“Which Edward was he?”
“The third. Patron saint of difficult marriages.” She lifted Bess’s dress.
Nicholas left the shed.
Mayhap a quarter of an hour had passed before Celestia was washed and ready for the meeting. She carried a mug of hot lemon and honey, to help stop the lingering nausea. Lemon and honey were also used to cleanse the palate, but the tart sweetness did not erase the stench of death in her nostrils. She drank again.
She took her place next to Nicholas, who was sitting at the head of their makeshift table, and looked at each of the keep’s inhabitants. All she saw were faces filled with sorrow. Geoffrey’s eyes were red from tears; Viola’s face was puffy and raw. Forrester and Henry were subdued, while Petyr tapped his finger against his thigh, and appeared to be deep in thought. Bertram and Willy sat like soldiers, their faces set in grief. Nicholas looked … guilty?
Why was she surprised? The man took everything that could go wrong as a personal affront. “Unless you killed Bess, my lord Nicholas, this situation is not your fault. Kindly bring yourself from your moment of self-pity and help me solve this crime.”
Nicholas got to his feet, his face white with fury.
“What?”
Celestia calmly sipped her hot drink. “You heard me, my lord. We need your brains, sir.” She wouldn’t look at him and turned to the rest of the group. “Bess was knocked on the back of the head, and then choked to death with her own apron.”
Viola sobbed, “Who would want to kill poor Bessie?”
Celestia met her husband’s angry, accusing eyes. “It could have been
any one
of us. The only injuries I found to her person were the ones I just described.”
Nicholas exhaled, his relief evident. “When was the last time anyone saw Bess?”
“We all went to bed at the same time last eve,” Bertram said.
“I was tired, and slept through the night.” Forrester glanced at Nicholas. “Well, most of it.”
Her husband studied the trussed ceiling of the hall.
Petyr said, “Nicholas, you slept in the barn. Did you hear anything?”
Celestia hid her smile as Nicholas glared from Petyr to the rest of knights. Forrester sent her a knowing grin, which she immediately frowned at.
“Well, Petyr, as you know, I have trouble sleeping, and I did not wish to disturb my wife. But no, I did not see Bess, nor hear anything amiss.”
Celestia intercepted a look that Nicholas sent Petyr, and if she read it correctly, it was a look that promised retribution. She looked at Petyr, but his nose seemed fine. Nicholas crossed his arms over his chest.
Petyr finger combed his mustache, as if unconcerned.
The bottoms of his leggings were wet, yet he hadn’t gotten in the moat.
What was going on?
Celestia looked to Nicholas and cleared her throat to remind him he needed to take control. “Well, my lord? What are we to do?”
Nicholas almost broke under the weight of so many needy stares. He had no bloody answers. He paced the main hall, thinking. He was lord of this pile of rock, and it was his duty to care for everyone in it.
He could leave, go to the baron, and tear the bastard limb from limb. But not while there was a murderer loose and Celestia was in danger.
Fate.
He crossed his arms and ground his back teeth. He made eye contact with each person. “Bess left the castle sometime in the night, and none of us heard her or noticed her missing.”
Viola raised her head. “I awoke to, er … well I just did.” Her red cheeks let everyone know she’d had to use the chamber pot. “I might have wakened Bess, for it was after I was,” the red flamed from her cheeks to the tips of her ears, “finished, that I thought I heard rustling. I assumed Bess had a similar need, and I went back to sleep.”
Celestia touched Viola’s hand. “‘Tis all right, Viola. So you don’t know if she went outdoors instead? For more privacy, perhaps?” The pretty maid shook her head.
Nicholas paced, his boot heels clicking against the stone floor. “Let us say, then, that she must have left the solar of her own accord. What made her go near the moat? Who had the watch last eve?”
This time it was Willy who colored like a rosebush. “It was me, Lord Nicholas. But I …” The young man straightened his shoulders and said, “I fell asleep.”
Petyr shot to his feet. “Nay! You did what?”
“All was quiet on the battlements! I saw nothing, and the wine at dinner … I fell asleep at my post, sir.”
Willy straightened his shoulders, certain that he’d be given twenty lashes. Petyr cuffed him upside the head and looked ready to follow through with another tap.
Nicholas grabbed Petyr’s fist. “Not in here amongst the women, Petyr. There has been enough violence already. Discipline him outside.”
Petyr bowed an apology, as did a shamefaced Willy.
Nicholas lowered his chin and resumed the mantle of duty. “Did anyone here kill our Bess? I don’t think so. Are any going to now confess of the deed?” He glowered at them all, but none admitted to murder.
Instead of guilt on their faces, he saw hope—the belief that he would somehow keep the rest of them safe. The burden was heavy so he expelled a sigh and admitted, “Last night, I was going to leave the keep.”
Celestia gasped. “Leave?”
“To find my father.”
“Oh!” Her dainty, work-roughened hands clenched tightly in her lap, the pulse in her throat leapt. He had no doubt she believed she cared, and it scared the piss out of him. He hadn’t wanted any responsibilites.
“But now I will go to the village that Grainne Kat mentioned. There should be a priest there, and we can bring him back to properly bury Bess. He can say a blessing for the others, too.”
Celestia nodded, her face proud. “I shall go with you.”
“Nay. I can go alone.”
She pushed back from her bench seat and walked to him, unmindful of his towering height. He could see that she’d slept, or rather didn’t sleep, in her dress from the eve before. She was disheveled, her hair tangled, and her heart confused. She faced him like a warrior as she pierced him with her blazing mismatched eyes.
His heart beat louder in his ears, and his mouth dried. “Would you argue with me?”
“I will go, Nicholas. We will go together. You need me.”
His groin tightened. “I don’t need you,” he lied.
“Aye, you do; you are just too stubborn to admit it. I am coming, Nicholas, even if I have to sneak out and follow you!”
Visions of Celestia using bedsheets to climb out of their chamber to the ground below buckled his knees. The woman had no sense of her own mortality. He yanked at his hair, frustration in every bone of his body. “Fine.”
Nicholas didn’t know whether to laugh or howl when she gave him a curtsy meant for a king and said in that sweet voice, “Thank you, Nicholas.”
B
renin and Ceffyl—chestnut and white, stallion and mare—got along better than their human riders. Nicholas was afraid to point out the similarities.
“Why do you never do as I say?”
Celestia glowered at him. “You should ask me to do something worthy, and then I might.”
“I am capable of bringing back a priest on my own, Celestia. Believe this or no, I used to be quite able to care for myself.”
She jerked her chin in the air. “And how long ago was that, my lord?”
Nicholas wanted to throttle the wench. For once, wallowing in his guilt was not near as important as making her see reason. He cantered forward. She caught up, refusing to let him take the lead.
They rode into the village, bristling like hedgehogs. Celestia quietly asked, “Can you stop frowning? Who will talk to us if you frighten the children?”
“Would be that there were children to frighten. Is this entire country deserted?” Nicholas sought calm, but it was nowhere to be found. His life had been remarkably easier when he hadn’t cared at all, about anyone or anything.
He eyed Celestia, who looked like a fairy queen in her dark green cloak. Her hair flowed down her back, almost as white as Ceffyl’s mane. “Why didn’t you braid your hair? Or wear a veil? Have you no modesty?”
“Aghh! You said you were leaving without me. I was lucky to get the tangles out.”
Nicholas ground his back teeth together.
Neat and tidy huts lined the road, smoke curled from various chimneys, but no people showed their faces. “We don’t look like the bloody Scottish patrol, so why is there no one to greet us?”
“For once I agree, Nicholas, this is more than passing strange. Let’s go to the church over there on the corner.”
He found the steeple and turned toward it, at his wit’s end. The churchyard was fenced and whitewashed, and inside were a few pigs and chickens. An elderly man in a black robe came around from the henhouse and into the front yard.
“Good day,” Nicholas called out.
The priest looked up, and fright immediately covered his age-lined face. He dropped his eggs on the cobblestones and didn’t seem to notice when they oozed yellow yolk over his toes. “Baron Peregrine!”
Celestia rode forward. “Good day, Father.”
The priest turned to Celestia and clutched his heart. “Oh, God in heaven, a fairy witch!”
She laughed, as if she was accused every day, and used to it. “I am no witch, nor a fairy. Just small.” She dismounted and held out her hand to Nicholas.
“Nicholas,” she whispered from the side of her mouth. “Nicholas. He only has one eye, stop staring.”
Nicholas was not staring because the priest had but one eye, no, it was something else. A tip of something, mayhap a memory.
The priest pointed a shaking, gnarled finger at Nicholas. “I told ye, Baron, that I know nothing about a curse. It was the Lady Esmerada’s doing.”
Celestia tugged on Nicholas’s tunic hem, and he was hard-pressed not to shake her off. “Nicholas. He thinks you are your father … say something! Can’t you see he is scared to death?”
Nicholas blinked and swatted at her hand. “Um, yes. Priest! My name is not Philippe Peregrine. I am Nicholas. Nicholas Le Blanc. And I remember you. You are Father Michael.”
Celestia looked at him in awe. “You know him?”
“Aye. Do you not remember me, Father?”
Father Michael shuffled his feet forward until he came to the short fence and tilted his face so that his good eye could see clearly. “Nicholas? Nicholas! Not the father, but the son.”
Nicholas slid off of his horse, and the priest opened the gate. Celestia stayed by his side, quiet for once, but he saw the happiness on her face, for him and for the return of a memory, and he forgave her for arguing.
“You’re handsome when you’re moody,” she teased.
Father Michael led them into his small quarters on the side of the church. “Would some ale be welcome?”
Nicholas answered nay, but Celestia smiled and accepted a leather mug, as regally as a princess born, Nicholas thought. She settled comfortably on her bench, as if readying for a childhood story.
Nicholas felt like a giant in the small room, and he had to duck his head until he sat. “What happened to you, Father Michael?”
The priest waved his hand. “‘Tis an old wound.”
Nicholas looked at Celestia, wondering if she could heal him, but she shook her head no. He nodded. The eye was gone, so what could she do? Funny, how little time it had taken for him to expect miracles from her.
“What curse were you talking about?”
The priest shifted uncomfortably and took a large gulp from his mug. He changed the subject. “It is time that you’re here, Nicholas. Where are you staying?”
Nicholas scratched the back of his neck, startled by the question. “The keep, of course. Where else? We are living in the parts that are habitable until I can get to the rest. As to why I am here in the village, one of our maids was murdered. We came looking for a priest so that she could have a proper burial.”
The priest sucked his bottom lip, his one eye wide. “Murdered?”
“Aye. She was hit on the back of the head, and then strangled with her own apron strings.”
“Shame.” He made the sign of the cross and bent his gray-haired head in prayer.
“Have ye caught the brute who did it?”
“Not yet, but we will.”
Father Michael stared into his mug, as if he’d rather join the dead Bess than journey to Falcon Keep. “I’ll come, then.”
“I thank you.” Nicholas made no move to get up. The priest held answers to his past, and mayhap it was time to ask questions. “What do you remember of my mother?”
The priest winced.
Nicholas’s gut clenched and he tapped the table top. “I’ve changed my mind, good father; I’d like some ale after all.”
Father Michael looked uncommonly nervous as he went to get ale, and Nicholas wondered what secrets the old man was hiding. After more drink, the chances were greater that the priest would give away information as freely as chickens laid eggs.
Nicholas glanced at Celestia, who was contentedly sipping from her mug. He put a finger to his lips, warning her to be quiet and to let him speak.
Father Michael returned and handed Nicholas a mug with a shaking hand. He sat, fidgeting uncomfortably, repeatedly smoothing the black robe over his thin legs.
He looked to Celestia, who sent him an encouraging smile.
Finally the priest cleared his throat. “Your mother … she was a lovely woman, she was.”
Nicholas had the sudden urge to keep the past within the past. He’d tried, with Celestia and her healing hands, to move ahead, and how much pain had that wrought? He got up, banging his head on the low ceiling so hard he saw stars.
The priest looked alarmed as dust fell to the table.
“Nicholas!” Celestia captured Nicholas’s sleeve and urged him to sit back down. “Father Michael, Nicholas cannot remember much of his childhood. He was a lad of six when he arrived at the monastery. Don’t you find it odd that he has so few recollections of his life before then?”
Father Michael hid his face in his mug and slurped his ale, but not before Nicholas saw the fleeting expression of guilt cross his brow.
“Father? What do you know?” Nicholas decided to let her badger the priest a while. Asking Celestia to still her tongue had been a futile effort anyway. His head ached, and he swore he could smell apples. He plopped his elbows on the table.
Father Michael sighed and set his mug down with a thump. “How often our sins come back to haunt us.” The elderly man closed his one eye and said, “I told a small lie, but for the good of dear Nicholas. He was just a boy. And a monastery has no place for toddlers. Too young to work, too much trouble. But not our Nicholas, he was a strapping lad, big for his age.”
Nicholas narrowed his eyes but held his tongue. Celestia tapped her finger impatiently against her tankard, her gaze unrelenting as she stared the priest down. Nicholas would have told her everything, had she ever used that gaze on him. No, wait, he reflected, he had already spilled all of his secrets with but a touch of her hand.
“And what small lie would that have been?” she prodded.
“Hmm,” the priest said quietly, looking away from Celestia to speak to Nicholas. “It was for your protection, mind, that we sent you so far away. I’d heard of a monastery run by Abbot Crispin, a man with a more than fair reputation. You were in danger here, so in the letter I sent to the abbot I said that you were six, when in reality you were but four. “Tis no surprise that you can’t remember. And mayhap that is just as well, my son.”
Nicholas closed his eyes. His name was not his own, his age was not his own. His entire life was a lie. It took all of his courage to stay seated, knowing that he would finally hear the truth of his past. The soft nudge of Celestia’s foot against his reminded him that at least he wasn’t alone.
The priest drained his mug dry, then smacked his lips together. “Let me see, now, the year was 1169, or was it ‘68? No matter, our Lady Esmerada—your mother,” he said with a tip of his head toward Nicholas, “was a fetching lass of sixteen years. Half-Scot, she were, and half-English. She lived with her parents at Falcon Keep, which was her mother’s property. Her mother being the Lady Margaret, who had inherited the keep upon her own father’s death.”
Waving his hand as if that was just the bones of the story and not Nicholas’s family history, the priest continued, “After his demise, Lady Margaret was alone in the world. Frail and lovely she was, a pure English rose. But no matter her goodness and beauty, she was but a woman, and all know that a woman cannot hold a keep by herself.”
Celestia opened her mouth to protest, but the priest rambled on, having found his speed. Nicholas found the look on her face endearing.
“Afore long, she found herself wed to the Scottish brigand, Brinden McCarthy, and not long after that, she bore our Esmerada. Are you following along, Nicholas?”
Nicholas nodded, feeling dazed. Margaret, his grandmother, and Esmerada, his mother. He had Scots’ blood.
“Your grandsire, Brinden McCarthy, was an enterprising man, and remained loyal to his Scottish clan. Ye’ll have followed Solway Firth a ways before coming inland to the keep? Aye, Falcon Keep is too far from the water to be used as a port, but Brinden, he found a use for it—he grew crops and raised sheep, all to give food and money to the Scottish rebels.”
The priest’s brows furrowed in concentration. “The borderlands were being torn up by King Henry and King William. Each king wanted more than what they had. Scotland’s never been rich, but King Henry wanted land for his sons to inherit.” He chuckled, as if impressed by the old king’s audacity.
Nicholas broke in, “Aye, but King Henry won the argument, did he not? Forced King William to sign the Treaty of Falaise.”
“Good lad, to know your history!”
“I was raised a scholar, before becoming a knight.”
“Ah.” The priest nodded with approval before turning to Celestia. “For fifteen years Scotland was under England’s thumb. The country was beggared and pillaged by the Scots and English alike. ‘Twas after Henry died and Richard the Lionhearted became king that Scotland reverted back to King William.”
“King Richard sold it to him, his own land,” Nicholas scoffed. “Richard was already looking for coin.”
“It was said he felt great guilt over his part in his father’s death.”
Guilt? Nicholas understood that motivation quite well. And like Richard, he would pay his penance
after
doing the dirty deed.
Celestia smiled pointedly, “Nicholas’s grandfather?”
The priest colored, “I digress … Back when Henry was king he found out what old Brinden was up to. Falcon Keep was English, on English soil, and Henry vowed to put a stop to the Scottish McCarthy’s traitorous ways. However, your grandsire, me boy, was never of a mind to do as he was told.”
Celestia giggled. “A family trait, Nicholas?”
Nicholas looked over his nose at her before turning to Father Michael, fascinated by his own history.
“So when Brinden got the missive stating that his lovely daughter, Esmerada, was to be married to an Englishman, a lord favored by King Henry, he weren’t happy, and that is the God’s honest truth. Nor was Esmerada, for she was in love with the Scottish rebel, Robbie MacIntosh. She fair turned her nose up at her mother and her English ways; her wild heart was pure Scots.”
The priest looked sadly at Nicholas.
“Now it is my opinion that the good lady Margaret died of sorrow, for what her no-account Scottish husband had done to her keep and king, and for her daughter who had followed his ways. None but God knows for certain.” The priest wiped his watery eye. “I’ll tell you, Nicholas, Lady Margaret was a good woman, and I was sorry when she passed.”
Nicholas found himself sorry, too. The good Margaret had been his grandmother, and he had never gotten to know her. “What happened then?”
“The day came when the Lord Peregrine arrived, young and cocky. You look most like him, but not so, er,
vicious,
around the, er, eyes,” the priest stammered and hastily took another pull from his empty mug. He set it down with a reproachful glare and continued, “Brinden was not so foolish that he thought he could deny the English king’s order. Did I mention he was an enterprising man? Aye, what he did was plan something else for his daughter’s wedding day, something that was to have suited them better. I remember that the sun shone that day, how rare, eh?” He smiled at Celestia’s nod. “A rarity it was, and lucky too, as the wedding was to be held outside. You’ll have noticed the large field in the front of the keep?”
Nicholas grunted. “The vacant acres of grass and weeds, you mean?”
“Yes. Away from the safety of the keep walls, but in all of nature’s splendor. There were a hundred trees at one time, apple trees.”
“I said I remembered apples,” Nicholas said to Celestia, his belly tight.
The priest frowned. “Your mother, the Lady Esmerada, and your father, the Lord Philippe Peregrine, were wed beneath God and before witnesses. Barely were the vows finished when the Scottish rebels arrived over the mound, ready to slaughter your father and all of his knights.”