When Christ and his Saints Slept eoa-1

by Sharon Kay Penman

“Well…at least you’ve stopped flinching every time you use the word see in my hearing.” Try as Rhiannon might to keep her voice level, it sounded suspiciously husky and strained to her ear; most sighted people were not as sensitive to tones, though, and she hoped he’d not notice. She’d known that sooner or later someone would come looking for her. But she’d not expected it to be Ranulf, and she stiffened as he moved toward her across the straw. She was not ready for this, nowhere near ready.

  Ranulf hung his lantern on an overhead hook and sat down beside her on the bale. “I had the most astounding talk tonight with your father. It is as if my whole life was turned upside down in a matter of moments-just like an hourglass!”

  He laughed again and Rhiannon discovered that she couldn’t swallow; there was an excited edge to his laughter that she’d never heard before. He did not sound to her like a man who’d just rejected a marriage proposal. She could think of nothing to say that would not betray her and listened in growing despair as he said, “I’d not realized until tonight how much I wanted to stay in Wales. When I came back, it was like coming home. Passing strange that I could not see that for myself, that I needed to have it pointed out to me.”

  “I know,” Rhiannon said faintly, “about…your talk. Papa confided in me beforehand.” Her words seemed to come of their own volition, and she felt a sudden dizziness, as if she were teetering on the edge of an abyss. But she was less afraid of falling then of prolonging this torment. “Then…you accepted Papa’s offer?”

  “No…I could not.”

  Rhiannon sat very still, as if one false move could send her plummeting off into space. “Why?”

  “Because he offered me the wrong daughter, Rhiannon.”

  She’d not dared to move. Now she dared not speak, either. Had she misunderstood? If only God would restore her sight, if just for a moment, long enough for her to see his face and judge for herself if she’d heard him right.

  “Rhiannon…you did hear what I said? I am making a botch of this, I know. Mayhap I’d best say it straight out. I want to marry you.”

  Her heart was pounding so loudly that she was sure he could hear. At the touch of his fingers on her cheek, her pulse jumped. “Why?” she whispered. “Why me and not Eleri?”

  “That is what your father asked, too. I could tell you that it’s because Eleri is not yet sixteen and I’m thirty-one and I want to marry a wife, not raise one. Or I could tell you that whilst I am very fond of Eleri, my feelings for you run much deeper. And it would all be true, Rhiannon. But what matters more than any of that is the way I felt when Rhodri offered me Eleri. There was no need to choose. I just knew. You were the one I wanted.”

  He’d taken her hand as he spoke, and now he pressed a kiss into her palm. “Do you need time to think about it, Rhiannon? I realize this took you as much by surprise as it did me, but-”

  “No…I do not need time. My answer is yes. I would be honoured to be your wife.”

  Even then it did not seem real to her, though, not until he tilted her face up and kissed her gently, first on her cheek and then on her mouth.

  Rhiannon awoke the next morning with an irrational fear that she might have dreamed it all. “Eleri? Olwen?” Getting no response, she slid out of bed. But for the first time in years, she’d forgotten to lay out her clothes for the next day. Retrieving her chemise, she pulled it over her head and moved to their washing laver, shivering as she splashed cold water onto her face. She’d begun to brush her hair by the time Eleri returned.

  “I fetched you some buttermilk, Rhiannon. I’m putting it on the table, in the right corner.”

  “Thank you. Eleri…did anything out of the ordinary happen yesterday?”

  “Nothing that comes to mind. It was a day like any other, as far as I recall. One of the goats strayed off, Selwyn’s tooth was hurting him, Ranulf asked you to marry him, and we had that wretched salted herring again for dinner.” Turning, she saw that Rhiannon had sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed. “You are not going to tell me, girl, that you forgot!”

  “Of course not!” Rhiannon bit her lip. “I was just so afraid,” she confessed, “that it had all been a dream.”

  When Eleri sat down on the bed, too, Rhiannon gave her a quick hug. Eleri knew that Ranulf had chosen Rhiannon over her, for in his exhilaration, Rhodri had not thought to keep that to himself. She’d seemed genuinely joyful about the marriage, but Rhiannon could not bear for her sister’s pride to have gotten even the slightest scratch, and she needed to be sure that no shadows lurked in the corners of Eleri’s certainty. “Eleri…are you truly content with this?”

  “‘Content’? That is such a tame, bland word to describe what I’m feeling! Unless…you did not really think I would ever have married Ranulf, do you? By Corpus, you did!” She sounded suddenly and highly indignant. “How could you have believed that of me, Rhiannon? I would never have betrayed you like that, never!”

  “You…you knew?”

  “That you were utterly daft about the man? Of course I did!” Eleri snatched up a pillow and smacked her sister with it. “That is for being such a prideful fool and this is for not confiding in me!” Another whack with the pillow. “Not that I needed to hear you admit it, for you melted every time you said his name. Of course I knew! Did you forget which of us is the blind one?” she needled, and Rhiannon grabbed for the pillow. They engaged briefly in a tug-of-war, but then Eleri let go unexpectedly and Rhiannon went over backwards onto the floor rushes. Eleri tried to catch her, only to lose her own balance and go tumbling off the bed, too.

  It had been a long while since they’d had a pillow fight, and sprawled now in the floor rushes, her mouth full of feathers. Rhiannon remembered why she’d given it up. “I’m too old for this sort of tomfoolery,” she complained good-naturedly. “I landed right on my tailbone, you brat! And where are all these feathers coming from?”

  “Usually from ducks,” Eleri drawled, getting up on her knees to retrieve the torn pillow and loosing another flurry of escaping feathers. Rhiannon inhaled a few, sputtered, and then began to laugh. So did Eleri, and they clung together, laughing until their cheeks were streaked with tears and the air was so feather-filled that it seemed to be snowing and Enid was standing in the doorway, gazing down at them in consternation.

  “What in Heaven’s Name is going on here? Look at you, rolling about on the floor like a couple of puppies and…and the room is full of feathers!”

  “I guess the duck died,” Eleri quipped, and that nonsensical answer set the sisters off again, while Enid looked on in disapproving bafflement. Rhiannon was still giggling when Eleri called out cheerfully, “Come on in, Ranulf. You’re missing all the fun!”

  Rhiannon didn’t really believe Ranulf was in the doorway; that was the sort of prank Eleri loved to pull. But then Enid gave a dismayed cry. “Ranulf, do not look! It is not fitting that you should see Rhiannon in her chemise!”

  “Why ever not?” Eleri held out her hand so her stepmother could help her up. “Once they’re wed, he’ll see her in her skin, will he not?” She managed to get Enid out by the simple expedient of refusing to let go of the older woman’s arm. By then Rhiannon had been able to scramble to her feet and was brushing ineffectually at the feathers clinging to her chemise. It was not until she heard Ranulf say her name that she was sure he was still in the room.

  Rhiannon was slightly embarrassed; Ranulf was the last person she’d have wanted to catch her playing the fool. But she had a far more pressing concern than her dignity, and the only way she knew to dispel it was to confront it head on. “Good morrow,” she said, although she thought such formality sounded silly, coming from a woman with feathers in her hair. “There is something I must ask you, Ranulf. Now that it is the morning after, have you had any second thoughts?”

  It was an awkward question for Ranulf, and one that showed him just how well she knew him, for upon awakening that morning, his first thought had indeed been, What have I done? It was not so much that he regretted h
is marriage proposal as that in the cold light of day, he fully comprehended the magnitude of what he’d be undertaking. His earlier joke about an upended hourglass no longer seemed funny, for that was exactly what he’d done-turned his life upside down. Marriage was one of God’s Sacraments, a lifelong commitment, and marriage to Rhiannon would have its own unique pitfalls. Because her vulnerability was so much greater, so much greater, too, would be his sense of obligation to her. She deserved all that he had to give. But what if it was not enough? He still felt that what he’d done was right, but it could not have hurt if he’d taken a little more time to think it through. If God let him reach his biblical three score years and ten, would he still be jumping off cliffs without ever looking to see where he’d land?

  His hesitation stirred up Rhiannon’s anxiety into outright alarm. “You must tell me if it is so,” she entreated. “If you have misgivings, better that we talk about them now…ere it is too late.”

  “No, it is nothing like that, lass.” Stepping toward her, he reached for her hand. “I am not sure how best to explain this. Until I walked through that door and saw you thrashing about in the floor rushes, I admit I was feeling some unease, fear that I would let you down or cause you hurt. I was thinking of our marriage in sobering terms-responsibility and commitment and duty. What I should have remembered, though, is that I am still getting to know you…and you are constantly surprising me.”

  Rhiannon tilted her head, listening as much to his intonation as to his words. He did not sound as if he were weighed down with regrets, but mayhap she was hearing only what she wanted to hear. “I am not following you.”

  “There seem to be so many Rhiannons. First there was the nurse, striving to save my life. Then my cousin, who soon became my companion and confidante. Even my confessor,” he said, and for a moment, they both remembered that summer afternoon by the rushing waters of Rhaeadr Ewynnol. “But now…well, now I am seeing you in an altogether different light.”

  He could not help smiling then, for he saw she still did not understand. But she did not realize how she looked-barefoot in her chemise, russet hair in beguiling dishevelment down her back, wispy white feathers kissing her cheek, her throat, the curve of her bosom. Half waif, he thought, and half wanton, a woman to cleave unto, as Scriptures said.

  “What I mean,” he said, “is that I am of a sudden seeing you as a bedmate, Rhiannon.”

  He could see a blush tinting the whiteness of her throat and cheeks, but there was nothing shy in the smile she gave him. “Well, then,” she said happily, “we’d best be married as soon as possible.”

  They were, much to Enid’s chagrin. She argued in vain that such a hasty wedding would be sure to give rise to scandal, but her protests fell upon deaf ears. Rhodri did not believe that anyone could think ill of his Rhiannon. Eleri took the opposite tack, pointing out with cynical but accurate insight that the marriage was bound to cause gossip in any event. And Rhiannon and Ranulf cared only about getting married before the start of Lent, when marriages were prohibited. They settled upon Shrove Tuesday, beating the Lenten deadline by one day, placating the indignant Enid by agreeing to have a lavish celebration after Easter, then upsetting her anew by not bothering to post the banns.

  They were wed in a simple ceremony at Llanrhychwyn, a small stone chapel in the hills above Trefriw. It was nothing like the great cathedrals where Ranulf had witnessed the weddings of his Norman-French kin, but it was newly whitewashed with lime, aglow with candles, fragrant with scented floor rushes, and in the secluded stillness, they could hear the rustling of yew trees in the wind, the clarion cry of a soaring hawk, even the distant howling of a Welsh wolf.

  Afterward, they had a quiet wedding dinner back at Rhodri’s manor, attended only by the members of his household, a meal of roast goose and baked trout and mead and harp music. Instead of the usual raucous bedding-down revelries, Rhiannon’s sister and stepmother then accompanied her up to the wedding chamber, where they made her ready for Ranulf, while he enjoyed a final flagon with the man who was now both his uncle and father-in-law.

  As a king’s son, Ranulf had witnessed more than his share of weddings, and he knew from experience how bawdy and boisterous the bedding-down revelries could get, the humor both explicit and uninhibited, a carnal and often crude celebration of life and lust and the anticipated pleasures of the marriage bed. But Ranulf felt sure that their bedding-down revelries would have been dreadfully different. They would have been subdued and decorous and seemly enough to have satisfied the most pious of priests, for the wedding guests would not have known how to deal with a blind bride. They’d have been painfully polite, offering Rhiannon their pity instead of their lewd mockery, and Ranulf was very glad she’d been spared that. She already knew full well that others viewed her as an oddity. Tonight he hoped to show her that she was a desirable woman to the only man who mattered, the one she’d married.

  That proved to be very easy to do, for once they were lying together in their marriage bed, she soon discovered incontrovertible proof of his passion, and he discovered in his turn that her other senses were functioning perfectly. She was eager to touch what she could not see, eager to please him, and afterward, he felt confident that her deflowering had been as satisfying for her as it had been for him. “I did not hurt you too much, did I?” he asked drowsily, surprised to realize how much that mattered to him.

  She shook her head, tickling his chest with a long strand of her hair, and then trailing it still lower, across his belly. “Ranulf…do we have to wait till morning ere we can do it again?”

  “Shameless wanton,” he murmured, and there was such tenderness in his voice that she found herself blinking back tears.

  “Ranulf…I want you to know that I understand divided loyalties. You chose me and Wales, but that does not mean you repudiated your past life. England will always exert a powerful pull upon you, and whenever you feel the need, you must follow it. You may return to England as often as you wish and I’ll not object…just as long as you keep coming back.”

  “I do have other loyalties,” he admitted. “But from now on, my first loyalty will be to you. That I promise you, Rhiannon.”

  She wondered if that was an oblique reference to the woman he’d loved so deeply and disastrously. But she dared not ask, dared not summon up Annora’s restless spirit to haunt their marriage bed. Instead, she settled back in his arms, shifting so she could hear his heart beating against her cheek until she fell asleep.

  46

  Rouen, Normandy

  August 1151

  Maude could have lodged in Rouen’s great castle, as Geoffrey did whenever he was in the city. Or she could have moved into the royal residence adjacent to the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Pre. Instead she chose to live among the monks, dwelling in the guest quarters of the priory, an austere and surprisingly stark milieu for a woman who’d once reigned over an imperial court.

  On the first Sunday in August, Ranulf and his niece the Countess of Chester arrived at the priory. They were both a long way from home, but they were bringing Maude wounding news, not the sort of grief to be delivered in a letter.

  Maud had gone to the church, ostensibly to light a candle and offer up prayers, actually to give her aunt the only solace she could-some private time to grieve. Blinking in the glare of shimmering white sunlight, Maud paused in the doorway, waiting for Minna to catch up with her; the German widow was showing her age, moving stiffly and slowly even on warm summer afternoons.

  Out in the garth, Ranulf was carrying on an animated conversation with a new arrival. The man was a stranger to Maud, and yet there was something vaguely familiar about him, enough to kindle her curiosity. He looked to be in his early twenties, with very vivid coloring-curly copper-gold hair, fair ruddy skin dusted with freckles, silver-grey eyes. Like Ranulf, he was a little above average height, but he seemed taller, for he was powerfully built, with a deep chest and broad shoulders that she was eyeing appreciatively when Minna’s startled “Mein Gott!” e
choed behind her. “It is Lord Harry!”

  “Harry?” Maud was astonished. “My cousin Harry?” Not having seen Henry on either of his last two trips to England, her memories were of a precocious ten-year-old. But what surprised her more than his maturity was how unlike his parents he was. He might have been a foundling, she marveled, so little did he resemble her aunt or Geoffrey. He did have Geoffrey’s coloring, but the freckles were all his own, and so was the brawn. He had none of his father’s flash, none of his mother’s aloof elegance. And when she went to greet him, she discovered that his personality was-like his appearance-very much his own, too.

  For Maude’s son, he showed a remarkable indifference to protocol and ceremony, and his humor held none of Geoffrey’s darker undertones. He charmed Maud at once, for he was playful and irreverent and quite sure of himself. The rapport was mutual, like recognizing like, and with a fine feel for teamwork, they soon pounced on Ranulf, for his impulsive and hasty and unforeseen marriage was too tempting a target to resist.

  “And so there I was,” Henry grumbled, “haunting all the ports in Normandy, waiting for reliable Uncle Ranulf to arrive as he’d promised. I spent so much time hanging around Barfleur that two of the fishing boats offered to take me on as a crew member. And just where was Ranulf whilst I was turning down a chance to catch cod? Off in the Welsh wilderness, taking advantage of a trusting damsel in distress.”

  “One who was unable to see what she was getting,” Maud chimed in. “Although I know many wives who would count that as a blessing!”

  Minna went hot with embarrassment. That Ranulf should have chosen a handicapped wife was a mystery she could not begin to fathom; the only thing more incomprehensible to her was that others would joke about it. She frowned at Henry and Maud, baffled and indignant that they could salt Ranulf’s wounds like this.

  “There is a lot to be said for having a blind wife,” Ranulf protested. “She is sure to overlook my flaws, is she not? Nor will she care when I get grey and wrinkled. But even if she had keener sight than an eagle, Rhiannon would still turn a blind eye to my failings. I only hope you can find a wife as merciful, Harry, for from what I’ve heard, you’ll need all the forgiveness you can get!”