Outrageous

by Christina Dodd

  Marian pinched her nose against the stench. “I didn’t promise him I’d take it forever. I’m better now.”

  “So you are. This last week in bed has been good for you.” Angharad wrapped Marian’s hand around the mug. “So another week will be better yet.”

  “Another week?” Marian squeaked, and to her disgust her voice promptly failed her—a circumstance of which Angharad was quick to take advantage.

  “See now, you’ve hurt yourself.” She caressed Marian’s cheek, much like a mother luring her infant. “If you’ll drink it, I’ll allow you some visitors.”

  Marian glared and wished she weren’t so weak. She had thought she was going to die—now it seemed she’d come too close. The days of fever had seemed endless, a dark swirl of pain and fear, of sleeping with dread nightmares and waking only to cough until she was sick.

  The malady had extinguished the spark of energy that drove her. She could lift her head off the pillow, but there seemed to be no reason to do so. She could verify, every day, that her treasure was still hidden in the bag where she’d placed it, but it seemed almost unimportant. She could sit up to have her hair brushed, and stand up to take care of her body’s needs, but she didn’t want to go out and face the myriad challenges her life had become. Her son was safe and being cared for, and she was weary. Bone weary.

  “I’ll rub your back,” Angharad offered.

  Marian wavered. Angharad had a way about her.

  Griffith had offered his mother to her as if she were the greatest gift he could tender, and Angharad had proved to be more. She drew Marian under her wing as if Marian were a long-lost and much beloved chick. She fussed—too much, Marian thought, but with such affectionate concern Marian found herself doing everything to ease Angharad’s worry. And Angharad loved. Loved Marian, loved Lionel, as tenderly as if they were her own. She baited her snare with the soft down of motherhood, and Marian willingly entered and remained.

  “Tyrant,” Marian muttered, and drank down the disgusting brew. It tasted like bat dung mixed with herbs, and as she knew, it could well be. It didn’t bear thinking about, though, so she accepted the ale Angharad passed her to help wash the taste away and twitched her loose linen gown over as she rolled onto her stomach. “Rub, please.”

  Angharad sat on the mattress beside Marian, pushed the long, heavy red braid out of the way, and began to massage the neck and back muscles that protested the long hours in bed.

  Marian gave a heartfelt moan of pleasure, then asked, “Is Lionel coming to see me?”

  “Lionel, Rhys, and Griffith.”

  “Griffith?” A bit of the lassitude afflicting Marian fled, and she struggled up onto her elbows. “I don’t want to see Griffith.”

  “You’ve refused him this whole week, and he’s been acting like a bear waiting to face the bull. Pacing and grumping and snapping.” Angharad lightly smacked Marian’s rump as if it were all her fault. “’Tis time to put him—and the rest of us—out of our misery.”

  “I don’t feel well enough to see him.”

  Angharad pushed her face back into the pillow. “A moment ago you were well enough to get up.”

  Muffled, Marian protested, “He’ll make me worse.”

  “He’ll make you better.” Angharad pressed her palm into the center of Marian’s back. “Just feel how your heart is pounding. ’Twill move the blood in your system, and you’ll exhale the bad humors which have made you ill.”

  Marian buried her head in her pillow to hide her heated cheeks. If Angharad so easily recognized her confusion, fear, and embarrassment, who else would see it? Would Griffith?

  Never in her life had Marian hid from trouble. Indeed, in the old days Lady Elizabeth had complained she ran to meet it. But this was different. This wasn’t a fight to be fought or a challenge to be met. This was confronting the man who had taken her to the limits of her control, and beyond. He’d raided the storehouse of her body, with her own help. He’d stolen something that could never be returned—her innocence—and replaced it with a frustration that grew stronger even as she did. No, she was too tired to see Griffith—ever again.

  Lifting her head, she begged, “Can’t we wait until tomorrow?”

  She jumped when Griffith answered her, “Not another day.”

  One glance sufficed her. He looked like one of the towering ancient stone slabs that jutted out from the ground. She’d discovered them in her travels around England and even more of them in Wales. Menhirs, they called them here. Battered by wind and rain, they stood, immovable, indestructible, inexplicable: monuments that defied the march of time to silently proclaim their might.

  The silence in the room strained Marian’s nerves—the nerves she never realized she had—and she risked another glance.

  He stood closer now, no longer just a shape and a menace, but a man. A man as hard and hot and massive as a menhir heated from within by the earth from which it sprang.

  Could they communicate without words? To her discomfort, Marian found they could. As clearly as if he’d told her, she knew his fury and his desire. He desperately wanted her, yet desperately wished he didn’t.

  Did Griffith have a weakness? If he did, she was it, and he fought to relegate her to her proper place in his well-organized life.

  Hoarse with his need, he asked, “Are you well?”

  She found her voice had escaped once more and only nodded.

  “We’ll be married as soon as the banns can be called.”

  Her voice returned quickly enough. “Nay!”

  He seemed to grow taller. “We must act in a responsible manner.”

  When facing him, she found it hard to remember more than their tumultuous, all-too-enjoyable encounter between the sheets. But she had to. She had her responsibility to Lionel. Softly, taking care not to strain her fragile throat, she answered, “I am acting in a responsible manner. I cannot marry Henry’s man. Not now. Not ever.”

  It was odd to feel the pain that flashed over his tough countenance as if it were her own. Odd to feel ashamed of suspicions that could save her child’s life.

  Griffith strode to the window overlooking the bailey. He leaned his shoulder against the wall and spoke, sounding as unyielding as a menhir would sound, if it could speak. “I’ll have the priest call the banns for the next three Sundays.”

  “A waste.”

  “We’ll see,” he answered.

  “Son,” Rhys said, his voice heavy with displeasure, “you can’t force her to wed you.”

  Marian stared in surprise. Rhys stood in the middle of the room, holding Lionel as if he’d been there the entire time.

  But she’d not noticed him. She’d not noticed her baby, whom she’d been longing for. Come to think of it, she’d even failed to notice Angharad, who was still rubbing the tense place on her neck.

  “We must wed,” Griffith insisted. “For her safety and the safety of her child.”

  “We will keep them both safe,” Rhys vowed. “But regardless of the danger, our priest will not call the banns until the lady has consented to the union.”

  Griffith hunched his shoulders and folded his arms across his chest.

  Rhys watched his son and waited, but Griffith would vouchsafe no reply, so Rhys asked, “Is Lady Marian well enough to hold Lionel?”

  “Aye, she can hold him,” Angharad said. They were both doing their best to lighten the conflict between Griffith and Marian. “There’s been no fever these last three days, and the lad is as healthy as Griffith was at his age. As feckless as Griffith, also.”

  Marian accepted her son from Rhys with a murmur of pleasure and hugged his wriggling body close. “Has he been a great pest?”

  “Nay,” Lionel took it on himself to answer.

  Rhys laughed. “He’s a pleasure. You’ve done the world a great service by raising him to be a bright and curious lad.”

  “Nay,” Lionel said again, then plastered a kiss on Marian’s lips.

  She glanced at Griffith and found him watching th
em with a smile. The week in his own home had been good to Griffith. He had bathed and now wore new, clean clothes—colorful clothes in the fashion of the court. His hair had been trimmed and brushed until it gleamed like polished wood. In fact—as Angharad promised, the blood moved in Marian’s veins—he looked like a man come a-wooing.

  No sooner had she thought it than he said, “I met Marian because of Lionel. The lad has my gratitude, and I’m not likely to forget it.”

  Message received, she thought. If only she could say, message believed.

  While Marian fussed over Lionel, giving him a pillow of his own, covering his legs with a blanket, Angharad leaped in to fill the silence. “At least you didn’t meet like Rhys and I met.”

  “Hey!” Rhys remonstrated. “’Twasn’t so bad.”

  “Not so bad?” Angharad turned to Marian and confided, “We met during the wedding ceremony.”

  “Our parents thought it best.” Rhys sounded quite righteous and solemn, then he grinned. “What did they know? What did I know, for that matter? I didn’t care. What did a wife matter? I was twenty-one, just knighted, a man of the world.”

  “I was twelve,” Angharad said.

  Rhys held up his hand with his little finger stuck up. “With just this many curves.”

  “He scared me to death.”

  “I thought I was supposed to.”

  “He entered the sleeping chamber, took one look at me, naked and shivering, and proclaimed, ‘I’m not sleeping with a baby.’”

  “And I left.”

  “You stomped out,” Angharad accused.

  “You’re not making me feel guilty about that,” Rhys said.

  “No.” A smile played around Angharad’s mouth. “I was secretly relieved. And publicly humiliated.”

  Rhys smiled at his wife, and Marian could almost see him wrapping Angharad in his embrace. Something existed between them: a pleasure strengthened by time and affection and old desire easily rekindled.

  Griffith sighed and shook his head. “They’re lovestruck,” he told Marian.

  She did not reply. It was too easy to think she and Griffith could be a couple like this one, relating the story of their courting with practiced ease, knowing what each was going to say before it was said.

  Painful to consider, too, that she and Griffith could still be star-crossed in forty years. Even to her own ears, Marian sounded husky and on the verge of tears when she asked, “What happened?”

  “How did we get together, do you mean?” Angharad clasped her work-worn hands in her lap. “I grew up.”

  “Very nicely, too,” Rhys supplemented.

  Angharad scoffed, “You never even noticed. I was keeping your house and the widow in the village was keeping you satisfied, and you were oblivious of my meager charms.”

  “Until you flirted with my squire.”

  “The squire was my age”—Angharad leaned closer to Marian—“and handsome as wicked sin.”

  “And stupid,” Rhys added.

  “Saint Winifred’s head! If he was obvious, it was because he thought you didn’t care. And you didn’t, either, until you saw someone else did.” Angharad huffed with long-ago indignation. “Like a dog with a bone—unwanted until another dog desires it.”

  “I wasn’t as oblivious as she thinks,” Rhys said sotto voce to Marian.

  Angharad crossed her arms across her ample chest. “Ha!”

  “Oh, I’d been noticing her. Her figure had filled out very”—Rhys rolled the r—“nicely. But we’d been married four years, and it wasn’t so easy to change the sleeping arrangements. I didn’t want to look the fool, courting my own wife.” He sighed and spoke with profound dejection. “But courting would have been easier.”

  Angharad subdued a faint smile, but Marian wasn’t so capable. Seeing this big bear of a man cowed by his tiny wife proved too much for her gravity, and she laughed.

  “See?” Rhys pointed at her and at Angharad. “See, son? Women are ever disrespectful of their sweethearts. I’m relating a tale of my own humiliation, and they’re giggling.”

  “’Tis shocking, Da,” Griffith agreed.

  “Aye.” Rhys cocked his eyebrow sternly at Marian. “I see nothing funny in my plight.”

  Marian cleared her throat and tried to look restrained. “Please go on. What did you do with the squire?”

  “I sent him home in disgrace. I pulled the ungrateful whelp from a home in the village and raised him up to be my squire, and he repaid me by lusting after my wife.” Rhys gestured angrily. “My wife!”

  Marian suspected the squire’s expulsion had been none too kind, and when Angharad said, “He’s back, you know,” Rhys almost shouted.

  “Do you think I care? Stupid, young—”

  Angharad interrupted. “He’s not young anymore, but he’s still handsome, still wrathful, and I wish you’d watch your step.”

  The old feud still moved powerful emotions, it seemed, for Rhys flushed scarlet, and Marian asked hastily, “What happened to you and Angharad after you were alone?”

  Rhys visibly checked the irate words on his lips; he looked at his anxious wife and let the moment pass. “I stomped around all angry. I expected Angharad to grovel.”

  Angharad sniffed. “And I didn’t.”

  “She was angry, too.” Rhys still sounded amazed at this outbreak from his previously docile wife. “As though it were my fault.”

  “It was your fault,” Angharad told him.

  “So the next thing I know, my twelve-year-old bride tells me she’s sixteen and sick of being treated like a child.”

  “And he said if I wanted to be treated like a woman, I should act like one.”

  “So I took her to bed.”

  They’d been involved in the telling, topping each other with each addition, but Rhys’s blunt statement seemed to catch them almost by surprise. They both blushed, a ruddy intrusion of color in the wrinkled, paper-thin skin of the aging. They exchanged swift, shy glances, then Rhys coughed. When he spoke again, the timbre of his voice had softened. “The thing is, bedding a virgin when you’re enraged is not a good idea. Not at all. There’re tears—”

  “Some of them his,” Angharad interjected.

  “—and a man has to make amends, and it puts him in a bad position to negotiate.” He wiped at the memory of ancient sweat on his brow and settled back. “Of course, that’s not a difficulty you’re likely to encounter, so be grateful.”

  “Rhys,” Angharad reprimanded.

  Wrapped in a cocoon of silence, the little group watched Lionel as he played peek-a-boo with the blanket. No one seemed to want to say more, and Marian dared not look at Rhys or Angharad, and most certainly not at Griffith.

  Then Griffith cleared his throat. “Well, actually—”

  She lifted her outraged gaze, thinking she must be mistaken, knowing he wouldn’t tell them the truth.

  “Marian and I—”

  She could scarcely breathe, and she sat up in a flurry. “Griffith?”

  “—had quite a similar experience—”

  “Griffith, don’t say another word!”

  “—and I need your help in dealing with the consequences.” Griffith relaxed against the window frame. “Don’t fret, sweeting, Mama and Da always give me good advice.”

  Desperate to make him understand, she said, “This isn’t just about you and me.”

  “’Tis not about you and me that I ask.” Griffith bowed to her but remained out of reach of her fists. “God willing, we will work it out. ’Tis Lionel we should be concerned about.”

  “Griffith, I forbid—” Marian tried to raise her voice. To her dismay, she discovered it faded completely.

  “The lad’s not hers,” Griffith said. She took several deep breaths of the chilly air, trying to revitalize her voice, but he continued steadily, “I had the proof less than a moon ago.”

  Angharad and Rhys exchanged dumbfounded glances, then stared at Lionel, then at Marian, then at Griffith.

  Rhys recov
ered first. “What do you mean, Griffith?”

  Pride and embarrassment warred on Griffith’s face, but he drew himself up loftily. “I mean, she came to my bed a virgin.”

  Marian covered her face with her hands and moaned. This was it. Lionel’s parentage had been betrayed.

  “How did it happen she was in your bed, Griffith?” Angharad almost stuttered in her excitement.

  “She…had a nightmare.” As if he realized how absurd that sounded, Griffith rushed to add, “She truly did. She was white and shaking…Lionel had been kidnapped that day, and she was afraid…of someone taking…”

  “Of course, of course,” Rhys agreed heartily. “But you’re telling us you made love with the lass. That you’re no longer celibate. Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

  “Aye, Da.”

  Uncomprehending, Marian lifted her head. She and Griffith’s parents didn’t seem to be thinking on the same level. She was worried about Lionel’s pedigree and how it would influence the history of a nation. They seemed interested only in Griffith…and her.

  Rhys rubbed his hands together with relish. “Why did you make love with the lass?”

  Griffith hung his head. “I lost control, Da.”

  Angharad clapped in an excess of delight. “You lost control?”

  “Aye,” Griffith admitted.

  “With Lady Marian?” she insisted.

  “Aye,” he said again.

  Angharad lifted her arms to heaven. “God be praised, we have a daughter at last.”

  “Amen,” Rhys finished reverently.

  With a quick kiss to Lionel and an enthusiastic hug to the bewildered—and horrified—Marian, Angharad hopped off the mattress. “I’ll prepare the wedding.”

  Rhys stood from the chair and joined her. “And I’ll go tell the priest to call the banns.”

  Her head spun, but Marian swiftly objected, “But you said you wouldn’t allow it until I agreed to the union.”

  “That was before we heard this astounding news.” Angharad hugged Rhys’s arm and looked from Griffith to Marian. “You’ve given us our son back.”

  It didn’t make any sense to Marian, and if she’d been clothed, she’d have leaped up to confront Rhys. “But what about Lionel?”