She felt his fingers twitch beneath her hand, where she had grasped his on the hilt. It was not the movement that made her understand his meaning, but the look he gave her. He was pressing the weapon gently into her hand, just as he had once pressed her knife-blade to his heart. Then, he had asked for mercy. Now his eyes asked it again, the same steady plea, the same patient wait for judgment. Only the tremor in his hand was different, and new.
Her fingers tightened over his, and she pushed the hilt back toward him. Her jaw tightened as she forced the sword away from her, refusing it. She began to hear the murmurs around them, began to feel the eyes on them as they stood unmoving. But she did not look away, or step back.
It was he who moved first, lowering the sword and catching up her hand. He raised her hand to his lips, and closed his eyes briefly. The gathered onlookers saw contrition and gallantry. She could only feel the harsh rasp of his breath against her fingers and the desperate strength of the hand gripping hers like a drowning man.
It lasted but a moment, and then he had let her go. He was in command of himself. He moved toward the man he had left gasping and clutching his arm in the dust. Ranulf moved to give his hand in aid, and the man fairly cringed from him. But Ranulf held steady, offering his hand until the man recovered, grasped it, and heaved himself up.
Gwenllian beckoned Davydd, and spoke to him quietly while keeping her eyes trained on Ranulf.
“Go quickly and find Hugh Wisbech, to tell him we serve ale and bread now in the hall, and bid the minstrels play.” She watched Ranulf look to where the other men lay bloody, and knew instinctively that he did not want to approach them. Still Davydd did not move. “Go now, we will not wait until the appointed hour to feast, run you and tell Hugh.”
Davydd ran, and she crossed to where Ranulf stood. Still everyone watched him, muttering to each other as they waited to see what he would do.
She raised her voice to be heard. “Be ye pleased on a day warm as this one, to refresh yourselves within the keep,” she urged. It was not a particularly hot day, and so she put all she knew of command in her look, daring them to stay here. “The ale is fine, and plenty.”
They were reluctant to move. It was the girl to whom she had been teaching the herbs, bustling through the crowd to the clearing, who at last broke the spell. A page had fetched her to revive his lord, the bearded man who winced at every indrawn breath. Gwenllian moved forward to the girl, who wiped blood from the man’s face. Quietly, she instructed the girl to bind his ribs, to prepare poultices of comfrey for the wounds, to examine the hurts of the other men and repair them as well as could be managed. She hoped the girl was equal to the task.
The crowd at last began to disperse, and move toward the hall. She walked back to Ranulf, stood before him with her head bowed slightly, and took his hand. He had not worn gloves and it was bruised and bloody.
“Come with me, my lord, and I care for your hurts.”
His face was wooden, staring blankly at her hand on his.
“Others there are who need your care.”
She stared at the linen of his shirt, stained with the blood of other men, and knew she had no potion that might heal him.
“Come with me, I pray you.”
He did not respond. After a time, he allowed her to guide him away.
The north tower was nearest, and so she took him there. Inside, the room was half-bare. No rushes on the floor, a single forlorn tapestry on the wall, and a low bench. There she sat him down and knelt before him. In her pocket was a small glass bottle, hastily stowed there while she worked. She reached for it now, hoping it would be of some use. But it was angelica, steeped in water and easily known by the fragrance it gave off, useless in dressing wounds.
Still it would wash the blood from his hands, she decided. She found the small knife in her pocket, used to trim plants, and cut a strip of linen from her undertunic. She was too hasty, her unsteady hands making a jagged tear in the gown too, but she could not care. His right hand was swollen, the knuckles scraped raw. He did not flinch as she began to clean the torn flesh.
“They are dead?”
She looked up at him, startled. “Dead?”
His eyes were almost black, the blue deeper than she had ever seen.
“The men. In the yard. Two of them.”
He must mean the men who had lain senseless. She shook her head. “They live,” she said, but knew he did not believe her. She did not know how to reassure him, to ease the tension that radiated from him. “I saw one revived but unmoving, the other breathing in deep sleep. Is likely they do not wish to move their aching heads, and so they did not rise.”
A decoction of meadowsweet, she thought, with white willow bark, to ease the ache. That’s what the girl should be clever enough to give them. She wished for willow tonic now, to pour on his lacerated hand. There was a jar of it in the herb-house. But she did not want to leave him. It frightened her, how strong was the pull to be with him, how it tore at her when she knew he suffered. How soft and womanly she had become, only by being near him. But she could not bear to leave him in his distress.
She looked up to find his eyes trained on her.
“You struck with intent to kill them?” she asked. He frowned slightly, but did not answer. “What offense did they give?”
“None.” His voice was dismissive, distracted. “Was meant to be training only.”
She reached up to touch the scar that marked him, running her thumb over the white line that cut across his eyebrow. He did not pull away, but she felt the flinch in him. No longer would she pretend she did not see what was so plain.
“You were maddened.” His eyes came back to her face. “You would have killed them, in hoping they might kill you.”
He did not deny it. “I should not have taken up my sword,” he said only.
He turned his face from her to look at the stone walls, his gaze roaming over them as if he could see evil there. A bleakness was on his face. “I have thought Morency accursed, and that it curses me. In this place I can never be anything but wicked. Nor yet with Edward can I be uncorrupt.” A hoarse sound escaped him, of humor or despair. “Is my fate to displease God.”
She felt the warmth of his flesh under her hands, watched the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. “And so you wish my blade in your heart?”
His fingers played with the edge of her white veil, like a child seeking comfort.
“Already you are like unto a blade in my heart, Gwenllian. Happily would I die of it.”
She shook her head, a confused and sorrowful denial. As he had done earlier, she raised his hand to her lips, kissing the bruised and beaten flesh. She pressed it to her cheek.
“I do not wish you to die. I do not wish that you are hurt.” She reached up again, and traced the scar above his eye. “I would have you tell me why you think yourself accursed beyond redemption.”
He pushed her gently away, pulling his hand from her grasp, rising from the bench. She rose too, and watched him go to the inner door which led to the bedchamber beyond. Too late, she remembered that it was in this tower where he had killed Aymer, likely in these very rooms.
She thought again of the letter she had had from Aymer, so many years ago, of the love he bore Ranulf. What was it like, to murder a man who loved you well, who called you his own? And yet since coming to Morency she had seen well how Aymer had been despised and feared.
“He woke, you know.” He said it to the empty room. “In the moment before I struck, he woke. He saw me above him, and was not afraid. He thought he had nothing to fear from me, until the very moment his throat was slit.”
She imagined it: the dark and hushed room, the warm bedclothes, the startled eyes looking at him, the hot rush of blood.
“Have you ever killed a man?” He asked her.
“Nay.” She had watched men die, but never killed.
“It is an evil thing.”
She shook her head, though he could not see, and said what she had t
hought many times since coming here. “If a man be evil, I think it not evil to kill him.”
“Even as he sleeps?” He asked it without turning, his voice echoing into the empty bedchamber where he looked. “Even if he is defenseless?”
She thought of the knightly vows he had taken. “Even then, if to do so protects the weak.”
He gave a hollow laugh. “Who do you imagine I protected? Alice had already taken her own life when I took his.
“Then you spared me.”
“A happy accident,” he said. “I had no thought for you. I killed him because I knew it would buy me favor with the king.”
“It is a sin forgiven.” She moved closer to where he leaned against the doorway. “Your remorse is not for the favor you bought, but for the love he bore you.”
“No,” he said, turning to face her. His back pressed against the stone as though to fix himself to the spot. “Not only his love for me, but mine for him. For even when I saw his cruelty and knew him depraved, sure he was a creature of Hell…” He paused to raise his face to look at her, and in him she saw revulsion for himself. It was a disgust so deep that it stung her to see it. “Even then did I love him as a father. Even as I killed him.”
His eyes searched hers, but she could not guess what he found there. He lifted his hand to the scar across his eyebrow.
“When I was a boy learning the sword, he watched as we practiced. Another student bested me, held me to the ground with his blade and I was forced to yield. Aymer pulled him off me and the blade swung free and cut me here. It was unwitting, a mischance only. But Aymer beat the boy for it, and cracked his bones, and crippled him.”
She knew without asking that it was only one such tale he might tell, of the viciousness he had seen here. The people were ever ready to cringe from him, so accustomed were they to unpredictable brutality from their lord.
“Never have you committed such a cruelty.”
“Have I not?” An echo of his mocking smile came to his lips. “Little do you know of my sins.”
It angered her and pained her, his easy rejection of her good opinion. But she would not give in. She knew him too well now. She pressed her hand to his chest, felt his heart beating there. “Much do I know of you.”
He tried to push it away, but she would not let him. Instead he left his own hand there, atop hers as his breath came faster, more shallow. His gaze was trained on her face, unfocused.
“Is not only this first sin for which they name me Edward’s butcher.”
“You have killed on your king’s command, even outside of war?”
He gave a faint nod. “Twice has he asked it of me, to dispatch enemies in secret. I… once by my own hand, and once I made certain it was done.”
She remembered the rumor of Edward’s enemy who had died by Ranulf’s sword, the accident that was no accident. She thought of her mother, cold dread spiraling in her belly.
“As well disobey God as your king,” she said firmly. “Is Edward’s sin, and not your own.”
“It must be my sin,” he insisted, “Else her ghost would not haunt me.”
He must mean Alice. But Gwenllian did not believe in ghosts, and had seen none in this place. “To dream of a dead woman does not make it a sin.”
“Not only in dreams. I saw her waking, as clear as you stand before me now. But in dreams did she speak, and bade me save my immortal soul lest I become as wicked as the man who raised me. She bade me commit no more murder, even if Edward commands it.”
And so he had fled, and was lost in Wales. Almost could she laugh, to think how her mother and her men were sure he had come to commit some villainous act his king had laid on him. He was entirely opposite of everything they had believed. Her conscience pricked her, knowing she had believed it too.
“But when I woke you were there,” he said, in a voice that squeezed her heart. His hands moved again to her veil. “I thought you another vision.”
She thought of him as he had lain injured and vulnerable in that Welsh hut, what felt like a lifetime ago. In all his hours of illness, he had never looked peaceful, not even when the fever broke. Always had he thrashed fitfully as though tortured by Lucifer himself – except when he had opened his eyes and looked in hers. Even when he had held her knife to his breast and she saw what he meant by it, even then he had a rare air of untroubled calm.
And now, she knew, he waited for her to deliver judgment. The knife at his breast had become the sword he had pressed in her hand, moments ago.
“You are tormented by this place,” she said. “I have seen it. You give it power over your spirit.”
“I am tormented wherever I go, to Jerusalem and back again. You tell me I am bedeviled while I sleep unawares. So long as my heart beats, it is tormented.”
Still he looked at her, waiting.
“Think you I would stop your heart?” She pressed her lips together, to stop their trembling. “Gladly would I slay any who threatened it.”
His eyes were a burning blue flame fixed on her, his voice a rasp that pleaded with her.
“Is a foul thing, that would love Aymer.” He went to his knees, pressed his face into her body, his arms wrapped around her hips. She felt the deep tremor in him, the desperation evident in the strength of his grip on her. “I would have it cut from me.”
She put her hands to his hair, smoothing her fingers over the soft blackness. She wanted to protest that she was no priest, nor confessor. She could not absolve him, nor even did she know how to comfort him. She was only his wife, uncomely and unwomanly.
“Would you leave me?” she whispered.
He looked up, his eyes meeting hers. There was an anguish in him, and she knew what she must say.
Her hands slid down to his face as she lowered herself to her knees before him. She looked at him steady and sure, waiting until she saw the same look he had given her before – when she had tended him in his fever, and again when he had known her for a woman and not boy – the look that said she held the answer he sought.
“Clearly do I see your heart, and it is surpassing fair.” She ignored the fluttering in her belly, fought against the fear of admitting it. “I cherish it. There is nothing more dear to me.”
She held his gaze until she was sure he had heard her, had understood. Then she drew a breath and raised herself from the floor. She walked back to the bench where the glass bottle sat open, and busied herself with finding the stopper.
“There are no ghosts here.” She adopted her most rational tone, learned from Master Edmund long ago. “Aymer of Morency is dead, but for what part of him you allow to live.”
She slid the empty bottle back in her pocket, then brushed the dirt off her gown where she had knelt on it, her hem bedraggled from where she had torn it. They should go to the hall. She should have the willow tonic fetched, to treat his hand. Ranulf stood now, his back to the empty bedchamber as he watched her movements.
“The men await you in the hall, my lord. I will go first to see those who were injured today, and then go to you there.”
He came to her, stood next to her, reached down and took her hand in his. It was strength and comfort, their hands joined. It troubled her, that her own balance now depended wholly on his nearness.
She felt his lips press against her veil at her temple, a brief touch before they walked away from that place, together.
CHAPTER 17
When the letter arrived, her life came clear once again.
She had spent weeks in uncertainty, struggling to swim in this unfamiliar sea where other women floated along so effortlessly. When a mound of wool, left untouched from the summer’s shearing, was discovered and Gwenllian must decide what should be done with it, she hesitated while the other ladies discussed the many options. They offered to card and spin it themselves, to set the weavers to making an untold number of garments. They examined a handful of it and speculated on its quality and worth should it be sold or used for trade, which dyes it might best take. Then they looked
at her with deferential curiosity, wondering what decision she might make on it.
She had thought no further than how she might make use of this great pile of wool by hiding herself under it at moments like these, when the messenger was brought in. She watched his eyes go immediately to the fairest woman there. Adela, sister to the great bearded knight whose ribs had been badly bruised by Ranulf’s unyielding wrath, was newly come to act as attendant to the Lady of Morency and serve as a reminder of all the things a woman should be. Gwenllian had never met anyone so different to herself: golden-haired, lighthearted, delicate, and demure. Men were helplessly drawn to her.
It took the barest instant for the messenger to remember himself, whereupon he turned his attention to Gwenllian, bending his knee to the ground and giving greeting.
The clarity began even before she read the letter he brought, before even she knew he carried it. At a glance, she knew he was sent by Madog. There was nothing to indicate it, yet she was more certain of her cousin’s hand in this than anything else she had known since she had come to Morency. Just as well did she know that whatever message this man bore was a dangerous one, and that it would decide the whole of her life.
In response to her questioning, the messenger admitted that he had come by way of York and had not been to London or Windsor. It was said in a perfectly careless way, with a look that told her there was more to be known and only in secret. She had just begun to wonder if it would seem strange to dismiss her ladies so that they might be private, when Ranulf came through the door.
She inclined her head slightly to acknowledge him, and said simply, “A messenger come from York, my lord.”
It was only the slightest change in his face, an easing of the tension in the lines around his mouth that likely only she would notice. His relief that this was not word direct from Windsor – from Edward – was plain. He came to her side and gave her a look that reminded her that it did not matter if it might seem strange to dismiss her ladies. If she wished privacy, she should have it. She bid them leave her.
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