“And did you sleep?”
“Of course, and you know it, since you were the one responsible.”
“Yes, I was,” Bea brazenly admitted, and without a particle of contrition. “You looked so exhausted I used a potion the apothecary taught me to make after he’d tended to Merrick.”
She grinned as if she’d just won first prize in a joust. “And you do look much more rested this morning, even if you’re grumpy. Why don’t you go to the kitchen and get something to eat? Maybe that will improve your mood. There’s porridge that should still be simmering, and some smoked ham and bread and cheese from Tregellas.” She surveyed him in a matronly sort ofway. “You’ve been working too hard and not getting enough to eat. You look far too thin.”
“My lady—” he began sternly, telling himself it didn’t matter how he looked to her.
“My lord,” she interrupted, her bright blue eyes shining. She clasped her hands together as if she was about to plead for mercy. “All I want to do is to act as your chatelaine for as long as it continues to rain, as Constance and Merrick asked me to. When it stops, I’ll meekly and mildly go back to Tregellas just as you command.” Her expression softened and turned sorrowful. “I haven’t forgotten what you said to me last night, Ranulf. I doubt I ever will. But can we not be friends for now?”
As he hesitated, wanting to agree and yet wondering how he could he possibly be friends with Bea given the feelings she aroused within him, he realized that the hall had become as quiet as a cathedral on a midsummer’s afternoon. Every single one of the servants—including Maloren—had stopped working, or doing whatever they were doing to watch them.
Bea darted a glance at them, and they immediately went back to work.
“Well, Ranulf?” she asked quietly, her voice so low, only he could hear. “Will you agree to my request, or will you order your servants to stop what they’re doing and go back to doing nothing, even though you feed and shelter them?”
How could he refuse when she put it like that? He gritted his teeth a moment, prayed for strength, then raised his voice so that all in the hall could hear. “While Lady Beatrice graces us with her presence,” he announced, “you will obey her as you would me.”
Her grateful smile seemed to reach right into his chest and grab hold of his heart. “Thank you, Ranulf.”
He didn’t know whether he wanted to shake her or embrace her. He wanted to think of some clever, cutting thing to say to her.
No, what hereallywanted to do, he realized as he turned on his heel and strode to the kitchen, was take her in his arms and kiss her until they both were breathless.
“SACRE BLEU!” the Frenchman muttered as he climbed over the slippery rocks at the entrance to the cave near the village that same morning and despite the pouring rain. “A thousand sea battles I have survived, yet now I may fall to my death on some rocks!”
He glanced up at the young Cornishman holding a smoldering pitch torch on the relatively dry ledge above. “That would be too bad for you, eh?”
Myghal frowned as he watched Pierre climb the last few feet. The Frenchman had been smuggling tin between Cornwall and France for over twenty years, and he had the look of a man who’d spent his entire life at sea: weathered skin as brown as aged oak, hair liberally sprinkled with gray, and gnarled, callused hands that looked strong enough to bend metal. He wore a leather tunic and breeches, boots and a shirt of coarse linen. His sword belt was wide and its buckle silver, like the hilt of his broadsword. He also had two daggers stuck in his belt and, Myghal didn’t doubt, at least one in his boot. He’d lost an eye from a loose rope whipped by a fierce wind and the empty socket puckered beneath a thick black eyebrow.
Pierre followed Myghal some twenty feet back into the cave to a dryer grotto. Another torch, stuck between the rocks, burned there. A hole leading upward from the grotto drew the smoke, which then dispersed through several small cracks until it appeared as no more than mist outside. That was why Myghal’sfamily had used this cave as a secret cache for their goods for generations.
“You have the tin?” Pierre asked.
Myghal nodded and moved back into the dimmer recess of the grotto. He rearranged one of a pile of rocks and brought forth twenty pounds of tin he’d purchased from several tinners who mined the moor around the village.
Pierre examined the metal in the light of the torch. “Although naturally I don’t suspect you of cheating, not after what I’ve done for you, I think there is more you owe me.”
“This is the last,” Myghal protested. “This is what we agreed.”
“For killing Gawan,oui. But things have changed now that Sir Frioc is dead.”
“Was that your doing?” Myghal asked warily, and with sickening trepidation.
“Mon Dieu, no!” Pierre cried as if appalled at the very idea. He settled himself on one of the large rocks. “I would never have killed such a valuable fellow—so content to let smugglers ply their trade, as long as they kept the peace. But this Sir Ranulf… well, if I get the chance, he may go to the devil sooner than he plans. And the devil it will be, if even half the stories I’ve heard of him are true.”
Myghal slowly sat on another rock. “What sort of stories?”
Pierre grinned. “I fear Sir Ranulf is not so genial a fellow as Sir Frioc. He’s a vicious branch from a vicious tree. They say he drowned his own brother.”
Myghal’s eyes widened with disbelief. “Who told you that?”
“It’s common knowledge among the brothels of London. That is why his father cast him out with nothing. Somehow he convinced Sir Leonard de Brissy to train him, and thus he came to be friends with the mighty lord of Tregellas. They tell other stories about him in the brothels, too. He is quite the lover, Sir Ranulf.”
Myghal frowned, finding it difficult to reconcile this notion of his overlord with the man he knew.
“You don’t believe me,mon ami?You should. I make it my business to learn about the men who oversee this coast. And now Sir Ranulf wants to find out who killed Gawan. That must be very uncomfortable for you.”
