Free Royal Harlot by Susan Holloway Scott Page B

with only so much meat as this.”
    I slipped the sausage daintily between my lips and into my mouth. Because it was so small, it was no great trick to take the entirety into my mouth, and a tasty morsel it was, too, after so long and cold a day. My cheeks must have bulged with it, and my lips glistened with the fatty juice.
    Ah, but all gentlemen are alike in their carnal thoughts, and how easy this makes it for women to play them however they please! From the dumbstruck look upon Roger’s long face, I knew he’d watched me devour that sausage with his own share of simmering lubricity, just as I knew he was imagining another essence of his own manufacture glistening on my sated lips.
    All of which, of course, was exactly how I’d hoped to stir Roger on this day of national mourning. I was honest, yes, but I was wicked, too. The more ale and sausages I consumed amidst the cheerful clatter of the cookhouse, the more delectable Roger looked to me. I’m not sure what else could have made me choose that day, except that I’d neither seen nor heard from Philip for over two months, and Roger was here and being extraordinarily pleasant to me, and that I wished to send the most priggish man in all England to his next reward with a tribute more fitting than all drums and trumpets.
    But then Roger did something that reduced all these wicked inclinations of mine to a sentimental pudding. He reached inside his coat, drew out a small leather box, and slid it across the pockmarked table to me.
    “I had this made for you, Barbara.” He cleared his throat with a sawmill’s scraping rumble, so unsure was he of how to give a token to a lady. “Because, ah, you share my devotion to His Majesty, and my belief in his right to the throne of this country. It seems especially proper for today.”
    I set down my fork and opened the little hinged box. Nestled inside was a chain and pendant framed in herringbone silver gilt, a faceted glass heart. Buried deep within the heart for safekeeping was a cypher wrought of twisted golden wire, so finely made that it might have been the work of dainty fairy fingers rather than mortal man’s.
    “It’s a C and an R, of course,” Roger explained. “For Carolus Regnum. Charles the King. They first were made to honor our martyred sovereign, but now the followers of his royal son wear them as well. You’ve shown yourself to me to be worthy of our party, and with this around your throat, others will recognize your loyalty as well.”
    “Oh, Roger,” I whispered, tracing the cypher’s delicate outline with my fingertip. The significance of his gift was not lost on me. This was no ordinary bauble, such as a man gives to his sweetheart, but a symbol of far greater meaning. “That you would grant such a pendant to me!”
    He was watching the glinting gold and glass in my hand, and I’d no notion of which mattered more to him. “I’ve spoken of you to the leaders of our group, and they agree that a lady of impeccable loyalty could be of use. There would be risks. There would be danger. I can’t deny that.”
    “Do you mean I could carry messages for you?” I asked with excitement. My teasing play with the sausage now seemed shameful bawdry. No one had ever expected more of me than that I be amusing and beautiful, and this—this was a heady expectation indeed. “You would trust me that much?”
    “In the right circumstances, yes,” he said, and the admiration with which he regarded me made me shiver. “Put the chain around your neck, Barbara. I wish to see it there.”
    Obediently I unhooked my cloak and let it fall back from my shoulders, and unwrapped the fine wool kerchief I’d needed against the cold. The neck of my bodice was cut low and wide and banded with a velvet ribbon, as was the fashion, with only a narrow ruffle of my white smock beneath for an edging. The pendant’s glass was cool against my skin, and once I fastened the chain at my nape, the heart lay at the top of the cleft