“First thing in the morning, my lady, upon my word. Would you care to stay here at the king’s residence, to ease your travel back in the morn? No? You needn’t be startled, my lady; ’twas but a question. Well, then, in the morning.”
He moved away through the crowd like a ship cutting through water. Gwyn’s head spun. Shivers spidered across her skin, a web of tingling terror. This was not possible. St. Jude, this could not be happening.
Marcus’s voice murmured by her ear, “You know, Gwyn, the king thinks your loyalty will hold me to his cause as well. Who knows but that it will? With such beauty to come home to”—he picked up a strand of her hair in his fingers—“mayhap I could find some measure of loyalty in my heart.”
She stomped her heel on his boot and fled.
Only after he’d searched the crowd for her, after he’d poked his nose into every crevice and cranny for the green-eyed beauty, only then was Marcus fitzMiles forced to admit she had left. The little fool.
She thought to be rid of him so easily? Not with an earldom at stake. And more to the point, not with an estate once worth some two thousand marks annually clasped between those shapely thighs. Nay, be she a trull with eyebrows that met in the middle, the Countess d’Everoot would be worth the agony.
When Ionnes de l’Ami had died a fortnight back, a fact Marcus knew simply by virtue of being there when it happened, he swooped in immediately, deciding the raven-haired birdling in the Nest had simply become far too tempting.
And, to his surprise, found he had to bide his time. Lady Guinevere’s wings may have been inexperienced but they’d never been clipped, and what she lacked in leadership, she made up for in her capacity to earn loyalty. Her knights were like attack dogs. Marcus found he had to cluck and pet them when what he wished to do was kick them from here to the Cinque Ports.
So he waited, standing at her side when her father was laid in the crypt, offered condolences which made her frown, extended administrative counsels which she shunned with an airy disdain—and which he tolerated with a smiling good grace that made his jaw ache—and waited. Biding his time.
But the waiting was over. De l’Ami was dead, d’Endshire soldiers were at her gates, and King Stephen was in disarray, unable to offer more than feeble resistance to the takeover, if indeed he offered any at all. The king had not agreed to his petition to wed Guinevere, fool that he was, but if the countess believed it, so much the better. It would be easier to convince her.
But easy or not, Guinevere would be his wife. The Everoot empire had some of the deepest roots in all England, tendrils that spread in a series of manors and forest rights from Scotland to the Irish Sea. And the Nest in Northumbria was the heart of the wold.
And in that beating heart lay a treasure far too spectacular to be imagined.
He scanned the crowd one last time. She was indeed gone.
He wanted to spit on the fragrant rushes in fury. Shouldering through the crowd, he found one of his men outside the huge wooden doors. “Find the Countess Everoot; she’ll be at her home on Westcheap. Keep her there until I arrive.”
The knight turned to go, but Marcus clasped his shoulder and spun him back around.
“And send for the priest,” he hissed.
Chapter Two
Twenty minutes later, d’Endshire kicked open the door to the Westcheap apartment. Throwing off his cape, he stood momentarily in the flame of torchlight, then looked to the grim-faced knight who stood beside the door.
“She’s gone, de Louth?” he asked.
The place was in shambles, as if a storm had moved through. Shelves were cleared of their contents, swept in wild disarray over the floor. Clothes were scattered over the rushes and benches and a toppled trestle table was upended in the shadows. Tapestries that once hung on the wall lay slashed to ribbons on the floor. But there was no woman.
De Louth nodded grimly. “She left everything behind.” By way of illustration, he picked up the end of a gossamer length of yellow silk trailing down the stairs. The delicate fabric caught on his calloused hand as he held it out for inspection. Marcus barely glanced at it.
“Gone when we arrived, my lord. No woman, no servants, no guards—”
“And no chests, I’ll venture?”
“Chests?”
“Coffers. Chests. Small wooden boxes.”
The reply was indeed dry, but not as dry as de Louth’s mouth became. He shook his head.
“She made a speedy exit but I didn’t see where she left any small chests behind, other than the one at the foot of her bed. And we went through that. See for yourself.” Marcus pushed by and took the stairs two at a time.
The room was in greater shambles than the downstairs. Dresses and tunics were thrown about in long, twisting heaps of colour. A candle had been knocked over and hastily extinguished, its thick tallow congealing in a warm puddle on the floor. Marcus’s gaze swept to the chest. The padlock was wrenched in hideous twists of iron, the chest’s curved lid flung open.
He crouched on his heels, fingering the twisted iron latch.
“Nothing?” he asked, his tone alarmingly soft. “You found nothing?”
De Louth swallowed. “This.” He extended a small silver key, hung on a rusting linked chain. Marcus unbent his knees. “I found it on the floor, my lord. Looks like it fell when she fled.”
“Christ on the Cross,” Marcus murmured, almost reverently. “One of the puzzle keys.” He pulled the chain from de Louth’s palm, his eyes locked on the steel key, his voice soft and almost crooning. “I recall seeing this, years ago. There are three, you know.” He slid the long silver chain between his fingers, smiling faintly.
“No, my lord. I didn’t know.”
Marcus’s eyes snapped up. “Find her. Tonight. Now.”
“My lord.” De Louth choked out the words and left the room. The gossamer veil he’d held in his hand fluttered to the floor, a tawny splash of colour against the dull wood. Marcus barely spared it a glance as he trod behind his man, crushing it under his boot.
Gwyn dug her spurs hard into the horse. “I am sorry,” she muttered, and then did it again.
Steam rolled from the stallion’s flared nostrils as he snorted in anger and half rose on his hind legs, his monstrous hooves pawing at the air before dropping back to the earth. Great clods of damp earth flew into the air as he leapt forward in a ground-eating gallop.
Gwyn rolled wildly around on the saddle, jamming her pelvis into the pommel before righting herself again. Biting her lip to clamp down on a screech, she bent low over the horse’s withers and guided him with a deft but trembling hand.
Sunset had come and gone, evening had turned into night, and she was barely two miles from London and the danger it held.
When she had arrived back at the apartments on Westcheap, no one had been present, not even Eduard and Hugh, the two young knights left behind to guard Gwyn when the others were sent north to relieve the siege. The house had been eerily quiet. She’d flown through the dark rooms, skidding on her knees to a stop in front of the huge oak chest at the base of her bed.
Gowns and smallclothes and bolts of bright fabric flew into the air as she searched frantically for one of the “promises,” the small, simple but exquisitely-wrought chest her father had bequeathed to her on his deathbed. The padlocked, curved chest held letters of love her father had written to her mother when on Crusade.
She was not leaving it behind.
She almost screamed in frustration as she flung another handful of underlinens over her head. Through the window floated the sound of booted feet.
“Please