At the Queen's Summons (24 page)

She had no answer, so she scowled at him.

“Pippa,” he said, “if it means that much to you, we can claim I forced you to come along as hostage.”

“That,” she said, “would not be so far from the truth.”

“We could arrange for you to be rescued by the English.”

The idea of being taken in by strangers was repellent to her, but she could not let him see the truth. She drew herself up and said. “Ha! You'll not be rid of me that easily, my lord.”

 

Aidan saw that she was close to shattering. Pippa, sturdy survivor of the London underworld, was about to be driven to weeping by the only man who cared about her.

He wanted to touch her again, to gather her to his chest, but touching was dangerous. His blood was still on fire from their embrace. He might not be able to stop himself a second time.

“Tell me more of this reward,
a gradh
,” he said, brushing a curl away from her temple.

“The queen made me an offer. If I persuaded you to eat, she'd help me. All you could think of was your fast, and your honor—your stupid, precious honor.”

The lash of anger was sudden, unexpected. “You and the queen made a bargain? That's why you wanted me to eat?” As quickly as the fury had seized him, it fled. So she had made a bargain, using him as leverage. It was no worse than what he had done.

“Ah, Christ.” He grabbed her and pulled her against his chest. “I didn't know.”

“She was going to summon all the noblewomen of the realm, get an army of clerks to search the records.” She clutched at the front of his shirt. “Nothing would have
come of it. I know you're thinking that. But it was my only chance. And now it is gone.”

“You should have explained it all,” he said. “Nay, it would have made no difference. I would not have compromised myself even to give you your most cherished wish. The true cost would have been exacted from the people of this district.”

She blew out a disgusted breath. “I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if something terrible happened here.”

He ground his teeth together to keep himself silent. He knew in the very marrow of his bones that she was Philippa de Lacey.

Instead of telling her, he forced himself to think matters through. The lofty de Laceys might reject her, which would be more painful than never knowing.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered into her hair. “Somehow I'll get you back to England. You'll be blameless, I swear it.”

She pulled back to look up at him. “If all of your eloquent speeches were solid gold, I should be a wealthy woman indeed.”

He stood and helped her to her feet. “I never promised I would be good for you.”

The breeze tousled her curls, which by now had grown nearly to her shoulders. “You were good to me. Never doubt it.”

He took her hand, and they started up the hill together. If someone had told him that one day his best friend in the world would be a Protestant Sassenach street waif, he would have laughed them out of his presence.

Yet the most unlikely of circumstances had come true.

At the top of the hill, O Mahoney met them. His face pinched and white, the scout sat upon a lathered Connemara-bred mount.

“What news?” Aidan asked. “Have you been to Ross Castle?”

“I have seen it.” O Mahoney glanced at Pippa and switched to Gaelic. “Ill news. The ramparts are flying English colors.”

 

By the time the party rode into Aidan's district, Pippa had ceased complaining. She was still terrified of riding on horseback, but all her protests fell on deaf ears.

The sharp sea air gave way to the rich green scents of woodland and pasture. The forest thickened, and in some places, branches and debris lay across the path.

“Tis plashing,” Donal Og explained, gesturing at a heap of broken trees. “The Irish damage the paths through the woods to slow the advance of the Sassenach.”

She shivered. This war was real here, imminent. Not just some vague idea murmured about at court. The trees soared to the sky, the trunks like massive pillars, the leaves a translucent canopy. Velvet moss grew on the forest floor. Sunlight, filtered through the leafy awning, glowed with a verdant luminescence. A hush hung in the fecund air.

No wonder the Irish believed in enchantment. Only magic could have created a place so holy and silent. It was like standing in a cathedral; the star-shaped leaves, shot through by sunlight, were glass panes in the most glorious of windows.

“It was a fine, grand place to be a boy, long ago,” Donal Og said, kneeing his mount to draw abreast of Pippa.

“This is where you and Aidan played?” She thought it extraordinary for a person to have ties to a particular spot on earth. That was an alien notion to her.

“Playing? Nay, it was all serious business. I was always the bigger lad, but he was the braver and the better thinker, though if you tell him I said so, I'll damn you for a liar.”

“Your secret is safe with me.” She pictured them, one dark, one fair, darting through greenwood groves or leaping across one of the many burbling springs or hiding in the cleft of a rock.

“No wonder London seemed so strange to you,” she said. “This is a place apart. A wild, magical world.”

“Like all magic, it has its perils.” Donal Og clicked to his horse and trotted to the fore to fall in step with Aidan.

They had reached the edge of the forest. The shadowy woods opened out like a set of lofty doors flung wide. With a cry of wonder, Pippa shaded her eyes. The forested hills surrounded a misty blue-and-green valley. Lakes dotted the landscape, and here and there little rock-bound bits of tillage hugged the shores.

Very far away, on a jut of land pushing out into the largest of the lakes, stood a castle. The massive tower was built of light-colored stone, surrounded by lofty battlements near the top. Small, defensive windows pierced the walls and ramparts.

High atop the tower flapped the banner of England.

“That is Ross Castle,” she said.

“Aye, it is.” Aidan's voice sounded strained.

They rode the rest of the way in silence. Aidan's one hundred soldiers were already encamped on the shores of the middle lake, awaiting orders.

The main tower of the castle shone like alabaster, the foundations formed by a great upheaval of ancient rock. A narrow neck of land led to an imposing gate with an arching guardhouse. The iron teeth of the raised portcullis gave the menacing look of an evil grin.

A guard stepped out to challenge them. “Halt, while I summon the master.”

Aidan barely glanced at the guard. He rode straight on through the arched gate while the Englishman spluttered and gesticulated wildly. “Attack!” he called. “Invasion! The barbaric hordes are upon us!”

Donal Og's fist swung down like a hammer and clobbered the guard on top of the head. The man staggered against a wooden rail, clung there briefly, then sank in a daze.

Two faces peered from a half door at the front of the stables. “Come along, then,” Aidan called in an exasperated voice. “Since when do you fear the O Donoghue Mór in his own house?”

One lad shoved the other along in front of him, and they emerged from the stables. Aidan dismounted and tossed his reins to the taller boy, a skinny lad with flame-red hair. “And how are things with you, Sorley Boy Curran?”

The boy hunched his shoulders and let the reins fall without catching them. “Begging your pardon, my lord, we've been told we must serve a different master now.”

The other lad, like enough to Sorley Boy to be his brother, nodded fearfully. Pippa held her breath and watched Aidan, even though she wanted to shield her eyes from the expression on his face. She recognized it, the numb shock of betrayal. There was something especially poisonous when treachery came from children.

The boys would never know what it cost Aidan to smile at them and hold out the reins once again. He spoke in Gaelic. The lads exchanged a glance, replied to Aidan with relief in their voices, then set to putting up the horses.

“This way.” Aidan led them to a stairway that spiraled
up the outside of the main keep. Aidan seemed a stranger to Pippa. His face was set and grim, his strides long and purposeful.

As they climbed the lofty tower, she could smell boiled cabbage and roasting meat, and in a few moments they found themselves in a huge hall with an arched ceiling made of plastered wicker. At one end of the gallery was a broad hearth and table where a host of enemy invaders sat eating their midday meal.

All four of them saw the face of the new master of Ross Castle. Pippa blinked at him in astonishment. “God's holy nightgown,” she whispered.

Aidan made a dangerous sound in his throat, a combination of growl and Gaelic curse. The expression raised prickles on her arms. She could only wonder what it did to the folk in the hall.

The O Donoghue Mór strode to the high table. His huge hand shot out and lifted the usurper off his bench. “Enjoying your stay, my lord?” he asked in a voice Pippa had never heard before.

Even growing red-faced and goggle-eyed from lack of air, Richard de Lacey still managed to look ridiculously handsome.

“I…can…explain,” he choked out.

Four English guards rushed forward.

Richard made a quelling gesture with his hands, and the guards subsided. Aidan loosened his hold a notch. “Talk,” he barked.

“I
shall explain,” said a strong female voice.

A remarkable woman stepped down from the dais. She was dressed from neck to toe in unrelieved black, and she kept her head covered by a thick, heavy cloth.

The lack of adornment only made her beauty more apparent. It was like seeing the face of the moon in a cloud
less night sky. She had perfect, smooth cheeks and expressive eyes, a bowed mouth and small white hands. A prayer-book pouch hung from her waist.

“Felicity,” Aidan said in a cold voice, “be quick with your explanations, or dear Richard might expire from lack of air.”

Felicity? Pippa looked to Donal Og and Iago for a hint, but both of them studiously avoided her eyes.

“I invited Lieutenant de Lacey to occupy Ross Castle,” said the mysterious Felicity.

Aidan relinquished his hold on Richard, who sank to the bench and loosened his collar.

“Oh, that is fascinating,” Pippa burst out, unable to contain her outrage. “By what right do you offer the home of the O Donoghue to strangers?”

The silence in the hall was absolute. Felicity stared at Pippa, regarding her with such false pity and false tolerance that Pippa wanted to choke her.

Felicity walked with measured paces to stand directly in front of Aidan. She held out her dainty porcelain hand. She stared up at him, although she directed her answer at Pippa.

And somehow, in some remote place in her mind, Pippa felt it coming, the thunderhead of emotion hurling like a storm toward her. She braced herself for agony beyond enduring, already knowing what she would hear.

“What right have I? By my right,” said the poetically lovely Felicity, “as Aidan's wife.”

T
he day Aidan O Donoghue agreed to wed Felicity Browne was a day like any other—with one exception.

It's true that the abbot frowns on superstition, but I, Revelin of Innisfallen, do swear on the heavenly bosom of my own sinless mother that I heard a fairy horn blow that fateful morn.

To God, Aidan felt he had no choice. Fortitude Browne, the father of Felicity, came up from trade and had what the Sassenach would call Ambitions. He wanted his daughter to marry a lord. Even an Irish lord would do.

Constable Browne required the marriage as part of the peace he made with Ronan. Of course Ronan refused, but Aidan saw a way to bring about peace in the district. Ah, but it was a fine rage that came on Ronan. He did, quite literally, have a “fit” of temper.

Aidan is convinced he slew his father by his own hand. Still, he wed her—a Protestant and Puritan to boot—just as he had promised.

She was beautiful in the flawless fashion of a marble
saint—holy, remote, untouchable. It was that quality, perhaps, that drew young Aidan. The challenge of her. The promise that beneath her porcelain Sassenach surface lay a loving heart.

It was the one time Aidan should have listened to his father. It was the one time the instincts of Ronan O Donoghue were right.

—Revelin of Innisfallen

I
f Aidan could have slain a person with his eyes, he would have done so, and cheerfully. He hated Felicity with a virulence so sharp and toxic that he wondered how she could still be standing at this moment.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he murmured for her ears only. “You're supposed to be gone.”

“Did you think, my lord, that Revelin's feeble annulment petition to Bishop O'Brien would drive me off?” Her hand in his felt cold as stone.

He pulled away and looked at Pippa. There she stood with her heart in her eyes, and in that instant he understood.

She loved him. No matter what she said, no matter how loudly she protested it, she loved him.

And now his betrayal had struck a fatal blow to her soul. He looked into her eyes and could see her love for him dying by inches.

“His wife,” Pippa said in a small, clear voice. “You are the wife of the O Donoghue Mór.”

Felicity's smile softened to perfect sympathy, and only Aidan could see the hard falseness in her expression.
“We have been married nigh on a year. And who might you be?”

“Nobody.” Pippa took one step back, then another. “No one at all.”

And with that, she turned and fled.

A curse wrenched from Aidan's throat as he followed her out of the hall and up another flight of the stone steps. Clearly unfamiliar with the layout of the castle, Pippa came to a cramped landing, hurled her shoulder against a low door and burst through it.

This led along the open-air battlement overlooking Lough Leane. She paused between two square-topped merlons.

He froze several feet away from her. For a moment a horrible terror seized him, the same fear he had felt when he had seen her on the sea cliffs, swaying as if in a dream world. She had only to thrust herself forward a few more inches, and she would plummet to her death hundreds of feet below in the rock-bound lake.

“Surely I'm not worth dying for,” he said softly.

She looked at him with dazed hurt glazing her eyes and her face pinched and pale. “Never think it,” she said.

He chanced a few steps forward and leaned against the wall. “See that island out there?”

He pointed, and she looked out across the blue glass surface of the lake. “Innisfallen?” she asked.

“Aye.”

“I can see the roof of a church through the trees. Do you think your friend Revelin is still there, or do you suppose Richard de Lacey ousted the canons as well?” She spoke with perfect, understated acid.

“I imagine they are all still there. The place is of little strategic value.”

“I will be interested to meet Revelin,” she said. “To
meet the man who was your tutor, charged with turning you into a man of honor.” She regarded him with piercing sympathy. “What a disappointment you must be to him.”

“That,” he said, hating himself, “is no doubt correct.” He forced himself to look at her when all he wanted was to hang his head in shame. “Pippa, what shall I say to you? Shall I tell you I'm sorry? Tell you how she came to be my wife and why she is no wife to me at all?”

That, at least, sparked a flicker of interest. “Telling me all of those things explains nothing. Not why you deceived me. Not why you took me in and gave me gifts and treated me with more kindness than anyone ever treated me before. Not why you held me in your arms and kissed me, caressed me, made me—” She bit her lip and turned her face away.

“At least hear me out,” he said.

Other than the weary sigh of the wind, he heard no sound. He held his breath until she looked back at him and asked, “Why?”

“Because I care about you, Pippa. God forgive me, I have from the very start.”

The breeze corrugated the lake with shimmering ripples. She stared at him, her mouth agape. She looked as fragile and beautiful as a new-made flower, uncertain of her position or what to do next.

Finally, after a long, windy silence, she kicked her heels against the castle wall. “Why should I believe you?”

“You should not. You should be able to hear the truth in my voice and feel it when your very touch makes me burn,
a gradh.
”

“Lust. That's what I see in you. Lust and deceit.” She raked a hand through her wind-mussed hair. “I can't think of a single reason I should believe a word you utter.”

“Don't believe words. Believe what you see and feel.”

“I don't know what I feel,” she said. “I wish I could rage at you and throw things, but I feel too numb for that.” She looked at him over the top of the merlon. Her face was soft with suffering and bewilderment. “Why didn't you tell me?”

A shudder of self-disgust passed over him. “At first, there seemed no reason. You were a stranger who did not need to know my business. Later, I thought I would leave you at Queen Elizabeth's court, never to see you again. I did not even speak of Felicity to my friends, much less acquaintances I didn't expect to last.”

He winced at the stark pain in her eyes. “But you lasted. You came to mean the world to me. I would have done anything not to hurt you, Pippa. I said nothing because I knew the day would come that I would have to leave you. Selfish as I am, I wanted to leave you with a fondness for me in your heart, and so I said nothing. By the time I realized you were coming to Ireland with me…” He hesitated and studied the broken-backed line of Macgilly-cuddy's Reeks in the distance, outlined by the marbled blue sky.

“After that, I just couldn't find the words. I hoped I would never have to speak of her to you. I had a letter from Revelin stating that an annulment would be granted. She was supposed to have gone back to her father. Even so, there is no excuse. I should have told you about her.”

“Then tell me now.”

He got up and then sank to one knee before her, holding out one hand. “Please come down.”

She hesitated, and that brief distrust cut at him. He had lost her. The old Pippa would have leaped into his arms. At last she took his hand and stepped down.

“I wish we could be alone somewhere, far from the rest of the world,” he said.

“You wish for the impossible. The world will never go away.” She shivered and hugged herself. “Neither will your wife.”

He stood, dropped her hand and gave a harsh laugh. “Aye, here she is, having surrendered my castle to the enemy.” He propped a shoulder on the stone wall and listened for a moment to the wind off the treetops. “Still, that does not excuse my deception.”

“She is the reason you never made love to me, isn't she?”

He nodded. “For the very worst of reasons, I pledged a vow to her. I am bound to keep that vow.”

Pippa gave a self-deprecating smile. “At least that's a crumb for my vanity. Each time you stopped and put me aside, I thought something about me repelled you.”

If she had not been so gravely earnest, he would have laughed. Instead he said, “Quite the opposite,
a stor.
There is nothing in the world I find more beautiful than you.” He smiled. “Does that surprise you? Don't look so pale, love. From the first time I saw you performing at St. Paul's, I found you completely captivating. I even liked it when you sang in the bath. Ah, Pippa, you worked so hard to entertain me so I would keep you close. What you didn't know is that I wanted to keep you forever. But I could not.” He slid a glance at the archway leading back into the keep.

“Why did you marry her?” Pippa asked.

“For the sake of my people.” He gave a bitter laugh. “How noble that sounds. I wed Felicity in order to form a much needed alliance with the English constable in Killarney town. My father had been working feverishly to finish building Ross Castle. I was given a choice of offering for Felicity or suffering an attack on the stronghold.”

“But that is not so unusual,” she said with touching credulity. “Don't the gentry always marry for reasons of expedience?”

“That is the reason I told the world. The truth is, I wed Felicity in order to spite my father.” There. After all this time, he admitted it. He felt again that hot stab of emotion brought on by thoughts of his father. He closed his eyes and let the wind rush over his face.

He remembered it all with razor-edged clarity: his father's snort of disbelief, followed by a bellow of outrage, and then the blows, two of them, open-handed slaps across the face, so hard that Aidan's head had snapped from side to side. These went unchallenged, and more blows followed, until Aidan had sunk to the floor and put up a hand to stanch the ooze of blood from his split lip.

Ronan O Donoghue would have murdered his son barehanded, Aidan was certain of it. As the older man hammered away, and as Aidan all but sat on his hands to keep from fighting back, the long buried truth had come out.

“You are no son of mine,” Ronan had roared, “but a Sassenach mercenary's get, a bastard. Your faithless mother tricked me into believing I had sired you, but I finally beat the truth out of her.”

The old sickness built in Aidan's throat. He pressed his back against the wall and inhaled through his teeth. He would never know for certain if his father had spoken truly that night. The rumors that Máire O Donoghue had died by her husband's hand seemed likely. Ronan had never sired another child, so perhaps his accusation was true also.

“Blood will tell,” Ronan had bellowed. “I thought I could make a true warrior of you, but the moment I turn my back you crawl into the lap of the Sassenach.”

The beating and bellowing had gone on. Hatred formed like a ball of ice in Aidan's chest. He would not let himself fight back, for his rage was too strong. He could not trust himself not to kill his father.

And then, after all, he did kill him. Ronan had stopped screaming midsentence, his arm raised for yet another blow. His purplish face contorted, his eyes bulged, and he pitched forward.

His heavy bulk had landed on Aidan. Slowly, on fire with agony from the barrage of blows, Aidan extracted himself and stood. He remembered looking at his father for what seemed like a long time. He remembered walking—not running—down the winding stone steps of the tower to find someone to send for the barber surgeon.

“Aidan?” Pippa's soft voice rescued him from the hellish memories. “Go on.”

Aidan surprised himself. He told her. For the first time, he revealed to another person every hideous, humiliating detail of that night.

“My defiance was the ax that killed my father,” he concluded. “He died while raging at me about Felicity. His death did cause me considerable guilt, so I finished building the castle according to his plans.”

She listened without taking her eyes off him. She looked at him as if he had become a stranger. She was pale and still, yet rather than disgust or accusation, she regarded him with sympathy. “I thought people who had families were happy,” she said at last.

Clasping his hands behind his back, he paced the wall walk. “Within hours of marrying Felicity, I knew I had made a mistake.”

“Within hours?” She blushed. “You mean the wedding night.”

He stopped walking. “I suspected something was
amiss when she barred me from the marriage bed. Just in case I misunderstood, she declared she would remain a virgin until I and all my subjects renounced the Catholic faith and embraced the new Reformed religion.”

“She placed a high price on her virtue.”

He smiled at Pippa's dark but ready humor. “It proved to be little incentive. Call me strange, but I find nothing attractive about smashing icons and cursing the pope.” His smile vanished. “In every sense that counts, I have never been married at all. Yet I am consumed with guilt over my feelings for you.”

She gave a soft moan and stepped back as if to resist going into his arms. “What do you intend to do now?”

His heart beat slowly, heavily. He allowed himself to smooth his hand lightly over her cheek. “When I married her, I had no idea it was possible to care for a woman the way I have come to care for you.” He wanted to say he loved her, but he couldn't. Not now. Not when he had no idea what he could offer her.

She tilted her head so that his hand cradled her cheek, and he could feel the warmth of tears. It proved to be his undoing. He gathered her into his arms and pressed his lips to her hair.

“It is too late for us, isn't it?” she whispered.

“That is what common sense tells me. But my heart tells me we will find a way.”

“Aidan—”

“We were never properly introduced,” Felicity called from the arched opening of the stairwell. An icy sheen of hatred gleamed in her cornflower-blue eyes.

Aidan and Pippa broke apart to see her standing there. An odd turbulence seethed in Felicity's eyes. She had always been strange and fanatical. She appeared tense, as if she were a tautly coiled spring.

Pippa put her hands on her hips and faced Felicity unflinchingly. “You may call me Mistress Trueheart.”

“Mistress?” Felicity hissed out the word. “Don't you mean leman, or perhaps
whore?”