Her head lolled back against his arm. With a little laugh, she said, "I know what you are feeling, my Lord Lieutenant. That spinning force. The first time we merged it left my hair in corkscrew ringlets for more than a day!”
His laughter was liberating. “You have me trussed fast in your love-lock dungeons, fairy maiden.”
Her finger traced the scar that deepened his lip’s crisp indenture. “You are experiencing these exquisite sensations because you are coming close to uniting your energy with a greater force. Do you know that? Do you understand what—”
"Hush!” he said, closing his mouth over hers to silence her disturbing words. He reveled in kissing her, but she ended it, by pushing him to one side. "What are you doing?” he rasped.
She rolled atop him. Her hands pressed against his heaving chest, and her hair curtained their faces. “Showing you that a maid can make love in this position as well.”
The feeling of her pumping his loins was agonizingly breathtaking. Still, it seemed un-natural. He groaned aloud at the thought.
Her laughter was like quicksilver that slipped through the fingers. "Unnatural? Why? Because the man should have the upper position?” Her eyes twinkled. "Your St. Augustine doubtlessly thinks this supreme way of demonstrating love disgusting. But then me thinks if there was a better way of dealing with procreation, the Creator would surely have invented it.”
There was no way he could disagree with her at that moment.
"The next time we do this, my Lord Lieutenant, I shall show you yet another way.” Her fingers caressed his nipples, changing them to hard little pebbles. "One that I am sure your abbot-tutor would denounce as imitating animals with the male mounting behind the female but one that the Indian Hindus describe as quite delightful.” Her lips sweetly wreathed one aching nipple. "I am curious to see if they are right. What think you? Should we experiment with this Hindu practice?”
He could only groan again as bliss bathed him.
Beneath their entwined bodies lay his wreath, the flower petals crushed.
CHAPTER XI
Through eyes glazed by Paxton's intense and intimate lovemaking, Dominique studied the man asleep next to her . . . the hard line of his broad cheekbones and angled jaw; the way his brows peaked over the outer corners of his eyes before sloping down sharply; his body powerful even in repose. In the pale, predawn light, his facial scars were not even noticeable.
A handsome face, it was not, but an inordinately interesting one.
He was a quick student of the metaphysical arts. He pleasured her in ways even she had never imagined. Goaded by his lovemaking, she came dangerously closer each time to an emotional abyss. After that first time of experiencing his effect on her, she had been most careful to exert her will, even during the throes of their passion.
As if her thoughts had disturbed his slumber, Paxton’s eyes opened. As was his habit, he quickly scanned his darkened chamber before moving. Then, rising on one elbow, he planted a kiss just below her ear lobe where it joined her jaw. She tilted her head to one side to allow him access to the fully exposed length of her neck, and he chuckled. “You will weaken my reserves, Dominique. Today I must ride to one of the garrisons being restored to its former strength.”
The thought of Denys leaped into her mind. How was he faring with the troops to which Paxton had assigned him? She dared not ask.
Paxton rolled from her and began dressing, shrugging into his tunic and the wide-sleeved, leather surcoat, before even bothering to light a candle. Did he think because she could not see his back that she was unaware of its scars? Her fingers were not sightless. By now they had memorized every sinew, every muscle, yes, even every welt of his body. Honed by a soldier’s life, it was a magnificent specimen of male beauty.
She sighed, almost purred. She felt satiated, replenished. Like Paxton's cat, she stretched languorously. We both bask in his presence, she thought. That he had yet to mention marriage disturbed her, but she was becoming adept at putting the unsettling thought from her mind.
She watched him stride to the open window. He walked with such confidence and assurance that he could combat anything. He stared out at the dawn, its first pale glow muted by a light rain. She loved its refreshing scent and its lulling patter on the roof slates. She sat up, tossing her heavy hair away from her face. "The rains will be harder come summer,” she said, her voice still husky from their lovemaking.
He did not turn from the window. "I plan to show Montlimoux’s tenants how to gather the soil that has slid to the bottom of the hills after such a rain, and haul it up to the top.” He paused, then added, “I believe the soil’s shaly slate is responsible for the region's superb crops, but it will not always be so if precautions are not taken.”
For a man trained in warfare, his knowledge of the earth amazed her. There was so much she did not know about her warlord. Wrapping the linen sheet about her, she walked up behind him and put her arms about his waist. "Is it just possible you appreciate and love the land as I do?”
His answer was a harsh, "No.”
"But, Paxton, Mother Earth is a living system just like the human body, and like the human body she needs attention and care and love.”
"She will also take the sweat of your brow and the blood of your hands and more often than not render you nothing in return.”
Dawn’s breeze was redolent with rain, chilling her, and she hugged him close. "A farmer would disagree with—”
"Tell me nothing about farmers and their love of the land. I, too, cultivated the land, but t’was not for love. I pulled the plow for my mother. I was the mule, the ox, because as serfs we had no such animals. I was the animal!”
A serf! Impossible. A contradictory image of his haughty assurance, his autocratic mien almost that of royalty, crossed her mind. "But your education?”
He braced his hands on the sill, and the veins stood out on their backs. "Baldwyn would certainly appreciate this one. ‘When two nobles quarrel, the poor man’s thatch goes up in flames.’”
"I do not understand.”
"Our landlord disputed a boundary line with the Earl of Pembroke.”
Her breath caught at the name, but she said nothing as Paxton continued. "The earl’s men rode down all the serfs and their children. I was quicker than the rest of my family. My mother, my brothers and sisters were trampled. I watched their skulls smashed open like melons. I kept thinking, ‘This cannot be happening!’ I was literally blind with fury. For days. The earl’s abbot was on the scene. He took me in and nursed me back to a sanity of sorts and eventually tutored me.”
"A kind man,” she murmured.
"The very same one you claim is misogynous.”
"Kind but ignorant.”
"Lucky for me,” he quipped over his shoulder, “that he taught me more beneficial subjects than woman-hating, subjects like mapmaking and surveying.”
That explained so much about him. Laying her cheek against his back, she summoned the courage to ask softly, "And the welts that stripe you here on your back?”
Beneath her palms, his corded stomach muscles rippled with his sharply indrawn breath. "Those are more recent.”
She knew enough to wait. Mayhap, some day he would share that part of his life with her as well as other things she wished to know about him. Had there been a woman he’d loved?
On the heels of that thought came another. Was there a wife back in England? Unexpected pain tugged so harshly at her heart that she gasped.
"What is it?” he asked, turning around to take her in his arms.
"Nothing, only a chill.”
His brown eyes lightened with amusement then darkened with passion. "I can remedy that.” He caught her behind her knees and swung her up against his chest to stride back across the room to the bed. "You heal your way, Dominique de Bar, I shall heal mine.”
“Now I understand the true fear of a woman for a man. The love for another that ultimately demands the loss of oneself. I would rather feel nothing at all
than this . . . this fear.”
“You? Afraid?” Iolande was amazed. The child had seemed dauntless, mature with a knowledge far beyond anything Baldwyn or she could impart. But Dominique the adult?
“Pass me that vial of salt.”
Iolande searched among the laboratory's rack of vials until she found the one requested and passed it to her mistress. “At my age, I can safely promise that you have many feelings still to suffer, my Lady Dominique.”
“The sulphur, please. Do you know that Paxton is avoiding me now during my life-giving flow? He dared to refer to it as that ‘secret malady of women!'” She sniffed contemptuously and added, “As if t’were some distasteful feminine weakness.”
Iolande shrugged her stooped shoulders. “I have never had that problem, my child, since no man ever desired me to begin with.”
Dominique flashed her a penetrating look. “Has there been no man you felt drawn to, as if compelled by something beyond yourself?”
Iolande's jaw ached. She told herself it was her remaining teeth that plagued her so. But the ache, she knew, came from swallowing back those feelings all these years. An image of those ebony eyes half masked by the straight line of his lids came to her when in truth there was but the knight in rusty armor. "There was one for whom I felt the feelings you described.”
"And?”
Dominique's perceptive sympathy was the last thing she wanted. Endurance was all she wanted at this point in life. "And nothing came of it.”
Dominique flashed her a skeptical glance but only said, "The mercury now, please.” She thrust the vial of mercury at her mistress, who added the third ingredient to the mixture. "Mercury, sulphur, and salt,” Dominique murmured to herself. "Spirit, soul, and body.”
The elements bubbled and hissed and steamed, prompting Iolande to speak of what was troubling her. "I fear, my Lady Dominique, that your quest for hidden knowledge may lead you into a dark and evil force beyond the veil.”
"There is no such thing as evil, Iolande. Only the misdirection of power. Life’s powers lived backwards instead of forwards. Tis no accident that the word ‘live’ spelled backwards is evil. No, I believe my quest for hidden knowledge will end with initiation into divine truths.”
Iolande shuffled toward the staircase. Yes, there were still many feelings for her mistress to suffer and ambitions to abandon, all feelings that overtook those unlucky enough to survive infancy. Fervently, she wished her Lady Dominique could be spared the consequences of old age.
Another garrison refortified, another bridge built, another arsenal created. Dominique watched Paxton dress in preparation for leaving to reconnoiter a potential fortress site. No half-day trip this time but an absence of almost a week. He no longer avoided baring his back to her, and she could only gaze upon the wine-purple welts with a sort of horror at the violence they represented. The scars she knew, ran all the way to his soul, where she doubted she could ever reach.
Was she falling in love with him? Truly, she did not know. Her fear of what he represented blighted any other emotions. No longer could she even detect the differences between people’s malevolent and benevolent energies.
Mayhap, he was indeed her warlord.
As the last of his dressing ritual, he sheathed his sword and dagger at his sides. In the morning’s half-light, his dark brown eyes found hers. Feelings of passion and, yes, compassion, inundated her, threatening to weaken her even more, so that she had to turn away. She must remember herself. She could not care for Montlimoux and her people if she did not care for herself first.
"Today promises to be perfect,” he said, coming up behind her to take her in his arms.
She closed her eyes, resting her head back against his chest, and savored the feeling of him: his strength as counterpart to her softness; his rational complimenting her intuitive faculties. Then, too, there was the extraordinary sensuousness she felt when with him.
"Travel with me as far as the next hamlet,” he said, his warm breath stirring the tendrils of hair at her temples. "You can ride pillion with me and tether your gray to the camp wagon. John could escort you back to the chateau.”
"Mmm, I would like that,” she said. She turned her head against his shoulder so that she could see his face, and he winced. "What is it, Paxton?”
He dropped a kiss on her nose. "Probably an old shoulder injury. It aches occasionally.” She said nothing, but she knew that the source of his pain, his left shoulder, was also the source of the heart’s conflict. For some reason, there was most likely a congestion of energy there. Prospects of the diversion of a trip lightened her mood, and she hurried to ready herself.
By the tenth hour, Paxton’s cavalcade had already left the village of Montlimoux far behind. She clung tightly to his waist as his war horse picked its way across a pebbled brook. The courser was so enormous, she felt as if she sat high in a belfry tower.
"The day turned out as beautiful as you foretold,” she teased. "Perhaps 'tis you who is the sorcerer.”
Paxton's laughter was as sparkling and warm as the sunshine. She rested her cheek against his back. A contingent of maybe fifteen knights, thirty or so archers, and a score of foot soldiers accompanied them, but she felt an oneness with him that excluded all peripheral distractions. She doubted he would believe her if she told him her heart was actually singing. Every part of her being, radiated life and light.
Did he feel the same? He was so closed off to his emotions, he was impossible to decipher.
When they reached the hamlet of Brisceu, he relinquished her to John Bedford with what might have been a fleeting look of regret. But not enough regret that he wanted her permanently in his life. Her efforts to extract a contract of marriage from him had failed miserably.
On her return trip to Montlimoux, she tried to pry more information about Paxton from John, but the captain, who acted as an intermediary at the chateau between her and the soldiers garrisoned there, would reveal little.
"What about the Earl of Pembroke?” she pleaded. "Please, can you not confide in me anything? Paxton told me about the horrible act the earl’s men committed, trampling his family to death, but he will not elaborate.”
John’s usual merry eyes were sober. "All I can tell ye is that at one time the earl thought highly of Paxton and came to love him like the son he never had.” Beyond that enigmatic piece of information, he would divulge no more.
Upon her return to the chateau, Esclarmonde was waiting for her in her library. In her lap, lay Arthur, lids closed, throat arched to her stroking hand. At Dominique’s entrance, she glanced up. Her smile matched the cat’s satisfied expression.
For a long moment Dominique stared at the distant and cool blonde. Where was the childhood playmate? What had happened to the laughter and glee enjoyed in the games of Blind Man's Bluff, Hide and Seek, and the May Day celebrations of Robin Hood and Maid Marian? She recalled the shared secrets of mischievous misdeeds that somehow Francis always managed to worm out of them. Even then he had made a perfect father confessor.
Over the years, childish disagreements had evolved into fissions of discord that not even Dominique could mend. She only knew that Esclarmonde had developed an unreasonable jealousy as Francis’s regard for Dominique had deepened.
Esclarmonde ceased stroking the cat and reached for a scrap of parchment on the escritoire. "I believe this was meant for you,” she said, waving it as charmingly as she had her handkerchief at the tourney.
Dominique's eyes narrowed. "What is it?”
"A copy of a missive. The messenger mistook me for the chatelaine of Montlimoux. At my importuning, your scribe kindly copied it from the original. I forwarded the original to Paxton, where I thought the missive would catch up with you." Her painted lips made a moue of simulated sympathy. "Obviously, it did not.”
Dominique jerked the parchment dangling from the young woman's outstretched fingers. The epistle was penned from Denys himself.
'To My True Lady, the sergeant has allowed a respite in the ar
senal construction. My message is thus brief, only to inform you that my love for you is ever strong. Seven years’ time seven I would wait if I thought to gain your hand. The work I do for your Grand Seneschal requires no aesthetic efforts. My soul languishes for its once consummate creativity, as it languishes for you. Only a month, and I still have more than six years to serve Paxton of Wychchester. When my hands pound the mortar, me thinks of pounding his skull or conspiring against his rule. Seven years! How can I endure it? This loss of my plans, my grandiose dreams of creating the most beautiful of cathedrals. Only you can understand how my soul is dying. Give me solace, my Lady Dominique.”
Dominique's eyes lingered over the last words before she looked back to Esclarmonde. "Why? What have I ever done to you that you wish to cause me or Denys harm?”
As if she had not the courage to meet her gaze, Esclarmonde returned to stroking Arthur. Her voice was so low and tense that Dominique was not certain she heard aright. "You have everything I have ever wanted.”
"What are you talking about?”
Esclarmonde lifted eyes bright with unshed tears. "Paxton, if I would let you. And Montlimoux. Tis a crown that needs the proper jewel.”
Dominique flipped the parchment scrap onto the writing desk. "And you are that proper jewel? No, I think 'tis more than that. Tis Francis. You resent me because of his affections for me, do you not? All along it has been Francis between us. We could have had a friendship that few men ever dream of, but your perverted jealousy prevented it.”
"Perverted?” As she rose to confront Dominique, Arthur sprang from her lap, as if glad to be released. "You call me perverted when you dabble in works for which the world would burn you as a witch!”
"Your brother, I might remind you, holds alchemy in the same high—”
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