“Here is your son, my lord,” Mairin said quietly. “Here is William de Combourg. I swear upon the True Cross that he is your child. Will you recognize him as such?”
He knew he must answer in the affirmative, and yet he hesitated, and in that moment, the king entered the room with Margaret. Gratefully, he turned to greet the visitors, but not before he had seen the disbelief and hurt spring into Mairin’s eyes.
“Josselin, my friend,” said Malcolm Ceann Mor, “I have to tell you something that has been discovered while preparing the body of Eric Longsword for his burial. My wife has never doubted Mairin’s assurances that her captor never forced himself upon her, and for my Meg’s sake, I believed it also. Your wife did not lie, though I know there were those who did doubt her.
“When the body was stripped of its garments to be washed prior to preparing it for its burial, it was discovered that Eric Longsword had no genitals.”
“What?” Josselin felt both relief and amazement pouring through him in equal amounts.
“The man had no genitals,” the king repeated. “Once he did, but he was obviously injured severely in some battle of the past few years. He used a reed to aid him in peeing, but as for his cock and balls, they have been long gone. There are terrible scars, but nothing else remains to attest to his manhood. I thought you would want to know. Now let me see this fine son you have had a hand in producing.”
Silently Mairin handed William to the king, and then she said, “I would consider it an honor if you and the queen would stand as godparents to my son. Will Father Turgot baptize William tonight?”
Margaret glanced at the new parents, and realizing that there was something very wrong, she quickly said, “Of course he will. Here, Malcolm, give me our godson. We will go immediately to the chapel, and see that young lord William is pronounced a good Christian before the hour is out.”
The room quickly emptied but for Mairin and Josselin. After a long silence broken only by the snapping of the dry apple wood in the fireplace, Mairin said quietly, “I will never forgive you, Josselin.”
“You must,” he said. “I cannot go on without you, enchantress. I tried to believe you! I wanted to believe you! I thought I did, but as I stood in the anteroom just a few minutes ago, all the terrible things that Eric Longsword said to me this afternoon came thundering back, and for the briefest moment, I admit to my doubt.”
“You would have continued to doubt me and to doubt William had the king not brought us the information that he did.”
“No!” He denied it, feeling greater shame now than he had felt before, for he knew what she said was true.
“I will never forgive you, Josselin,” she repeated, and seeing the cold anger in her dark violet eyes, he found himself more afraid now than he had ever been in his entire life.
“You must forgive me, enchantress. I love you, and I recognize William as my trueborn son!”
“Too late,” she hissed at him. “You are too late, my lord. William is my son, and mine alone! I will never let you have him!” Then she turned her back to him, and Josselin de Combourg knew that of all the battles he had faced in his life, the battle now facing him, the battle to win back his wife’s love, would be the hardest battle all.
Chapter 17
When William de Combourg was two weeks old, his parents began their journey home to Aelfleah. He had been a strong and healthy baby from birth, and he thrived further in the bright autumn air of his travels. He made his journey resting comfortably in a heavy cloth sling which enabled him to ride cuddled against his mother’s warm breasts. When he was hungry, Mairin merely drew a breast through one of two slits she had made in her tunic top, and popped a nipple into William’s eager little mouth. The infant’s appetite was quite prodigious, and the motion of Mairin’s horse seemed to have no ill effects upon him.
Mairin was overly protective of her son, clutching him to her bosom possessively whenever Josselin came near. Although she did not create any overt scandal, her attitude was enough to unnerve Josselin. He dared not remonstrate with her publicly, for before others she appeared to be the sweetest-natured woman and an obedient wife. She did not speak to him, however, unless he spoke to her first. Her demeanor was a modest and quiet one.
Dagda, watching her, knew better. The dark side of her Celtic nature was asserting itself strongly, and he knew that she plotted revenge against Josselin de Combourg who she felt had wounded her so deeply. In Mairin’s entire adult life, Dagda had never seen her so coldly angry at anyone as she now was at her husband, and Dagda thought that his mistress was wrong. It was not fair, he thought, for her to have expected Josselin to disbelieve Eric Longsword’s story. Mairin seemed to forget that, had her captor been fully endowed with all his parts, she would have indeed been raped, and the paternity of her son, quite definitely, in doubt. Dagda thought that the mere fact that Josselin had tried so hard to accept his wife’s word should have exonerated his momentary lapse of blind faith.
He was probably the only person who might challenge her attitude, and Dagda did. “You are treating the man shamefully,” he scolded Mairin several days after little William’s birth.
“Has he not treated me shamefully?” she argued back.
“Nay,” said Dagda bluntly, “he has not. He publicly accepted your word when others would not. He has been a loving and a kind husband to you. Sometimes I think he is better than you deserve.”
“He would not have acknowledged my son as his heir had not the condition of Eric Longsword’s manhood been brought to light. He doubted William’s paternity, and for that, I will never forgive him. A woman knows the father of her own child! Especially when she has never known any man but him.” Mairin glowered at the Irishman.
“Agreed!” replied Dagda. “But you cannot be certain he would have denied William, my lady Mairin. He but hesitated a moment. Perhaps it was to clear his throat. Perhaps not. Josselin de Combourg is but flesh and blood. He is no saint. Whatever private devils he may have had troubling him, he kept them to himself. You were not there upon the field of honor. You did not hear the words with which Eric Longsword taunted him. I did! That he did not go mad is a miracle, and a testament of his love for you. Why will you not forgive him?”
“Do you know the kind of life he would have condemned my son to by not acknowledging him? He would have made William a bastard, and not even a bastard like himself. At least Raoul de Rohan admitted to his paternity where Josselin was concerned. Josselin would have denied William on suspicion alone, condemning him to the life of a fatherless bastard, and shaming me in the process, for mine is a tale that could hardly be repeated over and over again each time an explanation was due. Josselin would have denied his eldest son his rightful place and his inheritance. I will not forgive him for it!”
“Then you are either a fool, or your wits have been disarranged by this experience,” snapped Dagda. “Maire Tir Connell would have never behaved in such a fashion.”
“Spare me the stories of my sainted mother,” Mairin snapped back, sending him a withering look. “She died in her fifteenth year. I am practically twenty.”
They took their leave of King Malcolm and Queen Margaret, and the many friends they had made at the Scots court.
“I am verra sorry to see ye go,” Angus Leslie said. “I hope the next time we meet, ’twill not be in some damned battle.”
“Let us make a pact then.” Josselin grinned. “You stay away from the English border, and I’ll stay away from the Scots.”
The laird of Glenkirk chuckled. “I think yer right, Joss. ’Tis time I, like ye, took my wife and went home where the politics of our two countries canna reach us.”
The two men gripped each other’s hands in a grasp of friendship, and then parted. The king and the queen presented Mairin with a silver goblet for their godson. It was beautifully wrought, and had the de Combourg seal upon it done in silver, azure enamel, and gold. The new mother thanked them, knowing that this was the first heirloom to be received by the n
ow English branch of the de Combourg family of which her son was the firstborn.
The queen embraced Mairin, and said softly, “Do not answer me now, for you would but answer me in haste, Mairin, but you must eventually purge your heart of this anger you now feel toward your lord husband. Forgive him, my friend. You will not be happy until you do.”
Forcing a smile, Mairin thanked the queen for all her kindness, pointedly ignoring that good lady’s plea, and feeling guilty at the saddened look she saw in Margaret’s eyes as they met hers in final farewell. I am right, Mairin thought stubbornly. I am right!
Mairin’s heart raced joyfully at her first sight of Aelfleah. They had traveled slowly and carefully for both her sake and the baby’s. Now as she looked down upon her home for the first time in ten months, it was early October and from the vantage of the hillside upon which her horse stood, she could see the beeches, the oaks, and the birches splashing their russet, scarlet, and golden tones amid the deep green of the pines within The Forest. Then her eye was irresistibly drawn to something upon the heights of the western hills, and Mairin gasped.
“Aldford,” she said, amazed. “ ’Tis finished!”
“Not yet,” Josselin answered his wife. “There is still a great deal of interior work to do, but it can be done during the autumn and the winter months. The castle is defensible now, however. When it is finished, the king has said he will come, and our old friend Eadric the Wild has agreed to pledge his fealty to William then. In the meantime, he has promised me he will keep the peace.”
“I imagine he would keep the peace now. The lesson of Northumbria cannot have been lost on him.”
“Would you like to inspect Aldford tomorrow?” he asked her.
“If it would please you, my lord, that I do so,” came the deceptively meek reply.
“I would think you would want to since it is soon to be your home, and you its chatelaine. The family apartments are quite spacious, and I have arranged for fireplaces in all the major rooms.”
“I will never leave Aelfleah to live in your castle,” she said sweetly. “You built Aldford to keep the king’s peace. Although I have not been happy to have your beacon of a castle drawing strangers to this manor, as a good servant of the king, I allowed it. I did not, however, promise you that I should live there.”
“I am Baron Aldford,” Josselin said through gritted teeth, “and William is my heir. Aldford will one day be his, and he should live there until he is fostered out.”
“You will never take my son from me,” she said in a low voice, “and as I do not intend living at Aldford, neither will William live there, my lord.”
“He is my son too, Mairin.”
“Are you certain of that, my lord?” she replied mockingly. “You were not so sure upon the day he was born. You would have denied him despite my assurances. It took the sight of poor Eric Longsword’s mutilated body to convince you of William’s paternity! In the moment that you doubted me, you gave up all claim to William, my lord!”
“We cannot go on like this, Mairin,” he protested to her.
“Like what, my lord? I will be a good and faithful wife to you, as I have always been. I will tend your house, and bear your children, but you shall not have William.” Then before he might argue further with her, she pointed with her finger as they were descending the heights and said, “Look! There is mother, and she has Maude with her! My God! Our daughter is walking! I left her an infant in arms and she is walking now! Oh, damn Eric Longsword! How much else have I missed?”
Eada wept with happiness to have her daughter back safely once again, and she was ecstatic at her first sight of baby William. “Look, Maude,” she said to her granddaughter, holding the baby at the little girl’s level, “here is your baby brother. His name is William.”
Maude cast a jaundiced eye over the swaddled bundle. “Wi!” she said. “No! No!”
Mairin laughed, and dismounting, swept her daughter up into her embrace. “You must not be jealous of William, my poppet,” she said, nuzzling kisses on Maude’s soft little neck. “Mama loves you as much as she always has.”
Maude turned her head and looked into Mairin’s face. “Mama?” she said.
Mairin’s eyes filled with tears that threatened to spill over down her cheeks. “Yes, Maude,” she told her daughter. “I am your mama, and I will never leave you again.”
Maude gave her mother a sunny smile, and then she said, “Down!”
“She wants you to put her down,” said Josselin. “She walked at thirteen months and hasn’t stopped since.”
“I am capable of interpreting my child’s needs, my lord,” Mairin said icily as she set Maude upon her feet, and took William from her mother. Then she turned and walked into the house.
Eada looked at Josselin. “What on earth is wrong with Mairin?” she said.
“Your daughter is a stubborn, unforgiving, and impossible creature,” he snapped at her, and turning, stamped after his wife.
“I will explain,” said Dagda wearily to Eada, “but first you must give me a cup of cider, for my throat is parched from the dusty travel.”
Together Eada and Dagda entered the house, and she settled him by the fire in the hall, a wooden cup of freshly pressed foaming cider in his big hand. “Now,” she said, seating herself opposite him, “what has happened between them?”
Dagda took a long sip of the sweet apple liquid, and then set about to explain what had caused the problem between Mairin and Josselin. As he finished the main body of his tale, he observed, “You know how she is when she feels she has been betrayed. Suddenly, everything is all black or all white. There is no in between for her. Remember when Basil was murdered? She convinced herself that he had not loved her at all. It was several years before she could face the situation honestly, and admit to the real tragedy of her first marriage.”
“But she was still a child then, despite the status of her marriage. She is a woman now, and she must behave as such.”
“You are her mother,” he answered. “You tell her. I have done my best. She will not listen.”
Eada did not wait. She went immediately to her daughter, who was ensconced in the solar feeding William. “What is this that Dagda tells me?” she demanded.
“What is it he tells you?” Mairin replied innocently.
“Do not dare to play cat and mouse with me,” Eada said sharply. “There is a breach between you and Josselin which Dagda tells me you will not allow to heal. Why?”
“If there is a breach between us, mother, it is of his making, not mine.”
“Tell me,” Eada begged her daughter, her tone softening. “I might be able to help.”
“I am certain Dagda has already told you, mother, and there is nothing more than that. Josselin refused to recognize William as his son when he was first born, and for that, I will never forgive him. William is my son now, and mine alone.”
“I did not refuse to recognize him!” Josselin said, entering the solar. “That is something your own mind has invented.”
“I pronounced him your trueborn son, and asked you if you recognized him as such. When Maude was born you practically tumbled over yourself to answer that query, but with William, you said naught until King Malcolm came to inform you of Eric Longsword’s deformity. Only then did you accept my word that William was your son!”
The subject of the discussion heard loud and frightening voices. Beneath his cheek his mother’s heartbeat accelerated alarmingly. Worse, her nipple slipped out of his mouth, and he found himself denied his sustenance. William de Combourg howled with fright and outrage at this sudden turn of events.
“Look what you’ve done!” Mairin raged at her husband. “You are terrorizing my son! Leave us at once! I hate you!” She pressed the baby close to her chest, slipping her nipple back between his lips which effectively silenced him. The silvery baby tears upon his fat, rosy little cheeks touched her to the quick, and she sent Josselin a black look.
Eada took her son-in-law from the
solar, and together they descended the stairs back into the hall. “Let her be for now, my son. She has worked herself into an evil Celtic temper, and I am afraid that no one can reason with her right now. If we refuse to pander to her mood, I am certain that her anger will eventually cool.”
“In all the time we have been married, I have never seen her like that,” he said.
Eada chuckled. “Women,” she said, “change more often than the weather. You have had an unusual spell of dry sunny weather, Josselin, but everyone knows that after the sun comes the storm. In this case, it is a particularly violent storm, but it too will pass, and the sun will shine once more. Until then, we can do no more than seek shelter and hope for the best.”
“Did you ever get as angry at your husband as Mairin is at me, mother?”
Eada chuckled again. “Once,” she said, “Aldwine made me so angry that I went out in the hills and hid in a cave for three days. I almost frightened him to death, I fear. When I arrived back at Aelfleah, he swore on his knees never to intentionally anger me again.” A sad little smile touched her lips. “He never did either,” she finished.
Despite Mairin’s apparent reticence, she had gone up the hill the following day to see Aldford. She was totally amazed by what she found, for the castle was practically completed. Riding through the gatehouse, she entered the outer ward. Her guide was one of Dagda’s younger sons, a tenyear-old named Scandy.
“The lord was wise to build on rock,” said Scandy. “When it rains, the courtyard don’t become a bog of mud.”
They passed through the inner curtain walls into the inner ward. Here Mairin found that half-timbered buildings had been only recently constructed about the edge of the entire inner ward. They would add to the castle’s living space for the family, their retainers, and their servants. With Scandy dogging at her heels, she inspected it all.
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