Almost Innocent

by Jane Feather

  She touched the back of her hand to her lips, hearing his anguished misery, struggling to contain the hurt of his words and to find the right ones of her own. “There is sorrow, deep and abiding sorrow. But must we bear the guilt for his death?”

  The bleakness in his eyes was suddenly replaced with a rapier thrust of anger, and she recoiled instinctively.

  “If you had not broken your oath, Magdalen, Edmund would still live.”

  She shook her head in bewilderment and pain. “No … I did not break my oath. I said nothing—”

  “He discovered the truth from you.”

  “But … but it was my cousin who told him … who led him to believe—”

  “And you did not deny it, did you?” There was now just harsh anger in his voice. His hands lay flat upon the table, and his bright blue gaze went through and through her. She shook her head numbly. “Had you denied it, he would have believed you because he bore you such love he would have accepted your word in anything. He wanted your denial, and you would not give it to him. None of this would have happened if you had stood fast to your oath.”

  “You are saying that it is I who am responsible for Edmund’s death.” Her voice was a bare whisper as she read that dreadful revulsion in his eyes, and her own defiled blood moved sluggishly in her veins.

  Guy did not reply.

  “It is because I am my mother’s daughter,” she went on in a faint, distant voice. “Edmund loved me, and that love led to his death. All those men who died up there yesterday died because of the love Edmund bore me … That is what you are saying.”

  Again there was no reply. “I did not mean him to die,” she said in the same threadlike whisper. “I cannot help the taint of my blood that makes these things happen.” She brushed her hair from her face as the sun came up. “I may be born of a whore, in a moment accursed, but I would prefer my own death than to cause that of others in the manner of my mother, even if I cannot help it.”

  She walked away from him as he still sat, unmoving and silent. She walked down to the river. The sun began to dry the grass beneath her feet, fell warm on the back of her neck, and she sought the cool green gloom of a copse of elder and poplar, as if its shadowy depths suited her soul better than the heedless sun rising in promise on another day.

  Guy had barely heard her words. They had fallen soft and deadly as poisoned rain, and only in the silence of her departure did their residue sound a note of foreboding. He had spoken out of anger and grief at such a cruelly abrupt ending to a young man’s life, but such endings were a part of life. He had witnessed many such and grieved for many young men; ordinarily he would have absorbed the fact, and the anger and grief would have settled, finally to be forgotten. But guilt and remorse added an extra dimension to this death. He had made peace with Edmund, had received his forgiveness, yet his death revived the wretchedness of betrayal. When Magdalen had denied the guilt—hers, his, theirs—he had lashed out in a furious need to implicate her in his own thicket of remorse. He had intended to wound her as he was wounded, and it was only as he heard her words again that he realized she still bled from her own wounds, those inflicted by the de Beauregards during the long days of her ordeal at Carcassonne. He had laid his own stripes across those she already bore at a moment when she had needed his love and his comfort, as she had offered him her own.

  Whatever the future might hold for either of them, their love was still as vital a force as it had ever been. He rose abruptly to his feet. Magdalen’s distress had been of no ordinary quality, and he was suddenly afraid of what had been said and done between them. There was nothing further he could do for Edmund, but the living had need of him as he had need of her.

  Her footprints were fading in the grass as the sun dried the dew, but he followed them to the copse. It was quiet, the night’s cool still lingering. A woodpecker rat-tatted. Something rustled in a bramble bush. He called her and heard only the empty echo of his voice imprinted in the air. Fear twisted around his heart. He saw those gray eyes, candid as always, filled with a self-disgust that he had done nothing to eradicate. He heard her voice, so soft yet pulsing with revulsion. Twice, she had called herself the daughter of a whore, and on neither occasion had he denied it. He hadn’t denied it because it was true. But Magdalen had not been talking of the fact; she had been talking of the spirit that lay behind the fact. That, he could and should have denied immediately. In his own absorption, in what he now recognized as the need to punish her for his own pain and guilt, he had left her unrelieved in the morass of self-contempt and what she believed had been his contempt.

  “Magdalen!” He called her again, his voice rising with anxiety, but still there was no response.

  Sunlight glimmered at the end of the bramble-strewn path he trod, and the trees gave way to a broad meadow. He stepped into the light. The river ran between wide banks, dark brown water over flat stones, the silver glint of trout, the flat sharp-fanged head of an eel in the mud, a dragonfly swooping low, the feathered silver of a weeping willow drooping over the gently moving water. A peaceful scene, one untouchable by malevolence, by vengeance, by a poisoned love of the past.

  A little bridge of logs lay across the river a few hundred feet away. A fragile handrail of sagging rope had been slung alongside. Magdalen stood on the logs, facing the water, her hands gripping the rope. Her head was bent, and her hair fell richly brown across her breast.

  He came swiftly toward her, but she didn’t look up, not even when he reached the bridge and placed one foot on the logs. They shifted with his weight, then settled.

  “You must not wander so far from the camp,” he said, stepping carefully beside her.

  “They are evil,” she said, still not looking up. “And I belong to them … I am of them. It is not possible to love one of them, only, it seems, to be drawn to them … to be drawn into their evil. I have drawn you. I drew Edmund … as my mother drew my father. Mad Jennet said there was love and blood in my hand. I did not then understand how much.”

  “I love you,” he affirmed quietly, looking along the river, allowing the peace of the scene to inform his words, to heal his soul. “You are the daughter of Isolde de Beauregard and John of Gaunt. And I love you. You have borne me a child. And I love you.”

  “My mother was a whore.”

  “But you are not.”

  “Am I not?” She turned vigorously, and the logs trembled beneath her. “I betrayed my husband doubly and led him to his death. You could as easily have died at Carcassonne. How many men died there because of who I am and what I have done?”

  “You are not responsible for your birth or for the evil of your mother’s family, the evil that led to Edmund’s death. I spoke heedlessly out of my own pain, and you must take nothing I said into yourself, except this: I love you.”

  “You cannot. I bewitched you. How often have you said so? But you do not love me.”

  “Once upon a time,” Guy said thoughtfully, “there was a little girl who became very tiresome when she was told something she didn’t want to believe … so tiresome, in fact, that those who loved her lost all patience.” He caught her chin, forcing her to look at him. “The years don’t seem to have eradicated that tendency. You grow tiresome again, Magdalen of Lancaster.” He was smiling at her, his finger lightly running over her mouth. “I love you. And it does not matter whose daughter you are.”

  She looked into his eyes and read their truth. She saw the grief still there, the haunting remorse that would take a long time to fade, but she saw the truth of his love, a bright strong flame through the shadows, a flame that could only purify the past. And she saw that he would now allow it to do so. Secure in that love, she could lay down her own defiling heritage, trust once again in the simple fact of her own love, the love she bore the man and their child, a love that could only be a driving force for good. “Hold me,” she said, as she had so often done.

  “When there is solid ground beneath my feet,” he replied. “I have no wish to swim.”
/>   A tremulous laugh hovered on her lips, then she turned and leaped lightly along the logs to the far bank. Guy followed her as speedily, but he had barely touched ground before she was in his arms and he was engulfed with his own need. It had been so long since he had last held her this way, so long since he had felt the sinuous, lissom curves beneath his hands, smelled the warm, womanly fragrance of her hair and skin. She reached against him, her hands palming his scalp, her body pressed urgently to his, and a hot, hungry passion swept through them in an all-consuming tide. Her tongue was on his, his on hers, her teeth nipping his bottom lip, his hands pushing aside her skirts, probing, delving, opening in the warm, humid furrows of her body, and she moaned against him, desperate for his skin upon hers.

  They came together still clothed, hands scrabbling to push aside confining material, their bodies twisting to fit into each other with the familiarity of much shared intimacy and the piquancy of long deprivation, so that it felt familiar yet at the same time new and fresh.

  She felt she must hold him within herself forever, the throbbing, pulsing presence inside her that was intrinsic to her self. She felt she could forever bear the weight of his body upon hers, pressing her into the earth so that she was one with the earth and one with his body, the goodness from each flowing inside her, through her.

  He felt he was encompassing her with his body as she was consuming him with hers. They were one under the sun and upon the earth. They were one in life and in death, and their blood mingled hot with the juices of love in a transcendent, healing tide of joyous affirmation.

  Epilogue

  John of Gaunt’s long fingers pinched the wax falling from the candle on the table in the womblike privy chamber at the Savoy. The ruby on his ring glowed deeply crimson as his finger moved into shadow, sparking purple-red fire when it caught the candlelight. He rolled the wax ball between finger and thumb, enjoying its malleability, its warm softness.

  The messenger, dust-streaked, exhaustion etched on his swarthy face, dimming the natural brightness of his black eyes, stood against the door, head bowed, shoulders drooping.

  Lancaster tapped the parchment lying open on the table before him. The paper crackled in the overheated silence of the room. “Seek your rest, man,” he said abruptly. “You must have ridden day and night to arrive here so speedily.”

  “True enough, my lord duke,” Olivier said. “But my lord instructed me to bring you the news with all speed.”

  “You are a faithful and obedient servant,” the duke said. “But go to your rest now.”

  “When may I take an answer to my lord?” Despite his bone-deep fatigue and the man to whom he spoke, Olivier’s voice still had a certain obduracy.

  John of Gaunt frowned. “I see no call for an answer. Your master has simply informed me of certain facts, to whit: the death of Edmund de Bresse, the fall of the de Beauregards at Carcassonne, and the vulnerability of the fiefdom of Bresse. Do you see the necessity for an answer therein, Master Courier?”

  Olivier raised his head. “I believe my master expects an answer, my lord duke.”

  A sharp crack of laughter escaped the duke. He jerked his head toward the door. “Go to your rest, loyal courier. If I discover aught to respond, then I will apprise you of it as soon as you are rested.”

  Olivier bowed low and slipped soundlessly from the privy chamber.

  John of Gaunt again perused the document in Guy de Gervais’s sharp black script. Then he rose and went to a small jeweled chest set upon a shelf in a niche in the wall. He lifted the lid and took out another parchment. It bore the same black script.

  He sat down again, smoothing out both documents on the table. He was remembering that moment beside Magdalen’s bed when he and Lord de Gervais had told her of her husband’s disappearance, and he had felt the powerful surge of passion between his daughter and de Gervais and had recognized it because he had felt its like with the girl’s mother.

  When he had assumed Edmund de Bresse to be dead, Guy de Gervais had asked his overlord for the widowed hand of Magdalen of Lancaster.

  But Edmund de Bresse had not then been dead, and John of Gaunt had put the letter aside, deciding in kindness that it was best to pretend it had never been written. Now Edmund was dead in truth, and Guy de Gervais had informed him of this, and of Magdalen’s rescue, and of the destruction of the de Beauregard threat. This document, however, contained no plea for the widow’s hand.

  But it was there, nevertheless. The courier, Olivier, knew it to be there.

  He sat back, mentally reviewing potential suitors for his daughter’s hand. Another French connection could yield powerful allegiances. Then there were the Italian Viscontis. Rich and powerful, bandits in essence, but all too eager for a royal alliance. There were several young English lords whose absolute loyalty could be bought with the gift of such a bride. The girl had a proven ability to bear children. Where would it be most useful to plant his Plantagenet seed?

  Without volition, his hand moved to the deep pocket in his furred gown. He drew out the enameled miniature and gazed for long minutes on the face of the woman he loved and could not marry. Katharine Swynford was not of the blood that made royal brides, even were he free of his wife, Constanza of Castile. But he loved Katharine and he knew he would snap his fingers at the conventions of breeding if he were free.

  There were no such conventions preventing the marriage of Guy de Gervais and Magdalen of Lancaster, only a father’s desire to dispose of his daughter as advantageously as possible.

  John, Duke of Lancaster, took a sheet of parchment from the press, mended his pen, and began to write to his vassal, Guy de Gervais, Earl of Redeforde. He wrote fluently for many minutes, and at the end sanded the script, and without rereading it, folded the parchment, dropped wax from the candle upon the fold, and sealed it with his great ring.

  The following day, Olivier set out on his return journey, the duke’s parchment sewn into the lining of his doublet.

  He arrived at the Castle de Bresse a week after his lord’s return from Carcassonne. It was a tawny gold day of early autumn, and the castle wore the orderly air of a place under the command of its master, as if assaults, breached walls, and abduction had never disturbed the smooth pattern of daily life.

  He found Lord de Gervais and the Lady Magdalen in the pleasaunce, playing with the child whose red-gold hair and gray eyes offered the promise of an unusual future beauty.

  “You have made good speed, Olivier,” Lord de Gervais said. He was counting sunflower seeds into Zoe’s rosy palm as she sat on his knee, showing her how to hold her hand out to the softly murmuring doves. It was not an entirely successful exercise, but one that seemed to amuse the baby mightily.

  Guy shifted his hold to encircle his daughter with one arm and took the duke’s parchment with his free hand. “Go to your rest, Olivier. We will talk further when you are refreshed.” He waited until the courier had slipped with his usual discretion from the pleasaunce before breaking the Lancastrian seal. Zoe gleefully snatched at the parchment, and he captured her grasping fingers in his encircling hand, holding them firmly as he read. Finally he looked up.

  Magdalen was sitting back, her lap brimming with the embroidery silks she had been sorting. The warm glowing vibrancy was back in her face, her lips softly parted, the candid gray gaze containing love and the knowledge of its fulfillment. Her contentment was as one with the soft golden surfeit of the autumn garden, and he knew that for her it mattered nothing what John of Gaunt said. She knew that their love could not be touched by her father’s manipulations. John of Gaunt would decree, but she and Guy de Gervais would find their own way.

  But he had not been able to share her resignation or her calm certainty. Therein lay the difference between them, a difference that had always been there and always would be. The thought pleased him with its encompassing of the future, a future that he could now allow to enter his soul.

  He smiled. “We go to England, pippin.”

  “Why so?”r />
  “To be wed. His grace of Lancaster sees fit to bestow the hand of his dearly beloved daughter Magdalen upon his loyal vassal, Guy de Gervais, Earl of Redeforde.”

  “ ‘Dearly beloved’ ?” said Magdalen. “I believe my father lies.”

  “Do not be tiresome.”

  Her eyes closed for a minute under the soft autumnal sun, and a tiny, secretive smile played over her lips as she remembered all that had been and contemplated all that was to come. She opened her eyes. Guy was watching her, his own smile, comprehending and amused, illuminating his face.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Yes, I know,” she returned. “I even believe you love me as much as I love you.”

  “You are learning, it seems.” He set Zoe on the ground and stood up, reaching down a hand to pull Magdalen to her feet. “I think it’s time this little one went for a sleep, don’t you?”

  Magdalen stood up, heedlessly scattering embroidery silks in gay profusion on the grass at her feet. Zoe seized the bright swatches with a gleeful chuckle as her parents moved out of the sunlight under the golden canopy of a beech tree.

  “She’ll be happy enough for a little longer,” Magdalen whispered, lifting her face imperatively. “We can have a little interlude under the trees.”

  “Or we could simply let matters take their course,” he replied, grazing the curve of her cheek with his lips.

  “Or we could do that,” Magdalen agreed, tracing his ear with a delicate fingertip before standing on tiptoe to nip the lobe. “Yes, I think we should certainly do that. It’s always the best plan, I’ve found.” He laughed against her mouth.

  Zoe yawned, settling down amid the bright colors of her carpet to sleep. It was quiet in the warm, late afternoon garden, only the soft rustles of an affirming love mingling with the indolent drone of a wasp and the sharp chatter of a starling.

  Almost Innocent

  © 1990; 2001 by Jane Feather