by Robyn Carr
“All of our children are home,” he comforted.
“They are a worrisome group. Please stay with me.”
“You are not alone, my love. I am with you always.”
“Will you stay? Will you hold me against the night? Just once?”
“What is it you fear most?” he asked, pulling her with him toward the large draped bed. He let her kneel and take his boots from his feet, and pulled off his vest and short gown. “Is it Brainard? Sloan? Me?”
“I’m not sure what I fear, Brennan. How different we’ve all become,” she sighed, settling into the bed, into the crook of his arm. There was familiar comfort there. “Without you, I am nothing,” she murmured.
He sighed deeply, pulling her closer. “That has never been the case, not even when first we met. You were very special then, and you become more special every year. You, Anne of Ayliffe, are remarkable and strong. I have grown to admire you.”
Anne of Ayliffe. She marveled at the sound. Is that how Brennan thought of her now? Her life had changed so dramatically that she barely remembered who she was. The young girl who submitted bravely to the older, wiser, stronger earl was gone forever and in her stead was a woman, shaking inside from the fearful demands of her station, composed on the outside for fear that someone would guess how vulnerable she really was and, therefore, refuse to follow her commands.
No one knows me, she thought suddenly. No one at all. Her mother was jealous of her and thought her cunning. Brennan considered her independent and strong, not needy and weak, as she thought of herself. Dylan might know her better than any man, yet was near her so seldom. Sometimes, she felt she did not even know herself and that there was no one to help her discover who she was.
“Brennan, you molded me into the countess you wished to have serve Ayliffe.”
“I did. And I will expect nothing less from you until the day you die. But remember you this, I chose the perfect person to be the Countess of Ayliffe. I will take only the credit I deserve. And that praise, for helping you use your womanhood to good purpose, I will take proudly.”
“Anne of Ayliffe,” she repeated doubtfully.
“Swear me nothing else, but that you will never abandon Ayliffe.”
“Never. I love Ayliffe.”
“ ‘Tis well. I could forgive anything but that. My wives before you loved Ayliffe, and they loved me, but differently than you do. They admired its wealth, its prominence. They were both good women – they tried hard to do well. Neither one was born with a gift to serve this place, to preserve its exquisiteness. You are different. You seem to know what it really is.”
“Your other wives, Brennan,” she began uncertainly. “Did they love you ... very much?” Did they love you better than me? she wanted to ask. Did you love them better? Did I ever make you as happy as you hoped I would? She longed to tell him how hard she had tried, how much she had desired to make him proud, to please him well.
He was silent for a long while. When he answered, his voice was soft. “We all love in very different ways, dear Anne. This I have learned, finally.”
Brennan had somehow resigned himself to the relationship molded originally by Anne. He was a strong arm to lean on, a friend to talk to, a courteous and generous lord. He no longer lamented nor complained that she did not meet him in passion. He was comforted mostly by Deirdre, who thrived on her father’s attention.
“Do you still love me, Brennan?” she asked him.
“I do, Anne. In you, I see hope for Ayliffe.”
“Do you love me for myself? At all?”
“Oh, my dear, I love and respect you for all that you are. All.” And he dropped a paternal kiss on her brow and slept at her side. Anne felt a ripple of disappointment. The man who had desired her body, the man who had nearly lost control of his passions as she passed him in the gallery, was now calling her his “dear” and his “little love.” She felt she had failed him. Her mind traced the years in a flash of brightly colored pictures. A great noble knelt at her feet and begged her good favors, wished to tumble with her in a frenzy on the grass, and she had blandly told him how fond she was of him. She had never been able to return his passion. The circle of their love had never closed; she had kept a gap open for Dylan. Her passion had always been for another.
For that one night, as she lay in her husband’s arms, she believed she had done wrong. She felt, for the first time, deep regret. It was not her adultery that shamed her, for she could not deny the love she had for Dylan, but her failure to give Brennan what he most desired, what he willingly gave her. And now it was forever too late.
***
In the high heat of summer, when the crops were growing tall, the stock fat, and a good harvest was in sight, Anne heard the door of her husband’s bedchamber slam. She looked up toward the stairs from the hall and saw Brainard descending, red-faced and furious. He looked at her as if he could kill her with his eyes. She shuddered involuntarily at his expression of loathing.
“A clever trick, my lady vixen,” he accused in a harsh whisper.
“I do not know what you mean, Brainard.”
“So the wealth of Ayliffe is to be divided? Among three ... nay, four! I am no longer the sole heir here, unless I choose to accept some promise of title when I am an old, old man. We shall see, madam slut! We shall see!” He looked over the length of her as if she were a wench whose services could be purchased. He smiled wickedly. “Do you think I can’t make my own way? One day, when you are still quite alive enough to see it, I will take Ayliffe!”
Sloan was just coming into the hall and Brainard rudely pushed him out of his way to take his leave. Anne followed his departure with worried eyes.
“Madam? Mother?”
She let her gaze drop to Sloan’s face. She suddenly realized that Brennan’s support was not enough. Her husband was aging before her very eyes, becoming melancholy, sentimental, worried. She had to keep herself and her children safe.
“Sloan, fetch me Sir Clifton. Right away, lad.”
She knew of no one else to seek for aid. She needed strength and loyalty close to her hand. She thought it was essential to draw Sir Clifton closer to her needs, her troubles. She did not think it was a hasty decision.
***
Dylan housed one thousand soldiers and men-at-arms. Half that number equaled his farmers, smiths, servants, wheelwrights, artisans, craftsmen, weavers, bakers, and others. One thousand five hundred pledged. To whom? Only his right arm, Sir Mark, knew that their allegiance to the Duke of Clarence and the Earl of Warwick was only a fleeting, fancy trick.
He had watched his villeins bring in a good harvest, doubling his wealth. He had journeyed to the Scottish border with men and arms and drove back blood-minded Scots in an uprising, proving his value as a leader of armed warriors. The winter came down hard and fast after the celebrations for harvest and victory in battle. The ground was hard to break. He buried a baby son, born dead. And before 1469 was very old, he was informed of his brother’s death.
Cameron was only five and thirty when a winter illness consumed him. Dylan could not believe it had happened to a man so vital, so strong. As Dylan’s wealth and importance multiplied, so did his losses. He rode toward Cameron’s demesne with a heavy, aching heart. They had been close in Calais. He grieved that Cameron had not been restored to his rightful position. He grieved for lost friendship, a lost son, a lost love.
Lady Raynia had not risen from her bed since the early delivery of her dead child at Christmastide. It was not the loss of the babe that caused her suffering. She had not wanted a child. Raynia would never recover from her marriage. She hated England, hated Dylan. She cried for the rich, sunny skies of Calais, her mother, her freedom from intimacy and childbearing. Dylan did not begin to understand how these strange things had happened to Raynia, nor why, but he knew his wife was sadly demented and tormented. She was only nineteen years old and had twice miscarried and once delivered her child too soon to save him. She had not wished to leave Calais, in an
y case, but her father had insisted upon the marriage, which looked to be the best prospect for his plain, poor-tempered young daughter. Raynia had hated her father as she hated all men. Then the old man died and Raynia was sent to Dylan, and to a cold, gray England.
Jeannette was Raynia’s only solace, and their carefully tended secret was no longer safe from Dylan. He had found them together in bed, naked. “Is this what you prefer?” he had asked her, amazed.
Raynia had unshielded her heart, her tongue. Dylan, she accused, only forced agony on her with painful, disgusting acts, followed by the gruesome tortures of pregnancy. Jeannette was gentle, kind, soft, and loyal. Raynia begged piteously to be sent back to Calais. She hated everything in her life.
“I will send you back,” he had said, gently. He did not love Raynia enough to be jealous or even outraged. “But I cannot soon. I need a wife. You must play the part. Keep your shame locked tight in your bedchamber. If the servants learn of your perversion, I will be forced into harsh punishments, and there will be no Calais. I don’t care that you defy me, but you defy the church, and I cannot help you with that. When I can, I will send you away.”
He knew he would find Daphne with Cameron’s widow, he had not seen his mother in over a year. When she embraced him, kissing his lips and both his cheeks, his stoic mien crumbled, and he cried like a lad at his mother’s breast.
Daphne stroked his brow, kissed away his tears, and held him. She had never broken. Dylan knew some secrets of his mother’s private torment, of her own lost love. She had buried a husband and now two sons. Yet, she did not weep, but seemed to grow stronger. She whispered the name of his nephew, Cameron’s son, in his ear. “Justin, Justin.”
Cameron had been laid to rest on his wife’s dower lands, and young Bess wept honest tears of grief and loneliness when Dylan was with her. She had loved Cameron, given him a strong and handsome son, and was now left with the very thing she had begun with--a modest manor house on decent, but not rich, lands in the south of England.
“Give me Justin,” Dylan said to her. “He is five years old and needs a father. I will raise him to be brave and skilled, and you may go to Lady Scales, Anthony Woodville’s wife. He will visit you often, but I will petition the queen to find you a suitable marriage when your period of mourning has spent itself. We will do better for you than this. We will turn an eye toward a good man whom you can love. You are young and strong, Bess. You are lovely.” He grasped his sister-in-law’s hands. “I cannot otherwise have a son. Justin is all there is for me.”
Dylan stayed a month on his dead brother’s estate, feeling more comfortable and at home there than he did on his own lands. The estate he had conquered through tournaments and gifts did not feel like his yet. He kept it precariously balanced between an imaginary allegiance to George of Clarence, and a true, but secret, loyalty to the king. And Raynia was there.
It had not taken Dylan long to understand that Edward was wise to mistrust his brother. Richard Neville, the kingmaker of Warwick, who had helped Edward achieve the throne, had successfully turned the duke’s head, and together they had begun to agitate small groups, creating minor uprisings, which raged in the countryside. Warwick’s name was not mentioned by the rebels, but the skirmishes were fought with the battle cry of opposition to the king, calling Edward a bastard, degrading the Woodville family, and an attempt to usurp the crown was coming. Dylan did not yet know whom Warwick would crown, but the Duke of Clarence had been promised a position close to the throne. Dylan shook his head in wonder that the duke did not see that his link to power through his brother was more secure than a treasonous alliance with Warwick. Dylan sent frequent, secret messages to his king. Clarence was one day Warwick’s good henchman, the next day, the king’s true subject. It was a chess game of players that moved too rapidly to follow. But Dylan kept Edward very well informed. If Warwick, or, for that matter, the Duke of Clarence, found himself betrayed, Dylan would be executed most quickly.
The danger of the conspiracy, along with his loneliness and grief, was changing Dylan. His pain was so deep that he did not realize it was making him strong. Stronger than ever.
“I do not like this allegiance with the Duke of Clarence,” Daphne said as they rode north to Dylan’s demesne.
“Why, madam? The duke is a strong man – he is generous. He is close to Warwick--the richest man in England.”
They had brought Justin with them. Daphne had agreed to live with them at least until Justin had adjusted to his father’s death. He would need frequent, reassuring visits with his mother, and since Dylan could not provide motherly love in his home, a grandmother’s attention was more than important. As they rode together, Dylan’s eyes were focused ahead on some distant point. His future was out there somewhere. He knew it was beyond the estate that he had managed to win. Beyond the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Clarence. Beyond his marriage, his nephew. It was still very far away. But he still hoped. He could not kill the hope, even though he wished it would leave him.
“What is it you think to gain in this alliance? Wealth? Power?”
“Aye,” he said simply. “And a secure hold on my possessions for my family.”
“What family, Dylan?” she asked. “Lady Raynia? I know Raynia is not long for England. If you keep her here very much longer, she will die of grief. A more unhappy lady does not live.” Dylan was silent. “For Justin? Will you make him your son, your heir?” Still he did not reply. “For me? I do not need wealth and power, you are all I have left, you and Justin. Your heart is heavy and sad and all I ever wanted for you was your happiness. Dylan?”
He turned his head and looked into her crystalline eyes with his own determined eyes. He smiled vaguely, secretly. They were mostly alone. Justin was asleep in the litter behind them, the escort troop was far ahead. “There are only two women in all the world to whom I would trust the truth. You are one, madam. And I have been lonely long enough. Come into my confidence, Mother.”
“Two?” she asked in a whisper.
“Anne of Ayliffe,” he answered.
Daphne crossed herself and looked down into her lap as she rode, her lips moving as if she uttered a prayer.
“I mean to have her, Mother.” Daphne turned to look at her son. She saw his smile. He appeared confident, almost serene. “I think you should finally hear it. You have gathered your knowledge from my eyes for long enough. Hear it from my lips. All of it.”
***
Warwick’s rumblings erupted into small battles in the spring of 1469. The uprisings were mainly in Yorkshire and along the Scottish border among splinter groups of commoners that protested the king’s favors to his wife’s family. None of the little battalions of ruffians wore any official noble name. It appeared the people of England had become disenchanted with their king and were rising in rebellion, just as Warwick had planned.
The Earl of Ayliffe was in London with his family and, as was typical of his visits, he was pulled into secret councils and meetings every hour of the day and night. He spent little time with Anne, which gave her far too much time to look around the gathered courtiers in search of a pair of turquoise eyes.
The element of intrigue in Brennan’s life had become a matter of fact for them, and so a late-night interruption that pulled them from sleep was not met with any great surprise. A herald wearing the king’s tabard was announced. Anne rose, as did Brennan, but she covered her nightgown with a chamber robe and left their bedchamber so that her husband could receive his message in privacy. She listened at the door of a small anteroom.
“You are a man of many costumes, Dylan,” Brennan said quietly.
“Your pardon, my lord.” His voice was anxious, strained, perhaps frightened. “A courier of mine was captured on the road. My message to the king was intercepted, and the messenger was executed. In a few days I will know if he spoke my name.” There was a heavy sigh. “I’m certain you will hear, by way of gossip, whether I am done of this service.”
“I’m sorry, Dylan,
” Brennan said. “You knew the risks.”
“Aye. Never mind, I have faced this before and will again. The king must be told these facts. There are many small groups inciting rebellion, but there is one to watch closely. There are bandits who run with Robin of Redesdale, he is not a champion of the people. He is Warwick’s man, and his army is large and will converge on Edward.”
“Who is Robin, then?”
“I am not sure. There is talk that it is Sir William Conyers, Lord Warwick’s good man, and that he has sixty thousand now. I have seen factions of the army, you may be assured these are not the unhappy artisans and serfs of York following their local hero. And the demands they make will sound strikingly like his lordship of Warwick’s own vendetta. The names of those whom Robin would remove from the king’s personal favors will be Warwick’s enemies. This you must tell His Majesty.”
“And George? Where does he stand?”
“Today, with Warwick. He seems determined to marry Warwick’s daughter Isabel. It is true, though, that he has never mentioned wearing the crown of England himself. It is only that Edward’s brothers hate the Woodvilles.”
“Gloucester, too?”
“Richard of Gloucester refuses to be drawn into Warwick’s camp. He is hard for Edward. But, my lord, he hates the Woodville family every bit as much. Be wary. Richard is young still.”
“Do you know their plans for attack?”
“Nay, my lord, but I was told by the duke that I would be called. My forces are not great and we will be ... delayed. All this, of course, if I do not hang before the week is out, for my betrayal of Clarence.”
“Flee, Dylan. The king will understand.”
From behind the closed door Anne felt tears come to her eyes. Flee, she wanted to cry out. Run, Dylan, run. She pressed her fist to her mouth to keep herself silent. The struggle to contain her emotions was almost impossible. She had not even seen his face in two years.