He breathed again, to reassure himself that it was not his imagination, and this time he caught the spicy fragrance of something like carnations—gillyflowers, Lucy called them. “Oh, Lucy,” he whispered. “Oh, El.”
A tidal wave of grief and loneliness crashed over him, so that he had to sit a few minutes while the tears ran down his face. At last, he wiped the tears away and got out of the car. Immediately he was struck by the size of the ruins. There was certainly nothing miniature about the gray granite walls, the size of the huge stone blocks lying like discarded giant toys amid the weeds. The shell of the central keep towered at least three or four stories above him. A deep depression marked where the moat must have been. He walked slowly toward the great structure. Even after eight hundred years, it was imposing.
He skirted the walls, arrow slits still visible high on the ramparts, and entered the keep. The roof had long since collapsed, the upper floors long ago rotted, but the stone staircase still spiraled up the interior wall to a ledge high above.
Moss grew in a hearth high enough for a man to stand upright, deep enough to burn young trees. The back wall was black with the soot of centuries. With an outstretched hand that almost shook, he touched the darkened stone. This was real history, he thought, not the sanitized stuff he’d seen in museums, where the past was neatly catalogued and kept behind velvet ropes and clear glass. Here, he could believe that once knights had ridden out, broadswords in their belts, lances in their hands, ready to do battle for the honor of their king. England had not always been a country of miniatures.
An owl hooted, and he turned, startled, to see a black shape flit across the sun. How strange, he thought. Owls don’t usually come out during the day.
Something red fluttered near his foot, and he bent to pick it up. A crumpled candy wrapper lay in the long grass. Then he saw that the ground was littered with wrappers, and bottles and cans, and that graffiti marred the rugged surface of the walls.
He started up the steps, stepping carefully, testing each one before he placed his weight on it. The ragged walls looked like broken teeth against the sky, the gaping windows like empty eye sockets. Somewhere near the top, he paused on what had obviously been a balcony or lookout, and gazed out over the countryside.
England stretched before him, a patchwork of shaded greens, bounded by hedges and fences and winding roads, dotted with cottages and barns. Far off, to the west, the Welsh mountains loomed like sentries, as though they guarded their strongholds still.
“We’re here, El.” He gripped the edge of the stone wall. Nothing answered him, not even a bird.
It would have been different if she were here. She would have laughed, and scrambled from one thing to another, like a child on Christmas morning. She would have explained battlements and crenellations and buttresses, and would have dragged him up and over the stones a dozen times.
“Here,” she would have said, “this was the kitchen, and here were the stables. And here was where the lord and his lady would have slept…”
He would have listened, entranced, not by the information, but by the look on her face, the happiness in her voice. In the sunlight, her hair—mouse brown, she called it, ash brown, he called it—would have been edged in silver gilt, and her high cheekbones would have been blushed a delicate pink.
And he would have found those gillyflowers and picked them all for her.
His throat thickened, and his eyes blurred. Blindly he turned to start down the steps. It was too late when he heard the crack. The stone beneath his feet crumbled into a shower of powder, and he felt himself falling, tumbling head over heels, helpless as a rag doll. He struck his head against the wall, and heard, as though from a distance, a sharp, distinct snap. He had just enough time to pray “Let me find Lucy,” before the world went dark.
CHAPTER 2
BARLAND KEEP, HEREFORDSHIRE
SEPTEMBER, 1214
Lady Eleanor de Lambert pushed away from her loom. Her head ached, her neck was stiff, and her hands were sore from trying to manipulate the rough woolen threads with cold fingers. The rain beat a monotonous tattoo upon the shutters, and the ineffective fire snapped and hissed more viciously than the heat it generated warranted.
She got up and stretched her cramped shoulders and knotted back. She was four months past her twenty-first birthday, but she felt like an old woman three times her age. Across the room, Ursula, who really was almost that old, spun as if her salvation depended on it. Eleanor watched as the older woman worked, oblivious to the scrutiny. Her thin lips were pursed as she hummed a tuneless little song, and her wrinkled, bloodless cheeks were flushed in the glow of the rushlights, the room’s only other illumination.
No doubt, thought Eleanor, as she turned away with a sigh, Ursula was lost in the memory of happier times than these. She poked at the fire, glad to have an excuse to bend low over its heat. Ursula had been her mother’s nurse, and then her maid, and now finally served Eleanor.
But to Eleanor, she was much more than a servant. Ursula had become a bulwark, a refuge, a comfort, in the months since the death of her father, the elder Hugh St. Clair, and Eleanor’s subsequent marriage to Richard de Lambert at the king’s decree. Eleanor had not been surprised that the king had promptly sold her wardship to the highest bidder. John Lackland, John Softsword, as her father called him with a sneer, was notoriously low of funds. But she had been surprised at the sight of the man who came riding through the gates of Barland Keep to claim her lands and her person. She remembered how foolishly she dared to hope that he really was the knight of her dreams.
Richard could have had her heart, she thought bitterly, as she sorted through the rolls of new fabric. From the time she was a little girl, she’d had a sense that he was out there somewhere—the man whom she would love, who would love her in return with gentleness and respect. Certainly Richard looked the part. He was tall and dark, his body lean but muscular under his surcoat and chainmail. His hair curled in little waves at the nape of his neck and around his ears, and his eyes were a bright and piercing blue.
Even his voice enthralled her, strongly cadenced with his native Normandy.
But Richard made it clear that he cared nothing for her, nor the rest of the people of her father’s lands. Serf and daughter alike, he regarded as nothing but chattel for which he had paid dearly. And he intended to get the most for his money. He worked the land and the villeins harder than they’d ever been worked before—demanding higher rents and more days on the manor lands so that the peasants had less time to till their own small plots.
He was cruel to her brother, Hugh, who had made no secret that he resented de Lambert’s presence on the manor from the first hour he set foot on it. Richard had responded by making the boy the butt of his jokes, ridiculing him in front of the men-at-arms, ceaselessly goading him into a display of temper, then smacking him down as carelessly as he might a puppy.
He was ruthless to the Welsh, determined to reclaim Barland lands her father had bargained away, leading raid after raid over the border, even when the local chieftain had appeared on Lammas Eve and offered a treaty. When the chief, or the prince, as the Welsh styled their petty warlords, refused to leave both his son and daughter as hostages, Richard had laughed, and torn the parchment to shreds before the Welshman’s eyes.
He then waylaid them as they crossed the border back into Wales, had slain the son, and brought the father back to rot in the dungeon until a substantial ransom had been paid. The daughter was never seen again and rumor had it that Richard had arranged for her to be sold as a concubine to an Arab infidel.
Among the other marcher barons, he was known as a bully and a braggart, but his bravery in battle, and the reputation of his prowess with a lance and sword, were unquestioned, and had won him the grudging respect of the most courageous men in England. It was said of him that even old William the Marshal, the greatest soldier in England or on the Continent, had complimented his fighting.
And of Eleanor, he demanded obedie
nce, unquestioning, unassuming. Twice he’d raised his hand to strike her with the same offhand brutality he showed the servants when she had dared to question his judgments at the manor court. He also expected a son and was furious that so far there was no sign at all that she carried his child. Privately Eleanor hoped she would conceive, for surely it would mean that de Lambert would cease his more brutal treatment. But each month brought disappointment, and those nights that he did not drink himself to sleep with his cronies in the hall found him rutting in her bed.
Last night had been one of those nights.
Eleanor knew that dark smudges marred the delicate skin beneath her eyes, and dulled her pale complexion to a pasty white. She wished she could take a bath, to remove the salty stench of her husband’s body from her skin, but she had not the heart to ask the overworked servants to carry hot water to fill the old wooden tub. Richard sneered at her convent-bred sensibilities, anyway, and sometimes even forbid her to bathe.
“I like my woman to smell like a woman,” he’d say with a nasty grin.
A shudder went down her spine as she remembered how he’d caressed her last night in the dying firelight. He was a warlock, she’d thought then, as she had so many times before, because once in bed beside him, her body responded of its own accord. Will herself as she might to remember his cruelties, his jeering grins, she felt all her resolve melt like spring snow the moment he ran his hands down the length of her body. Richard was a skillful lover, there was no doubt of that, and he took great pleasure in watching her respond to his shameful desires even while his flesh took possession of hers.
Eleanor ran one hand over her eyes and sighed softly.
“Tired, my dear?” Ursula laid down her distaff, as though hearing the echo of Eleanor’s thoughts.
Eleanor shrugged. She couldn’t talk to Ursula. How to explain that the man who mistreated them all made her body shiver with unimaginable pleasure? It shamed her to think of it. Instead she managed a tired smile. “Just a bit. It’s so dark, you’d think it was evening.”
“And he’s too cheap to allow a few candles.” Ursula sniffed.
Eleanor said nothing, although she knew Ursula was right. Even the convent where she had spent her childhood was less parsimonious than Richard. The Reverend Mother Abbess might have been strict, but she was never cruel, and although convent life had not been luxurious, it had never been harsh. Even when the harvest was lean and the sisters had had as little to eat as the villeins in the fields, there had always been light enough to read and write and sew and spin.
And certainly Eleanor had never felt like the prisoner she knew herself to be here. Eleanor sighed, momentarily homesick for the place she had spent most of her girlhood. The abbey near Rouen was more home than this stark stone keep overlooking the mountains of Wales.
After her mother died, her father had sent his only child, then five, to his sister on the Continent who had recently been elected Abbess of a quiet convent on the Normany coast. It was a place of whitewashed walls, quiet gardens, a long, high-ceilinged library that smelled of wax and parchment, and the clean refectory scented of herbs.
Even though Eleanor grew to love the quiet serenity of the place, and sometimes spoke of taking vows, she knew her life lay elsewhere, with the man whom the years would bring to her. And whenever the subject had been broached, her aunt had insisted that Eleanor must spend time in the world before she ever contemplated returning to the abbey to take the veil.
Eleanor suspected that the old nun was shrewd enough to realize that her father would have laid siege to the convent before he allowed his daughter’s inheritance to fall so easily into the hands of the Church. If only she’d had the sense to stay there, and hadn’t given in to what she knew now to be girlish fancies sparked by songs of traveling troubadours.
A log sent up a shower of sparks, jarring Eleanor out of her reverie. The past was gone. There was no sense mourning for it. In the end she’d never had a choice. The King had decided her fate, and so she must accept it. At least she wasn’t banished from all she knew to be hers. “It must be nearly time for dinner anyway. Why don’t you put that aside, and I’ll go check—”
Shouts from the courtyard interrupted her. Eleanor paused, wondering what could possibly have happened that the stout wooden shutters did not muffle the noise.
Footsteps pounded up the narrow stairs. Eleanor heard voices calling for her. She threw open the door. “Yes?”
“My lady, my lady, come quickly—” Ralph, the fat, red-faced steward puffed up the steps, his face puckered in distress.
With a worried frown at Ursula, Eleanor gathered up her shabby skirts and followed the little man down the steps. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”
The little man could not answer. He only shook his head and gasped for breath. At the bottom of the steps, Hugh stood, stripping off his cloak, his garments streaming water.
“Hugh!” cried Eleanor, as she took in the scurrying servants, the wide-open doors where the men-at-arms shouted in the courtyard. “What’s happened?”
“The bastard—” Hugh spoke through clenched teeth. “He finally got what he deserved.”
“What—” Eleanor broke off at the sight of men being carried into the hall. Geoffrey de Courville and two men-at-arms were struggling to bring in a heavy form that lay unnaturally still. She reached for Hugh. “What happened? Tell me.”
“My lady.” Geoffrey stood before her, helm in hand, blood and mud streaking his hawk-nosed face. His broad shoulders sagged beneath his chain mail, and his cloak flapped like wet laundry about his legs. His dark, wide-set eyes were shadowed with an expression she could not read. “Will you come?”
She glanced once more at Hugh, who shrugged and turned away. “Will you please tell me what’s happened here, Sir Geoffrey?”
He gestured toward the figures lying on furs and rushes by the hearth. The fire had been hurridly stirred into roaring life, and the flames flickered over the still forms, the servants hurrying from man to man, with wine and bandages and blankets. She allowed him to guide her. “The Welsh, my lady.” His voice was hoarse, his shoulders sagged beneath his cloak. “They’d hidden in the woods—they ambushed us—”
“Tell her why,” Hugh seized the older man’s upper arm and stepped in front of them. “Tell her the truth. Tell her why…tell her what you were all doing, all the terrible things you all did—”
Geoffrey ended the torrent of Hugh’s words with a casual smack to his head. “Keep your opinions to yourself you little priest, and stand aside. What we were doing is none of her concern. Her husband is.”
As Geoffrey and Hugh stared each other in the eye, Eleanor broke away from the men. She hurried over to the hearth, picking her way through the wounded men. Some moaned, some gasped for breath, some lay quiet. All were bloodied. She bent, searching for de Lambert. He lay beside the fire, the shaft of an arrow protruding from his upper chest, a bloody wound at his throat, another arrow in his side surrounded by a spreading stain. His face was ashen in the ruddy light. She touched his chest, and felt no movement beneath her fingers.
“My lady?” It was Ralph, holding a bowl of water, and clean linen over his arm.
She hesitated, held her fingers over de Lambert’s mouth. The lips were bluish. His stubbled beard was a dark shadow on his chin, and she noticed, incongruously, how chiseled those lips were, and the cleft in his chin. He was such a beautiful man; she’d hoped their children would be as handsome. She held her breath, waited for a little puff air on her fingertips.
But none came, and there was no other sign of breathing. Tentatively, grimacing as her fingers
touched the sticky blood from his throat wound, she felt his neck for a pulse. There was nothing.
“I brought water for Lord Richard,” Ralph held out the bowl.
“He’s beyond that, Ralph.” She rocked back on her heels, and wiped her blood-stained hand on de Lambert’s sodden cloak. “Send for the priest. Lord Richard’s dead.”
/> She waited in the hall, watching with curious detachment the women tending the wounded, the men carrying out the dead. When one of the women tripped in the uncertain light, the cry of the wounded man roused her. “Bring candles,” she said to Ralph.
“But, my lady, Lord Richard—”
“Lord Richard’s dead.” It was the fourth or fifth time she’d spoken those words, as though they were a charm, an incantation. Or a prayer, she thought. Hugh sat at the long table on the dais at the far end of the hall, watching with satisfaction. She looked around for de Courville, but he had left to ensure that the manor defenses were sound in case the Welsh were planning an attack.
Ursula was among the women tending the wounded. Every now and then, she raised her eyes to her mistress, and Eleanor met her gaze calmly. Ralph had seen that Richard’s body was placed on a low pallet away from the wounded, and he lay, much the same as he had been brought in. There was no sense in laying out the body until it had been shriven.
The body. It. There, she told herself. That’s all he—it—is. Not your guardian, not your husband. He’s dead, and you’re free. Free as she had never been before. She was twenty-one, and a widow. Not even the king could force her to marry against her will. Oh, he could pressure her perhaps. But she was no longer some helpless minor in need of a guardian to be sold like a milch cow to the highest bidder.
She glanced at Hugh where he sat watching, his gangly legs stretched out before him. His face was hidden in the shadows, but she knew he had not taken his eyes off Richard’s still body since she had announced his death.
The great doors banged open, and with a rush of water, and swirl of wind, the priest, Father Alphonse, stood shaking the rain off his black cloak. “Lady Eleanor?”
Slowly she advanced, and gestured to the body. The priest handed his cloak to a servant who had materialized out of the gloom, and drew a vial of holy water from a pouch at his waist. Over his long black tunic he wore a purple stole around his neck. The ends hung almost to his knees. With his long Norman nose, and thin shoulders hunched against the chill, he reminded Eleanor of a raven dressed for church.
[1997] Once and Future Love Page 2
