Danger's Kiss (2 page)

Something about the spectacle of an execution turned men ugly.  Townsfolk who smiled and nodded and exchanged kind words with a fellow one day suddenly became sneering, jeering, heartless wolves the next when that fellow was bound for the gallows.

Nicholas glanced down at Kabayn’s feet.  They were bare, red from trudging through the bracing snow, but he knew the old man didn’t feel the cold.  His thin white nightshirt clung almost transparently to his spare frame, and his gray hair grew sodden with the falling snow, but the condemned man was past feeling.

“Let him go, you bastard!” the woman shrieked, her voice shrill above the self-righteous reprimands of law-abiding villagers and the vulgar shouts of craven lads who’d piss their braies were they in the old man’s place.

Nicholas clenched his jaw.  Did women not realize how cruel their pleas were on a condemned man’s ears?  How they inspired false hope?  Why could they not instead call out softly like welcoming seraphim?  Why could they not ease the unfortunate’s way from this world?

That was what Nicholas always tried to do.  He believed in justice, aye, but swift justice.  Witness to too many slow stranglings from cruel hangmen, he’d devoted himself to learning the quickest, cleanest, least painful methods of delivering death, and he intervened when it was necessary.  He saw himself as an angel of mercy, doling out one final gesture of kindness to otherwise God-cursed men.

He’d sat up with Kabayn all night, as was his custom with the men he was about to send to their death.  He’d spoken a little, listened a lot, and helped the man come to terms with his inevitable fate.

He’d brought a full bottle of good Spanish wine laced with opium for the prisoner.  In his experience, women and death were prettier companions when seen from the bottom of a bottle.

Kabayn had refused the wine.  He wanted to face the hangman with a clear head, he’d said.  He wondered if the old man regretted that now.

At the bottom of the gallows, Kabayn turned to him.  His eyes were rheumy, evidence of the wasting sickness that had kept him coughing all night and would have killed him by spring, anyway.  His voice was but a whistle, as faint as the wind through a cracked shutter.  “You’ll keep your promise?”

Nicholas nodded.  He might have been despised by some as the cursed arm of the law, and feared by others as the right hand of the devil, but he was a man of his word.

The chaplain began murmuring the sacrament while the hooded hangman flexed his gloved hands in preparation, and Nicholas took a deep breath, turning to the crowd with a dramatic swirl of his black cloak, preparing for the spectacle.  Angel of mercy he might be, but he dared not let the people of Canterbury know that.  After all, he had an unyielding, iron-fisted reputation to uphold.

Desirée kicked and struggled and spat curses at the burly man-at-arms who restrained her at the back of the crowd.

This couldn’t be happening.  They couldn’t be hanging Hubert Kabayn.  He was far too clever for that.

Aye, he was as black with sin as Lucifer, and he could be a mean son of a whore to her at times.  But he’d always been able to wriggle his way out of the shackles of lawmen, even when he had to resort to sacrificing some of his hard-won silver to do so.

What was the old fool doing?  Why wasn’t he using that shrewd tongue of his to talk his way out of this?  Why was he climbing the gallows ladder so complacently while the ruthless brute of a shire-reeve ordered his death?

It was absurd.  No one bested Hubert Kabayn.  She had to stop this farce at once.

“Leave him be!” she yelled at the shire-reeve.  “You black-hearted spawn of the devil!”

The lawman gave no response.

“God-cursed demon!”

Her words fell on deaf ears.

“Murderer!” she cried.  “You’ll burn in
—
“

“Silence!” he roared.

The oath stuck in her throat as the lawman whipped his head about, even at this distance picking her out of the crowd with a glare of condemnation.  Suddenly she felt as if she’d inhaled a lungful of snow.

He didn’t speak.  He didn’t need to.  His thoughts were in the dark menace of his gaze.

Or you’ll be next.

Desirée didn’t frighten easily.  But she wasn’t stupid.  The shire-reeve was a man of power.  And the way he was staring at her from the shadows of his hooded cloak, he seemed more demon than human, as if he might swoop over the crowd and snatch her up in his claws.

She swallowed back a lump of misgiving.  It would serve nothing for her to be strung up beside her partner in crime.

Her eyes blurred with the cold, and she sniffed back the moisture collecting in her nose as the helplessness of her position became frustratingly clear.

Damn that brutish shire-reeve!

Hubert might be a varlet and a cheat, but he didn’t deserve to die like this.  He was a decent man.  Maybe not a
good
man.  But at least no worse than most men.

To be completely forthright, there was no love lost between herself and the conniving bastard who’d bought her six years ago from her desperate, impoverished parents.  Theirs had been a business alliance, no more.  Young Desirée had served as a pretty distraction for his thievery, and in exchange, Hubert had seen she didn’t go hungry.

He hadn’t beaten her, not often anyway.  He’d never forced her to lie with strange men for coin, as some would have.  And though he seemed determined to cast her aside of late, for six years, he’d seen she was provided for.  It wasn’t his fault if those provisions came from the only talents he possessed
—
sleight of hand and theft.

Aye, knave and outlaw he might be, but surely he didn’t deserve hanging.

“Hubert Kabayn,” the shire-reeve intoned for the benefit of the crowd, “you are charged with the crime of murder.”

Desirée’s jaw dropped.

Murder?  Hubert wasn’t a murderer.  He’d gone to rob the lord’s house, not take a life.  The old cheat was about as capable of murder as he was of playing a fair game of dice.  There must be some mistake.

Curse his blighted hide!  Why wasn’t he fighting the charges?  It wasn’t as if he didn’t know how to lie.  God’s eyes!  The two of them had spent years doing just that, separating fools from their coin with false promises of health, prosperity, and a place in heaven.  The slippery outlaw had wormed his way out of a hundred gaols.

But he wasn’t worming his way out of this.  This wasn’t a game of Fast and Loose.  There was no way to slip a hangman’s knot.

The stupid old fool!  He stood at the top of the ladder now, his spindly legs pale against the blackened wood.  The shire-reeve read the sentence while the executioner bound Hubert’s wrists behind him and looped the rope about his neck.

As he took up the slack in the noose, Desirée felt her own throat close around a final thin scream of disbelief.  “Nay!”

As if he meant it for her ears alone, the shire-reeve turned to the crowd and proclaimed in somber tones, “No one comes between Nicholas Grimshaw and the law!”

The lawman nodded then to the executioner, giving him leave to twist the ladder.  Desirée tore her gaze away and squeezed her eyes shut, unable to endure the grisly spectacle.

But though she could blind herself to the sight, there was no turning a deaf ear to the ominous squeaks of the rope as Hubert’s body swung from the gallows timbers.

Desirée swayed in stunned silence, unable to move, unable to breathe, vaguely aware of the villagers yelling out around her, some in disappointment, some in morbid glee.  When she finally dared to open her eyes, Hubert was already dead.

The shire-reeve, his jaw clenched, held up his hand to quiet the chaotic outcries of the crowd.

“Hear you well!”  His voice cracked over the words, as if he were equally shocked by the brutality of Hubert’s death, as if he were somehow not responsible for it.  Then he quickly regained his composure, biting out a dire threat.  “Let this serve as a warning to you all.  So die all murderers in my shire.  Do not think you can outrun justice or outwit Nicholas Grimshaw.  No man is above the law.  And one of you,” he said, scanning their faces from the depths of his hooded cloak, “may well be next.”

Desirée, reeling with shock, watched as Hubert’s lifeless body, no longer of interest to the crowd, swung back and forth from the blackened arm of the gallows.  She felt her own bones go limp, and the man-at-arms, sensing she’d be no more trouble, released her.  She sank down onto the snow, heedless of the cold.

For a long while she sat frozen, hypnotized by the sway of the rope, while snowflakes gathered on her lashes and dusted her cloaked shoulders.

She might have borne little affection for her partner in crime, who’d all but tossed her aside like garbage.  Indeed, on her miserable journey here, she’d thought of a thousand ways to punish him for his betrayal.  But never had she wished upon him so cruel an end.

Nicholas Grimshaw must have broken him.  There was no other explanation.  Hubert had been ill of late, and Grimshaw must have preyed upon his weakness, forcing him to confess to a crime he didn’t commit.

What ominous threats the shire-reeve continued to issue to the crowd she didn’t know, nor did she measure how long she sat there.  But by the time she at last blinked away the film of shock, the square had grown quiet and most of the villagers had dispersed.

The demon in the black cloak remained by the gallows, however, as stark as a raven against the fall of snow, conferring with his constable, the executioner, and a few others.  A stout troll of a man dressed in finery approached the others, dug in his purse, then dropped several silver coins into the shire-reeve’s palm.

Blood money for hanging a helpless old man.

The sight made rage rise in her like ale stored too long in the keg.  Casting about, she snatched up a sharp rock from the ground and, with a hoarse cry of pure fury, hurled it forward with all her might.

To her astonishment, it sailed true, striking the shire-reeve in the face.  He staggered back, pressing his hand against his cheek, drawing back bloody fingers.

“Seize her!” the constable cried, drawing his sword.

But the shire-reeve took one look at her and stayed the constable’s arm.  “’Tis only a child.  Leave her be.  ‘Tisn’t the first stone I’ve caught.  Won’t be the last.”

The constable reluctantly sheathed his sword, but Desirée was already beating a hasty retreat down the lane.  She might  be reckless, but she was no fool.  Nor was she a child.

Huddled behind the stone wall of a butchery shop, she peered down the long, narrow street.  The snow was falling more heavily now, but she could still make out the silhouette of the black-cloaked man striding past the distant gallows, defiling the white landscape, like a crow waiting to feed on the spoils of his kill.

She would wait for him.  She knew he was mortal now.  He could bleed.  She fingered the short dagger cached in her skirts.  The blade was cold and sharp and merciless...just like revenge.

"
G
od’s hooks!  ’Tis colder than an old trot’s teat,” the constable complained.

Nicholas stomped the snow from his boots and nodded toward Hubert Kabayn’s still-hanging body.  “Go on,” he bade the executioner, “cut him down.  He’s not getting any deader.”  The sooner he got this business over with, the sooner he could see to the nasty gash on his cheek and the sooner he could drink himself into oblivion by a warm fire.  Anything to erase the dreadful image of Kabayn’s death.

“The law’s the law,” said the squat, pig-eyed steward of Torteval, who stood between them, jabbing a scolding finger at the air in front of the constable’s nose.  “A full hour.”

Nicholas ground his teeth.  Abiding by the law was one thing.  Following it to absurd limits was another.

“You owe it to Lady Philomena,” the steward insisted.  Then, as if Nicholas were both blind and deaf, the man jerked his thumb toward him and confided in a loud whisper to the constable, “He cheated her.”

Nicholas frowned down at the steward, who was small enough to squash with his thumb.  “Cheated her?  How?”

Like a spooked squirrel, the man trembled at being directly addressed by the shire-reeve.  Then he licked his lips and blurted out, “The outlaw didn’t suffer in the least.”

“The man’s dead,” Nicholas said.

“But Lady Philomena specifically requested
—
”

“I don’t give a bloody damn what...”  Nicholas bit his tongue.  He knew better than to get into an argument of ethics with the steward from the richest holding of Canterbury, the household that paid the bulk of his wage.