Chapter Five
He wasn’t sure if there was actually pounding on the door or if it was simply the pounding in his head.
Tiberius was trying to sleep, trying to ignore the massive headache that was throbbing against his forehead, but the pounding on the door assured him that he could no longer sleep.
Someone was not only pounding on the door but they were calling his name.
Frustrated, and ill, he struggled to lift his head.
“Enough!” he roared to whomever was doing the pounding. “I am awake.”
The voice on the other side of the door was muffled. “Lord Gallus requests your presence in the armory,” someone said. “He requests it now.”
Tiberius braced a hand against the wall next to the bed as he pushed himself into a sitting position.
His head hurt so badly that he was sure it was about to explode and send brains and blood all over the floor.
Surprisingly, it didn’t burst, although he fervently wished it would.
Perhaps it would relieve the pressure. He was in more pain than he’d been in for quite some time.
He wasn’t one to overindulge, at least not as much as he had last night, so he was rather angry at himself for having imbibed too much. Now, he was paying the price.
He was also angry at himself for another reason.
Oddly enough, he could remember certain things he said the previous night.
He remembered telling de Moray that Lady Douglass belonged to him since he had saved her from de Montfort’s assassins.
Bits and pieces of memories came back to him, like weeping for his mother, but the rest of it was mostly a blur.
He didn’t like the blur, fearful of what else he had said in his inebriated state.
Drunken men usually said embarrassing and odd things, and he had a feeling that he had utterly humiliated himself in front of Lady Douglass.
With a grunt of absolute pain, he stood up unsteadily from the bed.
More pounding on the door startled him, shooting bolts of pain through his head and he nearly fell over with it all.
The soldier sent to deliver Gallus’ message called to him again and Tiberius angrily chased the man away, assuring him that if he caught him on the other side of the door when he opened it, then he would promise the man pain of his own.
The soldier ran off as Tiberius yanked open his door.
Hand on his head, Tiberius staggered from the chamber.
His usual custom in the morning was to sing at the top of his lungs.
He did it almost every morning to the point where Maximus would become enraged and try to shut him up.
Prior to marrying Courtly, Maximus had been known to throw punches in order to quiet him down, but since marrying his lovely bride, the man would simply sit and stew and throw punches when his wife wasn’t looking.
It was fairly amazing how marriage had changed the man.
But Tiberius wasn’t thinking about marriage at the moment and he certainly wasn’t about to sing.
He was thinking on Lady Douglass and how he needed to apologize to her for his drunken antics.
In fact, it was nearly the only thing on his mind.
As he took the stairs down to the first floor, he could hear Violet and Lily and the barking of their dogs.
He could also hear Courtly and Jeniver as they went about their chores for the day, instructing the servants to wash bed linens on this day and clean the floors.
As Tiberius reached the landing, he could see his nieces playing with the dogs, the very big, black Taranis and the equally leggy Henry the hound.
When the girls saw him, they squealed and ran to him happily, but he refrained from picking them up because it hurt his head too much to bend over.
But Violet wouldn’t be put off so he ended up picking her up, groaning in pain as he did so.
The sounds of pain he was emitting had the attention of Courtly and Jeniver.
Courtly emerged from what used to be Lady Honey’s chamber. Now, it belonged to Courtly and Maximus. When Courtly saw her brother-in-law, she grinned.
“I am surprised to see that you are up and moving,” she said. “I thought for sure you would spend the day in bed.”
Tiberius couldn’t even shake his head to refute her statement.
The action hurt too much. He rubbed his bloodshot eyes.
“Gallus has summoned me, ’else I would surely still be sleeping,” he muttered, setting Violet on her feet because holding the girl hurt his head.
“I would assume your husband has been summoned as well?”
Courtly nodded, thinking it quite humorous that Tiberius looked so terrible. He also smelled horrible. “He has already gone to Gallus,” she said. Then, she eyed the man carefully. “I am afraid to ask how you are feeling.”
Tiberius grunted. “How do you think?” he said grumpily. “I feel as if my head is about to pound right off of my shoulders.”
Courtly laughed softly. “Then let it be a lesson to you to never again drink so much of that devil cider,” she said. “That stuff has fallen many a man here at Isenhall.”
Tiberius rubbed his eyes again. “I will never touch it again,” he swore softly. Then, he looked at her, blinking his red eyes. “I am afraid to ask just how much I embarrassed myself.”
Courtly sobered a bit. “Maximus removed you before you did too much damage.”
“But I did embarrass myself.”
She shrugged. “It was the drink. Everyone knows that.”
He grunted, unhappy. “I knew it,” he said. “I made an arse out of myself in front of Lady Douglass and her father, didn’t I? Something about Lady Douglass belonging to me because I saved her?”
Courtly was trying not to laugh. “You were quite adamant about it.”
Tiberius was feeling increasingly miserable. “Has de Moray left yet?”
Courtly shook her head. “Nay,” she said. “He is breaking his fast with Lady Douglass and Garran in the great hall. Jeniver and I were going to join them shortly. Will you come?”
Tiberius looked at her, thoughts of Lady Douglass rolling through his pain-hazed mind.
Strangely enough, even though he knew he said that she belonged to him, he didn’t regret it.
At the time, he truly meant it, and now…
well, he meant it still but he knew it was an unreasonable assumption.
However, he was sorry that he had spouted off so and he wanted to tell Lady Douglass that without her father or brother hanging about.
He would apologize to them as well, but for the lady… he wanted to apologize privately.
“Not at the moment,” he said. “I want you to do something for me.”
Courtly nodded. “Anything. What is it?”
Tiberius hesitated. “Will you bring Lady Douglass to the solar?” he finally asked.
“I fear… I fear that I must make apologies to her for my behavior last night and I wish to do it in private. I am sure her father will not let her meet with me, alone, so I would ask that you bring her to me. De Moray will let her go with you as an escort.”
Courtly’s blue eyes twinkled. “You want to see her alone?”
“Aye.”
Courtly regarded him a moment. “Tiberius de Shera, if you want to see her alone to do something unseemly, then I will have no part of it.”
He waved her off. “Nay, I swear it,” he said. “Nothing unseemly. I simply wish to apologize to her. Will you please help me?”
Courtly’s gaze held steady on him. Her brother-in-law was a bit of a rake and quite randy with the women.
He flirted and he conquered, and under normal circumstances she would not have trusted the man alone with a lady.
But there was something in his manner that told her this situation was different.
She didn’t know why, but there was something about him that was unusual for Tiberius.
Could it possibly be the very real trappings of humility?
For once, did he truly wish to apologize to a woman for his actions? She wondered.
“Very well,” she agreed. “But under one condition.”
“Name it.”
She put her fingers to her nose. “That you bathe yourself,” she said. “You smell like a barn animal. Go and bathe yourself this very minute or I will not summon the lady. I would be ashamed to.”
Tiberius sniffed himself, realizing that he did smell rather bad, although he’d known that for days. He hadn’t cared until this moment. If it would get him what he wanted, he would do what he was told.
There was a room off to the side of the kitchen that was used for bathing with a massive copper tub that was half-buried in the floor.
Once, the tub had been used to strip carcasses but over the years, the men of Isenhall realized it was big enough to bathe their rather enormous bodies in and that was where they did their bathing these days, close to the kitchen and close to an endless source of hot water.
Tiberius made his way down to this room, ducking through the doorway to enter the low-ceilinged chamber.
He’d passed through the kitchen on his way and told the cook what his intentions were, so there were already servants bringing forth hot water from a supply that was usually kept simmering off to the side of the enormous kitchen hearth.
The cook’s husband, a big man with a round belly and no teeth, began filling up the big, copper tub with buckets of hot water, splashing some of it on the floor as Tiberius began to undress.