The Maiden Bride (12 page)

"He shall be the keeper of the wardrobe."

"Him?" Confounded, Nicholas glared at the man, who looked equally astounded. Spooked, and ready to run.

"Me?"

"Exactly you, Master Mullock." She stood up between them, set the stuffed rucksack upright against her knee, and tied it off at the neck. "I need someone to make sense of the mess that my husband and his steward left behind for me. The storage rooms and the undercrofts are a jumble. And have you thought, Nicholas, of how we'll sort through all the chattel that will come out of the village? Someone needs to do something with it all. I can't spare the time. Do you read, Mullock?"

The thief's mouth gaped still. "No, milady."

"Then I'll find you a clerk. Somehow." She handed the man his rucksack.

"And you want me to manage this wardrobe?"

"If you please." She waited patiently for Mullock's assent, while the man twitched his eye and ran his filthy finger along the neck of his tunic.

"I do please, my lady," Mullock finally whispered, as though he feared being drummed out of the thief's guild if they ever learned he'd gone honest on them. "Very much so."

Damnation.

"Good. Come then—I'll settle you in and put you to work immediately." She started off toward the keep with the man and his sow, her hands sketching out her dreams against the sky.

In a single edict, she had appropriated Mullock's thieving and knighted him with her trust. He looked suddenly sainted, transcendent. Not that it would last. Men like Mullock crossed every class, from princes to peasants. They lived entirely for themselves. She needed to understand this.

He would set her straight about unreclaimable brigands and impoverished hearts. About a God who jousted with unarmed innocents.

Chapter 11

«
^
»

"
A
solar? Way up here?" Eleanor hadn't seen the tower room on her first foray. Odd, because it hadn't a lock, though it was tightly closed up, smelling of dust and
in
dire need of the crisp sunlight that filled it when she slid aside the heavy drapes and opened the tall shutters onto the shimmering blue ocean that seemed to stretch out forever. Bright and sublimely homey, with a small connected chamber through another set of drapes, with another tall casement window.

There were three barrel chairs and a small hearth, four braziers, a scarred worktable and benches, stout candles with dust-covered wax pooled in their tallow catches, pots of ink, coffers full of paper, upright pigeonholes stuffed with counting sticks, shelves of large books—

"Books! This isn't just a solar, it's the steward's office!"

Feeling wildly triumphant, she hefted an ancient-looking book off the shelf, spread it across the table and opened to the first page. It was, indeed, everything that she'd been searching for.

"'Faulkhurst Castle. Household accounts: Michaelmas, 1301.'" Fifty years old, but there were many more books here, dozens of them. The record of every minute of the manor's years, its pulse and its livelihood: from how many chickens were used for supper on the octave of Easter, to the number of candles burned during Twelfth Night.

The newer books were thicker, but stopped abruptly, tellingly, four years ago—1347. The year before the plague had come.

The front page of the book was signed by a Rudolphus—whether merely a clerk or William Bayard's well-educated steward, his daily paragraphs were neatly scribed and set apart.

"'25 March, 1347. 'Delivered from the East Tower wardrobe to the armory, 17 ells of canvas, 4d.' for banners." The East Tower—exactly where she and Hannah had discovered the spinning room.

"'To the kitchen: one-quarter ox, from castle stores, and one barrel salt. Three peahens, 1d.'"

She sat at the table and read on through a hard, wintry year, with plowing and planting and reaping schedules that clearly revealed—as she had suspected they would—her husband's meanness of spirit: driving his tenants to produce more than they could bear, driving them off their land when they failed, collecting harsh fees and taxes, showing no mercy toward those who needed it most.

All of his sins, recorded in the tidy quill strokes of his dispassionate steward.

She scanned the lines quickly, chiding herself to stop with each turn of the page. But toward the end of November of that year, a single item in a single paragraph made her heart lurch.

"'One band of gold from Faulkhurst Treasury, 10s. To John Sorrel for the lord's bride.'"

The lord's bride.

"Me."
The brevity of the notation numbed the tips of her fingers, heated smudges across her cheeks. "I was an item on Bayard's accounting sheet. Not even a name."

Of course, not surprising at all. Yet it was difficult to explain the hollowness that came with seeing it inked with such casual permanence.

The lord's bride—but never his wife.
There was no line for that.

An unwanted, unexpected grief washed over her, thoroughly wasted on a regret that she shouldn't feel.

Because he didn't matter anymore.

Because, according to the common laws and those of God, he'd never been her husband at all.

Unconsummated. Incomplete.

Still a virgin—dangerously so, if Edward or his barons ever discovered that she and William had never met. How simply that could happen: a casual mention of timing, a little investigation into William's travels, then into hers.

The consequences terrified her, were unthinkable: that Faulkhurst might one day be taken from her by lack of a marital formality. No one need ever know that it hadn't happened, the ceremonial rending of her maidenhead.

No one but her next husband, if there ever was such a man—right in the middle of their wedding night when he would discover her intact and trembling, her home, her heart, completely at his mercy.

And there
would
be another husband someday—Edward would see to that.

Unless she found a remedy for her highly inconvenient chastity—some willing gentleman who wouldn't mind deflowering
a virgin.

Someone like Nicholas.

Deflower you, madam? Certainly. Would you prefer before or after I finish the bakehouse?

Now.

But it would be never. Oh, God. Here she was daydreaming again—still—flushed and glowing to the tips of her breasts, breathless with imagining that Nicholas might kiss her there someday. His lips had been wondrously warm and questing last night, and he'd only kissed her fingers, their tips, and that stunning, stirring place in the middle of her palm.

But he was the absolutely wrong man for the task—should she ever decide to undertake such a rash act. He was her laborer and she the master: she'd made that decisively clear. It wouldn't be fair to him. He'd surely consider her request an order and feel obligated. She wouldn't take advantage of her position—no matter her desire for his kiss, or those appealing eyes of his, when they filled up with his passion. Or when he smiled from inside them.

No, a perfect stranger would be best of all. Unattached, unable to tell tales afterward.

Sneaking around with a stranger? This whole ridiculous scheme felt like an unforgivable betrayal. Not of her husband, oddly, but of Nicholas.

'Twill be my pleasure, madam. As it will be yours.

Blast it all. She took three long, deep breaths and righted her focus, forcing herself to scan the short lines of her husband's book once again, looking for more than had been there before.

The lord's bride.
But there she was still, wedged between 'the expenses of the hounds
in
taking one fallow deer' and '250 salted herring from stores.'

"A pox on your soul, Bayard. An itchy, burning one."

She slammed the book closed and scavenged through the chamber for the most recent records, opening chests and trunks and wardrobes of male clothing. But the last book ended abruptly in 1347.

"You couldn't even leave me a few measly words about your castle, a few numbers, a few hints at how to dig my way out of your midden, could you, husband?"

Selfish to the end.

Not that she was going to give up her search, even though Rudolphus might have escaped with the records to one of Bayard's Burgundian estates when the pestilence arrived. If so, Edward had doubtlessly used them to eviscerate her husband's holdings after his death.

Another scavenger always waiting to pick at the bones. She'd be damned if she'd stand still long enough to let anyone pick at hers. The sound of Pippa and her pounding tread came chasing up the stairwell.

"Nellamore! Nellamore, look! Look what we found." Pippa flew into the room, slid to a stop, and grinned as Eleanor knelt to catch her. "See!"

Pippa laid a small toy horse—or some such beast—into Eleanor's palm; a sweet thing, crudely made of leather-jointed twigs, a sleek body, and a frayed rope tail. It was one-eared, begrimed around its middle, and smoothed to silk by a child's adventures.

It had been so well and deeply loved that when Eleanor brushed it across her cheek, she felt the soft breath of the boy who had left it behind. Her eyes pooled with sudden, unexpected tears, and her chest became stuffed and aching with a sob for him and all the children in the world.

Sad-faced in sympathy, Pippa crawled into her lap. "Why does the little horse make you cry, Nellamore?"

Ghosts, Pippa. Sudden, sad ones.

"He's just that sweet, Pippa. Don't you think so?" The twiggy legs dangled from their tethered joints. A fine, neglected destrier, made by someone who had loved deeply, enduringly.

"Crying-sweet, he is, Nellamore." Pippa gave the poor beast a kiss on its nose, then tucked it into her bulging belt pouch. "Sweeter even than that 'normous block of sugar you found this morning."

"Much sweeter."

"Pippa! Lady Eleanor! Look!" Lisabet flung herself onto the landing and then into the chamber, lushly swathed in green-and-gold damask and spinning around in abandon.

"Lisabet! What happened to your face?" Eleanor's heart flew into her throat until she realized the girl wasn't bruised and battered, merely rouged crimson to her temples, her eyebrows kohl-black nearly to her hairline.

"I'm a lady, milady."

More like a misguided London tart, and far too innocent to be let loose on the world anytime soon. Lisabet wobbled, curtsied, stepped on the twisted fabric and then pitched forward into Eleanor's arms.

"What have you gotten into?" Eleanor set her upright, trying not to laugh at Lisabet, who was trying to be so grown up.

"Lady's things, I think. Aren't I lovely?"

Terrifying. And dear.

"Too lovely for words, Lisabet." She shooed both girls toward the door, leaving the books and
ledgers
behind
until she
could corner
her
steward and study them alongside him. "Come show me where you found the pony and these lady's things."

There was a whole wardrobe of fine lady's things as it turned out, from tissue-thin chemises and broidered kirtles to silken stockings and doe-hide slippers. Men's garments as well, splendid worsteds and camlets trimmed in sable and fox, and even a goodly amount of sturdy children's clothes that would fit Pippa and any other children who might come through the gates.

Lovely things indeed, delicate, extravagant. Booty from her husband's sacking and pillaging, no doubt, hoarded with care and camphor. The lady's robes and gowns had been her size exactly, richly cut and newly styled. Yet they hadn't been fashioned for her at all. For her husband's courtesans, or a mistress, perhaps.

Certainly not for his forgotten, virginal wife.

* * *

"You've done all this, Mullock?" Not two hours in his new position and the great hall looked like a London market. "It's astounding."

The man shied as easily as Dickon. "Thank you, ma'am. Sorry that it's not His Lordship's opinion, my lady."

"His lordship?" Ah, Nicholas. The man did have that lordly breeze about him, as though he'd never been subject to the whims of anyone. Not even as a soldier. A man used to giving orders and seeing them done. One mystery after the next, to be solved and sorted.

"What did Master Nicholas say to you?"

"Didn't have to say anything, did he, ma'am? I can feel him watching me from clear across the bailey. Like a great flying beast, he is, ready to pounce on my back and tear me to a skeleton."

"I assure you, Mullock, he'll not harm you." But it would be good to reiterate that fact to "His Lordship," to find him at the armory. "He's only looking out after my interests."

"Can't blame him there, my lady. You've quite a cache to lose, if a fellow had a mind to steal. Which, o'course, I don't. But look at this here chest of silks, for one."

Mullock might have been a wily merchant thief, liable to steal her blind, but he did seem to know his goods—or else he spun a palatable tale of the value of Faulkhurst's potential.

A man well worth nurturing.

It was late afternoon by the time Eleanor could spare a moment to speak with Nicholas—a double errand to also draw water from the gatehouse well, to test its taste against the kitchen cistern and the well in the keep. She had dipped a ewer's worth and was just rounding the picket wall of the stables—to speak to Nicholas about Mullock, when she was struck by a sight that rocked her to her bones and that changed the direction of her pulse.

Nicholas—standing high up on the ridge beam of the armory, his legs braced astride two rafters at the gable end a full three stories above the bailey, as beautiful and glistening and as near to naked as a man could be while still wearing his boots and long breeches.

Bedazzling, he was—gold-sinewed and sunstruck indigo, his too-long, wildly thick hair lashed by the wind, his broadly muscled shoulders braced by nothing but the blue sky as a backdrop. His effortless movements at guiding the huge windlass and the crane were as fluid as the pull of the sea, a part of the shifting sunlight and the wheeling gulls.