The days drew on. Speech was not encouraged in the convent and Alyson saw Gytha or the wisewoman Eva only with the width of the church nave between them. At night she prayed on her knees in her cell, longing to speak to Guillelm, to share with him the snippets of news she gleaned from the nuns about the civil strife between King Stephen and the Empress Maud, and to hear about him in return. Was he safe? What had happened to Fulk and the Templars? More selfishly perhaps, did he miss her as greatly as she missed him?
When she first began to feel sick, Alyson thought it was because she was pining. In the refectory at meals she avoided the game and poultry dishes that the convent were allowed to serve in addition to fish and vegetables, telling herself she did not fancy the rich roast duck. Even a liking for hot blackberry tisane was nothing new. It was only when her breasts began to feel tender and her monthly course did not come that she began to wonder.
Was Guillelm right? Was she with child?
That night she dreamed of Guillelm. She dreamed they were together again in the barn, only this time the night was fine and dry, spring rather than high summer.
“I ache here” In her dream, Alyson placed a hand on her breasts. She was so tender there that she could no longer sleep upon her front, and the fabric of her tunic felt tight and harsh.
It was a warm, breezy night and they had lit no fire. Guillelm lifted the wooden whistle from Alyson’s lap and laid it aside. “Untie your tunic, sweetheart. Let me see”
He crouched so that the moon could shine upon her breast and laid hands on her, his firm touch surprisingly comforting. “Look up” He stared at the prominent veins below Alyson’s collarbone. A smothered laugh escaped him. “We should be in the lambing field ourselves.”
Guillelm touched her throat on the big life-vein. “You know what it is, Alyson. Part of you knows. The part that has caused your mind to give me these words within your dream”
Alyson looked down at herself. She put a hand on her taut stomach and sucked it in. So tiny, it could not be felt as yet. She felt old, mortal, her own childhood gone forever. She thought of the women in her family, fated to die in childbirth. She lifted her head. “What should I feel?”
“Nothing yet, the baby is too young to be moving within you,” answered Guillelm, deliberately misunderstanding her. He caught Alyson against him, both of them kneeling, and rocked her.
“Peace, peace,” he whispered, as she remained stiff. “There will be time enough. Our child will spend three seasons within you-you will love each other by then”
With Guillelm’s dream-acknowledgment of the child as his, some of the fear and numbness ran out of Alyson. “Are you glad?”
Guillelm nodded, laying his bright head against her shoulder. For a time all was quiet, their dream-world still, then Alyson felt him start against her. “Listen, the first lamb born!”
Alyson heard the fragile, bleating cry for herself and something woke within her-soon that would be her child, Guillelm’s child. She sprang to her feet. “Who shall we tell?” she cried. “Who first?”
She woke on her own question, already knowing the answer.
Chapter 26
She felt guilty, stealing away from the convent during the silent predawn hours, before the first service. Without parchment, she had no means of writing a note to the abbess to explain or apologize for her absence and she dare not wake her sibling; she was certain Sister Ursula would raise an alarm to prevent her going.
Walking barefoot from her cell Alyson had several nervejangling moments. The tiny creak of her door as she eased it open seemed as loud as a horn blast. The broken snore of a sleeper in one of the other cells convinced her that she was discovered, until the steady, heavy drone began afresh. Another few steps and she froze, spotting a moving shadow, which turned out to be nothing more than the abbess’s pet tabby cat, Nero, stalking the corridor. The painted eyes of a statue of the Madonna reproached her as she passed the statue’s narrow window niche but now no others saw her.
So far, the abbess’s instruction that she, Gytha and Eva be housed not in the more lavish comfort of the guest house but with the novices and nuns in the general dormitory had worked to her advantage-no one expected her to take flight from here, in the midst of so many other sleepers. Alyson grimaced afresh at the thought but kept on. Unbarring the final door and closing it slowly and softly behind her, she stepped outside into the pinky-gray morning.
In the clammy, dew-laden air she took several steadying breaths and laced on her shoes. Careful to walk all the way around the courtyard, keeping close to the walls in case any should spot her crossing the cobbles that she herself had swept only the evening before, she made for the small stable block.
In the straw-scented barn she knew she would not find Jezebel-Guillelm had taken the mare back with him when he left but she hoped to find some mount she could use. There her luck failed. Aside from the abbess’s gray palfrey-which Alyson dare not borrow-there was only a drab mule, which she sensed would bray loudly if approached. Smiling grimly at the recollection of her sister’s accusation of Guillelm “braying,” she retreated rapidly, hurrying from the convent on foot by way of a small eastern gate. Blinking into the yellow glimmer of the rising sun, she turned southwest, toward the distant church tower of Saint Michael. After Saint Michael’s would come Saint Jude’s and after that she would truly be on the road to Hardspen, on the road home.
She walked until she was certain she would be out of earshot of the convent and then ran, anxious to put as much distance as she could between herself and the nuns.
Fixing her eyes on the tower of Saint Michael, she began by cutting across country, blundering once through a patch of thistles that tore at her gown. Behind her, faintly, there were voices shouting and fading; her departure from the convent may have been discovered. Ignoring that, Alyson ran on-she was running more slowly now, making for the track she knew was at the other side of the upcoming wooded valley, pacing herself so that she could breathe but not think. The early sun flashed in her eyes, its heat already as humid as a summer afternoon. There was a rumble in her ears like thunder, but it was her own pounding heartbeat, urging her to greater speed.
Alyson sprinted off the balls of her feet. Her hair broke free of its plait. She flew down the dry stream bed of a water course, her toes scarcely rocking the round yellow pebbles, and her feet bit into mud as she entered the green twilight of the wooded valley. There her speed was checked by the thick undergrowth of hazel and her own weariness.
She slowed to a walk. The bed of the stream grew sloppier, soothing her burning feet. Deeper in the wood she heard the trickling sound of water; a spring welled out from a bank and ran over the grass to the stream bed. Alyson cupped her fingers and drank.
Suddenly she was weeping into her wet hands. What was she doing? Sneaking away from her hosts, deceiving nuns, rushing off with no coherent idea other than to see Guillelm again. Would he be pleased to see her? Please let him be pleased, she thought, while a darker voice in her head added, IfI am with child, please let us both survive.
She stretched her hand across her stomach. Be safe, she pleaded to the tiny, fragile life within, another soul, the fruit of her and Guillelm’s love.
Did he love her?
“Enough!” Alyson said aloud, mopping the last of her tears away from her cheeks with her fingers. Even where she did not keep to the winding road, as now, she would have a long, exhausting trek today. “Save your energies for the journey. Do not talk. Do not think. Walk.”
Alyson walked on through the woods. She was glad to be taking a shortcut through here had she kept to the turf-andstone track that snaked up and down beside this wood, she would have added another mile or so onto her trip-but this was no carefully maintained royal forest. In this wood, there were no ditches to keep deer in or out, or woodmen coppicing oaks and limes; it was in truth a long, narrow strip of straggly trees, some old and rotting, others hung about with lichen. It smelt of musty rooms and the only birdsong she heard was
the frequent, scolding alarm call of the blackbird.
She moved quickly, wary of disturbing animals either the two-or four-footed kind. No boar grazed here, Alyson noted with relief, seeing no characteristic score marks on the tree trunks, but she noticed badger hair on a stump and fox tracks near to a small muddy pool in the middle of the wood. From there she could also clearly see the farther edge of the wood and now she quickened her steps, keen to be out in the fresher air again and back on the road.
Then she heard it. A whistle that was not a birdcall, answered by another. Ducking under the low branches of a chestnut, Alyson pelted for deeper cover, a stand of hollies where she could hide until the men had gone. Had they seen her? Worse, were they tracking her? Whoever they were, Guillelm was not part of their number; he would have shouted, made himself known. Had they seen her?
Risking a look back, Alyson recognized an emerging shadow and instantly flattened herself onto the damp earth, praying the man had not spotted her. He was still on horseback, jabbing and slashing at the undergrowth with his sword, a boyish, childish gesture except that his face was taut and red with anger.
It was Fulk.
Where was she? Fulk had watched her leave the convent and from the instant his men had brought word of her movements he had followed her sneaking progress. No doubt she was heading for Hardspen, but to him it no longer mattered. She was outside the convent, having deliberately left sanctuary. She had put herself outside the protection of the holy place. She was his now.
Fulk tightened his grip on the reins, angry that the search was taking so long. Everything had been clear until she entered the wood. He should never have hung back, but then, he had expected her to keep to the road, where a single lone female could be easily ridden down. He had planned to seize her a mile away from the convent, out of sight of anyone, but by fleeing into the trees the cunning witch had escaped. Not for long, though. Once captured, she would be blindfolded, taken to a more private spot and then—
He closed his eyes, sending a prayer of thanks to God. Sir Michael, that great Templar knight, had been right. His advice had been timely.
“If you wish to recover your lord’s good graces, then I would suggest you strike camp close to the convent, and wait,” Sir Michael had told him as they had shaken hands in parting. “Those women will betray themselves: One or all of them will flee sanctuary and when they do, you will know who is guilty. It is a proof your lord will not be able to ignore. A witch cannot bear to stay by a holy place.”
Fulk opened his eyes, catching a flash of blue-purple off to his left, shimmering against the browns and greens of the trees and earth like the brilliant plumage of a kingfisher. As two of his men hauled her out of a mess of holly branches and dry leaves, Fulk permitted himself a grin Alyson had been found by her own female vanity, by a scrap of veil, fluttering in the breeze.
Chapter 27
Blindfolded and gagged, her hands tied by a thin cord that cut so badly into her wrists that she could feel a trickle of blood on the sleeves of her gown, Alyson was flung facedown across the back of a horse. A nightmare ride followed, where every step of the horse’s hooves jolted up through her body like the punch of a hammer. She could do nothing to protect herself from the searing pain in her breasts and stomach, and each time she shifted slightly on the plunging horse, trying to ease the agony of her ride, a heavy mailed hand slammed into her back or brutally thrust her head down again. She rode with her face thrust against the flanks and neck of her mount, waves of sickness rising in her gorge, her teeth aching as she bit desperately into a filthy rag Fulk had forced into her mouth. Her only relief now was pride, that she would not scream. Dizzy with the relentless, thunderous motion, clammy with dread that she would fall or be pitched forward into the rushing void, she vowed to herself that when they stopped, wherever they stopped, she would fight. Whatever happened, Fulk would not make her scream. He would not make her beg.
Some long time later, when her muscles felt flayed and her arms gone numb in their sockets, a gobbet of dirt struck her in the face as whoever was riding the horse above her reined in with savage force. She was hauled off the sweating charger with as little ceremony or concern as if she was a bale of cloth and dropped onto the ground.
Despite Alyson’s best efforts, her legs were shaking so badly that they buckled and she sprawled forward. While she was prone, a man grabbed her arm and she curled inward, instinctively shielding her belly from kicks or blows, but instead her bounds were efficiently cut, her blindfold tugged off and her gag removed.
“Thank you,” she tried to say, but the soldier, who was a stranger to her, shrugged and put a finger to his lips and stepped back. He had a young-old face, lined by exposure to strong sun and a bush of russet hair, that curled in a way Petronilla would have envied.
“Eustace does not understand you. He speaks only French” Fulk stood before her, hands on hips. He wore gloves of mail and she wondered if she had been put across his horse, an almost unendurable thought.
“Where are we?” she asked quickly, if only to spare herself his gloating smile.
“These men with me are all loyal to me,” Fulk continued, as if she had not spoken. He watched her struggling to sit up amidst the dry grass and ferns with the same cool patience a spider uses to watch a fly. There was no pity or care in his look.
“May I have some water?” Alyson asked. She loathed the thought of having to deal with Fulk, but deal she must. She forced herself not to touch her stomach; there was no way she could check on the babe within, if there was a babe. Would a child survive such a ride? What if she should miscarry? What if the child was harmed in some way, deformed? Her mind flashed to a terrifying image of Guillelm, his face warped in disgust, repudiating both her and her baby.
“Water,” she croaked, close to tears, repeating her request in Latin as she tried to remember the same word in French. “Please?”
Fulk merely stared at her. The strange soldier, Eustace, who had cut her bonds, touched his hand to his own water flask and then turned his back.
Alyson almost howled with despair. She glanced past Fulk and her possible ally, who was now striding away, shouting something in French over his shoulder about making water, and she looked to the rest. She knew there were others; at least three men had wrestled with her when they had caught her.
Five men circled her, tall and implacable as standing stones, in gray armor and plain brown mantles. None wore any insignia, she noticed, no device to show which lord they served. Three wore helms and she could not see their faces. The other two were unknown to her. She might have seen them at Hardspen, but she could not swear to it.
The red-haired stranger knight, the only one who had shown her any gentleness, had vanished into a stand of trees.
“Where are we?” she repeated.
This time Fulk deigned to answer. “Somewhere you should recognize.”
It was a place she did not know. A roughly circular clearing in a stretch of forest. About them were massive beeches and oaks, and beyond the clearing the understory enclosed them like living curtains, the hazel and elderberry bushes heavy with growing nuts and berries that shone in the sunlight. Within the clearing itself there were orchids flowering amidst old tree roots and stumps, their bright glossy petals flickering like dragon tongues amidst the sandy, grassy base of the woods.
“Did my lord Guillelm bring me here?” she asked, speaking his name like a charm.
If she hoped for some sign of shame or disquiet amongst the half-dozen warriors loyal to Fulk, she was to be disappointed. They regarded her gravely, unsmiling, one thoughtfully scratching at his beard, another addressing a remark to his closest companion that she did not understand.
Fulk thoughtfully translated. “Piers is from Brittany. He says that now he can see you properly, he can understand how you bewitched our lord.”
Piers added more, which made Fulk twitch like a horse stung by a fly. Scowling, he made a cutting motion with his hand and Piers fell silent.
“Do not try to dissemble to me, Alyson of Olverton.” White spittle gathered at the corners of Fulk’s mouth as he raised his voice. “You are sitting in a circle you yourself have made, a witches’ circle. You came here many times this summer, with the woman Eva and the woman Gytha, to make your foul magic.”
Affirmative grunts of agreement issued from the other men as Fulk named her supposed coven, although Alyson could not be sure how much of her speech with Fulk was understood by them. It made her task of argument that much harder, but she had to attempt it. If she could only delay whatever Fulk had planned for her until she could make an escape
“Really?” She tried to sound as bored as possible, while she scanned the horizon. Where was the red-haired knight? Had he perhaps had a change of heart and gone for help? Even as she dared to consider that, her hopes were dashed. She heard him beating back through the forest and a moment later he too was in the clearing, taking his place in that ominous circle of men.
She used Guillelm’s name a second time, praying that she might inspire a fear of retribution in these men, if not fealty. “If you are sure of this, Fulk, then why do you not bring your charge before our lord Guillelm?”
“And have you maze him again out of his wits? I think not”
“Does my lord dragon seem dull-witted to you, Fulk?”
Fulk’s face darkened. “Where you are concerned, he has shown neither wisdom nor seemliness. If you had not interfered, my lord would have returned to the Holy Land to fulfill his true destiny, fighting the infidel. He should be there now, defending Outremer.”
Fulk took a step closer to her, his hands raised before him, making a protective cross.
“I have a cross, too” Alyson lifted the small silver crucifix that the abbess had given her from her neck, dangling it aloft on its chain so that the men could see it. She kissed the cross and wound the chain about her fingers. Still unsure if she rose that she would be able to keep her feet, she knelt instead and began to recite the Creed.
A Knight's Vow Page 27