Once Upon a Pillow Read online

  She eyed the epic proportions fondly. The years had taken their toll, and generations of former owners had left their scars on it, but these were only to be expected. What male Masterson had ever been able to resist marking anything that came into his possession? Still, it was a handsome, grand old thing and just looking at it filled her with a sort of reverence. One the handyman obviously didn’t share, since he was regarding the group with the indulgence an adult generally saves for tots at a cartoon matinee.

  She didn’t spare him more than a glance but that didn’t keep her from realizing that he was now sparing her plenty. And why not? At five and a half feet, packing a well- toned hundred and thirty pounds into a pair of well-cut navy slacks and snug cream-colored cashmere sweater, with hair as black and shiny as a raven’s eye, and a face some men called piquant, the one thing she wasn’t insecure about was her looks.

  “Come have a good look-see,” Laurel invited her group.

  The middle-aged American ladies made a beeline for the bed. The smallest one, Mrs. Stradling, red-haired and comfortable-looking, began a minute inspection of the headboard. Brian—more interested in power tools than antiques—wandered over to where Max had exposed the wall’s internal wiring.

  “She’s a grand old thing, isn’t she?” Miss Ferguson, buxom and pert, asked.

  “How do you know it’s a ‘she’?” the honeymooning groom asked curiously.

  Miss Ferguson regarded the younger man with the condescension of the cognoscenti. “Honey, it gets made, it gets rumpled up, and it gets walked away from in the morning. Of course, it’s a ‘she.’”

  Meghan blushed. The other ladies chuckled and even Max Ashton grinned. Only Brian didn’t seem to get the joke and that was because he was backing into Max.

  “Oops! Geez, I’m sorry, mister,” the boy exclaimed guiltily. He’d been trying to peer through the hole in the wall.

  “Think nothing of it, lad,” Max replied.

  At once, the three female American faces swung toward him. “You sound just like Laurence Olivier,” Mrs. Plante breathed.

  “Only you’re taller, and fairer, of course,” Mrs. Stradling pronounced, eyeing Max speculatively.

  “And while the voice is refined, the look is definitely rugged.” Miss Ferguson nodded sagely.

  “A duke,” Miss Ferguson clipped out, “with an agenda.”

  “Or a vendetta,” Mrs. Plante mused quietly.

  “Or a past,” proposed Mrs. Stradling.

  Even the starry-eyed Meghan was eyeing Max in friendly, if objective, appreciation. The tour was definitely getting sidetracked and Laurel did not want to spend any unnecessary time weaving fantasies about Max Ashton. She’d woven one too many in that area already.

  “Please,” Laurel said in barely suppressed exasperation. The women turned around from their contemplation of Max and looked at her.

  “He’s not Dan Stevens and this isn’t Downton Abbey, you know,” she said, trying for jocularity and ending up sounding tense. “Mr. Ashton, would you mind finding something else to do while we’re in here? We won’t be but a short while.”

  Max shrugged, his smile lazy and knowing. “Not a bit. But since you won’t be long, and I was going to call it a day after I was done in here, why don’t I just hang about while you lecture? Might even learn something interesting.”

  “I am sure nothing I have to say could interest you.”

  “Are you?” His smile had become softer. His dark eyes darker. She felt a little breathless, a little cornered by the look in his eyes… Nonsense! “Yes. Besides, I wouldn’t want to bore you.”

  His smile faded and his gaze became even more focused on her. “Never.”

  She felt herself flush and to cover her sudden confusion, she turned her back on him. “As you will. Now, what say we turn our attention to the star of this show?”

  “Yeah,” agreed Brian.

  “Good.” Laurel smiled at the boy. “First off, anyone have any questions?”

  This wasn’t how this part of the tour was supposed to go. Usually, she did a five-minute chronology of the bed and “hasta la vista, tourists.” But today she wasn’t in any hurry to have them leave and the museum close for the last time. She wanted to extend this rare sense of ownership. Even more, deep within her was welling a strange feeling of urgency that there were a million stories in her that needed to be told, or else they would be silenced forever.

  “Come on,” she urged them. “Anything. This bed is a legend. How often do you get to sit on a legend and ask a Legend-Meister questions?”

  Miss Ferguson raised a hand.

  “Shoot,” Laurel said.

  “Okay. When was the bed made and who made it?”

  “Good question.” Laurel nodded sagely. “The fact is, we don’t know for certain who made the Masterson bed. It’s first mentioned in historical annals in the late thirteenth century, when a visiting nobleman wrote about his sojourn in Trecombe and how his host gave up ‘a wondrously carved, magnificently foreign bed for my comfort.’

  “‘Magnificently foreign’ is a direct translation and our best clue as to its origins.”

  Laurel knew she was good at this, not because she was smart or conscientious, but because she loved it. As she spoke, she could feel the decades and centuries slip away, a world form in her imagination that she only needed to close her eyes to see, feel, smell, and hear.

  “From this reference and judging from the motifs in the carving, we can gather that the bed was made somewhere near Jerusalem at the beginning of the same century,” she went on. “Undoubtedly it was brought back to England by a crusading knight.” She smiled happily. “That’s right. The first recorded Masterson was a bona fide knight.”

  A knight in shining armor, a man who understood and lived by a code of chivalry, a ‘flower of manhood,’ she thought wistfully. And while logically she knew she would have found a thirteenth-century knight chauvinistic, egocentric, and violent, she wished there were men about today—she glanced at Max—who treated a lady as well as they did, with respect and consideration.

  “Just think of what it must have been like to be a knight in those days,” she went on dreamily. “It was like being a rock star today, only the jousting field was his concert hall and noblemen and noblewomen were his groupies.

  “And a tournament! The ultimate concert! It would have been fabulous. Imagine one in which the Masterson knight rode.” She sighed deeply, her eyes fixed on an interior vision she alone could see.

  “He enters the field on his prancing destrier, his armor shimmering in the sun. The pennants ringing the field snap beneath a cerise-colored sky as the crowds dressed in silks and satins cheer. The children throw him flowers while the ladies toss him their silk scarves.”

  She closed her eyes. “I wish I could have seen it…”

  Chapter One

  Trecombe, Cornwall

  circa 1200

  “Get those pigs off the tilting field!” Simon Gundry, sheriff of Trecombe, hollered at the children.

  The two boys, eager not to postpone the promised entertainment, complied without complaint, hieing after their father’s escaped sows, sliding and whooping across the icy uneven ground.

  Simon watched until they’d cordoned the pigs off by the tanner’s stall and then turned back to the task at hand.

  “It is agreed then,” he bellowed with as much authority as he could muster, “whoever is unhorsed by his opponent first, will withdraw his claim on the lands abutting the river.”

  Simon watched as the knights mounted their destriers at opposite ends of the long jousting field, the length of which was separated by a low rail. He blew into his hands and shivered in the raw March wind. It was early in the day yet and the field was still frozen. Later, the sun would turn the ground into an ice-clotted mire. Not that the cold had kept spectators from turning out.

  The young gentlemen from Teague Manor milled about the far end of the list, while their ladies, wrapped snug in rabbit-lined pelisses, the
ir hoods drawn tight about rosy faces, roosted on rough benches hauled out by their servants. Along the rest of the field’s length stood the free folk of Trecombe. Even the holy brothers from tiny St. Albion’s Abbey stood in the crowd.

  And why not? Simon thought. Trecombe was too small and remote to attract tournaments the way the cathedral cities and market towns did. Trecombe’s only tournament was the one held annually on Saint Neot’s name day. For the common people of Trecombe, this was a rare holiday, while for manor-born sons and daughters, it was an escape from a long winter of boredom.

  Simon, however, being neither manor-born nor bored, but instead in charge of all the civil justice in the shire, was unhappy. He did not like this. Not at all.

  A dispute between knights regarding property should properly await the king’s assize. Unhappily, as knights, the two combatants had every right to demand judgment by combat rather than await the king’s justice, and consequentially endure the loss of a valuable planting season.

  Aye, Simon understood the reasoning behind the challenge. But he liked it no more for the understanding. He stomped his feet and offered a quick prayer that his role here did not come back to haunt him. Then he cupped his hands and hollered, “Are you ready, Sir Moore?”

  Pretty as a maid with his golden hair and ruddy cheeks, Sir Guy Moore looked born to the brilliant raiment he wore, presents his proud parent had bestowed upon him at his knighting nine months past. Since then, he’d already won three tournaments. Now, he dug his golden spurs into his destrier’s milk-white sides. The brute arched its neck, rolling its eyes and drumming its hooves anxiously upon the hoar- touched ground.

  A cheer rose from the crowd in response. Simon, who’d seen his share of knightly posturing and had known Guy Moore when he was a spoiled bit of snot hanging from his father’s nose, wasn’t so easily impressed.

  “I am ready!” Guy shouted, his voice ripe with confidence.

  Simon turned toward where the other knight, a stranger here, fought his borrowed warhorse to a standstill. It was woefully apparent that he was not ready. The crowd eyed him without warmth. A few snickered.

  The stranger looked like Hotfoot compared to Guy Moore’s Gabriel. Where Moore was fair, smooth, and light, this one was dark, bearded, and huge. Where Moore looked like greenwood, supple and tensile, this man looked to be carved from a bole, hard and obdurate.

  He was a crusader, knighted, rumor had it, upon a bloody battlefield by Richard himself before following that same Richard to the Holy Lands. It was a good story, Simon admitted, but Trecombe had seen crusaders before and knew all too well that knightly armor as oft shielded vice as virtue. After all, Sir Gerent Corbet had been a knight, and only think on the years of terror his tenure had wrought in Trecombe.

  No, what stimulated curiosity about this man wasn’t what he was, but who he was: Sir Nicholas, whose origins were so humble and obscure they did not even boast a proper surname, the newly named heir to Corbet Manor. Once it had been Sir Gerent’s demesne and now it was the richest in the land.

  Making Sir Nicholas No-Name, as the town’s brats had dubbed him, even more fascinating was the fact that he’d never actually seen the lands to which he held tide—not until he’d ridden into Trecombe two days ago. Because before he’d come into his inheritance, he’d been lost on the crusade and presumed dead. Indeed, even now perpetually lit candles graced the altar at St. Albion’s, assuring his soul’s ascension to heaven.

  He’d come on the Sabbath, entering church as bold as brass, and announced himself. Amid a cacophony of amazement, Father Timothy and Father Eidart had vouchsafed that this Sir Nicholas was who he said he was, having known him from Glastonbury and having been instrumental in the events that had led to his inheriting the Corbet lands.

  But before Sir Nicholas could even retire to spend a night at his newly claimed manor, Guy Moore had arrived and challenged the stranger to ownership of the orchard by the river. When Sir Nicholas had disclosed that he owned no steed, the holy brothers had come to his aid yet again, finding within their snug stables the destrier of a knight they’d lost to God’s grace this very winter. Unridden since then, the horse had grown unruly and Sir Nicholas now had all he could do to keep the creature under control.

  No wonder the people of Trecombe, great and small, were willing to forsake their work to see this particular joust. ‘Twas not often a man returned from the grave—particularly a Syrian grave. If only he’d looked the part of God’s returned champion. He did not.

  For while Guy Moore looked every inch his position, not even the most accomplished troubadour could have found much in Sir Nicholas’s person worth romanticizing. Nicholas’s dull mail—again, the deceased knight’s—was as ill-fitting as his horse was ill- tempered. Even his lance was borrowed; its history, like his own, a mystery; its strength and straightness as suspect as the man who wielded it.

  Simon shook his head despairingly. It would be, he feared, a short tournament.

  “Sir? Are you agreed?” Simon shouted to the newfound lord of Corbet Manor.

  In answer, Sir Nicholas raised his arm. Impossible to read his expression. His already dark visage was further obscured by a thick, untrimmed beard and the black locks that fell unkempt upon his shoulders.

  But his green eyes were clear and his gaze seemed steady enough. If he felt at a disadvantage on his vexatious mount with his borrowed lance, he did not reveal it. He wore composure like a mantle.

  “By the thighs of the poxy bitch that whelped you, Simon, get on with it!” Moore shouted.

  “Ride!”

  Both men’s lances rose in brief salute and Moore’s steed reared, silhouetted against the blinding blue of the newly flushed day. Then he was flying down the field, his mail shimmering, the red silk ribbons braided in his horse s mane rippling, his young body canted forward.

  As for Sir Nicholas… Well, no one would be writing odes to Sir Nicholas’s prowess this day, that was a certainty. His mount plunged forward, unbalancing his rider and sending the point of Nicholas’s lance pitching earthward. For an instant, Simon thought it would impale the ground, unseating Nicholas before Moore drew near enough to take credit for it.

  Pity, Simon thought morosely. Then, slowly amazingly, the battered knight pulled the tip of the thirteen foot lance from its perilous drop. Alas, not in time to guide its path.

  Still, The Virgin must have favored her resurrected knight, for in heaving back to keep his lance from falling, Nicholas’s shield shifted, slanting sideways so that when Moore’s lance struck it, it skittered along the shield’s surface, its force deflected.

  Moore cursed roundly and the riders thundered past one another to their respective ends of the list. Moore wheeled his mount sharply and adroitly while Sir Nicholas fought his mount into a looping turn.

  “Ready!” Moore shouted and, without awaiting his opponent’s consent, spurred his destrier forth, once more charging down the tilting rail. And once more, Sir Nicholas’s mount gathered its haunches and bolted.

  This time, however, Sir Nicholas was ready. He crouched low over the beast’s withers, his lance steady.

  The crowd held its collective breath. Only the thunder of hoof beats and the squeal of the incarcerated pigs broke the quiet. The air frosted over with the spectators’ mingled breath. Flecks of mud sprayed from beneath flying hooves. Somewhere a baby squalled.

  Twenty feet from his adversary, Nicholas abruptly stood up in his stirrups. It was a bold ploy. Raised thus, if Guy struck true, Nicholas would easily be toppled. But, the stance also allowed Nicholas a few precious inches of height which he used to his advantage, leaning out and over the tilt rail, risking all on the gamble that by doing so his lance would reach Guy a split second before Guy’s reached him.

  Close…closer…

  The lances seemed to strike the knights’ shields at the same instant. Nicholas fell back into his seat, pitching sideways, his lance swinging up as he tried to right himself. Guy, quick to seize advantage, yanked savagely a
t his reins, trying to wheel his mount on his rear legs in order to finish off his flailing opponent from behind.

  He had almost turned his horse, dropping his shield to do so, when suddenly Nicholas spun around, his leg swinging over the pommel so that he circled round in the saddle without bothering to turn his mount to match his direction. His seemingly uncontrolled lance suddenly sliced through the air in a deadly up-swinging arc, colliding into Guy’s unprotected side.

  And with that, it was over.

  Like a bothersome fly, Guy Moore was brushed from his destrier’s back and landed in a clatter of metal on the muddy ground.

  * * *

  Either the hammers pounding against his temples or the taste of rotted wool in his mouth woke Nicholas. Neither was pleasant and the knowledge that he’d willfully pursued both did not make them any more appealing. He’d never been a man to lose his caution in drink, and less the sort to deliberately spend his joy after having dulled his senses. Pleasures—in his limited experience with them—were too rare to enjoy with less than a full complement of faculties.

  But his triumph at having won the joust, and the release that came of having yet again cheated death, had for once overwhelmed him. He’d started drinking as soon as he’d found a tavern. Now he was paying the price, learning anew that self-indulgence was a luxury he could scant afford.

  He squinted into the shadowed interior of the only proper bed he’d found in Cabot Manor, noting the plain dark curtains hanging about it and the rough texture of the wood surface, hand-planed and unadorned. ‘Twas far cruder furnishings than one would expect in so well-made and well-tended a manor house—at least, he recalled thinking it well-tended after he’d finally found his way here early this morning. Still, he thought with a sweet sense of ownership, it was his bed.

  He had never owned anything in his life besides his honor, the skills to do bodily injury to another man, and his fearlessness in doing so. Or rather, there’d been a time he’d been fearless. No more.