Page 70 of Burying Venus
‘Because I saw you,’ Dermot said. ‘The night I rescued Aubrey. You and Robert together, saying the vilest of things.’
‘As if you can talk there!’ Will cried. Dermot blushed, hopeful the men outside wouldn’t hear what was to come next. ‘Stroking your prick every night to some new name. Aubrey, Tristan, the witchfinder of all people. Taking a boy prostitute to the servants’ quarters! And all that time I was your friend, friend to a beast who poisoned the food of his masters. We can only thank God you failed to hurt anyone, that no one got so much as sick. Because you’ve never succeeded at any task. Even Béchard hates you, a mere scullion in his twenties. And now you rampage and tear the castle apart with envy, just like all your new brethren.’
‘Tristan is dead,’ Dermot said, wanting to hurt. ‘I slit his throat.’
‘Good riddance. If only you’d done the same to yourself,’ Will spat.
The two of them once met for lunch every day. They were strangers now, if not worse. Closing his eyes to hide the hurt, Dermot grasped Will’s shirt, searching for what he knew to be there.
‘What… what are you…!’ Will shouted, kicking and groaning with the pain of it.
Feeling the shape underneath cotton, Dermot secured the keys to the upper chambers. He knew them immediately. Robert’s great weapon; how he’d locked Aubrey away.
‘No!’ Will said. He tried to push himself up, gasping with shock.
‘I know,’ Dermot said bleakly, startled by the sudden realisation. ‘You love him.’
Will stared back at him. Worse had been done to him with that comment than any attack on his person. He turned away, ashen.
Dermot got to his feet, knowing this to be their last meeting. He shivered with the weight of it, then pushed his shoulders back in a shrug. ‘I won’t kill him,’ he said. He daren’t turn childish thoughts to words, that Robert had left his lover to die downstairs while he hid in his chambers. His own bitterness went unsaid, that Will had been capable of loving another man, but hadn’t chosen him.
Dermot stumbled out, turning the handle and stepping safely into the courtyard.
‘Nice talk?’ one of the men said. He gave no indication of having heard. ‘We’ll put him with the other servants. The Colonel says we aren’t to kill them unless they cause trouble. Which your friend did, by the way, but we’ll ignore that for your sake.’
‘My most sincere thanks,’ Dermot said, cold and weightless. ‘Do you have any news of the maids? Have they also been taken prisoner?’
‘You randy bastard!’ the soldier shouted, turning Dermot’s face as red as the bloodied walls. ‘There’s no sign of any maids. I think they might’ve got the better of us there.’
Marvelling at their good sense, Dermot ventured upstairs, struck by the lack of portraits. No longer would lords eye himimperviously from the walls. Whether Robert would shortly join them in hell rested on him, a scullion.
One of Robert’s guards met him on the stairs. He was so bewildered that Dermot simply landed a well-placed kick, sending him tumbling down. The Stanley shields still hung on the wall, waiting on some enterprising man to cut them down.
Dermot’s breath hitched as he reached Robert’s chambers. He steeled himself for what was to come next, wondering how he would force the potion down Robert’s throat. This, he knew, would not happen unless the man was severely beaten.
Clutching his sword in one hand, Dermot turned the key. He shut the door immediately after, terrified soldiers might follow like hounds and tear Robert apart.
Stifling the urge to call out to him, Dermot meekly walked inside. He stared at the great tapestries decorating the room, depicting one of the mainland’s great battles; Robert’s ancestors standing on the edge of the melee, waiting for the tide to turn so they knew which side to join. Deceitful, treacherous vipers even then.
The door to the adjoining room was not concealed. Whether Robert flinched as Dermot neared, fearing soldiers had come for him at last, he did not know.
The lock screeched, and Dermot almost rushed back to the courtyard so men better equipped could handle the sorry affair. Hesitating until he realised Robert might’ve been readying his sword, he flung the door open, unsheathing his own weapon in one great tremor.
‘Robert,’ Dermot said. ‘Come quietly. They’ll drag you out if you don’t.’
‘Begging your pardon…’ Practised hands graced the doorframe, and Dermot marvelled what a beast he was. Whether he be Norman or Saxon, for the Stanleys invented myths whenever one was in fashion, Dermot knew not. But he was tall,well-built, and rightly required more than one man to take him down. As black eyes met his, Dermot feared his soul had been snatched in one fell swoop.
‘Dermot, it is you. I had thought some other islander, you all being so alike. Are you quite serious?’ He laughed. ‘To have stolen my brother away and left without working your notice, which, as you know, is against the law, then to have forced your way back in, and to what purpose?’
Dermot’s lips remained fixed in a gape as Robert continued.
‘Your village is burnt to ashes now, my boy. I ordered my brother to spare no one in the assault, especially not your mother. A Mrs Skelly, is it?’ Dermot observed the fine sword secured to his belt. ‘My apologies, I misspoke. Was it, I mean.’
‘As dead as Tristan,’ Dermot said.
‘Well,’ Robert said, impassive.
Despite witnessing the destruction of his village, Dermot knew this to be the most disconcerting thing he’d seen. He watched Robert for any indication of feeling and observed nothing.