With a mocking smile, he bowed to her. Without a glance at Prince Henry, Rainault turned and strode after his companions.
When he was out of sight, Prince Henry said softly, “You have made an enemy in him, lady. Beware of him. Indeed, I wonder myself that you travel the forest dressed — like that.”
She hesitated. Was it going to happen, all over again? The prince spoke as though he read her thoughts. “I take no Norman lady against her will,” he said gravely. He gazed long at her. “But by the rood, I hope the day will come —”
He did not finish, but abruptly changed the subject. “Where are your clothes?”
“Back there,” she said in a small voice and gestured in the direction from which she had come.
“Come, mount,” he said, “and we will find them. I dare not return you to Countess Maud like this!”
Without a word she came to his stirrup and reached both hands up to him. There was nothing else to do. Lifting her bare foot to gain purchase from his mailed boot, she glanced up and met his deep-set eyes. The indolent amusement was gone. In its place came a spark of desire — and stayed.
He lingered overlong, bending down from his saddle; his gaze traveled from her mud-spattered foot, resting on his for support, up her curving thigh, slowly past hips and breast, and rested at last on her green eyes, glaring proudly at him.
“Not against your will, lady,” he repeated softly, but with unmistakable meaning. Then he pulled her up and set her before him in the saddle.
His arm slid around her waist, and the back of his hand nestled warmly against the gentle swelling of her breast. She stiffened involuntarily, but his only answer was a chuckle.
“And now, lady,” he said, holding her so she could not move away, “which way shall we go?”
3
The way she had come in headlong flight was lost to her memory, but the three Normans and their hounds had blazed it well. Prince Henry set his steed at a walking pace through the game paths and forded the stream where she had picked up the mud now drying on her slim feet.
She wiggled her toes and the caked mud drifted down to the ground.
“You must have come a league,” the prince commented. “But I imagine you did not feel the cold.”
“Nor more did I,” she murmured. She was now acutely conscious of her nakedness. Henry’s leather surcoat covered his link-mail shirt — no man in the troubled times walked abroad without protection — and she felt its hardness on her tingling back.
“There it is!” she cried at last. “I recognize the spring, and there — there is my slipper!”
He let her slide to the ground. She flew to her gray mantle, looking like a patch of fog on the ground. She searched and found the silver clasp, where Valdemar had thrown it down as of little value. With shaking fingers she fastened the fur-lined garment around her, and breathed a sigh of relieved satisfaction.
“I confess I liked you better before,” said the prince, leaning forward on the pommel and crossing his arms. “What are you looking for now?”
“My pelisson — my shift — my other shoe!”
“Forget them,” said Henry. “You are covered, and from what you told me, the missing garments are in tatters. Come.”
The authority in his voice brooked no evasion. She let him pull her again into the saddle, but this time she covered herself well, tucking in the folds of the cloak beneath her, as Henry reined his mount around and started in the direction of the lodge.
Confidence swept back to her, now that she was clothed. She leaned back against the hard chest of her rescuer. She was safe, when she had thought never to be again.
“What will happen to them?” she wondered.
“Nothing. They’ve not harmed you.”
“But they would have. And you let them go!” cried Gwyn indignantly. “And what stops them from doing the same cruel trick all over again?”
“Only the good sense of any Saxon maiden,” retorted Henry promptly, “that keeps her out of the sight of a hunting Norman.”
She twisted in his arms, which held her tight against his chest. She searched his face, so close to hers that she saw the little eyelashes around his deep blue eyes, saw the crinkles at the corners of his eyes that spoke of good humor, the tightness of his lips that hinted at strong passions, held in firm check.
“Good sense!” she echoed. “How can anyone know where the Normans are riding? Even a girl’s own house is not protection from the Norman wolves. I’ve known more than one girl —”
“And so have I,” said Prince Henry smoothly, “and more than one wasn’t ashamed to please her Norman lord.”
“Only because she had no choice!” cried Gwyn. “The Normans are all alike — cruel, savage beasts, with no thought for anyone else, but only their whims!”
Henry pulled up the reins, and his steed stopped abruptly. The quick halt overbalanced her, and she shifted suddenly in her precarious seat. Henry’s arm brought her back to safety and turned her toward him. Suddenly, she realized her mistake in goading this man, her rescuer, who was one of the noblest of all the Normans. The son of the great Conqueror, brother of the present king …
She could only look up at him, her sudden fear bright in her eyes. She might have been in her own solar at Ramsey Castle, she thought — just as vulnerable, and ripe for conquest. Her cloak fell away, for the silver clasp was bent and did not hold. Her hair was coming unloosed from its braids, and Henry held her in an unbearably intimate embrace.
He moved his hand downward from her waist, and the fabric moved as well. She opened her lips to protest. She could feel his leather surcoat rubbing against her bared skin, and she tried to pull back, but his arm was like an iron vise, holding her to him. Deliberately, clearly enjoying the alarm in Gwyn’s face, he pressed her even closer to him and sought her lips with his. His eyes bored into hers, the quick amusement in them turning darker as his passion stirred.
He let her go; only his strong arm kept her from tumbling to the ground with the force of his pulling back.
“You want to dismount,” he said, shaking with irony, “and take your chances with the Norman knight?”
Wordlessly, she shook her head. Then she found her voice. “I am sorry. I should not like to appear ungrateful —”
“Which, of course, you do,” said Henry irrepressibly, returning to normal. “But, if I remember, Gwynllion Ramsey herself is Norman? Do you deny your own blood?” He laughed and tightened his hold on her again. “I take no Norman lady, as I said. But Saxon — don’t tempt me too far! Although,” he added in a musing fashion, “I have never had to chase a Saxon maid through the woods. Perhaps I have more charm than yon rough soldiers!”
“Yes, my father was Norman,” she said slowly. In spite of herself the touch of Henry’s lips still burned on hers and threw her thoughts into unaccustomed turmoil. “But my mother was Welsh. Pray let us move on. Countess Maud will be anxious when I do not return.”
“And rightly so,” rounded Henry, making no move to set the horse in motion. “How could she have let you out without companions? I think I shall put a word in my brother’s ear.”
“Oh, no,” cried Gwyn quickly. “Please do not. It was not her fault. I had companions, but I wandered away from them. The countess is truly kind to us.”
“Us?” he repeated. “Then you are not alone in the lodge?”
“Oh, no. Do you not know the affairs of the king’s court? I have just come to the Great Lodge, before Easter when the king returned to Winchester. Little Jeanne — Jeanne de Guilbert, you know — was already there. She is a darling, so gentle. I did not know her parents, but her mother must have been a great lady.”
“Yes, she was. I remember Lady de Guilbert,” said Henry soberly. “When my mother died, I was a gawky lad of fifteen, and the lady was perhaps five years older. A sweet, comforting nature.”
“Her daughter is the same.” Gwyn glanced up at her rescuer. The well-trained palfrey stood without impatience.
“Th
en,” said Henry thoughtfully, “there are just two wards at the lodge?”
“Yes. And of course Countess Maud, and her son, Brian.”
“Brian du Pré? I remember the name.” With a sudden sally of amusement, he said, “How old is he? Shall I be jealous?”
“I feel sorry for him,” she said. “He is — not made for this rude world.”
Henry raised an eyebrow in inquiry, and she explained, “A poet. But yet, I confess I do not find him likable. Only pitiable.” She was, she thought darkly, becoming too comfortable. “Pray let us move on. Countess Maud is very good to me, and I should not like to worry her.”
“Well, then, since you plead her cause so prettily, I shall hold my tongue against her. Besides,” he said, smiling at his own thought, “if she is in fact less strict than you say, I shall find it to my advantage, no doubt.”
“Your advantage, sir?”
“She might not notice when you leave the lodge again, to meet me.”
“That, my lord, will not happen. I can assure you of that. But perhaps you could tell me this — do you think I could have the Saxon girl — the one who started all this — for my maid? Could I keep her safe that way?”
Henry roared. “I can see that my charm, which, I tell you, has been much praised by many ladies of some experience, has no effect on you. What other maid, in the arms of Prince Henry, would scheme to save an unknown Saxon girl from a vague harm?”
She joined him in laughter. It was absurd, now that she thought about it, she told him, and his mouth drew down in a grimace. “But that is no help to my vanity,” he told her, “to say that you never even thought of — well, I shall try to recover my credit.”
He gave the horse his head, and they started again toward the Great Lodge, where Countess Maud du Pré was without a doubt scanning the road into the forest for the first sight of her wayward charge.
The lodge stood on the edge of a village clearing, destroyed by the king’s men to free the forest for his hunting pleasures. But the forest stretched for miles around the lodge, broken only by clearings as small as the one where Gwyn had met the Saxon girl, or as large as a village common. And in the forest roamed the fallow deer, the wild boar, and uncounted numbers of wolves. It was, as she now knew, no place to roam alone.
“Besides,” said Henry after a while, “how could you find the Saxon? And would she come?”
Gwyn, regaining her self-confidence and losing her fear of the prince, who still held her tightly, said reflectively, “No, I think perhaps she would only run again. She seemed to think I was a witch. She was out of her mind with fear, of course. But I could not argue with her — there wasn’t time. Already I could hear the great hound. So I simply raised my hand — thus — and said a few words in my mother’s tongue.”
“Not Saxon?”
“Cymric. The Welsh speak it, you know.”
“To my sorrow. I have tilted at the border many times, on my brother’s behalf. The Welsh are untameable, and they speak such a gibber that no Christian man can understand them!”
“Christian!” she cried, squirming in her precarious seat. “We’ve been Christian longer than you pagan Normans!”
“Us pagan Normans?”
Gwyn grinned reluctantly. “Just now I hold all Normans in distaste, my lord.”
He laughed, with genuine amusement. “I have yet to hear that Saxons, or even Welsh, lack the juices of crude desire, lady. Lust is not an exclusively Norman trait.”
She dropped her gaze to a spot somewhere between the ears of the palfrey. “My apologies, my lord.” She moved restlessly in the safety of his protecting arm.
“Hold still,” he commanded, “lest I reconsider. You’re a delicious handful, and I’m only a man, after all.”
“A prince, my lord — a Christian prince, I think you said?” But nonetheless she resolved not to move against him anymore. To tell the truth, the feel of his broad chest through the thin cloth of her cloak aroused certain pleasant pricklings in her back, and Henry’s free hand, ostensibly holding her safe as they rode, by coincidence — or design — seemed unable to stay around her waist, where it should have been. Instead it moved upward, to the gentle swelling of her small breasts, or downward, to her hip.
It was high time that they reached the lodge.
“So the Saxon maid thought you were a witch?” resumed Henry. “I vow I think so too, for you are like quicksilver in my mind.”
But then the Great Lodge came in sight, and Gwyn viewed her temporary home with relief.
Lodge was a misnomer. It had originally been a Saxon outpost, and the walls were made of wood, not of stone in the Norman style. It was almost a castle now, except that it did not boast a great keep, nor the donjon tower. The walls enclosed a handful of buildings for kitchen, for servants, for horses, and a disused blacksmith shop. The quarters for the noble residents were distinguished only by being larger and better maintained than the serfs’ hovels.
Countess Maud fussed, as Gwyn knew she would. She ran across the bailey when she heard the sentry’s cry, her flowing pelisse, fur-lined against the evening cool, billowing behind her.
Countess Maud was a prickly woman, obsessed by the anger she felt at her husband for not having lived long enough to provide her with the luxury and power she had fully expected from a baron in William the Conqueror’s train. Instead, he had provided her with a son, who resembled Countess Maud’s own father, a weakling, a broken reed — Maud could not find words sufficiently descriptive of her father, and usually, at least from the time she was six years old, she forgot him. But Brian was more and more like the old man every day.
“Where have you been, Gwyn?” she cried. “The girls came back with some harebrained tale that you went to pick flowers. Flowers? I wonder they could not think of some lie that would be more easily believed. Where have you been?”
Henry let Gwyn slide down to the ground, holding her wrist until she was firmly on her bare feet. “I’ve been picking flowers,” Gwyn told her. “As the girls said.”
“Then where are the flowers? And what happened to your braid cases?” Countess Maud’s voice came surprisingly deep for a woman of her small stature. “And — coming in so late and alone! I have warned you, my child, you are not at home on Ramsey lands now!”
Then she stopped short. The color drained from her face, and she added, in a queer, out-of-breath voice, “Your mantle, in such a state! And your feet —” She was dimly aware that Gwyn had been brought home by a stranger, but she paid him no heed. She was suddenly terrified that she had failed her charge to keep the royal ward virgin and marriageable until the king’s will was known. And now!
“Who had you? I vow the vengeance of heaven on him!”
Stretching to her full height, Gwyn could almost look levelly into Countess Maud’s stormy eyes. “No harm has come to me, thanks to my noble rescuer. And I think it would be fitting were we to offer my lord refreshment. Besides, I’m starving!”
For the first time Countess Maud looked closely at the nobleman still astride his horse, waiting with controlled impatience for her first eruptions to be over. What she saw took her aback.
“My lord Henry!” she breathed. “Of course, if it was you who — I mean, I never would have said — I would not have —”
“I agree with every word,” said Henry solemnly. “But I think I smell meat roasting? I shall be obliged if you invite me, Countess Maud, to share your supper.”
“Of — of course, Lord Henry.” With many another word of stumbling apology, Countess Maud ushered him into the dining hall of the Great Lodge.
The site had been originally, so Brian had told Gwyn, a Celtic village, tied by bonds of defense to the great fort at Winchester a few miles away. There were traces of Roman road-building leading past the walls and vanishing into the forest, but their origin was in Winchester, the king’s favorite castle.
The lodge, standing alone in a broad clearing that had once held a Celtic, then a Saxon village, was too isolated
for Henry’s taste. The Saxon lord’s house had been made into what William usually called, with a salacious wink, the nunnery. Countess Maud was installed as chatelaine, with sufficient maids and servants to do her bidding. In payment for her keep, she was asked to receive from time to time certain female wards of the king and to hold them safe and in reasonable comfort until the king could marry them off to one or another of his vassals.
The lodge lacked in luxuries, but it was remote from the court, of which Gwyn had heard whispered unbelievable tales that by turns whetted her curiosity and turned her stomach in revulsion.
The dining hall was low ceilinged, in the Saxon fashion, the overhead beams blackened with smoke from many fires on the great stone hearths, and the rushes on the floor not fresh, so that they lay flat upon the dirt. Bones, gnawed by the dozen or so dogs that came in and out at will, lay free of the straw, and Henry’s foot kicked them out of the way.
The long trestle tables had already been brought out from the wall, and dinner was about to be served, before Gwyn reappeared. She had hastened upstairs, clutching the ragged edges of her torn cloak together over her breasts, as Henry’s eyes followed her up the stairs to the first turning. A likely wench! he thought, and then, more soberly, reminded himself that he would be every kind of fool to seduce a ward of his mischancy brother’s.
Henry forced no lady. But his charm, enhanced by his position, was such that he recognized at least a dozen bastards already, and he could not estimate the likelihood of many he did not know of. The prince was a man of capacious appetites and the means to satisfy them. He had been shortchanged in the inheritances left by his father the Conqueror — William got England, and Robert Short-Hose received Normandy, and Prince Henry got five thousand pounds. A handsome sum, he realized, even princely, but not one acre of land he could call his own.
The prince, with growing shrewdness, held certain plans, it was said, hidden under his dark hair, but in the meantime he reaped what benefit he could from his rank and his lust for living.
Crown of Passion Page 4