Silken Threads Read online

  “Patricia Ryan moves Rear Window to medieval London, and does things Hitchcock never dreamed of! Fresh, swift and sexy, Silken Threads strengthens Ms. Ryan’s reputation as an outstanding author of medieval romances.” New York Times bestselling author Mary Jo Putney

  SILKEN THREADS

  Recipient of Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award for Best Long Historical Romance and a Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award nominee

  Patricia Ryan

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 1999 Patricia Ryan. All rights reserved. With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the author.

  Originally published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Other Electronic Books by Patricia Ryan

  Medieval Romances:

  Falcon’s Fire

  Heaven’s Fire

  Secret Thunder

  Wild Wind

  The Sun and the Moon (the companion book to Silken Threads)

  Nell Sweeney Historical Mysteries by P.B. Ryan:

  Still Life with Murder

  Murder in a Mill Town

  Death on Beacon Hill

  Murder on Black Friday

  Murder in the North End

  A Bucket of Ashes

  For my dear friend and critique partner, Kathryn Shay, with love and appreciation

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  May 1165, London’s West Cheap District

  How do you tell a man you’ve come to take his wife away? Graeham wondered as he knocked on the red-painted double door of Rolf le Fever’s Milk Street town house.

  He’d pondered the matter at some length during his storm-ravaged Channel crossing and the two-day ride from Dover to London, but no easy answer had come to him. It was a dicey business, removing a woman from her husband’s home, one that might call for the most silken finesse...or savage force. Graeham automatically touched the horn handle of the dagger sheathed on his belt, hoping he wouldn’t need to use it.

  The iron door knocker was shaped like the head of some unidentifiable beast with a gaping mouth, from which curled a long, demonically pointed tongue. Graeham reached for it again, but hesitated as footsteps thudded from within, accompanied by a man’s voice. “Where the devil are you, you bloody worthless wench? Didn’t you hear that knocking?”

  The door swung inward with a squeal of corroded hinges. The fair-haired man who had opened it looked about Graeham’s age, although Graeham knew him to be, at five-and-thirty, fully a decade his senior. He was taller than average, though not as tall as Graeham. Pale, smooth-boned, clad in a calf-length tunic of emerald silk trimmed in sable and cinched with a jeweled belt, Rolf le Fever more closely resembled a royal courtier—or his own notion of one—than a merchant, however prosperous he might be.

  Le Fever assessed Graeham up and down with eyes the color of water, his expression that of a man contemplating an insect. Little wonder; unwashed and unshaven, his split-front riding tunic and leathern leggings grimy from the road, his unbound hair hanging limply, Graeham must have looked as if he were there to empty the privy.

  “Rolf le Fever?” Graeham inquired, although there was no quesion in his mind whom he was addressing.

  “Tradesmen enter round back.” Le Fever stepped away from the door and began to swing it shut.

  Graeham slammed a hand on it before it could close. “Gui de Beauvais sent me.”

  At the mention of his father by marriage, le Fever slowly reopened the door. “Lord Gui sent you?”

  Graeham opened the hardened leather case resting against his hip, suspended by a cord across his chest. He pulled out a folded sheet of parchment bound in gold cord that had been sealed with the baron’s insignia, and handed it to the merchant. “His lordship’s letter of introduction.”

  Le Fever broke the waxen seal, slid the cord out of the slits in the crisp parchment, and unfolded the letter, his mouth silently forming the words as he struggled to decipher them.

  Opting for tact—at least for the time being—Graeham said, “I apologize for my appearance. I’ve been traveling for the better part of a week, and I’ve only just arrived in London.”

  “Indeed.” Le Fever refolded the letter and tapped his chin with it. “Where’s your mount, then?”

  “I left them—”

  “Them?”

  “I have two.” One for me and one for your wife. “I left them at St. Bartholemew’s.” It was on Lord Gui’s advice that Graeham had chosen the renowned monastic hostelry, located outside the city wall, over Holy Trinity or one of London’s many public inns. His lordship had extolled the priory’s hospitality, but Graeham hadn’t been there long enough to sample it. Upon his arrival a short while ago, he’d stabled his exhausted horses and proceeded by foot through Aldersgate—one of the seven gates that provided access into London proper—and through the bustling city streets to the retailing district of West Cheap, mindful of his mission. Too mindful perhaps, for le Fever might have proven more receptive had Graeham taken the time to clean himself up and dress as befitted the emissary of a distinguished Norman baron.

  He was overeager. Little wonder, considering the urgency of his assignment...and his stake in its success.

  “May I come in?” Graeham asked. “I have a matter of some importance to discuss with you.”

  Le Fever drilled his eerily transparent gaze into Graeham. “Lord Gui describes you as a retainer. That’s not very specific.”

  “I’m one of his serjanz.”

  “Ah. A military man,” le Fever said, as if that explained Graeham’s appearance. He tucked the letter beneath his belt. “Come.” Turning, he strode through a small entrance hall and up a flight of stairs to a second-floor landing, with Graeham following; the stairs continued upward to a third level, Graeham noticed.

  “You’re English,” le Fever observed as he led the way into a sizable chamber, opulently furnished and bedecked in silken hangings, its floorboards plastered with smooth white clay.

  “Aye.” Graeham couldn’t help smiling, gratified that the eleven years he’d lived in the Frankish county of Beauvais hadn’t completely erased the native accent with which he spoke the Anglo-Norman common tongue of his homeland.

  Le Fever motioned Graeham into an ornately carved chair, one of two facing each other before a hooded fireplace set into a stone chimney. A hellish blaze roared within it, out of keeping with the mild spring afternoon. The merchant crossed to a corner cupboard painted with leopards and fleurs-de-lys. “Do you have a name, serjant?”

  “Graeham.”

  A ring of keys dangled from a chain attached to le Fever’s belt, much like a lady’s chatelaine. Sorting through the keys, he chose one and unlocked the cup¬board. “Graeham of...?”

  “Some in France know me as Graeham of London—I was born here. But I’m also called Graeham Fox.”

  “For your cleverness?”

  “For my hair.” And for his cleverness, but sometimes it was best to be underestimated. “In sunlight, it has a reddish cast.” When it was clean, which it hadn’t been since his last bath, back in Beauvais.

  Le Fever’s expression hovered somewhere between indifference and disdain. “One must take
your word for that, I suppose.” He retrieved a flagon and a silver goblet from the cupboard. “Something to cool your throat after your journey?”

  “Ale, if you have it. I’ve missed English ale.”

  “Wench!” le Fever shouted. After a moment’s silence, he snarled, “God’s tooth,” and stalked to a corner stairwell. “Aethel! Where the bloody hell are you?”

  Something scraped on the ceiling overhead—a chair?—and then came the hurried descent of footsteps on the stairs. A doughy serving wench appeared, clutching her apron in one hand and a spoon in the other. “Beg pardon, Master Rolf. I was upstairs feeding Mistress Ada, and I didn’t hear—”

  “Go down to the buttery and bring our guest some ale. Step lively.”

  “Yes, sire.” Aethel cast Graeham a swift, curious glance as she darted back into the service stairwell.

  “Pointless creature.” Le Fever filled the goblet with wine and sat opposite Graeham to sip it. Rings glinted on his fingers and thumbs. When he crossed his legs, Graeham glimpsed, beneath the hem of his tunic, the intricately embroidered garters that secured his chausses just above the knees. The snug hose were fashioned not of wool, but of gleaming plum-colored silk—an understandable affectation, Graeham supposed, given that his host was not only London’s most prominent silk merchant, but master of the newly established Mercer’s Guild.

  “I can’t help wondering,” le Fever said as he eyed Graeham over the rim of his goblet, “what ‘matter of some importance’ could prompt Lord Gui to send a soldier to his daughter’s home.”

  Tread carefully. “His lordship misses Mistress Ada, and is eager to visit with her. Given his advanced years and ill health, it would have been unwise for him to attempt such an arduous journey himself. He sent me to escort his daughter across the Channel to him.”

  Le Fever’s eyebrows quirked, just slightly. “He wants you to take her back to Beauvais?”

  Slowly Graeham said, “To Paris. He’ll visit her there.”

  “Ah, yes,” le Fever sneered. “Ada has never set foot in her own father’s castle, isn’t that right? Tell me—does the baron’s lady wife even know about the twin daughters her husband sired on that Paris whore?”

  “Nay,” Graeham said evenly. “And, as I understand it, their mother was a dressmaker.”

  Le Fever snorted contemptuously. “They call themselves all sorts of things.” He took a long swallow of wine and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “I’m afraid your journey has been for naught, serjant. I have no intention of consigning my wife to the care of a complete stranger, especially...” His frosty gaze took in Graeham’s disreputable appearance.

  “I assure you she’ll be entirely safe with me.”

  Le Fever smiled thinly. “That’s really not the point. ‘Tis quite irregular for a married lady to travel abroad without her husband. ‘Twould reflect badly on me, and I do have a reputation to maintain. I’m a man of consequence in this city, after all, regardless of what his lordship may think of me.”

  Something clattered on the floor upstairs. Le Fever did not avert his unnervingly steady gaze from Graeham.

  “Are you aware,” Graeham said, “that your wife has maintained a steady correspondence with her father since your marriage to her last year?”

  “What of it?”

  “Six months ago, the letters stopped coming.”

  Aethel reappeared with a stein of ale for Graeham, at whom she smiled shyly before disappearing back into the corner stairwell. A moment later, there came footsteps on the floor above, and another grating of chair legs. Listening closely, Graeham heard Aethel saying something apologetic in muffled tones, followed by the much softer voice of another woman.

  Tracking Graeham’s gaze to the ceiling, le Fever said, “My wife has been ill since Christmastide. When she’s recovered, she’ll resume her correspondence with her father. Is that why he wants to see her? Because she stopped writing?”

  “That...” Graeham gained a moment by taking a slow sip of ale. Too bitter, but it tasted like ambrosia; it tasted like England. “And because of what she communicated to him while she was still writing.”

  Setting his stein on a little table next to his chair, Graeham reached into his document case and brought forth a short stack of letters. Le Fever eyed them uneasily, as well he might have.

  Graeham said, “Your marriage appears to have soured within days of the wedding.”

  Le Fever made a sound of derision. “We were married in Paris. Three days later, while we were in a boat crossing the Channel, she told me what her father had declined to mention before the nuptials—that the daughter whose hand he’d so generously offered me had, in fact, been born on the wrong side of the bed. He’s never publicly acknowledged Ada and Phillipa, never even owned up to their existence. I thought I’d negotiated a union with a baron’s daughter, but what I ended up with was a wife I daren’t speak of, lest someone inquire after her parentage. How could such a marriage possibly benefit me?”

  “‘Twas to protect the delicate sensibilities of his lady wife that the baron opted for circumspection regarding—”

  “He hid those girls away in Paris like the shameful little secret they were. And still are.” Le Fever drained his wine in one swift tilt of the goblet.

  “On the contrary, after their mother died, he delegated their upbringing to the care of his own brother, a canon of Notre Dame. They were well provided for, educated, given every possible advantage. He visited them frequently.”

  “And all the while,” le Fever said, gripping the stem of his goblet as if squeezing a throat, “he hoped and prayed that no one in Beauvais would ever learn of them. Is it any wonder he betrothed Ada to an Englishman? The farther away he could keep her, the better. God damn that blackguard to eternal hell for his treachery.”

  “His lordship realizes he...misled you.”

  “He lied to me,” le Fever spat out as a livid flush suffused his face. “If not outright, then by implication. He arranged my betrothal to his bastard daughter as if there were naught amiss, laughing at me all the while. Tell me—were you privy all along to his sordid little scheme to foist one of his by-blows off on a gullible English mercer?”

  “‘Twasn’t the way of it. Lord Gui was merely trying to provide for his daughter through marriage to a man of means.” Although his lordship had, of course, concealed his daughter’s illegitimacy during the betrothal negotiations. By the time le Fever discovered it, he reasoned, the marriage would be consummated and the English mercer would be too enamored of his lovely and sweet-tempered young bride to raise any objections. As it turned out, he was wrong. “But no,” Graeham added, “I knew naught of the matter until two weeks ago, when Lord Gui asked me to come here.”

  His lordship’s eyes had been damp and red-rimmed when he’d summoned Graeham to his private chamber. What I’m about to tell you, he’d said unsteadily, I’ve never revealed to a soul—at least not in Beauvais. Nineteen years ago, while visiting friends in Paris, he’d had a brief liaison with a woman named Jeanne, whom he’d hired to make some new gowns for his wife. Never before had he strayed in his fidelity to his beloved Lady Christiana, but he found himself helpless to resist Jeanne’s seductive charms. Nine months later, he received word that Jeanne had given birth to his twin daughters. Four years later, the dressmaker succumbed to an outbreak of typhoid and Lord Gui made the girls wards of his brother, Canon Lotulf. Phillipa still lived with her uncle in Paris, where she had several suitors vying for her hand, although her studies consumed her complete interest. Ada was united with Rolf le Fever last year in a marriage that Lord Gui arranged, but which he had since came to deeply regret.

  “His lordship must hold you in the highest esteem,” le Fever said, “to have confided such a secret—and to entrust his daughter into your care for the journey back to Paris.” What might have seemed like a compliment from another man struck Graeham as the most oily dissembling.

  “I gather he was simply desperate,” Graeham lied, ever heedf
ul of the strategic advantage of being underrated. In truth, Lord Gui considered Graeham by far his most trusted serjant, as skilled in diplomacy as in the combative arts, which was why the baron had chosen Graeham for the delicate task of spiriting his daughter away from her husband, employing whatever means necessary.

  “Despite the circumstances of Mistress Ada’s birth,” Graeham said, “Lord Gui loves her—and her sister—as dearly as he loves his sons by Lady Christiana. He only wants what’s best for them. If he erred in not revealing the circumstances of Mistress Ada’s birth, he now deeply regrets it.”

  “He bloody well should regret it. He ruined my life, the lying cur. May he die of the bloody flux and roast in everlasting torment.” The contemptible turd actually crossed himself.

  Graeham held up the top letter from the stack. “Apparently you flew into quite the rage when your new bride admitted the truth of her birth.”

  “I damn near pitched her over the side of the boat. I daresay you’d have had the same reaction if you’d been hoodwinked as I was. And do you know the most galling part of it? There’s absolutely nothing I can do. I can’t annul the marriage—there are no grounds. And naturally I can’t let it get out that my wife is the product of some sordid tryst in the back alleys of Paris. So I swallow my pride and carry on. Just as Lord Gui knew I would have to.”

  Quite right, Graeham thought, sympathizing reluctantly—but only fleetingly—with the bastard’s dilemma.

  “Ada is provided for,” le Fever said, “and her reputation remains intact, as does Lord Gui’s marriage to the blessedly oblivious Lady Christiana. The only one who suffers is me.”

  “And your wife.” Choosing the second letter in the stack and setting the others on the table, Graeham unfolded it and read a portion aloud. “‘I despair, dearest Papa, over what will become of me in this marriage. I can bear it when he strikes me. Most husbands discipline their wives, do they not, and Rolf is really rather restrained in this respect, except when he is in his cups. It is his endless taunts and insults that wear me down. Yesterday he said, “No wonder the great Baron Gui de Beauvais was willing to wed his daughter into the merchant class and pack her off to England. You’re the misbegotten spawn of some Paris whore. He was glad to be rid of you. Oh, that I could discard you so easily.”‘”