Keeping to the shadows, she entered the small room with a feeling of relief that the evening was over, that she had escaped Peter’s personal leave-taking and that the act she had kept up all evening could now be dropped. The banqueting-house floor was still littered with crumbs in the light of a single candle that the servants had left burning, and a heap of wooden roundels, painted side uppermost, lay discarded on the table, their rhymes sung and forgotten. Holding them towards the candle flame, she went through the stack one by one until she found the one she wanted, peering to make out the words and touching them with the tips of her fingers.
‘And so my love protesting came,’ she whispered, reading as she turned it.
‘But yet I made her mine,’ came the reply from the doorway.
She half-leapt in fright, clutching the plate to her bodice and whirling to face him, angered by the intrusion. ‘I came here…’ she began, ready to resume the act. But the lines had already faded from memory, and she could only glare, defensively.
‘I know why you came here.’ Sir Nicholas closed the door quietly behind him. ‘You came here to escape Master Fowler’s attentions, in the first place. Isn’t that so? Poor Adorna. Saddling yourself all evening with him to keep yourself out of my way. Was it worth it, then?’
‘It worked well enough until now, sir!’ she snapped.
‘Tch, tch!’ He shook his handsome head, smiling with his eyes. His hair and the deep blue of his clothes blended into the shadowy room, but could not conceal the width of his shoulders or the deep swell of his chest. Though he made no move towards her, Adorna found his presence disconcerting after a whole evening of trying to avoid him. He held out a hand for the plate. ‘May I?’ he said.
Evading his eyes, she placed it back on the pile. ‘A silly jingle,’ she said. ‘Quite meaningless. I must not be seen with you here alone, Sir Nicholas. We have nothing to say to each other, and my father will—’
Before she could say what her father would do, he had stepped forward a pace and nipped the candle flame with his fingers, plunging the room into darkness except for the lambent glow from a rising moon. At the same time, Adorna’s neat sidesteps towards the door was anticipated by the intimidating bulk of his body. ‘Then we must make sure,’ he said, ‘that we are not seen here alone, mistress. But I cannot agree that we have nothing to say to each other when you said so little to me earlier in the evening. Do you not recall the moments when you could have spoken but chose not to? Shall we reconstruct the dance to ease the flow of conversation?’ In the darkness, he held out his hand.
She had noticed his graceful dancing, but this was a game she did not intend to play, nor was she by any means ready to fall into his flirtatious trap, as she was sure many others had done. Far from queueing up for his attentions, she wanted nothing to do with him, especially after what she had heard that evening. It was time someone taught him a lesson.
Taking up the act where she had left off, she let out an exaggerated sigh and turned away from him to stare out of the same window where, two nights ago, she had watched him kiss a woman in the friary paradise. ‘Sir Nicholas, I have had a busy day and I have little inclination to wake all Richmond with my screams. But I am prepared to do so if it’s the only way to get out of here. Now, please will you go and make your courtesies to my parents and leave me in peace? Others may find your ways diverting, but I don’t.’
In one step, he came to stand close behind her with his knees enveloped in her wide bell-shaped skirts. ‘For one so unmoved by my diverting ways, mistress, you send out some strangely contradicting signals,’ he said, his voice suddenly devoid of his former playfulness. ‘You came in here to seek my—’
‘I did not come in here to seek anything!’ she snarled at him over her shoulder. ‘The poem was one that caught my eye.’
‘I see.’ He allowed the explanation to go unchallenged. ‘So perhaps you came here to remind yourself of something you saw out there. Eh?’
‘I saw noth—’ She bit her words off, remembering that he had seen her. She started again. ‘What I caught the merest glimpse of, Sir Nicholas, in no way concerned me. If you choose to tell my father that you have no lady, that’s entirely your own affair. I care not if you have a different lady for each day of the week. All I ask is that you don’t ever consider me to be one of them.’
‘You may be a marginally better actor than your brothers, Adorna, but I still say that your signals are in a tangle. Shall I tell you why?’
Again, she made a move towards the door, but her skirts hampered her and this time his arm came across her to form a solid barrier. She willed herself to maintain an indifference that had nothing to do with the facts, to make her voice obey her head instead of her heart. It was not easy.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t. If you find my signals conflicting, then you are obviously not reading them correctly, sir. Master Fowler finds them easy enough to understand, and so do other men. When I keep out of their way it means that I do not want their company. Now, what part of that message do you not understand? Shall I put it in French for you? Or Latin?’
Even in the darkness, she could feel the changes that crossed his face, his silence verifying that she had scored at last, checked his cocksureness. For once, he was nonplussed. But it did not last long. ‘You mean it, don’t you?’ he whispered. ‘Do you flee from all men on sight, just for the fun of the ride?’
His temporary unsureness gave her courage. ‘What I do with all men is none of your business, Sir Nicholas. But one thing I will tell you is that any man who compares me to a horse, however delicately, may as well take himself off to the other side of the Christendom. And if you’ve finally understood that I mean what I say, then I shall sleep better at nights. Now, return to your long line of amours, sir. They’ll be awaiting you.’
‘When I’m ready. I find it interesting that you feel able to indulge in equine double-talk when you are looking down at the top of my bonnet, but it’s a different matter when your feet are level with mine, isn’t it? Now, that can mean only one thing.’
His arm still held her back against the wall, but his closeness spelt a dangerous determination, and her act of indifference began to falter as his warmth reached her face and the bare skin below her ruff. She gulped, moistening her mouth.
‘You are obviously about to tell me,’ she whispered, ‘though you must have performed this jaded ritual so many times before.’ She turned her head to one side. ‘Tell me, if you must, and then allow me to go in. I’m getting chilled here.’
It was a blunder she could hardly have bettered, but in one way it prepared her as nothing else would for what he might do. Although there was a part of her that wanted him with a desperate longing, she had never anticipated yielding to a man in the middle of an argument about the exact meaning of her signals. If she herself didn’t know what they meant for certain, how could he, for all his experience? No, this was not the way she wanted to be wooed, not like his other easy conquests; small talk, gropings in the dark, a kiss and a fall like ripened fruit into his lap. She was not like the others.
Before he could take hold of her, she had knocked his hands sideways and rammed one elbow into his doublet, swinging herself away into the darkened room to find the table as a barrier. Caught by the side of her hand, the pile of wooden roundels clattered onto the floor, halting her long enough for Sir Nicholas to reach her again with a soft laugh and an infuriating gentling tone that she was sure he used on restive horses. ‘Steady…steady, my beauty. You’re new to this, aren’t you, eh? I knew it. Scared as a new fill—’
Her hand found its target with a terrifying crack on the side of his head that shocked Adorna far more than him. Never in her life had she done such a thing before, nor had she ever needed to. The success of her assault, however, gave her no real advantage except to reinforce her anger and fear, which Sir Nicholas was already aware of. Even in the dark, he was