Rainulf rose up on an elbow to look at Corliss lying on her stomach in the middle of the big, tousled bed, plucking grapes and popping them into her mouth. The grapes shared a platter with a wheel of cheese, a half-eaten squire’s loaf, some sweet wafers, and a pot of honey—a late supper of sorts, shared by two naked and sated lovers. Her inquiry about mistresses represented a shift in the conversation, for they’d been talking about Peter’s visit earlier that evening.
“There were many women who gave themselves to me,” he said. “I never thought of them as mistresses. In truth, I rarely slept with a woman more than two or three times.”
“Why not?” She dipped a grape in the honey pot and touched the tip of her tongue to it experimentally; the sight stirred his loins.
“Because they weren’t you.”
She rolled her eyes as she took the grape into her mouth. Chuckling, he moved closer, breathing in the exotic perfume that Martine had given her, and which she’d applied that evening just for him.
Earlier, when it had come time for Peter to return to where he was staying, the prior’s lodge at St. Frideswide’s, Rainulf had walked him downstairs and chatted in the street for a while. When he returned to Corliss’s chamber, he’d found her sitting in her night shift on the edge of the bed, brushing her hair... and smelling of hot, musky Oriental perfume. Dropping to his knees, he’d taken her hard and fast, right there, tearing her shift in the process.
He reached over to lightly skim his fingertips from her upper back to her small, shapely bottom.
“I’m your first mistress?” she asked disbelievingly.
He frowned slightly as he caressed her. “You’re my first lover... my first
true
lover. For some reason I don’t think of you as a mistress, exactly.”
She seemed to ponder this. He watched her insert a finger in the honey and close her lips over it. Heat swelled in his lower body; he stiffened, rose. She saw this and smiled, sucking lazily on her glistening finger, licking it like a cat as she watched him out of the corner of her eye.
He cleared his throat. “What made you ask that, about how many mistresses I’d had?”
Her cheeks pinkened beguilingly, and she avoided his gaze. “I was just wondering where you learned... all those things.”
He smiled and drew looping patterns on her taut buttocks with his fingertips. “What things?”
“Those things that... we do. The things you do to me. You know. The positions, and... well, like before, with the honey, when you dripped it on my, um... and licked it off. Who taught you that?”
He let his hand glide over her sweet curves and down between her thighs to where she was moist from recent lovemaking... and residual honey. “I’m self-taught,” he murmured as he investigated her sticky-sweet folds. “You’re very inspiring.”
She emitted a soft, feminine growl as his curious fingertips stroked and explored. Her legs parted. Presently that delectable bottom began to move, just slightly, in rhythm with his caress. He waited until she went still, her expression almost surprised as she clutched the sheet reflexively.
Now
. He was on top of her—and inside her, as she lay facedown—in less time than it took her to draw an astonished breath. As she cried out, he plunged deep, savoring the sweet violence of her release. He slid his hands beneath her, one cradling a breast, the other her honeyed sex, until her passion renewed itself. He went slower then, grinding sinuously against her until she moaned his name and clawed at the sheets. With a strangled cry that echoed her own, he erupted inside her, his arms locked around her as she thrashed beneath him.
As their passion ebbed and their breathing steadied, he kissed her hair, the back of her neck, her shoulders. He felt his erection shrinking, and sighed in resignation, hating that feeling of loss whenever they uncoupled.
What would it be like, he wondered, when he left her completely—or rather, when she left him? How would it feel to watch her walking away from his house for the last time?
“Christ,” he whispered.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Everything
. She couldn’t leave him. He couldn’t lose her. He really couldn’t.
It wouldn’t just hurt. It would empty him out.
It wouldn’t just drive him mad. It would plunge him into nothingness. His own bleak, personal hell.
He’d thought that, when the time came, he’d find a way to deal with it, to cope with the loss of her. But now he realized, with sudden, startling clarity, that he would never be able to deal with it. She had joined herself to him in such a real and critical way that he couldn’t do without her. He needed her as he needed his heart, his lungs. The loss of her would destroy him; worse, it would destroy
them
, the incredible, singular
them
that lived and breathed and loved as one.
This revelation of her indispensability filled him with awe, this awe producing a kind of astonished chuckle that shuddered through him.
She giggled. “I feel you throbbing inside me when you laugh. What’s so funny?”
He raised himself up on his elbows and plucked strands of hair off her sweat-slicked cheek. “Not funny, just... sort of overwhelming. I’ve had an epiphany and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He chuckled again, the movement causing him to slide out of her. With a pointless groan of complaint, he rolled to the side and gathered her up, entwining his arms and legs with hers. He loved the way she felt after sex, all warm and damp and limp. She lightly kissed his bruised cheekbone. He trailed a fingertip over the half-healed scar on her chest.
“So,” she murmured, “these women in Paris, these women who weren’t mistresses but gave themselves to you anyway...”
He laughed. “Are you still thinking about them?”
“You’re laughing an awful lot tonight,” she noted.
“It’s a bad habit I’ve acquired from you,” he mumbled into her hair. “So, what more do you want to know about the ladies who weren’t mistresses?”
She hesitated. “After you slept with these women, and it was all over, did you remain friends?”
“For the most part, we were never friends to begin with. I barely knew most of them. It wasn’t like it is with you and me.”
She snuggled against him contentedly, clearly pleased that he considered her a friend. “So you just said ‘Good-bye, and oh, yes, thank you for having sex with me?’”
He laughed again; it
was
becoming habitual. “I generally thought up something a bit more elegant to say. And I usually bought them a gift of some sort.”
“A gift...”
“A parting gift. A jeweled girdle, a brooch, perhaps a book if she could read. There was one who liked to hunt, so I gave her a litter of deerhound pups.”
Corliss grew still. In the ensuing silence, it occurred to him that she was wondering whether he’d give
her
a parting gift when the time came. He felt the tension in her, and knew this prospect displeased her, inasmuch as it would reduce her to just another of his faceless non-mistresses. An absurd notion, of course, yet this talk of gifts did give him an idea...
He smiled to himself. A very good idea, actually.
She looked at him. “You’re laughing at me. You think my ceaseless questions are ridiculous.”
“I love your ceaseless questions.”
“I only ask you about these women because such affairs are so foreign to me. The idea of giving oneself to men one hardly knows, and then getting dogs in return...” She shook her head against his chest. “You must think me hopelessly unsophisticated, but it strikes me as very strange. Then again, I’ve never even been to Paris. I’m just a simple Oxfordshire peasant.”
He tightened his arms around her. “There’s nothing simple about you, my love.”
She fell silent for a moment. Although she didn’t look at him, he felt her face heat up; was she blushing?
“Call me that again?” she asked.
“My love,” he said softly. He kissed the top of her head. “My love.” He kissed the hotly flushed edge of her ear. “My love... my love...”
He kissed every part of her he could reach, and then he laid her on her back and kissed the rest—slow, sweet, hot, endless kisses that tasted of night-opening flowers and sweaty lovemaking and honey—whispering, over and over, “My love... my love... my love...”
* * *
Pigot stood in the shadows of his St. John Street alleyway, watching the windows of Corliss’s chamber until they went dark some time after midnight.
Corliss
indeed... It was Constance of Cuxham up there, spreading her legs for the magister in exchange for a roof and four walls—in which she’d hidden from Pigot all damned summer. It was Constance of Cuxham, whoring still because she knew no other way.
It was Constance of Cuxham, after all, who had trotted alongside Rainulf Fairfax for four months, right out there in the open for all the world—himself included—to see. It was Constance of Cuxham, in her tunic and chausses, who laughed at everyone—at
him
, most especially—for not seeing through her deception.
And it was Constance of Cuxham who would pay for that deception with the very female charms she seemed so eager to deny. He’d start, as always, with the face: those wide, childish eyes; and that lovely mouth, with its quick tongue. The tongue would go first, he decided. That way she couldn’t scream when he did the rest of it. He’d found that constant screaming in his ear gave him a headache.
This ceaseless waiting gave him a headache, too. How frustrating, to have discovered her disguise—to have located his prize!—yet be denied the capture simply because she was always with someone, usually Fairfax. One lesson he’d learned during his years of finding runaways for Roger Foliot: wait till they were alone. That way, there’d be no bothersome witnesses to deal with. But he’d never had to wait as long as this, and it was beginning to wear on him. His knife hand itched with the need to slice, to excise.
With a heavy sigh, he left the alley and began walking home. On the way, he passed a whore with yellow hair. She reminded him of Fabienne, the first woman he’d punished with his knives, so long ago. Fabienne, who had scorned him when he was young and easily stung. She had laughed at his face, had compared him to a spotted toad. But he’d taught her a lesson in humility. His clever steel had transformed her from a beauty into a monster, and then he was the one who’d laughed. It made him hard just to think about what he’d done to her.
He considered offering the wench with yellow hair tuppence for her services. Then, when she took him to whatever private place she’d set aside for her whoring, he could, among other things, appease his itchy knife hand...
No. That was messy, risky. And ultimately unsatisfying, for she wasn’t the woman he wanted, merely a convenient substitute. He’d have Constance of Cuxham herself soon enough. Until then, he should do nothing to distract himself from his goal of apprehending her. He must return to the alley on St. John Street before dawn and follow her every move.
The moment she was alone, he’d pounce.
Felice lit up when Corliss walked into Mistress Clark’s establishment on Catte Street, accompanied by Thomas and Brad. The young girl seemed to barely notice the two scholars, who busied themselves by perusing the pattern books and exemplars lying about; she gazed at Corliss, grinning in delight.
“Is your mother in?” Corliss asked her.
“Nay!” barked a voice from behind. Corliss turned to find Bertram glaring at her as he nailed a board across the largest of the shop’s big front windows.
This wasn’t the only storefront being boarded up that morning. All along Catte Street—and all over Oxford—merchants were securing their businesses and fleeing, a response to the unrest rapidly sweeping through the city. During the past few days, scholars had advanced from beating the occasional townsman to looting and burning shops. The locals had retaliated by arming themselves, attacking with clubs and knives anyone foolish enough to go out alone wearing a cappa. The situation reminded Corliss of a cauldron of water hanging over a fire. The water grows hotter and hotter, until at last the pot can contain it no longer.
The streets through which Thomas and Brad had escorted her—at the request of Rainulf, who was occupied with trying to quell the impending riot—were filled with chaos. It seemed to Corliss as if everyone in Oxford—scholar and townsman alike—was running somewhere, weapon in hand. Most of them were screaming. Fights broke out at regular intervals. The pot was boiling over.
Bertram drove a nail into the board with one angry whack of the hammer, his gaze never leaving Corliss. “Mistress Clark ain’t in. You’d best be on your way.”
“I’ve got the last signature with me,” Corliss said, dumping her satchel on a desk and withdrawing the gathering of pages. “I need to give it to her and get my money.”
“You finished it already?” Felice asked. “You’ve only had it three days.”
“‘Twas naught but capitals and paragraph marks. Those don’t take long.”
Felice smiled shyly. “Only because you’re so good at it. Mama says you’re the most talented illuminator she’s ever—”