The Queen's Lady (48 page)

I
n Yarmouth harbor Honor heard the news. She was delivering the latest refugees, a Protestant couple, to the
Vixen
for transport, and was surprised to find Pilot Tate, not Thornleigh, in charge of the ship. Thornleigh, Tate said, was too busy to leave home.

“With wool business?” she asked, recalling it was shearing season.

“Aye. And with settling his wife’s affairs.”

“His wife?”

“Did you not know, mistress? She’s dead.”

Honor was abashed at how happy—how instantly happy—the news made her feel. She tried to enforce onto her mind a proper respect for the dead. But it was no use. She had never even known the woman. She was glad. Shamelessly, girlishly glad.

She knew that Thornleigh’s manor of Great Ashwold was only fifteen miles away. If she set out now, she would see him by nightfall.

It was late afternoon when she dismounted in the courtyard of Great Ashwold. She gave her mare to the groom with instructions to brush and feed her carefully; there was no hurry.

With a pleasurable flutter of uncertainty in her stomach, she knocked on the big front door. A bearded, shuffling servant opened it. Honor asked immediately for the master. The man showed her to the great hall, then shuffled away. Not even an offer of refreshment, Honor thought, with some amusement at the laconic fellow. Well, no matter. Richard’s face would refresh her enough. She stepped into the hall.

Thornleigh was alone there. He sat on a stool before the hearth. His back was to her, but she saw that he held a poker, and with it he was absently prodding a piece of charcoal in the dying fire.

“Richard,” she said, coming to him.

He looked up at her. His chin was stubbled, his eyes bloodshot. His face was expressionless. “Ah,” he said quietly.

Her heart twisted. He looked exhausted. She dropped to her knees beside him. “Richard, I’m . . . so sorry.” Moments ago it would have been a lie, but the sight of his haggard face changed everything.

“Then you’ve heard,” he said flatly, turning back to face the fire.

“Yes.” She looked around the hall. There was dust on the table, and a smell of decaying fruit drifted from a corner. The floor rushes, crushed and dry, looked as though they had not been changed in weeks. And the house seemed very quiet. “Where’s Adam?” she asked.

“With my sister. Joan got married last month.” He looked at Honor. “About Ellen . . . did you hear how?”

“No.”

“The God-rotting apparitor told her a pack of lies. Frightened her to death.” He smiled bitterly. “No, that’s not quite right. I accomplished that all by myself.”

“An apparitor? What do you mean? What happened?”

“They hauled her into Nix’s prison. For heresy. She was awaiting trial when the apparitor came around, sniffing for more business. Told her if she didn’t give the names of her accomplices she would be burned, I would be excommunicated, and Adam would be called a bastard. A beggar woman in the same cell told me about it . . . after.” He shook his head. “All Ellen had to do was abjure, and they’d have had to let her go. But she didn’t know that. She believed the lies. She hanged herself.”

Honor’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, Richard!”

He did not look at her. “And do you know what evidence those jackals cited to arrest her? One of our good neighbors, it seems, reported hearing her say a Paternoster in English to our son. That was all. A bloody prayer. In bloody English. Oh, yes, very suspicious. Christ, she picked up such things like a parrot—songs, rhymes. It didn’t mean anything to her. I could have
told
the bastards that.” He glared at the fire and added, “But, of course, I wasn’t there.”

She shivered at the tone of his voice. She didn’t know what to say. “Can I get you anything? Some wine?”

He ignored her. “No burial in consecrated ground, of course. They pitted her at the crossroads outside the village. But first, because she’d done away with herself . . .” He shook his head and did not finish.

He did not have to. Honor knew, as everyone knew, the regimen that the Church inflicted on a suicide’s corpse. It was foul with unabsolved sin, the Church taught, and its ghost would never rest unless a stake was driven through its heart. That was the law.

Honor bowed her head. If she had lacked feelings before for Ellen Thornleigh, she made up for it now with a swell of pity. But, she told herself, what was done was done. Her real sympathy was with the living.

She leaned close to Thornleigh and lay her arm across his shoulders. “Richard,” she murmured.

He looked at her hand on his shoulder. He rested his cheek against it and closed his eyes. His eyelids trembled. Honor sensed a battle going on inside him. A battle not to weep? It tugged forth her pity again, but with tenfold the tenderness she felt for the sad, dead woman. She stroked his hair, his cheek. She said his name quietly, over and over.

He kissed her hand. He turned his face to hers. His pain moved her more than she could say. She nudged closer and brushed her lips over his, softly. She had meant only to give comfort, but the touch of him immediately kindled her. She craved more. She pressed her lips on his.

His response was instant. His hand cupped the back of her head, holding her to him. He kissed her again, harder, longer. She felt his need.

She pulled free only long enough to stand and move in front of him, between his legs. He looked up at her, his breathing becoming ragged. She bent and kissed the warm skin at his throat. Her fingers pulled at the lacings of his shirt, opening it so that her mouth could move down to his chest. He groaned. His arms went around her waist and he pulled her to him, making her arch her back. He pressed his face against her breasts.

She wanted more. She slid down against him and knelt between his legs. She kissed his forehead, his cheek—her mouth burned by the rough stubble—his mouth. He held her shoulders tightly, and his kisses covered her throat, then the exposed skin of her breasts.

“Richard,” she breathed. “Marry me.”

He stopped. He looked bewildered. “What?”

“There’s nothing to keep us apart now,” she said eagerly.

He blinked at her as if trying to comprehend. His breathing was still uneven. “But—”

“You want me, don’t you?”

“God, yes.”

“Well, now we can be together. Marry me.”

He shook his head as if to clear it. He looked at her, his expression eloquent with desire and uncertainty in equal parts. “My wife’s been dead only two days, and you—”

“That’s right,” she broke in. “Your wife is dead. And I’m alive.”

His hands lay motionless on her hips. “Honor, you don’t understand what’s happened here. I—”

“Of course I do, and I’m sorry. It’s tragic. But it’s done. It can’t be changed.” She was reaching for him again, longing for him. “And I can’t change how I feel for you.”

His arms stiffened, holding her at arms’ length. “No. You don’t see it,” he said sternly. “I killed her. As surely as if I’d tightened the noose. I killed her.”

“That’s nonsense, Richard. She was unstable. Sam, told me. She was that way when you married her, he said. It had nothing to do with you.”

“It had everything to do with me. I was never home. Couldn’t stand being here. Her endless melancholia. I left her alone. All the time. And then, when she needed me most—”

“You can’t blame yourself. There was nothing you could do for her.”

He shook his head. “Maybe there was.” He stared again into the fire as if facing an inquisitor there. “Children. She loved babies. Maybe if I’d . . .” He paused.

“She had Adam,” Honor offered weakly.

But Thornleigh was dealing now only with the interrogator within the glowing coals. “We had a baby daughter. Ellen . . . neglected her. The baby . . . died.”

“I know, Richard. Sam told me. Don’t torture yourself.”

“After that,” he went on bleakly, “I wouldn’t . . . be a husband to Ellen. I couldn’t trust her, you see? I’d think of her abandoning another child, so I didn’t . . . I wouldn’t . . . take her to bed.”

Honor said nothing. When he looked back into her eyes, she was afraid he could read the surprise there. She did not want to show it, did not want to hurt him more than he already had been hurt. But she saw that it was too late.

With a groan of humiliation he twisted away from her. He got up and walked quickly to the door. He half turned to her, avoiding her eyes. “I’m needed at Aylsham for the shearing. Stay if you want.”

He left the hall. Within moments she heard his horse’s hooves clatter out of the courtyard.

*

“Careful, Master Thornleigh,” a shearer called. “That ewe can nip right smart.”

Thornleigh’s mind had been straying. He bent again to apply the shears to the ewe’s leg. Already, he was up to his knees in fleece. He finished the job, let the ewe go, and straightened. He wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve, and looked around. The shed, hot and dusty, was full of bleating sheep and grunting shearers, the men’s blades flying over the animals’ backs.

The shearers were an itinerant band; once they’d got through Thornleigh’s flock here at Aylsham they’d set out for his neighbor’s pens. They were skilled laborers, and he knew they did not need his help; he could not match the speed of even the least experienced of them. But he had thrown himself into the work to keep his mind occupied. Ellen’s awful death he had accepted. He hoped her spirit might now find peace. But for the two days he’d been here he’d been able to think of nothing but Honor.

He stepped out of the shed, rubbing at a knot in the muscles of his back. A child ran to him with a foaming tankard from her mother’s nearby table, a makeshift alehouse set up for the shearers. Thornleigh gave the child a penny for the ale and quickly quaffed it down.

Wiping the foam from his lip, he walked across the dusty path to a field and stopped to watch the activity. This was his tenting yard. A half-dozen men and women were busy spreading wide swaths of cloth, wet from the fuller’s, over two twenty-foot wooden frames. The broadcloth, stretched on tenterhooks across these frames, would be left in the sun to dry.

Thornleigh was pleased with the success of setting up the tenting yard next to his shearing shed. With them close together, and with his new fulling mill operating on the stream nearby—he could faintly hear the men’s mallets pummeling the cloth there—he’d been able to reduce the time he used to spend riding the shire to supervise the various craftsmen with whom he dealt.

Still, he thought ruefully as he stretched his back to ease the stubborn muscle knot, the amount of work for him in overseeing the enterprise seemed to end up the same, if not more. Every important decision remained his.

He shook his head at the conundrum: there wasn’t enough work to keep his mind off Honor, but too much to let him get away and ride back to her. He ached to see her.

What an idiot he’d been. What a blinkered, self-wallowing, fog-brained fool. He’d been groping in the darkness of self-blame for so long, had thought of himself as cold-blooded for so long, that when the woman whose love he wanted most in the world had knelt and offered herself to him—offered him a chance at genuine happiness—what had he done? Refused her. Shrank away like some addle-brained wretch let out after years in prison and frightened by the sunlight.
Refused
her. Fool!

But her—she was magnificent. Bold and obstinate and generous. Unbending in her purposes. Yielding in his arms. God in heaven, he loved the woman.

Restless, thinking of her, he watched the tenting. All was going smoothly here. And the fulling mill was operating trouble-free. And the shearers certainly didn’t need his clumsy pair of hands. Could he leave now? Go to her? Was there any point? Would she still be there? Would she understand that he was ready to put his many failures with Ellen behind him, and be happy?

“Master Thornleigh!” a man’s voice called from the office near the shearing shed. “Can you come, sir? There’s a Yarmouth waggoner in confusion about which bales of worsted he’s to take. And the dyer’s asking payment for his woad.”

Thornleigh closed his eyes, hoping to savor in his mind, for one last moment, the image of Honor smiling up at him. Did he have any right on God’s green earth to expect that she’d still care? No. In his mind she was sadly turning from him. He had missed his chance. With a feeling of loss more hollow than he had ever known, he let her slip away.

He walked back to work.

*

In the stable, Honor stood stroking her mare’s nose, lost in thought as the groom finished buckling the saddle.

“All set, mistress,” the lad said shyly.

Honor looked up from her reverie. “I’ll walk her out myself, Harry. Thank you. Now, off with you to the hall. They won’t wait dinner for you, you know.” She gave him a coin.

“Thank
you
, mistress!” he said with a grin. “Safe journey.” He touched his cap to her and hurried away.

Honor took the bridle and led the mare out through the open stable doors. She walked slowly. She was in no hurry to leave Great Ashwold. She had come to like the manor very much. But she had stretched out her time here as long as she reasonably could. Three days of walking the grounds, talking to the tenants, introducing herself to Thornleigh’s sister, Joan, and her new husband, Giles, at their house in the village, exploring on horseback the summer countryside, visiting the steward’s lodging to discuss the wool trade—just as if she truly were Thornleigh’s business partner. Or wife. Waiting. Hoping he would come back. But he had not come back. Now, her excuses to tarry had run out. She must leave.

The mare’s hooves clacked on the courtyard cobbles. It was noon, hot and still. Honor passed a maid on her way to join the household at dinner, though the girl was ambling, apparently in no hurry to get there. Harry, the groom, had stopped near the front door of the house. Red-faced, he went to the maid and they fell into whispered conversation. Honor smiled. So that was why the girl was in no hurry to rush inside. Her horse moved on lazily toward the open main gate. When it began to wander toward some tufts of sweet grass growing by the fleece shed, Honor allowed it to go there, to stop, and nibble. She stroked its neck and thought of Thornleigh.