Almost Innocent

by Jane Feather

  She said only, “My lord.”

  He took a deep shuddering breath at her submission, his hands moving to her gown, fingers fumbling awkwardly with the hooks. She had changed her ceremonial dress of the evening before taking Zoe to her father in the chapel, and now wore only a simple linen tunic over a white shift. She made no attempt to help him, however, as he loosened the gown, pushed it with rough haste from her shoulders, and removed the shift similarly.

  She remembered that first time, when he had not taken the time to remove her clothes in his urgency. Now she felt his trembling hands moving over her nakedness in loving wonder, and while she could summon no physical response to his caresses, she could be touched by his tenderness, stirred by the almost awed joy in his gaze. She stroked his face fleetingly and saw his delight in the skimming gesture of affection. And she felt remorse and compassion and the depths of her unworthiness to be the object of this great and guiltless love.

  “Ah, my love … love … love …” he whispered, bearing her backward to the bed. Husky endearments broke from his lips as he came down with her, but his need was so keen, so long kept at bay, so long an agonizing hunger that it could be curbed no longer. For a moment, he held himself above her, desperately trying to bridle the rampant forces of his passion, knowing she was unready and terrified of hurting her in her unreadiness this first time after she had given birth. But with a soul-deep groan he yielded to the wild, plunging forces of lust that drove him to her center, drowned him in the enchanted well of her body, lost him in the bewitched forest of her body, brought him swirling and gasping out of a maelstrom that left him inert upon her soft and tender flesh.

  Magdalen lay still beneath him, feeling his weight crushing her breasts, squeezing the breath from her, feeling his sweat-slick skin clammy against the cool dryness of her own. She wondered how it was possible to be so distanced from another’s passion when that passion was being poured into one’s own body. She wondered how the same act could be so dissimilar between different people as to have no points of contact, to be deserving of a different name.

  Edmund slowly came to himself. He lifted his head where the black hair stuck wetly to his forehead and the residue of passion lurked in his unfocused blue eyes. He looked down at her still face, the quietness in her eyes.

  “Can you feel nothing for me?”

  There was such a desperate sorrow in the question, a grief that she understood, that spoke to her own. Lifting her arms, she took his head and drew it down to her bosom. “I feel much for you, Edmund. But you must give me just a little time.”

  There was a tenderness in her voice that brought him immeasurable comfort. She stroked his back, smoothed his hair, eased him gently to lie beside her, feeling him slip into the sleep of satiation.

  It was a sleep that eluded Magdalen, who kept vigil for her lost love, dry-eyed and steadfast throughout the night as if she were on her knees on the cold stone before the altar rail. At dawn, she heard Zoe’s morning plaint, and she rose and went next door to feed her.

  Erin was already tending to the child, changing her breechclout, whistling softly at her from between her teeth.

  “Ah, good morrow, pigeon.” Magdalen bent to kiss the wailing child. “Never mind such niceties, Erin. She is hungry.” Scooping up the baby, she sat down on the stool beneath the window and gave the child her breast.

  From the court below came sounds of the beginning day. Voices, scurrying feet, commands, and the herald’s horn followed on the heels of the bell for prime. The guests would all be leaving before midmorning, and the urgency of departure filled the air. Magdalen sat enclosed in the absolute privacy that came when she was feeding her child. Only the two of them existed in this solitude and she was only vaguely conscious of Erin and Margery setting the chamber to rights, bringing her a cup of honeyed mead, preparing the baby’s bath.

  Edmund’s sudden appearance in the doorway was a momentary violation of this privacy, something he had never done before, but she looked up and smiled at him.

  “I give you good morrow, my lord.”

  “And I you, lady.” He ran a hand through his disordered hair and came over to look down at the child still nuzzling at the breast. He shook his head in a gesture of bemused wonder and smiled at his wife. “So pretty,” he said.

  “You had best get dressed, my lord.” Magdalen laughed slightly. “Your guests will be leaving, and you must bid them farewell.”

  “We must both do so.”

  She shook her head. “No, I beg you will excuse me, Edmund. I slept ill and am feeling fatigued. I will keep to my apartments this day. You will explain that I am unwell.”

  “But are you truly so?” He looked anxious. “It was not—”

  “No,” she reassured him quietly. “But I am truly fatigued.”

  “Then I will make your excuses,” he said. “It will be such a turmoil anyway that you are well out of it.” He bent to kiss her, still with some of the hesitancy of the last two weeks, but with more assurance. She did not return the salute, but neither did she turn her head away.

  She sat beside the window throughout the morning, listening to the bustle of departure. She did not see Guy de Gervais and his knights ride out, but she felt his departure as if some part of herself had been wrenched from her, and the tears spilled heedlessly onto her joined hands in her lap. Erin and Margery hovered helplessly, and when she gestured that they should leave her, they did so with some relief.

  Magdalen was not in the place d’armes to hear Charles d’Auriac say to her husband in jocular tones that he wished to claim a kinsman’s right to hospitality for another week while he awaited a summons from his uncle at Toulouse.

  She was not in the place d’armes to hear her husband reply as he must: that his lady’s cousin should consider the Castle de Bresse as his own.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Charles d’Auriac began his campaign of whispers before Guy de Gervais was out of sight upon the plain on his way to Calais.

  “Your lady will doubtless be melancholy now that Lord de Gervais has left.”

  Edmund looked surprised at this casual observation. “She has always held Lord de Gervais in high regard, ever since she was a child in his household during our betrothal.” He walked toward the garrison court. “I have some business with the sergeant-at-arms, d’Auriac. If you would care to ride to hounds after dinner, I will have order sent to the stables.”

  “Perhaps my cousin would accompany us,” Charles said, falling in step with his companion. “On my last visit, she was with child, and the Lord de Gervais would not permit her to indulge in such exercise.”

  Edmund made no response, and Charles continued, “Such care as he had for your wife can only be commended.”

  Edmund felt the first prickles of unease at the soft-spoken words, but he didn’t know why he should, unless it was something in the tone; it was too sweet and soft, reminding him of decaying fruit. Or was it in the gray eyes, so like Magdalen’s yet so unlike in their narrowed coldness? “I believe it to be so,” he responded neutrally. “Lord de Gervais has stood in place of her father, Lancaster, these last months.”

  “And in place of her husband, surely?” The gray eyes flicked sideways, swift and thin as a snake’s tongue. Again Edmund didn’t respond because he didn’t know how to.

  “My cousin carried her child well,” Charles went on. “In late December, when I was here, she bore no signs of her pregnancy. Indeed, if it were not for the care Lord de Gervais took of her, one would not have guessed at her condition.” They had reached the garrison court, and d’Auriac stopped just inside the arched entrance. “I will leave you to your business with the sergeant-at-arms, but will gladly join you with the hounds after dinner.” He turned and left, his short cloak fluttering in the breeze.

  Edmund stood watching his departure, a puzzled and uneasy frown creasing his forehead. Something had been said yet not said, but for the life of him he could not pinpoint what it was.

  Before dinner, he
found Magdalen in the antechamber of the lord’s apartments, sewing with her women. He noticed immediately her drawn countenance, her pallor, the sadness in her eyes. He had been aware of those things before, but for some reason they seemed more pronounced now. Was it perhaps because he had been given a reason for her melancholy? A reason that had not occurred to him before.

  “The guests have departed?” she asked, laying down her needle.

  “All but your cousin,” he replied. “He is to stay a further week.”

  Her hand flew to her throat, her eyes filled with a species of terror. “The Sieur d’Auriac remains?”

  “As I have said.” Edmund sounded impatient. “He awaits a summons from Toulouse.”

  “You must tell him to leave.” Her voice was low but contained a fierce determination informed by fear. “He intends me harm.”

  “I will not permit him to harm you,” he said as he had done before, but this time he read the disbelief in her eyes.

  “Lord de Gervais has gone from here,” she said in flat, dull truth.

  “Do you believe only he can protect you? I have said I will do so.” Edmund’s voice rose with his hurt and an anger that seemed to have come from nowhere. “Leave us!” He spoke sharply to Erin and Margery, who hustled from the chamber without a word. “Well, answer me. Do you believe only Lord de Gervais can protect you?”

  Magdalen was silent as she mastered her fear and marshaled her defenses. “I had come to rely upon him,” she said finally. “He has been at my side for many months. You must understand that, Edmund.”

  “I suppose I do.” He went to the cradle where the baby lay cooing. “You have never said when our child was born.”

  “You have never asked,” she replied calmly, picking up her needle again, only the slight tremor of her fingers betraying her agitation. “She was born in April.”

  Edmund’s frown deepened. “But should she not have been born in March?”

  “First babies are often a week or so late, I am told,” she replied, keeping her eyes on her sewing. “It is hard to be exact about such matters.”

  It sounded reasonable enough to Edmund. The child’s dimpled fists were waving randomly, plucking at the air in front of her face as if she would capture some golden dream, and her soft contented cooing mingled with the lazy droning hum of a bumblebee at the open window. It was too serene a scene for ugliness, yet ugliness had entered his mind, and he could not put it from him.

  “We go out with the hounds after dinner,” he said, turning back to Magdalen.

  “I will keep to my apartments until my cousin has taken his leave.” She looked up from her sewing, her face closed and determined.

  “No, I insist that you take your place as his hostess.” Her refusal to see her cousin seemed to underscore her lack of trust in her husband’s ability to protect her, and the hurt and anger rose anew. “It is not right that you should hide from a guest, whatever your dislike of him.”

  “It lies much deeper than dislike, Edmund.” Her head lifted with that unconscious yet unmistakable Plantagenet arrogance and determination that Guy would have recognized. Edmund did not recognize it. Guy de Gervais would have prevailed over that arrogance and determination. Edmund de Bresse could not.

  They argued for many minutes, Edmund becoming angrier as Magdalen became colder and more resolute. She refused to have anything to do with her cousin and would remain in her apartments, indisposed, until he took his leave.

  Baffled and frustrated, he left her finally, the door shivering on its hinges with the force of the slam. Zoe jumped at the bang and wailed. Magdalen picked her up and rocked her, humming soothingly. But it was as if the child felt her mother’s agitation and fear, and she would not be soothed.

  Magdalen stood at the window, looking down on the inner court. In Guy’s absence and d’Auriac’s presence, she felt more vulnerable than she had ever felt in her life. She understood Edmund’s hurt, but she could not help it. Edmund de Bresse was as a film of parchment against the power of Charles d’Auriac to hurt. She knew it in the deepest recesses of her soul; the knowledge flowed through her body with her blood. And her terror grew with the recognition that she did not know why he would wish to harm her, or how he intended doing so. She knew he lusted after her, knew that it was this hunger that crawled like the sticky slime of a slug’s trail across her skin, that filled her head with the terrifying images of the oubliette. But she also knew it was not just her cousin’s concupiscence that threatened her.

  There was some secret here that Guy had known and had chosen not to share with her. And he had ridden away, leaving her in ignorance and fear, to face her cousin’s malevolence without his protection. Tears of anger mingled now with the tears of loss she had been shedding all morning, mingled and were indistinguishable as the emotions became indistinguishable.

  Magdalen did not know it, but her refusal to see her cousin played perfectly into his hands. Had she been beside her husband, the hints and innuendo would have found less fertile soil. But in estrangement, Edmund had no counterbalance for d’Auriac’s clever malice.

  Edmund’s pride was hurt that he had failed to compel his wife’s obedience, and more so that he had failed because she did not trust in his strength. He knew d’Auriac possibly posed a threat, either to Magdalen or to himself, but like Guy de Gervais, he could not imagine how he could put such a threat into practice from within the walls of the Castle de Bresse. There was always poison, of course, but Edmund ate only from the dishes d’Auriac ate from first, and he knew Magdalen’s women prepared her food themselves. Knives in the night were too hard to cover up afterward, and d’Auriac could not stand openly accused of the murder of John of Gaunt’s daughter or son-in-law. So for the moment, there was nothing to fear.

  But Edmund was a man of action and of limited imagination. He saw threats only in terms of the physical. An honest man, a guileless man, he could not plumb the devious depths of an evil mind and was no proof against d’Auriac’s whispers.

  It was a word here, a word there, but it was relentless. D’Auriac talked of little else but Guy de Gervais and Magdalen de Bresse, and whenever Edmund was in his wife’s company the whispers were reinforced by her patent unhappiness and by his earlier recognition that something had changed her from the friendly companion of the past into this remote and rather forbidding woman. She no longer refused him her body, but he knew she was absent in spirit. Even her gentle kindness in their bed, he began to feel as a form of tolerant pity rather than the promise of a future love, and the cold steel of wounded pride twisted in his gut.

  “It is interesting your daughter should have such unusual coloring,” d’Auriac remarked on the third morning as they rode through the outskirts of the forest of Compiegne, a pack of lean deer hounds in full cry ahead of them. “But of course she has the de Gervais blood in some measure, does she not? That red-gold hair is so distinctive.”

  Why had he not remarked on Zoe’s hair coloring? His own was black as night, Magdalen’s as dark and richly brown as sable. A wild fury surged in the young man’s breast at the soft, insidious words of his companion, but no insult had been given, no statement made that could be challenged. He was related to Guy de Gervais and so, therefore, was his daughter, although the shared blood would be running thin in his children. But the poison seeped, and his arrows flew awry throughout the day.

  Before supper that day, he stood above his daughter’s cradle, examining the sleeping child with the poison corroding his soul. Her hair promised to be thick and wavy, glinting red and gold in the evening sunlight. Her eyebrows were faint lines, but they were straight and fair. He glanced at his wife, sitting in contemplative silence by the window. Her eyebrows were the same rich sable as her hair, and they were delicately arched. His own he knew were black and unruly, almost meeting over the bridge of his nose.

  “You will come down to supper,” he said to Magdalen.

  She shook her head. “Not until my cousin takes his leave of us.”

&nb
sp; “You are neglecting your household duties as well as those of hospitality.”

  “The seneschal and the chamberlain can manage quite well without me for a few days. If any has a question, I am here to answer it.”

  “I bid you, as your lord, to come down to supper.” He didn’t expect the command to have any effect, anticipating it would slide off that smooth, resolute composure like water off an oiled skin.

  But Magdalen said simply, “Very well, my lord. If you so command.”

  His surprise was evident in his slackened jaw, the widening of his eyes. He tried to find satisfaction in her submission but could not and heard himself bluster that it was time she learned obedience. And then he felt foolish and stood in awkward silence before saying, “We will go to vespers together.”

  “As you wish, my lord,” she replied in the same flat tone.

  Even more baffled and frustrated by this abrupt capitulation, he strode from the chamber completely ungratified. In truth, Magdalen had yielded because suddenly it seemed not to matter. Her grief and loneliness had become so all-pervasive in the days since Guy’s departure that she had ceased to fear her cousin; or, rather, her fear had ceased to be important.

  Erin and Margery were so relieved that their mistress had decided to bring an end to her enforced seclusion that they chattered like magpies as they helped her dress for the evening. If it hadn’t been for their encouragement, she would not have troubled unduly over her dress, but they were so shocked at her inclination to attend in the great hall in the simple tunic she had been wearing all day that she let them have their way and stood compliantly while they clothed her in cream damask and a scarlet surcote trimmed with silver fox.

  They brushed and braided her hair before fastening her headdress of cylindrical gold cauls attached to a gold headband over her brow. A filmy white veil stood out at the back, brushing her shoulders bared by the wide, low neckline of her gown.