Her True Lord's Claim by Emily Tilton

Author:Emily Tilton [Tilton, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Stormy Night Publications
Published: 2014-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Nele took ship from Dover to Barfleur aboard the Henricus Rex, cursing the irony that had anything of that name separating him even farther—by a sea, now—from Anne, when it had been the king himself who bestowed her on Guy de Freche.

The passage took a day, for the winds and the tides did not seem to wish to consort well together, as if nature herself told Nele that he must not go from his lady’s side. His lady, heaven help him: that was how he thought of Anne already. Memories of that night possessed him still, and vague imaginings of what she must have undergone at the hands of Guy de Freche, the new earl of Mercester, tormented him. While Nele rode through the night from Mowton to Dover as if the devil were indeed behind him his cock grew hard, to his eternal shame, thinking of Guy whipping Anne, fucking Anne, riding her there, in her tight little ring where Nele himself had taken her in the best bedchamber of Hawner Castle only the previous night.

Through the whole passage, Nele walked the deck of the little ship, unable to tolerate being still despite having also a full appreciation of the foolishness of pretending he could go anywhere afoot while he sailed across the channel. He began even to think, in his folly, that when he took a turn around the stern, while thinking ‘I love Anne’ ten times, the ship seemed to sail higher into the wind and to make more rapid progress toward Barfleur. But then, the fourth or fifth time Nele tried it, the wind actually died. Faced with the choice of whether he had not performed his little ritual correctly or in fact the wind and the tide paid no heed to lovers’ foolishness, he had reluctantly to decide upon the latter, and to force himself to think of other matters.

He thought about the plan.

“Richard of Poitiers,” Lord Hawner had said, speaking of the old king’s second son, called after his mother Eleanor’s county in Aquitaine, “respects men of action and true loyalty.”

“That I know,” Nele had replied. “In Aquitaine I saw it time and time again—the men whom he rewarded were not always those who did the greatest deeds, but those who did what they said they would do.”

He and Lord Hawner had sat speaking closely in Lord Hawner’s solar, the day before Nele would ride to Stanmer to fetch Anne. Time upon time, Lord Hawner had told Nele since Nele’s return to England after the murder of his cousins in the great hall of Mowton, that a plan could be laid to make all right, or at least to make right all that was left of the house of Lourcy: now the time had come to lay that plan.

“I do not say,” Lord Hawner continued, “that my notion of how the thing may be recovered cannot fail. But I have not lived these sixty years, watching Henry second of his name grow old and wily, without developing wiles of my own.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.