“That is all? Water?”
“It is a start.”
She was not sure, either, and it was for him to take charge; he was the man, the warrior.
“I will lead Hector. We should carry the children always. They seem to welcome the contact and we do not want them wandering in sickness.”
She nodded, deferential again, and now she waited as he rose, then fell into stride behind him as he took his first swift steps into the unknown.
Chapter 16
Leading Hector, Ranulf boosted the lad onto his own back and checked his dagger. He did not expect trouble, or lurking thieves, but these were strange days and it was wise to be prepared. He strode into silence and the lengthening shadows of evening, listening for the slightest cry and feeling his mouth growing drier than old hay—with hunger, he told himself. Yet it was puzzling and disconcerting to realize that this whole village was here and yet marooned. None had ventured forth from here to the castle. Was that because they feared they would get no aid? Or had the sickness worked so swiftly that all had been overcome?
Beside him, matching him step by steadfast step, Edith sang a soft lullaby that he thought seemed familiar to him, rocking the younger child on her hip. The little girl sucked her thumb but her eyes were wide open and she said something.
Edith nodded, kissing the infant’s dirty fingers, answering her and then repeating in the English he understood. “Yes, we shall see your mama soon. Is she sleeping?”
The boy replied and Edith translated. “Mary thinks she is tired, but I think she is dead.”
Ranulf felt him shiver and could only pity the lad as Edith added, “Simon wishes his mother would awaken.”
“We must take them away from here.” Again, Ranulf blocked this small, determined woman’s way. “Do you want them to see horrors?”
Edith said, in an urgent whisper, “Can we leave now, without knowing if others are alive? I have some manchet bread and some cheese. I will keep giving Mary and Simon bits of each when we arrive inside the village. That should keep them intent on food.”
“You planned this?” He was not sure if he was revolted or respectful at her coolheadedness.
He saw the rim of a blush around her veiled eyes. “I brought it for us. I thought you might be hungry.”
He chuckled, indulgent afresh, until he spotted a flicker of movement from a pile of rags farther along the track.
“I will take him.” Edith held out her other arm for the child on his back.
Later he would marvel at her strength, but at that moment he silently swung the boy into her waiting embrace, knowing she would do her utmost to spare the children what she must know awaited them. With the dark creeping up, his thoughts ran to wolves and feral dogs and he did not ask again that she remain outside the village or apart from him.
“Stay back if they cough blood,” she said, in bad French.
Her hands gripping the children were white-knuckled—and now he saw the network of scars on her fingers and understood that her hands were not red with the setting sun but red due to old burns and injuries. Due to some kind of hard manual work, he guessed.
No wonder as the princess she wears gloves. No wonder she is strong.
“Be very careful,” she entreated, returning him to their present danger.
“Scold, scold,” he replied, saying a prayer under his breath as he dropped his charger’s reins, allowing Hector to graze on a tiny patch of hawthorn saplings, and forced his stonelike limbs into action.
Still she kept with him. Taking an unmanly comfort from her presence, he approached the heap of rags.
Something exploded, squealing, from the bloody pile. Beside him Edith sobbed once, then was deathly quiet, whirling round and round with the children, making a game of horror.
“A rat man.” He had seen them before on battlefields. “The rats go in and chew and sometimes they shift the corpse so that it seems to live again.” But he should remember this was no sight for a woman. “Not pretty, but the fellow is at peace, so let us move on.”
He touched her shoulder as she whirled and she leaned into him briefly before breaking and heading for the largest group of houses.
“What madness has come here?” Every step and he saw more heaps of decaying corpses and around them, signs of wildness or despair. Bodies sprawled half out of doors clutching jugs of wine or ale that had shattered as they fell in their final death throes. Bodies he could see in barns where the pigs had been slaughtered and folk had cooked the parts then and there and then died in the midst of their feasting.
“An eating frenzy,” Edith murmured. “These poor folk knew they were dying and wished to take what pleasure they could.”
“You have seen this before?”
“I have heard of it.” She sighed. “We cannot all be noble knights, playing at jousts.”
You are part of that world, too, he almost said, but he was robbed of words. From every hut issued the sweet, cloying stench of decay. His calls brought no answer save the cawing of crows. A crow walked from a barn with a gobbet of meat in its beak and he took care not to look at it too closely. Outside another hut, a dog lay on its side with a knife thrust through its heart.
He walked on, seeing scattered chicken bones and feathers, a broken quern stone, a plow smashed to pieces against the body of a man who in life must have been a giant.
“These folk were mad with anger.”
“Or despair.”
“It is a sin to despair,” he said, but who would not despair in a scene such as this?
Edith called out a few times, her voice seeming to be swallowed in this dim, closed-in valley. The children laid their heads on her bosom and chewed on the bread she fed them. Glancing at their peaceful, almost bored expressions, Ranulf did not want to consider how long they might have called and cried and received no answers.
“I see the well!” Edith started forward.
“So do I.” Ranulf wished they had not found it. “Stay back.”
He picked his way through more bodies, some bloodied, many contorted, their eyeless faces warped into unending expressions of terror and pain. The reek of pus and sickness rose in a foul miasma and he covered his mouth with his hand. Had these sad souls crawled here seeking relief from thirst?
“I hope they got a drink.” Edith spoke his wish.
Ranulf looked about, turning on the spot. Close to the well, the church was a stone box of a building with a crucifix in a yard full of half-finished coffins. The carved wooden crucifix had been burned and the painted Christ on it was dark and charred.
“These people were abandoned by God.” Ranulf crossed himself, wondering what dreadful sins they had committed to be smitten by such terrible retribution.
“Instead of trying to make coffins, or praying, they should have fled,” Edith said harshly.
“Would you leave a loved one unburied?”
She made a choking sound and he instantly drew his arm about her and the infants. “There is nothing we can do here,” he said softly, looking directly into her eyes. “We should take these innocents and leave.”
“There are other children here, dead children. Do you think they deserved this? Is this the work of a loving God?”
Ranulf shook his head. “I have no answers. Let us recover the horse and go.”
“Amen to that,” Edith said bitterly, turning her back on the dead.
Edith marched in a blaze of rage, ranting afresh at Gregory, who had died, and the villagers here, who had died, and the knights, who did not care and did not come and who lived. No doubt Sir Giles would be loitering about her tent tonight or tomorrow, convinced she could not resist him.
And Ranulf is that arrogant pig’s friend. . . .
She choked and spat, an action that was not ladylike but which Ranulf, patting his horse and checking the children were secure on Hector’s back, politely ignored.
Ranulf was a surprise. He had not fled the village. He had not called her evil for surviving. He had listened
to her. He had brought two peasant youngsters with them when Sir Giles would certainly have abandoned them.
She looked at him. His face was hidden by the neck of the horse as they toiled back up the wooded track to the main road, but she could see his powerful long legs and his supple, shapely hands and she could hear him.
“What is that you sing?” Curiosity won over her temper.
“A song Olwen taught me.” He resumed, his voice deep and mellow, soothing as dark honey.
A pretty song, with a lilting refrain. No doubt a bed-song, Edith thought sourly, before the images of what they had just seen struck her anew.
“Your wife?” she asked to keep the darkness at bay. Being with Ranulf helped keep her old memories of the pestilence and now these terrible fresh ones just a little away from her.
“Edith, you know Olwen was my wife.” Ranulf slapped Hector’s flank and encouraged the charger forward, then closed the gap between them.
“Now,” he said, taking her into his arms. “What do you really mean to ask? Did I love Olwen? Yes, I did. Do I blame myself for her death? Yes, I do. Are you satisfied?”
She was not, but having his warm, strong arms wound round her made it hard for her to recall her objections. “What happened? Why do you blame yourself?”
She was shocked when his mouth came down on hers, kissing her through the cloak-veil.
“Children!” she gasped, twisting her face away, her lips seeming to burn on the rough cloth.
He paused, then drew away from her. To her horror, Edith felt her eyes fill with tears.
“Children, indeed, and you have endured enough. I must get you back to your people.” He plucked her into his arms and placed her on the horse before the children. He patted her trembling arm. “Tomorrow you will join me at the castle, as my prize and my lady, and these young ones will stay with me. They will be companions for my page.”
“But they may be wild, strange—” And you are a knight who will not understand. These poor things do not even speak your language!
“I know they have witnessed appalling things, but pray God they will forget swiftly,” he said, confident and yes, a little pompous. Edith was startled to discover she was too weary to care, but she had to try.
“Let them stay with me, lord.”
“Time with you, then time with me. Agreed?”
She knew she would have no peace until she nodded and so she did. “Time with me first,” she persisted.
He started to chuckle, then stopped, perhaps as the terrors of the evening returned to him. “Let us go back,” he said. “I would have us in the camp before full nightfall.” He clicked his tongue to encourage Hector into a brisk walk, striding beside the horse, singing again to the children.
Somewhere on the journey, Edith fell asleep.
Chapter 17
Edith stirred late the next day, close to sunset. Scrambling up, realizing with relief that she was fully clothed on her own bed, she found the tent full of steam.
Maria was bathing herself and the two children, Mary and Simon, in the biggest cauldron they had. Mary was wailing as Maria poured a jug of warmed water over her head, but Simon was splashing in the water and eating a pie.
“All these two have done is eat and cry. We shall be days before we gain sense from them, if we ever do.” Teodwin sat down on the pallet beside her. “Sir Giles is outside, begging an audience.”
That knocked the sleep from her. “Did he recognize you?” Edith glanced longingly at the water. She craved a bath herself.
“Our old lord know his pig-man? No! But I am most glad that your new lord’s men are on guard.”
Edith clenched her teeth on her automatic denial that Ranulf was her lord.
“They allow no disrespect. When the pie-man asked if the Eastern lady wanted any pies, the captain told him he must call you Princess or take his pies and go.” Teodwin smoothed the front of his purple robe. “The whole camp knows that any who insult you will answer to the black knight. He has jousted earlier today, wearing your favors.”
The ones he took from me and still keeps. Edith sighed and boosted herself off the bed. “The yellow silk today,” she said. She needed the cheerful color to give her heart, especially as Giles was prowling outside, convinced of his own suit.
“What?” she almost snapped, for her steward was shaking his head.
“The black knight has sent you a new gown, with veiling.”
“Most gorgeous, too,” Maria piped up from the tub. “Silk as fine as yours and with long flowing sleeves, as fine as mist.” She laughed and pointed at the rippling water in the tub. “See how my babe within kicks!”
“He will soon be ready to come out,” Edith said, smiling at Maria while within she felt numb. Here she was, alive, well fed, being gifted with gowns, while her brother rotted in a roadside grave and those poor creatures in the unnamed village had no graves at all.
“I will see this gown.” Distraction, that was what she needed. “I will find some combs for you, Maria, for Mary’s hair.”
“We are doing well enough for now with my fingers,” Maria answered, ever cheerful. “Put that new robe on and give us a dance!”
Ranulf brought his small, silent page with him to Edith’s tent. Hearing Gawain gasp, he knew the great fluttering mass of colors still worked their magic and was relieved. He would not have Edith—or should he still think of her as the Lady of Lilies?—revealed as less than a Princess of the East. Perhaps she was from the east—the east of England, at least.
A small hand pressed anxiously in his and he crouched. “Those knights outside await my lady’s first appearance,” he told Gawain. “Sir Henry is not there.”
But Giles was. Giles, waiting with the others under the canopy, glittering as the fading sunlight in tunic and mantle of blue and gold. Giles had not been at the joust today—few had been, for several knights had heard of the princess’s absence and had come to her tent instead. Still, Ranulf had not expected Giles to wait so long.
The gown I gave her is blue and now they will match, he thought, alarmed, before good sense returned. He knew Edith detested Giles.
“Let us go in. We can, for the lady knows me.” He ruffled Gawain’s hair, wondering how the little lad would react to the tent and the two new youngsters within. He had a hope that perhaps if Gawain had something to care for, he might be less fearful.
“Hello, Ran! I will come in with you.” In a shimmer of gold and blue, Giles moved to intercept him.
Ranulf avoided his mock punch and blocked him. “Not this time.” He watched Giles’s smile thin and his blue eyes turn to chips of ice, his combat face, and was even less impressed. “Go elsewhere, Giles.”
“I will win this contest,” Giles hissed. “No woman can resist me once I set my heart on her.”
“And I will not give you that chance,” Ranulf countered, conscious, as Giles was not, of his page whimpering softly beside them.
“’Fore God, Ran, this Eastern maid has bewitched you!”
“I admit she haunts me,” Ranulf said. “Now begone. I will be a while speaking to the lady.”
Giles turned on his heel and strode away, while Ranulf tried to feel sorry that their friendship was probably at an end. He could not.
He took Gawain on his shoulder, although it was against all custom to do so, and crooked his head so he could see the boy’s face. “We are going to see the princess.”
The child nodded and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. For the first time that day he looked curious.
As am I, Ranulf thought, as he had one of Edith’s “Eastern” heralds announce him. I wonder if she wears the blue gown?
Maria refused to leave the hot bathwater and refused to have screens put round. “I want to see this encounter.” Her chin, the only sharp point of her these days, cut toward Edith. “You cannot order me otherwise.”
“I can say it is our Eastern custom,” Edith agreed, pinning her blue veil in place. Off in one corner, at a small table set between guide
ropes, Teodwin fussed with cups and a jug of ale, exactly as he had done when Sir Tancred came calling, she thought with a pang. Then Ranulf ducked into the tent and she noticed no one but him.
“Princess.” He bowed and approached.
For an instant she was afraid, for he now knew her true name, and then she was busy, marking the changes in him since yester evening. His fair-to-russet hair was wilder than ever, with two leaves in it—he had not combed it at all since last night, or else had missed those. His tunic was handsome, a dark scarlet, but he had forgotten his customary belt. His full mouth was not as pale as it had been in the pestilence village but there were deep shadows under his brooding eyes.
He has scarcely slept after witnessing those horrors, my poor, dear man.
To stop herself from saying something too revealing, she thought of Sir Giles, Ranulf’s friend, walling them into the church. To prevent her rushing to his side to comb his raggy hair, she sat on her hands. Her bare hands, she now realized, with a jolt of alarm. She had forgotten her gloves.
Ranulf bowed to Maria. “Mistress Maria. Mary. Simon.” He nodded to the children. Mary had stopped wailing and Simon dropped his pie into the water and pointed at Gawain.
“Yes. This is my page, Gawain.”
Simon found the pie in the bath and held it out to Gawain, who stared at it as if it were a cow pat, Edith thought. Seeking to smooth the moment, she said, “Good evening, Gawain. My people and I are most pleased to meet you.”
She bowed, but Gawain was staring now at skinny, woebegone Mary.
“She does not like her wet hair in her eyes,” he announced, in a clear, piping voice. “I do not like that.” He tugged at his own fair curls.
“Will you help her, please, Gawain, as a knight should a lady?” Edith asked, aware that Ranulf’s eyes had widened with astonishment, although he said at once, “Here is a comb, and a jug for pouring.”
The jug seemed almost as large as Gawain’s tiny chest but the child took it at once. Walking carefully to the wooden bathtub that was almost as tall as he was, he gently swept Mary’s soaking hair away from her face. Deftly, he dipped the jug and began to pour it over the little girl’s shoulders.
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