Anne shook her head and looked back at her needlework. ‘She wishes it to be done quickly.’
‘No pomp? No circumstance?’ No huge celebration of all his work? ‘She is of royal blood and marrying the future King. There has been no such wedding since...’ When? Before he was born.
She looked at him sharply. ‘Appropriate to their station, yes, but she is wedding the man she wants.’
‘She wants?’ A much more urgent and earthy word than loves or even needs. One that conveyed a stiff staff and a welcoming hole. One uncomfortably like what he was feeling for the woman before him. ‘I persuaded the Pope to bend the laws of God for what she wants?’
Words he should not have said. Her wide eyes told him so.
‘You were sent,’ she said, as if teaching a child, ‘because you could accomplish the task. You should feel humbly grateful for the trust placed in you.’
‘Grateful?’ No, that was not what he felt. Instead, it was that most serious of the seven deadly sins: pride. ‘I only hope it is worth the cost.’
‘To you?’
A sharp tongue, this one. Sharp enough to puncture his moment of desire for her. Despite her lectures, she seemed no more humbly grateful than he.
He cleared his throat and collected his wits. ‘To me it is, yes.’ Well worth it. Now, he would be free. ‘I meant worth the cost to them.’ The cost of the chapels alone was more than Nicholas would see in his lifetime.
Her needle paused, for the first time, and she gazed beyond him, as if he had disappeared. ‘To be able to look at someone that way...?’
‘As if they cannot wait until darkness?’ His words were more than reckless, but, in just weeks, he would no longer be the Prince’s thrall.
She shook her head. ‘It is more than lust.’
That, he could not argue. It was madness. ‘The Prince is...’ Every word he tried sounded like an insult. The Prince acted like a man bewitched. His own father had looked so, when he married his second wife. Bewitched and blind to the truth of her.
Anne gazed up at him, as if she understood the meaning he could not find words for. ‘Blissful. He is blissful. She is the same.’
He shook his head. Bliss would not last. His father’s had not. ‘I have never seen him so before. But then, he has never been wed.’
Now she looked at him, her eyes—what colour would he name them?—unwavering on his. ‘And she has? Is that your meaning?’
As if she knew thoughts he easily hid from others.
Did the woman speak so bluntly to the Countess? If so, she would not be a comfortable companion. ‘Have you recently come to her service?’ If so, perhaps she would not be there long.
‘No. I have been with her for a long time.’
Perhaps through all the marriages, official and otherwise. Perhaps she could save him a trip to Canterbury. ‘Were you there when she and Thomas Holland wed?’
She pricked her finger and popped it in her mouth. His gaze lingered on her lips longer than it should have. He was thinking of wants, of needs...
‘You are right,’ she said, finally, glancing down at the Prince’s badge, fallen again to the earth. ‘I seem to be ever dropping things at your feet. Could you hand it to me again?’
For a moment, he could not look away from her lips. Thin, yes, but finely drawn, an apology from the Creator for what he had done to her leg.
Nicholas forced his eyes away and picked up the needlework again, glad of the excuse to break his gaze, struggling to remember his thoughts.
‘Are you a juggler, Sir Nicholas?’
He thought she had not noticed. ‘Only to amuse myself.’ He remembered now, as he returned her stitchery to her, his question. Had she wanted him to forget? ‘Her marriage to Holland. Were you there?’
‘Yes, of course. It was a quiet affair.’
‘I meant the first time.’
She looked away. ‘The first time? Her marriage to Salisbury, you mean?’
‘No. Her first marriage to Holland. The secret one.’
She pursed the thin lips. ‘I was but four. They did not have a babbling babe present.’
He thought of her at four and smiled.
She did not. ‘Now, as you have reminded me, I have duties to perform in the here and now.’ She put the needlework in a pouch and reached for her walking stick.
‘Let me...’ He reached to help her, still not knowing why, again resenting her for his discomfort.
She turned a frigid gaze on him. ‘I have lived twenty-five years without your help. I do not need it now.’
He gritted his teeth to hold back sharp words. ‘Then I shall not offer it again.’
He watched her hobble away, anger mixing with guilt for thinking ill of her when he should be filled with pity.
Yet pity was the last thing he felt. She wore her limp as proudly as a knight might wore his scars earned by prowess in war.
No, he was feeling something else even more surprising.
Want.
He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. He had been too long without a woman. On his trip to Canterbury, he’d make a detour to Grape Lane and find a woman with fair hair and lush lips and blue eyes who did not hurl prickly insults at him.
Strange, he puzzled again, watching her stumble back to the lodge, for Lady Joan to keep such a woman with her, and not only because of her tart tongue. Typically, such persons were shunned, or discreetly kept out of sight. This woman, on the other hand, was ever close to her lady. And while she could not agilely leap to perform tasks, she seemed to be in charge of others who did.
Well, he was not here to wonder about a lady-in-waiting. He was here to make sure the Prince could wed his lady love.
After that, he’d be gone.
* * *
‘Come, Anne,’ Lady Joan said, patting the bench beside her as Anne returned to her chambers. ‘Where have you been? We must speak of all that is to be done before the wedding.’
Anne hobbled over to the bench and sank onto it, more tired than usual. Her first thought was to tell her lady that Nicholas had asked dangerous questions.
Her second thought was to keep that secret to herself.
But her lady, speaking of the wedding, did not question further, so Anne pulled out her needle and thread and settled in to listen.
Her lady demanded all her attention and more. She was as jumpy as a cat, Anne thought, prowling the chamber, speaking of one idea, then another, her fabled calm shattered.
Lady Joan was unaccustomed to being without a man. When Thomas Holland had been gone to war, well, that was one thing. But he died late in December, in Normandy, she by his side. It had been a blur, those next weeks. Packing, moving back across the Channel. Anne had expected peace and mourning when they returned.
But her lady was not a woman who could live for long without a husband. How many weeks had it been after they returned before she was looking for her next companion? Barely enough to mourn the man. And Joan was not only the most beautiful woman in England, she was also the most wealthy. She had her pick of men, clustered, pleading their cases.
But she had waited for the best catch of them all. And a man she had known in the nursery.
Anne