The Taming (22 page)

As the astonished crowd watched, Liana took a pair of scissors and cut a silver coin from in front of her face. “Will this be enough to pay for the wine, my lord?” She cut off a gold coin. “Will this cover the cost of the beef?”

Rogan gaped at her, looking at the coins she cut away.

“Do not look so fearful, my lord,” she said loudly. “I will not eat so much that you will be exposed to my ugliness. I am sure the sight of the money pleases you more than my plain face.”

Rogan's face turned cold. He did not say a word to her, but rose and left the Hall.

Zared turned to Severn, who looked as if he might be ill. “Eat up, Severn. Tomorrow we'll probably get rocks in our bread and Rogan is going to work all of you into the grave on the training field,” Zared said cheerfully. “You were smart to try to keep Liana from interfering.”

Liana, with all the grace and dignity she could muster, left the Hall.

N
o!” Liana snapped at Gaby and Joice. “Don't put that there. Nor over there. And certainly not there!”

Joice backed out of the room as soon as possible, but Gaby stayed in the solar, looked at the back of Liana's head, and bit her tongue. Not that she'd kept her mouth shut in the two weeks since that awful supper when Lady Liana had appeared wearing the coins, but she'd learned it did no good. “He has what he wanted,” was all Lady Liana would say to Gaby's pleadings that she and Rogan talk to each other.

And Lord Rogan was worse than his wife. Gaby had wheedled Baudoin into broaching the subject to the lord, but Rogan had nearly put a pike through Baudoin's belly.

So, because of the anger between the master and mistress, the whole castle, as well as the village, was suffering. The bakers refused to deliver fresh bread because Rogan refused to pay them, and Liana refused to have anything to do with the household. So there was, once again, sand in the bread. The courtyard was full of manure because no one ordered the men to clean it. The peasants were hungry. The moat, with only a foot of water in it, already contained half a dozen rotting cow carcasses. Whereas this had been the normal way of life before, now everyone complained. The men complained about the lice and the fleas in their clothes and the manure under their feet. They complained about Rogan's temper. They complained about Lady Liana not doing her job properly. (No one seemed to remember the way they'd fought her when she first arrived.)

All in all, after two weeks there wasn't a person within a ten-mile radius who wasn't affected by this argument between the lord and his lady.

“My lady—” Gaby began.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Liana snapped. Two weeks had done nothing to calm her temper. She had made every effort to please her husband, to be a wife to him, and he had ignored her and humiliated her in public. He, a man of great beauty, might think that the plainer people of the world had no feelings about their lack of looks, but he was wrong. If he thought she was so ugly, then she'd spare him having to look at her.

“It's not me,” Gaby said. “The lady Iolanthe asks to see you.”

Liana's head came up. “Severn has had his way. He has won and he has his brother the way he was. I see no reason to see Severn's mistress.”

Gaby gave a bit of a smile. “The gossip is that Lord Severn and his…the Lady Iolanthe are quarreling also. Perhaps she'd like to commiserate with you.”

Liana wanted to talk to someone. Gaby constantly preached forgiving Rogan for everything. She thought Liana should go to him and apologize, but Liana was sure he'd reject her. How could a woman as plain-faced as she was have any influence on a man like Rogan? And how could someone as dazzling as Iolanthe understand Liana's problem? “Tell her I cannot accept,” Liana said.

“But, my lady, she has invited you to her apartments. It's said that she's never invited anyone inside there before.”

“Oh?” Liana said.
“I
am to go to her? I, the lady of the manor, am to visit my brother-in-law's married mistress? Tell her no.”

Gaby left the room, and Liana looked back at her tapestry frame. She was seething over the presumption of the woman, but part of her was also curious. What did the beautiful Iolanthe have to say to her?

The invitation was reissued daily for three days, and each time Liana refused it. But on the fourth day she looked out the window and into the courtyard and saw one of the Days, her generous bosom pushing against the coarse wool of her greasy dress.

Liana turned to Joice. “Fetch my red brocade gown, the one with the cloth-of-gold underskirt. I am going visiting.”

An hour later Liana was dressed so that she knew she looked her best. She had to go outside and cross the courtyard to reach the stairs to Iolanthe's apartments, and she could feel every eye on her. But she looked straight ahead and ignored all of them.

When she at last reached the apartment and a maid opened the door, it took Liana a moment to recover her composure—and close her gaping mouth. Never had she seen a room of such wealth. There were gold and silver-gilt dishes everywhere. There were
rugs
on the floor, deep-piled, intricately patterned carpets. The walls were hung with silk tapestries of delicate scenes and so intricately woven, a flower no bigger than a thumbnail had a dozen colors in it. The beamed ceilings were painted with pastoral scenes. The windows had leaded panes with colored-glass inserts that shone like jewels.

And in the room were carved chairs with cushioned seats, carved sewing frames, beautiful chests inlaid with ivory. There was nowhere she could look that was not of exquisite beauty.

“Welcome,” Iolanthe said, and in her silver gown she was the most beautiful object in the room.

“I…” Liana took a breath to recover herself. “You had something to say to me?” Earlier, Liana had thought of telling this woman how immoral she was and how she would spend eternity in hell for being married to one man and living in sin with another, but in Iolanthe's presence, no such words came to Liana.

“Won't you have a seat? I have had something prepared for us to eat.”

Liana took the seat offered and sipped watered wine from a ruby-studded gold chalice.

“You'll have to go to him,” Iolanthe said. “He's too stubborn to give in to you, and besides that, I doubt if he knows how.”

Liana set the chalice down with a thunk and stood. “I'll not listen to this. He has insulted me repeatedly, and this is the final straw.” She started for the door.

“Wait!” Iolanthe called. “Please return. That was rude of me.”

Liana turned back.

Io smiled at her. “Forgive me. It has been difficult lately. Severn has been in the worst temper. Of course I've told him this is entirely his fault, that if he hadn't been so jealous of his brother, Rogan would never have said he'd married you for your money and you would never have had to resort to the veil of coins.”

Liana sat back down. “True,” she said, and picked up her wine goblet again. “He said, in front of his men, that he couldn't bear my ugliness.”

Iolanthe stared at the blonde woman. So, she thought, it wasn't the money. It was that Rogan had insulted his wife's looks. Rogan and Severn were such divine-looking men that it was easy to see how a woman could feel intimidated by them. Every morning Io studied her own reflection in the mirror and, at her age, she was teaching herself to smile without crinkling her eyes. She lived in terror of the day when Severn no longer believed her to be beautiful. She couldn't imagine how she'd feel if Severn said that he wanted her husband's money and not her person.

“I see,” Io said at last.

“Yes,” Liana said. “And
I
see, too. I thought I could make him love me. I thought I could make myself indispensable to him, but he never wanted me. Nor did anyone else want me here. It's ironic. My stepmother tried to tell me this, but I wouldn't listen. I thought I knew more than a woman who'd had two husbands. She was right. Even my maid Joice was right. Joice said men didn't want wives. In my case not only my husband didn't want me, but his brother didn't, his mistresses, his men—no one wanted me except the Lady, and now even her door is locked against me.”

Iolanthe listened to this speech of self-pity and understood it very well. As long as a woman felt desirable, she could feel confident. She could set his bed, with him and his mistress in it, on fire; she could dare to make a wager that he would lose; she could tempt his wrath by countermanding his orders for the castle staff. But when a woman felt undesirable, much of her strength left her.

Io had no idea what to do. Never in all of time could she hope to get Rogan to go to Liana. Rogan was a stubborn man who had no idea what was good for him. He wouldn't like thinking any woman had ever had any influence on him. “Who is the Lady?” Io asked, stalling for time while she thought about this problem.

At first Io barely listened to Liana's explanation, but something in her words caught her attention. “She lives above the solar?”

“In a single room that is almost always locked. But she seems to sense when I'm troubled, for then the door is open. She has been my greatest friend since I arrived. She told me about Jeanne Howard. She told me that men do not fight battles over timid women—or over ugly women,” Liana added.

“Is she an older woman, quite pretty, with soft brown hair?”

“Yes. Who is she? I've meant to ask her, but every time I see her—” She broke off as she watched Iolanthe ring a little silver bell. A maid appeared, Io whispered something to her, and the maid disappeared.

Iolanthe stood. “Would you mind if we went to this room and met your Lady?”

“The room is locked. It has been since I…since I went to supper with my husband.”

“I have sent my maid to fetch the key. Shall we go?”

Liana's lone appearance earlier had slowed movement in the courtyard, but when Io and Liana appeared together, everyone came to a halt and stood gaping at the two women. Iolanthe was a rare enough sight, but her with another woman was impossible to believe.

Liana ignored the staring people both inside and outside the castle and led Iolanthe to the locked door above the solar. “When she doesn't want to be disturbed, she keeps the door locked. I think we should respect her privacy.”

Io didn't say anything, but when her maid reappeared, a big key in hand, she inserted it into the lock.

“I don't think—” Liana began, but broke off. The room, which had been the one clean place in the castle when she arrived, was bare. No, not bare, for she could see, under years of cobwebs and rodent droppings, the Lady's furniture. There was the cushioned bench Liana had sat on. There was the Lady's tapestry frame. The windows that had had sunlight streaming through them were broken, and a dead bird lay on the floor.

“I don't understand,” Liana whispered. “Where is she?”

“Dead. Many years ago.”

Liana crossed herself even as she denied this. “Are you saying she's a ghost? That's not possible. I talked to her. She's as real as you or I. She told me things, things other people didn't know.” Her eyes widened.

“I've heard she does. I've never seen her, nor has Severn, and I don't know if Rogan has or not, but several other people have. She seems to love helping people in need. Years ago a maid who was pregnant was about to throw herself into the moat when she heard the Lady, as you call her, singing and spinning. The Lady talked her out of suicide. Didn't you wonder why no one lived in these rooms? Half the men refused even to go into the solar to fetch the birds, and
no
one would come up here.”

Liana was trying to take this in. “No one told me. No one so much as hinted.”

“I guess they thought your cleaning would do away with her. She never harms anyone. As ghosts go, she is benign.”

Liana walked through the thick dust on the floor to the tapestry frame. On it was an old, unfinished piece of work of a lady and a unicorn—what the Lady had been sewing when Liana had visited. Liana suddenly felt as if she'd lost a very dear friend. “Who is she? And why does she haunt the Peregrines?”

“She is Severn's grandmother, Rogan and Zared's too. She was Jane, the first wife of old Giles Peregrine. Their son was John, Severn's father. After Jane died, Giles married Bess Howard and it was her family who said Jane had never been legally married to Giles and therefore her son and his children were bastards. This castle and Bevan belonged to Jane's family; she grew up here.”

“And so she comes back here to haunt.”

“Years after her death, she was in this room when her son John arrived home after the king declared him illegitimate. He locked the door on her and never unlocked it again. Only she unlocks it now. Some people say John was a fool, that his mother came to tell him something and he wouldn't listen.”

“She probably wanted to tell him to stay away from the village girls,” Liana said bitterly.

“No,” Io said. “Everyone believed she wanted to tell him where the parish registers were.”

“What registers?”

“John could never prove that his parents had been married. All the witnesses to the marriage either died or mysteriously disappeared and no one could find the registers that recorded the marriage. Most people believed the Howards had destroyed them, but some people said old Giles had hidden them from his grasping second wife.” Io smiled. “If you see your Lady again, you might ask her where the registers are. If there were proof the marriage did take place, perhaps the king would restore the Peregrine estates to Rogan and Severn and this feud with the Howards would stop.”

Liana wondered if Rogan would love her if she found the registers. No, probably not. She'd still be plain-faced even if she were the richest woman in the world. “We should leave,” she said, “and lock the door. She should have her privacy.”

They left the room. Io locked the door and handed the key to her maid, who had been quietly waiting outside.