Page 6 of The Sword and the Damsel (The De Veres #2)

W est of Winchelsea, in a large meadow just off the road, Victor guided Lord Daniel around the nearly finished tournament grounds, showing off the work of the carpenters. There were stands for the audience, a platform for the Rossignol and de Vere families, a corral for the horses, and booths for vendors. A group of men was currently hammering in a wooden palisade around the field of competition.

“I checked on the provisions this morning, my lord, and everything was delivered as expected. We have food, wine, and ale aplenty for your guests,” Victor said as they passed the half-built booths where merchants would sell their wares to the crowds attending the tournament.

“Excellent,” Lord Daniel said with a nod. “And the healer is prepared with everything he needs to treat the injured?”

He gestured to the ancient symbol of healing, a snake and staff, a worker was painting on the canvas of the healer’s tent as they passed by.

“Yes, my lord.”

They continued their tour of the grounds and came to a stop on the central platform where the Rossignol and de Vere families would sit.

“How are our guests from Hastings and Hawkhurst? Is everyone behaving?” Lord Daniel asked, surveying the field with a keen eye.

“So far, so good, my lord,” Victor answered, following Lord Daniel’s gaze, and feeling rather proud of his work. “I think you were wise to host this tournament. It’s clear they’re spoiling for a fight, but it’s much better for all concerned if they vent their spleens in taunts and jousting rather than open warfare. To my mind, though, Canterbury is more of a concern than Hastings or Hawkhurst. The archbishop has already made more headway with my aunt than I would like. I’m discreetly keeping a close eye on Sir Elias. He’s a Canterbury man through and through.”

“Good thinking. I don’t trust Canterbury. Your aunt and I have had our differences, but I’d rather form an alliance with her than submit to Canterbury’s incursions. He has far too much land already.”

“Agreed, my lord.”

Lord Daniel nodded in satisfaction, then furrowed his brow. Was he dissatisfied in some way? He started pacing back and forth like he was avoiding something.

“What is it, my lord?” Victor asked, at last, worry getting the better of him.

“I was hoping you could help with another delicate task related to Lady Alais.”

Victor stood very still. Not again. Whatever Lord Daniel was about to say, Victor was certain he wouldn’t like whatever came next. He tried to stand tall and appear unconcerned. “Yes, my lord?”

Lord Daniel took a deep breath and let it out before he began. “Lord de Vere and I would like to enlist your help figuring out how suitable Lady Alais’s suitors are. I don’t mean what they offer in terms of lands, titles, alliances, however. Lord de Vere has that well in hand, and I’ve already shared my preferences with him on alliances. What we need to know is what kind of men they are.” He paused.

“My lord?” Victor thought he saw where this was going, and he didn’t like it.

“Setting political considerations aside, none of us want to see Lady Alais get hurt. We can’t let her fall prey to someone who will make her miserable.”

Victor stifled a groan. Far too much of his life revolved around Lady Alais de Vere these days. And, though he couldn’t voice his feelings aloud, she was managing to make him miserable even though he had done everything in his power to avoid becoming her prey. It was no easy task defending her honor when she was temptation incarnate.

“She can’t end up with someone cruel or neglectful,” Lord Daniel continued, “or deceitful or unfaithful or…well, you get the idea. The thing is, the suitors are all on their guard around us, always careful to say what they think we want to hear. You, on the other hand, can go places we can’t—gambling halls, brothels—”

“My lord—” he objected.

“Don’t try to pretend you don’t know your way around Winchelsea’s brothels. I try to stay out of my men’s private lives, but everyone knows where you spend your nights.”

Victor gritted his teeth and clenched his fist. One of the downsides of his scar was that he attracted notice. People followed his doings with prurient fascination, even if most would never admit it in his presence. God, how irksome it was the way the gossip seemed to swirl around him everywhere he went.

“All I’m asking,” Lord Daniel continued, “is that you see who else is there, see what they let slip, and let me know if there’s anything I should be aware of for the sake of Lady Alais’s safety and happiness.”

Christ on the cross, his aunt had better be deeply grateful for what he was putting himself through here in Winchelsea.

“Fine,” Victor grunted through clenched teeth. At least it didn’t involve any more contact with Alais.

“I’ve offended you,” Lord Daniel said, frowning.

“No, my lord,” he said, recovering. “I’m not offended, only disappointed that my private affairs seem to be so widely known.”

“What you choose to do when you are off duty is between you and God. I’m not here to judge.” Lord Daniel shrugged. “Thank you for agreeing to help me out. Lord de Vere and Carenza will be quite relieved.”

Victor exhaled. How did the man manage to be so damned nice while giving him torturous assignments?

“Tell Lord de Vere and your lady wife I’ll learn what I can,” Victor said in flat tones, doing his best to keep his irritation at bay.

Lord Daniel looked at him with a furrowed brow but said nothing.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, my lord,” Victor said after a moment of silence, “it’s time for me to meet with my men.”

Lord Daniel nodded. “You may go.”

With a bow, Victor made his escape. Socorro was waiting for him by a tree, giving him a dirty look for interrupting his grazing.

“Not you too,” Victor grumbled as he untied Socorro and mounted. “I’ve got enough trouble without my own horse giving me lip.”

Pressing his heels into Socorro’s sides, Victor rode faster than was strictly necessary back to the city gates, venting his spleen in a good gallop. As he rode through the city gates, he forced himself to slow down. It wouldn’t do to run down the innocent citizens of Winchelsea just because he was in a bad mood.

Upon arriving back at the castle and handing Socorro over to a stable hand, Victor headed straight toward the stone building where the Watch congregated. When his men informed him that a prominent wool trader had just been found with his throat cut in a warehouse on Fish Street, Victor had to hide his delight.

Thank Christ! A distraction that has absolutely nothing to do with Alais.

He managed to refrain from rubbing his hands together in excitement as he asked his men to take him to where the body had been found.

They led him down to the dank stone building and showed him the corpse. The man’s blood had spilled on the sacks of grain where he was left, and nowhere else, so he must have been killed on site. There weren’t any noticeable bruises, so it didn’t seem like there had been much of a struggle. Victor searched the man’s pockets and found a curious token—a wooden coin with a black X painted on it. He showed it to his men, and they looked unnerved.

“Well, at least we know who did this now,” said a stringy old coot named Bernard.

“Explain,” said Victor.

“There’s a money lender here, a usurer, goes by the name of Matthew,” Bernard explained. “He works out of one of the brothels on Birdie Street when he’s in town, though he travels around a lot. He’s based in Canterbury, I’m told. To get past his armed men, you have to show this token. Usually, he keeps a low profile, but every so often someone winds up dead for nonpayment.”

“Then why hasn’t he been apprehended and hanged?” Victor had no patience for usurers.

Bernard shrugged. “He isn’t an easy man to get to. He magically disappears every time we try.”

“ Hmm . Well today, I’m going to look for him.” One wasn’t supposed to hope for violence. If Victor had an opportunity to carry out some justice while working through his feelings about his latest Alais assignment, though, all the better. “You four, come with me. The rest of you deal with the body, then go back to your duties.”

Bernard and three others showed him to the brothel on Birdie Street where Matthew was rumored to operate.

Victor breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t the Bird in Hand. That would have been awkward. He stationed two of his men in front and sent two in the back. Then he took the dead man’s token inside the brothel.

It was a rather sad establishment—none of the light and fun of the Bird in Hand. A meager fire failed to take the chill out of the air. The stale scent of spilled ale mixed with the acrid, burnt scent of something being overcooked in a cauldron. Most of the women who circulated amongst the clientele looked underfed. The rough, worn, trestle tables were filled with grim-looking men, a mix of sailors, dock workers, and ruffians. Eight of the men stiffened slightly and quietly reached for their weapons when he entered. So he was outnumbered. Thank God. He had a lot of spleen to work through.

He went up to the bar and showed the token to a bartender who was missing all of his teeth. “I’m looking for Matthew. Do you know where I can find him?”

The bartender gestured toward a hallway into the back. Victor walked down the hall, hearing the eight men from the front room closing in behind him. There was a door to his left and another door out to the back at the end of the hall. He opened the one to his left and saw a small man in velvet disappearing down a trap door into the cellar over the shoulders of two enormous men who were shoulder to shoulder, blocking the door and trying to hide the small man from view.

“Fucking suitors,” Victor grumbled as he punched the two guards in the balls. He lunged for the trap door while they were doubled over. Prying the door open, he jumped down to the cellar floor, ignoring the ladder, and saw the small man frantically fiddling with the lock on a door at the other side of the cellar that must lead to another building’s cellar. Victor tore across the room and pinned him, then pulled a small knife from his sleeve and held it to the man’s throat.

“You’re Matthew?”

“Yes,” he said in a thin, wheezy voice. He was licking his lips, and his eyes were darting back and forth.

“I’m told that the murdered merchant I found in a warehouse just now might be a customer of yours.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Victor searched him quickly for weapons and threw two knives and a short sword into a mess of crates in the corner. Moments later, he heard one set of feet and then another land in the cellar. Victor couldn’t help smiling as he turned to face his opponents. Oh, they would regret crossing him today.

“You attack me, Matthew dies,” he yelled to make sure everyone heard. Two large men barreled into sight with swords drawn and stopped dead when they saw the knife at Matthew’s throat. “If you let me out of here with Matthew, I’ll forget your ugly faces, at least until the next time we meet. You don’t need to make this difficult for yourselves.” He really hoped they didn’t take him up on it, but he felt morally obligated to try.

“Who you callin’ ugly, ugly?” said a man with stringy black hair who was all neck and no chin. “There’s ten of us and one of you. Why should we do anything you say?” They began to close on him.

“Shit,” Victor said, realization dawning. “This isn’t Matthew, is it?”

Ugly’s friend, Ugly II, chuckled. “He’s quick.”

Victor jabbed his knife into Not-Matthew’s side. He was still hoping to interrogate the man when this was all over, so he made sure to incapacitate, not kill. Then for good measure, he knocked the man over the head, leaving him limp and unconscious. He had no such qualms about the Uglies. They were clearly hired muscle and wouldn’t know anything useful, and since they were trying to kill him, he had every excuse to defend himself. Vigorously. While imagining them as Alais’s suitors.

He drew his sword and carved his way through the two men in front of him, swiftly dispatching a third as he dropped down into the cellar. It was disappointingly easy. This particular Matthew really should hire better muscle.

Victor was about to jump up the ladder when Ugly IV leaped down on him. He ran his sword through the man’s gut, and the man collapsed, dead, on top of him. But the dead man was not small, and it took some maneuvering for Victor to roll him off. As he was wriggling free, an unpleasant smell nearly choked him. Fluids he didn’t want to identify leaked from the man’s gaping wound and smeared all down his front. “Ugh,” he groaned as he pulled his sword free, realizing he was now wearing the contents of the man’s lower intestine.

He climbed back out of the trap door and was forced to take off Ugly V’s left leg in the process. Uglies VI and VII came running at him with swords drawn. Ugly VI stopped short and wrinkled his nose. “Jesus, he stinks.”

“Oh, shut up,” Victor spat back, decapitating Ugly VII before stabbing Ugly VI through the neck, which spattered Victor’s face and hair with arterial blood. The remaining Uglies went running into the arms of his men outside. God, what a mess. And Ugly VI had been right. He stank of another man’s entrails.

Victor walked into the common room, covered in blood and guts. Hob and Ulf rushed in, swords raised.

“There’s a wounded man in the cellar. Tie him up and take him to the castle dungeon,” Victor ordered, and his men rushed to comply.

The horror and disgust on every single face in the common room made for a comical picture. If only Victor was in a laughing mood. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid this establishment is closed until further notice, though I will pay good coin to whoever can point me to a bucket of water to get this filth off me.” Most of them fled the room, though one enterprising young woman with an admirable bosom held her nose and showed him to a well in the back. He dumped a bucket over his head before extracting his soggy bag of coins and paying her for her service.

Upon his return to the castle, he got some clean clothes from his room and went down to the bathing room for a lengthy bath.

As he emerged, thoroughly cleansed, and smelling a bit too strongly of lavender oil, a servant informed him that Lords Rossignol and de Vere wished to speak with him, and he followed him to Lord Daniel’s study.

“Did you just kill seven men and shut down a brothel on Birdie Street?” Lord Daniel demanded with no preamble. Victor wasn’t sure whether he was angry or impressed.

But then Lord Daniel sniffed and looked confused. Definitely too much lavender oil.

“The Watch informed me a money lender named Matthew was responsible for the murder of a silk trader. I went to investigate. We don’t want trouble this close to the tournament. When I tried to apprehend the criminal, I was attacked by his lackeys.”

“Matthew,” Lord Martin mused. “We’ve been trying to get at him for years. This is the first time we’ve made any headway. The man you captured is Matthew’s right hand. I’m amazed we didn’t lose anyone. When we’ve tried this in the past, we’ve always had casualties of our own. Frankly, I’m astonished you’re still alive. I’m told you fought your way through seven men?”

Victor nodded. He wasn’t sure what to say. Other than it was the most fun he’d had in weeks, but that sounded like boasting so he stayed quiet.

Lord Daniel whistled. “I underestimated you.”

“Most people do.” Victor shrugged. It was hardly the first time.

“Why in heaven’s name did Lady Helisende let you go?” Lord Daniel asked, running a hand through his dark hair. “She must have known what she was giving up.”

“I needed to leave Hastings, and I told her so.” And she had been none too pleased. “Too many people there remember me from before—” he gestured at his face—“and I got tired of all the pitying looks. I threatened to join the Templars, and she proposed I come here instead. I think this was her way of keeping me close.”

Lord Daniel and Lord de Vere looked at each other for a long moment.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” Lord Daniel said. “I need a new commander for my troops. John, who holds the position currently, is getting too old for this work and asked to retire. I think we’ve found a worthy replacement at long last. Also, if you’re willing, I’d like you to take over as my swordsmanship instructor. Seven men! Good Lord in Heaven, I would like to be that good.”

Victor swallowed and nodded, trying not to grin. “Thank you, my lord.” Saints above! Did he just get a promotion? His aunt would be ecstatic. So far, his mission to Winchelsea was a rousing success. If only life were simpler, and he could escape all the women who were complicating it.

*

That evening after dinner, he made his way down the winding street from the castle to Jane, proud of his success, and still smelling a bit too strongly of lavender oil.

“My lord, I hope this fragrance isn’t for my benefit,” she said pulling back in surprise after kissing him.

“It’s for my own benefit as well. I had a messy day. You wouldn’t have appreciated my stench from earlier.”

He nuzzled her neck and grazed it with his teeth, making her gasp. It was so much fun to make her do that.

Grabbing the front of his cotte, she pulled him into another kiss.

“I heard all about your messy day,” she murmured in his ear. “Several ladies came here seeking employment after you shut down their establishment.” She hastily unlaced his cotte and pulled off his shirt, kissing her way down his chest, then unlaced his breeches so that she could stroke him. “I was worried about you.” She knelt and took him in her mouth, and he moaned at the intensity of the sensation.

“Oh God…oh God… Wait, Jane!” He pulled away from her exquisite torture, panting. “You know I always insist on ladies first.”

Pulling back, he lifted her to her feet, wrapped an arm around her waist, and pressed her back on the straw pallet, climbing on top. He pulled up her skirts and rendered her speechless, not relenting until he felt her convulse beneath him. “God, I love watching you come.” Sliding into her, he lost himself in record time.

As they lay catching their breath, she asked, “Did something new happen with Lady Alais today? You were quicker than usual. I can always tell when she’s done something new to set you off. I’m starting to suspect you have feelings for her ladyship.”

He shook his head vehemently. Feelings? He couldn’t afford any of those. For heaven’s sake, he was supposed to be guarding her, not trailing after her like some lovesick swain. He had a sworn duty to defend her from all comers, himself included. Not to mention that she would never look twice at him when so many whole and handsome men vied for her hand.

“I hardly saw Lady Alais, but I did get a new, irritating, Lady-Alais-related assignment. Actually, I could use your help with it. Come to think of it, you may be uniquely positioned to assist me. I’ll make it worth your while.”

He explained about the research he was supposed to do into Lady Alais’s suitors.

“If you hear of anything or know of anything that you think might be useful, let me know.”

“Like, for example, a noble lord that comes to me several times a week without fail because he can’t have the real Lady Alais?” She cocked her head, giving him a saucy look.

He groaned. “I already know about him. You’re all the ‘Lady Alais’ he needs. Trust me.” He pulled her into a kiss, which she returned with more affection and enthusiasm than he had any right to expect from a woman in her profession. “So you’ll help me then?”

“Of course.” She winked at him and smirked.

“Thank you, Jane.” He left his payment and hurried out into the night, praying that none of the Rossignols or de Veres ever found out who exactly it was that he visited so often on Birdie Street. Or what it could possibly mean about him, something he didn’t want to delve into too deeply. Better he ignore that and focus on what he should instead of what he could never allow himself to have.