“We are not asking his permission,” Henry said evenly. “And as the captain has said, we do not take one without the other. We all go together, or none of us go at all.”
“Captain Brevant is helping in this madness?” Eleanor whispered.
“Willingly, my lady,” Marienne said, her fear beginning to give way to excitement. “He is a good man, and as such, has surely had his fill of this place, as have we all.”
“He has sworn to see you safely away,” Robin added. “And to lend his sword as far as Nottingham if need be.”
“Nottingham?” Eleanor’s lovely face showed more confusion than ever. “Why on earth—?”
“It was Eduard’s idea,” Robin said proudly. “For the time being, at any rate, he reasons the safest place to hide you is right under the king’s nose. Certes, the Channel will be watched and all ships searched that are bound for Brittany. Brittany itself will be scoured from border to border. It was originally planned to take you to Wales—”
“Wales!”
“Powys, Your Highness, but Eduard has reconsidered in light of your … your reluctance to test the king’s mettle. His … our father, Lord Randwulf, held lands north and east of Nottingham. In Lincolnshire. He still has many friends thereabout, loyal to our grandfather, and among them is a certain prioress who owes a large favour to the House of Wardieu.”
“My head,” the princess gasped. “It begins to spin, Robin. Can you not speak in plainer terms?”
“Plainly said,” bespoke a deep, familiar baritone from the doorway, “if you will allow us, Eleanor, we will fulfill your brother’s promise to you.”
“Eduard?” A slender white hand trembled over empty air for a moment until it was caught and held firm by the stronger, bolder grasp of Eduard FitzRandwulf d’Amboise.
“The priory is called Kirklees, and the abbess will welcome you to its cloisters without a qualm, I can promise you. Safely there, the king cannot touch you, even if he manages, by some wild mischance of fate, to determine your whereabouts. And though it galls me to say it, he will have no more need to fear you once he knows you have taken your vows to heart.”
“A priory?” Eleanor whispered, raising the fingers of her other hand to her lips. “Can it be true?”
“It can,” Eduard promised. “And it will, I swear it on my soul, providing you offer no more arguments.”
“But the risks, Eduard! Nottingham is so far away!”
“It is closer than Wales, with fewer obstacles in our path. A week, no more, and you should be safe behind the walls of Kirklees.”
“And you? What will you do then? How will you get back to Amboise?”
“By a somewhat longer route, I imagine,” he answered casually. “I have sworn to bring my father word personally of your safe conduct, and I fully intend to do so, regardless of any kings … or dragons … who might stand in my way.”
Mention of oaths made reminded Ariel of oaths broken, and she could not stop herself from glancing his way. He had donned his armour, his polished mail hauberk and chausses, and overtop wore the plain gray Crusader’s gypon, slit at the sides for riding. His hair was hidden beneath the mail coif and his gauntlets were tucked into his belt, near the hilt of his sword. He looked every inch a man to whom failure was unheard of. An hour ago, she had been naked in bed with him, thinking everything had changed. Seeing him now, armed and defiant, she suspected nothing had changed at all. Eleanor’s safety was still his first priority, as it should be. But by the time he delivered the princess to Kirklees, would Ariel de Clare be long gone on the road to Wales?
“My lady,” Henry said gently, stepping forward to win the princess’s attention. “We have come this far with no ill effects. God must have willed it, just as He has put the safety and solace of Kirklees within your grasp. How can you refuse Him?”
Eleanor’s head was bowed. When she raised it, there were twin streaks of wetness streaming from the puckered scars across her eyes. The effect on Henry was likened to an iron hammer striking him across the chest.
“How odd,” she whispered softly, her finger lifting from her mouth to her cheek. “To still be able to weep.”
“Surely they are tears of happiness,” Henry said. “To know God has found a way to bring you into His house.”
Eleanor gasped at a breath, then surrendered with a small, fleeting smile. “It appears I cannot fight all of you …” She lifted her face. “Perhaps you will tell me what I must do?”
Robin refrained from letting out a whoop of joy, but just barely. Ariel and Marienne moved at once to sort through the variety of garments strewn on the bed.
“You must wear a disguise,” Ariel said. “A squire’s disguise is best, with a cloak and a hood to keep your head well covered.”
“A blind squire,” Eleanor mused. “Indeed, it might draw a curious eye or two.”
“It was more the colour of your hair I was thinking of, Highness,” Ariel amended. “Such a golden crown would not go unnoticed.”
The faintest hint of chagrin pinkened Eleanor’s throat and she apologized by way of a compliment. “Eduard tells me your own colouring is nothing shy of spectacular.”
With Ariel’s startled glance, FitzRandwulf cleared his throat and snatched up Robin by the sleeve of his hooded jerkin, ushering him out the door. “Come along, Henry, and help gather up the rest of the armour. Ladies … as swift as swift can?”
“Before you can blink an eye,” Marienne promised, already shaking the folds—and dust—out of the chainse that would replace Eleanor’s long tunic.
“What am I to do with this?” the princess asked, pulling Ariel’s thoughts back to reality. In her hands she held a leather belt, strung with over forty rawhide strips.
Since it was the very article that had given Ariel so much grief on the journey through Normandy, she felt expert enough to offer instruction.
“It is worn thus, Highness,” she explained, buckling it firmly around Eleanor’s waist. “These ties are called points and are used to bind the hose snugly to the limbs.”
“So many?” Eleanor exclaimed. “Can not just one or two suffice?”
“Men … especially knights are all vain creatures,” Ariel announced grimly, catching up the first leg of the hose Marienne assisted the princess into. While she began to attach the points to the corresponding ring of eyelets woven into the top of each stocking, she kept talking, if only to keep her mind off the next and most dangerous stage of the rescue. “God and all the saints forbid there should be a wrinkle or a sag to mar the bold thews of such a fellow’s thighs. For a woman to bare an ankle, it would cause the earth to tremble and monks to prostrate themselves by droves. But a man—ho! The tighter the hose, the shorter the tunic … the more likely he is to strut and stretch and boast of his wares. Why, I have even known my brother to pad himself with wads of linen for the benefit of winning a particular maiden’s eye.”
Eleanor’s lips trembled with a smile. “Did he succeed?”
Ariel paused and thought back. “As it happened, halfway through the evening, the wadding shifted and started to creep down toward his knee. He had the maiden swooning, but not for the reasons he intended.”
A small choking sound sent Ariel’s gaze flying upward. Her expression changed from concern to relief to shared amusement when she saw that Eleanor was laughing. Marienne was laughing too—and fighting tears again, blessing Ariel with silent thanks for prompting what had been the first time the princess had laughed since the fiasco at Mirebeau.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A gray and sinister dawn was seeping through the teeth of the outer battlements as FitzRandwulf’s party assembled in the courtyard. Few of the lower windows showed any signs of light; most were still shuttered against the wind and the rain that came and went in waves, sweeping across the bailey, soaking and resoaking everything in its path. The walls were silvered with it and the gutters overflowed, sending swift rivulets of water running through the cracks and crevices in the cobbles.
/> Ariel walked into the circle of horses and hissing torchlights, looking neither to the right where Henry was conferring with Brevant, nor to the left where Eduard and Sedrick were rearranging their saddle packs with exaggerated care as they kept a close watch on the doors and windows that opened on to the bailey. Ariel was more conscious of the two cloaked and hooded figures who followed steadfastly behind her. So engrossed was she in worrying how Eleanor would cope with the uneven cobbles, she stubbed her toe on one and nearly launched herself headlong into her palfrey. The princess did not miss a step, however. She kept her head tilted forward and a hand grasped around a fold of Marienne’s cloak, gauging each footfall to precisely match her maid’s.
Six grumbling, grousing guardsmen stood in a huddle beating their arms for warmth and cursing in unbroken waves over Jean de Brevant’s lack of concern that none of them had laid their heads on their cots more than an hour. The captain had insisted the ruse was still necessary, to give the appearance of leaving Corfe under protection of Gisbourne’s guard, otherwise the sentries on duty at the gates might question the reason why only he accompanied them.
Collectively, they looked as nondescript as when they had ridden through half of Normandy, yet their swords were within easy reach. They all wore their helms and carried their shields slung across their backs on leather straps, rubbing an assortment of arms that might otherwise have been relegated to the packhorses. Even Ariel, when she mounted her palfrey, found both a falchion and a bow looped over her saddle, placed there by a man whose gray eyes acknowledged her glance and expressed confidence in her ability to put the weapons to good use if it became necessary.
Brevant, cursing the rain in a loud enough voice to earn a partial grumble of agreement from the guards, ordered the knights to mount and waste no more time dallying. He had better things to do, he said, (eliciting another round of sly grins from Gisbourne’s men) than to squander the morning pointing them onto the right road. He assumed the lead on his enormous rampager and set a belligerent pace through the inner bailey and over the first draw. The outer bailey was just as deserted and bleak; the ground was mud underfoot and the horses made deep sucking sounds as they approached the huge barbican. They rode in pairs and threes, with the guardsmen remaining in a glum pack in the rear, preferring to keep to their own company.
Ariel, despite the rain and the chill, found she was sweating uncomfortably beneath her layers of linen and wool. The skin between her shoulder blades was clammy and her hands, inside her gloves, were sticky with a dampness that had nothing to do with the wetness that leaked under her clothes. Henry rode beside her, and although his face was naught more than a dark blot beneath the steel nasal of his helm, she thought she saw a puff of breath after one sidelong glance, accompanied by the whispered words: “Courage, Puss.”
Behind them, riding three abreast were Sedrick, Eleanor, and Eduard. Iorwerth, with his arm cradled in a leather sling, rode behind them with Marienne and Robin completing the threesome.
Twenty paces from the main gates, a shadow detached itself from the guard tower, prompting Brevant to hold up his hand and signal a halt. He rode forward alone, supposedly to identify himself and explain what they were about. Ariel could hear nothing but the loud pounding of her heartbeat. Her palfrey took a nervous half-step sideways and skidded on a hump of mud, righting itself with an indignant snort. Somewhere off in the rain-soaked distance she thought she heard a bell ringing, but since she had no idea of the hour, she could take no comfort in knowing if it was a church bell or an alarm bell being sounded.
Beside her, Henry cursed softly into the drizzle. His helm creaked as he turned his head to glance over his shoulder, but a hissed warning from FitzRandwulf stopped him before the gesture could be completed.
Brevant had been swallowed into the gloomy base of the barbican tower, and the expectation of hearing a scream or a shout grew proportionately with each agonizingly slow minute that ticked past.
When the shout did come, it brought all of them jumping out of their skin. Barely had it tightened around their bones again when the grate of rusted iron links winding through a winch sent spidery clawmarks of relief scratching down their spines. The spiked grate of the portcullis seemed to take another eternity to lift high enough for Brevant to stalk out of the shadows and remount whereupon an impatient wave of his hand brought them moving forward again.
The horses hooves, clacking over the wooden draw, sounded like the rumble of thunder. Ariel was certain a momentary shout would bring a hail of crossbow bolts raining down upon their heads, and she rode as stiffly as a wooden marionette at a fair.
The village seemed to be leagues away, the forest beyond might have been on the other side of the world. On their right, the sea shone dully through the rocky hillocks that shaped the coastline; landward, to the east, a receding mountain range of low-lying black clouds still bristled with night evils.
Evil, in another form, sent a second shock to test the strength of Ariel’s heart and nerve. They were barely through the village and taking their first cleansing breaths of forest air, when the unmistakable blast of a horn trumpeted an alert to anyone venturing along the road: the royal cavalcade was approaching and expected to encounter no obstacles in its path.
Eduard and Henry exchanged a hard glance.
Their first instinct was to order everyone into concealment behind the wall of dense underbrush that lined the road. With the poor light and the rain, there was a chance the cavalcade would pass by without paying too close attention to the forest shadows. It was Brevant who kept a leveller head and drew the knights’ attention to the guardsmen who, though resentful of being out on the road in such miserable conditions, were already in the process of dismounting and smoothing their tunics lest the king’s eye happen to fall upon them as he passed by.
“Now we’ll see what stuff your balls are really made of, my lord,” grunted the captain, grinning.
He took command, ordering his men to form a straight line along the side of the road. Following their example, the De Clare party dismounted and led their steeds clear of the road, subtly forming a second line opposite the captain’s men. Eleanor, Marienne, Ariel, and Robin were put well back with the horses, while the knights prepared to give proper salute to their liege.
The next blast of the horn went right up Ariel’s spine. Robin was beside her and she took some courage from the wink he gave before he bowed his head deeper into the shadow of his hood. All of the knights and guards went down on bended knee and lowered their eyes as the first of the king’s horsemen came into view. He, in turn, saw the troop of graycloaks and men-at-arms kneeling in the rain by the side of the road and gave two brief blasts on his horn to alert the others behind him.
Only Brevant remained afoot, his lance held high to display Gisbourne’s pennons. One of the heavily armoured guards in the king’s troop rode forward with brisk authority to exchange a few words with Brevant, and, seemingly satisfied with the answers he received, barely glanced at the bowed helms of the others before he wheeled his horse back onto the road and rejoined the rest of the guard.
Ariel, her view partially blocked by her brother’s broad shoulders, risked a few peeks as the cavalcade moved past. A guard of perhaps a dozen foot soldiers marched in the van, carrying the pennons and banners that normally would have fluttered colourfully and boldly to celebrate the approach of the king. Rain and wind had wrapped most of them to the lance poles, but here and there, a snap of wet silk revealed John’s device of stalking leopards. Behind the footmen came archers, and behind them, a single horse with the king’s personal confessor, who glared through the rain with a mean and unholy expression, probably thinking of a warm bed and a blazing fire. Fully a score of mounted knights splashed by next, their faces almost completely obscured by visors or long, wedge-shaped nasals. Heavy suits of chain mail were supplemented by baldrics and belts holding swords, daggers, and battle-axes; all creaking and sawing back and forth with the motion of the heavy destriers. Most of the
animals looked walleyed and balky, having spent the past two days in the bowels of a transport ship.
Riding in the middle, surrounded by this armoured phalanx of mercenaries, was the king. Ariel might have missed him entirely, so swathed and caped was he against the elements, but for a turn of the head and a glimpse of the long, pointed face. There was nothing regal about him. Nothing to set the heart aflutter or the lips moving in a prayer of exaltation. Certainly nothing that would bring to mind his brother, the glorious golden-maned lionheart who had ruled before him. John’s features were dark and mean, his face starting to look bloated under the vee-shaped beard and prickling brows. His body was swollen from his overindulgence in rich foods and his legs stuck out, short and stubby, from the sides of his horse.
Ariel lowered her lashes again. Another raised his and stared at England’s king through flint-gray eyes as cold as ice, as hard as steel. The bitter taste of gall rose in Eduard’s throat as he watched the pompous, gloating fool parade past. It would have been so easy—an arrow in the back and damn the consequences—to end all of Britain’s woes then and there.
Eduard felt the hatred burning through his veins like acid. He saw the faces of the knights taken at Mirebeau who had been brought here to Corfe in chains and left to starve to death in darkness and unimaginable agony. He saw the proud, handsome face of Arthur, and the tormented features of the dowager queen so utterly devastated by the need to choose between a son and a grandson.
And there was Eleanor. A casual word from John had crippled her forever. Eduard had not allowed himself to think about it until now, but he wondered if her uncle had watched while his torturer stuck his thumbs in Eleanor’s eyes and gouged them from the sockets? Had he savoured the pain she must have endured, the fear and incomprehensible terror she must have felt being strapped to a chair, her head held rigid while she suffered through the appalling disfigurement? Was her last sight that of John smiling, gloating over his cleverness and cruelty?
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