Chapter 2 – A Wedding #3
“I’ll draft additional orders tonight,” he said. “You can forward them on, Miche, I’m sending you ahead to Celderline tomorrow. You too, Huber. Make sure the Prior’s still in residence and pay some men to spread the word that the Duke of Andelin is getting married.”
It still felt strange to say it, as if he were talking about someone else who was a duke, and someone else’s wedding.
“Give me money,” drawled Miche, sprawled out by the fire with his long limbs in everyone’s way. He was never shy about asking.
“No more than ten sovereigns.”
“Should I spread word that the duke is getting married in a barn?”
“How much do you think you need to bribe a few drunkards?” Remin retorted. “Pay the Prior and buy two rings. Plain silver.”
“My older brother got married twelve years ago,” said Auber. “I know it was twelve years ago because my sister-in-law complains about her silver ring every year on the same date. Not one diamond to grace it, not one star for her hand.”
“Weren’t we camped on the Talfel most of last year?” Tounot asked.
“I got letters. She mentioned it in the letters,” Auber said, a little grimly.
Remin looked from one man to the other. There seemed to be an important message here.
“You’re suggesting I buy diamond rings,” he said slowly.
“And maybe some flowers,” Miche put in, to a general murmur of agreement. “Even if she is the Emperor’s get, Rem, she’s going to be your wife for life. Women don’t forget this kind of thing. Don’t do anything you don’t want to hear about for the next fifty years.”
“Twenty sovereigns,” he said, in a tone that closed the discussion. Wisely, his men moved on to another topic.
The subject had made him acutely uncomfortable.
After he drafted his orders, Remin relieved Darri at the supply wagon and propped himself against the wheel, wrapped in a blanket.
He could see the girl’s sleeping face in the starlight, turned in three-quarter profile and undeniably pretty, when it wasn’t hidden under a mass of hair.
Had the third messenger at Aldeburke come for her?
Would the Lord and Lady even know about it, if the girl had a habit of roaming around the estate unguarded?
And if the message had been for her, what might it have been?
Even if she was the Emperor’s spawn, she hardly looked capable of assassinating him herself.
And once they reached his lands, she would be utterly alone.
She had no allies. She wouldn’t be able to send so much as a smoke signal without his knowledge.
He watched her sleeping for some time, burrowed into the fur cloaks at the front of the wagon. Her hair was impractically long, cascading off the side of the cart and already tangled. Had any of those benighted maids thought to pack anything as useful as a comb?
“Here’s fifty,” he told Miche before dawn. The company’s gold was distributed among a number of saddlebags and other unlikely places, including the soles of Remin’s boots. “Buy diamond rings. And find her a dress.”
“A dress?”
“One that fits. And one for the wedding.” Remin scowled, daring the man to be amused. “If the duke is getting married, his bride shouldn’t look like a beggar.”
“They’ll think she’s a queen,” Miche said, with his most elegant bow.
Sir Miche of Harnost was a cynic and a womanizer, but he could charm birds out of the trees and for reasons known only to himself, had sworn his service when Remin was still a boy.
“Size-wise, you think she’s more like Lady Flavie or that seamstress back in Merelde? Chinot, that was her name.”
“How should I know? You saw a great deal more of them than I did.” Remin’s eyes flashed a warning, because he knew exactly what was going through Miche’s filthy mind. “Use your discretion about what else a woman might need, but make sure she’s fit for travel. And don’t waste my money.”
“I will hire minstrels to sing the story of your love throughout the Empire,” Miche promised, and ducked Remin’s fist.
“Huber.”
“Yes, Your Grace. No minstrels.” Huber was already mounted, the humorless balance to irreverent Miche. “Quit fucking around, Miche, get in the saddle. We’ll have to ride hard to make Celderline before nightfall.”
Knowing Miche, Remin found himself wondering if maybe he should have given them a little less time. Idle hands were ripe for mischief.
* * *
The maids had not, in fact, packed a comb.
Hidden under the supply wagon, Ophele rummaged through her small bag of supplies, a pretty flower-patterned valise that might have been sufficient for a day trip in a carriage but was getting battered to bits in the wagon.
Already something had been broken—she suspected a mirror—and she was carefully picking the larger pieces out of the bag and taking stock of the surviving supplies.
It looked as if there were several changes of undergarments rolled into discreet little bundles of silk and lace, along with another of Lisabe’s old dresses, two pairs of stockings, a small packet of various medical herbs (considerably crushed), several bolsters of sanitary cotton, along with cosmetics, perfume, and three jeweled hair pins.
Someone had thought of hair pins, but not a brush or comb.
Muttering to herself, Ophele fished carefully through the case, hoping not to slice any fingers.
After riding all day yesterday and sleeping in the wagon, she felt unspeakably grungy and would have traded all three pins for a toothbrush.
One of the duke’s men had appeared with a basin of water while she was still rubbing the sleep from her eyes, but she felt too self-conscious to wash in front of so many strangers.
All she wanted to do was stay out of their way until it was time to leave.
“Princess?” rumbled a deep voice, and a pair of long legs clad in thick breeches and leather riding boots stopped beside the wagon. The duke’s face appeared, sun-bronzed and stubble-jawed, his shaggy black hair damp from his own ablutions.
“A mirror broke,” she said nervously before he could ask. The duke always made her feel like she was doing something she shouldn’t. Plucking a curving shard of glass from the bag, she held it up as evidence.
“Let me see.” He moved with animal grace as he crouched over her, reaching for the valise which contained multiple varieties of unmentionables. She snatched it away.
“Oh, no, it’s all right,” she said quickly. “I’ll be careful, I—”
His black eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Give it here.”
Did he think she was going to try to stab him? Or grind up glass to put in his food? Ophele’s face reddened.
“There are…private things in it,” she said, willing him to understand. “It’s only—”
“Now,” he snapped, his eyebrows lowering like thunderheads. Clutching the bag, she wondered wildly whether she would actually fight him over this, maybe even run for it, though she couldn’t possibly win. His huge hand grasped the bag and twisted it out of her arms.
This was mortifying. Ophele looked at her feet as he rummaged, picking out more shards of the broken mirror, meticulously setting every object in the grass as if he were one of the Emperor’s tariff men performing an audit.
She couldn’t bear to look at his face, but she could tell the precise moment he realized what the little bundles of lace and silk were, and realized that he was openly displaying her breast bindings and underclothes to two score milling knights.
“I told you,” she whispered, humiliated beyond all description. “It was a mirror. I didn’t even pack the bag.”
“That is true,” he said stiffly. And then, unbelievably, he went on removing the rest of the articles, all the way down to the bolsters of sanitary cotton, at which point she buried her face in her hands and wished she was dead.
His one concession to decency was that he covered her underthings with the spare dress.
She heard rather than saw him slip out from under the wagon, and he shook out the smaller pieces of glass into the coals of a nearby fire. His boots returned, and he paused for a moment, then knelt back under the wagon and handed her the empty valise.
“We’ll be leaving soon,” he said, without expression. “Pack your things. Don’t hide under the wagon again. If it rolls, you might get hurt.”
She refused to acknowledge him. She had never been so embarrassed in her life, and growing up with the Hurrells had given her an extensive reservoir of experience.
Biting her tongue, she looked down at her lap, furiously blinking back tears.
She would not let him see her cry. That would be the final humiliation.
After a moment, he moved away without another word.
That man was going to be her husband. In a few days, he was going to be doing worse than touching her underclothes.
Ophele had no concrete idea what went on between a man and a woman—the library at Aldeburke had little information on the subject—but she had overheard the maids gossiping often enough to have a vague notion.
She would die. She would be the first person in recorded history to actually expire of mortification.
He was a brute, he was a cruel, callous, heartless bully and a mean man.
Snatching up her violated undergarments, she stuffed them into her bag, every jerk of her hands punctuating a growing list of adjectives.
Unfortunately, once she was packed, the only place she could go was back to that mean man.
At the front of the line of horses and men, the duke mounted his black warhorse and wordlessly held out a hand, a silent order to come, and lifted her in front of him.
She tried to shift toward the front of the saddle, sitting stiffly upright to touch him as little as possible.
They moved out.