by Jane Feather
“May I not come too?” Magdalen could not believe he would exclude her.
But Guy wanted to read it alone. It must have been sent some time before he had dispatched his own messenger to Lancaster, and he needed to know in private whether its contents obviated his own request to wed the widow. He did not think he could handle Magdalen’s response to whatever was contained in the message until he had handled his own.
“You may come to me in my study in twenty minutes,” he said. “I wish to refresh myself first.” He strode off on the words, Geoffrey following him, leaving Magdalen standing openmouthed in the court.
With a muttered exclamation that was not in the least seemly, she went up to her own apartments. She had been feeling much stronger after an afternoon’s rest, but now tears prickled ridiculously behind her eyelids. They were tears of weakness, she knew well, having found them most inconveniently frequent since Zoe’s birth. It took little to trigger them, and her present apprehension and hurt were sufficient spur.
In the seclusion of his study, Guy forced himself to wait until Geoffrey had taken his mailshirt and sword belt, poured him wine, and left the room before opening the duke’s letter.
Its message was short and clear: Edmund de Bresse had survived the assault last summer, had recovered from his wounds in a nearby abbey, and had returned to the Savoy in February. He had then been taken ill again but was now well on the way to full health and strength. It had not been possible to convey these glad tidings to Edmund’s wife earlier because of winter travel restrictions, but Edmund de Bresse was shortly taking ship for France to resume his duties as grand seigneur of Bresse. On his arrival, Lancaster ordered the immediate return of his dearly beloved vassal, Guy de Gervais.
Guy stood immobile for many minutes, holding the document, staring sightlessly at the stone wall of the chamber. If Lancaster had presented another prospective husband, he might have been able to press his own suit, counting on the duke’s longstanding friendship. But the reappearance of Magdalen’s husband left him in the falsest of false positions. He had been Edmund’s guardian and mentor since the lad was ten years old, and Edmund was entitled to expect only honest dealings and true faith from his uncle. Instead, that uncle had cuckolded him, albeit unwittingly, and bred a bastard child on the body of his wife.
A shudder of self-loathing went through him, leaving him cold and sick, as he had not been since the first time he had killed. He had been a young page at Poitiers, but had grown to manhood in the few short hours of that battle.
He knew now only that he must leave this place without delay, must leave the woman who had entranced him with her passion and her beauty and her willful determination to follow the path of her choice: must leave his child, leave her to the man who by rights should have sired her. He must leave this place of sin and the woman who had led him into sin, must seek absolution, and, shriven once again, he must start life afresh.
And the prospect of that life filled him with the deepest desolation, stretching ahead into an infinite wasteland. A fitting punishment for his sin. He would do penance every day of the rest of his life.
The door opened without ceremony, startling him. He swung round to face it.
“What is it?” Magdalen went deathly white as she saw his face … so unlike his face, a mask obliterating all the life, the love, the humor she knew so well. Her hand went to her throat, plucked at the strand of pearls she wore. “Guy, what has happened?”
He saw the woman who had brought him to this, who had brought them both to it, with her intemperate passion, her blind and selfish pursuit of her own desires. And he recoiled.
Magdalen felt the recoil like a blow. Uncomprehending, terrified of what she did not understand, she stood staring at him. “Please … I beg you, my lord … tell me what has happened.” The whispered plea seemed to stick in her throat, and she massaged the slim column with long, restless fingers.
Guy forced himself to focus on her, to see her distress, to remember her present physical frailty, and as he did so, his love rose strong and invincible again. “Come here,” he said gently, opening his arms to her.
She seemed to collapse in his embrace, shaking with a terror she could not define, a terror brought about by the look she had seen in his eyes.
He held her securely as he told her of her father’s missive. “You may expect your husband here at any time,” he finished, his voice as expressionless as it had been throughout.
Magdalen drew back, tilting her head to look up at him. Now that she understood, she was filled with a great calm. “I knew Edmund was not dead. Indeed, I have tried to tell you so many times.”
“How could you have known it?”
She shrugged. “I did. But when I brought up the subject, you became so wretched it seemed easier to leave it alone.”
A sudden stab of apprehension, of premonition, lodged cold in his soul. “You understand what this means, Magdalen?”
“It is difficult,” she said, “but I have thought long about what I must tell Edmund—”
“You will tell him nothing!” he interrupted in horror, unable to grasp truly what she was saying. “I will leave here as soon as your husband arrives. He will know nothing … nothing. Is it understood?”
She shook her head with that stubbornness he knew so well, her eyes clear and amazingly untroubled. “No, you do not understand. I cannot live without you, Guy, and we will manage this as others manage it. My father lives openly with Katherine Swynford. She has borne his bastards. There are others, so many others—”
“You do not know what you are saying!” His voice was harsh with shock and revulsion. “You are dishonored, your husband is dishonored, I am dishonored by what has happened between us. Your husband has the right to take your life and mine for the shame visited upon him, and I would not deny him that right. But there is no reason that he should be made to suffer. No one apart from ourselves and your women knows of this. It will die now … as if it had never been.” But he knew as he said it that it could never be as if it had never been.
“No.” She shook her head in blank incomprehension. “You cannot speak like that. I know you do not mean it. What of your child? You cannot just cast her aside. There is a way to manage this—” She broke off on a sob of pain and fright, her hand pressed to her cheek where the scarlet imprint of his hand burned like the desperate fury that had fueled the swift and sudden blow. She stared at him, her eyes distraught, dumb with shocked betrayal.
Through the foggy rage of despair, Guy de Gervais saw not Magdalen but the image of her mother, the woman who had spun her web of mortal sin and treachery around so many men and brought them all to destruction. Isolde de Beauregard had used the power of her body and her deep sensuality to entrap, and her daughter, empowered in the same way, was following the same course. Charles d’Auriac had fallen beneath that spell. Guy had watched it happen, had seen the lust, the hungry need in the man’s eyes, a need that transcended whatever family purpose he had for the cultivation of his cousin. Edmund de Bresse was bound in her toils, lost in love and desire from the first time he had taken her to his bed. And Guy himself had fallen victim to the devil’s power of her, a power that now sought to entrap him because she wanted him and for no other reason. She cared nothing for the hurt and shame her husband would suffer, a man who loved her as deeply as Guy did himself. Edmund de Bresse must be sacrificed to her passion, as she would eventually and inevitably sacrifice her lover.
Yet, even as he thought this in his blind despair, he knew that there was an innocence to her sorcery, an innocence her mother had not evinced. Magdalen’s webs were spun without the desire to cause hurt or to achieve some nefarious purpose; they had no motive but that of love and passion. The power she wielded was no fault of hers. She was innocent of treachery and she bore on her face the mark of his hand raised in anger against her.
“Ah, sweetheart,” he said, his voice a low throb of remorse. “Forgive me.” He took her again in his arms, and again trustfull
y she yielded to his embrace as if he had done and said nothing to breach that trust.
“Why?” she whispered through her tears. “I do not understand what I did that you should strike me.”
“Forgive me,” he said again, moving backward to the deep stone windowsill, sitting down, drawing her tightly against him, his palm smoothing over the hurt, a finger tenderly smudging the tears as they rolled down the damask skin. “You were saying such things, such impossible things, I could not help myself.”
She shuddered against him in the aftermath of shock and distress but said nothing further, now too unsure of her ground to know what could safely be said, or how to express her conviction in such a way that it would not bring a resurgence of that frightful anger. Later, when she had thought things through and could speak in a considered fashion, she would try again.
“Do you forgive me?” he whispered into her hair, stroking her back.
“Yes … yes, of course … always,” she murmured brokenly. “I do not mean to cry so, but I do so easily at the moment …”
“Hush,” he said helplessly, stabbed afresh with the most dreadful sorrow at what he had done. “Dry your tears, now, for they are the worst punishment you could inflict upon me, love.”
Magdalen sniffed and wiped her eyes with the long pointed sleeve of her gown. “I cannot find my handkerchief.”
Guy went to the table where stood a pitcher of water. He dipped his own handkerchief into it and gently bathed her face. “There, that is better. In a little while, you will look yourself again, and no one will know at supper that anything untoward has occurred.”
“My thanks.” She tried to smile. “But I do not want any supper tonight.”
“You must,” he insisted, but still gently. “The news from England must be announced in the great hall, and no one must think that the news is a matter for anything less than rejoicing. The Sieur de Bresse returns to his wife, his child, his household, and his vassals. We must celebrate and put all in motion to receive him with due honor. And I must prepare to depart this place. My task is done.”
Words of protest bubbled up despite her resolution to think before she spoke again on the subject. But as if he would forestall her, Guy’s blue eyes darkened abruptly in warning and the words were stillborn. “I do not know if I can bear to sit through supper in the hall tonight,” she said, instead. “Could I not be excused because I am still not fully recovered?”
“No.” His voice was flat, admitting no possibility of argument. “Your absence on such an evening for whatever reason would be inexplicable. Go to your apartments now and compose yourself. The summons will sound soon.”
Magdalen left him immediately. In the privacy of her own chamber, she examined her pale face where the gray eyes seemed washed out and overlarge, and a faint shadow colored her right cheek. But it was nothing that cool water would not repair. She still did not fully understand what Guy had said to her. He could not possibly contemplate leaving her and his daughter, so she must have misinterpreted him. Or perhaps, in the shock of the news he had not been expecting, he had reacted without due thought, had failed to see the matter clearly.
Since she had never believed her husband to be dead, the news was no shock to her. She had hoped in her secret heart that the news would never come, but she had not allowed it to trouble her love. Her love had never been troubled by external events. It was simply the life-defining fact on which her existence depended. Nothing had been changed by Lancaster’s news … except Guy.
A niggling voice spoke the thought in her heart. There had been a dreadful moment when the man in the study had not been the Guy she knew, the man she loved, and he had looked at the woman he loved as if he loathed her.
Ice enclosed her heart, and the blood in her veins seemed to run cold and sluggish. Nothing on earth could change what was between them. Only witchcraft, only the satanic powers of witch and warlock, could turn such golden goodness into something evil and harmful. The power of love could only bring sweetness and balm; it could do no harm. But he had talked of shame and dishonor, of death as just punishment for what they had done, as if their love were indeed a powerful force for injury. He had talked of their love as if it were sullied, had come from the stews of mankind not the celestial planes of divine commitment.
But he had been speaking from the distemper of shock. Tonight, in the big bed, she would talk with him, would ease his troubled soul with the truth of an innocent love, and they would decide how best to manage the tangle.
Magdalen entered the great hall at his side, a little pale but perfectly composed. She had met his anxious scrutiny with a small gallant smile that had wrenched his heart even as it assured him that she would not fail to perform the part expected of her.
They took their places on the high table, then Guy signaled to the herald to blow the call for attention. The noise in the hall died down, the minstrels laid aside their instruments. Lord de Gervais rose slowly to his feet. His voice was steady, his smile seemingly indicative of genuine pleasure in the news as he informed the people of Bresse that their liege lord would be returning to them.
The news was received with polite enthusiasm. The young Edmund de Bresse was little known in his castle, and they had become accustomed to the just and predictable rule of the Lord de Gervais, whose touch was always sure, whose prowess on the field brought honor to all who rode with him, whose care and tutelage of the young Lady de Bresse had drawn only admiration. Change was always disturbing and rarely for the better.
The enthusiasm became more marked, however, when Lord de Gervais declared that he and the Castle de Bresse would host a tourney in honor of the returning lord. There would be three days of feasting, jousting, and all manner of revelry in which the household would take part. They all knew that material benefits would most certainly accrue from the influx of visiting knights and their ladies, in addition to the license such entertainment would grant them, and a cheer of approval rose to the smoke-blackened rafters of the great hall.
Magdalen accepted the congratulations of those around her with a calm smile and ate and drank sparingly. Somehow, Guy’s announcement made Edmund’s imminent return tangible; the image of feasting and jousts, of entertaining such a host of guests—the Lady Magdalen de Bresse at her husband’s side in their own domain for the first time ever—stunned her with its reality. But it would have to be done. Whatever arrangements they could make to manage the tangle of love, the appearance must be maintained. She was her husband’s wife.
Suddenly, she remembered what that would mean in all its facets. She remembered Edmund’s ardor, the love in his eyes that she had treated with light friendliness, assuming that it would die when he found himself a paramour, as he would, as all young knights did. She remembered the conjugal bed they had shared from January to August. What took place in it had not troubled her unduly, but neither had it particularly pleasured her. She had lent herself to her husband dutifully, passionlessly. Passion she had reserved for Guy de Gervais to whom she had given herself; to whom she had given herself, it seemed, in spirit since he had ridden into the life of an eleven-year-old child, waiting with increasing impatience for her destiny to come for her.
She must resume all aspects of her wedded life with Edmund, even if it was done in the full knowledge of her other life with Guy de Gervais. Edmund would—must—understand where her heart lay, but he was still her husband, and as such was entitled to her body. And Magdalen did not know how she would be able to submit now that she knew what the true marriage of body and soul entailed.
It grew hot in the hall, and she was glad when Guy, alert as always to her fatigue, rose from his seat. They left the hall and the household to continue their supper as they pleased, going out into the cool night air.
Magdalen drew a relieved breath. “May we walk a little, my lord? I have need of the air.”
“If you wish it. But not for long, as I have much to accomplish before your husband arrives.” It was said in a flat, matter-of-fact t
one, and Magdalen could only guess what an effort it cost him to speak in such fashion.
Disconcerted, she looked up at him in the dim light of the flambeaux held by sentries at the far corners of the inner court. He seemed to have withdrawn from her. “We need not walk, if you do not wish it,” she said. “I will come to you later, when all are gone to their beds.”
“No, Magdalen,” he said, in the same flat tone. “You may not come to me in that way again. Did I not explain that to you?”
“But … but … ?”
“No!” He turned on his heel and went toward the outside stairs.
Desolation and confusion swamped her. How could he forbid her company at such a time? How could he deny that there were things they should talk about? Things to be arranged? Comfort they could take in and of each other? But he was denying her. He was denying the woman he had loved, the woman who had borne him a child, the woman who loved him more than life itself. And he must not be permitted to do so.
She had always known that this tangle would be for her to manage. She had always suspected that Guy’s inner, honor-born doubts lying beneath the force of his love would raise their heads and bring heartbreak if she permitted them to do so. So she must take matters into her own hands.
In her own apartments, she found Erin and Margery agog with the news, but they were too sensitive to press their lady, whose apparent pallor and listlessness seemed at odds with a certain energy they could detect flowing though her.
She fed the baby with her usual loving patience and then allowed her women to prepare her for bed. Zoe slept with the women in the antechamber. If she woke hungry in the night, they soothed her with honeyed water so that her mother’s rest would not be disturbed. It was a satisfactory arrangement from many aspects, not least in that the Lady de Bresse generally slept the night peacefully in the arms of the Lord de Gervais.
Once Magdalen was alone, she sat beside the open window, where the dark blue velvet of the night sky was pierced with myriad diamond-studded configurations, and the air was scented with lilac and lavender, and she prepared herself for the meeting—the confrontation—that she must have with Guy de Gervais once the lights were extinguished. The bell for compline rang, and she determined to wait until matins sounded. At that time even Guy would be in his bed. In a household where the first gray streaks of dawn signaled the beginning of a busy day, few eyes remained open after compline. Her own eyes drooped, however, as she sat, her elbow propped on the stone sill, and she dozed fitfully as the castle put itself to bed.
