“You must ask someone else,” Stephen said without looking up from the blade he was sharpening. “I am busy.”
“There is no time,” Robert said. “All I ask is that you go tell Isobel I’ve been called away so she does not sit waiting for me all afternoon.”
“She can wait.”
Robert glanced at the men hammering metal at the far end of the armory and lowered his voice. “The king needs me to come at once, and I cannot just leave her there.”
“I see I shall have to tell you the truth,” Stephen said and slammed the blade down on the bench beside him. “ ’Tis for her own protection I cannot go. The lady is not safe with me.”
Robert’s mouth twitched with amusement, which annoyed Stephen more than he thought possible.
“Surely I can trust you not to attack Isobel in broad daylight in a common area of the castle?” Robert said, widening his eyes in mock horror. He leaned down and whispered, “The king wishes me to listen behind the secret doorwhile he meets with de Roche.”
That did it. Stephen wiped his blade and returned it to his belt. When he looked up, Robert was halfway out the door.
“You will find her,” Robert called over his shoulder, “in the small garden behind the Old Palace.”
The small garden! With tall hedges on three sides and a wall on the fourth, that garden was made for liaisons. Stephen should know. He opened his mouth to call Robert back, but his friend was long gone.
Damn, damn, damn. So much for good intentions.
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. Stephen fought it, but he could not prevent it from spreading into a grin.
A man could fight fate only so long.
Isobel. He could hardly wait to see her.
A rat scrabbled along the secret passageway behind Robert. God’s beard, it was filthy back here! Three hundred and fifty years of royal spies and lovers traipsing through it, and he doubted it had ever seen a broom.
Robert pressed his ear to the hole again.
“I have persuaded my cousin Georges de la Trémoille to do all he can to keep Burgundy on your side.”
Robert remembered the beady-eyed Georges from boyhood—a pompous ass if there ever was one, but a wily one. If Georges was taking the English side, it was for his own reasons.
De Roche droned on about various members of the Burgundy faction, all of whom he claimed he could influence. Not a word passed de Roche’s lips that Robert could use against him. Damn the man.
At long last, the king dismissed de Roche and his guards.
“You were right to suggest I use common soldiers as guards today,” the king said as Robert stepped through the hidden panel. “De Roche assumed they could not understand French and spoke freely.”
The soldiers could not, in fact, follow the conversation. That was Robert’s job.
“He told you nothing we did not know,” Robert pointed out as he brushed a cobweb from his tunic. “He is a slippery one. We cannot know on which side he will land.”
The king slapped his fist against his palm. “Then it is time to force his hand with the betrothal.”
Robert did not believe it would be so easy to flush de Roche out. He would wait to share this insight, however, until the king was ready to hear it.
“At the pace you and de Roche are negotiating this marriage contract,” the king fumed, “I may as well have asked the lawyers to do it.”
Robert was rather proud of how long he’d managed to drag it out. He had to stifle a smile—until he caught the steely glint in the king’s eye.
“I will have this betrothal settled,” the king said, pointing his finger at Robert, “within a sennight.”
Seven days. That did not give him much time to thwart the king’s plans. Rather, it did not give Stephen much time.
He hoped matters were progressing in the garden.