White Lion's Lady (34 page)

A guard stood post on the landing; he merely frowned at Isabel as she ducked past him and into the fetid, musty air of the dark gaol. A single rushlight hissed in its sconce near the door, the slim, wobbling illumination enough to show her that the place was all but deserted. The cells were empty; nothing but vacant quiet greeted her. She stepped farther within, pivoting her head to peer into the darkened corners.

“He’s gone.” A deep voice issued from behind her. She whirled about, breathless, and found Sebastian sitting on a faldstool in the gloom at her back.

“Where?” she asked.

“He didn’t say, my lady.”

“Will he …” She took a quick breath and worked to keep her voice from breaking. “Will he be back?”

The earl stared at her, sympathy evident in his carefully held expression. “I don’t know.”

Isabel had to struggle to tamp down the stab of pain that tore through her. Griffin was gone. He had left without a word to her. The very thought was like a wound torn afresh, though why his departure should surprise her, she knew not. He had sought to divest himself of her that day at the monastery; now, given this new chance, it appeared he had succeeded.

“I offered for him to stay … given the circumstances, it seemed the least I could do,” Sebastian said. “I trust you understand what I am talking about, my lady.”

Isabel nodded weakly. “Your mother explained everything to me … what had happened, what she had done.”

The earl rose from his stool and stalked to the open grate of the prison cell. He gripped the iron bars in his hands, staring up at the granite ceiling and the three solid walls of stone that comprised the rest of the gaol. “For nearly all my life, I have been schooled to enjoy noble, gentlemanly pursuits, guided away from boyish recklessness and a young man’s need for adventure because of my
obligation to Montborne. I have long felt that I was living another man’s life, but I had no idea just how right I’d been.” He released the grate with some force and let it bang against the wall. “I may as well have been physically shackled to this keep from the day I was born.”

“And now you are shackled to a bride you do not want,” Isabel suggested, recalling their conversation en route to Montborne, when Sebastian had confessed that marriage had not been foremost on his mind.

Sebastian regarded her over his shoulder, the rushlight playing over his striking features and setting a glossy sheen to his raven-dark hair. “Ours will be an arrangement in name only, you have my word of honor on that, my lady. I respect your feelings for my …” he hesitated as if stumbling over a foreign phrase “… for my brother, and will not force myself upon you. If you have his child in the months to come, I shall raise it as my own and bear you no ill will.”

“Oh, Sebastian,” Isabel said softly, touched by his kindness. “Don’t you see? I cannot marry you, not in name only or in truth. My heart belongs to Griffin. It always will.” Even if he thought so little of her that he would leave her there at Montborne without so much as a backward glance. And she knew that regardless of that fact, whatever it took, she would find a way to go to him, to tell him how she felt. “I’ll gather my things and be ready to leave in the morn. You’ve been most generous and I’ve no wish to impose on your goodwill any longer.”

She bowed her head in deference to the earl and took a step toward the open door.

“My lady … I don’t think you understand.”

If his voice had not been so gentle, Isabel might have kept walking. But the soft tone spawned a knot of dread in her stomach. Her feet stilled beneath her, and slowly, she turned around to face him. Sebastian’s gaze was soft, apologetic. Terrifying in its tenderness.

“It is the king’s will, my lady,” Sebastian said, “but it is also Griffin’s own wish that you and I are wed.”

“W-what?” she heard herself whisper. She shook her head from side to side, trying to deny what he said. “His wish that we …? No, that can’t be true …”

But Sebastian’s expression remained firm, unyielding. He spoke slowly, his voice tender even as his words cut into her like a blade. “Before he left, Griffin made me promise him, out of concern for your well-being, that I would take you to wife … as our king commands.”

The numbing statement hung between them in the semi-darkness, punctuated by the soft pop of the oiled rushes smoldering in their sconce. Isabel stood there in the shadows of the gaol, watching mutely as Sebastian looked down at his boots, then simply walked past her. He paused in the doorway as if he meant to say something more but then perhaps thought better of it. When she glanced up, he was gone, leaving Isabel alone and shaking in the cold, vacant blackness of Montborne’s prison.

“What will ye have, me love?”

The tavern maid stumbled back on her heels when Griff lifted his head and met her gaze. While the din of the afternoon crowd growing drunk in the Derbyshire public room was raucous, it was not so loud as to drown out the woman’s gasp of startlement upon seeing a known outlaw seated within arm’s reach of her. Wild-eyed and speechless, she worried her hands in her stained apron, swallowing with an apparent degree of effort.

“Good eve, Willa,” Griffin drawled. “Do you suppose a man could get a tankard of ale around here?”

“Oh, my—of course, m’lord,” she stammered, bobbing her head and dashing off to serve him.

Griff leaned back on the bench he occupied at a corner table of the tavern. He pressed his spine against the plastered wall of the establishment and let out a heavy sigh. It had been a hard day-and-a-half ride from Montborne to his stop here, where he had last seen Dom and his soldiers. A few questions posed to some of the townsfolk along the way garnered him information that Droghallow’s lord had since returned to his keep, though a handful of his men yet prowled the Derbyshire villages for signs of the bride thief they had been ordered to hunt down and retrieve.

Griffin had no intention of waiting around to be apprehended; he would take refreshment here, then find a few hours’ rest somewhere away from town before continuing
on his way to Droghallow. The mount Sebastian had given him was a robust beast that would make the journey easily, the finest in his stables, just as the earl had promised. Sebastian had also gifted Griffin with another consideration, for along with the food and supplies, secreted in one of his saddle packs had been a satchel fat with silver. Griff had not counted the coins, but he felt their significant weight where the purse now hung from a cord tied to his baldric.

He withdrew a couple of sous to pay for his ale when Willa returned with the cup a moment later. Tipping the tankard to his lips to taste the bitter drink, Griff could not help thinking about all that had transpired in the past few days. He could not help his astonishment over the news he had learned at Montborne … the place of his birth. God’s blood, but it still staggered him to think that he was brother to the earl. To think that as the eldest, even by scant moments, he had been born the rightful heir.

What he had told Sebastian was the truth: he did not begrudge him Montborne and its title. Nor did he blame his lady mother for sending him away. He had seen the pain in her eyes, heard the torment in her words as she told him of the events leading up to the night of his birth. As hard as it was to reconcile the depth of his father’s scorn, Griff harbored no ill regard for him either. The old earl’s jealousy and superstition had commanded his will the day he forced his wife to surrender one of their children.

In truth, he almost wished the mystery of his past would never have been solved. The question of who he was, where he belonged, had burned inside him all his life, but now that it was answered he felt more empty than ever before. And it had little to do with envy over lost years or privileges and kinship denied him in his banishment to Droghallow.

No, the hollowness in his heart had everything to do with Isabel.

It had taken all his strength to ride out of Montborne’s
gates without seeing her, without going to her and begging for one last embrace, a bittersweet final kiss. More than anything, he had wanted to see her beautiful face again, to feel her arms around him before he left, perhaps forever. But he knew that if he allowed himself to be near her, especially then—knowing that in another place, another time, she might well have been his—he would never have found the will to leave.

With a muttered curse, he cast aside the thought. There would be plenty of time to count his regrets in the days it would take him to reach Droghallow.

Griff drained his cup and set it down on the table. He stood up to take his leave, catching Willa’s eye across the room and beckoning her hither with a crook of his finger. She abandoned the tankards she had been swabbing out and bustled over to where he sat.

“Aye, m’lord? Will ye be needin’ anything else?”

“Yes,” he told her. “Put out your hands.”

She gaped at him in frank uncertainty. “Beg pardon, m’lord?”

Griff reached out and seized her by the wrist, turning her hand over and uncurling her gnarled, work-callused fingers. He pulled the satchel of coins free from where it hung on his baldric and deposited it in her upturned palm. “For you,” he said, watching her eyes widen at the sound of so much silver clinking together within the pouch.

“B-but m’lord!” she gasped, then looked about and lowered her voice to a private whisper. “I don’t understand. What be the meaning of this?”

“Consider it a token of my thanks,” he told her. “For coming to my aid the last time I was in town.”

She shook her head, blinking at him disbelievingly as she weighed the satchel in her palm. “Saints preserve me—there must be several pounds in here!” She laughed, a sudden bark of joy that she tried to stifle behind her hand. “ ’Tis so much money, m’lord!”

Griffin smiled at her ebullient reaction. “I wager it will be plenty enough to take you out of this place.”

Willa hugged the purse to her bosom, her cheeks flushing with color. “ ’Tis nothing short of a miracle is what this is,” she whispered. “Be ye some sort of angel, m’lord? A heavenly body come to answer a poor woman’s prayers?”

Griff gave a wry chuckle. “Just a man looking to settle his debts.”

Smiling broadly, Willa stepped forward and placed a kiss on Griffin’s cheek. “God bless ye, love.”

“Go on, now,” he told her, dismissing her with a faint scowl and a jerk of his chin. She backed away from him, still grinning, then she sauntered to the bar like a countess, her prize dropped safely into the bodice of her ragged, ale-stained gown.

The silver would surely do her more good than it could him, Griff reflected as he crossed the littered tavern floor and stepped into the bracing cold of the autumn afternoon. Droghallow was less than a week away; fewer than seven days separated him from the battle yet to come with Dom. A battle he truly did not expect to survive.

Even if he made it into the castle undetected, he could not hope to call Dom to arms without a garrison of knights being set upon him in protection of their lord. A small part of him regretted his decision to ride for Droghallow alone, but another part of him, a part he had thought long forgotten, compelled him forward regardless of the danger.

That spurring part of him was honor. Battered and rusty, but honor nonetheless. And if he did not go to Droghallow now, he would lose even this last meager scrap of his self-worth. Dom had stolen a good deal of his life from him, but Griffin would be damned if he would permit him to take what was left of his honor.

Mounting the fine white charger given to him by Sebastian, Griff wheeled the steed about and gave it his heels, steering the beast onto the beaten strip of southern road
that would deliver him to Droghallow and whatever fate awaited him there.

October’s chill had grown damp with rain by the time Griffin reached his destination. A cold, wet night meant misery to an uncovered rider already long tired of his saddle, but it also meant fewer guards on watch at Droghallow. The company of more than two dozen knights patrolling the castle’s battlements had dwindled to a sparse handful as the drizzling night wore on toward dawn.

From the concealment of the woods that fringed Droghallow’s broad sloping motte, Griff dismounted and watched the inky silhouettes of the armored soldiers and their spike-tipped lances. He grinned with satisfaction as the dark sky rumbled and shook above them, then opened up with a torrential downpour. While the guards ran to huddle beneath a slim overhang of brickwork, Griff ran for the postern gate located at the far end of Droghallow’s soaring curtain wall.

Stealth, and a once inquisitive lad’s firsthand knowledge of the keep’s secret passageways, led him through the wending bowels of the tower and storerooms, then up a private stairwell that snaked and climbed to the living quarters situated on the floors above. Griff stole along the corridor, past empty castle apartments and anterooms, to the polished oak door that sealed off the lord’s chamber from the rest of the keep.

Griff flexed his hand and reached out, wrapping his fingers around the cold iron latch. He squeezed the handle and heard it click softly on the other side. While capable of being locked from within, on this eve Dom had left the door unbarred, an oversight the arrogant earl would no doubt rue in a few short moments. With slow deliberation, Griff pushed the panel open and carefully let himself into the darkened room.

Floor-length brocade curtains were drawn around all
four sides of Dominic’s bed, the pale silk panels ruffling slightly in the evening drafts that whistled in through the shutters of the chamber’s sole window. Dom’s deep snores were underscored by soft feminine breathing, a rustle of bedsheets as one of the two occupants shifted on the mattress. Having no desire to slay an unarmed man in his sleep, Griff crossed the lightless chamber and unhooked the fastener on the shutters, letting the panels swing wide. Cold air and rain blew in from outdoors, skating across the rushes on the floor and setting the draperies around the bed into a violent quiver.

One of the two bed partners roused with the sudden chill. Griff stepped back into the shadows as the curtain was parted and a bare white leg was flung over the edge of the bed. It was the woman—Felice, he realized as she set her feet on the floor and rose from behind the veil of the drapes. She weathered a deep shiver that shook her from head to toe, muttering angrily through her chattering teeth as she slipped naked from the warmth of the bed. Two paces to the open window, she looked up and saw him standing there.