“Ah. Well...”
“It’s been over a week since you came to Halthorpe,” she said, moving toward him.
He backed up against the wall—against the wall, for pity’s sake, which was precisely what he had chided Phillipa about after their initial encounter that night in Oxford.
“Has it really been that long?” he asked, thinking she looked remarkably like a two-day-old corpse this close up. “I’ve been having such a—”
“Why haven’t you fucked me yet?”
Ah, the splendor of courtly love. “There hasn’t really been a convenient—”
“I shove my tits in your face at every possible opportunity. You always seem to have an excuse. Don’t you find me attractive?”
This was a treacherous arena. Hugh couldn’t afford to snub her, lest she cast him out of Halthorpe Castle, along with Phillipa. The only reason Clare had defied Aldous and kept him around this long was her assumption that he would eventually break down and tup her. Now he knew how Phillipa felt, having to string Aldous along when the thought of bedding him filled her with revulsion.
“I find you immensely attractive,” he claimed, straining to make eye contact while not wincing at the dead-white skin, the harsh smears of rouge. Bloody hell, it’s a wig, he thought when it became too unnerving to stare at her face and he started staring at her hair instead. God knows what’s under it.
“Then, why,” she demanded, each word snapping off like a dead twig, “won’t, you, take, me, to, bed?”
“I...”
“It doesn’t even have to be a bed.” She smiled that whore’s smile of her. “You could have me against the wall.”
“Ah. Enchanting though that prospect—”
“Or bend me over right here.” She took a step forward, pressing her bosom to his chest as Salome squawked and fussed; her right hand began gathering up his tunic. “I rather like the idea of you mounting me from behind. You could take me hard and fast, just like a real stallion.”
“Won’t that disturb Salome?”
“She’s used to it.”
He seized her hand as it began crawling up his thigh. “Clare...”
“It’s been twenty years since I’ve had it from a real man. The last time was your father, the night of my wedding. He came into my chamber as I was awaiting the boy I’d married, and locked the door and—”
“I have the pox,” Hugh blurted out, recalling that night with Phillipa in Aldous’s stable. I’ll tell him you have the pox and I don’t want to catch it. At the time, he’d been outraged, but now... “The thing is, I wouldn’t want you to catch it.”
“Don’t worry.” She smiled conspiratorially. “I have it, too.”
When, he wondered, had she been planning on telling him? “I’ll tell you the truth, then,” he said with feigned sobriety. “I’m...” Mother of God... “I’m incapable of performing.”
She stared at him with those flat black eyes of hers. “Nay...”
“It’s true, it’s...it’s because of the pox.” Yes! Of course! “The pox has made me—”
“Marvelous.”
“What?”
“I do so love a challenge.”
That was Hugh’s cross to bear of late, women who loved challenges. “But you don’t understand. I can’t—”
“Of course you can. All you need is little inspiration—something I feel certain I can provide.”
“But—”
She pressed a finger to his lips, murmuring, “My chamber. Tonight. Don’t knock. Don’t speak. Just join me in my bed and let us surrender ourselves to each other.”
I know! Phillipa had said. I’ll tell him you prefer men... Hugh opened his mouth, but the words just would not come out.
“Tonight,” Clare whispered.
Hugh let out a long, ragged sigh. “Tonight.”
Chapter 18
“He says he can’t perform in bed,” Clare told her brother. Tonight it was she who stood in the shadows at the south end of the great hall, along with Aldous, watching Hugh and that wife of his dance an intricate and ritualistic galliard along with the rest of her guests, while Turstin sang and plucked at the mandore lying across his lap.
“Verily?” Aldous looked like a little boy at Christmastide. “Does that mean he can’t get it up at all, or just that he can’t—”
“How would I know?” She plucked a shred of raw hen flesh out of the bowl she’d bullied Aldous into holding and dangled it in front of the unhooded Salome, who clung to her gloved left fist. The bird snatched the meat out of her hand and devoured it. “He promised to come to my chamber last night and then never showed up. That was after I’d found him snooping in the cellar. He claimed he was just curious, and I believed him. I’d wanted to believe him. But now I’m not so—”
“If he can’t get it up at all,” Aldous mused, “then God knows how long it’s been since she’s had any. She’s probably seething with suppressed desires. She’ll be a real vixen in bed if I can just—”
“I know it’s a struggle, Aldous,” Clare said wearily,” but do try and concentrate on something other than your cock for one damned minute, will you?”
“Perhaps I’d be able to,” he snapped, “if you’d send Hugh of Wexford back where he came from so I could finally take a poke at his bloody wife!”
“‘Twas my understanding that Marguerite is seeing to your needs in the meantime.”
Aldous grimaced. “‘Tisn’t the same. Half the time she doesn’t even let me...” Reddening, he looked away.
“God, you are pathetic.” She fed another tidbit to Salome. “All right, since you seem incapable of sorting through this on your own, I’ll spell it out for you. Hugh’s behavior is making me suspicious. For one thing, he’s put off tupping me for more than a week now while feeding me a series of increasingly implausible excuses.”
“You mean you don’t think he’s really impotent?”
“If he is, it’s a recent development. According to the kitchen wenches in Poitiers, he could go all night, and he made them scream like banshees. Ah yes, and so well-endowed was he that it was like being ‘impaled on a war club.’”
Aldous’s face fell; he swore colorfully.
“But it was last night, when I realized he wasn’t going to come to me,” Clare said, “that I started thinking about the way he’d darted down into the cellar, looking around as if he didn’t want to be seen. And then, when I took him back up to the hall and locked the door at the top of the stairs, he stared at the key as if it were the holy grail.”
Aldous frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t, because you are, despite your patina of refinement, a drooling lackwit.” Salome screamed for more meat; Clare fed it to her. “It’s possible that Hugh’s motives for being here are not entirely pure. He might, in fact, have been sent here to spy on us.”
Aldous blinked. “Do you mean you think he’s the queen’s agent?”
Clare rolled her eyes. “No, Aldous. The queen’s agent, whoever he is, is here simply to keep an eye on us and make sure we don’t say or do anything to jeopardize her rebellion. Which wouldn’t have been necessary if you didn’t have such a reputation for imprudence and dim-wittedness.”
“Me! You’re the one who wrote her an unencrypted letter!”
Clare closed her eyes briefly, summoning the composure not to rake her nails across her brother’s face. “As I was saying, the queen’s agent is merely here to observe us.”
“And to dispatch us to our Maker if we displease him.”
“By being indiscreet or losing control of the situation here. But that’s not going to happen, is it, Aldous?”
He pulled a face. “I’m not a child, Clare.”
“Then why do you cry when you’re spanked?”
He gaped at her, a tide of purple staining his face.
“Marguerite and I share everything,” Clare said with a smile as she chose another scrap of meat from the bowl. Well, almost everything. Marguerite had
never asked what was going on in the cellar and Clare, loath to incur the queen’s wrath by compromising the secrecy of Orlando’s work, had never volunteered the information. “I’ll find out who the queen’s agent is eventually,” Clare said with confidence. “I’ve been making inquiries among our guests, and I’ve narrowed down the possibilities to a handful of people with connections Eleanor. Once we’ve identified him, we can make sure he observes us only at our most circumspect and competent. That means you will only do and say in his presence what I tell you to do and say, is that understood?”
Aldous opened his mouth—probably to point out again that he was not a child—but seemed to think better of it.
“In any event,” Clare continued, “Queen Eleanor’s agent would have no reason to sneak into the cellar. Presumably he already knows what’s going on down there. But an agent for someone else, say King Henry, might very well want to—”
“King Henry! You don’t think Hugh is working for—”
“I don’t know. But I mean to find out.”
“How?”
Clare regarded him balefully. “The less you know about any of this, the better. I’m sorry you’ve gotten as deeply involved as you have. Suffice it to say I’ve taken certain measures aimed at misdirecting...” She trailed off, watching Hugh bow to Phillipa as the galliard concluded, whereupon he led her toward a table. Marguerite intercepted them and spoke to Hugh, telling him, presumably, what Clare had asked her to tell him—that his friend Raoul d’Argentan, who had kept to his chamber since bolting from the court of love last night, needed to speak to him on a matter of grave urgency, and that he would meet him in the buttery.
Even from across this cavernous hall, Clare could read Hugh’s lips as he said, “The buttery?”
Marguerite pointed toward the door in the corner that led to the service rooms. Hugh said something to Phillipa, touching her arm, then turned and walked in that direction.
“Excellent.” Clare transferred Salome to a linen-wrapped hawk perch jutting out of the wall nearby and tugged off her gauntlet, handing it to a bewildered Aldous. She smoothed down her low-cut, plum-colored tunic and patted her wig. “Now I shall find out just how eager he is to get into that cellar.”
“What are you going to do?” Aldous asked.
Clare glanced heavenward in exasperation. “I’m going to maintain control of our end of things and thereby keep us from getting our throats cut in our sleep by Eleanor’s agent. Look after Salome.”
“But...”
Without a backward glance, Clare strode across the great hall, through the corner doorway and down the service corridor until she came to the open door of the buttery. Hugh was in there, scowling as he perused the casks of wine and ale stacked around the perimeter of the windowless little storage room, lit by a brass lantern dangling overhead. He was excruciatingly handsome tonight in a silver-trimmed black tunic, his hair pulled off his face, that deliciously phallic infidel dagger sheathed on his hip.
“Clare,” he said warily when she stepped into the buttery. “I’m...waiting for someone.”
“You’re waiting for me.” She closed the door and leaned back against it. “I had Marguerite tell you it was Raoul who wanted to see you, because I was afraid you wouldn’t come if you knew it was I who was summoning you.”
“If you’re wondering why I didn’t come to your chamber last night—”
“I know why you didn’t come. I don’t excite your desire.”
“That’s not true, Clare.” But he looked down as he said it, the lying cur—the contemptible, arrogant blackguard. If Clare was good enough for William of Wexford, she was damn well good enough for his son.
“Then why didn’t you come?” she asked.
“I got drunk and passed out.”
“You’ve used that excuse before.”
“I get drunk a great deal.”
“Funny,” she said, “I haven’t seen you in your cups since the first night you were here.”
“I do most of my drinking late at night, after everyone’s retired.”
“Well, you’re not drunk now.” She skimmed her hands down over her breasts, eyeing him seductively. His gaze lingered on the cluster of keys at the end of the gold chain around her neck. “It cuts me to the quick, the way you keep putting me off. Last night, when you didn’t come, I decided there was no way to salvage my pride except to ask you and your wife to leave Halthorpe.”
Alarm flickered in his eyes.
“But then I thought perhaps I should give you one last chance to make it up to me. And that’s when I arranged to have you meet me here.” Her gown laced up the front by means of a satin cord. Without wresting her gaze from him, she tugged open the bow in which it was tied.
“Clare, I really don’t think I can do this,” he said. “Beautiful though you are, it’s been a very long time since I’ve been able to rouse to a woman.”
“The women who failed to rouse you weren’t as creative as I am.” She slid off her many bracelets and tossed them on top of a nearby wine cask. “There are things a woman can do, clever little tricks that could bring a dead man to full attention—things that priggish little wife of yours could never conceive of, much less bring herself to do. Shall I try a few of them out on you?”
He held his hands up. “I really...”
“There’s some almond oil in the pantry,” she said, pulling off her key chain, along with her necklaces, and setting them next to the bracelets. She saw his gaze home in on the keys. “You wouldn’t believe what a little oil and a lot of imagination can accomplish. Shall I go fetch some while you undress?” she asked, reaching for the handle of the door.
After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “I don’t suppose it could hurt to try.”
“Not unless you want it to.” Tossing him a wicked little grin, she left, closing the door behind her.
Clare stood on the other side of the door, listening for sounds from within, but it was a thick door and she could hear nothing. She waited several minutes anyway, and was about to go back in when she remembered about the almond oil. May as well make this look good. She fetched the flask of oil from the pantry and headed back toward the buttery, only to encounter Hugh as he was leaving.
“Where are you going?” she asked. “I thought you were taking off your things so I could...” She jiggled the flask.
“I just remembered,” he said, his gaze darting away from her, “I told Phillipa I’d be right back to dance the tourdoin with her. She’ll come looking for me soon. ‘Twould hardly do for her to find us...” He gave her that too-charming lopsided grin of his and shrugged his big shoulders. Bastard.
“Perhaps she could join us,” Clare suggested coyly.
He shook his head. “Nay, she...she would never...”
“Yes, of course she wouldn’t, poor little prude. What a shame, just when things seemed to be working out.”
“Indeed. Perhaps some other time.”
“Why don’t I just take this—” she caressed the flask suggestively “—up to my bedchamber, and perhaps some night when you haven’t drunk yourself into a stupor, you can pay me a visit and let me open up my little box of tricks.”
“I can think of nothing more enticing.” With a cursory little bow, he turned and made his way back to the great hall.
Clare reentered the buttery and stood over the wine cask, inspecting her collection of household keys, which normally numbered thirteen and now numbered twelve. The large, distinctively ornate brass key that fit the lock at the top of the cellar stairs was gone.
Just as she had expected.
* * *
Phillipa, holding a glass-covered lantern to stave off the midnight darkness of the great hall, held her breath as Hugh inserted the big brass key into the lock on the cellar door and turned it. There came a muted click. He grasped the door handle and pulled slowly, opening it an inch.
She released her breath in a grateful rush and smiled at Hugh. He smiled back. Nodding toward the handful of
house servants asleep in the rushes at the other end of the hall, she put a finger to her lips; he nodded.
Hugh slipped the key into the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. They had arranged with one of the kitchen maids to reattach it to Clare’s chain after she brought up her mistress’s breakfast tray in the morning but before she awoke her—for a price, of course.
Phillipa handed Hugh the jar of kitchen grease they’d absconded with, which he smeared over the door’s rusty iron hinges before opening it all the way. There came only the faintest of creaks, which did not disturb the sleeping servants.
Slipping through the door and closing it behind them, they padded down the narrow stairwell on bare feet, Phillipa lifting the skirts of her wrapper and night shift well off the stone steps, lest she trip and rouse the entire castle. At the bottom of the stairs there was, as Hugh had told her, a second door, this one sans lock. He opened it and they stepped through, into a wall of reeking heat.
“That smell is sulphur.” Phillipa held the lantern high as they scanned the undercroft, a long, narrow chamber of damp rock, the front part of which, unsurprisingly, appeared to have been fitted out as a laboratory. The flickering lamplight eerily illuminated a long table scattered with thick glass flasks, vials, mortars, tools of various types—tongs, sieves, spoons, scoops, chisels, hammers—a press of some sort, an anvil, a stack of books, some odd little cups with spouts sticking out of them and a number of covered earthen vessels.
“There was that round iron thing on this table last night,” Hugh said. “That thing I said looked like a helmet at first, remember? ‘Tisn’t here anymore.”
Jutting out from the wall behind the table was a high, hooded stone hearth on which an iron cauldron and a number of clay and metal crucibles rested on a rack over dimly glowing coals. Tongs and pokers hung on one side of this fireplace, which had been altered up to hold extra fuel and fitted out with a leather-and-wood bellows to feed air to the flames.
“They’ve made it into a furnace,” Hugh observed.
More earthen pots—dozens of them—sat on shelves and workbenches against the walls. On the floor near the makeshift furnace sat sacks of various fuels for it: charcoal, peat and dried dung. Off to the side were devices that Hugh identified as a pole lathe and a rotary grindstone, although Phillipa wasn’t too clear on their purpose.
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