A Rose in Splendor (14 page)

“Is he man enough to carve up a plump partridge named Miss Deirdre Fitzgerald, that’s worry enough for me.”

Deirdre stepped out of her gown as it fell to her ankles. “You need not worry. After our introduction, I doubt he will ever think of me as anything other than a dirty, spoiled child.”

“If ’tis so, then shame on ye,” Brigid replied. She bent down and picked up the discarded gown, shaking her head as she spied a rip in the hem. “A lad likes his lass to have a bit of sparkle in her, and ye’ve given him nothing to set his heart upon.”

“Perhaps he’d prefer this display.” Deirdre pirouetted about the room, her petticoats lifting in a swirl to show slim ankles, strong shapely calves, and the neat indentation of dimpled knees.

Brigid clucked her tongue in disapproval.

Deirdre flung herself across her bed and rolled onto her back, tucking her arms behind her head. “Oh, Brigid, do not pout. I have no designs on the forbidding MacShane. Conall said he was once bound for the Church. Perhaps he keeps his priestly vows.”

Brigid did not reply. She had seen no more of Killian MacShane than a second-story window would allow, but that was enough to convince her that he was not a man much given to thwarting his desires. A tall man with powerful shoulders, he had stood in the Fitzgerald yard and appraised the house as though he had come to purchase it.

“He’s come for something, and that’s a fact!” she muttered.

*

Deirdre glanced about the dining hall in disappointment. “What do you mean? Did you drive him away, Da?”

“Aye, I might have, had he dared show his face to me,” Lord Fitzgerald grumbled from his place at the head of the table. “Yer brothers, like scared rabbits, hied off with MacShane before I got a look at him.” He eyed his daughter suspiciously. “Is that a new gown?”

Deirdre touched the lace at the neckline of her new
rose-silk gown and said, “This? Da, you never remember which you’ve seen and which you haven’t.”

Lord Fitzgerald nodded absently. It was true that he never paid much attention to his daughter’s gowns. What he paid attention to was the modiste’s bill. “Well, ’tis a very pretty picture ye make, lass, and sorry I am there’s none to see it.”

Deirdre took her place at the table feeling defeated in a battle she had not fully realized she was waging. “Where did Conall and Darragh take him? ’Tis like them to prevent me from amending my wretched impression of the morning.”

“They’ve gone to Nantes, whoring, nae doubt,” Lord Fitzgerald grumbled. “I do not expect them before morning.”

Lady Elva smiled at her stepdaughter. “There’ll be another, better time to make a good impression.”

“MacShane’s no man to impress, now or ever,” Lord Fitzgerald said. “I’ll nae have his like eyeing me daughter. Ye’re to keep to yer room when he’s about.”

“Da!” Deirdre looked from her father to her stepmother and back. “Is the man so much a brute that you fear he will snatch me out from under the nose of a Fitzgerald man? If ’tis so, I’d best wed an army, and quickly, for there’s no protection to be had under this roof.”

Lord Fitzgerald snorted. “Ye best be wed to yer supper before yer tongue snatches it from ye.”

Deirdre picked up her fork. Her father’s mood was unalterable where MacShane was concerned. It made her all the more determined to learn what it was about the man that he mistrusted and feared.

“He is a most polite young man,” Lady Elva offered into the silence of the meal. When Deirdre glanced at her in surprise, she added, “He was most solicitous in offering his sympathies upon learning of the weakened wits of my daughter.”

“
Wirra
!
The lad’s mad!” Lord Fitzgerald answered.

Deirdre hid her smile with a spoonful of soup. So, MacShane had learned the truth, or part of it. The
summer was beginning to show promise. MacShane might not be an ogre, but two minutes in his company had convinced her that he would not be an easy man to know…and there was nothing she liked so much as a challenge.

Chapter Six

Fey crouched in a midnight-dark alley on the waterfront of Nantes and waited until the last of the footfalls died. Safe. For a short while. In the morning, Darce would come looking for his little beggar, the wicked iron buckle of his belt flashing in the morning light.

No, that was wrong. Darce would never come looking for anyone again. Darce was dead.

Fey cringed, remembering how that buckle had gleamed in the lantern light as Darce had swung it. Sniffling back sobs, Fey reached back to rub one of the many welts that belt had raised. Uncertain whether the sticky substance was sweat or blood, Fey sniffed it. Blood.

“Damn Darce’s rotten black heart to hell!” Fey muttered and angrily wiped away new tears. Who would have expected gold to be among the coins a stranger threw a beggar’s way?

Fey pulled the ragged shirt from the abused skin and shivered. Darce had not believed it. Darce had been certain that Fey had cut the purse of an aristocrat, something that Darce strictly forbade because theft was a hanging offense.

“Beg your livelihood, do not steal it!” Darce always
warned the ragamuffin children he protected from the workhouse.

Fey was only one of many whom Andre Darce had tutored and then sent into the streets to beg from passersby. Each child kept one-fourth of whatever he begged. In exchange, Darce gave him a dry warm place to sleep, an evening meal, and protection from the workhouse and the other beggars who vied for key positions on the streets. They all feared Darce and left his brats alone. In spite of the occasional flare of Darce’s brutal temper that earned the offender bruises, Fey had had little to complain about.

The girls Darce kept did not fair as well. By the age of eleven, they spent most of their hours on the street after dark. The boys’ lives were the better part…until now.

“Base-born bastard off a pock-ridden whore!” Fey mumbled in Gaelic without conscious thought. Gaelic had been the language of Fey’s mother, but she had died when Fey was eight, and life in Brittany had taught the Irish child that French and Breton were better languages for begging in France. So, too, had Fey learned the value of new ways of dressing and acting, ways that no one had uncovered.

With dark hair cropped short and wearing breeches and a shirt, everyone who saw Fey assumed that they saw a young boy. That was not surprising. After four years of the masquerade, barring an incident or two when the call of nature had nearly given her away, Fey had ceased to think of herself as a girl.

Yet, the time of hiding was coming to an end. And then what? Life in the streets as one of Darce’s whores? No, not Darce’s whore. Darce was dead.

“Should have hid the gold,” Fey murmured. Instead, as always, Darce had been offered a fair share of it and Fey had lost it all. Every beggar in Nantes knew of the peculiar turn of mind that made Darce dangerous. ’Twas said a child was never seen again once he had crossed Darce.
It had done Fey no good to protest that the gold was not stolen
. Darce had not believed it.

When the buckle had first bitten into Fey’s skin, she had scarcely believed it. There had been beatings before, but not with a force that tore skin. When Fey realized that
Darce would not stop but was bent on murder, she had done the only thing possible and pulled her dagger in defense.

Fey wrapped her thin arms about her bony knees, wishing she could shrink into a tiny speck and disappear before daylight. Yet, there was total resignation in the sigh she uttered. Right was useless. There was scarcely a sailor or pub owner who would not recognize her. It was one of the drawbacks to life with Darce. When they learned that Darce had been murdered, none of the townspeople would hide her. They would seek out Darce’s murderer, and when they did, Fey would die.

Fey gave short consideration to hiding aboard a ship but dismissed it. The worst time of her life—other than this night—had been during a short excursion aboard a ship where seasickness colored every memory of the voyage. No, even a slit throat was preferable to that tortured living death. So, she must wait to die, all because the foolish generosity of a well-to-do stranger had ended in death.

“Served the bastard right!” Fey continued as the desire for revenge flowed in warming pulses through her bruised body. If she ever found the stranger who had tricked her with gold, she would drive the sharp length of her blade through his liver, too.

Fey suddenly shot to her feet. If she was to die, she would not die easily or as a coward. She had perhaps five hours before daylight, time enough to find a new hole to hide in.

*

Killian felt more alive and less angry with the world as he and his companions followed a meandering street through the dockside of Nantes. It was nearly daybreak. The brandy humming in his veins would soon claim him in sleep. Only the promise of a clean, louse-free, goosedown mattress awaiting him at the Fitzgeralds kept him from dismounting and taking a bed in one of the boardinghouses they passed.

He glanced at Conall and Darragh, who rode ahead of
him. Darragh dozed as his horse walked a familiar path. Their loquaciousness had been drowned by spirits and for that Killian was grateful. The Fitzgerald brothers shared one of the more lamentable qualities of their countrymen: they loved the sound of their own voices. For hours he had been subjected to story after story until it was all he could do to keep from deserting their company and the tavern. To ease his frustration, he had drunk far more than he was accustomed to doing.

Killian smiled in the darkness. He felt a fluid ease in his body and mind that was all too rare. Spirits usually left him in the mood to sermonize. Well, he had done his sermonizing that morning, on the streets of Nantes. The young scoundrel had no doubt accounted himself blessed to have earned five gold francs for nothing more than a thrashing.

What a fool he had made of himself. He had tossed away the coins without glancing at them. Five gold francs! That would teach him to act in the heat of righteous anger. “A costly lesson, to be sure,” he murmured.

The
clip-clop
of their horses’ hooves made the only sound on the street as Killian momentarily closed his eyes. Immediately the image of gray-green eyes and bright wheat-ripe hair stirred behind his lids. The thought of her stirred him more deeply than he had expected. She was lovely, like a rare marsh orchid sprouted suddenly in the midst of a bog. The fact that her beauty was marred by a wandering mind made him unaccountably sad.

Yet, he was too experienced in the ways of the world to wish her different. Had she her full wits, doubtless the lass would trade on her good looks. If guile were added to that loveliness, she would be a hardened flirt, an aspiring courtesan worthy of a king. It was just as well that her feeble mind kept her from knowing the power she might possess over men. Perhaps it was God’s grace given to a lovely fragile spirit. Still, it was bitter to contemplate.

Suddenly there was a movement across his path. It might have been nothing more than a cat’s paws on the sandy lane, but then again…Killian reined in his horse as the others went on ahead.

A shadow moved, ejected from the gloom of a doorway with unexpected speed. It was much too thick and brief to seem human, but Killian did not wait to find out whether it was a ghost or his imagination. His right hand reached for his pistol as his left hand shot out to grasp at the wind. He did not encounter empty air. His fingers closed hard and tight on a small fist flashing a blade. The fist twisted in his. Killian held tight, muttering a curse as the blade pricked him in the arm.

Bending from the saddle, he expected to face the man who had dared to attack him, but when he looked down into the gloom he saw nothing. If not for struggling hard within his grip he would have doubted that anything had happened, for the Fitzgerald brothers were riding ahead, the only sounds in the lane made by their horses.

“Damn!” Killian felt the blade prick him again, this time in the thigh. In anger he wrenched up his prize and found himself dangling a boy by the arm. For the second time this day he had been accosted by a child. He tucked his pistol back into his pocket and with his free hand jerked the knife from the boy with a vicious twist.

The boy yelped but Killian was too angry to care. He stuck his face close to the child’s and said in French, “What a place is this, that children plague men!”

“Let go of me, ye great stinking whoreson!” came back the tear-choked reply in Gaelic. The boy kicked and twisted as he dangled by his captured arm.

It was too dark to see, but a feeling of recognition stole over Killian. Throwing a leg over his saddle, he dismounted without releasing the child. Then, looking back down the lane, he spotted a lantern’s glow at the far end. Without saying a word, he dragged the boy toward it.

“Wait! Where are ye taking me? Stop!
Peste! Merde!”
the child cried, only to be silenced by a box to the ear.

“Yell again and I’ll choke you and have done with,” Killian answered in Gaelic. Immediately the boy ceased struggling.

The lantern was posted at the corner near the entrance to a pub. A couple stood within its glow but they were
occupied in an embrace and did not give heed to the man and boy who came toward them.

“You, ratling, who are you?” Killian muttered as he swung the boy around to face him.