The anger burst on her as swiftly as the joy of a moment ago. She had already been disturbed that she was to be allowed naught up her skirts but stockings and skin, already suspicious of the next step of Warrick’s plot to break her, but this, to deny her the woman who was like a second mother to her? She forgot her tenuous position, forgot that he could throw her back in his dungeon, beat her, kill her.
She ignored Enid’s hand pulling on hers and marched up the raised dais to the front of his table until she stood across from him. He did no more than raise his brows in question, as if he could not see that she was enraged.
She leaned forward to hiss for only his hearing, “You can deny me every last thing that I hold dear, but I can and will pray every day for the rest of my life that you rot in hell, Warrick.”
He gave her that cruel smile that she was coming to know so well. “Am I supposed to fear for a soul that is already damned, wench? And I did not give you leave to be so familiar in your address.”
She leaned back, incredulous. She had just cursed him to everlasting hell, and he was only concerned with her use of his first name? She was seething, and he continued to merely smile at her?
“I beg your pardon,” she sneered. “What I should have called you was bastard.”
He stood up so fast, he startled the anger out of her. And before she even thought to run, he leaned completely across the table to grab her wrist.
Rowena gasped, his hold was so tight, but all she heard him say was, “My lord.”
“What?”
“You did not end that statement with the proper address due me. Say ‘my lord.’”
He was not going to kill her for calling him bastard? “But you are not my lord.”
“I am now, wench, and henceforth I will hear you say so—often. And I will hear you say it now.”
She would rather cut out her tongue. He must have seen that in her stubborn expression, because he jerked her close to warn in a soft but menacing tone, “You will say it, or I will have a whip fetched and mete out the standard punishment due for such insolence.”
’Twas no bluff. He had said it, so he would do it, whether he wanted to do it or not. A man such as he did not give idle threats. And she liked it better when she did not know the consequences.
But she waited several pounding heartbeats before she gritted out, “My lord.”
He released her immediately. She rubbed her wrist while he sat back down, his expression no different from what it had been before she had challenged him—and lost. But this time his look was deceiving, for he was in fact annoyed that the first thing she had done upon her release was to castigate him, when after the past three days she should have been too intimidated to don any mantle of noble outrage.
“Mayhap you are not as bereft in wisdom as you are in intelligence,” he said in response to her capitulation, but then added in a growl, “Get you from my sight ere I take exception to what youdidcall me.”
Rowena needed no further prompting, did not even spare him a parting glare. She hurried over to Enid, who was waiting anxiously below the dais, and followed her out of the hall and down one floor to the kitchen.
The kitchen could usually be found in a separate building out in the bailey, but it was becoming popular in recent years to have the kitchen moved right into the keep, particularly in areas that received a great deal of rain and foul weather. Fulkhurst’s kitchen was one such new addition, having taken the large area where the castle garrison used to be quartered.
There were at least twenty people busy at different tasks in the large room. Preparation of the evening meal was already under way. A huge fire pit was being stoked under a roasting side of beef. Cooks surrounded a long table where vegetables were being peeled, pastries made, meat chopped. The wardrober was doling out spices. Two men-at-arms were eating a hasty meal standing up while a pretty maid flirted with them. A dairymaid was cuffed for spilling a bit of milk from her bucket when she tripped over one of several dogs underfoot. She in turn kicked the dog, which only yelped, but did not relinquish its seat near the butcher’s block. A scullion was washing out tankards from the morning meal. The baker was sliding new loaves into his oven. Two hefty serfs were coming up from the basement with heavy sacks of grain.
Because of the room’s size, it was not oppressively hot, but it was exceedingly warm and smoky with so many fires going and so many wall sconces burning. Rowena took it all in with dread. The steward was there, just leaving the clerk’s office up on a higher level above a store area. But it was not to him that Enid took her. It was to the large woman who had cuffed the dairymaid. Blond, florid-faced, and quite tall for a woman, at slightly over five and a half feet, she was not a serf but a freewoman, and wife to the head cook.
“So yer the other one from Kirkburough,” Mary Blouet said as she looked Rowena over from head to foot, as just about everyone else in the room was also doing, though not so openly as Mary. “’Twas rumored it were a lady kept in the dungeon, but yer being sent to me puts the lie to that right quickly. Ye will call me Mistress Blouet, and give me no airs or back talk. I have had right well enough of that from that haughty Mildred, and her having the lord’s favor, I cannot give her the back of my hand. But ye be not so favored, are ye, wench?”
“Indeed,” Rowena replied, unable to keep the dejection from her tone, “I am so ill-favored ’tis my lot to be eternally punished.”
“Punished?” Mary frowned. “Nay, not unless it be needful. Well, come along, then. I have to make my rounds, or naught will ever get done, not with the lazy sluts I have in my charge. I will explain yer duties on the way.”
Rowena was surprised. “I am not to work in the kitchen, then?”
“Here?” Mary laughed with genuine humor. “They have enough hands down here to not need more, and my husband does not like my wenches in his domain. He cannot abide laziness in his workers, whereas I am cursed with naught else, and can find no cure for it, not when that bitch Celia belittles my authority the moment my back be turned. And she gets away with it because she be Lord Warrick’s favorite slut, and everyone knows it. How I wish…”
The thought was left unfinished as Mary mounted the stairs back to the Great Hall. Rowena dragged her feet, dreading another encounter with Warrick, but he was no longer in the hall. Not as many ladies remained by the hearth either. And there was no sign of Mildred.
“I have no say over the ladies’ maids,” Mary said when she noticed the direction Rowena was looking toward. “But yer not so lucky as that Mildred was, to be getting such an easy job as that.”
“Has Mildred been here long?”
“Nay, she came with the lord. Why? Do ye know her?”
