Chapter Three #2
With the mention of the new wife, Victor’s good mood faded. He was back to being frustrated again. Heavily, he sat opposite Edward. “I do not suppose we could leave the woman out of it?” he asked. “I should like to meet my new knight without distraction.”
Edward’s gaze was steely as he looked at his cousin. He knew he had the man. “Nay,” he said deliberately. “The terms are this, Victor – no wife, then no knight. If you want the Scorpion, then you must accept the wife. This is non-negotiable.”
Victor grunted, knowing he had just been cornered.
It was a discouraging feeling, as if a bucket of cold water had just been thrown over him, and it was an effort not to vigorously resist. He wanted the knight, God only knew, he did.
His vanity demanded it. But the wife… not so much.
In order to get one, he had to accept the other.
Damn Edward! Victor puckered his lips as if he was about to say something quite nasty, but just as quickly backed down and drank his wine instead.
“Bastard,” he mumbled.
“What did you say?”
Victor looked at him. “I said that I have been bested,” he lied. “Bested. What did you think I said?”
Edward started laughing. He couldn’t help it. He drank his wine, his voice echoing off the cup. “I know exactly what you said,” he remarked. “Take heart, Cousin. The Scorpion shall be well worth the price paid.”
Victor simply shook his head. “I doubt that.”
Edward set his cup down. “All you have to do is impregnate the girl and send her off somewhere until she gives birth,” he said.
“See to her comfort for the rest of her life somewhere else while you raise your son in the manner you see fit. But you are not, under any circumstances, to be cruel or abusive to the woman. I know you do not want her but you are forbidden to treat her like an animal. Is that clear?”
Victor’s brow furrowed. “Do you truly think I would do that?”
“I know you, Cousin. You can be cruel when you want to be.”
Victor simply looked away. As Edward regarded his cousin, mulling over the all of the things he was capable of, servants entered the small hall with trays of bread, cheese, fruit, nuts, and other delicacies. It was evident that they were preparing for the supper hour that was swiftly approaching.
As the servants prepared the table and Edward grabbed at food as it was set around him, Victor rose on his big legs and moved towards the hearth.
His movements were pensive as he thought on the turn his life was about to take.
Edward’s idea about sending the woman away had been sound and, in truth, was the only attractive suggestion in this entire situation.
Victor had properties in Dorset and Somerset, so there were places he could send her.
The one factor that concerned him, however, was impregnating her.
He’d only been with one woman in his life, when he was about fifteen years of age, and that had been enough of an experience to convince him that women were simply not his taste.
It had been a disgusting experience as far as he was concerned.
He’d had dozens of lovers, all of them male, but it wasn’t something Victor spoke of.
His sexual preferences were his own and he was a private man.
Therefore, his biggest distress in all of this was consummating the marriage.
Edward was expecting a son from him and it would not bode well were he to disobey the king.
As Victor stood there and fretted, guests began to enter the smoke-filled hall.
It was soon for him to meet his new wife, like it or not.
It was most definitely not.
*
“Some wine, Kevin?”
Thomas’ words were quiet. Kevin, who had been sitting in a window seat in a large oriel window overlooking the south section of the palace grounds, looked up from where he had been hunched over, lost in thought.
He’d spent the past hour seated on the cold, stone bench, folded over and staring at the floor as he thought on the death of his father.
Even though he knew his father had been in ill health, still, it was a shock.
He wasn’t ready for it. His heart screamed for his papa.
“Thank you, no,” Kevin replied softly.
Thomas and Adonis had been hanging back in the shadows, watching Kevin as the man dealt with his grief. They knew he needed time to think and to reflect, and they’d give him a nominal amount of time for that. Now, it was their time to speak because they were hurting, too.
“We never did send a missive north to announce your return,” Thomas said.
“We left Dover so quickly that there was not time and, to be truthful, I do not believe any of us thought about it again on our ride to London. Mayhap we should send a missive now to let your mother know you are safe and back in England. I should think she would want to know.”
Kevin nodded slowly. “She will,” he said. Then, he smiled faintly, with irony. “She will want me to come home right away, you know. If I remain in London any length of time then she will come looking for me. When she finds me, she will box my ears.”
Thomas grinned and Adonis, who had been standing back against the wall, stepped forward.
“Aunt Jemma was never afraid to express herself,” Adonis said.
“She would blister the buttocks of any child who veered out of line, me included. Your father was always there to protect us. I wonder who will protect us now?”
Kevin chuckled in spite of himself, thinking of his feisty mother whom he loved dearly.
“It will have to be Uncle William or Uncle Paris, or even Uncle Michael,” he said, his smile fading.
“God’s Bones, I wonder how Uncle Michael has dealt with my father’s death.
He and my father were closer than brothers. ”
The Kevin of old would have worried about others before himself, so the mention of his father’s best friend, Michael de Bocage, was not unusual.
However, the Kevin since leaving for the Levant was much more selfish, so the mention of someone else’s feelings, these days, was something of anomaly.
The Scorpion thought of himself first and foremost, so at the moment, it was clear that the persona of the Scorpion was becoming distorted with the sensitive Kevin Hage from the past. It was the Kevin who had freed his emotions much more easily. It was rare when those lines blurred.
“Uncle Michael has William and Paris to help him,” Adonis said, thinking of the great knights of Castle Questing and Northwood Castle who were now so old.
“I remember as a child how much Uncle Michael would frighten me. The man is taller than any man I have ever seen. I remember some of the other children telling me that the stammer in his speech was really a curse. Every time he spoke and stammered, he was cursing me. I was terrified of him for years because of it.”
Kevin was back to grinning again, weakly.
“He is a kind man,” he said, sighing softly.
“I know my father thought the world of him. I… I suppose my father’s death should not have shaken me as it did because his health had not been good for years.
His heart had been weakened. But when the king informed me of his passing, I realized I felt very much like an orphan.
Even though my mother is living, my father was my rock.
He was the man I most wanted to be like.
With him gone, I feel lost and directionless.
I feel as if I have failed him somehow.”
Adonis sat next to him on the stone bench. “You never failed him,” he said quietly. “You are a great knight, Kevin. Your father was very proud of you. Out of all of your brothers, you are the most like him in both looks and temperament. Your father shines through you.”
Kevin reflected on his father, his brothers, his family as a whole.
There was much regret in that reflection.
“I do not even know why I went to the Levant now,” he confessed.
“My father begged me not to go but I insisted. It was so very foolish; I should not have gone. I should have stayed with him. I should have… stayed.”
Thomas sat down on the other side of Kevin.
“Had you stayed in England, you would have been miserable and we all knew it,” he said.
“You cannot blame yourself for doing what you felt you had to do. Your father did not fault you for it. Why do you think he asked us to go with you? He knew that you had to follow your heart, to seek your purpose in life. He knew that better than you did.”
You had to seek your purpose in life. Those words rang true. In fact, he recalled his father saying a very similar thing. Kevin sighed heavily, nodding as he thought on his departure to the Levant.
“I had to get away from thoughts of Penny,” he said.
“I will be honest when I say I have still not forgotten about her. How could I? From the time I was very young, I always knew she would be the woman I would marry and that was cruelly taken away from me. She is part of me, no matter what I do. My father knew that. But she is more a memory now than anything else. That raw pain I felt for her is finally gone. I wish I could have told my father that.”
Thomas wasn’t sure what to say. Penelope was his sister, after all, so in some small way, he felt guilty for Kevin’s pain purely by association.
Perhaps that was why he had gone to the Levant with the man – guilt.
But his guilt was reconciled in his mind much as Kevin’s lost love was reconciled in his, so there was no point in discussing it. It was simply the way things were.
“Wherever he is, I am sure he knows,” Thomas finally said.
“I am sure he knows of the greatness you have achieved also. You went to the Levant to seek your purpose and now you have found it. You are now to be a knight sworn to the Duke of Dorset, the king’s cousin.
Not even your father or Uncle William can make such a claim.
Wherever your father is, Kevin, I am sure he is very proud of you. You must believe that.”
Kevin’s thoughts lingered on a particular piece of Thomas’ statement – you are now to be a knight sworn to the Duke of Dorset. It was a highly honorable position but he still wasn’t sure how he felt about that. With the news of his father’s death, everything seemed a bit muddled to him right now.
“I am not entirely sure the honor is all mine,” he said. “The king was most insistent, as you saw, so I am quite positive I have no choice in the matter. But I do not do this alone. You two are coming with me.”
Thomas looked at Adonis, who shrugged. “If the duke will accept my oath, I shall give it,” Adonis said. “I have heard the man is quite generous with his men. He has a very fine fighting force.”
Kevin lifted his eyebrows. “It just became better because now it will have a Hage, de Wolfe, and de Norville in it,” he said. “Those three names are some of the biggest among England’s knights. The duke should be well-honored to have all three of us.”
The conversation seemed to be veering away from the sorrow over Kieran Hage’s death, for which Adonis and Thomas were grateful.
Kevin, a highly emotional man at times, could brood with the best of them and now was not the time for brooding.
The king was demanding something of him and Kevin would need to follow through or risk damaging his reputation.
There would be time enough for grieving later.
At the moment, they had a future to face.
“I am sure he will be,” Thomas said. Then, he stood up and peered down the corridor that led into the bowels of the palace.
“Let us find a servant now so we can be taken to our rooms. I have a very strong desire to submerge myself in hot water up to my neck before we attend supper. I have not taken a long, hot bath in over six years.”
Adonis stood up as well, stretching out his big body. “And I have a very strong desire to lie upon a bed that isn’t dirty or isn’t spread upon the ground. A real and true bed stuffed with feathers is exactly what I want.”
Kevin didn’t want to think on baths or feather mattresses; his mind was still very much focused on thoughts of his father but he would no longer linger on it publicly.
Whatever he felt, whatever sorrow he was experiencing, would not become public knowledge.
He’d already said too much on the subject.
Sorrow and emotion were weaknesses and the Scorpion had no weaknesses.
It was time to bury his grief just like he buried everything else.
No emotion must show. When he grieved for his father, it would be in private or not at all.
Squaring his big shoulders, he stood up from the bench.
“Then let us retreat to a comfortable chamber where Thomas can drown in a tub and Adonis can sleep on feathers,” he said. “As for me, I would like something sweet to drink. Mead, mayhap.”
Thomas snorted. “That is a woman’s drink.”
Kevin cocked an eyebrow. “Will you call me a woman to my face?”
Thomas shook his head. “Not me,” he said flatly. “If you want mead, then mead you shall have.”
Kevin’s gaze lingered on Thomas as if challenging the man to say something more about his sweet tooth, but Thomas grinned and went to collect his saddlebags.
As the men collected their gear, Adonis managed to locate a servant who fetched a house servant who took them to two adjoining chambers on the upper floor of the palace.
Even as the men settled down and bathed, and Thomas turned shriveled in a hot bath because he had stayed in it so long, Kevin’s mind still lingered on his father and his regrets for having left the man.
He couldn’t shake his thoughts, as much as he tried, and that infuriated him.
He had to be in control of himself, always, and not let his feelings control his better sense.
Emotions were a gateway to pain and he was tired of being in pain.
He was tired of allowing himself a weakness, however small.
The death of Kieran Hage shut off the last few strains of feeling that Kevin would ever allow himself to feel.
The Scorpion now ruled completely.