Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  Aldous studied Hugh as if taking his measure. “You’re William of Wexford’s son?”

  “I am.”

  “Not the one who turned mercenary.”

  “He only has one.”

  Aldous smiled slowly, his gaze traveling from Hugh’s earring to the dagger sheathed on his belt. “An artfully vague answer. Interesting. Your father and my father used to go hawking together quite a bit, I believe.”

  This was news to Phillipa, and apparently to Hugh, who hesitated before saying, “Is that so? I had no idea. Did you join them?”

  “Once or twice. It never held much appeal for me. My sister used to go along—she has an affinity for birds of prey.”

  “Then she must have gotten along well with my sire.”

  “Indeed she did,” Aldous said with a dry little smile. “I must say I’m curious as to how a fellow with...your sort of background ended up united in matrimony with a lady scholar from Paris.”

  “I met her in Oxford, actually,” Hugh said.

  “I left Paris not long after you did, seven years ago,” Phillipa told Aldous, “thinking to pursue my studies in Oxford. ‘Twas the following year, at Christmastide, that I met Hugh. I’d gone to Oxford Castle to pay my respects to Queen Eleanor, who’d retired there to give birth to her son John. She was...well, she was in a melancholic humor at the time. Her physician attributed it to the presence of black bile in her veins.”

  Hugh grimaced convincingly. “More likely ‘twas the presence of her husband’s whore at Woodstock,” he said, referring to Queen Eleanor’s having stumbled upon Rosamund Clifford several weeks earlier, ensconced at the queen’s most beloved residence.

  “Aye, I heard about that,” Aldous muttered. Of course he had; all of England and France had heard about it.

  “I spent a great deal of time at Oxford Castle that Christmas season,” Phillipa said, “trying to liven the queen’s spirits. ‘Twas there that I met Hugh. He’d been summoned by the queen, along with some other trusted knights, to counsel her on a certain matter, and—”

  “My dear.” Hugh reached out and gripped her arm, scowling at her as if she’d spoken recklessly. “Your friend isn’t interested in every tiny detail.” Turning to Aldous, he said, “Suffice it to say I was enamored of the lady Phillipa from the moment we met.”

  “As was I. I was smitten by the thunderbolt of true love,” Phillipa said. From the corner of her eye, she saw Hugh’s mouth quiver. “Although I refused to wed him until he’d forsaken the life of a mercenary.”

  “You’re confidants of the queen’s, then,” said Aldous, sounding slightly awed.

  “Would that I could make such a claim,” Hugh said modestly. “I’ve been in her company only once in recent years, during a visit to Poitiers, and we didn’t speak. I doubt she even remembers me from Oxford, she was so preoccupied then.”

  “Nor I,” said Phillipa. “Not that I don’t think of her—and pray for her—every day. Especially now, with the way her husband has humiliated her and disgraced the throne—”

  “Phillipa...” Hugh scolded under his breath.

  “Please.” Aldous held up a hand. “You needn’t be circumspect on my account. I assure you I’m in complete sympathy with your views.”

  “Oh, I knew it!” Taking a step toward Aldous, Phillipa reached out and grasped both of his hands. “You were always so discerning, so perceptive. You always knew right from wrong and were never afraid to take a stand. How I admired that about you.”

  In truth, she was astounded that Aldous had been so easily hoodwinked into thinking they shared his disloyalty toward the king—subterfuge that Lord Richard felt was critical if Aldous was to let down his guard around them.

  He was snapping at the bait; now to reel him in. Judging from his moonstruck expression as she gazed into his eyes, it wouldn’t be difficult—not that that absolved her from a certain measure of contrition to be playing him along like this. To look a man in the eye and lie to him was bad enough; to toy with his affections as she did so was all but inexcusable. If Phillipa were a more pious sort, she’d find a parish priest and confess this duplicity, regardless that it was for the good of the realm; perhaps she would, anyway.

  “I do wish we didn’t have to go back to Oxford tomorrow, especially now that I know you’re here.” She caressed Aldous’s palms with her fingers, her voice dropping to a slightly huskier register. “I’ve missed you so much over the years. I have...” She lowered her voice, as if wary of Hugh’s overhearing. “Certain regrets. So often I’ve wished I could see you again and perhaps—” she dropped her gaze, hoping she wasn’t overdoing it “—make up, in some small way, for having been so...unappreciative of you.”

  “Yes,” he said hoarsely. Clearing his throat, he said, “I mean, yes, I...I’d love to see more of you.” His gaze lowered to her breasts and then shot back up. “That is...I meant...”

  “I think I know what you meant,” she murmured silkily, “and I’d like that, too. Or...I would have liked it, if only—”

  “Darling, we really should be getting along,” Hugh interrupted, coming up behind her and laying a hand on her shoulder; she dropped Aldous’s hands with guilty speed. “We need to find an inn and get our horses and luggage brought there before nightfall. And you need to unwind if you’re going to get a good night’s sleep before our journey tomorrow.”

  “Do you...do you have to go back to Oxford?” Aldous asked.

  She nodded. “I don’t think I could bear a public inn for more than one night.”

  “You shouldn’t have to stay in such a place for even one night.”

  “We tried the local monasteries. There were no suitable accommodations for us, although they did let us leave our mounts and belongings at Holy Trinity. If only we knew someone in the city—”

  “You know me. Not that I live in the city proper. I live over in Southwark, but my house is quite large, and you’re more than welcome to stay there.”

  “Oh, Aldous,” she said, “We couldn’t possibly impose—”

  “‘Twould be no imposition,” he said earnestly. “You could stay as long as you like—weeks, months...”

  “That’s awfully generous of you, Aldous,” said Hugh. “What think you, Phillipa? We can have our holiday after all.”

  “Say yes,” Aldous implored. “I’d love to have you.”

  “Do you hear that, darling?” Hugh closed his big hands over Phillipa’s shoulders and massaged them lightly. “He’d love to have you.”

  “Both of you,” Aldous quickly amended. “And I’ll give you the largest guest chamber. It’s got a feather bed and its own fireplace.”

  “Sounds mighty cozy, doesn’t it?” Hugh murmured into Phillipa’s ear.

  Too cozy, Phillipa thought, wondering what, exactly, she’d gotten herself into.

  Chapter 8

  Southwark

  Hugh heard the muffled laughter as soon as he walked through the front door of Aldous’s house—low, intimate laughter. Hers...and his.

  He drew in a deep, unsteady breath, let it out slowly.

  A little marble font of holy water stood off to the side of the small entrance hall, one of that bastard’s many sanctimonious affectations. Hugh normally walked right past it, but this evening he felt compelled to dip in his fingers and cross himself, thinking, Help me to bear this. Help me not to care.

  The laughter was emanating from the second-floor salle that served as a combination sitting and dining room in Aldous’s massive, ostentatious stone house. Hugh climbed the stairs slowly, his gaze trained on the leather-curtained doorway to the salle, his tread silent despite the wooden-soled riding boots he’d worn for his trip to West Minster this afternoon.

  It had been his first progress report to Lord Richard since he and Phillipa had moved into Aldous’s house a week ago...

  “Any luck getting him to talk about a plot against the king?” the justiciar had asked.

  “Nay, although every time we hint at the subject, I sense he’s
hiding something.”

  “Aye, well, brilliant though your intuition is, King Henry will need more than that before he can move against the queen.”

  “We have been able to do some snooping about during the day, while Aldous is at St. Paul’s. We found a recent letter from his sister, the lady Clare, about some important personage whose arrival they’re awaiting—a foreigner, I gather. Evidently Aldous is expected to escort this fellow to Halthorpe Castle as soon as he gets to London. I have a copy,” he said, handing the document to Lord Richard. It was Phillipa who’d penned the duplicate, taking the task on herself without consulting Hugh. She assumed he was illiterate, of course.

  “Good work,” Lord Richard praised. “As for the lady Phillipa, she’s the one I’m expecting to extract the truth from Aldous. Has she added his skullcap to her collection yet?”

  Hugh had gritted his teeth until they throbbed. “Nay, but she’s working on it...”

  Standing on the second-floor landing, Hugh edged aside the leather curtain a bit and saw them, standing very close together on the narrow balcony overlooking the Thames at the far end of the lamplit salle. Phillipa, dressed in a gown of ivory damask that bared her shoulders and the soft upper swells of her breasts, her inky hair in a pearl-wrapped coil at the nape of her neck, looked ethereally lovely against the dusky sky.

  This was the first time Hugh had seen Aldous in anything other than black clerical garb. He’d shed his long robe and skullcap this evening—because he knew he’d be alone with Phillipa?—and wore instead a snowy, crisply-pleated shirt over black chausses. When he turned his head, Hugh could see the small tonsure neatly shaved into the deacon’s thick, dark hair. He towered over Phillipa, being nearly as tall as Hugh. Despite his vocation, he looked to be fit, and judging from the way most women blushed and stammered in his presence—from highborn ladies to his many maidservants—Hugh knew they found him handsome.

  Not that Phillipa reacted that way to him. Even at her most flirtatious, she maintained a certain cool dignity that Hugh—and, apparently, Aldous—found oddly fetching. But then, Phillipa was the last woman Hugh would expect to lose her composure over a man. Hugh suspected, for example, that she was as drawn to him, on a purely sexual level, as he was to her; it was evident in the way she’d responded to his kiss in the orchard before reining him in, and there were other things, little looks, gestures, comments...

  But these were subtle things, hints and implications. It was clear that she meant to appear unmoved by him, and for the most part, she succeeded. Despite his displeasure at being deemed unworthy of her, part of him admired her for not surrendering to him as easily as did most women he set his sights on.

  “Would you care for another?” Aldous asked.

  “Mm...please.”

  The deacon had a silver bowl in his hand, Hugh saw, and now he reached into it, producing a dainty strawberry on a long stem, which he held toward Phillipa’s mouth. She closed her lips over the ripe fruit and bit it off the stem, never losing eye contact with Aldous.

  Hugh let out a pent-up breath, wondering why it troubled him so much to watch her bewitch Aldous Ewing this way. That Hugh hungered himself for the favors that she would eventually yield to Aldous should be of no import. Often in the past, Hugh had shared women with other men, even women he’d taken quite a fancy to, like that voluptuous silver-blond laundress who’d followed them about during the Finnish campaign. If it hadn’t bothered him for Ingebord to tup half the fellows in his regiment, why should it bother him for Phillipa to be planning on tupping Aldous? Hugh hadn’t even bedded her, nor was he likely to, given her “discriminating” tastes. He had no claim on her, no right to feel incensed at the prospect of her lying with Aldous.

  And yet he did.

  “When do you expect your husband to return from the horse fair?” Aldous asked.

  Phillipa raised her shoulders is a gracefully indifferent shrug and reached into the bowl Aldous held. “Hugh comes and goes as he pleases. He’s a hard man to keep track of—and God forbid I should try to.”

  She fed the berry to Aldous, who covered her hand with his as he plucked it off the stem.

  “Can I surmise that the ‘thunderbolt of love’ with which you were once smitten has faded over time?” he asked.

  “‘Tisn’t easy to maintain that sort of passion over the course of a marriage. And, too, Hugh is...a hard man to love. He’s something of a loner at heart. Fiercely independent, loathes having to answer to anybody.”

  All of which, Hugh reflected, was entirely accurate. They’d gotten into the habit, in their dealings with Aldous, of feeding him verifiable facts whenever possible, not only because it was easier to tell the truth than to lie, but as a safety precaution in case he took it into his head to check up on them.

  “I think,” Phillipa continued, “that’s why Hugh turned mercenary—better to fight for a series of foreign princes as a paid soldier, free to leave at any time, than answer to one man for the rest of his life. And I think perhaps that’s why he forswears the sort of blind, unthinking allegiance to King Henry that afflicts so many of his subjects. Hugh offers his fealty to those he finds deserving of it—like Queen Eleanor and her sons.”

  You shrewd little thing, Hugh thought, admiring how neatly she’d twisted the conversation around to politics. But his hopes that Aldous would rise to the bait were dashed when the deacon asked, “And what of Hugh’s feelings for you? Have they diminished as well?”

  Phillipa hid her disappointment well, plucking another berry out of the bowl and twirling it by its stem. “You’re assuming he ever had real feelings for me.”

  “Are you saying he never loved you?” Aldous asked incredulously. “I can’t imagine knowing a woman like you, being with her, and not falling helplessly in love. He must have a stone for a heart. He’s incapable of love.”

  Phillipa shook her head, looking, if Hugh was not mistaken, genuinely sad. “Tisn’t that he can’t love. He won’t love. I think he’s afraid that if he lets a woman into his heart, even...even me, he’ll be in her power, subject to her expectations. He’s afraid he’ll lose that precious independence of his.”

  It was uncanny, Hugh thought, how well she’d pegged him, even if it vexed him to hear her dissect his character for the benefit of this self-important, hypocritical whoreson. That she was only doing it to make Aldous think their marriage had lost its spark—which would presumably pave the way for him to seduce her—didn’t do much to take the sting out of it.

  “Why did he marry you, then?” Aldous asked.

  “He wanted to possess me.” Phillipa ate the berry and dropped the stem into the bowl, then lifted one of two blue glass goblets from the balcony’s stone railing and took a sip. “Once he did, he lost interest.”

  Hugh was impressed—and somewhat abashed—at how well she seemed to have puzzled him out, for of course, such had been his pattern since he’d first started wenching at fifteen. He became fixated on a woman and had to have her, at all cost—but from the moment she lay down beneath him, the spell was broken. Not that he wouldn’t bed her again, especially if she were exceptionally desirable, like Ingebord, but he would never again feel that driving compulsion to possess her...and only her.

  For, when he was in the grip of such a sexual obsession, no substitute would satisfy him; surrogate couplings with whores and the like were always vaguely pathetic, and no more gratifying than self-abuse. He’d learned over the years to not even bother seeking out other women until the object of his passion had yielded to him.

  It was for this reason that he hadn’t relieved his lust through a visit to one of Southwark’s many stews this past week, although he’d considered it. Night after night he lay next to Phillipa on the big feather bed they shared, feeling her heat, breathing in her warm, womanly scent, watching the rise and fall of her breasts beneath those damnably modest night shifts she wore.

  Lying there in the dark, painfully stiff beneath his drawers, he would soak the sheets with sweat as he tried no
t to think of Phillipa sitting up in bed and pulling that shift over her head...Phillipa warm and soft and naked in his arms, Phillipa moaning as he drove into her, her body pumping all the aching hunger from his and leaving him sated, at last, so that he no longer dreamed of her every night and thought about her every day, so that he no longer cared and was no longer in her thrall.

  Most nights it got to be too much. If he hadn’t succumbed to sleep by the time the bells of nearby St. Mary Overie rang matins, he arose from bed—silently, so as not to wake Phillipa—got dressed, saddled up Odin and rode as hard as he could along one of the thoroughfares leading south. By the time he returned, brushed down his weary mount and slipped back into bed, he was generally exhausted enough to sleep.

  If he could have Phillipa, just once—if she would deign to give him that much—then he would be free of this maddening lust that held him in its grip. If not for the low regard in which she held him, she might already have submitted to him—but there was naught he could do about that. He was who he was, a soldier at heart, a creature of the body. Phillipa de Paris, on the other hand, was a creature of the mind inclined to seek out her own kind.

  Like Aldous Ewing, who even now was trailing the back of his hand down Phillipa’s face and gazing deeply into her eyes. “If I were your husband,” he said quietly, “I’d not tire of you, not ever. You would be all I ever needed, all I ever wanted.”

  If Phillipa shared Hugh’s doubt on that matter, she didn’t show it. Indeed, she met his gaze and held it raptly, as if she were just as caught up in the moment as he. In fact, last night she had told Hugh that this was, for her, the hardest part of their mission—leading Aldous to believe she was losing her heart to him.

  “You would have been a good husband,” she said. “I know that now. Forgive me for having rebuffed you as I did.”