Fairest Of Them All (2 page)

Possessed of a keen intelligence and a wicked wit, he parried each of her tart rejections with renewed vigor. A master of the hunt, he seemed to savor the thrill of the chase with almost unholy pleasure. Holly shuddered. He struck her as the sort of man who would take delight in toying with his quarry once it was cornered.

“I’d ask you to join us, Papa,” she said hastily, “but the baron was just making his farewells. “Wasn’t he, Elspeth?”

“On the contrary.” Montfort’s smooth rejoinder stifled Elspeth’s murmured agreement and drew a glare from Holly. His dark eyes glittered with mischief as he lounged back on the bench, hooking one lean leg over its elaborately carved arm as if he, and not her flustered father, were the host. He took a lazy sip of wine, emptying his goblet “My minstrel was just performing a chanson I composed as a tribute to the ample charms of the future Lady Montfort” His gaze hovered at the level of her bodice, paying its own lascivious tribute to her “charms.”

Holly grit her teeth behind a gracious smile. “Before your minstrel proceeds with his homage, my lord, might I entice you to partake of some more wine?”

“Why, I’d be delighted.”

Before Elspeth could rise to serve him, Holly closed fingers numb with anger around the delicate handle of the silver ewer. Eugene held out his goblet with a flourish. Tipping the ewer three inches past his cup, she poured a waterfall of steaming wine into his lap.

“God’s breath, woman!” He sprang to his feet, trying vainly to pull the clinging velvet of his hose away from his skin.

“How clumsy of me. Tis fortunate the wine had cooled somewhat.” She gave his bulging codpiece a scathing look. “I doubt you’ll suffer any permanent damage.”

Her father’s horrified scowl warned her she had gone too far this time. “You must forgive my daughter, sir. She’s been troubled by a slight palsy since childhood.” He hastened to add, “Nothing hereditary, of course,” before flapping a fringed kerchief at the baron like a flag of truce.

Eugene shoved the offering away, his posture rigid with offended dignity. His eyes had lost their sparkle, going cold and flat like extinguished embers. For the first time, Holly paused to wonder if her rash impulse had not only discouraged an unwanted suitor but earned her a dangerous enemy.

“It appears I’ve overstayed my welcome. Good day, my lord,” he said, drawing his cloak around his narrow shoulders. His eyes caressed Holly’s face in unspoken challenge as he snapped open a silver brooch and secured his cloak with a vicious stab. ‘Till we meet again, my lady.”

After he had departed, his minstrel dragging at his heels like a chastened pup, a shroud of appalled silence fell over the solar. Holly eased from her seat as if an economy of movement could somehow render her invisible.

“Sit!” her papa barked.

Holly sat Elspeth edged toward the lancet window. If her father hadn’t replaced the ancient wooden shutters with colored glass the previous spring, Holly was convinced her nurse would be perched on the ledge.

The earl paced to the hearth, bracing his splayed hands against its stone hood. He rocked lightly on his heels, as if even unmounted he could feel the rhythm of the countless steeds that had bandied his squat legs.

Holly considered bursting into tears, but quickly dismissed the notion. The merest hint of moisture in her limpid blue eyes had been known to drop both knaves and princes to their knees, but her father hadn’t lived with her for eighteen years without learning to resist such ploys.

When she could bear his unspoken reproach no longer, she wailed, “He said I had ears like a rabbit!”

Those ears rang as her father swung around and roared, “Montfort has the king’s favor. He can say you have ears like a jackass if it so pleases him!”

“And we all know how he curried His Majesty’s favor, don’t we? By overtaxing his poor villeins. By purchasing rotten foodstuffs for their tables and barren seed for their fields. By outlawing their precious feast days and spending the profit to buy the king’s ear.”

Realizing too late that her ire was a match for his own, her papa raised a placating hand. “That does not mean he would make you a poor husband.”

“He made that unfortunate heiress he married a rather poor husband. Especially if you recall that the child tumbled out a tower window only hours before my eighteenth birthday. Are you that eager to see me wed?”

He rubbed the top of his head, ruffling his sparse hair. “Aye, child, I am. Most girls your age are long wedded and bedded, with two or three babes at the hearth and another on the way. What are you waiting for, Holly? I’ve given you over a year to choose your mate. Yet you mock my patience just as you mock the blessing of beauty our good Lord gave you.”

She rose from the bench, gathering the skirts of her brocaded cotehardie to sweep across the stone floor. “Blessing! Tis not a blessing, but a curse!” Contempt thickened her voice. “ ‘Holly, don’t venture out in the sun. You’ll taint your complexion.’ “Holly, don’t forget your gloves lest you crack a fingernail.’ ‘Holly, don’t laugh too loud. You’ll strain your throat’ The men flock to Tewksbury to fawn and scrape over the musical timbre of my voice, yet no one listens to a word I’m saying. They praise the hue of my eyes, but never look into them. They see only my alabaster complexion!” She gave a strand of her hair an angry tug only to have it spring back into a flawless curl. “My raven tresses!” Framing her breasts in her hands, she hefted their generous weight “My plump, tempting—” Remembering too late who she was addressing, she knotted her hands over her gold-linked girdle and inclined her head, blushing furiously.

The earl might have been tempted to laugh had his daughter’s tirade not underscored his terrible dilemma. Holly serene was a sight to behold, but Holly in a fit of passion could drive sane men to madness. Not even fury could mar the angelic radiance of her profile. Her black hair tumbled down her slender back like a nimbus of storm clouds. His heart was seized by the familiar twin pangs of wonder and terror. Wonder that such an exquisite creature could have sprang from the loins of a homely little troll like himself. Terror that he would prove unworthy of such a charge.

He bowed his head, battling the pained bewilderment that still blamed Felicia for dying and leaving the precocious toddler to his care. Holly had passed directly from enchanting child with dimpled knees and tumbled curls to the willowy grace of a woman grown, suffering none of the gawkiness that so frequently plagued girls in their middle years.

Now she was rumored to be the fairest lady in all of England, all of
Normandy
, perhaps in all the world. Strangers came from leagues away in the vain hope of catching a glimpse of her, but he allowed only the wealthiest, most reputable noblemen the boon of an audience. Twas not concern for her complexion that kept her locked within the castle walls, but his deep and abiding fear of abduction. His secret conviction was that some man would carry her away and defile her innocence without troubling to obtain the rightful blessing of both he and his God.

The obsession gnawed at him until he awoke in the still, dark hours between dusk and dawn, reeking of stale sweat and quaking like an old man in his bed. He was an old man, he reminded himself without pity. Nearly fifty. His bones creaked in complaint when he mounted his destrier. Old wounds earned battling both Scots and Welsh in the king’s defense throbbed a dirge at the approach of rain. He’d done as well as he knew how by his only daughter. Twas past time for him to relinquish the burden to another man. Before he grew too feeble to stand between her and the avaricious world clamoring outside the castle walls.

“I’ve arranged for a tournament,” he said without preamble.

Holly jerked her head up. Tournaments were common enough affairs, she thought An opportunity for knights and noblemen to flex their brawny arms and secretly compare the size of their swords. So why had a gauntlet of foreboding closed steely fingers around her heart?

“A tournament?” she said lightly. “And what shall be the prize this time? A kerchief perfumed with my favorite scent? The chance to drink mulled wine from the toe of my shoe? A nightingale’s song from my swanlike throat?”

“You. You’re to be the prize.”

Holly felt the roses in her cheeks wither and die. She gazed down into her father’s careworn face, finding his gravity more distressing than his anger. She towered over him by several inches, but the mantle of majesty he had worn to shield him from life’s arrows since the death of his beloved wife added more than inches to his stature.

“But, Papa, I—”

“Silence!” He seemed to have lost all tolerance for her pleas. “I promised your mother on her deathbed that you would marry and marry you shall. Within the fortnight If you’ve a quarrel with my judgment, you may retreat to a nunnery where they will teach you gratitude for the blessings God has bestowed upon you.”

His bobbing gait was less sprightly than usual as he left Holly to contemplate the sentence he’d pronounced.

“A nunnery?” she echoed, drifting toward the window.

“No one would gawk at ye there, my lady.” El-speth emerged from her own self-imposed exile, her hawkish features softened by concern. “Ye could cover yer fine hair with a wimple and take a vow of silence so ye’d never have to sing at someone else’s bidding.”

Dire heaviness weighted Holly’s heart A nunnery. Forbidding stone walls more unscalable than those that imprisoned her now. Not a retreat, but a dungeon where all of her unspoken dreams of rolling meadows and azure skies would rot to dust.

Sinking to her knees in the stone seat, Holly unlatched the window, gazing beyond the iron grille to the outer bailey where the quadrangles of her father’s lists lay like a lush green chessboard. Soon warriors bearing their family standards would come pouring into those grassy battlegrounds, each prepared to lay down his life for nothing more than a chance to offer her his name and protection. But would any one of them dare to offer her his heart’

What are you waiting for, Holly? her papa had asked.

Her gaze was drawn west toward the impenetrable tangle of forest and craggy dark peaks of the Welsh mountains. A fragrant breath of spring swept through her, sharpening her nameless yearning. Genuine tears pricked her eyelids.

“Oh, Elspeth. What am I waiting for?”

As Elspeth stroked the crown of her head, Holly longed to sniffle and wail. But she could only cry as she’d been taught, each tear trickling like a flawless diamond down the burnished pearl of her cheek.

“A comely wife is a pox upon her husband’s fortunes,” Sir Austyn of Gavenmore called over his shoulder as his destrier’s blunt hooves tore grassy divots from turf dampened by a recent spring rain.

Arguing philosophy with his man-at-arms gave him an excuse to steal a glance over his shoulder, something he’d been compelled to do with increasing frequency since leaving behind the sheltering bracken of the Welsh forest. He could ill appreciate the beauty of the verdant countryside while expecting an English arrow to pierce his hauberk and embed itself in his back with every breath.

Carey drew alongside him, leading a string of pack horses and bearing the oaken staff from which the Gavenmore standard proudly rippled. A gust of wind molded its faded crimsons and greens to his face.

He slapped it away, snorting harder than his piebald gelding. “Fie on you, Austyn! Would you rather bed an ugly woman than a comely one?”

“Bedding and wedding are beasts with different backs. For the one, a man might tolerate fairness of form, but for the other, a plain girl of gentle disposition will prove a jewel in her husband’s crown. After all, ‘Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman that fearest her lord, she shall be praised.’”

“Stop mangling the scriptures to bolster your cause. Tis ‘a woman that fearest the Lord.’” Carey’s voice dropped to a wary mutter. “Although if a Gaven-more is her lord, she’d do well to fear him.”

Sawing at the reins to slow his horse to a walk, Austyn shot his companion a baleful glare. Over the past eight centuries, the notorious Gavenmore jealousy had provided fodder for scores of legends. His own grandfather had kept his grandmother imprisoned in a tower for ten years after she had dared to bestow a smile on a traveling jongleur. The fate of the unfortunate acrobat was never confirmed, although it was rumored in discreet whispers that his final performance was rope dancing of a more lethal nature for his appreciative host.

“I’ve never lifted a hand to a woman,” he growled.

“You’ve never married one either.” Carey was not intimidated by Ausryn’s thunderous glares. He’d tolerated them since boyhood and had yet to feel the lash of threatened lightning. “Suppose this Tewksbury wench is as fair as they claim?”

“Ha! No mortal woman could be as fair as they claim her to be. If she were why would her father be offering such an extravagant dowry? Ill wager she has teeth like a horse and ears like a hare.” He added hopefully, “Coupled, of course, with the loyal disposition of a hunting hound.”

Carey shrugged. “Perhaps she’s exceedingly fair, but possessed of a shrewish temperament or a fickle nature.”

Austyn felt himself pale beneath his beard. His gauntleted hands flexed on the leather reins as if to warn him of the monstrous deeds they might commit should his bride prove less than constant

Let beauty be your doom.

The damning indictment of the faerie queen Rhi-annon, falsely accused of faithlessness by his Gaven-more ancestor, tolled in his ears. As he spurred his horse into a canter through a meadow dotted with purple heartsease, his gaze lifted to the parapets of the castle drifting in a haze of clouds on the far horizon.

“Then God help us both,” he whispered, more to himself than to his man-at-arms. “For I intend to win her.”

Holly paced the parapet walk outside her chamber. Greedy gusts of wind tore at her cloak and mocked the silver fillet she had slipped over her brow to tame her unruly hair. Her head felt swollen with unshed tears and the narrow band seemed to tighten with each step. She finally jerked it off and cast it into the night, letting her hair whip where it pleased.