being drummed out of the thief's guild if they ever learned he'd gone honest on them. "Very much so."
Damnation.
"Good. Come then—I'll settle you in and put you to work immediately." She started off toward the keep with the man and his sow, her hands sketching out her dreams against the sky.
In a single edict, she had appropriated Mullock's thieving and knighted him with her trust. He looked suddenly sainted, transcendent. Not that it would last. Men like Mullock crossed every class, from princes to peasants. They lived entirely for themselves. She needed to understand this.
He would set her straight about unreclaimable brigands and impoverished hearts. About a God who jousted with unarmed innocents.
* * *
Chapter 11
"A solar? Way up here?" Eleanor hadn't seen the tower room on her first foray. Odd, because it hadn't a lock, though it was tightly closed up, smelling of dust and in dire need of the crisp sunlight that filled it when she slid aside the heavy drapes and opened the tall shutters onto the shimmering blue ocean that seemed to stretch out forever. Bright and sublimely homey, with a small connected chamber through another set of drapes, with another tall casement window.
There were three barrel chairs and a small hearth, four braziers, a scarred worktable and benches, stout candles with dust-covered wax pooled in their tallow catches, pots of ink, coffers full of paper, upright pigeonholes stuffed with counting sticks, shelves of large books—
"Books! This isn't just a solar, it's the steward's office!"
Feeling wildly triumphant, she hefted an ancient-looking book off the shelf, spread it across the table and opened to the first page. It was, indeed, everything that she'd been searching for.
"'Faulkhurst Castle. Household accounts: Michaelmas, 1301.'" Fifty years old, but there were many more books here, dozens of them. The record of every minute of the manor's years, its pulse and its livelihood: from how many chickens were used for supper on the octave of Easter, to the number of candles burned during Twelfth Night.
The newer books were thicker, but stopped abruptly, tellingly, four years ago—1347. The year before the plague had come.
The front page of the book was signed by a Rudolphus—whether merely a clerk or William Bayard's well-educated steward, his daily paragraphs were neatly scribed and set apart.
"'25 March, 1347. 'Delivered from the East Tower wardrobe to the armory, 17 ells of canvas, 4d.' for banners." The East Tower—exactly where she and Hannah had discovered the spinning room.
"'To the kitchen: one-quarter ox, from castle stores, and one barrel salt. Three peahens, 1d.'"
She sat at the table and read on through a hard, wintry year, with plowing and planting and reaping schedules that clearly revealed—as she had suspected they would—her husband's meanness of spirit: driving his tenants to produce more than they could bear, driving them off their land when they failed, collecting harsh fees and taxes, showing no mercy toward those who needed it most.
All of his sins, recorded in the tidy quill strokes of his dispassionate steward.
She scanned the lines quickly, chiding herself to stop with each turn of the page. But toward the end of November of that year, a single item in a single paragraph made her heart lurch.
"'One band of gold from Faulkhurst Treasury, 10s. To John Sorrel for the lord's bride.'"
The lord's bride.
"Me." The brevity of the notation numbed the tips of her fingers, heated smudges across her cheeks. "I was an item on Bayard's accounting sheet. Not even a name."
Of course, not surprising at all. Yet it was difficult to explain the hollowness that came with seeing it inked with such casual permanence.
The lord's bride—but never his wife. There was no line for that.
An unwanted, unexpected grief washed over her, thoroughly wasted on a regret that she shouldn't feel.
Because he didn't matter anymore.
Because, according to the common laws and those of God, he'd never been her husband at all.
Unconsummated. Incomplete.
Still a virgin—dangerously so, if Edward or his barons ever discovered that she and William had never met. How simply that could happen: a casual mention of timing, a little investigation into William's travels, then into hers.
The consequences terrified her, were unthinkable: that Faulkhurst might one day be taken from her by lack of a marital formality. No one need ever know that it hadn't happened, the ceremonial rending of her maidenhead.
No one but her next husband, if there ever was such a man—right in the middle of their wedding night when he would discover her intact and trembling, her home, her heart, completely at his mercy.
And there would be another husband someday—Edward would see to that.
Unless she found a remedy for her highly inconvenient chastity—some willing gentleman who wouldn't mind deflowering a virgin.
Someone like Nicholas.
Deflower you, madam? Certainly. Would you prefer before or after I finish the bakehouse?
Now.
But it would be never. Oh, God. Here she was daydreaming again—still—flushed and glowing to the tips of her breasts, breathless with imagining that Nicholas might kiss her there someday. His lips had been wondrously warm and questing last night, and he'd only kissed her fingers, their tips, and that stunning, stirring place in the middle of her palm.
But he was the absolutely wrong man for the task—should she ever decide to undertake such a rash act. He was her laborer and she the master: she'd made that decisively clear. It wouldn't be fair to him. He'd surely consider her request an order and feel obligated. She wouldn't take advantage of her position—no matter her desire for his kiss, or those appealing eyes of his, when they filled up with his passion. Or when he smiled from inside them.
No, a perfect stranger would be best of all. Unattached, unable to tell tales afterward.
Sneaking around with a stranger? This whole ridiculous scheme felt like an unforgivable betrayal. Not of her husband, oddly, but of Nicholas.
'Twill be my pleasure, madam. As it will be yours.
Blast it all. She took three long, deep breaths and righted her focus, forcing herself to scan the short lines of her husband's book once again, looking for more than had been there before.
The lord's bride. But there she was still, wedged between 'the expenses of the hounds in taking one fallow deer' and '250 salted herring from stores.'
"A pox on your soul, Bayard. An itchy, burning one."
She slammed the book closed and scavenged through the chamber for the most recent records, opening chests and trunks and wardrobes of male clothing. But the last book ended abruptly in 1347.
"You couldn't even leave me a few measly words about your castle, a few numbers, a few hints at how to dig my way out of your midden, could you, husband?"
Selfish to the end.
Not that she was going to give up her search, even though Rudolphus might have escaped with the records to one of Bayard's Burgundian estates when the pestilence arrived. If so, Edward had doubtlessly used them to eviscerate her husband's holdings after his death.
Another scavenger always waiting to pick at the bones. She'd be damned if she'd stand still long enough to let anyone pick at hers. The sound of Pippa and her pounding tread came chasing up the stairwell.
"Nellamore! Nellamore, look! Look what we found." Pippa flew into the room, slid to a stop, and grinned as Eleanor knelt to catch her. "See!"
Pippa laid a small toy horse—or some such beast—into Eleanor's palm; a sweet thing, crudely made of leather-jointed twigs, a sleek body, and a frayed rope tail. It was one-eared, begrimed around its middle, and smoothed to silk by a child's adventures.
It had been so well and deeply loved that when Eleanor brushed it across her cheek, she felt the soft breath of the boy who had left it behind. Her eyes pooled with sudden, unexpected tears, and her chest became stuffed and aching with a sob for him and all the children in the world.
Sad-faced in sympathy, Pippa crawled into her lap. "Why does the little horse make you cry, Nellamore?"
Ghosts, Pippa. Sudden, sad ones.
"He's just that sweet, Pippa. Don't you think so?" The twiggy legs dangled from their tethered joints. A fine, neglected destrier, made by someone who had loved deeply, enduringly.
"Crying-sweet, he is, Nellamore." Pippa gave the poor beast a kiss on its nose, then tucked it into her bulging belt pouch. "Sweeter even than that 'normous block of sugar you found this morning."
"Much sweeter."
"Pippa! Lady Eleanor! Look!" Lisabet flung herself onto the landing and then into the chamber, lushly swathed in green-and-gold damask and spinning around in abandon.
"Lisabet!
What happened to your face?" Eleanor's heart flew into her throat until she realized the girl wasn't bruised and battered, merely rouged crimson to her temples, her eyebrows kohl-black nearly to her hairline.
"I'm a lady, milady."
More like a misguided London tart, and far too innocent to be let loose on the world anytime soon. Lisabet wobbled, curtsied, stepped on the twisted fabric and then pitched forward into Eleanor's arms.
"What have you gotten into?" Eleanor set her upright, trying not to laugh at Lisabet, who was trying to be so grown up.
"Lady's things, I think. Aren't I lovely?"
Terrifying. And dear.
"Too lovely for words, Lisabet." She shooed both girls toward the door, leaving the books and ledgers behind until she could corner her steward and study them alongside him. "Come show me where you found the pony and these lady's things."
There was a whole wardrobe of fine lady's things as it turned out, from tissue-thin chemises and broidered kirtles to silken stockings and doe-hide slippers. Men's garments as well, splendid worsteds and camlets trimmed in sable and fox, and even a goodly amount of sturdy children's clothes that would fit Pippa and any other children who might come through the gates.
Lovely things indeed, delicate, extravagant. Booty from her husband's sacking and pillaging, no doubt, hoarded with care and camphor. The lady's robes and gowns had been her size exactly, richly cut and newly styled. Yet they hadn't been fashioned for her at all. For her husband's courtesans, or a mistress, perhaps.
Certainly not for his forgotten, virginal wife.
* * *
"You've done all this, Mullock?" Not two hours in his new position and the great hall looked like a London market. "It's astounding."
The man shied as easily as Dickon. "Thank you, ma'am. Sorry that it's not His Lordship's opinion, my lady."
"His lordship?" Ah, Nicholas. The man did have that lordly breeze about him, as though he'd never been subject to the whims of anyone. Not even as a soldier. A man used to giving orders and seeing them done. One mystery after the next, to be solved and sorted.
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