Reaching his bloody hand out to her, he whispered, “You were… meant… to be… my goddess…”
As she watched, the life left his eyes. Then his body spun sideways and fell with a thump on the ground beside her.
A second blade was in his chest.
“I had him,” Jamie shouted as he hauled her to her feet. “By all the saints, Linnet, what were you doing?”
She swallowed back the tears that suddenly choked her. In a high voice that shook, she said, “I was trying to save you.”
Jamie wrapped his cloak more tightly around her and pulled her against him. How close he had been to losing her. He breathed in the smell of her hair and closed his eyes.
She was trying to save him.What was he to do with a woman who would act like that? A woman who would throw herself in the way of danger for him without a second thought?
He would love her forever. That was what he would do.
Chapter Forty-three
Linnet rested her head on the edge of the wooden tub as Jamie sat behind her, running an ivory comb through her hair. After an hour of soaking, the smell of her captivity was gone from her skin, and she felt almost clean.
“You make a fine lady’s maid,” she said without opening her eyes.
Jamie stopped combing her hair to pour a fresh bucket of steaming water into the tub, then moved his stool to the other end of the tub and began kneading her foot.
“That feels heavenly,” she murmured.
The hot water and Jamie’s ministrations were the perfect antidote to her ordeal with Pomeroy and the witches.
“ ’Tis almost dawn,” he said. “We should get you to bed.”
Linnet had insisted on waiting at Westminster while Jamie took some of Edmund Beaufort’s men to track down Alderman Arnold and Margery Jourdemayne. After finding them, he had awakened the mayor to have them arrested.
“We shall have to testify against them,” Jamie said in a quiet voice. “The mayor assured me, however, that it will not be a public trial. Everyone—the mayor, Gloucester, the Beauforts—has an interest in keeping this quiet.”
Jamie took her hand, encompassing it in the warmth and strength of his own.
“I should have helped you set things right before.” Jamie looked away, clenching his jaw, then brought his gaze back to her. “I will do whatever you ask to remedy it now.”
“What could I have you do?” She gave him a soft smile. “Take away Lily and Rose’s house? Ruin Mistress Leggett’s trade? Malign the good mayor’s character? They are innocents. Even if they profited from the wrong, it would give me no satisfaction to punish them.”
Jamie pressed his lips together and nodded. “Brokely is dying, so we shall have to leave him to make his accounting to God. The mayor, however, has offered to make whatever compensation you think just for what his father-in-law did.”
Linnet shook her head. “There is nothing I want from the mayor.”
She thought of how her enemies had joined forces against her and covered her face with her hands. “How did Brokely and Pomeroy find each other?”
Jamie gently pulled one hand free and pressed a kiss to her palm. “Most likely it was the alderman, as he was both a member of the coven and party to the merchant conspiracy.” He paused, then said, “Yet I suspect Eleanor Cobham played some part in bringing them together. She knew Pomeroy through Gloucester, and she is closely tied to Margery Jourdemayne.”
“I cannot prove it, but I believe Eleanor and that priest of hers are involved with this sorcery,” Linnet said, and then she told him about Father Hume’s warning to leave for France. “Eleanor must have disagreed with Pomeroy’s plan to kidnap me out of fear it would go wrong and expose her.”
Jamie poured another bucket of steaming water into the tub and began to rub her calf.
“What will happen to the alderman and Margery?” she asked.
“They and the others who are caught will be held in royal custody at Windsor,” he said. “It does not seem near enough.”
“I hope you do not feel you must gouge out the alderman’s eyes and slit his throat,” she said, attempting a smile. “He is too pathetic to be worth the trouble.”
“I would do it if it would help you forget what happened tonight,” he said. “I would kill them all for you.”