Prisoner of the Flames (Leisure Historical Romance) (28 page)

Robert took her in his arms. “Do as he says, lass,” he murmured, then kissed her long and hard and thrust her toward the magistrate. “Take her,” he commanded, turning away from the devastating sight of those vacant, sightless eyes. He raked his damp hair back with a steady hand, and when he turned again, though he hadn’t heard the door of the one-room dwelling close behind them, they were gone.

Violette was no fool. She would not settle for this without a fight. Fearful that if she left Robert in the hands of the Huguenots she would never see him again, she could not sit idly by and let Montaigne spirit her away. Robert’s pleas
that she obey Montaigne fell upon deaf ears. There was no question that she would be safe in the magistrate’s hands—as safe as could be expected with the winds of change blowing every which way. But what good was safety if she were to be denied the man she loved, and had loved since they met at the foot of the little bridge by the Seine, when the boys tipped over her flower cart.

How could he think himself ugly? Laird Robert Mack was the most beautiful creature she had ever known. Sometimes the blind had more vision than the sighted, she decided. The fact remained that fate had brought them together, and she would not let her blundering separate them now. If he had left her and gone back to Scotland as he’d wanted, he wouldn’t be lying captive at the hands of the ruthless Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, whom she feared would use him and then murder him. The nightmare of that possibility had been festering since Montaigne spirited her away, for she knew the ways of such political men firsthand. Had not they sent her into the exile that began this nightmare?

She held her peace until they reached the little bridge over the Seine, the last lap of the journey to reach Montaigne’s château. The minute she heard the water music, the gentle gurgling the river made rushing under the bridge, she fisted her hands in the back of the magistrate’s cloak.

“Take me back!” she cried. “Please, seigneur, you
must.
These are ruthless, vicious men. They will not let Robert go. They will make use of him and then
kill
him. Don’t you see? They cannot let him live. They do not need him for this mad raid they are planning. They take him only to toy with him—to make of him a puppet, with the hope of release afterward. It will come, that release, but at the point of a sword. How can you abandon him thus? Please, I beg you, take me back!”

Montaigne’s broad back became as hard as steel beneath her pinching fingers. “And what good do you suppose you
can do?” he gritted out through clenched teeth. “They will kill you, too.”

“That would be better than this!” she cried. “Never to know what has become of him.…Never to have tried to forefend it. Much of this is my fault, seigneur. We are betrothed. I want to be with him. Perhaps if I am…”

“What? You think your presence would sway them? Hah! It would only make an end of him sooner. They are obsessed with battle madness. They want the blood of Catholics to flow in reparation for the Huguenot souls who died at Vassy. They see naught beyond blind vengeance. They can no longer see that retribution serves them not, that they have become the very thing they abhor. And as if that is not enough, little flower, they think you still carry
plague!
If you had your sight, you would know the terror in the eyes of those who shooed us away, their noses and mouths covered for fear of breathing the very air you breathe. The only reason we got clear of that camp is that you are in my company. They dare not meddle with me. But
you!
You are expendable. Go back there now and they will run you through and toss your body on the bonfire they leave behind when they march on Normandy. Robert is not blind, Violette. You would want him to see that? Is this how well you love him, child?”

“He needs an ally now. I know being blind is a hindrance, but surely any ally is better than none.”

“What makes you think he needs one? He is a force to be reckoned with, believe me—a warrior well seasoned, with a sense of honor and decency seldom seen in these troubled times—or any times, come to that.”

“You do not need to sell his honor to me, seigneur,” Violette sallied. “He is honorable to a fault, or I am simply not satisfactory. I can think of no other reason why he will not have me.”

“Did it never occur to you that without you underfoot in
your…affliction, he might be free to concentrate upon just the sort of strategy necessary to best Coligny? You need to leave him, Violette, and let him be about the business he knows well without distraction. While he worries over you, he is vulnerable to
them.”

“I love him so…” she sobbed. “What if he never comes to Bordeaux? How will we ever know what has become of him?”

“You love him, and I have come to look upon him as a brother, lass,” Montaigne said. “Trust me to know what is best in this. If things go as he plans, he will come to Bordeaux straightaway, and if you are not there, what then? Trust us to know what is best in this, little flower.”

Violette did not hold the same view. His method would not see her safely into Robert’s strong, warm arms. If she were to take action, it had to be now, and here, where she knew every inch of the city—where she had friends in the vendors’ quarter who could see her back to the Huguenot village as they had once before.

She gave Montaigne’s argument next to no credence. It didn’t matter that her alternative was rash, or that it offered little or no hope of success. She had to do
something.
She could not bear to think that she had just spent the last moments she would ever spend in the arms of the man she loved. He had braved the halls of Notre Dame Cathedral to liberate her. Could she do less than try to help him now?

They had reached the foot of the little bridge, and without a second thought, Violette slid off the horse’s back, turned to the east, and ran along the lane to the vendors’ quarter she knew so well.

“Violette!”
the magistrate cried.

But she paid him no mind, not even when she heard the horse’s frenzied cries as it reared, pawing the cobblestones, frightened by her hasty leap off its back and Montaigne’s shrill oaths and commands. On she ran until her foot struck
a paving stone and she fell sprawled on her belly with the wind knocked from her lungs.

Strong hands hauled her erect and shook her none too gently. “Enough, now!” Montaigne admonished her. “These streets are crawling with gendarmes. Do you want to be shut up in the Bastille?”

“The vendors will take me back if you will not,” she argued.

“They will not!” Montaigne said. “Now come! Let Robert Mack do what needs must without the obvious distraction of you. Then maybe…just maybe, with his wits about him, he might manage to reach Bordeaux alive.”

F
or the most part, Robert was placed under guard and forgotten.
He saw little of Coligny during the week that followed. Anxious to leave for Normandy, however, the admiral sent his healer regularly, a hawk-faced little man known to Robert only as Guerisseur who spoke in some harsh-sounding dialect he couldn’t place. The healer fed him foul-tasting febrifuge tinctures, and plastered his wound with thick poultices of fermented balsam and vinegar to “cure” the wound—cure as in ‘preserve,’ more than heal as the young laird understood it. By the third day, Robert’s shoulder more closely resembled coarsely tanned leather than human skin, but it was beginning to heal. That notwithstanding, he hated to see the odious little man coming, and noted with not a little amusement that he wore around his neck, on a twisted silk cord, a garishly large orange-red jacinth stone—the legendary amulet for warding off plague. It dangled down in plain view against his black physician’s robe, like a shield, which he obviously believed it to be, for he fondled it often.

Robert thought of Nostradamus’s lozenges, a cure he’d trust against an amulet any day. No, there was no comparison between the two physicians’ skill. Guerisseur may call himself a ‘healer,’ but that did not make him one. The man’s manner was brusque, his long, bony fingers were merciless, his breath smelled of badly digested onions and garlic, and his credentials were suspect. Coligny was anxious to march on Normandy, and this odious charlatan was assigned to expedite the matter. It was that simple.

Robert longed for the steady, skilled hands of Doctor
Nostradamus instead, and for the mold poultices that seemed to work like magic and were kinder to the skin—maggots and all—than the itching, burning fermentation of balsam and vinegar. He longed for the gentle, feather-light touch of Violette’s soft fingers—ached for her sweet breath, and the scent that drifted from her skin and hair.

Waking and sleeping, he was haunted by the soft, supple pressure of her lithe body rubbing up against his broad back as they rode through the rain returning from the very village where he now lay at the mercy of the Huguenots. Again and again, he relived the insatiable hunger that had ignited a climax like no other. What would it be like to immerse himself in that willing flesh, to love her as a woman needed to be loved, to know the warm silky feel of her come alive for him—for
him
, just as he was? She had taken possession of him—heart and soul. With his mind thus clouded, he was ill equipped to enter into the admiral’s conflict, or any other, come to that, until he’d had her, until those dreams became reality.

He wondered how Violette’s journey with the magistrate was progressing, and spent every spare minute going over the contours of the map Montaigne had showed him in his mind, lest it fade from his memory. He was anxious to have the Normandy raid behind him—to slake the admiral’s bloodthirsty craving for revenge sufficiently enough to buy his freedom, and somehow manage it with a minimum of innocent blood being shed. Just how he planned to manage that feat was a mystery to him then, but manage it, he would. He was resigned. He was also straining at the tether, and just when he thought he could bear no more of the awful waiting, the admiral paid him a visit.

Robert hadn’t touched his food. Instead he paced the length of the small one-room dwelling as he exercised his arm, and when the door came open in the admiral’s grizzled hand, the Scot stopped mid-stride.

“I am glad to see you so…improved, my lord,” Coligny said, taking his measure. “It is good, because enough time has been wasted. We march at dawn, and I shouldn’t want to have to lash you to your saddle. Our target is Rouen.”

“I am not familiar with your country,” Robert growled. “I have no idea where this ‘Rouen’ is.”

“It lies about eighty-five miles northwest of here, on the right bank of the Seine River.”

“That far north,” Robert mused, thinking—so close to the channel…and home—so far from Bordeaux, and those dear to him depending upon him. It did not bode well.

“It is an inland seaport that serves Paris, and a great Catholic cultural center. There are many churches to despoil, and a great cathedral that also bears the name of Notre Dame. The Archbishop’s Palace adjoins it. Behind that lies Saint Maclou, a garishly flamboyant church, then several streets to the north is Saint Ouen, originally a Benedictine abbey church, and the very one where Jeanne d’Arc was sentenced to death. There isn’t much inside it, but ahhhhh, those windows! Mon
Dieu!
If we can only reach them. There is no question. We will take the city.”

Robert did not have to be told about Saint Ouen. He had been raised hearing tales of the legendary Jeanne d’Arc told by his uncle, who was never remiss in pointing out that the famous church’s roots were Benedictine. Could he have a hand in sacking such a place and face Aengus ever again? He couldn’t imagine it, nor did he want to.

“Here,” said the admiral excitedly, unfurling a map drawn on sheepskin on an oaken table beneath the fading rush dip. “This is a map of the city. You can see here how these churches are like links in a chain that we shall disassemble. Then, here,” he added, pointing to a crude X drawn not far from the cathedral, “is the giant clock—Gros Horloge, set in a gateway. We will break its hands, and stop its ticking to mark our visit. And there, adjacent, is the belfry tower
where we will station a lookout. It affords a panoramic view of the city.”

“I will be that lookout?” Robert said, hopeful.

The admiral’s rapture faded and he scowled at him, his eyes narrowed and cold.
“You?
A lookout? I think not. Were you a ‘lookout’ for the Guises? You were in the thick of things, as I have it—close enough to the battle to take out its leader, were you not? You are disappointed. You do not wish to fight in this war, do you, my lord?”

“I do not wish to fight in any war but that which wages on my own soil, my Lord Admiral,” Robert hurled at him.

“But you
did
fight for Charles de Guise.”

“Under protest, as his hostage, as I have told you.”

“And so you shall fight for me…as mine.”

“Then let us have done. My own lands are under siege at home, and I am needed there. Do we go by water?”

“What? And have them burn our barges in the Seine and leave us like wharf rats with our backs to river? There are twelve miles of docks along that port. They run along the Seine as far as Bouille. We will go by land, and take them unaware in their sleep.”

“I told you I know naught of this France of yours,” Robert snarled. “We do not have such problems north of Hadrian’s Wall. We fight hand-to-hand in the open—’tis honest warfare—aye, honest and honorable. We do not skulk about in the dark, roust inept holy men from their beds, and hang them in the public square like plucked chickens.”

“Wait,” the admiral mouthed complacently. “You will. There is John Knox on your shore, and you will soon be one of us, my lord. Your Queen Mary tries to glue the land together by permitting each man to worship according to his own conscience, but there is only one true religion, and now that Henry’s red-haired hellion has replaced Bloody Mary on the throne of England, you will soon see the feathers fly. She is her father’s daughter—as jealous as King Henry ever
was. There are English here now fighting in France, and we have learned much news from them. Wait, my lord, and learn your art well here, for you will soon enough be hanging Scottish holy men in your own land.”