“While I must leave and go to some man who—”
Helen put up her hand. “It was a mistake for me to try to talk to you. Go to your father, then. Let him marry you off to this man, who will probably beat you, a man who will take every penny you have and leave you without so much as the clothes on your back. Clothes! Clothes are nothing to these men. The oldest one dresses worse than the kitchen boys. When he moves, you can see holes in his filthy garments.” She heaved herself off the bed. “Hate me if you must, but I pray that you do not ruin your life merely to do what I say you should not.” She left the room.
Liana wasn’t much interested in this new man who had announced he planned to marry her. Men like him had been coming night and day for months now. For her part, she couldn’t see a great deal of difference in them. Some were old, some were young, some had brains, some did not. What they had in common was a desire for the Neville money. What they wanted was—
“Holes in his clothes?” Liana said aloud, her eyes wide. “Holes in his clothes?”
Joice came into the room, “My lady, your father—”
Liana pushed past her maid and ran down the steep spiral stairs. She had to see this man, had to see him before he saw her. At the bottom of the stairs she ran out the door and through the courtyard, past knights lounging about, past horses waiting for riders, past spitcock boys resting in the sun, and into the kitchen. The enormous open fireplaces made the rabbit warren of rooms feverishly hot, but Liana kept running. She pulled open a little door near the slophole and went up the steep stone stairs to the musicians’ gallery. She put her finger to her lips to silence the fiddle player as he started to address her.
The musicians’ gallery was a wooden balcony at one end of the Great Hall, with a waist-high wooden rail blocking the musicians from view. Liana stood in one corner of the gallery and looked down into the Hall.
It was him.
The man she’d seen yesterday, the man who had kissed her, sat at her father’s right hand, an enormous falcon on a perch between them. Sunlight streaming through the windows seemed to make the red in his hair catch fire.
Liana leaned back against the wall, her heart pounding. He wasn’t a peasant. He had said he was off to do some courting, and he’d meant her. He had come to marry her.
“My lady, are you all right?”
Liana waved the harpist away and looked back at the men below, not sure of what she’d seen. There were two men with her father, but to her eyes, she could see only one of them. The dark man seemed to dominate the hall with his sprawling way of sitting and the intensity with which he spoke and listened. Her father laughed and the blond man laughed, but her man did not.
Her man? Her eyes widened at the thought.
“What is his name?” she whispered to the harpist.
“Who, my lady?”
“The dark man,” she said impatiently. “There, that one. Below.”
“Lord Rogan,” the musician answered. “And his brother is—”
“Rogan,” she murmured, not caring about the blond man. “Rogan. It suits him.” Her head came up. “Helen,” she said, then flung open the door and started running again. Down again through the kitchens, past a dog fight the men were laying odds on, across the cobbled yard to the south tower, then up the stairs, nearly knocking over two maids who had their arms full of laundry, and into the solar. Helen sat before a t
apestry frame and barely glanced up when Liana came rushing in.
“Tell me about him,” Liana demanded, panting from her run.
Helen was still smarting from Liana’s remarks of an hour before. “I know nothing about any man. I am merely a servant in my own home.”
Liana grabbed a stool from against the wall and went to sit before Helen. “Tell me all you know about this Rogan. Is he the one who has asked for me? Reddish hair? Big, dark? Green eyes?”
Every person in the solar came to a standstill. Lady Liana had never shown the least interest in a man before.
Helen looked at her stepdaughter with concern. “Yes, he is a beautiful man, but can you not see more than his beauty?”
“Yes, yes, I know, his clothes are crawling with lice. Or they were until I—Tell me what you know of him,” Liana demanded.
Helen did not understand this young woman at all, but she’d never seen her so alive, so flushed, so pretty. A feeling of dread was spreading over her. Sensible, sane, mature Liana could not possibly fall for a man’s beauty. There had been hundreds of handsome men here in the last months and not one of them—
“Tell me!”
Helen sighed. “I don’t know a lot about them. Their family is old. It’s said their ancestors fought with King Arthur, but a few generations ago the eldest Peregrine gave the dukedom, the family seat, and the money to the family of his second wife. He had his eldest children declared illegitimate. After he was dead, the wife married a cousin of hers and the son of Peregrine became a Howard. Now the Howards own the title and the lands that once belonged to the Peregrines. That’s all I know. The king declared all the Peregrines bastards and they were left with two decaying old castles, a minor earldom, and nothing else.”
Helen leaned toward Liana. “I have seen where they live. It is hideous. The roof has fallen in places. It’s filthy beyond belief, and those Peregrines care nothing for dirt or lice or meat covered with maggots. They live for only one thing and that is to revenge themselves on the Howards. This man Rogan doesn’t want a wife. He wants the Neville money so he can wage war on the Howards.”
Helen took a breath. “The Peregrines are horrible men. They care only for war and death. When I was a child there were six sons, but four of them have been killed. Maybe only these two are left, or perhaps the men breed sons like rabbits.”