Almost Innocent

by Jane Feather

  Bertrand nodded. “Continue.”

  “She will go out to them, and she must bring them within the fortress to parley. How she does so will be up to her, but she must be convinced that the child dies if she fails … She will not fail,” he concluded with quiet conviction. “I have seen her with the child.”

  “Then I suggest we present our kinswoman with the alternatives without delay.”

  Magdalen had heard the bugles’ challenge but could see nothing of the outside from the high slitted window. But the sound sent the blood coursing through her veins, embodying hope although she did not know why. It was always possible that if something beyond the walls was occupying her family, they would leave her alone for a while longer. She had not forgotten her cousin’s threat of the previous evening, and the long hours of the night had failed to bring a new plan to mind.

  Sister Therese came in, and for once her face showed some expression. “Come, you must hurry and dress,” she said. “You and the child are to go to the battlements.”

  Magdalen made no response. Her performance of the previous day had worked well enough then and it was still all she had at the moment. She remained listless and silent, but offered no resistance to putting on the clothes thrust at her. Defiance must be saved for great matters. Taking up the wakeful Zoe, she followed Sister Therese from the chamber. The thought of fresh air and sunshine encouraged a spring to her step, and she had difficulty maintaining a dragging pace and lowered head as they emerged from the bleak gloom of the donjon into the inner ward. She looked up to where the standard of Beauregard fluttered with the lilies of France from the topmost rampart of the keep. Who was challenging that standard?

  Her uncle and cousins were gathered on the outer battlements. Archers ranged along the ramparts, longbowmen with arrows already to their bows, crossbowmen laboriously cranking the unwieldy bolts. Men were bringing pails of water to line the walls, ready to be poured upon the fires that the besiegers would light to provide smoke cover for the scaling ladders.

  Magdalen recognized all these signs of a fortress preparing to withstand an assault. She had ordered the same herself a few weeks ago. But who would be attacking the de Beauregard stronghold of Carcassonne? Again a tiny spark of hope flickered crazily.

  She climbed the steps, preserving a lethargic passivity of face and step, and walked toward the group waiting on the battlement. Zoe was waving her arms around and gurgling with pleasure in the balmy morning, the swooping rooks, the fluttering flags.

  At the edge of the ramparts, Magdalen looked down. Her legs almost gave way beneath her. She could see Guy, astride his massive war horse, his red-gold head bare, his standard snapping. Joyous love, overwhelming relief that he was alive, safe, that he had come for her, flowed sweetly in her veins. All appearance of passivity vanished. She wanted to call out to him; she wanted to shout her love to the bright blue skies. She saw Edmund just behind him, and her relief at his safety was no less piercing. That they were both here, had both come for her, could only mean that some agreement had been reached between them. She would not be responsible for the death of one or both. Their blood would not be in her hand. In that moment, she knew that in gratitude for God’s mercy, she would put Guy de Gervais from her as all but a memory to lighten the soul’s darkness, and she would embrace her husband with what love she had left to give.

  “Yes, cousin. It would seem your champions are come.” Charles spoke, dryly sardonic, shattering the intensity of her thoughts. “I see you have recovered your senses. That is fortunate because we have work for you to do.”

  All her joy seeped away from her with the certainty that she was about to face a further ordeal. Her mother’s family was not going to yield her up without a fight.

  “Stand up here and show yourself. Let them see what they have come for.” Bertrand indicated a step in the parapet. “No, do not take the child up there. It is dangerous.”

  Somehow, she found she had relinquished Zoe to her cousin Philippe, whose hands took the child before she had time to think beyond her eagerness to see more clearly over the parapet. A hand went under her elbow, and she was standing on the step, exposed well above the rampart.

  Guy saw her and, despite the distance between them, some spirit flew between them, joined them in a moment of intense communion. Her hair was unbound, held back from her face by a simple wooden fillet at her brow, and the wind sent the rich sable mass swirling around her shoulders as it flattened her gown against the lissom lines of her body.

  “Magdalen!” Edmund, less restrained than Guy, couldn’t resist calling to her, but the wind snatched at his voice. “Is she unharmed?” he said in desperate anxiety to his companion.

  “I believe so,” Guy returned quietly. In that moment of communion he had felt that she was whole, but he had also felt something else, and he could not control his unease as she stood so exposed upon the parapet. He had felt her fear.

  “You may stand down now.” Bertrand spoke behind her, and she stepped backward to the flat broad solidity of the battlement. She turned to take Zoe, but Philippe held the child away from her.

  “Give her to me,” she said, trying to still the panic rushing dizzily to her head.

  “No. You have a task to complete first,” Bertrand said. “When it is done to our satisfaction, the child will be returned to you.”

  “What do you mean?” She now knew terror greater than that of the oubliette and a moan escaped her, her hands reached pathetically for her child.

  “Charles will explain.”

  She turned to d’Auriac, who was smiling his thin smile. “You will go to your husband and your lover, and you will invite them into the fortress to parley. When they pass through the gate, the child will be returned to you. If you fail …” He reached over and touched the baby’s cheek with a negligent forefinger. “If you fail, she will die … A pike thrust, and you may fish her body out of the moat.”

  “No! You could not—” But she knew they could. Her hand plucked at her throat. “Please …”

  “Bring them within the fortress,” Charles said.

  “And you will kill them?”

  “Them or the child. The choice is yours.”

  This was the abyss. She had been drawing ever closer to it, but each time she had thought she had reached it, she had been wrong. Now, she was there.

  “How?” She could barely form the word. Her throat was as dry as leather, and there seemed to be no breath in her lungs.

  Charles shrugged. “My dear cousin, that is for you to decide. You will know what arguments will serve best. You know those men, after all.” He was softly insulting. “Let us go down.”

  They all left the battlement. In the court below, Sister Therese still stood. She accepted the child without surprise. “Take her away and keep her with you at all times,” Bertrand said. “Her mother has work to do.”

  Magdalen watched, enwrapped in blackest despair, as the nun carried the child back to the donjon. If she could save them all with her own death, she knew at that minute that she would do so. But she had not been given that choice. She must entice Edmund and Guy to their deaths.

  She must go to them with loving eyes and open arms, words of promise and appeal on her lips. She must call to the love they both bore her, and they would do what she asked. She would bring them to their deaths with the vow of love, just as her mother had condemned so many enemies of the de Beauregards. She was her mother’s daughter; she had her mother’s power.

  Without a word, she began to walk toward the outer ward and the arched gate of the fortress.

  “You have one hour, cousin,” Charles called softly, and she felt his words on her back like a knife in the night.

  They let her out through the postern gate and lowered the drawbridge. She walked slowly across it, aware of the eyes of archers and pikers on the battlements, aware of the eyes of her mother’s family, watching her every step. Guy and Edmund had dismounted and stood at the edge of the drawbridge as she came forward. They
made no attempt to step upon it, governed as they were by the rules of chivalry ensuring that during parley no advantage must be taken of an enemy’s dropped defenses.

  She stepped off the drawbridge onto the cool green grass of the bank along the moat. The two men stood very still. Oh, how she needed Guy’s arms around her at this moment! How she yearned for his body against hers, enfolding her with his love and his passion and his strength. And oh, how she felt Edmund’s burning need for her to turn to him, to take those things from him.

  So she went to neither of them.

  She held out her hands in a gesture of mute supplication, her face deathly white under the sun, her eyes haunted with her terror.

  “What is it?” Guy said softly. “What have they done to you?”

  “I am to bring you both within the castle, or they will murder our child,” she said, knowing now that she could never have told him anything but the truth.

  He looked up toward the watchers lining the battlements, then he turned away. “Come with me.” The instruction was curt, masking the depths of fury threatening to chase all reason from his brain. “You too, Edmund.”

  They followed him out of the sunshine, into the first shadowed street of the town. There he stopped and turned to them. His eyes ran over them, assessing, and he knew Edmund could do nothing for Magdalen at the moment. It wasn’t a lover she needed with a lover’s needs to obscure her own. So he opened his arms to her. “Come here, pippin.”

  She fell against him with an incoherent sob and he stroked her hair, gently soothing, as if she were again the little girl he had comforted and reassured. And she gave way to the terror, dropping her defenses for the first time since they had parted in the chapel at Bresse and he had ridden away from her.

  Edmund, from his own horror at what she had told them, watched without jealousy. He knew he could not give her what she was receiving from the other man, and the knowledge brought him sorrow but now no sense of betrayal.

  “Enough,” Guy said finally, when her dreadful, wracking grief had yielded to gulping sobs. “Plantagenets do not give in or give up. Remember who you are, Magdalen of Lancaster.”

  She raised her tear-streaked face from his chest. The faintest indentation of his mailshirt beneath the tunic showed on her cheek, so tightly had she been pressed against him. “I am the daughter of a whore, sent to do a whore’s work.”

  Edmund exclaimed and Guy’s face darkened, but he said no words of denial. There were none. “How long have they given you to do this work?”

  She was not hurt by the lack of denial. She had simply stated the truth, and the pain was her own. “One hour,” she said. Her tears had dried, and her body seemed to be emptied of all emotion, even fear. Only a cool, dark void remained within her.

  “It’s not long enough,” Guy said, turning to Courtney Durand, who had been standing in the shadows, drawing his own conclusions from the scene. “What do you think, Durand?”

  The brigand chieftain said nothing for a minute, wondering why, now they’d got the woman, they didn’t simply leave the place. Children were expendable, and that one was so young anything could happen to it in the next few years. But he hadn’t been paid to advance what he sensed would be an unpopular viewpoint, so he said finally, “The lady must parley for more time.”

  “I do not know if I can,” she said.

  “You must.”

  “Magdalen?” Edmund spoke her name hesitantly.

  She remembered that moment on the battlement when she had sworn to give her husband all she had to give, and she realized that in her desperate need for Guy’s strength she had not yet acknowledged Edmund. She went quickly toward him, her hands outstretched. “Forgive me.”

  He gripped her hands, remembering painfully the violence of their last time together. “Forgive me for what I did to you,” he said in a low voice. “I have regretted it every minute—”

  She shook her head in vigorous denial. “I have not thought of it … will never think of it.”

  He longed to take her in his arms, but he could not, not here, so he just held her hands and devoured her face with his eyes. “I have been so afraid for you.”

  “Edmund … Magdalen.” Guy’s voice called them to him softly. He and Durand had been talking to Olivier, who in customary fashion had appeared silently and usefully. “Magdalen, you must return and negotiate a further two hours before we will enter the fortress.”

  “They will kill—”

  “Be quiet and listen.”

  Abashed, she fell silent, aware of the strangest resurgence of strength and optimism under the brusque, commanding tone.

  “Olivier knows where the underground corridor is located,” Guy said. All well-constructed castles had them, narrow passages running from the dungeons of the donjon, beneath the walls and the moat to the outside. Only thus could supplies be brought in during a siege and couriers escape unseen. Such corridors could not provide egress for large numbers; they were narrow, low-roofed dirt tunnels, and their location was in general known only to the castle commander. But on one of his spying visits to Carcassonne, Olivier had contrived to discover the whereabouts of this one.

  “Comes up in the saddler’s in the town,” Olivier said, picking his teeth. “Starts below the armory in the garrison court.”

  “We are going to send a small force through the corridor,” Guy said. “They must have time to get in place within the walls before Edmund and I enter. You will tell the de Beauregards that Edmund and I are prepared to discuss a ransom for you and the child and will come in peace to parley. We will bring our squires and pages and two knights banneret apiece as escort, and we will come in two hours.”

  “And if they will not accept that?”

  “You must ensure that they do.”

  Magdalen absorbed the flat statement.

  “Could we not send a herald with the message?” Edmund said tentatively. “Magdalen could stay safely here—”

  “They will kill Zoe,” Magdalen interrupted, her voice shaking. “I thought you understood that. If I do not return within the hour, they will kill her. And if you do not enter the fortress, they will kill her.”

  “I would not ask it of you,” Guy said gently, “but I can think of no alternative. You must trust that we will come for you both.”

  “What else must I do?”

  “If it is possible, you must get yourself and the child into the outer ward. We will raise the portcullis from within as soon as we are able, to admit reinforcements. When it is raised, you must leave immediately. You are not to concern yourself about anything that is happening within the courts. You are simply to save yourself and Zoe.”

  “I will tell them that you have made it a condition of parley that you see both the child and myself on the parapet, unharmed, in an hour,” she said, a slight tremor still in her voice but her mind now clear and resolute. “That way, they must give Zoe back to me, and I will ensure they do not take her from me again.”

  Guy nodded. “Return now, pippin. You must be strong for just a little longer.”

  She paused, shaking her head infinitesimally. Her voice very low, she said, “No, Guy, you are mistaken. I must be strong for a lifetime.”

  He knew what she meant, the final, absolute relinquishment of love. “And I also,” he said as quietly. “Go now.”

  They escorted her back to the drawbridge. She crossed without a backward glance and slipped through the postern gate. The drawbridge was pulled up behind her. Her uncle and cousins awaited her in the place d’armes.

  “Well?” Bertrand demanded.

  “I will tell you in a minute.” Magdalen put up her chin. “I have not broken my fast this day, my lord, and I am faint for lack of food.”

  “By the Holy Rood, you are your mother’s daughter,” Bertrand said into the stunned silence. He gave a sharp crack of laughter. “Many times I have seen Isolde put up her chin in just that manner.”

  “I am also a Plantagenet,” Magdalen said, thinking of all the mi
nutes she was using up in this exchange. But she must not go too far. “May I eat?” She put the request in a conciliatory tone.

  “They will come?” It was Charles who spoke the harsh question, and she turned to look at him, reading to her surprise a hint of anxiety in his voice, as if there was something personal riding on the success of this betrayal. She hid her satisfaction and dropped her eyes. Her voice was low, with a note of defeated submission.

  “They will come. But there are conditions.”

  “Come, there is no reason to discuss this in the open court.” Bertrand swung on his heel and strode to the donjon. “Bring meat and drink to the bastion room,” he instructed a page trotting at his heels.

  Magdalen tried to eat as if she had not had a decent meal in weeks, thinking all the time of the men crawling beneath the earth to shoot up where they were least expected, like the unruly suckers of a giant oak. But she could not procrastinate for long and finally told them of the conditions, making the telling long-winded and disjointed, as if the evidence of her success in this evil had to be dragged from her.

  “You told them we wished to discuss ransom?” Bertrand cut a thick slice from the sirloin on the table. “A good enough invention, I daresay.”

  “But they will not come if they do not see me and the child on the parapet first,” she said, trying to keep her desperate anxiety from her voice. She had to have Zoe again in her arms; without the child none of this was worth anything.

  “What has the child to do with it?” Charles demanded.

  Bertrand waved him down as he chewed solidly for a few minutes, and Magdalen waited, her eyes on the table lest they read her dreadful apprehension. “I see no reason why not,” her uncle pronounced finally. “A reasonable man would see that what he wished to ransom was ransomable. It simply indicates that he comes in good faith. Let her have the bratling. We can take it from her any time we choose, if it’s necessary to punish her failure or again compel her obedience.”