by Jude Chapman
“I am.”
Drake drank and passed the tankard to Stephen. “’Tis the lower grasslands and the central massifs, which slide gracefully into extended rills, that I crave.”
“You’re a leg man.”
Stretching onto their sides and mirroring each other down to the crooked right and left legs, they cleared the board and set it up for another game.
“When we go on crusade …” Stephen hesitated. “Neither of us has been tested on a real battlefield.”
Immediately after his coronation, Richard planned to raise money, fleet, and men for a long sojourn to the Holy Land where Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and leader of the Saracens, had overrun Jerusalem nearly two years ago. Upon receiving news of the invasion more than a hundred days after the event, Richard took the cross in Tours, as did Drake and Stephen.
“I, for one, can hardly wait.”
“Whereas I,” said Stephen, understanding the true nature of war, “can.”
Drake studied his brother’s profile. “Aye, but consider the alternative. You would make a poor monk.”
Stephen looked up and said without regret, “Not uncommon for a second son, even a second son by three breaths, to dedicate his life to the Church.”
Drake said nothing, mostly because he believed in neither Heaven nor Hell, mortifying his brother to no end.
“William could find a position for me as canon,” Stephen went on. “In ten years, maybe as little as five, you would have to call me Bishop fitzAlan.”
“Not likely.” Drake lined up his chessmen. “Pious, you may be, but in addition to praying before God’s altar, you also pray before Aphrodite’s.”
“My first religion.”
“Then I see you as neither canon nor monk.” Drake grunted his irritation. “Do you really believe William would let you stay behind in England?”
Organizing a crusade was no small undertaking, and in the intervening months, Richard had waged war on his father King Henry. Nearly a year and a half had gone by since Richard vowed to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel Muslims and return it to Christendom, and another year might easily pass before he embarked on the holiest of pilgrimages.
Stephen shrugged. “We can make a wager.”
“How much?”
“Our first pay?” Stephen ventured.
“Done. In two years’ time … less … your skin will burn under the hot Jerusalem sun.”
“I’ll take that bet.”
Drake opened with white queen’s pawn. “Making you the fool.”
“Provided mine is on the same side of the wager.” Stephen countered Drake’s move.
“Leaving no payoff for either?”
“I suppose I can serve God just as well at Solomon’s Temple as Winchester Cathedral. A knight I am destined to be. To stand beside my king. To slaughter the infidel. And to defend God’s dominion.”
Drake stared at his brother. Stephen was waiting for him to make his next move. When he didn’t, he glanced up.
Unfolding a grin that did not erase the suspicion amassing in his brother’s eyes, Drake said, “I offer a proposition.”
“Is there something about my face that attracts all your damnable propositions?”
“Aye. It rather looks like mine.”
They didn’t finish the fourth game.
Hours later, when Stephen climbed back through the window, Drake was sitting up in bed, an empty tankard clutched to his chest and a single candle licking shadows across his bruised face. Drake’s twin swayed unsteadily. A grin swept from cheek to cheek. The flame flickered and highlighted his countenance, bruised as badly as his brother’s. A nasty cut at the hairline had swelled into a lump. His ear was mashed. His nose oozed blood. His chin was discolored. His cheek was scraped. And his jaw appeared disjointed, though it worked well enough when he pulled a tankard out from his tunic, tipped it back, and drank thirstily.
“Is that how I look?” Drake said.
The empty tankard clanked onto the floor. Stephen put a finger to his lips and shushed himself before saying, “Aye, dear brother.”
Drake caught him before he fainted dead away. Clutching his brother, he laughed himself silly while trying not to rouse the rest of the household.
“As you see, I would do anything for my brother.” Drake’s proposition to Stephen earlier that evening had been to pick a fight with anyone but himself. Stephen gripped his side and moaned. “Now what?”
“You get into bed.”
“Is that all? Expected it would be more dire than that.”
Drake relieved him of his belt and scabbard and the bundle he clutched firmly in his hand. “Who did you pick the fight with?”
“Who else? Drogo Atwell. Something I have to tell you.”
“It can bide.” Drake used a damp cloth to wipe away the blood.
“You should know …”
“Stop talking. You’re spitting blood onto Nelda’s counterpane.”
Swallowing their laughter, they shushed each other until a wave of nausea gripped Stephen. Drake propped him over the basin. When he finished, Stephen collapsed against the pillows.
“I know you were the fifth man,” Drake said simply.
Stephen’s eyes fluttered open.
“You gave yourself away when you told William the odds were five-to-one.”
“I did, didn’t I, dolt that I am.” He saw the humor and laughed despite spasms and twinges. “I deserved this beating. My punishment. Your revenge. And you didn’t have to lift a finger.” He chortled again through groans of pain. “Am I forgiven?”
“Not until you tell me everything.”
Stephen didn’t know any more than Drake. Trapped with enraged men out for blood, he dared not come to his brother’s rescue. Had he, he likely would have received the same thrashing. “So after everybody went above stairs to drink themselves into oblivion, I talked them into bringing you out when it was dark and hanging you in the woods.”
“That was thoughtful.”
“Please, Drake. I feel bad enough.”
Whenever they got into fights, Drake was the one to hold a grudge and Stephen the one to beg for forgiveness. He needed it now. It would have to wait. “Go on.”
“I … I didn’t believe they’d really hang you. It was just the drink talking. But I convinced them they wouldn’t want to leave any evidence behind for others to find.”
“Eminently logical.” Of the two, Drake was the rash brother who reacted without thinking whereas Stephen was the rational brother who always thought ahead, sometimes with frustrating observance.
“And I …” Stephen faltered. “I was thinking of father. I could have gone for him, but I was afraid of what he might do. To storm Twyford Castle would have brought vengeance upon the fitzAlans. You know the Twyford clan. They would have stopped at nothing to eradicate every fitzAlan in the county, and damn the consequences. And I …” He faltered once more. “… was worried what father would think of me. What you would think of me. I wanted to bring you out myself. To … to make up for my cowardice,” he said at last. As to the fates of Seward and Rufus, he knew only what Drake knew. “You wouldn’t have done that to them. Or to Maynard.”
“How generous of you.”
“Drake,” he said on a hiccup. “You know I didn’t mean.”
“Then it must have been Graham.”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
Graham had been Drake’s closest friend since boyhood. They shared wine, women, and song; practical jokes and playful pranks; innermost desires and deep-seated hatreds. Graham didn’t have the meanness in him to castrate anyone.
“I’ve been trying to track him down,” Stephen said, his voice fading. “He’s disappeared. No one has seen him since that day. Dead or alive. Whole or in pieces.” His eyes drifted closed; his head lolled to the side.
Drake shook him awake. “What about the giant of the efficient seaman knots?”
In a sleepy monotone, he said, “Baldric, I think his name was.�
��
“He must be the one who killed Maynard and Rufus and left Seward for dead.”
“Might have, but he wasn’t carrying your sword.” Like his twin, Stephen could be foolish, but also like his twin, he wasn’t a dolt. He observed what Drake had observed: the killing sword did not have a dragon etched on the blade.
“Are you going to make it?”
Stephen jerked at the sound of his brother’s voice and brushed sweat-soaked hair from his eyes. “All I need is some sleep.”
“You won’t get it. You’re leaving after prime.”
“Nay, you’re leaving after prime.” Stephen chortled with a spurt of mirth cut off by a twitch in his side and an accompanying moan. “Anything for my brother.”
Drake took hold of his Stephen’s hand. The almandine cabochon—a twin to the ring stolen from Drake in the Twyford Castle dungeon—was missing.
“Oh, that.” He let the hand drop to his side. “I lost it … misplaced it.”
“Lost it gambling, you mean.”
“Never could lie to you.”
Drake gathered up the sword and bundle Stephen brought back with him. “It’ll be all over Winchester by morn that Stephen fitzAlan lost his pretty face in a drunken brawl with the town bully.”
“And that he received his just desserts for being a fitzAlan.” Stephen laughed half-heartedly. Just as Drake reached the window, Stephen roused himself. “Wait. You promised.”
“You’re forgiven,” Drake called out in a whisper and escaped from Nelda’s chamber the same way Stephen had reentered.
Chapter 5
A SINGLE FLAXEN BRAID DRAPED over one shoulder, Geneviève de Berneval was sitting on her haunches, her bare feet tucked beneath her and her back straight and proud. “Drake?” Her voice was hopeful yet laced with fear.
Sunrise was an hour off, but the setting moon filled the sky with ample light to behold a willowy body adorned in a blue kirtle embossed against the indigo grotto. The secret aerie, hacked by nature into the hillside, was tucked behind a gentle waterfall. A single approach led straight up from the riverbed. When Drake stepped into the mouth of the cave, Jenna lifted azure eyes to his and studied his face.
“Drake?” she said again. “Oh, Drake. I came every night. Hoping. Praying.” Moving with ease, she rose to her feet and sank into his waiting embrace. He gasped involuntarily. “You’re hurt.”
“No longer.” He smiled to reassure her.
They dropped onto the short-cropped grass. Craggy eaves of white granite enclosed them inside an enchanted dwelling, private and exclusively their own. She smelled of the night. The silver bobs in her ears tinkled whenever she moved. The entwined Celtic dragon she wore around her creamy neck settled into that tantalizing depression at the base of her throat. Fearful of what they might find, neither looked into the other’s face. Instead, they blindly groped to make sure the other was real.
“I’ve heard stories,” she said. “They’re accusing you of the most horrible acts.”
“None is true,” he said.
“What will you do? Where will you go?” The moonlight captured the amulet on a shimmer. “You can’t stay here. There are men about. They want blood. They’ll stop at nothing until they find you. Oh, Drake,” she said on a sob.
Tears streaked down her pale cheek. Even in darkness, Jenna was beautiful beyond words. Day or night, summer or winter, she never changed, and hadn’t changed since they were children. Jenna was his first love, his only love, and he hers. There had never been another for either. “William is sending me to the continent. I leave at dawn.”
Her sobbing increased. She barely had breath enough to say, “F-for how long?”
He cradled her in his arms and used his mouth to find all the delectable parts of Jenna de Berneval. Her winged shoulder blade. Her willowy neck. The underside of her moist jaw. The throbbing pulse behind her ear. “As long as it takes for him to clear my name.”
“And how will he do that?” She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “Everyone is convinced you did what they say. The town is against you. We’re to be wed next month, or did you forget?”
“How could I?” He fondled the betrothal ring encircling the middle finger of her left hand. The master jeweler of Winchester used moonstone and Welsh gold to fashion it. The wedding contract had been signed. The nuptials were set for the end of September.
“Where is your father sending you?”
“He hasn’t said.”
The normally soft planes of her heart-shaped face were drawn tight in worry. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t.”
“I will if you’re God knows where.”
“Then I’ll pretend to be Stephen. I’ll steal you from your aunt’s manor and spirit you away on my white steed. We’ll live like sprites in the weald. Eat nuts and berries year-long. Bear sons and daughters beneath eternal summer skies.”
An angry slap rang out and stung his ear. “It’s dreadful what has happened! How can you make light of it?” Her eyelids lifted with interest. “Have you done that before? Pretended to be Stephen?”
“Oh, aye. As boys, we switched places every other day, excepting holy days or if William was in a particularly bad mood.”
“And no one found you out?”
“Not even William.”
Her fingers stroked his face. Her touch became a healing balm to his bruises. “Then how do I know … who’s to say … the times we were together … it might have been Stephen.”
“I beg your pardon, ma demoiselle. I’m a much better lover than my brother.”
“How would you know?” She tweaked his nose. Her eyes laughed. “The first time, mayhap?”
He was fifteen, and she had just entered her twelfth year. Following the sudden death of Richard’s older brother, Old King Henry released Queen Eleanor from her strict imprisonment at Sarum Castle and installed her at Winchester, where the walls were not as formidable, and her guardians more amenable. That spring, Jenna and her family joined her father when he delivered the queen to her king. Summer, the season for farming and war, lay on the horizon. “When Stephen and I were about to begin our service with Richard, and we skinny-dipped in the river. Innocently. And then not so innocently.”
She twirled a sprig of clover between her fingers, and remembering, looked shyly at him. “Christmas court at Winchester?”
Reuniting after a decade of strife, the royal family gathered for a public reconciliation at Windsor. Prominent in their display were the three surviving sons of King Henry and Queen Eleanor: Richard, Geoffrey and John. Later, when the Plantagenêts returned to Winchester for the balance of the winter season, the brothers spent time with William at Itchendel. Never could he forget the second time they lay together. “When Eleanor tried to make up for so many wasted years, and we first discovered the aerie.”
She giggled at the memory. But still skeptical, she said, “The following spring, when Queen Eleanor held Easter court in Poitiers?”
His eyes surveyed the overhang. He reached up and traced initials scratched into the chalky stone: a delicate J and a snaking D. “When Richard fought with his father over the Aquitaine, and we built the warming fire that nearly burnt down the wayside hut with us inside in a state of disrobe.”
“Last year?” Jenna asked.
“When we spent Eastertide with Queen Eleanor at Winchester Castle.” Richard had been very busy that year, waging war on many fronts. He put down a revolt launched by the rebellious counts of Aquitaine, launched a massive attack on Toulouse, and beat back King Philippe of France, all in prelude to inheriting the crown. “Again in the aerie. Bluebells lay like a carpet at our toes.” Drake added, “Our wet and very naked toes.”
Preoccupied with thought, she stared in the distance. Her stormy eyes were troubled. “Have you heard? Prince John is to marry in a sennight.”
“Isabelle of Gloucester was promised to him when he was a boy of nine.”
He let his fingers explore forb
idden reaches. She nudged his hand away and restored her skirts. “How can it be sanctioned? They’re cousins.”
“Third cousins.”
“Second, one generation removed, but still ….”
“When your brother is king of England, anything can be sanctioned.” He found a honeyed corner of her lips. “Now he will have Gloucester and a new title to content him.”
On a tide of anger, she sat up and glared down at Drake over a hair-draped shoulder. “To keep the peace between him and Richard, John will need more than Gloucester.”
“Aye, knowing John. But I don’t wish to speak of the future earl of Gloucester.”
He embraced Jenna and lowered her beneath him. In a ceremony as old as time, he unbraided her hair and splayed the silken gold into a crowning circle. Her face glistened with perspiration. She flung her arms to either side, the half-seamed sleeves falling away from milky flesh. Her mouth parted; she licked them moist.
Drake made love to her. He was not gentle since this stolen night might well be the last he would spend with Jenna, perhaps forever and a day.
Guilt having nothing to do with the crimes he was accused of committing, Drake fitzAlan had been made into an outlaw. As an outlaw, he must forsake Winchester and England. It behooved him to do so. But he had lied Jenna. He did know where he was going, to the day and the hour. Drake fitzAlan was to be so much cargo on the king’s ship Esnecca, coming out of Portsmouth to Barfleur, with armed escort arranged from there to Chinon. At the castle, the elder son of William fitzAlan was to be put under close watch, knowing William and Richard, under lock and key until word was sent of his proven innocence, if word was sent of his proven innocence. And so, while one fitzAlan brother had comparative freedom to come and go as he pleased, the other was to become a virtual prisoner in a foreign land, his future given over to others.
But Stephen was the one sailing for Normandy, posing as Drake. And Drake was staying behind, answering to the name of Stephen, free to investigate his many crimes punishable by death. Poor Stephen. Poor Drake. For though he was to remain in Winchester, he would be cut off from Jenna as surely as if he were that cargo bound for the continent. But worse, if he were unable to prove his innocence, he faced exile from home, country, and everything else he held dear, not for a week or a month but for a lifetime.
