Danger’s Promise

by Marliss Moon

  “I will do what I can,” she heard herself say. And in the same instant, she thought of several improvements she might make at Helmesly before the seneschal returned. Would it help her cause at all to make his castle more welcoming? It might dissuade him from violence, she reasoned, to find his home transformed when he did come back.

  She could place a tapestry or two upon the walls, make torches to brighten the great hall, gather flowers to add color. At this juncture she would try anything within her powers to earn his good will.

  She felt precisely like a straw dummy hanging in the wind, awaiting the thrust of a lance.

  Chapter Ten

  With Simon ever present in the sling tied across her shoulders, Clarise carried luncheon for two to the outer ward. The day was growing hotter, much like the situation in which she found herself. She hoped today to make an ally of Sir Roger. If anyone could aid her with her cause, it was he.

  She found the knight in the training arena, tightening bowstrings on the arsenal of bows. With no men-at-arms to train, he focused his energies on keeping Helmesly in constant readiness for war. All the fighting men were off with the Slayer at Glenmyre.

  Clarise hailed him from a distance and showed him her basket. They found a shady area in the orchard, where Sir Roger spread the blanket under a pear tree. She didn’t miss his quizzical look. If his watchfulness were any indication, he knew that she was up to something.

  “Have you any news?” she asked to distract him. She pulled Simon from the sling and laid him on his stomach in the center of the blanket.

  The knight eased himself down beside her, his joints protesting loudly. “Nay, nothing more than to say that Ferguson has yet to strike. Perhaps he has changed his mind with my lord on site defending Glenmyre.” He began to unpack the basket. He lifted out a bit of dry meat and grimaced. “How does the babe today?” he asked.

  “Fully recovered,” Clarise assured him. She patted Simon on the back. The future baron grunted in an effort to lift his head. There was much to catch the eye. A butterfly settled at the edge of the blanket and fanned its black and yellow wings at him.

  Clarise glanced sidelong at the knight to gauge his mood. He appeared more somber than usual. She guessed it must chafe him to linger at Helmesly awaiting summons, but such was his duty as second-in-command.

  She began by informing him of Doris’s miscarriage. He listened intently, clucking with compassion to hear that the baby was stillborn. Clarise did not miss the pitying glance he sent her way. No doubt he was thinking that she had suffered a similar loss. For the hundredth time she lamented the necessity of that particular lie. “I wonder who the father was,” she said out loud. “The servants must know, for one of them whispered that the babe looked just like his father.”

  “Did you see the babe?”

  “Nay,” she admitted. She had scarcely been able to glance at the lifeless infant.

  “Hmmm,” said the knight. “Doris is a spinster.”

  Which meant that she could be with whomever she pleased, provided she was discreet. “As you can tell, the event will have an impact on the food we eat,” she remarked, indicating the meat at which he had already pulled a face. “Doris was the best cook in the castle.”

  They settled on splitting a capon wing and sharing the wine. “ ’Twill take her a week or so to recover,” she said, accepting the wineskin he handed her. “I could speak to the others about the quality of the fare.”

  “You had best leave that to Dame Maeve,” he warned. “She is jealous of her duties, that one.”

  Clarise agreed with him and steered the conversation back to the day’s events. “Is there only one midwife in these parts?” she asked.

  “Aye,” he said. “Why?”

  “Then the woman I saw this morning must have been the one who oversaw Simon’s birth?” She knew she was prying, but she could not imagine the Slayer putting up with the shriveled woman’s malpractice.

  Saintonge cast her a glowering, sidelong look. “Aye, she was the same,” he answered bitterly. “Lady Genrose was fine until that shrew took over,” he added.

  Clarise took note of his disapproval. “I do not agree with her methods,” she felt safe in adding. “Heating the chamber is a heathenish practice. She was insensitive to Doris’s pain and seemed not at all dismayed to deliver a stillborn.”

  “As I said, there are no other midwives.” Taking a bite of the bread, he added that the men would grow discontent if they were made to eat such fare.

  The time had come to lay her proposition before him. Clarise reached into the basket. “Would you like a sugared almond?” she offered. “ ’Tis the last one in the kitchens.” She held out the confection she had squirreled away for bribery.

  His gray eyes narrowed, and his familiar smile took hold of one edge of his mouth. “What do you want?” he asked. “I know you ventured into this heat for something. Out with it.”

  “ ’Tis a simple request, really,” she assured him.

  “Speak it then,” he said kindly.

  She experienced an inward twinge. Would the knight be so congenial when he learned how very much she had kept from him? “First I need the key to the chapel.”

  “What!”

  “Doris asked that her babe be given a mass,” she quickly explained. “She wants him buried in the castle graveyard with the rest of her family. The servants hunger for a spiritual life, Sir Roger. I know that the interdict prohibits services of any kind,” she added, cutting off the protest that was certain to come, “but they will be happier with a chapel where they may venture in and pray.”

  Sir Roger itched a spot inside his collar.

  Clarise saw that Simon’s eyes had begun to cross as he examined the pattern on the blanket. She put him in a new location.

  “Who would bury the babe and say the proper words over his grave?” Saintonge finally asked. His question betrayed at least some consideration.

  “Perhaps the Abbot of Revesby would come? The servants think highly of him.” She also had personal reasons for wanting to meet the good abbot. If she didn’t soon get a hold of Alec, she was doomed to confessing her guilt to Lord Christian.

  The knight shook his head. “I doubt he will defy his colleague again.”

  “Defy? What do you mean?”

  He looked displeased with himself for having said so much, then grimaced with resolve to share what he knew. “It was Ethelred who wed Lord Christian and his lady in the very chapel you speak of,” he grimly explained. “The Abbot of Rievaulx had refused to marry them, offering no other reason than his differences with the baron. Ethelred petitioned the archbishop and received permission to perform the sacrament in Gilbert’s stead.”

  “Gilbert is the Abbot of Rievaulx?” she asked.

  “Aye.” He gave her an odd look. “You must not have lingered long at the abbey to have escaped that knowledge.”

  “I was housed separately from the men,” she answered, wincing. Coward! You should have seized the opportunity to confess to him.

  “Ah. Well, on the day of the wedding, Gilbert discovered Ethelred’s betrayal. He tried to stop the ceremony but arrived too late. In a choleric fit, he cried out a warning that has caused a rift between the serfs and their seneschal ever since, just as he meant it to.”

  “What was it?” Clarise asked, feeling a chill on the top of her head. At last she would know why the folk at Helmesly persisted in fearing their master.

  The knight began dumping leftovers in the basket.

  “Please tell me,” she softly begged him.

  He stilled, struggling with himself. “My lord is an honorable man,” he told her. The scars stood out starkly on his face.

  Clarise felt her eyes sting in response to such loyalty. “I have seen the better side of him,” she admitted. And she would doubtless see the worst unless she could soften the blow when it came. “What did Gilbert say?”

  Sir Roger looked down at his own callused hand. “He said Lady Genrose would be slain by
her husband.”

  Clarise barely smothered her gasp. A vision of a body desecrated rose up in her mind’s eye, and she shook it free.

  Sir Roger’s eyes flashed with unaccustomed fierceness. “The lady labored long and died in childbirth. Lord Christian saved Simon from dying, also. He never wanted such a fate for his wife!”

  She put her own hand over his roughened one. “I believe you,” she said convincingly. “I do. And God will reward such loyalty as yours.” As she squeezed his fingers, she mourned that their bond of friendship would soon be put to the test. “Gilbert is mad,” she added, saying out loud what she had thought the moment she saw the unreal glitter in the abbot’s eyes. “When I spoke with him, he left me feeling quite uneasy.”

  “You may be right,” Saintonge agreed. “They say he works night and day pouring over his herbs. Likely he has tried one too many of his concoctions, and it has turned his brain to mush.”

  Clarise smiled at the knight’s imagination. “I don’t know why the servants put any credence in the things he has to say,” she commented lightly.

  His eyes began to crinkle at the corners. His smile took up its post once more. “Helmesly is a happier place for your presence, lady,” he told her with feeling. “You have cast your light into my lord’s dark heart, and I thank you for it.”

  So that he wouldn’t see the guilt in her face, she lifted her gaze toward the main keep where it stood between its graceful buttresses. To her amazement, contentment flooded her heart when she looked upon its clean lines. How could she feel so connected to a place when the foundation of her existence here was built on sand?

  Heathersgill had ceased to be a home after Ferguson usurped her father. For months she’d felt abandoned by Alec, overwhelmed by her family’s plight. Now all those feelings were removed from her, by time and distance. It was wrong of her to forget her family.

  “Do you know if Alec has made reply to Lord Christian’s offer?” she dared to ask. If there were any way to escape her final judgment, she would take it. Alec’s chances of defeating Ferguson were not as high as Christian’s. But at least she knew him for an honorable man, a kind man.

  The knight studied her from beneath his lashes. “There’s been no word,” he said neutrally.

  Sir Roger had praised her for bringing happiness to Helmesly, but he didn’t yet trust her with issues of power and politics. She could not forget that underneath his friendly veneer there remained a bond of loyalty, firm and enduring. “Tell me how you came to serve Lord Christian,” she heard herself inquire.

  Saintonge leaned in with an air of confidence. “I served the Wolf before him.”

  “His father?” she asked in amazement.

  “I didn’t know he was his father. Nor did Lord Christian, until later. He came to Wendesby to train as a squire. He was but twelve years old—a slim lad with a vocabulary that had me scratching my head to remember my grammar. He spoke eloquently of angels and apostles and a vision of the future.”

  Clarise went curiously light-headed. “He was that innocent, then?” she breathed, all ears as she waited for more. “Go on,” she said when the knight paused thoughtfully.

  “The Wolf refused to recognize him publicly. He kept their kinship a secret, I think because he didn’t understand him. He looked at the boy and saw his weakness rather than his strength. He felt the need to turn the whelp into a warrior.”

  Oh, nay. She felt a sudden pang for Christian’s lost simplicity. “Did Lord Christian take offense to that? Is that why . . . why he razed his father’s demesne six years ago? Did he hate him so much?”

  Sir Roger picked up the baby, whose head had dropped wearily to the blanket. He held Simon against the hard surface of his iron-linked chest. “My lord was ill treated by his sire. He was made to sweat and to toil. To train long hours and then grow hungry. He did not discover that the Wolf was his father until his half brother taunted him on the lists, calling him a bastard.”

  Clarise stifled a gasp of sympathy.

  “By then I had grown fond of him,” the knight continued. “He was a quick study in the art of warfare. In just a few years, he had grown as tall and strong as the father who denied him. His sword arm became the stuff of legends. Yet what I most admired in him was that he never lost his sense of right and wrong. He had a determined spirit and a streak of chivalry that the Wolf could not snuff out.”

  He patted the baby, transferring his loyalty to the Slayer’s child. “That is how he got the scar on his cheek,” he recalled. “His father found an altar he had built in one corner of the stables. He was a Dane, himself, and a godless man. He ordered Christian chained to a post and whipped. My lord refused to cry out. He even turned his head to send the Wolf a defiant look, and the tip of the whip cracked his face. He was only fifteen.”

  Clarise touched a finger to her cheek. She could almost feel the sting of the whip herself. Why, he’d been only a boy! How could a father treat his flesh and blood so cruelly? She stared at the knight, aghast.

  “Five years later my lord left Wendesby with blood on his hands. I cannot say that I blame him. All those years he’d trained under a man he hated. It was too much to learn that the man was his father.

  “When he left, I was afraid he would lose the honor that I cherished in him. So I mounted my horse and followed him. There have been times,” the knight said with a sigh, “when I believed the Wolf succeeded in claiming his soul for evil. But lately, I remark more of the Christian I once knew. He is coming back into himself,” he decided with a contented nod.

  Clarise was enraptured by the tale. She found herself rallying fiercely behind the Slayer of Helmesly. So, she was right in guessing that he was not as ruthless as rumor depicted. Ah, the Saints, she should have trusted her instincts and told him what had brought her to Helmesly. Perhaps if she had, she would now have a champion at her side. As it was, she would have to earn his trust all over again.

  “We traveled east,” the knight added, recapturing her attention, “and pledged our swords to various lords. The Baron of Helmesly saw Christian fight in a tourney and hired him at once to train his men. A few years later, desiring to go to the Holy Lands and needing to leave his estate in capable hands, the baron betrothed my lord to his only daughter.”

  Simon, who was finding the unyielding surface of Sir Roger’s armor too hard, let out a plaintiff cry. The knight quickly passed him to Clarise. As always, when she took him in her arms, she felt a rush of tenderness for the helpless babe. The fear that her days at Helmesly might be numbered tinged the tenderness with grief. “Sir Roger,” she began in a strangled voice, “I . . .”

  Someone across the field called out his name at the same time and waved him over.

  The knight struggled to his feet, unaware of the confession that hovered on her tongue. “Thank you for the meal,” he said. “I pray that Doris soon recovers.”

  “As do we all,” Clarise replied. Perhaps this evening she would get around to admitting to what had brought her to Helmesly. “Er, there’s just one more thing, Sir Knight,” she added, coming to her own feet. “Could you ask Dame Maeve to give me the key to the chapel? She won’t heed my request.” She’d asked the steward’s wife herself, but the woman had refused her.

  He nodded his head distractedly. “Very well.”

  “Oh and, er, may I have your permission to make some changes in the castle?”

  Now she had his full attention. “Like what?” he asked, scowling suspiciously.

  “Well, I think the hall would benefit from the addition of flowers, don’t you? And there is an urgent need for more torches to be made, or perhaps you haven’t noticed that everyone scuttles about in the darkness? Also, it would not be amiss to hang a tapestry or two.”

  Sir Roger wiped away the sweat that was dripping from his forehead. He looked quite overwhelmed by her quick suggestions. “Fine, fine,” he said, clearly eager to return to such simple things as weapons and their use.

  “Thank you,” Clarise replied
. “Do you know what happened to the tapestries that were there before? Nell says the baron had a number of them hanging in the hall.”

  The knight’s brow wrinkled and then smoothed again. “The Lady Genrose gave them to the poor in honor of her parents’ memories, I believe.”

  “And the silver, too?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose.”

  Clarise could not contain her remark, “Then she managed to live in a convent after all!”

  “Indeed,” the knight agreed, not missing a beat. Thanking her for lunch again, he strode across the field, returning to his labors. Clarise worked to return Simon to his sling. Then she bent to shake the crumbs from the blanket. If she thought that replacing a few tapestries would ensure the Slayer’s forgiveness, she was literally hanging by a thread, she reflected ironically.

  Christian couldn’t sleep. That circumstance in itself was not a novel one, but this was the third night in a row that he’d awakened in the middle of the night, unable to return to sleep. The tedium of waiting for the darkness to lift taxed his patience.

  He lay on a feathered bed in the chamber that once belonged to Alec Monteign, staring at the whitewashed ceiling. The bed curtains had been stripped by the peasants and used for clothing. The shutters had been broken off the window and used for firewood. Nothing prevented the moon from shining through the open window to mock him.

  Perhaps he should have slept in the lord’s chamber, where the bed was tucked out of the way of the moon’s illumination. Yet he’d made it a point never to sit in Monteign’s chair nor sleep in his bed. Not only did he worry that the ghost of Alec’s father would torment him, he had no wish to exacerbate his relations with the people of Glenmyre. They disliked him well enough as it was.

  He sent a hopeful look toward the open window. No hint of dawn yet. Stars paid court to the half-moon’s brilliance. Insects chirped in the overgrown yard below. The room was hot and humid. His eyeballs burned, but whenever he lowered his lids, unanswered questions beat against the door of his brain, finding no outlet.