A Knight's Vow

by Lindsay Townsend

“The leader of the Templars staying with us, Sir Michael of Normandy, wishes to have urgent speech with you, my lord. It concerns the safety of your very soul.”

  “What?” Guillelm was already laughing.

  “What?” Alyson’s prickle of tension flared into alarm. She wanted to ask What have you done? but knew she would have no true answer from Fulk. Conscious that with Sir Tom leaving Hardspen she was without a doughty ally, she now asked, “Where is Sericus?”

  “Abed, lady. I heard a rumor yesterday that he had taken a chill.”

  “Steady, Alyson.” Guillelm squeezed her shoulder, misunderstanding the depth of her concern. “If Sericus is out of sorts he will doubtless enjoy your fussing, but we shall see him hale and thriving again, hopping about the castle.” He turned to Fulk, his look less kindly. “Never mind this nonsense of souls. Hand my lady her horse and help her to mount. Do you expect her to walk into Hardspen while we ride?”

  “Nay, Guillelm,” said Alyson quickly, distressed at the thought of Fulk touching her. “Sir Fulk was merely being a little tawdry through prudence, as at the joust”

  “Before God, you are right,” Guillelm muttered, recogniz ing her point immediately, along with the reminder of his own jealous antics. “Fulk, I beg your indulgence.”

  “There is entirely no need,” Fulk said, very affable, bowing and handing Alyson the reins to her horse. “If you will permit me?”

  He did not say “my lady,” Alyson realized-a tiny thing, but one that deepened her growing sense that something was very wrong. If Fulk was up to no good again, then he had chosen his time well, with Sericus ill, Sir Tom gone and the nuns of St. Foy’s going. Pretending not to notice Fulk’s outstretched hand, she pulled herself deftly onto Jezebel’s back and took a moment to arrange her skirts.

  Fulk, however, was not interested in what she was doing; he had planted himself even closer to Guillelm and was even now repeating his warning. She caught the words, “soul,” “your well-being,” “Sir Michael” and “no time to be lost.”

  “Peace, man, we are coming,” Guillelm interrupted, winking at her.

  It was the last time she saw him truly smile for the rest of that day.

  Entering the great hall, Alyson felt an outsider. The sense struck her instantly, even more forcefully than when she had been at Hardspen as a “guest” of Lord Robert. There were no other women in the echoing, high-ceilinged room and the men sitting at the trestles, talking quietly, paring their fingernails, scratching for fleas, roughing with the dogs, were strangers. No Sericus, nor any of the other old-timers who knew her. No single man of Guillelm’s command except Fulk.

  “Our men are at the practice ground,” Fulk explained, catching Guillelm’s questioning glance.

  “All our men?” Guillelm seemed as suspicious as she was, Alyson thought, unless that was wishful thinking on her part. Staring at the knights ranged about the hall, she found herself missing even a rough flirt like Thierry. None of these Templars smiled at her.

  They were drinking and eating nothing, she noticed. Instead, as she and Guillelm walked into the hall they stopped chatting and straightened on their benches, solemn as the keenest of novice students at a cathedral school, and all facing the dais.

  From the rim of her vision she saw Guillelm touch the place on his belt where his dagger was, as he jerked his head up to scan the walls.

  “Where is the sword and shield of my ancestor, Thorkill of Orkney?” he demanded, pointing to a patch of stones beneath a window slit. There a faint outlining of fire-soot showed where these arms had recently been displayed. “Why have they been taken down?”

  “They are here, my lord de La Rochelle,” the leader of the Templars answered, pointing to a space behind his highbacked chair on the dais. “I ordered it done. These are pagan weapons. We are warriors of Christ.” “

  Sir Michael of Normandy, his face hidden-deliberately?by the hood of his cloak, shot back his plain cuffs and gripped the arms of his chair. Almost as if he were lord here, Alyson thought, sickened by a dread that would not abate. She was horribly conscious that the nuns who could claim equal spiritual worth with these fighting monks had already set out for their new home, escorted ironically by a Templar escort, but there were still too many Templars left at Hardspen. She counted a score in the great hall and still had not finished as Guillelm spoke in answer to Sir Michael.

  I am lord. Those weapons should not have been removed” Releasing her hand from his, Guillelm glared at Fulk. “What is going on?” he demanded softly. Fulk did not answer.

  As three men stood by the door into the great hall, barring the way, Alyson scanned the room, seeking another escape. Unless they could fly, there was none. She tugged urgently on Guillelm’s cloak, whispering as he lowered his head to her, “Can you throw my veil and this necklace through one of the window slits? Would that alert your men?”

  “It is already in hand,” he whispered back. “No harm shall come to you, I promise.”

  “Please, my lord. All will become clear.” Sir Michael nodded his hooded head and several knights rose from their places. They placed two chairs in the middle of the hall and then withdrew.

  “Please, sit,” Sir Michael suggested.

  Guillelm handed Alyson into a chair but remained standing. “If I do not receive an explanation, Sir Michael, you will regret it.”

  “You mean, I will not live to regret it.” Sir Michael answered, his smile visible even with the cloak hood and shadows shielding most of his face. “I have heard from your comrade of your prowess with all weapons, including knives. But think! If you hurl your dagger and kill me, my men will cut you and your lady down.”

  His features etched into deep lines of harsh disgust, Guillelm turned to Fulk. “Will you escort your lady outside?”

  Alyson drew in breath to protest, but Fulk stared at the floor rushes and did not stir.

  “What price, Judas?” Guillelm demanded, as his seneschal remained silent.

  “Lord Guillelm,” Sir Michael interjected, “you must not think too badly of Sir Fulk. He serves a higher master than you, as do we all.” He touched the red cross conspicuously embroidered on his mantle. “And in his concern for you, he turned to me for help. You are not yourself, Guillelm de La Rochelle.”

  “Say plainly what you mean, man,” snarled Guillelm.

  Sir Michael finally drew back the hood of his cloak, revealing a long, faintly equine-looking face and an utterly hairless head. Alyson noted the marks of shaving on his narrow skull and the marks of fasting in his pale, gaunt cheeks, bloodless mouth and dull, unblinking drab brown eyes. A pitiless ascetic, she guessed and, from the wary, cold glance he gave her, a man who disliked women as greatly as Fulk did.

  This dislike was confirmed by what he said.

  “This morning my men arrested a local female, a so-called wisewoman, Eva”

  “You had no right,” Guillelm ground out, his tanned face flooding with rapid color. “The Templars may be a powerful order, but even their writ does not run in the borders of another lord’s lands. Justice is for the ruler of England, and for me, who holds these lands in the name of the sovereign.”

  “Which ruler, though?” Sir Michael asked mildly. “King Stephen or the empress?”

  “You still had no right,” Guillelm persisted.

  “In matters concerning religion and the church I have more rights than you,” Sir Michael replied. “The pope will uphold my claim of jurisdiction”

  A spasm of scorn crossed Guillelm’s face. “You would send petitions to Rome because of one local woman? What did she do, forget to bow as you passed?”

  “She is a witch, my lord. There is the very sign of evil upon her flesh: two red marks close to her ear, the place where Satan kissed her. She has been arrested and shown the necessary instruments of inquiry-“

  By which he meant instruments of torture, thought Alyson, with a shudder.

  “She has confessed to her witchcraft and has named two more of her coven. Freewoman Gytha,
a former nurse, and-“

  “Folly!” Guillelm bawled. “The women are no more witches than I am!”

  Sir Michael shook his shaven head, steepling his fingers together on the smooth wood of the dais table. He was sitting at the high table, almost in Guillelm’s place, and he spoke with unconscious arrogance.

  “In your present condition, my lord, I find your assertion unconvincing. You clearly have been bewitched and by none other than that woman who sits beside you, staring at me as brazenly as any man”

  Sir Michael lifted something from his lap and placed it on the table with an audible snap. “This potion was procured by your wife from the witch Eva to use against you. It was found amongst the possessions of the nurse Gytha, who is the confidante and gossip of your wife. Gytha confessed freely that the potion is witchcraft.”

  Alyson freed her dry tongue and forced herself to speak. “A love potion, no more” She knew Gytha. Her poor old nurse would not have been able to resist the idea of a charm to help Alyson and Guillelm in bed. “Such things are harmless.”

  “Witchcraft,” Sir Michael repeated with relish. “And evidence to be used at your trial.”

  “Think, Guillelm!” Fulk broke in. “If she is found guilty of witchcraft, your own reputation will suffer unless you put her aside and annul this marriage. You may lose Hardspen!”

  Alyson trembled at the threat, but not because of Fulk. Now surely was the moment where Guillelm would declare his love, where he would openly pledge himself to her. She looked up at her husband-after last night, her true husband-and willed him to answer.

  “I do nothing on your say-so, Fulk,” Guillelm responded, without even glancing at her. “Alyson and I were wed in church. She is mine, my wife.”

  Alyson gasped as, still glaring at Fulk and Sir Michael, he reached down and spread his hand across her stomach.

  “She is carrying my heir.”

  That was it. No words of love. No public declaration of his feelings. Hard, practical reasons; she was his, and his broodmare.

  A tear rolled down her cheek and before she could prevent it or hide her distress from the corpse-pale, grinning head of the Templars, there came a thunder of knocking on the door and Thierry shouting, “Guillelm!”

  “Here and whole!” Guillelm yelled, straightening to confront Sir Michael. “I am not so old nor so young as to fall into any trap,” he said. “I saw dust by the jousting ground and sent a message”

  “How?” Fulk asked, flinching as he realized how far he had revealed his part in the Templar’s conspiracy.

  Now Guillelm smiled, although to Alyson it seemed his face was no more than a mask. She sensed the dragon anger boiling beneath his grim exterior and, despite her own bitter disappointment and her renewed revulsion for Fulk, she trembled for the man. His punishment would be far worse than riding in full armor for a day.

  But Guillelm was answering Fulk. Alyson scrambled to attend.

  “The lad who delivered me a message yesterday was shadowing us today. I spotted him almost at once, but for the sake of my lady’s gentle heart I let him be. When I saw the rising dust on the practice ground and realized just how many men would have to be there to make it, I disliked it. So I nodded to the boy, jerked my head. He is a quick study; he was off for the jousting ground in a moment. I cannot guess what he told my men, what plea he made on my behalf, but it was enough. They are here”

  “We have reached a stalemate, Lord Guillelm,” Sir Michael remarked, grasping the new situation at once. “What do you suggest? An ordeal? Champion against champion?”

  No! She would defend her own honor, Alyson thought. She pushed herself off the chair. “I will prove my innocence and sanctity,” she declared, her voice ringing clear to the rafters. “I and my nurse Gytha and the woman Eva will go live with the nuns of the former convent of St. Foy’s. We shall join them at the convent of Warren Applewick. We shall pray with them, and God and the Holy Virgin will protect us. We are no wrongdoers ””

  “Well said, my lady,” came a new voice, as Sericus, with Thierry covering his scrawny body with a shield and men loyal to Guillelm streaming past them, now tottered into the great hall.

  Guillelm said nothing.

  Chapter 25

  “You have been wise.” Sister Ursula paused in brushing her sister’s hair, an intimacy Alyson had been glad of, until she realized that her sibling was taking their moment alone together as another chance to drive home her argument.

  “As you say,” Alyson demurred. Having walked all day, leaving Gytha and the wisewoman Eva to ride on Jezebel, she had reached the new convent of the former sisters of St. Foy’s with her legs aching and her whole body weary. That had partly been her intention, to tire herself so she would sleep quickly and not lie awake fretting, but she was too exhausted to dispute with her sister. “Is my lord well?” she asked.

  “He is dining with the abbess and the prioress in the guest house,” replied Sister Ursula stiffly. “Why were you walking with him today, Alyson? You should have treated your journey here as a pilgrimage and eschewed his company.”

  “Peace!” said Alyson, using Guillelm’s own oath. She had walked with Guillelm in the company of his men because not to do so would have caused her almost unendurable pain. As it was, to be separated from him at all and especially in these circumstances, with the threat of witchcraft hanging over her, was vile. She found that the space beneath her breastbone actually ached, that there seemed an absence in the very center of her.

  She glanced about the bare whitewashed cell that would be her sleeping place for this and for how many other lonely nights, seeing the tiny posy of flowers in the wall nook by her thin, narrow bed without any real pleasure. She could not even take the trouble to discover what the flowers were.

  Am I going to be like this forever? she thought, panicking at the idea. Everything seemed dulled, purposeless. She told herself it was shock, horror at Fulk’s treachery and the Templar leader’s malice, but she knew it was more simple and terrible.

  Walking with Guillelm, she had hoped he might say the words she ached to hear from him. But though in parting by the convent gate he had clasped her so tightly to him she could hear his racing heart, though he had whispered, “Sweetheart, take care. This will not be for long-I swear I will challenge the pope if I need to so that you are safely restored to me!” he had not said, “I love you.”

  “When he leaves tomorrow, I will not see him for many days,” she said, finding it some relief to speak of him, however obliquely. “Do they serve roasted fruit at the abbess’s table here? Guillelm enjoys those. And mulled wine.” She had been planning many variations with spices and the rare sugar to try on him, especially as the winter months drew on. “I trust they do not oversalt the fish. I know he dislikes that”

  I neither know nor care,” was her sister’s bald response, accompanied by a fierce pull of her brush that tugged at the roots of Alyson’s hair. “Such worldly concerns are not for me, and they should not be any part of your life.”

  Sister Ursula banged the brush down on the edge of the bed. “Yes, you flinch now!” she spat, her green-gray eyes flashing dislike, her thin face one long grimace of reproach. “Why did you not flinch away from him? You know the fate of the women in our family! I have heard him, braying his manhood in the very church of this holy place, asking the abbess to pray for his unborn son!”

  Not for me. Alyson was glad to be sitting on the edge of the bed. As her left foot went into an agonized cramp she almost cried aloud, although not with her body’s pain. I have not been rejected. Guillelm respects my decision and sees the logic of it. It is the safest way for Gytha and Eva. Being here saves them from the questions of Sir Michael and possibly even torture. Guillelm’s mother died in childbirth and he knows too well the history of the women in my family. Perhaps he is right to ask for prayers. What else can he do? It is women who bear children. I am not being abandoned. Trying to be resolute, she limped to the door of her cell and opened it.

 
; “Thank you” She could scarcely look at her much-loved sister, buried in her black piety, her thin fingers stroking the cross at her neck as if to wipe away the contagion of any human contact. “I wish you good night.”

  “Pray God protects you from the consequences of your own sin and desire,” Sister Ursula retorted, determined as she had been in childhood to have the final word. She glided past Alyson, leaving without once looking back.

  Life in the convent settled for Alyson into a bland, colorless existence. Gytha and Eva were put to work in the gardens but Alyson was told that digging was not seemly for one of her status. “It could also injure your child,” the abbess continued, smiling at her charge and glancing at the fine silver altar crucifix that Guillelm had left as a gift.

  “Then allow me to work in the infirmary,” Alyson pleaded, but again she was denied.

  “No. For you, I think that your innocence is best proved here, in our church” The abbess brushed some stray pollen from a vase of drooping lilies off the altar cloth, looking round the convent church in the same satisfied, managing way that a house-proud wife might check over her stores. “Remain in church from your time of waking to your time of retiring and pray. God and the world will then see your purity.”

  “May I have a little parchment, so I may write to my lord?” Alyson asked.

  The abbess, still brushing pollen, shook her head. She was a small yet angular woman, seemingly fashioned of straight lines, so that in her plain gown she seemed like a black cube. Her wide face, with its heavy jaw and narrow brown eyes, radiated nothing but honest good nature. “You have no need to write, my child,” she replied. “He knows where you are. You are safe here and at peace. You must direct your thoughts to God”

  Alyson prayed in the convent church. She joined the nuns in all their services. She swept and cleaned the church, taking care not to disturb the nuns who entered for their own quiet contemplation, or those who changed the flowers. She asked for nothing for herself and learned not to approach her own sister, who resented being singled out, or to ask for news of Guillelm. Kind but implacable in her own sanctity, the abbess believed that talk of husbands in a nunnery was inappropriate. She never answered Alyson’s questions.