At The Queen's Summons

“Go on,” he said.

“Do you know the first thing she said to me? She said I would meet a man who would change my life.”

He muttered something Celtic and scowled at her.

“No, it’s true, my lord, you must believe me.”

“Why should I? You’ve lied about everything else.”

His observation should not have hurt her, but it did. She pressed her knees even closer to her chest and tried to will away the ache in her heart. “Not everything, Your Loftiness.”

“Continue, then. Tell me what the witch woman said.”

“Her speech was slow, broken.” In her mind’s eye, Pippa saw it all as if it had happened yesterday—the leaping flames and the ancient face, the deep eyes and the Gypsies whispering among themselves and pointing at Pippa, who had knelt beside Zara’s pallet.

“She was babbling, I suppose, and speaking in more than one language, but I remember she told me about the man. And she also spoke of blood and vows and honor.”

“Blood, vows and honor?” he repeated.

“Yes. That part was very distinct. She spoke the three words, just like that. She was dying, my lord, but clutching my hand with a grip stronger than death itself. I hadn’t the heart to question her or show any doubt. It’s as if she thought she knew me and somehow needed me in those last moments.”

He folded his arms against his massive chest and studied her. Pippa was terrified that he would accuse her again of lying, but he gave the barest of nods. “They say those in extremis often mistake strangers for people they have known. Did the old woman say more?”

“One more thing.” Pippa hesitated. She felt it all again, the emotions that had roared through her while the stranger held her hand. A feeling of terrible hope had welled from somewhere deep inside her. “A statement I will never, ever forget. She lifted her head, using the very last of her strength to fix me with a stare. And she said, “The circle is complete.” Then, within an hour, she was dead. A few of the young Gypsies seemed suspicious of me, so I thought it prudent to leave after that. Besides, the woman’s wild talk…”

“Frightened you?” Aidan asked.

“Not frightened so much as touched something inside me. As if the words she spoke were words I should know. I tell you, it gave me much to think on.”

“I imagine it did.”

“Not that anything ever came of it,” she said, then ducked her head and lowered her voice. “Until now.”

She watched him, studied his face. Lord, but he was beautiful. Not pretty, but beautiful in the way of a crag overlooking the moors of the north, or in the majestic stance of a roebuck surveying its domain deep in a green velvet wood. It was the sort of beauty that caught at her chest and held fast, defying all efforts to dislodge a dangerous, glorious worship.

Then she noticed that one eyebrow and one corner of his mouth were tilted up in wry irony. She released her breath in an explosive sigh. “I suppose that is the price of being an outrageous and constant liar.”

“What is that?” he asked.

“When I finally tell the truth, you don’t believe me.”

“And why would you be thinking I don’t believe you?”

“That look, Your Worship. You seem torn between laughing at me and summoning the warden of Bedlam.”

The eyebrow inched up even higher. “Actually, I am torn between laughing at you and kissing you.”

“I choose the kissing,” she blurted out all in a rush.

Both of his eyebrows shot up, then lowered slowly over eyes gone soft and smoky. He gripped her hands and drew her forward so that she came up on her knees. The bedclothes pooled around her, and the thin shift whispered over her burning skin.

“I choose the kissing, too.” He lifted his hand to her face. The pad of his thumb moved slowly, tantalizingly, along the curve of her cheekbone and then downward, slipping like silk over marble, to touch her bottom lip, to rub over the fullness until she almost did not need the kiss in order to feel him.

Almost.

“Have you ever been kissed before, colleen?”

The old bluster rose up inside her. “Well, of c—”

“Pippa,” he said, pressing his thumb gently on her lips. “This would be a very bad time to lie to me.”

“Oh. Then, no, Your Immensity. I have never been kissed.” The few who had tried had had their noses rearranged by her fist, but she thought it prudent not to mention that.

“Do you know how it’s done?”

“Yes.”

“Pippa, the truth. You were doing so well.”

“I’ve seen it happen, but I don’t know how it’s done in actual practice.”

“The first thing that has to happen—”

“Yes?” Unable to believe her good fortune, she bounced up and down on her knees, setting the bed to creaking on the rope latticework that supported the mattress. “This is really too exciting, my lord—”

His thumb stopped her mouth again. “—is that you have to stop talking. And for God’s sake don’t narrate everything. This is supposed to be a gesture of affection, but you’re turning it into a farce.”

“Oh. Well, of course I didn’t mean—”

Again he hushed her, and at the same moment a log fell in the grate. The brief flare of sparks found, just for an instant, a bright home in the centers of his eyes. She moaned in sheer wanting but remembered at last not to speak.

“Ah, well done,” he whispered, and his thumb moved again, with subtle, devastating tenderness, slipping just inside her mouth and then emerging to spread moisture along her lip.

“If you like, you can close your eyes.”

She mutely shook her head. It was not every day she got a kiss from an Irish chieftain, and she was not about to miss a single instant of giddy bliss.

“Then just look up at me,” he said, surging closer to her on the bed. “Just look up, and I’ll do the rest.”

She tilted her chin up as he lowered his head. His thumb slid aside to make room for his lips, and his mouth brushed over hers, softly, sweetly, with a sensation that made raw wanting jolt to life inside her.

She made a sound, but he caught it with his mouth and pressed down gently, until their lips were truly joined. His deft fingers rubbed with tender insistence along her jawline, and his lips pushed against the seam of hers.

Open.

Here was something she had not learned from spying on couples pumping away in the alleys of Southwark or groping one another in the shadows of the pillars of St. Paul’s.

His tongue came into her, and she made a squeak of surprise and delight. Her hands drifted upward, over his chest and around behind his neck. She wanted this closeness with a staggering, overwhelming need. His mouth and tongue went deeper, and his hands smoothed down her back, fingers splaying as he pressed her closer, closer.

The quickness of his breath startled her into the realization that he, too, was moved by the intimacy. He, too, had chosen the kiss.

All her life, Pippa had been curious about every bright, shiny thing she saw, and loveplay was no different, yet wholly different. It was not a case of simple wanting, but the experience of a sudden, devastating need she did not know she had.

Tightening her arms around his neck, she thrust against him, wanting the closeness to last forever. She could feel his heartbeat against her chest, feel the life force of another person beating against her and, in an odd, spiritual way, joining with her.

He lifted his mouth from hers. A stunned expression bloomed on his face. “Ah, colleen,” he whispered urgently, “we must stop before I—”

“Before what?” She reveled in the feel of his wine-sweet breath next to her face.

“Before I want more than just a kiss.”

“Then it’s too late for me,” she admitted, “for I already want more.”

He chuckled, very low and very softly, and there was a subtle edge of anguish in his voice. “When you decide to be honest, you don’t stint, do you?”

“I suppose not. Ah, I do want you, Aidan.”

A sad-sweet smile curved his beautiful mouth. “And I want you, lass. But we must not let this go any further.”

“Why not?”

He lifted her hands away from him and rose from the bed, moving slowly as if he were in pain. “Because it’s not proper.”

Stung, she scowled. “I have never been preoccupied with what is proper.”

“I have,” he muttered, and turned away. From the cauldron, he ladled himself a cup of wine and drank it in one gulp. “I’m sorry, Pippa.”

Already he had withdrawn from her, and she shivered with the chill of rejection. “Can’t you look at me and say that?”

He turned, and still his movements seemed labored. “I said I was sorry. I took advantage of your innocence, and I should never have done that.”

“I chose the kiss.”

“So did I.”

“Then why did you stop?”

“I want you to tell me about yourself. Kissing gets in the way of clearheaded thinking.”

“So if I tell you about myself, we can go back to the kissing?”

An annoyed tic started in his jaw. “I never said that.”

“Well, can we?”

With exaggerated care, he set down his cup and walked over to the bed. Cradling her face between his hands, he gazed at her with heartbreaking regret. “No, colleen.”

“But—”

“Consider the consequences. Some of them are quite lasting.”

She swallowed. “You mean a baby.” A wistful longing rose in her. Would it be such a catastrophe, she wondered, if the O Donoghue Mór were to give her a child? A small, helpless being that belonged solely to her?

She felt his hands, so gentle upon her face, yet his expression was one of painful denial. “Why should I do as you say?” she asked, resisting the urge to hurl herself at him, to cling to him and not let go.

“Because I’m asking you to, a gradh. Please.”

She blew out a weary sigh, aware without asking that the Irish word was an endearment. “Do you know how impossible it is to say no to you?”

He smiled a little, bent and kissed the top of her head before letting her go. “Now. We were working backward from your move to London. You met a mysterious hag—”

“Gypsy woman.”

“In Ireland we would call her a woman of the sidhe.”

“She said I’d meet a man who would change my life.” Pippa leaned back against the banked pillows. She wondered if he noticed her blush-stung cheeks. “I always thought it meant I’d find my father. But I’ve changed my mind. She meant you.”

He lowered himself to the foot of the bed and sat very quietly and thoughtfully. How could he be so indifferent upon learning he was the answer to a magical prophecy? What a fool he must think her. Then he asked, “What changed your mind?”

“The kiss.” Jesu, she had not been so truthful in one conversation since she had first come to London. Aidan O Donoghue coaxed honesty from her; it was some power he possessed, one that made it safe to speak her mind and even her heart, if she dared.

He seemed to go rigid, though he did not move.

Idiot, Pippa chided herself. By now he probably could not wait to get rid of her. Surely he would drag her to Bedlam, collecting his fee for turning in a madwoman. He would not be the first to rid himself of a smitten girl in such a manner. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she explained, forcing out a laugh. “It was just a kiss, not a blood oath or some such nonsense. Verily, Your Magnitude, we should forget all about this.”

“I’m Irish,” he cut in softly, his musical lilt more pronounced than ever. “An Irishman does not take a kiss lightly.”

“Oh.” She stared at his firelit, mystical face and held her breath. It took all her willpower not to fling herself at him, ask him to toss up her skirts and do whatever it was a man did beneath a woman’s skirts.

“Pippa?”

“Yes?”

“The story. Before you came to London, where did you live? What did you do?”

The simple questions drew vivid images from the well of her memories. She closed her eyes and traced her way back over the long, oft interrupted journey to London. She lost count of the strolling troupes she had belonged to. Always she was greeted first with skepticism; then, after a display of jests and juggling, she was welcomed. She never stayed long. Usually she slipped away in the night, more often than not leaving a half-conscious man on the ground, clutching a shattered jaw or broken nose, cursing her to high heaven or the belly of hell.

“Pippa?” Aidan prompted again.

She opened her eyes. Each time she looked at him, he grew more beautiful. Perhaps she was under some enchantment. Simply looking at him increased his appeal and weakened her will to resist him.

Almost wistfully, she touched her bobbed hair. I want to be like you, she thought. Beautiful and beloved, the sort of person others wish to embrace, not put in the pillory. The yearning felt like an aching knot in her chest, stunning in its power. Against her will, Aidan O Donoghue was awakening her to feelings she had spent a lifetime running from.

“I traveled slowly to London,” she said, “jesting and juggling along the way. There were times I went hungry, or slept in the cold, but I didn’t really mind. You see, I had always wanted to go to London.”

“To seek your family.”

How had he guessed? It was part of the magic of him, she decided. “Yes. I knew it was next to impossible, but sometimes—” She broke off and looked away in embarrassment at her own candor.

“Go on,” he whispered. “What were you going to say?”

“Just that, sometimes the heart asks for the impossible.”

He reached across the bed, lifted her chin with a finger and winked at her. “And sometimes the heart gets it.”

She sent him a bashful smile. “Mab would agree with you.”

“Mab?”

“The woman who reared me. She lived in Humberside, along the Hornsy Strand. It was a land that belonged to no one, so she simply settled there. That’s how she told it. Mab was simple, but she was all I had.”

“How did you come to live with her?”

“She found me.” A dull sense of resignation weighted Pippa, for she had always hated the truth about herself. “According to her, I lay upon the strand, clinging to a herring keg. A large lurcher or hound was with me. I was tiny, Mab said, two or three, no more.” Like a lightning bolt, memory pierced her, and she winced with the force of it. Remember. The command shimmered through her mind.

“Colleen?” Aidan asked. “Are you all right?”

She clasped her hands over her ears, trying to shut out the insistent swish of panic.

“No!” she shouted. “Please! I don’t remember anymore!”

With a furious Irish exclamation, Aidan O Donoghue, Lord of Castleross, took her in his arms and let her bathe his shoulder in bitter tears.

“Act as if nothing’s amiss,” Donal Og hissed. He, Iago and Aidan were in the stableyard of Crutched Friars the next day. Aidan had grooms to look after his horse, but currying the huge mare was a task he enjoyed, particularly in the early morning when no one was about.

Iago looked miserable in the bright chill of early morn. He detested cold weather. He made impossible claims about the climate of his homeland, insisting that it never snowed in the Caribbean, never froze, and that the sea was warm enough to swim in.

Absently patting Grania’s strong neck, Aidan studied his cousin and Iago. What a formidable pair they made, one dark, one fair, both as large and imposing as cliff rocks.

“Nothing is amiss,” Aidan said, leaning down to pick up a currying brush. Then he saw what Donal Og had clutched in his hand. “Is it?”

Donal Og glanced to and fro. The stableyard was empty. A brake of rangy bushes separated the area from the kitchen garden of the main house and the glassworks of Crutched Friars. Through gaps in the bushes, Lumley House and its gardens appeared serene, the well-sweep and stalks of herbs adorned with drops of last night’s rain that sparkled in the rising sun.

“Read for yourself.” Donal Og shoved a paper at Aidan. “But for God’s sake, don’t react too strongly. Walsingham’s spies are everywhere.”

Aidan glanced back over his shoulder at the house. “Faith, I hope not.”

Donal Og and Iago exchanged a glance. Their faces split into huge grins. “It is about time, amigo,” Iago said.

Aidan’s ears felt hot with foolish defensiveness. “It’s not what you think. Sure and I’d hoped for better understanding from the two of you.”

The manly grins subsided. “As you wish, coz,” Donal Og said. “Far be it from such as us to suspect yourself of swiving your wee guest.”

“Ahhh.” A sweet female voice trilled in the distance. All three of them peered through the tall hedge at the house. Slamming open the double doors to the upper hall, Pippa emerged into the sunlight.

The parchment crinkled in Aidan’s clenched hand. Aside from that, no one made a sound. They stood still, as if a sudden frost had frozen them. She stood on the top step, clad only in her shift. Clearly she thought she’d find no one in the private garden so early. She inhaled deeply, as if tasting the crisp morning air, cleansed by the rain.

Her hair was sleep tousled, soft and golden in the early light. Although Aidan had kissed her only once, he remembered vividly the rose-petal softness of her lips. Her eyes were faintly bruised by shadows from last night’s tears.

As spellbinding as her remarkable face was her body. The thin shift, with the sun shimmering through, revealed high, upturned breasts, womanly hips, a tiny waist and long legs, shaded at the top by dark mystery.

She held a basin in her arms and shifted the vessel to perch on her hip. She descended the steps while three pairs of awestruck eyes, peering avidly through the stableyard hedge, watched her.

At the bottom of the steps, she stopped to shake back a tumble of golden curls. Then she bent forward over the well to draw the water. The thin fabric of the shift whispered over a backside so lush and shapely that Aidan’s mouth went dry.

“Ay, mujer,” whispered Iago. “Would that I had such a bedmate.”

“It’s not what you think,” Aidan managed to repeat in a low, strained voice.

“No,” said Donal Og with rueful envy, his jaw unhinging as Pippa straightened. Some of the water dampened the front of her shift, so that her flesh shone pearly pink through the white lawn fabric. She paused to pluck the top of a daffodil and tuck it behind her ear. “No doubt,” Donal Og continued, “it is a hundred times better than we think.”

Aidan grabbed him by the front of his tunic. “I’ll see you do penance for six weeks if you don’t quit staring.”

Oblivious, Pippa slipped back into the house. Iago made a great show of wiping his brow while Donal Og paced the yard, limping as if in discomfort. The horse made a loud, rude sound.

“The urchin turned out to be a beauty, Aidan,” he said. “I would never have looked twice at her, but you looked once and found a true jewel.”

“I wasn’t looking for treasure, cousin,” Aidan said. “The lass was caught up in a riot and in danger of being thrown into prison. I merely—”

“Hush.” Donal Og held up a hand. “You needn’t explain, coz. We’re happy for you. Sure it wasn’t healthy for you to be living like a monk, pretending you were not troubled by a man’s needs. It is not as if you and Felicity ever—”

“Cease your infernal blather,” Aidan snapped, pierced to the core by the merest thought of Felicity. His grip on the parchment tightened. Perhaps the letter from Revelin of Innisfallen contained good news. Perhaps the bishop had granted the annulment. Oh, please God, yes.

“Don’t speak of Felicity again. And by God, if you so much as insinuate that Pippa and I are lovers, I’ll turn blood ties into a blood bath.”

“You didn’t bed her?” Iago demanded, horrified.

“No. She ran off at the height of the storm and I brought her back here. She seems to have a particular fear of storms.”

“You,” said Iago, aiming a finger at Aidan’s chest, “are either a sick man or a saint. She has the body of a goddess. She adores you. Take her, Aidan. I am certain she’s had offers from lesser men than an Irish chieftain. She will thank you for it.”

Aidan swore and stalked over to a stone hitch post. Propping his hip on it, he unfurled the parchment and began to read.

The letter from Revelin of Innisfallen was in Irish. Aye, there it was, news regarding the marriage Aidan had made in hell and desperation. But that hardly mattered, considering the rest. Each word stabbed into him like a shard of ice. When he finished reading, he looked up at Donal Og and Iago.

“Who brought this?”

“A sailor on a flax boat from Cork. He can’t read.”

“You’re certain?”

“Aye.”

Aidan tore the parchment into three equal portions. “Good appetite, my friends,” he said wryly. “I pray the words do not poison you.”

“Tell me what I am eating,” said Iago, chewing on the paper with a pained expression.

Aidan grimaced as he swallowed his portion. “An insurrection,” he said.

By the time Aidan went back to Pippa’s chamber, she had dressed herself. Her skirt and bodice had been laced correctly this time.

She sat at the thick-legged oaken table in the center of the room, and she did not look up when he entered. Several objects lay before her on the table. The morning sun streamed over her in great, slanting bars. The light glinted in her hair and gilded her smooth, pearly skin. The daffodil she had picked adorned her curls more perfectly than a comb of solid gold.

Aidan felt a twist of sentiment deep in his gut. Just when he had thought he’d conquered and killed all tenderness within himself, he found a girl who reawakened his heart.

Devil take her. She looked like the soul of virtue and innocence, an angel in an idealized portrait with her sun-drenched face and halo of hair, the lean purity of her profile, the fullness of her lips as she pursed them in concentration.

“Sit down, Your Serenity,” she said softly, still not looking up. “I’ve decided to tell you more because…”

“Because why?” Willingly shoving aside the news from Ireland, he approached the table and lowered himself to the bench beside her.

“Because you care.”

“I shouldn’t—”

“Yet you do,” she insisted. “You do in spite of yourself.”

He did not deny it, but crossed his arms on the table and leaned forward. “What is all this?”

“My things.” She patted the limp, dusty bag she had worn tied to her waist the first day they had met. “It is uncanny how little one actually needs in order to survive. All I ever had fits in this bag. Each object has a special meaning to me, a special significance. If it does not, I get rid of it.”

She rummaged with her hand in the bag and drew out a seashell, placing it on the table between them. It was shiny from much handling, bleached white on the outside while the inner curve was tinted with pearly shades of pink in graduated intensity.

“I don’t remember ever actually finding this. Mab always said I was a great one for discovering things washed up on shore, and from the time I was very small, I would bring her the most marvelous objects. Apples to juggle, a pessary of wild herbs. One time I found the skull of a deer.”

She took out a twist of hair, sharply contrasting black and white secured with a bit of string.

“I hope that’s not poor Mab,” Aidan commented.

She laughed. “Ah, please, Your Magnificence. I am not so bloodthirsty as that.” She stroked the lock. “This is from the dog I was with when Mab found me. Mab swore the beast saved me from drowning. He was half drowned himself, but he revived and lived with us. She said I told her his name was Paul.”

She propped her chin in her cupped hand and gazed at the whitewashed wall by the window, where the morning sun created colored ribbons of light on the plastered surface. “The dog died four years after Mab found us. I barely remember him, except—” She stopped and frowned.

“Except what?” asked Aidan.

“During storms at night, I would creep over to his pallet and sleep.” She showed him a few more of her treasures—a page from a book she could not read. He saw that it was from an illegal pamphlet criticizing the queen’s plans to marry the Duke of Alençon. “I like the picture,” Pippa said simply, and showed him a few other objects: a ball of sealing wax and a tiny brass bell—“I nicked it from the Gypsy wagon”—flint and steel, a spoon.