The Maiden Bride Read online

  She hurried down the stairs to the undercroft beneath the great hall, armed with her lamp, her faithful picklock, and a sledgehammer for good measure.

  She hung the lamp on a peg and fit the pick into a rusted lock, certain that God completely understood why she'd learned to pick locks with such ease: to open the herbalist's cabinet at the deserted Priory of St. Oswald, to free Dickon and Lisabet from that horrid jail at Bristol. The skill was an uproarious source of humor for Dickon.

  She did her level best with the small picklock, but still the rusted hasp just hung there.

  Like so many of her husband's locks, it was impregnable. An overlarge hunk of rusted iron, corroded by the salted air of the sea, encrusted with his villainy. But hopefully, no match for a simple sledgehammer and a chisel.

  She hoisted the long-handled thing over her shoulder, fit the chisel blade against the hasp, raised the hammer above her head, inhaled a breath of suddenly familiar, altogether intoxicating coolness, then put every ounce of her weight into a downward swing.

  But the hammer went nowhere. At all. It hung with a magical weightlessness in the air just above her head.

  "What—"

  "Are you trying to take your fingers off at the wrist, madam?"

  "Nicholas!" Furious that he could so easily thwart her—that he could sneak up on her like a shadow, as though he owned every passage, she kept a firm grip on the handle and turned beneath his arm, only to come face to chest with his frozen-frowned fury. "Let go this instant. I order you."

  Nicholas decided then and there that the only way to save the woman from herself was to lock her up and toss away the key. "And I refuse, madam." He plucked the sledgehammer out of her hand and tossed it aside, well out of her reach.

  "On what grounds, sir?"

  "On the grounds that you are being careless with your well-being."

  "I'm perfectly capable of breaking a few locks. I've been doing it this way all morning." She rapped on the panel with the heel of her hand, then leaned back against the door.

  "This way?" Holy hell. "Wild swings with a sledgehammer and a chisel?" He took the chisel out of her hand.

  "Lacking a set of keys to my husband's castle, I have no choice. You haven't seen any, have you, Nicholas? Keys to any of the doors?"

  He nearly laughed. There was a whole ring of them rusting beneath the waves where he'd tossed them over a year ago. But she didn't need to know that. He would open the damned locks himself.

  He'd never in his life had to lie about anything. He'd never needed to—he'd always taken what he wanted by force or coercion, had spoken his own brand of truth and to hell with the opposition, royal or otherwise. Now, speaking one falsehood after another to his wife didn't set at all well.

  "I've seen no keys, my lady," he said, adding to his tenancy in hell. He wanted to press her up against the door and make love to her mouth, because she'd caught up her glistening lower lip with her teeth in her exasperation at him—and at her husband, that ghost that was forever hanging about.

  "How about gunpowder? Is there any?"

  She was utterly mad, and beautiful, the ends of her hair scented with cinnamon at the moment.

  "Gunpowder, madam?"

  "Never mind; I suppose a sledgehammer will have to do me. Now stand aside; I have loads of work to do, and you're in my way." The woman picked up the hammer again, nearly clubbing his knee with it before he caught the handle and took it from her.

  "Allow me, before you damage one of us." He took a swing and the lock popped easily and clattered to the ground. She made an approving little noise in her throat that made his heart swell like a knavish fool's.

  "Thank you, Nicholas."

  She flipped the remains of the latch off the hasp, swung the door wide, and carried her lamp into the blackness. He followed her uneasily, not remembering what he'd left in here or in any of the other storage rooms when he'd locked the doors so long ago.

  He'd prepared well for a long siege, at the beginning. He'd kept rigorous accounts in the estate records until it hadn't mattered anymore, until everyone had just slipped away.

  "Nothing," she said, glaring into the single barrel that stood lidless in the center of the small and otherwise empty room. "I wish my husband were here beside me just now."

  "Do you?" He was standing as near to her as he dared, close enough to see more than he ought to of the small, rounded ripeness of her breasts, their peaks hidden completely from all but his imagination, from the delight they would be to hold, to nuzzle.

  His heart skipped along his ribs and his mouth was dry when he finally asked, "Why do you say that?"

  "Because then, sir, I could curse him to his face, just as I constantly do under my breath for leaving me such a mess of his stores."

  The urge to defend himself shoved at his pride, nudged him to say, "Your opinion of your late husband seems overly strong, considering that you never met him."

  "I didn't have to meet him to know that he was a wicked man. Great heavens, his legends told me so, long before I was wed to him—even if only half of them were true."

  True as it was, her indictment struck hard. It made him want to demand a list of all of his flaws in detail, so that he could at least dismiss the falsehoods and repair some of himself in her eyes. "Bayard was wicked in what way?"

  "In every way imaginable. You must have known his reputation—the worst being that he was too cowardly to care that his tenants were dying by the score, too busy raiding and debauching or tallying his plunder, or outright hiding from the calamity, instead of sending help to Faulkhurst or coming himself."

  Cowardly. He didn't want her to believe that of him, not cowardice. It hadn't happened that way at all and he wanted her to know, somehow. "You're sure that your husband abandoned Faulkhurst so heartlessly?"

  "If not him, then his steward did so on his behalf and then locked the gates."

  "Perhaps it was a mercy, my lady, to send them all away. To someplace better."

  "Ballocks! William Bayard never did a merciful thing in his life—except for his neglect of me. I've never known a man so practiced at abandoning his obligations at the first hint of trouble. Whether castle or village … or wife."

  He hated that she could believe that of him. He hadn't abandoned her; he had believed absolutely that she was dead with the rest of her family.

  Aye, but not in those first months of their marriage. He could have sent for her then, but he had been too busy sacking churches and razing farmers' crops, overrunning villages for their plunder. No time for a wife while he was despoiling his soul. Damnation. If he could just explain that she had been better off without him—that she still was.

  She was just picking up the lamp when he realized with a stinging shock to his pride that her fingers were entirely barren of rings.

  Even his.

  A battering surge of possession threatened to swamp him, and he took her left hand and turned her palm upward in the cradle of his own, threading her fingers lightly between his own.

  "He gave you no ring?" he managed.

  He'd sent one to her at the time of the wedding, some little nothing, though he'd never even seen it himself. It was chosen by his ambassador to put a seal on the marriage contract. John Sorrel—a bastard soul himself—had stood for him as groom while he'd tended to his other interests. He'd never spared the ring or the wedding or even the woman he'd married a single thought.

  Yet now it angered him to the marrow that she wasn't wearing his ring, alleged widow or no. Worse—that he had allowed some other man to place it on her finger.

  "Do you mean my husband?"

  He swallowed hard, cleared his throat. "Who else would I mean? He must have given you a ring."

  "Yes, but it's gone."

  "Gone how? Did you lose it?" He could easily imagine what it must have meant to her by the sound of her derision: little enough to make her toss it into the nearest gutter on principle alone.

  "I sold my wedding band in Doncaster a year ago, to
buy boots for Dickon and a new kirtle for Lisabet; she'd outgrown hers. I also bought three loaves of bread with the proceeds, I believe. Yes, and carrots. And an onion."

  A negligible amount for what the band of gold and garnets must have cost his treasury, and what it cost her pride. "Your wedding ring fetched all that?"

  Her eyes narrowed. "It was fashioned of alchemist's gold, Nicholas."

  "I doubt that." He bit the edges of his tongue, sorry that he'd ever mentioned the damned ring, sorry that it made his gut ache to think of it placed on her hand in his absence.

  "I never wore the horrid band after that travesty of a wedding ceremony."

  Travesty? Sorrel had said nothing of any problems.

  "It gained value in my heart only when I used it to buy food and shelter for the people I love. I don't miss it at all."

  A belly-kick would have winded him less. "Well, good then. Fine."

  "Did you need me for anything, Nicholas?"

  Damnation. He couldn't very well tell her that he'd come because he didn't trust her to stay out of trouble for more than an hour, that he planned to keep a closer eye because he was terrified of her coming to harm. "Merely to report the progress on the armory."

  "Why the armory?" She crossed her arms below her breasts and tapped her booted foot. "I told you specifically to start with the bakehouse. We need bread, Nicholas."

  "Not until the forge is running again, which can't happen until the armory roof is secure. One step before the next, in their proper order."

  She looked wary but willing to listen. "How long do you think?"

  "Two days, no more than three." When she frowned at that very reasonable estimate, he added, "Hannah can bake for the few of us in the kitchen ovens till then."

  "There'll be many more than a few of us by then, Nicholas."

  He would have scoffed aloud at her moon-eyed fantasies, but she stalked out of the chamber with her lamp, only to turn back to him in the doorway, the light of her escapades dancing in her eyes. "Which reminds me, Nicholas. I'm looking for my husband's estate office. Have you seen it?"

  A great, cold weight landed hard in his gut. His office. "Why?"

  "Because I expect to find the manorial records there. Bayard's steward must have kept them somewhere central to the daily activities, in an office or the tithe barn, maybe the gatehouse."

  In my private solar, wife, high in the keep. Every word of the last two years written distinctly in his own hand. "I suppose he must have."

  "Yes, but where? I found a store of blank paper, ink and quills and sealing wax, but nothing that looked to be the accounting rolls. Have you ever come across a chamber that might be such an office?"

  "I'm sorry, my lady. I can't help you there." Not until he secured the records from the solar and hid them far from her sphere. There were too many of his secrets to be plundered among the lines and numbers. "Come, madam. I'll crack open a few more locks for you."

  "You don't need to."

  "Indulge my peace of mind, my lady."

  He led her far away from the keep tower, breaking every lock they came across until she was too busy with her discoveries to follow him with her mischief.

  Then he slipped away to the keep tower, where memories slowed his tread to a stop.

  The last few steps up the stairs to the shuttered solar were a daunting distance, rife with the recollection of locking the door against that careful accounting of his sins, and his failure to protect the innocent.

  He couldn't let Eleanor see the most recent records of the estate; she was far too observant. He was her steward now, and she would soon know his handwriting as well as she knew her own. A cataclysmic error, if she ever made the connection between Bayard and himself.

  So he climbed the stairs, just as he had done a thousand times before, dreading the buffeting memories.

  Of racing Liam and his laughter up the steps, of catching him halfway and swinging him over his shoulder to gallop into the tower.

  Again, Papa! And so they had made their adventures each night, until the stars winked out.

  This had been their refuge—his and his son's. Where the boy had played and learned his Latin and his numbers, where Nicholas had labored over accounts that he'd never paid attention to before, where he'd watched his son sleeping—terrified of the boundlessness of love that seemed to gather strength with every day. His son, tucked away safely against everything but God's confounding will.

  Now the chamber smelled of dust and regrets and should-have-beens.

  He closed his heart and gathered all his account books and his journals, everything that he'd ever been, and then escaped with them back into the comfortable shadows.

  * * *

  Chapter 10

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  "A plow harness stored in the silk-chest." Eleanor wheeled another barrow of goods out of the door of the east tower and thumped down the stairs into the bailey, wishing she had a chamberlain, when she noticed an odd little man come swaggering through the gate into the sunshine of the inner ward.

  He was every inch a bandy-legged fighting cock, with a ragged green band tied across his right eye and a rucksack towering two heads taller than his stout shoulders. He was trailed by an exceedingly pregnant sow.

  The man stopped dead when he saw her, preened a bit, hitched up his jangling pack, and then deepened his swagger in her direction.

  An outlaw. Oh, yes. She knew it for certain, even before he opened his mouth to ask, "Does this be Faulkhurst castle, missy?"

  A housebreaker, without a doubt. A pig stealer, for certain. Arrogant, light-footed, and wearing a whole peddler's cart of things that didn't belong to him.

  "Aye, sir, it—"

  "Beggar me bald, I should ha' known better than to trust the bastard." The man threw his leather cap to the ground and stomped on it.

  "Trust who?"

  "Never you mind yourself, missy girl. Here I come all this way 'cause I heard that 'er ladyship was paying folks to live here."

  Another wayward soul—and Nicholas wouldn't like this one a bit. "I know for a fact that she is doing just that, sir. You've found the right place. A tithe and a cottage and a—"

  "A cottage, too? Here, you say?" He stalked around her on his short legs, his one eye as sharp as two. "Well, it damned well better not be one of those heaps of wattle and daub I just passed in that piss-pot excuse for a village."

  Discriminating as well as enterprising.

  "Who are you, sir?"

  "The name's Mullock." He cocked his head sharply and looked Eleanor up and down with a smile that lacked a tooth at each of its corners. "And who do you be, mistress, when you're at home roosting on your lovely lark's nest?"

  An insolent outlaw. "See here, Master Mullock, I don't care to know how you found—"

  She would have finished setting the man straight about who was in charge here, but an enormous, sun-blotting shadow fell across the space between them and then Mullock was suddenly dangling above her, squirming and croaking like a frog on a fish line, held aloft by the scruff of his tunic by Nicholas's lethal fist.

  "Master Nicholas, put him down."

  But her steward was striding toward the gatehouse, or toward the jagged teeth of the seacliffs, by the cold fury in his eyes.

  "No, Nicholas!" She chased after him, after those rippling shoulders, that broad back. She managed to grab hold of his dagger belt and dig her heels into the rocky ground. Pointless, as she sailed along behind him, a broken rudder to his momentum. "What do you think you're doing, sir?"

  He stopped, a solid wall of leather to her colliding motion. He swung around to face her, still dangling Mullock like a spitting cat.

  "I'm taking out the refuse, madam."

  He started away again. But she was ready this time as she blocked his way with both hands extended, though his chest loomed. "Master Mullock isn't refuse."

  "'At's right, I'm—" His protest ended in a gacking sound and more struggling.

  "Madam, he insulted you."r />
  Mullock played fisticuffs with the breeze three feet above the ground, while Nicholas ignored him entirely.

  "They were words only, sir. It takes a lot more than Master Mullock's coarse little insults to threaten me. I took no offense."

  He spoke through his teeth. "Well, I did."

  Mother Mary, she could fall hopelessly in love with all that nostril-flaring outrage. He was defending her as her husband never had, as her father never thought to.

  Immense and protective, her shade in the hot sun. What a dear man.

  And what a danger to her authority.

  "I'm grateful for your concern, Nicholas. But it isn't necessary."

  Nicholas couldn't recall a blacker rage, not even in the thickness of battle. Mullock wasn't fit to sweep the sand off the cobbles, yet he knew where his wife was going with her philosophies, and he loathed it with every part of him.

  "He's a thief, madam. And a worse villain than that, I'll wager."

  "Nicholas. Please. Let's at least hear what Master Mullock has to say for himself."

  Not bloody much at the moment. But she was tugging at his belt again, a wife's familiar insistence, a gentle pleading for the life of this cur.

  He brought the man closer and gave him this one and only chance. "If you want to live long enough to take another breath, Mullock, you'll speak to the lady Eleanor with the greatest respect."

  "I wi—"

  "The slightest slip, Mullock, and I'll cut your tongue right out of your fool head and feed it to the crabs. Do you understand me?"

  Mullock nodded and flailed. "Down."

  Nicholas let go gladly and Mullock splatted onto the cobbles, hacking and coughing as he struggled to his hands and knees. "Didn't know she was yours, milord."

  Aye, she was that, and his pulse roared through his ears, leaving a ringing sound that deafened him to all but the whisper: she's mine.

  "I'm not anyone's, Master Mullock. I am Eleanor Bayard, the lady here at Faulkhurst."

  "You? The lady—"

  "Master Nicholas here is my steward." She bent down to help the man, to dust him or coddle him, but Nicholas yanked him upright by the scruff, leaving him wide-stanced and staggering.