My True Love

by Karen Ranney

  Did he believe that?

  There were only twenty feet that separated them, but it might as well have been measured in years and miles.

  He remained in the same position, a half smile on his face. She’d drawn him that way once. The child had been fascinated with him, the young woman had wanted to emulate him. The woman? Had tasted passion in his kiss, was captivated by him.

  His eyes darkened as she watched him. She looked away, finally. Too long for propriety’s sake. Too long to dissipate the awkward silence.

  She fisted her hands in her skirt and did not look at him. Instead, she looked down at the bricks of Langlinais. Over the years the corners had rounded from so many footsteps. But the same force that had eroded them also kept them banded tight together. A lesson, perhaps. One whose exact meaning escaped her.

  “What is war like?” A question she could never have asked her father or the other men at Dunniwerth. They would have looked at her as if she were daft. Men spoke of war, and women were there when they wished their minds free of it. A masculine notion that had only amused the women of Dunniwerth.

  “Noisy.”

  She looked up, startled.

  His smile surprised her as much as his answer had. “As a boy I’d dreamed of being a great knight, like one of my ancestors. I envisioned myself cutting down hordes of Saracens with silent strokes of my battleaxe. In reality, battle is a strident thing. Not only the screams of the wounded and dying. Insults are traded before blows. The report of muskets, the boom of cannon, the shouts of commanders. Then, too, there are the prayers. Most men pray fervently both before and during a battle.”

  She tilted her head and looked at him.

  “Then why do men fight?” she asked.

  He frowned at her. “The easiest answer is because they are told to.”

  “But why is there war?”

  He looked away. For a few moments he didn’t speak. “Choose any answer,” he said surprisingly. “It will apply to some confrontation.”

  “Greed.”

  He nodded. “A man often wants something that is not his. Territory. A common reason.”

  “Money.”

  He smiled. “A rich country has often been overwhelmed.”

  “Power?”

  “The most common of all motives.”

  “Freedom,” she suggested.

  “A more complicated reason. A great ruler will couch all motives behind it. It speaks to the need within each man.” He glanced at her. “Give a man the promise of being unchained, and he will fight for no other reason.”

  “God.”

  “The most complicated reason of all,” he said. “Countless wars have been fought with religion as the base. The Crusades were fought for it. Perhaps even this war. Some would say it’s for freedom. Others would say the king’s greed. It all depends which side is asked.”

  “The other side of the circle,” she said, smiling.

  “Circle?”

  “Because I was an only child,” she said, coming back and sitting on the half wall again, “there were those who thought my life to be one of great luxury. They didn’t know that my father insisted that no hour be spent in sloth or that I had my own share of chores. I once complained to him that the children who envied me didn’t know what it was like.” She turned and smiled at him. “He took me into the courtyard and drew a huge circle on the ground around me. He told me to study where I was and what the circle looked like. Then he held my hand and led me out of the circle. Together we stood there looking down at the ground. ‘Look at the circle again,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t changed. But it no longer looks the same, does it?’ It taught me that things are often seen different because of the way we view them.”

  “A wise man. How is it that he let his daughter enter England with barely an escort?”

  “Ian would not consider that a compliment,” she said. Not an answer, perhaps, but a portion of it. She was becoming too adept at prevarication. He was too riddled with honor and she too lacking. The thought should have shamed her. Instead, it angered her. This journey had been to find him, and all she had truly succeeded in was discovering her self. Not all the bits and pieces that had been revealed had been to her liking.

  “Is he the man who guarded you so well?”

  She nodded. A chore given to him by her father. No doubt punishment for those years he’d made her life miserable.

  “Do you have some fondness for him?” His look was solemn again. He had a way of doing that, of hiding his thoughts and blanking his face.

  “Ian?” She smiled. “He was my childhood tormentor. He told me stories of witches and ghosts and made me think that there were monsters at Dunniwerth.”

  “Is he the reason you dislike storms so?”

  His glance was quick, shuttered. Unbidden, the memory of their kiss. It warmed her in ways she’d not known a memory could.

  “I wish I could blame him for that,” she said. “But they have always made me afraid. My earliest memories are hiding beneath a blanket in terror.”

  “Sometimes it’s good to fear something,” he said surprisingly. “If it prompts restraint and caution.”

  “Is there anything you fear?”

  The question appeared to startle him. It stretched beyond the carefully prescribed boundary between host and unwitting guest. But the kiss they’d shared had done so, too. The memory of it provided a doorway between them.

  “I fear a good many things,” he admitted.

  She remained silent.

  A moment passed. Then another.

  “It would be foolish not to.”

  She said nothing, but she began to feel a welcome amusement. It lightened the sadness that threatened to overwhelm her and the anger that lay just beneath it. The first because he was leaving, and the second because she was too much the coward to tell him why she was here.

  “Mice, perhaps?”

  “Mice?” He frowned at her. “No.”

  “Spiders?”

  He only shook his head.

  “Parliamentarians, then.”

  His look of disgust amused her.

  “People who are so wise about being brave are normally never afraid,” she said.

  “Perhaps they’ve conquered their fears.”

  “Have you?”

  The look he gave her was tinged with irritation. “Are we to repeat the list?”

  “No,” she said amiably.

  “I have some fears,” he said. “Simply because I cannot immediately call them to mind means nothing.”

  She glanced away, hiding her smile.

  “Perhaps you should begin to read again.”

  He studied her in silence. “Are you given often to orders, Anne Sinclair?”

  She felt her face warming. “Yes,” she confessed. She had a great many duties at Dunniwerth, one of which was supervising the women who carded the raw wool. Perhaps leadership came easily to her because of her father’s position as lord. Or perhaps it was simply practice.

  He picked up the codex again, but instead of opening it, he stood and extended his hand to help her down from the wall.

  He was staring at her, his deep blue eyes narrowed. His face was not thin, but there was no spare flesh on it to hide the strong bones of cheek and jaw. His mouth was unsmiling, but the severity of it was marred by her memories of the kiss they’d shared. Too soft to look so firm. Too alluring for such a forbidding expression.

  She knew him so well, had studied his face in the light of candles, in the harshness of a noonday sun, at gloaming. All his expressions seemed imprinted on her mind, so it surprised her that this one was difficult to decipher.

  “Have I angered you?” she asked.

  “In what way?”

  “By saying what I did. I have found that it is easier to simply tell people what to do rather than to wait until it occurs to them. Most people do not mind direction if it is given fairly.”

  He smiled, and it seemed as if the smile held genuine amusement.

&nbs
p; “You will find that I do not need much direction,” he said. “As to my duties, they weigh only too heavily on my mind.”

  “I did not mean you, Stephen.”

  He chuckled.

  “I didn’t think you did. But it is unfortunately true that I have things to attend to.”

  His departure.

  The sky was a clear blue, the air chilled with spring, the scent of it promising. Here and there were small puddles to give evidence of the storm they’d passed through only yesterday. The mound of rubble that had once been the north tower gave evidence of its fury and of the danger they’d escaped.

  She wanted to stay right here, right now. Frozen to this place and this time. Never to allow the time to tick one second past this moment.

  Stephen, however, released her hand and stepped away.

  Chapter 11

  Anne sat in her chamber and surveyed the night. She’d moved a chair to the window, sat with her bare feet upon the sill, her arms wrapped around her knees.

  The darkness was total; even the stars were obscured. A three-quarters moon was tucked into a pocket of clouds and only made a rare appearance. She knew because she’d sat here for hours, hoping to lull herself to sleep. It hadn’t worked.

  She faced the reflection of herself in the night-shrouded glass of the window. There were other women at Dunniwerth who were more attractive. She’d never minded before that her chin was a bit too square or that she had broad shoulders. Nor did it seem to be a great burden that she was taller than many of the females she knew. Hannah was as tall, and perhaps that’s why it hadn’t struck her as odd. Her legs were long, her breasts perhaps too large.

  One day, when she had just begun to grow from child to woman, she’d asked her mother why her chest seemed so much larger than before. Her mother had answered with a smile. “Because you are being prepared for the children you may have,” she said. But the men of Dunniwerth had looked at her differently from that year on, and it did not seem something entirely connected to her future motherhood.

  Her feet were large. The cobbler had always made a comment when she’d gone to be fitted for a new pair of shoes. It seemed the last was always too small. Only during the last two years had her feet stopped growing.

  Ian had once called her a great hulking lass, and it had made her cry, a fact that had made her even angrier. It seemed that most of her life had been spent being enraged by Ian. Even now. She asked each day if he’d any sign of Douglas, and each day he snarled at her. Today he’d done the same.

  “Ask your precious earl, Anne. He’s volunteered his own men to help search.”

  The first she’d known of it. But the gesture had not surprised her.

  She wished, for the first time in her life, that she was beautiful. Her mother was beautiful, with lustrous green eyes and hair the shade of a fox’s tail. Hannah was less so, but there was character in her face and more often than not humor in her eyes.

  Was it a sin to wish for less character and more allure? If so, she could not be the first woman to have done so. In fact, she suspected that a great number of her wishes were not at all uncommon.

  She wanted Stephen to look at her and not be able to look away. To be captivated by something in her. Whether her wit or her eyes, she didn’t care which. She wanted to be kissed until she couldn’t breathe. Again. And to be touched, perhaps, on all those various parts of her that had given her such grief. A stroke of fingers along her foot might make it feel more dainty. A kiss on her shoulders might applaud their width. A long, lingering look from toes to nose might very well excuse her height. A caress upon her breasts would venerate their size.

  Wasted thoughts. He would not be here long enough to ever know of her secret wishes or forbidden ones.

  From his words she could create a vision of war. Fill it in with what she’d overheard at Dunniwerth. Too easily, she could imagine him in the middle of it. With his sword raised high and his grin turned feral, he would be a formidable opponent. She knew only too well that he was mortal. She’d held him when he was in pain and witnessed the degree of it. Did he think himself immune from death?

  He was a man chained by honor. She knew all about vows and promises and oaths. She was a Sinclair. A woman of Dunniwerth. Her clan was banded together by a sense of principle so thick it might be a rope. Or a noose.

  Beó duine d’éis a anma, agus ni beó d’éis a einigh. Better a man lose his life than his honor. This proverb she didn’t bother to repeat to a man who lived the meaning of it.

  She would not beg. Sinclair women did not. It would be useless anyway.

  She had watched as her mother had bade farewell to her father on numerous occasions, and each time he was out of sight, Maggie Sinclair had burst into tears. But she’d never collapsed in front of her husband, never begged him to stay or let him see her fear. The only words that had passed her lips were admonitions for him to guard his back and see to his own health. The harshness of her words had effectively hidden a grieving heart.

  “A Sinclair is always brave, lass.” Words her father had spoken too many times to count. For the first time, Anne wondered if he’d thought of her mother when he’d counseled her on courage. Could she be that strong? Stand on the steps of Harrington Court and watch Stephen ride away? She must be.

  Had there been regret in his voice when he’d told her he was leaving?

  As much remorse for returning to war as for kissing her?

  It would be easier, perhaps, if he had remained a vision. Only a caricature of who he truly was. Only a shadow of the man. She’d wanted him to be real, but he had become too much so. She watched as the reflection in the window laughed at herself and the tenor of her thoughts.

  The night was a quiet one. Even the inhabitants of Harrington Court were silent beneath the blustery sky. She envied them their rest even as she knew she would not share in it.

  Chapter 12

  Stephen rode Faeren hard, the straining muscles of the animal beneath him echoing his own need to outdistance his very thoughts.

  He felt the blood pound in his veins, an elemental force of nature as primitive as the wind that blew or the orange and pink sky in the east.

  He felt good, healthy, for the first time in days. Too soon he would be gone from here, and these moments would be savored in memories. Here there was no smell of burned powder or the stench of death. There was only the dawn of a spring day at Langlinais. A reward, then, for days spent in mire and muck and weeks of freezing nearly to death. Or perhaps it was something he earned by his wound.

  Here, Stephen, a taste of something clean and fresh and sweet for all your days of pain.

  He laughed aloud at the thought that God might deign to converse with him. He did not offer himself as saint, nor did he think himself that great a sinner to attract the attention of the Almighty.

  He grinned into the wind and let his horse have his head.

  The ground was a blur beneath Faeren’s hooves, the flying clods of dirt behind them evidence of the wet spring. They marked the earth with their passing, but the crops would be planted soon, and the only indication that he had ridden a spring-fevered horse would be soon obscured.

  What he left to history would be seen as bricks and stone and the reverence he felt for the legacy that was his. He doubted people would marvel at his life or his exploits as much as simply count him as one of many. A link in a chain that had never been broken.

  Was there time to create a legacy? Something that might mark him as separate? A singular Earl of Langlinais? Were there enough years left to him? Or was he destined to die in battle? A question more properly asked of those who believed in predestination.

  He rode to the top of the hill overlooking Langlinais. If he squinted, he could envision the castle as it might have looked six hundred years ago. A rambling place, whitewashed and glaring on a spring dawn. The three baileys would be green with lush grass, the garden would give off a heady scent of flowers. The river would be high because of the spring rains, the b
ank protected by a short wall built the length of the castle complex. Birds would nest in the embrasures as they did now, calling out a warning of an early-evening rain. Above all would be the sound of laughter.

  Home. A longing for this place sliced through him like a sword. He could not retreat to the past. He could not remain where he was. The only course was to go forward.

  He turned, but before he could descend the hill, looked back at the castle. It had become what it was again. Simply ruins of a place he knew, had always known.

  In the silence of the morning he could almost envision Juliana slipping into the north tower to hide her coffer and its tantalizing codex. Why had she done so? What were the secrets she alluded to so mysteriously?

  A woman of mystery.

  As if he’d summoned her with his thoughts, he saw Anne then. She stood beyond the gardens of Harrington Court. The dawn light blessed her with radiance, cast a gentle shadow over her form.

  Was he a fool to think her not an enemy? They lived in perilous times, and she was from Scotland. That country was divided as to which English side to support.

  A spy, Stephen? If so, she was a poor one. She’d held him when he was in pain, and her only act of secrecy was in drawing pictures of his castle. Betty liked her, as well as Ned.

  As well as he.

  She had not pulled away when he’d kissed her, had not repudiated him, only his apology. In fact, she’d looked irritated with him when he’d spoken it. Almost angered. A woman of some will. A terrible spy, if so. An intriguing woman.

  He grinned and raced to meet her.

  She didn’t flinch as he reined Faeren up within inches of her. A test, then, if she’d known it. Or perhaps she did. There was something in her look that said she did. A pride, if the flush on her cheeks was any indication.

  Or anger. She did not hide it from him. She was no sweet miss with simpering manners. Nor was she a courtesan used to men’s fawning. She was strangely both and neither.

  A woman to be wary of, certainly. One who fascinated him too much. Hours had been spent with thoughts of words he might teach her, Latin phrases she could learn and in the recollection of them also remember him.