Danger's Kiss (6 page)

He opened the door, and her nose quivered with the first breath of sharp, frosty air.  Perhaps it was a blessing she didn’t have to walk, after all.  Better the knave should have to soak
his
feet, tramping through the snow.

The squeak of his boots and the flap of his cloak were the only sounds as he moved with long strides down the empty lane.  Not a soul roamed the streets to offer her aid.  Not that any would.  One had to be a fool to tangle with a man of the law.  A fool or a wench bent on vengeance.

Where was he taking her?  No shops were open at this hour.  The bakers were only beginning to fire their ovens.  The inns were shuttered tight.  Even the patrons of the town harlots hadn’t yet begun to stumble home from the brothels.

Maybe he was carrying her to the main road out of the city to banish her from Canterbury.  Or perhaps he was conveying her to the cathedral to force her to repent of her sins.

With her limited vision, she didn’t at first recognize where they were when he at last stopped in his tracks.  But when he upended her and set her carefully on her bound feet, the first thing she saw was the stark black post of the gallows.

Her heart bolted.

God’s eyes!  He meant to hang her.

The devil meant to hang her beside Hubert.

One glance at Hubert’s snow-stiff corpse and panic sluiced through her veins.

With a startled squeak, she broke loose of his hold and tried to escape.  After two desperate hops, she staggered and fell sideways, thankfully onto a thick cushion of snow.

“Wench!” he hissed.  “What ails you?”

Determined to escape despite the odds, she squirmed and bucked and wriggled along the ground.  But alas, she succeeded only in moving a few yards beyond his reach.

He easily closed the distance and hunkered down beside her, studying her with a perplexed gaze.  “Where the devil are you going?”

How he expected her to answer, gagged as she was, she didn’t know.  Ignoring him, she resumed her writhing.

He shook his head, then took her by the shoulders, picked her up, and set her aright again, this time gripping her arm so fiercely in his giant hand that she couldn’t jerk free.

When he began drawing her forward toward the gallows, she hung back with all of her might, leaving ruts in the snow.

Lucifer’s ballocks!  Was this how her life would end?  Hanged beside her partner in crime, in a city she didn’t know, with nary a witness?  For God’s sake, she was only nineteen!

She’d hardly tasted life.  She’d didn’t have a place to call home.  She’d never born a babe.  Hell, she’d never even lain with a man.  It wasn’t fair!

Nicholas didn’t want to shackle the lady to the gallows.  But damn it, he had no choice.  She wasn’t being the least bit cooperative.  And to think he’d brought her here as a courtesy.

Forcing her to sit on the edge of the wooden platform, he unlocked one of the shackles and attached it to a support timber at the base of the gallows, flinching as her freed hand began its inevitable pounding at his battered back.

Finished, he stepped back while she rattled the shackle in rage and in vain.

He crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head.  “I thought you’d want him cut down by loving hands.”

She stopped struggling and looked up at him, her enormous eyes like brilliant green gems set in her pale face.  Surprise lit her gaze.

“Why else would I bring you here?” he asked.

Her glance at the gallows crossbar was reply enough.  She’d thought he meant to hang her, as well.

He frowned.  Why did people always assume he was a harsh, unyielding brute who took great satisfaction in administering justice?  Could it be, he thought with grim irony, because he did his best to perpetuate that myth?

“I’ve no warrant to kill you, wench.  I’m a shire-reeve, not a judge.  I don’t take the law into my own hands.  I brought you here to bury your grandfather.”

The longer she stared at him, her gaze beautiful and brilliant, yet full of mistrust, the guiltier he began to feel about the way he’d dealt with the maid.  She had cause to doubt him.  Most lawmen were as crooked as a crone’s teeth, using their positions of power to extort coin or favors from hapless victims.  He supposed he should be more patient with the lass.  After all, she’d just lost a man who may have been her only kin.

“Listen.  Swear you won’t cry out and I’ll take that off,” he said, nodding to the gag.  Even as he said the words, he thought he must be the greatest fool in all England.  The wench was the granddaughter of an outlaw.  Certainly her promises were as hollow as dry bones.

Nonetheless, he chose to trust her when she bobbed her head in agreement.  She didn’t even try to beat him to a bloody pulp this time when he drew near.  She sat patiently as he picked the knot and took the wad of linen from her mouth.

She tried to speak, but her voice came out in a croak.  Clearing her throat, she made a second attempt.  “He’s not my grandfather.”

Nicholas blinked.  “What?”

“He only told you that.  We were...traveling companions.”

He should have known.  He wondered how much else of what Kabayn had “confessed” was invented.  But why would the man have made such a claim?

“You have family?”

“Gone.”

Nicholas sighed.  He’d heard the tale a hundred times.  It seemed most of the criminals he dealt with had sorry beginnings.  Sometimes they exaggerated their tales of woe, but often they were indeed desperate and turned to a life of crime because they had nothing else.  This damsel was surely as much an outlaw as Hubert.  She’d simply had the good fortune not to get caught.

For a long while she said nothing, only staring at the snow at his feet, avoiding looking at the corpse hanging but a few yards away.  Her every muscle was taut.  She was primed like a cocked bow, ready to fire.

Lord, what was he going to do with her?  He’d promised Kabayn he’d see to her welfare, and he intended to keep his vow, despite the man’s manipulations.  But what was he to do with a full-grown woman?

It would have been easy to find a childless couple eager to adopt a homeless little lass to help with chores.  But this was no tractable child.

He supposed he might find her a husband.  Surely a woman so beautiful should have no trouble making a man fall in love with her.  But she didn’t strike him as the kind of maid to go willingly into marriage.  And the man who married this snapping vixen would have to be made of stern stuff indeed.

The idea of finding suitors for her left a bitter taste in his mouth.  What did he know of courting?  It had been years since he’d engaged in courtship.

Nay, he’d have to think of another solution.  Meanwhile, he had a task to do.

“What’s your name, lass?”

She hesitated, as if weighing the consequences of divulging such information.  Finally she conceded.  “Desirée.”

Desirée. 
Desire
.  That was certainly fitting.  “Well, Desirée, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind a few kind words spoken over him, grandfather or not.”

He propped the ladder against the gallows post, then climbed it, drawing his dagger.  With one arm wrapped around the frozen body, he sawed at the rope.  With as much reverence as he could manage, he carried Hubert down the ladder and laid him out in the snow.

“You’ll come to bury him?” he asked her.

She gazed at the body, stiff and pale upon the ground, then gave an infinitesimal nod.

He unlocked her shackles and stuffed them into his belt, then extended his hand to help her up.  “Don’t make me chase you down.”

She refused his assistance.  She might be cooperating, but she was clearly not doing so willingly.

He shook his head, then hefted the body over his shoulder and started out along the main road leading out of Canterbury, expecting her to follow.

She didn’t.  When he turned around to see what was delaying her, she was frowning.

“Isn’t the chapel
that
way?”  She gestured in the direction of St. Mildred’s.

He frowned beneath the hood of his cloak.  Didn’t the wench understand?  “Lass, your grand-, companion...was a criminal.  He can’t be buried in hallowed ground.”

For an instant, he thought she might cry.  Her chin trembled, and her eyes grew liquid.  Then he realized she wasn’t bereft.  She was vexed.

“Fine!” she snapped, picking up her skirts and stomping through the snow toward him.  “Go ahead and bury him in the sinner’s graveyard...next to your
mother’s
plot.”

Desirée kicked at the snowdrifts as they traveled down the road, silently cursing the shire-reeve for ruining her life.  If he hadn’t hauled Hubert into his gaol, fabricating that charge of murder, things would have been fine.

After all, Hubert and she had lived by the seat of their braies and the edge of their wits for years, drifting like goatsbeard seeds along a stream, never lingering any place long enough to grow roots, staying one step ahead of trouble.

They would have left Canterbury in another day or two, moved on to the next town, cheated a dozen half-wits out of their coin, and lived on their winnings for another week, long enough to travel to the next village.

So she told herself.  But the truth was, things had changed irrevocably between Hubert and herself long before his arrest.  The bitter old man’s criticisms had grown harsher and harsher, his aggravation with her more and more apparent.  He demeaned her at every turn, constantly threatening to trade her in for a younger, more gifted lass.

Sooner or later he would have left her behind, if not in Canterbury, in some other town.  And the selfish old cheat would never have looked back.

Still, it chilled her to recall that when he’d made the deadly mistake of trying to rob Torteval Hall on his own, claiming Desirée had become too much of a liability to include on such delicate missions, she’d crowed over his capture, glad the smug bastard had been caught in the act, thinking it was no less than he deserved for his heartless desertion of her.

She’d foolishly hoped a few days in gaol would make him regret his actions and put an end to his talk about replacing her.  Never had she imagined it would put an end to his life.

Desirée’s breath made puffs of mist on the air as she struggled to keep up with the shire-reeve.  Despite his heavy burden, he gobbled up the road with his long strides.

Lucifer’s ballocks, where were they going?

At last, far from the outermost cottages of Canterbury, the road cut through a thick forest, eventually crossing a narrow lane.  It was there he stopped.

“Crossroads,” he explained as he carefully lowered Hubert’s body to the ground.

Indeed, a wooden cross marked the site.  Such places often served as the burial ground for outlaws.  It was the next best thing to being interred in hallowed soil.

The spot had been used before.  Secreted behind one of the trees was a spade.  For a brief, ignoble moment, she wondered if she might wrest the thing away from him, whack him on the back of the head, and bury him in a shallow grave in Hubert’s stead.

But he was already digging up the earth in a clearing between two oaks, desecrating the white snow with black soil.

She let her gaze drift to Hubert’s body.  It was strange to see the old man so still.  He’d been quick and sly and adroit in life, his tongue slipping over lies as smoothly as butter melting on pandemain, his wrinkled hands moving with a litheness that deceived all but the keenest eyes.

He’d told her once, before he’d taken to disparaging her skills, that she had that same touch, that grace, that speed.  But she’d never believed him.  No one was as clever or nimble-fingered as Hubert Kabayn.

“Ready?”

She glanced at the grave with disdain.  It couldn’t have been more than a yard and a half deep.  “I hope the wolves won’t dig him up,” she grumbled.

He placed Hubert’s body in the shallow pit.  The man’s movements were gentle, almost caring, and Desirée wondered how he could possibly be the same man who’d so viciously broken Hubert’s neck.

She neared the grave, looking down at the quiet body.  The shire-reeve had crossed Hubert’s arms piously over his chest.  But Desirée feared it would take much more than that for an outlaw like Hubert to broach the gates of heaven.  He’d likely have better luck
stealing
his way in.