By His Majesty's Grace (16 page)

He whistled as he approached, trilling the self-same air he had played earlier. It lingered in his head, maddening him with its sprightliness and the images of playful lovemaking it brought to mind. His thoughts were running once more to the use of berries when he emerged in the antechamber that led to the chamber.

A man straightened from where he hovered in the shadows on the far side of the long room, a somberly dressed figure in black and white. He adjusted the wide hat he wore with its fan of swan feathers, tipping it at a jaunty angle that concealed much of his face. At a sauntering pace, he moved off toward another door that gave onto a maze of corridors and the rabbit’s warren of the old palace’s back reaches.

The walk was familiar. Rand frowned, undecided. It couldn’t be. No, surely not. Leon could not be here in the palace when half the soldiery in Henry’s service rattled up hill and down dale on his track. Could he?

Rand turned his footsteps in the direction taken by the other man. The gallant of the big hat stepped up his pace, reaching the far door and passing through it. Rand broke into a run. The next moment, he heard racing steps ahead of him. Bursting through the half-open door, he glanced right, glanced left, heard the faintest jingle of bells and caught a flash of white and black descending the squeaking treads of a servant’s stair. He gave chase.

Cat and fiendishly agile mouse, he and his quarry sprinted along passages, swirled through chambers made jewellike with tapestries and Saracen carpets, crashed through storerooms and lumber rooms. They slid across a court slick with water and old soap scum, slapped through dangling laundry and ducked down a narrow alley. Emerging in a courtyard that had been turned into an abattoir, they dodged around menservants armed with cleavers, circled each other about vats where hogs’ heads were being rendered and leaped gingerly through a far corner given over to eviscerating chickens. The clatter of wings marked the Master of Revel’s bypass of a pigeon roost.

Moments later, the figure clad in black and white sought the dusty shadows of a stable where rows of horses, destriers, palfreys and rounceys lifted curious heads over half doors. Rand knew his way now. He swerved toward the rear doors of the long building. Plunging to a halt, he flattened his back against a gate shaped like a horseshoe. As Leon whipped through it, he caught his doublet in a hard grasp, slinging him into the wall at his side with a solid thud of flesh meeting stone. Then he bore him down to the ground.

They breathed with the wheeze of a blacksmith’s bellows. Sweat streaked their faces and matted their hair. Leon looked half-dead, with a lump like a hawk’s egg forming at his hairline and blood trickling from his nose. His eyes were glazed, and in his olive skin lay a blue-tinted pallor.

Rand had pig’s blood on his shoes, chicken feathers on his sleeve and a complete lack of mercy in his soul. Hovering above the fugitive with a knee pressing into his heaving chest, he slipped his knife from its sheath and held the point to Leon’s throat.

“What were you about near my lady’s chamber?” he asked in hard demand. “You have the space of a single breath to answer before I carve you a new airway.”

“Nothing, I swear…swear it.”

Rand increased the pressure of his blade point. “What did you there, then?”

“The lady is gracious…kind.”

“How kind, exactly?” he inquired while his heartbeat drummed in his ears.

“She speaks…understands… Does not hold herself above me. I thought…”

This did not have the sound of assignation. Rand eased the pressure of his knee a bit, also his knifepoint. “Thought what?”

“That she might tell me…tell me what you and the king have done with my Juliette.”

Rand sat back on his heels. Whatever he had expected, it was not this. “Your Juliette?”

“Mine,” Leon said in strangled certainty. “Mine before Henry turned her head with jewels and fine clothes, before she thought she might be his lady mistress or even his queen. Mine, even as she warmed his bed and his cold heart.”

This was lèse-majesté, indeed, to bed the mistress of a king. “You could be hung for admitting such a thing, or made to disappear without a trace.”

“I don’t care, never did. Juliette felt…otherwise.”

“So I would imagine. Unlike with the Saracens, an English king doesn’t sew an unfaithful concubine into a sack and toss her off a sea cliff but may still be less than kind.”

“Ah, she never feared for herself.”

“For you, then?”

Leon managed a nod and a smile that was both sickly and whimsical. “For the father of her babe.”

It was beyond belief, the smiling duplicity of women, Rand thought. He had played host to Mademoiselle Juliette for six weeks or more, had sat with her at his table, spoken with her during long evenings while she sat stitching on small garments. He had walked with her in the first throes of labor, and stood beside her while she was delivered of a daughter. Never in all that time had she breathed a single word to indicate the child she carried was not of the king’s get.

“You think Henry discovered the dupe and has done away with her?”

“I don’t know. I can’t find out, can’t find her, and it’s driving me mad.”

It would. Rand could imagine how he might feel if it was Isabel who… He pulled up short before the thought was complete.

“What did you and Juliette expect,” he asked in strained patience, “a nice stipend to live on while you continued the affair? Or were you supposed to come and take her away?”

“What chance had I of removing her? Or that you would let her go except at Henry’s command?”

“She went so willingly when the escort arrived, as if she expected it.”

“We had made no plans, lacked the money for it,” the troubadour insisted, speaking more evenly as he caught his breath. “She may have thought she could evade Henry’s attention and come to me once she was back at Westminster.”

It was vaguely possible. People were able to convince themselves of almost anything. Except Juliette had never reached the town.

“That mummery the other night,
La danse macabre,
” Rand said, “the woman with the dead child was meant to be Mademoiselle Juliette instead of the queen.”

“I wanted to make Henry think. That is, if he is holding her somewhere. As for the queen, it should have caused no more disturbance than any priest’s homily on the fires of hell. Yet I do pray there have been no ill effects.”

“Even as it’s Henry’s child Elizabeth carries, his true child this time?”

“You think I wish him ill?”

Rand gave him a straight look. He had felt murderous with jealousy himself just moments ago. He could hardly imagine what it must be like to suffer it for months on end. “Don’t you?”

“I meant to present a lesson in humility, to show him that life is weak and death is strong. My dancing dead were to say to all,
As you are, so we once were. As we are, so you will be.
”

Rand grunted in recognition of the sentiment before he went on. “You did not take the role of grim reaper upon yourself, then?”

“Never! The mechanism was not meant to burst apart. It was supposed to pass by the high table as a reminder of what rumors say happened to Juliette’s child. Someone tampered with it.”

“Mayhap someone who wanted the king to have a more desperate lesson. Who could have done it? Who had access to your workshop?”

Leon closed his eyes and shook his head. Whether it was from despair or reluctance to speculate was impossible to say.

“You’re quite sure? There is no one who came by while you worked on that contraption, no one who asked more questions than usual?”

“Many were curious, but none more so than others, as I recall. And I was not always there.”

“You have no wider reason to want the king and his queen dead? Or if not that, then warned they might be?”

The Master of Revels lifted his lashes to meet Rand’s gaze, his dark chocolate eyes opaque. “What are you asking? Do you want to know if I am an emissary of some foreign government, a tool for their bidding? There are diplomats enough at court for that role.”

That much was certainly true, Rand thought. He gave a short nod.

“My concern is for my daughter, tender new babe that she is, and for her mother, who is my love. I will not rest until I know what the king has done with them.”

“And if he has done nothing, if he is as much in the dark as you are as to their whereabouts, just as afraid for the child he believes to be his?”

“Then I will discover who had taken them, and where. If they have suffered hurt, if they no longer live, then I will not rest until I have returned pain for pain, death for death.”

It was a vow Rand could understand. “Should it prove you speak the truth,” he said deliberately, “then I will join you in it.”

“And be a welcome ally,” the Master of Revels said, his eyes clear at last.

Rand rose to his feet, held out his hand to help the other man to his feet. Leon took his arm at the wrist, grasped hard. He began to pull himself up.

Abruptly, he jerked Rand off balance, shoved him against the stable wall. Then he was gone, speeding like a parti-colored shadow in black and white, vanishing into the maze of outbuildings that served the palace.

Rand watched him go with no attempt to chase after him. He had much to think about, much to do to discover the truth of the story he’d heard. It would be time enough to lay the Master of Revels by the heels if it was shown that he had lied.

For now, he had another need altogether, one that flayed his mind raw and shriveled his heart in his chest, though he would not shrink from it. He required to hear just how much his lady wife knew of what he had learned, how much she had been keeping from him.

11

I
sabel roused from a ravishing dream to feel an exquisite caress on the very peak of her breast. So sensitive had she become to such things of late that she was instantly awash in desire. She made a small sound deep in her throat and tried to turn toward that touch. She could not. Rand lay with one elbow propped on the mattress beside her and a heavy knee across hers, so she was wedged between his arm and his lower body.

She slept without clothing, as most did in summer. He had eased the sheet from her so her breasts were bare. Now he touched her with only the sword-calloused surface of one palm, brushing in small circles above her nipple so he barely skimmed the tight and tender bud.

She lifted her lashes by slow degrees, still not fully awake. Her husband’s face was serious, absorbed. He watched what he was doing, and her reaction, as if nothing had ever been so fascinating. To be touched with such attentiveness was stirring beyond any mere caress.

“You are late to bed this night,” she said with the beginning of a smile.

“I had things to do.”

“Did you?” she asked, but with little curiosity. There was heat in the depths of his gaze that she had learned to recognize. Sleeping was not his intention, she thought, now that he had joined her on the feather mattress. He had discarded his clothing, was completely, rampantly, naked.

“I needed to go a-berrying.”

A small frown pleated the skin between her brows. She wasn’t sure she had heard aright. “Berrying?”

“For these.” He took his palm from her breast and reached to take up a small crock that sat on the mattress near her shoulder.

The crock held raspberries. Their sweet, mellow scent drifted to her. A faint inkling of his intention touched her as she recalled his earlier song, though she could scarcely credit it. “Hardly a task for a knight,” she said, her voice a little husky.

“Oh, I didn’t pick them myself, but only searched them out in town.”

Reaching into the bowl, he took a handful. Gaze intent, he placed the ruby-red berries, one by one, in a deep semicircle from one collarbone to the other, so the line curved just above her nipples. Some few berries would not stay in place on the milky-pale hillocks they traversed, but tumbled down into the valley between them. He bent his head to pick up the truants with lips and tongue and crunch them between his white teeth.

A drawing sensation invaded her lower body. She squirmed a little beneath him. “Rand…”

“Shh,” he said, his warm breath drifting over her breasts.

“What are you doing?”

“Making a necklace to replace the Order of the Garter you put away.” Another pair of berries fell from their places and he followed them, leaving a trail of kisses along their path.

“It isn’t necessary,” she protested on a gasp. “Only let me up, and—”

“Do not deny me, I beg. I have been thinking of this all day.”

“Have you?” The surface of her chest felt on fire. Pulsing heat swirled in her veins. Her heartbeat throbbed under her breasts, adding to the instability of his effort at edible jewelry.

He tipped his head in solemn assent as, abandoning the raspberry chain, he made a small pyramid of berries in the valley where the fallen had congregated. “Since I saw you in the great hall, my mouth has been parched for the taste of these, and of you.”

What woman would not be seduced by such an admission, let alone the sweet suction of his mouth upon her as he captured a berry and her nipple with it? She closed her eyes as intoxication flowed in her veins and the tender, feminine core of her grew overheated, swollen. Though one of her arms was trapped between their bodies, the other was free, and she lifted her hand, threading her fingers into his hair.

He groaned in satisfaction, or so it seemed. A moment later, she felt him shift, reach for something, perhaps more berries.

The next sensation against her skin was different, a sprinkling feeling, as light as a feather. Through her lashes, she watched pale gold sugar drift down from his fingertips, falling onto the berries he had placed. It must have required considerable effort with mortar and pestle to grind it so fine, she thought in near incoherence. Or mayhap it had been David who had been put to that labor. Pray God he had no idea what his master intended with it.

“They will stain, the berries will,” she said with tried reason. “What will Gwynne think?”

“I care not. If she says aught, send her to me.” Rand went on in the same pensive, conversational tone, his gaze rapt as he took another pinch of sugar, watched it drift over her skin. “I saw a friend of yours today.”

“Did…you?” she asked with a catch in her voice as he began, quite gently, to crush raspberries into the sugar-sweetness with a single hard fingertip.

“Leon, Master of Revels.”

Her eyes flew open. “Truly?”

“He seemed quite well. Did you know he was still in the palace?” He spoke against her skin, just before the velvety warmth of his tongue lifted a droplet of sweetened raspberry juice from her nipple, then harried the sensitive bud for more.

“How…how should I?” she answered on a ragged whisper.

“He was not far from our chamber here. I thought you might have been expecting a visit.”

She gave a small shake of her head. “I had no idea he was near.”

Rand pushed another raspberry to the peak of the same rose-red nipple that held his attention. “He wanted to speak with you, felt you would be sympathetic. He seemed…reluctant to accept me as confidant in your stead, but was finally persuaded.”

Her head was beginning to clear, caused in large part by the hint of steel she heard beneath the quiet timbreof Rand’s voice. Ignoring the throbbing between her thighs as best she might, she said, “You fought?”

“How could you think so? Your Leon spoke freely, as he had questions for me in his turn. He wished to know, you see, if I could direct him to Mademoiselle Juliette.”

“Mademoiselle—but why?”

He looked up, his gaze bleak. “I thought you knew. He is troubled over her health and well-being—given that he is her lover and the father of her babe.”

“No,” she whispered, her eyes wide as she searched his face. It was quite impossible, she was sure of it.

“I have his word on it.”

“But that would mean…”

“That he has been unfaithful to you.”

“Not at all,” she said in distraction. If Leon wished Rand to believe such a tale, he must have reason. She should know what it was before she said more. “I told you there was only friendship between us. I was thinking of the king, of how he will feel if he hears of such betrayal.”

“And what if,” he asked in contemplative tones, “Henry has heard it already?”

She sat up, pushing Rand away from her so suddenly that he was thrown back, half off the bed, before he came upright again with the flex of stone-hard stomach muscles. “Then he may have sent the men for Mademoiselle Juliette, after all,” she pointed out. “He could be keeping her shut away until he can be certain to whose child she gave birth.”

“Or he can be preventing her from making a claim against the royal purse for her bastard.”

“While you are suspected of its murder. That’s infamous!”

Instead of an answer, he supported himself on one elbow again, reaching out with his forefinger to follow the trail of raspberry juice and bits of sugared berries that ran from between her breasts to her navel. Eyes shuttered, he smeared the juice down her abdomen and into the triangle of soft, gold-brown hair between her closed thighs. With a soft sound of disapproval, he said, “Just look what you’ve gone and done.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

She came to a breathless halt as he probed among the fallen berries with insinuating thoroughness, raised his finger and licked it. He closed his eyes, groaning with pleasure.

“Rand?” she said in a different tone altogether, one strained in its softness. Heat flared through her, scalding her like the hot, sweet moisture that seeped between her thighs. She forgot to think, forgot even to breathe.

“What?” He felt for the crock of raspberries without taking his eyes from her. Locating it, he emptied it into the small V-shaped opening where her legs came together.

“I don’t see…” she began a little incoherently.

“I do, but no matter. More important business is at hand.” He dipped again into the cluster of crushed and sugared raspberries that bejeweled her soft curls, and sucked the results into his mouth.

“You mean…”

He heaved a sigh of long suffering and turned to his stomach above her, shifting his weight until she opened her legs so he could lodge his upper body between them. Resting on his elbows, he sighed again, blowing his warm breath across her belly, against the center of her being, as he drawled, “It appears I must go a-berrying again.”

Isabel roused as Rand left their bed at daybreak. She watched him covertly as he moved about the shadowed darkness of the chamber, bathing in cold water, dressing without David’s aid in the clothing he had discarded the night before. His bruises from the tournament were fading, she saw as he pulled on his hose, the cut on his forehead almost healed. He had threatened to remove the stitches with his knife tip yesterday, desisting only when she said he would leave more of a scar.

He reached for his shirt, turning it right-side out. She watched the muscles that rippled in his back and along his sides as he pulled it on. She could almost feel them under her fingertips, between her legs. Memories of the night before drifted in her mind and slow heat moved from her curled toes to her hairline. Had she done those things, made those noises, pleaded in such abject need?

She must have. She felt sticky with sugar, berry juice and other liquids she did not care to name. She was incredibly tender in various places due to his fervent attention there. And she could feel, almost certainly, the prick of a raspberry seed under one hip.

Dear God in heaven, were all lovers so tender yet insatiable, demanding yet careful? She could not think so. Husbands, from what she had gathered, most certainly were not.

The mere thought of him tasting her, filling her, plunging into her with a cadence that matched the hard, swift beat of her heart sent a rash of goose bumps shivering over her skin. Almost, she called outto him, reached out for him.

She held back with stringent effort. She must not cling. The desire that had moved him the night before seemed forgotten this morning. He had not touched her before sliding from the bed, did not glance her way now. His mind bent on whatever task or errand taking him abroad, he left the room without a backward glance.

Or it might have been from consideration, because he preferred to let her rest now to be ready when next he desired her, she thought with a sigh. That was acceptable.

Instead of sleeping again, she rose at once. Moving quickly, she flipped the sheets up over the berry stains, and then used the cold water Rand had left to wash the stickiness from her skin. With that done, she turned to her chest to search out something to wear. She hoped to be away from the chamber before Gwynne arrived with her bread and watered wine, before her serving woman found the evidence of how she had passed a part of the night. It was not that she cared overmuch for what Gwynne thought, but she was in no mood to hear her scold.

She was not swift enough. She was still kneeling in front of the chest when Gwynne swept into the chamber with tray in hand. There was nothing to be done except wrap a cloak around her against the early-morning coolness and settle upon a stool to receive her breakfast.

Gwynne bustled about the chamber while Isabel ate. She picked up Rand’s discarded clothing, took away the water left from where they had bathed to dump it down the stool of the garderobe. Returning, she laid out a fresh shift, also a gown of plum silk with a wide and heavy band of rose embroidery at the hem, and a cone-shaped cap, a truncated hennin, for Isabel to wear with her veil.

“My hair,” Isabel began as Gwynne turned toward the bed, but it was too late. The serving woman flung back the sheets Isabel had pulled up and stood staring. Finally, she turned.

“You had your monthlies just before the wedding, milady. Are you injured? Is there aught I can do?”

Isabel felt hot all over, but also knew a mad desire to crow with laughter. “It is not blood.”

“But, milady…”

“Sir Rand had a powerful craving for raspberries, and brought them to bed with him. They…spilled.”

“Ah.” Gwynne turned back to the bed, but not before a flash of understanding passed over her face. “You failed to notice the accident, I see, so lay in the berries. No doubt you were busy with other things.”

“Yes.” Isabel allowed a moment to pass before she spoke again. “Are all men dedicated to bed sport?”

“It’s my belief they think of little else.”

“But do they…?”

“What they do about it depends on the man, and on his lady,” she answered with stolid practicality.

Isabel let that dry assessment pass while watching as Gwynne stripped the feather mattress of its sticky sheets, then covered it again with fresh ones brought from some linen press. She tried to think of any other man of her acquaintance who might give lovemaking so much attention as Rand, but could not imagine it. Their aim seemed to be for their own pleasure in most things, which would surely carry into the bedchamber. The only one who appeared at all likely to view it as a time of endless mutual joy was Leon. But though he might be a tender and even inventive lover, he appeared to lack Rand’s hard strength and stamina.

It was a conundrum, that someone with no claim to be a gentleman should display so surely the gallantry of a courtly knight.

“Do you believe, Gwynne,” she asked after a moment, “that the love of a knight for his lady as shown in the tales of the troubadours is as pure as they pretend? Did a knight, good and true, never bed the lady who held his devotion?”