Linda Barlow (44 page)

The battle was brief but bloody. The five or six riders proved to be merely a vanguard. A dozen armed men were soon upon them. Too many, Roger realized, reeling after being set upon by two swordsmen, one of whom had nearly taken him down. His head was throbbing; he heard cries coming from the longboat, which had gone no more than a few yards from the bank before being set upon. "God in heaven, they've brought archers," he heard Francis say, his voice strangely calm as he deflected the swordplay of the three men who had leapt from their mounts to attack. Francis forced them back so he could move in closer to Roger. "Are you hurt?"

"No." Archers. Roger heard a woman's voice cut off in mid-scream. At least it was a quicker death than the stake. He hoped, as he turned to face the half-circle of men-at-arms who were closing around them, that he and Francis would die as easily.

"Watch your back," he said to Francis as a man with an axe took a swing at them from behind. A split second later the man was dead on Francis' expert blade, and the other attackers hesitated briefly before advancing again.

Francis shot Roger a grim but recognizable smile. "I thank you, but we're only staving off the inevitable; it would be unrealistic to think we're going to get out of this. What an ignominious end to our adventures together." He paused, parrying effortlessly. "I have loved you ever."

"And I you." He had never really loved Francis as much as the other man had loved him; the only person he loved so wholeheartedly was Alexandra. Oh Christ, Alix. Rebellion kicked through his entrails. Yesterday at this time he would have accepted death, but not today. He wanted to hold her again. He wanted to love her. Just once, he pleaded with God, even as his sword arm was violently parrying and thrusting. Let me hold her once more to my heart, then you can do whatever you want with me.

Even as the wild, impossible thought crossed his mind, another flashed—an old saying Merwynna the witch had taunted him with one day when he was still a lad. Be careful what ye pray for, boy, lest the gods see fit to grant yer prayer.

The soldiers closed. Because Francis seemed to be the more dangerous of the two, they tried to hold him off while directing most of their energy toward Roger. His heart pounded, his weapon slipped in his sweat-sticky fingers, his arms and legs grew leaden. There were too many of them. He was skilled and clever in his own defense, but he couldn't be everywhere at once. It is no dishonor, he told himself, for two men to be defeated by so large a troop.

He felt a monumental wrench and knew they'd succeeded in disarming him; he saw a blade flash in quarte, his vulnerable line of defense, the line that guards the heart. Quick. Aim true, you bastard, and my death will be gentle, easy, as effortless as sleep.

All within the space of a moment, he heard Francis yell, and he felt an even stronger wrench than before. There was a groan, and the sensation of a body falling, but strangely enough, it didn't seem to be his. Then somebody was commanding the swordsmen to put up their weapons, and the attackers reluctantly fell back. When the dust cleared, Roger, though wobbly, was still standing. Francis lay on the ground, bleeding badly from a wound in the right side of his chest.

Roger fell to his knees in the dirt, seizing Francis' shoulders between his two hands. He shook him gently. "You took the thrust that was meant for me, didn't you?" He shook him harder, enraged, although his eyes were moist. "Francis! Don't you dare die, damn you! Lift your eyes and look at me."

Francis Lacklin obeyed, summoning the strength to gaze around them in what appeared to be amused contempt. "Why aren't they hacking us to pieces?"

"Someone told them to stop." Roger tried in vain to stanch the alarming flow of blood. Francis' face was graying rapidly, his skin growing cold. "Blast you! Couldn't you let me get killed my own way for once? I'm not bloody fifteen years old any longer."

Francis coughed, spitting out a bloody froth that scared the dickens out of Roger. His attention was directed somewhere over Roger's shoulder. "Forgive me. Your death, I fear, will be crueler than mine. Look, my foolish friend. Behind you. It was your lady who betrayed us."

At first the words made no sense. Then as Francis' eyes drifted shut, Roger raised his head and saw her. She was there, perhaps five yards away, watching, staring, not moving, not protesting. And beside her, his arm possessively encircling her waist, was Geoffrey de Montreau, who had promised to be present at his death.

"I should have killed her," said Francis in a considerably weaker voice. "May God forgive me for all the ways I’ve failed you. Roger? Hear me..."

But Roger could no longer hear him. His head was buzzing, his nerves screaming. He couldn't believe it. Not Alix. It couldn't be Alix. And yet her hair was flaming in the stiff sea breeze—foaming all red and feathery against Geoffrey's throat, and he was smiling, pulling her closer, caressing her. It could not be, and yet it was. Other women, he reminded himself, had proved false. All his life, the people he'd counted upon had, one by one, abandoned or betrayed him. Was it so impossible that this time it would be Alix—the cruelest betrayal of them all?

Let me hold her. Well, there she was, nearly within touching distance. She wasn't an apparition; she was there. She was the only outsider who had known their plans, the only possible source of a breach in their careful security. Had she gone to Geoffrey with the details of tonight's planned escape? Geoffrey, with whom she had been seen conferring on numerous occasions? Had the handsome and elegant Geoffrey, serpent that he was, tempted and corrupted her? It seemed impossible… unless… were they both in league with her father, Sir Charles, Queen Mary’s devious spymaster? Was it as he had feared, that torn between her duty to the Queen and her loyalty to him, she had chosen Charles Douglas and Mary Tudor?

He remembered her own words of earlier today:
You, for all your noble-minded motives, are a traitor and my enemy.
And Francis telling him a few months ago, You don't acknowledge that devotion itself can wither and rot. For nearly a year Alix had been proclaiming her love, but he had rejected her, over and over.
I don't deserve the way you have treated me,
she had said just a few hours ago. Did that mean she finally given up? Had he been too blind to see it because he thought, in his arrogance, that she was his to toy with in whatever way he pleased?

All this flashed through his brain in moments; then a rage blinded him, a colossal black rage. He turned back to Francis, who was still trying to tell him something. Bending over to put his lips near his friend's, he whispered, "No blasted last words, Francis! You're going to live. Do you hear me? Live!"

Then, surging to his feet, Roger seized Francis' sword and fell upon the men who had attacked them, the men who had so grievously wounded his friend. The soldiers were driven back as Roger exploded into a frenzy of brilliant, deadly swordplay. One died quickly, two. He'd kill them all, damn them. Alix was the only woman he had ever ventured to trust, much less to love. Yet in that mad, bloody moment, had she been close enough, he would have driven his blade through her heart.

* * *

Alexandra knew nothing but the sight of the man she loved with all her heart and spirit—he was alive, alive! She was drawing breath to call to him when she heard the serpentine hiss of Geoffrey's voice in her ear: "Every word out of your mouth will add a full minute to the time it takes him to die. Do you understand? If you contradict anything I say, I will have him slowly and exquisitely tortured."

"You'll do that anyway." The thin, reedy voice that issued from her lips did not sound like her own.

"No. The mental torture of believing you've betrayed him will be enough."

"He won't believe your lies." But even as she spoke, Roger looked up and saw her, and she understood that he would. For one dreadful instant their eyes met, and his scream of disbelief seemed to echo inside her own head. No, no, she whispered, trying in vain to reach him without words. But somewhere a red tide surged and the gates to his mind slammed shut.

"Restrain him," Geoffrey snapped as Roger began so ferociously to fight again. He waved more of his men into the fray. "Do what you must, but I want him alive."

And Alexandra, to her own horror, was thinking: No! Kill him. Let him die cleanly, fighting on the strand with the smell of the sea in his lungs. Let him not be tortured, in body or in mind. And yet she feared his death with far more terror than she feared her own, and when she saw that although they had disarmed him and clubbed him to the ground, he was rising again to his knees, still breathing—Oh God, still alive!—she cried out in thankfulness and blessed relief.

But the next few minutes were hellish. Geoffrey forced her closer to the bloody bank where the battle had been fought. Francis Lacklin lay on his back, not moving, his eyes rolled back in their sockets. She couldn't tell whether he was dead or alive. A few yards behind his body on the riverbank, a small boat had been drawn back to the shore, loaded with murdered heretics, victims of the archers' arrows. Men, women, a beardless youth—all appeared to be dead. Geoffrey's soldiers were callously pulling them out of the longboat and dumping them on the rocky strand. Alexandra made a sound in her throat as her stomach rose.

Roger was on his knees surrounded by men-at-arms who held their blades to his heart and his throat while brutally twisting his arms behind his back. He was panting from exertion, and a mixture of sweat and blood was running down his face, but, miraculously, he seemed unhurt. In body, at least. His mind, she could tell, was reeling.

"One word," Geoffrey warned her while they were still out of earshot, "and I'll have them start with those big brown eyes of his. We’ll gouge out the left, and then the right."

She believed him. His voice was high-pitched with excitement and bloodlust, his arm was tight around her waist, his French perfume sickened her. She thought for a moment she might faint; she wished she could. But such an escape was not granted her.

"How do you like your Mistress Douglas now?" Geoffrey taunted his helpless enemy. "Not that I need employ so formal an address with her,
n’est-ce pas, cherie?
" One of his hands slipped up to caress her breasts. She scarcely felt it. Her eyes were locked with Roger's and she was pleading with him silently: Don't believe him, please. I love you. No, Roger, don't look at me like that!

She hardly heard as Geoffrey said, "It was really too reckless of you, Trevor. A worthless bunch of heretics. I knew you were up to your neck in something, but I expected treason more colorful than this. 'Tis unworthy of you, truly. I almost doubted your lady when she reported the details of this remarkable venture."

Roger's eyes pierced hers. She could see the grief and rage burning in him. "Geoffrey de Montreau would lie to the priest on his deathbed. Tell me he's lying now."

Alexandra stared in to those beautiful eyes, soft, brown, mocking; the eyes she had loved all her life. There was a man with a knife just beside him; he was watching Geoffrey for the order to plunge it into Roger’s eyes. She swayed slightly and said nothing.

Roger's gaze shifted to Geoffrey. "What have you done to her? Torture? It must have been torture, for she would never have betrayed me otherwise."

Geoffrey smiled. "Does it matter?" Geoffrey’s serpentine voice hissed like the sea. "She's still speechless with wonder, no doubt, from the pleasures I taught her in bed."

"Have you been in his bed?" When she merely stared, without words, he snarled, "Answer me!"

"Yes," she whispered, unable to lie but equally unable to explain the truth of the matter. What
was
the truth? Geoffrey had violated her, if not completely, and his hands were all over her now, his intimate touch filling her with shame and revulsion.

Roger’s expression grew even darker, if such was possible. "Then I shall kill you."

"No! It wasn’t what you think—" she began, but Geoffrey silenced her with an agonizing wrench of her arm. Roger didn’t seem to be hearing her, anyway. She could understand why. One look at the carnage on the beach was sufficient to explain the anguish he must be suffering, and Geoffrey knew all too well how to torment him.

"Threaten one of the queen's ladies, will you?" Geoffrey said. "You're adding to your crimes. Her Grace's troops should be arriving anytime now, to take you and throw you in prison. Will they burn you for heresy, or draw and quarter you for treason, I wonder."

Roger ignored this. "Where's Alan? Was he in on this too, or did you dupe him as cleverly as you deceived me?"

Geoffrey had given her no instructions regarding Alan. If he was still alive, poor Alan must be agonizing over what he had been forced to do. There was no reason Roger for to know it had been his brother's confession that had betrayed them. Alan had spoken to stop her torture. The least she could do in return was protect him from Roger's wrath. "Alan is not at fault. If you must blame someone, blame me."

"Why did you do it, Alexandra? For the love of God, why?"

Although he spoke quietly, to her mind it sounded like a scream, a cry of anguish to a cruel and baffling God. She couldn't think of an answer. A glimmer of hope sparked inside her. He would know there was no answer. He would think it through and know there was no inducement in this world that could ever have made her betray him. He would understand Geoffrey was lying and that she had been most vilely ensnared.

But Roger didn't understand. Surrounded by the bodies of the people he had tried to rescue, his heart thumping, his skin and his clothing splattered with blood, he couldn’t seem to think clearly. The logical part of his brain had ceased to function, and his perception had narrowed to a series of overwhelmingly brutal impressions: Francis bleeding, dying; the dissenters set upon and murdered; Alexandra admitting her crime from the shelter of Geoffrey de Montreau's arms. It could not be, and yet it was.