By His Majesty's Grace Read online

  That man, she realized now, had been Braesford. She had heard whispers of him about Henry’s court, a mysterious figure without family connections who came and went with no let or hindrance. He had endured Henry’s uncertain exile in Brittany and his later detainment in France, so they said, and was honored for that reason. Others whispered that he was a favorite of the new king’s lady mother, Margaret Beaufort, and had sometimes traveled between her and her son on missions that culminated in Henry’s invasion. No one could speak with accuracy of him, however, for the newly made knight remained aloof from the court and its gossip, occupying some obscure room in the bowels of whatever palace or castle Henry dwelled in at the moment. The only thing certain was that he had the king’s ear and his absolute trust. That was until he disappeared into the north of England, to the manse known as Braesford, which had been gifted to him for his services to the crown.

  Was it possible, Isabel wondered in some perplexity, that her presence at Braesford, her betrothal to such a nonentity, sprang from that brief exchange of glances? It seemed unlikely, yet she had been given scant reason for it otherwise.

  Not that there need be anything personal in the arrangement. Since coming to the throne, Henry had claimed her as his ward, given that her father and mother were dead, that she was unwed and heir to a considerable fortune. Graydon had raved and cursed, for he considered the right to manage her estate and its income to be his, though they shared not a drop of blood in common. Still, her stepbrother had been forced to bow to the will of the king. If Henry wanted to reward one of his followers with her hand and her property, including its munificent yearly income, that was his right. Certainly, she had no say in the matter.

  Rand led Isabel Milton of Graydon from the great hall into a side vestibule and up the wide staircase mounted against its back wall. At the top, he turned to the left and opened a door leading into the solar that fronted the manor house. Glancing around, he felt the shift of pride in his chest. Everything was ready for his bride, though it had been a near thing. He had harried the workman with threats and not a few oaths to get the chamber finished in time. Yet he could not think Henry’s queen had a finer retreat.

  The windows, with their thick, stacked circles of glass, gave ample light for the sewing, embroidery or reading of Isabel and her ladies. The cushioned benches beneath them were an invitation to contemplation or to observe what was taking place in the court below. The scenes of classical gods and goddesses painted on the plastered walls were enlivened with mischievous cherubim, while carpets overlaid the rushes here and there in a manner he had heard of from the Far East. Instead of a brazier, there was a fireplace in this room just as in the hall below. Settles of finely carved oak were drawn up on either side, their backs tall enough to catch the radiating heat with bench seats softened by embroidered cushions. A small fire burned against the advancing coolness of the evening, flickering beneath the massive mantelpiece carved with his chosen symbol of a raven and underlined by his motto in Latin: Interritusaum, Undaunted. Beyond it was the bed, resting on a dais fitted into the corner. As he was not a small man, this was of goodly size, and hung with sumptuous embroidered bed curtains, piled with feather-stuffed mattresses and pillows.

  “Your solar, Lady Isabel,” he said simply.

  “So I see.”

  Rand had not expected transports of joy, but felt some word of appreciation might have been extended after all his preparations for her comfort. His disappointment was glancing, however, as he noted how she avoided looking at the bed. A faint tremor shook the hand that lay upon his arm, and she released him at once, drawing away a short distance.

  She was wary of him, Rand thought. It could not be helped. He was not a superstitious man, put little credence in curses, prophecies and other such foretelling, yet neither did he leave things to chance. It was important that he take and hold Lady Isabel. He would do what was necessary to be sure of her and make his amends later.

  And if holding her promised to be far more a pleasure than a duty, that was his secret.

  “You will need to quench your thirst, I expect,” he said gravely. “I will send wine and bread to sustain you until the feasting.”

  “That’s very kind. Thank you,” she said, speaking over her shoulder as she turned her back on him, moving farther away. “You may leave me now.”

  Her tone was that of a princess dismissing a lackey. It grated, but he refused to take offense. No doubt she feared his attack at any moment, not that she lacked cause. It happened often enough with these alliances of great fortune, wherein to bed the lady was to take her virginity and her wealth in the same act. He thought briefly of living up to her expectations, of sweeping her into his arms and tossing her on the bed before joining her there. The surge of heat in the lower part of his body was a fine indication of what his more base self thought of the idea.

  He could not do it. For one thing, being closeted with her for any length of time would expose her to more of the ribald, lip-smacking comment she had endured already. For another, forcing her was not a precedent he wanted to set for their life together.

  Let her have her pride, then. She was in his power whether she accepted it or not. There would be time enough and more to see that she understood that fact.

  “I regret that you were embarrassed just now,” he said abruptly.

  “Embarrassed?” She turned to give him a quick glance from under her lashes. “Why should I be?”

  “What may take place between us is not a matter for rough talk. I would not have you think I view it that way.”

  Color as tender and fresh as a wild rose invaded her features. “Certainly not.”

  “It’s only that there is bound to be speculation, considering the misfortune met with by your previous suitors.”

  Between them lay the knowledge that he made the fifth in a line that had begun when she was in her cradle. The first was to a baron her father’s age who had expired of the colic. Afterward, the honor had descended to his son, a youth of less than six years who did not survive the childhood scourge of measles. A match had been arranged then with James, Marquess Trowbridge, a battle-scarred veteran of almost fifty. Trowbridge had been killed in a fall while hunting when Isabel was nine, after which she was pledged, at age eleven, to Lord Kneesall, merely seventeen years her senior and afflicted with a harelip. When he was executed after choosing the wrong side in the quarrel between Plantagenet factions, the betrothals halted.

  This was in part, Rand knew, because the lady carried a reputation for being one of the accursed Three Graces of Graydon, sisters who could only be joined in wedlock to men who loved them. A more pertinent reason was the constant warfare of the past years which made selecting a groom problematical, given that the man chosen could be hale and hearty one day and headless the next.

  The lady began to remove her gloves with meticulous attention to the loosening of each finger. Rand watched the unveiling of her pale hands with a drawing sensation in his lower body, his thoughts running rampant concerning other portions of her body that would soon be revealed to him. It was an effort to attend as she finally made reply.

  “You can hardly be blamed for the vulgarity of others. My stepbrother, like his father before him, takes pleasure in his lack of refinement. Being accustomed to Graydon’s ways, I am unlikely to blush for yours.”

  “Yet you flushed just now.”

  She kept her gaze on what she was doing, carefully inching the leather off her little finger. “Not for the subject of the jest, but rather at having it raised between us.”

  “So I am at fault,” he said evenly.

  “There is no fault that I see.”

  Her fairness touched him with an inexplicable tenderness, as did her courage and even her unconscious pride. She was a jewel there in that perfect chamber he had created for her, the final bright and shining addition. Her eyes were the soft green of new spring leaves, alive with watchful intelligence. Her lips were the rich, dark pink of the crusader’s rose that c
limbed the courtyard wall. Her mantle was a mere dust protector of russet linen, and her riding gown beneath it of moss-green summer wool. She had thrown back the cloak’s hood to reveal a small, flat cap of crimson wool embroidered with fern fronds, attached to which was a light veil that covered her hair so completely not the finest tendril of it could be seen. Rand’s hands itched, suddenly, to strip away that concealment, to strip her bare in truth, so he might see in full the prize he had been given.

  “You relieve my mind,” he said, his voice harsh in his throat. “If the bedding others mentioned is in advance of the wedding, I trust you will understand the cause. The best way I know to dispel a curse is to disprove it.”

  Her chin lifted another notch, though her lashes shielded her expression. “You will at least allow me to remove my cloak first?”

  The vision his mind produced, of taking her in a welter of skirts and with her stocking-clad legs clamped around him, did such things to him that he was glad for the unfashionable length of his doublet. It would be so easy to manage since it was doubtful she wore braies of any description under her clothing, unless to prevent saddle soreness during her long ride. Moreover, her challenge sounded as if she might resent the necessity he claimed but would not fight him. That was promising, and fully as much as he had any right to expect.

  She stripped away the glove she had loosened, but stopped with a gasp as her hand slid free of the soft leather. The color receded from her face and a white line appeared around her mouth.

  Rand stepped forward with a frown, reaching to take her wrist in his hard fingers. “My lady, you are injured.”

  A small sound somewhere between a gasp and a laugh rasped in her throat as both of them stared down at her little finger, which was bent at an odd angle between the first and second knuckle. “No…only a little.”

  “It’s broken, obviously. Why was it not set?”

  “There was no need,” she said, tugging on her arm in the attempt to free it from his grasp. “It’s nothing.”

  Her skin was so fine, so soft under his calloused fingertips, that he was distracted for an instant, intrigued also by the too-fast flutter of her pulse under his thumb. “I can’t agree,” he answered. “It will heal in the shape it has taken.”

  “That isn’t your concern.” She twisted her wrist back and forth, though she breathed quickly through parted lips and her eyes darkened with pain.

  “Anything that touches upon my future wife is my concern.”

  “Why, pray? Because you expect perfection?”

  She meant to anger him so he would abandon her. It was clear she knew him not at all. “Because I hold myself responsible for your well-being from this day forward. Because I protect those close to me. Also, because I would know how best to serve you.”

  “You will serve me to a nicety by leaving me in peace.”

  She meant that literally, Rand thought. As granting that particular wish was impossible, he ignored the plea. “How did it happen? A fall? Were you thrown from your palfrey?”

  “I was stupid, nothing more.”

  “Were you indeed? I would not have thought it your habit.”

  She refused to be drawn, pressing her lips together as if to withhold any explanation. The conviction came upon him that the injury might have been inflicted as a punishment. Or it might have been in the nature of persuasion, perhaps to cement her agreement to a match she considered beneath her.

  He released her with an abrupt, openhanded movement. An instant later, he felt a constriction around his heart as she cradled her fingers with her other hand, pressing them to her midriff.

  “I will send the local herb woman to you,” he said in gruff tones. “She is good with injuries.”

  “So is the serving woman I brought with me. We will manage, I thank you.”

  “You are quite certain?”

  “Indeed.” The lady lifted her chin as she met his gaze. She let go of her mistreated hand and, with her good one, tucked the glove she had removed into the girdle of leather netting she wore across her hip bones.

  He swung toward the door, setting his hand on the iron latch. “I will send your woman to you, then—along with your baggage and water for bathing. We dine in the hall at sundown.”

  “As it pleases you,” she answered.

  It didn’t please him, not at all. He would have liked to stay, lounging on the settle or bed while he watched her maid tend her. It would not do, not yet. He sketched a stiff bow. “Until later.”

  Rand made his escape then, and didn’t stop until he was halfway down the stairway to the hall. His footsteps slowed, came to a halt there in that rare solitude. He turned and put his back to the wall, leaning his head against the cool stone. He would not go back. He would not. Yet how long the hours would be before the feasting was done and it was time for him and his betrothed to seek their bed.

  How was he to bear sitting beside her, sharing a cup and plate, feeding her tidbits from the serving platters or their joint trencher, drinking where her lips had touched. Yes, and breathing her delicate female scent, feeling through linen and fine summer wool the slightest brush of her arm against his, the gentle entrapment of her skirts spreading across his booted ankles?

  Ale, he needed a beaker of it. He required a veritable butt of ale immediately. Oh, but not, pray God, so much as to dull his senses. Not so much that he would disgust his bride with his stench. Certainly not enough to unman him.

  Maybe ale was not what he needed, after all.

  He could go for a long ride, except that he had no wish to be too tired for a proper wedding night. He could walk the battlements, letting the wind blow the heat from his blood while staring out over the valley, though he had done that far too often this day while waiting for his lady. He could descend to the kitchen to order some new delicacy to tempt her, though he had commanded enough and more of those already.

  He could entertain his male guests, and hope it wasn’t necessary to stop their crude comments with a well-placed fist. And, just possibly, he could learn something from Isabel’s stepbrother that might tell him how strenuously she had objected to this marriage, and what had been done to her to assure her agreement.

  What he would do with any knowledge gained was something he would decide when he had it.

  2

  Isabel emerged from the solar at the tolling of the Angelus bell. Her spirits were considerably improved after a warm bath to remove the dirt of travel, also the donning of a clean shift beneath a fine new gown of scarlet wool, the color of courage, with embroidery stiffening its hem and edging the slashed sleeves tied up at intervals with knots of ribbon. Sitting before the coals in the fireplace while Gwynne brushed her hair dry and put it up again under cap and veil had also given her time to reflect.

  She had avoided being bedded at once by Braesford, though she could hardly believe it. Had he changed his mind, perhaps, or had the possibility never been anything more than Graydon’s low humor? She hardly knew, yet it was all she could do to contain her giddy relief. Pray God, her good fortune would continue.

  It was not that she feared the intimacy of the marriage bed. She expected little joy from it, true, but that was a different matter. No, it was marriage in its entirety she desired to avoid. Too many of her friends had been married in their cradles, given to much older husbands at thirteen or fourteen, brought to childbed at fifteen or sixteen and mothers to three or four children by her own age of twenty-three. That was if they were not dead from the rigors of childbirth. Her own mother’s first marriage had been similar, though happy enough, possibly because Isabel’s father, Lord Craigsmoor, had spent much time away at court.

  The second marriage of her mother’s had not fared so well. The sixth earl of Graydon had been brutal and domineering, a man who treated everyone around him with the same contempt he showed those attached to his lands. His word was law and he would brook no discussion, no disobedience in any form from his wife, his stepdaughters or his son and heir from a previous marriage. M
any nights, Isabel and her two younger sisters had huddled together in their bed, listening while he beat their mother for daring to question his household rulings, spending too much coin on charity or denying him access to her bed. They had watched her turn from a smiling, animated woman into a pale and cowed shadow of herself, watched her miscarry from her beatings or deliver stillborn infants. It had been no great surprise when she failed to rally from one such birth. The saving wonder had been that the monster who was her husband had been killed in a hunting accident not long afterward.

  No, Isabel wanted no husband.

  Yet to defy Braesford would avail her nothing and might anger him to the point of violence, as it did her stepbrother, who had been formed in his father’s image. Her only weapons, if she was to escape what the night had in store, were patience and her God-given wits. What manner of good they might do her, she could not guess. The pain of her broken finger was a flimsy excuse at best. More, Braesford seemed all too likely to press for how she had come by it. To admit her stubborn refusal to agree to the marriage was the cause could not endear her to him. She might claim the onset of her monthly courses but had no certainty that would deter him. A vow of celibacy would give him pause, though only long enough to reason that she would not have been sent to him had it been binding.

  No, there had to be something else, something so immediate and vital it could not be ignored. Now, she thought with conscious irony, would be a fine time for the curse of the Three Graces of Graydon to make its power felt.

  In truth, she feared nothing would stop Braesford from possessing her. So many women must have prayed for escape from these entrapments, most to no avail. It was fated that those of her station should become the pawns of kings, moved at the royal will from one man to another, and all their tears and pleas changed that not a whit. The most Isabel could do was to make herself agreeable during the feasting while watching and waiting for a miracle. And if it did not occur, she must endure whatever happened in the bed of the master of Braesford with all the dignity she could command.