The Taming Read online

  Liana’s heart beat quickly with the humiliation she’d received. Helen had said she’d been spoiled by her power at the Neville estates, but Liana had had no real idea of what she meant. She suspected that few people realized how different other people’s lives were from their own. She’d expected her married life to be somewhat different, but this feeling of being powerless, of not existing, was something altogether new to her.

  This must have been how Helen felt at the Neville estates when the servants obeyed Liana and not her. “She felt like this, yet she was still good to me,” Liana whispered.

  “My lady,” Joice said softly.

  Liana blinked at her maid and saw the fear on the older woman’s face. Liana didn’t seem so sure of herself now as she had before the wedding. At the moment she was too tired to think what she was going to do in the future. For now the immediate needs were for food and a place to sleep.

  “Send Bess to find the kitchens and bring up supper—I do not want to eat in company tonight. Then get some of my bedding sent up to the solar.” She put her hand up to stop Joice from speaking. “I don’t know how to accomplish that. It seems that I have no power in my husband’s home.” She tried to keep the self-pity out of her voice, but she didn’t succeed. “And find some shovels. Tonight we will empty two rooms of enough filth to be able to sleep. And tomorrow we’ll—” She stopped because she didn’t like to think of tomorrow. If she had no power, even in directing a maid, she would be a prisoner just as if she were locked in a dungeon.

  “Find out what you can about this place,” Liana said as an afterthought. “Where is Lord Severn? Perhaps he could…help us.” There was little strength in Liana’s voice.

  “Yes, my lady,” Joice said meekly and left the room.

  Slowly, Liana made her way up the circular staircase to the solar. The hawks moved on their perches at the sound of her, then settled again. If the whole castle were not littered with the remains of people’s living, she might have thought the place deserted. It was so unlike her father’s house, with people moving in and out of rooms, people laughing and teasing. Here there were only men, hard-faced, unsmiling men with scars on their bodies and weapons in their hands. There were no children, and no women except for the two bitches who’d laughed at her and refused to obey her.

  She looked below at the moat and in the fading light saw the head of a cow bob in the black, thick ooze. This place was to be her home. Here she was to bear children and raise them. And what love she was to have was to come from a husband who didn’t seem to recognize her from one hour to the next.

  How was she to make him love her? Perhaps if she and her maids cleaned the place, perhaps if she made this castle a fit place to live, he would be glad he married her. He would think of her as more than just the person who came attached to the dowry.

  And food, she thought. Perhaps if she hired some good cooks and covered his table with delicious, delectable food. Surely the man who ate well, slept between clean sheets, wore clean clothes, would be pleased with the woman who made this possible.

  And then there was the bed. Liana had heard her maids say a woman who pleased a man in bed could control him out of it. She’d get one bedroom clean by tonight and he’d seek her out, for now that they had privacy, he’d want his wife. She smiled for the first time since seeing Moray Castle. She just had to be patient and what she wanted would eventually come to her.

  Moments later all seven of her maids came to the solar, their arms loaded with food, pillows, and blankets, and chattering all at once.

  It took Liana a while to understand what the women were saying. Lord Severn was with someone called the Lady and wasn’t likely to be seen for three or four days. Other than the Lady and her maids, there were only eight women in the whole castle.

  “They do no work,” Bess said, “and no one would tell me what they do.”

  “And they’re named for the days of the week. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and so forth, except one is called Waiting. They didn’t seem to have any other names,” Alice said.

  “And the food is awful. The flour is full of weevils and sand. The baker just bakes it into the bread.”

  Bess leaned forward. “They used to buy bread from a baker in town, but he filed an order of a feud against the Peregrines for nonpayment and…”

  “And what?” Liana demanded, trying to eat a piece of meat that could have been used for saddle leather.

  “The Peregrine men tore the door off the baker’s house and…and used his flour bins for a toilet.”

  Liana put her inedible meat down. The women had cleaned off a seat under one window and now sat there together. Below them they could hear the sounds of steel on steel, of men yelling, of food being eaten with open mouths. It seemed that her husband and his men were eating in the room below, but no one had thought to ask the wife of their lord to join them.

  “Did you perhaps hear which bedchamber is Lord Rogan’s?” she asked, trying to keep her dignity.

  The women looked at each other, pity in their eyes.

  “No,” Joice murmured. “But surely that one there, the large one, is his room.”

  Liana nodded. She hadn’t yet felt strong enough to mount the wooden stairs of the solar and see what rooms were above—or, more likely, what manner of filth was there. If birds were kept in the solar, were pigs kept in the upper bedrooms?

  It took two hours of hard work to shovel out two bedrooms. Liana wanted to help, but Joice refused to allow it and Liana understood. At the moment her maids were almost her equals, as they all felt lost and alone in this strange, foul-smelling place, but Joice did not want her mistress to lose her power over these women. So Liana sat on the window seat in the solar and held a clove-studded orange to her nose to block out the smell of the moat.

  When at last her room was ready—not clean, but at least she could walk in it without tripping over bones—a maid persuaded a farrier to bring up two mattresses, and Liana, with Joice’s help, undressed and went to bed. She lay awake for a while, waiting for her husband to come to her. But he didn’t.

  In the morning she awoke to loud noises and hideous smells. What she had thought was a bad dream was reality.

  In the morning Rogan walked into the Lord’s Chamber to see Severn sitting at the table, his head resting tiredly on his hand, and eating bread and cheese. “I didn’t expect to see you for a while. Want to go hunting with me?”

  “Yes,” Severn answered. “I need the rest after last night with Io. You look well rested. Your wife didn’t bother you too much last night?”

  “Last night was Saturday,” Rogan gave for an answer.

  “And you didn’t spend it with your wife?”

  “Not on Saturday.”

  Severn scratched his arm. “You’ll never get any sons like that.”

  “Are you ready to go or not? I’ll get around to her. Maybe next…I don’t know when. She’s not something to stir a man’s blood.”

  “Where is she now?”

  Rogan shrugged. “Upstairs, maybe. Who knows?”

  Severn washed the rest of the bread down with sour wine and spit sand onto the floor. What his brother did was none of his business.

  For three days Liana and her maids worked at cleaning the solar. And for three days she was afraid to go belowstairs. She couldn’t bear to show her face to the people of Moray Castle. They all knew that she had been rejected by her husband, that he not only refused to sleep with her but that he refused to give her power over his servants.

  So Liana stayed alone, never seeing her husband, never having any contact with the people of the castle. So far, she thought, not only wasn’t she winning her husband’s love with her meekness, but he wasn’t even noticing her, meek or otherwise.

  It was on the afternoon of the fourth day that she dared to venture up the wooden stairs. The upper floor was as dirty as the solar had been, except there were no signs that anyone had been here for years. She wondered where the people of the castle slept and instantly pictu