Almost Innocent

by Jane Feather

  But in Zoe she saw what had once been and in Zoe she saw what must be … the future she must enable her daughter to have, whatever the future might hold for herself.

  Her first sight of the fortress monastery dominating the mountainous countryside from its commanding hilltop position brought the terror alive and vivid again. The lilies of France and the hounds and hawk of Beauregard flew side by side from the donjon. It was a dark, menacing, massive pile of stone. The approach through the town sprawled across the hillside was a sunless ride through narrow, fetid cobbled streets overshadowed by the great walls of the fortress.

  It was midday when Durand left the main body of his army encamped outside the town and rode with his prisoner and a small escort of pikers and archers up to the fortress. Magdalen’s arms tightened around the baby as they reached the drawbridge across a moat, wider and deeper than any she had seen. Durand’s herald blew his note. It was answered from within, and the portcullis rose slowly as the drawbridge was lowered.

  A dark, dank stench of old never-dried stone floated from the entrails of the fortress as Magdalen and her child rode to face the horror it contained. She was trembling, and Zoe wailed in sudden sympathy, her little face screwed up with unidentifiable unease.

  The cry strengthened Magdalen. “Hush, pigeon,” she soothed, lifting the child to kiss the plump cheek.

  They rode beneath the arch, into the place d’armes, thronged with men-at-arms. Cowled monks in the brown corded habits of the Franciscans mingled with the warriors, hurrying on their own business, God and war inextricably bound here as they were in the minds of all men.

  They rode through the place d’armes and into the inner ward, where attendants hurried from the donjon to greet them. A woman in nun’s habit, a harsh-featured face beneath the stiff starched wimple, came over to Magdalen as she was helped from her horse.

  “I am Sister Therese, lady. You will come with me.”

  Magdalen followed the nun into the donjon. The air inside was chill despite the midsummer heat, and there were no floor coverings on the stone passages or wall hangings to block the draughts. The nun led her through a circuitous maze of passages, up twisting staircases, and stopped outside an iron-bound oak door.

  “For the moment, you are to be lodged in this apartment.” She raised the heavy latch and opened the door onto a small, well-swept chamber. The only light came from a narrow slitted window high up in the stone wall and from tallow candles that burned on a long pine table beneath the window. There was no fire in the hearth, but the hangings to the bed looked clean, and there was a wooden cradle on rockers beside the bed.

  “There is a latrine beyond the garderobe.” The nun gestured to the door in the outside wall. “You will be brought hot water for you and the child, and meat and drink. If you have need of anything further, there is a bell beside the door.” She indicated the hand bell on a table. “When they are ready to see you, I will come for you.”

  Her face had remained set in its original, forbidding lines throughout this brief communication, her speech delivered with a degree of indifference, as if she were simply reciting by rote. She offered Magdalen no sign of fellow feeling, no hint of sympathy, and Magdalen’s questions died in the face of an impassivity that seemed to indicate little or no interest in the captive woman’s fate.

  The door closed on the nun, and the heavy wooden bar fell into place with a dull finality. Magdalen examined her surroundings. The chamber was furnished with the bare necessities, offering no clues to the intentions of her captors. In a few minutes, the latch was lifted and a serving wench appeared with a steaming pitcher which she took into the garderobe. Beneath her arm, she carried a pile of toweling which she set beside the pitcher.

  “My thanks,” Magdalen said. “I’ll be glad to wash away the dust of the road.” She smiled at the girl. “How are you called?”

  But the girl merely stared at her with frightened eyes and scuttled from the chamber.

  It was not reassuring, but Magdalen turned to the soothing tasks of caring for the baby. She was washing her when the door again opened, admitting this time two burly varlets, who deposited her own trunks in the middle of the floor.

  There was something both comforting and discomforting about having her own possessions again. For the first time in weeks, she could change her clothes in the privacy of four walls, but the presence of her trunks, of the familiar possessions in this dim chamber, seemed to impart a finality to her present residence, as if she must learn to call this place home.

  She had fed Zoe and changed her own clothes before the serving wench reappeared, this time with a tray bearing bread, meat, and wine. It was simple fare, but Magdalen found she could not eat. The meat would not be swallowed however much she chewed, and the bread settled in a solid lump in her throat. Apprehension was now filling the gap left by the accomplishment of her physical tasks. She drank a little wine, hoping it would give her some courage, and paced the small chamber, waiting.

  It was late afternoon when the nun returned for her. The sun was still hot and bright, but the day might as well have been dull and overcast for all the sunlight penetrating the little slitted window. Magdalen was chilled and rubbed her hands together as if it were midwinter. When she heard the latch being lifted, she turned to the door, and the cold was in her soul.

  Sister Therese came in. Her eyes were a muddy brown, without depth or warmth. “You are to come now. They are ready for you.”

  Magdalen bent to pick up Zoe, who sat propped against pillows on the bed, shaking a wooden rattle with an air of great concentration.

  “The child is to remain here.”

  “No!” Magdalen forgot her own fear in the face of this new threat. They would not separate her from her baby, not in this place. “The child goes where I go.”

  “She stays here, lady.” The nun looked significantly over her shoulder to where two brawny men-at-arms stood. They stepped into the doorway.

  “You will have to kill me first.” Magdalen issued the dramatic threat with composure now. She knew instinctively that for the moment she herself was to be unharmed, and if she stood her ground they would have no choice but to accede to her demand. Her arms were wrapped tightly around Zoe, and her gray eyes glared their implacable message.

  There was a short silence when the coiled tension in the room seemed almost palpable. Magdalen did not move in her Plantagenet determination, and her eyes did not so much as flicker. Sister Therese touched her wimple; it was a gesture of uncertainty.

  “The child will not be harmed,” she said slowly.

  Magdalen’s eyes went to the two men standing in the doorway, and she said nothing.

  “I swear to you that she will not be harmed,” Sister Therese said, and there was a placatory note in her voice.

  Magdalen thought rapidly. She knew she would want no distractions when facing whatever she was about to face. The child was her weakness, as well as her strength, and she could not afford to reveal that weakness to those she was about to confront. “You will swear on the cross you wear that my child will come to no harm in my absence.” Her voice was low and steady.

  The nun touched her crucifix. “I swear it. She will come to no harm while you are gone from this chamber. If you wish it, I will remain with her. You are to go with the men.”

  Gently, Magdalen laid the baby in the cradle, tucking her up securely. Zoe blinked sleepily and seemed not ill content with the arrangement. Magdalen kissed her brow and then straightened.

  “Very well,” she said. “I leave her in your charge.” Strangely, their roles seemed to have been reversed and she was in control, making the decisions instead of having them made for her. It gave her courage.

  She walked out of the chamber, and the nun closed the door gently behind her. The gentleness reassured Magdalen since it seemed to indicate some consideration for the child, a desire not to startle her with a sudden noise. The two men-at-arms silently fell in on either side of Magdalen, forming an escort.


  They progressed in silence down endless passages, past hurrying pages and anxious servitors. Couriers and men-at-arms moved with a stolid purpose, cowled monks with measured pace. None offered the woman and her escort more than a passing glance, and Magdalen wondered if such sights were common enough in this vast fortress dedicated to so many purposes, both religious and secular.

  At a door set into a bastion wall, her escort stopped. One of them rapped with his staff. The door was opened, and the man who stood there smiled his thin smile at Magdalen.

  “Such a pleasure, cousin,” Charles d’Auriac said, bowing. “I bid you welcome.” He gestured sweepingly that she should enter the tower room.

  Magdalen felt his evil, but she was accustomed to it and had prepared herself well for this first encounter. She was not, however, prepared for the massed wall of malignancy that seemed to shimmer before her eyes as she walked past her cousin and faced the four other men in the round chamber.

  They were sitting at a rectangular table in the center of the room. Fingers of light came from the slitted windows set at eye level around the wall. A branched candlestick in the middle of the table augmented the light and threw golden shadows. Four pairs of gray eyes regarded her as she stood uncertainly just inside the doorway.

  “I bid you welcome to your mother’s family, Magdalen, daughter of Isolde.” A heavy-set man, older than the others, spoke from his place at the head of the table. None of the men rose at her entrance. “I am Bertrand de Beauregard, your mother’s brother and the head of this family. You will accord me the reverence due your uncle and the head of your family.”

  He was her uncle. She could read it in his face, in the resemblance they shared. He did not look in the least like her, yet something told unmistakably that they were of the same blood, as she had known it with Charles d’Auriac. And courtesy decreed that she make her reverence.

  She ignored courtesy. “I have been brought here under duress.”

  “You were removed from your mother’s family without consent and have been brought back to them.” His voice was harsh, but she sensed that the grating note was habitual and that he was not at the moment angered by her refusal to obey his demand.

  “I have never known my mother’s family. I do not understand how I was removed from them.” She held herself very still, aware of Charles behind her, so close she could almost feel his breath on her neck. Her skin crawled at his proximity, but he was a known danger and for the moment she put him aside, concentrating instead on the unknown embodied in this burly man, whose gray eyes pierced the world from beneath massive shaggy brows above a large, pointed nose.

  “That will be explained to you. For now, you will acknowledge your place in this family.”

  “I am the Duke of Lancaster’s daughter,” she said, lifting her head. “It is to him I owe filial reverence.” She had moved to the end of the table and now stood facing him, her hands flattened on the cool oak surface.

  There was a flash of blood-red as something caught the pointer of sun from one of the window slits. The next instant she was staring in disbelief at her hands on the table. Between the middle and index fingers of her right hand a dagger shivered, the ruby-eyed sea serpent glinting. It was impossible to believe that the dagger was not pinning her finger to the table, yet she felt no pain and could see no blood. Her eyes lifted slowly, appalled, to the man at the end of the table.

  “Pay attention,” said Bertrand. “You talk too much and listen too little.”

  She swallowed, moistened her dry lips, gingerly moved her fingers apart. A tiny bead of blood showed where the dagger had nicked the skin of her middle finger. The silence in the chamber was profound.

  “My lord uncle,” she acknowledged finally, bowing her head.

  Charles d’Auriac reached over her shoulder, pulled out the dagger, and sent it skidding across the table to his uncle. Magdalen noticed distantly that the entire surface of the table was scarred with incisions like the one just made. Her sense of unreality increased. What had happened was clearly accepted as a usual method of discipline in this group.

  Bertrand laid the dagger on the table at his right hand. “Niece,” he responded. “You are most welcome. My sons, your cousins …” His hand moved in leisurely fashion, indicating the three men at the table.

  “Gerard, Marc, and Philippe. Your cousin Charles, you already know. His mother was sister to myself and to your mother.”

  “What do you want of me?” She managed to frame the question, to keep her head raised, despite the deep chill of terror in her belly.

  “Why, your allegiance to the de Beauregards, niece,” Bertrand responded gently, leaning back in his chair. “You are one of us. You belong to us, as your mother belonged to us. We would embrace you.”

  The embrace of the serpent. Her eye fixed on the serpentine head of the dagger, and the malevolence of her mother’s family swirled around her in choking possession. “I am a Plantagenet,” she said, summoning the last drop of defiance, her eyes never leaving the dagger. Next time, she knew, it could draw real blood.

  But Bertrand made no move toward the weapon. He leaned back in his chair, looking up at her with narrowed eyes. His voice was suddenly quite soft. “You were born in this very chamber, daughter of Isolde.”

  “Here?” She had always known she’d been born in France, but beyond that had neither asked for nor been offered further information. “In this room?”

  She looked around the bastion room, its thick stone walls, flagstone floor, and great hearth, empty now, but on the winter night of her birth a fire would have been kindled. A shiver lifted the fine hairs on her spine. She was standing in the room of her birth, among her mother’s family. And she had known only the cool green lands of England, the drear wilderness of a border fortress, the lush arrogance of the Plantagenet court. Only these had informed her sense of herself, of who and what she was, of her place in the world. And now she was standing where some woman had gone through the agonies of birth to bring her into the world … agonies she had gone through herself … agonies that she knew welded a mother to her child. The sense of the room seemed to seep into her blood, through her pores, like the presence of the mother she had never known. Had Isolde de Beauregard died in this room? Had she died here in the moment of birth, or afterward, in some other chamber?

  “Did she die here?” She uttered the question on the thought.

  Something in Bertrand’s gray eyes flickered, a serpent’s darting venom. His voice was still and cold, almost disembodied, as if it emerged from the mouth of a corpse. “Your father poisoned her in this room … and here she suffered her death agony at the moment of your birth. Lancaster took you from her dying body.”

  The horror swirled around her. She grabbed the edge of the table, her knuckles whitening as she hung on to the hard solidity in an effort to keep upright as she absorbed what had been said. “My father killed my mother?”

  Softly, his words falling into the cool light of early evening, Bertrand told her. He told her of her mother’s gifts, her power to bewitch men, the way they had harnessed those gifts, that power, to work for the good of the family. He told her how Isolde had set out to entrap Lancaster and how her plan had been foiled by the prince. He told her her mother cared nothing for Lancaster, had seduced him simply to achieve his death for the greater good of France and the aggrandizement of the de Beauregards. The words were soft, but their meaning was as marble, ice cold and indelible. She had been conceived in hatred and born of a murderous revenge.

  So this was the secret Guy de Gervais had kept from her. She understood then so much … understood that dreadful moment when John of Gaunt had rejected his eleven-year-old daughter … understood his continuing aversion … understood the strange, oblique remarks Guy de Gervais had made about her resemblance to her mother, how he would never expand, would stop as if he had already said too much … understood his recoil when she had blindly stated her belief in following the dictates of passion. She understood then that the ef
fect she had on men, the hungry gazes of the men at her father’s court, the lusting of her cousin, of the brigand chieftain, the passionate loving and lusting of Edmund and Guy, was the effect her mother had had on men. She was the daughter of Isolde de Beauregard, and these men, Isolde’s family … her family … intended to put her to the same use to which they had put her mother, employing the same innate powers.

  And all the love she had felt from anyone was suddenly tarnished like old brass, green and spoiled. It was aroused from tainted roots, despoiled and despoiling. She felt as she had done all those years ago, when Guy de Gervais had told her that John of Gaunt was her father. The same desperation, confusion, excoriating hurt of the soul swamped her. And this time there was no loving, understanding figure in whom she reposed absolute trust to lead her to understanding.

  But she was no longer a child. The same experience could not engulf her as it had once done, and she had no need of an omnipotent guardian to make sense of the world for her. She had a core, her own core, and she clung to it, facing these men with their uncanny resemblance to herself, these men who were telling her she was of them and belonged to them, telling her that she would work for them because she owed them family fealty as her mother had done. She would reject their taint.

  “No!” she said.

  She recoiled with a gasp as the dagger drove into the very edge of the table a fraction of an inch from her belly.

  “Pull it out and give it back to me,” Bertrand said. his voice as cold and calm as ever. She obeyed because she could not imagine doing otherwise, drawing forth the blade, seeing its keenness shimmer in the candlelight as she pushed it along the table so that he would have it to use again.