“A friar, my lord king?”Conall queried, forcing a smile and hoping to draw King Robert from the melancholy that seemed to have drifted over him no matter the raucous mood in the hall.“I was thinking mayhap a friaranda healer.They’re always needed and can gain admittance tae any household if one appears with a basket of vials and potions.Do you think your own healers might loan me some supplies tae help me pass for one of their own?”
The king lowered his cup to study him for a moment, almost looking relieved that Conall appeared to have accepted what lay in front of him, and then gave a nod.
“Quick-witted, just as I said—and as daring as they come.Aye, Campbell, whatever you need, it’s yours.”
Chapter2
Convent of the Grey Friars, Dumfries, Scotland
“You clumsy fool, will you yank the hair from my scalp?Give me that comb, I’ll do it myself!”
Lisette gasped as her irate half-sister, Isabeau Charpentier, snatched the ivory comb from her and struck her with it, leaving a red mark on the back of her hand.
Wincing in pain, Lisette stepped back just in time to avoid another blow, which made Isabeau utter a high-pitched squeal of rage.Her beautiful face contorted and with her long dark hair whirling around her, she jumped up from the chair and advanced upon Lisette.
“Get out, you’re of no use to me at all!Why did I ever bring you with me from France?I should have cast you out onto the street like my sainted mother bade me right before she died, but no.Out of the goodness of my heart, I kept you on as my lady’s maid, which is more than your incompetence deserves.Get out!”
Lisette didn’t waste another moment in obliging her.She fled across the room and flung open the door just as the comb hit the doorjamb, barely missing her head.
“Lord help us,” breathed a young nun who stood stock-still and wide-eyed in the hallway, holding a breakfast tray.“Is she always so out of sorts in the morning?Here,youtake the tray.I dinna dare go in there.”
Lisette had only just closed the door behind her before she had the tray thrust into her hands, the nun not waiting for any explanation but crossing herself and scurrying back down the hall.
Lisette wanted to cross herself, too, but she would have dropped the tray.Instead, she moved to one side of the door and leaned against the wall, tears smarting her eyes though she swallowed hard to force them back.
Tears were useless.She had learned that well enough since her father, Hugh Charpentier, had died a year ago and left her at the mercy of Isabeau and her equally mean-spirited mother, Claudia, who had gone to her grave only two months past.
How desperately Lisette wished she had remained in France instead of traveling by ship to Dumfries, Scotland, with a half-sister who had been taught since infancy to hate her!A half-sister who would be wed in two days to a Scotsman, Euan MacCulloch, who couldn’t wait to sink his teeth into her fortune, a fair sum of which should have gone to Lisette, as Hugh’s illegitimate younger daughter.
Yet her poor father, at the height of his delirium brought on by a deadly fever, had signed a new will that had bequeathed everything to Claudia—his lands in Normandy, his castle—and all had been inherited by Isabeau upon her mother’s death.Not a single coin had been left for Lisette after Hugh had tried to provide for her, she sensed as much out of love as of guilt for the misery she had suffered from years of Claudia and Isabeau’s abuse.
He had done his best to protect her by giving Lisette his surname, but his domineering wife had made his life a misery as well for fathering a bastard that had been foisted upon her after Lisette’s mother had died in childbirth.
A kitchen maid, no less…Elise.
All Lisette knew of her from servants forbidden by Claudia to ever speak of her was that her mother had been as sweet-tempered as a fawn and as lovely a young woman as they had seen with mahogany-colored hair and soft brown eyes…just like Lisette.
The little she had gleaned about her mother had given her some comfort over the years, and helped to hold back despair, but now fresh tears welled again at the fate Isabeau had in store for her.A fate Isabeau had taunted her with again that morning…
“I cannot have you stay within my household and risk you turning the head of my husband like your whore of a mother did to my father.”
“Ourfather, you mean,” Lisette had said under her breath in a rare show of dissent, for she had learned a year ago that speaking up for herself only brought added misery.
Slaps to her face when she least expected it.
Her food delivered cold to her sparsely furnished room on an upper floor of the castle they had left behind in Normandy…if it came at all.
Unseasoned logs in the small fireplace that smoked more than burned and offered her little warmth.
Servants forbidden to speak to her or to assist her.
Claudia and Isabeau’s cruel offenses had not been so blatant while Hugh had been alive, but after his death—
“Lisette, whereareyou?”
She had jumped at the door flung open, Isabeau stepping out into the hall and lifting her chin imperiously.
“Ah, so my breakfast tray has come.Why are you dallying?Will you leave me in this room to starve?”
