She surveyed the people sitting at the other three tables. In addition to Sieg, Vittorio, Geva, and the apprentices, four other servants worked here on a regular basis. David's household appeared large, well run, and efficient. He certainly didn't need a wife to manage things. She suspected uncomfortably that her own presence would be superfluous at best and maybe even disruptive.

Throughout the entire meal, David let her know that he had not forgotten her presence. His gestures and glances suggested that despite his attention to his guest, most of his mind dwelled on her. When they had both finished eating, his hand rested permanently over hers atop the table, the long fingers absently caressing the back of her palm while he conversed. In subtle ways he maintained the intimacy they had shared in the ivy garden.

She became very conscious of his touch and looks as the meal drew to a close. As the hall began emptying, the apprentices heading back to the shop and the servants to their duties, she sensed his awareness of her heighten even though nothing changed in his behavior or actions. John Constantyn did not linger long after the other tables had cleared. They accompanied him into the courtyard.

"I will see you at the wedding, my lady," John said. "Is it true that the King attends, David?"

"So I have been told. Christiana is his ward."

"I hear that the mayor convinced you to move the banquet to the Guildhall."

Christiana tried not to embarra.s.s David by letting it show that she knew nothing of the plans for her own wedding. They had never spoken of it. She had never asked, because she had never expected to be there herself.

She could not blame him if he thoroughly disliked her by now. Maybe he did. He would never let her know. He was trapped as completely as she, but would try to make the best of the situation. Is that all they were? Two people accommodating themselves to the inevitable?

"Aye. And the mayor made clear that if the royal family attended, all of the aldermen should be invited,"

David said. "We will have the mayor's dull, official banquet, and then another one here for the ward and household. Save your appet.i.te, John. Vittorio cooks for the second one."

John laughed. "And your uncle Gilbert, David? Will he come?"

"I invited him. I borrowed a royal page to send the message, in fact. Gilbert's wife is a good woman and I would not insult her. She will make him attend." His eyes sparkled mischievously. "The decision will drive him mad. Decline and he misses the King. Accept and he honors me."

"Aye," John said, grinning. "His dilemma might be cause enough to get married if the best reason didn't stand by your side now."

She decided not to think about how David came to have use of a royal page. John left then. The courtyard suddenly seemed very quiet.

David's arm slid around her waist. "Come. I'll show you the house."

They visited the stable first. Her black horse, unsaddled and brushed, stood in a stall beside David's two mounts. The groom was nowhere to be seen. She reached up and petted the black nose. She supposed that she could name him now that she would be keeping him.

In the building facing the street she saw the chambers used by Michael, Roger, and some of the servants. Andrew slept at the shop, she knew. It impressed her that each person had his own small room. The servants of this mercer possessed more privacy than the n.o.ble wards of the King. Silence greeted them as they reentered the hall. Even the kitchen echoed empty. Vittorio was just leaving with a basket on his arm to shop for the evening meal. He smiled indulgently and slipped away. As David opened the door to the last building, Christiana thought that there should probably be a little more household bustle going on. She realized with a jolt that everyone had left the premises. She followed David to the storage rooms filled with wooden crates on the first level, beyond his mother's old chamber. The scent of cinnamon and cloves wafted toward her. Carpets and spices and silks. Luxuries. John's observation had been correct. David would always sell these things. They defined status and honor and many people would eat only soup in order to purchase them. His arm circled her shoulders as he led her back toward the kitchen. The simple gesture suddenly seemed less casual than before. Had he dismissed the whole household, or had natural discretion made them all decide to become scarce so that the master could be alone with his lady?

They were alone, that was certain. The resonating silence had imbued this simple tour with a creeping intimacy. By the time they returned to the stairs leading to the upper level and David's chambers, her caution was fully alerted.

David began guiding her up. She balked on the second step.

His smile of amus.e.m.e.nt made her feel childish. He took her hand. "Come now, girl. You should see your house."

Her mind chastised her instincts. After all, she had been in the solar before. They would marry soon and, despite Morvan's warnings, he had not misunderstood her reason for coming. She let herself be cajoled upwards.

In the light of day she could see the solar's beauty. The glazed windows on one side looked down on the garden, and in summer the flowers' scents would drift into the square high chamber. David built up the fire and she walked around, admiring the furnishings. Each carved chair, each tapestry, every item down to the silver candleholders, possessed an individual and distinctive beauty. She fingered the relief of ivy edging the chair on which she had sat that first night. What had this man thought of the child who faced him, her feet dangling as she announced her love for someone else?

Stephen. The thought of him could still open a hollow ache.

She looked up to see David regarding her. "Did these lovely things come to you with the house?" she asked.

"Nay."

She hadn't thought so. Like the severe cut of his clothes, they were, in their own ways, perfect.

"You must spend a lot of time looking for such things."

"Rarely. Something catches my eye and I buy it. It doesn't take long at all."

She gazed at one of the tapestries hanging beside the windows. Superb. She thought about Elizabeth's dependence on his taste. He had a natural eye for beauty. It must give him a tremendous advantage in his trade.

I think that you are the most beautiful girl whom I have ever met. Her eyes slowly followed the sinuous lead tracery that held the pieces of gla.s.s together in the windows. She felt him watching her.

He saw her and wanted her and offered the King a fortune for her. A small book rested on a low table near the hearth. She knew that if she opened it, she would find richly painted illuminations. Like everything else in this room, it would be exquisite. Something catches my eye and I buy it. It doesn't take long at all. Two doors flanked the hearth. She drifted to the one on the right and opened it. She found herself on the threshold to his bedchamber. Ignoring a qualm of misgiving at the way he watched her, she went inside. The hearth in this chamber backed on the solar's and the windows also overlooked the garden. The chamber was simply furnished, with one chair near the fire and a large bed on a low dais in the center of the room. Heavy blue drapes surrounded the bed and formed a canopy, and one side was tied open to reveal a rich matching coverlet. A fire burned in the hearth.

She walked along the wall overlooking the garden and pa.s.sed through a door at the far end of the chamber. She entered a wardrobe with chests and pegs for clothes. It included a small hearth and wooden tub just like Isabele's, and a door at its end led to a garderobe and privy. A spout in a wall niche, similar to ones seen elsewhere in the house, provided piped water. She opened a door cut in the wall and found herself at the top of the stairs leading down to the small ivy garden. Besides the solar, this was the only other way into the apartment. Back in the bedchamber, she looked around, trying to grow accustomed to this s.p.a.ce. David stood at the threshold, his shoulder resting casually against the doorjamb. She smiled weakly at him, feeling like an intruder.

"Where is my chamber?"

"You mean the lady's bower? There is none. Merchants do not live that way. Your place is here with me."

He walked to the hearth. There was no need to build up this fire. It sparked and crackled with new logs. She stared at the hot bright flames and read their flickering significance. Who had come and prepared this room? Geva? He would not expose his intentions to a woman. Sieg, then. The big Swede had been the first to leave the hall. She doubted that David had said a word to him. It had simply been done. She managed not to glance at that big bed dominating the room. Of course, Sieg would not know of David's rea.s.surances in the garden.

She could not just stand here forever. She searched for something to look at. The solar stretched the width of the building and had windows over both the garden and the courtyard. This chamber was not so wide, and its court wall was solid. She spied a door at its end and strode toward it.

As soon as she saw the side chamber she stopped in her tracks. It was a study. She quickly surveyed the objects filling it and knew that now she definitely intruded. She began backing out and b.u.mped into David's chest. His hand came to rest over hers on the door and he pushed it forward.

"This is your home," he said. "There are no doors closed to you here."

Home. She had not had a home since Harclow. Not really. As the royal household moved from one castle or manor to the next, she had never felt at home, not even at Westminster. For eleven years she had been something of a permanent guest.

This small chamber might not be closed to her today, but it obviously was to everyone else. No housekeeper tended this room, and a thin layer of dust covered some of the items on the shelves flanking the high window. Her gaze took in a stack of books and some scrolls of paper. A small painting in the Byzantine style and a beautiful ivory carving were propped at one end beside an ancient hand harp whose frame was inlaid with intricate twining lines of silver.

The only furniture was a large table covered with parchment papers and doc.u.ments. A chair angled behind it, and underneath she saw a small locked chest on the floor.

From the corner of her eye she noticed that the wall behind the door also bore shelves. She turned and gasped as a man's face peered back at her.

David laughed and stepped past her to the shelf.

"It is remarkable, isn't it?"

She approached in amazement. The man's face was carved in marble and its realism astonished her. Whichever mason had done this work possessed a G.o.d's touch. Subtle shadows modeled the skin so accurately that one believed one could touch flesh and feel bone beneath it.

"I found it in Rome," he explained. "Just lying there in the ancient ruins. I picked up a small section of a column and this was underneath. There are many such statues there. Whole bodies just as real, and stone caskets covered with figures that are used now to hold water at fountains. I saw some statues at the Cathedral of Reims recently that come close, but nothing else similar north of the Alps."

Reims. Near Paris. What was he doing there recently? Stupid question. He was a merchant, after all.

"You carried it all of the way home?"

"Nay. I bribed Sieg to," he said, laughing.

"You seem to like carvings and paintings a lot. Why didn't you become a limner or a mason?"

"Because David Constantyn was a mercer and it was he who gave me an apprenticeship. As a boy I sometimes dawdled around a limner's shop and watched them work, mixing their colors and painting the images in books. The master tolerated me and even showed me how to burn wood to make drawing tools. Fate had other plans for me, however, and I do not regret it."

She stepped behind the table. On its corner were some new parchments folded and closed with a seal showing three entwined serpents. Strewn across it were papers with oddly drawn marks. The top one simply showed jagged lines connected by sweeping numbered curves. Little squares and circles lined up along snaking borders. She glanced away carefully. It was a map. Why did David make maps?

Not today, she reminded herself.

She turned and examined the books on the high shelf. "Can I look at one?"

"Which one do you want?"

"The biggest one."

He lifted the large folio down, placing it on the table, covering the cryptic drawings. Christiana sat in the chair and carefully opened it. She stared in surprise at the lines and dots spread out in front of her.

"It is Saracen, David."

"Aye. The pictures are wonderful. Keep turning."

She flipped the large sheets of parchment. "Can you read this?"

"Some of it. I never learned to write the language well, though."

"Is this forbidden?" she asked skeptically. She knew that the church frowned on certain books.

"Probably."

She came to one of the pictures, and it was indeed wonderful and strange. Little men in turbans and odd clothes moved across a world drawn to look like a carpet.

"Will you teach me to read this?"

"If you wish."

He took down the harp and leaned against the table's edge beside her, looking down at the book while he plucked absently on the strings. The instrument gave a lovely lyrical sound. She continued turning the pages, glancing on occasion at the man resting close to her now and the compelling fingers creating a haunting melody.

Toward the back of the book she found some loose sheets covered with chalk drawings. Spare lines described tents on a desert and a town by the sea. She knew without asking that David had drawn them. Beneath them, on smaller sheets, lay the faces of two women.

One of them riveted her attention. The face, beautiful and melancholy, appeared vaguely familiar. She realized that she studied an image of his mother. It felt eerie to be facing a dead person thus, but she examined the face closely.

"Will you tell me about her?" she asked quietly.

"Someday."

She turned her attention to the other face. "Who is she?" She gazed at the sloe-eyed exotic beauty captured forever with careful, fine lines. She knew that she pried but she could not ignore the worldly way this woman's face looked at her.

"A woman whom I met in Alexandria."

As with the likeness of his mother, there was much of the artist's feelings in the sensitive way this woman was drawn.

"Did you love her?" she asked, a little shocked by her own boldness but not too much so. He had become much less a stranger since she stepped into this chamber.

"Nay. In fact, she almost got me killed. But I was enchanted by her beauty, as I am by yours."

Something in his quiet tone made her go very still. She lifted her gaze and found him looking at her and not at the book and its drawings. Looking and waiting. He was good at that. Something in his eyes and in the set of his mouth told her that he contemplated waiting no longer. He saw her and wanted her and paid the King a fortune to have her. He had stopped playing the harp. Her pulses pounded a little harder in the renewed silence. Total silence. Not a sound in the whole house.

She returned to the book and very carefully turned the page, burying the drawings. Another painting loomed but she didn't really see it.

"Do you know that I have only seen your hair down once, at the betrothal," he said. She sensed his hand reach toward her even before his fingers fell on her head. "Even in the bath it was bound up."

The light pressure of his caress sent a tremor through her. The bath. The wardrobe. His hands and his touch.

"Take down your hair for me, Christiana."

His tone fell somewhere between a request and a command. She leaned back in the chair, away from him.

She would marry this man very soon. She shouldn't be afraid of him. But her quickening blood and unworldly spirit shouted to her that she should get away from him now. She looked at him, silently asking him to remember their conversation in the garden and to understand and wait a little longer. "Morvan is probably at the shop, David. I should go and meet him."

"I left word that we were coming here."

"Then he most likely waits outside. He will not enter. I should not leave him there."

He gestured to the window. "It looks out on the courtyard. See if he awaits you."

She eased out of the chair and past him, and turned on her tiptoes to glance down at the deserted courtyard.

His quiet voice flowed over her back and shoulders. "He will not come. He accepts that you belong to me now. As you do."

She went down from her toes and looked up at the clear afternoon sky. A part of her wanted desperately to fly out that window. But his touch and words and the expectant silence of this house had awakened those other feelings, and that exquisite antic.i.p.ation licked through her.

"You frighten me sometimes," she said. "I know that you should not and that you have said that it isn't fear, but a part of it truly is."

He was quiet for a moment. The house seemed to quake with its emptiness. "Aye," he finally said. "For a virgin, part of it truly is."

She sensed him move. She felt his presence behind her. She both awaited and dreaded his touch, her spirit stretched with tension like a string pulled taut.

His hands gently took her waist and she sighed at the feel of each finger. His head bent to her bare shoulder. He kissed the little scratches, and then her neck. She closed her eyes, savoring the delicious closeness of him.

"Take down your hair, Christiana."

She raised her arms and clumsily fumbled for the pins that held her hair. She pulled out the intricate twists and plaits, terribly conscious of how weak and vulnerable she felt, wonderfully aware of those fingers splayed around her.

The heavy waves fell section by section down her neck and back, all the way to his hands. She shook her head to release the last of them, placing the pins on the windowsill. He nuzzled his face in her unbound hair, and his breath tingled her scalp and neck through the tresses. His hands turned her to him and took her face, cradling it gently like something precious and fragile. He kissed her tenderly, beautifully, and fully, and she trembled as his mouth made the low tension and excitement sharpen and rise.

He prolonged the kiss, taking her in an embrace that pulled her to his warmth. She held her arms open at his sides for one worried moment before accepting him.

She sensed a change in him after that. His kiss deepened, commanding her desire. His hand cupped her breast. She gasped and closed her eyes, waiting for the delicious sensations. They undid her completely. Her limbs went languid as heat poured through her body. His soft hair brushed her face as he lowered his mouth to the skin exposed by her low-cut cotehardie, kissing the top swell of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s that his fingers caressed into peaks of yearning. Fear told her to stop him but the desire would not let her. Rivulets of pleasure merged into a fast-running river, and struggling against its current seemed futile and impossible. His fingers played at her and the pleasure became a little frantic. I am drowning in it, she thought as his mouth claimed hers again.

He lifted his head and looked down at her, watching her responses to his touch. She gazed at the parted lips and deep eyes and knew that there would be no help from him this day. He began guiding her toward the chamber door.

She thought about where they were going and what he wanted. "I don'ta" she whispered even as she took another step.