Derica sat up, looking at him. She suddenly looked like a child, small and vulnerable. “I am afraid,” she said. “What will happen if…?”
He put his fingers on her lips. “Hush, now,” he murmured. “No fears. The Marshal will be sated and your family will eventually come to terms. Everything will turn out fine, given time. We simply need to let the situation cool a bit.”
Derica lay back down against his warm, comforting chest. She didn’t want to voice her doubts. Though she heard his words, she wasn’t sure she agreed.
CHAPTER TEN
“Ishall notask again.”
He’d been burned, beaten, poked, slapped and moderately cut. Tied to a gnarled oak tree somewhere south of where the de Rosa’s had caught up to him, Fergus hadn’t yet become impatient with the situation. For the moment, he was tolerant. Bertram de Rosa was missing his daughter and he was understandably brittle. Besides, Fergus had suffered worse wounds at the hands of scorned women. Most of what he’d received thus far had been child’s play.
“If I have told you once, I have told you a thousand times,” Fergus said patiently. “I know nothing of your daughter’s disappearance. I am a bachelor knight in the current service of Somerset. I was attempting to return home when you and your brigands ambushed me.”
“You are a liar,” Donat snarled in his face; the middle de Rosa brother had inflicted most of the torture. “We know you were at Framlingham. We found your handcart by the side of the road and followed your tracks.”
“I have no knowledge of any handcart, though I was in the vicinity of Framlingham. I have friends in Saxmundham and was passing through. That is why you found my tracks.”
“Liar! What did you do with her?”
“I have done nothing.”
“If she is lying dead somewhere in a ditch, you will curse the day you were born. I swear it on God’s Holy name.”
“If she is lying dead somewhere, it is not by my hand.”
Donat shoved his fist into Fergus’ stomach once again. It was the latest blow in a long line of many. Fergus coughed in pain, trying to convince himself it wasn’t so bad. He’d felt worse. But when a strike came to his face, he saw stars and thought, perhaps, that it was indeed bad.
Bertram stood with Lon and Alger, watching Donat beat their prisoner senseless. Dixon helped his brother now and again by thumping the captive on the head when he was particularly uncooperative. Only Daniel stood off by himself, watching the beating without emotion. He had tried to intervene once to suggest reasoning was a better method of interrogation, but he had been ignored. Now he said nothing. If his brothers beat their only suspect into oblivion, then they would never get any information out of him. Their brutal methods would cause their failure.
Bertram was already feeling failure. Five days without Derica suggested that the trail was growing cold. He suspected that le Mon had everything to do with her disappearance. When they had asked their captive about le Mon, they had received nothing by way of answer. It was becoming a maddening game. Watching his son split the prisoner’s lip, he turned to his brothers.
“I wish we had Hoyt with us,” he muttered. “He had a knack of being able to gain any information he wished.”
“That is because he used methods that Donat has yet to aspire to,” Lon said. “A hot poker up the arse has a way of making a man talk.”
Bertram grunted. “Aye, but my sons still feel that beating a man is the only way. Pure strength.”
“They’re young. They will learn.”
“Learn indeed. But they will not learn from the best.”
Bertram had flashes of his larger brother in times past, pouring scalding water on a man’s eyeballs in order to gain vitalinformation. Before the blow to his head, Hoyt invented new ways of creating pain to all those who opposed the de Rosa will. Bertram found himself cursing that day when Hoyt took a blow so hard in the tourney that his helm had to be pried from his head. He was never the same after that. He could have used the old Hoyt now, very much.
“If they want to learn how to dress and fold laundry, Hoyt can teach them very well,” Alger mumbled.
Bertram sighed. “I had hopes when he chose to ride from Framlingham in search of Derica, in the manner of days of old. But the moment we tracked down this thief, he disappeared without the stomach for doing what needs to be done.”
“Where do you suppose he went?”
“Who can say? To the nearest town to buy fabric, or perhaps he went home. I do not know. I am coming not to care any longer.”
The senior de Rosa brothers nodded in silent agreement. They continued to observe as Donat pummeled the hostage. It was having no effect. Finally, Bertram himself moved forward. He was tired of waiting. Grabbing his captive by the hair, he looked into the swollen blue eyes.
“I shall make this brief,” he said. “If I do not receive the answers I seek, then I will allow my son to do whatever he wishes to you. Keep in mind that he young, lacks discipline, and had a fondness for creating as much pain as he can. With that said, I will make you a proposition; whatever le Mon has promised to pay you, I will double it if you tell me where my daughter is.”
Fergus didn’t reply; he continued to stare at him. Bertram’s attempt at good will was fading. “Have you no answer for me?” he pressed.
Fergus didn’t say a word, and it was clear that he was not going to. Bertram let go of his hair and turned towards the men.
