No Greater Pleasure

  I am his Handmaiden. I am his comfort. I am what he needs before he knows he needs it, not his bedamned chambermaid!

  Yet Gabriel did not correct his wife, though he had to have known what an insult she’d given to Quilla. “Would you like a brannigan, my lady wife?”

  Saradin giggled, the sound like fae chimes that nonetheless grated on Quilla’s nerves like gravel on a toddler’s knees. “A party! A brannigan! Who shall we invite?”

  “Whomever you like,” replied Gabriel in a genial tone Quilla had never heard from him. It made her turn to look at him. He turned to Allora. “You may go, Allora. I will take care of my lady wife.”

  Allora bobbed into a curtsy. “Yes, my lord.”

  She left the room, and Saradin began chattering about guests and food and room arrangements, while Quilla merely stood by the fire with ashes on her hands.

  After a moment, Quilla left the room as well, for even though he hadn’t said a word, Gabriel had dismissed her as thoroughly as if he’d shouted at her to get out.

  Chapter 7

  Jericho looked like summer with his bright golden hair and eyes the color of a sky untouched by clouds. His ready smile, too, made brighter any room he graced, but he did not smile now. Jericho stared, pensive, out the window of the third-floor parlor, where Quilla had gone to do some mending while the rest of the house laughed belowstairs.

  “Forgive me, my lord Delessan,” she murmured. “I did not know you were here.”

  He looked up. She expected a glib remark. He gave her none, not even a hint of a grin. He gestured toward an empty chair across from him.

  “Don’t leave on my account.”

  Quilla took the seat, grateful for the sunshine. More snow had fallen overnight, but the day had dawned with brightness, and the glare off the white reflected through the windows. She lifted a stocking from her basket, then the needle and thread, and began to sew up a hole in the toe.

  “The ladies here would throw that away and buy another. Not mend it.”

  “I am not one of the ladies here, and I have not the luxury of such waste.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “My brother would buy you another pair of stockings.”

  She looked up at him. “I’m certain he would, my lord Delessan, however, my intent is not to waste your brother’s coin in buying me new stockings when I can easily repair the old.”

  “You’ve used the material I gave you, I see.”

  She touched the skirt of her gown, made from the green fabric. “Yes. Thank you for it.”

  “But not the red.”

  “No, my lord Delessan. Not the red.”

  Jericho’s laugh also reminded her of summer. Of carefree days. “I should be but half offended, then, as you’ve used but half my gift.”

  “You shouldn’t be offended at all.” Quilla made a few tiny stitches, closing the hole. “I may use the red someday.”

  “Will you?” He leaned forward. “I wish you would, Quilla. I wish you’d make a dress of it and wear it.”

  “Do you?” She looked up at him, her fingers pausing in their stitching. “Why?”

  “Do you want me to answer that?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked the question if I did not seek an answer.”

  Jericho passed a hand over his face. “If you were mine, I would not hide you away in a garret room. I wouldn’t dress you in drab, dull clothes that do nothing to show your beauty. I wouldn’t treat you like a—”

  “Like a what?” she asked, amused. “Like a Handmaiden?”

  This silenced him for a moment, and she realized he was not being charming. He was being sincere. Quilla put down her mending.

  “My lord Delessan, there can be no point to this. Stop, now.”

  “Stop what? Being honest?”

  She sighed. “Stop wanting what you can’t have. You only cause yourself grief.”

  “And what about you? Are you not caused grief? I see the way you look at him.”

  She set her jaw. “You see nothing but your own greed reflected.”

  He shook his head and leaned forward, close to her. “No, Quilla. I don’t. I see you look at him, and I see him not looking at you. Not at all. How can he ignore you that way?”

  “ ’Tis not my—”

  “Don’t you ever wish for someone’s arms about you?” Jericho’s voice dipped low. He moved to the edge of his seat, even closer to her, and reached to run a hand down the length of her braid. “Do you never wish for solace of your own?”

  “I—” She got up, her basket forgotten, but he was on his feet as fast as she, and blocking her way.

  “When was the last time anyone did something nice for you?” Jericho gripped her upper arms, his hands warm and strong, holding her in place. He pulled her step by reluctant step, closer, until the heat of his body aligned with hers. He brought his mouth to her ear, whispering, his breath a caress along her neck. “When, Quilla?”

  “My patrons are always—”

  “No. I mean someone who did something nice for you, Quilla Caden, not a Handmaiden to whom they have responsibility. I mean something beyond clothes, or food, or shelter. When was the last time someone pleased you?”

  She shivered. “Let me go.”

  He wasn’t holding her hard enough she couldn’t get away. He wasn’t hurting her. But he was not letting her go. Jericho’s mouth moved again against her ear, and he almost, not quite, nuzzled her neck.

  “Let me go, what?”

  “Please.”

  He chuckled, low, making more hot breath caress her skin. “No, Quilla. Let me go, Jericho. I want to hear you say my name. I want to hear you taste my name on your tongue the way I taste yours whenever I say it.”

  She opened her mouth to protest. She stiffened her body to yank her arms free of his grip. Yet in the end, she did not. Women we begin, and women we shall end. The principle was meant to embody spirituality and humility, but now it held another meaning for her.

  “Have you ever had a lover?”

  “No.”

  He sounded truly sorrowful. “That is a shame, Quilla.”

  “I have never needed one.”

  “Everyone needs someone to love them.” Somehow his grip had loosened, and his hands slid around to her back rather than gripping her arms. His mouth did not move from its place by her ear.

  She tensed, ready to flee, but again something held her back. The truth of his words kept her in place. It was wrong, and she cursed herself for it, but she couldn’t make herself move away from him.

  “Everyone needs someone to hold them, once in a while.” His arms went around her, holding her against him. “Everyone needs someone to care about them. You need it, too. Someone who cares if you laugh or if you cry. Someone who knows how you like your tea, and your dreams, and your favorite color. Tell me you do not want these things, Quilla.”

  Tears burned her eyes, and she closed them. “I cannot, because I would be lying.”

  He nuzzled her neck again, his whisper filling her mind as his scent filled her nostrils and the heat of him flooded her body with warmth. “You offer so much to others, yet you take none of it for yourself.”

  This was wrong. It was disloyal. It was not her purpose and her place, and somehow, she found again the strength to say, “Let me go.”

  “Do as I said, and I will.”

  She licked her lips, her voice aquiver with emotion and yes, she would admit it, desire. Desire for what he’d offered, indirectly. Desire for the promise of something beyond what she had. It would have been easy for her to give it to him, then, and to let him give her what he wanted, but it would still not have been what she wanted.

  “Let me go, Jericho.”

  He sighed and his hands tightened on her once more, but he stepped away. She wiped her eyes with shaking fingers. He ran a hand down her face; she jerked away.

  “I love the sound of my name in your voice.”

  “If you care for me at all, as you claim,” she told him, “you will never b
ehave this way again.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Don’t care? Don’t behave? Quilla did not ask him what he meant. She pulled herself away from him and left the room, not realizing until much later she’d left her mending basket behind. She didn’t even miss it until she found it settled upon her bed with a square of Alyrian silk, enough to make an evening wrap, inside. The colors matched the red fabric perfectly. Quilla took them both and put them in a box at the back of her wardrobe, and did not look at them again.

  Preparing for the gathering put the household into a tizzy unlike Quilla had ever seen. Kirie, Rossi, and Lolly gossiped and chattered as they cleaned and scrubbed and mopped and dusted—but cleaning, scrubbing, dusting, and mopping were not her place. Florentine bustled and shouted and cooked, and again, those things were not Quilla’s place, either.

  Her place was with Gabriel, bringing him solace, which had become a near impossible task. She’d thought him difficult to please before, but now . . . now no matter what she did, or how she tried, he would not be soothed.

  She’d begun to think convincing him to hold a party was the wrong idea, that Florentine had tricked her into suggesting it to supply the house with amusement. That made Quilla turn over the scene in her mind of him speaking with his lady wife—for she knew that though it had been her idea to put the thought into his head, it was the desire of his lady wife that had made him acquiesce.

  She’d thought herself immune to jealousy. It had taken her some time to realize the feeling for what it was, and a bit longer to admit it. She was jealous of the mad lady Saradin. Her golden hair, her eyes of green, her lovely clothes and petite figure. But most of all, Quilla was jealous of the attention Gabriel paid her.

  She’d experienced it before. Couples whose marriages were undergoing rough times, who brought in a Handmaiden. She’d never minded if being in a home made an indifferent wife suddenly solicitous of her husband’s pleasure. In the end, it was her duty to bring solace. If that was part of it, it was all part of the package.

  But this . . . this was different, though she hated admitting it to herself. This was watching her patron’s eyes alight when Saradin swept into the room, chattering inanities about party games and foods. This was watching him put aside his work to let her kiss him, allowing her to take him by the hand and draw him into the bedchamber.

  This was being invisible to him, her patron, for though he still drank the tea and ate the simplebread she continued to prepare for him every morn, he rarely spoke to her.

  Quilla had been told Saradin was mad from taking a dose of something from Gabriel’s workshop, but she saw no sign of insanity in her patron’s beautiful wife. Slyness, churlish selfishness, and shallowness, yes, but her eyes gleamed with an intelligence belied by her brainless behavior and silly, little-girl voice. She might seem to ignore or discount Quilla’s presence, but she did not. Saradin did not need to speak to Quilla to insult her.

  Though she wasn’t supposed to serve more than one patron, and she did so out of a sense of resigned obligation and not real pleasure, she fetched and carried at Saradin’s indifferent commands for tea and biscuits, for the lights to be dimmed or brightened and the fire kindled higher to combat her seemingly constant chill.

  Quilla played the part of fetchencarry because Gabriel did not tell her not to, and because to do otherwise would bring him displeasure. She suffered the glares of Allora, who sometimes attended her mistress to her lord husband’s chambers and sometimes did not. She even remained silent in the face of Saradin’s sniping about tasks performed incorrectly.

  Quilla’s eyes were for her patron, for Gabriel, and nothing Saradin requested of her was more than something to be done to please him. It amused her, though she wouldn’t show it, to follow Saradin’s increasingly churlish commands, because the more calmly she did it, the angrier it seemed to make the lady mistress.

  What upset her was the fact Gabriel did not seem to notice what his lady wife was trying to do. He seemed neither to notice nor care the place to which Saradin was trying to put Quilla—to demote her position to that of a servant, and not only a servant, but her servant. Not his.

  On the days Saradin did not visit Gabriel’s chambers to giggle and gossip about guest lists and dinner menus, Gabriel occupied himself even further with his work, and was even worse tempered as a result of the time he was spending away from it. This, at least, Quilla knew how to combat with tea and simplebread, with scented oils and massages, with a calming voice that did not rise to shrill giggles at the end of every sentence.

  She gave him her silence, which he seemed to crave, and she made his job as easy as possible to do so that although he was spending less time working, he could accomplish more.

  This assignment was not her most difficult. She’d dealt with wives who’d behaved more cruelly. She hadn’t quite counted on the extent of Mistress Saradin’s slyness.

  “Gabriel, my darling,” said Saradin as she swept into the room, eyes asparkle and cheeks prettily pinked. “I simply must speak with you about the arrangements for the brannigan.”

  He turned from his work, and Quilla caught the glimpse of annoyance in his dark eyes. She busied herself with the leather-bound journal she’d bought him, into which she was carefully copying lists of supplies and receipts. Saradin swept past her, elbow knocking the pot of ink, which spilled.

  Quilla grabbed it up, but the damage had been done. Ink had splattered the ledger’s thick parchment pages, ruining the morning’s work. Worse, it stained the leather cover. The pages could be removed. The cover looked ruined.

  Saradin didn’t bother with an apology, ignoring Quilla the way she always did. “Gabriel, darling—”

  “I’m working, Saradin,” he said impatiently. “Make whatever arrangements suit you best.”

  “But I need you,” she said, voice just this edge of a whine.

  Quilla wiped her hands, though ink had now stained them, as well. The lady mistress should watch her tone, she thought, attention fixed on the mess in front of her. Gabriel wouldn’t suffer a whine for long.

  But Saradin knew how to woo her husband, the way many such wives did. She sidled her way into his arms with a coo and a wiggle Quilla caught from the corner of her eye.

  “I need you,” Saradin repeated, tone gone low and breathy, an entire other meaning in the words this time.

  “Sara,” said Gabriel, though by his voice Quilla could tell he’d already given in. “Can’t this wait until later?”

  “No.”

  Invisible Mother, Quilla thought sourly, doing her best to ignore them the way they obviously had no trouble ignoring her. The bint is going to get on her knees for him right in front of me.

  The thought so disturbed her, and being disturbed even more so, that Quilla got up and went to the fire to poke the flames higher. From behind her she heard soft, low giggles and the noise of skin on skin. Yet he did not dismiss her, and it was simply not her place to go.

  In the next moment she heard the click of the bedchamber door closing, and she looked up. Disquiet settled over her, and she fended it off by getting to work. She kept herself busy dusting the vials and bottles on his worktable, lifting each one a scant inch from the tabletop to dust beneath before replacing it in exactly the same place so he’d be certain not to notice it had been moved at all. It wasn’t easy to listen to the squeals of ecstasy coming from Gabriel’s bedchamber, but Handmaidens did learn diplomacy and the ability to close their eyes and ears when the situation warranted it. So she closed her ears to the sounds of Saradin screaming Gabriel’s name and the distinctive thud-thud-thud of a headboard knocking against a wall. She tried to ignore how hearing it made her feel.

  The sound of the door opening made her look up. Saradin, hair not so neatly coiffed and cosmetics definitely smudged, came out of the bedchamber. A cat licking cream from its whiskers had never looked so smug. Quilla turned her attention back to the desk from which she was carefully scrubbing ink.

  To her surpr
ise, Saradin approached her, standing so close there was no possible way for Quilla to ignore her. Quilla put down the cloth and brush she’d been using, and looked into the other woman’s eyes. Green and tilted like a cat’s, and shining with malice.

  “He won’t need you anymore.” Saradin’s broad grin nearly split her face in half. She didn’t look half so pretty with it on her lips.

  “I will wait for my patron to dismiss me,” replied Quilla evenly, “or until my term of service is ended for the day.”

  “Consider it ended. He’s sleeping now, anyway, and won’t wake until the evening, I’m sure of it. He won’t need you anymore.”

  She repeated the words with just enough inflection to show Quilla she meant for more than the rest of this day.

  “I plead your mercy, my lady, but that will be for your lord husband to decide. Not you.”

  Saradin’s smile, if anything, grew broader. “My lord husband has exhausted himself this day, and will not be requiring your services. But if you’d like me to wake him to confirm that fact with you—”

  “Of course I would not.” Quilla didn’t raise her voice.

  Saradin lifted a perfectly groomed eyebrow anyway. “Tell me something, slut. Did you like listening to us? Did you stand outside the door and finger your cunny, imagining it was your thighs his face was between? Because, my little fetchencarry, my darling chambermaid, my sweet and so effusively ineffectual and pliant Handmaiden, it was not you in there he was fucking so lustily.” She paused to lean forward, so close Quilla could smell the mint she must have chewed after breakfast. “But it was not you. ’Twas me. His wife.”

  True patience, Quilla thought, willing herself to be calm though Saradin’s nasty accusation and sly grin made her jaw clench. “ ’Tis not my place to listen at doors, my lady.”

  Saradin let out a snort of disbelief and reached out a hand to stroke along the length of Quilla’s braid. Her hand stopped at the bottom and fisted in it, not yet tugging but with the obvious promise that she could at any moment.