Sword of Justice (White Knight Series) (14 page)

“I treated you and your brother exactly alike. I loved you both alike.” William became speechless, realization intervening, along with a lifetime of memories, some subtle and some not so subtle, and the effect they had on shaping character, personality, and the insubstantial commodity called love. “You’re different from your brother. You have your head in the clouds. This talk of monasteries ….” He ran a hand through his hair, as thick as memory served but increasingly laced with threads of silver. He sighed, and looked at the man he believed to be Stephen, truly looked at him as he had never before beheld either brother … with softened eyes of love. “If I treat you more harshly, it’s only to temper you into a man.”

Drake stepped away from the window. “I
am
a man.”

His eyes darkened. “God’s body! If not for your brother, where would you be, eh? Running away from your God-given duties. Shirking your heritage and your king. Or swiving in the brothel houses and spawning God knows how many bastards on God knows how many wenches.”

A flush of heat crawled along Drake’s spine, followed by a wave of cold. “And how many bastards have the revered William fitzAlan spawned on God knows how many wenches? Enyd, of course, which all of Winchester knows about.”

William’s sunburnt face turned ruddy. The silence that followed was like the slice of a sword, dividing flesh from flesh.

“You never formally introduced me to my dear sweet sister. Perhaps I should court her. Perhaps Enyd and I can spawn roe-eyed fish with gills and forked tongues—”

Drake should have seen it coming: the fist that connected like a mace. The force toppled him to the floor. He reached a hand to his smarting eye and shuddered. “And then there’s Aveline Darcy and her green-eyed Pippa.”

William’s fury was properly smothered. He bunched his fists at his sides. “You would know the answer to that better than I.”

Drake knew he had made a fatal error.

His father stared down at him in shocked silence. “Unless—”

“You’re right,” Drake said. “Maybe my head
is
in the clouds.

“Come. I didn’t hurt you.” William helped him to his feet, afterwards making a study of his face. He took in the bruises, the stitches he hadn’t seen before, and the recent swellings. His eyes focused on the mole on the left side of his mouth and lingered. His bewildered expression uncovered layers of love, puzzlement, and lastly revelation. A distrustful eyebrow lifting, he engagingly said, “Halloo.”

Warily Drake responded, “Halloo.”

“How are you?”

“Still standing on my own two feet, no thanks to you.”

“What happened to your face? You rather look like your brother.”

“’Twould seem everyone in Winchester believes your eldest son a most foul murderer and his twin brother not much better.” He blinked. “If we cannot exonerate Drake, do I stand to inherit Itchendel?”

“God’s eyes!”

And with that, William fitzAlan stormed out of the chamber.

Chapter 12
                  
 

AT THE OUTSKIRTS
OF WINCHESTER,
Drake rode past a leper covered head to foot in tattered rags, his clappers scaring away the blackbirds and his staff leading the way. The social outcast was in the proper vicinity, it being two short miles from the Leper Hospital of St Mary Magdalene.

Drake spurred Stephen’s palfrey toward Hogshead Tavern. Having dressed in Stephen’s best tunic, one of two spares his brother obligingly left behind at the alehouse, Drake went in search of the chanciest game in town, where he planned to lose neither the tunic off his back nor the braies off his nether parts. On his way out he had offered Aveline the wager. She sportingly took the bet.

Located not far beyond the city walls, Hogshead enjoyed the benefits of self-imposed isolation. Though the town’s upright citizens, and in particular its righteous women, cared what went on there, they could do little about the many ways the tavern’s activities flirted between the proprieties of law and the wantonness of menfolk.

“Men,” the womenfolk whispered behind steely hands, “will be men.”

Patrons greeted him familiarly, mates whom Stephen had befriended but Drake never before met. He politely turned down offers of cheerful camaraderie. Guffawing knowingly, the men gibed about seeking the comforts of a lady rather than joining his friends at dicing and carousing. Before long, the Devil’s guardians—the goons who attacked him outside the London Way Alehouse and Inn two nights before—dogged his heels, but there wasn’t much they could do to bother him in a public place filled with witnesses. The pirate, Drake reasoned, must have been abed with his insides oozing out of a bothersome hole. It gave the two escapees from Hell a good enough reason to keep Drake from slipping too far out of their sights.

Having frequented Hogshead only once before with Stephen, he’d forgotten what a lively place it was. The hasard table was the most popular. Since the rules constantly changed and the action went at a blinding speed, he never played the chanciest of all games, though watching was an exciting pastime in itself, the play fast and loose, and filled with whoops and hollers that volubly escalated as the wagers increased, the losses doubled, and the night lengthened.

Sweating like a laborer, Mallory d’Amboise was throwing coins down on the table and hooting with each roll of the dice. He glanced up at Drake, winged him a toothy grin, and took another bet, which he forthwith lost.

Drake moved on to discover other games more accommodating to his purse and temperament: tables, queek, naughts and crosses, and nine men’s merrills. The raffle table was not as crowded or noisy, but he knew the dice were weighted with quicksilver and so never gambled.

He tried his luck here, lost a wager there, doubled his bet on this table, and halved it on the next. Anyone with any sense knew the odds were with the house except the hundred or so other men throwing good coin after bad. Whatever the game, quarrels broke out despite thick-muscled gatekeepers stationed at every other table.

Ladies of the evening roamed the hall for in-between and after-hours enjoyment, fastening onto willing men who lost everything but the price of a half-hour. They arrived alone but climbed upstairs with a pair.

Drake played the wheel of fortune and lost his wager, a trifling amount. In exchange for his last two coins, a lady put into his hand a concoction guaranteed to rot his gut. A man whose name escaped him slapped Drake on the back and asked if he had a good reason for not joining him at the dicing table. He did; he’d spent his last penny. To which the fellow responded, “When has that ever stopped you?”

Cockfighting was reserved for the back room. The stakes were higher but the drinks were free. Drogo was pitching innumerable short-crosses onto the floor. Not one for picking sides, a giant energetically cheered for both cocks. After Baldric acknowledged Drake with a subtle wink, he returned his attention to center circle. Smell or instinct compelled Drogo to glance Drake’s way, tawny hair plastered to his forehead. He swilled down a half tankard of ale and called loudly for more drink.

For no good reason, or possibly it was the obscene gesture Drake thrust in the other man’s direction, Drogo plunged into a different kind of cockfight. Charging past several men to reach the fitzAlan spawn, he clutched the front of Stephen’s tunic, jostled the wearer with a violent snap, delivered two quick jabs to his midsection, and walloped him with an uppercut to the jaw.

Drake reeled, staggered, and impulsively came back for more punishment, his legs wobbling in the undertow and arms paddling against the current. Since the room was spinning at a fast clip, as well as roiling up and down, he found it difficult to focus on his foe. He punched here and swung there, meeting empty air, while Drogo mischievously cuffed an ear, slapped a cheek, and poked an eye. Then scowling like a rabid cur, he closed in for the kill, but Baldric handily cornered Drogo and kept him from tearing out Drake’s throat like the winning cock was doing to the losing cock on the blood-spattered floor. The Devil’s guardians used the opening to escort Drake out of the room, twisting his arm behind his back and applying a throat-choking headlock.

In the main room, men laughed when Drake slid across the floor and slammed into a pillar. The jolt flipped him flat onto his back. He blinked, stirred, reached back, made sure his neck was still attached to his spine, and groaned. The ceiling swirled at a sickening pace.

A lady entered his field vision and looked down at him from on high. “Are you dead or alive?” she asked in all seriousness.

“Dead,” he answered, equally serious.

She reached down. “Come. It looks as though you need tender loving care.”

“It’ll take more than that, lady.”

“Your wish is my command.”

Oh, lady, don’t tempt me.”

Employing a gentle arm around his waist, she guided him into a private chamber rife with atmosphere and dim lamps. Tapestries depicting Bacchus, Hypnos, and Cytherea flanked the walls. A table was set for two, candle flames dancing at the center. A luxurious featherbed made up with fine linens and pillows awaited pleasures. Clearly, they had intruded upon another pair’s imminent engagement, or else the beating was to be replaced with an exquisite kind of torture that would force him to confess all the sins of this life as well as the next.

Drake excused himself and made toward the door, but the lady plucked him back and urged him thither with a whisper and the application of persuasive fingertips. He fell into an armchair of infinite comfort and sank into its velvety confines, glad for the respite.

She disappeared.

Escape was at hand. As soon as he tried to regain his feet, the chamber began to rotate. He willed the walls to stop their mad gyrations, and when they didn’t, settled on closing his eyes. He must have drunk more than he remembered, for the spiraling continued even with eyes closed.

The lady returned. She bathed his forehead with a cool rag and gently wiped away blood from his split lip. Unlike her sisterhood, she did not carry the same heavy scent of overpowering roses. Hers was a more subtle odor that reminded him of lilies of the valley. Dressed differently from the other ladies as well, she appeared downright matronly even while exhibiting the same henna-dyed hair, powdered face, and vermilion cheek coloring preferred by women of her profession. When he gazed into her flinty eyes, Drake realized she was several years older than he, yet still a woman to be sought after since she possessed the attributes young men his age look for in their virginal and not-so-virginal lasses but never found. She belonged in a nobleman’s house instead of a brothel house, and he wondered, however briefly, what she was doing in a coarse establishment like this one.

“We missed you, Stephen,” she said after setting aside the rag. “And when you finally grace us with your company, you find trouble in less time than it takes to bed a fast whore on a slow night.” Though refined through practice, her speech revealed an early upbringing on the docks. Undoubtedly, she was the daughter of a fishmonger. Getting by on beauty, brains, and luck, she had moved up a notch or two, deft at taking up airs and mingling with her betters, but would never quite leave her roots behind. This was her place in society, her fate set at birth, as was his at the side of the king.

Her hand expertly examined the territory of his braies. “Thirsty?” she asked.

His keenest desire was to make good her offer. “Only if it’s worth the price of purchase.”

“Oh, we can do better than that.” She tugged a bell pull. Almost immediately, a flagon was produced. She opened it with practiced ceremony, her fingers as skilled on the vessel as they had been on his braies. Venetian glassware received the brilliant crimson liquid.

Her extravagance on a bloodstained knight was welcome but suspicious. She wanted something. But what? He would soon find out, one way or the other. It was the ‘other’ that worried him. He drank anyway. The liquid slipped down his gullet like silk across the bare back of a highly paid lady lying in a horizontal position, which Drake rightly assumed she was. The claret
was
worthy of the price, however much it was going to set Stephen back.

By Jhesu above!
No woman of high regard knew how to use her fingers the way she did and not have learned her trade without nightly practice on as many men as possible.

“Hungry?”

“
Lady, am I ever hungry.” Her laughter rang out like a finely tuned instrument. “What do men call you?”

“Anything they want, but my name is Tilda.”

As if by magic, a steaming bowl of mussels appeared. The shells experienced boiling water for mere moments. The sauce—blended of fresh cream, wine, sautéed onions, and a pinch of garlic—was simple and delectable. Tilda fed Drake with adroit fingers, opening shell after shell and placing tender meat on ready tongue with scarlet-enameled thumb and forefinger, delicious of themselves. She broke off chunks of bread straight from the oven to wash down the mussels and refilled his glass several times over to wash down the bread.

“You seem to be a man with a quest.” Her plucked eyebrows arched delicately over amber eyes. “Or a question.”