“The man then divorced his wife very publicly, repudiated her and his children in front of the entire court, then took her away. She has not been seen or heard of since.”
“He killed her?” The question emerged as a shocked whisper.
Renard concealed a half-smile and shrugged. “Perhaps. Rumor has it that he had her locked away in a convent in the Pyrenees, a particularly strict order, a silent order committed to a life of abject poverty, as I understand it. It would be a savage existence for a woman whose lifeblood was the rich and exciting life of the court, a woman who needed adulation with every breath she took. She would probably have preferred death. Indeed, rumor yet again has it that she sought death at her own hands.”
Robin said nothing. He could think of no adequate response to such a horror.
“A savage punishment, I think you would agree,” Renard continued in his smooth manner. “Even for an unfaithful wife. If indeed she
had
been unfaithful.”
The ambassador raised an eyebrow. “Very few people believed in her guilt, which she denied with her last breath. It was generally believed that the man had trumped up the charges in order to be rid of her. It was assumed that there was another woman involved.”
Renard shrugged again. “If there was, she hasn’t made an appearance. Anyway, he took the children, whom he’d publicly declared to be bastards. No one knows where he took them, but it’s generally believed that he’s not laid eyes upon them since. He then eschewed all society, which had anyway all but ostracized him, and he was seen in Paris only when he had business there.
“As far as the French court is concerned he has dropped out of sight . . . and, therefore, since a Frenchman has the attention span of a gnat, out of mind. He appears in London and elsewhere, of course, when he is about his business. But few people know his unsavory story.”
Renard picked up his glass again. “There you have my little tale, my friend, and, as I said, you may make of it what you choose.”
Robin was silent for longer than courtesy permitted before he recollected himself. “My thanks, sir.” His reflective gaze returned to the now-empty goblet he held.
Renard watched him with his earlier hint of amusement. “Was that what you wished to hear, Lord Robin?”
Robin looked up again and his eyes were bleak. “Perhaps so, sir. But I don’t care to cause pain to those I love.”
“Ah. In our world, my friend, that makes a man vulnerable. And that is very dangerous.” Renard stood up and Robin took his cue.
“Thank you for your time, sir. I am most grateful.” He set down his glass rather awkwardly and it tottered on the edge of the table. He caught it in time, replacing it with exaggerated caution in the center of the table.
“Not at all. I’m glad to have been of some service. My man will see you out.” Renard offered a short bow and left the chamber while Robin was still executing a deeper bow to his host.
The saturnine servant appeared immediately and in silence escorted his master’s guest to the street. Robin stood looking up at the house, which seemed fancifully to him to be as dark and devious and secretive as its occupant. Renard had been as forthcoming as Robin could have wished, but Robin knew his own business well enough to be certain that that was because the ambassador would call in the debt in his own time.
He’d warned Robin against an open challenge to a superlative swordsman. The warning piqued Robin’s pride, but he took it to heart nevertheless. He was no mean blade himself, but not in the first rank of swordsmen.
But he’d cross that bridge if and when he came to it. His first duty was to Pen. And it was a duty that turned his blood cold. How did you tell your dearest friend that her lover was a monster?
Fifteen
Owen went into a peal of laughter when Pen appeared in the stable yard.
“What’s so funny?” Pen demanded, pulling Cedric’s cap down low on her brow. “Mary thought it was scandalous but she didn’t think there was anything amusing about my appearance.”
“It’s just so unlikely,” Owen said through his laughter. “You’re far too pretty for a page.”
Pen considered whether to accept this as a compliment or as an adverse comment on her disguise. She decided it was both. “Well, I can’t do much about it,” she stated, tugging at the hem of Cedric’s short doublet as if she could thus lengthen it to cover more of her thighs.
“It has its alluring aspects,” Owen observed. “I hadn’t realized you had quite such a deliciously round backside.”
At any other time she might have been flattered, but not in the middle of an inn’s stable yard. Pen flushed to the roots of her hair. “Someone will overhear you!”
“There’s no one around,” he returned with perfect truth. “The groom has gone to fetch Cedric’s horse for you. I believe we’ll make better progress if you ride Nugget.”
“Does Cedric mind?” Pen asked doubtfully.
“No more than he minds lending his spare suit of clothes and being excluded from my business for the day. If he wants to go abroad he knows to use the cob, although I doubt he’ll subject himself to such an indignity.” Owen’s smile was affectionate.
Pen had observed both Cedric’s adoration of his master and Owen’s easily affectionate manner with the lad. It had struck her that there was a strong bond between master and page. It was another of the mysteries that thickened around Owen d’Arcy.
The groom appeared from the stable leading Cedric’s dun-colored mare. He barely glanced at the page. “I’ll fetch the black now, m’lord.”
Owen nodded and turned to Pen. “Let me put you up.”
Pen didn’t trust his somewhat wicked smile, but the dun stood too high for her to mount unaided. In her present costume she would be able to ride astride, though. She disliked the new sidesaddles that were now considered de rigueur for ladies of the court. They restricted movement too much.
She bent her knee for Owen to toss her up into the saddle. As she’d expected, he took the opportunity to run his hands over her bottom, and for one instant that left her breathless he slipped one hand between her thighs in a darting intimate caress before he boosted her into the saddle.
“Nice,” he observed with the same wicked smile. “Very nice indeed.”
Pen had not the slightest desire for sex play. The business at hand was far too serious, and yet Owen was behaving as if they were going on a jaunt. She refused to smile, and stared straight ahead.
Owen mounted his horse, the smile still playing on his lips, but he made no attempt to elicit a response. He turned his horse out of the stable yard and onto the road to High Wycombe.
It was barely seven o’clock but the world was already stirring. They passed a milkmaid with her full pails and a young goatherd yawning as he drove his flock through the village to the fields beyond. A knot of ragged children were clustered around the village well, throwing stones at one another, laughing and playing tag, until an irate woman emerged from one of the cottages lining the street and came towards them flourishing a broom. She smartly boxed the ears of the first two children she reached, and the others hastily fell into an orderly line with their buckets.
Cottage doors stood open as women swept debris into the street; the smoke from cooking fires curled in the crisp air. A tiny girl chewing a lump of black bread ran barefoot into the roadway chasing a chicken. She was oblivious of the horses coming towards her and suddenly veered sideways, trying to cut off the chicken’s path.
Owen dragged his horse aside, avoiding the child by an inch. He was swearing, a stream of French that Pen, whose command of the language was more than competent, barely understood.
The child picked herself up, and seemed only then to realize the danger she’d been in. Owen switched to English as he scolded her for not looking where she was going.
Frightened out of her wits, the child stared up at this angry man on his great black charger, then she turned and raced back into the cottage from whence she’d come, abandoning her pursuit of the squawking chicken.
Owen sat very still as his horse settled down. He looked shaken and he seemed to Pen to have lost color, his lips almost white, his eyes blank with shock. She didn’t know whether it was anger or distress at the child’s near miss or both, but she knew she had never seen him affected in this way.
She herself could still not believe that the child had escaped unscathed. The stunning speed of Owen’s reaction, the strength in his hands as he’d pulled up the horse, had amazed her. It was as if the horse was an extension of himself, a weapon almost, to be controlled just as he controlled his rapier. Deft, certain, deadly. But when he’d wielded his rapier to lethal effect he’d behaved afterwards as calmly as if nothing had happened. But there was something about his reaction now that was quite different, and she didn’t know what to say.
Owen stared into the past. He saw little Andrew, all of two years old, toddling into the sunlit courtyard of the château in Burgundy flourishing a little wooden sword. The boy had seen his father returning from the hunt and with excited shrieks tottered towards him, tripped, and fell straight into the path of Owen’s great horse, an animal built to carry a man in full armor in the jousting lists or across a battlefield. The horse had reared as Owen, in terror, hauled him back, and an iron-shod hoof had caught the child a glancing blow to his shoulder. A glancing blow, but enough to dislocate the fragile joint. His son’s screams of agony still lived in Owen’s memory, almost as vividly as if he was hearing them now.
Pen could bear the silence no longer. Alarmed by his expression, she leaned over and touched his arm. “Owen?”
He jumped as if stung and looked at her as if he didn’t know who she was.
She said, her fingers pressing into his arm, “It’s all right, Owen. The child’s not hurt. You reacted so quickly . . . like lightning.
She’s not hurt.
”
Her words and her touch reached him through the shock of memory. His eyes focused again and the color returned to his cheeks, his mouth once more relaxed. “No, you’re right. Come, let’s get on.”
Pen didn’t immediately set her horse to follow him. It had been a bad moment, but she’d never before seen Owen look lost. Indeed, she could never have imagined that he could be. He’d handled the situation with his customary efficiency, but he
had
looked lost. The more time she spent in his company the less she seemed to know about him.
“Pen!”
At the imperative summons she nudged her horse into a canter to catch up. Owen glanced at her. “We don’t have time to daydream.”
Pen offered no defense.
He rode fast but Pen, comfortably astride a young and steady horse, kept up easily. It was twelve miles to High Wycombe and they reached their destination in just under two hours.
“Where do we go first?” Pen asked, looking around the familiar village from beneath the pulled-down brim of her cap.
“The tavern,” Owen said. “The fount of all gossip.” He had barely spoken since they’d left Gerrards Cross, and Pen had not interrupted his reverie. She had put the mystery aside for the moment and given herself over to her own thoughts as they drew closer to the place that contained so many memories for her, the happy ones almost obliterated by the terrible ones.
“Is that the Bryanston house?” Owen gestured with his whip to a pair of closed iron gates set into a high stone wall on the outskirts of the village.
“Yes, the manor,” Pen said with an inner chill. She had not been back here since her mother and Hugh had taken her away after the baby’s birth. She and Philip had enjoyed country life and had done much to enhance the beauty and convenience of Bryanston Manor. She wondered whether Miles had continued the improvements . . . Miles and his mother.
“The Bryanston Arms is on the green,” she said.
Owen rode towards the large expanse of grass in the center of the village. It was ornamented with a whipping post and stocks occupied by a miserable-looking vagrant liberally splattered with refuse.
“Nothing changes,” Pen murmured, recognizing the vagrant as Old Tom, whose fecklessness and propensity for helping himself to anything he fancied frequently landed him in the stocks.
The tavern was small, its thatched roof in need of repair. In fact, Pen noticed, there was a general air of neglect in the village that had not been apparent during Philip’s tenure at Bryanston Manor. It was the earl’s responsibility, or rather that of his steward and bailiff, to keep the tenants’ housing in good order, but there were crumbling roofs, broken gates, dismantled walls, and thickets of weeds in the hedgerows. Everything she saw spoke to an absentee lord of the manor.
She mentioned this to Owen, who said, “Good. That should work in our favor. If the family are rarely here and their tenants have reason to bear a grudge they’re more likely to talk.”
He drew rein at the tavern’s ale bench and swung down. “Take the horses to the stables and see them baited and watered. I’m going inside to lubricate some tongues.”
“Wait!” Pen exclaimed, swinging herself from the dun. “I’m coming in too. That’s the whole point of my disguise.”
He turned back, his eyes once more alight with amusement, and Pen, to her heartfelt relief, saw that whatever mood had enveloped him had vanished.
He said, “Unfortunately it’s less convincing than I’d hoped. But if you play the part of servant, it might add verisimilitude to an otherwise implausible tale.”
“I’m a page, not a groom,” Pen protested.
Owen laughed. “Don’t take offense, sweetheart, but besides being too pretty, you are a little too old to make a convincing page. Go and talk to the grooms and ostlers and see what you can glean from them, but I should avoid talking to anyone who might have known you in your customary guise.”
With that he sauntered into the tavern, leaving Pen torn between indignation and acknowledgment that he was probably right.
She took the horses’ reins and led them round to the stables. At first it seemed that they were deserted, and they were certainly not as well ordered as she remembered them. The cobbles were slippery with ordure, the straw filthy and stinking. She led the horses to the water trough and broke the film of ice with her riding whip. The water beneath was green and foul.
“Ye want summat?”
She spun round at the rough voice and found herself face-to-face with a man she vaguely recognized. Young, with a surly air, he would have been little more than a boy four years ago.
“Fresh water for the horses,” she said, trying to deepen her voice, but it still sounded lighter than she would have liked.
“Well’s on the green,” he said carelessly. “Bucket’s over yonder.” He gestured to a bucket in the corner of the yard.
Pen hesitated. It occurred to her that she didn’t recognize the youth but that she had known his father, or maybe his uncle. He too had had a surly twist to his mouth and a greasy lock of hair falling across his eyes. But he had been cooperative; it was more than his livelihood was worth to be otherwise in those days.
“Things have changed since I was here last,” she observed, fetching the bucket.
The youth spat on the cobbles. “Aye. Them up at the manor. Don’t do nothin’ fer us no more.”
“You don’t need them to clean the stables for you,” she said acidly.
“Eh, you watch yer tongue, you!” He took a step towards her, and prudently Pen grabbed up the bucket and hurried from the yard. An altercation would do no good at all.
She drew water from the well, and staggered back with the heavy bucket to the stables wondering what Mary’s ladies would say if they could see her now. The princess’s confidante up to her elbows in muck and manure.
She watered the horses, led them into the stables, forked unappetizingly damp hay into their troughs, and headed for the inn. Apart from her eagerness to see how Owen was faring, she was thirsty.
Owen was holding court at the taproom counter. He was surrounded by men from the village, all sporting foaming pitch tankards, and even the landlord held his own as he leaned over the stained counter.
“So why’d ye be a-lookin’ fer Granny Wardel, sir?” the landlord was asking as Pen slid into the dim room. “A fine city gent like yerself?”
“I’m a lawyer,” Owen informed him. His voice had changed, the soft melodic tones accentuated so that he spoke with a pronounced lilting cadence. “I’ve some news for her . . . something to her advantage,” he added with a conspiratorial wink.
“God’s bones!” exclaimed a farmer. “Nellie Wardel, come into a fortune!”
“Not quite,” Owen temporized. “But if you’d give me her direction . . . ?”
He caught sight of Pen in the shadow of the doorway. She took a step towards him, but with a barely perceptible movement of his hand he waved her back into the shadows.
“Mine host, draw a pint of ale for my servant, if you please.” He tossed a coin on the counter. The innkeeper drew ale from a keg and sent the pot skimming down the counter to where Pen stood in isolation.
She took it up without a word and drank thirstily. The name Nellie Wardel had been the first one on the ledger page. Pen had never heard of her, but it seemed she was well known. Granny Wardel. She tried to remember, to picture the faces that had crowded around her in her agony. Was there one that would fit the sobriquet
Granny
?
She couldn’t think. All her memories of that dreadful time lurked in the shadows of pain and terror.
Owen turned from the counter and came over to her. He gave her a nod that clearly indicated she was to finish her ale and accompany him. Pen drained the pot and followed him outside.
“I hate to leave the horses in those stables. They’re a disgrace,” she said in a low voice.
“We’ll need them anyway to pay our visit to Granny Wardel. She lives some two miles away across the fields.” His voice was his own once more.
Pen needed no instruction. “I’ll fetch them then.” She gave a mock tug on her forelock and went off on her errand.