“Back!” Rogan said under his breath. “Get back to the women. If I want an opinion from a woman, I will ask,” he said in the same tone as he might say that he’d ask his horse about the grain before he asked a woman.
“I was merely—” Liana began.
“I will tie you inside a wagon if you say more,” Rogan said, his eyes hard and angry.
Liana swallowed more anger as she turned her horse and went back to the women.
Severn was the first to speak when they were again alone. “The water? What could be wrong with the water? And a curse. Do you think the Howards put a curse on our sheep? How do we get rid of it?”
Rogan was staring straight ahead. Damned woman, he thought. What was she trying to do, interfere in men’s work? Once he’d allowed a woman to interfere. Once he’d listened to a woman, and she had repaid him in treachery. “There is no curse. Merely greedy peasants,” Rogan said firmly. “I’ll show them whose land they farm.”
Severn was thoughtful for a moment. He was not possessed of the same hatred of women that his brother was. There were many things that he discussed with Iolanthe, and he often found her answers were wise and useful. Perhaps there was more to this Neville heiress than he’d thought when he first saw her.
He turned in the saddle and looked back at her. She sat rigid on her horse, her back straight, her eyes glittering with anger. Severn turned and grinned at his brother. “You’ve offended her now,” he said jovially. “Her temper won’t be so sweet tonight. I’ve found that a gift will usually put a woman in a better mood. Or perhaps compliments will work. Tell her that her hair is like gold, tell her that her beauty tempts you from your soul.”
“The only thing that tempts me is the gold in the wagons, not in her hair. And I think that tonight you’d better take one of the maids to keep you from thinking of women’s hair.”
Severn kept smiling. “While you lay with your pretty wife and give her a few sons?”
Sons, Rogan thought. Sons to help him fight the Howards. Sons to live on the Peregrine lands once he took them back. Sons to ride beside him. Sons to teach to fight and ride and hunt. “Yes, I’ll give her sons,” Rogan said at last.
Liana was convinced Joice was right after her confrontation with Rogan. It was going to take a while to teach herself to be obedient and to listen and to keep her ideas to herself.
That night they camped again, and again Liana put furs under a far tree. But again Rogan did not come to her. He did not speak to her or even look at her.
Liana refused to cry. She refused to remember Helen’s words of warning. Instead, she remembered the time at the pool of water when he’d kissed her. He seemed to find her desirable then, but not now. She slept fitfully and woke before dawn, before the rest of the camp was awake. She rose, a hand at her stiff back, and made her way into the woods.
Stooping down to take a drink from a little spring, she became aware of eyes on her and whirled to see a man standing in the shadows. She gasped and put her hand to her throat.
“Do not leave the safety of the camp without a guard,” came Rogan’s low voice.
She was acutely aware that she wore only her thin silk robe over her nudity, her hair hanging loose down her back, and he wore only his braies, the hose covering him from waist to toe, his broad chest bare. She took a step toward him. “I could not sleep,” she said softly. She wished he’d reach for her, take her in his arms. “Did you sleep well?”
He frowned at her. Somehow, she was familiar, as if he’d seen her before. She was tempting enough in the early morning light, but he felt no raging desire for her. “Get back to the camp,” he said, then turned away from her.
“Of all the—” she said under her breath but caught herself. Was there some reason this man ignored her? Joice said she’d be able to make herself indispensable to him once she was in his home. There she’d be able to make him comfortable and see to his many needs.
And there they’d share a bed, she thought with pleasure.
She hurried forward to catch up with him. “Do we reach the Peregrine castle today?”
“It’s the Moray castle,” he said tightly. “The Howards occupy the Peregrine lands.”
She was having to rush to keep up with him, her long robe causing her to trip over branches and stones. “I’ve heard of them. They stole your lands and title, didn’t they? You would be a duke now if it weren’t for them.”
He halted abruptly in front of her and turned angry eyes on her. “Is that what you hope for, girl? That you have married a duke? Is that why you married me and turned down the others?”
“Why no, I didn’t,” she said, astonished. “I married you because…”
“Yes?” he demanded.
Liana couldn’t very well say that she lusted after him, that her heart was pounding in her throat even now at being so close to him, and that she greatly wanted to touch the bare skin of his chest.
“There you are,” Severn said from behind them, thus saving Liana from answering. “The men are ready to ride. My lady,” he said, nodding to Liana.
His eyes studied her so hard that she blushed, then looked up through the curtain of her hair to see if Rogan saw. He did not. He had started toward the camp, leaving Liana where she was. She made her way back to the camp by herself, following along behind the brothers.
“She’s prettier than I first thought,” Severn said to his brother as they rode.
“She doesn’t interest me at all,” Rogan said. “No woman who has ‘wife’ attached to her interests me.”
“I would imagine that you’d fight hard enough if someone tried to take her.” Severn was jesting with his brother, but the minute the words were out, he regretted them. Ten years ago someone had indeed tried to take a wife of Rogan’s and he’d fought so hard to get her back that two of their brothers had been killed.
“No, I would not fight for her,” Rogan said softly. “If you want the woman, take her. She means less than nothing to me. The gold she brought me is all I want of her.”
Severn frowned at his brother’s words, but he said no more.
Chapter
Six
Moray Castle came into sight at midday, and a more depressing sight Liana had never seen. It was the old-style castle, made for protection, and left unchanged for over a hundred and fifty years. The windows were arrow slits, the tower was thick and impenetrable-looking. Men lined the battlements, which were broken in places, looking as if the castle had been attacked and never repaired.
As they drew closer, she could smell the place. Over their own horses and the unwashed bodies of the Peregrine knights came the stench of the castle.
“My lady,” Joice whispered.
Liana did not look at her maid, but stared ahead. Helen had told her of the filth of the place, but she was not prepared for this.
They came first to the moat. All the latrines of the castle emptied into this protective body of water and it was thick with excrement as well as kitchen slops of rotting animal carcasses. Liana kept her head high and her eyes forward while, around her, her maids coughed and gagged at the smell.
They rode in single file through a long, low tunnel and overhead Liana saw three openings for heavy, spiked iron gates that could be dropped on intruders. At the end of the tunnel was a single courtyard, half the size of her father’s outer bailey, yet there were three times the people here. Her nose already outraged, now it was her ears’ turn. Men hammered hot iron on anvils; dogs barked; carpenters hammered; men yelled at each other above the noise.
Liana could hardly believe the noise and the stench of stables and pigsties, which looked as if they’d not been cleaned in years.
To her right a maid squealed and her horse sidestepped into Liana’s. Liana looked up to see what had frightened the girl. A urinal from the third story opened into the courtyard and now a heavy waterfall of urine was cascading and splashing down the wall into a deep puddle of filth on the ground below.
After the maid’s squeal,
neither Liana nor her maids said another word. They were too horrified to be able to speak.
To Liana’s right were two stone staircases, one leading to the single tower, the other to the lower two-story slate-roofed building. With this small castle there were no inner and outer courtyards, no separation of lord and retainer, but everyone lived together in this small space.
At the head of the stairs Liana saw two women. They searched the crowd of newcomers until they saw Liana, then one of them pointed at her and they both laughed. Liana could see they were maids, but the filth of the place made it obvious they did no work. She’d soon fix them and teach them not to laugh at their betters.
The girls sauntered down the stairs and as they rounded the short stone wall, Liana saw their figures. They were both short, buxom, small-waisted, big-hipped girls with lots of coarse dirty brown hair hanging in long braids down their backs. Their clothes were tight and revealing and they walked with an insolent, exaggerated sway to their hips. They strutted across the courtyard in a slow way that made their big breasts move under their clothes, and most of the men stopped to watch them.
As a knight helped Liana from her horse, she saw the maids ooze their way toward Rogan. He was yelling at some men about the Neville wagons, but Liana saw him glance down at the girls. One of them turned and gave Liana such a look of triumph that Liana’s fingers itched to slap her face.
“Shall we go inside, my lady?” Joice said meekly. “Perhaps inside it’s…” Her voice trailed off.
It was obvious that her husband was not going to show her her new home and by now Liana didn’t expect him to. Assuming that the staircase the insolent maids had used led to the lord of the manor’s quarters, she lifted her skirts and went up them, kicking bones and what looked to be a dead bird out of the way as she ascended.
At the top of the stairs was a large room, the doorway partitioned off by what once must have been a beautiful carved wooden screen, but now axe heads were buried in the wood and nails had been driven into it to hold maces and lances. Through the wide wooden doors of the screen, one of which hung by only one hinge, was a room about forty-five feet long by twenty-five feet wide, with a ceiling as high as the room was wide.
Liana and her maids stepped into this room in silence because no words could express what they saw. Filthy would not describe it. The floor looked as if every bone from every meal that had been eaten in this room for over a hundred years was still on it. Flies swarmed around the maggot-covered bones, and Liana could see things—she refused to consider what things—crawling about under the thick layer of refuse.
Spider webs with fat occupants hung from the ceiling almost to the floor. The double fireplaces at the east end of the hall had three feet of ashes in them. The only furniture in the room were a thick, heavy table made of a slab of blackened oak and eight scarred, broken chairs, all covered with grease from years of meals.
There were several windows in the room, some of them fifteen feet above the floor, but the glass and the shutters were gone, so the smell of the moat, the courtyard, and this room mingled.
When one of the maids behind her swooned and began to faint, Liana wasn’t surprised. “Stand up!” she commanded, “or we’ll have to lay you on the floor.” The girl uprighted herself immediately.
Taking her courage in her hands, as well as her silk skirt, Liana made her way across the room to the stairs in the northwest corner. These too were covered with bones, straw crushed to powder, and what was possibly a dead rat. “Joice, come with me,” she said over her shoulder, “and the rest of you remain here.”
Up eight stairs was a room, opening to the left, and a toilet, to the right. Liana just looked into the room but did not enter it. It contained a small round table, two chairs, and hundreds of weapons of war.
Liana continued up the circular stairs, a timid Joice behind her, until she reached the second floor of the tower. Before her was a short, low round-topped hallway, and a few feet along it was a door leading off to the right. This was a bedchamber with a filthy straw-filled mattress on the floor, the straw so old, it was merely two pieces of coarse wool on the floor. A latrine led off this room.
Joice stepped forward and put her hand down as if to touch the two blankets heaped at the foot of the mattress.
“Lice,” was all Liana said, and moved on down the hallway.
She entered the solar, a large, spacious room filled with light from the many windows. Along the south wall was a wooden staircase that led up to the third floor. A rustle overhead made Liana look up. Along the carved corbels that held the ceiling beams were wooden perches and here sat hawks, all of them hooded and jessed. There were peregrines, kestrels, merlins, goshawks, and sparrow hawks. The walls were coated with bird droppings, which had dripped down to form hard hills on the floor.
Liana lifted her skirt higher and went across the filthy floor to the east side of the room. Here were three arches, the center one creating a little room, one wooden door barely hanging, the other missing. Set in the stone wall was a little piscina, the basin used by the priest for ablutions after mass.
“It is sacrilege,” Joice whispered, for this was a private oratory, a holy place for the saying of mass for the family.
“Ah, but here we have an excellent view of the moat,” Liana said, looking out the window and trying to bring some humor into this hideous place. But Joice did not laugh or smile.
“My lady, what shall we do?”
“We shall make my husband comfortable,” Liana said with assurance. “First we will prepare two bedrooms for tonight, one for my husband and me,” she could not prevent the flush that crept over her face, “then one for you and my maids. Tomorrow we shall start on the rest of the place. Now, stop standing and staring. Go and get those women I saw below. A little work should take the insolence out of them.”
Joice was afraid to move about the castle alone, but her mistress’s manner gave her courage. She was afraid of what lurked in the shadows and corners of the castle. If something attacked, how long would it be before they found her bones among the others?
In the solar, Liana went to the other arched rooms flanking the oratory. The bird droppings were less in evidence here and she could see that under the dirt the walls had once been painted with scenes. Once they were cleaned she could have them repainted, and there on that far west wall she’d hang a tapestry. For a moment she could almost escape the smells of the room, the ominous sound of birds’ wings rustling, and the sound of whatever was moving about under the refuse on the floor.
“They won’t come, my lady,” said a breathless Joice from the doorway.
Liana came back to reality. “Who won’t come? My husband?”
Joice was indignant. “The maids! Lord Rogan’s maids won’t come. When I told them they were to come and clean, they laughed at me.”
“Did they?” Liana said. “Let’s see what they say to me.” She was ready for a good fight. She’d been so obedient and had swallowed so much anger in the past few days that she wanted an outlet for it, and overdeveloped maids who pointed at her and laughed would be an excellent target.
Liana stormed down the steep stairs, across the lord’s chamber, down the outside stairs, and into the loud, dirty courtyard. The two maids she’d seen before were lounging near the well, allowing three young knights to draw buckets of water for them while they brushed their big breasts against the men’s arms.
“You!” Liana said to the first one. “Come with me.”
Liana turned on her heel and started back toward the castle only to realize that no maids were following her. She looked back to see the two maids smiling at her as if they knew something she did not. Liana had never had a maid disobey her before. Always before, she’d been backed by her father’s power.
For a moment, Liana didn’t know what to do. She could feel the eyes of the other people in the courtyard on her, and she knew that now was the time to establish her power as mistress of the castle. But she couldn’t do that unless
they knew she had her husband’s backing.
Rogan was near the far wall of the courtyard, directing the unloading of a wagon that contained several suits of armor that were part of Liana’s dowry. Angrily, she made her way across the courtyard, sidestepping three fighting dogs, overstepping a pile of rotting sheep entrails.
She knew what she wanted to say, the demands she wanted to make, but when Rogan turned to her, annoyed that she was interrupting him, her confidence faded. She so much wanted to please him, wanted to have his eyes change when he looked at her. Now he seemed to be trying to remember who she was.
“The maids will not obey me,” she said quietly.
He looked at her in consternation, as if her problem had nothing to do with him.
“I want the maids to start cleaning, but they won’t obey me,” she further explained.
That seemed to relieve his puzzlement. He turned back to the wagons. “They clean what’s needed. I thought you brought maids.”
She moved between him and the wagon. “Three of my maids are ladies, and the others…well, there’s just too much for them to do.”
“Dent that armor and I’ll dent your head,” Rogan shouted to a laborer who was unloading the wagon. He looked down at Liana. “I have no time for maids. The place is clean enough as it is. Now, go away and let me get these wagons unloaded.”
He dismissed her as if she didn’t exist, and Liana stood there staring at his back and feeling the eyes of every man and, most of all, those two maids on her. So this was what Helen had warned her about. This was what marriage was like. A man courted you until he got you, then you were less than…than a piece of steel to him. Of course, with Rogan, she hadn’t even received the courting.
Now she knew that at all costs she must keep her dignity. She didn’t look right or left but walked straight ahead toward the stone steps and went up them and into the castle. Behind her she could hear the noise of the courtyard resume with tripled force, and she even heard some high-pitched female laughter.