To Kiss A Spy (9 page)

“Pen . . . Pen . . . are you in there?” It was Robin’s voice outside the door.

Pen jerked her hand out of Owen’s clasp. Her face was suddenly hot as if she had been caught in some dishonorable act. Of all the moments for Robin to arrive, playing that impatient tune on her door with his knuckles.

She spun to the door and opened it wide. “What is it, Robin? Does the princess want me?”

Robin stared over her shoulder to where the chevalier stood by the fireplace, an expression of bland indifference on his face, his dark eyes cool and quiet as they met Robin’s. Robin’s mouth tightened and angry spots of color appeared on his cheeks. “Forgive me, Pen, I hadn’t realized you were
entertaining
a guest in your chamber.”

“I would not outstay my welcome, madam,” Owen said softly. He came across the chamber, his step as soundless as always. He offered Robin a bow and a courteous smile. “How pleasant to run into you again, Lord Robin. I trust it will not be the last time.”

Pen set her lips, and Robin could do nothing but return the bow in stiff silence.

The chevalier left, still smiling, and Pen closed the door gently. She was conscious now only of the part she had to play. The world must believe that she and the chevalier were on the best of terms. Robin must never guess what she knew of Owen d’Arcy. “What is it, Robin? Why do you look so disapproving?”

“You should not be closeted with a stranger in your bedchamber,” he stated, his mouth stubborn.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. I am not answerable to you for my conduct, Robin! I’m a widow, not some innocent virgin. And I will talk with whom I please, where I please.”

“You know nothing about Owen d’Arcy,” Robin said. “What makes you think you can trust him?”

“Trust him to do what?” Pen met his gaze with one as stubborn.

“You know what I mean!” His ruddy cheeks grew brighter.

Pen could no longer pretend to be angered. She and Robin were too close, and she knew his concerns were only for her. If only she could tell him the truth, explain her devil’s bargain. But for the first time in all the years they’d known each other, she had to keep something from him.

She asked with seemingly mild curiosity, “Why do you dislike him so much?” He wouldn’t tell her, of course, but it was only natural that she should ask.

Robin turned aside from her clear gaze. He bent to the fire, poking at the logs until scarlet flames shot up the chimney and a billow of smoke filled the ill-ventilated chamber.

Pen coughed, waving at the smoke. “Leave the fire, Robin. It was fine as it was.”

“ ’Tis cold in here,” he said in half-apology.

Pen went to the side table and poured a goblet of wine from the flagon that stood there. “Maybe this will warm you.” She handed him the goblet. “Now, tell me why you dislike Owen d’Arcy. You said the other night that you’d never met him.”

Robin drank deeply. For two pins he would tell her what he knew of d’Arcy. But he couldn’t do it as yet. Loyalty still forbade him to disobey Northumberland’s orders, at least until his growing distrust of the duke was justified. There were too many plots twisting in the wind around the young king’s unstable throne, and a wise man would thread a careful path through them. Robin could not afford to act prematurely.

“There’s just something about the man,” he muttered, concealing his frustration at the half-truth. “He makes me uneasy. I worry about you, Pen.”

“Oh, I know you do.” She put her arm around his shoulders and kissed his cheek. “And I worry about you. But there’s nothing to worry about, Robin. I’m quite capable of taking care of myself.”

“You think you are,” he mumbled, returning the kiss. “But what do you know of the man?”

Pen hesitated. “Not much,” she said, then added deliberately, “But I like being in his company.”

“You’re not falling in love with him?” Robin stared at her in horror.

“
No!
Of course not,” she said with a laugh that she knew sounded convincing. Earlier that evening it might not have done. “But I can amuse myself a little, can’t I? Pippa does, and no one objects.”

“Pippa’s different. Everyone knows she’s not serious. But people know that you are, that you do take things seriously.”

“Perhaps I do.” She kissed his cheek again, hating herself, hating Owen d’Arcy, hating Philip’s mother with a power even greater than hitherto. Her heart had turned to stone.

“I love you dearly, Robin, but you cannot take charge of my life. I’m sorry if you don’t like Owen, but I do. And unless you can give me good reason why I shouldn’t trust him, I see no reason why I shouldn’t trust my own instincts and inclinations. Do you?”

Robin had no answer. He would give his life for Pen, but he knew, too, that she would do what she believed in. He knew her strengths. He admired them and wished he shared more of them than he did. Pen didn’t sway in the wind like so many people in their world. She clung steadfast to her views unless or until she had good reason to change them.

But how could he protect her without confiding in her? The question tormented him because for the moment it had no answer.

Seven

The parlor reeked of tallow candles, woodsmoke, and overblown perfume poured on hot flesh. The drapes were drawn tightly across the windows in a vain attempt to block the drafts that needled their way through every cranny between the creaking shutters.

Miles Bryanston shuffled his feet and wrinkled his nose at the stale smell that rose from the rushes that he thus disturbed. How long had it been since they’d been changed? he wondered with an unusual fastidiousness. The sole of his boot seemed to have stuck to something unsavory on the wooden boards beneath the rushes. He shook it free with a disgusted oath and turned at the sound of the door opening.

“So, my lord, welcome. We wasn’t expectin’ to see you for another two weeks. ’Tis not your usual time to visit.” The voice was a curious blend of obsequious whine and sharp suspicion. A strong fog of aqua vitae accompanied the words.

“Circumstances have changed, Mistress Boulder.” Miles tried to sound brisk and commanding even though the madam of this South Bank brothel emasculated him with every piercing glance from her rheumy eyes. Miles couldn’t imagine how she could encourage men to take advantage of her whores. His balls shriveled at the very sound of her foot on the stair. But fortunately that was not where his business lay. He just wished his mother would take on Mistress Boulder instead of leaving it to him. She was much more the woman’s match.

“Oh?” the madam said, her eyes narrowing, her mouth pursed into what struck Miles as a good resemblance to a chicken’s arse. “And ’ow might that be,
my lord
?”

“We . . . my mother . . .” Miles gathered his forces. “The dowager Countess Bryanston and I have decided to make other arrangements, Mistress Boulder. You will, of course, be paid up until the end of the month.”

“We ’ad a contract, my lord. Six months.” She bent over a low table to fill two tin cups from the leather flagon of aqua vitae. “ ’Ere. This’ll put ’eart in ye, dear sir.” She leered at him but he was not deceived. He shook his head at the cup and laid a hand on his sword hilt. It made him feel more in control even if it didn’t convince the fearsome Mistress Boulder.

Mistress Boulder drained both cups with one swallow each. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Now, you can’t be expectin’ me to give up six months of income, not you nor ’er ladyship,” she continued. “I’m a businesswoman, my lord, and I’ve got me own responsibilities. I’ve got me girls to look after. By all means I’ll consider our contract ended, jest as long as you pays me my due. Six months was what we agreed. You pay that now an’ you can leave ’ere wi’ what you come for and no questions asked.”

Miles tried to summon his mother’s image to his aid. But he wasn’t sure whether even the redoubtable dowager countess could make short work of Mistress Boulder. “I have coin to pay you until the end of the month,” he said, reaching into his pocket, hoping that the sight of actual money might sway the woman. “I daresay I could add a couple of guineas extra, for goodwill.” He shook the leather purse so that the coins chinked invitingly.

The woman regarded him with evident disappointment. “Now, now, m’lord, that won’t do at all. A deal’s a deal, an’ I’ve done me part. You don’t ’ave no complaints, I trust.” There was no mistaking the menace in her voice or the challenge in her bloodshot little eyes.

“No . . . no,” Miles denied hastily. “No complaints, but circumstances have changed. We have to make other arrangements.”

“I see.” She folded her arms across a skinny bosom. “So, if there’s no fault to be found, my dear sir, then you’ll understand that I’m entitled to me full due. Six months’ payment, as promised.” She held out a grasping hand, the fingers curled slightly. The nails were broken and black with dirt. Miles repressed a shudder.

There were more salubrious stew-houses in this brothel-strewn stretch of riverbank opposite St. Paul’s, but Lady Bryanston had instructed her son to find one that would not be frequented by any man who moved in their own social circles. Mistress Boulder’s establishment certainly fitted that bill, but by the same token it was unfamiliar territory for Miles himself, and he found his usual bullying bluster inadequate in the face of a brothel keeper who was accustomed to dealing with the toughest customers. Sailors who spoke every known tongue piled riotously off the trading ships that sailed up the Thames estuary to the London docks.

“Of course,” she mused, her hand still outstretched, “there’s folk what might pay a pretty penny for what I know.” She leered at him again, but the menace was yet more pronounced. “Not that I’d be spreadin’ the word, mind you, but word gets around all on its own, y’know.”

Miles was between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If he yielded to the woman’s demands, his mother would be furious. She detested spending a groat more than she had to, and kept the family purse strings firmly in her hands despite Miles’s occasional bleats that as the earl he should have access to more than the paltry allowance his parent gave him. But he could not refuse to satisfy Mistress Boulder’s greed in the face of this blackmail.

“I’ll pay you for four months,” he tried, but without much conviction.

Mistress Boulder shook her head. “Can’t stand ’ere all day, my lord. I’ve work to do. My girls are wakin’ up and the customers’ll be bangin’ on the door any minute now. You want what you come for, just pay me what’s right an’ proper and you can be on your way wi’out another word spoken.”

Miles gave in with a little sigh, and his shoulders hunched in defeat so that he looked rather like a deflated frog. He drew another leather purse from his pocket and counted out a pile of gold and silver under the madam’s sharp scrutiny. She counted with him, under her breath, and as soon as the last coin joined the pile she swept them up in a movement so swift and clean it was as if a magician had waved a wand. She unlocked an iron-bound casket on the table and deposited the coins.

She turned to him, all business now. “Right, I’ll get what you come for.”

Miles waited impatiently. He would have to hurry if he was to complete his business on the South Bank before the bells sounded for curfew and London Bridge was closed for the night. His mother would want a report on the afternoon’s business before she sent him off with his wife to Greenwich Palace for the Twelfth Night revels. There he was supposed to accost the Duke of Northumberland. . . .

A heavy sigh escaped him. He’d be hard-pressed to enjoy the traditional unlicensed roistering of Twelfth Night when he’d have to keep a clear head to do his mother’s bidding. There were times when he longed for the carefree days before Philip’s death, when he could carouse with his friends, hunt, frequent decent brothels for their true purpose without question or hindrance. But his mother had had other plans.

He sighed again as the door opened and Mistress Boulder returned, a bundle of rags in her arms.

Miles went out into the frigid late afternoon with his burden. Black-edged clouds raced across the gray sky and the air smelled of snow. He hastened to an establishment in a back alley away from the riverbank. A tall narrow house with overhanging gables and dingy plaster. A rickety wooden staircase on the outside gave access to the upper floors. It was a house not dissimilar to the one he had just left.

The ill-hung door opened a crack at his knock and he entered the narrow passage, again wrinkling his nose at the unsavory odors. The bishop’s inspectors wouldn’t bother with this stew-house, and it was inevitable that the women would be diseased. No one he knew would darken the doors of such a place. At least that would please his mother.

The transaction with a slatternly woman, whose rheumy eyes shifted beneath drooping lids, took a bare fifteen minutes. Miles, no longer burdened, retraced his steps down the narrow alley to the riverbank, drawing the cold air deep into his lungs, trying to rid himself of the noxious air of the brothel. He passed an open door from which wafted a rich scent of cloves, nutmeg, and wine. Women’s laughter sounded from within, light and full of promise. There was the sweet sound of a plucked lute. He could smell roasting meat.

Miles hesitated, sniffing like a bloodhound on the scent of quarry. Duty called him across London Bridge, but then he’d have to face his mother and admit to his cowardly submission to Mistress Boulder’s demands. Joan would look mournful and disappointed as Lady Bryanston uttered her sharply contemptuous opinions of a son who was incapable of fulfilling a simple task. Sometimes Miles wondered why his mother had always favored him over Philip. Philip had been so much cleverer than he.

But somewhere in Miles’s generally befuddled brain lurked the knowledge that whereas he would always meekly do his mother’s bidding, Philip had had a mind of his own. Lady Bryanston did not look with favor upon those who had minds of their own. If Pen had not shown her own strength of will, her mother-in-law might well have chosen a different course of action.

Miles grimaced, thinking of the recriminations ahead, followed by an abstemious and inevitably uncomfortable evening trying to find the opportunity for an apparently casual interview with Northumberland. The duke barely knew who he was.

Another heavy sigh escaped him, and on the exhalation he followed his nose without another coherent thought through the open door into the hot, sweet-smelling world of warm-fleshed women and spiced wine. A well-regulated world where the bishop’s inspectors examined the women every month, and comfortable apartments opened off a cloistered garden where torches kept the encroaching dusk at bay. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation as an elegantly dressed woman billowed across the spacious hall to greet him.

He didn’t notice the man standing just beyond the circle of light thrown by the flaming torch that lit the entrance to the brothel.

Owen tapped his mouth with his gloved fingertips, a slight frown between his brows. He had been leaving the Bishop of Winchester’s palace after a particularly fruitful discussion with one of his grace’s manservants who kept his ears open for France. Then he’d recognized Miles Bryanston scurrying out of one of the squalid alleys that opened onto the broader thoroughfare of the South Bank. Even if it weren’t for Pen, the instincts of his profession would have prompted him to follow a man who could not possibly have business in the unhealthy stews where a woman could be had for a groat, with robbery and disease thrown in as part of the deal.

But it seemed that whatever the earl had been doing in the dark, dank lanes behind the lights of the established world of sex for sale, the world that catered to men of his rank and fortune, he hadn’t been grubbing for a woman. A satisfied man did not leave one pair of thighs and instantly dive between another.

Unless, of course, Bryanston had some interesting perversions, Owen reflected. It wouldn’t surprise him. Owen had been doing some probing of the Bryanston family, wanting to be sure that Pen’s story wasn’t the crazed fabrication of a grief-stricken widow that everyone else believed it to be.

The picture that emerged hadn’t been particularly pretty, and it had convinced Owen that there might be something to Pen’s story. Miles was widely considered a dolt and a barbarian, ruled by his own appetites and his mother’s ambition. When people spoke of the Dowager Lady Bryanston and her ambition it was in generally mocking tones. She was considered greedy and not very clever.

Owen, however, was not inclined to dismiss her so easily. It was always possible that she would trip herself up as she reached for the moon, but in his experience greed, cunning, and a complete lack of scruple made for a dangerous opponent.

Miles’s brother Philip, on the other hand, had been well liked and respected, his premature death mourned by those who’d known him.

Possibly Miles had been satisfying his more brutish appetites in the back streets before seeking conventional relief in more sanitary surroundings. Then again, maybe there was more to it.

Owen turned under the lights and entered the brothel. An elegant woman appeared immediately. She welcomed him with a gracious smile and a small page proffered a tray with wine.

“Come this way, my lord.” The brothel keeper glided ahead of him into a handsome paneled chamber, warmed by fires at either end and dimly lit by oil lamps. Women stood around the walls, chatting in groups. They cast covert glances at the newcomer, sizing him up, he thought with some amusement, like a prize stud at the market fair. No matter that the shoe should be on the other foot.

Miles Bryanston was standing before the fire at the far end of the chamber. He held a pewter tankard of mead and wore an air of smug satisfaction as he looked the women over. Before Owen could approach, he drained his tankard in one swallow and tossed it to the floor, then he beckoned to one of the women, wrapped an arm around her waist as she came up to him, and bore her from the room, brushing rudely past Owen without any acknowledgment.

“Pleasant man,” Owen murmured with curled lip.

“A regular customer, my lord,” the brothel keeper said with a discreet smile. “Will you make your choice?”

“I’m not interested in a woman tonight, except as a companion while I take my wine. If one of your women is blessed with wit and the art of conversation, I’ll be well pleased in her company,” Owen said.

The brothel keeper considered. She had a honed instinct when it came to customers and this one would pay well, even if his inclinations were not quite the usual. She said, “If you’ve a mind for some music, my lord, Sally has a delicate hand on the lute.”

“That will suit me well,” Owen said. “Bring me a flagon of burgundy and I’ll take my ease by the fire. When our friend comes down again, I would have him join me in a glass, if you would mention it to him when his business is done.”

“Certainly, my lord.” The woman went over to the girls clustered along the wall, and after a soft-spoken exchange one of them separated herself from the group and came over to where Owen now sat on the long settle.

She curtsied, examining him with frank curiosity, clearly wondering why a man would come to a whorehouse just to listen to music. “I give you good even, my lord. I’ll fetch your wine and my lute, if it pleases you.”