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“Come back here, you evil little monkey,” the wife roared. “This day shall be your last!”
Dove was enjoying the fight by now. He had his opponent by the neck and was playing with the man’s nose, slapping it back and forth and laughing.
Mort, his companion, was equally gleeful, squaring off with the whore who had approached Aidan earlier.
Pippa led a chase around the cross, the bookseller and his wife in hot pursuit.
More spectators joined in the fray. The horse backed up, eyes rolling in fear. Aidan made a crooning sound and stroked her neck, but he did not leave the square. He simply watched the fight and thought, for the hundredth time since his arrival, what a strange, foul and fascinating place London was. Just for a moment, he forgot the reason he had come. He turned spectator, giving his full attention to the antics of Pippa and her companions.
So this was St. Paul’s, the throbbing heart of the city. It was more meeting place than house of worship to be sure, and this did not surprise Aidan. The Sassenach were a people who clung feebly to an anemic faith; all the passion and pageantry had been bled out of the church by the Rome-hating Reformers.
The steeple, long broken but never yet repaired, shadowed a collection of beggars and merchants, strolling players and thieves, whores and tricksters. At the opposite corner of the square stood a gentleman and a liveried constable. Prodded by the screeched urging of the bookseller’s wife, they reluctantly moved in closer. The bookseller had cornered Pippa on the top step.
“Mort!” she cried. “Dove, help me!” Her companions promptly disappeared into the crowd. “Bastards!” she yelled after them. “Geld and splay you both!”
The bookseller barreled toward her. She stooped and picked up the dead fish, took keen aim at the bookseller and let fly.
The bookseller ducked. The fish struck the approaching gentleman in the face. Leaving slime and scales in its wake, the fish slid down the front of his silk brocade doublet and landed upon his slashed velvet court slippers.
Pippa froze and gawked in horror at the gentleman. “Oops,” she said.
“Indeed.” He fixed her with a fiery eye of accusation. Without even blinking, he motioned to the liveried constable.
“Sir,” he said.
“Aye, my lord?”
“Arrest this, er, rodent.”
Pippa took a step back, praying the way was clear to make a run for it. Her backside collided with the solid bulk of the bookseller’s wife.
“Oops,” Pippa said again. Her hopes sank like a weighted corpse in the Thames.
“Let’s see you worm your way out of this fix, missy,” the woman hissed in her ear.
“Thank you,” Pippa said cordially enough. “I intend to do just that.” She put on her brightest I’m-an-urchin grin and tugged at a forelock. She had recently hacked off her hair to get rid of a particularly stubborn case of lice. “Good morrow, Your Worship.”
The nobleman stroked his beard. “Not particularly good for you, scamp,” he said. “Are you aware of the laws against strolling players?”
Her gaze burning with indignation, she looked right and left. “Strolling players?” she said with heated outrage. “Who? Where? To God, what is this city coming to that such vermin as strolling players would run loose in the streets?”
As she huffed up her chest, she furtively searched the crowd for Dove and Mortlock. Like the fearless gallants she knew them to be, her companions had vanished.
For a moment, her gaze settled on the man on the horse. She had noticed him earlier, richly garbed and well mounted, with a foreign air about him she could not readily place.
“You mean to say,” the constable yelled at her, “that you are not a strolling player?”
“Sir, bite your tongue,” she fired off. “I’m…I am…” She took a deep breath and plucked out a ready falsehood. “An evangelist, my lord. Come to preach the Good Word to the unconverted of St. Paul’s.”
The haughty gentleman lifted one eyebrow high. “The Good Word, eh? And what might that be?”
“You know,” she said with an excess of patience. “The gospel according to Saint John.” She paused, searching her memory for more tidbits gleaned from days she had spent huddled and hiding in church. An inveterate collector of colorful words and phrases, she took pride in using them. “The pistol of Saint Paul to the fossils.”
“Ah.” The constable’s hands shot out. In a swift movement, he pinned her to the wall beside the si quis door. She twisted around to look longingly into the nave where the soaring stone pillars marched along Paul’s Walk. Like a well-seasoned rat, she knew every cranny and cubbyhole of the church. If she could get inside, she could find another way out.
“You’d best do better than that,” the constable said, “else I’ll nail your foolish ears to the stocks.”
She winced just thinking about it. “Very well, then.” She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Here’s the truth.”
A small crowd had gathered, probably hoping to see nails driven through her ears. The stranger on horseback dismounted, passed his reins to a stirrup runner and drew closer.
The lust for blood was universal, Pippa decided. But perhaps not. Despite his savage-looking face and flowing black hair, the man had an air of reckless splendor that fascinated her. She took a deep breath. “Actually, sir, I am a strolling player. But I have a nobleman’s warrant,” she finished triumphantly.
“Have you, then?” His Lordship winked at the constable.
“Oh, aye, sir, upon my word.” She hated it when gentlemen got into a playful mood. Their idea of play usually involved mutilating defenseless people or animals.
“And who might this patron be?”
“Why, Robert Dudley himself, the Earl of Leicester.” Pippa threw back her shoulders proudly. How clever of her to think of the queen’s perpetual favorite. She nudged the constable in the ribs, none too gently. “He’s the queen’s lover, you know, so you’d best not irritate me.”
A few of her listeners’ mouths dropped open. The nobleman’s face drained to a sick gray hue; then hot color surged to his cheeks and jowls.
The constable gripped Pippa by the ear. “You lose, rodent.” With a flourish, he indicated the haughty man. “That is the Earl of Leicester, and I don’t believe he’s ever seen you before.”
“If I had, I would certainly remember,” said Leicester.
She swallowed hard. “Can I change my mind?”
“Please do,” Leicester invited.
“My patron is actually Lord Shelbourne.” She eyed the men dubiously. “Er, he is still among the living, is he not?”
“Oh, indeed.”
Pippa breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, then. He is my patron. Now I had best be go—”
“Not so fast.” The grip on her ear tightened. Tears burned her nose and eyes. “He is locked up in the Tower, his lands forfeit and his title attainted.”
Pippa gasped. Her mouth formed an O.
“I know,” said Leicester. “Oops.”
For the first time, her aplomb flagged. Usually she was nimble enough of wit and fleet enough of foot to get out of these scrapes. The thought of the stocks loomed large in her mind. This time, she was nailed indeed.
She decided to try a last ditch effort to gain a patron. Who? Lord Burghley? No, he was too old and humorless. Walsingham? No, not with his Puritan leanings. The queen herself, then. By the time Pippa’s claim could be verified, she would be long gone.
Then she spied the tall stranger looming at the back of the throng. Though he was most certainly foreign, he watched her with an interest that might even be colored by sympathy. Perhaps he spoke no English.
“Actually,” she said, “he is my patron.” She pointed in the direction of the foreigner. Be Dutch, she prayed silently. Or Swiss. Or drunk. Or stupid. Just play along.
The earl and the constable swung around, craning their necks to see. They did not have far to crane. The stranger stood like an oak tree amid low weeds, head and shoulders taller, oddly placid as the usual St. Paul’s crowd surged and seethed and whispered around him.
Pippa craned, too, getting her first close look at him. Their gazes locked. She, who had experienced practically everything in her uncounted years, felt a jolt of something so new and profound that she simply had no name for the feeling.
His eyes were a glittering, sapphire blue, but it was not the color or the startling face from which the eyes stared that mattered. A mysterious force dwelt behind the eyes, or in their depths. Awareness flew between Pippa and the stranger; she felt it enter her, dive into her depths like sunlight breaking through shadow.
Old Mab, the woman who had raised Pippa, would have called it magic.
Old Mab would have been right, for once.
The earl cupped his hands around his mouth. “You, sir!”
The foreigner pressed a very large hand to his much larger chest and raised a questioning black brow.
“Aye, sir,” called the earl. “This elvish female claims she is performing under your warrant. Is that so, sir?”
The crowd waited. The earl and the constable waited. When they looked away from her, Pippa clasped her hands and looked pleadingly at the stranger. Her ear was going numb in the pinch of the constable.
Pleading looks were her specialty. She had practiced them for years, using her large, pale eyes to prize coppers and crusts from passing strangers.
The foreigner raised a hand. Into the alleyway behind him flooded a troop of—Pippa was not certain what they were.
They moved about in a great mob like soldiers, but instead of tunics these men wore horrible gray animal hides, wolfskins by the look of them. They carried battleaxes with long handles. Some had shaved heads; others wore their hair loose and wild, tumbling over their brows.
Everyone moved aside when they entered the yard. Pippa did not blame the Londoners for shrinking in fear. She would have shrunk herself, but for the iron grip of the constable.
“Is that what the colleen said, then?” He strode forward. He spoke English, damn him. He had a very strange accent, but it was English.
He was huge. As a rule, Pippa liked big men. Big men and big dogs. They seemed to have less need to swagger and boast and be cruel than small ones. This man actually had a slight swagger, but she realized it was his way of squeezing a path through the crowd.
His hair was black. It gleamed in the morning light with shards of indigo and violet, flowing over his shoulders. A slim ebony strand was ornamented with a strap of rawhide and beads.
Pippa chided herself for being fascinated by a tall man with sapphire eyes. She should be taking the opportunity to run for cover rather than gawking like a Bedlamite at the foreigner. At the very least, she should be cooking up a lie to explain how, without his knowledge, she had come to be under his protection.
He reached the steps in front of the door, where she stood between the constable and Leicester. His flame-blue eyes glared at the constable until the man relinquished his grasp on Pippa’s ear.
Sighing with relief, she rubbed the abused, throbbing ear.
“I am Aidan,” the stranger said, “the O Donoghue Mór.”
A Moor! Immediately Pippa fell to her knees and snatched the hem of his deep blue mantle, bringing the dusty silk to her lips. The fabric felt heavy and rich, smooth as water and as exotic as the man himself.
“Do you not remember, Your Preeminence?” she cried, knowing important men adored honorary titles. “How you ever so tenderly extended your warrant of protection to my poor, downtrodden self so that I’d not starve?” As she rambled on, she found a most interesting bone-handled knife tucked into the cuff of his tall boot. Unable to resist, she stole it, her movements so fluid and furtive that no one saw her conceal it in her own boot.
Her gaze traveled upward over a strong leg. The sight set off a curious tingling. Strapped to his thigh was a shortsword as sharp and dangerous looking as the man himself.
“You said you did not wish me to suffer the tortures of Clink Prison, nor did you want my pitiful weight forever on your delicate conscience, making you terrified to burn in hell for eternity because you let a defenseless woman fall victim to—”
“Yes,” said the Moor.
She dropped his hem and stared up at him. “What?” she asked stupidly.
“Yes indeed, I remember, Mistress…er—”
“Trueheart,” she supplied helpfully, plucking a favorite name from the arsenal of her imagination. “Pippa Trueheart.”
The Moor faced Leicester. The smaller man gaped up at him. “There you are, then,” said the black-haired lord. “Mistress Pippa Trueheart is performing under my warrant.”
With a huge bear paw of a hand, he took her arm and brought her to her feet. “I do confess the little baggage is unmanageable at times and did slip away for today’s performance. From now on I shall keep her in closer tow.”
Leicester nodded and stroked his narrow beard. “That would be most appreciated, my lord of Castleross.”
The constable looked at the Moor’s huge escort. The members of the escort glared back, and the constable smiled nervously.
The Moor turned and addressed his fierce servants in a tongue so foreign, so unfamiliar, that Pippa did not recognize a single syllable of it. That was odd, for she had a keen and discerning ear for languages.
The skin-clad men marched out of the churchyard and clumped down Paternoster Row. The lad who served as stirrup runner led the big horse away. The Moor took hold of Pippa’s arm.
“Let’s go, a storin,” he said.
“Why do you call me a storin?”
“It is an endearment meaning ‘treasure.’”
“Oh. No one’s ever called me a treasure before. A trial, perhaps.”
His lilting accent and the scent of the wind that clung in his hair and mantle sent a thrill through her. She had never been rescued in her life, and certainly not by such a specimen as this black-haired lord.
As they walked toward the low gate linking St. Paul’s with Cheapside, she looked sideways at him. “You seem rather nice for a Moor.” She passed through the gate he held open for her.
“A Moor, you say? Mistress, sure and I am no Moor.”
“But you said you were Aidan, the O Donoghue Moor.”
He laughed. She stopped in her tracks. She earned her living by making people laugh, so she should be used to the sound of it, but this was different. His laughter was so deep and rich that she imagined she could actually see it, flowing like a banner of dark silk on the breeze.
He threw back his great, shaggy head. She saw that he had a full set of teeth. The eyes, blazing blue like the hearts of flames, drew her in with that same compelling magic she had felt earlier.
He was beginning to make her nervous.
“Why do you laugh?” she asked.
“Mór,” he said. “I am the O Donoghue Mór. It means ‘great.’”
“Ah.” She nodded sagely, pretending she had known all along. “And are you?” She let her gaze travel the entire length of him, lingering on the more interesting parts.
God was a woman, Pippa thought with sudden certainty. Only a woman would create a man like the O Donoghue, forming such toothsome parts into an even more delectable whole. “Aside from the obvious, I mean.”
