by K. E. Saxon
Maggie looked up from her embroidery and shrugged, silently shaking her head.
“I know not, but I pray ‘twill be soon,” Branwenn replied. Bao had evidently cautioned the others not to tell her the reason he had been summoned, nor why his wife had been so determined to speak on his behalf, but Branwenn knew there was something amiss. Else, why would everyone insist upon keeping the information from her? And, she wondered, what could it possibly have to do with Callum? He’d been called upon to speak with the elders as well. Aye, there was something very, very wrong, Branwenn could feel it in her bones, and she was hurt and angered that her brother refused to allow her knowledge of it.
Reys ap Gryffyd had left at dawn to return to the Gwynedd realm in Cambria and speak with his cousin, Prince Llywelyn. Branwenn still could not think of Reys as her brother, nor fathom having a relation as noble as a prince. Her mind churned. What if Reys was not successful in his bid? What if Bao and Daniel were forced to battle for her right to remain here? And, whatever was the purpose of this secret meeting regarding Bao? Might he be banished? Oh, Lord. Feeling panicked now, Branwenn forced herself to focus instead on the tapestry on which she was working. When she realized she’d dropped a stitch several loops back, she sighed and let her hands fall into her lap.
A knock came on the door just then and Branwenn started. “Enter!” she called out a bit too loudly.
In the next second, Jesslyn moved across the threshold into the chamber. “The meeting has ended,” she said, giving both Maryn and Maggie a steady look, “and all went well. Tho’ whether he will be chieftain has still to be decided.”
“I’m pleased that Robert MacVie came first to Daniel with his tale instead of spreading it through the ranks, as it likely had been intended,” Maggie said.
“Aye,” Maryn said. “And thanks be to heaven that Daniel learned that another soldier had overheard the tale as well before he could cause trouble for Bao.”
Branwenn sighed loudly and dramatically flung her arms wide in frustration. “What was the warrior told?” she prodded.
“That is for your brother to reveal, and he is not yet ready for you to know of this,” Jesslyn told her. “Just know that it is something about his past and be glad that all has turned out well.”
Branwenn groaned behind clenched teeth and shook her head in disgust. She rolled her eyes, but prodded no further. ‘Twas evident she’d get no information from this quarter. Nay, if she was to learn anything, she’d have to wait and speak with Bao. Her heart ached that he was keeping a secret from her. Especially when the rest of the family had been made fully aware of it.
“Do you know who gave Robert the tale?” Maryn asked.
“Nay, I do not,” Jesslyn said. “They spoke not of it while I was in the great hall. However, I believe the men know who it was but are not speaking of it, yet.”
“Aye. I’m sure all will be revealed in time,” Maggie said.
* * *
Jesslyn was just passing Callum’s chamber on her way to the stairs leading to her own when the door swung open. “Lara! Are you well? Callum said you were in need of a bit more rest this morn.”
“Aye. In fact, I was just coming out to find you. Have you a moment to speak with me?”
Alarm bells sounded in Jesslyn’s head, but no polite excuses for refusal came immediately to mind, so she nodded and said, “Aye.”
“Come inside, then. The hearthfire is warm and quite pleasing on such a cold day as this.”
Once the two were comfortably seated near the hearth, Lara said, “You must be in utter delight over the attentions you receive from your husband. I know I certainly was.”
Her stomach trembled. “What mean you?”
Lara laughed. “Lord, that mouth of his, those fingers! He knows just how to combine their strumming to send a woman into her utmost bliss. Several times.” She sat forward, as if a kindred conspirator. “And don’t you adore that enticing brand he has on his chest? ‘Twas given him by a jealous lover, you know,” she said. “Of course, the long scar on his hip is from a blade, ‘tis clear. What a warrior! Oh, Lord! And doesn’t he have the mightiest cock?” She giggled. “However do you take it? All at once, or a bit at a time?”
Jesslyn hadn’t been able to drag in more than the smallest of breaths since Lara’s first volley. “When?” she managed to say, though it was barely audible, even to her own ears.
“Ah,” Lara said, giving her a knowing nod. “Several times, actually. I paid my price for him each time I visited my sister in Perth these five years past. But most recently, the night of the Hogmanay feast, first in one of the tower chambers and again in the stables.”
A warm damp began under Jesslyn’s arms. “The tower room was untouched.”
“Aye, we didn’t even make it to the pillows, so wild was he to mate with me.” She sat forward a bit more. “He took me where we stood—we never even shed our clothing!” she trilled.
Her look turned conspiratorial again. “Tell me, does it burn a bit for you as well when he first enters you? I shall wager it does. No matter how prepared he makes a lady, it still hurts at first.”
Jesslyn was torn between rage and heartbreak. Disillusion and disgust at herself for being gulled again so easily with a soft word, a sensual touch made her physically ill. Rising from her seat, she said jerkily, “I must leave.” Then she stormed across the room, threw open the door and fled down the corridor, the stairs, across the antechamber, through the door of the keep and across the courtyard. Anger and horror put wings to her feet and on she sped, through the arched gateway of the fortress and down the pebbled path toward the village. She didn’t stop until she had her back pressed flat against the inside of the door to the cottage.
Bao and Lara had evidently enjoyed each other many times. The hypocrisy of his words the night before, of his pretense of disgust at the lady’s shameless betrayal of Callum, hit her all at once and a strangled cry burst from her throat. She bit down hard on her lower lip to keep from splitting the air with a second, more deafening one. What a fool she’d been! Why, oh why, had she not paid more attention to the qualms she’d felt upon finding the lovers’ nest that night? Instead, she’d proceeded with her plan and given him her body again. Revulsion filled her as she recalled how openly eager she’d been for his attentions—and that, mere hours after his adulterous tryst with Callum’s wife! The lecher! When would she ever learn?
She groaned. Thoroughly humiliated, her chest tightened and her breath hung suspended like a noose in her throat. She was bound for a lifetime with a man who broke, and likely would continue to break, his vows of faithfulness willfully and without regret. When she thought of how fiercely she’d defended him, waxed on about his good character, his strength, his courage, she wanted to retch. Pressing the heels of her palms over her eyes, she whispered aloud, “And I was the one to initiate the loving!”
Lord, how she dreaded telling the others of her disgrace. But she must. Pushing herself away from her position against the door, she stood with her spine straight and her shoulders back. Because she wouldn’t live with the man a moment longer. Not one moment longer. Wiping the tears from heated cheeks with the back of her hand, she gazed around at the front chamber where she’d cooked so many meals for herself and her son and began to scheme. It wouldn’t take long to have a few things brought down from the keep. Just enough to make the place habitable once again. Walking over to stand in the doorway of one of the bedchambers, she scanned the empty bedframe. First, she would need two freshly filled mattresses brought down. Her and her son’s personal belongings were meager and wouldn’t take long to gather. A few cooking and eating utensils, linens for the beds, kindling and wood for the cookfire, peat for the hearth, and mayhap a bit of food as well, just to get them started. Aye, it shouldn’t be more than an hour, mayhap two, before she and her son were settled once more in this tidy cottage.
* * *
Bao stood in the courtyard watching as Callum, Lara, and their retinue slowly made
their way through the gate of the fortress. Bao absently took the familiar pouch from his belt and held it in his palm for a moment, feeling the weight of the treasure that was hidden in its folds. Callum had given it to him only moments ago. He slowly loosened the string that held it closed and peered inside. It held two smaller pouches, and he knew what they contained: More of his mother’s dowry and trousseau that his father had stolen from her and then, ultimately, given to Callum when they’d journeyed here not long after Branwenn’s birth. He’d been angered, yet powerless at the time to retrieve his mother’s possessions his father had so callously given away.
Callum had apologized for not returning them sooner, but Bao saw no reason for such, as he’d not been back to the Maclean holding for any length of time since Bao’s first arrival this summer past. Besides, Bao had known where the coins were: he’d found them during the time he and Branwenn lived in the wood. He’d almost taken them back then, but had decided against it. They were not his to take, they were his mother’s, and she was dead.
Bao scooped out a handful of the Cathayan coins and allowed them to slide off his palm and back into the pouch. Then he unfurled one of the black scarves with its red woven symbols and imagined it covering his mother’s thick, silky black hair. With a sigh, he tucked the scarf back in it’s pouch and set his mind to current matters.
‘Twas time to find his wife. Believing her most likely to be with the other ladies in the solar, he headed there first, but was quickly informed that she had quit their company close to an hour past with the intention of resting in her bedchamber. He headed there then, glad that they’d have this time to themselves, but again was thwarted in his pursuit of Jesslyn when he found the chamber empty.
Stepping back into the passage, he closed the door behind him and stood for a moment in thoughtful debate as to where else to look for his wayward wife. Mayhap she’s visiting Niall’s mother, he thought. Or mayhap, she decided to inspect Alleck’s fortress once more after the lads’ unwise use of the mangonel this morn past.
A half hour later Bao was out of ideas. He’d looked in every place he could think of to look for Jesslyn and had yet to find her. He was coming back through the village when he glanced up and saw her with a bucket in her hand stepping through the doorway of the cottage. Highly curious at her reasons for being there, as ‘twas not her usual ale-making day, Bao rushed to meet her before she’d had time to shut the door behind her. With his forearm resting against the door, he asked, “What do you here, my love?” He took the bucket from her and placed it on the table by the hearth.
She didn’t answer right away, and her face looked grim, which immediately brought an answering tension in the tendons of his neck and shoulders. Folding her arms across her chest, she said, “I’m preparing the place for habitation. Mine and Alleck’s.”
“What? Why?” Moving around her, he closed the door and leaned against it with his arms crossed as well. “Were your words to the elders all lies, then?” Dread, like an iron fist, gripped his insides. “Are you sickened by what I revealed to you last night—have you realized you can only despise a man such as me?”
“Aye, I am sickened.” Bao’s knees went weak. “And aye, I do despise you!”
All the air went out of his lungs and it was all he could do to remain standing. Every part of him started to tremble, his legs, his arms, his stomach, his cheeks, his lips.
“But I am not sickened in the way that you mean. I’m sickened by the fact that a lad so young was forced to sell himself and go against his nature to perform the works of Eros in order to survive.”
He’d not told her that, and yet, like so much else, she’d somehow figured it out. The vise grip around his lungs released and he was finally able to take in air. It made his head spin. “All right then, why have you left me?”
She turned away from him and, with jerky movements, took one of the folded cloths from the table and dropped it into the bucket.
He wanted to rush over and shake her, force her to give him her answer. Tell me! But he didn’t. He was treading kraken-infested water here. ‘Twas best to let her say what she would in her own way, her own time.
So he watched her in silence. After she wrang the cloth of most of its moisture, she rolled a cake of lye soap in it to lather it up before using the worn piece of material to scrub the table. “Because I’ve had enough of your fickle nature,” she finally said.
Bao dropped his arms and pushed himself away from the door. “My fickle nature?” His heartbeat tripled. “What mean you ‘my fickle nature’?”
“Lara.”
Christ’s Bones! “Whatever she told you, it isn’t true,” he ground out. He walked a step closer to where she stood, bent at the waist and furiously scrubbing the non-existent soil from the tabletop. “Will you tell me what lies the woman gave you so that I may defend myself?” he asked with less heat in an effort to soothe her anger.
Her movements came to an abrupt halt. Rising from her position, she looked him straight in the eye. “Not only did she tell me, very precisely, a certain way you have of making love, but she described your body as well. And in a way that only one who’d had intimate knowledge of both would be able to do.”
His hands balled into fists at his side, his heart started its pounding again, and Bao stood motionless. He forced in a deep breath and released it before he answered. “Jesslyn...” He wanted to tell her the whole sordid tale, starting with his discovery of Lara’s identity and ending with her attempt at revenge for his destroying the deed. “Jesslyn, I…I…” But he was unable to turn his jumbled thoughts into coherent words.
Her eyes moved away from his, down to the cloth, lying in a wet mound on the table. She picked it up and threw it with a plop! into the bucket of water. “She had the gall to ask me if I could take your manhood inside me all at once—or if I had to take you a bit at a time! I was mortified.”
Oh, God. “The woman was a client of mine,” he began carefully, “but I-I only learned it when she arrived here and revealed such to me. She…always wore a mask, you see.” Jesslyn’s eyes lifted to his again, but there was skepticism in their depths. “I should have told you of this sooner,” he rushed to say, “but I feared it would ruin the fragile accord we’d managed to build o’er these past sennights, so I remained silent. I see now, I should have told you of this as soon as I found out who she was.”
“Aye, you should have. How many more former lovers will I be obliged to meet, do you suppose? The number must be legion, I suspect, after so many years spent in such amorous pursuits.” She threw the rag on the table again and started scrubbing. “One probably cannot travel more than a mile in any direction without meeting up with one or more of them.”
He put his hand over hers to halt it’s movement, but she jerked it away. “They were clients, not lovers,” he said. “At least not in the way that you mean, and I was very particular. I kept only a few at a time, Jesslyn, and they are most all securely settled in the king’s court, fear not. The likelihood of you ever meeting another of them is almost naught,” Bao said.
She looked up once more into his eyes and shook her head, then she turned and walked away from him, her arms crossed over her chest once more. Turning back to face him, she continued, “I saw the tower chamber with its wine, its pillows, its candles. A veritable lover’s bower. And she had you again, it seems, in the stables just afterward. Twice she had you before…before you and I—argh!” She swung around, turning her back on him.
“We didn’t couple in the tower chamber, I swear it,” Bao said. “The woman tricked me into believing you’d requested my presence there and then she followed me.” Sighing, he scrubbed his fingers across his brow and squeezed his eyes shut. “She wanted me, that much is true,” he finally said. “But I rebuked her, rejected her advances. Then—then she made an offer that could not be refused.” He walked over to Jesslyn and turned her around to face him. “She held a deed of ownership, Jesslyn. With Branwenn as the property transferred. Signed by
Jamison Maclean and Lara’s stepbrother Giric when Branwenn was only sennights old. But Callum came upon us before—”
Jesslyn whirled around, turning her back on him. “Aye, Lara always has something which will entice my husbands from their vows.”
“What mean you, your husbands?”
“Tell me, is she as adventurous in bed as Graeme once said she was?”
“Graeme broke faith with you?” he asked unbelievingly. Graeme, the standard upon which all others were compared? The ideal of all that was manly and perfect in husbandly conduct? The man Bao had secretly feared he’d never match up to in Jesslyn’s regard? All his hopes evaporated. Just like that. And he could swear the hammering in his head was the sound of the last nail in his crucifix.
“Where is this deed?”
“Burned.”
“Convenient.”
“Callum can vouch for its existence.”
“Mmm. Still, we’ve not yet been wed two moons and in that time you have broken your vows of marriage to me with as many women.”
“Jesslyn…about that time in the wood—”
She whirled around to face him. “Nay, I’ll not hear more lies and excuses. I no longer want to be wed to you.”
“It wasn’t as it s—”—She spun around and hurried toward her bedchamber—“Jesslyn, please!”
In the doorway, she turned. There was naught in her eye, neither anger, nor sadness, only resignation. “Just go.”
Bao’s shoulders slumped in defeat, but he nodded and turned away. With swift strides, he departed the cottage, quietly closing the door.
* * *
Jesslyn wandered into her chamber and lay down on her bed. Twining her fingers together over her belly, she looked at the rafters above as threads of the words she and Bao had exchanged went through her mind. Mayhap she was being stubborn in her unwillingness to forgive Bao his caresses of another for the sake of his sister’s freedom, but no matter how she tried, she simply could not feel comfortable with him again. Not when she also knew that he and Lara had lain together—lord knew how many times—prior. And not after having dealt before with a husband who found that same woman’s caresses far superior to her own.