by Jane Feather
Magdalen received this advice with a hiss of annoyance and announced her intention of getting up. “Oh, my lady, that were foolish,” Erin protested. “You’re still weak as a new-dropped lamb.”
“Nonsense. I am perfectly strong and will be more so if I cease this melancholy lying about. Help me with my gown, for I go to find my lord. If he will not come to me, then I must needs go to him.”
She was somewhat disconcerted, however, to discover how shaky her legs were when she stood upon them properly for the first time. She clung to the door frame for a minute, then resolutely stepped into the unsavory passageway. A rickety wooden stairway led to the inn’s main room, and she walked carefully down it, lifting her skirt from the piles of dust and other more unsavory debris in the corners. Her pointed-toe slippers stuck occasionally on the step and had to be pulled free of whatever grim substance held them.
The room below was crowded and reeked of sweat and stale beer, overlaying the fish. She felt a moment’s dizziness, then pushed forward through the throng, heading for the door to the square. Erin had said Lord de Gervais had been about to go out with his page, so presumably if she waited for him outside in the fresh air and sunshine, she would catch him on his return.
She sat down with some relief on the ale bench against the inn wall and closed her eyes for a minute.
“My lady, you will forgive the impertinence, but this is no place for you.”
The unfamiliar voice brought her eyes open, and she found herself looking at a man of middle years, booted and spurred as a knight. Her first thought was that she must have seen him somewhere before, because there was something about him that she recognized, although she could not pinpoint it. It was something about the eyes, perhaps; gray like her own. His face was thin and pointed, the nose large and dominating, his mouth barely there at all. She did not care for his looks in the least. Her second thought, more fanciful, was that, although he was bowing and smiling in the most unexceptionable fashion, there was a shadow over him, a strangely menacing shadow.
“Sir?” Her brows lifted haughtily, with pure Plantagenet arrogance.
“Sieur Charles d’Auriac, my Lady de Bresse.” He bowed again, taking her hand and bringing it to his lips. “Forgive my intrusion on your peace, but indeed the public street is no place for a lady. If you will accept my escort, there is a little garden a few paces from here where you may enjoy the sun without annoyance.”
“I had received no annoyance until now, sir,” she said, her rudeness arising as much out of uneasiness as out of irritation at his presumption.
His eyes darkened, and that shadow of menace became almost palpable. Magdalen was suddenly afraid. But she had no need to be, surely. The inn door was at her back, its noisy safety within easy reach.
“I can assure you I wish only to be of service,” he said, laying a hand lightly on her arm. “Pray permit me to show you the garden. You will find no one there but monks. It belongs to the presbytery, but they will be happy to offer you their seclusion.”
Why, when everything he said was so reasonable, when there was nothing about his attire or demeanor to give the lie to his claim of knightly status, why then was she so certain he meant her no good? Her eyes flickered sideways along the street as she felt the hand on her arm tighten just a little. Lord de Gervais and his page turned onto the square from the far corner just as she was about to wrench her arm free and plunge back into the inn without further ado.
“My Lord de Gervais!” she called loudly. Charles d’Auriac glanced over his shoulder, then he released her arm and strode off without a word.
Guy hurried over to her. “What are you doing out here?”
“I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “Since you would not come to me, it seemed I must come to you.”
He frowned and sent his page into the inn. “Who was with you just then?”
“A man I did not like in the least,” she said. “Sieur d’Auriac, I believe he said. He knew my name without my telling him.”
“That is hardly surprising. Calais is a small town, and one person’s business is everyone’s business.” He stood frowning down at her. “You should not be out here unaccompanied.”
“That is what he said. He wished me to go with him to the presbytery garden, where he said I could enjoy the sun without fear of annoyance.” She shivered slightly. “I do not know why, but he frightened me.”
“In what way?” Guy felt a prickle of unease.
“I felt he might have made me go with him,” she said, feeling for words.
“Abduct you?”
“It is folly, I know, but I felt it. I also felt as if I ought to know him, as if there was something familiar about him … almost like a memory …” She stopped and shrugged. “I cannot find the right words.”
Guy’s frown deepened. He could think of no reason why a French knight should threaten Magdalen, however obliquely, if he knew her for a lady. Had he believed her a woman of the town, taking her ease outside a tavern in open invitation to all comers, it would have been different. In such a circumstance, an element of roughly persuasive sport would have been perfectly natural. In addition, Calais was an English possession, and the lady but newly disembarked from an English ship, flying the Lancastrian colors. No Frenchman would have offered her insult or discourtesy if he knew she had come from that ship. Unless … But no, it was far too soon for the de Beauregards to make any kind of move on French soil.
“Go back to your chamber,” he said. “It must be clear to you by now that the open street is not a suitable place for you.”
“Will you not bear me company? It is sadly tedious on my own, and I really do not need to be in bed any longer. Perhaps we could walk a little way?” She smiled hopefully.
De Gervais felt the ground slippery beneath him again. “I have no desire for your company,” he said brutally. “Go within. If you wish to leave this place in the morning, you will ensure that you spend the intervening hours resting.”
What little color she had drained from her cheeks, and the look in her eyes was the one she had worn when he had punished her all those years ago for causing Gwendoline such distress. It reminded him now as then of a betrayed and wounded fawn. Then she turned and without a further word went into the inn.
The bell for vespers rang from the church, but the noise from below did not lessen. Erin brought supper to the chamber, a dish of lampreys and an eel pie. “Why have they no meat?” Magdalen demanded palely from her pillow. “The stench of fish is trapped in my nostrils, and I cannot suffer the thought of its taste upon my tongue.”
“But ’tis a good pie, my lady,” Margery piped, looking up from her own platter. “And you will not regain your strength if you do not eat.”
Magdalen turned her head into her pillow and closed her eyes.
An hour later, the sounds of music and loud laughter came up from the square. “Oh, there are jongleurs, my lady,” Erin exclaimed, leaning out the window. “And mummers.”
“Oh, yes, and see, there is a group of those mad dancers,” chimed in Margery, hanging so far out that Erin seized hold of her apron at the back. “I have seen them in Lincoln. They dance like that because they are possessed. Do come and see, my lady.”
Magdalen sighed wearily. She could summon no enthusiasm for the demonic dancers. Her head still ached, but it was not that that led to her present joylessness.
“Why do you not go down, then, if you wish to join the crowd?”
“Oh, we could not leave you, my lady,” Erin demurred, although her eyes shone. “Why do you not come too?”
Magdalen shook her head. “Nay, I do not feel like it, but do you both go. I have no further need of you this night.”
After only a token protest, Erin and Margery donned their hooded capes and ran down to the square where the shrieks and hilarity grew more wanton by the moment. It sounded to Magdalen’s jaundiced ear as if the revelry were growing out of hand. She pulled the sheet over her head and buried her face in the pillow.
She must have drifted off to sleep because when she next opened her eyes, the chamber was in darkness, although the noise from the square continued and the light from the flambeaux illuminating the gaiety flickered in the window. She did not know what had wakened her, but whatever it was had set her heart hammering against her ribs and dried her mouth. Then she saw the shadow against the window, a huge fluttering batlike shape, and she knew that some sixth sense of danger had pulled her from sleep. She opened her mouth to scream as the figure seemed to swoop upon her, arm upraised, something curved and glittering in its hand.
She threw herself sideways as the glittering thing came down upon her, and the knife ripped into the pillow. The scream would not leave her throat but stuck there, heavy and useless. She had hurled herself to the floor when the cowled figure freed his weapon and came at her again. Then the scream came loose, but it was lost in the noise from the square below. She grabbed the sheet off the bed and flung it toward her assailant. It twisted around his knife hand, and a foul oath came from him. She screamed again, running naked toward the door. Her fingers were slippery with the sweat of terror, and she fumbled with the latch. The huge shadow grew on the door above her, and she knew he was at her back. She ducked desperately beneath the upraised hand just as the door flew open.
What happened next was a blur. She cowered against the wall as Guy de Gervais and the man struggled with silent fury. Then Guy was suddenly left holding a brown monk’s habit, and the figure in britches and shirt threw itself at the open window. With an agile twist of his body, he swung himself onto the gable overhang and disappeared across the roof.
“Why did he wish to kill me?” she gasped on a sobbing breath, flinging herself against Guy, shaking from head to toe with terror. He held her, enfolding her nakedness in his arms, whispering softly into her hair until the trembling had ceased. “I did not think anyone could hear me scream,” she managed to say. “There is so much noise outside.”
“I was passing the door,” he said, adding soberly, “I would not have heard you else.” Her trembling began again, and he was abruptly, vibrantly conscious of her nakedness, of the silken curve of her buttocks beneath his hands, the rise and fall of her breasts against his chest. He let his hands fall from her, but with a little moan of protest, she burrowed closer.
“Hold me. I am so cold and afeared.”
There didn’t seem to be much else he could do. He wrapped her in his arms again, letting his hands rest where they would. “Where are your women, pippin?” He frowned over her head at the empty chamber.
“I gave them leave to join the sport in the square,” she said, cuddling closer, feeling warmth from his body lap her skin, and feeling something else as well … Where his hands touched her, her skin seemed to come alive, and a deep tingling sensation was in her belly.
“That was foolish of you in such a place as this. They should not both have left you.” The statement did not, however, sound as angered as he intended. He became aware of her nipples peaking hard against his shirt and the stirring of his own body in response. With supreme effort, he stepped away from her and picked up the fallen sheet. “Put this around you, then you will not be cold.”
She took the sheet with a reluctance that was unmistakable. “I’d prefer it if you would hold me.”
He looked at her helplessly, powerless to make any impact on her determination to plunge them both into a swirling morass of danger and dishonor. “You would commit mortal sin,” he said, yet hearing his own lack of conviction. There was no point denying his own desires any longer, to himself or to her. He was no longer even sure whether it was worth attempting to manage those desires. But until John of Gaunt declared her officially widowed, adultery was the name of the game she would play. True, it was a game played lightly by all and sundry, but it did not sit easy with him.
“I love you,” she said as she had so often before. “And I believe you love me.”
He did, of course, and had known it without acknowledging it for some time. But it did not alter facts. Without replying, he went to the window and looked down at the riotous scene in the square. It had deteriorated to a melee of debauchery, wine spilling into the gutters, conjoined bodies heaving in the shadows, and some indeed not even bothering to seek that concealment. A woman’s shrieks came from an alley, but it was impossible to judge whether they were shrieks of fear or pleasure. Magdalen’s lusty wenches had presumably been up to no good, he reflected. It was to be hoped neither of them acquired a swollen belly as a result.
Magdalen came to stand beside him, swathed now in the sheet. She laid a hand on his arm, looking up into his face as if she would read some affirmation there, but when she spoke it was no longer of illicit passion. “Why would someone try to kill me?”
“Such a night of revelry and debauchery breeds robbers, assassins, brigands,” he said, having no intention of telling her the truth at this stage—that tonight’s attack was no coincidence. She seemed to find nothing to question in the explanation, and he turned to pick up the monk’s habit from the floor, examining it with a frown. It was an ordinary garment with no identifying marks, offering no clue to its owner—or wearer if the two were distinct, as seemed likely.
“I am going to post a sentry at your door,” he said. “I daresay it will be long before your women decide to return.”
“Don’t leave me alone,” she said, fear again in her voice. “He might come back while you are gone.”
Guy stood irresolute. It occurred to him that his entire force was likely the worse for wear by now, and the sounds of feet stumbling drunkenly along the passage outside the chamber did not bode well for the courtesy and consideration of the inn’s other occupants. “Very well, I will stay with you until your women return. But get into bed.”
She looked at him for a minute, considering, as if weighing the situation, then turned to the bed, slowly shook off the sheet, and as deliberately brought one knee up onto the mattress. He inhaled sharply, aware that her movements were purposely provocative, were constituting some kind of an invitation, although their present surroundings did not lend themselves to the issuing or acceptance of such an invitation.
“Behave yourself,” he said roughly, coming over to the bed. “Get in.” He slapped her rounded behind in emphatic punctuation and she jumped, hastily putting herself between the covers.
“Spoilsport,” she accused.
“I have told you that that is a sport I will not play,” he declared.
“Yes, you will.” She closed her eyes, drawing the sheet up to her neck. “I bid you good night, my lord.”
He stood looking down at her for a moment, unable to prevent the slight smile curving his mouth. He was lost, it seemed, but lost or no, he had to ensure her safety. He sat on the window seat as the noise from below finally died away and the bodies in the square either went slinking off into the surrounding alleys or remained where they were in sterterous sleep. Had the Sieur d’Auriac anything to do with tonight’s attack? Who was d’Auriac? He would have to set some inquiries in motion. He would put the matter in the hands of Olivier, a swarthy native of Provence with the physique and agility of a monkey, who was as adept at ferreting out information as he was at slipping in and out of places where he had no business. He was probably the most valued and valuable member of de Gervais’s retinue.
Margery and Erin reappeared at midnight, disheveled, flushed, and slurred of speech. At the sight of Lord de Gervais sitting on the window seat, fear and guilt flared in their suffused eyes.
“My lady said we could go, my lord,” Erin whimpered.
“Did she also say you could return in this condition?” he demanded in a caustic whisper. “While you’ve been tumbling and debauching in the streets, your lady has been in grave danger. You are fortunate I do not have you beaten for your negligence and dissolute behavior.” He strode to the door. “We leave at dawn. Make sure you and your lady are ready to travel at first light.”
It became very clear at da
wn, however, that rounding up his household and widely scattered men-at-arms was a near impossibility after the night’s excesses. Those who could be found were generally incapacitated, and it appeared that the only two members of the sizable party not suffering the ill effects of debauchery were himself and Magdalen. Even his page moved his head with the greatest care and showed a reluctance to move speedily on his errands. Guy resigned himself to another day and night in their insalubrious lodgings in Calais, but it was three days later before they were able to leave. Two of his men were accused of theft by an outraged citizen of the town, and the subsequent inquiry and peace making took a full two days. Guy fretted but knew he could not afford to ignore such complaints of the French townsfolk, who were already all too inclined to resent their involuntary subservience to the English crown.
Magdalen’s objections to their continued residence in the noisy, ill-smelling tavern were lessened when Guy gave her permission to go about the town with an armed escort of two squires and pages. It would have seemed an overly large escort but for the previous night’s attack, and Magdalen accepted the protection with cheerful gratitude. Her strength returned rapidly as she wandered the busy port, enjoying the foreign sights and sounds and smells under a warm September sun.
At last, however, they resumed their journey, Magdalen and her women installed in a covered wagon whose heavily cushioned bench offered little protection as the vehicle lurched and jolted over the uneven roadway. The accompanying force in glittering mail presented a fearsome aspect as they marched, the herald sounding his trumpet at each potential obstacle in their path, the attached pennants of Lancaster and de Gervais lifting in exclamation as he raised the horn for each blast. The impression was that of a fighting force, one not to be tangled with, and the local inhabitants, accustomed to such companies roaming the land, set upon plunder and spoiling, trembled until they had passed in peace.
