Anne gave him a cool look. She had dark hair, mostly hidden under her headdress, dark brows, and dark eyes that could burn a man when she chose to do so. "You ask me to endanger a man who will be a guest at my father's house?" She rose, glaring at him. "I had thought better of you than this."
He caught her before she'd gone two steps. "I said I meant to help them, and I am telling the truth." He said no more, just looked at her, praying she would believe him.
"Why?" she asked. "Why do you wish to help filthy beasts like these Peregrines? Isn't it true that they believe all your lands to be theirs? You wish me to believe you would help men who would make you a pauper?"
"It is difficult to believe, but it is true. I do not even know these brothers. I've seen them only from a distance, but I have no hatred for them as my brother does. I merely wish to…" He couldn't tell her more and couldn't think of an excuse for why he wanted to help the Peregrines without telling her of Zared.
"There is a woman involved," Anne said.
Tearle blinked. Clever brat, he thought. "A woman? How could a woman be involved? There are two brothers coming—an older one to compete and a younger one to be his squire. Can I not do something out of my love of mankind? My brother hates these Peregrines, and I am sick of the talk of hatred. Could I not merely wish for the end of this hatred? Perhaps I wish only to make peace between our families."
"What is her name?"
Tearle narrowed his eyes at her. "I recant my marriage proposal. I have known you since your birth, yet you doubt my good intentions. You dishonor me and my family."
Anne smiled at him in a knowing way. "Are you in love with her as much as you loved that young count's wife?"
"That was something altogether different. She was a woman married to a boy. And I told you, this has nothing to do with a woman." Tearle vowed to go to confession as soon as possible. "I am hurt that you think so little of my character."
"All right," Anne said. "You win. I will keep your secret, but I swear to you that I will find out why you wish to dupe this poor stupid Peregrine man."
Tearle didn't answer her because he had no answer to make. He had no idea why he was interested in a girl who dressed as a boy, a girl who was the daughter of a house that had been at war with his family for generations. Her brothers had killed his brothers. By rights he should hate the girl, should have been glad his brother's men had captured her.
But he hadn't been glad, and later, when she'd tried to dress his wound, he'd wanted her to remain with him.
He looked back at Anne and smiled. Perhaps it was merely that the Peregrine girl was a novelty. He'd had many beautifully dressed women, so perhaps it would be different to bed a woman who might fight him for his clothes in the morning.
"There is nothing to find out," Tearle said, looking innocent. "I but want to help some poor, misunderstood people."
Anne gave an unladylike snort. "You may keep your secrets, but keep those Peregrines from me. I do not wish to be the fool Lady Liana was. Now leave here before someone sees you and tells my father."
Tearle gave a nervous glance toward Hugh Marshall's big house. "Thank you," he said, quickly kissing her hand and bounding over the garden wall out of sight.
Anne sat on the bench after Tearle had left and smiled. It was so good to see a person who could laugh, a person who could take life less than seriously, people such as she had known in France. Anne's mother had taken her daughters home to France when Anne was only five years old and her sister Catherine six, and Anne and her sister had grown up with their mother's family. They'd been surrounded by laughter and learning and beauty. Their mother's family's household had been a place where they'd felt free to say whatever they wanted, where they were encouraged to use their wit and intelligence. They were praised for their beauty, their skill at cards, their talents on a horse or when they read aloud. It was almost as though they could do no wrong.
Looking back, Anne knew she had not been appreciative enough of those wonderful years of freedom and happiness. They seemed so long ago and far away.
When Catherine was seventeen and Anne sixteen Hugh Marshall had demanded that his wife bring his daughters back to England, saying it was time to get them husbands. Since neither Anne nor her sister could remember their father, they felt no fear. Instead they looked at their journey with anticipation, and they whispered excitedly about the idea of husbands.
But Hugh Marshall's demand had sent their mother into a decline. Overnight her face had lost its sparkle, her hair its sheen. At first the girls were too caught up in their own excitement to notice their beloved mother's misery, but by the time they boarded the ship for England they saw that their mother was wraithlike in her thinness, and her face had no color in it.
It didn't take two weeks at their father's house to learn the cause of their mother's misery. Hugh Marshall was a humorless, uneducated bully of a man who ran his rich estates by terror and brute force. He also tried to run his wife and daughters that way.
After the women returned to England there was no more laughter, and certainly no more praise. Hugh Marshall made no attempt to hide his disappointment in how his wife had reared their two daughters.
"You give me nothing but daughters," he bellowed at his wife, who seemed to lose weight daily, "and then you fill their heads with books. They try to defy me!" he yelled.
When Catherine had told him she didn't like his choice of husband for her he'd blacked her eye, then locked her in a room for two weeks. Tearfully Catherine had finally agreed to the odious old man her father had chosen for her. Her father, already a rich man, wanted more riches, but more than that he wanted power. He had visions of grandsons who sat at the king's right hand. So he was marrying Catherine to an earl who was a distant relative of the king and enjoyed some society at court.
Six months after they'd returned to England their mother had died. Hugh Marshall had shown no regret at the loss, saying she was never a wife to him, that she'd been able to bear only worthless daughters. He'd allowed her to go to France when he was told she could bear no more children. She was useless to him as a wife if she couldn't give him sons. Since she was dead he planned to get himself another wife, one who could give him a dozen sons or more.
Anne had stood at her mother's grave and felt deep, deep hatred for her father. He had killed her mother as surely as if he had taken a knife to her throat.
After her mother's death and her sister's betrothal Anne had declared war on her father. There was a part of her that didn't care what happened to her, so she dared to defy him and to make some demands of her own.
Anne knew that her father would use her as a pawn in his life game, just as he'd used Catherine, but Anne planned to do better than her sister had. Anne used all her knowledge, used everything she'd ever learned,
to talk Hugh Marshall into giving a tournament at Catherine's wedding. At the tournament Anne planned to choose her own husband and to use her powers of persuasion to get her father to marry her to a man who would make her a proper husband. She was not going to allow him to marry her off to a man like himself, as he was doing to Catherine.