“You need only send one or two of your serving women to assist me in my tour,” she said calmly. A momentary silence prompted her to ask, “You do have women in your employ, do you not, sire?”
“Yes, of course I have women in my employ,” he said confidently, although a slight raising of his brows seemed to suggest, “At least, I think I do!” He turned away from Gwyneth and said to the nearest page something that sounded to her remarkably like, “Go to the kitchens and see if you can find any women. If you do, send one of them here at once.” Then he added some further instruction, rapidly spoken, that Gwyneth did not catch.
The page ran off. Beresford looked at Gwyneth, feeling impatient to return to his day’s work. She looked at him, hard and handsome in his way, and was caught between two radically different emotions. She drew a breath and took control of herself and the situation. She had decided that she would not allow the ladies-in-waiting from the castle to accompany her on her tour of the premises. She was sure that the vile condition of Beresford’s house must be widely known, but she did not wish for the humiliation of fresh details to be spread in court. What could be seen from the gallery was bad enough.
“Well, my lord,” she said, “if you would have a bench brought around for the ladies, they may remain here and watch the training in company of the two castle soldiers who, I am sure, are eager for you to take the field again.”
Beresford found immediate favor with this suggestion and had her request for the bench quickly fulfilled, whereupon Gwyneth assured him that he need not wait for the arrival of the household women. With a nod, he turned again to his training, working his shoulder muscles as he strode toward the fray, eager to wield his sword.
Presently, Gwyneth saw a lone woman emerge with the page from a far passage diagonally across the courtyard. This passage led, no doubt, to a second courtyard, around which would be arranged the stables, the servants’ quarters and the kitchens, which would communicate with the main part of the house from behind. As the woman approached, Gwyneth saw that she was a slattern, though a pretty one. Dressed as she was, in a sluttish skirt and shirt, her virtue seemed to hang by a few threads. From the comely young woman’s expression, it was clear she was put out. Gwyneth reckoned that she should well not be pleased to have another woman bear witness to such an ill-kept house. Gwyneth guessed that she had heard the news of her master’s impending marriage and was, furthermore, displeased to have a new mistress—or any mistress at all.
This was confirmed by the young woman’s palpably insolent demeanor. “Give you good day,” she said curtly in a version of Norman. “My name is Ermina.”
“Good morrow to you, Ermina,” Gwyneth said in English, making the young woman’s eyes widen in surprise. Ermina’s attitude held no challenge for Gwyneth. She said authoritatively, “You know who I am and where I come from. You should also know, then, that I prefer English to French. In this case, I think it better to use English so that no misunderstandings may arise between us.”
Ermina said, “But your English sounds different.”
“That is because I come from the north. I confess that your English sounds different to me, but it’s completely understandable, which is the essential point, is it not?”
Ermina cast a wary glance at Gwyneth from sultry brown eyes. “Yes, my lady,” she said sullenly.
“Now, are you the woman in charge here?” Gwyneth inquired.
“In a manner of speaking,” she replied with a careless shrug.
Gwyneth did not hesitate to put the woman in her place. “Then we may begin my inspection of the house with the chambers in the upper story and descend, in due course, to the foul corners of the gallery.”
Ermina was brazen enough to say, “I’m to show you around the back courtyard.” Her disrespect was obvious. “The master’s wishes.”
So that was the extra order that Beresford had conveyed to the page. Gwyneth smiled briefly. Beresford wanted her out of the way, did he? “I have neither time nor stomach today, I fear, to brave the kitchens or the stables. I wish to begin with the main living quarters. Pray follow me to the stairs.”
Gwyneth did not look back as she set off with a determined step toward the unsound staircase that led to the upper story. She knew that Ermina was following her, and she used all her instincts to gauge the climate of emotions that emanated from the young serving woman. It was a complex composition, Gwyneth decided, and she would need further interactions with her before determining how best to dispel the woman’s mood or to turn it to her own advantage.
Having circumvented the activity in the yard by way of the gallery, they arrived at the staircase. Gwyneth lifted her skirts and tried the first step. She was rather surprised when it held her weight. She put her hand on the rail and tested its strength. It had an unstable, elastic feel, but seemed usable.
With Gwyneth present in his house, Beresford was distracted from his practice, as if a mote of dust clouded his eye. He blinked to be rid of it, then blinked again as he looked over at the spot where Gwyneth had stood. She was gone. His narrowed eyes quickly scanned the gallery and then popped open when he saw her at the bottom step of the stairs, accompanied by Ermina. Why did the page have to find that woman? He breathed a savage Saxon epithet, imagining the havoc that Ermina might wreak, after which—worse thought!—he wondered if Gwyneth would make it past the broken third step, which he from long habit knew to skip. Too late! He saw her stumble and nearly fall, saved only by her grip on the rail. Resigned, he threw his sword down, nearly maiming the man nearest him. He quit the field for the second time, fending off a blow with his shield as he did so.
He crossed to the staircase in a few long strides, bounding up the first few stairs, which groaned under his weight. Brushing past Ermina, he cocked his head and gestured her away. He caught Gwyneth at the small of her back and fairly propelled her upward, over the treacherous second-to-last step.
Upon stumbling on the third step, Gwyneth had remarked to Ermina that the house did not look as if it had been touched in five years. She had just received the rather snide rejoinder that it had been much longer than that when she heard the ominous sound of wood giving way and had the horrible thought that the stairway was about to collapse. Then the scent of male sweat and two powerful hands engulfed her, and the next thing she knew she was standing in relative safety on the balcony. With her heart beating erratically, she looked, astonished, into the gray eyes of Beresford.
“I’ve decided to accompany you on the tour of this part of the house,” he said gruffly. “If I had known you wished to visit here first, I would have done so from the beginning.” To Ermina he said, “You may go now.”
Gwyneth stepped away from him, and he quickly dropped his hands from her waist. “It is not necessary for you to accompany me,” she stated evenly, trying to regain her composure after the shock of his rough, protective touch, “and I think it important to be accompanied by at least one of your women,” She told Ermina in Norman, “You may stay.”
With her large sultry eyes, Ermina consulted her master. Beresford was out of his depth, but he was in his own home and would be damned if he was not in charge. Effecting what he thought was a pretty clever compromise, he gestured ahead of him, vaguely indicating a far door to his right. To Gwyneth he said, “You will probably wish to visit the mistress’s quarters, above all.” Then he turned to Ermina. “Run along ahead and straighten up, if need be.”
Ermina obeyed.
It seemed to Gwyneth that Beresford was still trying to get rid of her quickly. She would have none of it. She took a step in the opposite direction. “Yes, I will want to visit the mistress’s quarters,” she said. “But first I would like to visit the solar, which, if I gather correctly, runs above the passage over the main entrance, opposite us.”
He confirmed that this was so.
She looked up at him. “If we visit there first, Ermina will have more time to set the mistress’s room to rights, if need be.”
Beresford shr
ugged. He did not really care about the condition of the room, but wanted Ermina as far away from Gwyneth as possible. He proceeded to lead Gwyneth to the solar. After he had mounted his strong guard against the effect she seemed to have on him, he began to entertain the suspicion that she was deliberately trying to annoy him by opening every door and poking her head inside, thus making their progress around the balcony over the gallery excruciatingly slow.
Gwyneth was not trying to annoy him with her inspection of his house. As she looked into chamber upon chamber of unswept filth, she was attempting to discover the true extent of the neglect. She was also taking her time in order to brace herself for any truly nauseating experience. Finally, they arrived at the solar, and Gwyneth opened the door, half fearing to be overcome by some stench. Instead, the room looked merely unused, rather than abused.
She stood on the threshold but did not enter. It must have been a beautiful room once. Its generous space was in proportion to the general plan of the large house. The walls were paneled and the exterior one boasted the extravagance of three pretty windows of thick, leaded amber glass. Most of the panes were broken, of course, and stuffed with rags or simply gaping. Half the shutters were gone as well; the other half might best be used for kindling. The design of the limestone fireplace was impossible to discern for the soot staining it. The hearth was choked with ashes. The state of the fireplace gave her a fair estimation of what must be the state of the kitchens, for she guessed that this hearth stood back-to-back with the fireplace in the kitchens sharing the chimney.
In the center of the solar was the only piece of furniture, a trestle table, with the benches stored atop it. The rushes on the floor had long since decomposed and smelled merely stale, not rancid. She thought that it might be used now as a storage room of some sort, for she saw what she thought was an old mattress shoved in one corner, the straw stuffing exposed at crazy angles.
She closed the door and, standing beside Beresford, looked up into his face. Despite herself and the outrage that surrounded her, she was aware of the pulse of this strong man who could wield a sword with terrifying beauty. She was aware of his sweat, too, and its fresh quality. He was not, by Odin, clean in his household habits, but he was at least clean in his bodily habits, for his scent was not that of rank male sweat unwashed for days. It was that of a healthy man hard at work.
He looked down at her, still surprised that she had come to his house and puzzled by her desire to open every door of the living quarters. He was amazed that so ethereally lovely, so seemingly frail a woman would have such a visceral effect on him.
She broke their locked gaze by looking away, and said, “I gather that you do not use the solar these days.”
“Certainly it is being used,” he said. “My sons have it for their bedchamber.”
Her eyes flew back to his. “Their bedchamber?” She frowned. “That would be Benedict and Gilbert, no?”
“That’s right,” he said. “They’re down there, playing by the rain barrels.”
Gwyneth spotted the two boys below, who, she would have sworn, were urchins off the street. She looked determinedly away. Maternal anger shot through her. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she had summoned a noncommittal smile. She said pleasantly, “Shall we continue?”
They proceeded along the adjacent leg of the balcony to the mistress’s chambers, where Ermina was making a half -hearted effort to put the dusty, musty wreck to rights. Gwyneth actually stepped into this room. Beresford, thinking that she would next inspect the master’s chamber, quickly entered his own room to pick up any clothing that he might have left here and there over the last day or two. As he snatched up several piles and tried to think of places to stash them, it occurred to him that perhaps he had let his chamber go more than just a day or two. He also made an effort to arrange the wild disorder of bedclothes, with not the most expert results.
Gwyneth was still next door, looking about her at the dismal state of her future bedchamber and trying not to fall into a pit of black despair at the age and depth of the dirt. The window giving out onto what she guessed was the secondary courtyard was boarded shut, as was the window to the balcony. The shutters were gone. Ermina flicked a limp dust cloth ineffectually at the cobwebs in one dim corner. In another corner Gwyneth spotted an interior door covered by a ratty curtain, which evidently led to the master’s chambers. Through the door she could hear the sounds of Beresford’s movements.
The bed occupied the whole of the long wall. Its frame looked sturdy, but Gwyneth guessed that the mattress needed a month’s airing, while the bed curtains were beyond cleaning and needed to be burned. Beside the bed was a chair, a minor luxury except that it sat at an angle, missing one leg. The whole of the room cried out for a scrub brush, lye and a great flush of water.
The carved chest beside the door to the balcony captured her interest. She bent down in such a way as to avoid having her knees come into contact with the floor, to inspect what might be within the chest in the way of linens. There were some moth-eaten remnants of what might have been blankets, but as she gingerly picked them up, they crumbled at her touch. In her excavation, she came upon the curiosity of a little mirror encircled by a badly tarnished silver frame. She held the mirror up and looked into it. Her attention was not captured by her own image, which she had only rarely seen, but with the scene that unfolded behind her.
Ermina, seeing Gwyneth’s back turned, had dropped her pretense of cleaning and had gone to the door that led to Beresford’s chamber. In the reflection, Gwyneth saw her lift the curtain that separated the two rooms in the manner of a whore lifting her skirts. She heard Beresford’s movements momentarily halt, and she saw Ermina strike a pose that even in the dim light Gwyneth had no difficulty interpreting. She was left to imagine the gesture Beresford made in response, for Ermina let the curtain drop with a huff, but not before she had sent Beresford a bold, pouty look of purest desire.
Gwyneth thought, But of course! She put the little mirror back in the chest, closed the lid, and rose from her position. She left the chamber to stand on the balcony and wait for Beresford. She did not even look into his chamber through the open door. She was considering, in a vague sort of way, the visible desire of this strumpet for the man she herself was to wed, when Beresford was suddenly next to her on the balcony.
He asked, “Do you wish to see my chamber now?”
Gwyneth composed her face and looked down modestly. “It would not be proper, sire.”
Beresford was vexed that he had been put to so much bother with the piles of clothing for nothing and was prevented from commenting rudely on her intrusion in his household only by the appearance of Ermina on the balcony.
Gwyneth reappraised the maid in relation to Beresford and felt the force of Ermina’s dislike for her down to her toes. She was unmoved, however, and asked the woman to fetch a broom and begin sweeping the mistress’s chambers at once. When Ermina replied cheekily that there was no broom at hand, Gwyneth informed her that she had seen one in a room off the balcony, third door on the right. When Gwyneth again asked her to get it, Ermina turned to her master. Beresford gestured with his head that she should fetch the broom.
“Thank you so much for your time, my lord,” Gwyneth said when she had gone. “Ermina will spend the rest of the day cleaning my chamber.” She smiled, cool and confident. “And I will find her a position in another household before I move in.”
“A position in another household?” Beresford repeated blankly. “Why?”
“What would you do with a knight-in-training who did not live up to your standards?”
Beresford looked around him, frowning, wondering whether the house had not become a little disheveled in the last year or two. He was honest enough to say, “I would have him turned off.”
“Exactly,” Gwyneth said. “Ermina is most unsuitable, in every way, and she shall not be here when I am mistress. Of course, until then, I have no cause or reason to interfere wit
h your arrangements. For the next four days, she may stay here and do for you what she has always done,” she added pointedly.
She asked Beresford to escort her to the door. Not many minutes later, she had left with her ladies and the two soldiers, leaving him to wonder How did she do that? He could tell from the inflection in her voice and the expression on her face that she knew exactly what Ermina had always done for him. He was amazed, because just as the maid had conveyed to him the offer of her body, he had been able to see from his chamber that Gwyneth’s back had been turned away from them and that she was bent over Roesia’s linen chest. He considered the unsettling possibility that all women naturally knew these things. Then he remembered that Roesia had never seemed to know about his casual women and had not seemed to care. Or perhaps, he suddenly realized, it was rather that he had not cared if Roesia knew and did not know if she cared.
But Gwyneth…. It might well have been some feminine notion of housekeeping standards that caused her to turn Ermina away. And it might well have been coincidence, the evening before, that had brought her with Fortescue to the battlements at the very moment he had caught Lady Chester in his arms in full view of Adela. The way Rosalyn had looked up at him at just that moment had given him pause, and it would have put him at a disadvantage with Adela if he had given in to the impulse to take advantage of what she was so plainly offering him. When he had considered it later, it had seemed, in fact, that Rosalyn wished to put him at a disadvantage with Adela, if not also with Gwyneth.
He shook his head and decided that none of it was worth thinking about. None of it. Not Rosalyn. Not Ermina. Not Gwyneth. He was in his home, in command of his men, and he knew what he had to do to release the energies shooting through him.
He walked back on to the field where the men, in absence of their leader, had become slack in their exercises. In any case, they had been rather more interested in witnessing the progress of the threesome on the balcony.
Simon’s Lady Page 8
