My Lady of the Whip by Cara Hogarth

Author:Cara Hogarth [Hogarth, Cara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-13T22:00:00+00:00

It wasn’t because of the whip he was here.

No, that was as confusing a detail as any he had heard that evening. All he knew was that there was something about de Peyto’s doxy that snagged his interest like no other.

William stopped in his tracks and sank down on the nearest steps.

He could still turn back. He hadn’t given the huge man his true name and he’d carefully removed any heraldic identifier beforehand. The giant would never know and probably wouldn’t much care if Will failed to attend his appointment at the tower—after all, half the men listening to de Peyto’s tale would likely attend his mistress in their turn.

Will pulled a face. Had the woman encouraged de Peyto to noise her reputation abroad, perhaps tempting him with ex gratia favors? A tempting prospect indeed—the woman charged exorbitant rates.

The thought was enough to make him turn back.

Will stood, brushed off his hose just in case and turned in the opposite direction, pressing his lips together.

Then halted.

That was it. The description of the whore’s mouth. Will frowned, trying to recall de Peyto’s phrasing.

And like a trickle of icy water down his spine, Will knew. He was chasing a pair of lips—the lush lips of a ghost.

She was dead.

Hope against hope, he’d called upon the Lancasters on his latest return from France—again. Isabella would be tired of telling him the same old story. Five years ago, her lady-in-waiting had accompanied the countess as far as the Welsh Marches only to turn south for Somerset and, no, she had not appeared to be sickening.

But William knew better. Bess had embraced death when she embraced him. She had done it knowingly and he, lust-crazed fool that he was, had not questioned what she offered. It was no chance that the pestilence had never so much as touched him when all around were dying.

She had saved him.

The news had trickled through in its usual haphazard way—her father John, Lord of Withycombe, was dead of the plague and his only son with him. The Withycombe castle and lands had passed to a cousin. And Bess? She had vanished. Last heard, she was nursing a mother sick of grief and pestilence. Then—nothing more.

So many people had disappeared in that terrible year. Whole villages had been wiped out, fragmented families had wandered away from the land their ancestors had tilled for centuries. Even when de Montfort went to Withycombe, days in the travelling, people just shrugged impassive shoulders and pointed to the churchyard.

Heart near choking him, William had read them all—rough wooden crosses and sepulchers scarred with Latin. She was not there. But then who knew how many bodies lay within the great pit delved at the height of the plague? No carven marble for them—no time, no mason.

She was dead and he was chasing a whore’s lips.

For what? Old times’ sake? Some twisted fantasy about reliving the past and somehow making things right? He was no frequenter of whorehouses, not even in France where many a man sank himself between the legs of a camp follower just to forget the horrors of the day.

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