Page 16 of Never Love a Lord
After a long moment, Sybilla turned and began walking swiftly toward him. “We’re finished for the day,” she said in a cool voice. Her face was the color of the fog beyond the square window. She did not slow as she neared the table, only set her cup down as she passed by. The clicking of her footsteps echoed behind Julian, and then he heard the scrape of the solar door opening. He did not hear it close, and so he craned his neck around to look over the settee behind him.
The door was open, and Sybilla Foxe was gone.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured to the empty, dark room. “Sorry, Sybilla.”
And he found that he was, because he knew it was to get much worse.
“Oh, come on, you stupid . . . you stupid”—Alys pushed against the hulking beast with all her might—“cow !” Her breath came out of her in an agitated huff when she realized her efforts were for naught. She stood aright and slapped the red and white rump.
“You know if I can’t get you to the barn, Piers will never let me help again.” The cow turned its head lazily, grass poking from either side of its wide mouth as it regarded Alys over its shoulder.
Alys gestured toward the cow with the thick limb in her right hand. “He told me to use this on you, you know. ‘Give her a good whack,’ said he. Is that what you want? Can’t you just mo—”
“Moo-oo,” the cow interrupted.
“Yes,moo-oove,” Alys cried.
The cow lowered its head to the new spring grass and began to graze once more.
“Bloody good dairy wife I’ve turned out to be,” Alys grumbled and turned to lean her aching back up against the cow’s warm side. She rubbed her left hand over her growing stomach and looked down. “I do hope you’re a boy.” There was a prickling at her neck and Alys instinctively looked up.
Coming up the closest hill from Gillwick were two riders dressed in quilted leather and mail, weapons clearly at their sides, their horses wearing padded armor.
Alys felt her brows draw together. What would soldiers want with Gillwick? Alys thought she’d left all remnants of politics behind with Sybilla when she had married Piers.
Apparently the cow also heard the riders coming, and fickly chose that moment to move her great bulk toward the barn. It caught Alys by surprise, concentrating on the approaching riders as she was, and she gave a short scream while she windmilled her arms valiantly. She toppled backward into the great, cold, muddy wallow the cow had most recently occupied, the muck splashing up to her hair and face.
And certainly the riders reached her just then, trotting their horses through the gate of twisted gray limbs that marked the field, directly over to her.
This shall likely be very embarrassing, Alys reckoned, as she used her husband’s stick to lever herself from the mud.
“You there, farm girl,” one of the soldiers called out. “Where is your master?”
Alys raised her gaze slightly from where she had been trying to shake the larger blobs from her skirt. “My master, you say? He is in yonder barn. Who are you to ask after him?”
The other soldier looked Alys up and down in a rather personal fashion. “I’d like to get to knowyoua mite better, missy. No reason not to have a little fun with a heifer that’s been had, eh?”
After a short, outraged gasp, Alys swung the thick stick Piers had given her as hard as she could, and an instant later, the mouthy soldier had landed on his head in the mire.
“Ho, there, girl,” the other soldier warned, nudging his horse as if to approach her.
Alys swung around, brandishing her stick. “I am Alys Foxe, Lady Mallory, and if you take one more step toward me, I promise you will be dead before my husband has a chance to rip you apart.”
The soldier halted his mount instantly, and ’twas only then that Alys noticed the royal insignia burned into the saddle leather. “Lady Mallory, my apologies. Are you harmed?”
“I will ask you only once more,” Alys said, eyeing the second soldier warily as he flung off the mud and made several false starts at gaining his mount once more. “Who are you, and what do you want with my husband?”
A deep rumbling of many hooves on packed earth tickled deep in Alys’s ears and she turned her head to once more regard the hill the soldiers before her had only just gained.
A wave of soldiers—a lake, a sea, it seemed—rolled over the land toward Gillwick.
Chapter 7
Sybilla sat in the big, round copper tub before her hearth, the steam from the water wafting around her like the fog along the moors. If her maids had thought the request odd, of a bath so soon after emerging from her rooms, they had not shown it. Sybilla had no desire to join the household for the noon meal, especially since Julian Griffin had said earlier that he would be about with his noble spawn. She needed time to herself to think upon what he had revealed to her. Time to plan. Time to remember.
She stared at her bed—Amicia’s bed not so very long ago—and in the gloom of the shadows it seemed as though the coverlet shimmered, the bed-curtains swayed with an invisible breeze full of whispers.
’Tis terrible things I must speak to you of, Daughter. Shameful things. Horrid, wretched things.
