The Mistress of Normandy
Susan Wiggs
#1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs transports readers to the lush French countryside of Normandy in a tale of love, family honor and true knights in shining armor www.SusanWiggs.com
#1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs transports readers to the lush French countryside of Normandy in a tale of love, family honor and true knights in shining armor…
www.SusanWiggs.com (http://www.SusanWiggs.com)
Praise for (#u7d520697-4991-57ed-b557-ff347843aa77)
“Wiggs adds humor, brains and a certain cultivation
that will leave readers anticipating her next romance.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Drifter
“Susan Wiggs delves deeply into her characters’ hearts
and motivations to touch our own.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Mistress
“[Wiggs] has created a quiet page-turner
that will hold readers spellbound as the relationships,
characters and story unfold. Fans of historical romances
will naturally flock to this skillfully executed
[Chicago Fire] trilogy.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Firebrand
“Susan Wiggs masterfully combines real historical events
with a powerful captive/captor romance and…
draws readers in with her strong writing style….”
—RT Book Reviews on The Hostage
Also by SUSAN WIGGS
Contemporary Romances
Home Before Dark
The Ocean Between Us
Summer by the Sea
Table for Five
Lakeside Cottage
Just Breathe
The Goodbye Quilt
The Lakeshore Chronicles
Summer at Willow Lake
The Winter Lodge
Dockside
Snowfall at Willow Lake
Fireside
Lakeshore Christmas
The Summer Hideaway
Marrying Daisy Bellamy
Return to Willow Lake
Candlelight Christmas
The Bella Vista Chronicles
The Apple Orchard
The Beekeeper’s Ball
Historical Romances
The Lightkeeper
The Drifter
The Tudor Rose Trilogy
At the King’s Command
The Maiden’s Hand
At the Queen’s Summons
Chicago Fire Trilogy
The Hostage
The Mistress
The Firebrand
Calhoun Chronicles
The Charm School
The Horsemaster’s Daughter
Halfway to Heaven
Enchanted Afternoon
A Summer Affair
Look for Susan Wiggs’s next novel
THE MAIDEN OF IRELAND
available soon from Harlequin MIRA
The Mistress of Normandy
Susan Wiggs
Refreshed version of THE LILY AND THE LEOPARD,
newly revised by author
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Contents
Cover (#udde2286f-5d94-5a22-9d18-4a60df586e44)
Back Cover Text (#ubfa6dd10-d811-5044-b80b-963d3ee195b1)
Praise (#uff05112e-4481-5d3b-87ea-d510271b1ee7)
Title Page (#uea536385-a2dd-5c7a-a7bd-f413b0dc0bfe)
Prologue (#u52f1ef93-52ee-5f02-8d78-3131b78b77bb)
One (#u58caa487-cf59-5285-ada5-67c0203ac3c7)
Two (#uc7ecda1a-e697-5263-8452-87727205973c)
Three (#u66565469-bd45-53af-bffc-1a8f6a46ed1f)
Four (#uf91d6472-9ffa-5bc7-a3d5-3815f32312ed)
Five (#u24cbb505-7146-5c49-8c6e-6005a9e022ca)
Six (#uf42ab6f6-f72d-514b-9d91-ea65b3d139e2)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
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Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
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Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Afterword (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#u7d520697-4991-57ed-b557-ff347843aa77)
Westminster
January 1414
He sat naked in a wooden tub; the King of England loomed at his back. He shivered, tensed, and awaited a sluice of cold water from Henry V’s own hand. The wind whistled, harmonizing with the voices in the shadows of the stone chamber.
“Always thought he’d earn his spurs on the battlefield,” remarked Thomas, Duke of Clarence. “Enguerrand Fitzmarc is the king’s own avenger. He served us right well at Anjou.”
“It was a different dragon Rand slew for the House of Lancaster,” said Richard Courtenay. The Bishop of Norwich leaned forward, the rushlight giving his face a ghostly aspect. “A far more deadly dragon,” he added. “God in heaven, Tom, if not for Rand, you and your brother the king would be but carcasses carved up and served by the Lollards to the Thames.”
Listening, Rand felt pride in Courtenay’s tribute. Then he felt shame in that pride. What had he done, after all, save overhear a plot of ill-guided religious fanatics? A peasant could have done as much. But it hadn’t been a peasant; it had been Rand, gone a-harping at twilight, stumbling into intrigue, barely escaping with his hide intact to alert the king at Eltham.
“Are you ready,” King Henry said with quiet solemnity, “to wash away your former life?”
Rand paused before delivering the expected response. Unlike many aspirants who yearned for the glory of knighthood, he did not want to shed his former life: the quiet sunsets over Arundel keep, the baying of the alaunts on a hunt, the silvery tones of his harp across the heaths of Sussex, the warmth of Justine’s hand in his.... Jesu, could he wash her away?
The men in the chamber fell silent. The king waited.
“Aye, Your Grace,” said Rand.
Water, blessed by the bishop and chilled by the January air, drenched Rand from head to toe, crawling like rivers of ice over his naked flesh. He sat unflinching, although inside he clenched every nerve against the cold.
Jack Cade, Rand’s scutifer, stepped forward. Awkwardly Jack held a pair of barber’s shears in his maimed hand. He flashed an irreverent grin as he bent to his task, the crude scissors biting into Rand’s golden locks. “Enough baths like this,” Jack muttered, taking up a razor, “and you’ll be well able to hold to your vow of chastity.” The razor nicked Rand’s chin.
Hearing King Henry clear his throat, Rand swallowed his laughter. “Hush, Jack, and mind that blade. The shearing’s supposed to show my submission to God, not to your clumsiness.”
Washed clean of his former life and shorn of his former identity, Rand was dressed in shirt, hose, and shoes—black, the color of death, that he might never forget his own mortality. Over this he wore a white tunic for purity, then a red cloak of surpassing richness to show his nobility and willingness to shed blood for God and his king.
Jack secured a white belt around Rand’s waist. “Another symbol of chastity,” he whispered, disgusted. “Would you like me to loosen it, Enguerrand Sans Tache?”
Edward, the portly Duke of York, sniffed. “Mind your manners, varlet.”
King Henry’s dark eyes glinted beneath a shock of straight brown hair. “Leave off your scolding, cousin. Tom did contrive the title Sans Tache—the Spotless—in jest. And yet...” Henry’s sharp gaze assessed the aspirant. “I do find it fitting. By my troth, Rand, were you born with that damned saintly countenance, or is it merely an affectation? Never mind, we’ve a long night ahead of us. We can talk then.” He grinned at Rand’s thunderstruck look. “Aye,” said the king, “I do mean to sit vigil with you.”
Rand sank to one knee. “Your Grace, you do me too much honor to stand as my sponsor.”
“We shall see, Enguerrand Fitzmarc, if you think that is so on the morrow.” King Henry turned and led the way through the winding passageways of Westminster, up two newel staircases from the confessor’s chapel, to the chantry Henry had built to honor Bolingbroke, his father. Rand’s new weapons and armor lay on the altar steps, his sword on the altar itself.
Courtenay said mass, then intoned, “Hearken, O Lord, to our prayers, and bless with the right hand of Thy majesty this sword with which Thy servant desires to be girded.”
Rand stared at the sword, a gift from King Henry. Girded...nay, more likely shackled, he thought. Yet the bright blade, wrought of Poitiers steel, inlaid with gold, its cruciform hilt glinting with the single green eye of an emerald, beckoned to something deep inside him.
Following mass, the celebrants filed slowly out of the chapel. Rand remained kneeling before the altar, pondering the sword and all it meant to him.
Henry sat down on a prie-dieu. “I’ll stay hard by, to give you encouragement, to prod you if the temptation to sleep becomes too great.” Grinning, he added, “Though you’re unlikely to fall asleep on your knees.”
Rand resisted the urge to shift restlessly. The cold stone flags pressed into his bones.
The king leaned back and crossed his ankles. “You’re well formed, Rand Fitzmarc. My brother of Clarence says you once vaulted a battlement at Anjou without a ladder. How tall be you?”
Remembering that an aspirant should pass the night in tacit meditation, Rand lowered his eyes and kept silent.
“Come, you may speak,” said the king. “There are things I would know about the man who saved my neck. Did you indeed vault the battlement?”
Rand flushed. “It was a common wall, not a battlement. I heard a woman crying on the other side, saw flames rising. There was no time to call for a ladder.”
“I see. So, how tall be you?”
“A hand...nay, two, perhaps, past six feet, Your Grace.”
“And did you deliver the woman from the flames?”
Rand glanced at his hands, folded in prayer. The knuckles of the left one were sleek with scars. “Aye.”
“How came you to learn your battle skills?”
“From my father, Marc de Beaumanoir. He was captured by the Earl of Arundel’s men at St.Malo, and held prisoner at Arundel. He was never able to raise his ransom.”
“So he stayed in England, got a son, and raised him up to be a knight,” Henry finished, satisfied.
Rand looked up. The king had spoken in French. Politeness dictated that he answer in kind. “He did, mon sire, but never found the means for my initiation into knighthood.”
“You’ve earned it by denouncing the Lollard plot. Damned religious zealots.”
Hearing the quiver of pain in the king’s voice, Rand said, “Mon sire, I do not believe your friend John Oldcastle was among the conspirators at Eltham.” One corner of his mouth rose in a crooked grin. “Oldcastle would never have let me escape.”
Henry nodded. “You’re right. You’re...” His voice trailed off, and his eyes danced with a keen light. “You’re speaking in French, by God!” He threw his head back, and his laughter ricocheted through the chantry. “Your French is as flawless as your reputation. Faith, but I see the hand of God in this.”
Rand felt a prickle of apprehension in his fast-numbing limbs. God’s hand lent convenience to many of the young king’s schemes.
Henry’s laughter stopped abruptly. He leaned toward Rand, eyes ablaze with an inner fire, brighter than the light from the tapers on the altar. “Have you lands?”
“No, Your Grace. I am bastard born, and Beaumanoir was seized by the French Crown.”
“Are you betrothed?”
Rand hesitated. The banns had not been posted; Jussie had insisted on waiting until his campaigning with Clarence was over. Still, their vows had been spoken to the stars above the Sussex heaths, long ago....
“Well?” King Henry prodded.
“Not yet, Your Grace, but there is a girl—”
“A commoner?”
“She is not of noble blood, sire, but there is nothing common about her.”
Henry smiled. “Spoken as a true knight. But I’ve your future in hand now.” Rising, he melted back into the shadows at the rear of the chantry. Rand heard him summon his advisers from their beds, heard the whispers of a conference, and felt a thin, cold knife blade of foreboding slice into his heart.
* * *
At sunrise Rand preceded the king and his nobles and ministers into the yard where the arming would take place. His mind nearly as numb as his limbs, he was clad in hauberk, cuirass, and gauntlets. A white linen cotte d’armes, emblazoned with the gold Plantagenet leopard, was drawn over his head. Around Rand’s neck hung an amulet, another of King Henry’s gifts. The talisman, too, bore the leopard rampant and the motto A vaillans coeurs riens impossible. To valiant hearts nothing is impossible.
Symbols and ceremonies, thought Rand. They seemed so strange to a bastard-born horse soldier.
The Earl of Arundel bent and affixed the golden spurs to Rand’s heels. “Your father would be right proud, lad, to see you thus,” he said.
“Aye,” said Rand, “he would.” But not Justine. Jussie would know the cost of his new status.
Spurs whirring, Rand approached the king and held out his hand. Henry laid the gleaming naked sword over his palm.
“On this blade,” Henry said, “depends not only your life, but the destiny of a kingdom.” He girded the sword to Rand’s right side, and Rand knelt before him.
“I do mean that, my friend,” Henry said. “I intend to grant you lands and a wife, and style you a baron.”
Rand’s heart raced. Jesu, a title and lands. And a wife. His heart stilled.
“The barony is Bois-Long—Longwood—on the river Somme in Picardy,” Henry said. “The lady is the Demoiselle Belliane, niece of the Duke of Burgundy. Her lands rightfully belong to England. I claim her as my subject, and have the right to order her marriage. Burgundy and I have an agreement.”
Belliane. She was yet faceless, soulless. But her name skewered Rand’s hopes like a flaming arrow.
Eagerly Henry leaned forward. “Bois-Long guards a causeway where an army can cross the Somme. I need a loyal noble stationed there if my campaign to win back my French lands is to succeed.”
Dashed dreams and disillusionment raked at Rand’s heart.
Henry said, “With your new rank come privileges, my lord, but also responsibilities.” His gaze held the fierce power of royal determination. “This alliance is my will.”
The king’s will. Nothing was more sacred, more compelling. Not even the promise Rand had made to Jussie. The ground beneath his knees felt as if it were falling away. His will rebelled at the idea of going to a hostile land, of marrying a stranger. As Rand Fitzmarc, he might have ducked the obligation. Yet as Baron of Longwood, he had no choice.
Staring hard at the king, he said heavily, “Your will be done, sire.”
The king smiled, bent low to give Rand the kiss of peace, and drew his own blade. Bringing the broad side down onto Rand’s shoulders, he said, “Rise, Enguerrand Fitzmarc, first Baron of Longwood. Be thou a knight.”
One (#u7d520697-4991-57ed-b557-ff347843aa77)
Bois-Long-sur-Somme, Picardy
March 1414
It was her wedding night.
A breeze from the river teased the flame of a cresset lamp, and the shadows in the room flickered. Having been conducted to the nuptial chamber by a host of besotted castle folk, Lianna stood listening until their bawdy chants faded.
She gathered a robe about her shoulders and went to sit in a window alcove. Absently tapping her chin with one finger, she listened to the lapping of the river Somme against the stone curtain walls. The dancing, the feasting, the salutes from Chiang’s cannons, the endless rounds of toasts to the newly wedded couple, had left her a weary but triumphant bride.
She considered the marriage her greatest victory. Not because her husband was handsome, which he was, nor because he was wealthy, which he wasn’t. Nor even because she had found the mate of her heart. Love and romance, she knew, existed only in the whimsical gesso paintings on her solar walls.
Still, triumph rang through her veins. Her marriage to Lazare Mondragon, a Frenchman, shielded her from the English noble who was on his way to wed her at the command of Henry, King of England and pretender to the throne of France. Her life hadn’t been the same since King Henry had set his sights on Bois-Long, the gateway to the kingdom of France.
She felt no regret at having defied the English usurper’s orders, no shiver of fear when she considered the consequences of her rebellion, because the sovereignty of France was at stake. Besides, a more immediate matter faced her.
A scratching sounded at the door. She jumped, then calmed herself and glided to answer it. Clutching the doorjamb, the caller sagged drunkenly into the room.
“Nom de Dieu,” Lianna said with mingled amusement and annoyance. “Look at you, Bonne.”
The maid grinned crookedly, her pretty face flushed to ripeness. “Aye, look at me, my lady.” Wine-scented breath rushed from her mouth. “Sainte Vierge! That devil Roland, he has torn my best bliaut!” Bonne indicated the gaping garment, her big breasts nearly spilling from the bodice.
Her red-rimmed eyes widened as Lianna stepped into a pool of light from the cresset lamp. “By the head of St. Denis, you’re already prepared for bed!”
“Somehow, Bonne,” Lianna said dryly, “I knew you wouldn’t be much help to me tonight.”
The maid stamped a slippered foot; the motion made her lurch. “You should have summoned me.”
“I hadn’t the heart to pull you away from...” She tapped her chin, thinking. “Whose lap ornament were you tonight? Ah yes, Roland.”
“My first duty is to you,” Bonne said, then hiccuped softly. “Roland would wait a hundred years for me, anyway,” she added matter-of-factly. “At least let me do your hair.”
Bonne drew Lianna down to a stool. With the overcautious motions of a drunk, she fetched an ivory comb and freed Lianna’s hair from its coif. “Spun by the angels, I always say,” she said, pulling the comb through the silvery curtain of straight, fine locks.
“I’d as soon have it cropped by the hand of man,” Lianna said, grimacing as the comb snared in a tangle. “Chiang nearly set my head aflame when we were testing those new charges.”
“Chiang.” Bonne spat the name. “You’re too much in the company of that odd Chinaman, my lady. I trust him not.”
“You’ve been listening to the men-at-arms,” Lianna chided. “They’re jealous because they know Chiang’s gunnery can defend Bois-Long better than their swords.”
“I know naught of defending a castle. But I do know of pleasing a man. Tonight you’ll play the lady instead of dabbling in warfare like a soldier. Perhaps a woman’s pleasures will turn you from a man’s pursuits.”
Lianna sat still as Bonne unstopped a bottle of fragrant oil and anointed her, secreting the scent of lilies at her nape and temples, between her breasts and at the backs of her knees. Despite her drunken state, the maid’s hand was steady as she imbued Lianna’s lips and cheeks with a discreet mist of rouge.
Bonne stepped back and gasped in admiration. “By St. Wilgefort’s beard!” She took up a polished-steel mirror and angled it toward Lianna. “You look like a princess.”
Lianna frowned at her image. The pale robe fluttered against her willow-slim form; her hair hung in drifts around her oval-shaped face. Her customary look of arrogance, worn to hide the intrepid dreamer deep inside, made her delicate features seem hard tonight, hard and bloodless.
“How can you scowl at being so favored?” Bonne demanded.
Lianna shrugged and eyed her maid’s ripe bosom and bold smile. “In sooth, Bonne, you have the looks that turn heads. Besides, an agreeable face doesn’t win a kingdom, nor does it endure.”
“Happily for you, your beauty has endured into your twenty-first year, my lady. You look far younger. I was beginning to think your uncle the duke would have to drive you to the altar at sword point. Think you he’ll approve of your Lazare?”
Lianna swallowed. “My uncle of Burgundy will send his spurs spinning into oblivion when he learns what I’ve done.”
“Aye, I’ve always thought he wanted better for you.”
Privately Lianna agreed. She’d often wondered why Uncle Jean had never pressed her to wed, but was too content in her spinsterhood to question him. Now King Henry had forced her out of that comfortable state.
A burst of noise from the hall drifted in through the window, along with a breeze tinged by the smell of the river and the lingering acrid odor of Chiang’s fireworks. Bonne put away the mirror. “I’d best leave you to your husband. My lady...you must be biddable and patient with him....”
Flushing, Lianna raised a hand to forestall her maid. “Don’t worry, Bonne.” Women’s talk made her ill at ease; she had no interest in secrets whispered behind a damsel’s hand. She propelled Bonne toward the door. “I daresay I’ll survive my wedding night. Go and find your Roland.”
The girl swayed down the narrow spiral of stairs.
Lianna returned to her solar to ponder that mysterious, much-lauded act that would solidify her marriage to Lazare Mondragon. With a stab of loss, she thought of her mother, long dead of drowning. Dame Irène might have guided her this night, might have prepared her to receive her husband.
Glancing at the gesso mural, Lianna watched the firelight flicker over a detail of a young woman reading to a child from a psalter. Again Lianna searched her memory for her mother but found only a whisper of rose-sweet fragrance, the ghost of a cool hand against her brow, the soft tones of a female voice. She might have told stories to me, Lianna mused.
Shaking her head, she tossed aside the useless sentiment. She had no place in her life for pretty stories and games. Fate had left her to learn on her own, to approach every task with calculated logic.
She faced marriage in the same dispassionate manner. When the English king’s envoy had arrived three weeks earlier ordering her to marry a baron who styled himself Enguerrand of Longwood, she’d begun a swift, methodical search for an eligible Frenchman who didn’t fear her powerful uncle. In Lazare Mondragon, she’d found him. Sufficiently needy to be dazzled by her dowry, and sufficiently greedy to flout the duke, Lazare had proved instantly agreeable. The castle chaplain—aging, senile—hadn’t insisted on a lengthy reading of banns.
The door swung open. With stiff movements Lianna inclined her shining head. “Mon sire.”
Lazare Mondragon stepped inside. He was resplendent in his wedding costume, from the velvet capuchon on his graying head to his narrow pointed shoes. The shimmering cresset flame lit his handsome features—a strong nose, angular chin, and dark, deep-set eyes. Taking Lianna’s hand, he brushed it with dry lips.
The brief contact ignited a flicker of trepidation in her. She snuffed it quickly and said, “Is all well in the hall?”
“My son Gervais and his wife have won the hearts of the castle folk, Gervais with his bold tales and Macée with her pretty singing.” Lazare’s voice rang with fatherly pride.
She studied his lined face. The shadowy eyes looked world-weary, the eyes of a stranger she’d met only six days before. He lacked the eagerness of a new bridegroom. She pushed aside the notion. Of course he wouldn’t look eager. Lazare was a widower, her senior by twenty-five years. But he was French, and that was enough for Lianna.
She poured wine into a mazer and handed it to him.
“Thank you, Belliane,” he said absently.
“Please, Lazare, I do go by my familiar name.”
“Of course. Lianna.”
Smiling, she filled another cup and lifted it. “A toast, to the deliverance of Bois-Long from English hands.”
A frown corrupted the smoothness of Lazare’s brow. “That’s what you wanted all along, isn’t it, Lianna?”
The bitterness of his tone sparked a flash of understanding in her. Crossing to his side, she laid her hand on his arm. “I never pretended otherwise.”
He shook her off and turned away. “I was quite cheaply bought, was I not?”
“We were two people in need, you and I. That our marriage answered those needs is no cause for shame.” She faced the window and looked out at the beloved, moonlit water meadows surrounding Bois-Long. “We can be well content here, Lazare, united against the English.”
He drank deeply of his wine. “Longwood could arrive any day now, expecting a bride. What will he do when he finds you’ve already wed?”
“Pah! He’ll turn his cowardly tail back to England.”
“What if he challenges us?”
“He’s probably old and feeble. I have no fear of him.”
“You’re not afraid of anything, are you, Lianna?” It was more an accusation than a tribute.
Nom de Dieu, he did not know her at all. Soon enough, no doubt, some loose-tongued castle varlet would tell him of her soul-shattering terror of the water, that childhood nightmare that plagued her yet as an adult.
“I fear some things. But I won’t waste the sentiment on this Baron of Longwood.” With distaste she recalled his flowery missive, scented with roses and sealed with a leopard rampant device. “In fact, I look forward to sending him on his way.” She touched her chin. “I’ve been thinking of saluting him with Chiang’s new culverin, the one on the pivoting gun carriage....”
“It’s all a damned game to you, isn’t it?” Lazare burst out, his eyes flaring. “We court the disfavor of the two most powerful men in all Christendom, yet you talk of cannon charges and fireworks.”
Although dismayed by Lazare’s mood, Lianna bit back a retort. “Then let’s talk of other things,” she said. “It is our wedding night, mon mari.”
“I’ve not forgotten,” he muttered, and poured himself another draught of wine.
She almost smiled at the irony of the situation. Wasn’t it the bride who was supposed to be nervous? And yet, while she faced her duty matter-of-factly, Lazare seemed distracted, hesitant.
“We’ve bound our lives before God,” she said. “Now we must solidify the vow.” Dousing a sizzle of apprehension, she went to the heavily draped bed and shrugged out of her robe. Naked, she slipped between the herb-scented linens and leaned back against the figured oak headboard.
Lazare approached, drew back the drapes, uttered a soft curse, and said, “You’re a beautiful young woman.”
Her brow puckered; the statement was not tendered as a compliment.
Cursing again, he jerked the coverlet up to her neck. “It’s time we understood each other, Lianna. I’ll be your husband in name only.”
The sting of rejection buried itself in her heart. Ten years without a father, seventeen without a mother, had left scars she’d hoped her marriage would heal. “But I thought— Is it King Henry or my uncle? Are you so afraid of them?”
“No. That has nothing to do with it.”
“Then do you find me lacking?”
“No! Lianna, leave off your questioning. The fault doesn’t lie with you.” Lazare’s eyes raked her shrouded form. “You are magnificent, with your hair of silk and sweet, soft skin of cream. Were I a poet, I’d write a song solely on the beauty of your silver eyes.”
The tribute stunned and confused her. He laid his hand, dry and cool, upon her cheek. “You’ve the face of a madonna, the body of a goddess. Any man would move mountains to possess you!”
The stillness between them drew on. A faint crackle from the fire and the hiss of the ever-shifting river pervaded the chamber.
Lazare jerked back his hand. “Any man...” He laughed harshly. “Except me. One of the wenches downstairs will have to do as a receptacle for the unslaked lust you inspire.”
Lianna shivered. “Lazare, I don’t understand.”
He leaned against a bedpost. “This marriage is one of mutual convenience. No children must come of our union.”
“Bois-Long needs an heir,” she said softly. And in her heart she needed a child. Desperately.
“Bois-Long has an heir,” said Lazare. “My son, Gervais.”
A cold hand took hold of her heart and squeezed. “You can’t do this to me,” she said, clutching the sheets against her as she sat forward in anger. “The château is my ancestral home, defended by my father, Aimery the Warrior, and his kinsmen before him. I won’t allow your son to usurp—”
“You have no choice now, Lianna.” Lazare smiled. “You thought yourself so clever, marrying in defiance of King Henry’s wishes. But you overlooked one matter. I am not a pawn in your ploy for power. I’m a man with a mind of my own and a son who deserves better than I’ve given him. My life ended when my first wife died, but Gervais’s is just beginning.”
“My uncle will arrange an annulment. You and your greedy son will have nothing of Bois-Long.”
Lazare shook his head. “If you let me go, no one will stand in the way of the Englishman who is coming to marry you. Your uncle of Burgundy has been known to treat with King Henry. He may force you to accept the English god-don. Besides, you’ve no grounds for annulment. We are married in the eyes of God and France.”
“But you yourself have decreed that it is to be a chaste union!”
“So shall it be.” With a smooth movement, Lazare drew a misericorde from his baldric. Shocked by the dull glint of the pointed blade, Lianna leapt from the bed, shielding herself with the coverlet. Lazare chuckled. “Don’t worry, wife, I’ll not add murder to my offenses.” Still smiling, he pricked his palm with the knife and let a few ruby droplets of blood stain the sheet.
Lianna bit her lip. In sooth she’d never quite understood where a maid’s blood came from; it was destined to remain a mystery still.
“Now,” he said, putting away the misericorde, “it is your word against mine. And I am your lord.”
She clutched the bedclothes tighter. “You used me.”
He nodded. “Just as you used me. I’m tired, Lianna. I’ll pass the night on cushions in the wardrobe, so that no one will look askance at us. After a few days I’ll be sleeping in the lord’s chamber—alone.”
“I’ll fight you, Lazare. I won’t let Gervais have Bois-Long.”
Giving her a long, bleak stare, he left the solar. A river breeze snuffed the lamp. Lianna crept back into bed, avoiding the stain of Lazare’s blood, and lay sleepless. What manner of man was Lazare Mondragon, that he would not take his bride to wife on his wedding night? Her wedding night.
Moonlight streamed into the room, casting silvery tones on the pastoral scene painted on the wall. Beyond the woman and her children, a richly robed knight knelt before an ethereal beauty, gazing at her with a look of pure, mystical ecstasy.
An artist’s fancy, Lianna told herself angrily, turning away from the wall. An idealized picture of love. But she couldn’t suppress her disappointment. The whimsical dreamer she so carefully hid beneath her armor of aloofness had hoped to find contentment with Lazare.
Instead, she realized bitterly, the sentence of a loveless, fruitless marriage hung over her. No, she thought in sudden decision. Lazare was wrong to think she’d relinquish her castle without a fight. She wrested the wedding ring from her finger. “I am still the Demoiselle de Bois-Long,” she whispered.
* * *
The chaplain’s rapidly muttered low mass was sufficient to satisfy the consciences of the castle folk who attended the morning service. Grateful for the brevity, Lianna sped to the great hall.
After nudging a lazy alaunt hound out the door, she stopped a passing maid. “It smells like a brewery in here, Edithe. Fetch some dried bay to sweeten the rushes.”
The maid bustled off, and Lianna crossed to the large central hearth, where Guy, her seneschal, stood over a scullion who was cleaning out the grate. Guy, a gentle giant of a man, ruffled the lad’s hair and chuckled at some joke. Both came to grave attention as Lianna approached.
Once, she thought, just once I wish they’d share their mirth with me. But her aloofness, cultivated to augment the authority she so feared to lose, did not invite intimacy. “Are the stores in the kitchen adequate?” she asked Guy.
He nodded. “We’ve yet a side of beef, and fresh eels, too. Wine’s a bit diminished after last night, but it’ll suffice.”
“Are the stables cleaned and stocked?”
Another nod.
She took a deep breath. “Gervais and his wife?” Her tongue thickened over the name of Lazare’s son. Did he know of his father’s plan?
Guy’s face was expressionless. “Stumbled abed not an hour ago, my lady.”
Fine, she thought. Gervais would have no part in running the castle. “My...husband?” She faltered over the word.
“Out riding the fields with the reeve, my lady.”
He would be, she thought darkly. Inspecting his new acquisitions, no doubt. Stifling a feeling of despair, she turned and spied Edithe returning. The maid dropped a handful of bay leaves onto a fresh bundle of rushes. “Nom de Dieu,” Lianna snapped, “they must be spread out, like so.” She took a twig broom from the girl and scattered the leaves.
Sulkily Edithe took the broom and set to sweeping. Spying the scullion staggering beneath a bucket of ashes from the grate, Lianna hastened to propel him out the door before he spilled his burden on the new rushes. He made it as far as the stone steps; then the ashes fell in a gray heap. A stiff breeze blew them back in again. Catching Lianna’s look, Edithe hurried over to ply her broom.
Lianna leaned her head against the figured stone of the doorway and sighed, thinking again of her mother. It was said that Dame Irène, singularly unattractive but beloved by her handsome husband, had been a gifted chatelaine. Guy, who was old enough to remember her, often said Irène’s success stemmed from the devotion her sweet nature inspired in the castle folk.
Lianna knew she possessed no such endearing quality. She directed every task with immutable logic, her manner distant yet implacable. Her thoroughness amazed the devoted members of the château staff and dismayed those who tried to shirk their duties. Yet no one, perhaps not even Chiang, understood that beneath her cool mien lived a lonely soul who did not know how to spark warmth in others.
* * *
Troubled by Lazare’s duplicity and seeking answers for her dilemma, Lianna rode out alone that morning. She crossed the causeway that spanned the Somme, then paused to look back at the château. The quiet impregnability of the stone keep, stout curtain walls, and limewashed towers comforted her. A month ago she had no adversary save droughts and hard freezes that threatened her crops. Now she had enemies within, enemies without.
She vowed to contend with each. Never would she let the castle fall to Lazare’s son. Nor would she allow Longwood’s leopard standard to supplant the golden trefoil lilies that now waved over the ramparts of Bois-Long.
As she nudged her horse into the long stretch of woods leading to the sea, the restful harmony of the landscape enveloped her. She found solace in the reflection of cottony clouds in the river, the calm strength of ancient beeches, the deep peace of cows udder deep in grass.
She did not stop until she reached the sheer, windswept cliffs overlooking the roaring Norman sea. Her fear of water held something of a horrifying fascination; simply looking at the churning swells made her tremble. Dismounting, she approached the lip of a cliff. Her palms grew damp; her breath came in curiously exhilarating shallow gasps. She sat on the promontory, hugging her knees to her chest, watching the white spray as it battered the rocks. Behind her reared a cleft of dark gray shale where she and Chiang mined sulfur for their gunpowder.
Yesterday morn, at her nuptial mass, she’d listened to the recitation of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin and dreamed of the children Lazare would give her. Children to bring to this beautiful, wind-worn place, to share the dreams she’d never dared reveal.
No children must come of our union. Lazare’s sentence rang like a death knell in her head. Lianna had never felt so alone. She buried her face in her arms and anointed her sleeves with hot, bitter tears.
The ship appeared while she wept. It was suddenly there when she looked up, a beautiful four-masted cog bounding over undulating swells. Sails painted with whimsical dragons and writhing serpents puffed like the breasts of great, colorful birds over the hull. Shields emblazoned with a leopard rampant flanked the ship’s sides.
She recognized the device from Longwood’s letter and King Henry’s written order. Her heart catapulted to her throat.
The English baron had arrived.
Two (#u7d520697-4991-57ed-b557-ff347843aa77)
From the deck of the Toison d’Or, Rand studied the Norman coastline. Squinting through a dazzle of sunlight against the chalky cliffs, he watched a pale rider mount a horse and gallop toward two dark gray clefts of rock. In moments the lithe horseman was gone, like a fleeting silver shadow.
Unhappy that his arrival had sparked immediate fear, he moved down the decks. Eu, the town where he planned to land, huddled against the tall cliffs. Denuded orchards and burnt fields, remnants of turmoil, lay about the village. France was a hostile, war-torn land, plundered by its own knights and the chevauchées of the English. Atrocities committed by the nobility had schooled mistrust into the plain folk of France. Rand resolved that when he took his place at Bois-Long, he would prove himself different from those greedy noblemen.
A swarm of tanned and wiry sailors climbed barefoot up the rigging to reef the sails for landing. The chains of the anchor ground as a seaman studied his knotted rope and called out the depth. Horses in the hold stamped and whinnied. The winds and weather had been relentlessly favorable, shortening the voyage from Southampton to a mere three days.
Rand was in no hurry to reach his objective, despite King Henry’s impatience to secure a path into the heart of France.
A moan sounded. His face a sickly pale green, Jack Cade staggered to Rand’s side. “I’ll never get seasoned to these goddamned crossings,” he grumbled. “Praise St. George I’ll be on dry land ere nightfall, upon a sound bed...and, if I be lucky, between a woman’s thighs.”
Rand laughed. “Women. You use them too carelessly.”
“And you use them not at all, my lord.”
“They are meant to be protected, revered.”
Jack belched, grimaced, and scratched his unshaven cheek. “Faith, my lord, I know not how you quell your man’s body into submission.”
“It’s all part of a knight’s discipline.”
“Remind me never to become a knight. I’ll get no comfort from golden spurs.”
Rand regarded his scutifer with affection. The droll face, the merry eyes brimming with earthy humor, marked a man whose feet were planted firmly on the ground, happily distant from the unforgiving demands of chivalry. “Little danger of that,” Rand remarked, “given your complete aversion to anything resembling high ideals and saintly devotion.”
“Goddamned right,” Jack said, and leaned over the side to heave. The bright, mocking laughter of a sailor drifted across the deck. Turning with elaborate casualness, Jack dropped his breeches and presented his backside to the seaman. A chorus of whistles and catcalls arose.
“You’ll not catch a fish on that shrunken worm,” remarked a seaman.
Jack hitched up his breeches and thumbed his nose.
Grinning and shaking his head, Rand looked again at the coast rearing ahead of the bounding ship. He’d crossed the Narrow Sea numerous times, under the colors of the Duke of Clarence, and usually he felt a surge of anticipation at the sight. This time he came in peace yet felt only dread, like a hollow chamber in his heart. His arrival heralded the end of the dreams he’d shared with Jussie, changed the path his life would have taken. That it also heralded the beginning of King Henry’s grand scheme gave him little enough comfort.
“My lord,” said Jack, “you’ve been too silent these days past. Are we not boon companions? Tell me what troubles that too pretty head of yours.”
His hands gripping the rail, Rand asked, “Why me? Why did the king choose me to defend this French territory?”
A grin split Jack’s pale face, and the wind ruffled his shock of red hair. “To reward you for exposing the Lollard plot at Eltham. And Burgundy’s envoys gave it out that the duke would have only the finest of men for his niece.”
Rand held silent; honor forbade him to voice his thoughts on the liberties Henry and Burgundy had taken with his life.
“You should be thankful,” said Jack. “Your new rank gives you a rich wife and her château. What had you at Arundel save a meager virgate to plow and a burden of boonwork to the earl?”
Rand looked at him sharply, felt a rattle of longing in his chest. “I had much more than that.”
The corners of Jack’s mouth pulled downward. “Your Justine. How did she take the news of your betrothal?”
Rand stared at the white breakers exploding against the cliffs. The seascape gave way to Jussie, sweet as cream and biddable as a lamb. As children they’d raced laughing through the ripening wheat that clothed the gentle landscape of Sussex. As youths they’d shared shy kisses, whispered promises. She’d listened to his songs and his dreams; he’d watched her clever fingers at their carding and spinning. He thought he loved her; at least he felt an affection and concern deep enough to control his manly urges and remain loyal. He’d wanted to plight his troth to her years before but couldn’t subject Jussie to the uncertain existence of a horse soldier’s wife.
Now it was too late. His grip tightened on the rail. Justine had taken the news with surprising aplomb. “’Tis fitting,” she’d said simply. “Your father was of noble blood, and French.” At first her response had confused him. Where was her outrage, her weeping, her defiance? She had merely bade him adieu and pledged herself as a novice at a convent.
Rand attributed the gentle reaction to her serene inner strength and admired her all the more for it. When he turned to answer Jack’s query, hopeless longing creased his fine-featured face. “Justine understood,” he said quietly.
“Perhaps it’s for the best. I always thought you two a mismatched pair.”
Rand glared.
“I’m only saying that you’re very different, as different as a hawk from a songbird. Justine is passing sweet and retiring, while you are a man of action.”
“She was good for me,” Rand insisted.
Jack raised a canny eyebrow. “Was she? Hah! Other than keeping you to your inhuman vow of chastity, she had no real power over you, offered you no challenge.”
“Had anyone save you made that observation, Jack, his face would have swiftly met with my fist.”
Jack brandished his maimed hand. Three fingers had been severed to stumps. “You’re ever so tolerant of a cripple.”
Rand clasped that hand, that archer’s hand that had been ruined by a vindictive French knight so Jack might never draw his longbow again. “Soon we will both live in this hostile place.”
“Think you the woman will prove hostile?”
“I don’t know. But she’s twenty-one years old. Why has she never married?”
“You don’t want to think about that,” said Jack. He extracted his hand and spat into the sea. “You’re determined not to like her, aren’t you, my lord?”
“How can I, when she stands between Jussie and me?”
Jack shook his russet head. “You know better than that. ’Twas the king’s edict that took you away from Justine.”
“I know.” Rand let out his breath in a frustrated burst of air. Ever loyal, he said, “I cannot fault Henry. Longwood is vital to him. He’s trying to secure it peaceably, and this is the best way he knows.” Rand tried to fill his empty heart with a feeling of high purpose, of destiny. It felt cold, like a draught of bitter ale after a cup of warm mead. “I suppose winning back the French Crown is larger than one man’s desires.”
* * *
Presently the Toison d’Or dropped anchor in the small, quiet harbor of Eu. Wedged between the granite cliffs, the town seemed deserted. Disembarking with his contingent of eight men-at-arms, his squire, Simon, the priest Batsford, and numerous horses and longbows, Rand recalled the ruined fields he’d observed. His shoulders tensed with wariness.
“Goddamned town’s empty,” said Jack. “I like it not.”
Their footsteps crunched over shells and pebbles littering the road, and the wind keened a wasting melody between the shuttered stone-and-thatch cottages.
His sword slapping against his side, Rand approached a large, lopsided building. Above the door, a crude sign bearing a sheaf of wheat flapped creakily. A faint mewing sound slipped through the wail of the wind. Rand looked down. A skinny black-and-white kitten crouched behind an upended barrel. Unthinking, he scooped it up. As starved for contact as for food, the kitten burrowed into his broad palm and set to purring.
“I puke my way across the Narrow Sea and for what?” Jack grumbled. “A goddamned cat.”
“Easy, Jack,” Rand said. “Maybe she’ll let you sleep with her.” The men chuckled but continued darting cautious glances here and there as if half-afraid of what they might see.
Rand shouldered open the door to the inn. Afternoon light stole weakly through two parchment-paned windows, touching a jumble of overturned stools, tables, and broken crockery. The central grate was cold, the burnt logs lying like gray-white ghosts, ready to crumble at the slightest breath.
Absently Rand stroked the kitten. “The town’s been hit by brigands. Lamb of God, the French prey upon their own.”
“And leave us naught,” Jack said, scowling at an empty wall cupboard. The other men entered the taproom. Jack looked at Rand. “Now what, my lord?”
A chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling and landed squarely on Jack’s head. He choked and cursed through a cloud of dust.
Rand’s eyes traveled the length of the ceiling. In one corner a small opening was covered with planks. “There’s someone in the loft,” he said. Ducking beneath beams too low to accommodate his height, he knocked lightly on the planks.
“We come in peace,” he said in French. “Show yourselves. We’ll not harm you.”
He heard shuffling, and more plaster fell. The planks shifted. Rand saw first a great hook of a nose, then a thin face sculpted by sea winds, its high brow age-spotted and crowned with a sprinkling of colorless hair. Sharp eyes blinked at Rand.
“Are you an Englishman?”
Rand rubbed absently behind the kitten’s scraggly ears. “I am a friend. Come down, sir.”
The face disappeared. A muffled conversation ensued above. An argument, by the sound of it, punctuated by female voices and the occasional whine of a child. Presently a rough ladder emerged from the opening. The old man descended.
“I am Lajoye, keeper of the Sheaf of Wheat.”
“I am Enguerrand Fitzmarc,” said Rand. “Baron of Bois-Long.” Yet unused to his new title, he spoke with some embarrassment.
“Bois-Long?” Lajoye scratched his grizzled head. “I did not know it to be an English holding.”
“All Picardy belongs to the English, but a few thickheads in Paris refuse to admit it.”
Lajoye glanced distrustfully at the men standing in his taproom. “You do not come to make chevauchée?”
“No. I’ve cautioned my men strictly against plundering. I come to claim a bride, sir.”
Interest lit the old pale eyes. “Ça alors,” he said. “Burgundy’s niece, the Demoiselle de Bois-Long?”
Rand handed him a stack of silver coins. “I’d like to bide here, sir, while I send word to her and await her reply.”
Lajoye turned toward the loft and rasped an order. One by one the people emerged: Lajoye’s plump wife, two sons of an age with Rand, and six children. More noises issued from the loft.
“The others, sir?” Rand said.
Lajoye glared at the men-at-arms, who were shuffling about impatiently. Instantly Rand understood the old man’s concern. “The first of my men to lay a hand on an unwilling woman,” he said, touching the jeweled pommel of his sword, “will lose that hand to my blade.”
Lajoye stared at him for a long, measuring moment, then flicked his eyes to Robert Batsford, the priest. Although he preferred hefting a longbow to lifting the Host, Batsford also had an uncanny talent for affecting an attitude of saintly piety. “You may take His Lordship at his word,” he said, his moon-shaped face solemn, his round-toned voice sincere.
Apparently satisfied, Lajoye called out, and the women appeared. Children dove for the skirts of the first two; the second two, their hair unbound in maidenly fashion, stood back, fearfully eyeing Rand and his soldiers.
Lamb of God, Rand thought, they must live like rats scuttling in fear of their own kind. Eager to show his good faith, he turned to his men. “Set the room to rights, send for the ship’s stores, and arm yourselves.” He handed the black-and-white kitten to a little girl. “We’ll ride out after the brigands. Perhaps we can recover some of the plunder.”
As the men set about their tasks, Lajoye eyed Rand with new respect. “Your name would be blessed if you could return the pyx those devils stole from our chapel.”
“I’ll try, Lajoye.” Rand moved out into the dooryard, where Simon was saddling his horse.
Lajoye followed. With a gnarled hand he stroked the high-arched neck of the percheron. “So, you lay claim to Bois-Long.”
Rand nodded. “Do you object to my claim?”
Lajoye heaved a dusty sigh. “As a Frenchman, I suppose I should. But as an innkeeper seeking a peaceful existence, I care not, so long as you keep your word on forbidding plunder.” He spat on the ground. “The French knights, they ravage our land, rape our women.”
Rand tensed. “Would the brigands attack Bois-Long?”
“No, the château is too well fortified. Have you never seen it, my lord?”
Rand shook his head.
“The first keep of Bois-Long was built by the Lionheart himself. Your sons will be wealthy.”
Rand furrowed his fingers through his golden hair. “As will this district, if I have my way. Do you know the demoiselle?”
“I’ve never met the lady, but I once saw her mother at Michaelmas time, years ago.”
“What was she like?” Rand asked.
Lajoye shook his head. “What can I say of the sister of Jean Sans Peur?” He grinned impishly. “Her face would better suit a horse—and not necessarily its front end. Like her brother, she wasn’t favored by beauty.”
Rand tried to laugh at the jest. “Pray God she wasn’t like Burgundy in character, either,” he said under his breath, thinking of the dark deeds credited to the ruthless duke.
“The father of your intended, the Sire de Bois-Long, was a fine man by all reports, and handsome as a prince. Perhaps ’tis he, Aimery the Warrior, the daughter favors.”
As he rode out in pursuit of the brigands, Rand clung to the possibility Lajoye had planted in his mind. God, let her be handsome and fine like her father.
Thrusting aside the thought, he moved restlessly in the saddle and waved two of his men toward the south. The hoofmarks on the forest floor were scattered; doubtless the brigands had separated. Rand didn’t mind riding alone. The events of the past few weeks had given him a restless energy, a coiled strength. He’d gladly unleash that power on brigands who robbed old men, widows, and orphans.
As he rode beneath the grayish branches of poplars, he noticed a carved stone marker in the weeds. A single stylized flower—the fleur-de-lis—rose above a wavy pattern. With a jolt, he recognized the device of Bois-Long. Burningly curious, he tethered his horse and approached on foot.
Skirting a cluster of half-timbered peasants’ dwellings and farm buildings, he walked toward the river until the twin stone towers of the castle barbican reared before him.
He stifled a gasp of admiration. Thick walls, crowned by finials, encompassed a keep of solid beauty, with slender round towers and tall windows, a cruciform chapel, an iron-toothed portcullis beneath the barbican.
Stone creatures of whimsy glared from the gunports, griffins and gorgons’ heads defying all comers to breach the walls they guarded. Like an islet formed by man, the château sat surrounded by water. The deep river coursed in front, while a moat curved around the back, which faced north. A long causeway—the structure Henry so coveted—spanned the Somme.
This is my home, thought Rand. King Henry has given me this; I need only be bold enough to take it. But not yet, he cautioned himself, moving back toward the woods. There is carelessness in haste.
He passed brakes of willows, stands of twisted oaks, and his thoughts drifted back to his bride. Belliane, the Demoiselle de Bois-Long. The lioness in her den. Rand smiled away the notion. He had the might of England and the right of seisin behind him. How could she possibly oppose him?
* * *
Her weaponry concealed beneath a long brown cloak, Lianna slipped beneath the archway of the barbican. Jufroy, who guarded the river gate, inclined his head.
“Out for a walk, my lady?”
She paused, nodded.
“I should think you’d stay hard by your husband.”
I’d sooner stay hard by a serpent, she thought. “Lazare is out riding again with the reeve.”
“Don’t stray far, my lady. We’ve had word les écorcheurs hit a coastal village yesterday.”
Lianna intended to go very far indeed, but saw no need to worry Jufroy. “Then they will be long gone. Besides, no brigands dare approach Bois-Long. Not with our new cannons on their rotating carriages. They’ll blow any intruders to Calais.”
Jufroy grunted and stared straight ahead at the causeway stretching across the river. Lianna realized she had stung the sentry’s pride by implying that the cannon, not the valor of the men-at-arms, was responsible for the impregnable status of Bois-Long. She stepped toward him. “A cannon is useless without strong men and quick minds to put it to use.”
Jufroy’s expression softened. “Have a care on your foray.”
As always, Lianna crossed the causeway without looking down. To look down was to see the dark shimmer of water between the planks, to feel the dizzy nausea of unconquerable fear. She concentrated instead on the solidity of the thick timber beneath her feet and the sound of her wooden sabots clunking against the planks.
An hour’s walk brought her to the very heart of the manor lands, far enough from the château to test her new weapon in private. The castle folk feared the cannons; surely this gun would send them shrieking. Another hour’s walk would bring her to Eu, where the Englishmen were doubtless billeting themselves among the townspeople. Lianna shivered. No need to venture there. The usurping baron would find her soon enough. She clenched her hand around the gun. She would be ready.
Pulling off her cloak and untying her apron, heavy with bags of powder and shot, she smiled. Chiang had cast the handgun for her as a wedding gift. Chiang alone understood her fascination with gunnery and, like her, believed that firepower in the right hands was the ultimate defense.
She hefted the wooden shaft and curved her fingers around the brass barrel. A bit of Chiang’s artistic whimsy, a tiny brass lily, stood over the touchhole. She ran her hand over the slim, angled rod of the gunlock, then murmured the customary blessing for a gun. “Eler Elphat Sebastian non sit Emanuel benedicite.”
Turning, she spied a plump leveret some yards distant. The rabbit, heedless of Lianna’s presence, nosed idly among a stand of sweetbriar. A live target. The perfect test for the efficacy of her gun. If Longwood proved difficult, it would behoove her to learn to use it well.
She made the sign of the cross over a small lead ball and fitted it into the barrel. Remembering Chiang’s instructions, she crumbled a cake of corned powder into the removable breech. The charge seemed too meager, so she added more, then lit a slow match of tow soaked in Peter’s salt. Fitting the smoking match into the end of the lock, she sank down on one knee and laid the shaft over her shoulder.
Blinking against the acrid smoke, she sighted down the stock at her quarry, her hand tensing. Steady, she told herself. A gun is useless in nervous hands. She closed one eye, drew a deep breath, let exactly half of it escape her, and slowly, steadily, began pressing on the lock.
“Poachers do favor the crossbow, pucelle, because it has the advantage of silence,” said a whisper-soft voice behind her.
Surprised beyond caution, Lianna let her hand clutch involuntarily around the lock. The slow match delved into the firing pan.
The ear-splitting explosion deafened her and seared her nostrils with the smell of overheated sulfur. The shaft of the gun recoiled violently, catapulting her backward against something large, warm...and breathing.
Furious at her stupidity in overloading the charge, she scrambled away on hands and knees, prepared to vent her rage on the man-at-arms who’d dared follow her from the château.
She turned.
He smiled.
The impact of her gape-mouthed surprise and his devastating smile sapped her will to rise. Bracing her hands behind her, she stared upward, her astonished gaze traveling a seemingly endless length of broad, blond man.
He picked up the gun, set it aside, and spoke. She couldn’t hear him for the ringing in her ears. Her first thought, if something so absurd could be termed a thought, was that she’d happened upon a mythical Norse deity, a golden forest divinity returned from days of old. For surely a body of such massive power, a face of such sheer beauty, could not possibly be human.
The vision extended a big, squarish hand. Lianna shrank back, afraid that if she touched him, he’d shimmer away like a will-o’-the-wisp from the marshes. His lips were moving; still she could not hear. He cocked his head to one side, his expression mild, quizzical, and perhaps a little amused.
This was no vengeful warrior god from the North, but a more forgiving creature. An angel, perhaps...no, an archangel, for surely only one of the very highest rank could be favored with that clean, powerful bone structure, the chaste innocence that imbued his beautiful smiling mouth and eyes with such heavenly character.
His eyes were not simply green, she noted wildly, but the pure color of a new leaf shot through by sunlight. In their depths she perceived the pain and devotion of the saints in the colored windows of a chapel.
He spoke again, and this time she heard: “Don’t be afraid of me.” He reached down, grasped her by the waist, and pulled her effortlessly to her feet.
In that instant she realized her reckless flight of fantasy for what it was. His hold was firm, his voice a rich velvet ripple over her scattered senses. It was a man’s body pressing against hers, a man’s voice caressing her ears.
Alarmed, she pulled back. “Who are you?”
He hesitated, just for the upbeat of her heart. “Rand,” he said simply. “And you, pucelle?”
She, too, hesitated. Pucelle, he called her. A maid. What would this man say if he knew he was speaking to the Demoiselle de Bois-Long? If he were a brigand, he’d consider her a valuable hostage. And if he were an Englishman... She dismissed the notion. The stranger’s French was not corrupted by the broad, flat tones of a foreigner.
Absently she tapped her chin. The novelty of anonymity intrigued her. The necessity of it, because Lazare had destroyed any trust she might have in a stranger, made her say only, “Lianna.”
“Your face is completely black, Lianna.”
Vaguely annoyed at the mixture of humor and censure dancing in his leaf-green eyes, she lifted her hand, touched her cheek, and looked at her fingertips. Black as soot. At least the concealing powder hid the hot blush pouring into her cheeks.
“I...mismeasured the charge,” she said.
“So it seems.” He took her hands and drew her down to sit on a bed of dry bracken. “I know little of such things.”
“Nom de Dieu, but I do,” she said with self-contempt. “I should have trusted the precision of science instead of my own eyes.”
“Alors, pucelle, how does one so fair possess a knowledge so deadly?”
“My...father was a gunner. He indulged my interest.”
He frowned at the blackened gun. “Then your father was a fool.”
She thrust up her chin but resisted the urge to defend her father and sink deeper into untruths.
“Hold still,” he said. “I’ll clean you off.”
She was never one to obey orders, but, unrecovered from the shock of the explosion and the surprise of meeting this mesmerizing stranger, she sat unmoving. He reached beneath his mail shirt, pulled out a small cloth bundle, and unwrapped a loaf of bread. With the cloth, he began cleansing her face. His light, gentle strokes felt soothing, but the odd intimacy of the gesture revived her anger.
“Why did you sneak up on me? You ruined my aim.”
“That,” he said, brushing her chin, “was my intent. The leveret was a doe, and nursing.”
She scowled. “How could you tell that?”
“Her shape. She was not as plump as she looked, only appeared so because her dugs were full.”
Lianna prayed he’d not yet revealed enough of her face to discern her new blush.
“You wouldn’t have wished to slay a nursing mother, would you?”
“Of course not. I just hadn’t thought of it.”
He held out the loaf to her. “Bread?”
“Thank you, no. I wasn’t hunting my dinner.”
“Blood sport, then?” he asked, mildly accusing.
“Nom de Dieu, I am not a wanton killer. I merely wished to test my gun on a moving target.”
“I doubt Mistress Rabbit would have appreciated the difference.”
She shrugged. “I probably would have missed anyway. My aim is imprecise, the weapon passing crude.”
Like a parent wiping away a child’s tear, he daubed the delicate flesh beneath her left eye. “Your eyes are silver, pucelle.”
“Gray.”
“Silver, like the underside of a cloud at dawn.”
“Gray, like the stone walls of a keep during a siege.”
“Argue not, pucelle. I’ve a sense about such things. Stone does not capture the light and reflect it, while your eyes—” he cleansed beneath her right one “—most assuredly do.”
* * *
Bit by bit, Rand uncovered the face beneath the soot. As he worked, his amazement and fascination grew like a bud warmed by the sun. He’d come to survey the area for brigands and have a glimpse of his barony. Instead he’d found a beautiful girl and a deadly weapon, two surprises and one of them curiously welcome.
Moving aside a pale lock of hair, he brushed the last of the soot from her cheeks. Black dust clung stubbornly to her brows and lashes, but at last her face was revealed to him. The cloth dropped from his fingers as he stared.
Sitting in the nest of her blue homespun surcoat, she stared back with huge, unblinking silver eyes. Her face was a delicate, pale oval shaped by fragile bones and small, fine features. Despite a lingering shadow of soot, he could discern that her skin was the ivory of a lily, with the shade of apple blossoms at her cheeks and lips. His body quickened at the sight.
An unexpected thunderbolt of awareness struck him. He desired this girl; he burned for her with a yearning Jussie had never aroused. Calling up all the strength of his vow of chastity, he resisted the idea that they were alone, unchaperoned, far from anyone else.
It was not so much her maidenly beauty that called to him, but the expressiveness in her features. Her eyes held a deep intelligence yet seemed haunted by shadows in their silver depths. Her mouth was full and firm, yet the way she worried her lower lip with her small white teeth hinted at vulnerability.
Years of celibacy faded beneath the onslaught of vivid desire. Rand laid his big hands on her cheeks, letting his thumbs skim in slow, gentle circles. “I’ve never seen a face like yours before, Lianna,” he said softly. “At least not while I was awake.”
Alarm flared in her quicksilver eyes. She drew back. “You are not from around here. You speak like a Gascon.”
He smiled. His father’s legacy. “So I am a Gascon, at least part of me is. And you are from around here. You speak like a Norman.”
“Are you a brigand? Do you burn, pillage, and rape?”
He chuckled. “Preferably not in that order. Are you a poacher?”
She stiffened. “Certainly not. I’ve every right to hunt the lands of Bois-Long.”
Suspicion shot through Rand. “You hail from Bois-Long?”
“I do.”
Sweet lamb of God, Rand mused, she’s from Longwood. He had to duck his head to hide a flash of curiosity. A gunner’s daughter, she’d said, yet she’d have to be of noble birth to hunt. Despite her homespun garb, her speech and manners marked her as no one’s servant.
“Your father was a gunner,” he said slowly. “Was he also a man of rank?”
“No.” She eyed him warily.
“You’re well spoken.”
“I am well schooled.”
“What position do you hold at Bois-Long?”
“I am...companion to the chatelaine.”
He nodded. “I see. It’s common enough for a gentlewoman to surround herself with younger girls, common for those girls to learn polite accomplishments.” One eyebrow lifted. “Gunnery is hardly a polite accomplishment.”
“But far more useful than spinning and sewing.”
“And far more dangerous. Does your mistress know of your experiments with guns?”
A small, tight smile. “Certes.”
“She approves?”
A regal nod. “Most heartily.”
Rand loosed a long, weary sigh. What manner of woman was his bride-to-be that she’d let this girl, clearly little older than a child, dabble in weaponry?
Lianna was staring hard at him. He sensed his questions had aroused her suspicions and so left off his queries. Instinctively he’d kept his identity from the girl. Now he was glad. Soon enough she’d learn he was Enguerrand Fitzmarc, the English knight come to claim the demoiselle and the château. Until then he merely wanted to be Rand to her.
“You’re trespassing,” she said matter-of-factly, pointing to a line of blazed poplars in the distance.
“So I am,” he replied, looking at the boundary of trees. He took her hand and helped her to her feet. Her hand felt small but strong and seemed to fit his own like a warm little bird in a nest.
“Come,” he said, “I want to be certain your gunshot didn’t frighten my horse all the way to Gascony.” Dropping her hand, he bent to retrieve her cloak and apron. The weight of the apron surprised him. He peered into the pocket, then stared at Lianna. “I don’t know why I expected to find winter stonecrop blossoms in here,” he said. “You’re a walking arsenal.”
She picked up her gun and stood while he tied the apron at her waist and draped the cloak about her shoulders. He let his hands linger there. “Your mistress is wrong to allow you to venture forth with a gun.” Silently he swore to stop Lianna once he took possession of the castle.
“My mistress understands the necessity of it.”
“Necessity?”
Her little wooden sabots kicked up her hem as she walked by his side. “We’ve had no peace since Edward the Third crossed the leopards of England with the lilies of France.”
What a curious mixture of innocence and worldliness she was. At once fragile, forceful, and forthright, she awakened powerful desires in him. She looked like a girl immortalized in a troubadour’s lay, yet her behavior contradicted the image. Jussie, he recalled, had never concerned herself with affairs of state.
“France is more at war with herself than with England,” he said. “King Charles is drooling mad, and the noble houses bicker like fishwives while the peasants starve.”
“And will subjecting ourselves to Henry’s usurpation improve our lot?”
“Better a sane Englishman than a mad Frenchman on the throne,” Rand said.
She stopped walking, whirled to face him. “Under whose banner will you fight? What cause do you champion?”
He swallowed, then affected a rakish grin. “Widows and orphans, of course.”
She sniffed. “A convenient reply.”
Discussing intelligent subjects with a woman, he thought, was not altogether unpleasant. “You speak ably of affairs that most men know nothing of.”
“I’m not one to hide myself away and pretend ignorance. ’Tis exactly what the English god-dons would like, and I’ll not oblige them.”
It’s not what every English god-don would like, he thought, watching the sunlight dance in the silvery mantle of her hair.
They found his horse grazing placidly on salt grass in a glade of water beeches. Nearby stood a weathered stone marker, its four arms of equal length marking it as St. Cuthbert’s cross. The horse looked up, ears pricked. His dappled flanks gleamed in the heatless light of the March sun.
Lianna stopped walking to stare at the hard-muscled percheron, then at Rand. “I think you should explain who you are,” she said. Her gaze slipped from the top of his blond head to the spurs on his mud-caked boots. “You are simply dressed, yet that horse of yours is no plowman’s rouncy.”
Inwardly he winced at the distrust in her tone. She was too straightforward to be easily deceived. “Charbu was a gift.” His hand strayed to the lump created by the amulet beneath his mail shirt. Henry had given him Charbu as one of many gifts and another thread in the web of obligation he’d woven around Rand.
Lianna set down her gun and approached the horse. “Charbu,” she said softly, stroking the handsome blazed face. “A fine, strong name. Tell me, Charbu, about your master. Does he hail from Gascony, as he claims? Does he ride you on raids with a band of écorcheurs?”
The horse whickered gently and tossed its head. Momentarily captivated by the sight of the small girl with her cheek pressed against the horse’s neck, Rand stood speechless. At length he found his voice and strode forward. “If you think me a brigand, why aren’t you fainting or screaming?”
“I never faint,” she replied smugly. “And rarely scream. And you’ve not answered me.”
“I am a...traveling knight, Lianna. I swear to you I do not ride with brigands. But I would like to ride with you. Let me take you to Bois-Long.”
“No,” she said quickly. “I think it best you stay clear of the château.”
Why? he wondered. Did the chatelaine treat trespassers harshly? God, did she mistreat Lianna? He touched a strand of her hair; it felt like spun silk. “Is Bois-Long such an inhospitable place?”
“I fear it has become so,” she replied, her eyes brimming with unspoken regret.
Rand felt a great urge to fold her against him then, to surround her with the tenderness that had been blossoming in his heart since he’d first laid eyes on her. “At least let me take you partway,” he suggested.
She balked; he persisted and, finally, prevailed. Her gun across the saddlebow, her arms clasped around his waist, she rode behind him and they talked. He learned that she often saved crumbs from her breakfast to feed a family of swallows that nested in the castle battlements. He told her that he invented songs to play on his harp. She confessed to a passion for comfits, and he admitted to holding frequent, absurd discourses with his horse.
Then she was silent for a long time. Glancing over his shoulder, Rand asked, “What are you thinking, Lianna?”
Softly, so softly he could barely hear, she said, “I’m thinking that you’ve come too late.”
The soft throb of sadness in her voice made something inside him ache. His hand stole to hers, cradling it. “Too late for what?”
She withdrew her hand. “For...nothing. It matters not.”
Although curious about her melancholy, he asked no more of her. If she yearned for a suitor, he could not be the one to court her.
Presently they came to a coppice of elm trees, and Lianna asked to dismount. Rand leapt to the ground and, grasping her at the waist, helped her down.
“Lianna?” he murmured, his voice deep and husky. He placed his fingers under her chin and raised her face to his. “Have a care for yourself, pucelle.”
“I will. And you, too, in your travels.”
Their eyes met and held for a breathless moment. Rand lifted a wisp of pale hair from her cheek and set it aside. She smiled, and her smile made everything inside him clamor with joy and fear. God, he thought, will she look at me so when she learns who I am, why I’m here?
His hands came up to frame her face, thumbs tracing the lyrical lines of her cheekbones. Slowly, like a man moving through a dream, he leaned down, drawn by a force that resisted every harsh rule that had been schooled into him. Their lips touched lightly at first, searching, tasting, and then their mouths fused into a kiss of desperate abandon. High, shattering waves of yearning crested within Rand, lifting his soul. He wanted to fill himself with this brave, winsome creature who smelled of soap and sulfur and who tasted of springtime.
His vows began to waver, but guilt bored a hole in his passion. Like it or not, he was betrothed to another woman. In kissing Lianna, he was betraying his obligation to the demoiselle and belittling his years of devotion to Jussie.
Slowly, unwillingly, he released her and drew his fingers from the shining white-blond hair that cloaked her shoulders. She wore a look of bewildered wonderment.
* * *
“I’d...best...go,” Lianna said unsteadily, feeling her every nerve vibrate with exultation. She put her fingers to her lips, to hold the taste of him there, to brand his touch on her memory. Her captivated heart wanted to beg him to come with her, but her cautious mind warned her off. Although a victim of Lazare’s treachery, she was a married woman. Trysting with this stranger was the act of an adulteress. One day, she thought hopelessly. Had I met him one day before, my life would have been different. This Gascon knight would not stray from her chamber, would not deny her an heir, a child. Quelling a surge of sorrow, she said, “I suppose you ought to get back to your travels.”
“I suppose....” He seemed as reluctant to leave as she was for him to go. “Lianna—”
The bright tones of clarions suddenly rent the air. Recognizing the distinctive blare, she froze. The familiar trills could mean only one thing: her uncle of Burgundy had arrived. Reality crashed down around her ears, ripping her mind from the fantasies she’d built around this great, golden archangel of a Frenchman.
“Who comes?” he asked, craning his neck to see the distant road.
“A...guest of rank,” she murmured, her thoughts already racing. Was the kitchen prepared to serve another feast? Was the hall presentable? A soft curse dropped from her lips.
“Did your father the gunner teach you to swear, too?” asked Rand.
She flashed him a smile. “I learned that on my own.” Her grin faded. Burgundy was coming to see her, and she was covered with soot and reeking of gunpowder.
“I must make haste,” she said. She pulled her hand from his, grabbed her gun from the saddlebow, and sprinted toward the château.
“Wait!”
“I cannot tarry,” she called back.
“When will I see you again?” he asked.
“I...we can’t...I shouldn’t...” Torn by indecision, she slowed her pace and turned, walking backward. She had too much to explain, and too little time.
“But I must see you again.”
The urgent, compelling note in his voice brought her to a complete halt. She stared at him, a sun-spangled vision surrounded by blue sky and budding trees, and her heart turned over in her chest. His eyes shone with a deep, inner light that she knew would haunt her for the rest of her days. He looked as if his very life depended on her answer.
“Meet me,” he said, “at the place of Cuthbert’s cross....”
The clarions blared again, startling her anew and driving a hot arrow of hopelessness into her heart. “Nom de Dieu, why?” she asked raggedly.
His face opened into that magical, mesmerizing smile. “Because,” he shouted, “I think I love you!”
Three (#u7d520697-4991-57ed-b557-ff347843aa77)
Her mind reeling with apprehension at her uncle’s sudden arrival, and her heart snared by Rand’s parting words, Lianna raced over the causeway and bounded into the bailey.
Don’t let him see me, she prayed silently. Please, Lord, not until I make myself presentable. She skirted the band of ducal retainers, ducked beneath the flapping standard of a blood-red St. Anthony’s cross, and headed for the keep. A flock of chickens wandered into her path, panicking as they tangled in her skirts. Shrieking, the chickens scattered, winging up dust eddies and leaving Lianna on her knees.
A vivid oath burst from her as she blinked against the dust. When her vision cleared, she found herself staring up at the unfaltering blue eyes, stark face, and uncompromising figure of her uncle. A wide-cut, squirrel-trimmed sleeve gaped before her as he extended his hand and helped her up.
“You stink of sulfur.”
She blushed. A ripple of mirth emanated from the retainers. Burgundy silenced them with a single powerful scowl.
Abashed, she indicated her gun. “I was out shooting.”
He rolled his eyes heavenward, took a deep breath, and said, “Five minutes, Belliane. You have five minutes to present yourself to me in the hall—as a lady, if you please, not some ragged hoyden from the marshes.”
She dipped her head in a submissive nod. “Yes, Your Grace,” she murmured, and fled to her solar.
Exactly four minutes later, clad in her best gown of royal blue, her head capped and veiled in silvery gauze, Lianna careened down the stairs toward the hall. Bonne had doused her with a generous splash of rosewater and had scrubbed the last traces of gunpowder from her face. Lianna glanced down at the heavy velvet swishing around her slippered feet. The anonymous pucelle who had enchanted Rand was no more. She longed to fold his image into her heart, to cherish in private his avowal of love. But her uncle was waiting.
Nearing the hall, she slowed her pace, lifted her chin, and glided in to confront the most powerful man in France.
Styled Jean Sans Peur—the Fearless—by friend and foe alike, he kept a stranglehold grip on the political pulse of the kingdom. A ruthless man, Burgundy possessed stone-cold ambition and a penchant for intrigue and deeds done in secret. Men lived at his sufferance and sometimes died at his command.
Yet when Lianna greeted him, looked into his blue eyes, she saw only affection. Pressing her cheek to his chest, she felt the chain mail he always wore beneath his ducal raiments. But the hand he lifted to stir a lock of her hair was gentle. Burgundy’s cold, suspicious heart housed a small, warm corner for his orphaned niece.
“Better, p’tite,” he said. “Much better. You’re lovely.”
She nodded to acknowledge the compliment, although she would have preferred that he notice the new gun emplacements she and Chiang had worked so hard to build. “Come warm yourself by the fire.” She took his wind-chilled hand.
But Burgundy gestured toward the passage at the back of the hall. “I would speak to you in private, niece.”
She preceded him into the privy apartment, waited until he sat, then perched nervously on the edge of a stool.
His eyes full of dark fires, Burgundy looked at her for a long, measuring moment. He sucked a deep breath through his nostrils. “Your disobedience would not hurt so much,” he said quietly, “did I not love you so, Belliane.”
An unexpected lump rose in her throat. “I had no choice. King Henry would have made an English bastion of Bois-Long.”
“Better an English bastion than a French ruin. Where is this husband of yours?”
“Out riding with the reeve.”
“I know Lazare Mondragon,” Burgundy said, his mouth twisting with distaste. “He came begging favors some years ago. I turned him away.” Stroking a long-fingered hand over his Siberian squirrel collar, he added, “They say Mondragon loved his first wife to distraction, nearly grieved unto death when she died. Think you he will hold you in such esteem?”
“I do not need his esteem, only his name in marriage.”
Burgundy sighed. “You could have had better, p’tite.
“Ah, for certes I did.” Frustration shadowed his face. “By marrying Mondragon, you’ve cheated yourself out of a brilliant alliance.”
Unbidden laughter burst from her. “What mean you, Uncle?”
“I speak in earnest,” he said harshly. “By my faith, Belliane, I was saving you for an English noble.”
Shock rocketed through her, then gave way to harsh understanding. So that was why King Henry had meddled with her life.
Bleakly she realized that she was her uncle’s pawn after all, a minor chess piece in his political game. An alliance with England would bring Burgundy’s power to a zenith, enable him to vanquish his hated enemy, Count Bernard of Armagnac, who now controlled the mad French king.
Recoiling from the idea, she took a gulp of air. “My allegiance begins and ends with Bois-Long and France. The promise of winning a title cannot lure me from it.”
“You should not have acted without my consent, Belliane.”
She could not meet his eyes, because he would see her distrust, her belief that his love for her was less compelling than his affinity for intrigue. “Uncle, your wardship over me ended when I reached my majority December last. I was free to contract for my own marriage, free to flout Henry’s directive.”
“You speak treason, my lady.”
“He is not my sovereign!”
“Yet he has styled himself so, claiming the lands won by his grandsire, Edward the Third. Henry will enforce that claim with military might. An alliance with him would be prudent at this time.” The duke’s face pinched into an expression known to strike terror into the hearts of royal princes. But Lianna didn’t flinch as she raised her head.
They sat facing each other, eyes locked. Then Burgundy’s expression changed to grudging admiration. “Would that more Frenchmen had your attitude,” he mused. “We’d never be under Henry’s thumb in the first place.” He strode to the hearth, stood before the blaze. Firelight carved hollows in his cheeks, and worry pleated his brow. Sudden tenderness touched Lianna. Her uncle held a difficult position. Caught up in the madness and dissension between the princes royal of France, Jean had spoken for the common people in the Royal Council, made enemies of the nobles. Now, banished from Paris and opposed by the Armagnacs, he had apparently thrown in his lot with the English.
“Young Henry means to regain the throne of France,” said Jean. “He’s a man driven, at least in his own mind, by divine inspiration. His ambition knows no scruples. Not a man to defy heedlessly.”
“That may well be, Your Grace. But I will not cede Bois-Long to him. I’d be doing my king and my countrymen a great disservice if I were to relinquish the ford to Henry’s army.”
“Your countrymen!” the duke spat. “Who are they, but a lot of quarreling children switching allegiance as capriciously as the winds over the Narrow Sea? France needs a strong guiding hand. Henry—”
“Is another English pretender,” Lianna snapped.
Burgundy sighed. “You may think you’ve thwarted him. Perhaps you have, for the time being. But Harry of Monmouth is too much like you for my comfort. He’s willful, intelligent, energetic.” Burgundy returned to his chair and sat in pensive silence. At length he asked, “What know you of Longwood?”
“Only what I could read between the lines of his overblown missive. This Longwood is un horzain—an outsider, an upstart bastard,” she stated. “His title is barely a month old. And he is a traitor like his father, Marc de Beaumanoir.”
“Beaumanoir was no traitor, Lianna. He simply hadn’t the means to buy his ransom from Arundel.”
“Traitor or not, his bastard will never have Bois-Long.”
Burgundy shook his head. “Parbleu, but you are an exasperating brat. You constantly meddle in male affairs.”
“Only those that concern me and my people, Uncle.” Seeing his face darken, she crossed to his side and took his hand. A cold tongue of apprehension touched the base of her spine. In the game Burgundy was playing, the stake was nothing less than the control of France. “What will you do?” she asked.
“I shall do as I see fit,” he said simply. His silence made her more nervous than any ruthless plan.
* * *
For the first time in her life, Lianna found herself too preoccupied to supervise the feast with her usual meticulous control. Ordinarily she would have chastised the servitor who brought the venison on a poorly polished plate. Her sharp eye would have noticed that the croustade Lombard, made with fruit and marrow, was placed too far from the high table, and that the pastry subtlety of the lilies of France was overdone.
Instead her mind worried her problems like a persistent itch. Burgundy seemed determined to undermine the steps she’d taken to protect Bois-Long. The Mondragons were intent on flaunting their new status. And all the while, sweet, lingering thoughts of Rand, his stunning declaration, the goodness that emanated from him, kept her heart in a state of high rapture.
Ignorant of Burgundy’s displeasure, the Mondragons feasted with delight. Lazare ordered wine casks to be unbunged and called to the minstrels’ gallery for livelier entertainment.
Gervais, darkly attractive and full of confidence, raised his cup. “To my mother,” he said, nodding congenially at Lianna. “Two years my junior, but I pray that won’t keep her from doting on me.” Laughter rippled from the lower tables.
The heat of a furious blush crept to Lianna’s cheeks. She darted a look at her uncle, who sat at her right. Only she understood the significance of Burgundy’s controlled silence, the tightness of his grip around his glass mazer. Damn Gervais, the salaud! He’d not speak so blithely did he realize how tenuous his hold on Bois-Long had become.
Artfully arranging a raven curl over her milk-white shoulder, Macée turned boldly to the duke. “Your Grace,” she said, fluttering her inky lashes, “don’t you wish for Belliane to perform for us? She has a fine hand at the harp.”
Lianna cringed inwardly. Macée had heard her play at the wedding feast and knew her art was poor. But Uncle Jean, merciful at least in this, shook his head. “I’m content to hear the minstrels, madame.”
Macée pouted. Lazare, affecting a dignified air to cover his drunkenness, clapped his hands and called for silence. “My wife will play for us,” he said.
Lianna had no choice but to comply. Lazare was asserting his husbandly control over her; if she wished to prove to Burgundy that she intended to uphold her French marriage, she must act the wife and obey.
Taking her place in front of the high table, she stroked the harp strings with her long, tapered fingers. She performed a chanson de vole that she knew to be a favorite of her uncle’s.
Her voice rang true, the notes hard and bright with unwavering clarity. Still, her style lacked the deep resonance of true artistry.
Burgundy watched her closely, seeming more interested in her somewhat dispassionate countenance than in her singing. When she finished on a clear, contralto note, he was the first to applaud. “Enchantante,” he commented.
She set aside the harp and returned to the table. She couldn’t resist whispering to Macée, “You’ll have to try harder, chère, to belittle me in the eyes of my uncle.”
Macée sent her a sizzling look. “Your art would improve did you not spend so much time in the armory, concocting gunpowder.”
The gibe hurt more than Lianna cared to admit. Of late her femininity had been called into question—by Lazare’s rejection, her uncle’s anger. Even Rand, in his kindness, had made a gentle censure of her interest in gunnery. Now Macée—fabulously beautiful, wise in ways Lianna was only beginning to suspect—challenged her.
“I’m defending the castle instead of warming a chair with my backside,” said Lianna, keeping her tone light.
Macée spoke slowly, as if to a half-wit. “The defense of the castle is men’s work.”
Lianna encompassed Lazare and Gervais with a dismissive glance. “The men in charge of Bois-Long have done little to see to its defense.” Flames of anger ignited in the eyes of both Mondragons. She stole a glance at her uncle. His mouth grew taut with suppressed merriment.
“Well spoken,” he murmured.
“But do you not think,” persisted Macée, “that a lady should have polite accomplishments? After all, if she’s to be received at court—”
A hiss of anger escaped from the duke.
“I’ll practice,” Lianna promised with sudden urgency. She prayed Macée, ignorant of Burgundy’s banishment, would speak no more of the French court. Inadvertently the foolish woman had stuck a barb in an old wound. Desperate to placate him, Lianna turned the subject. “Guy and Mère Brûlot, folk who remember my mother, say she made magic with the harp.”
The hardness left Burgundy’s eyes, as if he’d decided to let the offense pass. “Aye, my sister did sing well.”
“Perhaps there’s hope for me, then. I could send to Abbeville for a music master.”
He shook his head. “The feeling, p’tite, the passion, cannot be taught. It must come from the heart.” He glanced pointedly at Lazare, who seemed to have discovered something fascinating in the bottom of his goblet. “You have the skill. One day, perhaps, true music will come.”
She pretended to understand, because the duke wished her to. But in sooth she knew better than to suppose that passion would improve her singing. Unless... The blinding radiance of Rand’s image burned into her mind. The scene in the great hall receded, and she saw only him, her vagabond prince. The memory of his gentle touch and caressing smile filled her with a sharp, plaintive yearning that she likened to the ecstasy of an inspired poet. Nom de Dieu, could such a man teach her to sing?
* * *
“Sing the one about the cat again,” cried Michelet, tugging insistently at the hem of Rand’s tunic. The boy’s younger brothers and sisters chorused a half dozen other requests.
Rand grinned and shook his head. He set aside his harp and reached down to rumple the carroty curls of little Belle. “Later, nestlings,” he said, stooping to aim the baby’s walker away from the hearth. “I must not neglect my men.”
In the adjacent taproom, Lajoye and the soldiers discussed their forays, filling their bellies with bread and salt meat from the Toison d’Or and wine from a keg the brigands had overlooked. Some of the men vied, with lopsided grins and faltering French, for the attention of the girls.
Rand had avoided his companions since late afternoon. He was too full of unsettled emotions and half-formed decisions to act the commander. Meeting Lianna had left him as useless as an unstrung bow. One hour with her had threatened everything he’d ever believed about loving a woman. Before today, love had been a mild warmth, a comfortable, abiding glow that asked little of him. But no more.
The arrows of his feelings for the girl in the woods had inflicted a ragged wound, a heat that burned with a consuming, continuous fire. He felt open and raw, as if an enemy had stripped him of his armor, left him standing in fool’s attire.
Bypassing the taproom, he walked outside, looked around the ravaged town. Wisps of smoke climbed from a few chimneys. In the rose-gold glimmer of early evening, a woman stepped into her dooryard to call her children to table, while a group of men with their axes and scythes trudged in from the outlying fields. The town was beginning to heal from the wounds inflicted by the brigands. The woman waved to Rand, and he realized with relief that he was now looked upon with trust, not fear. An excellent development. If the Demoiselle de Bois-Long resisted his claim, he’d need to secure the town to use as a retreat position.
He followed a familiar, muffled curse to the paddock. His horses and those of his men occupied the stalls, Lajoye’s livestock having been taken by the écorcheurs. A bovine shape caught his eye. “Jesu, Jack, where did you find that?”
Jack Cade looked up from the milking stool. “Lajoye’s youngsters need milk,” he said. “Spent the king’s own coin on her, down in Arques.” The cow sidled and nearly overset Jack’s bucket. “Hold still, you cloven-footed bitch.” He grasped a pair of fleshy teats and aimed a stream of milk into the bucket. “I made sure Lajoye knows the milk’s from our King Harry.” Leaning his cheek against the cow’s side, he gave Rand a brief accounting of the events of the day.
“Godfrey and Neville ran down a hart and brought it back to Lajoye. Robert—er, Father Batsford, that is, went a-hawking. Giles, Peter, and Darby found the brigands’ route and followed it some leagues to the south, but the thieves are long gone, dispersed, probably, after dividing their spoils.”
Rand frowned. “I did want to recover the pyx from the chapel. ’Twould mean much to the people.”
Jack’s eyes warmed with affection. “Always trying to win hearts and souls, aren’t you?”
Rand smiled. Was he deluding himself to believe chivalry could achieve such an end? “Always skeptical, aren’t you?” he countered.
Jack shrugged. “Take them by the balls, my lord. Their hearts and souls will follow.” Wearily he rotated his shoulders. “I worked like a goddamned swineherd today. And yourself, my lord? Any luck?”
Rand swallowed and stared at the dust dancing in a ray of golden twilight. The rhythmic, sibilant splatter of milk against the sides of Jack’s bucket punctuated the silence. Presently Jack finished his task and straightened. “Well?”
“I met...a girl.”
The milk sloshed in Jack’s pail. Too late, Rand realized his voice had betrayed the feelings he’d kept folded into his heart since he’d watched Lianna run off toward the castle.
Eyes dancing with interest, Jack set down his pail, picked up a stalk of hay, and aimed it at Rand’s chest. “Has Cupid’s arrow found a victim? Welcome to the human race, my lord.”
“Her name is Lianna,” Rand said in a low voice. “She lives at Bois-Long.”
“Better still,” Jack exclaimed, rolling the hay between his fingers. “Surely it’s a sign from above. Merry, my lord, perhaps life won’t be so disagreeable with a ready wench at hand.”
Rand shook his head. “The married state is sacred. And I’d not dishonor Lianna.”
Jack laughed. “Knight’s prattle, my friend. Your commitment to the demoiselle is one of political convenience. No need to be good as gold on her account.”
Rand turned away. “If gold rusts, what would iron do?”
Jack tossed a forkful of hay to the cow and picked up the bucket. They walked out of the paddock. “I for one,” said Jack, “intend to grow right rusty wooing Lajoye’s hired girl. She’s got a pair of—”
“Jack,” Rand warned, drowning out the bawdy term.
“—to die for,” Jack finished.
“I’ve forbidden wenching.”
“Only with unwilling females,” said Jack. “But never mind. When do we go to Bois-Long?”
“King Henry insists on proper protocol. A missive must be sent, and the bride-price, and Batsford must read the banns for a few weeks running.”
“Still in no hurry.” Jack grinned. “That hired girl will be glad of it.” He walked back to the inn.
Caught in the purple-tinged swirls of the deepening night, Rand left the town and climbed the citadel-like cliffs above the sea. A nightingale called and a curlew answered, the plaintive sounds strumming a painful tune over his nerves.
Staring out at the breaking waves, he pondered the unexpected meeting and the even less expected turn his heart had taken.
Lianna. He whispered her name to the sea breezes; it tasted like sweet wine on his tongue. Her image swam into his mind, pale hair framing her face with the diffuse glow of silver, her smile tentative, her eyes wide and deep with a hurt he didn’t understand yet felt in his soul. She inspired a host of feelings so bright and sharp that it was agony to think of her.
There was only one woman he had any right to think about: the Demoiselle de Bois-Long.
The nearness would be hardest to bear. To see Lianna’s small figure darting about the château, to hear the chime of her laughter, would be high torture.
End it now, his common sense urged, and he forced his mind to practical matters. The Duke of Burgundy was at Bois-Long, but his retainers were few. Clearly he did not plan a lengthy visit. Jean Sans Peur could ill afford to tarry with his niece when his domain encompassed the vast sweep of land from the Somme to the Zuyder Zee.
Aye, thought Rand, Burgundy bears watching.
But even as he hardened his resolve around that decision, he knew he’d go back to the place of St. Cuthbert’s cross where he’d met Lianna. The guns, he rationalized. He must dissuade her from working with dangerous and unpredictable weapons. Yet beneath the thought lay an immutable truth. Guns or no, he’d seek her out—tomorrow, and every day, until they met again.
* * *
“Gone!” said Lianna, running into a little room off the armory. “Lazare is gone!”
“Did you think your uncle of Burgundy would let him stay?” Chiang asked, his dark eyes trained on a bubbling stew of Peter’s salt that boiled in a crucible over a coal fire.
A warm spark of relief hid inside her. Ignoring it, she said, “Uncle Jean had no right to order Lazare to Paris.”
“Not having the right has never stopped Burgundy before.”
“Why would he send Lazare to swear fealty to King Charles?”
Chiang shrugged. “Doubtless to keep the man from your bed.”
She nearly choked on the irony of it. Lazare had taken care of that aspect of the marriage himself. And now that he was gone, she could not place him between herself and the English baron.
“Burgundy has left also?” asked Chiang.
“Aye, he claimed he had some private matter to attend to,” said Lianna glumly. “He had no right,” she repeated. She studied Chiang’s face, admiring his implacable concentration, the deep absorption with which he performed his task. His eyes, exotically upturned at the corners, seemed to hold the wisdom of centuries. He had a stark, regal face that put her in mind of emperors in the East, a distance too far to contemplate.
“You know he has it in his power to do most anything he wishes. Pass me that siphon, my lady.”
She handed him a copper tube. “That is what worries me about Uncle Jean. He also refused to send reinforcements to repel the English baron. He will not risk King Henry’s displeasure.”
Carefully Chiang extracted the purified salt from the vat. “Will the Englishman press his claim by force?”
“I know not. But we should be prepared.” She sat back on her heels and watched Chiang work, his short brown fingers handling scales and calipers with the delicacy of a surgeon. Sympathy, affection, and respect tumbled through her. Chiang had been a fixture at Bois-Long since the days of her youth. Like the man himself, his arrival was a mystery. Fleeing the capture of a mysterious ship from the East, he’d washed up on the Norman shore, the sole survivor of a vessel whose destination and mission Chiang had never revealed.
Only the Sire de Bois-Long, Lianna’s father, had protected the strange-looking man from a heathen’s death at the hands of superstitious French peasants. With his timeless knowledge of defense and his meticulous skill at gunnery, Chiang had repaid Aimery the Warrior a hundredfold.
But even now, the castle folk who had known him for years regarded him as an oddity, some gossips falling just short of denouncing him as a sorcerer. The men-at-arms begrudged him this small workroom in a corner of the armory and never failed to sketch the sign of the cross when passing by.
Chiang peered at her through wide-set, fathomless eyes. “And are you prepared, my lady?”
She hung her head. During the two days of the duke’s visit, she’d prayed and worried over a difficult decision. “Yes,” she said faintly.
He set aside his sieves and calipers and gave her the full measure of his attention. “Tell me.”
She tapped her chin with her forefinger. “I’ve sent a missive to Raoul, Sire de Gaucourt in Rouen, asking for fifty men-at-arms.”
“Did you consult Lazare in this?”
“Of course not. He knows nothing of diplomacy and politics. It matters not anymore. He is gone.”
Chiang showed no surprise at her defiance, yet she read disapproval in his calm, steady gaze. In appealing to the Sire de Gaucourt, she had betrayed her uncle. Gaucourt did not openly side with the Armagnacs, yet he was known to be sympathetic to Burgundy’s enemy.
“Was I wrong, Chiang?” she asked desperately.
He shrugged. His straight dark thatch of hair caught blue highlights from the coal fire. “You have shown yourself to be a poor judge of character, but Burgundy’s niece nonetheless. The duke himself would have done no less. Remember his tenet: ‘Power goes to the one bold enough to seize it.’”
Bolstered by Chiang’s counsel, she gave him a glimmer of a smile. “Very well. Shall we try the culverin?” The piece was new and had three chambers for more rapid firing.
He looked away. “I plan to do so. But alone.”
“What?”
“Your husband forbade me to work the guns with you.”
She leaped to her feet. “The salaud. How dare he dictate what I may and may not do?”
“Your laws dictate that you are subservient to your husband—or his son in his absence. Gervais has already said that he will enforce his father’s command.”
“We shall see,” she muttered, and left the armory to search for Gervais and tell him exactly what she thought of his father’s interdict.
In the hall she found the women at their spinning. Fleecy balls of carded wool littered the floor, and women’s talk wove in and out of the clack and whir of the spinning wheels. Edithe sat by the hearth, idly eating a pasty.
“What do you, Edithe?” Lianna asked, struggling to keep the irritation from her voice. “Why are you not helping with the spinning?”
The girl wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Lazare released me,” she said, a faint gleam of smugness in her ripe smile.
Lianna stared. The wooden sounds of the wheels stopped, leaving an echo of expectant silence in the hall. Lazare had singled Edithe out to vent his lust; apparently all knew of it. Covering her dismay with anger, Lianna ordered the women back to work with a clipped imperative, then turned her attention to the idle maid.
Edithe made an elaborate show of finishing the pasty and licking the crumbs from her fingers. Fury welled like a hot powder charge within Lianna.
“I see,” she said, her throat taut as she exerted all the control she could marshal. “I wonder, Edithe, if you know where Lazare has gone.”
“Mayhap the mews,” the maid replied. “He does enjoy falconry, you know.”
No, Lianna didn’t know. Lazare had shared nothing of himself, and she had never asked. She didn’t care; she had his name, and that was all she needed for now. Still, his open infidelity stung her pride. With great satisfaction she said, “Lazare is no longer at Bois-Long, Edithe. He has gone to Paris.”
The maid’s eyes widened. Lianna smiled. “Lazare excused you from spinning. Very well, you are excused.” Edithe looked relieved until Lianna added, “You will do needlework instead. Aye, the chaplain needs a new alb.”
Edithe’s face crumpled in dismay. “But I am so clumsy with the needle,” she said.
“Doing boonwork for the church is good for the soul,” Lianna retorted, and strode out of the hall. Climbing the stairs to the upper chambers, she tried to formulate a speech scathing enough for Gervais. Keep her from her gunnery indeed. Her dudgeon peaked as she arrived at the room he shared with Macée. She raised her fist to knock.
A sound from within stopped her. A moan, as if someone were being tortured. Nom de Dieu, was Gervais beating his wife? But the next sound, a warm burble of laughter followed by a remark so ribald Lianna barely understood it, mocked that notion. Cheeks flaming, she fled.
Her fury deepened into an unfamiliar sense of helpless frustration. Shamed by the tears boiling behind her eyes, she rushed to the stables and commanded her ivory palfrey to be saddled. She rode away from the château at a furious gallop.
Please be there, she prayed silently as the greening landscape whipped by. Please be there.
Twice during her uncle’s sojourn she had managed to slip off to the place of Cuthbert’s cross; twice she’d found the coppice empty. No, not quite empty. The first time she’d found a single snowdrop lying on the cross, its waxy petals still fresh. The second time she’d found the emerald-tipped feather of a woodcock. She kept the flower and feather in her apron pocket, and often her fingers stole inside to touch the evidence that Rand had gone seeking her. Evidence that he wasn’t just a dream conjured by her troubled mind. Evidence that one man found her desirable.
But today a token would not suffice. Encased by the icy armor of betrayal and confusion, she needed Rand—his generous strength, his tender smile, the liquid velvet of his voice. She needed to gaze into the same green depths of his eyes.
He was there.
Lianna checked her horse, dismounted, and tethered the palfrey to a bush where Charbu grazed. Rand sat leaning against the cross. His winsome smile reached across the distance that separated them, to beckon her.
Her heart lifting, she hesitated, then approached at a slow walk. The scene was almost too perfect for her worldly presence to disturb. Rand sat cross-legged, surrounded by an arch of trees and meadow grasses that nodded in the breeze. An errant shaft of sunlight filtered through the budding larch boughs, touching his golden hair with sparkling highlights. In his lap he held a harp. The fingers of one hand strummed idly over the strings. Stepping closer, she saw that his other hand cradled a baby rabbit. I nearly slew its mother, she thought absurdly.
Rand’s eyes never left her. At last he spoke—to the rabbit, not to Lianna. “Off with you, nestling,” he said, and set the creature down, giving it a nudge with his finger until it scampered away. Then he laid aside his harp and stood.
She stayed rooted, frozen by new and awesome sensations that pulsated through her like the wingbeats of a lark. Rand was a deity in a dream garden, and suddenly she feared to enter his world. Lazare’s duplicity and her uncle’s scheming had soiled her. She couldn’t belong here.
But that was Belliane, an inner voice reminded her. To Rand she was Lianna, brave and unsullied in her anonymity.
He stepped forward, put out his hand, and brushed his knuckles lightly over her cold cheek, an inquiring gesture, one that demanded a response.
The restrained tenderness and gentle warmth of his touch melted the ice encasing Lianna. Thawed by his kindness, a single tear emerged, dangled on the points of her lashes, then coursed down her cheek. He traced its path with his thumb, caught the second with his lips, and then the broad wall of his chest absorbed the hot floodtide that followed.
Four (#u7d520697-4991-57ed-b557-ff347843aa77)
Stricken by her grief without understanding it, Rand wrapped the small, shuddering girl against him. Whatever he’d expected—a shy smile, a tentative greeting—was swept away by the depth of her naked emotions. For long moments he stood holding her, stroking her tense back, her rounded shoulders, bending to touch his lips to the wind-cooled silk of her hair. “Hush, pucelle,” he whispered. “Please don’t cry anymore.”
He’d felt guilty coming here, giving in to an impulse he knew he should not indulge. Now her need drove away the guilt and filled him with a powerful sense of rightness. Although pledged to Lianna’s mistress and bound to style himself the girl’s overlord, he could not withhold his comfort.
He tightened his throat against speaking further, for to speak now would be to admit to emotions he had no right to feel. Instead he cradled her small, quaking body against him.
At length her weeping subsided. She clung to him, kept her face buried in his tunic. When Rand curved his fingers under her chin and lifted her face to his, she stiffened and resisted. But the gentle force of his will won out, and he found himself staring into the battered silver of her eyes.
The pain there was so deep, so vivid, that he felt as if a fist had reached down inside him and squeezed his heart.
“Tell me, pucelle,” he whispered.
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
His finger caught the sparkling drop of a tear from her cheek and brought it to his own lips; he tasted the faint, bitter salt of her grief. “I’d break a hundred lances if the deed could drive the sadness from your eyes.”
That brought a tiny smile. “I am no damsel in a chanson de geste. I need no dragons slain for me.”
“What do you need, Lianna?”
“A friend.” Her voice sounded faint, as if she were reluctant to confess such a human necessity.
He touched his lips to her hairline, breathed in the light scent of her fragrance. Soon enough he would be forced to betray the childlike trust that softened her features. “I’ll be your friend, pucelle,” he said.
She unwrapped herself from his embrace. Long, loose strands of her hair clung to his arm, linking them. Gesturing at his harp, she said, “Sing me a song.”
He smiled. “I was prepared to break lances for you.” He brought her to sit by the cross and took the harp in his lap.
Fascinated, Lianna watched his strong hands close around the frame of ashwood worn smooth by years of handling. Long masculine fingers caressed the gut-spun strings, bringing forth a sweet shiver of sound. The tones lifted to mate with the spring breeze, and Lianna felt an odd sense of intimacy, as if the notes were whispered in her ear. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms about them.
He sang an old troubadour’s lay of unrequited love. He had a voice like none other she had heard—vibrant, clean as rain, powerful as the wind singing through the crags.
Only when a breeze cooled her cheeks did she realize she was crying again. But the new tears came on a release of pain, as if Rand’s singing had drawn a thorn from her flesh.
He watched her expectantly. She swallowed. “How can you sing like that? As if—as if your soul were touched by God.”
Laughter rippled from him. “Not by God. By you.”
They weren’t touching, but Lianna felt as if she’d been caressed. I think I love you, he’d called to her, and she’d wondered about that for days, questioning his honesty and her own worthiness of it. No man had ever said those words to her, had those feelings for her. Did he still feel affection for her, or was the emotion only a passing fancy? She feared to ask, but what she saw in the pure, liquid green of his eyes made her hear the words in her heart over and over again.
He set down his harp and walked to her horse. “Let me guess,” he said, stroking the palfrey’s satiny neck. “You’ve stolen a horse and you’re running away.”
“I am allowed certain liberties,” she said quickly, leaping up to join him. His eyes were so clear, so all-seeing. Did he know she lied? She felt guilty deceiving him. Quickly she justified it. This knight-errant would never befriend the Demoiselle de Bois-Long; no one ever had.
He ran his hand over the palfrey’s withers and down her leg, pushing aside the grass to examine the iron curve of her shoe. “The horse is well tended.”
“Of course.” Lianna’s chin lifted. She tolerated no sloth in her stables. Catching Rand’s curious look, she added, “The marshal is most exacting.” Only, she thought, because he knew she’d put him out to the rye fields if he shirked his duties. She tugged at Rand’s hand. “Let’s walk.”
Gratified by her lightened mood, Rand followed. Her hair played in the breeze like threads of moonlight spun by fairies. As they fell in step together, the hem of her heather smock brushed against his leg, sending a sweet, forbidden thrill to the center of him. The browns and greens of the new season colored the landscape, and he forced his attention to the pollarded willows and stunted poplars that nodded in the wind.
“I’m convinced this was a pirate path of the Vikings,” she said, leading him over the hill that sheltered the glade. “I used to play Helquin the Huntsman when I was a child.”
He smiled. She spoke as if her childhood were long past, yet in his eyes she was a child still. “Who is Helquin?”
“Ah, you do not know the legend in Gascony.” Her arm sketched the sweep of the landscape. “All the way from the cold white country of the north Helquin came, bearing the shrieking souls of the damned on his shoulders.” She shivered and looked as though she enjoyed the sensation. The thought crossed his mind that Justine would never have savored such a gruesome tale.
“When the wild birds cry out over the marshes, the peasants say they echo Helquin’s long gallop through the centuries. I’d pretend to see him burst through the woods with all the battalions of hell at his heels.”
Rand grinned. “Would you run in terror from Helquin?”
“Certainly not. I would pretend to blow him all the way to the Zuyder Zee with a sixty-pound ball.”
He stopped walking, took her by the shoulders, and rolled his eyes. “I do not approve of your penchant for gunnery.”
Scowling, she struck him lightly on the chest. “Doubtless you would have me cloistered in a lady’s bower, carding wool.”
I would have you folded in my arms, he thought. Next to my heart. He gave her shoulders a squeeze. “I cannot dictate what you should or shouldn’t do. That’s not how it is between friends. But I would prefer you didn’t work with guns. I’ve seen the destruction they can wreak.”
“Very well, Rand the Gascon,” she said, her eyes glittering a challenge, “how would you defend a château?”
“With the might of men-at-arms and archers.”
“Knights.” She spat the word. “They indulge in looting and ransom.” Color rose to her cheeks, and Rand realized he’d discovered a topic she had often pondered, and not happily. She planted her hands on her hips. “Chivalry is but an empty spectacle, an excuse to plunder the weak.”
“Unscrupulous men, not the laws of chivalry, are to blame.”
“Chivalry is but a cloak to hide the excesses of their chevauchées.”
A sudden hideous thought struck him. “Have you been hurt by knights, Lianna? Is that why you disdain chivalry?”
She lowered her gaze. “Anyone who has smelled the smoke of a burning orchard, seen a baby spitted on a sword, heard the cries of a terrified woman, has been hurt by these men who call themselves knights.”
He swallowed hard. She was French; she’d seen these horrors, lived with them all her life. Still, she challenged everything he believed about knighthood. “Do you include me in your censure?”
She looked up. “Do you do those things?”
“No,” he said. “Never. Do you believe me?”
“I think you truly wish to protect the weak and uphold the faith. But I also think you are wrong to believe you can achieve this through chivalry.” She softened the blow by touching his cheek, adding, “You are that rare man, Rand, a man who cannot be touched by corruption.”
Her statement sent him into a spiral of self-reproach. Every lying word he told her would soon come back to haunt him. Unable to extricate himself from the dilemma, he started walking again, then surprised himself by asking, “What think you of archers?” Jesu, was he truly having such a conversation with a girl?
“Rabble,” she said. “Undisciplined rabble.”
“Can you dispute the success of the bowmen at Crécy and Poitiers?”
She glared. “A fine way for a Frenchman to speak, lauding English victories.”
Fool, he said to himself, she’ll find you out even sooner if you don’t guard your tongue. “I laud not the victories, only the way in which they were won. How many arrows could a master archer let fly in the time it takes to load and discharge a cannon?”
“A hundred arrows cannot bring down a stone wall. A single gun can.”
“What good is a firearm that hides the enemy in smoke?”
“What good is an arrow in a strong wind, a bowstring saturated by rain?”
Her vehemence delighted and disturbed him. Deliberately he sidestepped the challenge. “What good is arguing with a maid too precocious for her own welfare?”
She scowled, but he held her with a look of amused affection until the corners of her mouth tipped up in a smile. “You will never defeat my logic in this, sir knight,” she stated. “I am far too quick for you—in more ways than one.” She turned and ran down a grassy slope.
Laughing, he followed her lead past great elms, old yews, giant beeches, over half-buried stones and purplish mud, until he glimpsed the sea through rows of wind-torn hedges.
His caution swept away by her capriciousness and the lithe grace of her movements, he lunged forward and caught her around the waist. Her soft gasp tickled his ear as he swung her in the air. They tumbled together into the soft grass until, with gentle force, Rand pinned her beneath him. One hand bound her delicate wrists and held them above her head, while the other tiptoed in light caresses down her rib cage until she fairly shrieked for mercy.
“Who is the quicker now, pucelle?”
She clamped her mouth shut, refusing to yield. His fingers found and tickled each rib in turn, sending little shocks of awareness through him as her form and the warmth of her flesh came alive beneath her homespun smock.
Boldly he teased the flesh of her neck, his fingers rippling beneath the dense silk of her hair. Her skin was as smooth as ivory, as lustrous as a pearl. Wildly he wondered if she could feel the simmering heat of his desire, if she knew how close he was to letting his passion devour them both.
Sudden guilt flayed him. He was betrothed to another. Yet with Lianna his vows of chastity, of chivalry, flew on the wind, beyond the reach of reason.
As of its own accord, his touch changed to searching caresses, his fingers tracing her cheeks, her shoulders, the dainty line of her collarbone. He explored her form and texture, wanting to stamp her image on his soul. She stirred, and a small whimpering sound escaped her. “Who is the quicker now?” he asked again, forcing lightness into his tone. “Who?”
“You...oh, you,” she gasped.
Immediately Rand released her wrists, but he touched her still with languorous strokes. Bringing his face very close to hers, he studied the clouds of pink color in her cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes.
“There is naught so heady,” he whispered, “as a battle won.”
“You do not play fair,” she replied breathlessly.
“Where you are concerned,” he said, “I forswear fairness.” The wind stirred the hedges, and a shadow drifted over her face, deepening the color of her eyes to opaque silver. She shifted beneath him, the slight movement bringing his every nerve to a state of burning aliveness.
“Lianna, I haven’t stopped thinking about you since the moment we met.” He touched his lips at random over her flushed and startled face. “You make me want to forget who I am, to forget there’s a world and a time beyond this moment.”
She took a deep, dreamy breath, and he caught it with his mouth, absorbing the warm sweet nectar of her lips. The times he’d held a woman in his arms were few, but had he kissed a thousand women, he knew not one of them could seize his soul as Lianna did.
She lay still, naive, accepting. Her lips felt like moist velvet as he brushed them with his own. She tasted of morning dew and mystery, as if her body held some secret just out of his reach. He burned for her, longed to unlock the person she was, to peel away the layers of her outward identity and cast them aside like petals plucked from a daisy.
Madness, he thought, feathering kisses over her brow, into her hair. Madness to indulge in this forbidden tryst. But oh, how he wanted to explore the insanity. His hand found the sweet curve of her breast. He lifted his head. She eyed him with soft inquiry. Her lips were moist, love-bruised.
“We’d best start back,” he said reluctantly.
Wistfulness darkened her eyes. “Why?”
“Because you are a funny little pucelle who enjoys guns and tries my convictions, and I am a knight-errant bound where my travels take me.” He forced himself to speak easily as he helped her up. “Did your maman never teach you better than to consort with strange men?”
“I am an orphan, and you don’t seem like a stranger to me.”
Although she spoke matter-of-factly, he recognized the glint of pain in the sea-silver depths of her eyes. He drew her against him, startled anew by her smallness, her sturdiness. He whispered, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
She nuzzled her cheek against his chest. “You’d never hurt a woman. You told me so.”
Desire swelled in him; he choked it off with a fresh dose of guilt. Before long she would learn who he was, and he’d never have the gift of her trust again.
At a leisurely pace they started back toward their horses, easing into a relationship that Rand knew could flourish only for a few more days—even hours, perhaps. He showed her a bittern’s nest occupied by four brown-speckled eggs. She showed him a limestone deposit and a ruined Roman aqueduct. He wove a crown of wildflowers and placed it on her head. She fashioned a tiny catapult from a green ash bough and showed him how to fling a stone fifty paces.
Rand scowled at the makeshift weapon. Putting it into his belt, he caught her against him. “You are impossible.”
“I am practical.”
“You are beautiful.”
“Prate not about the way I look. I would rather have you admire my skill at weaponry.”
He grinned. “Are all at Bois-Long as bloodthirsty as you?”
“Some are worse,” she said simply, and turned away.
Some are worse. Could she be speaking of her mistress? As he watched her untether her horse, his throat went tight with apprehension. Taking her by the shoulders, he stared at her. “Will your mistress punish you for taking the horse?”
Confusion, then amusement, chased across her features. “Of course not,” she said, flushing.
Relieved, he dropped a kiss on her brow.
“Will you come back?” she asked softly.
He swallowed. “I don’t know....”
“Are you leaving, resuming your travels?”
“My plans...are uncertain.”
She nodded, as if aware that what they had was tenuous. “I’ll come when I can in the late afternoon,” she said solemnly, “at the hour of the woodcock’s flight.”
Wishing the world would fall away and leave them to themselves, Rand hauled her against him and crushed his mouth down on hers.
But by the time he reached Eu, he knew he’d not go to the place of St. Cuthbert’s cross again. The selfish joy of being with Lianna was not worth the pain she’d suffer when she learned his purpose.
He rode out to sit alone on the cliffs where the breakers leaped up in an endless assault on the rocks. He longed to yank his dreams out of his heart and cast them into the sea, to turn himself back into the hollow shell he’d been before he’d met Lianna. She made him too human, too sensitive, and those qualities would serve him ill when the time came to take Bois-Long and his new wife.
He went back to the village, walked into the taproom, and found Jack Cade, who had agreed to act as his herald. Cheeks ruddy from too much hard Breton cider, Jack raised a wooden mug. “My lord of Longwood.”
Rand nodded curtly. “Tomorrow.”
* * *
Lianna lay wrapped in the cloud coverlet of a dream. She’d been dreaming of Lazare, her haughty husband. In the dream he’d stood in the shadows beside her bed, a dark, unwanted presence. But then he’d stepped closer. Darkness gave way to golden sunlight, and the figure by her bed was not Lazare at all, but Rand, his face alight with that heart-catching smile, his arms open, inviting her.
She moved toward him, reaching, getting close enough to catch the scent of sunshine and sea winds that clung to him, to feel the warmth emanating from him....
He faded on a shimmer of light, and she felt herself being pulled out of the dream and thrust into the cold gray drizzle of dawn.
Wondering what had awakened her, she stared bleakly at the long, narrow window. A shout sounded. She jumped up, wrapping herself in a sheet as she hurried to the window. The sentry at the barbican was gesturing at the causeway spanning the river.
Spying a lone rider, Lianna suddenly felt the cold of the stone flags beneath her bare feet. The sensation crept up her legs and crawled over her scalp. The traveler wore a white tunic emblazoned with a gold device. The leopard rampant.
Her throat constricted; she swallowed twice before finding her voice. “Bonne! Come quickly.” Moments dragged by before the maid appeared. Frowning at the wisps of straw in Bonne’s hair, Lianna guessed the maid had been dallying with Roland. Bonne’s sleepy, satisfied smile confirmed the suspicion.
“Honestly, Bonne,” Lianna snapped. “You’re supposed to sleep on your pallet in my wardrobe. Surely it doesn’t take the entire night to...to...” A hot flush rose in her cheeks, and, irritated, she looked away.
Bonne’s smile widened. “Not the whole night, my lady, but afterward...” She indulged in a long, luxurious stretch. “It is so agreeable lying in a man’s arms, you know.”
Lianna didn’t know, and that fact annoyed her all the more. “In the future, you’re to be here by cockcrow.”
“Yes, my lady,” the maid said, knitting her fingers together in front of her. “What is your pleasure?”
Lianna motioned toward the window. The rider was in the bailey now, his horse being led to the stables. Bonne looked out, then drew back, fully awake now. “By St. Wilgefort’s beard,” she breathed, “it’s the English baron.”
“Not the baron, but surely his messenger.”
“Gervais was up playing at draughts until the wee hours, but I’ll send for him. With your husband gone to Paris, it’s Gervais’s place to receive the message.”
“Don’t you dare awaken him,” said Lianna. “I shall dispense with Longwood’s man myself.”
Bonne reached for a comb.
“Never mind my hair,” Lianna said. “Just cover it with a hennin and veil. I’m anxious to meet this English bumpkin.”
Wearing her best gown and her haughtiest look, she found the man in the hall. He was sucking prodigiously at a wine flask. Then he gaped at her, his mouth slack as a simpleton’s.
She refused to ease his task. Flicking her eyes over his ruddy hair, oiled and mercilessly furrowed by a comb, she asked, “What business have you here?”
“I am Jack Cade. I bear a message for the Demoiselle de Bois-Long.” His crude French assaulted her ears.
“I am the demoiselle,” she said in English. The language, schooled into her by tutors sent by her uncle, tasted bitter on her tongue.
He gave her a sealed vellum letter. Distractedly she noticed his right hand was missing three fingers. A cripple, she thought uncharitably. What must the master be like?
The seal bore the hated leopard device. Breaking it savagely, she scanned the message. Though long and arrogantly worded, the grandiloquent phrases could not sweeten the outrageous proclamation. King Henry, self-styled sovereign of England and France, ordered her to receive one Enguerrand Fitzmarc, Baron of Longwood, along with the customary bride-price of the uncustomary sum of ten thousand gold crowns.
Momentarily dazzled by the amount, she glanced up. Bonne had entered, bearing cups of mulled wine. The herald stared at the maid. His eyes bulged, and mangled phrases of admiration burst from him. To Lianna’s disgust, Bonne accepted the tribute with smiling grace and gave him a cup of wine.
Furious, Lianna said, “Move aside, Bonne. I want him to see exactly what I think of his message.” She rent the vellum into tiny bits and scattered them among the rushes with her foot. “Your king is a pretender! I reject his edict, and I reject the spineless lackey he has sent to wed me, along with the pittance he mistakenly thinks will make him palatable. Tell your master that he can take his foul carcass back to England.”
Red-faced, the man stammered, “But...but my lady—”
“I wouldn’t marry that English god-don if the moon fell out of the sky. And if he thinks to force me, tell him to think again. I am already married to Lazare Mondragon.”
Cade’s jaw dropped. He grabbed a second cup of wine and drained it. “Married?”
She nodded. “I’ve had a copy of the marriage contract drawn up, so there can be no question as to its validity.” Drawing the document from the folds of her gown, she thrust it under Cade’s nose.
She couldn’t resist a slow smile of dark satisfaction. Today she would dispense with the Englishman; now she could turn her mind to the problem of Lazare. “There is nothing your master can do. Even King Henry cannot undo what has been wrought before God. Begone, now. The sooner you and that god-don you serve leave our shores, the better!”
With jerky motions he pocketed the contract, sent a look of longing at Bonne, took the last of the wine, and left the hall.
“You were a bit hard on the poor fellow,” said Bonne, staring after him. “He’s only a messenger, after all.”
“He’s an English god-don.”
An impulse of wicked mischief seized Lianna. She ran to the armory, put on her gunner’s smock, and climbed to the battlements. The new culverin, on its rotating emplacement, was small enough to be discharged by a single gunner. She loaded a ball and a modest charge into the chamber, lit a piece of tow, and waited until the Englishman passed under the gatehouse and crossed the causeway. She aimed the gun well away from him; the firing would be just for show.
The charge crackled, then rent the morning air with a powerful report. The ball passed wide of the rider and came down harmlessly in the woods. The horse reared; Cade spurred him and disappeared down the road.
The shot brought half the residents of the keep running out into the bailey, stumbling over milling chickens and squealing pigs. Wrapped in a hastily donned robe, Gervais appeared below, red-faced, shaking his fist.
Lianna didn’t care. Like potent wine, the heady sensation of triumph warmed her. How good it felt to vent her wrath, even on that worthless messenger. She half regretted that she’d never meet the master; she longed to see that damned horzain humiliated, wallowing in the mire of defeat, an Englishman bested by a Frenchwoman.
* * *
A gray mist drizzled over the Toison d’Or as she nosed up the coast from Eu to Le Crotoy, a stronghold of the Duke of Burgundy. Standing at the rail, Rand felt a chill seep into his bones. He barely heard the shouts of the crew as they made ready for landfall, because he was thinking of Lianna. Like a recurring melody, her name played in his mind. How tempting it had been, after seeing the demoiselle’s marriage contract, to seek Lianna out, to...to what? Locking his hands around the rail, he scowled. He was no more free now than he had been this morning when he’d sent Jack to Bois-Long. King Henry needed the ford; Rand was honor-bound to secure it—if not by marriage, then by might. Perhaps Burgundy, who had sent a cautious message to Eu, inviting them to come in secret, would provide an answer.
For now, though, Rand needed answers from Jack. The scutifer had returned a few hours ago, too drunk to do more than place the demoiselle’s message in Rand’s hand. “Fetch Cade for me,” he called to Simon.
Hand over hand, Jack Cade struggled along the rail toward Rand. “Please, my lord, not now.”
Rand scowled. “From the looks of you, if you put me off much longer, I’ll be talking to a corpse.”
Gulping air, Jack sank into a crouch. Rand took out a skin flask of wine. Jack waved him away. “I’m still drunk from this morning. Drunk and seasick. Fried to my tonsils.”
From his belt Rand drew Lianna’s ashwood catapult and a stone. He flung the missile into the sea. “Speak, Jack. Tell me of your interview with the demoiselle. What was she like?”
“Beautiful,” Jack mumbled sottishly.
“The demoiselle?” But she was Burgundy’s niece.
“Hair like flame...breasts like fresh cream... God, but she did fling a cravin’ upon me.”
“The demoiselle?”
Jack blinked. “Oh, that one. I was speaking of her maid. Bonne, that’s her name; means ‘good,’ don’t it? I’ll wager she’s very good indeed.”
His patience gone, Rand snapped, “It’s the demoiselle I want to hear of.”
Jack hiccupped. “Oh. Well...she’s...cold, my lord.” He grimaced. “Cold as the teat of a cockatrice.”
Unbidden relief spilled through Rand. Thank God she’d married another. “What did she look like?”
The ship listed. Jack closed his eyes and began to tremble. “Like...a cockatrice?”
“Jack—”
“My lord, what know I of the high nobility?” Jack opened his eyes. “She looked upon me with scorn. She was all tricked out in gauzy stuff, such as we saw on the ladies at Eltham.”
Rand could see the line of questioning was going nowhere. “What did she say?”
“She called you a god-don. What the hell is that?”
“A nickname we Englishmen have earned among the French, referring to our habit of calling upon God to damn whatsoever displeases us.”
“Well, she’s wrong about you. You’ve never taken the Lord’s name in vain. I do so often enough for us both.”
Rand sent another stone flying. It skittered across the iron-gray swells and was swallowed by a white-crested wave. “What else did she say?”
“She said she wouldn’t marry you if the moon fell out of the sky.” Jack watched him curiously but did not comment on the little weapon.
Robert Batsford, who had been standing nearby, joined them. “Her defiance is impressive,” said the priest. “Few men, still fewer women, would dare flout a king’s edict. Your bride is certainly bold-spirited.”
Jack mumbled. “She’s got the damnedest maid....”
Furious, Rand squinted through the stinging mist. He’d been duped by a woman; he’d failed in his knightly duty. “Oh, she’s a bride all right, Father. But not mine. She wed some Frenchman called Mondragon.”
“Good Lord, is the woman mad?”
“Having never met her, I wouldn’t know.”
Batsford let loose with a low whistle. “Married. Blessed St. George, I’m beginning to feel a grudging respect for the woman. What will you do now?”
Like ghosts in the mist, the four round towers of Le Crotoy hove into view. “Burgundy and I will find a solution,” said Rand.
Five (#u7d520697-4991-57ed-b557-ff347843aa77)
Rand was gone. For two weeks the glade where St. Cuthbert’s cross stood had been empty, save for the lonely presence of a confused young woman. Still Lianna went there; she waited at the hour of the woodcock’s flight, hoping to see Rand.
Her remembrance of him turned to longing, and longing to obsession. She couldn’t forget that smiling face hewed by angels, his lips whispering endearments before closing over hers, the rich caress of his voice as he sang her a love song. Standing in the glade, she moved her hands over her ribs, her neck, her breasts, remembering, wanting, needing. Her body cried out for him with a passion so strong it hurt. He’d plumbed a well of deep, secret longings inside her—longings only he could fulfill. A timeless, mystical bond had linked them from the first, and even if Rand never came again, she knew she would never be free of him.
She could think of only one reason for his disappearance. The Englishman had quit the coastal town of Eu; obviously her Gascon knight had known about the invading foreigner and had gone after him. He’d wanted to break lances for her. Perhaps, unwittingly, he was doing just that.
Swathed in dreamy sadness, she returned to the château one day and walked her horse to the stables. Absently she noticed a gilt leather bridle had been left in the yard. Roland, the marshal, snatched it up.
“Sorry, my lady, I must have overlooked that,” he mumbled, and scurried aside as if to escape the expected dressing down. But she said nothing as she gave him the reins of her palfrey. What mattered the loss of a bridle when her own heart was breaking?
An excess of equine noise penetrated the sorrow-spun web of her thoughts. Looking about, she saw that every empty stall was now occupied.
Catching her curious look, Roland said, “The Sire de Gaucourt has arrived, my lady. Best soldier in France, and right fussy about his horses, he is.”
Lianna froze inside. She’d expected Gaucourt; the château was prepared for his visit, but now that he was here, her defiance against her uncle was real, irrevocable. Swallowing a feeling of uncertainty, she went to the hall to greet her guest.
Raoul, the Sire de Gaucourt, sat by the hearth with Gervais. The knight had a strong, arrogant face and an oddly lashless stare of deep calculation. His eyes were pale stones washed by the ice of command. The sight of him sliced through Lianna’s defiance with a blade-sharp sense of apprehension.
Spying her, Gervais smiled. Unexpectedly, Lianna had discovered a tolerance for her husband’s son. He’d relaxed his father’s interdict against her gunnery and lately seemed content to leave the running of the château to her. “Come greet our guest,” he said. His eyes lingered on her stained homespun smock, but she saw no disapproval in his gaze.
She swept toward Gaucourt. “Welcome, mon sire.”
He took her hand and leaned down, brushing his lips over the backs of her fingers. “Madame,” he murmured.
She extracted her hand from his. “Thank you for coming to my aid.”
His chilly, pale eyes crinkled at the corners, and she realized he was smiling in his own bloodless way. “I could not but come when I learned of the brave deed you did for France.”
Despite her instinctive distrust of Gaucourt, Lianna was pleased that the knight offered none of the warnings and recriminations her uncle of Burgundy had dealt her. “Under the circumstances I had no choice. I couldn’t possibly wed the Baron of Longwood and cede Bois-Long to the English Crown.”
“I agree, madame. King Henry needs a stronghold on the Somme to give him access to Paris. He may have his sights set on France, but thanks to you he’ll get no farther than here.”
“And thanks to you, mon sire,” Gervais said, “the English will not take Bois-Long by force.”
Lianna sent him a cool look. So, Gervais did have some understanding of the lay of things. She turned to Raoul. “The Englishman was seen to sail away from Eu, where he landed, but I fear he’ll be back.”
“The presence of fifty of my best men will stay his hand.”
Her eyes traveled down the length of the hall. Servitors were setting up the trestle tables for the evening meal. In a far corner of the room, the elderly Mère Brûlot sat crooning to the two babies she held in her arms. At one of the tables Guy, the seneschal, labored patiently over a livre de raison, his record of the daily events of the château.
Fear rushed over her like the shadowy wingbeats of a dark bird. Not for herself, but for the many people under her protection. How many of their fields would be burned if Henry acted? How long would they survive if the marauding English leveled their homes and slaughtered their livestock? Even Chiang’s guns might not hold back Henry’s wrath.
Gaucourt must have understood her unspoken thoughts, for he patted her arm reassuringly. “I’ve sent a number of hobelars out to scout the area. They’ll report to me at the first sign of an English contingent.”
“I’m deeply indebted to you.” She wished she felt more confident. The greatest battle commander of France had come to safeguard her château. So why did his presence evoke such an odd, ineffable feeling of dread?
Gaucourt lifted his mazer of wine. “There is no price too high to preserve the sovereignty of France, my lady.”
“At the moment I can but concern myself with preserving Bois-Long,” said Lianna.
“With my help, you shall,” Gaucourt promised. His eyes coursed over her, fastening on her waist. “Slim as a willow withe,” he murmured with slight accusation. “You’d best call your husband back from Paris and see about getting an heir.”
Lianna hoped her light laughter didn’t sound as forced as it felt, issuing from a throat gone suddenly tight. “I wish you’d leave such concerns to my women and the soothsayers who haunt the marshes.”
“I jest not,” said Gaucourt. “A child is a political necessity. It would solidify a marriage your uncle of Burgundy opposes.”
Gervais cleared his throat. His customary congenial smile seemed strained. “Bois-Long has an heir apparent,” he said.
Gaucourt shrugged. “Belliane has the blood of both Burgundy and Aimery the Warrior in her veins. ’Twould be a shame to let the line die out.”
That night in her chamber, she felt out of sorts as Bonne helped her prepared for bed. “Gaucourt’s mention of an heir is all the talk, my lady,” said the waiting damsel.
“Fodder for idle tongues,” Lianna snapped, stiffening her back as Bonne ran a brush through her hair.
“A child would be a blessing,” Bonne said boldly. “Perhaps it would even sweeten Macée’s disposition. She’s barren, you know.”
Lianna stared. “No, I didn’t know. Poor Macée.”
“Get a babe of your own, my lady.” Bonne’s eyes glinted with a sly light. “But for your womb to quicken, you must lie with a man.”
Lianna shot to her feet and whirled, her linen bliaut swirling about her slim ankles. “I’m not an idiot, Bonne. Lazare is in Paris. What would you have me do?”
“Take a lover. Queen Isabel herself has dozens.” Bonne moved across the chamber to the bed, whipping back the coverlet and brushing a bit of dried lavender from the pillow.
Lianna shivered. The king’s brother, Louis of Orléans, had paid with his life for consorting with Isabel. The Armagnacs credited the murder to her uncle of Burgundy. “Would you have me present Lazare with a bastard?”
“And who could call your child a bastard?” said Bonne. “The bloodied sheets of the marriage bed were duly inspected.” The maid brightened. “Perhaps you’re carrying a child now.”
“That’s not poss—” Lianna stopped herself. If word ever reached her uncle that the marriage had not been consummated, Burgundy would waste no time in getting it annulled and forcing her to marry the Englishman. “Enough, Bonne,” she said. “It is not your place to speak to me so.”
“As you wish, my lady,” the maid said without a trace of contrition. She patted the pillow. “Come to bed. Doubtless Gaucourt and the fifty extra mouths he’s brought to feed will keep you busy on the morrow.”
Lianna slipped beneath the coverlet and lay back on the pillow. Wisps of gullsdown drifted around her.
Bonne brought her lips together in a tight pout of irritation. “By St. Wilgefort’s beard,” she declared, “I told that slattern Edithe to mend the pillow.”
Lianna patted her hand. “Leave Edithe to me.” The maid looked so outraged that Lianna tried to turn the subject. “Who, by the by, is St. Wilgefort?”
Bonne sat on the edge of the bed and leaned forward eagerly. “A new one, my lady, that Father LeClerq told me of. Wilgefort, it seems, was a matchless beauty. Growing weary of having so many suitors, she prayed to God for help.” Bonne hugged her knees to her chest and giggled. “She woke up the next morning with a full beard.”
Though she laughed, Lianna drew a painful parallel with her own dilemma. People lauded her beauty, but they kept their distance. She needed no beard, not with her domineering uncle, her scheming husband, and her own nature—a coolness born of confusion and ignorance—keeping men at bay.
Bonne started to withdraw, then returned to pick up a mug she’d left on a shelf. “Mustn’t forget my tonic,” she murmured, lifting the mug and draining it.
“Are you ailing?” Lianna asked.
Bonne laughed. “No, my lady, ’tis a draught of rue and savin.” She flushed. “Prevents conception.”
Knowing the substance to be a mild poison, Lianna frowned. “Is Roland so careless with you, Bonne?”
The maid shrugged. “Men. They are all alike. They spread their seed like chaff to the wind, heedless of where it takes root.”
That night Lianna had the dream again, the now familiar fantasy in which the husband who approached her bed transformed from Lazare into Rand. She awoke the next morning with a vague but compelling sense of new purpose.
* * *
During the three weeks since Rand had gone in secret to Le Crotoy, spring had pounced like a golden lion upon Picardy. Bees droned over the clover-carpeted meadow through which he walked, bearing hard for Bois-Long. In a distant field, cows stood motionless in the shimmering sunlight, and the scent of the salt marshes tingled sharply in his nose. Travel would have been quicker on horseback, but with Gaucourt’s hobelars about, Rand couldn’t risk detection.
As his long strides carried him across fields and through forests, he discovered a deep appreciation for the beauty of the land. To the east a field of blue flax and budding poppies waved in restful harmony; to the west loomed the highlands bordered by chalky cliffs and stunted trees. The Somme coiled inland, fed by scores of tributaries. A forest of beeches and elms, their powerful trunks nourished by rich earth, sprang from the marshy valley. Ahead, a line of blazed poplars nodded in the breeze. The gateway to Bois-Long.
His French heritage linked him to this land. His English title made him master of it. Yet Burgundy’s new plan made secrecy necessary. The duke had promised that the demoiselle would soon be free to wed; he seemed confident of an annulment of her marriage to Mondragon. Rand was only too happy to leave the intrigue to Burgundy.
Cautiously he approached his destination. He misliked stealth; he had no prowess at it.
As he edged along the bank, keeping to the shadows of great water beeches, he saw, for the second time, the impregnable magnificence of the château. Only now he looked at it, not as his future home, but as a fortress to be breached. He calculated the height of the walls and determined the route he’d take when he came for his bride.
With a bit of charcoal he made a sketch on parchment, noting the locations of the sentry towers, the number of windows in the keep proper, the merlons in the battlements.
The idea of sneaking into the château and abducting an unsuspecting woman filled him with distaste, but he had no choice. Gaucourt’s presence made an overt attack ludicrous; the idea of returning unsuccessful to England was unthinkable.
The clopping of hoofs on the causeway snared his attention. Muscles coiling, he pressed back against a thick tree trunk and watched a small contingent of men-at-arms emerge from beneath the barbican. At their center rode a woman.
The Demoiselle de Bois-Long.
It could be no other, for she perched on her saddle with an air of haughty authority and was robed in a gown of sumptuous red. King Henry’s gifts of cloth and jewels should please her, Rand thought. She favors rich dresses.
Feeling both detached and uneasy, he studied the woman who would become his wife. Her face was milk pale; she had ripe red lips, sleek black hair, and fine-drawn brows that swept high above eyes too distant to discern the color. Beauty, not warmth, was the chief impression Rand gleaned from his glimpse of the demoiselle. She was Burgundy’s kin, he reminded himself. Why look for kindness in her?
She reined in and snapped an order to one of the men. When he made no move to respond, she gave a little screech, produced a stout riding crop, and laid it about the man’s shoulders until he dismounted and adjusted her stirrup. Then they were off again, crossing the causeway and turning east along a dirt road.
As he stared at the narrow back and raven locks of the demoiselle, Rand felt each breath like a harsh rasp in his throat. This woman, with her hard red mouth and cruel white hands, was to be his wife, the mother of his babes. Not only was he condemned to asserting his control over a French keep; now he knew his wife had a temper he’d have to tame.
Troubled, he glanced up at the westering sun. I’ll come in the late afternoon each day, and wait until the hour of the woodcock’s flight. Lianna’s words drifted into his mind, pulling him to the place he knew he should not visit.
* * *
Lianna visited the glade with less and less frequency, for her hopes of meeting Rand again had begun to wane. He’s a knight-errant, she told herself. His home is where he pitches his tent and tethers his horse.
But the spring-soft afternoon and the terrifying goal she’d set for herself brought her back to the glade. Bonne’s words haunted her: Men. They spread their seed like chaff to the wind. At last Lianna was ready to admit that Bonne was right; Gaucourt was right. She needed an heir to prevent her uncle from tampering with her marriage to a Frenchman and to prevent Gervais from inheriting Bois-Long.
Walking through the long stretch of woods, she pondered her plan. Surely Rand, if she could find him again, would plant a child inside her, and Lazare would be too proud to deny the babe was his own.
So simple, she thought. So cold-blooded. So damnably necessary. She wondered if she had the courage and callousness to bring her attraction to Rand to its natural conclusion.
She did. But not by virtue of her courage, which she doubted, nor by virtue of her callousness, which had been soothed to tenderness by Rand’s loving hands. She was motivated by more than the simple need for an heir. She wanted Rand to make love to her, to fill the void that had gaped like an open wound in her heart all her life. He’d awakened the dreamer within her, given her the will to reach out with both hands for the love that had ever eluded her.
Since she was accustomed by now to finding the glade empty, her heart hammered in surprise when she spied Rand through a frame of budding willows. Filled with gladness and fear, she approached him from one side. The woods craft schooled into her by Chiang gave her a light, silent step. Rand didn’t notice her; he appeared deep in thought.
His back against the stone cross, his sun-gilt head bowed over his chest, he put her in mind of a sleeping giant, his power unsprung, hovering beneath a patina of repose. Hazy, diffuse light showered over his profile. His hair, she noticed with affectionate attention, had grown longer, the ends curling like a halo around the unspoiled beauty of his face.
His guileless pose, his pensive attitude, made her regret her intention to take advantage of their attraction, yet the heart-stopping magnificence of his long, muscled body filled her with guilty excitement.
She expressed her agitation with a soft gasp, a whispered greeting.
With a start that sent her stumbling back, he jumped to his feet and yanked out a pointed dagger. Recognition, then undiluted joy, blossomed on his face. The weapon disappeared back into its sheath. “You gave me a start.” His smile touched her heart like the shimmer of a sunbeam.
She flushed. “I didn’t mean to.” Studying the tender ferns on the forest floor, she felt suddenly shy.
“You always startle me, sweet maid,” he said, a strained note of longing in his voice.
Her throat constricted at the sight of those leaf-green eyes, that rugged face far more animated, more compelling, than the one she saw in her dreams each night.
With one swift movement he swept her into his arms. “Oh, God, Lianna, I have missed you.” He hugged her close with his powerful arms, buried his face in her neck, and plunged his hands into her hair. The plaited locks yielded to his fingers, and soon her hair lay loose around her shoulders.
He smelled of the sea and the sun. She felt as if she’d come home, with his arms tight around her, his chest solid against her cheek. “Where have you been?”
“Nowhere. I am nowhere without you.” He cupped her chin and tilted her head up. His lips began a slow descent onto hers.
Trembling, she clung to him, relished every tingling sensation that shivered over her as their lips melded into a long, slow kiss. Her hands ranged up his sinewy torso, feeling the sweat-dampened skin beneath his mail shirt. She twined her fingers through his golden hair and pulled him closer, her lips parting, inviting the velvety sweep of his tongue. He filled her with masculine sweetness, wrapped her with steel-tempered hardness, and kindled the fuse of her passion.
Seared by yearning, she pressed closer. He dragged his lips from hers. His eyes glinted jewel-bright with an inner torment that tore at her heart and filled her mind with questions. “Why did you stay away for so long?” she asked.
He touched her cheek, her brow. “Because it is wrong for us to meet like this, in secret. I can offer you nothing.”
“How can you say that? How can you belittle the friendship you’ve given me?” He started to pull away. She grasped his hands, leaned up on tiptoe, and kissed him hard on the mouth. Then she stepped back and let her hair fall forward to hide the fire he’d ignited in her cheeks. Peering uncertainly from between her locks, she wondered if her bold behavior appalled him. He’d certainly been disapproving enough of her interest in gunnery. Doubtless she violated every image this knight-errant had of feminine ideals.
He parted her hair with his fingers. With relief, she saw only affection in his smile.
“Would that I could give you more than friendship,” he whispered.
Hope billowed in her chest. “I’ve come here almost every day,” she admitted.
Taking her hand, he pressed his lips to the pulse at her wrist. “Testing your guns?” He sounded both teasing and annoyed.
She shook her head. “Looking for you. And I asked where you’ve been.” He didn’t speak. Raising one eyebrow, she ventured, “Doubtless on knightly business of utmost secrecy.” She fixed him with a probing stare. “But I’ve guessed your secret.”
He fell still, seemed not even to breathe. “Lianna—”
“Don’t worry,” she said, smiling softly. “I’ll not put it about that you’ve chased the Englishman from Eu.”
He blinked. “Chased the—”
“Aye, we heard that the god-don has sailed away.” Excitement danced in her eyes. “Did you fight him? Did you slay the man who came to conquer Château Bois-Long?”
“No blood was spilled.”
“Did he run back to England like the coward he is?” She touched his sleeve. “You wear no colors, my Gascon. Are you for the Armagnacs or the Burgundians?”
“I could ask you the same of your mistress. She is of the blood of Burgundy, yet she houses a supporter of Armagnac.”
Her eyes widened. “How do you know about Gaucourt?”
“His presence at Bois-Long is no secret.”
She regarded him with mock severity. “Perhaps you’re a spy for Burgundy...or the English.”
He grinned. “Suppose I were?”
“Then I would steal your dagger and use it on you.” She took his hand and laid it alongside her cheek. “Talk to me. I want to know you.”
“There is much I would share with you...if I could.”
“Have you a family?”
His expression softened. “If you could term a band of motley men a family.”
“Your men?” She turned to scan the area.
“My comrades. But you won’t find them here.”
“Tell me about them, Rand.”
“They are men like any other. They have mothers, sweethearts...except for the priest, of course.”
She smiled. “Somehow it seems fitting that you would keep constant company with a priest.”
Laughing, he said, “You’d not think so if you knew this priest. He’s more likely to be found ranging the fields on a hunt than in a chapel hearing confessions. He often says mass in muddy boots and falconer’s cuffs.”
“What of your other friends?”
A guarded look made him seem suddenly distant, unapproachable. “I think it is better for us both to keep silent about certain matters.”
Wanting to draw him back to her, she leaned up and kissed him lightly. It wasn’t fair to question him, not when she was full of her own secrets. She couldn’t tell him now that she was the Demoiselle de Bois-Long, and married, with the wrath of the Duke of Burgundy and the King of England down upon her. This glade was their private garden, a place to forget they were each part of someone else’s plan.
“Times are uncertain. I’ll badger you no more,” she said.
Cloaked in wildflowers, the fields beckoned. As they walked, Rand stooped to pick hepaticas, fire-pink gaywings, early yellow violets, and bluets barely furled from their buds. Lianna loved to hear him talk. His rich, musical voice revealed ideas as fine and fanciful as the flowers he gathered. With enchanting whimsy he told her improbable tales of gallantry, unconquerable villains, damsels in distress.
Stopping on a little rise in the middle of the field, he offered her the flowers. She shook her head. “What would you have me do with them?”
“Smell them, for God’s sake. Let them pleasure you.”
She laughed. “Pleasure me? What a silly notion?” She plucked a single stalk of mayapple from his bouquet. “Now this is useful in making a decoction for the grippe.”
He tucked it behind her ear. “To you, everything needs must have a practical use. Why is that?”
“I know of no other way to look at things.” Taking a violet, she stared intently at the blossom, then at the waving profusion of flowers all around her. “In sooth they all seem alike to me.”
He cupped her chin in one hand and rubbed the silken petals over her lips. “Then let me show you.”
Sitting down, he spread his hands and scattered the blossoms. The scent soon brought a flurry of butterflies.
She stepped back, her breath snared in her throat. He was so beautiful, so true of heart. She yearned for a measure of his charming insouciance, the self-assuredness that made him capable of exalting even a lowly mayapple. But, tainted by intrigue and secrecy, she knew she could never share his clear-eyed wonder. Stiffly she sat down beside him. A butterfly flitted between them.
“My sad girl,” he said softly. “Why do you look so sad?”
“I wish I could be like you, Rand. So...whimsical.”
“Whimsical! Dear maid, you unman me.”
“But it’s true. You’re so full of unexpected delights....” She let her voice trail off and frowned. “I am clumsy with words. I know not how to say what I feel.”
“Try, Lianna.”
“I have an emptiness deep inside me, a darkness. In studying weaponry I learned high-flown ideas of science, the timing of fuses, the use of priming irons, but no one ever taught me how to—” She swallowed hard. “You have said I am beautiful, but I cannot believe it because I don’t feel it in my heart. I’ve never thought the attribute of any value.”
She heard the rasp of his quick-drawn breath, saw the unsteadiness of his hand as he picked up the flowers in his lap. He plaited the blossoms into a circlet, put it on her head, let chains of lavender hepatica trail over her shoulders. Placing his arms around her, he lifted her up, out of her wooden sabots, so that she stood with her bare feet on the cool ground.
Her head and shoulders festooned with flowers, her heart pounding with a sense of new awareness, Lianna saw desire flare in his eyes. His admiration made her truly beautiful for the first time. The idea gave her a sudden, deep sense of her own worth, not as a political commodity, but as a woman.
As if he understood, Rand caressed her cheek. “Do you see now? You are lovely, sacred, worthy.”
Shaken, she closed her eyes, spread out her arms and opened her hands as if to grasp the very air around her. Filled with the scent of flowers and the enlightenment his words brought, she tasted the quiet exultation of a dream fulfilled. She opened her eyes and looked at him.
Her thoughts tumbled over one another. It was right. It had to be right. She wanted him now, not just for the child he could give her, but to satisfy the yearning in her newly awakened heart, to unleash the desire she recognized in his taut body and emerald-bright eyes. His hands were hard fists at his sides, as if he were clenching them against the urge to touch her.
How to tell him? she wondered wildly. She could not possibly blurt it out: Excuse me, but I cannot contain my passion for you and I need a child, so would you please make love to me?
Gripped by shyness, her tongue thick and clumsy with words she’d never thought to utter to any man, she snatched a yellow violet and rolled it between her fingers. “Rand...I have been thinking on...a matter. I think it is time we were honest about...certain things.”
His eyes dimmed almost imperceptibly. “What things?”
She inhaled a gulp of air. “Well...our feelings. I confess I am graceless with words. I know you have certain desires. I have felt this in the way you hold me, and kiss me.” A blush suffused her face with heat. “Doubtless you hold the favor of many women,” she rushed on, growing more embarrassed with each word, more entrapped in her own awkward speech.
“You presume a great deal,” he said.
She blinked, discomfited by his easy, bemused tolerance. “Of course, you might have been with a woman these weeks past.”
Suppressed laughter gave his voice a compelling richness. “Why don’t you ask me?”
She couldn’t bring herself to frame such a question. “You are free to do as you will. But I was wondering, if you could see your way, perhaps, to act on these feelings.” She lowered her head. “Do you not feel some...some measure of desire for me? That is—”
“Lianna,” he broke in, “I love you.”
Her head snapped up. “So you said,” she whispered. “At least, you said you thought you loved me.”
He stepped forward, brushed a wisp of silver-gilt hair from her temple. “I no longer think so. I know.”
Why did his declaration mean so much to her? She needed only his seed. Still, there was that deep agony within her that had nothing to do with procuring an heir and everything to do with the man standing before her.
Sudden doubts pricked at her. She was married; she could never share more than stolen trysts with Rand. Yet she wanted him so desperately....
He regarded her with a steady gaze. His lips curved into a tender smile. A smile she trusted.
The doubts vanished.
“Well,” she said, wondering if the raw inner tenderness she felt could truly be love. “Well. ’Tis settled, is it not?”
His smile widened. “What is settled?”
She forced herself to face him squarely. “Why, the matter I was trying to speak to you about. You’ll make love to me now, won’t you?”
Six (#u7d520697-4991-57ed-b557-ff347843aa77)
The thrust of an enemy lance could not have pierced Rand more deeply. Her earnest request singed his every nerve with a longing so hot, he burned with it, a frustration so sharp that he could scarce draw breath.
His mouth was dry, his tongue thick, when at last he found his voice. “Lianna, sweet maid, you know not what you ask.”
“Yes,” she whispered, her breath warm as she leaned toward him. “I do.” A pucker—innocent, adorable—turned her lips to a sweet bud. “I suppose you think no worthy lady would ask such a thing, but I want you....” She stepped closer, brought her thighs brushing against his. “And I think you want me.”
Indeed, he thought wildly, how could she mistake the iron-wrought bulge in his braies that reared against her soft, yielding form? “I am a knight,” he said, less forcefully than he would have wished. “I took an oath....”
She fixed him with a steady silver stare. “Every true knight,” she said, her finger tapping lightly against her chin, “is a lover.” She smiled. “So say the troubadours’ lays.”
“The troubadours preferred the sweet torment of yearning to the passing joy of a conquest won.” He spoke quickly, for his resolve flagged with each wild beat of his heart.
Her gaze touched his face, his shoulders, his torso. “And you, Rand. What do you prefer?”
He kept his hands at his sides, for to touch her now would be to lose the last shreds of self-discipline he possessed. “You are far easier to reckon with in my dreams. There, you are only a shadow.” Aye, he thought, in his dreams he could control her...and himself.
She sent him a whisper-soft smile. Her eyes shone, her face glowed, the curves of her flower-strewn body were evident beneath the plain smock she wore. Disconcerted, he moved away.
She set her hands on her hips. “Professions of knightly devotion might be enough for ladies of legend, but such lofty regard is not enough for me.”
“In person,” he conceded, “you are a more earthly goddess.” He met her steady gaze. “Demanding, complex, difficult.”
“Will you let your scruples get in the way of something we both want and need? How can it be wrong?”
He looked down at his big, rough hands, the left one sleek with scars. Too soon, he must put a ring on the finger of another. “I can offer you nothing.”
“You say you love me. Will you call that nothing?”
“I don’t want to dishonor you.”
“You dishonor me by denying my womanhood,” she said, her eyes flashing like quicksilver. “You refuse to acknowledge that I have a mind of my own, a body that sings for yours.”
“That is precisely what I’ve been fighting. Already I love you too much, more than I should.”
An errant breeze caused a blue flower to drift across her cheek; she caught the blossom with her hand and rubbed the petals thoughtfully over her chin. “Before I met you, I knew no love at all. Now you speak of loving too much. I do not understand.”
In her voice he heard all the hurt and bewilderment of an orphan left to the care of castle folk. He yearned to gather her into his arms, to teach her love, yet at the same time he felt a terrible futility, for she would also suffer betrayal from him.
He drew a ragged breath. “All my life I have had self-restraint schooled into me. A man who cannot control himself is doomed to be controlled by others. That is why I turn away from the chevauchées of my fellow knights.” Looking up, he met her wide, unblinking eyes. “Now you’ve catapulted into my life and shaken everything I’ve ever believed in.”
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