The Stolen Queen by Lisa Hilton Read Free Book Online

dark hair that covered his back.
    In my new, quiet, modest role as Lusignan bride, I learned that a sober countenance and a quiet step were excellent disguises for gleaning knowledge and, I learned, by watching and listening and minding my needle, that the Angevin lands were gravely contested, that the English counties of Anjou and Maine had been declared for the French king and that Arthur of Brittany was planning to claim his uncle’s throne. I learned that Lord Hugh was feared, and that he was considered ruthless and greedy for power but, subtle as the serpent he wore at his throat, neither John nor Philip knew which way he would turn his fealty. Yet to me, Lord Hugh remained as cool and courteous as the day I had drawn blood from his son’s hand. When we dined or listened to the musicians in the solar he seemed always entirely self-possessed, as though the creeping armies of the two kings, whose men seeped towards one another overthe lands of France like rivulets of flood water, were of as little concern to him as the gossiping of the castle washerwomen. So if men could be one thing, and seem another, then why could not I?
    Lord Hugh was fond of me, I knew it. He liked what he called my ‘pretty ways’: how I would rub my cheek against his sleeve and curl up like a kitten in his lap. He admired the grace of my posture and the elegance of my gowns and told me that his son would be a lucky man to have such a beautiful girl as a wife. When he was occupied I was invisible, but in the rare hours he spent at Lusignan he liked me beside him and I studied to please him, learning the Occitan songs he liked from his lutenist or asking him grave questions about the history of his lands, listening to the answers with my head cocked to one side, bright-eyed as a fledgeling. One hot evening in July, I told his steward that I thought Lord Hugh should like to dine outdoors and had trestles brought into the walled garden so that we could eat chilled almond soup and sweet orange-fleshed melons in the shade. I forced the maids to brave the mosquitoes in the river meadows to pick trefoil and bryony – they grumbled about the mosquitoes that bit – and scatter the yellow and purple blossoms over the white tablecloth. I mixed Lord Hugh’s wine myself and attended him as dutifully as I should have my own father.
    â€˜Very charming, Isabelle. We might be fairies at a hunting party, eh?’
    â€˜I should like to go hunting, Lord Hugh. I should learn to ride, should I not?’
    â€˜Quite right, I’ll enquire. We’ll find you a nice quiet palfrey, we don’t want to scare Agnes.’
    I wriggled into his lap and twined my fingers around the serpent brooch. ‘I don’t want a nice quiet palfrey, Lord Hugh, I want a real horse.’
    He drew back his head and looked at me, blinking as though he suddenly saw me for the first time. ‘Yes,’ he answered slowly. ‘I expect that you do.’
    â€˜So may I?’
    â€˜What about your chaperone?’ he whispered in my ear so that I felt his lips warm and dry against my skin. ‘I can’t see fat old Agnes heaving herself onto my destrier!’
    â€˜She doesn’t have to come,’ I teased back. ‘And if you wish it, my lord, what can she object to?’
    â€˜Then you shall have a real horse, Lady Isabelle. And you shall learn to ride.’
    He fluttered his fingers in an elaborate courtesy and I giggled, prettily, because that was what he expected. And in a few days he gave me Othon.
    Often, in the evenings after supper, Lord Hugh’s Aquitaine musician would recite romances for the company; plaintive stories of sighing knights who pined for beautiful ladies. I had never paid them much mind, preferring those tales of magic and adventure that my papa had sometimes told me. When I first saw Othon, he seemed to come from one of those stories. He was a bay gelding much too big for me with huge black eyes,