The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles (3 page)

A moment after Phillipe sprawled, Bertram kneeled on his belly. Auguste started to kick him.

Phillipe writhed, fought, struck out with both fists. But most of the time he missed. Auguste’s boot pounded his legs, his ribs, his shoulders. Again. Again—

In the middle of the beating, one of Phillipe’s punches did land squarely. Bertram’s nose squirted blood onto Phillipe’s coat. The older boy spat out filthy words, grabbed his victim’s ears and began to hammer his head on the ground.

Phillipe’s head filled with the strange sound of the heavy breathing of his two tormentors, the distorted ring of the goat bells from up beyond the pines. They beat him for three or four minutes. But he didn’t yell again.

From inside the hovel, a querulous man’s voice asked a question, then repeated it. The man sounded angry.

Auguste scooped up Phillipe’s money. Bertram lurched to his feet, picked up the jug, brought the neck to his bloodied mouth and drank. Groaning, Phillipe staggered up, barely able to walk a straight line.

Auguste kicked him in the buttocks one last time, driving him down the track toward the road. The fat boy shouted after him:

“Don’t come back here till your whoring mother can speak to her neighbors in a civil way, understand?”

Phillipe stumbled on, the sharp north wind stinging his cheeks. His whole body throbbed. He considered it an accomplishment just to stay on his feet.

Exhausted and ashamed of his inability to hold his own against Auguste and his cousin, Phillipe stumbled back to the inn along the lonely, wind-raked road. His sense of humiliation made him steal past the tavern perched on the hillside—he was grateful no one was looking out to see him—and seek the sanctuary of the empty stable behind the main building.

Hand over bruised hand, he pulled himself up the ladder to the loft and burrowed into the old straw, letting the blessed dark blot out the pain—

“Phillipe? Phillipe, is that you?”

The voice pulled him from the depths of unconsciousness. He rolled over, blinking, and saw a white oval—a face. Beyond, he glimpsed misted stars through cracks in the timbers of the loft. Down on the stable floor, a lantern gleamed.

“Sweet Mother of the Lord, Phillipe! Madame Marie’s been out of her mind all day, worrying about your unexplained absence!”

“Charlotte—” He could barely pronounce her name. His various aches, though not unbearable, remained more than a little bothersome. And waking up—remembering—was not a pleasant experience.

Charlotte climbed off the ladder and knelt beside him in the straw. He licked the inside of his mouth; it failed to help the dryness. Charlotte swayed a little, braced on her knees and palms. He thought he smelled wine on her. Probably filched from the inn’s cellar—

And it seemed to him no accident that Charlotte’s position revealed her bare breasts all white where her soiled blouse fell away. For a moment, he thought she was ready to giggle. Her eyes seemed to glow with a jolly, vulpine pleasure. But her touch of his cheek was solicitous.

“Oh, my dear, what happened to you?”

“I had an accident,” he said in a raspy voice. “Fell, that’s all.”

“Down ten mountainsides, from the look of you! I don’t believe it for a minute.” The girl stroked his cheek again; he was uncomfortably aware of the lingering nature of her caress. Nor could he overlook the feel of her fingertips. She must have been in the kitchen. She hadn’t wiped off all the lard.

“Who beat you, Phillipe? Brigands? Since when have poor boys become their game?”

“Not brigands—” Each word cost him energy. But he managed to sit up, groaning between clenched teeth. “Listen, Charlotte, never mind. I came back and wanted to sleep so I crawled in here.”

She began to finger his arm. A light, suggestive tickling. Ye gods, was
that
what she had on her mind? At a time like this? He was too stiff and sore, end to end, to be much excited.

But for her part, Charlotte was closing like a huntress.

“Poor Phillipe. Poor, dear Phillipe.” He caught a flash of her white leg as she hitched up her skirt to descend the ladder again. “You need a little wine.”

“No, honestly, I don’t really—”

“Yes, wait, you just let me help you, Phillipe. I’ve some wine hidden in one of the horse stalls.”

So she was stealing from the inn supplies, he thought, hardly caring. He had an impulse to totter down the ladder after her, and flee. But he didn’t. Wine might not taste bad. Might help revive him—

Charlotte made rustling sounds in the stall below. Then Phillipe’s eyes popped open—a second after the yellow light of the lantern went out. From the ladder, he heard a single delighted little syllable—

My God. She was giggling.

Feeling trapped, he started to roll over and rise to his knees. Aches exploded all over his body. He groaned and leaned back, trying to forget the humiliation and hatred the pain produced—the residue of the morning. Once more Charlotte uttered that strange, pleased sound as she maneuvered from the ladder to the loft.

This time, she didn’t even try for grace as she tumbled out next to him—permitting him, in the process, an ample feel of her breasts against his forearm. She pressed the bottle into his hand and didn’t take her own hand away. Because his cut lower lip had swollen, he still spoke thickly:

“How did you find me?”

“Well—”

She stretched out beside him with a cheerful little wriggle of her shoulders. She turned onto her side, facing him, so that his arm nestled between her breasts. He shifted his arm. She immediately moved closer. The wench was not sober, he realized with a sudden sense of confusion.

She ran her palm over his forehead, said abruptly, “Are you warm? You feel all icy.”

“Yes, I’m warm. Very warm.”

“That’s a dreadful lie, your teeth are clicking!”

“My teeth are cold but I’m warm everywhere else. I asked you—”

“Drink some wine. That’ll help.”

She practically forced the mouth of the bottle to his lips. The inn’s wine was poor and sourish. He coughed and spluttered getting it down. But when it reached his stomach, it did indeed warm him a little, and quickly.

Charlotte hitched her hip against him. Though he was conscious of aches in his belly and groin, he was suddenly conscious of something else. A reaction in his loins. Unexpected; startling. And—
God help me,
he thought with some panic—not entirely unpleasant.

But he still felt like some cornered fox.

“To answer your question,” Charlotte explained in a whisper, “we don’t have a single customer tonight. Not one! The worrying in the kitchen got so tiresome—your mother and Girard saying this happened, or that happened—I just got thoroughly sick of it and crept out here for a drink from the bottle I keep put away. Isn’t that lucky?”

Her laugh this time was throaty. That alarming, exciting hand strayed to his collar, teasing his neck. He didn’t even feel the lard residue because he was feeling too much that was surprising elsewhere.
What in heaven’s name was happening?

He tried to sound gruff: “Who gets the rest of what you steal? Your family?”

“No, I drink it all! Drink it—and have the loveliest dreams of—a certain young man—”

“I don’t believe that.”

“The dreams? Oh, yes! They are lovely!” She leaned her head in closer so that her curls tickled his cheek, accelerating the peculiar transformations taking place in his body. “What a pity they stay dreams and nothing else—”

“I mean I don’t believe you about the wine, Charlotte.”

“Well, I do take
some
home.” She brushed his cheek with her lips, the kiss a soft, quick, smacking sound. “You will keep my secret, won’t you? Please?”

He answered with a confused monosyllable. But it seemed sufficient to make her happy—and even more interested in his welfare, or something else. She burrowed closer.

“Phillipe, you’re freezing.”

“No, sincerely, I’m p-p-perfectly—”

“You need more wine!”

His protest ended in a gulp, as she forced it on him. The strong-smelling stuff ran down his chin. Gasping for air, he asked:

“Charlotte—you didn’t finish—how did you find—?”

“Oh, yes, that. Well, when I came in, I heard you thrashing and muttering in your sleep. Are you still hurting so much?” One of her hands slipped across his hip. “Can you move at all?”

“Uh—yes, I can move. In fact I should go inside and—”

“Oh, no!” she cried softly, pushing his chest with both hands. “Not until the chill passes. If you go out in the air, you might catch a fever. You need more wine!”

This time he hardly resisted at all. The sour stuff tasted better by the moment. It was relaxing him—except in a certain critical area over which he no longer seemed to have any control, thanks to Charlotte’s constant wriggling and stirring and pressing and touching. In the darkness, she seemed to be equipped with numerous extra hands, many more hands than were customary for a normally built human being. They were all over him. But after the first shock of fingers straying down his stomach and hesitating an instant, he got so caught up in this peculiar, half-fearful, half-exciting encounter that the torment of the beating quite vanished from his mind.

“My turn,” she giggled, prying the bottle from his faintly trembling hand. She drank. Somehow the bottle slipped, thudded to the dirt floor of the stable.

“Oh dear,” Charlotte sighed. “Whatever will we do to warm you now?”

“Charlotte, thank you, but I’m sufficiently warm—”

“No, your poor sweet hands are still like ice!”

She’s tipsy,
he thought. His head buzzed. She wasn’t the only one.

“We
must
do something for your hands. A warm place—”

She seized them, pressed them between her breasts. He now felt his bruises hardly at all. But he felt the other sensations with mysterious and mounting ferocity.

“Goodness no, that’s
still
not good enough! Oh, you’ll think me too forward, but—in the interests of your health, you sweet boy—”

Giggle.
Then she somehow got her skirt up—guided his hands to a place new and warm, furred and mind-numbing.”

“Ah—better,” she purred. His hands seemed to have absolutely no control because she was doing certain equally new and amazing things with them. All at once she kissed him on the ear. Strange heats burst inside him, little fires, as she tickled his earlobe with her tongue.

“Love warms the blood too, Phillipe, did you know that? Unless you hurt so much—”

“I ache, I was stoutly beaten, Charlotte. I don’t think we—”

“Oh, don’t tell me! You don’t care for girls?”

“Actually, I haven’t been thinking much about that tonight—”

“Well,
think!”
Another kiss on his ear. “You darling boy—you’ll feel so much better afterward. I promise!”

And before he knew it, her mouth came down on his, and he tasted the wine of her tongue. In some miraculous, crazy way he no longer ached—from the blows, that is.

“Oh, I’m just
suffocating,”
Charlotte gasped.

A moment later, with another of those mental explosions, he comprehended the bareness of her breasts against the hairs of his arm, not to mention her fingers at the waist of his breeches.

Then the breeches were gone. And the mystery unfolded itself at last in the eagerness of her body.

“Here, here, dear Phillipe. Here—no, not quite —there, that’s better—oh, you
are
warmer. I can feel you’re warmer already! Oh thank goodness, the treatment’s working—!”

“God, yes,” he croaked, and let every other consideration go except the heat of her mouth and the strange, wondrous rhythm that began from the almost unbearably pleasant joining of their bodies. Charlotte seized the back of his neck and held fast. Somewhere a door opened and closed.

The rhythm quickened. The girl’s hands worked up and down his back. He could feel her broken, work-blunted nails. The scratching only made him breathe more and more frantically. Uncontrollable surgings began in the depths of him, then roared outward in what his addled mind crazily decided was a most consuming, astonishing and remarkable cure for bruises and bad memories.

They drowsed pleasurably, arms intertwined. Then, without any warning, light blazed below. He heard something kicked over—the blown-out lantern?

“Phillipe?
Charlotte?”

Rousing, Phillipe made a noise. Charlotte tried to shush him. A moment later he heard his mother’s voice ordering them down.

Feeling trapped, he pulled up his breeches hastily. Charlotte was going, “Oh! Oh!” softly, fearfully. He touched her hand to reassure her. But her eyes looked stricken, her cheeks dead white in the glow of the other lantern at the foot of the ladder.

Phillipe climbed down first. He stepped off the bottom rung and groaned. The pain was back.

Charlotte joined him, smoothing her skirt, which appeared to be on sideways; the tie straggled down her left hip. Obviously terrified of the glaring woman with the lantern, she began, “Please, Madame Charboneau, let me say—”

“Be quiet, you little slut.”

Charlotte started to cry. Phillipe’s mother lifted the lantern higher, fixing her eyes on her son.

“My God, did you get caught in a rock slide? Or did she rake you like that?”

Marie Charboneau was a handsome woman with a wide mouth, a fine, aristocratic nose, and the dark hair and eyes of Auvergne that her son had inherited. As Charlotte continued sniffling, Marie addressed her quietly:

“Go inside and tell Girard he’s to give you wages for the week. And escort you home tonight. Don’t come back.”

“I’m not good enough for Phillipe, is that it?” the sobbing girl burst out. “What a noble attitude for a woman like you! A woman who can’t even get past a church door because—”

Marie’s slap was swift and vicious. Charlotte cried out and stumbled back, terrified, one hand at her cheek.

“You will leave,” Marie said.

“Look, Mama, that’s not fair,” Phillipe said. “She was only trying to comfort me because I’d been in a fight—”

But even as he spoke, a shadow flitted past him; and Charlotte was gone. Crying or cursing, he couldn’t tell which.