Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  If he’d thought about it, he would have guessed she only owned two tunics.

  Hugh slowed down when he spied a figure loitering on the corner of Kibald and Grope Lane, picking up his pace when he determined that it was just a woman, and a smallish one at that.

  When she saw him, she called out, “Evenin’, sir,” in a voice so high and reedy it might have belonged to a child. In fact, as Hugh got closer, it became increasingly apparent that she was little more than that, despite her face paint and scarlet kirtle. With her black-dyed braids, big eyes and delicate build, she looked unnervingly like a younger, tartier version of the lady Phillipa.

  “Are you lonely, then?” she asked with a coy smile.

  Why, Hugh wondered, did they always want to know if you were lonely? When he was lonely, he sought out his mates for a bit of rowdy companionship. It was at times like this, when he’d gone just a bit too long without a woman, that he went on the prowl for an obliging wench, and he didn’t mind paying if that’s what it took—unless she’d just crawled out from under some other fellow. Hugh liked to be a whore’s first customer of the evening; that way, he didn’t have to wonder what poxy bastard had just shared the same accommodations.

  “Are you with child?” he asked, noticing a bulge beneath her kirtle, a substantial one, that its clever folds couldn’t completely disguise.

  “It won’t get in the way,” she promised, patting her round stomach. “You can have me on me hands and knees, and you’ll never even know it was there. I’ll charge you only a penny if it bothers you. Usually I get twice that, but it’s been a slow night—you’re my first bloke.”

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  She hesitated, then gave him that coquettish smile again. “How old do you want me to be?”

  He regarded her balefully.

  The girl rolled her eyes dramatically. “Fourteen.” There came that smile again, evidently the only one in her repertoire.

  Hugh raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Almost. Come on, then, sir. There’s a place down the street where we can go. I’ll make you so happy—and you’ll only be out a penny.”

  Ah, happiness. A presumed cure for loneliness.

  Hugh reached into his purse.

  “You’re wastin’ your time, Mae,” said another, older woman as she sauntered out of the darkness; it was the red-haired wench from the alley. “This one’s already had it off tonight, courtesy of her ladyship.” She held her hand up, little finger raised, as if waiting for a courtly chevalier to escort her on a stroll around the castle gardens.

  Did she think he’d bedded the lady Phillipa? Incredulous laughter burst from Hugh as he scooped silver pennies out of the little kidskin sack.

  “You’re wrong, Gildy.” Mae pointed to Hugh’s outstretched hand with an air of triumph. “He’s fixin’ to...” She trailed off, gaping at the coins in Hugh’s hand.

  “Here.” Taking the girl’s hand, Hugh turned it palm up, filled it with the pennies—two shilling’s worth, perhaps—and closed her fingers around them. “There’s a convent to the south of here—St. Ermengild’s. I’ve heard the abbess will take in women in need for a modest donation. Go there before your baby is due.” Eyeing her swollen belly, he added, “I wouldn’t waste any time if I were you.”

  Mae stared unblinkingly at the coins in her hand. “Sir...I...” She shook her head in disbelief.

  “Quite the gallant gentleman, ain’t he?” Gildy said. “See, Mae? I told you he wouldn’t be wantin’ no tumble from the likes of you. Not when he’s got her ladyship liftin’ her skirts for him.”

  “Where on earth did you get that idea?” he asked, cinching his purse closed.

  “Ooh, you are the gallant one, aren’t you?” Gildy laughed harshly. “She ain’t got no reputation to protect, that one, so don’t be wastin’ your breath. Everyone in Oxford knows about the lady Phillipa.”

  “Knows what?” Hugh asked.

  “She’s one of them free-thinkers, one of them women what thinks they have as much of a right to bed sport as any man. They say she don’t even believe in marriage.”

  What had she said? Radical ideas don’t frighten me, Sir Hugh. They invigorate me!

  With a snort, the whore added, “That one spreads her legs as easily as I do, I’ll wager, only she don’t take no silver for it. And they say she’s the clever one!” The wench howled with laughter.

  “‘Tis the truth, sir,” said the young Mae as she filled her little purse with the coins. “She takes lovers as freely as any man—them fellows in the black robes, mostly. Brings ‘em right into her house, just as bold as you please. I seen it meself.”

  “And the men she shares her bed with,” Gildy said, “they don’t keep it no secret. They even brag about it while they’re diddlin’ me!”

  “Indeed.” Hugh rasped a hand over his jaw, not quite sure what to make of this remarkable claim. Phillipa did hold progressive views, and she greatly prized her freedom and independence. And she’d be attractive to men, certainly. She was pretty enough—but not in the way he normally associated with loose women.

  Was it possible that there were brazen appetites hidden beneath Phillipa de Paris’s innocently studious facade? Hugh’s gut told him it wasn’t...but, although his gut had served him admirably for the most part, it had also been known to lead him far afield from time to time.

  Could he have been that grossly mistaken about the woman’s character? It was dismaying, on the one hand, to think so—but it was also, he had to admit, somewhat intriguing.

  Actually, very intriguing.

  “Sorry if you didn’t know,” offered Mae.

  Hugh smiled negligently. “‘Tis of no import. You’d best be heading home now. In the morning you can pay a carter traveling south to give you a ride to St. Ermengild’s.”

  “I’ll do that, sir,” she promised, rising on tip-toe to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you,” she called over her shoulder as she walked away. “I won’t never forget this.”

  Gildy surveyed Hugh up and down as if he were something hanging by a hook in the window of a butcher shop. “Her ladyship’s a fool if she goes back to those soft-bellied scholars after havin’ a taste of you. But if you ask me, any wench what gives it away for free is a fool.” With a careless shrug, she turned and sauntered back into the night.

  Chapter 4

  The manor of Eastingham, two days later

  “Hugh,” Graeham shouted, “stop kicking your sister!”

  Shielding her eyes against a feverish sunset, Phillipa scanned the open meadow where Graeham Fox was overseeing a game of sport among his son and the sons of his villeins—a nightly summer tradition at Eastingham, judging from the way the twenty or so boys had converged on the meadow after supper, equipped with their flat, oddly carved sticks and leather-covered balls. An audience of high-spirited girls, including the eldest of Joanna and Graeham’s three children, six-year-old Cateryn, sat like a row of chittering sparrows on the low stone fence that bordered the meadow. Phillipa and a heavily pregnant Joanna also sat on the fence, but some distance away from the girls so as to be able to hold a conversation in relative peace. In the grass at Joanna’s feet lay an old black and white tom cat and a three-legged spaniel that seemed to follow her wherever she went.

  “I said stop it!” Graeham admonished five-year-old Hugh of Eastingham as he strode across the meadow.

  “I didn’t kick her hard,” claimed the boy as he held his stick out of reach of his three-year-old sister, Nell, who had toddled onto the playing field in the middle of the game.

  “Let me see!” pleaded the little girl in the voluminous white tunic as she reached for the stick with plump, straining arms. “Let me see!”

  “Here we go again,” Joanna chuckled. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she called out, “I’m sorry, Graeham. You know how she is—she just won’t stay put.”

  From across the meadow, Graeham speared his wife with an exaggerated scowl. She answered him with a look of m
ock terror. During supper, Graeham had described Joanna as being one of those women whose beauty is only enhanced by pregnancy. Indeed, with her ruddy cheeks and sparkling eyes, she glowed as if lit from within.

  “She won’t leave me be!” Hugh backed up from Nell, glaring at her as he held the stick overhead.

  “Let me see!” Nell wailed plaintively.

  “That’s no reason for you to kick her,” scolded Graeham as he scooped up his daughter, who nearly pitched herself out of his arms in her zeal to grab the stick.

  “Let me see!”

  “‘Tis the same every night,” Hugh griped. “She barges onto the field like a wild pig, squealing and ruining every—”

  “As did you when you were her age,” Graeham said as he carried a frantically writhing Nell toward her mother. There could be no doubt that these two were father and daughter, with their luminous blue eyes and reddish-brown hair that gleamed like fire in the setting sun. Cateryn had her mother’s bronze mane, while young Hugh, with his hair like ripened wheat, took after the uncle for whom he’d been named.

  Graeham handed little Nell over to her mother, who set aside her embroidery hoop to take the child onto her substantial lap. Issuing a stern command to “Stay with your mum this time,” Graeham kissed his daughter on the nose and his wife on the mouth, blowing another kiss to Cateryn as he loped back onto the field. “All right, boys, let’s finish this up while there’s still light to see by.”

  “Let me see! I want to see!” Nell twisted and bucked on Joanna’s lap, struggling to get down.

  “Nell, be still,” Joanna said over the shouts of the boys in the meadow and the laughter of the girls. “I’ve got a baby in my tummy, remember? You’ll upset him if you keep on that way.”

  Phillipa found herself holding out her arms. “Give her to me.”

  “Are you sure? She’s quite a handful.”

  “Oh, I think I can manage.” How great a challenge could it be to hold a child on one’s lap?

  It was like holding a sack filled with forty pounds of thrashing snakes. The child was much stronger than Phillipa had anticipated, and very determined to break free and run back into the meadow—which she did almost instantly.

  “You’ve got to hold her a bit more firmly than that,” Joanna called out as Phillipa sprinted after the child.

  “I was afraid of hurting her.” Phillipa made an unsuccessful grab for the child, who writhed out of her clutches and raced off, shrieking excitedly.

  Joanna laughed. “You can’t hurt her just by holding her. Have you never held a child?”

  “Nay.” Phillipa wrapped her arms around the wriggling little girl and half-dragged, half-carried her back to the stone fence.

  “Never?” Joanna laughed incredulously.

  For some idiotic reason, Phillipa felt her face grow warm as she settled back down on the fence, her arms locked stiffly around the squirming Nell. “I...I’ve never really been around any children...” Even when she was young herself, the only other child she had any contact with was her sister Ada.

  “I’m sorry.” Joanna rested a hand on her arm. “It’s just that your life is so much different than mine, I hardly know what to make of it.”

  “Few people do.” Phillipa adopted a studiously indifferent smile as Nell kicked and whined in her arms. “It matters not. My life suits me, and that’s the important thing.” She’d said the same thing to Hugh two nights ago in Oxford...my life suits me well enough. Never before had she been made to feel so defensive about her solitary existence. That was because, until now, she’d been surrounded by other academics, who understood how difficult it was to maintain both a life of the mind and a family life. In fact, those who’d taken minor orders in the church would lose much of their status, including their teaching privileges, if they married—and marriage was now forbidden altogether for deacons and priests.

  “Of course your life suits you.” Joanna resumed her embroidery, a complicated design on blue silk involving peacocks and interwoven vines. “I would never suggest otherwise.”

  Your brother is not so tactful, Phillipa thought, remembering their conversations about Oxford and academia during their two-day journey here, and his conviction that she’d wrapped herself up in “a safe, snug little cocoon of book-learning,” where she could neither see nor hear no feel the world around her.

  As if Joanna had sensed that Phillipa was thinking about Hugh, she said, “I wish my brother hadn’t disappeared like that after supper. Nell settles down with her Uncle Hugh. He’s the only one who can control her.”

  The little girl stilled at the mention of her uncle. “Where Unca Hugh?” she asked, looking around. She’d latched onto him the moment he and Phillipa had arrived at Eastingham that afternoon, even going so far as to sit on his lap all during supper, which he’d tolerated with surprising equanimity, feeding her bits of meat from his own trencher as if she were a lady he was wooing. Hugh was obviously a frequent visitor to his sister’s home, and Nell’s favorite human being in the world.

  Glancing up from her needlework, Joanna asked Phillipa, “Did he tell you where he was going when he took off after supper?”

  “He said he needed to wash off the dust of the journey.”

  “Ah, yes. There’s a stream in the south woods. He likes to bathe there.”

  “Want Unca Hugh!” Nell mewed, kicking her chubby legs.

  “Uncle Hugh is meeting with an important man tomorrow,” Joanna told her daughter. “He wants to be nice and clean.”

  According to Hugh, Joanna and Graeham were the only two people in England—aside from King Henry and his justiciar—who knew about his clandestine work for the crown. As far as his casual acquaintances were concerned, he was just a rather amiable nobleman with a bit too much time and money on his hands—another firstborn son frittering away the years until he became lord of the manor. Few people knew he’d spent fifteen years as a paid soldier; if they noticed his missing thumb, they were, like Phillipa, too polite to ask about it. It was also not generally known that Hugh had been estranged from his father for his entire adult life, as had his sister; who knew whether he would even be appointed lord of Wexford when Lord William passed from the world.

  “You can bathe, too, if you’d like,” Joanna told Phillipa, “and you needn’t resort to the stream. We’ve got a perfectly good tub, and I’ll be happy to have it brought up to your chamber and filled with hot water if you’d like a nice bath before bed.”

  “That would be lovely. You’ve been most hospitable.”

  “Your room is to your liking, I hope. I can move you to another if—”

  “Nay, it’s fine—perfect.” Phillipa held on tight to Nell, who’d begun fidgeting distractedly, although she was no longer laboring to get down.

  “It’s rather small, I know. When Graeham built the new wing, he was trying to fit as many private chambers in it as possible, but some of them are no larger than garderobes.”

  “Perhaps, but those big windows make up for it.” Phillipa’s gaze sought out the stone manor house beyond the meadow, a massive edifice comprised of an older, L-shaped section housing the original hall, solar and chapel, and the newly-constructed wing with its many individual chambers.

  “The first thing Graeham did when we married and settled in here,” Joanna said, “was to start building that new section. We’d agreed we were going to fill our house with children, but he didn’t want them to have to bunk down with the servants in the great hall. You see, he’d spent his own childhood sleeping in the dorter of Holy Trinity with a hundred other boys, and then it was the barracks at your father’s castle in Beauvais, so privacy has always been—”

  “Mummy,” Nell said, wriggling agitatedly on Phillipa’s lap, “I need to pee. Now.”

  Now? Phillipa thought. This very instant?

  “Lady Nellwyn,” Joanna intoned without missing a stitch, “what have I told you about not waiting until the last minute?”

  Bobbing up and down on Phillipa’s lap, her
expression pained, the child said, “I need the privy, Mummy.”

  “She...she needs the privy,” Phillipa repeated inanely, thinking the gray gown she had on was the cleanest of her two tunics, the blue one being mud-stained from that rainstorm the night before she left Oxford, and that if this child were to actually—Dear God—to actually urinate on her, she would have nothing decent to wear to her audience with Lord Richard tomorrow morning.

  “Can you hold it in for a bit?” Joanna asked the child.

  “Perhaps,” Phillipa said, lifting Nell beneath the arms in order to set her on the ground, “I should get her off my—”

  “Nay, don’t let her go, whatever you do. She’ll run off and we’ll never catch her.”

  “Oh.” Phillipa set the child back down on her lap, reflecting that the business of looking after one three-year-old was a good deal more complicated than she would have anticipated.

  With a sigh, Joanna called out, “Cat, I need you!”

  Her older daughter, sitting much farther down the fence with her friends, yelled, “What is it, Mum?”

  “Don’t ask me what it is. Just come here!”

  And do hurry, Phillipa silently begged as Cateryn came toward them with grudgingly slow footsteps.

  “I want you to take Nell into the house to use the garderobe,” Joanna instructed her older daughter. “And get her ready for bed while you’re at it.”

  “But Mum,” Cateryn lamented, “the game’s not over.”

  “‘Twill be over very soon, and you know your brother’s team is going to win.”

  Oh, for pity’s sake! Phillipa thought, expecting at any moment to feel a dreaded dampness through her tunic. “I’ll take her.”

  “Nay, thank you anyway,” said Joanna, “but Cateryn must learn to do as she’s told. Now, Cat.”

  Pulling a face, the girl reached for Nell and hauled her off a grateful Phillipa’s lap. “Come on, you pesky thing. Let’s go.” She planted a kiss on her sister’s head and led her by her hand toward the house.