by Tamara Leigh
Convinced it was his right to know, firsthand, the workings of his household, he drew back from the window through which he had seen Lady Richenda surreptitiously pass a missive to one of their men-at-arms who had immediately spurred away from the manor house. Shortly, she reentered the hall and cast her gaze about, but she did not see him where he had retreated into an alcove that had served him well for years.
With a square-edged smile that bespoke satisfaction, she bustled forward and up the stairs.
Judas followed. Measuring his footfalls to avoid the creaks in the steps he had learned to avoid long ago, he ascended to the first landing and cautiously peered down the left-hand side of the corridor in time to see the door of his stepmother’s chamber close—very nearly all the way.
Moments later, he stood alongside the door opposite the crack that allowed but a glimpse within, though that small slice revealed Lady Blanche sat in a chair near the window, a bundle in the crook of an arm.
“I have done it!” Lady Richenda’s voice was more tempered than usual, likely in deference to her infant grandson.
“Done what, Mother?” Her daughter sounded nearly as fatigued as she had three weeks past when Judas had been summoned to her chamber and she had drawn back the blanket to reveal his brother’s face—one he had rarely seen since, as if it was feared he would do the babe harm.
“I have done what we spoke of yesterday and the day before and the week before,” Lady Richenda said.
Silence fell, and Judas wondered what passed between the two women that should cause neither to speak for so long. Had he made a sound? Did they suspect someone was outside the door?
Much to his disgust, his heart that was already causing a terrible commotion in his breast, beat harder.
Then, blessedly, the conversation resumed with a heavy sigh. “Ah, Mother, I would that you had waited. I am not yet myself, and I do not know when I shall be again. My thoughts are ever escaping me and I am so…tired. And, Lord, I do not understand why I feel such terrible sorrow.”
“Need I remind you that your husband is dead? And, for the moment, your son is but a spare?”
For the moment…
Curt laughter sounded from the younger woman. “That first is not so bad and, sometimes, I think the second—”
“’Tis not for you to think, and most certainly not while you are in such a state!”
A shrill gasp sounded. “Mayhap I would not be in such a state if you allowed me a wet nurse! God’s mercy, this child drains me!”
And that child began to fuss, and then cry.
“Ah, see what you have done.” The robust figure of Lady Richenda appeared in the crack and, when it disappeared, the bundle was gone from Lady Blanche’s arms.
There was nothing more to be learned over the next few minutes as Lady Richenda paced back and forth and crooned in a voice so raspy and coarse Judas was surprised when the infant calmed.
“I want a wet nurse,” Lady Blanche restated.
“Not yet. Our little Alan is much too fragile and far too important to give him into the hands of another, but once his future is secure and all threats to his wellbeing are removed, you shall have your wet nurse.”
Lady Blanche groaned. “Do you truly believe the king will grant us an audience?”
Guessing she spoke of the missive just sent, Judas steeled himself for what was yet to come—that which he and Susanna had kept watch for.
“I have placed all my hope in it being granted,” Lady Richenda said. “We must pray it is.”
Pray! Judas nearly spat. If her prayers were answered as she wished, then he did not believe her God could be the same as his God, even though he knew one should not question the workings of the Lord.
“Still,” Lady Blanche said, “what if he does not disavow Judas’s claim to Cheverel in favor of my son’s?”
There it was. The only real surprise of it was that it was so soon set in motion.
“After all, though Alan may have snarled and sniped that he could not have beget a child such as that one, never did he outright disavow him. Never did he set the words in ink.”
Judas looked down. Though he knew well what his father had believed of him and had keenly felt his sire’s disgust on those occasions when others bore witness to his son’s gasping and wheezing and writhing, it still pricked him in those places that had yet to harden within him.
“God’s teeth!” Lady Richenda erupted. “If your husband had but waited a month to die! A month!”
“But he did not, Mother. Thus, if the king determines there is naught to prove Judas is misbegotten, what then?”
The tap-tap-tapping of the older woman’s feet that not even the rushes sufficiently quieted, told Judas she was pacing again. “Lady Susanna,” she said. “I am certain she knows the truth of it, just as her brother believed.”
Did she? Judas wondered. She owned that she did not, was ever assuring him she was certain that he was, indeed, born of Alan de Balliol, but—
“If she could be made to talk,” Lady Richenda mused.
“You know she will not. She loves the boy.”
“Fool that she is,” Lady Richenda muttered, then laughed. “Of course, now that you are delivered of a son, the best solution to that whelp’s claim to Cheverel would be if he were not to arise from one of his attacks.”
Judas blinked. She wished him dead? That he was not prepared for, and it shook him so deeply he felt a constriction about his chest—of the sort that could leave him gasping and flopping about like a fish thrown to shore.
Breathe, Judas de Balliol! he silently commanded. In through the nose. In. Hold. Out through the mouth. Out. Slowly.
“Unfortunately,” she continued, “I have seen fewer of his attacks this past year. And when he is taken with them, it seems always Susanna is there to coax the breath back into him. If it could be arranged—”
“Cease!” Lady Blanche lurched out of the chair, disappearing from the view between door and frame. “God’s Word! There is something very wrong with you, Mother.”
As her protest sank in, the dots before Judas’s eyes danced away and he drew a long, slow breath of sweet air. However, his throat stoppered when a sharp crack of flesh on flesh sounded, followed by a cry that made him take a step back from the door.
“Do you or do you not want Cheverel for your son?” Lady Richenda demanded.
A whimper sounded.
“Hear me well, girl. You will do whatever is required to secure your son’s future, your future, and mine. Do you understand?”
Lady Blanche cried out again.
In that moment feeling very much his nine years and hating the way they wore upon him, Judas pressed his arms tight against sides.
“Do you understand, Blanche?”
“I understand! Do not! Pray, stop!”
Unmindful of his footing and the temperamental floorboards, Judas backed away. Blessedly, the floor was silent—else he was deaf, as well as Lady Richenda. More blessedly, he had not the voice to yelp when a hand closed around his arm.
He turned to his aunt where she stood upon the landing. Eyes bright with urgency, a finger to her lips, she shook her head.
Though he hated himself for it, he allowed her to guide him down the stairs. And the rest of it—the walk from manor house to the bank of the river where she urged him to sit against the trunk of an ancient oak—was seen through a haze.
When he finally came back to himself and lifted his head from her shoulder, she cupped his cheek and smiled sadly, “Judas mine, I would that you had not listened in.”
“Then we would not know what I know,” he said. Haltingly at first, then in a rush as he gave way to anger, he told it all and glimpsed upon her face what he thought was fear before she covered it. In the end, she assured him there was hope in Lady Blanche’s response to her mother’s wicked suggestion and reminded him he mostly had control over his breathing attacks now. Thus, she concluded their only real worry was whether or not the king would grant La
dy Richenda and her daughter an audience.
Judas concurred, though he did not truly. Despite his aunt’s continual intervention and because of it—his punishments having often fallen upon her—his father had taught him well what to fear. And Lady Richenda was to be feared. Still, wishing to give Susanna comfort as ever she gave him, he let her believe she had eased his concerns.
“Sanna?” he said when they rose to start back.
A frown plucking at her eyebrows, she sighed and turned her gaze to his. “The answer to what you ask of me is no different from any of the other times I have answered, Judas—I do not know.”
“Lady Richenda believes you do, just as my…father did.”
“And, as usual, the lady is wrong.”
He drew himself up to his full height, for he had never before ventured as far as he was about to. “Then what do you think?”
She caught her breath, blinked, then seemed to slip away as sometimes she did when pressed to account for the past. “What I think,” she finally said, softly, “is that I have no right to guess at something so far beyond my reach.”
He did not want to accept her answer, but could see he would gain no other. Not this day. But perhaps another day once he raised himself above the weak-kneed Judas de Balliol who had given evidence of being so affected by what had gone between Lady Richenda and her daughter that he had been unable to negotiate the stairs on his own.
Feeling sick to his stomach, he resignedly nodded.
As they walked back to the manor house over which dusk had fallen, they agreed they would continue on as always. They would stay the course. They would keep watch.
CHAPTER TWO
She wished he would not look at her with such imaginings reflected in his eyes. Though she told herself she ought to be at least somewhat accustomed to the regard of men who deemed her passing pretty, it was hard to forget she was no longer the plump, splotchy-faced girl who had gone in search of Lady Judith that day.
“Aye, I shall watch him,” Sir Elias said and bent his head nearer. “But it shall cost you a kiss.”
And he would get it, though that was all. Susanna smiled tightly. “If that is the price I must pay.”
He chuckled, winked, and stepped away from her.
She watched him wend among the fenced areas where a handful of men-at-arms and squires practiced at arms, turning opposite only when he reached the farthest fenced area where Judas deftly swung a sword against another of the few knights she trusted—an older man who had been her father’s man before her brother’s.
With the crash and clang of blade upon blade sounding behind, her brisk steps making her skirts snap at her ankles, she followed the servant whom the cook had sent to fetch her. Another problem with the menu? A delivery of foodstuffs that had not arrived? Lady Richenda had once more put the back of a hand to a kitchen boy?
Resenting that it continued to fall to her to manage the household while Lady Blanche slid from her fifth week post-birth into her sixth, she entered the kitchen some minutes later. It was empty.
She turned to the servant who had fetched her and discovered the girl had disappeared.
“Well…” She sighed, stepped back out onto the garden path by which she had gained the kitchen, and called, “Hilde!” and twice more as she strode among the leafy patches of vegetables that would soon find their way into the kitchen and onto the table.
“Milady?” The cook’s head popped up from behind a low-lying bush. “There be somethin’ ye need?”
Susanna halted, raised her eyebrows. “I understood ’twas you who needed me.”
The woman sat back on her heels. “Nay, milady. All be well with my pots and spoons, roastin’s and stirrin’s.” She harrumphed. “For now.”
Then had she misunderstood the servant? No, the girl had definitely claimed to have been sent by Hilde. But why…?
She heard it then—the absence of steel upon steel and grunts and shouts that had receded as she advanced on the manor house. Though diluted, it ought to still be present. Instead, there was mostly silence.
She snatched up her skirts and ran for the training field that lay downhill from the manor house.
Please, Lord! she sent heavenward as she flew past the soldier’s barracks…the smithy…the stables… Protect Judas!
It was worse than the worst sight imaginable, for never had she seen him in such distress where he lay in the dirt on his back with knights, men-at-arms, and squires loosely gathered around as if the throes of death were a wonder to behold.
Scrabbling at his chest and throat, choking and wheezing sounds issuing from his gaping mouth, legs alternately kicking and stiffening, Judas de Balliol struggled to keep hold of life.
She cried out his name, and the brightly-clothed figure she pushed past turned quickly toward her. And caught her arm.
She stumbled, landed hard on a knee and, as she wrenched to free herself, snapped her chin around and found the nearly impassive face of Lady Richenda above her.
Susanna knew she was no longer the fourteen-year-old girl who gasped audibly at any cruel word spoken in her direction, who hunched her shoulders up to her ears at the first hint of physical aggression, but until that moment she did not realize just how far she had risen—though some would say she had fallen.
She came up snarling and swinging and, in an instant, gave expression to the lady who had so lacked it. Taking no moment to savor the horror, pain, and crimson mist that distorted the woman’s face, she sprang away and dropped to her knees alongside Judas.
“Breathe!” she commanded as she dragged him up into her arms. “In, Judas, in!”
His head lolled against her chest, and she nearly cried out, but then his lids fluttered and there came the painfully thready sound of air being dragged in through his nostrils.
“That’s it. Hold it—just a moment.”
As he did so, she lifted his lax hand from the dirt, placed it in his lap, and lightly began to trace the sign of the cross upon it. Over and over. “Now breathe out…out…slowly…”
He parted his lips and complied. His next breath was stronger, as was the one that followed. And those who had stood around watching and doing nothing to save him, began to murmur.
She dropped her chin, letting her hair fall forward and curtain their faces, and squeezed her eyes closed. Thank you, Lord. Thank you.
Of a sudden, Judas’s fingers closed strong and firm over hers, preventing her from placing more crosses in his palm.
Raising her lids, she saw he had tilted his face up to hers and the eyes with which he regarded her were steady, reflecting none of the sickly fatigue that ought to be there.
“Judas?” she breathed.
He smiled grimly and whispered, “Now we know, Sanna.”
“What?” No sooner did she breathe the word than everything fit painfully, perfectly together. Lady Richenda was responsible for this—had sought to bring about what Susanna had tried to convince Judas and herself that the woman would not go so far as to do. Indeed, the lady had even tried to hold Susanna back. And Judas had used whatever opportunity had been given him to test his brother’s grandmother by meeting cunning with cunning, his nine-year-old heart corrupted by the very real need to survive.
Something inside Susanna broke that she knew needle and thread would not put back together. The pieces were too hard, too sharp, too jagged. Thus, the sob that stole from her throat was followed by another, part relief that it had not truly been a near mortal attack Judas had suffered, part grief over his stolen childhood, and—selfishly, she knew—part despair that this should be her life. For years, her hell had worn the face of her brother who had been frightfully adept at emotional abuse. Now it wore the face of murder that could prove adept at taking from her the only being in the world who mattered to her.
She heard Judas’s voice, felt arms come around her that had to be his, but could not stop crying no matter the spectacle she made of herself as she had not done in years and years. Not until she heard anoth
er voice, one so hated it could not be ignored, did she drag herself out of her insides and back into the dirt of the training field.
“Poor child,” Lady Richenda said. “Certes, he must needs rest if he is to regain his strength. Bring him.”
Susanna brought up her head so sharply she nearly clipped Judas’s nose. To the right stood the one who, this day, had been thwarted, though perhaps not another day.
When Susanna saw what her fists and nails had wreaked upon the older woman, it was the hardest thing not to laugh. Lady Richenda’s veil was askew, upper lip smeared with blood that had not been completely wiped away, and four livid scores ran down her left cheek and over her neck.
“And assist Lady Susanna,” she continued. “Obviously, she is not herself, distraught as she is by her nephew’s illness.”
The two men-at-arms who stepped forward did so without conviction, as if uncertain of Susanna who, as all would attest, had attacked the other woman. Fortunately, their dragging feet provided her the time needed to stand on her own and pull Judas up beside her.
“Aunt Sanna?” he said, his shortening of her name in the presence of others revealing how shaken he was. But, then, never had he seen her reduced to such a state.
She swallowed hard against hiccoughs that, in her youth, had often followed a torrent of tears. “I am fine,” she murmured and put an arm around his shoulders. As he leaned heavily against her, his foresight in doing so but another ache to her heart, she set her gaze upon the men-at-arms. “We require not your aid,” she said and drew Judas with her to where Lady Richenda stood trying to look down her nose at them though it was impossible to do so, squat as she was.
“If you ever again…” Susanna drew a deep breath. “…lay a hand to Judas or me, I vow you will know exactly how distraught I can be made to feel.”
