By Grace Possessed

by Jennifer Blake

  “And break the circle? I’d not think of it.”

  His breathing was less strained than hers, his smile just as easy as when they began. He was stronger than she might have expected, given his ordeal. Another day or two and no one would guess he had been close to death.

  “You were there, admit it.”

  The demand came from behind her as he circled her once more and then danced to the fore again. He was relentless in his will. He would not stop until he had his answer.

  “Oh, very well!” she exclaimed, with a swift glance toward their neighboring partners. “I was there. What of it?”

  “Why would you deny it? Did it please you to make me think I dreamed you beside my bed?”

  “I was not meant to be there,” she said in a strained whisper as she danced close and away again. “If anyone knew…”

  “It was a grave risk.”

  “I am aware, believe me.” She gave him a fulminating glance, thinking of how she had traversed the cold corridors of the palace in one of Gwynne’s loose day robes and with a thick peasant’s kerchief covering her hair. More than once while traipsing back and forth, she had been forced to step into a storeroom, doorway or the darker shadows to avoid meeting those she knew.

  “Why would you chance it?”

  “You ventured more for me, and suffered more.”

  “Nothing that might affect my future.”

  Her glance was scathing. “I should think being killed an almighty affect!”

  “Mayhap keeping you safe from Trilborn is my purpose in being allowed to live,” he suggested with a whimsical smile.

  “Henry has had a bellyful of wrangling nobles, every one of them thinking himself the equal of a king. He will brook no meeting with sword or lance that he has not specifically decreed.”

  “That isn’t my intention. At least, not unless I’m forced to it.”

  What was he saying? Surely not what it sounded? “What else?” she asked with more than a little wariness.

  “A husband acceptable to Henry, one who would not misuse you, should solve your dilemma. Add to that the joy of snatching the bride he wants from Trilborn’s grasp, and the thing begins to have merit.”

  “You swore you would not agree!” she reminded to him in sibilant undertones. “If this is the way you repay my efforts to lower your fever, then I am sorry I bothered!”

  “Are ye, now?”

  No, it was not true. He had been so near perfect a specimen of manhood as he lay sprawled on his bed. She had taken guilty pleasure in running a cool cloth over the muscled expanse of his chest, along his arms, down the long, firm length of his thighs. And if she had lifted a corner of the sheet that covered him while Gwynne’s back was turned, who was to know? Unless it was he? Unless his suggestion came from some awareness of that heart-stopping instant of intimacy that gained her the knowledge of just how well, how bountifully, he was made?

  “That was before I knew your danger,” he was saying.

  “Yes, and before you saw how I could be used to spite your old enemy.”

  “You would rather be wed to him? It may come to that if you refuse. I don’t see Henry handing over your share of your father’s estates to a nunnery, as he must if you escape behind its walls.”

  Dread caught her by the throat, squeezing slowly so she felt the full pain of it. “It isn’t that, you know it isn’t.”

  “Because you think I may die then? The reaper comes for all of us, soon or late. We do what we are allowed, betimes.”

  “But don’t you see the feud with Trilborn may be your death? The vengeance and betrayal are there waiting, have always been there. They could overtake you if you defy the curse.”

  “They may do it, any road. I might as well make what goes before count for something.”

  “You can’t!”

  “No?”

  He watched her as he asked it, his eyes dark with unnamable impulses. She held his gaze, regardless, because she must. “No, not…not ever.”

  “Ah, well,” he said with a smile that did not light his eyes, “as you will, milady.”

  “You must promise me you will not change,” she insisted.

  He shook his head. “Whist, now, lass. It’s time for us to sing again.”

  The Yule log, tall as a man and so large four could not reach around it so it might burn the entire twelve days of Christmas, made the great hall insufferably hot. When Cate and her sister left to don cloaks and gloves for the midnight mass, Ross made his way outside. Greenwich Palace overlooked the Thames, and the deeper basin of a shipyard in a long curve of the river some distance away. It was a fair prospect during the day, though only pinpricks of light from stern lanterns could be seen in the darkness. Nearer at hand, the river was quiet and nearly empty of traffic.

  Ross took a well-worn path that led downhill, winding through a copse of leafless horse chestnuts and beside a stone wall before ending at the riverside. The quiet rush and gurgle of the water drew him to the edge. A pair of black swans approached, silent and almost invisible in the night, their eyes reflecting small pinpoints of light from the dimly glowing palace. He squatted and held out his hand to them, but they floated away when they saw he had nothing to feed them. Chuckling, he remained there on his haunches.

  The weather had turned somewhat warmer but was still cool and damp. The breeze off the water felt so good on Ross’s flushed face that he was barely aware of the smell of mud, decaying vegetation, and human and animal waste. Plucking a dried reed that grew at the river’s edge, he fashioned a rough flute and piped an air that had often sent men marching into battle with their plaids swinging and their swords weighty on their backs.

  It had scarce been two hours since he’d eaten, but he was hungry again. No doubt he would be until he was fit once more. Tomorrow would see a great feast at Henry’s expense. The boar Ross had killed in the New Forest would play its part. It most likely lay in salt somewhere in the bowels of the palace, after being dragged from the wood on his instructions and transported with the carts that had come from Winchester. He looked forward to sinking his teeth into it.

  He’d saved the beast’s tusks. One day they would grace the hall of his home, when his father had gone to a reiver’s reward. They would be a souvenir of a miserable yet magical night.

  For this evening of dancing and singing, and of looking into Cate’s face, flushed with effort and firelight, he required no reminder. It would live in the deepest part of his mind for many a long year, mayhap forever.

  By all the saints, but she was bonny, brave and true, a woman in a thousand.

  But not for him, never for him. If he told himself so often enough, he might one day come to accept it.

  Not that he felt anything beyond the concern any man might have for her plight. It was no fault of his that she had been lost in the wood or come under his protection. That Trilborn was sniffing around her was Henry’s problem, though Ross was certain his old enemy’s interest had sharpened once he saw she might be awarded to a Dunbar. If the man had never panted after her before, he would have conceived a sudden passion. It was how he was made.

  A dull thump, followed by a creaking sound, floated over the dark surface of the river. Hard upon it came a whispered reprimand. Ross lifted his head, quartering the shimmering flow with narrowed eyes.

  Just beyond where he hunkered in the reeds, a boat eased downriver, drifting with the outgoing tide until it turned toward the palace. Had it not been so silent, Ross might have shrugged it off as some nobleman returning from a carouse in freer surroundings than Henry’s staid court. The oars were muffled, however, and the occupants swathed in cloaks and wearing broad-brimmed hats that left their faces in shadow.

  Ross eased flat with the same slow care he’d have used if stalking a herd of nervous cattle. As he watched, the boat landed well above the stone dock that served the palace. Two men leaped ashore and made their way swiftly along the outer wall. They paused at a rustic gate, one from which kitchen refuse was take
n away or slops emptied into the river. It swung open, and the two night visitors vanished within.

  As it began to close again, it seemed to stick. The man stationed at the gate stepped forward to give it a hard pull. Light from somewhere inside glittered upon silver braid outlining a black tunic, winked over silver chains that held a black cloak. The way the man moved, the way he looked back over his shoulder before the gate thudded shut, made the hair on Ross’s neck stand up like a dog’s ruff.

  Trilborn, by the bones of Saint Peter.

  Trilborn had admitted the newcomers, though what he could be about was more than Ross could guess. Whatever it was, it was unlikely to be good.

  Ross sprang to his feet, brushed mud from his plaid with a quick gesture while keeping watch for more visitors, departing guests or sentries. A guard appeared on the wall high above his head, too far away to be a concern. Whistling a little, trying to act as if he’d been attending to an urgent call of nature in the open air, Ross strolled in the general direction of the gate where the men had disappeared.

  Guards, a pair of them, came to attention as he approached. Where they had been moments before, he could not guess, but they were certainly on watch now. To be admitted presented no difficulty, however; there was more than one advantage in being among the few known for wearing a plaid at Henry’s court. Either that, or the men on duty could not conceive of anyone asking entry at such a noisome back passage unless he belonged inside the palace.

  Ross made his way across the muck-littered space between the gate and a heavy door in the stone wall. Easing inside, he paused in the square entrance. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing to the right except the distant clatter as Henry’s kitchen staff labored over a feast for several thousand to be served on the morrow, he turned swiftly in the opposite direction.

  He had taken only a few steps when the bells began to peal from the king’s chapel. Matins, the midnight hour. It was time for the first mass of Christmastide. Hardly a soul in the whole palace would fail to head to the chapel, there to kneel with tightly closed eyes for the holiest of all celebrations. Trilborn had chosen well for his clandestine meeting, if that was what he had in hand.

  Ross thought he had lost the men for long moments as the rough corridor he traveled filled with serving staff hurrying toward the chapel. Carried along with them, he entered a series of public rooms leading one into the other. These in their turn were crowded with men-at-arms, minstrels, members of Henry’s yeoman guard, lords and their ladies hurrying with cloaks lifting behind their shoulders, and nuns in flying wimples. He dodged among them, protecting his side as best he might while using his height to see above their heads.

  It was in an antechamber that he spied his quarry again, a square room with a wooden floor that rumbled and squeaked with every footstep, and tapestries that shuddered in the draft that wafted from where its doors stood open to allow free passage. The men, three in number with Trilborn, had diverged from the main herd to enter a connecting chamber to what seemed to be a series of cabinet rooms. Ross forged after them, cleaving his way at a diagonal through the bustling throng while keeping his eye on the flash of silver braid. He did not try to close the distance, until the trio disappeared through a door at the far end.

  Before he reached it, a cloaked figure hurried to catch the heavy door panel before it closed. His face was concealed by a hood, but its width, as if it covered a headdress in the latest horned style, indicated a female. The light of a lamp, burning with a trio of wicks in its shallow bowl on a corner tripod, picked out the device embroidered upon the flowing velvet cloak she wore. It was that of the dowager queen, Elizabeth Woodville, wife of the late Edward IV and mother to Henry’s queen of the same given name.

  Elizabeth Woodville despised her son-in-law, so it was said, naming him a usurper with little royal blood in his veins, and that from the wrong side of the blanket and in his mother’s line. That was true as far as it went. Edward IV and Richard III had both descended from the eldest son of Edward III, while Henry’s line derived from the third son, John of Gaunt, and his mistress, Katherine Swynford. John of Gaunt had married the woman when he was able, and their offspring were made legitimate by royal order, but that hardly mattered in the Yorkist view. It was only the removal of all other Lancaster claimants to the throne, during the internecine fighting called the War of the Roses, that allowed Henry to come to the fore.

  A body would think the dowager queen would be in sympathy with Henry, Ross mused, as she was not from a titled family. More, her own marriage to Edward IV had been declared invalid by his brother, Richard, and her children therefore illegitimate. Edward, it seemed, had signed a betrothal contract, a legally binding instrument of marriage, with another lady prior to his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville.

  The cynical claimed the dowager queen’s partiality to the York cause had more to do with greed than loyalty. She, along with her sons from a previous marriage, her brothers and any number of other blood relatives, had held vast estates and rich offices while Edward was king. Richard had confiscated most of it on his brother’s death, but a return to a Yorkist regime might well set it all back in place again.

  Whatever Trilborn was about in company with the royal lady, it seemed unlikely to be to Henry VII’s benefit. It might well be a matter of treason.

  “Ross? Are you not going to the mass?”

  So great was his concentration on the closed door that he’d failed to see Lady Catherine sweeping toward him. His frown as he spun at the sound of her voice must have been fearsome; she, her sister and their serving woman just behind them, all stopped as if they had run into a stone wall.

  “Aye,” he said, keeping his voice a low rumble, “I’ll join you in a minute or two.”

  “You will have to stand if you delay,” Marguerite informed him.

  “On my own head be it,” he said shortly.

  Cate studied him, her gaze intent. “You are so recently come from your bed, and you look flushed. What are you—”

  “Not now.” He made a swift gesture with one hand. “Later.”

  She was not pleased. Her gaze went to the closed door that was his target. When Marguerite would have said something more, however, Cate put out a hand to stop her. “Yes,” she said as she moved away. “Later.”

  It sounded more a threat than a promise. Ross allowed a wry smile to quirk a corner of his mouth before he turned back to the business at hand.

  Skulking in dark corners and eavesdropping on private conversations was not his idea of proper conduct for the next laird of the Clan Dunbar. Some things had to be done, however. Moving with purpose, he continued on across the larger chamber that gave access to the room that interested him. Making every effort to appear as if he had serious business within, he opened the door and stepped inside.

  No convenient lamp burned here, not even a candle. It was, Ross realized, simply an antechamber where those who waited for an audience with the king could confer, dictate to a scribe or speak in private to a member of Henry’s council. Ross paused a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness, noting a bench under the single window, a writing table, a chair, a stool. Of greater interest was yet another door to one side, narrow in width, half concealed by draping curtains, and with a sliver of light beneath it.

  Easing forward with soundless footsteps on one of Henry’s Saracen carpets, he reached the door. He turned to place his shoulders against the wall beside it and leaned his head back.

  The wall felt substantial, comfortingly firm behind him, for he was suddenly weary beyond all reason. Yet his purpose was to make sense of the low mutter of voices he could hear in the next room, filtering around the door. He closed his eyes, the better to hear.

  “Margaret…Burgundy…tidings…”

  “…Yorkist…”

  “…by spring’s end, early…”

  “…boy prince…puppet…”

  “…thousand…German, well-armed…”

  “…payment for…”

  It w
as maddening to be unable to hear clearly. Ross could only guess the subject under discussion, and therefore its trend. Still, the pertinent fact appeared to be that Trilborn and the dowager queen were in league with those who sought to oust Henry VII from his throne.

  It seemed that he and the English king had a common enemy, Ross thought with grim amusement. It was almost enough to put him in charity with the monarch.

  Still, what arrogance, to penetrate to the very heart of Henry’s favorite palace to thrash out their plan. Even given that the entire court would be at mass, it was still breathtaking in its daring. Was it Trilborn’s choice, or the artful cunning of the dowager queen? She had a knack for intrigue, or so said the stories.

  Trilborn had almost surely thrown in his lot with the Yorkist faction. He was part of the scheme to remove Henry, one that involved Margaret, Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter who was also the dowager duchess of Burgundy, and an army of mercenaries that would land somewhere in England in late spring or early summer. Their purpose was to place a child king on the throne. No doubt Elizabeth Woodville expected to be named queen regnant until he came of age, a position with only slightly less pomp and authority than being queen in her own right. The boy’s supporters would then reap rewards beyond their most avaricious dreams.

  Did the woman really believe she would be putting her own child on the throne in the person of the boy? Or was this the most cynical of power grabs, made in full expectation that the young boy mentioned in whispers was an imposter who would eventually be deposed? Or did that matter when, as with Henry himself, might of arms instead of birthright would dictate the outcome? Did God decide on the battlefield who would or would not be king as some suggested, so that whoever was the victor could claim to rule by divine right?

  The stability of the throne of England was not his concern, Ross told himself with scathing disdain. If Henry died in the clash of foreign armies, it meant a likely end to Ross’s own enforced stay on English soil. He could go home to Scotland, take his place in his father’s keep and among his uncles and his cousins on their midnight cattle raids.