"What a delightful idea,” she said, rising gracefully from what would have been an awkward sitting position for him. Her hem caught on her girdle link, baring one shapely leg all the way to her thigh. His appreciation of her womanly contours was nudged aside by his sudden wanting of this woman who was now his. Only an acquired refinement was able to subdue what Brother Thomas had designated as “the dark animal that lurks within every man's depths.”
“Change into something more—something simpler,” he said, “while I have our mounts saddled.”
She did more than change into a simple linsey-woolsey tunic; she prepared a basket of cheeses and fruits, along with a sheepskin boleta of wine. Her joyous smile, her high spirits, were infectious.
They mounted and left the chateau, heading for the far meadows where ponds reflected diamond sunlight and trees flourished like Irish clover.
While she spread their repast beneath a shady oak, he set out to rig two poles. Baldwyn had told him that bream and pike as large as beavers were stocked in the pond.
“'Tis been so long since I last fished,'' she said, coming up behind him to take one of the poles. “Since I was maybe twelve and hooked more fish than Baldwyn.” Deftly, she secured the line and hook. "After that he refused to take me.”
A noblewoman fish? Her capabilities were truly astonishing. He eyed her askance as she seated herself in a grassy spot beneath an oak and dangled her line.
She saw his bothered expression and smiled. "We women are not the weaker sex, you know, Paxton.”
"I did not say you were.”
"Ah, but I can tell from your expression and your demeanor that you think so. I know well how the Dominican Inquisitors word it. ‘The cunning enemy Satan seduces a member of the weaker sex, who is inconsistent, wavers easily in her faith, is malicious, and has no control over her feelings and instincts.' ”
He had to smile at her deep-throated parody of a priest. "Mayhap, my lady, you are overly defensive. The Dominican friars could have been referring to the male.”
"Aha! Then you will freely admit the male is the weaker sex?”
"I admit nothing.” He chuckled. His wife was utterly and charmingly unpredictable, and he watched her, fascinated, waiting for what next her ingenious mind would produce.
She fixed him with a saucy look. "Do you likewise disavow the charge that Peter’s thrice-repeated denied of Christ was actually that of the voice of a woman?”
He dropped his pole and took hers, laying it aside. "I will admit only that if any woman could perform such a feat, it would be you. You have captivated me from the very beginning, Dominique.”
She aligned her hands on either side of his face and stared at him solemnly. "I know. I experienced the same when first I beheld you as a beggar. That tug at my innermost being. Ridiculous but true, Paxton.”
He splayed his hand over the small mound of her belly. A gentle warmth spread through him, a feeling of being home, although home, he would have said, was Pembroke. "This child of ours—”
"This daughter—”
"This daughter of ours, you will raise her to be like yourself?”
"You want that? For her to be like me?”
"Very much.” And then he could contain his desire no longer, and his hand deserted her stomach to slip beneath her skirts and find the moistness there. There was home. All the home he would ever need.
"Paxton only married you to better cement his authority of his newly acquired fiefdom,” Esclarmonde taunted. "The entire county of Montlimoux knows that.”
As much as Dominique regretted seeing Francis return to Avignon, she could only rejoice in his sister's imminent departure with him on the morrow. Dominique had been doing her best to be agreeable with this long-term guest, but annoyance got the best of her. "You are merely disgruntled because Paxton did not want you.”
The two women, along with Dominique’s maids-in-waiting, were wandering through the stalls set up for the annual trade fair at Montlimoux. The hubbub was diverting. The tables in the cloth hall were a kaleidoscope of colors. From the spice market could be heard the traditional call of "Hare! Hare!” From the pungent district of stalls came the smell of the fish merchants, the butchers, the linen makers, and most noxious of all, the tanners.
Esclarmonde smiled slyly. "Did not marry me, mayhap. Marriage ties, after all, are based on political calculation. But want? Can you say truly that Paxton does not want me?” Her lower lip made a mocking moue. "Tell me, Dominique, do you truly know what Paxton does with all his hours?”
Dominique would not let the vindictive woman spoil the growing pleasure she was taking in her marriage. Paxton was an attentive lover, with a delightfully lingering hand and his wry humor was totally unsuspected. His abbot had done well in instilling a measure of knowledge about a variety of subjects, so that they often conversed into the wee hours of the morning. Only the thought of Denys, imprisoned and mutilated, marred these first perfect weeks as Paxton's bride. "I have faith in my husband.”
"Tell me, is he as faithful to you as he was to his first wife?”
Dominique felt as if she had been hit in the stomach. She stopped, closed her eyes, and drew a fortifying breath, then waved away her maids. In a low voice, she asked, "What are you saying, Esclarmonde?”
"Are you slow of wit? That your beloved husband has been married before.”
"How do you know this?”
The blond young woman shrugged prettily and turned away to fasten her attention on an accumulation of costly pearls brought by Arab dhow and pack train. They were spread on black velvet like tempting, but untouchable, stars. "The soldiers. They talk.”
The hurt Dominique felt was unbearably heavy. Despite her love for Paxton, he was so closed off, so unsharing of his inner self.
Would she always be an outsider with her own husband?
She waited until after Paxton returned from stag hunting and had eaten. They were alone in the bedchamber. She sat on the great bed, staring at him as he removed his doublet and tunic. Clad only in his hose, his battle-honed body had the power to take her breath away. She dragged her gaze from his muscular chest and fixed it on his face. The way he smiled at her now, how had she ever found that face plain?
He knelt before her. "So solemn? I know. I forgot to bring you a chaplet today to crown your cindre hair. But I brought you something much better.”
The teasing gleam in his eye made resistance impossible. "What did you bring me, Paxton?”
He opened one large hand. A small gray pouch lay in his palm. "Look inside.”
Tentatively, she reached out to grasp the velvet bag by its draw cords.
"Pearls,” he told her, too impatient to wait for her to unveil his gift. "From the deepest seas.”
She spilled the pearls into her palm. "How did you know about—”
"Jacotte. When I asked your maid-in-waiting what caught your interest at the fair today, she told me you and Esclarmonde had stopped at the pearl stall.”
Dominique stared at the opalescent orbs so she would not have to judge the truth in her beloved’s countenance. Her words were barely a breath on her trembling lips. “Paxton, I want to know about your previous marriage.” She saw the ridges made by an abruptly clenching fist. "So you know.”
"Is your . . . you are not still married, are you?”
He rose and turned from her. "No. I am not still married.” He paused, then said, "Elizabeth is dead.”
A portion of her turmoil evaporated. "Why have you not told me of this, Paxton?” she asked. And the next in words of pain, "Why did I have to learn this from someone else?”
“‘Tis no one’s business but mine.”
"You are wrong, Paxton!” She sprang from the bed and slung the pearls like chicken feed. "On our wedding night you spoke of no more separation. Well, pray tell, what do you call this?”
He rounded on her. "This is my past. It has nothing to do with you and me.”
"Do you still love her?”
"No.”
“Did you love her?”
His head lowered. "Aye, at one time.”
"Tell me about her.” Did jealousy prompt her question? "Was she from your village, from Wychchester?”
“No. She was the Earl of Pembroke’s daughter.”
"The Earl—he had the people of your village murdered! And you married his daughter?"
He rubbed his fist into his other palm. "I had meant to seduce her—an act of revenge. But, before I knew it, Elizabeth had become an obsession with me. So beautiful. So un-touchable. I thought. And so passionate when at last I possessed her."
"How did she die?"
He stared at her stonily. "She was murdered."
"Murdered?” she whispered. "How?”
"It matters not. The fact is she is dead and our marriage is legal in the eyes of the Church.” His words came too rapidly. He caught her by her shoulders. "You are my wife, Dominique.”
His kiss hurt her, a possessive kiss that she struggled against Struggled and lost. His touch bathed her in bliss, however fleeting it was. Perhaps he was the sorcerer. She understood the power of sexuality, but this was something more, something that would take more than her will to withstand.
That certain "something” came to her in a dream later that night. She awoke with remnants of the dream meandering like the breeze through her sleep and lingering briefly on her conscious thought. "In chess, the Queen is free to move in any direction.”
She understood the import of the dream’s message. She had the power to do anything, if she wanted to badly enough. But was she truly queen?
Beside her, Paxton slept deeply, his arm heavily and reassuringly draped across her ribs. She could feel the crisp hair of his legs on her. Such delight to be taken in one's opposite!
The morning brought the departure of Francis and Esclarmonde. Their pack train was lengthy enough to flow out of the bailey, span the drawbridge, and creep down the village road. With Francis's leave-taking, Dominique felt, as she always had, that she was losing her last touch with civilization. Nevertheless, Paxton's gaze was upon her and made her farewell brief. Esclarmonde would have prolonged hers with Paxton, her hand tarrying overlong on his sleeve, but John Bedford interrupted the adieu.
He drew Paxton aside. His voice was low, but his words were obviously urgent. Dominique watched Paxton’s countenance darken. The muscles in his jaw tensed. He issued some order to John, who hastened away.
"What is it, Paxton?”
He flicked her an inquiring look. "Your friend, Denys. He has escaped his dungeon cell.”
At once, Paxton left with John and a few soldiers to scour the woods and nearby mountains for Denys. Her husband had given her the briefest of good-byes, and she sensed he suspected her of engineering Denys’s escape. She feared for her friend’s life. This time Paxton would certainly not spare it.
By evening, Paxton had not returned. Now she feared for him. What if Denys managed to ambush Paxton and his men in one of those narrow mountain files? Paxton did not know the lay of the land as Denys did.
Bored, worried, restless, she wandered down to her laboratory, where she had not been since Denys's imprisonment. Whatever relief she expected to find in her alchemical work was immediately quenched by the sight of Arthur. Its feline body lay upon the counter. A swath of dried blood semi-ringed its furry neck.
CHAPTER XV
Observing Dominique as she ministered to Hugh, who lay coughing with the ague, Paxton supposed he should be filled with admiration at the demonstration of her skill and her compassionate touch.
More often than not, though, he found himself dismayed and a trifle uneasy at the continuing revelations of heretofore undiscovered facets to her. It was unsettling enough that she read and wrote as well as any man and that she made him earn his victories at chess. Quite indomitable, willful, incorrigible, she challenged his forbearance.
Clearly, she was a pagan. Her interest in alchemy was a conjuring of nature’s dark secrets best left alone. Those trances she went into, calling them "meditation periods,” confounded him. Before their marriage she had been intriguing but now he found her a vexation.
Yet the idea of anyone else possessing her was . . . he pushed the thought from his mind.
Overcome by the reek of the mustard poultice she applied to Hugh’s chest, he fled the boy’s room and headed for the Justice Room.
John's mailed steps caught up with him in the corridor. "Denys is at it again. He and his routiers looted a pack train from the Mediterranean this time.”
Paxton rubbed his jaw with the heel of his hand. The knife had shaved dully this morning but then the shaving had been by perforce a hurried act.
"Last week,” John continued, "he set fire to the granaries in the hamlet of Briebaux.” Still that urge to turn and see if Arthur followed. Paxton missed that hissing ball of fur. When he apprehended Bontemps, the routier would this time pay with his own life for killing Arthur. "Get together a contingent of men,” he told John. "I shall set out after sunrise, at the ringing of the prime bells.” The Justice Room was doorway deep with petitioners. He sighed. He had thought he was blessed with patience. Patience to wait stealthily for the stag to drink from the pond. Patience to wait for the enemy to make that one false move. Patience to outwit a chess opponent, to sacrifice small pawns, for the capture of the opponent's queen.
Yet this kind of waiting was a trial of endurance that taxed him to the limit. Listening to the haggling, the mundane and petty complaints for hours on end when he wanted to feel the sunlight on his skin and stretch his kinked muscles in a round of jousting or chopping firewood wore on him. Was he truly qualified to rule a fiefdom justly?
Dominique taxed his patience also. The wench was becoming prone to throwing things more often. He supposed her volatile temperament was due to his child she carried. An image of her, silhouetted against the light of dawn in their bedchamber, taunted him even in that crowded room of peasants and bourgeoisie: her belly softly rounded; her breasts full, straining with her milk. On his tongue, the taste would be tart and tantalizing. So tantalizing he could not forsake those generous breasts this morning in time to sit through a proper shave.
When midday arrived, he abruptly ended the administrative tasks in favor of preparation for the forthcoming expedition. Forsaking the noonday meal, he went to find the blacksmith sweating over his fire.
Bertrand's smile displayed his missing teeth. "You be needing a lantern forged for whiling away your nights with the chatelaine, messire?”
He chuckled. "No, I shall need forged a pair of spurs by the morrow's sunrise, Bertrand. Knitting needles have sharper points than these spurs' rowels.”
Dominique appeared in the doorway. Dust particles floating in the sunlight made her seem as if she were a shimmering apparition. "I learned from Baldwyn that in the Justice Room today you confined the miller's wife to the stocks for adultery.”
Her terse tone told him she was highly annoyed, which puzzled him. "Aye, that I did. Better a period in the stocks than to cut off her nose or to lash her naked through the streets.”
She put her hands on her hips. "Alieson was only getting her revenge on her husband. The miller has been taking his pleasure with every willing woman in the village for months now.”
He found his temper growing shorter than a burnt candlewick. "A wife without chastity is a criminal blot on the husband’s escutcheon.”
Her eyebrows shot up. She put her hands on her hips. “So, you are saying that female virtue is the counterpart to male honor?"
“I shall not have my decisions in the Justice Room questioned, even by you.”
“You, sire, are insufferably highhanded!” She dared criticize him before a vassal. In England, a man would throttle a woman for such disrespect. He could not understand her, this strange woman. His teeth clenched. The blood in his ears pounded out his anger. He drew a deep breath that helped check his runaway fury. Without a glance at her, he stalked past her and out of the stables.
That night he did not sleep in their bed-chamber but stayed below in the Great Hall, drinking with his men and falling asleep on a proffered pallet. His last thought before sleep caught up with him was that his wife was an affront to his masculine ego. She may have been accustomed to ruling her domain, but he was now Grand Seneschal of Montlimoux —and she was his wife.
Clearly, he would have to see that Dominique mended her ways.
Nothing was going right these days.
Dominique’s fiefdom was no longer the peaceful countryside it once was. Violent winds and heavy rainstorms harassed the county, the granaries were being overrun by rats, and, worse, Denys was sowing dissatisfaction among the peasants. This time, Paxton had sworn not to return until he had Denys in chains. She wished Denys would abandon this vow of revenge and take sanctuary in another country.
More importantly, she fretted for Paxton's safety, and chaffed at how they had parted without reconciling their differences.
The problem was, their differences were so great that reconciliation was an improbability. This man to whom she was joined mentally, physically, and emotionally . . . there had to be a bridge of light to reach him spiritually as well. With such a union, she was sure they would experience a rapture greater than any bliss brought them by the joinings of their bodies.
But how did you communicate with a man who was aware only of his physical body? Who did not realize that fighting weakens while harmony strengthens?
And why did she have to love him as she did?
She tried to tell herself that he was a soldier, trained for violence and brutality, but she had to acknowledge that he had brought to fruition many of the plans she had conceived for Montlimoux, that he had a humor that always caught her off guard, that he was sometimes capable of tenderness though he would deny it vehemently.
Well, she had had enough of her misfortunes. She could only be thankful that the Summer Solstice was upon them.
Finished with her herb-gathering, she collected her straw basket. When she went to rise from the garden row, she winced at the sudden stitch in her side. With a gasp, she pressed her hand against the pain. Most likely, she had been kneeling in an ungainly position.
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