by Lisa Hendrix
The denial was on her lips when she realized he’d handed her the key. She grabbed at it. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”
His face lit with pleasure. As she looked up at him, tears welled up out of nowhere, shame at what she was doing to him combined with her ever-increasing fear for Gunnar. “Just take me home. I want to go home.”
“Of course, dearest.” He wrapped his arms around her and held her as she sobbed. For all the tears she’d shed in the years she’d been his wife, these were the first Richard had seen.
He did admirably well with them, stroking her hair, as gentle as a wife could ever hope a husband would be, and it only made her cry harder.
“Forgive me,” she hiccupped between sobs. “I cannot seem to stop.”
“Shh. Shh. Whether you’re with child or not, ’tis clear you need to be home. I will speak to York in the morning.”
York was reluctant, but his lady intervened on Eleanor’s behalf, and they started home as soon as the baggage could be packed and an escort arranged. As much as she wanted to see her mother, Eleanor convinced Richard to hold strictly to the great road and bypass Raby entirely. She held her breath until they reached York, well away from both Lesbury and the dene Gunnar had told her about, and then promptly told Richard her courses had started after all.
As might be expected, he was disappointed—but no more so than she had been every month for the past two years, when her bleeding only served as notice that she must suffer another month of lying with a man she didn’t want. He would surely survive more easily than she had.
With her guilt eased and Gunnar safe, her headache faded away and she began to enjoy the journey a little. The sky was overcast but dry, the hostels overflowed with travelers hurrying to get wherever they were going before the roads turned to mud for the autumn, and Richard seemed somehow less irritating than usual. If not for the presence of her father’s archers, she could almost, almost, imagine she was a good wife to a good man on her way back to a beloved home.
But the weather didn’t hold. The autumn rains finally caught them between Royston and Ware in a downpour that carried the chill of the coming winter in every drop. By the time they found shelter, the entire party, from Richard and Eleanor on down to the lowest porter, was soaked to the skin and shivering. The hostel had good fires, however, and by the time the next morning dawned clear and fair, they were all dry once more.
But as they prepared to mount, Eleanor heard Richard cough. Having struggled with her own lungs after the fire, she immediately put her hand to his forehead. “We should remain here. You can rest a few days.”
“Do I have a fever?” he asked.
“No, but—”
“Then there is no reason to rest.” Richard pulled her hand away from his forehead and pressed a kiss into her palm. “I have a kittle in my throat, is all, and ’tis less than a day to London and but another to Burwash.”
“If this is some misbegotten desire to see me home because I asked you, then please pay it no heed. Whatever was wrong with me has eased since we started back.”
“And I am glad for that.” He tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and turned to lead her toward her palfrey. “But we can be home in two days if we hurry, and I will rest far better in my own bed.”
“Are you certain?”
“As certain as I am that the Earth lies at the center of the Heavens.”
So they pushed to London, where they passed a night with the gray friars. The women were lodged separately from the men, of course, but in the still of the night, Eleanor could hear Richard’s worsening cough echo through the stone cloister. The next morning when they met at the gate, she was shocked by the dark circles under his eyes.
“You are ill. Let me send for a physician.”
“No. I cough only because London’s air is so foul. Give me the fresh air of Burwash and I will be hale soon enough.”
“When did you grow so stubborn?”
“I have learnt it from my lady wife.”
“Then you must know I am stubborn enough to hold you here.” She turned to Richard’s body servant. “Tell the Lord Abbot we need a physician and the use of a chamber for a little longer.”
“Yes, my lady.” The man rushed off without waiting for Richard’s leave, a sure sign he was as concerned as she. The physician soon arrived and, despite Richard’s protests, examined his eyes and throat and listened carefully to his chest.
“You should be bled, my lord,” he said, straightening. His guarded expression made the hair rise on Eleanor’s neck. “And you most definitely should not ride. The air is already chill and there will be frost tonight. It will not be good for your lungs.”
“All the more reason to leave now, so we’re home before the frost lays in.”
“Be sensible, Richard,” urged Eleanor. “We cannot reach Burwash by nightfall when we start so late. Stay here today and rest, and we can leave on the morrow. I will ask the abbot for broth and wine.”
“Why waste his wine when I am so near my own?” He turned to the physician. “This from a woman who was so anxious to return home that we rode the length of England in a fortnight.”
Guilt pricked at Eleanor for the way she’d lied to further her own ends, but there was no way to correct it now. She concentrated on doing right by Richard now, today, and folded her arms stubbornly across her chest. “Ah, but I am fickle as well as stubborn, and I tell you now, I will not ride to Burwash today.”
“Shrew,” said Richard with a grin, but his chuckle set off another round of coughing.
The physician frowned at the way he hacked. “My lord, I must agree with Lady Burghersh.”
“A compromise, then.” Richard wiped the corner of his mouth on his sleeve. “We will go only as far Merton today.”
“Merton? In Surrey?”
“A cousin on my mother’s side has a fine new hall there,” said Richard. “He will provide us with warm beds, and tomorrow when I show you that I am well enough, we will be poised to reach Burwash. Agreed?”
Eleanor looked to the physician and, when he nodded his acceptance, said, “Agreed. And when you show me you are well enough, I will apologize for being a such a shrew in this.”
“That alone will be worth getting well for,” said Richard, a teasing smile curling the corners of his mouth, making her think of how he’d always looked right after he’d put a toad somewhere abominable. “Now, someone kindly ready my horse.”
CHAPTER 16
ON THE FIRST Saturday of the following April, Eleanor stood in the choir of the abbey church at Tewkesbury, and watched them transfer Richard’s body into his finished tomb.
They had never had made it to Burwash. The lung fever had worsened in the course of the short ride to Merton, and unable to continue his pretense of health, Richard had taken to bed immediately. The best physicians were summoned. When their leeches and medicines failed, Eleanor called in the village healers. Their herbs and possets and poultices eased Richard’s breathing, and for a few days, she’d thought they’d won.
But one night he had declined abruptly, sinking into a stupor as his fever raged and boils broke out over his face and chest. Terrified that he suffered from plague, his cousins and the servants refused to come near. It was left to Eleanor and Lucy to sit with him, to feed him, and to clean him when he soiled himself.
They tried everything they or anyone else knew to do, but nothing worked and they were forced to watch him fade away, until near dawn on the seventh day of October, in the year of Our Lord 1414, his dying rattles went silent. He had been two months shy of turning eight-and-ten.
And so Eleanor found herself a widow at barely twenty, and may Heaven forgive her, after these months of mourning, all she could think of as she watched the workmen slide the massive stone lid onto Richard’s tomb was that she was finally, truly, and most blessedly free.
Her childish prayers notwithstanding, she would not have wished Richard dead for all the gold in the Exchequer. But now that he was, law
and custom gave her rights as widow that a maid did not have. She intended to exercise every one of them to its fullest, especially the right to marry as she chose.
She had chosen so long ago …
As the priest began the final prayer commending Richard to Heaven’s care, Eleanor closed her eyes, forced her thoughts back to Richard where they properly belonged, and tried to muster some wifely grief.
She failed. It simply wasn’t in her and had never been.
He had tried to win her heart, he truly had. He’d been generous and kind and had striven to please her, even abed. Yet although she had grown more tolerant of Richard and even found a measure of peace with their marriage, she had never warmed to him, had never had a heart free to give him. Whatever sadness she felt now was for the cousin who had bedeviled her as a boy, for his suffering in his last days, and for the years lost. Not a whit of it was out of the kind of love a wife was meant to have for her husband. Poor Richard. He had never had the best of her.
Now, in death, all he would have of her was this fine tomb and a Mass each day for the next year, both funded from her own purse in an effort to assuage her guilt. With no children of his body and no male relatives in the line, the barony of Burghersh passed to Richard’s younger sister, Isabel, Lady Bergavenny, whose husband would add it to his list of honors. The lands went with the title, of course, less the dower portion that was Eleanor’s to keep. It was a generous portion; her father had seen to that, the one good he had done her in all this.
“Flox crescit et mox evanescit,” said the priest, ending his prayer with the words carved on Richard’s tomb. A flower grows and soon passes away. “In nomine patri et filii et spiritus sancti. Amen.”
“Amen.” She crossed herself and said her thanks to the priest and father abbot. The tomb and masses were already paid for, the keys and accounts in Isabel’s hands, and her own things long since removed to the dower hall at Upton on Severn. It was done.
She stepped outside, unsteady in the giddiness of her new station, and tilted her face up to the bright spring sun. Eyes closed, she drew in her first breath as a fully free woman, sweeter than any air she’d known for years. She wanted to throw her arms out and spin like a child until she was so dizzy she couldn’t stand.
The feeling buoyed her the six and ten miles back to Upton on Severn, right up until the gate of Dunn Hall swung open to reveal the sea of red that filled her yard. Westmorland red.
No. No. No. No. No.
The metallic taste of panic filled Eleanor’s mouth. Her fingers tightened around the reins, ready to wheel her mount away, to run. Only a glimpse of her father’s big bay courser stayed her; the beast could run her mount to ground within a mile, and then what? No, she had to stay and find out what her father wanted, to play his game, whatever it was, until she could find her way clear. God’s knees, but she was tired of games.
“What can he want with you now?” fretted Lucy.
“Perhaps he wants nothing,” said Eleanor, trying to convince her hands to stop trembling before anyone could see. “Perhaps he only comes to visit.”
“Perhaps,” said Lucy doubtfully. “But what if it is more, my lady? What should we do?”
“We will make him welcome, of course. He is my lord father.” She turned a warning eye on Lucy. “And you will say nothing to him of consequence.”
“I will say nothing to him at all if I can help it, my lady. And I will smile while not saying it. But—”
“Then put on your smile,” said Eleanor as they rode through the gate. Now, if only I can do the same.
Of course she could. A smile was a simple thing compared to some of what she’d had to do over the past years. So as the door of the hall opened—her hall, curse it, her hall—and her father strolled out like he owned the place, she conjured a broad, welcoming smile out of naught but thin air and sunbeams and turned it on him.
“My lord! Welcome.” She let a groom help her down, then shook the dust out of her skirts before she approached to do courtesy. “Forgive me for not being here to welcome you properly.”
“You had good reason.” Westmorland stood aside so she could enter the hall past some of the selfsame archers she’d sent home last fall in one of her first acts as widow. “I take it Richard is properly laid to rest now.”
Her smile fell away and she stripped off her gloves. “Aye. At his father’s side.”
“You should have had him put elsewhere. Thomas le Despenser was a traitor and a fool.”
“And he was Richard’s father. It is what my husband wished. I owed him that honor.” She passed her gloves and traveling cloak to the serving woman who stood by silently. “When did you arrive, my lord?”
“Midday. I thought to ride out to meet you, but I was told you would be back by halfway Nones. You are late.”
“My mare picked up a stone. I am starved, Lucy. Have them lay the tables immediately.”
“I would prefer to sup alone with you,” said Westmorland.
Alone. The last time she’d been alone with her father, he’d beaten her half senseless. Ignoring the phantom pain that throbbed in her cheek and nose, she turned to Lucy. “Have our meal carried up to the solar. And we shall have a measure of the Poitou wine, as well.”
The corner of Lucy’s eyes tightened, but she smiled and nodded. “Yes, my lady.”
Upstairs, Eleanor settled into her chair with a sigh that belied the knot in her shoulders and motioned her father toward the other, a subtle gesture that reaffirmed her as lady and he as guest. “’Tis good to be home, even though I have been gone only the one night. My lady mother is well, I hope?”
“Very. She insists she will birth this one by the end of the month, the sooner to try the new mare I bought her.”
“A new mare? Oh, tell me about her.”
Family and horses—he’d also presented young William with his first mount—provided safe talk through the meal as servants carried dishes in and out. At last a plate of honey cakes arrived, and as the boy left and pulled the door shut behind him, Westmorland pointed at Eleanor’s middle. “I was hoping to find you round with a posthumous child. Richard had better than two years to get you breeding. Did he not do his duty as husband?”
“Richard’s dedication to the task was never in question, my lord. Nor was mine, if that was your next question. We swived like pigs every night the Church did not forbid it.” She met her father’s rude bluntness with her own just to watch his eyes widen in shock. “I never caught. It seems I am barren.”
“I questioned that, but your mother says it is too soon to know. Pray you are not, lest you leave Alnwick without an heir, too.”
“Alnwick?” A chill settled over Eleanor, colder than the rain that had killed Richard. There it was, the reason he had come in person. “You mean for me to marry Henry Percy.”
“I do. ’Twas Bedford’s idea, but I favor it, as does your mother. The two of you are well suited, and it will help us bring Percy back into the fold. We need his influence with Albany and …”
Her father’s voice faded away, muffled by the drumming of Eleanor’s heart. Not again. And not Henry. Never Henry. Oh, poor Lucy. How could her mother be a part of this, knowing it would break Lucy’s heart? How could Henry? Unless he intended to marry her in order to have Lucy within easy reach. Was he truly so scurvy?
As her thoughts raced, Westmorland watched her as though she were a mouse and he an owl, his sharp eyes all but daring her to speak one word of protest, to show one glimmer of refusal.
But she had learned much about hiding her true feelings in the past three years, so even as her dismay turned to fury, she let a slow smile spread over her face. “Will Henry come here, or shall I go to him?”
“You are in agreement, then?” He sounded vaguely surprised he’d won her over so easily.
“Why would I not be, my lord? He is Percy of Northumberland, and he is my friend, Henry. As little as he and I have been around each other, we have always found ourselves like-minded.” She gra
sped at bits of honesty where she could find them, the better to hide the larger lie. “An alliance between our two houses can do nothing but good for both. A woman would have to be a fool not to welcome such a match.”
“Exactly what your mother said.”
“I assume you—and she—have plans for bringing the earldom back.” A knowing smile curved her lips. “Perhaps a request from my lady to convince her nephew, the king, to return the county to Henry?”
“Already written and awaiting her seal. I will send it by fast horse as soon as you are wed. I doubt it will be a struggle. The king and Percy were fast friends as boys. The king is much disposed to forgiving what his father was so anxious to punish.”
“I’m sure Henry will be appropriately grateful. And if he is not, I will remind him. When is this all to happen?”
“I will carry you to Raby straightaway to help your mother with the birthing, and then on to Durham to meet with Henry and sign the contract. You can marry in the cathedral there.”
“That would be agreeable, but …” She tilted her head as if a new thought had struck her. “Would it not be better if we marry in Alnwick? The village has a lovely church, and if I am to be Countess of Northumberland, I should marry on county soil, before Henry’s people. It will better serve his cause with them. And thus our own.” And give her that much more time to find a way out of this snare.
“Quite right. Quite right,” said Westmorland, rubbing his hands together. His clear avarice almost made Eleanor laugh aloud. His plans to bend Richard to his will had been one thing, but did he truly think he could trifle with a Percy? “You have become quite cunning in your widowhood, Eleanor.”
“I have had good instruction, my lord,” she said blandly. “Now, your pardon, but I must retire. I am tired from my journey and must rise early to begin preparation for the next.”
“Of course.” He rose with her and held his arms wide. “Come to me, Eleanor. It has been too long since I had a kiss from you.”
Of course he would want a kiss, if for no other reason than to prove she was well and truly in his palm. Once more the lessons she’d learned with Richard came into use, as she went easily into his arms and made him believe the kisses she traded with him were sincere. For an instant as he looked down at her, his smile seemed to hold honest affection, almost as though he loved her as a daughter and not as a pawn on his chessboard. Alas, she didn’t believe it for a moment.
