Praise for the novels of #1 New York Times bestselling author
SUSAN WIGGS

“Wiggs is one of our best observers of stories of the heart. Maybe that is because she knows how to capture emotion on virtually every page of every book.”

—Salem Statesman-Journal

“A bold, humorous and poignant romance that fulfills every woman’s dreams.”

—Christina Dodd on Enchanted Afternoon

“[Wiggs] has created a quiet page-turner that will hold readers spellbound as the relationships, characters and story unfold. Fans of historical romances will naturally flock to this skillfully executed trilogy, and general women’s fiction readers should find this story enchanting as well.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Firebrand

“The Charm School draws readers in with delightful characters, engaging dialogue, humor, emotion and sizzling sensuality.”

—Costa Mesa Sunday Times

“Susan Wiggs delves deeply into her characters’ hearts and motivations to touch our own.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on The Mistress

“An inspiring story that will touch your heart.”

—Oakland Press on The Horsemaster’s Daughter

“[A] delightful romp…With its lively prose, well-developed conflict and passionate characters, this enjoyable, poignant tale is certain to enchant.”

—Publishers Weekly on Halfway to Heaven

“[A] lovely, moving novel with an engaging heroine…Wiggs’s talent is reflected in her thoroughly believable characters as well as the way she recognizes the importance of family by blood or other ties. Readers who like Nora Roberts and Susan Elizabeth Phillips will enjoy Wiggs’s latest. Highly recommended.”

—Library Journal [starred review] on Just Breathe

“Tender and heartbreaking…a beautiful novel.”

—Luanne Rice on Just Breathe

“Delightful and wise, Wiggs’s latest shines.”

—Publishers Weekly on Dockside

“Another excellent title to [add to] her already outstanding body of work.”

—Booklist on Table for Five [starred review]

“With the ease of a master, Wiggs introduces complicated, flesh-and-blood characters into her idyllic but identifiable small-town setting, sets in motion a refreshingly honest romance, resolves old issues and even finds room for a little mystery.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Winter Lodge

[starred review, a PW Best Book of 2007]

“A human and multilayered story exploring duty to both country and family.”

—Nora Roberts on The Ocean Between Us

At the King’s Command

At the King’s Command
Susan Wiggs

This book is for Joyce Bell—

friend, fellow writer, voice of reason,

ear at the other end of the phone

and all-around fairy godmother.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe a debt of gratitude to Joyce Bell, Betty Gyenes and Barbara Dawson Smith for their frequent and patient readings of the book in progress.

Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught.

—William Shakespeare

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Prologue

December 1533

The gypsy was hiding something. Juliana was sure of it. Even in the dimness of the barn, illuminated only by a wick burning in an oil-filled horn, she could see Zara’s eyes dart nervously, her big-knuckled hands dive for cover in the layers of her tattered skirts.

“Oh, come, Zara,” Juliana prompted. “You promised to read my future.”

Zara’s fingers came up to toy with her necklace of coins. “The hour is late. You should go back to the house. If your mother knew you’d sneaked out to consort with gypsies, she would beat you raw and turn us out in the snow to freeze.”

Juliana fingered the garnet buttons on her cloak. “Mama will never find out. She never comes to the nursery at night.” Juliana wrinkled her nose. “Besides, I shouldn’t have to sleep in the nursery anymore. I’m getting too old for Misha’s silly pranks and Boris’s night frights.”

Zara’s hand, large and heavy and smelling faintly of sheep fat, cradled Juliana’s cheek with a gentleness the girl had never felt from her mother.

“Fourteen is not so old,” Zara whispered.

Juliana peered at her through the dusty air, misted from the breath of the horses stabled in the back of the barn. The sweet, earthy smell of hay and animals drifted around her and insulated the small space from the blustering cold outside.

“Old enough to be betrothed.” Juliana placed her hands upon her knees, the sable lining of her cloak soft beneath her palms. “Is that why you won’t tell my fortune? Is Alexei Shuisky…Is he someone I can love?”

She thought of Alexei, a black-haired, fair-skinned stranger who had arrived only yesterday to settle the betrothal arrangements with her father. She had met him but once, for the house was vast and like everyone else, Alexei seemed to think she belonged in the nursery.

“After we are wed, will he beat me?” Juliana asked recklessly. “Take a new wife and send me to a nunnery? Grand Prince Vasily did exactly that. Perhaps it’s all the fashion now.”

Zara’s lips parted in the beginnings of a smile, yet worry haunted her dark eyes. Gaps showed where she had sacrificed a tooth for each child she had borne. Her brood, now seven strong, slept upon straw and rough blankets in an empty stall. Her husband, Chavula, and her uncle Laszlo were presently out checking the traps for rabbits for the pot.

A feeling of comfort and belonging settled over Juliana. It was rare for a band of gypsies to travel this far north, yet each winter they came to Novgorod, high in the forested heartland northwest of Moscow. Juliana’s father, Gregor Romanov, allowed the small tribe to shelter on his huge estate during the cold months.

The privilege was not lightly extended. At the age of three, Juliana had gotten lost in the thick, river-fed forest. Her father had mounted a frantic search. Hope dwindled as the cold northern darkness fell, and then a stranger had appeared.

Dressed in the bright breeches and beribboned blouse of a Carpathian, he had helped himself to a leash of three windhounds from Gregor’s kennel. Searching tirelessly with the huge, fleet dogs, he had located Juliana huddled and weeping by an icy stream.

She remembered little of the incident, but she would never forget the ecstatic barking of the windhounds or Laszlo’s wonderfully fierce face and the strength in his arms as he had lifted her up to carry her home.

Since that day, she had felt drawn to these mysterious, nomadic people. Her veins coursing with royal blood, she had been groomed from the cradle to be the wife of a powerful boyar. She was not even supposed to notice gypsies, much less associate with them. The fact that they were forbidden to her only made their secret meetings more delicious.

“Well?” she prompted Zara. “Have you seen such a vision of Alexei?”

“You know my visions are not so clear, nor so obvious.”

“Then what?” Impatient, Juliana yanked a silver button off her hood. “Here, this is worth at least a hundred kopeks.” Zara’s hand closed around the bauble, and Juliana smiled slyly. “Ah. Does that help you see more clearly?”

Zara dropped the button into her bodice. “You Gaje,” she said good-naturedly. “You’re all so easily gulled.”

Juliana laughed, the button no more valuable to her than a stick of kindling. Her family’s wealth was a fact she accepted as readily as she had accepted her father’s long absences in the service of Vasily III, grand prince of the neighboring city-state, Moscow.

The thought sobered her. A few weeks earlier, Vasily had died. He had left his son Ivan, a mere three years old, on the throne and his council of boyars quarreling bitterly amongst themselves.

Lately, Papa stayed locked in his study, writing frantic missives to allies in other cities. He was worried about the ruthless nobles who had begun to clamor for the power to rule now that the prince was dead.

Shaking off the image of her father’s troubled eyes, his drawn face, she held out her hand, palm up. “Hold nothing back this time. ‘Long life and happiness’ might satisfy the superstitious Gaje, but I want the truth.”

Zara reluctantly turned Juliana’s palm toward the flickering light of the lamp. “Some matters are better left unknown.”

“I’m not afraid.”

Zara’s eyes locked with Juliana’s, veiled pools of black confronting clear emerald green. “It is good to be fearless, Juliana.” Zara’s nail, edged with ancient dirt, traced a sinuous unbroken line across Juliana’s palm. Then the gypsy looked at the large brooch Juliana wore pinned at her shoulder.

The thin flame from the lamp gave the ruby a glow of life, making the precious jewel appear depthless in its cruciform setting of gold and pearls.

Zara’s eyes glazed and her cheek—the one marked so wonderfully with a star—seemed to droop slightly. Without moving, she appeared to slip away, deep into a secret realm of intuition and imagination.

“I see three strong women.” Zara spoke slowly, her Romany accent thickening. “Three lives entwined.”

Juliana frowned. Three women? She was her father’s only daughter, though she had innumerable Romanov cousins in Moscow.

“Their fates are flung like seeds to the four winds,” Zara continued, still staring at the heart of the jewel, and always her fingers stroked and circled, discovering the unique topography of Juliana’s hand.

Zara touched a delicate curved line. “The first will travel far.” Her blunt finger continued, edging along until it encountered a broken line. “The second will douse the flames of hatred.”

Zara’s finger circled back, finding the point where the three main lines converged. “The third will heal old wounds.”

A chill slid up Juliana’s back. “I don’t understand,” she whispered, fighting the urge to snatch back her hand. Outside, the wind rattled through the bare trees, a lonely voice in a world of ice and darkness. “How can you see the destinies of two others in my palm?”

“Hush.” Zara clutched her hand tighter, closed her eyes, and began to sway as if to a melody only she could hear. “Destiny falls like a stone into still water. The circles flow ever outward, encompassing other lives, crossing invisible boundaries.”

In the distant kennels, the dogs added their voices to the howl of the wind. Zara winced at the sound. “I see blood and fire, loss and reunion, and a love so great that neither time nor death can destroy it.”

The harshly whispered words hung, suspended like dust motes, in the dimness. Juliana sat motionless, part of her perfectly aware that Zara was a practiced trickster who could no more see the future than could her brother’s favorite troika pony. Yet deep inside Juliana something moved and shifted, grew warm like an ember fanned by the breath of the wind. She sensed a bright magic in Zara’s words, and for all that they were but vague prophecies, they embedded themselves in her heart.

A love so great. Is that what she would find with Alexei? She had met him only once. He was handsome and youthful, merry eyed and ambitious. But love?

Questions crowded into her throat, but before she could speak, an owl hooted softly from the rafters of the barn.

“Bengui!” Zara dropped Juliana’s hand. Fear shone sleek in her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” Juliana asked. “Zara, what are you hiding?”

Zara shaped her fingers into a sign to ward off evil. “The owl sings to Bengui—to the devil.” Her voice trembled. “It is a clear portent of…”

“Of what?” Faintly, Juliana heard the drumbeat of hooves. Not so much heard it as felt the deep rhythm in the pit of her stomach. “Zara, it’s merely a barn owl. What could it possibly portend?”

“Death,” Zara said, jumping up and running to the stall where her children slept.

Juliana shivered. “That’s ridic—”

The barn door banged open. In a swirl of blowing snow, lit from behind by the icy glow of the moon, Laszlo entered. Behind him came Chavula, Zara’s husband. Both men’s swarthy faces appeared taut with terror.

Chavula spoke rapidly in the Romany tongue. Then he spied Juliana, and the color slid from his cheeks. “God!” he said in Russian. “Don’t let her see!”

Cold apprehension gripped Juliana. “What’s happening, Chavula?” She moved toward the door.

Laszlo stood in her way. “Do not go outside.”

Anger rushed up to join with her fear. “You have no right to order me about. Step aside.”

Juliana took advantage of his hesitation. She pushed past him and stepped out into the blustering snow.

The wind tore at her cloak. Swirling snowflakes pelted her face, and she squinted through the storm in the direction of the main house.

An eerie red glow lit the rambling mansion.

Juliana screamed.

The house was ablaze. Her family and all the servants were in danger. Her beloved windhounds and hunting dogs were confined to the kennels adjacent to the kitchen.

Laszlo yelled a command to Chavula. Lifting her skirts, Juliana raced toward the house. She felt Laszlo grab at her sleeve, but she shook him off.

She ran as if her feet had wings, skimming over the soft snow rather than sinking into the drifts. She saw flames lashing from the windows, heard the yelp of a dog and the whinny of a horse.

But the horses were all stabled for the night. The thought slid through her panicked mind, then disappeared like water through a sieve.

As she was crossing the broad lawn where snowclad bushes and arbors created soft hillocks, she heard heavy breathing behind her.

“Juliana, stop. I beg you.”

“No, Laszlo,” she called over her shoulder. “My family—” Papa. Mama. The boys and their nurse. Alexei. New urgency increased her speed.

Laszlo’s hand gripped the hood of her cloak. He hauled back, and the sudden motion caused her feet to fly out from under her. She hit the ground with a muffled thud, landing beneath a snow-draped weeping mulberry. A shower of snow half buried her.

She opened her mouth to scream. Laszlo’s hand, in a smelly leather mitten, clapped itself over her parted lips, and all she managed was a huff of frantic rage.

Pinning her to the ground with his own body, Laszlo spoke softly into her ear. “I am sorry, little Gaja, but I had to stop you. You do not know what is happening here.”

She wrenched away from his hand. “Then I must go and see—”

A series of loud pops punctuated the air.

“Gunfire!” Laszlo dragged her deeper into the cavelike shelter of the snow-covered mulberry. With a shaking hand, he parted the lower branches to reveal the front of the house.

Shock robbed Juliana of speech. She lay as motionless as a gilt icon. The flames were brighter now, fed by the high winter wind, roaring like giant tongues from the windows and casting bloodred shadows on the ground.

A group of horsemen rode up and down in front of the house. Their mounts were skittish, mist pluming from their distended nostrils and snow flying from beneath their hooves.

At the base of the stone staircase, a black shape lay on the ground.

“Gregor!”

Her mother’s voice. The edge of tormented agony was one Juliana had never heard before. Natalya Romanov flung herself upon the shape. Even as her cries keened with the sharpness of grief, a broad-shouldered man in a fur hat and black boots strode forward. His wicked curved sword flashed in the firelight.

Natalya Romanov’s screams stopped.

“Mama!” Juliana tried to scramble out from beneath the bush, but Laszlo held her fast.

“Be still,” he whispered. “There is nothing you can do.’

Nothing. Nothing to do but watch the murder of her family. She spied Alexei rushing to and fro, and for a moment hope crested inside her. Perhaps Alexei would save her brothers.

But as quickly as he had appeared, he faded from sight, surrounded by menacing attackers and roaring flames.

It was evil torture for Juliana to lie there, helpless, as if in the grip of the hideous nightmare. The assassins struck like a storm. They were no band of outlaws but soldiers, doubtless under the command of one of her father’s many rivals. Fyodor Glinsky from across the river—only the week before, the rival lord had called her father a traitor.

“Shield your eyes, little one,” Laszlo begged her.

She sobbed into her cold hands, but she would not look away. It was too late to help her loved ones, for the soldiers were swift. Their shadows loomed like demons on the fire-colored snow. In seconds she saw Mikhail’s throat slit, little Boris fly backward as a man shot him at close range. Servants were herded like cattle into the courtyard and stabbed. The dogs, loosed from the kennel, were slaughtered as they lunged at the invaders.

Her entire glittering world, once so full of opulent promise, shattered like a house of spun sugar.

Juliana’s mouth opened in a voiceless scream. Her hand closed convulsively around her pearl-and-ruby brooch. The priceless piece had been a gift from her father. The cruciform shape concealed a tiny stabbing dagger, but the weapon was useless against the swords and sabers and firing pieces of the soldiers.

The snap and hiss of the flames invaded the snow-insulated quiet of the night. Then a dog barked. Squinting, Juliana saw two men locked in a struggle. One of them was Alexei, she was sure of it! She closed her eyes and offered a brief, frantic prayer for his safety.

The baying of a dog caused her to open her eyes. One of the windhounds leaped out of the shadows and clamped its jaws around a booted leg. Juliana heard a muffled curse. “Be damned to hell!” As one man fell to the ground, she saw the stark outline of his cheek above a thick beard and felt a stab of awareness, but the feeling quickly dissolved into the eerie horror of blood and flame.

A blade flashed, met the animal’s shoulder. The dog sped yelping into the night.

Through a drumbeat of shock, Juliana heard male voices rolling across the lawn.

“…find the girl?”

“Not yet.”

“Devil take you. Look again. We can’t let a child of Gregor Romanov live.”

“I’m here,” Juliana called to them, but her voice was only a dry whisper. “Yes, I am here. Come for me!”

“Fool!” Laszlo covered her mouth again. “What will it serve to sacrifice yourself to these boyars, as well?”

Like the bitter winter wind, comprehension swept over Juliana. Boyars. Jealous, power-hungry nobles. They had killed her father, her family, her fiancé.

She remembered the whispered arguments between her parents. Over the fearful objections of her mother, Gregor had helped the grand prince draw up a new will on his deathbed, one that slashed the powers of the boyars. Now Juliana understood her mother’s fear. The nobles would murder even women and children to seize control of the realm.

“Search the outbuildings,” one of the soldiers called.

She turned her tortured gaze to Laszlo and whispered, “Help me.”

“We must hurry.” He dragged her from beneath the bush. “Keep low and to the shadows,” he said, taking her by the hand. They skirted the lawn, her neck prickling in anticipation of the sting of a razor-edged blade.

They reached the barn and slipped inside. Moonglow shone through gaps in the wood siding.

Zara, Chavula and the children were gone. Only the faint scent of burnt oil from the lamp lingered.

Yet in the crossties between the stalls stood Gregor’s two swiftest horses, bred for speed and endurance in the vast and distant steppes. The mounts had been saddled, and they stood with heads low, blowing softly into the chill air.

“Quickly, get on,” Laszlo said, cupping his linked hands to receive her booted foot.

A muffled explosion sounded. Juliana looked through the open door to see that part of the palace roof had caved in, shooting a plume of sparks into the night sky. The sudden rush of firelight outlined three figures jogging toward the barn.

“We’ll leave through the grazing pasture,” Laszlo said, shouldering open a door in the rear.

Juliana bent low over the neck of her mount and slapped the reins. Her mind retreated and cringed in agony. The winter darkness swallowed the two riders as they headed toward the river Volkhov. They skirted the earthwork ramparts and walls of the kremlin of Novgorod, its torchlit towers speeding past in a blur of light.

The snow-muffled thunder of hooves startled the sleepy tollman at the wooden Veliky Bridge, but Juliana and Laszlo had stormed across by the time he roused himself to demand payment.

They galloped through the small merchant district of the town. Dogs barked and someone shouted, but the riders paid no heed. Not until the road had diminished to a snow-covered track and the naked woods walled them on two sides did they slow their pace to a lope.

“Someone is following us,” Laszlo said.

Juliana whipped a glance over her shoulder. A narrow shadow slipped toward them.

Laszlo yanked a dagger from his sleeve.

“No!” Juliana said, dismounting in a billow of skirts and cloak. “It’s only Pavlo.” In moments the huge borzoya filled her arms. Pavlo was but a year old, her favorite and one she had been charged with training. She was not surprised the dog had caught up with them. The windhounds were bred to run with breathtaking speed, tirelessly, for miles, to exhaust a wolf so the hunters could bring it down.

“Pavlo.” She buried her face in the deep fur of the dog’s neck.

And smelled blood.

“He’s been hurt, Laszlo.” She plucked an image from the midst of her nightmare—a dog leaping, the slash of a blade, a forgotten curse followed by a pitiful animal yelp.

Laszlo was crouched in the path, examining something. “He’s left a trail of blood, Gaja. I am sorry, but we must leave him.”

Juliana struck away his sharp dagger. “Don’t you dare.” Her voice held a hardness, a note she had never heard before. It was the voice of a stranger, no longer a girl but a woman who had seen hell. “By God’s light, Laszlo, he’s all I have now.”

The gypsy muttered something in Romany. He found a strip of material and bound the wound in the dog’s shoulder. Moments later, they were on their way again.

Laszlo pushed ahead with unwavering purpose. Only when the silver thread of dawn glittered on the snowy horizon did Juliana ask the obvious question.

“Laszlo, where are we going?”

He hesitated, then cast his gaze west, away from the rising sun. “To a place I have heard of in the songs of my people. A place called England.”

England. It was but a vague idea in Juliana’s mind, a few words on the page of a book she had once read. A murky, misty land of barbarians. Her tutor, a glib and gifted man, had taught her the language so he could read her odd poems of adventure and virtue triumphant.

“But why so far?” she asked. “I should go to Alexei’s family in Moscow to tell them what befell their son.”

“No.” Laszlo spoke harshly, and the shadows hid his face. “It is too dangerous. The assassins could be neighbors, people you once trusted.”

Juliana shivered, thinking of Fyodor Glinsky and all her father’s rivals. “But…England,” she said in a dazed voice.

“If we stay here,” Laszlo said, “they will hunt you down and kill you. You heard them, little one. I dare not risk a journey to Moscow.”

Exhausted by loss, she closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. But in the darkness behind her eyelids she saw it again—death, blood, fire, all painted in the bright red hues of savagery.

Juliana forced her eyes open. The rising sun cast a ray of weak winter light on a dead snow-covered leaf that lay in the path.

Then she remembered the prophecy. Zara had whispered it to her only the night before, but an eternity had passed since then.

The first will travel far.

One

Richmond Palace, England

1538

Stephen de Lacey, baron of Wimberleigh, walked into the Royal Bedchamber to find his betrothed in bed with the king.

His face as cold and unflinching as a Holbein portrait, Stephen stared at the dark-eyed Welsh beauty all but hidden beneath the quilted silk counterpane. A hissing tide of resentment roiled deep inside him, threatening to drown him. Clenching his fists at his sides, Stephen conquered the turmoil within. Through deliberately blank eyes, he looked at King Henry VIII.

“My liege,” he said, blowing stiffly, inhaling the scent of dried lavender and bergamot from the sachets in the bed hangings. By the time he straightened up, the king’s attendants had arrived to groom their sovereign for the day.

“Ah, Wimberleigh.” The king put out his arms as an attendant scurried forward and helped him don a loose silk jacket. Henry smiled. In that smile there lingered yet a hint of the old charm, the derring-do of a golden young prince. A prince whom Stephen, as a boy, had idolized as the second Arthur.

The legendary Arthur had died young, in a blaze of glory. Henry had made the mistake of living on into the corrupt mediocrity of middle age.

“Come, come,” said Henry, beckoning. He swung his swollen legs over the side of the bed and pushed his pale feet into a pair of brocade slippers held by a kneeling servant. “You may approach the royal bed. See what I’ve found you.”

As he crossed the huge room, Stephen felt the searing curiosity of the sovereign’s attendants. By now the chamber was crowded with titled gentlemen, all engaged to supervise the most intimate bodily functions of the king—and also to influence the policies of the realm.

Sir Lambert Wilmeth, groom of the stool, took His Majesty’s bowel movements as seriously as Scottish border disputes. Lord Harold Blodsmoor, surveyor of the wardrobe, regarded the king’s collection of shoes as highly as the crown jewels. Yet at the moment, the attention of these great gentlemen burned into Stephen de Lacey.

The girl smiled shyly and even managed to summon an artful blush. She stretched with catlike grace, a bare shoulder emerging from the bedclothes. Like most of the king’s mistresses, she took a perverse pride in sharing the bed of the sovereign.

After so many betrayals, Stephen should have known better than to trust the king. Should have known that the summons could only mean more petty cruelty.

“I was feeling frisky today.” Henry’s grin held both mischief and subtle rancor. Limping slightly, he went to the royal stool, speaking over his shoulder as he relieved himself. “I decided to exercise the droit du seigneur—again. An antiquated notion, to be sure, but one that has its merits and deserves to be revived from time to time. Now, make a gracious greeting to your lady Gwenyth, and then we’ll—”

“Sire,” Stephen broke in, heedless of the gasps from the noblemen present. No one interrupted the king. In the thirty years of his reign, Henry VIII had put men to death for lesser offenses.

Instantly Stephen regretted the risk he had taken. With that one blurted word he might have jeopardized everything.

“Yes?” The king seemed only mildly annoyed as his gentlemen helped him into doublet and hose. “What is it, Wimberleigh?”

Stephen couldn’t help himself. A killing rage rose like a fountain of fire inside him. “To hell with your droit du seigneur.”

He turned on his heel and strode from the Royal Bedchamber. Though well aware of the infraction he was committing, he could not be a willing player in the familiar, vicious diversion that so delighted Henry.

The red-and-white livery of the king’s Welsh yeomen passed in a blur as Stephen strode out into the paved central court. Seeking a place to cool his temper in private, he stalked into a walled garden. A pebbled path led him through tortured little plots of whitethorn and sweetbriar. The flower beds had been arranged geometrically, so that they resembled rather coarse mosaics.

Stephen wished for the hundredth time that he had ignored the king’s annual summons and stayed in Wiltshire.

But to refuse the command was to risk the one thing Stephen would kill to safeguard. If the price of keeping his secret was to have his heart ripped out and his pride publicly shredded, then so be it.

His conviction that the king hadn’t finished with him proved correct, for an hour later, a haughty majordomo summoned him to the Presence Chamber.

An open-timbered ceiling arched high over the hall. The watery sunlight of early spring streamed in through twin banks of mullioned windows. Colored glass made a shifting, jeweled pattern on the walls and floor. Somewhere, an unseen lute player strummed softly, the shimmering music a sweet undercurrent to the murmur of voices.

Members of the Privy Council stood by, sharp eyed, their shoulders hunched beneath heavy, long robes.

Stephen paced over the smooth flagstones to the gold-and-scarlet-draped dais. There he stopped, swept his satin-lined cloak back over one shoulder, and sank into a formal obeisance. Even without looking at the king, he knew Henry relished the submissive pose of a man of Stephen’s height. Henry took pleasure in anything that made Stephen feel smaller.

He rose with hatred and defiance clear in his eyes, and a gift in his extended hands.

Henry sat upon his massive carved chair, looking like Bacchus clad in silver and gold. In recent years, his face had grown as large as a haunch of beef.

“What’s this?” he asked, nodding to a page. The lad took the small wooden coffer from Stephen and offered it to the king. With childlike haste, Henry opened it and extracted a tiny watch on a golden chain. “Marry, my lord, you never fail to amaze me.”

“A trinket, no more,” Stephen said in a flat, dead voice. Henry had many appetites, most of them insatiable. Satisfying his craving for unique gifts was no challenge.

Henry slipped the chain through the baldric that encircled his ample girth. “I assume the design is original.”

Stephen nodded.

“You’ve a rare talent for inventions of all sorts, Wimberleigh. A pity you are so lacking in plain manners.” The breadth of his cheeks made his eyes look beady, his mouth thin lipped and tight. “You left the Royal Bedchamber without begging leave, my lord.”

“So I did, sire.”

Henry’s hand, pudgy and sparkling with rings, smacked down on the arm of his chair. His fingers strangled a carved gargoyle. “Damn your eyes, Wimberleigh. Must you always breach the limits of propriety and decorum?”

“Only when provoked, sire.”

The king’s expression did not change, yet his small bright eyes took fire. “Has it never occurred to you,” he asked in a soft, deadly voice, “that you might do better to dance with your betrothed rather than with my patience? Lady Gwenyth is beautiful. She’s well-bred and reasonably wealthy.”

“She is also ruined, sire.”

“I did honor to the wench,” Henry snapped. “There is only one king of England, just as there is only one sun. My favor is not for one alone.”

Stephen bit his tongue to stop himself from responding. It was useless to quarrel with a man who likened himself to a heavenly body. He could satisfy his every whim all too easily, for what sane man or woman would dare refuse him?

“For God’s sake, Stephen,” Henry thundered, “your evasiveness bedevils me. I’ve found you four eligible ladies in the past year, and you’ve refused them all. What is it that makes you so much better than any other noble?”

“I do not wish to marry again,” Stephen stated. He could not resist adding, “My favor is for no one, not even that silly Welsh comfit I found in your bed.”

“Comfits are sweet and agreeable to the palate,” Henry pointed out.

“Aye, but when handled by too many fingers, they lose their savor. And when left long enough to themselves, they rot.”

Without taking his eyes off Stephen, the king held out his hand. A servitor stepped forward and placed in it a silver cup of sack. Henry drank deeply of the Canary wine, then said, “Ah. Still you pine for your Margaret, now seven years cold.”

With all that he was, Stephen resisted the urge to bury his fist in his sovereign’s face. How blithely Henry spoke of Meg—as if he had never even known her at all.

“Was she so very dear to you, then,” the king went on, twisting the knife, “that you cannot love another?”

Stephen held himself motionless as his mind filled with memories of Meg. Peeking at him timidly from behind her veil on their wedding day. Weeping in pain and fear in their marriage bed. Hiding her secrets from the husband who adored her. Dying in a sea of blood and bitter curses.

“Margaret was—” Stephen cleared his throat “—child. Gullible. Easily impressed.” With terrible, blade-sharp guilt, he knew he had forced her into womanhood and then into motherhood. And finally and most unforgivably, into death.

“I know well what it is to mourn a wife,” Henry said, an unexpected note of sympathy in his voice. Stephen knew he was thinking of quiet, dutiful Jane Seymour, who had died giving the king the one gift he craved above all others: a male heir to the throne.

“However,” Henry continued, imperious again, “a wife is a necessary ornament to a man’s station, and old memories should not make you balk at duty. Now. As to the Welsh lady—”

“Sire, I humbly beg your pardon.” He dropped his voice so only the king could hear. “I will not take any man’s leavings—not even those of the king of England. I’ll not be a salve to your conscience.”

“My conscience?” Henry’s mouth curved into a cold sickle of amusement. His voice was a whisper meant for Stephen alone. “My dear lord of Wimberleigh, where on earth did you get the notion that I had one?”

Stephen’s neck tingled. He reminded himself that Henry VIII had put aside his first wife and brought about the execution of the second. He had appropriated the authority of the church, taken possession of monasteries, driven the poor from their lands. The mere ruining of a young virgin would hardly trouble a man like Henry Tudor.

“My mistake,” Stephen replied softly. “But never mind, the Lady Gwenyth would not want me anyway.”

“Ah, your tarnished reputation,” Henry said, waving his now-empty cup. “Wild revels, gambling and rapine. The gossip does find its way to court. Marry, sir, every maiden in the realm quails in fright at the very thought of you.”

Stephen preferred it that way. He had worked hard to hide his few good qualities beneath a patina of ill repute. “I am a man of low morals. An unfortunate flaw in my character. And now if it please Your Majesty, I must withdraw from court.”

With a swiftness that belied his age and bulk, the king came out of his chair. His thick-fingered hand closed in the front of Stephen’s quilted doublet. “By God, it does not please me.” He put his face very close to Stephen’s, so close that Stephen could smell the warm sweetness of sack on his breath. “Get you a wife, Wimberleigh, and then get you a proper heir, else all of England will know what you hide at your Wiltshire estate.”

An animal roar of denial surged to Stephen’s throat. With an effort born of years of iron control, he forced himself to keep from tearing into the royal face. How Henry had come to know Stephen’s terrible secret was a mystery; how he intended to use the knowledge was becoming painfully obvious.

With a will, Stephen expelled his breath slowly and stepped back. The king no longer gripped him, yet the hold lingered invisibly—would linger until Stephen shed himself once and for all of the king’s ire.

“To your knees, Wimberleigh.”

His cheeks on fire with rage, Stephen sank down.

“Now swear it. Let me hear you vow that you will obey me.” The king’s voice rang loud. “Let me hear that you will wed—if not Lady Gwenyth, then another.”

The command hung, suspended, in the deafening silence that followed. From his low perspective, Stephen caught details with uncommon clarity: the ancient dust clinging to the hem of the king’s cloak, the faint, septic smell of the ulcer on Henry’s leg, the soft chink of the sovereign’s chain of office as his massive chest rose and fell, and the dying echo of a plucked lute string.

All the court waited in a state of breath-held anticipation. The king had flung down the gauntlet, had challenged one of the few men in the realm who dared defy him.

Stephen de Lacey was no fool, and he valued his neck. The years, at least, had taught him to equivocate. “Your will be done, sire.” He spoke clearly so all could hear, for he knew if he mumbled the pledge, the king would make him repeat it.

A collective sigh came from the Privy Councillors. How they loved seeing one of their own humiliated.

Henry lowered his vast bulk onto the throne. “I trust you’ll obey this time.”

Stephen stood. The king dismissed him with a curt nod. Almost immediately, Henry began to bellow for his attendants. “Saddle my horse, I wish to go riding.”

Stephen left the Presence Chamber and passed through the antechamber. The air of corruption lingered even here, in the heavy scent of sandalwood burning in a corner brazier, in the stale mats of rushes that had not been changed in months.

Prior to his audience, Stephen had requested that his horse be brought out, for he wanted to be away swiftly. The grooms of the royal stables had promised to have the tall Neapolitan mare ready outside the west gate.

Stephen strode across the courtyard and passed between the octagonal-shaped twin towers. He paused beneath the ornate portcullis, the pointed wrought-iron bars aimed straight down at his head.

As promised, his mare stood ready in saddle and trappings, tethered to an iron loop in the shade of a spreading oak some distance beyond the gatehouse.

He frowned at the negligence of the grooms. Didn’t they know better than to leave a valuable animal unattended? And where the devil was Kit, his squire?

Cocking his head, Stephen saw a movement beside the mare. A wraithlike shadow, secretive as an unconfessed sin.

A filthy gypsy woman was stealing his horse.

Juliana could not believe her luck. So desperately had she needed a horse for the fair in Runnymede tomorrow, she had been prepared to enter the very walls of the riverside palace and boldly steal an animal.

Instead, as she crouched in a stand of copper beeches and regarded the glistening walls and gilt turrets of Richmond Palace, a groom had emerged with one of the most magnificent beasts she had ever seen. The horse was fitted out with trappings of silver and Morocco leather that would, if traded, feed the gypsy tribe for a decade.

Pavlo, her windhound, had scared the lad off. By now it was a common ploy. No Englishman had ever seen a borzoya, and most thought the huge white dog some sort of mythical beast.

She glanced around to gauge the chances of being caught. A pair of guards in Kendal green-and-white livery stood sentinel in front of the twin gate towers about two hundred paces distant. Their blank gazes were trained on the horizon of the hills that rose above the river Thames; they paid no heed to the horse standing quietly in the shadows.

Juliana paused to touch her luck token—the dagger brooch she wore pinned inside the waistband of her skirt. Then she crept out of the beech grove. The matted grass was damp and springy beneath her bare feet, and her anklets of cheap tin clicked softly with each step. Her skirts, constructed of pieced-together bits of fabric, brushed the ground.

After five years of living among the gypsies of England, she had grown accustomed to looking like a beggarwoman—and to behaving like one when necessary. She accepted her lot with a sort of weary resignation that belied the purpose that still burned in her heart.

Never had she forgotten her identity: Juliana Romanov, daughter of a nobleman, betrothed to a boyar. One day, she vowed, she would return to her home. She would find the men who had murdered her family. She would see the killers brought to justice.

It was a grand undertaking for a penniless girl. The early months in England had been almost hopelessly hard. She and Laszlo, who posed as her father, had bartered her clothes and jewels, bit by bit, on the long journey to England. She had arrived with nothing save her precious brooch, the glittering jewel encircled by twelve matched pearls, the secret blade inside, and the Romanov motto etched in Cyrillic characters on the back: Blood, vows and honor.

It was her last link with the privileged girl she had been. Never would she trade it away.

In time, the shock of losing her family had become a dull, constant ache. Juliana threw herself into her new life with the same determined concentration that had so pleased her riding and dancing masters, her tutor and music teacher, in Novgorod.

She had learned how to barter for a horse in apparently ill health, heal the animal, conceal its defects, and then sell it back to the Gaje for profit. How to appear at a market square looking like the most bedraggled, afflicted of creatures, so filthy that people gave her coin simply to be rid of her. How to perform breathtaking carnival tricks on horseback and afterward, with a lazy, seductive smile, collect coins thrown by her rapt spectators.

Life might have gone on like this indefinitely, but for Rodion.

Juliana shuddered as she thought of him—young, crudely handsome, glaring across the campfire at her with a sort of cruel possessiveness hard on his features.

The inevitable marriage proposal had come last night. Laszlo had advised her to accept Rodion. Unlike her, Laszlo had long since surrendered any dreams of returning to the old country.

Not so Juliana.

Rodion’s plans had spurred her on her quest. The time had come to leave the gypsy train, to present herself to the king of England and request an armed escort back to Novgorod.

Her first order of business was to obtain a set of proper attire. She had become adept at pilfering food from market carts and washing pegged out on lines. A fancy court dress was much more of a challenge.

In the past, the men of the tribe had taken all her earnings. This handsome mare was for her alone.

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. The town of Runnymede held its horse fair starting at dawn tomorrow. She would make the sale quickly, then put her plan into motion.

“Stay here, Pavlo,” she whispered. The large, shaggy dog cast a worried look at her, but lay down and settled his long muzzle between his front paws.

Crouching low, Juliana approached the horse from the front, slightly to one side. “There, my pretty,” she whispered to warn it of her presence. “You’re a pretty mare, that you are.”

The horse ceased its browsing in the tufts of clover at the base of the tree. Its nostrils dilated, and Juliana heard the soft huff of its breath. The well-shaped ears lay back.

Juliana made a low clicking sound with the back of her tongue, and the ears eased up a little. She held out her hand, palm up, offering the horse a pared turnip she had filched from someone’s kitchen garden.

The mare devoured the raw turnip and nudged Juliana’s hand for more. She smiled. For all their strength and speed and endurance, horses were simple creatures easily led by their appetites. Not unlike men, Catriona would say.

Though tension burned in her shoulders and the need for haste pressed at her, she fed the mare another piece of turnip and moved close, running her hand down one side of the smooth, firm neck and up the other. All the time, she kept up a soft patter of speech, English words, mostly nonsense, the lulling language of a mother soothing a child to sleep. In moments, she knew the horse was relaxed and docile.

She glanced at the gate; the guards had neither stirred nor noticed her. A man appeared beneath the portcullis. From this distance, she had only the swift impression that he was tall, broad and tawny haired.

Filled with a sense of impending triumph, Juliana untied the braided cord that secured the horse to the iron loop. She placed one bare foot in the stirrup and reached for the raised cantle of the saddle to hoist herself up.

“Stop, thief!”

For a fraction of a heartbeat, the shout froze her. But in the next instant, Juliana swung up as if lifted by the hand of God and landed astraddle. Without breaking the flow of motion, she slammed her heels against the sides of the horse and made a loud smooching sound.

The horse took off like an arrow shot from a bow. Juliana gloried in the sensation of riding the best horse she had mounted since her frantic flight from Novgorod five years before.

“I see the gypsy’s stealing your horse, Wimberleigh.”

Stephen was so shocked to see the woman galloping off astride Capria that he had not realized King Henry, surrounded by his entourage, had appeared on the high walk between the gate towers.

“She’ll not get far,” Stephen stated loudly. He whirled toward the stables where a groom was leading a saddled hunter out into the yard. “Bring me that horse at once,” he shouted.

The groom looked momentarily confused. Then, apparently convinced by the thunderous scowl on Stephen’s face, he hurried toward the gate with the horse.

“I’ll make you a wager.” Henry shaded his eyes and squinted at the fleeing figure of the woman, tattered skirts and tangled hair flying on the wind. “A hundred crowns says you’ll never see that mare again.”

“Done,” Stephen snapped, mounting the hunger. He dug in his spurs and clattered across the bridge, out onto the open road. The horse had an indifferent gallop and a hard mouth. Stephen would have a bit of a chase on his hands, for Capria was the superior animal. And, he conceded, the gypsy wench was a skilled rider.

She flew past a grove of copper beeches, and a large white dog joined her on the road. Surprise stabbed at Stephen. The lanky, long-haired dog was nearly as swift as the horse.

He bent low over the pumping neck of the hunter. The brown clay road streaked beneath him in a blur. The gypsy whipped a glance back and banged her bare heels against Capria’s sides.

Stephen closed a bit more of the distance between them. A sense of certainty surged up in him. He did not have to ride the woman down. He knew another way to bring Capria back. He needed only to get within earshot.

When he was sure his quarry lay close enough, he put his fingers to his lips. Shaping his mouth with his fingers, he emitted a long, ear-splitting whistle.

The mare jerked her head to the side. The reins slipped from the gypsy’s grasp. Capria slid to a stop, wheeled, and charged back the way she had come.

“No!” The thief’s faint cry carried across the undulating downs along the river. She groped for the flying reins, but the whiplike length of leather eluded her.

Stephen took a dark pleasure in her struggle. A lesser rider would have fallen, possibly to her death, but the woman’s legs stayed tight around the horse’s girth, her feet firmly in the stirrups.

With her throat locked in terror and her hands gripping the mare’s gray mane, Juliana exhorted the horse to turn, or at the very least to stop.

But the stubborn creature only did so when it reached a large man standing beside a horse in the middle of the road. Catching the loose rein, he held out a treat in his other hand.

A crushing sense of defeat caved in on Juliana, but she gave herself not a moment for regrets. Even before the mare came to a full stop, she hit the ground running.

Her head jerked back, and she felt a tearing pain. She loosed a low, throaty scream. The villain had hold of her long braid.

She kicked out with her bare feet, bruising them against the man’s tall boots. She scratched, digging her claws into his neck, his ears, anywhere she could reach.

The fight lasted mere seconds. With perfunctory swiftness, he used the leather reins to lash her wrists together.

“Now then.” His voice was a deep rumble of anger.

“Pavlo!” Juliana screamed.

The dog lunged. A hundredweight of muscle and fur hurled itself at the unsuspecting man.

Pavlo’s yelp of pain pierced the air. Juliana blinked in amazement. Somehow, the man had grabbed Pavlo’s crimson vellat collar and twisted, choking off the dog’s windpipe.

“It would be a pity,” he said, his tone infuriatingly blasé, “to destroy so magnificent an animal. But I shall, wench, unless you command it off the attack.”

Juliana did not hesitate. Nothing, not even her own freedom, was more precious to her than Pavlo. “Let up, Pavlo,” she said in Russian. “Easy, boy.”

The dog submitted, relaxing his knotted muscles and emitting a strangled whine. The man eased his grip on the collar and then let go. “I wonder,” he said. “Is this a case for the sheriff or the palace warden?”

“No!” Juliana had learned to loathe and fear the sheriffs of England. She plunged to her knees in front of her captor, her bound hands held high in supplication. “My lord, I beg you! Do not turn me over to the sheriff!”

“Christ’s bones, woman.” His face flushed with chagrin, he gave her sleeve a tug. “Get up. I mislike begging.”

Heaving a sigh of resignation. Juliana stood. Vaguely she became aware of movement high on the walk between the two towers of the distant palace gate, but her gaze stayed riveted on her captor. He was garbed as a gentleman, in a costume of such exaggerated virility that she blushed. An abbreviated doublet allowed his white shirt to billow forth. Huge sleeves with clever slashings bloomed from the armholes. Tight particolored hose hugged his long legs, his muscular thighs, and culminated in an immense codpiece all decked with silver braid.

A large hand, surprisingly gentle, touched her under the chin and drew her gaze upward. “Nothing but trouble there,” he said, a faint note of cynical amusement in his voice.

With the fire in her cheeks intensifying, she studied his face. He was cleanshaven, an attribute that never failed to shock her, for Russian and gypsy men alike always wore full beards. Framed by a mane of wheat-colored hair, this man’s face was smooth and stark, with chiseled angles that bespoke strength—and intimidating power.

Fear fluttered in her chest. It was his eyes that discomfited her. They were unusual, of the palest, opaque blue, cold as moonstones. She peered into the icy blankness and was startled at what she saw there. A hard, tight pleasure. As if he had enjoyed the chase.

Suddenly the thought of being handed over to the sheriff did not seem so dire as tarrying in the company of this huge, forbidding lord.

But instinct told her not to show fear. She tossed her head. “You’ve got your horse back. She’s a disobedient nag anyway, so why don’t you let me go on my way?”

The man’s mouth tightened. His version of a sardonic smile, she decided.

“Disobedient?” Absently he fed the mare a morsel from a pouch that hung from his wide, ornate belt. “Nay, just greedy. Capria learned long ago that to come to my whistle meant to win a bit of marzipan.”

Before she could catch herself, Juliana mouthed the unfamiliar word.

“Almond sugar,” the man said pleasantly enough. He held out a pasty-looking morsel. “Would you like some?”

She turned up her nose in resentment. The horse snatched at the tidbit.

“Where did you learn to ride like that?” her captor asked.

Juliana hesitated, wondering which lie to tell. If she admitted she had polished her considerable skills with the gypsies, it would endanger the band, for the Romany people were rarely welcome among gentlefolk. Unexpectedly, she heard herself blurting out the truth. “I learned from my father’s riding master. In Novgorod, a kingdom of Russia north of Muscovy.”

The man lifted one tawny eyebrow. “Not only a horse thief, but a lunatic, as well. How long has it been since you escaped Bedlam?”

“Not only a bully, but a braying ass, too,” she shot back.

“Lord Wimberleigh!” A man in palace livery came pounding along the road. “You’ve collared the horse thief, then.”

“It appears that I have, Sir Bodely.”

“Well done, my lord, and you gave His Majesty a few moments of diversion in the process. Though I trow he’ll not look kindly on losing the bet.”

“Your prisoner, Sir Bodely,” Wimberleigh said with a mocking bow. He grinned at Juliana. “The palace warden’s thief taker, at your service.”

Sir Bodely’s brows beetled together. “A wench, is it? Looks gypsy to me.” With swift, jerky movements, he bound her hands with coarse rope and gave the discarded reins to Lord Wimberleigh.

From a belt overhung with an ale-swiller’s gut were the tools of the thief-taker’s trade: a black whip, manacles, and hobbles.

Wimberleigh’s gaze fixed on the savage utensils. His eyes turned flinty, and beneath his billowing sleeves, his shoulders hunched. He turned away. “I’d best be on my way, then.”

In a red haze of fury and fear, Juliana called out, “Are all great lords as cowardly as you, sir?”

His back stiffened, and he swung around to regard her with the respect he might afford a spider. “Were you addressing me?”

“You are the only cowardly lord present at the moment.”

His eyebrows slid upward. “So. You find me cowardly, do you?”

Gingerly she lifted her bound hands. “You are quick to accuse me of stealing your horse, yet you balk at staying to see me punished. What is the penalty for my crime? Hanging? Or perhaps since I failed in my endeavor, I shall merely have my nostrils slit or a hand or an ear cut off. A true man would not lack the stomach to watch.”

His squarish jaw tightened. He addressed the palace official. “Will the wench have a chance to face her accuser in a court of law?”

Juliana held her breath. The law always reads against the gypsy. Laszlo had drummed that lesson into her head. But despite the past five years, she was not a gypsy. She was of noble birth. Her kin had been great princes and rulers. She would convince the court of her true identity and soon have the insolent Wimberleigh groveling at her feet.

The brassy blare of a horn scattered her thoughts. Out of the gates came a party of mounted noblemen, their persons arrayed even more sumptuously than Lord Wimberleigh’s. Retainers swarmed around the gentlemen, boys trotting at their stirrups, a few clutching lead reins.

Sir Bodely doubled over in an obeisance so deep it looked painful. Even Wimberleigh bowed. Juliana simply stared, and with unerring instinct she picked out the king of England.

He rode a roan hunter. His saddle was huge, no doubt specially constructed to accommodate his ponderous weight. Henry of England was as impressive as Grand Prince Vasily had been. Like a proper boyar, the English king wore a full beard. His raiments glittered with gold and silver threads, and his mantle was edged with the black fur of the civet cat.

“My lord of Wimberleigh.” The king’s voice was cold and full of hate. “It seems you made the better wager. I thought your mare a lost cause.”

A wager?

Juliana felt a hot stab of anger. Her life hung in the balance, and the king and Wimberleigh were settling wagers?

“Tell me, my lord,” said the king. “What trick did you play?”

“No trick, sire. I’ve trained the mare to come to my whistle regardless of her rider. She’s as obedient as she is swift.”

“The beast is a wonder,” cried one of the king’s men, clutching his velvet hat to his chest.

“Indeed she is, Francis,” Henry replied. “No need to get yourself overwrought.” His gaze flicked to Juliana. His small eyes were black and impenetrable. His thin mouth, enclosed in the graying red-gold beard, pressed tight; then the corners lifted in a grin. “An Egyptian wench. Well done, Wimberleigh.”

A fresh wave of fear struck at Juliana. “Egyptians,” as folk called the gypsies, were considered outlaws. In some areas, they were hunted for sport with prizes awarded to men who managed to kill or wound one.

“Your Majesty.” Juliana spoke clearly, aware that a faint accent tinged her words. “I am no gypsy.” Her resonant voice, the carefully formed words, attracted the attention of all. Her goal had been to win an audience with Henry of England. True, she had not anticipated these precise circumstances, but now that she had his attention, she would make the most of it.

Henry loosed a bark of laughter. “It speaks! And rather prettily, I must admit.” He reached out his gloves and jeweled hand. “Come here, wench.”

“Your Grace, no!” A dark-haired lady on a palfrey beside the king gasped. “She’s probably crawling with lice and vermin.”

“I don’t mean to touch it, Lady Gwenyth. I merely wish to look at it.”

With her head held high, Juliana stepped forward. To her constant mortification, she did indeed suffer from frequent infestations of lice, and at the moment she itched from a light case. Still, she refused to surrender her moment with the king. Rope dragging in the powdery earth, she made a graceful, flawless obeisance. A murmur of new interest rippled through the fast-swelling crowd.

Juliana took a deep breath. Borrowing the storyteller’s art she had learned from nights around the gypsy campfire, she began to speak.

“My name is Juliana Romanov. I was born in the kingdom of Muscovy to the royal boyar Gregor Romanov of Novgorod.”

From the corner of her eye, Juliana saw two ladies put their heads together and whisper. One of them pointed at Juliana’s cold, bare feet.

She ignored them. “It is true that I tried to, er, borrow the horse of Lord Wilberford.” She hoped she’d got his name right. “I knew not what else to do. Your Majesty, I am the victim of a terrible injustice. I meant to seek your protection and ask your help for a lady of the blood royal.”

Low laughter came from some of the courtiers. Juliana knew they could not see past her tattered gown, her tangled hair, the smudges of ash and road dust on her face.

Yet she had the king’s attention. She meant to seize the moment. “Five years ago, Grand Prince Vasily died, and the boyars—whom you call councillors or nobles—warred against each other. A band of mercenaries burned my father’s house and murdered my family.” She dropped her voice, amazed that even after five years, the nightmare memories still held her in a grip of horror and grief. For a moment, she was back in Novgorod, watching the bloodred flicker of flames on the snow, the tall boots crunching over the drive, the cruel blade of a killer. She heard again the yelp of a dog and a man’s muffled curse.

As quickly as it had come, the vision vanished, leaving her drained. “I alone survived, and by God’s grace escaped to England.”

“Cromwell!” the king bellowed.

The dark-robed man, his clean-shaven face pale, dismounted and stepped forward. “I am here, sire.”

“What think you, Sir Thomas? Can this barefoot wench truly be a daughter of Muscovy royalty, or has Wimberleigh bagged us a madwoman?”

Sir Thomas steepled his long, pale fingers. “It is true that Vasily the Third died five years ago, that there was infighting among the boyars. I had it from the Prussian ambassador.”

Encouraged, Juliana nodded vigorously. “Then you understand my position. No doubt a prince as lofty as yourself would feel honor bound to give me your full support.”

The king chuckled, a charming, musical sound. His mount shifted beneath him as if straining from the burdensome weight. “What sort of support, my lady?”

“A naval escort. Well-armed, of course, for I shall need help in bringing the murderers to justice.”

Someone in the riding party laughed outright. Others joined in the mirth. Wimberleigh raised his eyebrows in skepticism. Furious, Juliana did the unthinkable. She plunged her bound hands into the waistband of her skirt and drew forth the Romanov ruby brooch.

“This is proof of my identity,” she declared. “My father gave it to me on my thirteenth name day.”

“Tis paste,” Lady Gwenyth declared with a bored sniff.

“Or stolen,” said someone else. “We already know she is a thief.”

The dark man called Cromwell addressed Sir Bodely. “Take the cozening wench away and hang her.”

Though her fingers were numb with terror, Juliana had the presence of mind to slip her brooch back into its hiding place.

Chains and manacles clanking, Sir Bodely advanced. Wimberleigh planted himself in the warden’s path. “Free her,” he said.

“But, my lord—”

“I said free her,” the huge, brooding man repeated. “Her offense—such as it was—is against me. I say she goes free.”

The king stroked his beard. “You always did have a soft spot for downtrodden females, eh, Wimberleigh?”

“She’s naught but the bride of calamity,” Cromwell said, his voice nasal with annoyance. “Surely the baron of Wimberleigh has better causes than—”

“Peace, Thomas.” The king held up his hand, then gave a curt nod to Sir Bodely. The warden loosed Juliana’s bonds. Her first instinct was to flee, from the crafty king and his court, and most especially the forbidding man who all but held her hostage with his cold glare.

“What say you, Wimberleigh?” the king asked. Cruel laughter danced in his eyes. “Shall we send the wench on her way, or do you want to keep her for yourself?”

Lady Gwenyth tittered behind her hand.

Juliana watched the tall, tawny-haired lord. He did not move a muscle, yet she sensed that he was torn. His craggy face was a mask of sheer dislike—whether of her or the king, she could not tell. She held her breath, waiting for his answer.

Stephen expelled his breath, wondering how he should answer. Knowing that any response would be the wrong one.

Murmurs of laughter rippled from the crowd. As far as they were concerned, this was a farce put on for their entertainment. In spite of himself, Stephen had to admire the way Juliana bore up under the humiliating mirth of the king and his court. Henry’s black-eyed glare had taken down fiercer adversaries than an addlepated gypsy girl, yet she returned his stare with unflinching ferocity.

Almost as if she viewed herself as his equal.

All of Stephen’s instincts urged him to send the girl on her way, back to her coarse gypsy people. Then he committed a grave error. He looked into her eyes.

What a world of torment and yearning he saw there, in the flickering green depths. He thought of the husky, exotic cadences of her voice, the curiously accented words. Your Majesty, I am the victim of a terrible injustice. He told himself it should not matter; he had no business to concern himself with the troubles of an unwashed half-mad gypsy.

And yet a voice rose inside him—alien, yet wholly from the depths of his heart. “Sire, the choice should be hers.”

“Nay,” cried Henry, and his tone raised a prickle of suspicion on the back of Stephen’s neck. “The choice is mine. If we let the wench wander free, she’ll doubtless revert to her thieving ways. This girl, wild as she is, must wed.”

A chill touched the base of Stephen’s spine. In his mind he heard the echo of the king’s command: Let me hear that you will wed—if not Lady Gwenyth, then another.

Henry was angry at losing the wager. He had ruined a handful of maidens and his patience was wearing thin. Stephen knew, with a leaden sinking in his gut, that the king had found a new way to indulge his malice.

“You, my lord, will marry the wench,” Henry proclaimed.

Two

While the courtiers gasped in scandalized disbelief, and Lord Wimberleigh seemed to turn to stone, Juliana folded her arms to contain the frenzied beating of her heart.

“I cannot marry him,” she said in a rush. She tried to suppress her accent, but when she was nervous it became more pronounced. “He—he is beneath me.”

Uproarious laughter filled the air, and the sound stung like a glowing brand.

“Have you heard nothing I have said?” she shouted. “I am a princess. My father was a Romanov—”

“And mine is the Holy Roman Emperor,” said Cromwell, his thin mouth pinched with dry humor.

Sir Bodely nudged her, none too gently. “Show a bit of gratitude, wench. The king just saved you from the gibbet.”

She fell silent and still. Marriage to an English lord? But that would mean abandoning the goal that had driven her for five harsh years. It would mean putting aside her plan to return to Novgorod and to punish the assassins who had murdered her family.

King Henry brayed with laughter. “I did nothing of the sort, my good Bodely. I simply left the choice to Wimberleigh. And he chose to let her live.”

“So I did,” came Wimberleigh’s quiet answer. He stood close to her, his presence as threatening as a rain-heavy storm cloud. His light hair swirled about his face, and she noticed tiny fans of tension bracketing his eyes. “But I think we’ll both soon find, sweet gypsy, that some things are worse than death.”

She stiffened her spine in response to the chill that suddenly touched it. She tore her gaze from Wimberleigh. There was something disturbing about him, a ruthlessness perhaps, and deep in his eyes lurked a glint of raw panic. A dread that matched her own.

“A charming observation, Wimberleigh.” King Henry wore a jovial smile that Juliana instinctively mistrusted. Of all the men in England, only this king came close to the splendor she had known every day of her life in Novgorod. The dark raisin eyes darted from her to the baron. “This is an apt way for you to fulfill your vow to me, my lord. You promised to take a wife, yet insisted on a chaste woman. Why not the Egyptian princess, then?”

A fresh wave of laughter burst from the courtiers.

As Stephen watched the small bedraggled captive, she did a most amazing thing. Her dirt-smudged chin rose. Her narrow shoulders squared, and her hands balled into fists at her sides.

It was that stern pride, so incongruous in a girl in tattered skirts and matted hair, that caused Stephen to betray himself.

Summoning his massive frame to its full height, he glared the courtiers into silence. Even as he did so, he cursed himself for a fool. He shouldn’t ache for her. He shouldn’t defend her.

“Sire,” she said, her voice composed, yet still lyrically rhythmic, “it is a great compliment that you find me suitable for so lofty a lord, but I cannot marry this stranger.”

“Will it be the gibbet, instead?” the king asked, a cold smile on his face.

Though she did not move a muscle, she turned pale. Only Stephen stood close enough to see the pulse leap at her temple. He wanted to turn away, to shield his eyes from her. He did not want to see her courage or her desperation. He did not want to pity her or—may God forgive him—admire her.

He felt like a blind man in a thorny maze, unable to find a way out. Henry had aged rapidly and badly. He had grown as volatile and unpredictable as the Channel winds. Yet his craving for revenge was as sharp as ever.

“My lord of Wimberleigh,” Henry shouted in his most blustery I-am-the-king voice, “I have offered you true English beauties—ladies of breeding and wealth. You have refused them all. A gypsy wench is no better than you deserve. The de Laceys were ever a mongrel lot anyway.”

More laughter erupted. Yet some of the mirth began to sound forced. When the king lashed out with cruel insults, all feared the razor edge of his choler turned next upon themselves.

Thomas Cromwell cleared his throat. “Sire, for a nobleman to wed a common gyp—”

“Be silent, you spindle-shanked little titmouse,” King Henry thundered at Lord Privy Seal. “Better men than Wimberleigh have wed women of low station.”

Anne Boleyn, Stephen thought darkly. The woman who had shaken the monarchy to its foundations had been naught but the daughter of an ambitious tenant farmer.

Cromwell flinched, but with his usual aplomb, he said, “Perhaps, then, ’tis a matter for the clergy to debate.”

“My dear Cromwell, leave the canon lawyers to me.” Henry turned to Stephen. “Your choice is clear. Marry the wench, or see her hanged for thieving.”

“She’ll need cleaning up,” Stephen blurted. “And it will take her months to learn the new catechism. Then perhaps—”

“Nay, bring a cleric!” Dismissing Stephen’s attempt at stalling, King Henry gave a regal wave of his hand. “To hell with banns and betrothal arrangements. We’ll see them wed now.”

Evening mantled the knot garden outside the chapel. Like a flock of gulls after a fishing boat, the courtiers moved off in the wake of the king. Hushed whispers hissed through the fragrant night air, seductive and yet somehow accusing.

Feeling numb and emotionless, Juliana stopped beneath an arbor and fingered a long, spiny yew leaf. Its rough edges abraded her fingertip. She had no idea what to say to this stranger. A king’s caprice had made him her husband.

Stephen de Lacey turned to her. Stephen. Only during the hasty, almost clandestine ceremony had she learned his given name, learned it when she had been obliged to pledge a lifelong vow to this tall, unsmiling English lord.

Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.

She wondered if the cleric’s awesome words still rang in his ears as they did in hers.

He stood between two shadowy hawthorn hedges. The breeze ruffled his gold-flecked hair, and for a moment the thick waves rippled as if disturbed by the fingers of an invisible lover. He had the most extraordinary face she had ever seen, and the play of light and shadow only made it more so. His eyes caught an errant gleam of waning light, and she saw it again: the pain, the panic. The stark, lurking fear.

“Is he always this cruel?” she asked.

He cleared his throat. “The king, you mean?” He spoke in low tones, though his deeply resonant voice carried.

Juliana nodded. “Who else maneuvers lives like chess pieces?”

Wimberleigh pressed his palms against the railed border of the garden. He stood quietly for a moment, seeming to study the razor-clipped hedges. “He possesses both passion and whimsy. He grew up the second son, nearly forgotten by his father. Then his elder brother’s death launched Henry into the succession, and he seized power as if he feared someone would snatch it away. When a man of such qualities also happens to be king and pope alike, it can make him unspeakably cruel.”

“Why does he take pleasure in tormenting you?”

A bitter smile tightened Wimberleigh’s lips, and she knew she would get no honest answer to her question. “Your complaint surprises me. The king saved you from death.”

“I would have fought my way free,” she declared.

“For what?” His voice had a taunting edge. “So you could return to the gypsies, who would make you a serving wench and a whore for the rest of your days?”

“And you, my lord?” Juliana shot back. “What will you make of me?”

Stephen de Lacey stepped closer, his large shape filling the twilit path. She stood her ground, though instinct warned her to flee. There was danger here, close to her, just a whisper away.

“My dear slattern,” he said gently, in the voice of a lover, “I have just made you a baroness.”

His mockery cut at her pride. “And for that you expect gratitude, yes?”

“’Tis better than hanging as a horse thief.”

“So is having one’s nostrils slit, but that does not mean I relish the reprieve. Why did you save me? Clearly you like me not.”

Dark laughter stirred his broad shoulders. He leaned close, his breath warm upon her cheek. “Your powers of observation are keen, my gypsy.”

“You have not answered my question. You seem to be a man fond of his independence, yet you jumped like a trained spaniel when the king gave his orders. Why, my lord? I sense King Henry has a lance aimed at your heart.”

His chin came up sharply, and she heard his breath catch. “Do not amuse yourself with idle speculation. My affairs are hardly your concern.”

Resentment and frustration built inside her. She was supposed to be on her way to a horse fair now, planning her first audience with the king, who would help her win back her birthright. “It is my affair since you just took me as your wife.”

“In name only,” he snapped. “Or did you truly think I would take this marriage seriously?” With frigid disdain, he glanced at her from head to toe. “That I would honor vows wrung from me at the whim of King Henry?”

Juliana thanked God he did not mean to treat her as a true wife. She decided in that instant to stay in the tattered, lice-ridden guise of a gypsy wench, for it obviously disgusted him.

Still, a perverse sense of injured pride darkened her spirits. “I am free to go, yes?” she inquired. She fought an urge to clutch at the neckline of her blouse, to hide from him. “Well?”

“Not yet. I’ll take you to Wiltshire. Once the king tires of his trick, we’ll get an annulment and you can go back to—to fortune-telling or pocket picking or whatever it is that you do when you’re not off thieving horses.”

Juliana gritted her teeth. “I happen to do a good number of things. Some of them are quite clever. Tarrying in Wilthouse—”

“Wiltshire, my tenderling. ’Tis a few days’ ride west of here.”

She planted her hands on her hips. “Tarrying in Wiltshire was not part of—”

“Of what?”

She could not tell anyone, especially this stranger, of her secret schemes. “My plan,” she stated simply.

He bowed from the waist. “I regret the inconvenience, then. Perhaps you’d be more pleased had I left you swinging from the gibbet.”

She hated him for being right. Though she did not want to acknowledge the truth, he was as much a victim of the king’s wrath as she.

A sigh of resignation gusted from her. Darkness now filled the knot garden, and the first stars of evening pricked the sky. “What about tonight?”

“I managed to dissuade the master of revels from leading the bedding ceremony.”

“What is the bedding ceremony?”

“We would have been escorted to bed by a group of drunken revelers and…never mind. You may stay alone in my chamber. My squire and I will take the anteroom. Be ready to ride out at first light.” He turned to leave.

“My lord.” Juliana lightly touched his sleeve. The fine lawn fabric covered a hard, masculine warmth, and the sensation startled her.

Apparently it startled him, as well. His eyes widened, and a look of revulsion broke over his shadowed face.

Searingly aware of how long it had been since she had bathed, Juliana snatched her hand away. “I am sorry.”

“What were you going to say?”

“I…forget.” But as he showed her to the chamber where she was to sleep, she acknowledged the lie. She was going to thank him for saving her from the noose. For glaring the courtiers into silence when they would have made high sport of her. For speaking his vows loudly over the titters of the ladies.

But his look of disgust when she had touched him drove any sense of gratitude from her.

It was her wedding night, and save for the company of a large white windhound, she lay alone. More alone than she had ever been before.

As if the king had commanded it, the next day dawned clear and brilliant, the weather a sharp contrast to Stephen’s gloomy mood. He should have let the gypsy girl flee on his horse, should have forfeited the wager to King Henry. Capria was precious to him, but not nearly so precious as his freedom.

Instead, he had foolishly allowed himself to be captivated by the horse thief’s wide eyes, so clear and disarming in contrast to the dirt on her face, the tangles in her hair.

Gypsy eyes, he told himself. As false and full of lies as her Romany soul.

“Ah, Kit,” Stephen said, sitting on a heavy box chair and holding his head, “say it was all a bad dream. Say I’m not truly shackled by God’s law to a wild, half-mad gypsy.”

Kit Youngblood’s mouth quirked in a curve that suspiciously resembled a stifled grin. He held out Stephen’s plain frieze jerkin. “It was no dream, my lord. The king waived the banns and called for a clerk. You are well and truly married to the strange girl.”

Stephen lifted his head, rubbed his hands over his stubbled cheeks, then pushed his arms into the jerkin. “Must you always be so blunt?”

“My lord,” Kit said, lacing Stephen’s sleeve to the armhole of the jerkin, “why did you not simply refuse?”

Stephen did not answer, for not even Kit knew the truth—that if he had dared to cross the king once more…

“She would have been hanged,” Stephen said brusquely. “We shall collect my gypsy baggage and get ourselves home. Then I’ll find a way out of this mess. Where is the wench, anyway?”

Juliana was already mounted and ready to ride when Stephen came out to the park beside the river Thames.

“My blushing bride,” he muttered under his breath. She sat frozen upon a gray gelding, her cheeks still smudged with dirt, her eyes wide and wary with pain and uncertainty.

The look brought on a flash of remembrance. A few years earlier, Stephen had come upon a poacher’s trap. The sharp-toothed iron jaws were clamped around the foreleg of a young doe. The dying creature had gazed up at him, that same look in its eyes, begging for a quick death.

Stephen had slit its throat.

“The lady,” he said with a mocking bow, “does not seem to take joy in seeing her new husband.”

“I take no joy in riding off with my jailer,” she spat. “I’d no more pretend to like you than I would care to warm your bed.”

He slid his gaze slowly over her. She sat astride, her patched skirts hiked up and billowing over the saddlebow. Long bare legs and dusty feet clung expertly to the horse’s sides.

“Believe me,” Stephen assured her, “I have higher standards for the women I bed.” His fury at the king honed an edge of cruelty to his words. “You seem better suited to certain other domestic tasks.”

She glared at him with loathing hot in her eyes. “I will not do your Gajo washing, nor work in your Gajo fields.” With her strange dog trotting at her horse’s stirrup, she rode stone-faced, looking disturbingly like a scatterling from a siege. When they stopped at wayside inns along the way, she ate and drank mechanically. At night she lay unmoving on a pallet. The dog never left her side, and while she slept he remained vigilant, lifting his black lip and growling if Stephen even so much as blinked at Juliana.

Kit, understandably discomfited by the tension, kept up a constant, mindless chatter as they trudged through the terraced green west country: King Henry had sent aides abroad in search of a new royal bride. At the royal court of France, people drank from cups that, when drained, revealed a man and woman in flagrante delicto. Sebastian Cabot, the mariner, had sent a savage from New Spain to London, and the creature was on display at the Bear Garden.

By the time the broad fields, scored by stone fences and thorny hedgerows, yielded to the ancient bounds of Lynacre, Stephen’s shoulders ached with strain.

He glanced back and caught a familiar sight. Juliana had ridden too near the roadside hedgerow, and the hem of her skirt had snagged on the spiny bush. She yanked at it, and a piece tore off.

He knew her to be an excellent rider. Yet throughout the journey she had been careless with her person, leaving bits of thread or fabric or a few strands of her unkempt hair in the hedgerows.

She was clearly up to mischief and would bear watching.

“Ride ahead and announce us, Kit,” Stephen said to his squire. “Let the kitchen know we’ve not eaten since breakfast, and tell Nance Harbutt the baroness will require a bath.”

Kit kicked his mount into a canter and rode off, a plume of dust filling his wake. Stephen started off again—slowly, knowing with dread certainty that he was bringing havoc into his well-ordered world.

A lark in the hedge trilled, then fell silent. Only the soft thud of the horses’ hooves and the creak of saddle leather punctuated the heavy stillness.

Moments later the gypsy’s dog snarled and bounded across a field, a white streak flowing over the ancient barrows and undulating downs.

“Where’s he off to?” Stephen muttered.

“He heard something.” Juliana cocked her head. “Other dogs—I hear them now.”

Stephen scanned the horizon, looking past the clumps of bright, blossoming furze and stands of thorn and holly to the chalk heights in the distance. When he spied the rider, he cursed under his breath. “Of all the people to encounter…”

Juliana followed his glare. “Who is it?”

“My nearest neighbor, and the loudest gossip in Wiltshire.”

“You are afraid of gossip, my lord?”

Juliana watched Pavlo set upon the lurchers that accompanied the rider. The baying and yelping startled a flock of rooks from a stand of ash trees. The birds rose like a storm cloud, darkening the sky before wheeling off over the chalk hills.

Somewhat pleased that Pavlo had broken the monotony of the journey and the strain of their silence, Juliana clapped her hands, then cupped them around her mouth and called a command in Russian. Pavlo came bounding back, his narrow head held high, his feathery tail waving like a victor’s banner.

While the lurchers ran for their lives, the rider cantered down a sheep walk that joined the road through a break in the hedge. He pulled his horse up short and glared at the huge dog. “The blighted beast should be garroted,” he grumbled.

“He’d probably fight back, Algernon,” said Lord Wimberleigh.

“God’s holy teeth.” The young man peered past Stephen and stared at Juliana. While he studied her tattered clothes and matted hair, she stared back, taking in the fine cut of his doublet and riding cloak, the slimness of his gloved hands on the reins. Beneath a velvet cap, a wealth of golden curls framed his narrow, comely face. “What the devil have you got there, Wimberleigh?”

“A very large mistake,” said Stephen de Lacey, “but one I fear I am saddled with until I make some arrangements.”

Saddled with! As if she were a mare with the botch, to be foisted on some unsuspecting gudgeon at a horse fair. Juliana’s esteem for Lord Wimberleigh, never particularly high, slipped another notch.

“Marry, I forgot my manners,” he went on in that blithe, sarcastic way of his. “Algernon, this lady calls herself Juliana Romanov. Juliana, this is Algernon Basset, earl of Havelock.”

The jaunty young man flashed her a smile. He removed his cap, the long feather fluttering as he held it against his chest. “Charmed, Lady Error,” he said with a merry laugh.

Juliana felt a small spark of recognition. Havelock was a man of humor, breeding and manners. He would not have been out of place in her father’s elite circle of friends. Havelock was very unlike Stephen de Lacey, the brooding man who had, on a cavalier impulse that he clearly regretted, married her.

She gave the earl a cautious smile. “Enchantée, my lord.”

Algernon’s pale eyebrows lifted. Juliana was not certain what surprised him—her accent, her voice…or her smile. “And what brings you to our district?”

Juliana sent him the sly trickster’s grin she had learned from Rodion’s younger sister, Catriona. “Marriage, my lord.”

“Ah. You look to wed a sheepman, perhaps, or one of the dyers from the village?”

Though Juliana would have enjoyed cozening him awhile, Wimberleigh gave an impatient grunt. “She’s married to me, Algernon, and the tale is long in the telling, so I—”

“To you?” Algernon’s eyes bugged out. Juliana imagined she heard a clanking sound as his jaw dropped. “To you?”

“By order of the king,” Stephen explained, his voice tight, as if each word were wrung from him. “And Algernon, I’d appreciate it most highly if you could silence yourself—”

“Silence myself? Not for a third ball, Wimberleigh,” Havelock said, grinning broadly and resting a hand on his codpiece. “A Tower warden couldn’t muzzle me.” With a guffaw of sheer delight, he jammed on his hat, spurred his mount, and galloped back the way he had come.

Wimberleigh squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. He uttered a strange word that probably referred to some disgusting body function.

During the remainder of the journey, Juliana fought to remain calm and rational. She was a nobleman’s wife. His charming disposition notwithstanding, she might turn her new status to advantage. Her role as a baroness might help her bring her family’s murderers to justice.

Regrets rattled in a small, hollowed-out place inside her. She was to have married Alexei Shuisky. Her memories of the young boyar had been gilded by yearning dreams, and in her mind he had grown more handsome and engaging with the passage of time. How happy they would have been, living at one of the splendid Shuisky estates, raising their children amid beauty and splendor.

Juliana scowled at Stephen de Lacey, who sat his horse like a commoner, his broad shoulders clad in the simplest of garments, his golden hair overlong and in need of trimming. He had ruined any chance she might have had at a future in Novgorod.

Unless…Insidious as the wind through the hood of a caravan, an idea took hold. The king of England himself had claimed the power to end a marriage. It had been all the talk when Juliana first arrived in England. King Henry had put his Spanish wife on the shelf in order to wed a dark-eyed court lady. Even the gypsies had been impressed by his boldness.

They had been even more impressed by the eventual fate of Anne Boleyn: death at the block.

As a tall, turreted gatehouse hove into view, Juliana shuddered. Englishmen who did not want to keep their wives were very dangerous indeed.

An unearthly screech sent Stephen pounding up the stairs to the second story of the manor house. He hurried along the half-open passageway that ran from gable end to gable end, ducking low beneath slanting timbers.

What the devil could be amiss? They had arrived only minutes earlier. Yet the terror in the woman’s voice indicated nothing short of murder.

He passed the gilt-framed portraits of his grandsires, his father, his mother, himself. From long habit he averted his eyes from the last painting. The portrait of Meg. Even though he did not let himself look, it touched him—a quick, searing arrow wound to the gut—then he hurried on to the chambers of his gypsy bride.

Though somewhat small of stature, she had a rather robust set of lungs. Her cries were long and harsh, probably loud enough to carry to the village beyond the river that bordered the estate.

Stephen stopped in the doorway and surveyed the scene.

Juliana stood backed up against a gargoyle-infested cupboard. The carved, leering faces with their wooden eyes and lolling tongues surrounded her dirt-smudged face as if they recognized her as one of their own.

Nance Harbutt advanced like a besieging force on the gypsy. Nance had been part of Lynacre for as long as Stephen could remember, as ever present and unchanging as the gargoyle cupboard. The goodwife wore a starched wimple tied with a strip of cloth knotted beneath her well-fleshed chin.

“Stay away from me, you old gallows crow,” Juliana yelled.

Nance gestured at Juliana’s tattered skirt and blouse. “I know you felt pressured to wed, my lord, but where in God’s name did you find this slattern cat?”

“Long story,” Stephen said, perfunctorily searching Juliana for signs of physical abuse. Old Nance had never been averse to applying the switch or the rod where she deemed it necessary. “What’s the trouble?”

Juliana tried not to wince as a knob from the cupboard pressed into her back. What manner of man was Stephen de Lacey that he would come barging, all unbidden, into a lady’s chamber?

“She’s trying to make me sit in that—that—” Feigning horror, Juliana waved her hand at the trunklike bathing tub on the hearth. “That cesspool!”

“’Tis a fine, hot bath and you’re in sore need of it,” Old Nance snapped, scrunching her doughy face into an expression of disgust. “Jesu, you reek like a jakes-farmer.”

Juliana recoiled from the tub, when in sooth, she yearned to plunge into the steaming water. It was a singular arrangement with an open conduit that could be connected with a cauldron over the hearth fire for a steady supply of hot water. Steam rose from the tub. Bits of harsh-smelling herbs floated upon the faintly oily surface.

For Juliana, dirt and grime had been a shield from lusty men for five years. With the exception of Rodion, she had managed to keep all interested males at bay, and she meant to continue with the disguise.

“That is what all the yelling is about?” Stephen said with a short laugh. “A bath? I view it as an occasional necessity, not a cause for panic.”

Juliana shuddered. “I have seen people catch fever and die from sitting in stagnant water.”

“You never bathe at all?” Stephen asked calmly.

Juliana sniffed, folding her arms protectively. “I bathe once a twelvemonth in running water. Not—” she pointed a grimy finger at the tub “—in a stagnant vat that reeks of poison simples.”

“Poison simples!” barked Nance, all a-quiver. “Those are my own good herbs. I’m no necromancer, not like that Jenny Fallow, who done in her husband with mandrake. Told him it’d prolong the sex act, see, and—”

“Nance,” Stephen said, and Juliana suspected the woman had a penchant for meandering bits of gossip.

“And she said it did for a time, but—”

“Nance, please.” Stephen’s tone was edged with impatience.

“Ah, I do go on, don’t I, my lord?” She glared at Juliana. “God blind my eyes, she’s a pert one.” Scowling, she planted her fists on her hips and leaned menacingly toward Juliana. “If you want running water, go bathe in the millstream.”

“Never!” snapped Juliana. “I take orders from no one.” For good measure, she kicked out with a grimy bare foot, knocking over the ewer beside the tub. Several gallons of water spread over the rush-strewn floor. Not yet satisfied, she ducked past Nance, grasped the edge of the tub, and upended it.

As Nance yelled to the Catholic saints and reeled back against the wall, a tide of scented water flooded the room.

A blur of motion streaked toward Juliana. Stephen cursed—another disgusting body-part word—and she felt herself being lifted and slung with dizzying speed over his shoulder.

She screeched, but it did no good. She pounded on his broad back and earned a slap on the rear for her troubles.

Pushing past Nance, Stephen grabbed a stack of linen toweling, a cake of lye soap and a vial of dark liquid and marched toward the door.

Her great bosom bobbling, Nance ran after them. “My lord, have a care—”

“I’ll be all right,” Stephen said. “She doesn’t bite.” As he hastened from the room, he added, “Actually, she probably does, but I haven’t caught her at it yet.”

When they emerged from the manor house, Pavlo launched into a barking frenzy. Slung upside down over Stephen’s shoulder, Juliana called a command to the borzoya, but saw that he had been tethered to a hitch rail.

She felt the ground slope as Stephen stalked on, muttering under his breath, toward their destination—a swift-running river.

“You would not dare,” she said through clenched teeth.

“Your charms give me courage, darling,” he said. Handling her like a sack of cats he wished to drown, he threw her into the stream.

A mouthful of water silenced Juliana’s screams. The cold shocked her, but not nearly so much as the cruelty of the man she had married. She planted her feet on the pebbly bottom and surfaced, her hand on her dagger, ready to do battle.

He gave her no chance. He had waded out, fully clothed, and he, too, was armed—with a block of soap.

Juliana howled like Pavlo when he was confined to a cage. She bruised her hands and feet against her husband’s hard body, all to no avail. Stephen de Lacey was relentless. He drenched her hair in a witch’s brew of noxious herbs, then scrubbed every thrashing, squirming inch of her, and dunked her as if she were an armful of soapy bed linens.

When he finished, he did not even look at her, but turned and sloshed his way to the riverbank. “The towels are there,” he said, indicating them with a jerk of his head. “And supper is at the toll of six. We’re having company.”

“I hope I gave you lice,” she yelled after him.

Old Nance tucked a finger up under her hat and gave her head an idle scratch. Then she sighed heavily, the sound of a woman who was absolutely convinced of her own saintliness.

“I’ve set the lady’s chamber to rights, my lord.” She waved her chubby arm, showing off the fresh rushes. “It were no small task, I might add.”

Stephen offered her a straight-backed chair, and with a self-important rustling of fustian skirts, she lowered herself to the seat. He had hastily donned dry clothing and combed his damp hair.

“Well,” she said, her manner brisk. “I’ll not devil you with questions, my lord. We’ll leave the gossips to mull over how it is that the baron of Wimberleigh came to wed a wild gypsy.”

“Thank you.” Stephen pulled up a chair of his own, straddling it and folding his arms over the back. He was grateful she did not demand an explanation. Yet at the same time, he realized she alone would have understood, for she alone knew the nature of the blade King Henry held poised over Stephen’s neck.

“Aye, ’tis not my place to ponder the whys and wherefores of your new wedded state. Lord above knows, my poor old mind is too feeble to grasp how you got in such a fix.” She clasped her work-reddened hands. “Now that you’ve seen to the bathing, my lord, the gypsy needs a set of clothes. As to her savage ways, we’ll see about them later.”

“Is she truly strange, Nance?” Stephen asked, trying hard not to relive the tempest in the millstream. “Sometimes I glimpse something in her manner, hear a note in her speech, and I wonder.”

“She’s a gypsy, my lord, and everyone knows gypsies are great imitators.” The goodwife sniffed and poked her broad red nose into the air. “Much like a monkey I once saw. ’Twas a mariner at Bristol, see, and he…”

His attention fading, Stephen nodded vaguely and planted his chin in his hand. It struck him that he had not entered this room in eight years. The chamber, with its adjoining music suite and solar, wardrobes and close-rooms, had been Meg’s domain.

Though hastily aired and dusted for the new baroness, the room still bore Meg’s indelible imprint—the fussy scalloped bed draperies of fading pink damask, the blank-eyed poppet propped on the window seat, the mirrored candle holder Stephen himself had designed. And on a slim-legged table lay a bone hairbrush, its back etched with a scene of the Virgin guarded by a unicorn.

Fearful of the emotion building inside him, he scowled at the floor. And spied, half-hidden by the fringe of the counterpane, a bright bit of string. Distracted by the out-of-place object, he stood and crossed the room to pick it up. “What is this?”

Nance caught her breath. “Milady was playing at Jacob’s ladder the very night—”

Stephen turned toward Nance. His icy glare stopped her cold.

Nance’s hand fluttered at her bosom. “Ah, the sweet-ling. Ever the child, she was.”

The memory stung like salt on the wound of Stephen’s guilt. He thought of his vagabond bride invading this room, sleeping in Meg’s bed, handling Meg’s things.

Like a weed, Juliana would blight the perfectly ordered chamber.

I’m sorry, Meg. Sorry for everything. The regrets poured like quicklime through him.

“…burn the clothes, of course,” Old Nance was saying, having slipped back into her matter-of-fact manner.

Stephen shook his head, drawing his mind from painful remembrances. He stalked back and forth in front of the windows. “What’s that you say?”

“The gypsy, my lord. Her clothes are no doubt infested with vermin. ’Tis best they are burnt.”

“Aye, but then she’ll have nothing to—oh.” Stephen pressed his fist on the window embrasure. “She is of a size with Meg.”

“Not quite so plump as your first wife, my lord, but I could take a tuck or two in some of the gowns. Er, that is, if you don’t mind—”

“I don’t.” He slammed the door on his memories.

“And about a lady’s maid, my lord—”

“She doesn’t need a maid, but a warden.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Nance said. “While you was occupied with your wife, I sent to the village for Jillie Egan, the dyer’s daughter.”

“Jillie Egan?” Stephen aimed a mocking scowl at Nance. “Oh, you are naughty, dear lady. The Egan girl’s the size of a bullock, and has a stubborn will to match.”

Nance winked broadly. “She’ll not tolerate any stomaching from the gypsy.”

Stephen strode to the door. “Do as you see fit. I’ve a pressing engagement elsewhere.”

Nance Harbutt nodded in complete understanding. “My lord, what will you tell your new wife about—”

“Nothing at all,” he cut in, his voice as sharp as a knife. “Not a blessed, solitary thing.”

Three

“I trow that particular shade of blue is called woad,” said a faintly amused voice.

“Eek!” Juliana nearly came out of her numb, chilled skin. She spun away from the polished steel mirror to face the intruder. “Dear Lord,” she whispered in rapid Russian, “my jailer is a giantess.”

Her gaze traveled from the boatlike feet clad in sturdy clogs to the ruddy face framed by coarse yellow hair. The distance was at least a score of hands—the height of a grown plow horse.

“I don’t speak Egyptian, milady.” The giantess placed her pawlike hands on her hips and leaned forward, peering frankly at Juliana. “I assumed you was trying to decide what shade of blue your lips turned from the cold bath. I’d say woad, from the mustard leaf.”

“Woad,” Juliana repeated stupidly, shaping her lips around the difficult w.

“Aye, I knows me colors. Me da is a dyer. Blue as a titbird’s throat you are, milady.”

Clutching a robe around her shivering form, Juliana blinked in astonishment. The fact was, she had turned blue from the icy bath in the churning, spring-fed millstream. After the heartless dunking Stephen had subjected her to, she had slogged back to the house, cursing him in a patois of English, Romany, and Russian. When the ogress arrived, Juliana had been staring into the mirror and wondering if her coloring would ever return to normal.

“Who are you?” She managed to force the question past her chattering teeth.

“Jillie Egan.” The woman bobbed an awkward curtsy. “I’m to be your new lady’s maid.”

A lady’s maid. Juliana closed her eyes for a moment and surrendered to memories she usually kept locked away. As a girl, she had been attended by no fewer than four maids—all of them pretty as daisies, impeccably groomed, and nearly as accomplished as their young mistress.

“Milady?” The ogress interrupted her thoughts. “’Tis nigh time for you to be getting to supper.”

Jillie led Juliana close to the hearth fire and unwound the linen toweling from her hair. The damp locks reeked of strong herbs Stephen had used to kill the lice. Jillie untied the shapeless robe, replacing it with a long, fine shift. The sheer fabric was gossamer to Juliana’s skin, so deliciously different from the coarse homespun of her gypsy garb.

“Belonged to the first baroness, this did,” Jillie commented, shaking out the scalloped hem of the shift.

“Lord Wimberleigh’s mother?” Juliana inquired.

“Heavens, no. That one turned up her noble toes a score of years ago. Lord Wimberleigh’s first wife.”

Juliana caught her breath. It had never occurred to her that Stephen de Lacey had been married before. A wife. Stephen was a widower. Suddenly the thought colored everything she knew about him: the hooded sadness deep in his eyes, his bitter resentment of Juliana, his long, brooding silences and searing moments of high temper.

“Where are my own clothes?” she demanded.

“Nance said they was dirty past washing, crawling with vermin and such. She had them burned.”

“No!” The shout broke from Juliana on a wave of panic. “I must find them. I need my—”

“Bauble, milady?” Jillie handed over the brooch. “I spied it pinned inside the waist of your skirt.”

Juliana went weak with relief; then hope began to warm her blood. The ogress might be someone she could trust. Perhaps the only one she could trust until…She thought of the vurma trail she had left during her journey to Wiltshire, the bits of thread and fabric she had left to mark her way. Hurry, Laszlo.

Praying her guardian would rescue her from her own foolishness, she closed her fingers around the brooch. “Thank you.” In spite of herself she was beginning to like the big bossy maid. As her tension and suspicion relaxed, she decided to give up her gypsy disguise. Her plan to exhort King Henry for help had failed, but perhaps here she’d find help from Stephen de Lacey. How far would he go, she wondered, and how much would he risk to be rid of her?

“Jillie,” she said speculatively, “can you do hair?”

The maid grinned. “Like I were born to it, milady. By the time I’ve done, your new husband won’t know you.”

“Well, Wimberleigh,” said Jonathan Youngblood. “Don’t keep me on tenterhooks like a side of pork. What’s she like?”

Stephen squeezed his eyes shut, silently cursed Havelock’s wagging tongue then opened his eyes to glare at his best friend. Jonathan sat easily in a carved box chair at the opposite end of the trestle table. Older than Stephen by a decade, he bore the scars of the Scots wars and the ample girth of good living. His bristly gray hair stuck out in spikes around a florid face, and he dressed like a ploughman, for he was never one to bow to fashion. A knight of the old order, Jonathan Youngblood had no use for the perfumed, posturing gentlemen who now dominated the court.

His warm brown eyes were the kindest Stephen had ever known. Blessed with an even dozen sons, Jonathan had sent Kit to live with Stephen, thinking the lad would fill the void of Stephen’s childlessness.

If he only knew the truth…Stephen batted the thought away. “I ought to give you no preparation at all,” he declared.

“Just a hint, then. Otherwise I shall spend the evening gaping like a visitor to Bedlam.”

Stephen sighed and took a sip of malmsey from his pewter goblet, then set the cup down. The metallic clank echoed through the cavernous dining hall, with its tapestry hangings and the hammer-beam ceiling arching like giant ribs high above. The table was laid with fine plate and crockery for a sumptuous meal. Spiked on wrought-silver holders were beeswax tapers, their flames bending gently from the breeze through the tall, slender windows.

Great princes, learned scholars and dour clergymen had dined at this table, Stephen reflected. But never a half-wild vagabond. No doubt she had the manners of a sow.

Blowing out a sigh, he decided to tell Jonathan the truth. “Her name is Juliana, and she claims to be from the kingdom of Muscovy or Rus. No doubt ’tis a fiction she invented. She has been traveling with a band of gypsies.”

Jonathan’s eyes widened. “I had heard the king saddled you with a foreign wench, but I thought ’twas another of Havelock’s embellishments. Or a jest of the king.”

“To Henry, it was a jest.”

“The king has a passion for amusement—at the expense of a good man’s pride.” Jonathan rested his thick forearms on the table and leaned forward. “So what’s she like? Sloe-eyed and passionate? I’ve heard the Romany folk are a hot-blooded race.” He jiggled his eyebrows.

Stephen scowled over the rim of his goblet. “She is rather…” He groped for a polite term. “Rustic.”

“Ah. An earthy beauty, then.”

“Not quite.”

“She’s not earthy?” Jonathan’s gaze moved past Stephen; he seemed to be studying something behind his friend.

“She’s not a beauty.” Stephen realized he had little notion of what his wife truly looked like under all the grime and tangled hair. She had been too wild during the bathing, and he had glimpsed only raking fingernails and a red mouth spitting foreign curses.

In his mind’s eye he pictured her: dark strands escaping two thick braids, a dirt-smudged face, a small shapeless form draped in rags. “Her looks hardly matter to me. I intend to be rid of her once the king has had his fill of tormenting me.”

“I see.” Merriment gleamed in Jonathan’s eyes, and his lips thinned as he tried not to smile. “She is truly a humiliation, then.”

“Aye, a bedraggled wench with all the appeal of a basin of ditch water.”

“Why, thank you ever so much, my lord,” said a soft, accented voice behind Stephen. “At least I haven’t the manners of a toad.”

Jonathan wheezed in an effort to stifle a laugh.

The gypsy. How much had she overheard?

Slowly, still clutching his cup, Stephen rose from the table and turned. His fingers went slack. The pewter goblet dropped to the table, spilling wine across the polished surface. Stunned into silence by the vision that had entered the room, he could only stare.

She wore a gown and kirtle of dusky rose brocade with a high-waisted bodice and fitted sleeves, and an overgown with a long, trailing train. The square neckline of the bodice revealed her bosom—fine-textured and rosy, as inviting as a ripe peach.

Had it not been for her vivid green eyes, he would not have recognized the face. Every trace of dirt and ash had been scrubbed away to reveal a visage as exquisite as the delicate blossom of a rose in springtime.

Eschewing the usual fashionable French hood, she wore her hair long and loose, dressed with a simple rolled band of gold satin. A thorough cleansing had turned the indistinct dark color to deep, rich sable ablaze with gleaming red highlights. The endless length and fine, billowy texture of it made Stephen’s hands itch to bury themselves in it.

If I were to touch her now, he caught himself thinking, I would touch her hair first.

And with a dreadful, sinking awareness, he knew he would not stop there.

“You must be the lady Juliana, the new baroness.” Jonathan bumped against his chair in his haste to get up. He swept into a dramatic bow. “I am Sir Jonathan Youngblood of the neighboring estate of Lytton Mount.”

“Enchantée.” With a slim white hand, Juliana swept back a glorious lock of soft hair. Pinned to her bodice was the large brooch she had brandished in front of King Henry. She gave a faint smile. The color stood out high in her cheeks. “It appears my husband was entertaining you with his vast charm and wit.”

Stephen hated himself for recognizing the hurt in her voice. He hated himself for caring that his words had wounded her.

She faced him squarely, dipped her head in greeting, and said, “Le bon Dieu vous le rendra.”

Her French was impeccable. The good Lord will repay you. He did not doubt it for a moment.

Moving cautiously, as if navigating a snake pit, he took her hand to lead her to the table. Her easy grace surprised him. She took her place in a nobleman’s dining hall as effortlessly as if she had been doing it all her life.

The servitors came in their usual formal parade, with river trout and salad, venison pasty and loaves of dark bread, cold blood pudding and soft new cheese. Juliana received them with unexpected poise, nodding at the spilled malmsey and whispering, “His lordship needs more wine.”

Stephen scarcely tasted the food he ingested mechanically.

He could not tear his attention from his wife.

Her manners astonished him. Where had she learned to wield knife and spoon so deftly, to sip so daintily from her cup? And, Christ’s bones, to murmur such apt and discreet instructions to the servants?

Everyone knows gypsies are great imitators. Much like a monkey…The words of Nance Harbutt echoed through his mind.

But that wasn’t the answer. It couldn’t be.

Stephen barely heard the bluff, easy conversation of Jonathan, barely heard Juliana’s soft replies as they discussed Kit, the weather, and her wild claims about her past. Caught in the grip of amazement, Stephen could do no more than stare at his wife.

He had expected the crude gypsy wench to be overwhelmed by the opulence of his home, crammed with the spoils of battles fought by his ancestors, church treasures plundered by his father, and the rich yields of his own endeavors as baron of Wimberleigh.

Instead, she seemed only mildly interested in her new surroundings. It was as if the plate tableware, the Venetian glass cups and art treasures adorning the hall, the solicitous servants, were commonplace to her. As if she had found herself in these circumstances before.

Nonsense, Stephen told himself. Perhaps the treasures were so alien to her that she could not begin to grasp their value.

He forced himself to attend to what Jonathan was saying. “You tell a most singular tale about your past, my lady,” said the older man.

Juliana took a dainty bite of salad, then with a slender finger traced the rim of her glass fingerbowl. Just for a moment, sadness haunted her eyes, a melancholy so intense that Stephen’s breath caught.

Then her eyes cleared and she gave Jonathan a serene smile. “It is no tale, my lord, but the absolute truth.”

Stephen suppressed a snort of derision. Small wonder gypsies were outlawed. No one should be so adept at lying.

“The unexpected marriage to Lord Wimberleigh must have given you a bit of a turn.”

“Indeed it did,” she admitted with a pretty shrug. “I confess that I felt like the lady of Riga.”

“Riga?”

“A small principality to the west of Novgorod. My old nurse loved to tell the story. The lady of Riga found herself on the back of a tiger. Once mounted, she had no way to go but onward, for if she tried to get off, she would be eaten alive.”

“So you liken marriage to Stephen to a ride upon a tiger.” Jonathan seemed to be enjoying himself enormously.

Stephen vowed to ignore this foreign woman, ignore the garish beauty that so overpowered Meg’s demure costume. He would ignore Juliana’s captivating smile, her low-toned, beguiling speech.

To do otherwise would be to open his heart to unspeakable pain. He endured the meal in silence, then said his farewells to Jonathan.

“She is charming,” Jonathan said as they waited in the darkening yard for Kit to bring round his horse. “Tell me, where would a gypsy wench learn such manners?”

“I know not. Nor do I care.”

“She is fascinating to watch.”

“So is a poison asp,” Stephen stated. “Here’s Kit.”

The tall, sturdy lad approached with Jonathan’s horse in tow. “You’re good to the boy. He was getting lost amidst my wild brood.”

“No chance of that here,” Stephen said, and a familiar ache flared to life inside him. “Kit is quick of wit and masters every art I introduce.” He forced a smile. “Though I trow, other arts will interest him before long. He can hardly pass through the hall without setting the maids and scullions to sighing.”

Jonathan laughed. “Teach him chastity, Stephen. I’d not have him siring a brood before his time.”

“He’ll learn no bad habits from me.” Stephen stood watching as Jonathan bade Kit good-bye and trotted off down the lane. Chastity. Stephen was reputed to be the most profligate of noblemen, frequenting the dives of Bath, the harborside stews of Bristol, the gaming houses of Southwark.

He took no pride in his reputation, only a bleak satisfaction that it had made him distasteful to marriageable maidens. Now that Juliana had come into his life, he wondered what would become of the bad habits he’d cultivated so assiduously.

For a long while, he stood in the formal garden with its cruciform walks enclosing fragrant beds of foxglove and woodbine. The clean fragrance of springtime enveloped him, and he paused near a fountain to gird himself for the coming hours. The stone basin still held the warmth of the sun.

He pressed his fists against the basin, trying to banish all feeling, all emotion, forever. Yet he was like a rock in the sun, holding its warmth even as darkness surrounded him. He remembered Juliana’s smile when he had no business thinking of her at all.

The sun slipped below the horizon. A few more minutes, and it would be time for him to go.

Shuddering, he turned and went back inside.

Juliana stood waiting in the entrance to the hall. She held a hooded candle in one hand. The diffuse light showered her eyelashes and hair with gold dust and carved mysterious shadows in the hollow of her throat, between her breasts.

God Almighty, Stephen thought. Didn’t Jillie know a lady should wear a silken partlet there for modesty?

Just below the overtly feminine hollow, the jeweled brooch winked, its large center stone as darkly brilliant as fresh blood.

“What do you do after supper, my lord?” she asked softly.

Her question panicked him, and he lashed out in anger. “I’m sometimes wont to tumble a wench or two.” Narrowing his eyes, he let his burning gaze sweep over her. “Three are even better.”

Her small teeth caught in the fullness of her lower lip. “I do not believe you.”

“You know nothing about me,” he said.

She shrugged, the motion of her shoulders as graceful as a waterfall. “How much I learn is up to you. I noticed a music room connected to my chambers. Perhaps I could play for you—”

“The collection of instruments does not include gypsy bells and guitars.” Stephen saw the look that crept into her candlelit eyes. I have to hurt you, Juliana, he thought, wishing he could explain, knowing he could not. To show her kindness would be a far greater cruelty.

Juliana came awake slowly. Just for a moment, she was confused by the lavish bed hangings that soared above her, the silky warmth of the fur-lined covers blanketing her.

In that distant, half-aware realm between waking and sleeping, she fancied herself in the nursery at Novgorod, waiting for Sveta to come with a cup of warm honey-sweetened milk and a tray of soft bread and herbed sausages.

The image drifted away and Juliana came up on her elbows. Lynacre Hall. She was here in this noble house, not in a bedroll under a tree, nor beneath the rank mildewed covering of Laszlo’s caravan. She lay in a strange, beautiful chamber that had once belonged to the wife of Lord Wimberleigh.

What had the first baroness been like? Had he loved her, hated her, regarded her with cool indifference?

Had she been responsible for making Stephen into a cold, angry man, or had he always been that way?

Juliana decided to find out. In the cool morning breeze through the open window, she called Jillie and then waited, absently petting Pavlo’s long, sleek head and listening to the manor come to life—the call of the goose girl, the sound of shutters being opened, the scolding of chickens, voices from the bakehouse. A few moments later, Jillie came into the room, balancing a salver between her arm and hip.

“Ah, you’re awake, then,” she said briskly, thumping the tray down on a spindly gaming table. “Good morrow, milady. Hungry?”

“Always,” Juliana admitted, throwing back the counterpane. During her years with the gypsies, she had often gone to sleep with hunger gnawing at her belly. Begging, pilfering and poaching had their limits.

Jillie rummaged in the carved chest at the foot of the bed and emerged with a long wrinkled robe of finely woven wool. As Juliana put her hands through the gaping armholes, the scent of lavender and bergamot rose from the garment.

“Uneven dye job,” Jillie muttered, shaking out the folds. “Me da does better work—when he can get it.”

“Is there no work for a dyer, then?” Juliana peered at the thin brown liquid in the cup.

“Time was, he had the vats in the dying shed bubbling day and night—year ’round. But the trades have been moving to the cities—to Bath, to Salisbury and even London town.”

Juliana took a sip. Small ale. Hardly her favorite for breaking her fast. She bit into the bread. The flour had been coarse ground and was mealy; her teeth crunched down on a hard piece of chaff. She was going to have to make some changes around here.

With elaborate casualness she said to Jillie, “Didn’t the former baroness patronize local tradesmen?” She crumbled the bread crust between her fingers. “Dyers, millers and such?”

“No.” Jillie looked down at her large red hands. “The lady Margaret never seemed to…to think of such things.”

Margaret. Her name was Margaret. “I see. What sorts of things did she think of?”

“Don’t know, rightly. Fashion things, music, needlework, mayhap gaming in the hall.”

“And her husband.” Juliana hated herself for wanting to know. “Did she think of him?”

Jillie slapped her hands on her thighs. “Blind me, but I forgot to draw your water, milady. I’ll be back in a trice.” Moving with surprising swiftness, she left the chamber. When she returned with a ewer of warm water for washing, she seemed disinclined to speak.

Juliana did not press her. She had not a single friend in this place, and she was loath to test the loyalty of her only prospect.

Jillie helped her dress in a pale peach-colored bodice and gown. “Nance was up late tucking this to fit you, taking up the hem.” She stepped back to survey her mistress. “’Tis a good fit.”

Juliana heard the flatness in her tone. “But?” she prompted.

“Ah, listen to me. ’Tis not my place to judge my betters—”

“Jillie.” Juliana spoke the name carefully. “You must always speak your mind to me.” It felt strange inviting intimacy with a servant. Yet in her present circumstances, she had sore need of an ally.

“The color’s wrong, milady,” Jillie blurted out. “You’ve a fine rich mass of hair and roses in your lips and cheeks. ’Tis the jewel tones you’ll favor, not this pale washed-out stuff.”

“Then dye my gowns,” Juliana said simply.

Jillie’s jaw dropped. “Truly?”

“Truly. Tell your father I’ll gladly pay his price.”

“Ah, milady, you’re—”

A loud clanking sound rattled through the open window. Juliana hurried over, followed by Jillie. In the courtyard below, on the gravel drive, rolled a sturdy cart laden with crates and oddly shaped parcels.

“What is this?” Juliana asked.

“The new shipment. His lordship’s always bringing things from London town.” Jillie sighed and propped her chin in her hand. “The world is so big,” she said wistfully. “’Twould be a rare blessing to see it. I ain’t once been out of the shire.”

“Never?” The very thought made Juliana feel cramped and restless. “I’ll tell you about it someday.” She moved toward the door. “For now, we must receive our guest.”

An hour later, she stood in an airy solar and looked through oriel windows over the apple yard, enclosed by a high brick wall and white with May blossoms. Lynacre was a strange and beautiful place. She had yet to make sense of the house, with its gable-ended great and small wings, the porches, the clusters of chimneys, the crenellated parapets. The grounds provided a puzzle of their own. Thus far she had noticed at least three separate walled gardens, thick woods rearing almost menacingly to the west, and layer upon layer of soft green fells leading down to the river.

She lowered herself to the window seat, drew her knees to her chest, and rested her temple against the sun-warmed leaded glass. Aye, the estate was strange and beautiful—much like its master. The thought of him reminded her of the old Russian story of Stavr, an enchanted prince who was trapped in his forest kingdom. He could only be freed by the kiss of a princess, freely given.

“What the devil are you doing?” snapped a furious voice from the doorway.

Juliana froze. To her mortification, she discovered that she had pressed her fingers to her lips and closed her eyes, lost in the fantasy of a magic kiss. With as much dignity as she could muster, she jumped up and shook out her skirts.

Stephen stood there in the same trunk hose and jerkin he had worn the day before. A light golden stubble softened the hard lines of his cheeks and jaw. His pale hair looked mussed, as if long fingers had run through it. The disarray gave him a certain rakish charm that made her breath quicken and her cheeks grow warm.

It struck Juliana, disturbingly, that he had not yet been to bed—unless it was with one of the wenches he had so pointedly mentioned last night.

She silenced the jangle of alarm in her mind. If it was his habit to carouse each night away, that was his affair. She’d be a fool to let herself be hurt by it.

“My dear,” he said in a gravelly voice, “you’ve not answered my question.”

“A carter arrived with goods from London. I received them and sent the carter round to the kitchen for a meal. My lo—Stephen,” she corrected, boldly using his familiar name. She took an ivory whistle from a box and blew a high note. “What is this? For a shepherd, perhaps?” Before he could answer, she drew a light shroud from a dome-shaped cage to reveal a bright yellow canary perched inside. “And this…an addition to your dovecote?” She flipped through the stiff pages of a small, fat book, noting a few block-printed illustrations. “I do not read English well. Perhaps you could tell me what this says. And this—” She reached for a wooden box made of interlocking pieces.

A large male hand snatched the box away. “Are you quite finished?” Stephen demanded in a low, lethal whisper.

“These are children’s playthings,” she said, refusing to flinch. “I just wondered—”

He paced the length of the solar, his booted feet kicking up dust from the rushes. “I’ve a fondness for invention. My own, and those created by others. You need not read any further meaning into it.”

Perhaps the toys were gifts for the children of the nearby village. Perhaps Stephen de Lacey concealed a heart of gold behind a facade of stone.

Prodded by a devil of mischief, she picked up a tiny reed pipe and blew, her fingers covering the holes to vary the pitch.

“Stop that.” He stood inches away, glaring down at her.

Juliana continued to play. She would rather suffer the heat of his anger than the chill of his indifference. She picked out the first few notes of an old Russian song about a cherry tree. There was something compelling about his nearness.

“Damn it, Juliana!” He took her wrist, bringing her hand up between their bodies.

Never had she stood so close to her new husband—close enough to hear the labored rasp of his breathing and feel it warm on her cheek. Close enough to catch his scent of leather and lye. Close enough to study the faint lines that fanned out from his exquisite pale eyes.

She stood riveted, staring up at him, feeling her pulse leap wildly beneath the firm grip of his fingers. And suddenly she knew. He, too, had felt the shock, the heat, the awareness. The recognition.

Of what? she wondered crazily.

Of desire.

The answer came to her like an arrow shot out of the dark, hitting home with stinging accuracy.

“Stephen?” she whispered.

For a moment, he seemed to waver, caught up in the same unbearable tension that held her breathless. His sculpted, unsmiling mouth twitched and he bent his head, golden hair falling forward, almost brushing her brow.

Closer and closer, until a mere whisper of distance separated their hungry lips, until anticipation thundered in her blood.

And, just as suddenly, Stephen plucked the reed pipe from her hand and stepped back.

“I’ll see to the parcels,” he snapped. “You need not trouble yourself with them. And in the future, Baroness, I shall receive all goods and dispatches.”

He withdrew quickly, his footsteps ringing on the flagged floor outside, then stopping.

Juliana hurried to the solar door and peeked out.

He stood in the narrow, dim passageway, his big hands pressed against the stone wall. His head was thrown back to reveal a taut brown throat. His teeth were clenched, his eyes tightly shut. It was a posture of such anguished frustration that Juliana felt like an intruder.

She slipped back into the solar. She had learned something about her husband this morning. He wanted her. That was one secret he could not keep from her.

Faintly, through a thick blanket of sleep, the sounds came to Stephen. A cry in the dark. A ragged sob of terror and depthless despair.

His awareness weighted by the quantity of sack he had drunk the previous evening to forget the startled hurt in Juliana’s eyes, he barely acknowledged the sounds. And then, slowly, like a stalking sneak thief, realization crept over him.

The moment had come. For years, he had dreaded this night. And yet a small dark part of him had craved it. This was the end of the waiting, the uncertainty. At last, he would be free—

“No!” Denial broke from him, loud and fierce and anguished. He leaped from his bed, tearing back the covers, bare feet slapping the chilly flagged floor.

No, please God, no…With jerky movements he groped for his leather leggings, his billowy cambric shirt, and in seconds he flew out the door of his chamber and into the night-black passageway.

He expected to find Nance Harbutt, come to impart the long-dreaded tidings, but no one waited in the gloom.

Still the weeping sound that had awakened him reached out, drew him along the passageway….

To his wife’s room.

The fog of sleep and wine blew away on a cold, knife-sharp wind.

Juliana. It was his gypsy wife, with her weeping and strange mutterings, who had roused him.

Both relief and annoyance eddied through him as he stepped into her chamber.

A low, throaty growl greeted him. Her lethal weapon of a dog stood stiff-legged in the middle of the room, glaring with malevolent eyes.

Stephen glared back.

The dog looked away first and crouched down, warily letting him pass.

For a moment Stephen stood still, uncertain. Watery moonlight, faint as fairy’s breath, streamed through the open window and fell upon the imposing draped bed.

Juliana had been at Lynacre Hall only a week, yet already her presence pervaded what had once been Meg’s domain. The fragrance of lavender haunted the air; gowns and shifts made a cheerful disarray on the stools and chests; an old lute stood propped in a corner.

Stephen noticed this only in passing. He stood spellbound by the soft, terrible sounds coming from the figure on the bed.

Though she spoke in a foreign tongue, his heart constricted, for he knew the meaning well. In her sleep, she uttered the words of a soul that knew the icy black depths of despair and hopelessness, the supplication of a heart yearning to be healed.

Praying the dog would behave, he swiftly crossed the room to the bed. He of all people knew not how to comfort an unquiet soul, yet he could not stand to watch her suffer.

He sat on the edge of the bed, the heavy frame creaking under his weight. His large hands came to rest on the one shoulder that protruded from the twisted bedclothes.

She held herself curled up like a child shivering from cold. Her arms were hugged tightly around her torso. The trembling that emanated from her tore at Stephen. With a low, helpless curse, he pulled her against him. He felt her warmth, the wild tattoo of her racing heart, the hot dampness of her tears seeping into his shirt.

“Hush,” he whispered into her hair. His lips brushed the silky strands. He breathed in the faint herbal fragrance. “Hush, Juliana, please. ’Tis a night fright, no more. You are safe.”

She came awake with a loud, air-swallowing gasp. “Stephen?”

Feeling awkward and ungainly, he held her away from him and peered at her face. Her eyes were wide and staring, her cheeks wet.

“I heard you cry out,” he explained, gruff-voiced and struggling to sound matter-of-fact. “I thought to quiet you before you awakened the whole household.”

“Oh.” She scrubbed the voluminous sleeve of her nightrail over her face. “Didn’t Pavlo try to stop you?”

“He understands I mean you no harm.”

She nodded. “I—I am sorry I awakened you.”

“Are you all right now?” It was too dangerous to be alone with her like this—in the darkened bed, with her all warm and soft and tumbled from sleep. And vulnerable.

“Yes,” she said. But her voice was hoarse, her eyes tearful.

He knew he should make haste away, but it was contrary to his nature to leave a creature in pain. “It’s over, Juliana. You’re safe. ’Twas only a nightmare.”

“But the nightmare is real,” she whispered. “I see things that happened to my family, hear things—”

“What things?”

“Fire,” she said, starting to tremble again. “Hoofbeats and screaming, flames shooting from the windows—”

“The windows?”

“The house at Novgorod. My father’s house.” She tipped up her head, for a moment looking almost haughty. “It was a place that makes Lynacre Hall look like a peasant’s dwelling.”

Stephen felt a sinking sense of disappointment. This was yet another part of the fiction she had created to support her wild pretenses. Another thread in the web of lies.

“In the dream, I am looking at the snow,” she went on, oblivious to his skeptical thoughts and seemingly immune to his touch, to the hand that moved from her chin to her shoulder, his thumb tracing whorls in the hollow of her throat.

“The fire casts bloody shadows on the snow. And then I see my family gathered in front of the steps. The blades of the attackers flash. Alexei, my betrothed, is fighting.”

Her betrothed? Stephen opened his mouth to ask her about this Alexei, but she gave him no chance.

“The steel blades are red in the firelight. My brother shrieks in pain. They do not cut him cleanly but—”

Her voice broke. She buried her face in her hands. “They have to hack and hack, and his cries become gurgles, and I can hear no more. And then, at the last, while Laszlo is holding me back…” She swallowed, seemed to force herself to go on. “I see Alexei fall. The leader is about to order his men to search for me. And Pavlo leaps out of nowhere.”

“Pavlo?”

She nodded. “He had gotten free from the kennels. He is a very protective dog.”

Stephen lifted a strand of hair from the nape of her neck. How soft it was, how fragrant. “I noticed.”

“The rest, in my dream, is confusion. I see Pavlo leap, I hear muffled words. A curse. I cannot make it out over the roar of the fire, the sound of horses blowing, the other dogs baying. Pavlo yelps, and the man turns. He cannot see me, but the fire flares suddenly, and I wait, knowing I will see the face of a murderer.”

Stephen held his breath. In spite of himself, he had gotten caught up in her tale of horror. Dream or not, it had an immediacy that seized him.

“And?” he prompted.

She sighed and pressed her brow to his shoulder. “And nothing. It always ends the same. A flash, as if a firearm is being discharged. And then I awaken.”

“Without seeing the villain’s face?”

“Villain?”

He almost smiled, half enjoying the light pressure of her head against his shoulder. “The murderer.”

“I always awaken before I see his face.”

“You have this dream often?”

“At first, just after the massacre that forced me to flee Novgorod, I had this dream every night. Now, not so often. But it is like opening a wound. I feel it all again. The grief, the rage. The helplessness. The loss of everything.” Her hand closed around his. Her palm was cool and damp with sweat. “The terror.”

“Ah, Juliana.” He smoothed his free hand over her head, tucking it more securely against his shoulder. He did not know what to believe.

“I’m frightened, Stephen. Always, Laszlo has been nearby to quiet my fears. Now I am alone. So alone.”

“No, you’re not,” he heard himself say. “I’m here, Juliana.”

The tension flowed out of her at his words, and for a moment he was struck by the wonder of it. That mere words and a soothing touch could bring comfort was a foreign notion to him.

“Stay with me,” she whispered. “Stay with me and hold me while I sleep.”

He was so stunned by her request that he forgot to be cautious. Before he knew what was happening, he stretched out beside her. He pulled the coverlet over her and held her tightly, her cheek against his chest, his chin resting lightly on her head.

He told himself this was only for a moment, only until she was calm and able to sleep again.

But an hour later he was still there.

Juliana slept peacefully, her breath soft against his throat, her small hand resting in the curve of his waist. Her slim leg draped over his thigh.

Stephen tried not to think about the fact that he was in bed with a beautiful woman. His wife. He had every right to kiss her, to touch her, to slide his hands beneath her nightrail and—He cut the fantasy short, and the effort made him ache. It had been so long since he had felt the softness of a woman’s breasts loose beneath thin lawn fabric. So long since he had listened to the breathing of someone slumbering nearby. So long since desire had stirred within him and then, lancelike, had stricken him with sharp arousal.

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