She turned inside to stuff rags in the other men’s mouths.
Chapter Six
ROGER THE WHOREMASTER WAS EASY to find. An aging, venerable, good-spirited churchman bordered on all sides by scantily-clad women, he seemed quite willing to settle his debt to Magdalena by tending a few insentient soldiers, so Tadhg left them in Roger’s tender care, bound and gagged in a back room, naked, stripped of their Sherwood livery, after he and the churchman had soberly agreed it would be for the best.
“It will slow down their leaving in the morning,” Roger explained gravely. “If that would be of any use to you.”
It would.
Tadhg returned to Magdalena’s shop and stepped through the back door quietly. The shutters had been pulled tight, and the interior was dark and warm, lit by a few candles, and swinging oil lamps, and a low-burning fire in the kitchen grate.
Magdalena knelt in the front room, amid the shattered pottery. She held a damp rag in one hand and was picking through the remnants of her broken goods.
Tadhg felt an emotion he was fairly
certain was guilt. That had been a long time. But seeing this innocent with her dark golden hair, kneeling amid the wreckage of her life, a wreckage entirely of Tadhg’s making, did something to him. Something uncomfortable.
And when, on hearing the tread of his boot, she turned and smiled at him, it placed a dimple in the creamy skin of her cheek, and that, well, that awakened an entire host of unwanted and unnecessary emotions: guilt; desire; and the strange, saw-toothed gnashing of some kind of wanting for which he had no name.
He washed his hands in the basin she pointed to, then made his way over, righting a bench as he passed by. In silence he crouched beside her, reaching out to finger the broken shard of what had once been a decorated plate.
She sat back on her heels, brushing hair off her face. “My mother made that,” she told him softly.
Wonderful. He looked around the room and said in a casual voice, “What do you think they wanted?”
“I do not know. One of them mentioned a blade of some sort.” She dabbed at her neck with the damp rag.
He looked at the cool curve of her throat. “Why would they think you had such a thing?”
She gave a rattled laugh. “I hardly know; they were not entirely clear, by design I am sure.”
“Of course,” he murmured consolingly and ignored the way she was now dabbing at her ankle. It was a very shapely ankle.
He looked around at the shop, coffers overturned, fabric and greens and holly berries scattered everywhere, and hesitated only a moment. “Did they find it?”
She dabbed again, then went still.
Firelight shimmered along the now-loose tendrils of her hair, making it glint with shades of burnt-red and peach-gold, the ‘brown’ he’d used to describe her hair previously now revealed to be a glorious amalgam of reds and blondes and deep rich browns. Alchemist’s hair.
Alchemic eyes, too. Quite remarkable, really.
And the way she’d suggested he dump the soldiers at a whorehouse…. Well, he did like a woman with brains.
Inconveniently, though, she was using them now, putting together the meaning of his questions with the events of the past several hours, and he could see the moment comprehension dawned.
“Did they find what, sir?” she said sharply.
He hedged. “What they were looking for.”
She narrowed her fire-eyes at him. “What do you know of it? How…. Why…?” She looked suspiciously at the door. “How did you come to be here?”
Nothing for it then, the truth. Or part of it. “I followed you.”
Her breathing quickened, lifting the yellow tunic molded tightly over her breasts. “Why?”
“For the same reason those soldiers did.”
“And why is that?”