The King's Courtesan (29 page)

“Hope…don’t. That’s not true! But Harris is the last of them.

I’ve waited years and now there is no choice.”

“There is always a choice. You can stop. You can honor a vow to yourself or honor your word to me.” She looked over her shoulder to where his mount stood ready. “It appears the decision is an easy one.” She could hardly believe they were having this conversation. How could her world tumble down so quickly, changing completely from night to day?
I
am so stupid. Every time I believe or imagine, I end up
feeling betrayed. It’s my fault. I can’t seem to stop making
things into something they’re not.
First her mother, then Charles and now the one she had al owed herself to love.

Fool! Fool! Fool!

“Damn it, woman, there is nothing easy about it! But I can’t stop yet. This has to be done. This man means us harm.

’Twas he who asked your lover Charles for Cressly, and it’s the first real chance I’ve had at him in years.” She gasped in hurt and outrage. “You throw Charles in my face now?”

He let his breath out on a sharp exhale and clenched his hands behind his head, feeling frustrated and guilty, though he wasn’t sure why. When he spoke he did his best to keep his voice soothing. “I apologize. That was uncal ed for. But so is your attack on me. I do not go to honor myself, but to take care of unfinished business. He knows who I am, Hope. He knows what I did to his fel ows. He has come after me already. The fool stil believes there is treasure here. His fear and greed make him dangerous, not only to me, but to you. To everyone here.” He spoke to her as if he were calming an overtired child. “Once he is dealt with…”

“Once he is dealt with, what? Once he is gone you’l have nothing left, Robert. You’ve built your entire life around him.

Clearly nothing else matters. He is the reason you married me, is he not?” It felt as if he’d stabbed her and she was close to tears, but she refused to hold him that way. “Go, then. Seek vengeance. I pray it brings you comfort this time.”

“God’s blood, woman! Have you not listened to a word I’ve said. I…have…no…choice!” Sergeants Oakes’s words returned to haunt him.
You’re not very good with people,
are you?
He had thought he’d improved somewhat with Hope, but apparently he was wrong. Be damned if managing a wife wasn’t one of the hardest tasks a man could undertake.

“Oh, I’ve been listening, Robert. I fear it’s you who has not been listening to me. You have waited twenty years. Yes. I understand. He is a danger. I understand that, too. Now is the perfect opportunity to act, I assume because he’s far from both Cressly and London. I am not a fool. What I also understand is you made me a promise and when I need you, the thing that has waited for twenty years cannot wait a few weeks or even a few months more. You have farmers and shepherds with muskets tramping the fields. Cressly is an armed camp. He would have to come with an army to be a danger to you here.”

He spread his hands wide and let them drop to his sides.

“Hope I… You don’t understand.”

“No, Captain, I don’t. But you need trouble yourself no further. I wil manage perfectly wel on my own. In fact, I managed very wel by myself before we met.”

“And just what is that supposed to mean?”

“I’l be on my own way tomorrow. One doesn’t keep the king waiting. I have no more choice than you say you do.”

“On your way where?”

“Back to court!”

“Back to him? After the way he treated you? After he betrayed you and al owed his mistress to gloat? After al the fine words you’ve said to me? You said you were done with him! You
could
await my return. You
could
tel him your husband forbade you traveling alone. Last night you said you wanted me beside you. You claimed to love me. You said you knew we were fated when first we met and were meant to be together.”

Hope marveled at the indignation in his voice.
The betrayer
acts the betrayed. It is always so
. “Yet you have never claimed to love me in return. Revenge is your mistress and you choose her over me. As for him, he is the
king.
One comes when he summons.”

“And last night? It was some game or contest? Did it satisfy your curiosity? Do you know me now?”

“Last night was a dream. If it were real, I would have woken to find you beside me. If it were real, you would not choose to abandon me when I need you most. You are
not
the man I dreamt of, nor the man I thought you were. I am a fool and you… That day, now, it is a meaningless coincidence and nothing more. The kind that happens to people every day.” He spread his arms wide. “Look at me.
I…
am real.
This
is who I am. Last night I told you because you begged to know. I let you see it al . And I warned you, you would not like it. I am no knightly hero, nor have I ever claimed to be.

You don’t love me. I am not the one you seek. He is but some imaginary fel ow you have decorated with my face and form.”

“I know.” The words escaped as a regretful sigh.

Turning her back on him, she walked away.

THAT NIGHT THE WIND picked up off the water, howling through the val ey with a dul roar. Trapped within its fury were a thousand eerie voices. Some wailed and whimpered, others shrieked and whispered, and one seemed to breathe her name beneath a low moan. Hope buried her head under pil ows and blankets and a nightmare crept in with her. One that had visited her in various guises many times before. The only thing she remembered of it when she woke was that she always ended up alone.

BEFORE THE SUN CRESTED
the trees, Hope Nichols was on her way back to court, continuing her journey as it had begun years ago, by herself. Wel , not entirely. One had to have a care for highwayman, and apparently marriage made one’s husband’s enemies one’s own. Oakes and a complement of heavily armed men, expertly trained and fiercely loyal, accompanied her.

ROBERT CONTINUED in the opposite direction.

Vengeance was a personal business between one man and another. Harris, justice, resolution, lay to the north. How could she expect him to abandon it now? He’d known her less than six months but he’d carried this burden almost al of his life. And why couldn’t she understand the danger the man presented? Was his word not good enough? Harris assaulted women…and children, for sport, and he had a grudge to bear.

And what now? Instead of waiting for him so they might face the king’s displeasure together as they’d agreed, she had chosen to please her ex-lover by scampering back to London within hours of his summons. He had taken a risk, revealing himself to her. One he had shared with none other. Perhaps, in the light of day, despite her words of comfort and acceptance, the summons had come as a welcome excuse. He had known in his gut it was a mistake to tel her, and that was before she bloody decided he was her toy soldier brought to life.

Wel , he was no one’s toy. Certainly not Charles’s, and certainly no woman’s, and a good soldier fol owed his instincts. He completed his mission. He refused to be distracted. Let Charles deal with her. The man had betrayed and humiliated her and she’d sworn she would never take him back as lover. But what would happen when she was back at court with a charming and charismatic king intent on reclaiming her? How long would she resist?

She would be safer at court, though. If Harris had a chance to hurt him through his wife he would, but he would never dare molest one of the king’s courtesans.

His jaw tightened. She would be in London by tomorrow.

How would Charles greet her? With diamonds and sapphires cut and set to match her eyes. A palace suite now she was a lady. Apologies and blandishments and words to soothe her hurt and anger. Men like Charles and de Veres, they had a talent for such things, but he was unaccustomed to pretty speeches. Try as he might, he never seemed to find the right words.
You have never
claimed to love me in return,
she’d said. Wel , perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps the words didn’t drip from his tongue like honey, but he’d wager no one else had humored her with tales of Robin Hood or indulged her interest in sword fighting or stood patiently for hours while she admired shrubs!

His horse, sensing his mounting fury, grew restive, tossing its head, muscles bunching, fretting to be released. He turned him sideways, holding him in check as he reared and pranced, feeling the power and frustration coiled beneath him. Then he straightened him out, leaned forward and gave him his head, hurtling through the night with the ful moon lighting his path and his black cloak bil owing behind him like wings. He was vengeance. He was retribution. He rode for Caroline and Harris was his prey.

He approached Gildersome, a vil age close to Farnley, not quite sure what to expect. The message had been vague and he was wary. A tavern was the best place to mingle, listen to the news, make discreet enquiries and spread a little coin. It usual y required a good deal of finesse and even greater quantities of alcohol before suspicious locals actual y parted with any useful information, but this night the tavern was abuzz with the goings-on in the nearby woods. It seemed that militant-looking strangers had been making themselves at home with the local farmers and businessmen for several weeks now, and one more stranger was hardly worth a glance.

The heavily forested area was crowded and even easier to infiltrate than the tavern. Over a hundred men mil ed about, talking and arguing. Al of them were Protestant, many of them ex-parliamentarian soldiers, and several of them he recognized, including Joshua Greathead, whom he’d glimpsed in London. What he didn’t see was Harris. What he heard shocked him. Not for its content, but its delivery.

They spoke of treason, and a more voluble, undisciplined, indiscreet group of conspirators one could not imagine.

Perhaps they felt themselves too far distant in Yorkshire to attract attention, but they were blithely out in the open planning an attack on the royalist strongholds in Leeds, with the intent of starting an uprising to overthrow the king. There was even talk that General Fairfax, their old commander, might come to lead them.

It would have been laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. He hunched his shoulders to disguise his height, lowered his hat and wrapped his cloak like a scarf to obscure his features, and slipped into the shadows. It was beginning to feel like a trap, though not the kind he’d expected. Any man placed in these woods by witnesses could expect to be hanged, drawn and quartered. He’d overheard enough to make the risk worthwhile, though. It seemed the tavern in nearby Morley had been commandeered by a group of brutal braggarts and bul ies. He left the woods as quietly as he entered them, and went elsewhere to hunt his prey.

The King’s Arms was at the very edge of the vil age, backing onto the moor. It might have been a pleasant walk by day, but its isolation made it a perfect gathering spot for men of a certain sort, and a dangerous walk for the uninvited by night. The door burst open on a roar to drunken laughter. A portly older gentleman hurtled from inside, landing face first in the dirt. A voice that had lived too long in his dreams rose above the din.

“Come back when you have the rest, or your wife and daughter wil settle the account, you useless piece of dung.” A familiar feeling came over him. Anticipation, exhilaration, a sense of heightened awareness, focused and honed to a deadly, determined calm. His teeth flashed white in the moonlight as his lips drew back in a feral grin. He’d tracked his quarry to his lair. He waited for the uproar to subside, then quietly slipped inside. Only a few of the occupants looked to be locals. The bald man lounged by the hearth, groping the breast of a naked woman who looked to be drunk, asleep or, by the bruises on her face, unconscious.

A half-dozen wel -armed men were with him. They were al too busy dicing to notice his presence.

He took a seat on a bench near the back of the room and sidled over to rub elbows with a bleary-eyed fel ow who looked about ready to slide under the table. “Who’s that lot over there, eh?” he asked, sliding his new friend a pint of ale and half a crown. “They don’t look to be from around here.”

“Neither do you,” his drunken companion answered sourly, but he pocketed the coin and reached for the ale. “Too many strangers round here these days.” Another commotion drew both their attention. An unkempt, scrawny-looking youth carrying a heavy flagon of beer had done something to earn a string of curses and a cuff that sent him reeling to the floor. The boy picked himself up, expressionless, retrieved another flagon, and continued serving as he’d been doing before.

“That be the mighty war hero Colonel Harris, honoring us smal folk with his presence. He’s the earl of something or other, or so he claims. He’s here and about often these days. Some say too often. Some say it’s tied to the doings in the woods, but he ends up here every night cheating at cards and dice. You want to be careful not to draw his attention. If he invites you to play there’s no refusing, and no leaving til you’re parted from al your coin.”
So…the arrogant fool had used his own name
. “And that lot with him?”

“Those be his men and the reason none dare complain.

The lad is his son, poor bastard, and the woman one of his whores.”

“I’m no stranger when it comes to games of chance,” Robert said with a slow smile. “Perhaps I’l see what I might take from him.”

“They say a fool and his money are soon parted. Good luck, friend. Beware he doesn’t also take your life.” Robert rose and patted the man’s shoulder, then tossed him another coin. “Drink to my health at the wake.” He moved quietly through the shadows and they moved with him, coalescing into a dark shape that waited, just feet from its prey. Robert’s hand caressed his sword hilt. He could see the veins where his enemy’s neck met his shoulder, pulsing life in rhythm with his heart. That this thing should live when his sister did not was unbearable. Harris could be dead within two seconds, but he had to recognize and understand. He had to know that his casual slaying of Caroline was what ended his life now.