The King's Courtesan Read Free Page B

attacking with a lightning-quick savagery fueled by hatred, fanned by a lust for vengeance and nursed over the course of several years. One man took the blade to the throat before he could ready his weapon. Another fumbled with a pistol only to stagger backward, ashen-faced with shock, before falling.
    Their leader hadn’t moved. A handsome man with graying hair, he stood waiting, sword at the ready, curiosity rather than fear in his eyes. “We have met before. How do I know you?”
    “Cressly,” he hissed, leaping forward, slamming him hard against the wall. He pinioned him by the throat with one arm as the longsword drove under his guard between breast and back plate and thick buff coat, cutting through leather, skin and bone. The man’s eyes showed shock and bewilderment but it wasn’t enough. He leaned into him, turning and twisting the hilt of his sword with sadistic force, not bothering to stifle the man’s shrill scream of agony.
    “’Twas Cressly in Nottinghamshire we met, Lord Stanley,” he growled against his cheek. “My name is Robert Nichols and this is how I want to be remembered. Her name was Caroline…and this,” he said as he twisted again, “is for her.” He saw it then, the startled flash of recognition. He gave one final thrust, jerking the earl’s body up and nearly off the ground before pulling out his sword and stepping back, letting the lifeless corpse slide down the wall to join the refuse that littered the blood-slick pavement. He felt strangely empty. There was no satisfaction. No thrill of righteous retribution or sense of justice done. But Stanley was just the first. There were three more yet to go. Perhaps then she’d let him be.
    He regarded his handiwork, face impassive, before turning to look at a huddled form, mewling in the corner.
    Off in the distance, Prince Rupert’s forces were still hard at work, fanning through the town, routing out those who had run too late, stayed too long, or hadn’t found a place deep enough to hide. The night echoed with sporadic musket fire, shrill screams, drunken laughter and desperate cries of “sauve qui peut.” The rumble of cannon fire reverberated through the city. Strange now the walls were breeched and the battle done but for the looting. He cocked his head to one side, assessing, and then he spoke. “Run!” Somewhere, impossibly far away, a young girl cried….
    Robert Nichols jerked awake, heart pounding, his body bathed in a cold sweat. Thunder growled in the distance. A steady rain tapped on the windows and pattered against the roof. He groaned. Another damned storm. They’d been rol ing across the county for weeks. Soon the river would flood its banks.
    Vestiges of his dream stil lingered. No surprise there. He’d had the same one over and over through the years. It clung to him like a burr. Bolton. The first massacre of the civil war and he al of seventeen years old. Over three quarters of the town murdered, perpetrated by Price Rupert and the Earl of Derby in the royalist cause. He’d witnessed atrocities aplenty on both sides since then. The Lord Protector had been a pitiless man, too.
    He rol ed out of bed and pul ed on his boots and a robe, his nerves frayed. The girl’s sobbing stil resonated, wrapped within the wail and sigh of the wind. Caroline . She wouldn’t leave him alone. And why should she? Wasn’t this her home, too? Didn’t she have the right to demand retribution?
    And who to avenge her but him? Bolton had given him the opportunity to dispatch James Stanley, the first of her murderers. George Stanhope fol owed soon after, cut down in another bloody engagement, though he’d almost lost him to a Yorkshire pikeman during the melee.
    Chisholm had been harder. He was a superior officer, an ex-cavalier who’d switched al egiance with the bloody-minded zeal of the newly converted. Now there was just the one remaining. But she must be getting impatient. After al , she had been waiting for over ten years.
    He