The Poisoned Serpent Read Online Free PDF Page A

well.”
    He reached for her.
    “Oh God,” he said. “Cristen.”
    His arms closed around her.
    After a moment, she said in an eminently practical voice, “Your hauberk is extremely hard.”
    His grip loosened instantly. “I’m sorry.”
    She leaned back in his embrace and looked up into his face. “I gather that he said nay.”
    “He said nay,” Hugh agreed. In the light of the brazier she could see that his eyes were glittering.
    “I thought he would,” Cristen said.
    “I have even worse news,” Hugh told her bitterly. “He has made arrangements for me to marry Elizabeth de Beauté, the daughter of the new Earl of Lincoln.”
    Cristen’s slender body went rigid.
    A faint smile of satisfaction touched Hugh’s mouth.
    “Well, you’re not going to marry her,” she informed him fiercely.
    Hugh’s smile deepened. “Now you know how I felt about that Fairfax fellow.”
    After a few beats, her face relaxed and she smiled back. “I always understood how you felt about Henry Fairfax.”
    Without further speech, the two of them sat down side by side on the bench along the wall next to the shed door. Hugh pulled off his glove, reached out and took Cristen’s hand into his bare fingers.
    She rested her head against his arm. “What are we going to do?”
    “We have two choices,” he replied briskly. “I can go to the Earl of Gloucester and offer to join with the empress’s party if he will sanction our marriage. Gloucester needs Wiltshire as much as Stephen does. Actually, he needs it more. If he proclaims me the rightful earl, he can march on Wiltshire and hope that those men who still remember my father will rise for me.”
    I will see the whole world go up in flames before I will lose you .
    Those words of Hugh’s came into Cristen’s mind as she leaned against him in the aromatic closeness of the herb shed.
    “And the other choice?” she said quietly.
    “We can go to Keal, the manor in Lincolnshire I inherited from my foster father, and be married there by the parish priest. Keal is a nice property, Cristen. We can live there very decently.”
    Cristen shut her eyes. “I would live with you in a forest hut. You know that. But I do not want you to give up your heritage.”
    “Then I must go to Gloucester,” Hugh said.
    She didn’t want him to do that, either.
    “If you joined with Gloucester, what would happen if he decided to attack Somerford?” she asked.
    He rested their entwined hands on his leg and regarded them somberly. “Your father would have to choose between Guy and me.”
    Cristen opened her eyes and stared straight ahead. “He has already chosen you over Guy. He did that when he brought you to Somerford and told you who you were. What you would be asking him to do would be to choose you over his sworn oath of loyalty to the king.”
    Hugh ran his thumb up and down the length of her small, tense hand. “Cristen, the easiest way out of this is for us to go to Keal and be married there.”
    “We would have to run away.”
    He pointed out practically, “We will have to escape from Somerford no matter where we decide to go.”
    She removed her head from its resting place against his arm. Her eyes were fixed on the jar she had been filling with medicinal jelly. “I feel as if I am robbing you,” she said in a low, troubled voice.
    At that, he swung around to face her. “Don’t you understand? Nothing means anything to me if I cannot have you! You are…you are what ties me to life. If I lose you, I lose my very soul. It would be better for me to be dead than for that to happen.”
    She gazed up into his passionate face. Her lips trembled. “I know,” she whispered. “Oh, Hugh, I know.”
    He pulled her against him and buried his mouth in her hair.
    Hugh’s wool cloak was rough and the mail hauberk he wore under it was unforgiving, but this time she made no complaint. Instead, she drew in a long, unsteady breath and said, “All right. We’ll go to Keal.”
     
    Cristen and