Castle of the Heart

by Speer, Flora

  Guy had reason to be well content. He believed there would be peace, for a while at least, between England and Wales, and he’d had more than enough of raids and border skirmishes. And now nearly all of his family was living at Afoncaer, where he could enjoy them. His three-year-old twins, Oliver and Elise, were healthy youngsters and were growing up rapidly in close company with Thomas’s Jocelyn and Deirdre. Thomas himself had come back to Afoncaer from Llangwilym only the day before, and Cristin, whom Guy had missed more than he would admit, would return during the next week, her days of fostering at another castle completed. It was time to find a husband for his older daughter. Thomas had suggested Benet, who, although only the son of a long-dead and impoverished squire, had proven himself as brave and capable as any more nobly born lad. He would make a staunch liege man to Guy, the more so were he bound by family ties. Guy was considering the match, not a little tempted by the thought that Cristin, wed to Benet, would not have to be sent far away from her parents to live. Looking down at his still-beautiful wife and thinking how fortunate they were, Guy chuckled.

  “You have told me often enough how much you love children,” he said to her. “I have a feeling that this castle will be full of them in years to come.”

  Arianna’s mood as she rode toward the forest with Thomas was an odd mixture of apprehension and intense pleasure at his presence. She had understood his need, just after Selene’s death, to remain aloof from her. She had felt the same way. It had taken her weeks to accept the strong emotions of love and guilt that the loss of her kinswoman had evoked. Thomas’s decision to retire to Llangwilym Abbey for a time had been perfectly reasonable, but the man who had returned the day before appeared to her much changed. Maturity sat upon Thomas now. He was quiet and sober, self-contained, with occasional sadness in his blue eyes. He had spent much of the previous afternoon and evening alone with Guy, and beyond his first coolly polite greeting, he had not spoken directly to her. Arianna was thrown into confusion and uncertainty by this treatment, and wondered if the monks at Llangwilym had advised him to forswear his guilty love for her as penance, or if perhaps he simply did not love her any longer.

  And then this morning, as they broke their fast in the great hall, he asked her to ride with him. Arianna had looked at his serious face and wondered what he planned to say to her. She told herself that if he wanted her to leave Afoncaer she must do so. Whatever the cost to herself, she could not stay and cause him further pain. He’d had more than enough to bear in recent years. And so she had come with him, falling into his silent humor, riding beside him without a word.

  They turned off the road and entered the forest, moving more slowly through trees and underbrush. Arianna temporarily gave up wondering what Thomas’s intentions were in her delight at the landscape around them. She loved this forest in every season. Today the first faint greening of spring showed all about them. Leaf buds waited to unfurl in the sun’s warmth. But they would not yet, for this day was cool, with pale sunlight contending feebly against a thick mist. The tree trunks and branches were black with moisture, and Arianna could hear the constant drip-drop of water in the eerie silence. There were no birds singing, no raucous calling of crows, only the muted sound of their horses’ hooves on wet leaves. Arianna felt as though she were in a dream, wandering through a magical forest. They went further and further and the silence grew deeper, and still Thomas said nothing to her.

  After a while they came out into a clearing that was bounded on one side by a tumble of heavy, moss-covered boulders, and on the opposite side by one of those tiny streams that in Wales so frequently rise up from springs deep in the rocky hillsides to thread their way over moss and stones until they reach some larger stream or river. Here the mist was thinner, filtering the sun’s rays into a soft, pale gold light.

  Thomas stopped and dismounted, then helped Arianna to alight. While he looped the horses’ reins around a birch sapling so they could not wander away, she walked to the stream, knelt, and drank from it, fresh, clean water, cold with the chill of mountain snow.

  “Sit here,” Thomas said, taking off his cloak and spreading it upon a flat rock.

  Arianna sat, her hands clasped in her lap, watching Thomas toss pebbles into the little stream. He was silent again, frowning, as if he was deciding how to say whatever he wanted to tell her. Arianna waited, forcing herself to be patient. But it seemed to her she had been patient all her life, and she wished he would say the words and be done with them – and with her. She was afraid it was her sentence she was waiting for, the order that would send her away from him forever.

  At last he came to sit beside her. The rock he had chosen was not very big, and he was crowded against her. The deep blue wool of his sleeve lay against her arm. She looked at his large, strong hands with the tapered fingers.

  “Arianna.” One of those hands closed over her wrist.

  “Yes, my lord.” His smoothly shaven face hovered near hers, his eyes darker than his blue cotte.

  “My dear friend.” Now both of her hands were swallowed up in one of his. She swayed toward him as he lifted her hands and kissed the fingers one by one, but even in her blissful confusion at his closeness and at this sign of tenderness, some portion of her mind noted that he had called her his friend, not his love. She resigned herself to accepting whatever he commanded her to do.

  “It’s time to tell you the truth,” Thomas said. He took a deep breath and began to speak.

  She listened in astonishment as he recounted the circumstances of his birth, then went on to speak of the way his marriage to Selene had been planned by Isabel. He left nothing out except the most private details of his nights with Selene. When he was finished, she sat with her hands still clasped in his, staring blindly at the stream as it rushed madly toward its joining with the river.

  “So you see,” Thomas finished, “I am a bastard, with no rights of inheritance save those my father chooses to give me.”

  “You said he would keep the secret of your birth,” Arianna replied, “and I’ll tell no one. It can remain a secret.”

  “But you do know everything now,” Thomas said, “and that knowledge may prejudice your answer. Still, I had to tell you. You have a right to know.”

  “My answer, my lord?” She was so amazed by what she had just heard that she could not think clearly. She looked at him blankly. “What answer do you want from me? I do not think the less of you, or of Guy, for learning this. He was tricked, and you – you are still Thomas.”

  “I love you with all my heart, Arianna. Will you marry me?”

  “Marry?” She gaped at him. “I cannot marry. I am a penniless orphan. I have no dowry. Guy would not allow it.”

  “I am an illegitimate son.” Thomas laughed, his somber mood breaking, and suddenly there was the old Thomas, smiling warmly at her, teasing her. “There’s small difference between us, my love. My father sees no impediment to our marriage. I know, for I have spoken to him. Now all I have to fear is that you will refuse me. Say you’ll marry me, Arianna.”

  “But the dowry,” Arianna objected. “It would be unfair to you not to have a dowry.”

  “You have one,” Thomas told her. “Your dowry is love. It’s the only true dowry.”

  This could not be happening. It was a dream, some trick of the magical forest in which they sat. But he had said Guy saw no impediment to their marriage. He had spoken to Guy. Thomas wanted to marry her, and Guy had agreed. Somewhere deep inside her joy began to rise and spread, wiping out all her earlier fears, all doubts, until she could hardly contain her happiness.

  “You do still love me, don’t you?” Thomas asked anxiously. “I was not mistaken, was I?”

  “I love you.” She met his eyes and a smile began, lighting up her face with love and happiness. “I’ll tell you the truth, as you have just told me. I have loved you since the first moment I saw you at St. Albans. On that day I recognized you at once. You were the man I had seen in my dreams and never hoped to meet, the other half of
myself, the only one I could ever love. You are still all of that and more, for I have come to know you, and the reality is finer and more wonderful than any dream I ever had.”

  “And I was so blind to that love,” Thomas said, his bright smile dimming. “And for so long.”

  “At that time it would have made no difference if you had loved me, too,” Arianna told him. “Your course was set. You had no choice but to follow it, to do what had been planned for you, to fulfill the promises made in your name.”

  “And that course brought me here at last, so late. I’ll have no objections raised by you, my lady,” he added sternly, though with laughter in his eyes. “There is no time to waste in quibbling over dowries, or who loved whom first. You are twenty-three and like to remain unwed from advanced age unless I do something about your situation, and I am twenty-nine and growing older by the hour. Shall we seize whatever time is left to us, and make what we can of it?”

  “What would you like to make, my lord?” she asked demurely.

  “Love,” he replied, grinning broadly. “Marry me, Arianna.”

  “At your command, my lord,” she whispered.

  Chapter 21

  Arianna had a dowry after all, though a small one. Immediately after she and Thomas returned from their ride and announced their happy news, Guy asked Reynaud to write to Sir Valaire, who was still Arianna’s guardian, asking his permission for his ward to marry. Sir Valaire did not respond for so long a time that Arianna began to fear he would refuse to allow her to marry his daughter’s widower. She waited with growing tension through all of April and May, until, in the second week of June, Sir Valaire’s messenger arrived at last. He came to Afoncaer escorted by a goodly number of Valaire’s men-at-arms who were protecting a train of pack horses loaded with furniture, silver plates and cups and trays, a pair of magnificent silver candelabra, and bolts of enough wool and linen fabrics to keep Arianna well clothed for years to come.

  “I would not have anyone think that I do not welcome this marriage,” Valaire’s message explained. “Aloise and I are both fond of Arianna. She will make a good mother to our grandchildren. Let the gifts we send serve as her dowry, and know that we wish her and Thomas a happy life together.”

  “Well,” Guy said, smiling broadly as Reynaud finished reading the letter, “I see no reason to delay the marriage any longer, do you? Shall we say the middle of next week? Meredith, can you have a suitable feast prepared by then?”

  “We’ve been planning it for more than two months,” Meredith responded with some spirit. “Cristin and Blanche and my other ladies have been sewing Arianna’s clothes all that time, too. Midweek will be perfect.”

  For her wedding day Arianna wore a simple gown of palest blue silk. Upon her loosely tumbling brown curls rested a wreath of violets and ferns which Cristin had gathered early that morning and woven with nimble fingers into a delicate coronet more becoming to Arianna than the finest gold circlet would have been.

  Since no holdings of land or castles were involved, the marriage contract was brief, but it was read by Reynaud in a voice so full of warmth and affection for the two people standing before him that most of the witnesses in the chapel dabbed at their eyes. After the contract had been signed or sealed by everyone there, Reynaud stepped aside so the village priest could bless the marriage and say the Mass. Then it was time to stand upon the topmost step just outside the entrance to the keep, to show themselves to all the folk of castle and village, who were to have their own feast on the village green.

  Arianna moved through that warm, early summer day with calm assurance. It was not until evening, when she was in her own small room, with Cristin helping her to undress and Meredith tossing sweet-scented herbs into a tub of warm water for her bath while Blanche laid out her night-clothes, that she began to feel a twinge of nervousness.

  “There’s a surprise for you,” Cristin whispered, her pretty face shining with excitement. “I hope you will like it, Arianna. I did all of it. Thomas asked me – oh, dear, I wasn’t supposed to tell, was I?”

  “It’s all right,” Meredith assured her, smiling. “Hand me that linen towel, Cristin. Let’s dry Arianna off before she catches a chill. It’s time to take her to Thomas.”

  They covered her suddenly trembling form with a sheer, white linen gown embroidered around its wide neckline with little blue flowers and green leaves. They wrapped her into a pale green woolen robe. All three dear friends embraced and kissed her. And then they led her out of her virginal room and took her to the finest guest chamber in the castle, on the level just below the lord’s chamber.

  “Thomas thought you should begin your new lives in a room neither of you has ever used before,” Meredith explained, opening the door. “Thomas’s old room will become a guest chamber now.”

  The double windows in the wall niche faced west, looking out over the place where the stream joined the river. Opposite the windows was a large carved bed hung with cream wool, the coverlet turned back a little to reveal the new linen sheets Meredith had promised Arianna she would provide as a wedding gift. Blanche hastened to draw the cream wool curtains across the windows and light dozens of Meredith’s finest wax candles. Their golden glow chased the evening shadows away, so Arianna could see what she had begun to sense with the first breath she had taken within that room.

  The room was filled with flowers. Sprays of pink and white roses decked the mantel and sprouted from baskets set into the fireplace opening, where logs would blaze when winter came. Clove-scented gillyflowers and sprigs of sweet woodruff spilled from pitchers. Lavender lay strewn across the floor, while cuttings of pot marigolds, rosemary, and spearmint had been stuffed into small baskets and set on the seats in the window niche, from where their fragrance mingled with the scent of the roses. Other baskets placed about the room held ferns with small white daisies and blue forget-me-nots. And in every corner, on the floor or on tables, there were baskets and pitchers and large crocks filled with roses.

  “I’ve never seen anything so lovely,” Arianna whispered, “nor smelled anything so heavenly. Meredith, you must have robbed your gardens to do all this, and taken all the baskets from the still-room, too.”

  “It was Cristin’s doing,” Meredith replied. “This is the surprise, her gift to you and Thomas. She rose at dawn to pick the flowers.”

  Arianna could not speak. Her heart was too full for words, but she put her arms around Cristin, hugging the girl tightly, to express her gratitude. She saw in Cristin’s eyes that her feelings were understood.

  Thomas appeared at the chamber door, wrapped in a blue woolen robe and surrounded by men, Guy and Geoffrey, who had come from Tynant for the occasion, Kenelm and Benet, and a few of the men-at-arms who were Thomas’s closest friends.

  The men did not enter the room at first, but simply stood in the doorway looking at the flowers and the bed, their joking laughter stilled into silence by that scene of flowering beauty.

  Arianna trembled and blushed, nearly overcome by happiness and a sudden rush of nervousness, until Thomas stepped forward to take her hand. At the loving pressure of his fingers all her nervousness fled so she was able to smile into his blue eyes with complete love and trust.

  “When we were wed,” Guy spoke softly, “it was winter and there were no flowers.”

  “There was love,” Meredith responded, going toward her husband, her eyes on his still-handsome face. “That was enough.”

  “We must see them bedded.” The voice of the always-practical Blanche effectively broke the tender mood that had momentarily held two couples entranced.

  Now the men came in, treading carefully, as if they feared to disturb the fragile blossoms that filled the room. Blanche and Cristin removed Arianna’s woolen robe. Meredith helped her onto the high bed, and Arianna sat on top of the coverlet. Shivering a little in her delicate nightdress, she watched Guy and Geoffrey strip Thomas of his robe and push him onto the bed so they sat there together before all the witnesses.

 
Meredith kissed Arianna one more time, then leaned across her to kiss Thomas. And then suddenly the room was empty and quiet. Thomas got out of bed, quickly covering his nakedness with his blue robe.

  “I asked Blanche to leave a pitcher of wine here,” he said, pouring a little into a silver goblet. “I noticed you scarcely ate or drank all day.”

  He sat down beside her on the bed, handing her the goblet. Arianna sipped, tasting the herbs she and Meredith had put into the wine the day before, recognizing each herb, seeing in her mind’s eye the bee hives in Meredith’s garden from which they had taken the honey.

  “You are far away,” Thomas accused her with loving tenderness.

  “I was gathering honey to sweeten your wine,” she replied.

  “It needs no honey. It’s sweetened enough from the touch of your lips.” He took the goblet from her, turning it until he could place his mouth on it where hers had been. His eyes never left her face as he drank.

  Arianna raised one hand and lightly touched his face. When her fingers reached his lips he nibbled at them, and before she knew what was happening one of her fingers was inside his mouth and he was sucking on it gently, his tongue stroking around it.

  She sat staring at him, immobilized by the sensation of his tongue on her finger, just barely aware that he had put down the wine goblet. Her finger was still in his mouth, and each time he sucked on it something happened to her, some new and exciting heat raced along her veins, turning her bones and muscles to liquid.

  “Stand up a moment,” Thomas whispered, letting her finger go at last.

  “I can’t.” She knew her knees would never hold her. She felt much too weak to stand, yet at the same time, stronger than the bravest warrior and completely unafraid of him.