At the King's Command

by Susan Wiggs

  The stance of restrained violence was meant to frighten her. She squared her shoulders. “So did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Love her very much.”

  With slow, deliberate movements he set the stool aside and placed his hands on his hips. “How can that possibly matter now?”

  He seemed determined not to answer her question, so she let it pass. She brushed her fingers lightly over the smaller brass. “Which of your sons rests here?”

  Stephen grabbed her by the shoulders, his fingers biting into her flesh, and his eyes—his usually pale, cool eyes—burned hot with rage.

  “Witch!” he said, not shouting but almost whispering. “My God, what sort of unholy creature are you?”

  He was truly afraid, she saw, though anger took the greater part. For no reason she could name, she felt perfectly safe with him. Even when he was glaring at her as if he would like to set her aflame.

  “I did not mean to upset you. I had no idea …” She swallowed. How was it that she had infuriated him? It was as if someone had burned him with a brand. “Is it so terrible, asking about your children? I just wondered which son—”

  “I had only one son.” He spoke through gritted teeth. It seemed to take a sheer effort of will for him to pry open his fingers and let go of her.

  Juliana’s thoughts raced. Stephen had fathered two sons. She had seen the limnings—one of Margaret, and two others, each of a small boy.

  Perhaps each was a picture of the same child at different ages. Perhaps one was a relative, a nephew, a cousin.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to cover her confusion. “I just assumed … there were two.”

  “Why?”

  She had to answer carefully. If he truly did believe she was a witch, he could have her drowned or burned at the stake. “I just heard talk around the house.”

  “Talk? What talk?”

  She shrugged elaborately. “I suppose I misheard. I am not a native speaker of English, you know.”

  He glared at her for long moments. Then he made a visible effort to relax. “This is Richard’s effigy,” he said quietly. “Dickon, we called him. He died just two months before his mother—when he was six years old.” A catch snagged his voice. “I loved him as hard as I could. Prayed and gambled the very surety of my soul, but the lad just got weaker and weaker. He died in my arms.”

  Juliana could not help herself. She took his hand. When he did not resist, she carried it to her lips and pressed a kiss to his palm.

  He watched her as if in a state of astonishment. After a few moments, he pulled his hand away. She sensed no resentment in him.

  “I am so sorry,” she whispered. “I cannot imagine what it is like to lose your own son.”

  “It colors every thought I have. Every feeling. Every breath I take. There is no such thing as joy anymore.” His hands were balled into fists, his eyes dark pits of sorrow.

  She wanted to argue with him, to tell him he was wrong. But only a parent could gauge his grief. “Stephen? How did your wife die?”

  “In childbirth.”

  Her senses came alert again. Then there had been more than one child. “The baby was a girl?”

  “The baby is dead.” Of all the statements he had made to her, that was the most chilling. The most final. “And now, my dear baroness,” he said, his voice laced with familiar sarcasm, “you had best run along.” With one hand firm at her back, he escorted her out of the chapel, out into sunlight diffused by evening mist and tinged with the green of summer leaves.

  She turned and found herself very close to him, his chest inches from her. She did not know what to do with her hands, so she placed them in the crooks of his arms. “I know we are not supposed to like each other,” she said. “But I have not always been one who does as she is supposed to do.”

  “What are you saying?” Again, that weary voice.

  “That I am beginning to like you.”

  “Madam, that is a pity indeed.”

  She boldly touched his cheek. “Do not pity me for liking you. Pity yourself for not being able to accept my friendship.”

  They stood like figures in an artist’s frieze, held captive by the golden evening sun. As she gazed up into his face, her senses came to a heightened awareness. She heard the low drone of bees buzzing in the dwarf thistle that glowed purple in its bed of green. She smelled the spicy scent of hawkweed and trefoil, and she felt the warm caress of the gentle breeze on her face. It was as if they stood alone at the center of the world, as if the beauty of the meadow existed for none but the two of them.

  She liked being alone with him, close to him. Though he often glared at her and gnashed his teeth, he was still the man who helped a widow with her planting, who filled a beggar’s belly, who counseled Kit when the young man sought his advice.

  The world seemed to shift and tilt, and she realized it was because he had stepped even closer. Though a forbidding look darkened his face, his hands were gentle as they came to rest at her waist. His thumbs moved subtly upward, circling deliciously close to her breasts yet never quite touching them.

  “Pity,” he said, “has little to do with my feelings for you.”

  His gentle caress sparked a fierce yearning in her. She wanted to be closer to him, closer. Her slim arms went around his neck. She stood on tiptoe and still could not reach him. He met her halfway, bending, covering her mouth with his.

  She was unprepared for her own reaction. Unprepared for the softness of his lips or the intriguing taste of him, the silkiness of his hair, the warm solidity of his back.

  Juliana had seen her family slaughtered, had walked across a continent and spent five years with gypsies. She had the stoutest of hearts and yet Stephen’s kiss startled her and turned her pliant and supple like a willow bending in the breeze.

  She wanted the moment, the sharing, the letting down of defenses to go on forever. There was something exceedingly honest about the way he held her and kissed her. Much more honest than when he spoke with sarcasm or ignored her.

  He lifted his mouth from hers, and she made a sound of protestation, for she did not want him to stop.

  “This is insane,” he whispered, and he looked dazed as if someone had just knocked him off a galloping horse.

  “I do not know this word, insane,” she said.

  His eyes smiled at her, one corner of his mouth turned up, and he had never looked so appealing to her. “Yes, you do, my gypsy.” He brushed a lock of hair clear of her cheek. He bent to nibble at the pulse in her neck. “I assure you, you do.”

  The gentle flicking of his tongue, the grazing of his teeth in the sensitive spot made her forget to breathe. “Then it is not a bad thing, to be insane?”

  Low laughter drifted from him as his mouth traveled downward, savoring the mounds of her breasts that rose above her stiff bodice.

  “In this case, no.” He straightened and took her hand. “Let us go, Juliana. This is a place of death and remembrance, hardly a spot for trysting.” He looked idly at the tree where his horse was tethered and still cropping at the grass. “Your mount is gone.”

  Juliana muttered a gypsy oath. “The beast. She trotted off before I could tie her.”

  “She’ll find her way back, for where else can she find honeyed oats?”

  “And how am I supposed to find my way back?”

  “Two can ride as one, Baroness.” He took her hand and led her to the horse. “Didn’t you know that?”

  Sensing a deeper layer to his meaning, she felt no self-consciousness as she swung up and straddled Capria. Her skirts and petticoats, dyed crimson by Jillie’s father, rucked up and bared her silk-stockinged legs.

  Stephen mounted behind her, pressing himself back against the hindbow. He took the reins in one hand, and the other went around her waist. As they started at a walk toward the manor, Juliana thought she only imagined that his hand was straying, first upward to brush the underside of her breasts, then down to slide along her thigh, nearly dr
iving her mad as his clever fingers moved beneath the fabric of her skirts.

  “What are you doing?” she managed to whisper.

  “Just making certain you don’t lose interest on the way back to the hall. Shall I stop?”

  If she could have summoned the strength she would have laughed at the ridiculousness of the question. Stop? It would be like trying to douse a forest fire with a thimbleful of water.

  “No,” she said on a long sigh. “Do not stop, Stephen.” She leaned her head back against his chest, baring her throat to him, and instantly his mouth moved there, nuzzling and tasting while his hand did the most delicious things to her breasts.

  She felt a subtle coolness, and with idle lethargy realized that he had managed to free her breasts from the caged stiffness of the velvet bodice. His fingers played with them, rolling one rosy peak and then the other between thumb and forefinger.

  A low soft moan escaped her. She felt helpless, vulnerable, trapped from behind in the velvet vise of his strong thighs, his circling arms, his clever, clever hands.

  He quit his exploration and she would have wept, bereft, but he relinquished the reins to her in order to free both of his hands. With amazing delicacy, he lifted her skirts and touched the damp silk of her smallclothes in the most vulnerable spot of all. She felt wanton and free, with her skin bared and his hand never still, fingers flicking out and teasing her, and his mouth moist and warm on her throat.

  Through a haze of wonder she watched the woods open to a shady lane leading to the manor. Some distance ahead, the lane joined the main road to the gatehouse.

  Stephen’s breath rasped harshly as if he was in pain. She wanted to say something, to ease his discomfort, but she was so caught up in the silken magic of his touch that she could not.

  And then suddenly he spoke. “God’s teeth!”

  Juliana gasped, opened her glazed eyes, and saw what he was looking at.

  “Havelock,” he said through gritted teeth.

  As Algernon Basset, the earl of Havelock, raced along the road toward them, Stephen made haste to tuck Juliana back into her bodice, to smooth her skirts down as best he could.

  She swiveled around in the saddle. “What could he want? Surely he won’t guess we’ve been, er, doing—”

  He stared at her and seemed torn between horror and amusement. “A man would have to be blind to mistake that look on your face. If you look this much the well-tumbled wench after mere fondling, I wonder how you’ll appear once I take you to the heights.”

  “Didn’t you just do that?”

  “Not by a mile, Baroness. Not by a bloody mile.”

  Stephen was appalled. How could he have so forgotten himself?

  Juliana let out a quavering sigh and straightened her clothing. And he knew painfully how. She shifted gently, and he all but burst his cod laces.

  With an effort he managed to drag the invisible barrier between them once again. The shield around his emotions had served him well for years.

  Juliana alone, with naught but a soft-eyed look and a few whispered words, had breached it.

  He clenched his teeth to keep from spitting an oath. He dismounted, reached up, and took her by the waist. He tried not to feel the sensual glide of her body against his as she slid to the ground. He tried not to feel regret as he stepped back to wait for Havelock. What kind of fool was he, anyway? This was no game, and Juliana was no plaything.

  She seemed to sense his withdrawal. “Stephen?”

  Damn it! Why did she have to look like a … a fresh new bride tumbling, very recently, from her marriage bed?

  “Yes?” he asked impatiently. “What is it?”

  A frown puckered her brow. “Your moods, my lord. One moment you hold me as if I were the only woman alive, and the next you act the stranger.”

  “Don’t read any more than animal lust into the past few moments,” he made himself say. “You’ve a talent for inspiring it.”

  She caught her breath. He wanted to touch her cheek, her proudly tilted chin, to tell her he did not mean what he had said, but that was simply too dangerous.

  To her credit, she greeted the earl of Havelock with easy grace, waving as he slid his sweating horse to a halt.

  And for once in his life, Algernon Basset was speechless. His mouth was a round O, his golden-brown curls bouncing as he leaned down to peer at Juliana. Had Stephen not been so disturbed by the forbidden intimacy with his wife, he would have laughed at the earl’s gape-mouthed astonishment.

  “Cat got your tongue, Algernon?” he asked archly.

  Juliana offered her hand. “How charming to see you again, my lord.” Her accent was as dark and enticing as spices from Byzantium. “Welcome.”

  “Madam,” Havelock gasped, “the honor is mine, of course.”

  Stephen handed his reins to a groom who had rushed out to the gatehouse. Another lad waited for Algernon to relinquish his, but the earl shook his head. “I can’t stay.” His gaze, all but slavering with hunger, swept over Juliana. “To my eternal regret, I must be on my way. I simply came to deliver a message.”

  Suspicion trickled into Stephen’s mind. “Haven’t you retainers to deliver your messages, Algernon?”

  “Yes, but this is too delectable.” Again his eyes partook hungrily of Juliana. “Even better than I had thought.”

  Stephen waited. Algernon was given to dramatic pauses and knew just when he had taxed the patience of his listeners too long. “My dear lord of Wimberleigh,” he said importantly, “you might want to put your hall in order and slaughter a pig or two. The king is coming to hunt at Lynacre Wood.”

  Stephen’s breath gusted forth as if someone had punched him in the stomach. King … hunt … Lynacre Wood … He prayed he had heard wrong.

  “Are you not honored?” Juliana asked, her eyes bright with excitement. “A royal visit is a great event.”

  Algernon lifted his heels to spur his horse. “I do hope you managed to do something about the gypsy camp,” he said, laughing with his eyes. “And Stephen?”

  “Yes?” he forced out.

  One last time, Algernon’s eyes fed on Juliana. “Lock up your valuables.”

  Eight

  Stephen winced as heralds blew a salute, announcing the arrival of the king. The household retainers, decked in their best livery, waited in a military-style line behind him. He tried to pretend he was not bathed in sweat beneath his murrey doublet and shirt of white lawn. He prayed Juliana would have the sense to obey him and stay hidden.

  King Henry, ponderous as a storm-swollen cloud in his great high-bowed saddle, entered through the main gate. Sunlight blazed around him, catching on his gold-braided doublet and chain of office. Retainers flanked him like lesser stars around the sun. Stephen recognized Sir Anthony Browne and Sir Francis Bryan, the king’s young minions, and a host of others who had managed to snare the royal favor. Behind the king rode the sharp-eyed, pinch-faced Thomas Cromwell in his customary midnight black.

  “A royal visit,” whispered Nance Harbutt. “Why, we ain’t had a royal visit since his lordship were newly married to our dearest Marg—”

  “Nance.” Stephen silenced her, furious that she had reminded him of that day. He had been naught but a gawking green youth, overwhelmed by the arrival of the king, who, in Stephen’s credulous mind, had achieved the proportions of legend. Never was there so great a fool as Stephen de Lacey that day—fifteen and glowing with pride in his new wife, presenting her to Henry, watching her win the king’s heart with a simple blushing smile, an innocent, murmured greeting. Or so he thought.

  Stephen’s life had changed irrevocably that day.

  Now he was older, wiser, no longer gulled by the imposing splendor of the king. Now Stephen knew what to expect, and he had girded himself against the onslaught of royal intrigue.

  He watched in bland dispassion as the king’s attendants helped him dismount in the central courtyard. The task required no fewer than half a dozen strong men, yet Henry comported himself with a certa
in bulky dignity. Though his leg was swollen, he barely limped as he walked toward Stephen.

  His heart thudding, his mind ablaze with hope that his ruse would work, Stephen made his obeisance.

  Henry’s small dark eyes took him apart. God, thought Stephen. He had grown shrewd as well as fat. Pray his lust for the wives of other men had diminished.

  “How fares my lord of Wimberleigh?” Henry asked.

  “High in health and good cheer,” Stephen replied, feigning an eagerness to please his sovereign.

  The king perused the household: Kit and the lads of the stable standing stiffly at attention, the household retainers and Nance Harbutt properly slack-jawed with awe. “And your bride, Wimberleigh. Where is your vagabond bride?”

  Nance recognized her cue, thank God. She gave a wail of misery and lifted her apron to daub at her eyes.

  The king, who missed nothing, thrust up his beard, a hound on the scent. “Answer me, Wimberleigh.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice. “Have you done in this one, too?”

  Stephen nearly snatched at the bait, nearly forfeited his life then and there by attacking the king’s royal person. No. He was needed here. For how much longer, he could not say, but for the time being, he knew he must keep his temper in check.

  “Alas, she has fallen ill, sire.”

  “Ill?” The king raised a skeptical eyebrow. “The wench looked hale when last I saw her. Flea-bitten, perhaps, but healthy as a nanny goat.”

  “The settled life does not agree with her. But sire, do not let her indisposition keep you from my hearth and table. I pray you—”

  Kit Youngblood slapped his palm to his forehead and fell facedown in the yard.

  Nance Harbutt plunged to her knees beside him. “Christ have mercy, the lad’s done for. The sweat is at him!”

  The men-at-arms recoiled, angling their pikestaffs at the invisible enemy.

  William Stumpe, Stephen’s steward, made a hissing sound to shush the weeping woman. Heedless, Nance crushed her face into her apron. “ ’Tis the sweat. I’d know it anywhere. Same as the master’s wife—”