No Will But His (10 page)

Kathryn felt Manox's tongue licking along the length of her cleft, and she had to bite her lips together not to moan.

He licked and he sucked, and he seemed to know things about her body that she did not herself know.

She was torn between horrible embarrassment at what he was doing, this strange kind of kiss that, perforce, could not be natural nor normal, and excitement mounting from her body at the ministrations of his tongue and lips.

He found some part of her that seemed to be a trigger of some sort. The more he licked, the more his tongue played on that spot, Kathryn felt as though pressure were building within her being—a pleasurable, warm, insistent pressure but pressure nonetheless

She put her hands out on either side toward the rough, cold, damp stone walls, afraid she would otherwise utterly lose consciousness and fall, as the pressure built and built till there was nothing else in the world but a desire for a release that she wasn't sure could come or would come.

If she'd not been conscious of the tap tap of the walking stick upon the path outside, she would have let go and screamed her need and her desire for release.

But she dared not and followed the sound in her mind, as the walking stick seemed to distance itself. She wondered if she was dreaming, if it was her desire building up that had caused her to dream this, but at long last, she couldn't but risk it.

As her pleasure reached some sort of apex and mingled waves of release and joy washed over her, making her legs weak and her body tremble, she let out a long moan and then a long sigh.

She would have fallen then, save that Manox caught her. "You taste," he whispered sweetly. "As beautiful as you look and almost as beautiful as you sound."

Chapter Twelve

Kathryn never quite knew how it came to happen, except that Manox's suffering seemed to grow with her yielding and every time she met with him and allowed him to touch her in intimate ways, he wished for more. For a year they met at their music lesson and were proper and right, but she sat through the lessons stiffly and trembling, because she knew what would come after.

Part of it was fear—fear of being discovered and shamed, fear of what the duchess might do if she found what was happening under the chapel stairs. But there was also another type of worry for, though the encounters were pleasurable—or at least often brought her to gasping pleasure—they also were in a way against her will. She enjoyed Manox's hands on her, not because they were Manox's hands, but because they were hands. She enjoyed attention and praise—she'd had so little of it in her life.

But she didn't like Manox, or not outside the common way. He had taught her music, and for this she was grateful, but she did not imagine a future with him. Even her dim memories of her night on the street squired by Thomas Culpepper were more exciting and romantic than all she did with Henry Manox. And a superstitious fear gnawed at her mind that she might have to marry him—that this would be the end conclusion of all her escapades—because the lace thrown onto the dormitory floor had said Henry, and behold, Manox was Henry.

If Kathryn was going to have to spend most of her life obeying a man as though he were God on Earth, then she would surely want it to be a man of some worth and situation. Not Henry Manox, second son, music master, bound to work for what he could get. She knew where the end of that journey lay—she'd been born into it, in the family of a younger son, her impoverished father.

What she did for Manox, she did because she thought it would relieve his suffering. And what she did was never enough.

As he leaned over her during the lesson, to correct the positioning of her fingers—an endeavor that after two years of learning the virginal was quite needless, as her positioning was perfect or as perfect as Henry Manox could teach—and readied to whisper in her ear, she whispered fiercely back, "It is no use, Mr. Manox. Be content with what you have got so far. Be satisfied."

She could see his expression reflected in a bit of silver leaf on the virginal's figured back, and she saw that he had a certain and sure expression when leaning over her, but now the look in his eyes faltered to something like momentary panic, then disbelief. "You can't mean that," he said.

"Be sure I mean it, Master Manox."

"But . . . But we haven't . . ." He let go of her and started pacing, toward the window, then back again, his eyes wild, his hands clasped on either side of his head, as if he were a man ready for Bedlam. "But can you not see my suffering?"

Kathryn played on, hoping the duchess wouldn't hear a long silence in the playing and come to see what was about. "I can see your suffering, yes, but I do not know what I can do to relieve it. What you have asked me to do I've done, but what I've done never seems to relieve your pain, only to bring on a more pronounced bout."

He paced some more. On the keyboard, her fingers flew, heedless, from a traditional ballad to something that more closely resembled a march. She wondered if this was what the priest meant when he talked about a lady's citadel of virtue being under siege. It didn't feel like siege, not unless the conquering armies lay on the floor and writhed about moaning and screaming and telling the resisters to relieve their suffering.

"How can you say you've done all I want?" he asked, as he came behind her and, once more, put his hands over hers, stilling them. "How can you claim my suffering should be quite relieved? Don't you know what the sight of you does to me, the scent of your body, the memories . . . ?"

She shook her hands, trying to dislodge his. "What I do not understand, Master Manox, is what you mean by this. What can you expect me to give you that will quell such intemperate urges?"

"Some token of your affection for me!" He said.

"What token should I show you? I will never be aught with you, and you are not able to marry me."

His hands convulsed upon hers, as though weathering a blow, and they trembled a little, but then he clasped her hands with renewed fervor. His eyes, reflected in the reflective bit of silver designed to figure the summer sun above the pasturing deer and the forest lakes, were wild and desperate. "Only, only, Mistress Howard, this one token give me. Let me do no more than I've done before, but only touch you the same way in the light and see your body. Only this token I crave, and then I'll let you be."

"In the full light?" she asked. "It cannot be done."

"It can," he whispered, his mouth close by her ear and his words passionate. "Only hark to me, it can. If we go into the church at our customary time, we can get behind the altar, and there no one will see us if they only casually glance into the church."

"But what if my grandmother or the vicar should . . ."

"Ah, Mistress Howard. For a year we've been meeting beneath the stairs, and we've seen signs of life there but once. Surely our luck won't desert us now. And it's just the one time, and then on my honor I will let you be."

"On your honor?" she asked, to verify.

"On my honor I will, Kathryn Howard. I shall teach you the virginal and nothing more."

Kathryn took a deep breath. Her fear of carrying on such illicit relations in the church, where the holy sacrament would be exposed, was as strong as ever, but so was her wish to be rid of these demands of Manox's, these impetuous sighs and sad, imposing moods. She shook her hands to rid them of his, and she said, "If you will promise me, then, on your honor as a gentleman," she said. "That this be your intention and no more, and that once this is done you won't any further importune me, I'll let you. But the once only."

She felt, even as she said it, that there was some certain lack of force to her position, for before to, she had acquiesced to the one time which now extended to hundreds of times, in the dark space beneath the stairs.

He inclined his head. "On my honor as a gentleman," he said. "I so promise."

"What promise you," the duchess's sharp voice asked from the door.

They both jumped, in confusion, both probably reddening to their hair roots, and both quite disoriented. Kathryn's mind raced madly. How long had the duchess been there and why had they not heard her approach. What had she heard, and more important, what would she make of it.

Kathryn took a deep breath and then another, and between one breath and the next, she realized the duchess could not have heard anything incriminating, or at the very least nothing fatally so. Had she heard such, then she would surely have been laying about with her walking stick and probably sending Manox off on the spot. Instead she sounded merely curious.

"Why, nothing, Your Grace," she said, without getting up from the virginal and fumbling with the music on its stand. "Only what a start you gave us, coming in cat foot like that."

"I did not cat foot, wench, only you and this fine gentleman here were all involved in some hot dispute. I would know about what."

"Only this, madam," Kathryn said, hearing Manox's breathing still irregular and knowing that if left to himself he would make quite an incoherent protest. "That Master Manox believes I cannot play this quite difficult piece of music without error. He says if I do, then he will be done with me as a pupil, and I need no more attend his lessons and he will no further importune me with his corrections."

The duchess gave a low cackle, and said, "Oh, but you are a wench with sauce. Your cousin Anne . . ." She hesitated. "Well, it might have brought her low, her sharp tongue and her demanding ways, but then even now, I wouldn't put it past her to bring the king around her finger again, even from the Tower as she is. This whey-faced wench they say that the king is all taken with is no stop for my granddaughter Anne."

Kathryn inclined her head. She had heard about the trial and that her cousin was in the Tower, accused of bewitching the king and of many other foul deeds that no one would speak of directly in front of Kathryn. The duchess said it was all falsehood and lies, but Kathryn wondered if it were true. Not the foul deeds, of which, at any rate, she knew nothing, but the witchcraft. For, as she got older and more advanced in love lore, Kathryn learned that if one bewitched a man and attached him to her by those foul means, he would surely turn on her as the devil collects his due. Surely that described the mad desire and the oh-so-fast fall in the affair between the king and Kathryn's cousin.

"Well, girl," the duchess said. "Are you going to play, then? You have Master Manox's word for it that if you do and do it well, he will no more importune you. Isn't it so, Master Manox?"

"Indeed," Manox answered, his voice trembling only slightly. "Indeed, Your Grace, it is."

"Of course," the duchess said, sitting herself down in her customary chair by the virginal, which she occupied whenever she came to hear Kathryn play. "Mind you that to take the word of the grandson of a yeoman for that of a gentleman might very well lead you astray yet, but for the nonce we'll pretend Master Manox's word is good, and we'll try his forbearance."

Kathryn lowered her head and took a deep breath and played, her fingers flying on the keyboard as though self-willed and habit guided, though she'd done this piece no more than twice before.

When she finished, there was silence for a moment, and then the duchess cackled. "Well, I trow, Master Manox, that she has bested, and she is done with your lessons now. What say you?"

"I'd say she's performed admirably," he said. "And that from this day forth, I'll importune her no more."

Chapter Thirteen

It was cold and dim in the church, though neither so cold nor so dark as it had been in their customary space. When Kathryn got there, Manox was already waiting, sitting behind the altar, so that he would be wholly obscured from the door.

When he saw her arrive, his eyes quickened, reflections striking deep in the green eyes, like light seen through murky water. "You came," he said.

"Aye, and I keep my word," she said. "And so keep you yours."

"Oh, indeed," he said. "Indeed, I will."

"It was not easy," she said, "to leave, for I had to entertain the duchess with many a madrigal and air, and only that her chamberer Mary Lassells came to call to her for some duty or another did she agree to go and leave me alone long enough to come here."

He smiled at her. "But you did come."

She saw in the complacent smile the beginning of his belief that she would come here again and again at his command, just as she had come to the space beneath the stairs, and she thought it best to nip the thought in the bud. "Only the once, Master Manox, and then, remember you, your promise to importune me no further—for this is the way that fools behave when nothing may come of it."

"If only I had a name," he said softly. "Or a fortune."

"But you have neither," she said, cruelly, nipping such dreams in the bud. "And therefore enough now. I promised to give you this one token, to put your suffering to an end, but an' if you claim that I only inflamed you further, nothing can be done, but I'll have to tell the duchess you've been importuning me for favors beyond your station."

He looked as though he were about to reply to her, but instead he shook his head and said, gently, "Only this once. Now sit you, fair Kathryn."

Kathryn sat. The stone floor behind the altar was so cold that she could feel the chill even through her heavy brocaded skirts. And it was not just the normal flagstones back there but one long, unbroken stone, with faded names and dates on it. Some ancestor of the Norfolk clan lay buried there, Kathryn thought, and in thinking so shivered, imagining what that worthy, probably old and humorless, would think of his descendant Kathryn disporting herself upon the grave stone.

She crossed herself reflexively and kissed the back of her hand to ward off any evil that might come to her from this act. And found Manox's eyes on her. "Do you always cross yourself, then, before these amusements?"

Kathryn couldn't answer but only fix him with her unvarying glare until he chuckled, as if to convince her he meant nothing by his comment, and reached over, pulling her to him, kissing her lips tenderly, once, twice.