Almost Innocent

by Jane Feather

  “He will not forget again,” Magdalen said grimly as de Gervais lifted her onto her horse. “And if he is forbidden to sup in the great hall, I am not. I shall do so, and he may take his supper where he can.”

  “That is hardly wifely,” Guy chided, but without much conviction. Edmund certainly deserved some censure.

  “Why did he wish to fight the Sieur de Lambert a l’outrance?” she asked suddenly as they took the road, her two pages and Guy’s squire their only attendants.

  Guy shrugged. “A private squabble that had no place in a public tourney. They should both have known better.”

  “But de Lambert was permitted to joust in the melee.” Her anger had died, and she began to find herself allied with her husband in his sense of injustice.

  “So he was,” her companion agreed. “But if you dare to question his grace’s decisions in such an instance, I do not.” To what extent had he stilled her curiosity? It was to be hoped that Edmund would offer her something other than the truth if she questioned him. The technical nature of her legitimacy was known to them both by now, but she would be deeply distressed if she thought her husband could believe himself dishonored by it.

  The attack came when they reached a stretch of road winding between thickets of bramble and laurel. The scent of bay hung in the evening air, mingling with the rich loamy smell of the luxuriant undergrowth.

  There were six of them in the jerkin, hose, and boots of the peasant, but they were armed with the staves and knives of the outlaw robber. On foot, they set upon the horses with their knives, aiming for artery and tendon. Guy and his squire were armed with sword and knife, but the pages had only their daggers with which to fend off the murderous assault, leaning down to slash wildly as their assailants ran at the horses, dodging hither and thither, evading all attempts to ride them down. Guy, wielding his sword with deadly calm, noticed on the periphery of his awareness that they seemed less interested in the human prey than in the destruction of the horses. He supposed it made some kind of sense. Unhorsed, Guy’s party would be four against six. But none of the attacking rabble would be a match for his great sword, or even his squire’s, and the pages had months of discipline and combat training behind them. Such a disorganized attack was self-destructive madness. One of the horses went down, the page leaping clear, his knife flashing. A heavy stave swung at the lad’s wrist. Bone crunched, and the boy screamed. The next instant, his assailant crumpled, his head cleaved in two by de Gervais’s great sword.

  Magdalen sat her trembling horse, desperately trying to think of some way of helping. She carried only her little jeweled hip knife and could not imagine it doing the least good, except in close quarters. So far, the robbers had ignored both her and her horse, and then with shocking suddenness one of the brigands ran toward her and sprang up behind her with an agile, twisting leap. He kicked the mare’s flank viciously, lashing the horse with a thorny bramble, and the animal bolted down the road, leaving the bloody turmoil behind them.

  It was Magdalen they had been after! That was why they had been interested in unhorsing Guy’s party, who without mounts could not hope to pursue. Their assailants must have been well paid to venture such an assault against superior fighting power when death for some of them was inevitable.

  Guy realized all this with a bolt of self-directed fury. He should have been ready for something. The de Beauregards had already shown their hand; they would not delay in following up. He set his horse in pursuit, but one of their attackers had firm hold of the bridle now and was slashing upward. The horse kicked, reared, screamed in fear and pain, all but unseating his rider, who was forced to waste precious minutes eliminating the stabbing brigand at his bridle.

  Magdalen was initially so stunned by what had happened that she sat like stone on the saddle, feeling the hot, sweaty weight of the man behind her, holding her against him as he reached to wrest the reins from her hands. Her mount was a lot more powerful than little Malapert had been and seemed to be eating up the ground beneath them. She realized the truth with sudden terror. She was being abducted by this villein, and no one seemed to be coming after her.

  Terror and desperation galvanized her. She drove her elbows backward into the man’s ribs and heard with grim satisfaction his grunt of pain as the breath whistled through his lips and his hold loosened. She did it again, immediately, aiming lower for his belly, then, hardly knowing what she was doing, she kicked her feet free of the stirrups and tumbled sideways off the plunging horse, catching at an overhanging branch. The horse careened down the path, its rider now hauling back on the reins. At any minute, he would halt the mare’s bolt and would turn back for his quarry. She dropped to the ground, preparing to run into the undergrowth, when Guy de Gervais hurtled toward her. His horse was bleeding profusely from a gashed neck, foam flecked around the bit, and the whites of his eyes rolled wildly. Guy charged straight past her, intent on the destruction of her would-be abductor, who was now off balance, struggling to turn the frantic mare.

  The man had no time for his prayers. He would have been aware only of blue eyes, pinpricks of death, and a massive form rising in the saddle above him, the hilt of the great sword clasped between both hands. The sword took off his head.

  Magdalen was still standing by the roadside, staring at the carnage around her. To her shocked gaze, there seemed to be dead men and horses everywhere. It took her a minute to realize that all members of their party were still standing, and that one of the fallen horses was struggling to its feet. The page whose wrist had been shattered was leaning against a tree, barely conscious.

  Guy rode back, sheathing his bloody sword. He dismounted when he reached Magdalen, his expression grave as he took in her deathly pallor and the gray eyes blank with shock. “You’ve a mind as nimble as your body, pippin,” he said, taking her hands. “But it’s finished now.”

  With a gasping sob, she flung herself against his chest. For a minute, he resisted, feeling her soft and warm against him, pliant and graceful. He could smell her skin, the slight tang of fresh sweat, the rich scent of her hair. But she was quivering like a frightened kitten, and he could not deny her the comfort he had offered her as a child. He enfolded her in his arms, and her sob became a sigh of contentment. His body stirred at her closeness.

  Abruptly, he put her from him. “Come, there is no time for this, Magdalen. You have done well, and you are unharmed, but we must hurry to the Savoy. Dick has urgent need of the physician.” Turning from her, he led his palfrey back to the little troop waiting with the two relatively unharmed horses.

  Magdalen watched as he spoke gently to the injured Dick, bound his arm in a handkerchief, and helped him onto the back of the squire’s horse. The squire mounted behind; the other page mounted his own horse again. She supposed she should be helpful and reclaim her own mare, still standing, head hanging uneasily, along the road. But the headless corpse of her abductor lay close by, and she found she was feeling rather sick.

  Guy, fortunately, seemed to understand her reluctance, because he fetched the animal himself. “Do you feel able to ride, Magdalen?” His voice was as calm and gentle as if the last blood-sodden half hour had never happened.

  Magdalen considered. If she said she did not, then he would take her up before him. But somehow she knew that he did not wish to do that, and it was her fault that he did not wish to. She offered him a shaky smile.

  “Yes, I am quite able to ride, my lord.”

  It was such a pathetically gallant little smile that for a moment he was tempted to ignore the dictates of caution and scoop her up as he had been used to do so naturally in the old days. But those days were long gone, and Magdalen de Bresse was now the embodiment of dangerous temptation. He didn’t know how or when it had happened, only that it had.

  “You have a true Plantagenet’s courage, Magdalen of Lancaster,” he declared with calm approval, and lifted her onto her palfrey.

  Magdalen did not find his approval an adequate substitute for the comfort of the ph
ysical proximity she craved, but she accepted it as she must.

  Chapter Four

  Magdalen sat at the high table in the great vaulted hall of the Savoy Palace, looking in vain for Guy. He had escorted her to her apartments when they had completed their limping journey earlier and left her with her women and the advice that she take a little wine as restorative. It had been sensible and concerned advice, but she had felt dismissed, her part in the afternoon’s drama discounted. There had been no message from Edmund, either, and his squire, with some anxiety, had told her that his lord had ridden off alone when the final melee had begun.

  She had sent one of her pages to the duchess with the request that she be excused attendance at the banquet in the great hall that evening. The request had been denied, not by the duchess but by John of Gaunt, who insisted upon her presence at the high table. She could only assume that the duke wished to emphasize Edmund’s punishment by making his absence all the more noticeable with his wife’s solitary presence.

  It had done little to improve her humor. She had said nothing about the attack on the road and wondered if she should have pleaded that as an excuse for her absence. Surely the duke would have been more considerate of her well-being, if he knew of her ordeal. She assumed she was to have been abducted for ransom, a common enough crime since the companies of brigands and mercenaries had begun their reign of terror both in France and England—a direct consequence of the war that taught armed men to live by plunder in war, and in periods of truce threw them upon the land, unemployed and unpaid.

  His grace, however, was well aware of the incident. Guy had wasted no time in telling him of it, and of his suspicions that it was part and parcel of Edmund’s trouble at the tournament. There had been no time before the start of the banquet for extended discussion, and Lancaster now sat in his carved chair, deep in thought, his eyes occasionally flickering sideways to the still figure of his daughter. The chair at her left was empty, and she was making no attempt to converse with anyone else at the table. Despite her stillness and the unmistakable expression of an annoyed Plantagenet on her face, she seemed to exude her mother’s vibrancy. There was a sensuality about face and form, a quivering about her that made a man think of lusty tumbling, of limbs white and naked, twined in passion. But there was something else, too, something Isolde had not had, and John of Gaunt could not fail to recognize and acknowledge it. There was a straightness to her, an honesty that against his will tugged at him.

  Magdalen played with a morsel of goose patty, pushing it around her bowl with her trencher of white bread. She responded monosyllabically to attempts to draw her into conversation and was soon left to her own reflections. She knew she was not generally liked by the duchess’s ladies. An isolated childhood, broken only by the few months in the de Gervais household, had left her with a certain shyness, a reluctance for intimacy, an inability to engage in the gossip, frequently malicious, that passed for conversation among the women at court. She also knew that her anomalous position as the clearly disliked, suddenly revealed daughter of the duke left people unsure how to treat her. They did not treat her with the reverence accorded Lancaster’s other children, the ladies Elizabeth and Philippa, and his heir, young Henry Bolingbroke, but neither dared they offer her the least discourtesy. Nevertheless, her history was a matter for fascinated speculation.

  What Magdalen had failed to notice was that the ladies were also aware of the effect she had on the men of the court. One would have to be blind to fail to see the eyes that followed her, to fail to notice how there was always someone at her elbow, eager to help her mount, to pick up a glove, to proffer a new-picked bloom for her hair. Such attentions did not make the ladies any more drawn to her, although the recipient seemed blithely unaware of them. But then, no one else knew that for the Lady Magdalen only one man existed, and that man was not her husband.

  Magdalen took another sip of her wine, letting her gaze roam over the hall below. Chamberlains were directing new arrivals to tables appropriate to their rank, and the guests threaded their way between scurrying varlets carrying laden trays of roast meats, boar, venison, swan, all thickly smothered in slightly sweet sauces that disguised any detectable taint, inevitable in the midsummer heat. Jugs of mead and wine, shipped in quantities from the English fief of Aquitaine, were passed down the tables, and voices were rising commensurately, drowning the minstrels in the gallery above.

  A herald’s alerting note came from the great double doors. “My Lord Guy de Gervais, Earl of Redeforde, enters here,” the marshal cried, and Guy strode unhurriedly into the hall, followed by a squire and a page. He looked magnificent, his powerful body clad in a tunic of black and gold, the dragon of Gervais embroidered on his shoulder, a massive gold belt at his hip, golden spurs at his heels. Heads turned at his entrance, and servitors scuttled out of his path. He smiled and greeted acquaintances as he came up to the dais, where he knelt briefly before his lord, offering a word of apology for his tardiness. The duke merely smiled at his favorite and bade him get to his supper.

  Guy came immediately to the vacant chair beside Magdalen. “Since I stood proxy for your husband at his betrothal, I trust it will not come amiss if I take his place now, my lady,” he said.

  It was a simple pleasantry, designed to lessen her discomfiture at the obvious emptiness of her husband’s seat, but he felt the charge jolt through her as he sat down beside her. He could feel the heat of her body, smell the scent of her skin, and as her head turned toward him, he read again the message in her eyes, clear and determined, saw the eager promise in her parted lips, felt within himself the deep sensual throb of her body. His skin felt as if the blade of a knife had been passed, sharp-edged, across it, lifting the hairs in an assurance of danger and excitement.

  But he was accustomed to danger. “You are recovered from your ordeal, I trust, madame,” he said neutrally, turning to wash his hands in the bowl held at his elbow by his page.

  “I suffered no hurt,” she said. “I was afraid you had perhaps discovered some injury yourself when you were absent from the table.”

  He gestured to his page to fill his goblet. “Nay, madame, not I. But I remained with poor Dick while the apothecary set the bone. The lad had an uncomfortable time of it.”

  “Why, what has happened, Lord de Gervais?” Lady Maude asked, and everyone within earshot craned to hear the story.

  “We were attacked by brigands,” Guy said with a chuckle that sounded perfectly natural as he helped himself to meat from the platter held by his squire. “It would seem they had it in mind to carry off the Lady Magdalen for ransom.”

  There was much clamoring for the story, and he told it succinctly but with the narrative skills acquired during training in his youth. Magdalen contributed nothing, since no contribution was asked of her. But as she sat in her silence, the certainty came to her that something was being withheld here. Her eyes drifted over the hall again. She had told Edmund’s squire to bring her word as soon as his lord returned, but so far Carl’s blunt, square face had not appeared.

  “Your appetite is sadly lacking this even,” Guy observed as Magdalen waved away a basket of boiled raisins and a platter of almond sweetmeats. He knew of old that she had a sweet tooth, and he had often teased the child Magdalen over her passion for nutmeg custards and marchpane.

  “I do not know where Edmund is,” she said, speaking her thought with customary directness. “I feel that something has happened, and we must send out men to search for him.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, nibbling on a honeyed almond. Yet this concern for her husband relieved him somewhat, enabling him to put aside that disturbing moment earlier—that moment, and the others that had occurred on this troublesome day. “He is sulking, somewhere.” Probably in the city stews, he thought but did not say. It would be the natural recourse for any young man in similar circumstances—one he would have taken himself before Gwendoline had given him a distaste for such coarse dishes.

  He glanced at Lady Maude. The du
chess had intimated that if he wished for the prize it was his for the asking. The lady had good Flemish blood mixed with the Saxon, and had given birth to a full-term child in her previous marriage, so it was to be assumed she would bear him children. She was well dowered, and the duchess had promised to augment the dowry with an annual pension of five hundred pounds. But there was something about the florid complexion, the certain dullness in the flat green eyes, the broadening of the hips, the looseness to the flesh beginning to bulge at upper arm and around her midriff, from which he recoiled. His eyes drifted sideways to his neighbor. The comparison did not bear making.

  “I do not believe he is sulking,” Magdalen declared, her mouth taking a stubborn turn. Abruptly, she pushed back her chair just as the duke and his lady rose from the table to retire to their own apartments.

  As the entire company got to their feet in reverence, Magdalen went quickly along the table, her words hasty, their urgency unmistakable. “My lord … my lord duke, may I have speech with you?”

  The duke paused, and his eyes sought those of Guy de Gervais, who had taken a step in her wake. Everyone at the table listened unashamedly.

  “What is it, Magdalen?” Lancaster said. He used her name rarely, although it was the one he had bestowed upon her himself.

  “It is about my husband.” Her eyes, Isolde’s eyes yet not Isolde’s eyes, burned their appeal. “I believe some ill has befallen him.”

  John of Gaunt’s frown was fierce enough to send the devil scurrying. “Your husband has been banished from this table for three days, madame. That is all the ill that has befallen him.”

  She shook her head. “I am aware of that, my lord. But I believe there is something else.” Her hands moved in an inarticulate gesture, the candlelight sparking off the ruby and emerald rings she wore. She seemed as unaware of the immediate audience at high table as of the distant one below, where a silence had fallen, servitors paused in their duties, all eyes directed toward whatever drama was taking place among the highborn.