by Tamara Leigh
Of greater comfort is the surety that, had your brothers believed Christian Lavonne to be dishonorable, nothing would have impelled them to give you into his care.
The tinkle of bells preceded a gasp. “Hear that, my lady? Certes, ‘tis the language of angels.”
Gaenor remembered when she had bought the bells at market with the woman who would become her sister-in-law though, at the time, there had seemed no hope for it since Annyn was to have wed the rapacious Geoffrey Lavonne. The man’s death had changed everything, and now Gaenor was the one sacrificed.
“Do you not think, my lady?”
Gaenor peered around the chair. “I am glad you like the bells. Take them—they are yours.”
The girl startled so violently that, if not for the mouthful of teeth she showed, one might think she had been slapped. “Truly, my lady?”
“Truly.” Gaenor sat back.
I expect life must seem bleak, but I know you have the courage and fortitude to make of your marriage what I refused to make of mine. As Beatrix has found love with her Michael, I believe you will find love if you but look for it and learn to forgive where I could not. My knees and hands ache with prayers for you and your Christian.
“My Christian,” Gaenor whispered. Would he ever be truly hers? Or would their marriage be ever what it had been these past days—living in the same world in name only?
“This is most fine, my lady. What will ye make of it?”
Grudgingly, Gaenor heeded Aimee and saw that the young woman cradled a bolt of material the color of dewed moss. Her mother had included it, though there was no longer a need for a gown in which to be wed. “I do not know.” She returned to her missive.
I hope you will also seek God and remember all that I endeavored to teach you, above all that prayer is mighty. Have faith, beloved Gaenor, and know you are loved. ~ Isobel Wulfrith
As Gaenor closed her eyes that she might rest in her mother’s words, Aimee again made her presence known. “This is a psalter, is it not? Why, ‘tis more lovely than I have been told.”
Doubtless, Isobel had sent it to aid with Gaenor’s prayers.
“Oh, a page has fallen out!”
How had that happened? Had the binding—?
Gaenor surged to her feet, advanced on the wide-eyed maid who stumbled upright, and snatched the folded parchment from amid the rushes.
“My lady, ‘twas not I who loosened the page. I was most careful.”
The beat of her heart insistent, as if it sought to escape its cage, Gaenor forced a calming breath and took the psalter from her. “That is all, Aimee.”
Confusion furrowed her face. “I vow I did not do it, my lady.”
Gaenor nodded. “The psalter is of an age.” Not true, but she could not tell her that the loose parchment had never been bound with the words of God. Indeed, it was so far removed from holiness that its presence might be called an abomination. “Now leave me.”
Aimee glanced at the garments she had laid out on the bed. “What of your clothes, my lady?”
“I will see to them.”
“But—”
“I will see to them, Aimee.”
Resentment flashed in the girl’s eyes. “As you will.” With a tinkling of the bells she had secreted somewhere on her person, she hurried to the door and paused. “I may keep the bells, my lady?”
“They are my gift to you.” Hopefully, they would ease the sting of being sent away so abruptly.
As the door closed, Gaenor turned her attention to Aimee’s discovery. She should not have panicked, for it was not as if the maid could read a word of Sir Durand’s missive. Still, it boded ill that it was in the home of Gaenor’s husband.
She laid the psalter atop a woolen mantle in the chest, returned to the brazier, and reached the missive to the flames, only to pull back. Strange, but she could not clearly recall the words the knight had written though she had read them again and again. She unfolded the missive.
My lady, Gaenor,
I pray one day you will forgive me. ~ Ever your friend, Durand
So few words ought to be harder to forget than to remember, and yet they had slunk away with the advent of Christian.
Gaenor tossed the missive on the flames. The parchment darkened until it was indistinguishable from the black inked words, then collapsed and began its descent into ashes.
“Farewell, Sir Durand,” she whispered. “You are forgiven.” The absolution reminding her of her mother’s missive that advised her to learn to forgive, she spun around.
The parchment had rolled back on itself and lay beside the chair where, in her haste to retrieve Sir Durand’s missive, she had dropped it. She swept it up, read it again, and felt tears. Her mother’s words were to be cherished and were worthy of being always at hand—as far from abomination as the truth was from a lie.
She smoothed the parchment on the table beside the chair, folded it, and retrieved her psalter from the chest. Where Sir Durand’s missive had too long resided, she placed her mother’s missive. “Better,” she breathed, and though she had intended to set the psalter aside, she turned instead to the first psalm.
The maid, who surely had better things to do, was jingling.
More disrespect? Having received Sir Hector’s report that his wife’s attempts to claim her place as the lady of Broehne had been met with much grudging, Christian halted at the center of the hall. “Aimee!”
The young woman jumped, as did the servants around whom she had been prancing. “My lord!” She hurried forward, setting herself to jingling again.
“As it is your duty to see to my wife’s needs, I would expect you to be abovestairs tending to the arrival of her clothes.”
She came to stand before him, and the jingling ceased. “That I was doing, my lord, and still I would be had she not sent me away.”
He narrowed his lids. “Were you impertinent?”
“Nay, my lord. Indeed, she was so grateful for my help that she rewarded me with bells.” She shook a leg, causing the bells to sound again.
Christian ground his teeth. “Then you have settled her possessions?”
“I would have, but as I said, she sent me away.”
“Why?”
She drew a long breath. “I vow I did not do it, my lord—I was most gentle—but when I unpacked her psalter, a page fell out and methinks she blames me for it.”
Christian remembered her psalter that he had trespassed upon at Wulfen Castle and by which he had first learned the name of the one to whom she had given her heart. And her body.
“I do not think she will welcome me back, my lord, but if you wish it, I shall return to the solar.”
“Nay, you have done your duty.” Now if only his wife would do hers, but she likely clung to that accursed missive, was even now—
He strode to the stairs. When he entered the solar, he did not do so quietly, and yet Gaenor did not seem to hear him where she stood with her back to him before her opened chest. Her attention was held by whatever she bent her head to, and it would not surprise him if it was that miscreant’s plea for forgiveness.
Advancing on her, he said, “No welcome for the husband returned to you?”
He heard her breath catch, then the snap of what he saw was her psalter as she turned to face him. Stopping short of her, he stared at the unbound parchment just visible between the covers of the book.
She swallowed hard enough to be heard. “I did not hear you.”
Hating that his jealousy should be so strongly felt, he raised his gaze over her. “So deep at prayer were you?”
He expected a guilty flush to add to the color in her face, but it did not. Pressing her shoulders back, she said, “Indeed, I was.”
It was no easy thing to let her lie slip past—to not seize the psalter and expose her yearning for another man—but he pulled himself back from that edge. Still, he had to ask, “For what do you pray?”
She narrowed her lids. “That is between God and me.”
If
not for the content of her prayers, he would advise her to seek the spiritual guidance of the castle priest as the Church advocated, but he did not trust her beseechings, nor her confessions, to remain private any more than he trusted his own. Though the priest seemed a good enough man, he was too prone to idle chat.
“Now…” Gaenor reached the psalter behind her and dropped it atop the remaining contents of her chest. “…what welcome were you expecting?”
He stared at the psalter, the delivery of which he should have expected. How long did she intend to hold on to it—more specifically, what it secreted? Was the missive so dear she would risk its discovery by keeping it near?
“What welcome, husband?”
It was a good, albeit difficult, question, for the last time he had crossed words with her he had warned her not to include him in her plans to start anew until after her menses. Until that event, he could hardly act the husband returning home to his wife, no matter how often he recalled the sweetness of her lips.
He stepped around her and considered the garments and accessories strewn across the bed. There lay the hooded mantle she had worn to the chapel at Wulfen, also the gown of dark-blue cloth. “You are pleased to have your belongings?”
“I am.”
He looked across his shoulder. “You know your brother’s men also delivered your palfrey?”
Her eyes brightened. “I did not.”
“It has been stabled.”
She clasped her hands at her waist. “I thank you.”
Christian wearied of their stilted exchange, though he knew he had turned their talk this direction by ignoring her question.
“’Twill be good to ride again,” she surprised him. “Mayhap…” She shrugged. “…you could take me around the barony.”
Feeling the grit and grime of two days in the saddle upon the grounds of his demesne, he said, “Abel told you our search for the brigands yielded naught?”
“He did.”
“Then you know Sir Robert is still out there.”
She inclined her head. “With your father.”
Providing Aldous yet lived. “Though you are just the temptation to bring them out of hiding, I will not offer you up as bait, Gaenor. Hence, until they are—” He frowned, then glowered. “How know you my father is with Robert?”
She blinked. “Garr told me ere he left for Stern.”
Christian turned his hands into fists. “It was not his place to do so.”
She put her head to the side. “’Twas your place, but do you recall, when I asked after your father, you denied me.”
He had told her he would discuss Aldous at a time of his own choosing. And he had intended to, but after what had happened between them in this chamber, then the sighting of the brigands that he had been grateful for beyond the possibility of their capture…
“You are right,” he said. “I should have told you.”
Her lips parted. He had surprised her—and himself, for though he had determined through prayer these past days to seek some semblance of peace with her, that was before Sir Durand’s missive stole into his home. And into their bedchamber.
Anger seeking a new level, he forced his clenched hands open. Leave it be, Christian. Soon enough you will know whether she carries his child. Then you can determine how best to proceed with this marriage.
Wondering what darkness cast about her husband’s mind that made his struggle so palpable, Gaenor said, “I am grateful you would not use me as bait, but I beseech you not to allow your brother to make of me a prisoner. Even if you will not take me riding, I am sure Abel—”
“I will think on it,” Christian said sharply, then less so, “How fares your ankle?”
She sighed. “Better.”
“And John?”
He was another matter altogether. Though she had hoped the boy would be a diversion from the weightiness of her marriage, he was only tolerably less difficult than he had been that first day. “He is angry and confused by the loss of his mother, so much that only today did I see anything near a smile upon his face, and only when Abel came to the donjon.”
Remembering the boy’s sighting of the man who had scoured him clean and how he had scurried after him when Abel departed, she smiled. “I fear that, as long as my brother is at Broehne, he will find himself in possession of a short and unrelenting shadow.”
Seeing Christian’s gaze was drawn to her mouth, she remembered when, in the guise of Sir Matthew, he had said she was most becoming when she smiled. And the fool she had been had told him he gave her much to smile about. She eased her lips. For nothing would she give him further reason to accuse her of seduction.
His eyes returned to hers. “It seems I no longer give you much to smile about.”
He remembered too. Before she could think better of it, her thoughts wished themselves into words. “’Twas Sir Matthew who made me smile, and you are not…he.” That last came out on a breath of regret.
Again she caught the folding of his fingers into fists. Though he had vowed he would not raise a hand against her, there was comfort in having the chest between them—and it was that to which he next directed his gaze. As he stared into its depleted depths, she wondered if he gauged it as an obstacle to retaliation.
“Neither am I Sir Durand,” he said, almost with resignation, and once more turned his regard on her. “I am Christian Lavonne, and the sooner you reconcile yourself to that, the better it will go for us.” He came around the chest, strode past her, and out of the solar.
Gaenor released the breath she had not realized she was holding, retrieved the psalter, and hugged it to her. “Lord, help me think through my thoughts ere I let them onto my tongue.” She squeezed her eyes closed. “’Tis too late for love, but surely not too late for peace between us. Aye, peace is all I ask.”
He knew it would end badly for him. There was little question of it, certainly not with the king also set on his demise. Nevertheless, it would also end badly for others, and that made Robert’s failures tolerable and discomforts bearable. Today, however, success. Or something near it. After all, it was not a Wulfrith his men had taken, but a Wulfrith knight—and at a high price.
Though the three men-at-arms accompanying the knight on his journey to Wulfen Castle were now well on their way to hell, the bloody skirmish had taken the lives of five of Robert’s men, left two so severely wounded their injuries might prove fatal, and laid down a half dozen in need of the healer’s needle and thread. Unfortunately, Wulfrith’s man must first be given the benefit of the woman’s ministrations, for his value—whatever it might prove—lay in keeping him alive. For now.
At the center of the camp, Robert dismounted with the others, bent to the belly of the horse tethered to his own, and applied a dagger to the rope that bound the Wulfrith knight over the saddle. With a shove to the shoulder, he sent the man off the other side.
A grunt of pain sounded from the knight when he hit the ground.
Robert knew he should not have done that, not with his prisoner so injured, but the impulse had been too satisfying. “Helene!”
As if she had been awaiting his summons, she pushed back the flap of Aldous’s tent and stepped out. Pretty little thing, and if not that his accursed father objected, he would have found other uses for her.
Frowning over the bloodied knight, she advanced with short steps accompanied by the clink and clatter of metal. The next time she tried to run, she would not get as far as she had two days past.
“Tend him well so he does not die on me,” Robert said, “then see to my men.”
She narrowed her eyes on him before dropping to her knees beside the knight.
The temptation to strike her never far, Robert took a step toward her, but no more. The problem with Helene of Tippet was that she hit—and bit—back, which led to the greater problem that if he gave the wench what she deserved, he might find himself without a caregiver for Aldous. The thought was enough to sour his stomach and make him question, as he did more and
more of late, why he had not left his demanding sire at Broehne.
Helene eased the Wulfrith knight onto his back, only to have the neck of her bodice seized by the injured man.
“Ho!” one of Robert’s men crowed and was echoed by others who drew near as if to enjoy a rooster fight.
Feeling no need to aid the healer, for she had well enough proved her size was not proportionate to her strength when they had stolen her from Tippet, Robert looked between the two.
She cupped a hand over the knight’s where he held her. “No ill do I mean you, Sir Knight,” she said in Norman French, the language of the nobility that set her apart from most commoners. “I am a healer and, if you allow me, I will see to your injuries.”
“They are not mortal,” the man ground between clenched teeth.
But they were surely painful, every burn, throb, sting, and twinge well deserved for the thinning of the brigands’ ranks, Robert mulled with satisfaction. As with each time he encountered a Wulfrith-trained knight, including his departed brother, Geoffrey, resentment surged anew that Aldous had not sought such training for his eldest son. This knight, now at his mercy, should have died thrice considering the number of men Robert had set on him.
“Your injuries may not be mortal,” Helene said, “but if infection sets in, you will likely share the fate of those who did not survive this day. Pray, let me aid you.”
The knight released her, turned his head opposite, and scanned the faces of the brigands until he found Robert. “You know you will gain naught by holding me.”
“I do not know that.” Robert pulled his newly acquired weapon from its sheath, stepped forward, and dropped to his haunches. “Hence, rather than slit you navel to nose with your own dagger, a coveted Wulfrith dagger, no less”—he grudgingly admired the superb workmanship that had been denied him—“I will keep you around for a while.” He smiled and lowered the blade to the knight’s crimson-stained chest. “The only say you have is whether or not you must needs be staked to the ground that Helene may tend you.”
