To Kiss A Spy (33 page)

She turned back to the ledger, saying irritably now, “I wish you’d do something about your wife. Her sniveling is driving me to distraction.”

Miles opened his mouth to reply just as a violent banging echoed through the house.

“What the devil is that?” He opened the door to stick his head into the corridor. The banging resounded.

“Someone’s at the door,” his mother said, rising to her feet. “It doesn’t take the mind of a genius to understand that.” She swept past him into the corridor.

Raised voices reached them from the hall. Loud, rough tones. Joan’s voice, shrill and frightened, came in response.

“God’s blood, what’s this?” demanded Miles as he saw the great hall filled with men . . . men armed with pikes and swords.

He stepped off the last stair and was instantly engulfed.

“Lord Bryanston, I have a warrant for your arrest and that of your mother on the charge of witchcraft and treason,” intoned a man wearing a silver chain of office and carrying a heavy mace.

Miles was ashen. “What . . . what do you mean . . . what witchcraft . . . what treason?”

Lady Bryanston, herself surrounded now, said in rising tones, “What nonsense is this? There must be some mistake.”

“You are hereby arrested, madam, for introducing a confessed witch into the king’s bedchamber, and for plotting the king’s death by poison.”

Lady Bryanston swayed suddenly, her hand at her throat. “What proof? What evidence for such charges?”

“The confession of the woman Goodlow, introduced by you into the king’s chamber. She admitted inducing your daughter-in-law’s premature labor at your command, and to the frequent preparation of venomous potions and the casting of spells, also at your command.”

“Confession!”
The full implication seemed to take a long time to sink in. She stared at the official, looked around at the stony faces of the guards surrounding her.

“You are to be conveyed to the Tower for questioning,” the official said. “You, your son, and your daughter-in-law.”

Joan gave a shriek and fell to the floor in a dead faint. Miles’s pallor took on a greenish tinge. Lady Bryanston continued to stare as dreadful comprehension dawned.

The Tower . . . the Question.

They were allowed no further words, and indeed were capable of none as they were escorted by boat to the Tower, where they entered beneath the portcullis of Traitor’s Gate and were soon entombed in the dungeons beneath the Tower.

Twenty-six

Pen stepped outside into the soft air of the June evening. She held Philip’s hand, listening to his babbling recitation of the objects he saw, his constant repetition of “Look, Mama, look.”

Lucy and Andrew had been as responsible for his rapid grasp of language as had Pen. Philip seemed to respond to their cues more easily than he did to an adult’s.

Owen, arm in arm with his mother, came around the house from the vegetable garden. He carried a basket of new carrots. He was dressed in country clothes, the rich embroidered silks and velvets of London discarded in favor of woolen hose, linen doublets, homespun jerkins.

But he was never without his rapier or his dagger, even when engaging in a task as simple as pulling carrots from the ground for supper. And not a day passed when he didn’t practice his swordplay, tilted at the old quintain in the tilting yard behind the house, loosed arrows at the target on the butt. These activities fascinated his children, and Andrew ran around flourishing his own wooden sword in imitation. But Pen and Esther knew there was no play behind this concentrated practice.

Pen waited for them to reach her. She had sensed in the last weeks a certain growing impatience about him. She guessed that this quiet interval of healing, renewal, learning to know each other was coming to an end. And, in truth, she was impatient herself to return to her family.

She reached into her pocket for the letter she had just received from her mother. She had written to her family in care of the French ambassador, and Guinevere had replied using the same courier. They had exchanged little communication in the five months since Pen had left London. Owen still considered it dangerous to risk revealing his mother’s home to outsiders. But the letters they had exchanged had carried in a very few words all the emotion they felt, all the unspoken understandings that were now held among them.

Owen and Esther reached her. Owen kissed Pen’s mouth as she lifted her face to the evening sun. Esther smiled and bent to talk to Philip, who eagerly placed his hand in hers when she suggested they go into the kitchen garden to pick some strawberries for supper.

“Your mother always seems to know when we need to talk alone,” Pen said, shading her eyes against the setting sun as she watched them go. The slender band of gold on her ring finger glowed against the sun’s rays.

“I saw the courier’s horse,” Owen said. “You have news?” He indicated the letter she held.

“Miles and his mother were exiled two weeks ago,” she said.

“A good riddance,” he replied.

“Yes. Apparently no evidence was brought against Joan, but she was banished to her own family’s estates in Lincolnshire. The earldom lies open.”

“Then it is perhaps time we returned to claim it for your son.”

“I thought so, although I don’t know how. It lies in Northumberland’s gift at present.”

She gave a rather puzzled smile and said, “It doesn’t seem to matter very much anymore. Philip’s plump and talkative and happy. I don’t know how much he remembers of the bad time, but it doesn’t disturb his sleep. Maybe his inheritance is of no importance.”

“I think it is,” Owen said. “If it can be fought for, then we must do it.”

“Perhaps,” Pen said. “I’m so content, so sleepily smug like Nutmeg. I seem to have no stomach for mousing.”

She gave a tiny laugh, but then her eyes grew serious. Tentatively she broached the subject that could not be avoided any longer. “But I thought also that it was perhaps time for you too to pick up the threads of your life.”

He took her hand, twisting the ring on her finger. “Our life, Pen.”

“We have not talked about how we are to conduct it,” she said.

“No,” he agreed, stroking her hair. “There’s been too much else to talk about.”

She laughed, leaning into him, inhaling the sun-dried scent of his shirt, the tang of fresh sweat from his garden work, feeling the ripple of his chest muscles beneath her cheek. “I believe we’ve done more loving than talking.”

“ ’Tis a form of talking.” He continued to stroke her hair, which in this quiet countryside she wore unbound most of the day. The evening breeze took up the finest of the gold-brown strands and sent them wisping across her forehead.

“Will we take Lucy and Andrew?” She looked up at him and saw the old shadows cross his eyes.

“No,” he stated. “They are best with my mother for the present. London is too dangerous for them, and they won’t be happy. Later, when we can see things clearly, then I’ll fetch them.”

Pen didn’t argue. They were Owen’s children, although a bond was growing between them and herself. But Owen had to decide for himself when it would be safe to acknowledge them publicly again.

For herself, she wore his wedding ring and would stand up as his wife, but she knew the dangers, and her family would know them. If it came down to drawn swords to protect her, if Owen was not there, then she would have Hugh and Robin and all who stood beside them. This was a risk they had discussed and settled between them. But Owen was not yet prepared to expose his children . . . or prepared to ask someone else to protect them.

Pen knew that he was wrestling alone with the decision whether to continue in the service of France or to settle into unadventurous domesticity. She would not push him to make such a decision. She thought she had reached her own peace, and would make her own life according to what course he took. He would always love her.

Esther, like Pen, had sensed Owen’s impatience. She accepted their plans for departure without surprise, although it was hard for her to hide her sorrow.

Lucy and Andrew clung to Owen even as he explained carefully that he would not this time be gone too long. He and Pen would come back for them.

“But you’re taking Philip,” Andrew pointed out.

“Yes,” Lucy agreed, her chin trembling, tears standing out in her eyes. “We want to come, and we want to bring Grandmama too.”

“Not this time,” Owen said gently. He drew them against him, kissing them, holding them tightly. It was a physical effort to release them into his mother’s waiting arms. “Soon, I promise you.”

Pen felt her own tears pricking. She understood how hard it must be for him to leave them again, how it must remind him of the dreadful time when he’d sent them from him before. But she also knew that when the time came for him to take them again, Esther would suffer the loss most grievously.

Why was it that love, the most generous of all emotions, should cause such pain?

They left Wales at the end of June, and this time there was no urgency to their journey. The sun shone, the hedgerows and orchards were thick with blossom, their fragrance heavy in the air.

On the second evening, as the sun set, they came upon a stream. Owen dismounted and lay full length upon the bank. He rolled up his sleeve and plunged his hand into the gently moving water. He came up with a brown trout thrashing in his grasp. He dropped it to the bank and stunned it with a stone, all in one movement it seemed to Pen, who had dismounted with Philip.

“Une nuit sous la lune,”
Owen said, looking up at the shadow of the moon in the still bright sky. “Food, fire, blankets.”

“Oh, yes,” Pen said. “And we can bathe in the stream.” She turned to Philip. “Would you like to swim, love? Paddle in the stream?”

Philip regarded the stream with some gravity. He stretched out as he’d seen Owen do and reached down a hand, trying to touch the water. When he couldn’t reach it, he frowned and inched forward on his belly.

Pen moved to grab him before he toppled headfirst, but Owen was there before her, lifting the boy high into the air so that the child laughed uproariously.

Pen undressed him, then stripped off her own clothes. She twisted her hair into a knot on top of her head, picked up Philip, and carried him into the stream.

Owen watched from the bank, his eyes narrowed appreciatively. He loved the back of her neck, the sweep of her narrow back. He loved the smooth indentation of her waist, the slight roundness of her belly, the rich flare of her hips. He thought that she had put on a little weight just recently, that the happiness of the last months had somehow rounded her out. She had never been thin, not like her sparrow of a sister, but unhappiness had given her a drawn, taut look. Now she was luscious as a bowl of thick rich cream, or the ripest peach, and he loved every inch of her body.

Aware of his scrutiny, Pen turned around, her nipples hardening with the coldness of the water. Philip kicked his legs with squeals of glee, sending a shower of water across the surface, the drops winking in the sinking sun.

“Aren’t you coming in? Or do you prefer to play voyeur?” she called.

“For the moment the latter,” he responded. “If you weren’t holding the child it might be a different matter.”

Pen laughed. Philip’s presence was somewhat inhibiting. She played with him in the water awhile, washing off the dust of travel from her own skin, enjoying the freshness. When she came out, setting Philip on the bank first before scrambling inelegantly up herself, Owen had lit a fire, and two more trout lay beside the first one.

He wrapped the child in a towel and had him giggling as he dried him. Pen dried and dressed herself, then sat beside the fire while Owen cooked the trout.

Later, under the stars, while Philip slept curled in his own blanket, Pen moved over Owen’s body, relishing every familiar inch of skin, her tongue painting in broad strokes, her teeth nibbling at his nipples, grazing the length of his penis as she drew him deep into her mouth, inhaling the rich fragrances of his arousal, her cheeks brushed by the crisp curling hair of his inner thighs.

He lay back, arms stretched above his head, legs spread wide, giving himself up to her possession. The night air was soft, the silvery light of moon and stars rippled on the still waters of the stream.

She raised her head from his loins and gazed up the muscle-planed length of his body. She ran a hand lazily in the deep concavity of his belly, a finger found the even deeper pit of his navel. She pulled herself up on her elbows and kissed the pulse at the base of his throat.

He brought his hands down then to grasp her head, his fingers twisting in her thick brown hair. She obeyed the leisurely pull that brought her face up to hang over his. She smiled down into his eyes, her body lying full upon his, the outward curve of her belly nestled into the inward curve of his, the softness of her thighs supported by the hard muscle of his own lean length.

“Kiss me,” he demanded, and she lowered her head, fraction by fraction, teasing him, watching the glow in his eyes, until her lips met his. A mere brush at first, the tip of her tongue darting into the corners of his mouth, pushing between his lips to stroke his teeth, the inside of his mouth, tasting the wine they had drunk with their supper. Then he began to return the kiss, his tongue fencing with hers, stroking the inside of her cheeks, his teeth nipping the tip of her tongue, before he clasped her face in both hands and his tongue delved deep within her mouth.

She raised her lower body and he entered her with a long slow thrust. Their mouths were joined, their bodies were joined, and the wondrously familiar rhythm took hold of them, familiar and yet as always different. Some different nerve touched, some different emotion that each drew from the other.

Pen slowly left his mouth and sat back, leaning against his drawn-up knees. He reached down between her wide-spread thighs and touched the engorged lips of her sex, caressing the hot wet furrow. When it was right, he touched the erect and swollen nub of pleasure. She bit hard on her lip to keep from crying out on this quiet stream bank as her loins convulsed with the ecstatic rush and her thighs seemed to dissolve in liquid joy. She fell forward over his body again, and again as his own orgasm pulsed deep within her, a second wave ripped through her. She moved her loins against his and held her breath for the third, diminishing surge of pleasure.

“Women are so lucky,” Owen murmured, stroking her hair as she stretched limp and sweaty along his length. “It seems unjust.”

“ ’Tis payment for the pains of childbed,” she murmured when she could get her breath.

He chuckled weakly, stroking down her back, his hand coming to rest on her bottom, idly caressing the soft curve.

After a while, Pen struggled up so that she was once more sitting astride him. She heard her voice as if coming from a great distance, saying what she had promised herself she would not say.

“I do not know how I will endure living without you.” She brushed the hair from her eyes. “I know you will be gone often, and I know I won’t know where, and I don’t know if I can endure it, the uncertainty, the danger. I thought I could. I swore to myself that I would never say this, but, oh, Owen, I don’t know how I will do it.”

She added fiercely, “I will, of course I will. I just don’t know how.”

She looked down at him, her eyes now grave, haunted with the anticipation of sorrow, the fear she knew awaited her, and regret that she had spoken at all.

He put his hands at her waist and lifted her away from him. He sat up beside her. He took her hand, where she wore his wedding ring.

He spoke quietly, looking down at her hand. “Family, friends, they have always given way to my work. Until now, I have lived for my work. It was what defined me to myself as well as to others.”

“I know,” she said swiftly, placing a finger over his lips. “There’s no need to say more. It was just a moment of weakness.” She tried to smile. “Ecstasy weakens me, I find.”

He took her wrist and moved her hand down, holding both her wrists in one hand tightly against his knee. “I said,
until now,
Pen.”

She let this sink in, feeling the air cool on her sweat-slick skin, a light breeze lifting her hair. “But you could not give it up,” she stated. “And I could not live with myself if I thought that I had made you do so.”

He shook his head in reproof. “In this, sweetheart, you could not compel me. I have always done what I considered to be right, even if . . .” A shadow crossed his face. “Even if others suffered for it.”

He smiled suddenly, ruefully. “But I’m thirty-five, maybe it’s time to acknowledge the advancing years and find a profession a little less unpredictable.”