Alys fell back a step and rubbed at her arms, suddenly cold again.
‘Thank you for the dance, my lady,’ he said. ‘I think you are quite ready to impress the Queen.’
‘I do doubt it,’ she murmured. She turned away from him, flustered. ‘It—it is cold in here, is it not? I shall bring more blankets when I come back.’
‘I am perfectly comfortable here, Lady Alys,’ he said. ‘You have made it like a true home.’
She glanced around and found that everything did look different than it had only days before, a new place of colour and interest. He made it so; he made the world look different, made her imagine different things, a different life. If only it could be so.
‘I must go now, or I’ll be missed,’ she said. ‘But I will return later.’
He reached for her hand, holding it lightly balanced on his palm as he raised it to his lips. His kiss was warm, soft and light as a cloud and it made her tremble. ‘Thank you, my fair rescuer,’ he whispered.
Alys couldn’t answer. She spun around and hurried out of the room, catching up her shawl to wrap it tightly around her shoulders. The wind outside was chilly, but she welcomed its cold brush against her face. It helped steady her, helped wash away the clouds of dreams that had dared to come into her mind. Dreams of court life, of romance, of dances and kisses. With Juan.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ she told herself as she hurried along the cliffs towards home. Those moments with Juan were only that, dreams, and soon enough they would be gone. But she knew, deep inside, that she herself would never be quite the same again.
Chapter Nine
Alys tiptoed out of the castle, holding a basket of fresh supplies on her hip. It was growing late, the servants were at their own supper in the kitchens, her father was in his chamber and she had not seen their mysterious guest since their own dinner. It seemed a good time to go to Juan, with the risen moon lighting her path.
She felt a fizzing excitement as she made her way towards the abbey and it made her want to laugh and cry all at the same time. Looking forward to seeing him made her feel alive, in a way she never had before. She dreaded what it would be like when he left again, as he surely would very soon. Dunboyton would be quiet once more, her days filled with her household routines.
Yet she would have memories of him to go over in years to come. That would be enough. It had to be enough.
Alys paused at the top of the cliff steps to shift her basket. It had grown heavier with the climb. The moon shimmered with a silvery glow on the old stones of the abbey, turning their ruin into something jewel-like and magical. It seemed like a night when fairies might appear, when anything could happen.
For an instant, she thought she heard something, a rustle or a footstep.
She whirled around, her heart pounding. Was it the ghosts of the monks, gathering for their prayers under the moon? Or mayhap a far more corporeal danger. There was no guarantee that all Bingham’s men had left the area.
And then there had been the snake. Surely it had not just come out of nowhere, as a sign or a warning. Her old nursemaid would have said it was a demon.
Yet she saw nothing now. She was alone, except for the brush of the wind through the trees.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ she told herself sternly and turned to make her way towards the dairy.
As always when she came to Juan, for a moment she feared he would be gone already, that she would find the old building deserted. She knocked quickly. ‘’Tis me—Alys,’ she called softly.
The door swung open and Juan stood there. He looked almost as if he had been sleeping, his dark hair tousled, his shirt lacings loosened to reveal a vee of golden skin. A smile broke over his sensual lips, wide and delighted, bright as the sun of a summer day, and it made her smile, too. ‘I feared I wouldn’t see you tonight,’ he said as he took the basket from her.
‘Our evening meal took longer than usual,’ she answered. ‘My father has had guests for a couple of days now.’
‘Guests?’ He knelt down to stir the fire, making the flames leap higher. The light gilded his skin, making him seem like a golden god.
To distract herself, Alys started unpacking the food and wine from the basket, laying it out on a blanket as a makeshift table. ‘Not to worry, it wasn’t Bingham’s soldiers returning. I brought you some of the beef and chicken pies that were left, and some of the cook’s fine honey cakes. She doesn’t make them very often.’
‘Then I am most grateful to your guests. I confess I have a terrible sweet tooth.’ He popped one of the small cakes into his mouth and grinned, making Alys laugh.
‘Have you been too bored today?’ Alys asked, pouring herself some wine.
‘Not at all. I read some of the fine books you brought and watched the birds among the ruins. I don’t think I have ever felt so very peaceful in a long time. Maybe never. There truly is a magic in this place.’
Alys remembered when she would come to the abbey with her mother, climbing over the stones, lying in the meadows with the sun on her face. The way it had sheltered her after she lost her mother. ‘It brings me great peace, as well. My nursemaid used to tell me there were fairies living here.’
‘That reminds me, fair Alys—you do owe me a story still. Remember our bargain?’
Alys laughed. ‘I can’t think of any good tales now.’
‘Certainly you can. What of those fairies? Come, entertain me while I eat. I have been alone all day, after all.’ He gave her an exaggerated sad look that made her laugh again.
‘There is a tale I loved as a child,’ she said. ‘It rather reminds me of you.’
‘Of me?’ he said with a laugh.
‘Aye. There are many fairies who live near us and they watch what we do even as we have no awareness of them. Some of them wish evil on humans; some are only mischievous. And some do love us, in their own way, even though their fairy love can destroy us as easily as the illness-causing evil fairies.’
‘Am I an evil fairy, then?’
Alys studied him carefully, his easy smile, his beautiful eyes. ‘Nay. You are the sort who draw unwary mortals closer and closer, until they long for the fairy realm and forget their own homes. Just as the tale my old nurse told me, about a fairy king who sought to wed a human princess. She was betrothed to another prince, but when she saw the fairy king, he mesmerised her with his eyes, and drew her to him, until she vanished to her family and fiancé.’
‘He had magical eyes?’
‘Aye. A beautiful emerald-green, like your own, if I remember the story right.’
Juan gave a sad sigh. ‘But alas, I have found no princess to love me.’
Alys laughed. ‘You just have not looked close enough, I would wager. I am sure princesses from Antwerp to Lisbon have looked into your eyes and been lost. Mayhap your mother was not Spanish after all, but fey folk...’ Emerald-green eyes. Alys smiled as she thought of their rare beauty and felt the deepest sympathy for the lost human princess. They were mesmerising indeed. Just like...
Like the green eyes of the boy who had once saved her and soothed her tears away.
Startled by her own memory, she looked up at Juan and saw there the boy. The green-eyed boy with the floppy dark hair and sweet smile. He had come back to her now, when she had thought never to see him again.
Flustered, she looked away. ‘I should look at your shoulder and make sure it is healing properly before I go,’ she said. ‘Does it give you any pain?’
He rolled his shoulder with seeming ease. ‘Not at all. You have worked miracles. A healing angel.’
Alys felt her cheeks turn warm with a pleased blush. ‘Nay, not I, it’s just the herbs. My mother used to say any wound could heal, if kept clean and dosed with the right herbs. The earth knows what is needed.’
‘Then she was a most wise woman. I’m
fortunate she had such a daughter.’
Alys smiled and tentatively eased back his shirt. The linen was warm from his body and when she was so close to him it was hard to remain sensible. She forced herself to concentrate only on his wound, not on the way he smelled, the smooth, hot satin of his skin.
She turned back the bandage and saw that the poultice was doing its work. She reached for the new mixture of herbs from the basket and wound a fresh bandage around his shoulder. The familiar work distracted her from old memories.
‘Do you remember anything at all of your own mother?’ she asked.
‘Very little. She died when I was very young. I think I recall the way her perfume smelled, of summer roses, and her smile, which was sad and sweet. After she was gone, I fear our house was not a home at all. The buildings began crumbling, a wreck just like my father turned into.’
Alys felt a pang of sadness for him as a little boy, left alone to face a cold world. ‘I am sorry. Dunboyton might be dull and chilly, but it is never cruel. The home my mother tried to make is still here.’
‘Is it your home, Alys?’
She thought about that carefully. ‘Not the castle, no. But my memories, the people I love—that makes it home, I suppose.’
‘Will you miss it when you marry and leave?’ he said tightly.
Alys peeked up at him and found he watched her carefully, his bright eyes narrowed. ‘Of course. But thanks to my mother, I will know how to make a new home. What of you, Juan? Will you find a fine lady to marry and make a new home?’
He gave a bark of laughter. ‘Nay, I would not know how to do that. I have never known a home.’
‘But would you like to?’
He was quiet for a long moment. ‘I think I might. A home—it does sound like a fine thing.’
There was a note of sadness in his voice that made Alys’s heart ache all over again. She rested her hands on his shoulders and leaned against him, longing to bring him comfort. To bring that to herself.
Suddenly, the air between them seemed to change, growing charged as the sky was just before a lightning strike. She could hardly breathe, especially when he reached for her and drew her closer. She had never been so close to a man. How dizzying it was! All her senses tilted and whirled, and all she knew in that moment was him. The way he felt under her touch, so alive and strong and warm.
‘Alys...’ he said hoarsely.
‘I—I am here,’ she whispered.
As if in a hazy dream, far away, yet more immediate and real than anything she had ever known before, his head tilted down towards her and he kissed her.
The brush of his lips was so soft at first, like warm velvet, pressing softly once, twice, as if he expected her to run. But Alys could not have moved away from him. As she moved up to meet him, his kiss deepened. It became hotter, more urgent—the most urgent, hungry thing she had ever known.
Something deep inside her heart responded to that urgency, a rough excitement that grew and grew until she thought she would burst from it. She moaned, parting her lips to the shocking feel of his tongue seeking entrance, sliding over hers. There was only him, not the world outside, only him and that one perfect moment.
But the outside world insisted on breaking into her dream. A sound like a branch falling against the roof shocked her, making her fall back from him. She jumped to her feet, her whole body shaking. She longed to jump back into his arms, yet she knew she could not. If she did, she might never free herself again.
‘Alys, I am so very sorry...’ he said, his sea-green eyes grown dark.
‘Nay. Please don’t say you are sorry for what happened,’ she gasped. ‘I could not bear it. I just—I must go now.’
She whirled around and ran out of the dairy, hearing him call after her. She couldn’t stop, though. She hurried out of the abbey’s ruins as if the ghosts were indeed running after her. She didn’t feel the cold wind, even though she had left her shawl behind, and she could hear nothing at all but the wild beat of her heart in her ears.
She paused at the kitchen-garden wall to try to catch her breath. If her father was awake, she knew she could not let him see her in such a state. But as she studied the castle, she saw that no windows were alight, except the one in the guest chamber of the tower. The one where Sir Matthew stayed. She felt as if someone watched from behind those blank windows, someone who sought all her secrets.
Chapter Ten
He was not alone in his hiding place. John could sense it. And whoever lurked outside, it was not Alys. She would have dashed inside, her basket in her arms, and lit up the darkness with her smile.
John’s extensive training during his work with Walsingham had sharpened his sixth sense to an exceptional degree. He always knew when he was being followed, being watched. It had served him well in the palace corridors of Madrid and Paris, and the back alleys of Lisbon. Last night, when he was alone after Alys left, he felt the sharp prickle of that sense. He had tried to shrug it away, to attribute it to the darkness of the sky and Alys’s tales of ghostly monks and fairies. Now he saw how foolish shrugging it away had been.
John held the hilt of the only weapon he now had, the eating knife, lightly on his palm and stepped silently to the half-open door.
He could feel whoever it was moving closer, like the slow slide of a length of silk over his skin, barely a whisper.
Then he heard it. The merest crackle of a fallen leaf on the old, cracked flagstones. It could have merely been blown by the wind, but he knew it wasn’t. He heard another sound, the brush of wool against the wall, and he lunged out the door, his dagger raised. His other hand shot out towards a shadow looming in the darkness and caught a fistful of that woollen cloak.
The figure inside the cloak was too tall, too muscular to be petite Alys. He shoved the man against the wall, into the ray of light coming out of the door, and pressed his knife to a throat, just at the vulnerable spot beneath the chin. Before he could drive the blade home, the cloak’s hood fell back and he saw the man’s face.
It was as familiar to him as his own in its sharp, hawk-like angles, in the wry smile that curved the lips. ‘I see I taught you well enough, John,’ Sir Matthew Morgan said, his smile growing.
John drew back the blade. Shock and happiness shot through him at the sight of his godfather. It had been too long since he had seen anything familiar, had felt close to home again. Whatever home was. ‘Sir Matthew! What are you doing here?’
‘Whatever do you think I would be doing in the wilds of Ireland? Looking for you, of course.’
Looking for him? He had always known Matthew was good at his job, but perhaps now he had some second sight. Or perhaps the Queen’s astrologer, John Dee, had led him. ‘How did you find me?’
Matthew shrugged. ‘Perhaps we would be more comfortable talking inside?’
John nodded and led the way back into his little sanctuary. Matthew took it in with a flicker of a glance. ‘You have found a fine nest. I suppose the pretty Lady Alys made it so, since I remember the squalor of your Cambridge lodgings. You never had a talent for housekeeping.’
At the mention of Alys, John turned wary, his senses heightened in that prickling, warning way again. He closed the door softly behind them and leaned against it with his arms crossed. No one could be permitted to harm Alys, even his godfather, even if she was, technically speaking, a traitor to the crown. She had been moved by humanity alone to save his life and he would die to keep her from being punished for it. ‘Is that how you found me? Through her?’
‘In a way, though I must say she was remarkably careful for a lady with no experience as an intelligencer. She made sure she was followed by no servants or soldiers from the castle and gave no clue even to her father. Perhaps Walsingham could recruit her?’
John shook his head in anger. His gentle Alys, subjected to the things he had see
n and done in Walsingham’s service? He regretted nothing; it had been done to protect the Queen and the peace of England. But Alys could never know those horrors. ‘Don’t you dare approach her, Sir Matthew. She may be careful, but she is also an innocent.’
Matthew glanced at John, his brow raised in an expression of curiosity. ‘Indeed? ʼTis a pity. We could use her. We have few men here in this part of the world. Even spies can’t stomach it.’
‘You must have a few, though, to have found me so quickly.’
Matthew turned to the fire, his back to John as he held his hands closer to the flames. ‘We have been carefully tracking all the Armada ships that escaped from Gravelines. We heard the Concepción had been blown this way in the storm and I set off as soon as I heard. The Queen’s pinnaces are much faster and safer than your clumsy Spanish galleons. I prayed you had survived.’
‘And so I did. But how did you know I was here? Bingham’s soldiers were killing anyone they could find on sight.’
‘Surely you must know I have my own men with Bingham? They have sharp eyes and knew the right questions to ask, even in the midst of such chaos. They had not seen you. And I took shelter at Dunboyton. Sir William Drury is an old friend of mine and a smart man. I hoped he could help in some way.’
‘So you found Alys there.’
‘Alys, is it? Aye, so I did. Sir William had no knowledge of you, nor of any Englishman seeking shelter, and I could tell he was not lying. His daughter, on the other hand...’
‘You did not question her, did you?’ John asked sharply, that cold fear returning.
Matthew frowned. ‘Certainly not. As I said, for a civilian and a sheltered lady she was not a bad liar. She hid her fears well enough and was quite gracious. But she was not quite good enough. I could tell she was hiding something and when I saw her slip out of the castle with a rather large basket, I was sure of it. I followed her, simple as that.’
‘How did you know she was coming to me?’
‘I did not, of course. It could have been anyone she was helping, but I had a sense.’ A smile flickered on his face. ‘I do know the effect you have on fair ladies, John. It has served you well with the French mademoiselles and Spanish doñas, I trust.’
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