The Sun and the Moon by Patricia Ryan

Author:Patricia Ryan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Medieval
Published: 2010-07-07T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Hugh gritted his teeth when he noticed Lady Clare strolling toward him out of the darkness. He shouldn’t have let himself get so sotted; enacting his role in this strange little drama was challenging enough sober.

As the final courses of supper were being served—to the others, for Hugh had no stomach for food tonight—Halthorpe’s villeins had built an enormous Midsummer’s Eve bonfire in the middle of the outer bailey. Breaking out reed flutes and cowbells, they had danced around it in holiday celebration as Lady Clare’s guests, including Phillipa and Aldous, gathered to clap and sing—except for Hugh, who sat by himself at the table, watching from a distance as he emptied a jug of wine and started in on another.

A while ago, the music had taken on a more measured, haunting cadence, and Marguerite du Roche had stepped into the circle of onlookers, moving in a slow, sinuous, overtly seductive manner that had prompted the few remaining villeins to fall away. She had been performing this trancelike dance since. She swivelled her hips, caressed her breasts, whipped her hair like a fiery banner. In a trailing silken gown the color of fresh rust, with flames roaring behind her, her slit-eyed gaze lighting on one man after another, she might have been a succubus from the netherworld out to seduce their very souls.

“Marguerite’s like that in the bedchamber, as well,” Clare observed as she sat next to Hugh on the bench, her keys rattling, her right side snugged up against him although she was facing the other way; a kestrel now clung to her gloved left fist. “Completely loses herself in sensual abandonment.”

Hugh did not bother asking her how she knew this.

Leaning back against the table, her arms outstretched on it, Clare smiled at him the way whores did, the sexual promise crudely obvious. She was one of those women who strikes you as dramatically beautiful until you get close and realize that the hair is a bit too flatly black, the skin too marble-white—save for a bright pink smudge on each cheek. Phillipa, who’d been born with the coloring Clare emulated through artifice, had skin as translucent as oiled parchment, revealing the occasional little blue vein beneath; Hugh loved making her blush and watching hot color bloom within her cheeks.

Right now, Phillipa was standing with her back to him, hand-in-hand with Aldous as they watched Marguerite dance. In that lovely ivory tunic that bared her shoulders, her hair in a pearl-wrapped chignon, she was as angelic a vision as Marguerite was demonic.

Clare said, “Father and I used to fly the hawks with your sire—did you know that?”

“Aldous told me,” Hugh said thickly. Damn, but he wished he hadn’t drunk so much.

“I knew Lord William had a son two or three years younger than me, but you never came hawking with us.”

“My father didn’t permit any activities that would take time away from my training.”

Her smile deepened. “We were almost betrothed, you and I.”

God’s bones. The thought of being bound in matrimony to this woman was too grotesque to contemplate.

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