Knights

by Linda Lael Miller

  Gloriana responded—she could not help that—but when Dane released her mouth, she asked, “What of Mariette? We have not spoken since you bad your talk with her in the courtyard.”

  Dane took her hand and pulled her along behind him, striding along the gallery as confidently as if it were lit by a thousand candles, instead of intermittent patches of glimmering moonlight. “The mademoiselle is fond, as it happens, of the cloistered life,” he answered. “She wishes to join the abbey, under Sister Margaret’s care.”

  “But I thought—I thought she favored Edward—?”

  “Edward will be busy fighting these next few years,” Dane answered. “He is not ready to be a husband.”

  They were climbing the stairs that spiraled up and up toward the tower room, and Gloriana, breathless, began to wish her husband were still carrying her. “What do you mean, ’Edward will be busy fighting’?” she huffed. “Is he going away, as you did? I confess I had hopes he would forswear that ambition.”

  “He will not have to go away to fight,” Dane said, stopping again, his fingers tightening almost painfully around Gloriana’s. “Merrymont’s men have burned one of the outlying villages.”

  She sagged against the curved stone wall of the tower staircase, for this was news she had not gotten wind of during the evening’s merrymaking. “And Gareth and the others are going to take revenge?”

  A muscle moved visibly in Kenbrook’s jaw, and Gloriana dreaded his next words almost more than the fate that would soon force them apart. “Not only Gareth’s men will fight, but mine as well. Such deeds as Merrymont’s cannot be tolerated.”

  Gloriana had to stiffen her knees to keep from sliding right down to the floor. “What will you do, Dane?” she whispered brokenly. “Raid one of his villages? Cause innocent people to suffer, as Merrymont did?”

  Dane practically dragged her up the remaining steps and into the tower room. He slammed the great doors shut before turning to Gloriana, who was standing near the table, trembling a little and wide-eyed.

  Kenbrook’s nostrils flared slightly, and the light from the braziers danced around him, like flames made of shadow. “Do you think me a monster, Gloriana?” he breathed. “Can you believe, for so much as a moment, that I would do such things? For any reason?”

  Gloriana swallowed. “War is destructive work,” she said with timid conviction. “Fields are trampled, huts burned, farmers and village folk alike are killed and carried off. It matters little, it seems to me, which lord they serve, for they suffer in any event.”

  “Our quarrel is with Merrymont and his men, and no other,” Dane said coldly.

  She sighed and sank into a chair at the table. The room, so recently a prison, was now a clean, well-lit chamber. The bed had been prepared, scented water brought for washing, fresh clothing laid out for the morrow.

  Gloriana wondered if she would awaken in this room with the dawn or find herself in some other. “I am sorry,” she said softly, and she meant it. “I know that you are a just man, and would do no harm to blameless folk.”

  Dane shed his tunic, but kept on his leggings, trunks, and shirt. Opening a good-sized box on the table nearest the bed, he took out a small vial. When he approached Gloriana, his temper had calmed and his eyes were serene.

  He drew up a stool and sat upon it, facing Gloriana, lifting one of her feet into his lap. He made a sensual experience of removing her slipper, and she gasped as he ran his fingers lightly over her high arch.

  “I did not actually mean for you to rub my feet, my lord,” Gloriana babbled hastily. “I was only talking.”

  Kenbrook poured glistening golden oil into his palm and set the vial aside. Then, using all his fingers, but especially his thumbs, he began to work the small, tired muscles in the curve of Gloriana’s right foot.

  She gave a great, languid sigh and settled back in her chair.

  “You find this pleasant, milady?” Dane teased.

  Gloriana was feeling something very like sexual arousal, only different. This was a thing of the spirit, more than of the body, and profound. “Oh,” she breathed with another sigh, even more heartfelt than the first. “It is too wonderful.”

  His thumbs made circles on the ball of her foot, working the costly, scented oil in deep. “No joy is too fine for you,” he said. His voice was low and worked a trance of sorts. Gloriana forgot her ominous conversation with Elaina in the courtyard overlooking the graves of his ancestors, forgot the impending war with Merrymont and his army.

  She felt herself melting, slipping down and down on the chair. “Ummm,” she said. There was, could be, no evil in the world, no sorrow. It had been a mistake to think so …

  Kenbrook laughed and lifted her other foot, making Gloriana shiver and open her eyes halfway as he peeled away a second slipper and tossed it aside. “You are as shamelessly sensual as a cat stretching beside a fire,” he said. “Whenever you grow intractable in future, I shall simply rub oil into some part of you, thus rendering you pliant again.”

  Dane’s mention of the future was sufficient to jolt Gloriana out of her pleasant stupor, and she felt her heart swell to bursting with love as she looked into her husband’s fire-lit face.

  “Take me to bed,” she pleaded, “and plant your child in me.”

  He continued to massage her foot. “There is a certain merit in that suggestion,” he said hoarsely, “though I think you are already breeding.”

  Gloriana laid a hand to her abdomen, for the possibility, wondrous as it was, had not occurred to her before that moment. “How could you know?” she whispered, in awe. “Do you see visions, like Lady Elaina?”

  Dane chuckled and bent gracefully to kiss her knee before raising his head and smiling into her eyes. “I have no powers but those that love gives me,” he said.

  She blushed. The powers love gave Kenbrook were considerable, but to say so could only make him more arrogant. “But you seem very certain that I am already carrying your child—”

  “A son,” Dane speculated. His eyes glittered as he reached for the vial of oil, set Gloriana’s foot gently on the floor, and stood. “In truth, I would have preferred a daughter the first time,” he said. “I understand they are great comforts to their mothers when the master of the house is away.”

  Again, Gloriana felt sorrow brush her heart. She set it firmly aside, knowing how precious each moment was. “When did you sire this son by me, my lord?” she asked, a smile quivering on her mouth, as Dane raised her to her feet with one hand.

  “This day,” he said, with confidence, “in the Roman bath.”

  Gloriana felt again the heat of the springs, the bubbling caress of the water, the hard thrusts of Kenbrook’s manhood, deep inside her. She flushed as her eyes fell on the flask of oil in his hand.

  “Are you bringing that to bed with us, my lord?”

  “This and something else,” Dane replied, and bid her with a tilt of his head to precede him across the chamber.

  She went compliantly, dropping her kirtle in a pile at her feet, with the chemise whispering down to join it only moments later.

  As the lamps and braziers flickered and spat, feeding on the darkness, Gloriana’s cries of pleasure filled the tower. In the fiery midst of her ecstasy, she wondered if the servants, believing the keep to be haunted, would be afraid.

  Later, in the small hours, Gloriana awakened from a deep sleep to find herself already in the throes of a powerful climax. While she arched beneath her husband, he kissed the cleft between her breasts and murmured gentle words of adoration.

  The morning dawned gray and pink and gold, and when Gloriana opened her eyes, she saw immediately that Dane had already left their chamber. The braziers were lit against the morning chill, however, and there was a honeycake resting on Dane’s pillow in the indentation left by his head.

  Her body still humming with residual pleasure, Gloriana sat up, reached for the morsel Dane had left for her breakfast, and began to eat. From beyond the lake waters, she heard the tolling o
f the chapel bells at Hadleigh, summoning all within hearing distance to mass.

  Gloriana stretched. Later, she would arrange for a like service to be held in the keep’s small sanctuary, but today she felt lazy. Besides, it looked like rain.

  It was only when Judith came, breathless from the climb up the tower stairs and bearing a ewer of hot water, that Gloriana recalled what Gareth and Dane and the others had planned for this day. She wriggled into her chemise and ran barefoot to the western window, which should afford a view of the courtyard.

  Sure enough, Dane was there, his pale golden hair glistening even in the gloom of the morning, mounted on his fierce black stallion, Peleus. Behind him, wearing their battle colors, his score of soldiers had already aligned themselves into a fighting force.

  “No,” Gloriana whispered. Her shoulders sagged, and fresh tears threatened.

  “Come away, milady,” Judith said gently, taking her arm. “You’ll catch your death, standing by the window in that little scrap of linen.”

  “Dane is going to fight,” Gloriana said weakly, allowing herself to be pulled to the table, where Judith poured the wash water into a basin.

  “Yes, milady,” the girl agreed, without apparent concern.

  Gloriana felt sick. All her life, she’d watched men clash on the training field at Hadleigh Castle, seen them wielding swords and daggers and lances, watched them wrestling like bears under the hot sun. Combat had been nothing more to her than a rough game, but the forthcoming skirmish with Merrymont’s troops would be real. Men on both sides of the conflict would suffer terrible wounds, and even die.

  “Sit down, milady,” Judith commanded, “you look green as malachite.”

  Gloriana dropped into a chair and submitted while Judith brushed her hair and wound it into a plait, chattering as she worked.

  Once Gloriana was dressed, in a bright yellow gown with a golden overskirt and a belt set with colored glass, she left the tower room, too restless to stay in and read or stitch. The sky was an ominous charcoal color when she stepped out into the main courtyard, wondering if her pony was in the Kenbrook stables or still at Hadleigh. In the end, she mused, it didn’t matter, because if she tried to follow Dane into battle, the results would be humiliating at best and disastrous at worst.

  The crooked, ornate stones of the graveyard drew her, perhaps because of her gloomy mood. If she was to be mistress of Kenbrook Hall, she reasoned, she must know every part of it. When Dane returned, she would ask him about his mother and all those who rested with her.

  Elaina’s warning seemed unreal, in the light of day, however thin it might be—merely the ramblings of an unfortunate but imaginative woman who spent too much time alone, listening to voices.

  Gloriana stood among the stone angels, gazing at the marble crypt where Dane’s mother’s remains rested. A stiff, chilly wind blew off the lake, piercing the warm woolen of her kirtle and the linen of her chemise to sting her flesh. It would have been a comfort to think Lady Aurelia had joined the angels in heaven and could somehow watch over Kenbrook and keep him safe, but Gloriana was afraid to hope for that.

  She had come to her senses and was just turning around to go back into the keep—out of the corner of one eye, she saw Judith approaching determinedly—and huddle near a brazier when a headache struck her, as sudden and blinding as the blow of a broadax hard swung. She swayed and reached, groping, for one of the marble angels, lest she fall. Her stomach clenched violently, and she dropped to her knees, no longer able to stand.

  Gloriana could see nothing but a roiling darkness, as though she’d been taken up by storm winds, where she spun like a leaf. A thunderous, wailing roar filled her ears, and she clasped her hands to them, bent double on the ground, and screamed.

  “Dane!”

  The nightmare was timeless, without beginning or end, and Gloriana could not guess how long had passed when her vision slowly returned and the awful noise subsided, bit by bit, to a thrumming hum.

  Gloriana raised her head, so dazed that, for one terrible moment, she couldn’t remember her name or what she was doing in a rain-swept graveyard.

  Slowly, she became aware of voices around her, speaking in a strange, rapid language. She blinked as a rush of awareness came at her, as startling in its own way as the headache, which had now faded to a hollow throb.

  People were clustered about, staring at her. It was raining, and brightly colored canopies bobbed above their heads.

  Umbrellas, whispered the voice of memory from the back of Gloriana’s mind.

  They chattered, pointing, and she retreated a step, shaking her head.

  “Poor thing,” someone said. “She’s frightened.”

  “Look at those weird clothes,” said someone else.

  The same part of her brain that had recognized the umbrellas translated their odd, clipped words, but with painful slowness. The greater horror, of course, lay in the realization that what she had so dreaded had happened. She had made the transition, whatever it was, from the thirteenth century to some much later year. In this time and place, Dane and all the other people she loved were long dead, mere dust and bones in their graves.

  Gloriana gave a loud, piercing cry of pure despair, and a man stepped out of the crowd, extending one arm, speaking very gently.

  “Here, now,” he said, his words falling heavy and separate upon Gloriana’s mind, to be wrestled with, one by one, “don’t be afraid. I’m a doctor, you see. I’ll help you.”

  Gloriana closed her eyes and willed herself back to Dane, back to Kenbrook Hall.

  “There, there, you’re all right now, aren’t you?” the doctor fussed, laying a heavy woolen garment over her shoulders—a coat that smelled pleasantly of rain and some muted, vaguely spicy perfume. “Come along with me, and we’ll see youre taken care of.” Supporting Gloriana with a strong arm, the man pushed his way through the small, fascinated crowd. “What’s the matter with you lot?” he demanded. “Haven’t you ever seen a sick person before?”

  Frantic only moments before, Gloriana now felt numb. She stumbled along beside the man who’d wrapped her in his coat, too bewildered to do more than allow herself to be led.

  “My name is Lynford Kirkwood,” the man told her, bending his head toward hers. “My car is just here, beyond the gate, and I have a surgery down the way. We’ll take you there, get you some hot tea and dry clothes, and after that we’ll have a bit of a chat.”

  Gloriana’s head spun with the effort of making sense of what he said. She was depending at the moment on the kindness she sensed in this quiet, slowspeaking man. She nodded mutely, trying to recall what a “car” was, and remembered when she saw the object itself: a fuel-powered vehicle with glass windows. She looked back, toward Kenbrook Hall, as Kirkwood opened the door for her.

  The keep lay in random piles of stone, a bleak husk, utterly broken except for one part—the tower in which she and Dane had been imprisoned together.

  “Do get into the car, love,” the doctor urged, giving her a gentle push. “You’re frightfully wet, and it looks as though you’ve had some sort of nasty shock.”

  Gloriana sat, staring wordlessly through the rainspeckled window. She did not ask herself how such a thing could happen, nor did she think she’d gone mad, though lots of good people would have said so. On some level, Gloriana realized, she had always expected something like this.

  All that mattered to her now was finding a way to get back to Dane.

  Mrs. Bond, the housekeeper, rushed out of the kitchen door the moment Kirkwood brought his elderly Packard to a stop in front of the house. No doubt, somebody up at the keep had telephoned ahead to say he was bringing home another bird with a broken wing.

  “Oh, here, now,” the old woman stewed, holding a copy of the London Times over her frizzy gray head in a vain effort to keep off the rain. “She’s fair blue with cold, and see how she trembles!”

  Lyn Kirkwood did not respond, but came round to the passenger side and lifted the poor thing out, just
as if she were an invalid. She looked like an actress in some authentic pageant, with her strange, simple clothes and single thick plait of hair, braided through with ribbons. She hadn’t spoken in the car really, except to murmur something unintelligible, over and over.

  He brought her into the small library, since there was a fire burning on the grate, and sent Mrs. Bond for blankets, hot tea, and a robe. While the housekeeper was off attending to these requests, he poured a dose of brandy into a snifter and held it out to his visitor, who was shivering violently—too violently, for someone caught in a warm summer rain.

  She gazed at the brandy for a moment, then took it in both hands and sipped, cautiously at first, then with a thirst. When she gave back the snifter, he could have sworn she said, “Thank you, my lord.”

  Lyn set the glass aside and sat on the hassock. He was a good doctor, in his mid-thirties, and he loved his home, his work, and his life in general, except that he would have liked to have a wife and children.

  “What is your name?” he asked quietly.

  She frowned prettily, as though working out what he’d said. When she answered, he did not comprehend the name she gave, it sounded so garbled, but he’d made a study of languages, and he recognized the shape and inflection of her words.

  Medieval English, he thought. Impressive.

  He made another attempt to communicate. “Lyn Kirkwood,” he said, laying a hand to his chest. She was still wearing his overcoat, and he realized his shirt was wet through from the rain.

  Mrs. Bond returned then with the blanket and robe, chattering that the tea would soon follow. “You’ll want to leave her alone a moment, Doctor,” the old meddler said, almost clucking. “So she can get into the robe and all. Don’t you worry, though, I’ll see she’s bundled up proper.”

  Lyn scowled a little as he got to his feet and started toward the door. There was no need to shoo him out of his own library, he reflected irritably. He was a physician, wasn’t he, and had seen his share of naked women. “I’ll get the tea,” he said, and wondered if he was becoming one of those easily managed sorts—the kind of man he’d always pitied.