Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  Summoning her wits, Phillipa asked, in as steady a voice as she could manage, “Why are you doing this? I’ve done you no harm.” Having no idea how much they knew or had surmised, it would be best for the time being, she reasoned, to feign complete innocence.

  “‘Tis one of life’s more sobering truths,” Clare said, “that people seldom truly deserve the bad things that happen to them. We are perfectly well aware that you’ve done us no harm. That is not, however, true of your husband.” Leveling the arma at Phillipa’s head, she said, “Aldous, get her into position.”

  Aldous shoved her toward the sachentage.

  God, no, Phillipa thought as he pushed her head down under the small iron frame jutting out from the wall. He pried open the hinged collar that hung from the frame by chains, displaying its cruel, inward-facing spikes, and closed it around her throat. Thankfully, the spikes barely grazed her, probably because her neck was more slender than that of the men this instrument was designed for. Because of her short stature, however, the collar, even hanging at its lowest point, dug into her jaw, tilting her head upward slightly.

  “Lock it,” Clare ordered her brother. “It’s the little iron key with the square top.”

  Don’t panic, don’t panic... Phillipa repeated to herself as her heart thudded wildly and trickles of sweat crawled beneath her tunic and kirtle. “Think about what you’re doing, Aldous,” she entreated as he twisted the key in the collar’s lock.

  “I am.” With an all-too intimate smile, he lowered his head to her. “You’ve never looked lovelier to me.”

  Phillipa instinctively whipped her head to the side when his lips touched hers, only to cry out in pain as the spikes bit into the side of her neck.

  “You foolish little thing.” Aldous, his expression solicitous, touched a finger to the wound. “You’ve made yourself bleed.” He licked the fingertip, his troubled gaze meeting hers. “You must be more careful. We’re not trying to hurt you, my dear. We’re just need to secure your cooperation in a matter of grave consequence.”

  “What sort of cooperation?”

  Lowering her weapon now that Phillipa was immobilized, Clare said, “Your husband left Halthorpe yesterday, and we don’t know where he’s gone. We assume you do. We need you to write to him and convince him to return.”

  Phillipa swallowed against the hard, cold collar. “Wh-why?”

  “Let’s just say that we have enemies, and we’ve recently discovered that your husband is working for them.”

  They know.

  Aldous said, “We realize you have no idea he’s been spying for—”

  “That’s enough, Aldous!” Clare snapped. “If you tell her too much, we’ll be forced to have her dispatched as well as him, and I know you’ve got plans for her.”

  “D-dispatched?”

  “Not you,” Clare assured her. “Just your husband.”

  Phillipa went to shake her head, wincing at the pressure of the spikes. “You wouldn’t. You haven’t got it in you.”

  “Perhaps not, but those Frankish brutes hanging about the barracks have it in them not only to send Hugh of Wexford to his maker, but to extract from him beforehand certain information of a sensitive and critical nature.” Clare’s gaze lit on the malevolent iron chair with its hundreds of spikes and room beneath for a fire.

  No... Phillipa ransacked her mind for a way out of this, for Hugh’s sake. “What information do you want?” she asked, thinking she might be able to come up something plausible enough to appease them without actually revealing anything damaging to the king. “Perhaps I can tell you what you need to know.”

  Clare shook her head. “You know naught of these matters.”

  “What if I did? What if I were the spy and ‘twas Hugh who knew nothing? You haven’t considered that possibility because I’m a woman, but—”

  Clare cut her off with a harsh burst of laughter. “You’re not the one I caught sneaking down here in an effort to unearth our secrets. And you’re not the one who was sent to Poitiers a year and a half ago to spy on the queen. I’d like to say I admire your inclination toward self-sacrifice, but the truth is, I find it pathetic.”

  “Especially given the way Hugh has misused and debased you.” Aldous lightly stroked her upturned face. “I don’t know what you two quarreled about yesterday, but I know he left you in tears. He’s never loved you—you told me so yourself. And all this time he’s been lying to you, deceiving you, keeping his true vocation a secret from you even as he exploited you to gain access to me.”

  With a gentleness that made Phillipa shiver, Aldous brushed sweat-dampened tendrils of hair off her face. “He’s used you, Phillipa, regarded you with utter contempt, even as I’ve ached to make you mine. After he’s gone and we’re together, I’ll treat you like a princess. I’ll install you in a splendid house in Southwark so you can be close to me. You’ll have servants and jewels and fine gowns, finer than anything he ever gave you. You’ll want for nothing.” Lowering his mouth to hers, he murmured, “You’re the one, Phillipa, the only one.”

  He kissed her. She pressed her lips tight against the sluglike insinuation of his tongue.

  “Write to your husband and tell me where to have the letter delivered,” Clare said. “Once he’s back at Halthorpe and in our custody, I will release you into Aldous’s keeping with the understanding that no harm will come to you as long as you never speak of this to anyone. When asked what became of your late husband, you are to say he drowned in the Thames and that his body was never recovered.”

  “Nay,” Phillipa said. “Never.”

  Aldous, looking genuinely astounded, said, “After what he’s done to you? We could be together, Phillipa, just you and I. Think about it!”

  It was far too revolting a prospect to contemplate. “Do with me what you will,” she said, “but I have no intention of summoning Hugh back here to be tortured and killed.”

  “What we will do to you,” Clare informed her icily, “is simply to leave you right where you are, locked into this device day and night, with no respite—although I suppose I’ll have to come down from time to time to let you use the garderobe. There are esthetic considerations, after all. But other than that, you’ll be forced to stand without relief, which I understand can become fairly painful of its own accord. You’ll get no sleep, no food and no water, until you consent to write a letter to Hugh, which I will dictate to you word for word.”

  “I’m not writing any letter,” Phillipa said, “so you may as well kill me right now.”

  “We haven’t got it in us, remember?” Clare sneered. “Of course, if I wanted you dead, I suppose I could enlist the Frankish soldiers for that purpose. They would embrace the task with a fair measure of enthusiasm, I’m sure, especially if I were to give them free rein to disport themselves with you before putting you out of your—”

  “Clare, no!” Aldous grabbed her arm. “You said I could have her. You said—”

  “Unhand me, you simpering dunce!” Clare demanded as she wrenched her arm from her brother. “I’m just making conversation, for pity’s sake. If I wanted her dead, she’d be dead already. I’d much rather leave her in this thing until she breaks down and does our bidding. Or perishes slowly and in agony,” she added with an malignant little smile in Phillipa’s direction. “It’s really up to you, my dear. I doubt it would take more than a week for you to succumb to thirst, but ‘twill be the longest week you’ve ever endured.”

  “Phillipa, for God’s sake, write the letter,” Aldous pleaded. “I can’t bear to think of you destroying yourself this way—especially for the likes of him.” He closed his hands around her waist, skimmed them upward until they were snugged up against the undersides of her breasts. “You’re ravishing in pink. This tunic, it’s the one you were wearing that afternoon when I first saw you on London Bridge. That was no accident, you know. Hugh brought you there hoping I’d run into you, knowing that if I saw you again, I would do anything to have you.”

  Leaning over,
he whispered in her ear, “You look so beautiful like this, so exquisitely helpless. I could take you right here.” He lowered his hands, closing them around her hips, which he drew toward him so that she could feel how hard he was beneath his diaconal robes. “Perhaps tonight, when everyone’s asleep, I’ll come down here and—”

  “Not tonight, Aldous.” Clare, who had evidently heard her brother’s heated whispers, pulled the chain of keys over his head and looped it around her own neck. “‘Twould be prudent, I think, to hold such a visit in reserve. Perhaps in a day or two, if the lady Phillipa continues to refuse to write the letter, I’ll give you the key to the cellar door. But only to the door, so you can get down here, not to the sachentage—I don’t want to risk letting her escape. If you want her, you’ll have to have her standing up.”

  Dear God, Phillipa thought. She’s not even human.

  “Say goodbye, Aldous,” Clare instructed as she turned and strolled toward the door. “I can’t bear it down here for another moment.”

  Aldous spent a few moments fondling the captive Phillipa and whispering into her ear the things he would do to her when his sister deigned to give him the key to the door at the top of the stairs. Clare, meanwhile, laid the arma on the work table and extinguished all but one of the lanterns, leaving the laboratory area dimly illuminated but plunging Phillipa’s end of the undercroft into deep and horrible darkness.

  Brother and sister paused in the doorway before departing, Clare to inform her that she would return around matins in case Phillipa needed the privy, and Aldous to blow her a goodnight kiss.

  Chapter 23

  Pain can be transcended. The trick is to rise above it, as if you were floating in the air, watching it happen to someone else.

  Hugh whispered his counsel over and over in Phillipa’s mind, a never-ending litany of comfort and strength that had sustained her for...

  How long had it been since they’d locked her into this fiendish thing? How many days had she stood here in unchanging semidarkness willing herself not to feel the crushing pain in her legs and back, her neck and shoulders and jaw, the grinding hunger in her belly, the consuming thirst that sucked at her and sucked at her, driving her to the edge of madness and back again...to rise above the constant agony that had sunk deep, deep into her bones?

  Without seeing the sun rise and set, without being privy to the daily rhythms of the world around her, Phillipa found herself at a loss to judge the passage of time. In the beginning, she had tried to count Clare’s periodic visits to the cellar, during which Phillipa would be briefly freed from the sachentage in order to be escorted with an arma at her back to the corner garderobe. She had become only minimally adept at using the privy with her hands tied behind her back, but that was of little import now, since she rarely needed it anymore.

  Indeed, Clare’s visits seemed to have tapered off, although they hadn’t been very regular to begin with, as if to thwart Phillipa in her efforts to track time. And, of course, whenever Phillipa asked her how long she’d been down there, or if it was day or night, Clare would merely tell her that she could find out soon enough for herself—if only she would write the letter to Hugh.

  She craved sleep with a desperation that maddened her, literally. The struggle to keep her head upright so as not to fall victim to the collar’s spikes, along with the strain of having her hands bound behind her, made her neck and shoulders burn with pain. Her mind swam in and out of delirium as it searched for a reprieve from this waking hell. Phillipa yearned for the blessed oblivion of sleep even as she fought it, denied it, refused it. All too often she drifted off despite her best efforts, only to awaken to the bite of the spikes and her own cry of pain.

  Once, she did not awaken immediately. She dreamed instead—or was it a hallucination; she’d been having them, too—of a horned devil with a chain of keys around its neck and a mouthful of long, sharp teeth, who took her head in its mouth and bit down, hard, around her neck. It sank its teeth into her slowly, inexorably, in an effort to sever her head from her body and eat it.

  She’d jolted awake with her head having fallen sideways, the spikes on that side puncturing her skin like the imagined monster’s teeth.

  Little wonder her imagination had conjured up a devil, for if this wasn’t Hell on Earth, what was? To intensify her torment, Clare had set a jug of water on the floor near her feet where, despite the darkness in this part of the cellar, Phillipa could see it well enough if she looked down—which she tried not to do, so as not to add to her anguish, but still she knew it was there.

  The water was but a tangible token of the taunting and abuse that Clare seemed to delight in, her favorite threat being that she would give Aldous the key to the cellar unless Phillipa agreed right then to write the letter. Still, every time the door opened and Phillipa recognized her visitor as Clare, she whispered a few words of gratitude; she had uttered many such prayers and supplications during this hellish confinement. Although disinclined toward piety in the past, Phillipa had discovered that suffering did, just as Uncle Lotulf had always said, bring one closer to God.

  She thanked God most earnestly every time she saw that it was Clare and not her brother who had stolen down to see her. What was it Clare had said...Perhaps in a day or two...You’ll have to have her standing up...

  But it must have been more than a day or two since they’d locked her into this thing—mustn’t it?—and still Aldous had not come. And for that she was grateful beyond measure. Her rational mind—still nominally functional—told her that, whatever Aldous did to her, it would be naught compared to the other torments she was enduring. But logic was of little comfort in this dank underworld of fear and pain. The idea of his using her that way, making a sordid mockery of what she had shared with Hugh, distressed her even more than the terrible thirst and the ache in her bones and the interminable sleeplessness.

  Phillipa’s memories of making love to Hugh—those charmed intervals when it was just the two of them, becoming one—were touchstones of solace and sanity in this endless nightmare, regardless of Hugh’s dismissal of their lovemaking as being just about sex, and her feelings for him as naive fancies. He might or might not be deluding himself about what had transpired between them; he could not delude her.

  If she closed her eyes and thought hard enough, she was there with him, transported in his embrace, rising above this worldly anguish, drifting high over it, separate and apart from it, watching it happen to someone else entirely, free of pain, of worry, of her very body...

  The door squeaked.

  Phillipa opened her eyes to find her head slumped to the side. She straightened it, flinching when she felt the spikes withdraw.

  She squinted toward the shadow passing through the door, silhouetted as always by the single horn lantern that burned over the furnace. Her stomach clenched when she saw that the figure was taller than Clare, the shoulders thicker.

  “God, no,” she whispered desperately. “Please, God, I beg of you. There’s only so much—”

  “My lady?” It was a woman’s voice; Phillipa recognized the rustic Poitevan accent.

  Trembling with relief, Phillipa said, “Edmee? Is that you?” Her voice emerged raw and grating from her parched mouth.

  “Milady, where...?” Edmee paused to stare in turn at the work table with its array of arma and the bombe in the cage. “Jesus have mercy,” she muttered, crossing herself. “Where are you, milady?” she called out, peering toward Phillipa’s unlit end of the undercroft.

  “Here...back here, in the dark. Bring the lantern.”

  Unhooking the lantern from its chain, Edmee came slowly toward her, stepping warily around the talisman etched into the floor and the unfathomably deep well, her small eyes widening in horror when she saw Phillipa in the sachentage. “My God, milady, what...what on earth...did...did Lady Clare do this to you?”

  Phillipa tried to nod, but the spikes prevented that. “Aye.”

  “Why, for pity’s sake?”

  “She found s
omething out about...about my husband,” Phillipa said hoarsely. Mindful that Edmee had served at the Poitiers court and would naturally harbor loyalties toward Queen Eleanor, she thought it best not to volunteer too much. “And now she knows he’s her enemy, and she wants him dead, and...” She licked her cracked lips. “Please...there’s a jug on the floor. I haven’t had water in...how long have I been down here?”

  “Well, let me think...” Looking around for someplace to put the lantern, Edmee spied the iron chair and crossed herself. Setting the lantern on the floor, she lifted the jug and held it to her mistress’s mouth. Phillipa drank greedily, not caring that some of it spilled down her chin, or that her stomach tightened painfully as soon as the water hit it.

  “‘Twas four nights ago,” Edmee said, “that I went to your chamber to get you ready for bed and you wasn’t there. The next mornin’, Lady Clare told everyone you’d left Halthorpe. I thought it was strange that you hadn’t said goodbye to me. Even stranger that you’d left all your clothes and things in your room.”

  Phillipa paused in her drinking to rasp, “Four nights ago...and what time of day is it now?”

  “Early mornin’, milady. The chapel bells haven’t even rung prime yet. So that’s three full days you’ve been down here, and four nights.” Edmee tilted the jug to Phillipa’s mouth again. “I didn’t know what to make of you bein’ gone till it dawned on me that Master Orlando, he wasn’t comin’ down here no more. I asked him why, and he says how Lady Clare told him he was to stay away from here, even after he told her he wanted to get back to his work. And then I remembered how you was always askin’ about them sounds from down here, how you didn’t never credit that business about the wine barrels.”

  Phillipa turned her head away from the jug. “That’s enough,” she said breathlessly; talking was less painful now that her throat was dampened. “Thank you. Would you mind untying my hands?”

  “Oh, you poor thing. Of course!” Reaching behind Phillipa to fumble with the cord wrapped around her wrists, Edmee said, “First thing this mornin’, I asked Lady Clare if she wouldn’t like a nice bath. The moment she’d settled in to soak, I took them keys of hers—that’s the only time she ever takes them off, when she’s bathin’—and I come down here and—”