Knights Page 7

  His fingers loosened, like the hand of a wounded man releasing the handle of his sword, and Gloriana swept away, leaving him in the center of the courtyard. Before entering the great hall, she slipped into the shadows and, using the insides of her wrists, dashed the tears from her cheeks. Then, after drawing a deep, sustaining breath, she marched into the light and clamor of the hall, where seasoned knights, some Gareth’s men, some under Dane’s command, lined the long tables. Serving wenches moved among them with trays and pitchers, dodging pinches and swats even as they invited them. A juggler in a colorful costume plied his trade before the dais, keeping seven golden balls aloft while he danced to the spritely tune falling in a merry shower of notes from the minstrels’ gallery.

  Mariette de Troyes was indeed seated at Gareth’s table, nibbling delicately at a drumstick from a guinea fowl while the Scotsman, Eigg, regaled her with some intricate story, his telling full of gesticulations and punctuated with somewhat foolish laughter. The empty seat beside the young Frenchwoman was Kenbrook’s usual place; Gloriana’s own was further down the table, beside Edward.

  While most everyone was engaged in eating or talking or listening to the pleasant music, she felt more than one pair of eyes studying her, assessing her every expression and movement. She lifted her chin and walked boldly forward, mounting the dais steps, nodding to Edward and to Gareth as she passed them. Instead of sitting beside her young brother-in-law, who was obviously waiting for her, Gloriana settled herself at Mariette’s side.

  Eigg’s animated discourse fell off into silence, as did much of the raucous chatter on the floor of the hall. Even the music from the gallery seemed to recede, but that, Gloriana thought, might have been her imagination. The blood was thrumming in her ears, fit to render her deaf.

  Mariette turned to her, and Gloriana saw surprise in the exquisitely beautiful face. The emotion was quickly subdued, however, and the girl spoke in polite, tentative French.

  “My English is poor,” she said. “Perhaps you will be tolerant.”

  Gloriana liked her rival instantly, a fact that only made matters more difficult. Mariette reminded her of the crocuses that broke through the snow when spring was still only a distant hope, flourished, and then were gone. “And I have only a little French,” Gloriana replied. “Just enough, I think, to cause you to laugh at me.”

  Mariette’s smile was brilliant and short-lived, like the crocuses, “I shall not laugh. I am in want of a friend, after all.”

  Others might have taken that last remark for presumption, under the circumstances, but Gloriana received it with warmth. The girl was far from home, in a strange country, and of a timid countenance, clearly anxious and frightened. To spurn her offer of friendship would be cruel, to blame her for invoking Kenbrook’s lust, unfair. “You have found one in me,” said the baroness to her ascribed successor.

  There was a stir at the far end of the hall, and Gloriana saw, through her lashes, that Dane had entered and was even now striding between the long tables toward the dais. His gaze was fixed on Gloriana’s face, and she saw a grim fury in him that made her breath catch—not from fear, but something more complex and made partly of pleasure.

  “Our husband approaches,” Gloriana said to her companion.

  Mariette giggled, a fretful sound, rather than a frivolous one, then pressed slender, fluttering fingers to her lips. “He is terrifying, is he not?” the girl whispered.

  Gloriana supposed that, in his own way, Dane was a frightening man. For herself, she felt no impulse to flee. “Kenbrook has been too long on the battlefield,” she confided, in her bumbling French. “He has forgotten his manners, if he ever had any in the first place.”

  “He did not,” commented Gareth, who had come to stand behind Mariette and Gloriana. “He has ever been a barbarian and a tyrant, my brother.”

  Gloriana felt Gareth’s hand come to rest, very lightly, upon her shoulder.

  “Come, Gloriana,” he said. “The music is jolly and I would dance to it.”

  Others had left the table, Gloriana saw, to step to the tune. “I have not yet taken my supper,” she said, for she could be stubborn. When she was still at her lessons, Friar Cradoc had oft made her say extra prayers in consequence of this flaw, in the hope that God would expunge it from her nature.

  So far, He had not and, although the good friar might have been surprised by this oversight on the part of the Almighty, Gloriana wasn’t. She reasoned that God had other, more pressing concerns than the failings of one maiden.

  “As your guardian and the master of this keep,” Gareth said pleasantly, his fingers tightening on her shoulder as Dane stormed nearer, “I command you to obey me.”

  Gloriana sighed with all the force of a player upon a stage and rose from the bench. “I would not consider defying you,” she said in a tart whisper, smiling all the while.

  “A wise philosophy,” Gareth replied. Gloriana was barely on her feet before he’d gripped her arm and half-dragged her down off the dais, through the rushes, and into the midst of the revelers. Dane watched them for a few moments, as if considering whether or not to push through the crowd in pursuit. Then, after approaching the dais to speak to Mariette, he sat down at one of the lower tables to break bread with his men.

  One of the mummers approached, silently, and offered Gloriana a mask, a garish and tragic face with a handle. She took it, chagrined that in spite of her efforts to present a cheerful façade, her misery showed so plainly.

  She curtsied and held the mask to her face, gracefully following Gareth’s steps as he guided her. “I hate him,” she said.

  “I don’t blame you,” Gareth answered smoothly. He had always been a reasonable and perceptive man. “I am told that you intend to move into your father’s house in the village and live alone there, except for your servingwoman.”

  “I shall leave the castle immediately following Edward’s ceremony,” she confirmed.

  Gareth had maneuvered her out of the hall and into a cool passageway, dimly lit by smoking oil lamps suspended from iron brackets set into the walls. Gloriana lowered the mask and sank onto a bench. She was exhausted, not from the dancing, but from the effort of maintaining her dignity. Ever since Dane had returned, she had been as fragile as the shell of a sparrow’s egg.

  Bracing one foot against the bench upon which Gloriana sat, Gareth regarded her in silence for some moments. Then he sighed, and for the first time ever, she noticed that he was aging. “You must see reason,” he said, at some length. “It is neither prudent nor fitting for a young woman to set up household alone. Not when she has kinsmen to care for her.”

  Gloriana set the mask aside with a thump. “Nevertheless,” she said, “I intend to do it. I have gold—I can hire my own men-at-arms, if I wish to, and make them protect me. As for propriety—I simply don’t care about that.”

  “Who, then, shall protect you from your bodyguards?”Gareth inquired. “Gloriana, as strong and brilliant as you are, you are a woman.” He gestured with one hand in the direction of the hall, where noise erupted even then, in scattered and boisterous bursts. “Do you hear those brutes in there, lining my tables? Half of them have no better manners than my hounds. They would never obey you. Indeed, they would themselves present a very real danger.” He paused again while Gloriana digested his unsettling words, then went on. “I swore to your father that I would preserve your reputation and your virtue in the event that your husband failed in those duties. I shall keep my word, Gloriana—I always do. And if you try to impede me in this aim, I will take appropriate steps.”

  Gloriana’s hands became fists among the folds of her kirtle. “Your promise was just while I was yet a child,” she said, as calmly as she could. She loved Gareth, after all; he had ever been kind and generous. “Now I am a woman. I have lands and a fortune to command. I may go where I wish and do what I want.”

  “Where do you get these ideas?” Gareth muttered, his abundant patience wearing thin at last.

  Gloriana thou
ght of that other world, the one she had left behind when she was just five years old, and supposed that was the answer to Gareth’s question. She did not say so, of course. “You are no different than your brother,” she accused. “Kenbrook would send me to a nunnery, lest I prick his conscience by my presence, and you—you, Gareth, who have ever been my friend—hint that you will make me a prisoner if I do not obey your dictates.”

  Gareth had the good grace to look ashamed, but only for an instant. A moment later, he was flushed with righteous conviction. He did not need to say that any number of intractable women had lived out their lives in tower chambers, watching the seasons change from their narrow windows and never touching the earth again until they were buried.

  When at last he broke the protracted silence that stretched between them, he spoke with the voice of a stranger. “I love you as if you were my sister—nay, my own daughter—but you will pay heed to my wishes, Gloriana St. Gregory, or live to regret your lapse.”

  She rose, with what dignity she could manage, to face the lord of Hadleigh Castle and all the lands, excepting those of Kenbrook of course, for miles around. Not trusting herself to speak, Gloriana executed a deep, mocking curtsy, then turned on her heel and hurried back into the hall.

  Mariette was leaving, accompanied by her maid, as Gloriana entered. Dane stood in the center of a knot of rowdy men, engaged in a drinking contest with the Welshman and a ruddy-faced Hamilton Eigg. All around them, men and wenches alike perched on benches and tabletops, watching, cheering on one contender and then another.

  Gloriana was patently digusted and sought Edward, only to find him making his way through the throng to reach his brother’s side. Only Friar Cradoc was still on the dais when Gloriana climbed the steps, seeking a better view. Edward, she thought virtuously, would put an end to this indecorous nonsense. He was, after all, nearly a knight.

  “A sad spectacle,” commented the friar from his solitary place at the family table. “Sin has come to Hadleigh Castle, milady.”

  Gloriana hadn’t the heart to tell her teacher and priest that sin had taken up residence sometime previously. “Don’t worry,” she counseled distractedly. “Edward will put a finish to this.”

  Edward had at last reached the heart of the melee. There, he spoke to Dane and was answered with a booming gust of laughter, a slap on the back that nearly sent him sprawling, and a mug filled to overflowing with what appeared to be stout. To Gloriana’s stunned disbelief, Edward raised the tankard to his lips, tilted back his head, and drank until the great hall rocked with the other men’s shouts of encouragement. The foremost of these, of course, was Gloriana’s own untried husband, the now-drunken Dane St. Gregory, fifth baron of Kenbrook.

  “They have corrupted Edward!” Gloriana burst out, gathering her skirts to plunge into the mob and set matters aright.

  The friar had risen from his bench while she was watching Edward’s descent into dishonor, and he stopped Gloriana by linking his arm through hers. She would have stumbled if the priest hadn’t taken a firmer hold.

  “There is naught you can do, child,” Cradoc told her in the quiet voice that had guided her through Latin and French, mathematics and archery, Greek history and the basics of herbal medicine. “Go to your chambers, if you would please your aged tutor, and remain there until the bells summon you to morning mass.”

  Gloriana opened her mouth, then closed it again. Dane’s mug was refilled from the sloshing tip of a pewter pitcher, along with Edward’s and Master Eigg’s. She had engaged in enough battles for one day and had already learned that there was no reasoning with Kenbrook or his elder brother, Lord Hadleigh. Edward, in his youthful foolery, was already beyond help, for that night, at least.

  For a long moment, Gloriana simply stood there on the dais, watching as the contest of idiots went on. Only when Dane felt her gaze and raised his tankard to her in an impudent toast did she remove herself from the hall.

  Judith was waiting in the bedchamber. She had lighted the lamps, turned back the covers, and poured tepid water into a basin. After helping Gloriana out of her gown, the young girl bobbed her head.

  “May I go now, milady?”

  Although Gloriana had offered the girl a couch upon which to sleep, she insisted on returning to the kitchen, where she, like many of the other household servants, slept on a pallet in front of the fire.

  “Stay a moment, please,” said Gloriana, sitting before her mirror and taking up the ivory comb Edwenna had bought for her long ago in London Town. “I have a question to ask.”

  “Yes, milady?” Judith chirped, sounding somewhat worried and bobbing again.

  “If I were to leave Hadleigh Castle and live in my father’s house in the village, would you go along and attend me?”

  Judith fidgeted, shifting from one foot to the other. Her kirtle, though clean, was made of roughly woven wool, and her straggly brown hair fell, unbound, to her waist. “Leave Hadleigh Castle, milady? But they’d never let you do that, not without Lord Kenbrook, and he’s got a house of his own, hasn’t he?”

  “I am going,” Gloriana said purposefully. “Without Lord Kenbrook or his permission.”

  Judith paled visibly in the flickering glow of the fire and murmured some pagan exclamation before saying, “But, milady, you can’t go leaving his lordship’s keep just because that’s what you want to do!”

  “Very well,” Gloriana replied, with a sniff. “Never mind. You may stay here, Judith, and sleep with the hounds and the other servants in the kitchen. Of course in my house, you would have had a room of your own, with a bed you needn’t have shared—”

  The girl’s eyes went wide. “A lot of good that would be,” she blurted out, “when Lord Kenbrook comes to drag us back here by our hair!”

  Gloriana sighed. “I should put an arrow through Kenbrook’s heart if he tried such a thing.”

  Judith’s eyes grew larger still. “They’d hang you by the neck, lady or no, if you did such as that.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Judith,” Gloriana snapped, at the end of her patience. “I was not speaking literally. I was merely trying to make a point. Will you go with me or not?”

  Judith considered, swallowing visibly and scratching once or twice. “I’ll go if you wish it, milady. But you watch—we’ll both be tossed into the abbey till the end of our days when this is over, just like Lady Hadleigh.”

  The prospect sent a shiver tripping down Gloriana’s spine. Elaina seemed suited to convent life, but Gloriana knew she herself would feel like a captive and go mad for the want of freedom. “Lord Hadleigh is a just man,” she said, but with less conviction than she might have felt before her interview with Gareth in the passage outside the great hall. “He will never punish you for obeying my wishes.”

  Judith nodded, said “Yes, milady” again, and scurried out. The thick door of the chamber thundered shut behind her.

  Gloriana, hair trailing, clad only in her chemise, crossed the room to pull down the latch. Then, after washing and kneeling beside her bed for one last, hasty prayer, she climbed beneath the covers. The ritual squirming scramble to remove her shift followed, and then she settled into the feather ticking to sleep.

  The carousing in the great hall was clearly audible, even from that distance, and as Gloriana lay listening, her eyes burned with tears she refused to shed. She’d done enough weeping on Kenbrook’s account, and if she perished in the effort, she would not cry for him again. He simply wasn’t worth it.

  Except that she believed she was beginning to love him. Despite her own formidable will and the dictates of common sense, she felt her separation from Dane as an amputation.

  It isn’t supposed to be this way, she cried inwardly.

  A tap sounded at her chamber door, and was repeated.

  Edward, no doubt, too drunk to stand. He’d be sorry in the morning, she thought with satisfaction, when faced with the rigors of the day. “Go away,” Gloriana called.

  “Please,” replied a small, frightened
voice, in faltering English. “Let me in, mademoiselle, for I am terrible afraid.”

  Mariette.

  Gloriana sprang from the bed, pulled her chemise back on, and went to the door. The latch stuck, but she raised it and admitted the woman her husband had chosen as his bride.

  Mariette was weeping, and she shivered in her thin, lace-trimmed kirtle. A gossamer nightcap glimmered on her dark hair. “I do not like this place,” she said. “There is much noise and I am sore frightened!”

  Gloriana, who had once hoped to hate this woman, found herself eager to lend comfort instead. She led Mariette to the bench facing the fire and seated her there, then fetched a bedcovering to wrap around the slender, trembling shoulders.

  “I want to go home,” Mariette snuffled, when she had ceased her disconsolate wailing.

  Gloriana sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. “Shh,” she said, as gently as a doting mother comforting a fretful child, struggling to remember her French. Unfortunately, her command of that poetic language had never been more than inadequate. “You will be married soon. Then you will be happy.”

  Mariette summoned up a moist smile. “Yes,” she said, laboring to respond in English. The smile trembled, then fell away. “But for me to be happy, you must suffer, and this I hate to know. You have been much kind to me.”

  Gloriana sighed gently. “I shall go on being your friend, Mariette, no matter what.” Unless I find myself imprisoned in one of the towers or shut away in a nunnery, she added silently.

  Mariette’s hazel eyes were large and limpid with tears. “I thought you would be old. With warts and wrinkles. Kenbrook, he told me this. I am full of amazing when I see you.”