The King's Damsel Read Free Page B

fallen out, you must now remain under your guardian’s control until you are of full age to inherit. During that time, he will have complete authority over both your inheritance and your person. Most guardians take their wards to live in their own households. If Sir Lionel has sons, he no doubt intends to marry you to one of them, for by purchasing your wardship from the king’s Court of Wards, he has also acquired the right to choose your husband.”
    I stared at him in disbelief, but his solemn countenance and thetears that sprang into my stepmother’s violet eyes confirmed that he was not likely to be mistaken in what he told us. A sense of utter helplessness gripped me, hard as a fist squeezing my heart. Appalled, I realized that I had more in common with Star of Hartlake than I’d realized. We had both suffered loss and neither of us had any control over what happened to us next.

3
    I disliked Sir Lionel Daggett intensely from the moment I first saw him striding arrogantly toward us through the garden of the town house in Glastonbury. No, I will use a stronger word—I despised my guardian. At that early stage in our acquaintance, I could not have said why. As yet, he had not even announced that he intended to separate me from my stepmother and remove me from all that was familiar to me. For a few more minutes, that was only a possibility, not a fact. And yet, there was something about him that immediately set my teeth on edge.
    “You must be pleasant to Sir Lionel, Thomasine,” Blanche warned me in a low voice as we watched him approach. “A smile is more likely to be rewarded with kindness than a frown.”
    Seated on one of the two wooden benches beneath the rose arbor, she appeared calm, her hands steady as she embroidered flowers on a sleeve. She never missed a stitch in the intricate design. No lines of worry or care marred the cream-colored smoothness of her brow.
    I strove to keep my expression equally impassive as I studied my guardian. At first glance, he was not unattractive. He was lean rather than burly and not at all threatening in any physical way. He had rich blue-black hair that surrounded a deeply tanned face dominated by dark brown eyes.
    Very properly, he bowed first to my stepmother and then turned slightly to show me the same courtesy. My bench and the one Blanche occupied were arranged at an angle to each other, so that he had to step back to see both of us at once. The placing was deliberate. We wanted to keep him at a distance.
    “A delight, Mistress Thomasine.” His voice was raspy, like one suffering from a catarrh, but the absence of any coughing suggested that this was the way it always sounded, so rough that it flayed the ear.
    Because I was seeking flaws, I soon found another. He had a calculating look in his eyes. He answered my bold stare with a slight lift of soot-colored eyebrows.
    When he turned again to my stepmother, I saw that, from the side, his face was far less pleasing than in the front view. His features in profile put me in mind of a rat.
    “Have you traveled far to reach us?” Blanche asked, in part to be polite and in part because we knew nothing about Sir Lionel, not even where he lived.
    “From London,” he answered, which told us nothing. He cut short any further inquisition with a blunt announcement: “I leave Glastonbury at dawn tomorrow. Mistress Thomasine will accompany me. She may bring with her one maidservant.”
    Blanche’s needle faltered. Although Sir Jasper had warned us that Sir Lionel might take me away, my stepmother had spent the night on her knees in prayer and come away from her devotions convinced that she could persuade my guardian to let me remain in her custody. “She is too young to leave home.”
    His eyebrows shot up to his hairline. “She is thirteen, is she not? Some girls are wed and mothers by that age.”
    “Not Thomasine, Sir Lionel. It is well known that too-early breeding produces sickly children and unhealthy