A Knight's Pledge, page 19
Should he woo her now? Were they to couple?
Ridiculous.
He was no starry-eyed virgin. Yes, he and Effie had shared a night of phenomenal physical release, but he didn’t know if it would have any outcome whatsoever on their official relationship.
Regardless, he must make his way below. The band needed to be on the road as early as possible in order to reach the White Swan that evening, and Lucan was starving. He would take his cue from Effie Annesley and behave accordingly. Likely, it was no matter to her. A bit of sport. A release of pent-up passion as a result of the tumultuous few weeks she’d experienced and the strain she was under.
But Lucan’s heart beat faster once more at the idea of seeing her.
Lucan gave another sigh and stood up. There was no use delaying it—he’d faced worse in his life. He turned, reached to the bedpost for the strap of his satchel and froze.
He stepped quickly and looked to the other post—nothing. A frantic glance at the headboard revealed no worn bag, heavy with the square outline of the portfolio inside.
Blasted Effie Annesley.
Anger flared for a moment and Lucan struggled to remain calm. She’d taken it when she’d left his room. For what reason, he knew not, but there was no other explanation.
She was so drunk, she didn’t even know into whose bed she’d crawled, he chastised himself. So drunk that she stayed with you all the night.
He shook his pounding head free of those troublesome ideas. Effie had the bag. Lucan just didn’t know why she’d taken it.
He threw open the door and skimmed down the treacherous steps.
Thief.
Manipulative, thieving woman.
The door at the bottom of the stair was closed, and he flung it open, sending it crashing into the wall behind. All eyes in the common room raised to him upon his entrance—the whole of the party, breaking their fasts in morning silence at the trestles.
Only Effie Annesley kept her eyes on her bowl. Lucan’s heart stuttered at the sight of her despite his fury. She looked like a figure from a da Panicale painting, the light finding the side of her face and giving it a glow like polished ivory. Her hair was plaited and knotted at her nape, and Lucan knew it was because she had been unable to locate her leather tie—which he still hid in his gripped fist.
The toadish, aproned matron of the inn tossed him a glare. “Mind the door! What is it with you lot?”
“Good morrow to you, Sir Lucan,” Thomas Annesley called out. “Plenty of porridge left.”
Lucan strode across the floor and stepped over the bench to the empty spot at the trestle at Thomas’s side, directly across from Effie. He sat. Still, she did not raise her face.
But Winnie, seated to the right of her did. She stared directly at Lucan with a serene if serious expression.
Kit Katey was on Effie’s left, and she gave Lucan a small smile before lowering her eyes to her breakfast once more.
A steaming bowl of gray mush was set before him, but Lucan ignored it, keeping his gaze pinned on the blonde across from him, even as he picked up his spoon.
Lucan looked at the slight frame of Effie Annesley—no strap crossed her chest. Everyone else at in the hall had their personal possession near them at table.
She finally glanced up. “What?”
“The satchel?” Lucan quietly suggested.
Effie blinked. “What about it?” She didn’t seem at all bothered by his distress.
“You have it?”
She frowned. “No? Why would I have it?”
“You didn’t take it?”
“What do you mean? Why one earth would I”—she broke off. “Where’s the bag, Lucan?”
“Something amiss, Sir Lucan?” Gorman called out from down the table.
Lucan’s heart creaked to a halt, his blood continuing to rush in his ears. “It was gone from my room when I woke.”
In a flash Effie was up from her seat and had the old matron gripped from behind, her tray crashing to the floor, a knife pressing against the largest of the woman’s bloated chins. “Where is the bag?”
“What bag, mistress?”
“Don’t trifle with me,” Effie warned. “I will cut your throat in an instant. The bag that was in that man’s room last night. Just tell me where it is, and I shall let you go. We can forget it ever happened.”
“I don’t know anything about a bag!” the old woman sobbed and shook. “I never went in the chamber after setting the brazier—I swear!”
“Your servant, then,” Effie hissed.
“Nay, mistress! Nay!” The woman squealed. “Were only me last night. I sent the rest home to save the wages!”
Thomas got up from the table and strode to where his daughter held the woman captive, reaching out to gently take hold of Effie’s wrist and pull the blade from her hand.
“Easy, lass,” he said. “Let her go—she speaks true. She followed us out of the common room last night and made her pallet in the kitchen.”
The old woman spun out of Effie’s embrace as soon as she could and rushed from the common room with a hitching sob, leaving the mess of the tray on the floor.
If Effie’s skin had looked like polished ivory before, now it had lost all semblance of living color, like the frigid snow that had covered the land, blinding, blue-white, cold. Even her lips were drained of warm hue.
Lucan looked around at those gathered to either side of the trestle. “Did any of you see…?”
“No,” Gorman answered right away. “Winnie went up before her, but Effie retired when the rest of us did. The innskeep locked the door behind us.”
“Besides,” James Rose scoffed, “why would any of us care to take charge of the damned thing in such secret? We’ve no need of it.”
Some members of the band were murmuring to each other, but Lucan noticed that Winnie herself had again fixed him with a solemn stare.
She knows, Lucan realized. She knows Effie spent the night with me.
Effie was still standing over the mess in the floor, her father’s arm laid across her shoulders. “Are you certain you had it with you in the chamber last night?”
Lucan glared at her. “Of course, I’m sure—that satchel is priceless. I hung it on the post before I went to bed, and when I woke, it was gone.”
“The front door was open.” Chumley spoke from the end of the table, where he cradled a mug of warmed wine in his hands—he didn’t look up from the contents of his cup. All eyes turned to him, including Lucan’s. “I thought it was the innskeep sweeping the dooryard or fetching wood or some such bollocks and she’d not pushed it to afterward. But when she came through from the kitchen with the tray, she gave me a nasty look before walking over and slamming it shut. She’d thought it was me, I suppose.”
“It could have been anyone, then,” Bob offered glumly. “Gone before we woke, to who knows where.”
In Lucan’s peripheral vision, Gilboe crossed himself.
“Come,” Thomas was saying gently to Effie as he led her back to her spot at the table. “Let’s just think about this a moment. Nae need to get all a-fluster.”
“There is a need, Tommy,” Effie insisted loudly. “That satchel is the only thing saving you from the gallows. The only thing!” She placed her forehead in her hands. “Without it, you daren’t return to London.”
“Well, now,” Thomas began, easing back down into his own seat.
“She’s right,” Lucan said, needing to squeeze the words through his constricted throat. All Iris’s work, the risk she’d taken with her very life… gone. All gone, while under Lucan’s protection. “Going back now guarantees your death.”
Gorman shot to his feet. “Are you suggesting we simply abandon George?”
Thomas looked up at Gorman. “Nae one is suggesting any such thing.”
“You’ll get your son back,” Lucan said. “I swear it.”
“You shouldn’t promise such things,” Effie said in a low voice across from Lucan, her head still in her hands. “You have no power to sway Henry—it’s Caris Hargrave’s, Vivienne Paget’s, word against yours. And mine.” She raked her fingers back through her hair as she looked up at him. “Me, you, Tommy—all three of us are damned.”
“How could you not know someone crept into your chamber last night?” James demanded. “No one can so much as shit without your nose up his backside.”
Lucan tried to stay calm, but he felt his ears heat. “I don’t know,” he said hesitantly. Winnie hadn’t taken her eyes from him the entirety of the time, and Lucan’s skin was crawling. “I noticed the bolt on my door was missing the sleeve, but…I don’t know,” he repeated. “I was…”
“Drunk?” Chumley offered mildly.
“Yes,” Lucan murmured.
“Oh-ho!” James Rose barked. “It seems the saintly knight of the realm has executed a…how do you say?... faux pas!”
Dana frowned disapprovingly. “Stop. That is unnecessary, James. I’m quite certain Sir Lucan feels badly enough about losing the only evidence that could exonerate Thomas and free little George.”
“I didn’t lose it,” Lucan insisted. “It was stolen.”
“Iris warned us not to travel with it,” Effie whispered. Her eyes were on the tabletop, but she seemed to be looking through it.
Lucan scrubbed his hands over his face with a growl of frustration. “We can’t leave now.”
“What, you’re hoping whoever stole it will bring it back?” Gorman scoffed. “There’s nothing of value in it to anyone else. Any common thief would realize at once that it was only paper and toss it in the river or burn it.”
“No,” Lucan insisted. “It wasn’t a common thief. It couldn’t have been. Nothing else in my chamber was touched—my sword, my boots, my own bag. Easy plunder.” He broke off as the answer occurred to him. “We’ve been followed. This whole time.”
“No, we haven’t,” James Rose said with a roll of his eyes.
“We have,” Lucan stood up, unable to sit still with the realization. “I saw him on the Tower Road—I thought he was a villager or the sheriff late returning. But then I saw him set out before us the next day. He rode a sumpter, with a black tail.”
“A man in a deep hood,” Effie said. “With a pack across the back of his saddle. His sleeves were fur.”
Lucan’s gaze went to her, his blood chilling at the confirmation. “Yes.”
She looked across the room at him. “He was following us on the road yesterday. I saw him after our row, although he dropped back when I turned to watch him. It could have been the same man we encountered at the inn.”
“God damn it!” Gorman shouted, and he too stood up to stomp about the room.
Gilboe winced and crossed himself.
“That’s it, then,” Thomas said quietly. “He’ll have destroyed the packet for Caris Hargrave.”
“No,” Lucan mused, his mind racing. “No, I don’t think so, Thomas.”
“Neither do I,” Effie added. Everyone turned to her. “If he indeed was hired to steal the information, Caris wouldn’t trust him to dispose of it. She’d want it in her hands, first.”
“Yes,” Lucan said, low and emphatically. “She would want to see the charges that could be leveled against her, even in unsupported testimony, and come up with explanations for them all.”
“Then she will destroy the evidence,” Effie added.
Lucan nodded. Clever Effie Annesley. “I concur. Absolutely.”
“So, what you’re saying.” Bob leaned his elbows on the tabletop and held his palms apart, as if showcasing the ideas he was speaking aloud. “Some bloke hired by Caris has stolen the satchel to take it all the way back to London, where it’s actually the most dangerous to her? She’s mad to snoop through it all and then burn it or what have you?”
“Of course, we can’t really know until we return. But it’s precisely what she would do,” Effie said. “It’s why she was mad to know if I was truly dead. She wasn’t grieving for me all those years with her ridiculous farce of mourning, she wanted to be certain I would never talk about the things I knew. She’s not afraid of being caught. She never has been. She’s always been able to create some wild explanation that can’t be disproved. It’s as if she has a charm upon her.”
“What if you’re wrong?” Gorman interjected quietly. His question was spoken to the group, in a hypothetical tone, but Lucan noticed that he was looking directly at Lucan.
“I don’t accept that,” Lucan said with a shrug. “I’m not wrong.”
Dana spoke up meekly then. “But what if you are?”
“This is bollocks.” James Rose propped his boot heels up on the tabletop and leaned his shoulders back against the wall behind him. “What’s done is done. I say we leave Tommy at the Swan safely over the border and make a plan to rescue George. To hell with the rest of it. Let them all devour each other.”
“We’d never be able to breach Westminster unnoticed,” Lucan muttered crossly.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” James gushed. “I should have been more clear; by we, I didn’t mean you.”
“Henry will never let us be, James,” Chumley argued. “He’d burn all the forest down to find us. The Warren would never again be safe.”
James shrugged. “So we move.”
“Move?” Gilboe’s nonexistent eyebrows rose.
“Why not?” Bob asked. “I think James’s plan is a good one. There’s plenty of work to be done near the Swan. More friends. More resources.”
“But it’s not our home,” Effie argued.
Kit Katey said the first words she’d spoken that morning, in her quiet, musical voice. “You mean it is not Northumberland.”
Silence filled the common room until Winnie rapped on the tabletop with her knuckles and then moved her hands in a swift stream of signs, pointing to Effie, then to Lucan in the midst of the silent monologue. Everyone then turned their gazed to Lucan. His stomach fell into his boots.
“What did she say?”
Effie met his gaze. “She asked what would happen to you if we rescued George and then escaped.”
“Who cares?” James muttered under his breath.
“I care,” Dana objected with a frown.
Lucan looked around at the band watching him. “Well, I’d lose my position and rank, obviously. I could never step foot in London again. My family lands would be forfeit.” He paused. “I suppose I would return to France.” He rallied his ire. “James’s plan still doesn’t account for Effie’s brothers—Thomas’s sons. Tavish and Lachlan would likely be returned to Scotland, although reluctantly, I’m sure. But Padraig…”
“Padraig,” Thomas echoed quietly, and Lucan could hear the fondness in the very name. “Padraig would have naught.”
“Nor Iris,” Lucan reminded them all.
“And Caris Hargrave would win,” Effie said darkly.
The room was silent again for a moment.
“We go back to London,” Thomas said, breaking the heavy silence. “We stick with the original plan. I surrender to the king. We try to find the satchel before the trial. If we canna,” he paused and then looked around at all gathered. “You take George and run like the devil.”
“Tommy,” Effie whispered. “Henry will hang you.”
But Thomas was looking directly at Lucan now. “If I canna get close enough to her before I’m done in, you kill Caris Hargrave, d’ye hear?” Thomas’s gaze never left Lucan’s face. “You make sure that bitch is dead. I’ve spent me whole life running from Hargraves. Being frightened of me own shadow. I’m done runnin’. I trust in God that he will at the last hour preserve me, and if He do nae?” Tommy gave a half shrug and a shake of his head. “I’m done runnin’.”
“Thomas,” Lucan began.
“Nay. I’ll nae be swayed. And I’ll have nae more talk of it.” He stood and picked up his pack. “Let’s go chase a hooded man.”
Effie was stone still for a moment, staring at her father, and in that pose, Lucan could see Thomas’s profile in his daughter’s jawline. Her eyes were glossy with unshed tears.
Effie stood from the bench. “Mount up.”
Gorman clapped his hands once loudly. “You heard him—let’s go chase a hooded man!”
The common room expanded with shuffling sounds then. All the members of the band left a coin on the trestle for the poor innskeep before walking out the front door. Lucan leaned over to place his coin and saw that James Rose was now staring at him, with the same intensity as Winnie had done. The young man said nothing though, merely shrugged his pack higher on his shoulder and preceded Lucan into the overcast morning.
And Lucan realized Tommy was no longer the only member of the band with a price on his head.
Chapter 18
Effie kept as much space as was reasonably possible between herself and Lucan Montague without attracting undue attention. Sitting at her bowl of porridge earlier that morning, waiting with bated breath for him to appear, her stomach had been in knots. Her worst fear was that he would make a scene about the night they’d spent together.
Or that he would act no differently at all.
How foolish, how shallow she had been, to think of either of those things as the worst that could happen.
She could see him now, riding vanguard next to her father, as Effie rode at Winnie’s side behind the group of women they would leave at the Swan. Lucan looked no different from any other time she’d watched him from the saddle, and yet she knew now what lay beneath that fine, black, quilted gambeson. She knew that the thickness of his thighs were so much more than revealed by the trousers he wore. She knew the intimate curve of his buttocks behind his hips, the carved muscles in his chest, the way his neck tasted beneath his hair. She knew the very length and power of him.
