Sword of Justice (White Knight Series) (26 page)

“And how would that be accomplished?” John asked, casual to the point of disinterest. Drake offered no solution, but the king’s younger sibling came to one on his own. “Ah, Lord fitzAlan, working his diplomacy in the background. A skilled negotiator is William fitzAlan. Soon he will have all the injured parties assoiling your brother of malfeasance, and they will welcome him home with open arms, everyone in possession of full purses and well-stocked stables.” He brandished a sapphire-ringed hand. “You know, Stephen, I think it might be advantageous to become more fully acquainted with you
and
your brother, when he returns in all good propriety. Your strengths and weakness, likes and dislikes, predilections and prejudices. We are contemporaries, you and I. One day soon, I should like to call you friend.” He stood. Drake rose with him. John put his arm around his shoulders as a much older brother. “I do believe that is one of the better ideas I have had of late. After all, we are cousins, are we not? In truth I well remember playing a game of chess with Drake when we were boys. He lost, as I recall.”

The meeting was a whirlwind of brevity and ambiguity. Drake left on an affable note without fulfilling the promise he made to Jenna. There was a good reason for breaking the trust she put in him. Because upon first entering the
salle
, he espied a seemingly insignificant item sitting atop a massive oak desk. Taking notice of the object, Drake frantically patted himself down, searching for the missive he had carried with him since leaving Winchester and mindfully transferred from his old attire, burned per Eleanor’s instructions, to his suit of coronation finery. Not finding it, his thoughts flashed back to the crowd, and the closer than close proximity of the unwashed. He realized with sickeningly clarity that the note must have been stolen. Because there on the oak secretary lay a parchment folded in a unique style, the corners rather than the sides creased inward twice, the binding cord untied, and the broken seal of purple wax unmistakably stamped with the matrix of the sender’s personal seal—G for Geneviève.

Before John entered, Drake had the opportunity to open the unaddressed missive and to read the contents. The script was in Jenna’s precise hand. Signed with a single letter J, only one line was written —

I’ll wait for you at the aerie
.

* * *

“We’re riding for Itchendel!” Drake yelled at Stephen when he emerged from the castle.

Fighting their way back to the inn, the fitzAlan brothers came to an instant accord. That the prince was in possession of Jenna’s note—the missive stolen from Drake not an hour before yet paradoxically delivered into the hands of this very same man—was as damning as if that prince of thieves had confessed his sins in prostration before man, king, and God.

Drake’s initial reaction was disbelief. Followed by anger. And finally fear. Fear for Jenna and the desperate invitation her simple words belied:
I’ll wait for you at the aerie.

They claimed their horses, and abandoning a burning city, took the south road. No words passed from brother to brother, only the occasional meeting of eyes, matched eyes of stormy green.

Night fell quickly. The wind whipped up. When the storm struck, rain fell in torrents. Lightning illuminated the landscape with visions of Hell while thunder chased the brothers into the breach.

They rode through the night. The storm passed, but the premonition stayed, that Jenna had somehow become a threat to the brother of the king.

At sunrise, Drake left Stephen behind to secure the horses. He scrambled up the craggy hill, the waterfall splashing behind him. Arriving at the mouth of the grotto, he hesitated, bereft of courage. He stepped forward and entered the aerie.

Jenna lay on the bed of grass. The blue kirtle adorning her was the one she wore when last they met in this peaceful sanctuary mere hours before Drake made a pact with the Devil and changed himself into the guise of his brother. At first it seemed as though she had fallen asleep waiting up for a secret lover. But the drained color of her face and the stillness of her pose spoke of a different circumstance.

A single spray of blood erupted from her breast. A massive pool, sanguine and glistening, had coagulated at her side. Her sky-blue eyes were fixed open in a stare of sheer bewilderment. Her mouth was slung open, a silent scream on her lips. Her hand was thrown above her head as a final gesture of lost hope. Clasped inside the curled fingers of her hand was a stolen dagger, slick with blood.

She was as beautiful as a summer’s eve. And she was dead.

Drake dropped weakly to his knees. Unable to speak or cry or think rationally or feel much of anything, he reached over and closed her eyes. Her skin was still moist to the touch. He bent his head and delivered a parting kiss. Her lips were warm, pliant, and sweet as dawn. He gently pulled her into his arms, and cradling her, rocked her as he spoke words of endearment, words of reassurance, words of farewell. Teardrops splashed onto her face and slid down the plains of her cheeks. Memories came unbidden. When first he laid eyes on her—child and woman at once and forever—and knew he would love her to the end of his days. When first they explored each other’s bodies in the innocence of youth. And when first he learned what it meant to love a woman and not just bed one.

Stephen rushed into the grotto, panting with exertion. Soon, he too grew as silent as the cave. By then, Drake had laid Jenna back on her moss-covered deathbed. He held her hand, cold in his warm palm and still adorned with his betrothal ring. He gazed up at his brother in the vain hope he might work a miracle, knowing in his heart of hearts there were no miracles. Not here, not now, and not for Jenna. The promising life of a lass who laughed in the rain and cried at a rainbow had been cruelly snuffed out at the age of seventeen.

Covering his face with clawed hands, Stephen cried silent tears. For his brother’s beloved. For his own beloved. For God’s beloved.

Gazing into the shadowed crevices of the grotto, Drake sensed a presence, a shade, an interloper.
He
had been here.
He
had met Jenna in this sanctuary. He had made love to her, given her empty promises, taken what was never his, defiled this bed of posies and incense, and left her with nothing but hope. And then, as his final act of betrayal,
he
had sent assassins to silence her tongue.

To bid
adieu
to Jenna now was to bid
adieu
to her for eternity. Drake didn’t think he had the strength. He held her hand until the last, smoothing it across her body, the fingers gently curved and smeared with blood. He could not bring himself to touch the other hand, yet flung out to her side, her unyielding fingers grasping the damascene that ended her short life. Tangled about her throat, the dragon amulet reflected the brightness of an early morning sun. Drake set it aright. And as a last rite, he removed his bejeweled pellice and shrouded her still form.

Her languid face, white as the moon, bid good-night to the sun.

Chapter 24
               
 

DRAKE WENT FOR
THE SHERIFF
while Stephen reinstated himself as a beggar outside Aveline’s kitchen door.

Rand examined the grotto and Jenna’s body for signs of struggle but found none except for the single stab wound. He personally delivered Jenna to her aggrieved parents.

Still wearing his coronation finery
sans
feather, which must have blown off on the road from London, Drake waited out several hours in a forlorn cell lit by a single waxing candle. When the key clanked in the lock, Drake jerked awake.

Flanked by two sergeants, Randall entered via blinding torchlight and took up the bench opposite Drake’s. Dispensing with formal preliminaries, he launched into an interrogation. “What led you to the cave?”

Weary beyond exhaustion, Drake gathered his wits about him. “It was our secret meeting place.”

“Then you claim you are Drake?”

“I’m Stephen.”

The acting sheriff of Hampshire stared at his prisoner with piercing eyes, arms crossed over chest, chin resting on a fist, and forefinger thumping the side of an eye. “You admit that you and Jenna met in secret?”

“I do.”

“And that you cuckolded your own brother?”

“If you want to put it that way ….”

“There is no other way to put it.”

“Aye, I cuckolded my own brother.” It took all his wits to remember he was Stephen, not an easy thing to accomplish when his heart had been riven in two and the manacles encircling his wrists chafed.

The sheriff’s eagle eyes, it turned out, were more constraining than the irons or the dungeon. “Was it a prearranged meeting?”

“I took a chance she’d be there. I had just ridden from London.”

“You were there for the coronation?”

“I was.”

“But again, why go to the cave?”

“I couldn’t very well go to her manor house.”

“Why not?”

“Surely her parents wouldn’t approve of me courting their daughter.”

“Because you are Drake fitzAlan, depraved murderer and mutilator?”

“Because I’m the brother of Drake fitzAlan, who has been wrongfully accused of murder.” Ever since leaving the aerie, he couldn’t feel much of anything except for blackest grief. But he had to go on pretending, if only to save his neck. “But as it stood, Jenna pretended I was Drake, even though we both knew I wasn’t.”

Rand let out a chortle and shook his head with disbelief. “Do you mean to say you were cuckolding your brother’s betrothed in the guise of your brother?”

“It was a game we played since childhood. Drake never found out. We went on playing the game, even though Jenna knew the truth of it.” He wished the sheriff would leave off his questioning and leave him alone in this deep dark hole so he could curl up and sleep forever.

“Aren’t you cuckolding me now in the guise of your brother?” Randall was trying to confuse him, not a difficult thing to do.

“I’m telling you the truth. I’m Stephen whilst Drake is somewhere in Normandy, escaping the gibbet, since he’s as innocent as the day is long.” And the nights, he thought, are longer.

“Jenna did not fear sneaking off with a depraved murderer and mutilator?”

“She did not believe Drake to be a depraved murderer and mutilator. But I’m not Drake. I’m Stephen. Jenna knew that. When we were alone together, she pretended … we both pretended … that I was Drake and not Stephen … so she could seek solace in being with me.” He was shaking uncontrollably, but only on the inside where the sheriff couldn’t see.

“You must have told her you were really Drake.”

“I didn’t because I’m Stephen. If folk hereabouts so much suspected that I was Drake, I’d be a dead man. We played the game that I was Drake. It wasn’t difficult to play since we have played the same game since we were children.”

“And so you were free, free to continue your
affaire d’amour
without discovery, and without your brother getting in the way.” Randall emphasized the obvious. “Since Drake is in Normandy.”

“A pretty way of putting it, but the truth.”

Randall gestured to his sergeants. On a whiff of foul air, they left the chamber, leaving the sheriff and his prisoner alone together. The man paced. Silence entered the prison on an ill wind along with the gasping breath of man in misery. Back and forth, the sheriff marched until, on a bolt of lightning, he yanked Drake up by an arm and smacked his prisoner twice across each cheek. The knuckled backhands hurt worse than the slaps, but even those stings of reproach stirred nothing inside Drake. The sheriff wasn’t satisfied. He shot a fist into his shoulder, and Drake flew across the room and landed with a thud. He scrambled on all fours, dodging a hundred more blows raining down on his already bruised body until a wall stopped him. There, he twisted into the carapace of his agony on the cold hard floor, drawing knees into chest and taking whatever punishment the sheriff of Hampshire wished to dole out. The noise of gloved hand meeting tender flesh was more annoying than the trouncing his body absorbed. He endured everything without begging or screaming for mercy. He deserved this punishment for abandoning Jenna to her cruel fate, and he welcomed the beating with a perverse glee that released him from his agony and propelled him into an inner hell, where he could be alone with his guilt and revel in his pain. Soon, Drake didn’t feel the punches anymore. He didn’t feel anything at all, not even grief.

“
Jesu Crist
!” Rand backed off and resumed pacing. “Why are you sniveling like a child?”

Drake didn’t know he was crying. He only knew he wanted to be with Jenna, to join her in the grave, to dwell in darkness forever.

“Why would Jenna kill herself?”

His mouth was parched, his lips swollen, and his tongue slow to move, but Drake finally managed to croak, “I don’t know.”

“Surely cuckolding your betrothed with your betrothed’s brother is one reason.”