The Maiden Bride (11 page)

A great, cold weight landed hard in his gut. His office. "Why?"

"Because I expect to find the manorial records there. Bayard's steward must have kept them somewhere central to the daily activities, in an office or the tithe barn, maybe the gatehouse."

In my private solar, wife, high in the keep.
Every word of the last two years written distinctly in his own hand. "I suppose he must have."

"Yes, but where? I found a store of blank paper, ink and quills and sealing wax, but nothing that looked to be the accounting rolls. Have
you
ever come across a chamber that might be such an office?"

"I'm sorry, my lady. I can't help you there." Not until he secured the records
from the solar
and hid them far from her sphere. There were too many of his secrets to be plundered among the lines and numbers. "Come, madam. I'll crack open a few more locks for you."

"You
don't need to."

"Indulge my peace of mind, my lady."

He led her far away from the keep tower,
breaking
every lock they came across until she was too busy with her discoveries to follow him with her mischief.

Then he
slipped
away to the keep tower, where memories slowed his tread to a stop.

The last few
steps up the stairs to the shuttered solar were a daunting distance, rife with the recollection of locking the door against
that careful accounting of
his sins, and his failure to protect the innocent.

He couldn't let Eleanor see the most recent records of the estate; she was far too observant. He was her steward now, and she would soon know his handwriting as well as she knew her own. A cataclysmic error, if she ever made the connection between Bayard and himself.

So he climbed the stairs, just as he had done a thousand times before, dreading the buffeting memories.

Of racing Liam and his laughter up the steps, of catching him halfway and swinging him over his shoulder to gallop into the tower.

Again, Papa!
And so they had made their adventures each night, until the stars winked out.

This had been their refuge—his and his son's. Where the boy had played and learned his Latin and his numbers, where Nicholas had labored over accounts that he'd never paid attention to before, where he'd watched his son sleeping—terrified of the boundlessness of love that seemed to gather strength with every day. His son, tucked away safely against everything but God's confounding will.

Now the chamber smelled of dust and regrets and should-have-beens.

He closed his heart and gathered all his account books and his journals, everything that he'd ever been, and then escaped with them back into the comfortable shadows.

Chapter 10

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"
A
plow harness stored in the silk-chest." Eleanor wheeled another
barrow of goods out of the door of the east tower and thumped down the stairs into the bailey, wishing she had a chamberlain, when
she noticed an odd little man come swaggering through the gate into the sunshine of the inner ward.

He was every inch a bandy-legged fighting cock, with a ragged green band tied across his right eye and a rucksack towering two heads
taller than his stout shoulders. He was trailed by an exceedingly pregnant sow.

The man stopped dead when he saw her, preened a bit, hitched up his jangling pack, and then deepened his swagger in her
direction.

An outlaw. Oh, yes. She knew it for certain,
even before he opened his mouth to ask, "Does this be Faulkhurst castle, missy?"

A housebreaker, without a doubt. A pig stealer, for certain. Arrogant, light-footed, and wearing a whole peddler's cart of things that didn't belong to him.

"Aye, sir, it—"

"Beggar me bald, I should ha' known better than to trust the bastard." The man threw his leather cap to the ground and stomped on it.

"Trust who?"

"Never you mind yourself, missy girl. Here I come all this way 'cause I heard that 'er ladyship was paying folks to live here."

Another wayward soul—and Nicholas wouldn't like this one a bit. "I know for a fact that she is doing just that, sir. You've found the right place. A tithe and a cottage and a—"

"A cottage, too? Here, you say?" He stalked around her on his short legs, his one eye as sharp as two. "Well, it damned well better not be one of those heaps of wattle and daub I just passed in that piss-pot excuse for a village."

Discriminating as well as enterprising.

"Who are you, sir?"

"The name's Mullock." He cocked his head sharply and looked Eleanor up and down with a smile that lacked a tooth at each of its corners. "And who do you be, mistress, when you're at home roosting on your lovely lark's nest?"

An
insolent
outlaw. "See here, Master Mullock, I don't care to know how you found—"

She would have finished setting the man straight about who was in charge here, but an enormous, sun-blotting shadow fell across the space between them and then Mullock was suddenly dangling above her, squirming and croaking like a frog on a fish line, held aloft by the scruff of his tunic by Nicholas's lethal fist.

"Master Nicholas, put him down."

But her steward was striding toward the gatehouse, or toward the jagged teeth of the seacliffs, by the cold fury in his eyes.

"No, Nicholas!" She chased after him, after those rippling shoulders, that broad back. She managed to grab hold of his dagger belt and dig her heels into the rocky ground. Pointless, as she sailed along behind him, a broken rudder to his momentum. "What do you think you're doing, sir?"

He stopped, a solid wall of leather to her colliding motion. He swung around to face her, still dangling Mullock like a spitting cat.

"I'm taking out the refuse, madam."

He started away again. But she was ready this time as she blocked his way with both hands extended, though his chest loomed. "Master Mullock isn't refuse."

"'At's right, I'm—" His protest ended in a gacking sound and more struggling.

"Madam, he insulted you."

Mullock played fisticuffs with the breeze three feet above the ground, while Nicholas ignored him entirely.

"They were words only, sir. It takes a lot more than Master Mullock's coarse little insults to threaten me. I took no offense."

He spoke through his teeth. "Well, I
did."

Mother Mary, she could fall hopelessly in love with all that nostril-flaring outrage. He was defending her as her husband never had, as her father never thought to.

Immense and protective, her shade in the hot sun. What a dear man.

And what a danger to her authority.

"I'm grateful for your concern, Nicholas. But it isn't necessary."

Nicholas couldn't recall a blacker rage, not even in the thickness of battle. Mullock wasn't fit to sweep the sand off the cobbles, yet he knew where his wife was going with her philosophies, and he loathed it with every part of him.

"He's a thief, madam. And a worse villain than that, I'll wager."

"Nicholas. Please. Let's at least hear what Master Mullock has to say for himself."

Not bloody much at the moment. But she was tugging at his belt again, a wife's familiar insistence, a gentle pleading for the life of this cur.

He brought the man closer and gave him this one and only chance. "If you want to live long enough to take another breath, Mullock, you'll speak to the lady Eleanor with the greatest respect."

"I wi—"

"The slightest slip, Mullock, and I'll cut your tongue right out of your fool head and feed it to the crabs. Do you understand me?"

Mullock nodded and flailed. "Down."

Nicholas let go gladly and Mullock splatted onto the cobbles, hacking and coughing as he struggled to his hands and knees. "Didn't know she was yours, milord."

Aye, she was that, and his pulse roared through his ears, leaving a ringing sound that deafened him to all but the whisper:
she's
mine.

"I'm not anyone's, Master Mullock. I am Eleanor Bayard, the lady here at Faulkhurst."

"You? The lady—"

"Master Nicholas here is my steward." She bent down to help the man, to dust him or coddle him, but Nicholas yanked him upright by the scruff, leaving him wide-stanced and staggering.

He had every intention of locking the miscreant in the gatehouse cellar until midnight, then setting him out to sea in a leaky boat at high tide.

"I do apologize, Master Mullock," she said, brushing at the man's elbow, glaring at Nicholas. "We've gotten off to a bad start. But I assure you that you're quite welcome here." She'd sent that as a challenge to him, as though he still couldn't comprehend her logic—total reformation of souls, all because she wished it so.

She gave a gentle push against the center of Nicholas's chest to set him away a step, her palm and soft, cool fingers on the place above his heart, for the space of a breath. He nearly covered her hand to keep it there, but she had already moved past him to apply her balm elsewhere.

"Where do you come from, Master Mullock?"

Exactly Nicholas's question, but for an entirely different reason. Three people happening upon an abandoned castle in the course of a day wasn't a coincidence. It was the work of deliberate calculation.

Or the devil.

Or his very devious wife.

"I come here direct from Greenwich town." Mullock's eye darted from his wife upward to Nicholas, where he stood guard behind her, a place that felt all too fitting. In the full light of the cloudless day her hair gleamed a fiery copper, strewn liberally with gold, barely captured in a plait.

"Greenwich?" She retrieved the man's hat, brushed it off, and gave it back to him. He crushed it like a callow boy suddenly shy with his favorite lass. "What did you do there to get a living wage?"

"I was a—" he glanced at Nicholas, as though he might sense some uncomfortable truth, scoundrel to scoundrel "—well, I was a merchant."

And I am a monk.
"Have you been praying for merchants, my lady?"

"Truly, Master Mullock?" She ignored Nicholas but for that hand again, reaching backward to touch his chest. He captured and held it bundled in his, because he could, and she couldn't do much about it, but tug and then relax. "What kind of merchant?"

Beads of sweat sprang up on Mullock's half brow, dampening the filthy green band. A brigand, about to confess his venal sins in his wife's court of charity toward even the lowest.

"Bought and sold a bit of everything, milady. Ship's cargo, private cartage, movable chattel, the like."

"I can guess whose chattel, Mullock." Nicholas knew exactly what kind of business the man was in. A land pirate, a dealer in stolen goods.

"'Twas mine, sir. Whatever anyone wanted to buy, I was ready to sell."

"Or steal." Nicholas received a pair of scowls for that and a light poke from his wife, too near his tarse for her own good, for his. He let go of her hand and hoped to hell she hadn't noticed more than she should.

"Then you must be very good at knowing the worth of things, Master Mullock."

Mullock stalled, his eye roving between her and Nicholas. He obviously wanted insight into this illogical inquisition before he answered. "Aye. I did a fair lot of business in Greenwich and London."

"If your business was doing fairly, Master Mullock, whatever made you leave?"

"My bloody storehouse burned down a few months back, and everything in it. There was nothing left to me but these clothes."

"Then where did you get all this, Mullock?" Nicholas upended the rucksack onto the ground, disgorging plateware, a harness, a distaff, shoes, and an orange that had hardened to brick.

"Hey! That's mine." Mullock fell onto the pile, just long enough for Nicholas to pick him up again, for Eleanor to shoulder him aside and level a finger at Mullock

"Is that how you came by your treasures?" The question was so piercing and unexpected it made the little man shift his weight. "Well, did you?"

He stubbed his heel into the ground and mumbled, "I collected the stuff as I come here."

"I think you stole it," she said, and Mullock's shoulders sagged.

"Of course he did, madam."

"Aye. I suppose I did."

"Because…
?"
she asked in her perverse inquisition that could lead nowhere.

"Because it were there for me to take."

She glanced up at Nicholas, as though she'd proved her point once again. "Well, then, Master Mullock, you'll be glad to know that you'll never have to steal again. That is, if you choose to stay with us."

"What d'ya mean?"

Bloody hell, she was going to keep him, to cosset a housebreaker. In
his
castle!

"You'll
find the work here backbreaking, but well worth it, a chance to be an honest merchant—for there
are
such creatures in the world. You'll have a tidy cottage in that piss-poor village, land to till, and your pride to cultivate. There's no reason to be looking over your shoulder for the law anymore. It all comes down to freedom, sir. I find it the most satisfying thing in the world. Yours for the asking."

Nicholas never would have credited it, but Mullock had the grace to blush a stark crimson, leaving him stammering.

"If it's all as you say, lady—" Nicholas had never seen such doubt strangled by hope
"—
I'll count myself lucky for having come here after all."

"Well, then, Master Mullock," she said, kneeling to pat the sow and to help the startled man stuff his rucksack with the stolen goods, "I've got just the job for you. And you start right now."

Nicholas knelt as well and tipped her chin toward him so that she'd listen clearly for once, so that she would understand that he forbade her ever being alone with Mullock.

"If he stays, madam, he'll work for
me.
At my side, never out of my sight for an instant. Do you understand? For me alone."

He'd never seen a pair of eyebrows that could so quickly change aspects; from softly soaring to a deadly, hawk-winged dive that would end in bloodied feathers and a whole flock of squawking.

"No," she whispered—only out of deference to the bastard's sensibilities, as though they were perishable and his were not.

"He works with me, my lady."

"I appreciate your advice, steward. But I've an important task for Mullock. If I can spare him next week, you can have him."

You'll stay clear of him, wife, because I'm lord here; and I say so, because I can't have you risking yourself.

"What task, madam?" Whatever it was, he'd take care of it later.