The Taming (2 page)

Liana sat down hard on the feather mattress of her bed and waved her maid out of the room. Liana held her hands up and saw how they were shaking. She'd once faced a crowd of peasants armed with sickles and axes alone, with three terrified maids behind her, yet she'd kept her head and turned the rabble away by giving them what food she carried with her and jobs on her land. She'd dealt with drunken soldiers; she had once escaped a rape by an overzealous suitor. She had been able to deflect one disaster after another with calmness, assurance, and peace of mind.

But the idea of marriage terrified her. Not just frightened her, but deep-down, inside-her-soul terrified her. Two years ago she had seen her cousin Margaret married off to a man chosen by the girl's father. Before the marriage the man had written love sonnets to Margaret's beauty. Margaret used to talk about how her forthcoming marriage was a love match and she so looked forward to a life with this beloved man.

After the marriage, the man showed his true self. He sold most of Margaret's immense dowry to pay his huge debts. He left Margaret in an old, decaying, cold castle with but a few retainers, then went to court, where he spent most of the rest of her dowry on jewels for his many high-born whores.

Liana knew how fortunate she was to have the power of running her father's estates. She knew that no woman had any power unless it was granted to her by a man. Men had been asking for her hand in marriage since she was four years old. She had been betrothed once, when she was eight, but the young man had died before she was ten. Her father had never bothered to accept any offers after that and so Liana had quietly been able to escape marriage. When some suitor had pressed his petition, all Liana had had to do was remind Gilbert of what chaos her marriage would cause and Gilbert refused the offer.

But now this greedy Helen was interfering. Liana considered turning all power of running the estates over to her stepmother and retiring to their estate in Wales. Yes, that would be remote enough. She could live there in privacy, and soon both Helen and her father would forget about her.

Liana stood up, her fists clenched at her side, her simple, unornamented velvet gown sweeping the tile floor. Helen would never allow her to live in peace. Helen would pursue her to the ends of the earth to make sure her stepdaughter was as miserable as all women seemed to be in marriage.

Liana picked up her hand mirror from a little table by the window and stared at her reflection. In spite of all the love poems eager young men who wanted to marry her had written, in spite of the songs the traveling singers who were paid by her had sung, she could not see that she was a beauty. She was too pale, too blonde, too…too innocent-looking to be a beauty. Helen was beautiful, with her snapping dark eyes that let everyone know she had secrets, with her sultry way of looking at men. Liana sometimes thought the reason she could control the servants so well was because she was sexless. When Helen walked across the courtyard, men stopped what they were doing and looked at her. Men tugged their forelocks in respect to Liana, but they didn't stand gaping or guffaw and punch each other when she passed.

She moved to the window and looked down into the courtyard. A pretty milkmaid was being teased by an assistant farrier, the boy's hands reaching for the girl's round, shapely body.

Liana turned away, for the sight was too painful for her to bear. Never could she hope for some young man to chase her around a well. She could never find out if some young man
wanted
to chase her. Her father's people would always treat her with the respect of her station and address her as “my lady.” Her suitors would do anything to win her hand because they wanted her dowry. It wouldn't matter if she were a hunchback with three eyes; she would still receive flowery compliments and glowing praise of her beauty. Once, a man had sent her a poem about the beauty of her feet. As if he'd ever seen them!

“My lady.”

Liana looked up to see her maid, Joice, standing in the doorway. Joice was the closest thing to a friend that Liana had. Being only ten years older than Liana, Joice was almost like a sister. Liana's mother had hired Joice to care for Liana when Liana was just a baby and Joice had been little more than a child herself. Liana's mother had taught her daughter to run estates, but when Liana had had a bad dream, it was Joice who'd comforted her. It was Joice who'd stayed up with her through childhood illnesses and Joice who'd taught her about things other than estate management. Joice had explained how babies were made and what the man who'd tried to rape her had wanted.

“My lady,” Joice said, always careful to show respect to her young charge. Liana could afford to be friendly, but Joice was always aware of her place, always aware that tomorrow she could be without a roof over her head or food on the table. She did not volunteer advice that might not be wanted. “There is a dispute in the kitchen and—”

“You are fond of your husband, Joice?”

The maid hesitated before answering. The entire castle knew what Lady Helen was demanding, and the people were of the belief that if Liana left, the Neville estates would be dust in six years. “Aye, my lady, I am.”

“Did you choose him or was he chosen for you?”

“Your mother chose him, but I believe she wanted to please me, so I was married to a young and healthy man and I have come to love him.”

Liana's head came up. “Have you?”

“Oh yes, my lady, that often happens.” Joice felt she was on safe ground here. All women were afraid before their marriage. “When one spends long winter nights together, love often follows.”

Liana turned away.
If
one could spend time together, she thought.
If
your greedy husband didn't send you away. She looked back at her maid. “Am I pretty, Joice? I mean actually pretty enough so that a man might be interested in me and not in all this?” She moved her arm to indicate the silk-hung bed, the tapestry on the north wall, the silver-gilt ewer, the carved oak furniture.

“Oh yes, my lady,” Joice answered glibly. “You are
very
pretty, beautiful actually. There is no man high or low who could resist you. Your hair—”

Liana put up her hand for the woman to stop. “Let's see to the kitchen dispute.” She could not keep the heaviness out of her voice.

S
ix months!” Helen screamed at her husband. “For six months that daughter of yours has been finding fault with men! Not one of them is ‘suitable.' I tell you, if she is not out of here in another month, I shall take this child of yours that I carry and never return.”

Gilbert looked out the window at the rain and cursed God for sending two weeks of foul weather and for creating women. He watched Helen ease herself into a chair with the help of two maids. From the way she complained, it would seem that no woman had ever carried a child before, but what amazed him was how pleased he was at the prospect of another child and a chance to have a son at last. Helen's words and tone grated on him, but he was inclined to do anything she wanted—at least until his son was safely delivered.

“I shall speak to her,” Gilbert said heavily, dreading another scene with his daughter. But now he realized that one of the women had to go, and since Helen was able to produce sons, it had to be Liana who left.

A servant found Liana, and Gilbert met her in one of the guest rooms off the solar. He hoped the rain would clear soon and he could go hawking again and not have to deal with this unpleasant business further.

“Yes, Father?” Liana asked from the doorway.

Gilbert looked at her and hesitated for a moment. She was so like her mother, and at all costs he didn't want to offend her. “Many men have come to visit us since your mother—”

“Stepmother,” Liana corrected. “Since my stepmother announced to the world that I was ready to be sold, that I was a bitch in heat and needed stud service. Yes, many men have come here to look at our horses, our gold, our land and also, as an afterthought, at the plain-faced Neville daughter.”

Gilbert sat down. He prayed that in heaven there would be no women. The only female allowed would be the kestrel hawk. He wouldn't even allow mares or female dogs. “Liana,” he said tiredly, “you're as pretty as your mother, and if I have to sit through one more dinner with men telling you, at length, of your beauty, I shall go off food forever. Tomorrow I may have my table set up in the stables. At least the horses will not regale me with how white my daughter's skin is, how radiant her eyes, how golden her hair, how rose-red her lips.”

There was no answering smile from Liana. “So I am to choose one of these liars? I am to live like Cousin Margaret while my husband spends my dowry?”

“The man Margaret married was a fool. I could have told her that. He canceled a day's hawking to diddle with some man's wife.”

“So I am to marry a man who likes hawking best? Is that the solution? Perhaps we should hold a hawking tournament and the man with the hawk with the biggest kill wins me as a prize. It makes as much sense as anything else.”

Gilbert rather liked that idea, but wisely didn't say so. “Now see here, Liana. I've liked some of the men who've been here to visit. What about that William Aye? Good-looking fellow he is.”

“Every one of my maids thought so, too. Father, the man is stupid. I tried to talk to him about the bloodlines of the horses in his stables and he had no idea what they were.”

Gilbert was taken aback at that. A man should know about his horses. “What about Sir Robert Fitzwaren? He seemed smart enough.”

“He told everyone he was smart. He also said he was strong and brave and fearless. According to him, he's won every tournament he's ever entered.”

“But I heard he was unseated four times last year at—Oh, I see what you mean. Bragging men can become tiresome.”

Gilbert's eyes lit up. “What about Lord Stephen, Whitington's boy? Now there's a man for you. Good looking. Rich. Healthy. Smart, too. And the boy knows how to handle a horse and a hawk.” Gilbert smiled. “I'd guess he knows something about women. I even saw him
reading
to you.” Reading, in Gilbert's opinion, was an unnecessary burden for a person to carry.

Liana remembered Lord Stephen's dark blond hair, his laughing blue eyes, his skill with a lute, the way he controlled an unruly horse, how he'd read from Plato to her. He was charming to everyone he met, and everyone in the household adored him. He'd not only told Liana she was lovely, but one evening in a dark corridor he'd grabbed her and kissed her until she was breathless, then whispered, “I'd love to take you to bed with me.”

Lord Stephen was perfect. Flawless. Yet something…Maybe it was the way he glanced at the gold vessels lined up on the mantelpiece in the solar or the way he'd looked so hard at Helen's diamond necklace. There was something about him that she didn't trust, but she couldn't say what. It wasn't wrong, exactly, for him to take note of the Neville wealth, but she wished she saw a bit more lust in his eyes for her person and not her wealth.

“Well?” Gilbert prompted. “Is there anything wrong with young Stephen?”

“Nothing, really,” Liana said. “He's—”

“Good, then it's done. I shall tell Helen, and she can start planning the wedding. This should make her happy.”

Gilbert left Liana alone, and she sat down on the bed as if her body were made of lead. It was settled. She was to
marry
Lord Stephen Whitington. To spend the rest of her life with a man she didn't know yet who would have absolute power over her. He could beat her, imprison her, impoverish her, and he'd have a perfect, and legal, right.

“My lady,” Joice said from the doorway, “the steward asks to see you.”

Liana looked up, blinking without seeing for a moment.

“My lady?”

“Have my horse saddled,” Liana said, and damn the steward, she thought. She wanted a good long run, with the horse pounding beneath her. Perhaps enough exercise would help her forget what awaited her.

 

Rogan, the oldest of what was left of the Peregrine family, squatted on his heels and stared at the castle on the horizon. His dark eyes were full of his thoughts—and his fears. He would rather face a battle than what he faced today.

“Putting it off won't make it any easier,” his brother Severn said from behind him. Both men were tall and broad-shouldered like their father, but Rogan had inherited a sheen of red to his dark hair from their father, while Severn, who had a different mother, had more delicate facial features and hair streaked with gold. Severn was also quicker to be impatient, and now he was impatient with his older brother's immobility.

“She won't be like Jeanne,” Severn said, and behind him the twenty knights stopped moving and held their breath. Even Severn stopped breathing for a moment, fearing that he'd overstepped himself.

Rogan heard his brother, but he didn't betray the emotion that went through him at the mention of Jeanne's name. He did not fear war; he did not fear charging animals; he did not fear death, but the thought of marriage made him hesitate.

Below them ran a deep stream, and Rogan could almost feel the cold water on his body. He stood and went to his horse. “I will return,” he said to his brother.

“Wait a minute!” Severn said, grabbing the reins. “Are we to just sit here and wait for you while you decide whether or not you have courage enough to visit a slip of a girl?”

Rogan didn't bother to answer but looked at his brother with hard eyes.

Severn released the reins. Sometimes Severn thought Rogan could tumble stone walls with those eyes of his. Even though he'd lived all his life with this older brother, Severn felt he knew very little about him; Rogan was not a man to reveal much about himself. As a boy, when that bitch Jeanne had betrayed him so publicly, Rogan had withdrawn into himself, and in the ten years since, no one had penetrated his outer shell of hardness.

“We will wait,” Severn said, stepping out of the way and allowing Rogan to pass.

When Rogan was gone, one of the knights behind Severn grunted. “Sometimes a woman changes a man,” he said.

“Not my brother,” Severn answered quickly. “No woman anywhere is strong enough to change my brother.” There was pride in his voice. The world around them might change from day to day, but Rogan knew what he wanted and how to go about getting it. “A woman alter
my
brother?” he said derisively.

The men smiled at the impossibility of such an idea.

Rogan rode down the hill, then along the stream for a while. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do, just put off the time when he had to go to the Neville heiress. What a man had to do for money disgusted him. When he had heard the heiress was being put up for sale, so to speak, he had told Severn to go and get her and bring her back with her wagonloads of portable wealth and the deeds to some of her father's estates. Or, better yet, return with the gold and papers alone and leave the woman behind. Severn had said that a man as rich as Gilbert Neville would want only the oldest Peregrine, the man who would become duke as soon as the Peregrines wiped the Howards off the face of the earth.

As usual, Rogan's body tightened with hatred when he thought of the Howards. The Howards were the cause of everything bad that had happened to the Peregrines for three generations. They were the reason he was now having to marry some old-maid heiress, the reason he wasn't at home now—in the
real
Peregrine home, the place the Howards had stolen. They had stolen his birthright, his home, and even his wife.

And marrying this heiress, he reminded himself, would bring him one step closer to regaining what was rightfully his.

There was a clearing in the trees and the stream spread out to catch in a beautiful rock-edged pool. On impulse, Rogan dismounted, then began to shed his clothes, undressing down to the loincloth tied about his waist. He stepped into the icy pool and began to swim as hard and as fast as he could. What he needed was a good long hunt to expend the pent-up energy in his body, but swimming might do as well.

He swam for nearly an hour, then stepped out of the pool, his sides heaving with exertion. Stretching out on a patch of sweet green grass in the sun, he was soon sound asleep.

He slept so soundly that he did not hear the quiet gasp of the woman as she came to the pool for water. Nor was he aware that the young woman stepped back into the trees and watched him.

 

Liana rode hard and fast, outdistancing her father's knight who tried to keep up with her. Her father's men ate rather than trained and she knew the trails of the land better than they did; it was easy to escape them. Once she was alone, she headed for the pool north of the castle. She'd be alone there and she'd be able to think about her forthcoming marriage.

She was still some distance away from the pool when she saw a bit of faded red through the trees. Someone was there. She cursed her luck, then cursed her foolishness at having left her guard behind. She halted her horse, tied him to a tree, then crept quietly toward the pool.

The red was the dress of one of the farmers' wives who lived in town and had three small fields outside the walls. Liana saw that the woman was standing absolutely still and was so absorbed in what she was looking at that she didn't hear Liana approach. Curious, Liana started to move softly forward.

“My lady!” the young woman gasped. “I…I came to get some w-water.”

Her nervousness increased Liana's curiosity. “What were you looking at?”

“Nothing of any importance. I must go. My children will need me.”

“You're leaving the pool with an empty water jug?” Liana pushed past her and looked through the bushes and immediately saw what had held the woman's attention. Lying on the grass in a patch of sunlight was a splendid-looking man: tall, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, heavily muscled, with a strong-jawed face shadowed with dark whiskers and long, dark hair that glinted red in the sunlight. Liana looked from his feet to the top of his head, wide-eyed with interest as she gazed at the honey-colored skin of his nearly nude body. She'd had no idea a man could be so beautiful.

“Who is he?” she whispered to the farm wife.

“He's a stranger,” the woman whispered back.

Near the man was a pile of clothes of coarse wool. With the sumptuary laws, it was often possible to guess a person's income and station in life by his clothes. This man wore no fur of any kind, not even the lowly rabbit allowed the lower classes. He had no musical instrument nearby, so he was no traveling musician.

“Perhaps he is a huntsman,” the farm wife whispered. “Sometimes they come to trap game for your father. With your wedding, more game will be needed.”

Liana shot the woman a quick look. Did everyone know of her life? Her wedding was what she'd come here to contemplate. She looked back at the man on the grass. He looked like a young Hercules, power and muscle now asleep, merely waiting to be awakened. If only Lord Stephen looked like this man, she wouldn't mind marriage so much. But even asleep, this man radiated more strength than Lord Stephen had when clad in full armor. For a moment she smiled as she pictured telling Helen she'd decided to marry a lowly huntsman, but then her smile left her because she doubted that this man would want her if she weren't endowed with wagonloads of silver and gold. For just one day she'd like to be a peasant girl, to see if she were woman enough to interest a handsome man.