Chapter Four

It was an apartment near Aldgate, adjacent to St. Botolph, comprising of the entire top floor of a three-storied manor home that had once belonged to the Earl of Lincoln. The family lost the home to a debt they’d owed to the church, who turned around and sold it to a man from Paris who broke it up into apartments and sold each one for a princely sum.

Rotri de Wylde, Baron Dordon, had been given the apartment by his brother. His older brother, Rhun, had inherited everything else, including the castles and the title and the vast army, but Rotri had come away with a small garrison castle, Dordon, and a dingy little apartment in London because his brother hadn’t wanted it. At least that was what Rotri believed, even though his brother had insisted he simply wanted Rotri to have something that belonged to him.

But Rotri deserved so much more.

In his opinion, anyway.

He was an ambitious man, an intelligent man, and one that believed himself to be an astute political player even though the past several years had seen him support Simon de Montfort, who had been defeated in the battle for the English throne. Rotri tried to make himself indispensable to Simon, more loyal than any of his other followers, but Simon seemed to think that Rotri wasn’t a man of integrity. He seemed to think that all he was working toward were the rewards that could be given to him by a new king. Simon had even gone so far as to voice that concern, but Rotri had denied it vehemently. He only wanted to serve, he’d said, and he tried to make it sound as if he would be loyal no matter what the cost.

No matter if he never received any reward for his loyalty.

Rotri thought he’d been convincing enough, but Simon didn’t seem to think so and Rotri never received any gifts from Simon. Once de Montfort had been killed, Rotri knew that was the end. He would still have his small outpost castle at Dordon and he would still have his dingy apartment in London, although the apartment wasn’t entirely dingy. It did have lovely, big windows that let in the light, but any fine furnishings had long been sold to keep Rotri and his son living in the manner to which they were accustomed.

The truth was that Rotri wasn’t completely destitute. In his barony, there were several villages that he collected taxes from. The land was good and the crops were usually abundant, so the money he received was a decent amount of coin. The unfortunate fact was that both Rotri and his son simply liked to spend money and live well. They spent it on fine wine or fine horses or even women. Rotri’s wife died long ago and Rotri hadn’t seen a need to remarry considering he already had an heir, but he very much wanted that heir to marry well.

That was where his niece came in.

That was exactly why he was in London.

His lovely, intelligent niece was the heiress to one of the wealthiest earldoms in all of England. The Tamworth earldom had made its money from mining coal and lead deposits because the entire area around Tamworth was full of valuable minerals. In addition to the ore, there were also great forests of good English oak on Tamworth lands, and the wood had been harvested for decades for furniture and other things.

More money coming in.

But that was simply for the last few generations. Before that, no one was quite sure where the earldom got its vast wealth—but there were rumors that a few ancestors were nothing short of pirates. Since the de Wylde ancestors were descendent from Mercian kings, some thought that those kings had plundered other kingdoms and stolen their wealth, so there were many theories as to how and why the Tamworth earldom had become so wealthy.

Wealth that one solitary woman controlled.

Rotri had never seen such a travesty in his life. A woman with that kind of money and that kind of control was an abomination. That was the argument that Rotri used to several bishops, princes of the church that he hoped would see his point. The Bishop of Nuneaton didn’t. The Bishop of Birmingham actually ordered him away. However, the Bishop of Oxford took him seriously enough to send him to London with a letter of introduction to the Archbishop of Canterbury, but that meeting hadn’t happened yet.

And Rotri was going to remain in London until it did.

It never did any good to speak to the lesser priests, the ones who had no real power in this matter. Since his son and Lady de Tosni were first cousins, Rotri needed a papal dispensation for a marriage with bloodlines that were this close. The truth was that he was racing against the clock when it came to a marriage between his son and his niece because Rotri was a cunning man. He knew that his niece was a hot commodity, and he further knew that the king thought so as well.

Henry had entered into the situation shortly after Robert de Tosni died.

That was when Rotri realized he would be fighting an uphill battle. The king wanted Lady de Tosni, and Rotri had to know of the king’s plans so he could make his own. He wasn’t beyond paying for information and certainly wasn’t beyond paying for a few spies. There were always those close to men of power willing to divulge what they knew for a few coins, and Rotri had paid dearly for information from Westminster that told him Henry was trying to find Caledonia a strategic marriage.

But Caledonia, evidently, wasn’t so eager.

There was information that she was as elusive with the king as she was with her own uncle. Caledonia had always been something of a free spirit, even a wanderer, who wasn’t content to remain at home. There was news that she was spending a good deal of her time in the taverns and gambling dens of London. A serving wench at a tavern on the eastern side of London had even told him that the lady was a devoted visitor to the most notorious guild in all of London, Gomorrah.

Rotri didn’t find that hard to believe.

He knew a little something about his niece. He knew that she had virtually been ignored as a child because her father and mother focused all of their attention on her older brother. Constantine de Wylde had been a stellar young man who received the finest education available. By all accounts, he was of good character and would have made an excellent earl, but an ailment that settled in his lungs one winter destroyed all of that and he died before he’d had a chance to fulfill his destiny. The loss had devastated his parents and both of them had passed away within a year of their son’s death. That left their sole surviving child as the heiress to the great Tamworth empire.

The daughter that was an afterthought.

Caledonia had been formally educated and followed the path that all noble young women follow in their life. She had been taught to dance, to paint, to speak more than one language, and everything else that a fine young lady should know. But everyone knew that Caledonia de Wylde lived up to her name because she had a wild streak in her that no one could seem to tame. Not the nuns who tutored her nor the fine households where she fostered. Caledonia was bright and beautiful, but as wild as an untamed stallion. She’d always had a penchant for parties and doing any number of things that well-bred young women simply did not do. Her father, a strict and humorless man, had married her at a very early age to Robert de Tosni, hoping that her much older husband would be able to tame that wild streak.

Robert tried at first, but soon lost interest.

The Earl of Tamworth had been a good man, at least in the beginning. He tried politeness and understanding with his young wife. But his patience wasn’t endless, and within the first couple of years of their marriage, he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to control Caledonia, a woman full of life and vigor who liked to escape the castle to prowl the taverns in the surrounding villages. He’d caught her gambling with his soldiers more than once, but the final straw was after the birth of their eldest daughter when she went into town, not even a week after the birth, to celebrate at one of the taverns without him.

After that, Robert decided that she was not to be trusted. The young woman who had been ignored all of her young life went back to being ignored by her husband. They had two more daughters, which was a miracle in itself because Caledonia didn’t particularly like to be bedded by her older husband, but he very much wanted a son and, surprisingly, she knew it was her duty to produce one. Additionally, childbirth had proven very easy for her. But two more daughters came, and no sons, and Robert was at his wits’ end.

His final stroke was perhaps the cruelest.

Robert employed his former nurse as a caretaker for his own children, and the woman had final say on how his daughters were raised. Not even their own mother had any control. Everything was given over to Madam Madonna and Caledonia was pushed out from the lives of her own children by that woman, whom Robert fully supported. He had told Caledonia once that he would rather have his daughters raised by a nun than by a wild hare of a mother. Rather than fight with him about it, Caledonia returned to her taverns and her gambling dens while her daughters were raised by a strict and loveless woman.

Aye, Rotri knew all of this because in order to gain a papal dispensation, he’d had to investigate every aspect of his niece’s life. Most of the information had come from her father before he died, while some of it was just rumor. Still, the Bishop of Oxford told him that if he could produce proof that Caledonia was reckless and sacrilegious, it might be possible for such a marriage on the grounds that the lady was incapable of managing her own affairs and therefore incapable of managing an entire earldom. Rotri had even forged a document from a servant who used to serve the Earl of Tamworth, a servant who had never existed, declaring that Lady Tamworth was irresponsible and godless, so irresponsible that her own husband charged the raising of their children to someone else.

Now, all Rotri had to do was gain an audience with the Archbishop of Canterbury and produce his forged document. He had been waiting for almost four months for the opportunity and, quite frankly, was becoming impatient. As he stood at the window in the small solar of his apartment, gazing over the smoke-hazed skyline of London, he began to think that perhaps he needed to simply appear at the archbishop’s door every single morning until the man finally agreed to see him. He was growing weary of waiting because he knew Henry wasn’t waiting.

And that was what he was hoping for right now.

News about Henry.

Domnall, his son, had been trying to infiltrate the servants at Westminster Palace. Rotri was cunning, but Domnall was clever with a conscience. That meant he didn’t exactly agree with his father’s methods sometimes, but he was convinced that he deserved to be the next Earl of Tamworth because he carried the same noble blood that Caledonia did. Their fathers were brothers, after all. The only difference was that his mother was from a minor noble family, no one of note, and the only reason his father had married her was because they had met at a feast and he managed to compromise her during a tryst in the darkness. What Rotri thought would be a simple conquest of a daughter of an unremarkable family turned into an unexpected pregnancy, and he was forced to marry her.

Domnall was the result.

Even now, his son was over at Westminster because he was convinced there would be a breakthrough today. He’d had it on good authority that a servant he’d been paying well for the past several weeks was about to come forth with information because Henry had several nobles in town and there was to be a great meeting. Great meetings usually covered a variety of subjects and it was possible that Lady de Tosni and her rudderless earldom might be one of them. The same servant had mentioned that Henry had spoken of Lady de Tosni before, with frustration because she seemed to be good at eluding him. The hope was that she would be discussed again. If she was, Rotri needed to know about it.

So he waited.

It was nearing the nooning hour when he finally heard the door to the apartment open. He heard voices, including those of his son, as the young man removed his cloak and handed it off to a hovering servant. Footsteps approached the small solar where Rotri was pretending to wait casually when the truth was that he was on pins and needles. When Domnall’s bushy red head finally came through the door, it was all Rotri could do not to run at the man.

“Well?” he demanded. “Is there any news?”

So much for being composed. His anxiety was written all over him. Domnall cast his father a long glance on his way to a wooden pitcher of wine. He didn’t bother with a cup, but rather drank it straight from the neck. Some trickled down his chin, leaving a purple streak, before he finally lowered the pitcher and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Plenty,” Domnall said, struggling to catch his breath. “The servant I met at the marketplace those months ago serves in the halls of Westminster. You remember the one? One of our own servants knew him and knew he served at the palace. He serves the king personally. The man has cost me a fortune but today, it has finally come to fruition.”

Rotri’s eyes widened in anticipation. “What has happened?”

Domnall sighed heavily, wiping at his mouth again. “Callie has been found.”

Rotri had expected more than that. “I see,” he said impatiently. “So she has been found. We know she is in London. She has been residing at the Tamworth townhome, so that is not news. Why do you think I am in London? When Canterbury agrees to seek a papal dispensation, we know where she is and we will immediately collect her and force her to remain here, with us, until the dispensation is received. Canterbury will support this action.”

Domnall cocked an eyebrow. “Will he?” he said. “Papa, you know I want Tamworth more than you do, but holding Callie hostage until we receive word from the pope… She will not be a submissive hostage. You know that.”

Rotri waved him off. “We’ll chain her to the wall if we have to,” he said. “What else have you discovered?”

“That she is to be married to Thor de Reyne.”

That brought a big reaction from Rotri. “What?” he gasped, eyes wide. “Henry has found her a husband?”

“Aye.”

“Are you certain?”

Domnall nodded. “Certain enough,” he said. “The man I have been paying said that the Earl of Ashington was at Westminster today and he and Henry were arguing over Thor. You remember him, don’t you? He fought with Prince Edward against de Montfort, but we’ve met him before. At a feast at Bowes Castle years ago. His father is Lord Ashington and Thor serves the king as his personal protector.”

Rotri was beside himself at the news. “Of course I know him,” he said. “I knew his father’s brother, Boothe, many years ago. Gage de Reyne is an ambitious bastard. Married the Ashington heiress and assumed the earldom.”

Domnall cocked an eyebrow. “Sound familiar?”

He meant the current situation they were trying to manipulate, and Rotri scowled. “Tamworth is your right, lad,” he insisted. “With my brother dead, and Constantine gone, it would be logical that the earldom would go to you.”

“You and I may think so, but no one else seems to. Now, Callie is betrothed.”

That was devastating news to Rotri. Raking his fingers through his silver hair, he turned away, trying to think of a way to salvage the situation. But he couldn’t get past the disappointment he felt.

“Damnation,” he muttered. “I knew she had Henry’s attention. I should have moved more swiftly with this. I should have gone to Rome myself for a dispensation.”

“That would have taken months, if not years,” Domnall said. “What we should have done was abduct her, and I would have married her by force. Not even Henry could have dissolved a consummated marriage.”

Rotri glanced at him. “And you know she is betrothed for certain?”

Domnall nodded. “The servant heard it for himself.”

“Who is this man?”

“His name is Peregrine.”

“And he is close to the king?”

“Very close.”

Rotri considered that as he sat down in one of the remaining chairs in the chamber, one that hadn’t yet been sold. A servant very close to the king could still be useful. Perhaps there was still a way out of this.

“Then if he is close, he can tell us when the marriage is to take place,” he said after a moment. “Mayhap there is something we can do to prevent it.”

“Like what?”

Rotri rubbed his chin. “Mayhap there is something the church can do,” he said. “Knowing we have staked a claim on Caledonia, mayhap they can intervene and prevent the marriage until word is received from the pope.”

“We do not have a claim on Callie.”

“We have a better claim that de Reyne does,” Rotri snapped. Then he cooled as an idea came to him. His eyes widened. “Wait… a claim… a claim.”

Domnall eyed his father, who seemed to be in the throes of a striking idea. “What claim?” he said. “What are you talking about?”

Rotri held up a finger as he tried to put his thoughts into words. “A claim—a legitimate claim—might be the only thing to stop the marriage,” he said. “Something I should have done long ago.”

“What are you talking about?”

He looked at his son. “A claim,” he said urgently. “I had it within my grasp the entire time but did not think of it. I suppose that I did not think it would be so difficult to obtain a dispensation and simply forgot about it. But now… it may be our salvation!”

Domnall sighed impatiently. “I do not know what you mean.”

Rotri held his hands up, shaking them like a madman. “Listen to me,” he implored. “I have a missive from my brother that asks me to manage Callie’s affairs, but it is a very old missive from when she was a young girl. If Rhun died while she was still young, he would need someone to manage her. He asked me to do it.”

Domnall was starting to catch on. “And you are just remembering this?” he said, aghast. “Do you still have it?”

Rotri nodded wildly. “I do!” he said. “It is back at Dordon, somewhere in my solar. I’ve not seen it in years, but it must be there. I will send a servant for it immediately!”

Now, Domnall was excited like his father was. “If this is true, then it could be what we have hoped for all along,” he said. “At the very least, it will delay whatever Henry is intending. Rhun was her father and, as a widow, she would fall back under his wardship with no other man to take charge of her.”

Rotri shook his head, looking at his son with more delight than Domnall had seen in a very long time. “Not under Rhun’s wardship,” he said. “Under mine. And I would have to give permission for any marriage.”

It was as if a curtain was drawn back and the sun of possibilities was now blazing brightly upon them. Rotri wanted to keep Tamworth in the family and Domnall knew he’d go to great lengths to do it, but the sudden remembrance of an old missive from Rhun was unexpected. However, given that the mighty war machine of Ashington was involved, that might set up an epic struggle. If they were keen on Caledonia, too, then they would surely not want to relinquish her, not even for her father’s wishes from long ago.

If they could prove it.

A servant was riding for Dordon before the day was out.