Almost Innocent

by Jane Feather

  Almost Innocent

  Jane Feather

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Carcassonne, 1360

  The woman was smiling, and it was the smile that never failed to set the serpents of lust crawling in his belly, the heat of urgent desire suffusing his skin. It did so even tonight.

  The man returned the smile, reaching to touch the rich dark hair falling to her knees, glowing bright against the virgin white of her linen shift. A virgin white belied by the swell of her belly.

  “It seems nothing can dim your beauty, Isolde.”

  The woman took the compliment as her due. She began to play with the dripping wax from the tallow candle on the table in front of her, rolling the little puddles into soft balls. Her nails were long.

  The man felt the stirring in his loins. How many times had those nails raked his back in the throes of passion, those little white teeth nipped his shoulder during the violent heat of their sharing?

  He turned aside, walking to the narrow slitted window set into the turret wall of the fortress monastery of Carcassonne. He could see nothing but the black strip of night sky and a single steady star. The silence in the bastion room was profound, its quality somehow undiminished by the crackle of a splitting log in the hearth, the scrape of her chair on the stone-flagged floor, the whisper of wine flowing from pitcher to cup. At the last sound, he felt his shoulders stiffen. He kept his back to the room until she spoke. And it was a minute or two before she did so.

  “Come drink with me, John. You are in a strange mood this night. It is the last time we will be together for many months.” Her voice was sweet and cajoling, and bile rose in his gorge.

  “Aye, and this meeting was the devil’s own work to arrange,” he said, turning back to the room. Two pewter goblets of wine stood on the table. Her hand curved possessively around the one at her place. The man’s full, passionate mouth smiled, but his blue eyes were hooded, concealing their expression. The candlelight caught his golden head as he bent to kiss her mouth, curving beneath his caressing lips. How easy it was to do that.

  “I have a present for you,” he said, straightening slowly.

  Her gray eyes glittered as they always did at such a prospect. “What is it?”

  “A christening present for our child,” he replied. “I must leave tonight for the fighting in Burgundy, and you will be delivered and churched long before I may see you again.”

  “Where is it?” She rose from the table, tall and graceful despite her swollen belly. Vibrant, she was, with her glowing dark hair and her glittering gray eyes, and her rich red lips now parted eagerly. Her lover’s generosity was always princely.

  He gestured to the leather pouch on the settle beside the fire. “Why do you not see for yourself?”

  She moved with measured step. She bent over the pouch. Soundlessly, he switched the positions of the pewter cups on the table.

  “Why, ’tis beautiful!” She held up a golden two-handled cup studded with emeralds and rubies.

  “Look within,” he said softly.

  Slowly, she drew out a strand of sapphires, each one the size of a robin’s egg. “Ah, John, but you never fail.” She regarded him with that same smile. Was there a hint of regret in her eyes? If there was, it was gone almost before it was visible.

  “Let us drink,” he said. “A toast to the babe.” He lifted his own goblet. She took the one at her chair and raised it to her lips.

  “To love, John.”

  “To love,” he said, and drank.

  She watched him drink before she drained her own cup, then she came into his arms, so warm, so loving … so treacherous. But yet the passion stirred even as he felt on his own body the child in her womb kicking against her belly, pressed so close to his own.

  “Why do you wear chainmail?” she asked suddenly, running a hand beneath his surcote. “ ’Tis hardly the garb for a lover’s tryst.”

  “The roads are dangerous,” he said, tracing the curve of her jaw with his finger. “Brigandage in these parts is beyond control.” He drew her back into his embrace, tasting the wine on her lips.

  Then came the sound he had been expecting. The piercing note of a bugle, his own herald, sounding the call to arms from the great court. His own men would have been ready for the attack, however it was launched, although those who attacked would know nothing of the spy whose dying words, wrenched by torment, had alerted their intended victims.

  The woman in his arms pulled away. “What is that?”

  Running feet, stumbling feet sounded from the stone passage beyond the heavy oak door. The door flew open.

  “Lady, we are betrayed.” A friar, in the corded habit of the Franciscan, stood clutching his chest where the hilt of a dagger stood out. Strangely, there was no blood. Then he fell into the doorway, and the lifeblood began to flow from the wound.

  “What is this?” The woman clutched her throat, staring at her lover in the horror of realization. “What have you done?”

  “What you would have done to me,” he told her in a voice as flat as a summer sea.

  He whirled suddenly, withdrawing the dagger from his belt. Then it was lodged deep in the chest of a man-at-arms whose springing leap across the dead friar was stopped in mid-air. He fell, the wicked, two-pronged knife in his own hand clattering to the flags.

  The woman gave a sudden, choking gasp, her hand plucking desperately at her throat, her eyes widening in horror. “What have you done to me?”

  “What you would have done to me,” he repeated.

  Her eyes flew to the goblets on the table, and terror stood out clear on her face. Suddenly, she doubled over. “Help me! In the name of pity, help me!”

  He eased her to the floor, unable to feel pity for the woman who was suffering the torments she had prepared for him. Only she knew whether the poison in the goblet was mercifully quick or whether she had from her twisted soul planned a tortured death for him. Her eyes glazed rapidly, her body convulsed rhythmically, but all awareness seemed to have left her. He knelt beside her and swiftly murmured the words of absolution as papal decree permitted. For all her sins, and they were grievous and many, for all the blood she had upon her hands, he could not abandon her to hell’s damnation. As he whispered over her, he became aware of something else, some other convulsive movements of her body. The child was fighting its way into the world.

  For a moment he knelt, irresolute. The child was his, but it had grown in such a womb and was nothing to him. If he left, it would die beside its mother. It would probably die anyway; what chance did an eight-month child have? But there was something about the elemental struggle, the blind need of that life to emerge, that refused to allow him to turn aside.

  He pushed up the woman’s linen shift and helped the infant into the world as her mother died. To his amazement, the child immediately drew breath on a gulping cry. She was small, as was to be expected of an eight-month babe, but her limbs were whole, and she offered him an unblinking stare even as the thin wails shook the tiny body.

  There had been enough death in this chamber. He took a small knife from his belt, cut the cord, and knotted it. Then he wrapp
ed the child in his fur-lined mantle and left the place of birth and death.

  Chapter One

  It was dark in the wattle and daub hut—dark and cold. An ice-tipped wind, gusting down the hole in the roof that served as a chimney, sent smoke billowing into the dank air from the sullen fire. Despite the cold, fleas hopped in the moldering rushes laid on the earth-packed floor, and the child slapped absently at her leg, her interest centered on the scummy surface of the liquid in a shallow earthen dish set on the floor.

  “What can you read therein, mad Jennet?” she whispered in awe, peering fruitlessly for the magic message that her companion never failed to see.

  Mad Jennet shook her head and cackled with more irony than humor. “Mad they call me, but I’ve more wits than the lot o’ them and don’t you forget it, little maid.”

  “No, I will not,” Magdalen said, anxious not to cause offense at such a pivotal moment. “What can you read?”

  The crone began to intone in an expressionless voice, “Water and a land of wide spaces.”

  It was very disappointing. “Will I go to this land?” the child asked, eager to draw some relevance from the image.

  “Who’s to say.” Mad Jennet creaked to her feet and brought a leather flask to her lips, drinking deeply of its contents. “Who’s to say.” She wiped her mouth with the back of a filthy, gnarled hand.

  Magdalen knew from experience that once mad Jennet started drinking from the flask, there would be no more revelations. Disconsolately, she got to her feet, brushing at her orange holland smock where she knew, although she could not see in the gloom, any number of nasty things would have collected. “You said you would prepare me a spell, so that I could make something happen.”

  “And what would you like to happen, little maid?” The old woman reached up to a shelf set into the wall and brought down a box.

  “Anything,” Magdalen said. “Anything at all.”

  Mad Jennet peered at her in the dim light. “One day, you’ll have no such hankering. The day will come when you’ll pray for all to stay the same. Bad though ’tis, you’ll wish it to stay for fear of the worse that is coming.”

  Magdalen shivered. You could never be certain with mad Jennet when her pronouncements were based on prescience or when they were just idly made.

  “Give me your hand.”

  Obediently, the child extended her hand, palm up, and watched as the dame sorted through the box, selected, and placed items in her palm. There were bits of hair, tiny bones, a snake’s eye, a cat’s tooth, and a light dusting of some ashy substance. Magdalen stared, fascinated and awed at this clear proof of the dame’s power to cast spells.

  “Put them beneath your pillow for three nights,” Jennet instructed, “and be sure you have only broth for supper. The spell will not work if your belly’s over-full.”

  Magdalen thought of putting such a collection beneath the pillow of the bed she shared with her aunt, and her heart quailed slightly, even as laughter tickled at the back of her throat. She swallowed the laughter, thinking her companion might find it disrespectful in the face of such an awesome gift, thanked the dame, and slipped cautiously from the hut. Unfortunately, she was not cautious enough.

  The Lord Bellair stood upon the battlements of Bellair Castle, staring toward the dark huddlement of the forest of Radnor. It was from those massed and secret depths that a raid would come, and the presence of sentinels in all four belltowers of the fortress gave evidence of the castle’s watchfulness. It was the task of the Lords Marcher, of whom Lord Bellair was one, to protect the border from encroachment from the Welsh lowlands. The lords held their fiefs, strung along the border, in the king’s name, and none was more sensible of the importance of his duty and the honor attendant upon it than the Lord Bellair.

  This gloomy, blustery February day, however, this Lord Marcher was expecting visitors to come in peace on a matter of business that exercised him considerably. Rooks wheeled and cawed over the crenellated fortress, built for defense not comfort with its four massive towers at each corner. The vast donjon rose in the center of the enclosed space, towering over the working buildings of the compound, throwing its great shadow over the maze of cloisters and inner courtyards.

  A sudden burst of raucous laughter rose above the cawing of the rooks and the background sounds of the fortress at work, the hammer on anvil from the forge, the rattle of harness, the tramp of marching feet from the garrison court. The man on the battlements swung round to look down into the courtyard below. Two pages were engaged in a game of chase, threading their way through the groups of men-at-arms, who jeered or called encouragement, depending on their mood. One of the boys held aloft a velvet cap of the Bellair livery as he dodged the grasping hands of his capless pursuer. Two yellow mastiffs plunged noisily and eagerly into the fray.

  Satisfied that it was but exuberant play, more the responsibility of the master of pages than his, Lord Bellair was about to turn back to his examination of the horizon when he caught a glimpse of vivid orange hugging the wall of the outer ward.

  His lips thinned in anger. There was only one possible reason she could have had for being there. Mad Jennet’s hut was situated at the furthest extremity of the outer court. For fear of her powers, no one dared banish her from the castle, but she was kept in isolation, visited only by the desperate in their own need or the greatly compassionate in her need.

  The Lord Bellair, his fur-trimmed surcote swaying, strode rapidly down the stone steps, reaching the inner courtyard just as the child emerged through the central archway.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded, although he knew the answer well enough.

  “With mad Jennet, sir,” Magdalen answered. Lying would benefit her nothing.

  Lord Bellair regarded the child with his usual mixture of unease and bewilderment. It was unnatural for an eleven-year-old to find irresistible a filthy crone with her mutterings and incantations. Why was she not as afeared of the witch as he was convinced any other child of her age and upbringing would be? He took in the unspeakable dirt on her smock, the ribbon come loose from the long brown plait, and saw that she held something clenched in her fist.

  “What is that in your hand?”

  Magdalen examined the cobbles at her feet while she tried to decide whether she could keep her secret. But she knew she could not. Slowly, she uncurled her hand, revealing the unsavory little pile on her palm. “It’s a spell.”

  Lord Bellair recoiled. What sort of a child was she that she would dabble in witchcraft in this fashion? Was she so tainted by her birth? He had struggled for eleven years to overcome that taint, and he would try one last time. He wanted to take the disgusting, fearsome assortment from her and hurl it to the ground. But he dared not. If there was indeed magic contained within the grouping, he dared not disturb it. The spell must be returned intact whence it came.

  Taking the child’s free hand, he strode with her back into the outer ward and over to mad Jennet’s hut. He pushed through the skin hanging over the doorway and held his breath against the noxious stench. Mad Jennet cackled from the shadows at her visitor.

  “Well, well, my lord. Are you come to visit the mad crone? What can I do for you? Is it a willing wench you’d wish for … or the power to enjoy one? That’s long lost to you, I’ll be bound.” Her laughter rustled like sere leaves, mocking.

  They were not words for a child’s ears, and the Lord Bellair’s anger rose with his discomfiture. He shoved the girl forward. “Return those revolting things!”

  Magdalen stepped further into the hut and laid the spell carefully upon the ground. “My thanks, dame, but I may not accept it.”

  Old Jennet offered no response, and Lord Bellair and the child left without further speech.

  They went in silence across the outer ward and into the court. Magdalen was resigned to the coming punishment. Her feet took little skipping steps to keep up with the impatient, angry stride of her father as he marched with her to the donjon and through an arched doorway in
to the great hall of the castle. An ancient hound, sprawled before the massive fireplace, raised his grizzled head at the arrival, but the servitors and wenches bustling around the vast room, laying fresh rushes interlaced with lavender, barely glanced at their lord and the child as they went up the stone staircase leading from the hall. They went down a long passage and into the women’s wing of the castle.

  In the bedchamber Magdalen shared with her aunt, Lord Bellair whipped her. Nothing was said by either of them until it was over. The child made no sound, although tears crowded her eyes. He replaced the switch on the shelf beside the hearth and turned back to the room, the frown still deep on his brow. She stood with her back to him, her shoulders rigid, her head averted lest he see the trembling lip and tear-sheened eyes.

  He shook his head in weary incomprehension, appreciating despite himself the pride that kept her from showing him that he had hurt her, yet wishing she would offer just a hint of contrition. Just a hint, and he could make some move toward her, but she stood there, fierce in her refusal to offer him the slightest help.

  Such a fierce, indomitable, unnatural child she was. Even as he chided himself yet again for using such a term as “unnatural” in reference to an eleven-year-old child, he knew that it expressed what he felt about her. Was she touched by destiny, or tainted by the past? One of the two. He caught himself wondering what her horoscope would foretell, then dismissed the thought abruptly. With God’s grace, the child’s future would be no concern of his. And it was a future to begin this day.

  He walked to the door, and when he spoke his voice was without anger. “I am expecting visitors this day. You will be presented to them in the great hall. Wait here until your aunt comes to you.” The door closed behind him, and the key turned in the lock.

  Magdalen’s tears now flowed freely. They flowed for the smarting of the switch, but more for her own perverse nature that would not permit her to behave properly, that set imps of wickedness coursing through her veins so that she wanted to dance and sing and must always be moving, could not be still with her tambour frame or lute, could not restrain her exuberance and the joy of her soul, could not feel that she belonged in this drear, damp, border land of cold stone and heavy forests. And yet she had known no other; had known no caretakers but her father and her aunt, who, she knew in her heart, did the best they could with her, although she seemed constantly to disappoint them. She could not accuse them of injustice. So why did she seethe so with resentment sometimes, with the certainty that she didn’t belong, the certainty that she had never belonged, that these people were only passersby in her life? She flung herself facedown on the poster bed, but she was not made for tears and never wept for long. The tears dried rapidly as speculation about the coming visitors took her mind off her soreness.