Once Upon a Pillow

by Christina Dodd

  Once more he felt fear gnaw in his gut, fear that he no longer remembered the art of jousting, that it, along with so much else, had been lost in the Saracen dungeons or baked to dust under the Holy Land’s sun-blistered sky; fear that he’d escaped that blasted land to slave and beg and labor three thousand miles only to have it end on a rural tilting field, killed by a pretty boy in silver mail.

  But he hadn’t lost.

  Nicholas let his head roll back and smiled into the shrouded darkness. Finally, he was someone. No matter how short a time he held Cabot Manor, history must forever bear witness that he had existed, he had been. For he was lord of this manor, master of three thousand acres upon which lived thirty serfs, a mill, a granary, a buttery, a stable…and a bed.

  The tightness in his gut relaxed and the thundering in his head abated. He sighed and, stretching his arm out, brushed against something soft and yielding. A female breast. He looked over, startled.

  Ah, yes. He remembered now. As a newly christened debauchee, he had apparently decided to make up for the years he’d lain fallow in a Syrian dungeon. He studied the ripe figure sprawled beneath the blankets at his side. She was snoring and the scent of ale and peat smoke rose from her pink and grimy skin along with a mélange of other odors which, he suspected, had taken up residence on her person long ago.

  Sowenna? Aye, Sowenna. Warm, full-bosomed, avaricious, blonde Sowenna. After six years gone from England, he had been stirred by the sight of blond hair. He had promised her a trinket for her company and while he knew that in the eyes of the church offering “a trinket for company” was no different than offering a coin for prostitution, well, he’d had what he wanted and she’d gotten what she needed.

  Need and want. He’d always considered them separate, but of late he’d come to wonder how far apart they really stood.

  Still, the reminder that he was paying for her favors dimmed his initial pleasure. He scratched his chest, hoping she hadn’t given him fleas, and remembered an exotic room filled with steaming pools and ladles of clear water. Not every memory he’d brought back from the crusades was cursed with bleakness or fraught with peril.

  He closed his eyes and Sowenna rolled atop him.

  “You’re awake!” she crowed and fumbled between their bodies. “Good. Now let’s see what I ‘ave here. Nuthin’ I like better than to start the day with a nice—”

  Whatever Sowenna liked to start the day with was to be forever lost, for at that second the bed hangings snapped open and sunlight poured in, blinding him with brilliance. A slender figure stood by the side of the bed, her features eclipsed by the sunlight behind her, a nimbus of fiery darkness about her head, her hands on narrow hips. Her chin jerked up, as though she’d been slapped, bringing her features into view. She was lovely, lovely and careworn and proud. Like some displaced faerie lass, slight but strong, with a wisdom that belied her youthful visage.

  Sowenna blinked crossly, her playful demeanor wilting like harebells before a frost. “What do you think you’re doing?” she squawked, scooting upright without bothering to cover herself. “Who do you think you are, anyway, you scrawny get of a scrawny whore!”

  Nicholas closed his eyes, Sowenna’s shrill battle cry renewing the drumbeat in his head.

  “Who am I?” The slender beauty asked, pointing her finger at him. “I’m his wife.”

  Chapter Two

  Jocelyn Cabot stood above the bed, sick and furious, feeling as if she’d walked straight into her life seven years ago. The clothing lying in heaps about the room, the yeasty stench of ale under-pinned by the thick pervasive aroma of sex, it was all the same. From the spilt tankard on the floor to the look of sluttish triumph on the face of the woman peering over the man’s muscular chest, it was familiar.

  It could have been her uncle Gerent lying there with his latest woman, too drunk to meet with the guild masters, too stupid to rely on diplomacy to listen to them. Instead, he’d sent her out to feed them his threats. Not again. Never again.

  “Get out!”

  With alacrity, the woman scooted from the bed, grabbed her clothes and bolted out the door.

  The man, her husband, Sir Nicholas No-Name, swung his muscular hairy legs over the side of the bed and glowered at her. That, too, sharply brought back a memory. She flinched reflexively, expecting at any second to be struck and sent careening across the room.

  But he did not raise his hand to her. Instead, heedless of the fact that he was unclad, he rose and stood over her, naked and huge. Not huge like Gerent who’d been a grizzled, filth-encrusted bear of a man. Nay, this knight was a stallion in his prime, so flat of belly one could see the muscles clearly delineated beneath the dark fur that started at his chest and covered him all the way down to the sex hanging heavy and turgid between his legs.

  Jocelyn flushed, averting her eyes. With a scowl, Nicholas looked around and snatched the sheet from the bed, securing it low around his hips.

  Resentment and despair vied within Jocelyn. Resentment, because she’d kept her part of the bargain. She’d honored her husband’s memory, kept candles lit for his salvation, made donations for masses to be said for his soul. Despair, because after six years of rectifying all the wrongs Gerent had heaped on this tiny village, once more a whoring, drunken knight was lord of this fief.

  “You are supposed to be dead!” The words burst unbidden from her lips. Again, she cringed, certain now that she’d won not merely a smack across the face, but a graver punishment. One would think that after her years as Gerent’s ward, she would have learned to keep a still tongue in her head. Not so. And the people of Trecombe had on more than one occasion thanked the good Lord for her inability to let any miscarriage of justice pass unremarked.

  She closed her eyes and waited, fighting back tears of anger, trying desperately to ignore the fact that they were also tears of fear.

  “Pardon me for returning alive,” Nicholas finally answered.

  She opened her eyes and looked up. He looked grim and dangerous, but his arms remained at his side. He was so big. Father Timothy had never mentioned that the man she’d wed by proxy was so physically intimidating.

  No wonder this man had been knighted on the battlefield. He’d only need to stand over his enemy—as he was standing over her now—to have him quaking like a leaf in the wind—as she was shaking now. The reality of her situation came back to her with breath-stealing force. This was her husband. He could do with her anything he wanted. She was his chattel.

  What would he do to her? Impossible to say what lay behind those bright green eyes. Impossible to discern the expression on that dark, bearded visage surrounded by those long, matted locks of hair. She swallowed, deciding the best course would be to retreat while she could.

  “I will leave you to dress, sir,” she said with as much dignity as she could manage. She began to back away.

  At once, he followed. Her eyes widened and she backed up more quickly. He matched her pace for pace, deliberately herding her backward across the room until her shoulders banged into the wall.

  He raised his hand and she turned her head sharply. His eyes narrowed a fraction but he only lifted the braid that hung over her shoulder and looked down at it a second before turning his cool, uncompromising gaze to hers.

  “Why do you want me dead?”

  “Why?” Because you are a blight on this land, a curse on these people and they have been cursed enough. The words trembled in her throat, waiting to be spoken, but she managed to keep them back.

  “We were informed of your death. We have grown accustomed to it,” she said breathlessly, albeit accusingly, for his fingers still played idly with her braid, like a merchant testing the quality of a suspect bolt of silk. “King Richard himself sent word of your capture. And later we learned that knights whose families could not pay their ransom were killed. We were certain you were dead.”

  “I assume a ransom was demanded for me,” he said carefully. “Why wasn’t it paid?”

  “There was no
money,” she answered. “Gerent left nothing but the land and that entitled save the demesne which had been overworked and yielded few crops.”

  “You could have sold some land.”

  How dare he lecture her on husbandry and economics? She had done more for Trecombe in six years than her uncle had in the thirty. “To whom, pray thee tell?”

  “Perchance, that flower of manhood, Sir Guy Moore?”

  Her mouth flattened. “Guy Moore has never paid for anything in his life. What he wants, he takes.”

  “How is it then that he hasn’t taken the lands by the river?”

  “Everyone knows King Richard honors the memory of his fallen knights. He would look sorely on any who tried to wrest land from the family of a crusader who’d died in the Lord’s—and Richard’s—service,” she replied. “That is why I have been able to achieve some small prosperity for this demesne, for these people. Your death has protected us from jackals.”

  “I can hold the demesne,” he said. Once again, he reminded her strongly of Gerent and yet, there was a difference. True, Gerent would have made such a statement, but where Gerent would have swaggered and sneered, there was not even a tincture of the braggart in Nicholas’s voice. He was simply stating a fact.

  And she did not doubt him. He looked every inch the ready warrior. Before he’d covered himself she’d seen a long white jagged scar on his left flank. More scars puckered on his shoulder and left arm. They only accentuated the impression he gave of strength and power.

  “You mistake my meaning, sir,” she said roughly, too aware of how close she was to his naked chest. “Because there has not been a need to hold this demesne, we turned our eyes to greater purpose than keeping and taking. We built and cultivated.”

  She’d been convent-raised, torn from the holy sisters’ care at the age of twelve when she’d been hauled off by her sterile, vile, drunken uncle Gerent who had installed her in Cabot Manor as his heir. Fresh from religious instruction, she’d taken one look at the decrepit manor and the miserable, cowed faces of Gerent’s serfs and villeins and immediately understood her role in life.

  She was to be these people’s liberator. Nine years later, she knew herself to have been a good liberator, a good mistress, a wise and prudent steward. But now, for some unknown reason, God had seen fit to test these poor folk—and herself—with a new ordeal. She glared at the ordeal.

  “That is why the buildings are in good repair, the fields fertile, the cattle plump, and the people content. In short, because you were dead and there wasn’t anyone an ambitious knight could challenge for what we have.”

  “But now there is,” he said.

  “Aye. Only look what your return has already wrought! Not two days here and blood already shed, and more than like, every jackal within a day’s ride sniffing that spilt blood and ready to come a-running.”

  A renewed sense of injury filled her, not for herself, but for the people who would be trampled in any clash of knightly conceit. And there was always knightly conceit.

  “And you would rather I had died than return to share with you that which your uncle bequeathed me along with your hand.”

  “Might I speak plainly, sir?”

  At this, the huge warrior gave a short bark of laughter. “Blind me, Madame, but if your last words were an example of honeyed words, I fear I shall be smote asunder by your ‘plain-speaking.’”

  She gazed at him, subtly comforted by that brief sardonic speech. He had wit then. Gerent wouldn’t have known irony if it had given him a written introduction. She straightened her shoulders. When she left this room, they would both know exactly where they stood.

  He sighed. “Speak, girl, before you bite through your tongue.”

  “We covet peace, sir, not riches. We are not political, we are not significant, nor do we stand in the path of ambitious princes.” The words rushed from her, severe and accusatory. “We are a tiny fief of God-serving people who raise good wool and make a decent cheese and who, because the king treated us with benign neglect, were treated likewise by all men.

  “But now you are here and I will have you know that the ghost of your arm was better protection and far better guarantee of peace than your living arm can ever hope to be. And if your sword arm benefits us not, but instead brings only woe, what good are you to us then? To me?”

  He regarded her impassively. “You think a knight’s value does not extend beyond a hard arm and a long sword? You are quick to judge.”

  She eyed him with barely masked disdain. “Excuse me, sir. I have only had the example of a hundred or so knights from which to learn my prejudices. But I will endeavor not to fly to judgment.”

  He laughed again, this time with more humor and less rancor. “I am not sure that the edge of your tongue isn’t sharp enough to daunt any knight’s resolve. You are…” He trailed off abruptly as she smiled at what she’d perceived to be the honest appreciation in his tone.

  He looked amazed, and if he was, it would not be more than she. The last thing she expected was to be smiling at this unlooked-for and unwanted husband.

  He blinked, becoming mindful that he was staring at her. “Come, wife, I am sure you will find some use for me.”

  She darted a quick glance over his body and in that brief survey realized anew how large he was, how well-proportioned and clean-limbed, how dense his furry chest and broad and hard his shoulders. How masculine he was.

  And how close. She could feel his heat.

  She wet her lips, feeling suddenly a little breathless. “I only have yokes enough for two oxen, sir.”

  At this, he burst into laughter, throwing his great, bearded head back, the long, black hair swinging down his back. Suddenly he looked young and…and liberated.

  It was an odd thing to think, but she could not refute the impression. He looked down into her face, still smiling, his teeth flashing white in his dark bearded face and she met his gaze and was bewitched.

  She was caught in time, held in his eyes’ summer bower green, transfixed, exposed and shielded, all at once. She had never experienced anything like it; she could barely remember why she stood here, or who she was.

  “Your name is Jocelyn, is it not?” he asked.

  She blinked. His question broke the spell, roughly recalling her to the present.

  Had she meant so little to him that he hadn’t fixed his wife’s name in his mind? And why should that surprise her? He’d married her by proxy because he’d been promised a fiefdom should he survive the crusade. He’d forgotten her.

  All her grievances, the essential unfairness of his being alive, rushed back to her. Father Timothy had gone on ad nauseum about how fierce and ungovernable this man’s blood lust was and, because of that, how likely he was not only to die in battle, but be first to die.

  The man standing before her didn’t look intemperate and hotheaded. He looked like a man who had every ounce of his will under the strictest self-mastery. Indeed, she doubted his beard grew without first begging his indulgence.

  “Aye,” she said sullenly, winning a scowl from him. “Jocelyn. Was it only my name you mislaid or was it the fact that you had a wife at all?”

  He flushed bronze but replied with affronted pride, “If I had remembered I had a wife, I would not have bedded Sowenna.”

  Sowenna? Fury made her tremble. He had no trouble recalling her name. “Is your defective memory supposed to make your whoring more palatable to me? For if that is your intent, you have failed.”

  “It wasn’t my intent to make anything more palatable, simply to state a fact. I am no adulterer.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Tell that to Sowenna.”

  His skin darkened to a shade behind the bush of his beard. “I am telling it to you.”

  For a long minute their gazes locked. His cold, hers hot. “Tell me, wife,” he finally said, in tones which made it clear that they had done with that subject. Or so he thought. “Are you responsible for the manor’s repair, the fief and the crops, the rents and t
he aids?”

  Her pride made her forget her ire. “I would not pay a reeve for what I could do myself. And I trowe I have done better for this holding than any man has yet to do.”

  “Aye,” he murmured. “You’ve been a very good steward. Were you as assiduous and devout a widow?”

  “Of course,” she replied indignantly. No one had ever accused Jocelyn Cabot of shirking an obligation. “From the day we had word of your capture, I have had candles lit in supplication for your soul.” She eyed him severely. “The cost of such a tribute has been seven shillings a year. That is eight crowns gone from the demesne ledgers for the salvation of your perdition-bound soul. A soul,” she added darkly, “that your body still harbors!”

  “And this was done because you mourned my loss, not, perhaps, out of,” he paused, “gratitude?”

  She flushed, unhappily aware that his words struck close.

  “Don’t vex yourself over the price of those candles, Jocelyn,” he finally said. “Perhaps the Good Lord will think you meant it as an indulgence, though I’ve a full complement of indulgences already.” There was bitterness in his voice. “There is nothing like a crusade to earn indulgences.

  “Still, I’d hate to see all those candles go to waste. Perhaps I should pursue fresh vices to ensure that your coin was well spent?” The laughter, suspect and subtle, flickered in his gaze. “Perhaps, my lady, you’d care to join me?”

  His gaze warmed, inviting her. For a second, she wondered what sort of sins a man like him indulged in? Then she remembered that Sowenna already knew.

  “I shall say a novena for your blasphemy,” she said coldly.

  “My, you are a dutiful wife. How ever did I come to deserve such?”

  There was that word “wife” again, spoken in that disconcertingly intimate voice, a voice that stroked the senses and sauced the mind. And had he moved closer? Because his body closed her off from the room as effectively as a wall, and the movement of that living wall with each deep inhalation fascinated her nearly as much as the word “wife.”