The Passionate Brood by Margaret Campbell Barnes Page A

of his father’s shame. He had always deplored Richard’s passion for the truth.
    Of course, it was the woman who invented first. “You must be drunk or crazy, Richard, to speak to your father like that,” she said, trying to draw a tattered dignity about her. “I came to him only for comfort.”
    “You looked sad!” jeered Richard, remembering her laughter, and that other sniggering laughter which must have rippled from it down to kitchen, street, and guardroom.
    She had the audacity to come to him, warm from his father’s fondling, and try to tempt him back into blindness—and it was not self-protection alone that prompted her. All through her girlhood Richard had been there, casual as any brother, and his preoccupation with masculine affairs had bored her. Never once had she roused passion in him. But now, for the first time, she saw in the blaze of his betrayed anger the kind of lover he might become. All her sex subtlety called her fool, finessing for the flattery of a middle-aged man’s intrigue when ready to hand was an incomparable mate. “You are always so cold to me, Richard,” she accused. “And now I hear rumours that you intend to go crusading. Do you suppose that it means nothing to me that you have not asked me to come with you? To-night—in desperation—I came here to persuade the King to let us marry.”
    But Richard, who had come to ask that very thing, pushed her roughly from him. The belated invitation in her eyes made him feel unclean. “I want no man’s leavings on my plate!” he told her.
    Seeing the morsel he coveted so spurned stung the King from his confusion. “Only the rashest of your mother’s whelps would dare so far!” he said thickly, the veins swelling at his temples.
    But Richard’s rage was beyond caution. “Keep your tongue off of her!” he said. “She is finer than all of us. Fine enough to laugh when you tried to pin on her the poisoning of your other mistress.”
    “Be quiet, you fool!” his brother warned.
    “Oh, I’ve been fooled all right!” agreed Richard, laughing mirthlessly. Once and for all he would lay this foul thing, and there would be no more hateful secret laughter. “It is Ann—Ann who is young and scheming—who had more cause to poison Rosamund de Clifford,” he accused.
    Her pitiful pretence crumbled before his frenzy of disgust. “Send him away! Send him away!” she kept whimpering, cowering with covered eyes.
    “He shall go before daylight!” vowed the King, pealing the great bell beside his bed.
    That sobered Richard. “Back to Aquitaine?” he asked.
    His father laughed harshly. “To plot against me again with Louis and Philip? By our Lady, no! You’re too much your own master there. I’ll have you sent to Navarre—a chivalrous court where you may learn less boorish manners.”
    Here in England his turbulent sons were still puppets in his hands. He turned to his table and wrote with bold, angry strokes, and they waited in silence while he set his seal. “Send a messenger with this to Dover immediately,” he ordered, when Gregory came hurrying in. “Tell him to give it to Mercadier, the man in charge of my new castle there. He is to have the Cinque Ports prepare a ship to take the Duke of Aquitaine to Spain.” It was all settled before the sand could run down in the hour glass.
    Ann curtseyed low before her royal lover but he gave no sign that he had seen her. She passed between the two brothers on her way to the gallery stairs, and Gregory permitted himself the pleasure of shutting the King’s door with finality behind her. “Better wake one of the grooms and tell him to have horses ready for the coast,” Richard called after him, hating the man for what he must have seen and heard.
    “And will you not want a squire and some of the pages to go with you?” suggested Henry.
    Richard thought a minute. Knowing how the whole pack of them would be sniggering about this in the morning, he recalled the trustworthy face and