Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  “That’s right.” He let go of her hand, clawed his limp hair off his face.

  “But I am looking at you, Hugh. Because it wasn’t just about sex.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “No. It was about us.”

  “There isn’t an ‘us.’” He sat up, his elbows braced on his updrawn knees, the heels of his palms grinding against his forehead. “There can never be an ‘us.’ Christ, Phillipa, one of us needs to be strong. Can’t you see that?”

  What she could see, horribly ugly and real in the light of day, was the network of scars on his back—a decade’s worth of anguish that he had endured by retreating from it.

  She sat up and laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’re good at being strong, Hugh. You can rise above anything, even your feelings for me. But you needn’t. You shouldn’t.”

  “Those feelings—if I had them—would be my ruin. And yours.”

  “Perhaps they’d be our salvation. Why should we have to be strong alone when we can be twice as strong together?”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Phillipa. We’d be only half as strong if we tethered ourselves together. We’d be dependent on each other, subject to each other’s whims and demands—and therefore weaker and more vulnerable. You’re so young, so sheltered, so untouched by the world’s miseries.”

  She nodded, conceding the point. “I only wish you were, too.”

  Footsteps raced down the corridor outside the bedchamber, followed by the frenzied pounding of a fist on the door. “Milady! Sir Hugh! Are you awake?”

  “Edmee?” Phillipa said. “What the devil...”

  “It’s Istagio. He’s...” Edmee broke off in a choking little sob. “Jesus have mercy. He’s dead.”

  Chapter 20

  Hugh smelled it as they climbed the stairs that led to the second level of the north wing, where Istagio’s bedchamber was located. The stench of death was unmistakable.

  “Wait, love.” Damn, why can’t I stop calling her “love”? He reached for Phillipa, in front of him on the narrow stone stairwell, closing his hand around her waist. Edmee, ahead of them, continued on. “Why don’t you wait downstairs? This is likely to be pretty unpleasant.”

  “I’ve seen dead bodies, Hugh.” She looked absurdly pretty in the pink linen kirtle she’d thrown on hurriedly after Edmee’s summons, her face framed by disheveled wisps of hair that had sprung free from her braid during their long night of lovemaking.

  “But with this heat and all...”

  “I’m fine—really.” Her mouth quirked. “Of course, if you’d prefer to wait downstairs...”

  With a smirk, he prodded her up the stairs. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  They heard Orlando’s piteous lament as they emerged from the stairwell; the Italian, still in his long night shirt and sleeping cap, was among a group of guests and servants gathered at this end of the corridor. According to Edmee, it was Orlando who had discovered Istagio’s body in bed when he’d knocked on his bedchamber door to awaken him this morning. “God forgive me for how I speak to him last night. I call him bad names, I tell him he is fool. And now he is gone and I can never take it back...”

  “Orlando.” Phillipa embraced him. “I’m so sorry. But you mustn’t blame yourself for the things you said last night.”

  “She’s right.” Hugh patted Orlando on the back. “He provoked you. You’re only human.”

  Phillipa spent a few minutes comforting Orlando and then asked which room was Istagio’s, so that she and Hugh could pay their respects.

  Edmee pointed to an open door at the far end of the corridor.

  Turstin de Ver removed the scented handkerchief from his face to say, “Nicolas Capellanus is in there now, giving him Last Rites.”

  “Is too late,” Orlando moaned. “He’s already dead. Now he never be at rest.”

  “Even those who die unshriven can benefit from Last Rites,” said Hugh, who hoped this was true, having known many good men who’d lain dead on the battlefield for hours or even days before the sacrament of Extreme Unction could be administered to them.

  Phillipa touched Hugh’s arm and nodded toward Istagio’s room. “Shall we?”

  “Here.” Turstin handed Phillipa his perfumed handkerchief. “If you’re going down there, you’ll need this. The windows are open, but it doesn’t help much.”

  The smell became so staggering as they approached the door to Istagio’s chamber that it was all Hugh could do to put one foot in front of the other. He closed his mouth and covered his nose with his hand, but it didn’t help. The fetid odor crawled in through his nostrils to settle, thick and rank, in the back of his throat.

  They arrived at the open doorway to find Father Nicolas standing beside a narrow, four-post bed in his white surplice and stole, a cloth tied around his lower face, pulling a sheet up over Istagio’s head. He nodded at Hugh, then corked a little vial and slipped it into a satchel on the floor.

  “She shouldn’t do that,” Father Nicolas told Hugh when Phillipa took hold of the sheet to pull it back. It was telling, Hugh thought, that the priest directed the comment to him rather than to Phillipa, as if his disdain for women ran so deep that he wouldn’t even lower himself to censure one directly.

  “Why not?” Phillipa asked.

  Maintaining eye contact with Hugh, Nicolas said, “‘Tisn’t a pretty sight.”

  “I would hardly expect it to be.” Phillipa drew the sheet back slowly, partially uncovering Istagio’s remains, which were nothing short of monstrous. His body, already obese, had distended grotesquely in the heat. The poor man stared sightlessly at the ceiling with half-open eyes, his mouth agape, his face swollen and discolored. Hugh and Phillipa both crossed themselves.

  With the hand that wasn’t holding the handkerchief to her nose, Phillipa gently tilted Istagio’s head back to examine his neck. “I wish my sister Ada were here. She’d know what to look for.”

  “Is this the way you found him?” Hugh asked the priest.

  “Aye.”

  “His arms were crossed over his chest like this?” Phillipa inquired.

  Father Nicolas untied the cloth from around his face and handed it to Hugh on his way to the door. “Here. There’s some aromatic oil on it.”

  Hugh took the cloth gratefully and pressed it to his nose. “Did you cross his arms, Father?”

  “He is just as I found him.” From the doorway, the priest scowled as Phillipa uncovered the lower half of Istagio’s naked body. “Has she no shame?”

  “We’re just trying to determine why he died,” Hugh said.

  “He died because the Lord chose to take him. That is as much as any of us needs to know.” Father Nicolas turned and left.

  “How long do you suppose he’s been dead?” Phillipa asked.

  “All night.”

  “You seem very sure of yourself.” She lifted one of Istagio’s arms.

  “I’ve seen bodies left unattended in every sort of climate and condition you can imagine.” Too damned many of them. “I know the rate at which they putrefy in damp heat like this.”

  “So he was killed yesterday evening, then?”

  “He died yesterday evening—before matins, I would say. It could have been from natural causes, though. I don’t see any wounds on him, and unless I’m missing something, there are no obvious signs of strangulation.”

  “Look at this.” Phillipa turned Istagio’s bloated hand from side to side.

  “And...what, precisely, am I looking at?”

  “These marks here. They’re hard to see, but—”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  “He’s got them on both wrists.” She moved down to peer at Istagio’s feet. “And on his ankles, too.”

  “Mother of God.” They turned to find Aldous standing in the doorway, a hand clamped over his mouth, his horrified gaze riveted on Istagio’s corpse. He had obviously just arisen from bed, given his wayward hair and his attire—a rumpled shirt over underdrawers. Clare’s keys were visible as
a lump beneath the shirt.

  “Aldous,” Hugh asked, “is Clare still here?”

  “Nay. She...” The deacon closed his eyes; his sweat-sheened face was as pale as candle wax. “She left before dawn.”

  Hugh started to ask when she was expected to return, but Aldous lurched away, keys jangling, a panicked moan rising from him. Presently there came the sounds of violent retching.

  Hugh rubbed his jaw. “Clare would have been furious if she’d found out about Istagio’s little demonstration at the river yesterday evening, after all the trouble she’s gone through to keep their activities a secret.”

  “Aye,” said Phillipa, “but do you think she could actually murder someone in cold blood?”

  Hugh shook his head. “Nay. I can’t see it.”

  “What about Aldous?”

  “He hasn’t got the stones for it. Besides, listen to him out there. He’d not be reacting like that if he’d been the instrument of Istagio’s death.”

  “It must have been the queen’s agent trying to silence Istagio before he did even more damage.” Phillipa sighed and returned her attention to the corpse. “Help me to turn him over, would you?”

  They inspected the body at nauseating length, but without uncovering any additional signs of violence. “What do you think?” Hugh asked.

  “I think we should speak with Orlando.”

  * * *

  They found the metaphysician in his chamber on the floor below, fully dressed now, but gazing listlessly out the window as he sat on the edge of his bed, his face drawn, his eyes red-rimmed.

  “We need to know how you found Istagio this morning,” Phillipa told him. “Exactly how you found him.”

  “I find him dead.” Orlando executed a quavering sign of the cross. “He die in his sleep.”

  “Did you touch his body at all?” Hugh asked, thinking about those crossed arms.

  Orlando shook his head. “I leave him as I find him. He die in his sleep.”

  Phillipa glanced at Hugh as she sat next to Orlando, clasping one of his hands. “You’re trying to protect him, aren’t you? You’re worried about his reputation, about what people will think if they know how you found him.”

  Orlando shook his head, his eyes wetly glazed. “I know Istagio since he is little boy. Is good people, his famiglia. They no want him to leave Roma, but I say...” His shoulders shook; tears trickled down his face. “I say I take care of him...”

  “You did take care of him,” Phillipa said. “You did the best you could, but how could you have known we have a murderer among us?”

  “No! Istagio die in his—”

  “You’re trying to protect his memory,” Phillipa said, “when you should be helping us to figure out who did this to him. Tell us the truth—Istagio was tied up when you found him, wasn’t he?”

  Orlando buried his face in his hands, murmuring to himself in his own tongue.

  Phillipa put an arm around his shoulder. “You untied him so he wouldn’t be found that way, didn’t you?”

  He nodded. “It was so...undignify. He would be shame for people to see him like that.”

  Hugh thought it best not to mention that, in life, Istagio was hardly a paragon of dignity. “Were his hands and feet bound to the bedposts?”

  “S.” Reaching under the bed, Orlando produced a tangle of black silk stockings. “With these. And the...how you say...cuscino...”

  “Pillow,” Hugh supplied.

  “It was on top of his face.”

  “Oh.” Phillipa shook her head. “Poor Istagio.”

  Orlando leaned down to fumble beneath the bed again.

  “What are you looking for?” Hugh asked.

  “This.” The Italian brought out a whip of the type known as a “cat” for the scratchlike marks its many lashes left on flesh. “I find it on the floor next to his bed.”

  Phillipa did not look surprised to see it.

  * * *

  Marguerite du Roche’s bedchamber was at the top of Halthorpe Castle’s north turret, the door to which was just down the corridor. Given that the woman had very likely committed a rather gruesome murder the night before, Hugh insisted that Phillipa and Orlando wait at the bottom of the tower while he confronted Marguerite alone.

  Phillipa knew better than to object. Hugh was, after all, a trained, experienced soldier. If the situation became dangerous, she and Orlando would only get in the way.

  Hugh opened the tower door and climbed three steps of the winding stairwell that coiled through the ancient stone tower, then paused, frowning.

  “What is it?” Phillipa asked.

  “Don’t you smell it?”

  She stepped into the stairwell and breathed in; so did Orlando.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. It was the same smell they had encountered as they’d approached Istagio’s room; it was the smell of death.

  Hugh sprinted up the stairs, not protesting when Phillipa and Orlando followed him. He hesitated on the landing at the top of the stairs, where the odor was most pronounced, then slowly opened the door.

  The room was dusky, the window shutters being latched tight. A mammoth, curtained bed stood against one wall; God knew how they’d gotten the mattress up those stairs. Against the opposite wall was one of those slanted writing desks with an attached chair, such as a monk would sit at in his scriptorium. Marguerite, clad in a crimson silk wrapper, was slumped over the desk facing away from them, her hair draping her like a flaming waterfall.

  Hugh circled the desk and lifted the hair off her face, then closed his eyes and let it fall back. He crossed himself as he straightened up. Phillipa and Orlando followed suit.

  “I don’t think she’s been dead as long as Istagio,” Hugh said. “Look here—she wrote something.” He slid a sheet of parchment from beneath Marguerite’s hand, the fingers of which were still curled stiffly around a raven’s quill. There was an open clay jar of ink on the flat upper edge of the writing desk, alongside an empty silver wine cup.

  Hugh unshuttered the window above the desk, flooding the chamber with sunlight. His eyes widened slightly as studied the sheet of parchment, and then he handed it to Phillipa. There were three short lines of words neatly inked in the middle of the page–in Hebrew.

  But wit was gibberish.

  Phillipa looked up to meet Hugh’s sober gaze and share in the same unspoken conclusion—that Marguerite must have been Queen Eleanor’s agent, or else how could she have known the queen’s cipher?

  Turning, she surveyed the chamber, which was small but lavishly appointed, with fine silken hangings adorning the stone walls and bed curtains of purple brocade. A dozen or more luxurious gowns hung from hooks in the wall. Scores of little vials and pots cluttered the wash stand, and the gilt-framed looking glass tacked above it was the largest Phillipa had ever seen. Crossing to the little table next to the bed, she peered into the ewer that sat there, finding it half-filled with wine; cloves and cinnamon sticks floated on the surface of the ruby liquid, but the smell of death overpowered their scent.

  Hugh rubbed his jaw. “You did say that murder would be just another thrill to Marguerite, a new form of gratification.”

  Orlando said, “What means this...grati...gratifi...” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Why she do this to Istagio? He never hurt nobody.”

  “It’s...complicated,” said Phillipa, pulling the stopper out of a little blue glass vial she’d found lying on its side next to the ewer. “There’s much that we don’t understand, either.”

  “Such as why she’s dead.” Hugh lifted Marguerite’s hair again to look upon her face, his expression grim. “She presumably killed Istagio, but who killed her? And how?”

  “Look at this.” Phillipa tilted the vial, spilling a little pile of white crystalline powder into her palm.

  The two men came closer to examine the powder. Orlando sniffed it. “Is smell too bad in here to tell if there is odor.” He dipped a fingertip into it and touched it lightly to his tongue; Hugh followed
suit.

  “No taste,” Hugh said.

  Orlando nodded. “Arsenico.”

  “Arsenic?” Hugh spat into the rushes.

  “Arsenic, s. White arsenic. Don’t worry, that little won’t harm you.”

  “This is arsenic?” Phillipa rubbed a bit of the granular powder between her fingers. It looked so innocuous.

  Orlando nodded. “The minerale from the ground, it has the golden color and the very strong taste. But the great Saracen alchemist Jábir ibn Hyyan, he roast the minerale, thinking maybe it is the key to the philosopher’s stone. Instead, he make the white arsenic. Is most dangerous poison. It mix up good in hot liquid—no color, no smell, no taste. Very powerful—kill very much fast.”

  “Spiced wine is served hot,” Phillipa said.

  Hugh handed the sheet of parchment to Phillipa. “Take a look at this. There are seven words here, but two of them are repeated twice. Is it some sort of verse, do you suppose?”

  Because of the easily recognizable word pattern, it took Phillipa less than a minute, even without having the key to refer to, to decipher what appeared to be Marguerite du Roche’s departing message to the world. “Well, I’ll be...”

  “What does it say?” Hugh asked.

  “‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.’”

  “Through my fault, through my fault,” Hugh murmured, repeating the familiar litany of contrition in the common tongue, “through my most grievous fault.”

  “Perhaps,” Phillipa said thoughtfully, “she did not find murder so gratifying after all.”

  * * *

  It was much later that morning, nearly nones, when Hugh opened the door of the bedchamber he shared with Phillipa to find her sitting in a big wooden bathtub pouring a bucket of lavender-scented water over her head.

  “Oh, sorry.” He started to back out though the door. “I’ll just—”

  “Don’t be silly.” With a smile, she set the empty bucket aside and skimmed the wet hair off her face; water droplets trembled on her bare breasts. “Why shouldn’t you stay?”