Knight of Passion (27 page)

And yet, he could not forget one inch of Linnet. He could see her naked now, the candlelight glinting on long strands of silky
white-gold hair and revealing each tantalizing dip and devastating rise of her long, lean body.

And her face. Men would go to war for a woman with a face like that. Soft-blue eyes, straight nose, full bottom lip, high
cheekbones. Each part was perfect, and the combination was enough to take a man’s breath away. Such delicate features for
a woman as strong as the best-made sword.

“Jamie.”

He looked up when he heard his mother call his name and was surprised to find he and his parents were alone at the table.

“Come up to the solar,” his father said. “We have something to discuss in private.”

With all that had happened, he had forgotten about the messages his parents had sent to Windsor urging him to come home. Chances
were good they wished to discuss the very topic he wished to raise with them: his plans for marriage.

They had been patient and not pressed him after he had come home devastated from Paris. But it was time now. He needed to
know what he would bring to his upcoming marriage. Most of the family lands were entailed and the girls all needed dowries.
Still, Jamie expected his father had some small estate he could grant him.

As soon as they were settled in the family’s comfortable solar, Jamie made his announcement. “You will be happy to hear I
have decided to become betrothed at last.”

His mother raised her eyebrows and gave him a long, penetrating look. “I would be happy for you, if you seemed pleased yourself.”

“I am pleased,” he said in a firm voice. “Very pleased, indeed.”

“Who is the lady you have in mind?” his father asked.

“Lady Agnes Stafford.”

His parents exchanged a look.

“You know her?” Jamie asked.

“After you left Windsor, we had the ‘pleasure’ of speaking with Lady Agnes and her father. That Stafford is an insufferable
idiot.”

His mother cleared her throat.

“Lady Agnes is a… a lovely young woman, though perhaps a trifle… fervent,” she said, speaking slowly as if choosing her words
carefully. “But we had reason to believe your affections lay elsewhere.”

Jamie clenched his teeth and waited to speak until the blood ceased to pound in his ears. “You were misinformed.”

“From what I saw, son, ’tis Linnet you want,” his father said.

“Linnet is not the sort of lady I wish to make my wife,” Jamie said, keeping his voice steady with an effort.

“Perhaps you should give yourself time before rushing into a marriage with someone else,” his mother said, “so soon after
your… disappointment.”

“I am not disappointed. I am relieved to have escaped marriage to a woman who lacks every virtue a man would wish in a wife.”
His voice had grown louder than he intended, so he paused to take a deep breath before continuing. “I intend to leave soon
for Northumberland to make the arrangements with Lord Stafford. I have reason to believe he supports the match, as I hope
you will.”

“No need for haste,” his father said. “You’ve been gone a long time. Nicholas and the girls are just getting to know you again.”

“We all missed you,” his mother said, giving him
a warm smile. “Surely this can wait a few weeks, or months.”

“Waiting will change nothing, Mother. I am set on this.”

A long, tense silence followed this declaration. “Before you embark on marriage, there is something we must tell you,” his
father said. “It is what we called you up here to discuss.”

His mother turned away from him to look into the fire. When he saw how pale she was, the icy hand of fear gripped his heart.
God forbid that she was with child again at her age.

He rushed to her side and knelt beside her. “Mother,” he said, taking her hand, “are you unwell?”

Her hand felt clammy to his touch. As he rubbed her fingers against his cheek, he regretted every day he had been away. He
and his mother had a special bond. In the unhappy days before William FitzAlan came into their lives, they had been through
harrowing experiences that had not touched her other children’s lives. He had been so young he could not be sure how much
of his recollections were real. But he still had dreams in which he heard her screaming.

She brushed his hair back from his forehead, a gesture from his childhood. “Truly, I am well.”

He closed his eyes against the surge of relief that coursed through his body and gave a silent prayer of thanks.

“This cannot be about Father’s health,” he said, glancing at his father. “He still looks as if he could slay dragons for breakfast.”

When this old family joke about his father did not bring
a smile, Jamie looked from one to the other of his parents. “What is it, then?”

Like many old soldiers, his father still wore his hair cropped short, in the style made popular by their dead king. When he
ran his big hand through it, Jamie noticed it had almost as much white as bronze in it now.

“It is my story, William,” his mother said. “I will tell him.”

His father was always more a man of action than of words. After giving her a searching look, he nodded. “If you are certain,
love.”

She cleared her throat. “You have always known that William is not your true father.”

Jamie drew in a breath and let it out. After all this time, his mother was finally going to tell him. He got up off the floor
and settled himself into the chair opposite her.

William FitzAlan took his place behind his wife and put his hand on her shoulder.

“I never wanted a different father from the one who raised me,” Jamie said, meeting his eyes. “I know I could not have had
a better one.”

“Stephen told you some years ago that Rayburn, who was my husband at the time, also was not your father.”

His mother’s speech was uncharacteristically hesitant. He should tell her it did not matter, he did not need to know, but
he had waited too many years to hear the truth of his birth.

“I thought… I had reason to believe… that the man with whom I conceived you…”

Hell, this was awkward. He did not want to think about his mother “conceiving” with a man, as she put it, particularly with
a man who was not William FitzAlan. He ran
his hand through his hair, conscious that this gesture—like so many of his—mirrored those of the man who raised him.

“You thought what, Mother?”

“I never told you about him, because I believed he died shortly after you were born.”

Why did it matter just when the man died?

“I received a message from a monk, who advised me that… your father had come to his monastery gravely ill.”

His mother leaned back in her chair, looking exhausted.

“The monk wrote that the young man hung on the edge of death for days and did not recover,” she said. “But we learned a few
months ago that he did survive. The monks thought it a miracle.”

Jamie sat up straight.

“He never left the monastery,” she said. “After he recovered his health, he took vows and joined the brothers.”

“Are you telling me he has been alive all this time?” Jamie demanded. “And that he is a
monk
?”

“He was alive when we first sent for you,” his father said. “But he took a sudden fever sometime before Christmas and died.”

Jamie got up and began pacing the too-small room. It should not matter to him if the man was alive or dead—this monk had been
nothing to him.

“How did you learn of this?”

“You remember Isobel’s brother, Geoffrey?” his father asked.

“Aye, we were friends in France,” Jamie said. “He left to join a monastery in Northumberland.”

“When we last visited Stephen and Isobel, we went to
see Geoffrey at his abbey,” his father said. “There was a monk working in the kitchen garden as we passed. We paid no notice
of him, but he saw your mother.”

“Afterward, he asked Geoffrey about us,” his mother said, picking up the story. “He was quite upset, and he ended up confessing
who he was to Geoffrey.”

“It was not the sort of news to tell you in a letter,” his father said.

Jamie did not know what to think. “Why would he disclose himself after all these years, when he never bothered to make himself
known to us before?”

“Geoffrey says he kept his secret out of respect for your mother,” his father said. “He did not wish to cause her difficulty.”

“I suppose a child born of a man not your husband could present ‘difficulty,’ ” Jamie said, turning to his mother. “You haven’t
told me all of this yet, Mother.”

“Mind your tongue when you speak to your mother,” his father said, stepping toward him.

His mother stood and put herself between them, a palm up on each of their chests.

“Sit down,” she said in a voice that brooked no argument.

“I apologize,” Jamie said, regretting his harsh words. He knew too much of what her life had been like with her first husband
to judge her.

His father pulled a stool up next to her chair, and the three of them sat.

“I did what I had to do to save myself.” His mother spoke in a clear, forceful voice. “And I have never once regretted it.”

She drew in a deep breath and let it out. “I should have
told you once you were old enough to understand, but the time never seemed right. I did not realize how the question of your
father’s identity hung over you.”

He had not lost sleep over it. FitzAlan had married his mother when Jamie was three, and their bond was as close as any father
and son. All the same, Jamie had wondered about the nature of the man who sired him—and how he could have left his mother.

“What was this monk’s name?” Jamie asked, because he wanted to know the name he should have been called.

“Wheaton,” his mother said. “Richard James Wheaton.”
James.
So his mother had given him what she could of the man’s name. She must have had some regard for him.

“He told me he had considered joining a monastery in his youth, and so I am not surprised he became a monk,” his mother said,
using that careful voice again. “But from what Geoffrey told us, Richard Wheaton’s life was unusually… contained, even for
a monk. He took great comfort in the routine of monastery life.”

“Are you saying something was wrong with him?” Jamie asked.

His father shrugged. “Wheaton’s brother—your uncle, I suppose—can tell you a good deal more than we can. He’s written several
times expressing a desire to meet you.”

“His name is Sir Charles Wheaton,” his mother put in. “He is most anxious for you to visit. His estate is in Northumberland,
within a day’s ride of Stephen and Isobel’s.”

The three of them sat in silence for a long time, lost in their own thoughts.

Finally, his father said, “You have unfinished business. ’Tis best to settle it before you take on a wife.”

“I do not see what is unfinished about it,” Jamie said, “but I suppose I can pay a visit to Charles Wheaton when I travel
north to see the Staffords.”

“See Charles Wheaton first, before you make an offer of marriage.” His mother leaned forward to touch his arm. “The visit
may help you decide what to do.”

She could not say more plainly that she believed he was making a mistake in choosing Agnes for his wife.

“Mother, my decision is already made.”

Jamie leaned his elbows on his knees and rubbed his temples. Too many thoughts jumbled in his head at once. The man who fathered
him had been a monk. He had a new uncle. And his mother, whose opinion mattered more than he liked to admit, disapproved of
his marriage choice.

Before he could get his bearings, his father gave him news of a different sort.

“We received a message from Bedford today.” His father pulled a rolled parchment with a broken seal out of his tunic and handed
it to him. “The Council fears there will be riots if Parliament is held in London, so they have decided to hold the next session
in Leicester.”

Since leaving Windsor, Jamie had hardly given a thought to the political strife that still threatened the country.

“So, Bedford has not yet succeeded in forcing his brother and uncle to settle their dispute?” he asked.

His father shook his head and pounded his fist on his knee. “That damned Gloucester.”

“If King Henry were alive,” his mother put in, “Gloucester would never dare cause such strife.”

“Will the Council still have the young king open Parliament?” Jamie asked.

“Aye,” his father said. “ ’Tis all the more important that the king be seen.”

Jamie tried to hold back the question, but he had to know if Linnet was headed into danger. “And the queen?”

“She is already on her way north.”

T
he city of Leicester was in chaos. Linnet pulled back the flap of the carriage to look out as they lurched through the crowded
street that ran beside the church to the castle’s main gate. Drunken men with clubs and bats filled the streets.

“I am greatly relieved that His Grace the Duke of Bedford sent his own guard to escort us,” the queen said, her voice high
with tension.

Linnet, too, was glad to be traveling today with an escort of twenty men-at-arms and royal banners flying.

“When the duke warned us there could be trouble here,” Linnet said, “I had no notion it would be as bad as this.”

“Nor I,” the queen said, clasping Linnet’s hand. “I wish Owen could have ridden inside the carriage with us.”

Linnet chose not to respond. Nothing could have been more inappropriate than to have the queen’s lowly clerk of the wardrobe
travel in her carriage all the way to Leicester Castle.

Linnet and the queen were thrown against each other as the carriage rumbled and swayed over the uneven slats
of the castle’s drawbridge. Without pausing, the carriage continued through the barbican and gatehouse. After crossing the
expansive bailey yard at a fast clip, the carriage finally pulled up before what looked to be the castle hall.

Linnet pressed her face to the gap in the carriage cover.

“Jamie is here!” she cried out.

There he was, on the steps right before her. After longing for him every hour for the past month, she could not quite believe
he was here.