Page 20 of My Lady Melisende (Ladies Least Likely #6)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

N othing was as she remembered.

Well, almost nothing. She remembered the mountains towering against the sky, an immense and mysterious presence. Always there, like the father who had been a rock in her life, but capricious, delivering a clear sun in the morning and a thunderstorm later that day, snow well into summer in a predictable fashion and sudden, startling rockfalls with no warning at all. She’d forgotten how comforting it felt to have the shoulders of the mountains always around her, how they made the world seem at once so large and so small.

She’d forgotten how clear the rivers were, rushing over their rocks, the water crisp and cold. She’d grown accustomed to the somnolent Seine and the filthy, ponderous Thames. Merania was so tiny, a quaint village compared to Paris and Vienna and the wild, rowdy sprawl of London. Looking down from the walls of Meinhardin Castle, she could cover the entire valley with her hand. Hiding her precious realm from the rest of the world.

Her love for this place and its people hadn’t changed. Those fires had lain banked and dormant for going on eight years, but now, back in the land of her birth, in the land that held her roots, that love blazed to painful life. She belonged here, and she would never allow herself to be exiled again. Rudolf would have to drive a stake through her heart or cast her into the deepest dungeon if he wanted to be rid of her.

Or she would have to renounce Philip and marry her cousin to stay. Cold snaked through her at the thought.

The whole castle was cold. They’d come at dusk on the night of their arrival, covering the light of their lamps with leather shutters so guests at the feast, or those in the valley below, didn’t see a mysterious procession making its way to the castle. The stealthy withdrawal was Philip’s idea.

Rudolf would have learned of her arrival; it seemed news of the grand duke’s daughter had roared through town like the spring melt of the Adige River. Many had hailed her at the impromptu festival as the returning heir, the duchess coming to set a tilted world right. Many a toast had been raised to her health and her prosperous rule, and Rudolf would hear of it.

Philip reasoned that any assassin Rudolf dispatched would know exactly where to find her at the Hubers’ chalet. So, with Gin and Bruyit and two Huber sons to guide them, Melisende and Philip stole away under cover of falling night, and in the days since she had haunted her own castle like a ghost.

“Frau Huber sent produce and some salted meat for tomorrow’s meals.” Philip’s voice drifted across the vaulted space where Melisende stood on the flagged stones in a pool of colored light, staring up at the stained-glass window.

She didn’t move, though she sensed when he drew near. A warm tingle along the back of her neck, a heightened awareness in the air, told her when Philip was close.

When he wasn’t near, that awareness turned into longing, a quiet but persistent ache. The world went on around her, and she participated, but she was waiting to return to him. To come alive in the particular way she did when he was with her.

This was a development she didn’t need. A distraction she couldn’t afford.

“She asked if you wanted a chicken. For eggs.”

“To keep in the courtyard? The noise might give us away.” She sighed. “Though we’re not exactly hidden. I’m sure half a dozen shepherds and herders know that we are here. And if they don’t know already, it won’t take the townspeople long to guess that I went to one of the castles.”

“The Hubers are sending servants daily to some of the other castles as well. They’ve told people you traveled on to visit your sister in Carinthia, and they are readying various houses for your return.”

Melisende rubbed her forehead. “I must find the patent soon. Yet we’ve searched everywhere and come up with nothing. How can that be?”

Philip circled a hand over her back, and she leaned gratefully into his touch, steady, warm, reassuring, but sending that pleasurable curl of warmth through her, as his touch always did. They shared a chamber, the old solar above the great hall, and though Gin slept in the antechamber and Bruyit outside their door, they hadn’t discontinued their intimacies, only learned to be quiet about them.

Those intimacies would end, too. The only way she could keep Philip was if she failed to find the document and slunk away from Merania in disgrace.

Or lived in Merania as the deposed heir, in a marriage far beneath her in status, with no income or properties but her mother’s dwindling inheritance. Perhaps Rudolf would give her the Prince’s Castle. Which she couldn’t afford to live in.

Cold drifted along her skin and tunneled into her bones. What would her father say when she failed? When his last hope for being restored to his proper station—to resume the purpose that had grounded his entire life—disappeared?

“We’ve searched this room,” Philip said softly. “The old chapel, isn’t it? The one attached to the original keep, you said, before the castle was enlarged and a new chapel built beside the new great hall. We’ve searched that, too.”

“I keep ending up here,” Melisende said. “Something tells me it’s here , and yet…”

Philip followed the direction of her gaze to the figure in the window, a woman with wheat-gold hair and her eyes bent on the heavens, a golden halo wreathing her head. “Asking a vision from the saint?”

“Notburga.” Melisende attempted a smile. “She was born in the Tyrol, not far from here. Patroness of servants and peasants.”

“So not likely to go out of her way to serve a grand duke’s daughter,” Philip said. “Better luck with St. Barbara downstairs. She was a nobleman’s daughter, wasn’t she?”

“We searched that chapel also,” Melisende said wearily. “According to the directions on the map, it doesn’t make sense for the document to be there, but the notes say the treasure is hidden in ‘a place where all is washed away.’ That means the forgiveness of sins, wouldn’t you think? I’ve taken apart the new chapel almost brick by brick and found nothing. Which isn’t terribly surprising, because if the map is correct, the document was hidden here .”

She whirled a hand in the air. “This makes more sense, because that was the muniments room, where all the other documents are stored. That little cell, just off the upper balcony.” She pointed where the carved stone pillars of the chapel soared upward toward a high ceiling, and a wooden balcony offered a high perch for one to look down below on the altar, the prie-dieu, and the people at their prayers.

“But that room is empty, or mostly empty,” Philip reminded her. “We’ve been through the trunks remaining, and everything else has been carted away.”

Melisende let her shoulders sag, for the first time allowing herself to consider defeat. It tasted bitter and vile. “Perhaps everything has been moved. Perhaps the map was correct, but the document is here no longer. It’s been two hundred years, and the family still lived here, holding Merania in trust from the emperor. It’s not unaccountable to think someone ran across a chest or scroll.” She shuddered in the cold seeping from the castle walls, thick layers of mountain stone. “Perhaps my uncle found it.”

“He would have used it to validate his claim, wouldn’t he? Made himself the rightful ruler so he could brook no challenges.”

“I don’t think he could. I think the document is specific about who can make the claim to sovereignty, according to the ancient Germanic rules of inheritance. So my uncle couldn’t take advantage of it, not with my father alive and able, but he didn’t want my father or I to find it, either.”

“And now Rudolf stands to lose his position when you succeed.”

Which is why she had Philip in her room, Gin and Bruyit at her door, and other servants of the Hubers’, who had professed their loyalty to the exiled grand duke, staked around the castle. Every day one or two more trickled up from the valley, following a hunch or a rumor, swearing their service to the one they hoped would be their next grand duchess.

Her position wasn’t exactly a secret. And where a loyalist could find her, a killer could, too.

A warning shiver ran down her spine. What did Rudolf want from her? She remembered a reckless, confident boy who’d enjoyed mocking her during his few and occasional visits to Merania. He’d felt full of himself with the polish of Vienna and the favor of the Habsburg court to lift him. He didn’t even know Ladin, called it the language of the peasants. He’d been involved in the row that had followed the deaths of her siblings, when her sister had broken with her father and stormed away to Carinthia, never to return. Rudolf wouldn’t wish, on his own, to marry Melisende. That had to have been her uncle’s ploy to get closer to the throne, securing the line of inheritance through her. When her father demurred, her uncle simply revolted. Her father refused to risk the lives of his people to fight a dynastic war.

Yet the people had suffered anyway, from the sound of things.

She had to fight for her father and on her own behalf. She would have to confront her cousin sometime.

Philip tightened his arm about her shoulder and pressed a kiss against her temple. Melisende leaned into his warm embrace, desirous of support, reluctant to show that she needed it. Needed him.

“Come have your tea,” he said into her hair. “You’ll think better with something warm and sweet in your belly.”

“You British and your tea,” she murmured. “Say there’s coffee and I’ll come.”

“I’ll go find coffee, then,” he promised.

All that day, Melisende kept searching. The chests and table in the old chapel held paraphernalia for the altar, the dull, serviceable pieces she remembered from her childhood, not the splendid gold and bejeweled glories she had seen in other churches. Philip jimmied a lock on an old cedar chest and she found three enormous Bibles, in Latin, German, and Italian, folio size, with gold stamped into their covers. Priceless artifacts; the Duchess of Hunsdon would be astonished if she could see them.

Melisende carried her torch through the castle, spirits dampening with each step. The rooms yielded nothing. She’d searched the bed chambers and the solar above the great hall. She’d searched the dungeons and the keep. She’s searched the formal staterooms, with their retiring rooms alongside, perfect hiding places for an important document, but there was nothing. No loose bricks in the walls or loose stones on the floors, no hidden compartments or secret passageways.

She sent dark, accusatory thoughts towards her ancestors. Not one secret escape? Not one concealed closet where the skeletons were kept? The Meinhardins had completely lacked imagination, had no fear of attack, or had nothing to hide.

She’d combed the great hall and its antechambers, the gallery where musicians sat, the gallery where ladies could withdraw when dinner parties among the knights turned raucous. She’d gone through the kitchen, the larders, the scullery. She’d lowered a torch into the well to see if anything had been hidden there—nothing was, as far as she could see.

She’d opened every basket and chest in the still room, peered down the throat of every suit of armor on display in the armory, looked behind tapestries. She’d prowled around the inner courtyard, knocking on sections of the stone walls, and she’d crawled over every inch of the keep, the original tower of Meinhardin Castle built, it was said, in the twelfth century, over five hundred years ago.

The roots of her family went deep, so deep, and their rights as rulers over the lands they’d founded had been taken away—first by an emperor who could not keep his promise, then by an uncle who showed no loyalty to his lord. She’d withdraw in defeat if Merania were prospering, if people were better off with her and her father gone. But they weren’t.

Every loyalist who joined her ranks had a tale of woe. Bad harvests and fear of famine, when their valley had always yielded plenty, their herds had always prospered. Threats from without, from those her father had made allies. Divisions within, men and women encouraged to spy on their own families and report anyone disloyal to the crown. Taxes too high to bear, lining Rudolf’s coffers and swelling his militia. Merania had been peaceful, prosperous in the years she’d known it. How could it have all come to this?

One last place remained that she hadn’t searched. Dusk was falling, though here on the mountainside they had access to the sun a bit longer than in the valley. She’d always loved sunsets in Merania, not the glory of red clouds rising in the west but the golden splash of color on the opposite mountains, a light nearly holy in its softness. As a child it had seemed a promise to her that, though the sun was leaving and night was falling, the joy and the peacefulness and the golden light would return with the sun the next morning.

Now dark was falling, and there was no promise of joy the next day. No promise of light. Only the cold, still blindness of defeat, and what would she do then? Where would she go, driven from the place she was born and raised to occupy, her beautiful home denied her?

Philip went outside after dinner with Bruyit to walk a circuit of the castle and talk with the men who’d joined them that day, organizing them into some kind of watch. Gin, that scamp, was somewhere about his own business, one never knew. Far away clangs and chatter came from the scullery holding a Huber daughter and a cluster of other maids—the ranks of the women grew each day, too, come to serve the grand duke’s daughter in hope of a few coins to feed their families, or escape a position that was not kind or safe. Melisende was grateful for their allegiance even as she fretted over how to protect them. Or pay for their small services, the brushing and mending of her gowns, the food to break her fast and fill her at dinner, the fire that would be laid in the solar when she retired for the night.

Even in exile, she wasn’t alone. In fact, this was the first time in weeks—years, actually—that she hadn’t had another person within speaking distance. In her hope of reclaiming her position and status, she’d always managed to find a few friends. Now, spiraling into defeat and despair, though back in the country of her birth, she was alone.

So be it. She lit a torch in the bailey and climbed the flights of stairs in the old keep, the first of the castle’s real fortifications. She passed like a silent ghost through the ground floor, once an armory and weapons room, now full of casks for making wine and ale. The first floor, once the medieval dining hall, was now the knight’s hall, where the soldiers on guard gathered to dice and trade jests. The second floor had held chambers for the lord and his lady, their children and bodyservants. All those traces of life long gone, even their echoes faded to dust.

She headed for Meran’s Tower, the tiny room atop a turret named for the most famous of their female Meinhardin ancestors. Meran the Fierce, daughter of a king, wife to a prince, mother of warriors, had carved Merania out of the ancient Kingdom of Lombardy and claimed it for her own. Legend said that the clever queen, who kept watch from the highest tower of her keep, had seen the invaders coming and had time to organize a resistance. She had been granted the duchy in return for her sworn allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor, and her family had held it in trust until the Peasant’s Rebellion, for which the then-duke had negotiated a peace. For it he had been awarded sovereignty over Meran’s lands, a peer if not an equal to the emperor himself.

Until the emperor reversed his decision, of course.

Melisende’s leather soles scuffed over the stones, disturbing dust of perhaps a decade. The torch guttered in cold drafts of air as she climbed the circular stairs, narrow and steep. Melisende’s mother, the princess of Sardinia, had preferred the pleasanter, nearly tropical climes of the valley and the warm, luxurious palace over the mountain air and austere chill of the castle. It was possible no one had been to some areas of this castle since her death.

The thick wooden door gave her trouble, and Melisende muttered as she drew forth the heavy ring of keys attached to her girdle. She was chatelaine of the castle now; she had the gift and the burden of the keys, which frankly were a heavy business. She was about to call Philip, who had some uncanny skill with springing locks, when the door swung inward.

She would have screamed, but breath froze in her chest.

A man stood in the shadow falling across the small, circular chamber. He raised his arms. A long, lethal blade descended from one fist.

In the next instant recognition flushed through her, a chilling draft of mountain air, and after it, hot rage. Fool. She’d walked into his trap, blindly, and alone. He was going to kill her, and she’d practically bared her neck to the executioner’s blade.

“ Verdammter Mist! ” she hissed, reaching fruitlessly toward her hip. “I’m going to start wearing a sword.”

Except she wouldn’t have a chance to start wearing a sword, like Philip was doing. Philip . She was going to die here, sliced open by a betrayer’s blade, and he would never know that she loved him.

The attacker’s blade clattered to the floor.

“Frieden! ” Rudolf stuttered in German. “Peace. Let us make peace, Melisende.”

She lifted the torch between them, surprise tumbling through her chest with the remnants of rage. “Aren’t you going to kill me?”

“Aren’t you going to kill me? ” he croaked.

She debated, scanning his face in the torchlight, the gray of the mountainside and the quiet dusk framed through the open window behind him. The tower, narrow and small, was the perfect scene of a murder. The sound of screams wouldn’t carry through the thick walls of the keep. Or, more silently, one could tip an attacker out of the window into the bottomless valley below, the sheer gorge they called the Kostengraben—a greedy grave.

“Ought I kill you?” Melisende said coldly. “You seem to have made an effort to dispatch me.”

Rudolf looked around the darkening room, a look on his face as if he expected apparitions to ooze from the walls, or monstrous shapes to form from the shadows. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

A swoop of sound rose up the stairs, like the rush of bat’s wings, and Philip burst into the room, sword raised. Light glinted off the bared blade, and on his face was a feral snarl like nothing she’d seen from her civilized husband.

“Don’t harm him!” Melisende shouted. “That is Rudolf.”

Philip swirled to the side, lowering his sword before it found its mark, not taking his gaze from her cousin. “Isn’t he here to kill you?”

“That is what I thought also, but it seems not the case.”

“You were shouting. You sounded angry.”

“We were speaking German,” Melisende said. “That is how German sounds.”

“ Bitte .” Rudolf held his palms out, empty, begging. “I only want to talk to you. I swear on my father’s grave. Don’t let him kill me.”

“Philip won’t hurt you,” Melisende said. “Unless you deserve it.”

“I’m not talking about him .” Rudolf glanced about wildly, the whites of his eyes showing. “I speak of the other one. The one trying to kill us both.”