A Knight's Vow

by Lindsay Townsend

  “What?” Alyson looked over herself and the branches she was “walking” on and clinging to. Nothing to be alarmed of here; no rotten boughs or wasps’ nests. She took another stepplummeting into empty space as the part of her gown that had already snagged on an oak bole remained caught, throwing her off-balance and pitching her off the gently swaying tree. She heard a hoarse yell and then hit a shimmering mass of blues, greens and browns, choking as ice-cold water poured down her throat.

  Praise Christ the river was here to break my tumble, was her first thought, followed at once by the realization that she was sinking. She thrashed and pounded but her shock-stiffened limbs would not answer her wishes; she went under again, heavy, calm, unable to breathe.

  Another yell, and a pair of strong tanned arms scooped her out of the drowning murk.

  “There, you are safe” Guillelm lifted her clear of the water. “I have you, dear one, and all is well.”

  He cradled her tightly, hoping she would not feel him shudder. He had seen the thorn branch hooking into her gown too late. Watching her fall, helpless to save her, had been the worst moments of his life. He had forgotten the river flowing beneath the oak how foolishly preoccupied he had been with the merlin! A bird, when Alyson might have been lost. He had heard her hit the water, then clawing through the undergrowth to the water’s edge, he had seen her slide into the stream’s deep embrace. His Alyson was ever a fighter but she seemed unable to stop herself being dragged under in a deadly mesh of heavy skirts. Most eerie of all, a long, trailing skein of hair bobbed on the top of the water. Never before had he swum so rapidly, never in such terror.

  Her small white hand was still hooked beneath his mantle, clutching his sodden undershirt. Shiver after shiver ran through her, though she did not seem to notice, whispering with her head against the crook of his arm, “You have briared your face”

  “You think that matters?” The cuts and weals that stung on his nose and jaw, the result of beating desperately through the web of ferns, alder saplings and God knows what else, were nothing. “I saw you gone!”

  “But you saved me” Wonder and gratitude warmed her voice where Guillelm would have had her berate him for putting her life in danger for a bundle of screeching feathers. For an instant his arms clamped tighter still about her small, willowy form as he thought of wringing the merlin’s neck, then decided there would be more justice if he could wring his own.

  “I was a fool!” he said.

  “Then we both were, for I cannot swim.”

  That stopped him in midrage, as she hoped it would.

  “Truly?” He paused in midstream, his feet rocking on the river pebbles. “For all your clever book learning, there is something I know that you do not?”

  “Will you teach me?” The words were out before she could drag them back. I must be more shaken than I thought, Alyson reflected, appalled at her own question. Each time she was in Guillelm’s arms she forgot herself; it was a dangerous habit.

  “We should feed the merlin,” she went on, but the hawk, which had been Guillelm’s great concern all that morning, no longer was a distraction. He merely grinned at her in that way of his that always made her feel as if her heart was suddenly lifted and jammed into her throat, and he said lightly, “I will tend the spoiled little brute, while you prepare yourself.” He raised a thick gold eyebrow. “If you are certain you want me to teach you. My men will tell you I am a lethal taskmaster.” “Hard work never frightens me”

  She was no longer shivering but languid in his arms, smiling at him with absolute trust. Guillelm had a sudden, disturbing vision of himself as tutor, pulling a squirming Alyson over his lap while he applied a schoolmasterly discipline to her pert backside. He flushed, ashamed of his thoughtsHeloise was surely right about him-and plucked at the clinging sleeve of her gown.

  “You cannot swim in that,” he remarked, determinedly averting his eyes from her bodice. The water had sculpted Alyson’s clothes to her closer than a second skin, making him even more acutely conscious of his own aroused state. Fervently he wished the river was cold, blanketed with ice.

  “What is the salve for earache?” he asked desperately as he attacked the gently shelving slope of the riverbank. Perhaps hearing her voice would bring him to reason, or at least be a comfort. Part of him was still grasping the dreadful marvel of her too-near escape from death.

  “I have heard doctors swear by bloodletting and a tincture of mercury, poured into the ear. But for myself, I have found the gently warmed oil of the olive a good remedy.”

  “And for backache?”

  “A hot bath to start” Alyson broke off, frowning at her dripping plait and checking with a swift downward glance that she had not lost her shoes. “Why all these cures? Are you going to shout at me so much or make me swim this river to the sea?”

  “Worse.” Guillelm deposited her onto the grass. “I am going to make you as hungry as the hawk”

  She chuckled, that warm, throaty giggle that made him want to kiss her. “So ‘tis well Sir Tom gave us generous provender. Do we eat first or later?”

  “Later,” said Guillelm.

  The day was warm-more than warm, blisteringly hot, with a humidity that put Guillelm in mind of the East. It was airless under the trees by the river, or perhaps that was just him, he thought, as he kept busy, feeding the merlin, checking their horses, while Alyson shrugged off her soaking gown. It was at least a good day for a new swimmer, he told himself, tempted to ask if she needed help while he counted moorhen and coots with their young; bits of dark fluff swimming earnestly along the far riverbank. In these shallows the water would be perfect.

  He heard her splash into the river and swallowed, his ears buzzing with heat and barely thwarted desire.

  “I am ready.” She was sculling the water with her hands. Would she be naked? No, for she was already growing nervous, perhaps even regretting her impulsive suggestion. “Guillelm, do you think this is right? I mean, is it seemly?”

  “Why not?” He turned to reassure her and almost laughed: Alyson had sat down in the shallows and he could see little of her. “We are, after all, betrothed”

  “I have spread my gown on the hazel to dry.” She pointed and he could see she was still wearing her undershift, a modest choice. “Will you swim as you are?”

  “My stuff dries fast” His clothes were little enough of a barrier but they were something, a reminder he needed that Alyson was an innocent. Or is she? muttered Fulk in the baser recesses of his mind, a thought he resolutely thrust away. He strode to the river, willing himself to be a perfect gentle knight while he felt anything but chivalrous.

  Be a lady, Alyson thought, both relieved and disappointed when Guillelm stalked into the river fully clothed. He was so swift-moving when he needed to be that she forgot his size, but now he was beside her again he towered over her, an eagle to her merlin. And how that gift of Sir Tom’s had caused trouble! They were a good half mile or more off the recognized track through these woods and both of them had endured a wetting. Fulk will wonder what we have been doing, she thought, but then she forgot him in the face of Guillelm’s grim stare. Perhaps he dislikes this, perhaps I have been too forward. The fears scurried through her mind like dandelion clocks blowing in the breeze as she tried not to shrink from him.

  “Peace, girl.” Kneeling in the water beside her, he had spotted her slight movement. Alyson, knowing him sensitive to the point of wariness over her possible dread of him, was tempted to slap the river back into his scowling face, to prove she was in no way scared. Had she been younger she might have done so, but at one and twenty she knew she ought to have more finesse.

  “Did you swim the rivers in Outremer?” Not a very original question, but when Guillelm was apt to make her tonguetied Alyson was proud she had managed so much.

  “There are no such streams as these in the East” An evasive answer, made more mysterious by the ready stain of color that bloomed along Guillelm’s jaw line and chin. “What is that strange s
cent? Like a spice or perfume”

  He did not think it was anything to do with her, Alyson noted, disappointed, but she breathed in deeply. “It is fennel,” she answered, nodding toward the bank where a stand of the tall, yellow flowers swayed among the cobwebbed beauty of the white elder blossom. “I use it in eye baths and for the colic. I dare say you have forgotten it, being so long away.”

  “And those birds?” he asked, but there was a gleam in his eyes that made Alyson click her tongue.

  “Ducks, and you know it, you big oaf.”

  “Oaf, am I?” He lifted his feet from the river pebbles and stretched, floating full length on his back on the sparkling, tranquil surface. “Can you do this?”

  She set to his challenge at once, only to sink as she tried to follow his example, wallowing in an ignominious stream of bubbles onto the sandy base of the stream.

  “Steady, little swimmer. Up with you” Two hands buoyed her to the surface, their strong palms supporting her across her shoulder blades and the small of her back. “Relax. Imagine you are a bird and this water is the air beneath your wings. It will carry you easily. See?”

  She was floating, the blood-warm water eddying round her limbs. Feeling safe, she closed her eyes, dimly aware that Guillelm had lowered the hand beneath her back.

  “There,” he said.

  “This is marvelous,” she said. “It is like reading a new book!”

  “Only you would compare such things.” His tone was indulgent. “I would have said riding a fresh horse, or petting a new dog”

  The hand beneath her shoulder blades swept down the length of her spine and away. Alyson’s eyes flew open and, with considerably less grace than her partner in the water, she put her feet down hastily, sighing with relief as her bare toes dug into the sand.

  “Over with you.” Guillelm gave her no time to protest, catching her round the middle and turning her, resting her stomach on his bent knee and saying, “Put your arms like this-that is good! Now work them so”

  He showed her and she copied his movements. They paused a moment while he explained how to kick her legs and then she tried again.

  “I am swimming!” she cried, delighted at her progress.

  “Something, certainly,” Guillelm answered, amused by her jerky dog-paddling and making sure he had her safe at all times. If he released her now, she would drop like a stone and he did not want her to lose confidence.

  But she was a distracting thing and she did not even know it. Her linen undershift had turned half-transparent in the water, molding to her limbs in a way an Eastern harem beauty might envy. Attempting a churning, uncoordinated breaststroke on her front displayed her wildly kicking haunches and shapely legs to best advantage, while her breasts, cupped teasingly by the water and shown off by her beguilingly arched neck, were soft mounds he ached to caress. Their nipples were pink, he thought, although he was not entirely sure and did not trust his own countenance or continence to sneak a closer look.

  He knelt again on the river bottom, gently withdrawing his hand from her trim stomach. Even through the water and linen, her skin was smooth and flawless as the inside of a freshly split apple and smelled as sweet, as good to taste. It would be so easy, to brush his fingers that was outside his role as teacher, for now at least. Trust was everything, as Alyson herself proved, swimming three genuine strokes as he came round in front of her, stretching out his arms.

  “Hang on,” he coaxed. “I will give you a lift.”

  She caught his hands willingly in hers and he drew her along, swimming on his back and praying there were no overhanging branches for him to blunder into and sink them both. “Do you like it?” he called.

  She laughed, showing her white even teeth, giggling more as he accelerated in the water. “It is flying!”

  If you think that, wait until we have the nights together, Guillelm thought, but then he struck his head against a boulder and went under, swallowing a good yard of river.

  Strong fingers yanked his hair and tugged; he surfaced, coughing, and with part of his skull feeling as if it had undergone an ordeal with a hot iron, but still afloat.

  “I have you,” Alyson crowed. “I am swimming for us ””

  “Peace, wench, and get me to the bank,” said Guillelm. That was enough of lessons for the day.

  Chapter 9

  Three weeks later and there had been no time for more swimming, Alyson thought with regret, but with pride, too, for she and Guillelm had not been idle. The new well at Hardspen was being dug, the stores had been checked and added to, everywhere had been cleaned, including the stables, the sheep had been clipped, the hay harvest gathered, the wheat was growing well, firewood and timber laid by and folk were seen in the great hall with their appeals for help and justice.

  Though Alyson had no doubt that Fulk disapproved, Guillelm often sought her out to ask about the background to the various complaints from the local people. “You will know who is rumored to steal from the fish ponds and who gives light weight to their measures,” he remarked, a comment she hugged to herself. Guillelm’s father had never involved her in any way in such disputes.

  Her only cloud was her nights, where she had bad dreams. She begged her nurse Gytha to say nothing of her nightmares of blood and screams. They would pass, she thought. They must, or Fulk’s malice with that vile parcel he had left in her bed at Sir Tom’s would leave too great a shadow.

  She was also no closer to learning about Heloise. She had promised Sir Tom that she would not ask Guillelm directly and she had kept that vow. More oblique questions to him-Had he known many ladies in Outremer? What fashions did the women of the East wear? Were there any female crusaders? had yielded only one-word answers or, in the last case, a grunt of laughter.

  But perhaps she was being foolish. On the evening of the day they had swum in the river, Guillelm had asked her to join him in the chapel at Hardspen.

  There, with the last of the evening sunlight casting shadows on his face and hair he had knelt before her on the stone flags so that their eyes were almost level.

  “This is for you. I meant to give it you earlier.”

  He had handed her a scrap of cloth. His eyes gleamed with the same suppressed excitement that she had seen in them when he was a youth, when he was about some quest or mischief, and she heard the tendons of his neck crack as he lowered his head to watch her fingers.

  “I hope you like it,” he murmured.

  Wondering what it could be, she opened the roughly tied parcel. Inside the cloth had been a delicate web of something, thin as the wings of a butterfly. Alyson blew on it, watching the filmy stuff billow.

  “Silk?” she asked.

  Guillelm nodded. “Bartered from a trader in Jerusalem with a stall close to the spice market”

  “It is a gorgeous color. Like a fall sky at twilight.” Almost afraid to handle the purple-blue haze, she unwrapped it fully. “It is beautiful. So smooth and light.”

  “The only thing I thought worthy of covering your hair,” Guillelm said quickly. “It is a veil,” he added unnecessarily.

  “Thank you” She touched his cheek with the silk, feeling the rough grain of his tanned flesh through the rare fabric. “I shall wear it at our wedding,” she continued, catching her breath as Guillelm had turned his head and kissed her hand close to the wrist.

  Thinking back, Alyson smiled. Whatever memories Guillelm had of Heloise, he had given the silk to her. And proud, blond Heloise was in Outremer; it was she who was marrying the lord of Hardspen.

  Tomorrow.

  But what if she could not make him happy? What if her sister was right and God was angry with her for not entering convent life? What if she died in childbirth, like her mother? What if at some fatal moment, Guillelm did something that reminded her too closely of his father? What if he saw the scars on her body? What if they repelled him?

  The questions had driven her back to the castle chapel. She had been on her knees here since the midday meal, telling Guillelm that sh
e was keeping a vigil.

  “That is what a squire does, before he is knighted,” Guillelm had said. “He spends the night at prayer and fasting. Do you think our marriage will be such a battlefield?”

  His question had seemed innocent enough, a tease, but she had sensed his disquiet and answered seriously, “I will pray for those things a good knight prays for: faithfulness, fellowship, generosity of spirit.” Then she had grinned. “A good defense”

  “Off with you, horror,” Guillelm had said, tugging her plait as she mounted the stairs.

  She had been praying before the simple stone altar for several hours. Beyond the chapel door the daytime bustle of the castle had given way to the scurry of the evening meal in the great hall, then quiet. Guillelm was not drinking tonight and neither were his men. Presumably he did not wish to appear at his wedding thickheaded, she thought, but the lack of merrymaking made her wonder if he was having second thoughts. Where was he tonight? With some woman? His final bedding as a free man?

  Alyson tried to quell the thought, ashamed of her own jealousy. And in church, too!

  There was a knock on the chapel door. Alyson rose, rubbing her numb, cold knees, as Fulk entered.

  “I have brought you some mulled wine, my lady.”

  The wine smelt good and looked harmless. More surprising still was Fulk himself, very fine in a gold and silver mantle, smelling of fresh soap, and smiling.

  “Thank you, sir.” Alyson could think of no legitimate reason to refuse his apparent kindness and could only delay. “Would you leave the wine outside the chapel for me? To drink here does not seem quite appropriate.”

  “Yet we will take communion wine in here tomorrow, my lady.” He proffered the goblet again. “Please, for the sake of my lord. He would not have you catch your death of cold.”

  Guillelm had sent the wine? Perhaps he had, but then why had Fulk brought it and not a page or squire? Or even one of the maids there were plenty about the castle now, for all had thrown off the summer sickness.