By His Majesty's Grace

He was no longer there. Fuming and cursing under his breath, he retreated down the stairs, his footsteps stamping out his enraged withdrawal.

“Come,” Braesford said, guiding her back toward her solar with a brief touch at her back, “let me have a look at that finger.”

She went with him. What else was she to do? Her will seemed oddly in abeyance. Her finger hurt with a fierce ache that radiated up her arm to her shoulder, making her feel a little ill and none too steady on her feet. More than that, she had no wish to face Graydon just now. He would blame her for the humiliation at Braesford’s hand, and who knew what he might do to assuage his injured conceit.

Braesford’s features were grim as he closed the two of them into the solar again. Turning from the door, he gestured toward a stool set near the dying fire. She moved to drop down upon it and he followed behind her, dragging an iron candle stand closer before going to one knee in front of her. His gaze met hers for a long instant. Then he reached to take her injured hand in his and place it carefully, palm up, on his bent knee.

An odd sensation, like a small explosion of sparks from a fallen fire log, ran along her nerves to her shoulder and down her back. She shivered and her hand trembled in his hold, but she declined to acknowledge it. She concentrated, instead, on his features so close to her. Twin lines grooved the space between his thick brows as he frowned, while the black fringe of his lashes concealed his expression. A small scar lay across one cheekbone, and the roots of his beard showed as a blue-black shadow beneath his close-shaved skin. An odd breathlessness afflicted her, and she inhaled deep and slow to banish it.

He did not look up, but studied her little finger, following the angle of the break with a careful, questing touch, finding the place where the bone had snapped. He added his thumb, spanning the injured member between it and his forefinger. Gripping her wrist in his free hand, he caught the slender, misshapen digit in a grip of ruthless power and gave it a smooth, hard pull.

She cried out, keeling forward in such abrupt weakness that her forehead came to rest on his wide shoulder. Sickness crowded her throat and she swallowed hard upon it, breathing in rapid pants. Against her hair, she heard him whisper something she could not understand, heard him murmur her name.

“Forgive me, I beg,” he said a little louder, though his tone was quiet and a little gruff. “I would not have hurt you for a king’s ransom. It was necessary, or else your poor finger would always have been crooked.”

She shifted, moved back a space to stare down at their joined hands. Slowly, he unfurled his grasp. Her little finger no longer had a bend in it. It was straight again.

“You…” she began, then stopped, unable to think what she meant to say.

“I am the worst kind of devil, I know, but it seemed a shame that such slender, aristocratic fingers should appear imperfect.”

She would not deny it, was even grateful in a way. What she could not forgive was the lack of warning. Yes, and lack of choice. She had been offered so little of late.

He did not wait for her comment but turned to survey the rushes that covered the floor behind him. Selecting one, he broke its stem into two equal lengths with a few quick snaps. He fitted these on either side of her finger, and then reached without ceremony to slip free the knotted silk ribbon which held her slashed sleeve together above her left elbow. Shaking out the shining length, he wrapped it quickly around his makeshift splint.

Isabel stared at his bent head as he worked, her gaze moving from the wide expanse of his shoulders to the bronze skin at the nape of his neck where the waving darkness of his hair fell forward away from it, from his well-formed fingers that worked so competently at his task to the concentration on his features. His face was gilded by candlelight, his sun-darkened skin tinted with copper and bronze, the bones sculpted with tints of gold while the shadows cast upon his cheekbones by his lashes were deep black in contrast.

A strange, heated awareness rose inside her, the piercing recognition of her response to his touch, his inherent strength, his sheer masculine presence. They were so very alone here in the solar with the gathering darkness pressing against the thick window glass and only a single branch of guttering candles for light. She had few defenses against whatever he might decide to do to her in the next several minutes, and no expectation of consideration at his hands.

Husband, he was her husband already under canon law, with all the privileges that entailed. Would he be tender in his possession? Or would he be brutish, taking her with all the ceremony of a stag mounting a hind? Her stomach muscles clenched as molten reaction moved lower in her body. A shudder, uncontrollable in its force, spiraled through her.

Braesford glanced up as that tremor extended to the fingers he held. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, no,” she said, her voice compressed in her tight throat. “I just… I should thank you for coming to my aid. It was fortunate you arrived when you did.”

“Fortune had no part in it,” he answered, returning his gaze to the small, flat knot he was tying in the ribbon. “I was coming to escort you to the hall.”

“Were you?” Her wonder faded quickly. “I suppose you felt we should make our entrance together.”

“I thought you might prefer not to face the company alone. As there will be no other lady present, no chatelaine to make you comfortable, then…” He lifted a square shoulder.

“It was a kind thought.” She paused, went on after a moment, “Though it does seem odd to be the only female of rank.”

“I have no family,” he said, a harsh note entering his voice. “I am the bastard son of a serving maid who died when I was born. My father was master of Braesford, but acknowledged me only to the extent of having me educated for the position of his steward. That was before his several estates, including Braesford, were confiscated when he was attainted as a traitor.”

Isabel tipped her head to one side in curiosity. “Traitor to which king, if I may ask?”

“To Edward IV. My father was loyal to old King Henry VI, and died with two of my half brothers, two out of his three legal heirs, while trying to restore him to the throne.”

“You followed in his footsteps, being for Lancaster?” She should know these things, but had barely listened to anything said about her groom after the distress of being told she must wed.

“Edward cut off my father’s head and set it on Tower Bridge. Was I to love him for it? Besides, he was a usurper, a regent who grew too fond of power after serving in his uncle’s place when he became a saintly madman.”

Her own dead father had sworn fealty to the white rose of York, but Isabel held the symbol in no great affection. Edward IV had stolen the crown from his pious and doddering uncle, Henry VI, and murdered him to prevent him from regaining it. He’d also executed his own brother, Clarence, for treason in order to keep it. When Edward died, his younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, had declared Edward’s young sons and daughters illegitimate and taken the crown for himself as Richard III. Rumor said he had ordered the two boys murdered to prevent any effort to restore them to the succession. Mayhap it was true; certainly they had disappeared. Now Henry Tudor had defeated and killed Richard III at Bosworth Field, becoming King Henry VII by might as much as right. He had also married Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV, thus uniting the red rose of Lancaster with the white rose of York, ending decades of fighting.

So much blood and death, and for what? For the right to receive the homage of other men? For the power to take what they wanted and kill whom they pleased?

“And the present Henry is wholly deserving of the crown he has gained?” she inquired.

“Careful, my lady,” Braesford said softly. “Newly made kings are more sensitive to treasonous comments than those accustomed to the weight of the crown.”

“You won’t denounce me, I think, for that would mean the end of a marriage greatly to your advantage. Besides, I would not speak so before any other.”

He met her gaze for long seconds, his own darkly appraising before he inclined his head. “I value the confidence.”

“Of course you do,” she said in short rejoinder. Few men bothered to listen to women in her experience, much less attend to what they said.

“I assure you it is so. Only bear in mind that in some places the very stones have ears.” He went on with barely a pause. “In any case, Henry VII is the last of his blood, the last heir to the rightful king, being descended on his mother’s side from John of Gaunt, grandfather to Henry VI. With all other contenders executed, dead in battle or presumed murdered, he has as much right to the crown as any, and far more than most.”

“Descended from an illegitimate child of John of Gaunt,” she pointed out.

His smile turned crooked, lighting the gray of his eyes. “Spoken like a true Yorkist. Yet the baseborn can be made legitimate by royal decree, as were the children of John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford, not to mention Henry’s new consort, Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth. And as with the meek, they sometimes inherit the earth.”

“Do you speak of Henry,” she said after an instant of frowning consideration, “or mean to say that you inherited your father’s estates, as he was once master at Braesford?”

“I was awarded them, rather, for services rendered to Henry VII. Though I promise you I earned every hectare and hamlet.”

“Awarded a bride, as well,” she said with some asperity.

Rand tipped his head. “That, too, by God’s favor, as well as Henry’s.”

The former owner of Braesford, if she remembered aright, was named McConnell. Being baseborn, Rand had taken the name of the estate as his surname, identifying himself with the land rather than with his father. It was a significant act, perhaps an indication of the man. “I was told the reward was, most likely, for finding the golden circlet lost by Richard in a thornbush at Bosworth. Well, and for having the presence of mind to hand it to Lord Stanley with the recommendation that he crown Henry on the field.”

“Don’t, please, allow the king’s mother to hear you say so.” A wry smile came and went across his face. “She believes it was her husband’s idea.”

Henry’s mother, Lady Margaret, was married to Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, as everyone knew. Though she had set up her household at Westminster Palace with her son, living apart from her husband by mutual consent, she was yet protective of Stanley’s good name.

“It was the reason, nonetheless?” Isabel persisted.

“Such things come, now and then, from the gratitude of kings.”

His voice was satirical, his features grim, almost forbidding. He was not stupid by any means, so well knew the fickle nature of royals who could take away as easily as they gave.

Yet receiving the ripe plum of a fine estate that had once belonged to a traitor was not unusual. The late bloodletting, named by some troubadour as the War of the Roses, had gone on so long, its factions had shifted and changed so often with the rise and fall of those calling themselves king, that titles and estates had changed hands many times over. A man sitting at the king’s table today, lauded as a lord and dressed in ermine-lined velvet, could have an appointment with headsman or hangman tomorrow. Few so favored died in their beds.

She noted, of a sudden, that Braesford seemed to be avoiding her gaze, almost ill at ease as he smoothed a thumb over the rush stems of her splint as if checking for roughness. Disquiet rose inside her as she wondered if he had overheard what she’d said of him moments ago. Clearing her throat, she spoke with some discomfiture. “If it chances you were near enough to overhear what passed between me and my stepbrother just now—”

He stopped her with a slicing gesture. “It doesn’t matter. You were quite right. I am nobody.”