Prisoner of the Flames (Leisure Historical Romance) (13 page)

“No, young ram,” the healer replied, “he has not. He sends naught but his prayers and fond affection. His bondservant betrays you. At this very moment, she is carrying the tale to the cardinal, and Coligny. The greedy slattern will more than likely have her reward from both factions.”

“Ahhh, yes…Francine,” Robert growled, remembering. “She knows I am here at the ruins?”

“No. She does not know where you are, but only that you are alive, and wounded, and that I will seek you out at sunset. That is why I have come here now, to see you safe and away, and lead them on a merry chase while you put a goodly distance between yourself and the troops.”

“No one followed you?”

“No, the wench eavesdropped while I was closeted with Montaigne. I saw to it that she heard what they would believe, and came here straightaway once I’d gathered your provisions. You are safe for now, but not for long. You must be away at once, lest it be too late.” He frowned, taking the young Scot’s measure. “Your wound concerns me. Are you strong enough?”

“Yes, I will have to be,” Robert said. “But surely I will be recognized. How can I hope to hide like…like this in broad daylight?”

“Quite easily,” said Nostradamus. “I must admit, I worried
over that awhile myself, but then it came to me. It’s simple, really.” Foraging through the sack, he produced a monk’s robe with a deep cowl. “You will discard your helm for the time being, and wear this instead. The cowl will hide your face quite nicely, and should it fail we can thank God that few have seen you unmasked.”

“This is insane! What of Violette?”

“She must go with you.”

“No!”
he thundered. “It is out of the question. She
cannot!”
The mere thought of the temptation—of the torture of her company on such a journey terrified him more than any fearsome enemy he might come up against on the field of battle.

“You
must
take her, young ram. They know she is alive and in your company. I have let it be known that I will see her south to Salon when I depart from the city. Instead, you will travel west, toward the coast. There is a convent on your way. It sits in a forest glade about sixty leagues this side of Nance. I have drawn you a map. You will leave her there in the sisters’ keeping, and press on to the bay. Ships are plentiful, and you must be safely aboard one before word of you can spread to the coast. This must be. I cannot leave the city yet awhile, and she will not be safe here anywhere now. You have no choice, young ram, but to see her to sanctuary. I have a nun’s habit for her here as well. No one will question a monk and good sister traveling together. It is a common enough sight. I have brought mounts, food, skins of water for the horses, and mead for yourselves, as well as medicine for your journey, and the moldy bread and cheese for your poultices. Do not be alarmed. It is quite maggoty, but that is for the good. Moisten it, slather it on, and bind the wound. Stay that look! Traveling thus is the only solution now. There is no other way.”

“I will not go to the convent!” Violette shouted, turning both their heads.

“Be still,” Robert snapped. “None of us have a choice
here now. We must do as he says.” He turned back to Nostradamus. “What will you do once we have gone?”

“I will return to court and pay my daily visit to the king. I am expected. I must go every afternoon now until he is improved. That is why I cannot leave Paris. Then, I will go to my lodgings until ‘tis time. At dusk, I will lead them to a place I know, well north of the Huguenot village. They will presume that you are hiding there. It is a shrewd move. They will assume that you hope to elude them hiding in the last place they would expect you—where you murdered. By time they discover their error, you will be well out of their reach, traveling in the opposite direction.”

“What in God’s name do I say to you?” Robert murmured. “How do I thank you?”

Nostradamus smiled his knowing smile. “There is no time for thanking,” he said, “nor is there need. You’ll likely curse me, before ’tis done. It is a long, hard press before you.” Again he reached into the sack and produced a baked clay jar, crushing the young Scot’s fingers around it. “Some sweets for your journey,” he said. “Guard them well.”

“Sweets?” Robert said, nonplussed.

“Oh, not ordinary confections by any means,” the healer said. “These patties will safeguard you from plague. The recipe is my own, proven during the black death of 1546. Keep them close.”

Robert removed the stopper and shrank back from the smell.

“Now, now, don’t flinch,” the healer chided. “They are quite tasty, made of roses picked at dawn, while the dew still bloomed upon their petals, together with a liqueur distilled from green cypress wood, cloves, sweet flag, lichen algae, essence of plum, and…other ingredients. When carried in the mouth, they will protect you.”

Robert looked him long in the eyes and took a wracking chill at what he found there.

“Come,” said the physician, breaking the spell. “We must make ready. I will help you, and see you on your way. It would be wise for you to pretend the disguise is authentic…even at the convent, so far as you are concerned. Now then, let me look at that wound before you go.”

“Doctor Nostradamus,” Robert said, struggling out of his shirt with the old man’s help.

“No,” the healer interrupted. “Ask me no more. There is enough food to chew on in what I have already told you. Digest that if you can on your journey, with keen eyes upon the flames. They have already turned you once. They will do so again, my blind young ram. See that they turn you rightly.”

A
fter careful deliberation, Robert decided to take only one
mount. Were they to ride separately, the going would be dangerously slow, since Violette, in her blindness, would have to be led. That, coupled with the discovery that she had never before ridden a horse on her own, convinced him to sacrifice comfort for speed. It was the right decision, even though he couldn’t help but remember what occurred the last time they rode double.

The wise old healer saw to it that they wasted no time setting out, and, finally, armed with the provisions and map he’d brought, they headed southward, keeping to the forest when they could. By dusk they had put a considerable distance between themselves and what was happening north of the Huguenot village. Robert was not concerned about Nostradamus. Whatever the situation, he was certain that the crafty old man’s uncanny wisdom would be more than adequate to ensure his safety. What did worry him was Violette, and something cryptic he had seen in Nostradamus’s eyes—something that had chilled him to the marrow. And he bitterly wished he’d never consented to cultivating the art of seeing with his spirit.

By nightfall, the Scot’s wound had begun to throb like a pulse beat. They had made good progress, but it had not been an easy beginning. Frightened and reluctant, the girl clung to him with a relentless grip. The pressure of her pinching fingers grieved his shoulder painfully, and her whispered, soft sobs pricked incessantly at his nerves. She said little, but her silence was pregnant with dismay.

Robert endured as long as he could bear it. Then finally, as the moon rose high in the heavens, dodging wind-driven clouds, they came to a thicket. Walking the horse deeply into a tall stand of young trees at the edge of it, he helped Violette dismount and tethered the exhausted animal to a snarl of bracken. She sat quietly, leaning against a nearby stump while he tended the horse and offered nothing in the way of conversation. Above, the haloed moon was shining brightly down from a star-studded sky through a hole the risen wind had torn in the cloud fabric. It lit her pale, sad face framed by the draped headdress and sparkled in her sightless eyes, staring blankly in the direction of his footfalls disturbing the undergrowth.

Dropping the sack of provisions, Robert sank down close beside her, searching inside it for their food. Her fear was unmistakable then, and when he found a clerical stole and a pot of unction for the dying inside that the crafty old healer had put there, though the discovery made his skin crawl with gooseflesh, he made no mention of it. His hand closed next around the little crock of pastilles, and he slipped them into the pocket of his robe, making room inside to continue his search.

“The habit of a nun becomes you far better than my old battle-worn doublet,” he told her, rummaging deeper in the sack. “You look quite regal in it.”

She squirmed, tugging at the stiff, close-fitting headdress. “It itches,” she complained. “Nuns have no hair to fit inside such things, and mine is much too long to be confined so tightly. I cannot bear restrictions…they remind me that I am no longer free.”

“None of us are free unless we die, lass—especially in this godforsaken land. And God
has
forsaken it I think, though I cannot blame Him, since His children here shed each other’s blood so wantonly in His holy name. All of us have some form of tethers—even that poor, tired beast there.”

“I am certain God did not intend that all his creatures be…restrained,” she said, scowling.

“Well, whether He did or didn’t, you needn’t suffer restraint here now. Remove the headdress, and do not pout so. It spoils your lovely face.” Having found their food at last, he offered it. “Here…have some bread and cheese,” he said. “You must be starving.”

Closing her fingers around the offering, he watched while she raised it eagerly to her lips. Smiling, satisfied, he produced the skin of honey mead, leaned his weary head back against a straight-backed sapling, and downed a healthy swallow.

“Lack of food can make a body out of sorts,” he said, tearing off a chunk of the bread for himself.

“I am not out of sorts,” she defended.

Her tone, and the hasty downcast eyes, as prohibitive as his helm had ever been, contradicted her, and he set the bread and mead aside and leaned closer.

“Violette,” he said velvet-voiced, “you mustn’t be frightened. I know it must be terrifying alone here in a stranger’s keeping with no familiar thing to give you comfort. I have tried to put myself in your place, and I cannot imagine it. But I promise you, there is naught to fear. I will let no harm befall you.”

“I am not afraid of…that,” she murmured.

“What, then? What frightens you?”

She shook her head, unwilling to answer.

He sighed. “Well, if you will not tell me what your fears are, how can I still them?”

“They cannot be stilled.”

“You have suffered a great deal because of me. I cannot blame you for your resentment, but—”

Her head shot up, the blind eyes searching. “I do not resent you, my lord,” she cried. “It is nothing like that.”

“What is it, then, child?”

Again she shook her head and lowered her eyes.

He frowned. “I have been short with you I know. It is my way. I am a warrior, and I am not accustomed to young lassies. I…I apologize.” Had he ever said that to a living soul before? Not that he could recall. He cleared his voice, grateful that she couldn’t see the perspiration beading on his brow. “I have been under a great duress since I arrived here,” he blundered on. “I did not ask for duty in that massacre. If I wanted to fight Protestants, I could have stayed at home to do it. It was forced upon me. Is that what troubles you, lass? Is that what has sewn seeds of mistrust?”

“You never told me why you were among those troops,” she murmured, “why you helped them do that awful thing.”

“My uncle snubbed the cardinal in naming seigneur de Montaigne my sponsor here rather than himself. My presence at that gruesome raid was solely to spare my uncle a chastisement. God knows, they’ll probably have him imprisoned or killed here now for this, Montaigne as well. That
is
what’s troubling you, lass, isn’t it…that I was there…that I was among them?”

“He lives in Scotland, your uncle?”

“No, he is a monk at Mount St. Michael Abbey, off the Cornish coast of England.”

“Oh, so that is why you press so for shutting me up in the convent!” she snapped.

“No, it is not,” he said tersely. “I press for your incarceration to protect you—nothing more.”

A lengthy pause ensued, and Robert took another rough swallow of the mead, wincing from the sharp pain that movement caused in his shoulder. It wanted tending, but he was too tired, and considering the way exhaustion charged his passions, he dared not risk her soft, gentle touch just then.

“Who is Francine?” she hurled at him out of the blue.

He stared, the mead skin suspended before his lips. Lowering
it, he sighed. “A bondservant at the château,” he said warily.

“Why did she betray you?”

“No doubt because I would not succumb to her seduction,” he snapped. On the verge of anger at such a question, he had spoken sharply, that there be no mistaking his annoyance.

“Did you…lie with her?” she queried.

“What?”
he cried with a start. “I have just told you ‘no.’ Look here, how have you knowledge of such things—you, a…a mere child?”

“I am a street vendor,” she said haughtily, expanding her posture in a way that made his own clench. “I know of many shocking things—as many as you, perhaps even more. And I am no child, my lord. You may call me child as you will, but that by no means makes me one. I am in my nineteenth year. Many my age are already wed with families. That I am blind, sir, hardly makes me infantile, nor does it make me ignorant, only…restricted.”

“Is that it, then?” he returned, “Have you a swain that all of this has parted you from? Is that the cause of your ill temper?”

“I have no ‘ill temper’!” she shrilled, “and I have no swain, either.”

“Well, all that remains is that you must be suffering from exhaustion. Tiring makes all children cross. Oh, but, do forgive me, I forget! You are no child, are you? I must try very hard in the future to remember that. But I am going to find it difficult if your disposition doesn’t improve. So, I would suggest that you curl up there, my weary maid, and sleep. I will tend to my shoulder, and rest myself. We must set out before dawn if we are to reach the Loire tomorrow, and dawn comes quickly to the weary.” No, indeed she was no child, but fixing her as such in his mind was the only way of getting through the ordeal of close proximity to her without being driven mad by the sight, smell, and feel of her.