Piers shook his head once, little more than a jerk. Judith Angwedd was already here, somewhere, and Bevan with her. He had arrived in time, thank God. But only just, and his nerves sizzled and popped. He had to fight himself not to glance over his shoulder and look for them. “No. Forgive me, but it cannot wait.”
Again, the man’s eyebrows rose, and he seemed to present an expectant expression on his square face.
Piers clenched his teeth together, and he spoke low so that no other could eavesdrop. “The woman you named as my mother is not. She is my father’s widow, and she has come to Edward so that he will bequeath Gillwick Manor to her son, Bevan. But I tell you, Bevan is not my father’s child. Judith Angwedd Mallory is attempting to steal the lands that are rightfully mine, and is prepared to bear false witness to His Majesty in order to do so. I am the only true heir of Gillwick, and I can prove it.” Piers held up his right hand, his mother’s signet ring on his littlest finger flashing briefly in the dull light of the hall.
He let his hand fall back to his side. “If the king hears Judith Angwedd in his court without my witness, he will be making a grave mistake.”
The man’s eyebrows had slowly descended and then drawn downward as Piers spoke. He seemed to appraise Piers once again before saying, “Wait here.” He turned, rapped three times on the door, and then disappeared between them. Raucous laughter escaped the seam of the doors before they shut once more.
Piers let out a tight breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Even though he knew in his gut that Gillwick was rightfully his, that Judith Angwedd was naught more than a lying, conniving, mad bitch, Piers felt extreme unease with his surroundings and with the task before him. He longed for the humid peace of Gillwick, or the quiet forest he had traveled through and lived in for so many days. He wanted Alys, needed her. God, how he loved her! And with that thought, he realized now that he was not fighting to gain Gillwick for himself any longer, or even to give peace to his long-dead mother. He was doing it for Alys.
Perhaps once she returned to Fallstowe, she would not want the humble life Piers could offer her. But he would offer it any matter. He could not help himself. He needed her and he loved her, and he knew that he would for the rest of his life. If there was any chance that she truly loved him, Piers planned to seize that love with both hands and never let her go. That damned monkey which had nearly killed him could also come, if Alys wished. After all, Piers had invited Ira, so it was only fair that Alys should have her own sort of cross beast at Gillwick.
He felt the faint impression of a smile twitch at his lips at the thought, but the very idea of joviality was killed with the cold words he heard spoken directly behind him.
“Hello, Piers. Stealing clothes now as well as land, I see.”
Piers turned slowly, uncertain at what would happen once he faced the wretched woman who had tried to destroy his life.
She was actually smiling at him, her large, square teeth glistening in the festive gloom of the receiving chamber.
“It’s over,” Piers said, refusing to stoop to ridiculous, barbed banter with the madwoman. “I’ve just spoken to Edward’s man. I will see the king on the morrow.”
“Marvelous!” Judith Angwedd gushed, and clapped her hands together twice, as if in anticipation. “Just as I’d hoped.”
Piers was wary. Although Judith Angwedd had a penchant for the cruelly dramatic, he didn’t think she was being sarcastic.
“I would not be so enthusiastic, were I you,” Piers warned. “I have proof of your treachery, and once the king hears of it you will lose all.”
Judith Angwedd wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “No. I think not, really. I’m rather looking forward to you disavowing your claim to Gillwick before the king.”
“There is naught you could say that would sway me,” Piers growled. “You are a liar and a thief, and you will get exactly what you deserve.”
“Oh, I am certain I will,” she parried. “And I don’t have to utter a single word to convince you to make way for Bevan and me. I’m actually going to give you a gift, and then you may decide on your own. You are completely and utterly in control of how this all plays out. I am more than willing to negotiate with you, which is why I brought you”—her teeth sparkled like ivory blades—“a peace offering of sorts.”
“You mean a bribe,” Piers snorted.
Judith Angwedd conceded with a slight tilting nod.
Piers shook his head. “Whatever it is, you can keep it. Nothing you could give me, promise me, will convince me to let you have my father’s home. My home.”
Her smile was secret and small now. “Nevertheless, it would be foolish of you not to at least consider it. But before I give it to you, I only ask that you realize that Bevan is not with me at the moment. You will be able to guess his company soon enough though. Only keep that in your thoughts before you would do anything foolish. If you try to cheat the negotiations in any way, my offer will become immediately void, and Bevan will have my blessing to do as he pleases. You know how … spirited he can be.”
She held out her arm, her fist clenched palm down.
Piers didn’t want to extend his hand. He looked down at her fist, white with bulging blue veins, cold, like a swirl of milk caught in a block of ice. He looked up into her eyes.
“Take it,” she said softly, teasingly. “It won’t bite you, foolish boy.”
Piers held out his hand, and Judith Angwedd pressed something small and light into his palm. Her smile widened.
“Think well upon it,” she advised. “I shall see you in the morn, when we shall both hear what you will tell Edward. I am simply alive with anticipation!” She swept away from him, and Piers watched her go. She gave him not another glance as she waggled her fingers at this person or another while she walked through the hall. No one returned her greeting.
When she was gone, Piers looked down at the object she’d placed in his hand.
It was a bracelet, its wooden beads carved inexpertly into crude renditions of little pomegranates.
Alys’s bracelet.
All the air left Piers’s body and his face raised slowly, looking for Judith Angwedd to be standing across the room, beaming in triumph. But she was truly gone.
“My lord,” a voice behind him called, but it seemed too far away, and Piers was not accustomed to people addressing him by that noble title.
I only ask that you realize that Bevan is not with me at the moment. You will be able to guess his company soon enough though. Only keep that in your thoughts before you would do anything foolish. You know how … spirited he can be.
“Lord Mallory,” the voice said again, and Piers turned. He knew his lips were slack, his eyes wild. At the man’s wary look, Piers closed his mouth.
“Sorry. Yes?”
“The king will indeed hear your plea on the morrow, along with your stepmother’s,” the keeper of the doors advised with a frown as he glanced down at the wooden beads dangling over Piers’s fist. “But I am to warn you that if you are playing about with something you are not lawfully entitled to, he is prepared to see you punished straightaway. He does not well tolerate having his time wasted.”
Piers nodded faintly. He barely comprehended what the man was saying to him.
Bevan had Alys. Piers recalled the fleshy boy who had gleefully tormented and tortured Piers after he’d lost his mother, when Piers had been too small and frightened to fight back. And now the drunkard, who had once kicked a dog to death when it had dared to sniff at his boots. Bevan, whom Piers suspected had raped more women than he’d ever spoken to, and who not even the most heartless lords in the land would accept as a husband for their daughters. Piers knew nothing weaker than Bevan was safe in his presence.
And that man was now holding a delicate and innocent woman such as Alys in his evil and depraved clutches. Piers’s Alys. His wife.
“I understand,” Piers said and nodded again. He understood too well, perhaps. “My thanks.” Piers began to turn away
, feeling as though he were lost in a thick fog the color of terror.
“My lord,” the man called Piers’s attention once more.
Piers half turned.
“Have you secured shelter for the night?” he asked in a lowered tone. The lion’s eyebrows were drawn together, and had Piers been in possession of his capacities, he might have seen the concern there.
“Ah … no. No, I’m afraid not. I’ve”—he cleared his throat—“I’ve only just arrived in the city.”
The lion-maned man seemed to think for a moment, debating something behind his golden eyes. “My wife bears our first child even now. I do expect it will be some time before I see my court suite or my own bed.” He reached into a slit in his tunic and withdrew a key on a ribbon. He held it out to Piers.
Piers frowned and took it as if in a dream. If he could only think straight for one moment. “Forgive me, but—”
“Go above. Show the guard this key and tell him you have Lord Julian Griffin’s permission to pass the night in his rooms.”
Piers stared at the man for several moments. “Why are you doing this?”
Julian Griffin looked at Piers, and there was no ulterior motive in his eyes, no trickery. Only truth.
“Because I saw your boots,” he answered low. “And the little strand of beads you now hold was not in your possession only a moment ago. I believe you have a great battle before you.”
Piers nodded faintly. “I will one day repay you for your aid.”
“Good day, Lord Mallory,” Julian Griffin said dismissively and directed his eyes over Piers’s shoulder. “Good day to you, my lady. How can I be of service?”
Piers turned to see the frowning woman behind him, obviously impatient to speak with the keeper of the king’s court. Piers sidestepped out of the way, nearly stumbling. The woman swept past to take his place.
“Is there any time to spare today, Lord Julian? I fear my grandmother is—”
Piers dragged his feet back down the length of the receiving hall toward the wide stairs he’d seen when he’d arrived.
Somewhere, somewhere close, Alys was being held by a madman. And it was all Piers’s fault. Sybilla Foxe had not been the only spy tracking them after leaving Ira’s village, and Piers’s innocent beacon to alert Alys’s rescue had brought hell down upon her instead.
He looked to the ornate ceiling above his head, as if by concentrating he could discern Alys’s location amidst the warren of rooms stacked atop him. Was she even being held in the king’s home, though? Or an inn nearby? He did not know where or how to begin to search. Should he tear the stones apart and still fail to locate her, should he raise alarm to the king’s guards—mayhap even the lion-maned Julian Griffin—Judith Angwedd would surely hear of it. She would hear of it, and then Alys’s life would be forfeit.
He had but one recourse.
He would disavow his claim before the king. Gillwick had just slipped out of his fingers, for good this time. He would truly never have anything to offer Alys. Nothing but her life, which was in his hands now. And Piers was determined to move very slowly, act very carefully in the next several hours. There would be death in London, but Piers would breathe his last before he allowed that death to be Alys’s.
He forced his feet to move him from the hall and climb the steps mechanically, the worn soles of his boots slapping marble. He jostled people he passed but he could not care. He did not see them.
Chapter 22
After straining her neck to push the basket containing Layla from the side of her face—with a silent apology to the monkey who screeched indignantly—Alys began concentrating on her breathing. Deeply in, slow and easy out through her nose. Her tongue felt as though it was being forced down her throat, blocking her airway. She could not swallow properly. She knew that if she let herself succumb to panic, she would faint at the very least.
In, out.
She turned her head to the side, to give some sort of escape for the saliva in her mouth. Her jaws ached. In her futile struggle with the gag, she had managed to swallow more air than she had breathed, and so a sharp pain now stabbed at her midsection, so intense that she could feel it in the muscles of her back.
Breathe. In. Out.
She closed her eyes against the seemingly cavernous dark. And when she felt the hot tears streak down her cheeks, she realized that all was not yet lost. She was breathing. She was crying. She was still alive. And that was just enough to calm her to where she could begin to think.
She had initially thought that Judith Angwedd and Bevan had both quit the chamber. But after perhaps a half hour, she could hear disgusting, muffled grunts from beyond the thick wardrobe doors. Bevan. After only a few minutes, the noises stopped on a hoarse exhalation of choking breath. The pain in Alys’s stomach sharpened and swelled. Thank God, Judith Angwedd had said she was taking the key to the wardrobe with her when she’d left.
It wasn’t long afterward when Alys heard the redheaded woman enter the chamber once more. She strained to hear the conversation, but only caught fading and swelling pieces.
“—she sleep—”
Mumbling, and then, “—‘s’here … quested audience. Shh!”
Alys heard the key scraping in the lock again, and she forced her face to relax into some parody of sleep. She felt a release of pressure in the close air around her face, a slight puff of breeze, and then the lock was clicking once more.
“Asleep or dead,” she heard Judith Angwedd say in a fading voice. “Saw him … keep watch … John Hart.”
Bevan’s voice reached her ears, shockingly clear and close. He must have stood at the seam of the doors.
“I say we simply go on and kill her.”
There was a sharp, muffled reply from Judith Angwedd.
Bevan grunted. Then said, “If you’re so fearful of being caught, why not just let the peasant bastard have Gillwick? Hart Manor is twice its size, and I will have it regardless of Edward’s decree.”
Judith Angwedd must have taken offence to her son’s reasoning, for Alys could feel the sharp reverberations of the woman’s approaching footfalls through the wood of the wardrobe.
“Why settle for ten of something when you could have twenty? Why take some, when all is within your grasp?” she demanded in a raspy whisper, and Alys could sense her mad passion for which she spoke. “I came to Warin Mallory as a girl, in good faith.”
Bevan snorted.
“Shut your foolish mouth! John Hart was married, and he used me, just as I used him. I was determined to make a prosperous life at Gillwick, give Warin the children he desired, increase the worth of his farm. He cuckolded me with a commoner! It was simply my misfortune that I got with child by the wrong man.”
“Why, thank you, Mother.”
“But now,” Judith Angwedd continued, in a somewhat placating tone, “John Hart is widowed, with no heirs to leave his fortune to. You have two feasts spread before you now, Bevan—we both do! Once Gillwick and Hart Manor are joined together under us, we will have a veritable empire! Think of the power that will wield!”
Alys was aghast. Lord John Hart’s possessions were more than Gillwick’s, for certain, but it was not of such import as to be considered the basis of an empire. The woman was obviously delusional, and truly mad with greed.
“I fucking hate cows,” Bevan grumbled.
“That’s simply too bad. Now, go and do as I’ve asked. If Piers leaves the chamber, follow him. If he comes within beckoning distance of John Hart or this floor—”
“I know—kill him,” Bevan said wearily.
Alys’s throat threatened to close once more. Piers was here. Not only in London, but in a chamber not far from her, right at this very moment. He was here, and possibly in greater danger than Alys herself.
“What of her?” Bevan pressed, sounding unenthusiastic about his mother’s plans. “She may try to free herself once we are both gone.”
“And then she’d do what? Beat through the doors with her skull? The bonds
would need be cut to be removed, which I don’t plan on doing regardless of the outcome at court. I shall dine with John Hart this night. And shortly after the morrow’s audience, we shall be rid of bastard Piers and his pagan princess bride. Sybilla Foxe shall have her right comeuppance as well, and that thought does please me greatly.”
Alys waited until she was absolutely certain that both mother and son had departed before trying to sit upright. Her spine creaked, and as she pushed with both feet and slid up the side of the wardrobe it felt as if all the bones in her shoulder and back were laid bare to the wood.
Layla’s basket tumbled from her shoulder to her midsection and arrived upside down on her thighs. The exertion had caused Alys to break into a sweat, and she sat for several moments, slowing her breathing once more. Bevan had bound her hopelessly. There was no chance of her working her hands free—she couldn’t so much as feel them at this point. And without her hands, there was even less chance of her freeing her legs, which were bound to her knees so tightly that they could barely bend. But her feet tingled now that her legs were stretched out along the floor of the wardrobe, and that little thing heartened her.
On her lap, Layla shifted within the basket and Alys felt it move. Layla cooed sadly, and Alys wanted to comfort her pet, but the best she could manage was a strangled caw, which nearly choked her. The basket on her legs began to rock, and from within, Layla screeched in agitation. There was a terrible flurry of sound, crackling and splitting of the basket, and Alys hoped desperately that the monkey wouldn’t hurt herself. In a moment, the basket tumbled down toward her feet, and then four little appendages pummeled back up Alys’s body.
Layla was free. Alys could feel the little animal’s huffs of breath on her cheek as Layla inspected the gag in her mouth. The monkey forced dainty fingers between the rope and Alys’s skin and yanked, tugged, jerked back and forth wildly. Alys squeezed her eyes shut at the dizzying shaking but made no sound that Layla might mistake for disapproval. Layla climbed over Alys’s head, worried at the knot at the base of her skull, relieved her of several pieces of hair, bringing sharp tears to Alys’s eyes.
Never Kiss A Stranger Page 24