"What is it?” Iolande asked, coming up from behind her.
She sighed. “Either you are becoming lighter on your feet in your old age or I am becoming less in tune with my surroundings.”
The old woman’s eyes peered at her from beneath their hooded lids. "You are in pain?”
"No longer. Truly.” With a tender smile, she placed her hand on her swelling belly. "Just a stitch in my side, that is all. That I would willingly endure a hundredfold for the sake of the babe.”
Only then did she notice that Iolande’s mouth had taken on a tighter grimace than usual. If eyes could ache, the old woman's eyes looked as if they did. She touched her nursemaid’s brittle wrist, its skin veined with purple. "You have always wanted your own child, have you not, Iolande?”
She sniffed like a sweating wrestler on fair day. "A child? Nothing but a whelp with a snotty nose and a dung-smeared bottom.”
"If what you proclaim is true, then why did you care for me so lovingly?”
The old woman’s mouth crimped downward. "Duty. 'Twas my duty.”
"I do not believe you. I believe you wanted a child so much your insides were torn with the wanting.”
Silent tears blurred eyes already blurred by age. The old woman stared at nothing but the past. "Yes, my insides were torn. Torn from repeated raping.”
Dominique gasped, but Iolande appeared not to hear. Her knotted fingers interwound around each other in a slow dance of emotional pain. "I was young, not yet of twenty years. And pampered. I was descended from a royal family of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Nothing more than a name, really. But our fortress at St. Jean d'Acre rivaled those of Languedoc. Then one afternoon, a party of crusaders stormed our gates. Because we were Jewish, we were agents of Satan. Or so the one said, the one who first raped me.”
"Enough!” Dominique cried, blocking her ears with her hands and shutting her eyes.
The old woman continued in a bitter tone. "I was locked in a tower room for almost a year. The crusaders brought me food and watched while I relieved my bodily functions —and availed themselves of me when they pleased. Their brutality ended any hopes of childbearing. The savagery of those Holy Wars, God damn the popes and their self- righteous adherents!”
Dominique was weeping raggedly. She threw her arms around the woman. "I love you, Iolande!”
The old woman shrugged her off. "As I said, babes are a nuisance.”
"You have not forgot 'tis Summer Solstice?” Baldwyn asked.
Dominique sighed and laid aside the manuscript of Marie de France's poems. Her romances were full of Celtic atmosphere and made use of Arthurian materials, but Dominique was nowhere nearer understanding her English husband. "No, I have not, Baldwyn. I shall make my appearance in the village for the celebration. I swear.”
Summer Solstice was the longest day of the year, and for as long as the Provencal people could remember, the occasion had been celebrated. The longest day of the year was looked forward to as a source of joy and renewal. Come eventide large bonfires would be lit. In the square of Montlimoux the villagers would gather to laugh and dance and wait for the ruling comtessa to pass among them, distributing coins and fruit.
This evening, for the first time in centuries, a man and not a woman should have been presiding over Summer Solstice, but Paxton had not returned. So Dominique donned the best of her looser fitting tunics and, with John at her side, her maids-in-waiting, and retainers riding behind, rode down to the village square.
"The Celtics of our country celebrate this day, also,” John told her, as they watched the flames leaping high, the firelight dancing eerily over the faces of the villagers. "But it has a more mystical value.” He grinned. "Spirits and that sort of knavery.”
"You do not believe in the mystical?”
In his narrow face, his eyes seemed to reflect the dance of the fire, and their blue centers were as heated, for his gaze had often turned back to Beatrix, riding demurely behind them. "I do not accept the rumors that sorcery is the wellspring of thy power, my Lady Dominique, if that is what ye mean.”
"Tis no sorcery, John,” she said gently. “’Tis the power that comes from within me . . . from within you. The Divine gift. You have merely forgotten the gift.”
He genuflected, and his voice was as impassioned as the horror of his expression. "Ye know, my Lady Dominique, I shall guard your very life with my own, but I beg ye not to speak as ye do.”
She began to feel that sighing was about the only thing she could freely do these days. She seemed to have not one iota of control of her reactions. How could this have come to pass, how could she have handed over the reins of personal power so easily?
With the merriment of the festivities, the evening went quickly enough, and soon it was time to return to the chateau. Everyone in her party was yawning and yearning for their beds. All but she.
Once she closed her chamber door on John, she summoned Baldwyn to her. The Templar’s massive body lent reassurance to her nocturnal objective. "I have fresh mounts ready, my lady.”
She nodded. "Midnight is rapidly approaching. The night was lovely, with stars marking the passage of time across the vast heavens. The heaviness began to slip from her as she and Baldwyn made the trek to the traditional ceremonial site for the de Bar Summer Solstice. A rocky, climbing path and tall firs hinted at the higher elevation that made the stars seem within a distance of a mere fortnight’s journey.
She would be there sooner. Tonight, in fact.
The air was fragrant and cool, cool enough to build the bonfires. Together, she and Baldwyn gathered branches and twigs and piled them in small mounds that formed a path across the moonlit clearing. By striking a fire iron against flint, the Templar lit fires. Soon smoke spindled upward from each mound. Crackling and snapping of the wood punctuated the silence of the deep night.
The two sat and watched the play of the flames, watched until the mounds burned low and flickered to embers. The heat they gave off was still enough to warm her face. Soon the embers disintegrated into hot ash, pulsating with energy. That energy was the life force, the bonfire the symbolic energy cleanser.
"Ready?” Baldwyn asked.
She nodded.
He hefted his bulk from the ground and crossed to his mount to remove from his saddle the short rake he had brought along. While he racked the glowing cinders, she removed her leather slippers and hose. Minutes later, he was finished raking. He had leveled the red ash into a glowing, carpeted walkway.
She stood at one end of the walkway and closed her eyes. A circle of pastel, a lovely, lovely purple, began to expand on the backs of her lids, filling her inner vision. From within the circle, a white light began its own expansion so that she was completely filled with its purity. A serenity spread through her, insulating her and her unborn child from harm. In that blaze of white light, she came in contact with her spirit, surrendered her will.
The transformation was beginning as was her fire walk. Her state of mind transcended her body, transcended pain, refused to register painful signals. How long it took her to transverse the cinder carpet, she had no idea. She simply knew when she reached the far end, a glorious feeling suffused her. Smiling, tears in her eyes, she opened her arms wide and whispered, "I am! I am!”
Whether the fire walk put an end to the random misfortunes, as was claimed the ritual could accomplish, she did not know. But she did indeed feel renewed. Overflowing with joy and good will, she turned to glance back along the cinder carpet she had walked, and then looked back to Baldwyn.
She found him—and alongside him John. Then her gaze collided with Paxton’s.
His anger blazed across the intervening distance. Her serenity destroyed, she avoided the cinders as she walked toward the three men. Paxton was already striding toward her. His every step was like a thudding hammer on her heart. When he was almost upon her, she said, "You do not understand what you witness—”
His hands shot out to grab her shoulders. He shook her so hard her head snapped b
ack and forth. "Have you lost your mind? If you ever had one. The peasants are right. You are not normal. You are not like everyone el—”
She jerked away. "Even a common serf should know that what the mind thinks is possible—is!”
"The fact that I had been a serf did not bother you enough to keep you from my bed or to keep me from siring my child in you!”
"You fear woman’s life-giving power,” she taunted him. "For whoever can give life can take it away!”
Pain and fury contorted his face. His hand lashed out, and she staggered with the impact and fell to her knees. The hot cinders barely had time to sear her palms, before Paxton was scooping her into his arms. "Dominique, ma mignon, I am so—"
Whatever he had been about to say was cut short by Baldwyn's massive hand clamping on his shoulder. "I shall take my Lady Dominique.”
Hampered by the burden of his wife, Paxton could only shrug off the hand. "She is my wife, Templar. I shall care for her.”
John stepped in between the two. "Hold off, both of you!”
Something of the anguish in Paxton’s face must have reached through to Baldwyn. "See that you do, Englishman. ‘Tis your life in balance.”
On the return trip, she rode cradled in Paxton's arms. The hard, steady beat of the horse’s hooves commingled with that of his heart to echo through her ear, pressed against his chest. The thudding reverberated through her body to fill her, fill her so completely there was nothing else but him. This warrior was the man she was destined to love.
When they arrived at the chateau, he carried her into their bedchamber and gently lowered her onto their bed. Iolande pushed past him. "You are all right?” the old woman asked and took her hand.
Dominique winced, and Paxton rolled his eyes. "She burnt her hands, Iolande.”
The Jewess shot her a puzzled look.
"I lost my balance,” Dominique explained. Gingerly, Iolande turned over Dominique's palms. Blisters bubbled the flesh. “I shall make up a salve.”
After Iolande departed, Paxton said, "Dominique, I let my anger get the better of my will. I ask that you—”
She shut off the flow of his words with her finger. "Not now, please. Words . . . They are nothing. You are a soldier, a warrior, a fighter. A man of action. Later . . . show me what it is you want to tell me.”
His eyes darkened with the agony her words inflicted. He took her hand and kissed the burnt fingertip she had held against his lips. "Later, then.”
Later brought tremendous pain ripping through her. In a feverish haze, she felt Iolande’s cool hand on her forehead, she sensed Paxton at her side, but the pain in her stomach overwhelmed all else.
She was losing the babe. Their babe. She could not even be four months into her term. She overheard Iolande saying, "The babe did not take hold. It was not meant to be. . . .” Then darkness was all around Dominique. Stifling air. Disagreeable voices. An argument. Paxton closing the windows for her health, Iolande battling to keep them open. An exchange of words about leeches and bloodletting. Iolande’s adamant refusal.
From afar, she heard Paxton’s voice now. The one word: "Witch.”
She tried to deny it, but no words would come. She tried to fix her will, to affirm her perfect health, but the blood ebbing out of her drained her of all strength. Then at last, at last, blessed oblivion.
Sweat dripped from John's face onto Beatrix's ecstatic one. The rhythm of their pumping bodies was fast and furious. Mayhap, he could persuade the countess to let the country lass return with him to England for a spell. "For all your rutting, John, your arse resembles more a boar's than a stallion's.”
Taken by surprise, John shot back onto his knees. “Paxton! What the hell—”
Paxton's laugh was grim. “You have better things to do them seduce country wenches, Captain Bedford. Meet me in the Justice Room.”
John scrambled into his clothing and, bestowing a peck on Beatrix’s bewildered face, hurried off to the Justice Room to meet with his commander. The big man was pacing like an unsettled mastiff. “Trouble, Paxton?”
"Aye, trouble. Denys Bontemps is slitting the throats of Montlimoux cattle and peasants alike. He is as elusive as a field mouse and as dangerous as a Pyrenees bear. I leave again to go after him.”
John decided to risk the truth. "To go after him—or to escape yeself.”
"Myself?”
“Aye, yeself.”
Paxton planted his hands on the desk. "Now listen to me. We are here for one purpose only. Not to fertilize the Languedoc maidens with English brats. Not to come to terms with my past. Only to prepare for Edward’s invasion.”
John recognized the clenched jaw and flaring nostrils as a sign for him to retreat from the subject he had introduced. "Do you really think the French will accept a foreign ruler, Paxton?”
He shrugged his massive shoulders. "We English have always had foreign kings. Nor-mans, Germans, Scotch, Welsh, Angevines. And we are none the worse for it. At the most, a few French barons might have to yield to English ones.”
"Me thinks that not everyone will yield to us. Not Denys Bontemps—nor the Comtessa de Bar.”
Paxton's mouth flattened into that adamant line that John recognized as intolerant of interference. "I will prevail, Captain Bedford. Believe this if nothing else.”
"Paxton has gone out riding, my Lady Dominique.”
She turned her gaze from John’s soulful eyes and stared up at the ceiling. "My Lord Lieutenant is restless these days.”
He shifted from one foot to the other. "There are many administrative matters to attend to around the county, my lady.”
She pushed herself up in the bed and closed her eyes at the dizziness that overtook her. Three days abed was too much.
“Please, sit down, John.” When he remained standing, staring at the tiled pattern of the floor, she said, "Please? I need so to understand your lieutenant. My husband. John, I know you care for him greatly. I love him, too. Please help me to understand him!”
Reluctantly, John went to fetch a stool from a corner of the room. He sat beside her, clasped his hands dangling between his spread legs, his gaze fixed on her embroidered coverlet. "What is it ye wish to know, my lady?”
She wrapped her arms around her knees. "What drives Paxton now? What drives him at all? His anger, it frightens me.”
John’s mouth tightened. "That night you fire-walked. You must understand that he was secretly afraid of what it could mean.”
"I know he does not understand me. But does he even understand himself? Oh, John, I know he must be suffering at the loss of our child, but so am I!” The pain of that loss was like an open wound. It was as if she could actually feel the blood seeping, seeping, from it. Her heart hurt!
"Aye, he is suffering.” John raised an abashed gaze to hers. "But 'tis more to it than the loss of the wee one, my lady.”
"I know. You do not have to say it. I should never have taunted him about woman's life- giving power. Tis just that since men cannot experience birthing directly they fear us, they fear that separation they remember from birth.”
John's smile was wan. "I do not understand ye either, my lady.”
Her short laugh was mildly self-derisive. "I expect not. But I know that I am meant to learn something from this relationship I have entered into with Paxton of Wychchester. And I sorely need your enlightenment, John.”
He seemed to be concentrating on the way his thumbs interplayed with each other. His words were almost mumbled as he broke his silence about his commander. "Well, ye see, my lady, Paxton’s wife—”
“Elizabeth of Pembroke?”
"Aye. She was highborn, French on her mother’s side. Provencal French. As I under-stand it, Elizabeth was enchanting and fun-loving but, also frivolous and self-centered.” He stopped, but she knew there was more he could say. "Go on,” she prompted.
"A story is told about her as a girl, about a trick she played upon her dowager aunt. The old lady had a lap dog that she adored like her own child.
Anyway, one day when the aunt was watching from a balcony overlooking the nearby river, Elizabeth picked up the dog and pretended to play with it. She wandered closer to the river, calling the dog. Then, when near the bank's shrubbery, she screamed that the dog had jumped from her arms into the river. The aunt saw the animal being carried away by the swift current, and fainted."
"’T’was no accident?”
"Actually, the animal floating down the river was not a dog but a piglet Elizabeth had pilfered from a family of the demesne’s serfs and substituted for the lap dog behind the concealment of the shrubbery. The old dowager was delighted to discover her lap dog safe, but the family of serfs lost a piglet that would have provided for many meals. To them, it was a great loss.”
"As Paxton’s wife, she was still as fun-loving?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I suppose ye could call it that. Up to the time she found she was with child.” He made a grimace. "Ye see, she went to a midwife to rid herself of Paxton’s unborn babe.”
Dominique's held breath rushed from her. "Oh, no.” She could better understand Paxton's attitude. Could understand he had learned to hide his vulnerability, especially those who could wound him most; those in a position to become dear to him. Nevertheless, she was still hurt by his inability to trust her.
A full four weeks passed, four weeks of grieving and recovery, four weeks of rejection, of barely speaking should she and Paxton pass in the corridors of the immense chateau. Her soul was hurting, desolate and crying out for communication with him.
One night, she lay alone, awake when all the countryside slept. Tears that had quietly and willfully spilled over her lids had left dried tracks on her cheeks. Suddenly, candlelight stole across the room to blind her. She put up a shielding hand.
Paxton stood at the foot of her bed. The light of the candle he held shimmered over the muscles and tendons of his naked body. "I tried to stay away, Dominique. But the traditional six weeks, 'tis too long.” The slightest smile tugged at his mouth. "You have been like a plague in my thoughts, giving me no rest.”
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