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AN ANGEL ENCASED in shimmering bronze hovered above him, a smile on her pretty lips.
“Kiss me,” Drake said.
Her lips came within a hair’s breadth of his. Then her mother shouted, “Enyd! Go down to cook and have her dish up some clear broth.”
The promised kiss did not materialize since Enyd—only fourteen but already a beauty—was also fleet of foot and obedient. As the girl scampered below stairs, Nelda Goldsmith wiped hands upon her apron, threw Drake a baleful look of warning, and briskly backed out of the chamber.
Sunrise was breaking. He had been deposited in a bright and airy bedchamber, not his own, not his taste, frilly and feminine with lace and fine linens. A canopied bed stacked with layers of goose-down mattresses soothed his countless bruises and bumps. His blood-encrusted garb lay in a heap on the floor. A capacious tub sat conveniently next the latrine. He had been stripped, bathed, and wrapped like a corpse in its shroud. Beneath the winding sheet, he was mother naked. He didn’t remember any of it.
Sour of puss and mean of disposition, Nelda returned. Dispensing with modesty, his in particular, she replaced towels with a clean blouse belonging to one of her grown sons. When she finished, she laid his head gently against the feather pillows and covered him to the chin. He waited until the wooziness subsided before opening his eyes.
As soon as he did, she lashed out at him. “How a man can get drunk when he’s about to be hanged or worse is beyond my ken.”
“Wha’ better time?” His fractured words dribbled from split lips and swollen jaw. “B’sides, the drinking came afore, no’ after.”
“No excuse.”
He slid his tongue around, finding weals and blood clots, but his teeth were still intact. Nelda’s words slowly penetrated a hazy brain. “Wha’s worse ’n hanging?”
“Now that you ask―”
“Forge’ I did.”
“Many things, but let’s not belabor the point.”
“Agreed.”
Her husband having died five years past, Nelda was left with a lucrative goldsmith shop, three strapping sons, one beautiful daughter, and a tart mouth. Even though she fussed and grumbled like a crone, she wasn’t yet out of her thirties, and looked younger and fitter than many in their twenties. She fed Drake a potion of feverfew, chamomile, and lemon balm.
It tasted awful. He tried holding the goblet himself, but his hands were bloated and pain-filled. “Will I be a cripple?”
“Better a man has no hands than devilish ones to play with,” she said. And then, “Not if I have anything to say about it, you won’t.”
Enyd returned with a crock of broth balanced in her upraised hands. After lowering her sweet body next to his, she tucked a cloth beneath his chin, ladled out the broth, and held the spoon to his lips. He sipped. Her sparkling eyes and playful smile belied the innocence of her adorable face.
“Stephen’s gone for your father,” Nelda said, watching the byplay between the two. “They ought to be here in time to break fast.”
Drake’s hungry eyes begged for real food.
“Not you. You’re on liquids ’til I say other.”
The lass had been an afterthought in Nelda’s childbearing years, arriving several years after her sons. Though Enyd was at a perfect age to enjoy dalliances in flower-laden meadows, Nelda made it clear that her daughter was forbidden fruit when it came to the fitzAlan brothers. Drake had formed several theories about that, none of them good.
Footsteps on the back stairway announced the arrival of two men wearing spurs and swords. William fitzAlan entered first, his formidable presence filling the chamber. Red in the face, likely from the dressing down he’d already received from the lord of Itchendel, Stephen followed at a sheepish distance.
William greeted Nelda with a kiss and an aggrieved expression. He hurried to the bed and wordlessly examined his son, his touch gentle as he located every bruise, bump, contusion, abrasion, laceration, and cracked rib. Tears formed in William’s eyes. Tears formed in Drake’s eyes. Tears even formed in Nelda’s eyes. No tears formed in Stephen’s eyes, but Drake didn’t expect otherwise. Though identical twins in face and features, they were altogether different men. Drake showed everything he felt. Stephen held everything in. And as close as they’d been all of their lives, Drake didn’t always know what his brother was thinking.
Enyd hovered nearby, her curious eyes looking on. Anyone seeing the lass standing next to the lord of Itchendel would have seen what Drake now saw as an epiphany. Whereas Enyd looked nothing like her fair-haired mother or her redheaded father, she closely favored Old King Henri’s trusted seneschal. Bronze coloring from hair to skin, along with the same long nose Stephen and Drake inherited from William, marked her a fitzAlan through and through. Drake wondered why he had never noticed the resemblance before, but it was as plain as day to any observer with eyes and wit. His eyes flew to his father and thence to his nursemaid.
Nelda remarked the probing look in Drake’s bloodshot eyes and barked at her daughter. “Go below, Enyd.”
The girl took umbrage at her mother’s sharp tongue. “But―”
“The poultices ought to be ready. Now go!”
After the girl left, William fitzAlan used a word no man uses unless completely drunk and in the company of equally drunk men unrelated to him. Stephen was the first recipient of Lord fitzAlan’s wrath. “You say you found your brother at Twyford Castle. How? What led you there?”
Stephen stepped forward, timid a first but then pulling himself erect. “Since Graham, Rufus, and Seward are ... or were ... Maynard’s drinking companions―”
“As were you!”
Stephen ignored the reproach. “When I didn’t find Drake at the de Lacy manor, the next best guess was the fitzHughs, and lastly the Twyfords.”
William fitzAlan’s temper was known far and wide, but no one experienced the repercussions more than Drake and Stephen. “Why didn’t you storm the castle? Why didn’t you muster help? Why did you wait like a thief in the night in case they happened to bring your brother out?”
“Should I have knocked on the drawbridge and demanded they raise the portcullis?”
“Yea! A resounding yea! Particularly since Twyford Castle is no more than a fortified pigsty, and a badly fortified one at that.” Next up for William’s verbal lashing was Drake. “Did you do it? Did you hack off Maynard of Clarendon’s genitals and fling them to the pye-dogs?”
“If you knew your son,” Nelda said, “you wouldn’t ask a foolish question the likes of that.”
“And how in God’s name did you allow yourself to get taken in the first place?”
“Four against one, he might have been able to handle,” Stephen said, coming to his brother’s defense. “Five against one is beyond even Drake fitzAlan’s ability.”
“What do I care about numbers when my sons’ lives are in the balance? Especially when they can do something about it. Which neither apparently did!” His sunburnt complexion deepened. As angry as he was, he was holding most of his wrath inside. If he weren’t held together with flesh and bone, he would have exploded on the spot. He wanted to kill every man who did this to his son, even if it meant the gallows for himself. “If you didn’t kill Maynard, who in God’s name did?”
“Tha’,” said Drake, “is wha’ I mean t’find out.”
“By Christ’s pain, you won’t! Have you forgotten Maynard of Clarendon has well-placed kin?”
Drake would have gotten a queasy stomach if he didn’t already have one. Maynard’s older brother was Randall of Clarendon, the acting sheriff. Winchester had been temporarily left without a real sheriff inasmuch as Richard of Ilchester—who had served as both bishop of Winchester and sheriff of Hampshire—died earlier that summer. But since Randall performed the duties of the sheriff’s office, everyone addressed him as Sheriff Clarendon.
William stood. “When you’re able, you’re sailing for the continent, there to await your fate, whether foul or fair.”
“You want your son branded an outlaw?” Nelda asked.
“A breathing outlaw is better than a dead one.”
Enyd returned bearing sloshing basins. After Nelda dipped his hands into one of them, Drake let the pillows swallow him. Wearily he asked, “Di’ you receive a ransom deman’?”
“If I had, I would have gladly paid.”
“Then Graham meant t’hang me from the first.” Drake should have felt something—remorse, dread, rage—but he was beyond feeling much of anything.
“All the more reason to get you out of England. Soonest won’t be soon enough.”
Nelda covered Drake’s eyes with a moist compress of another of her concoctions. “Out. Everybody out. And let this boy rest.”
Enyd helped him swallow a third potion, which eased him into sleep as soon as the cup left his lips. Disobeying Nelda’s orders, William and Stephen stayed with him until his groans fell off.
He didn’t hear them leave.
