To Touch The Knight

by Lindsay Townsend

  Almost as if he understood her dread, the man said softly, “I have quit Sir Giles’s service. I owe him no more loyalty. Loyalty! As if Giles, who ordered the branding of his own nurse, his nurse, mark you, deserves it!”

  He took another, smaller step. “I will not harm you. ’Fore God, I swear it.”

  So men have always claimed, she might have answered, but he halted when she raised a hand. The half-moon, bright as a cleaned, cored apple, picked out the scars on her fingers.

  “You were a smith there?” When she remained silent, he added, “It is my trade to see things.”

  His words were an elegant admission of spying, Edith thought, wishing more and more for an escort. Even one of the camp dogs would do in this pinch.

  “Did you get them out of the church?” From saying nothing when they had last met he seemed almost garrulous, and now he whistled. “A woman! I had thought it was the priest, but—”

  He grunted, spinning right off his feet and collapsing face-down into a patch of nettles. Something long and black quivered between his shoulders.

  Edith shuddered and sank down, trying to hide. Now she could hear more men and see flares of movement as they searched the undergrowth with torches.

  “Princess!”

  Ranulf’s roar was too urgent to ignore. “I am here!” she called, shifting from the safety of the elm tree, her limbs feeling as stiff and heavy as iron. “Here, my lord!”

  He will be furious and he will be right. I have cost a man his life by my folly!

  But it was even worse than that. As Ranulf sprinted through bushes and hacked through low branches, straining to reach her, she saw who had cast the spear that had killed the nameless spy. Straight in line with the spear-cast, Giles stepped past a hawthorn bush and grinned at her. “Princess. Not so well met, but even so, always a pleasure.”

  He bowed.

  She backed hastily into the shadows, hiding her mouth with her fingers. To Giles no doubt she seemed shy, for he wagged a playful finger at her, remarking to the onrushing Ranulf, “You should give your lady more praise, Ran. Her beauty outshines the moon, yet she seems not to know it.”

  Ranulf did not look at Giles. “You are unharmed?” he panted, his face dark with strain and running.

  “Yes, my lord.” Her apology to him must wait, but she scanned his grimly handsome face for any kind of understanding.

  He frowned, the briefest downward quirk of his lips, and she felt the rest of the air drain from her lungs. What did he think of her now? What did he think had been happening here?

  He stamped through the grass to her, pausing to roll the dead man over with his foot. “Who is this?” he demanded.

  In her dread of his displeasure, the horror at her feet had been put at a distance. Now it returned in force and she could only stare at the dead, unnamed spy, knowing that this man had once served Giles and that Giles knew it. Knew it, and acted. He had stopped the man’s mouth by murder.

  “Him? A peasant, a runaway, a nobody who would have ravished your lady, had I not stopped him,” Giles said now, before she could speak. “You should take more care of her.”

  “I intend to,” vowed Ranulf as he reached out and took one of her hands in his. He did not squeeze her fingers or smile down at her: he was all hard possession.

  “Edmund,” he called to his squire, “please escort my lady to her tent. I will join her as soon as I may.”

  In the teeth of such a polite, chilly request, where he would not speak to her, Edith felt unmade. Her force of argument deserted her.

  Silently, numb with the shock of his rejection and denial of her, she allowed his squire to take her arm and to lead her away.

  As she waited for Ranulf in her own tent, surrounded by her people and her things, her mood reforged, becoming hotter and brighter.

  He must know that she had not met the dead man for any kind of tryst.

  How will you prove that? whispered Gregory in her mind. You have no witnesses.

  “I need none, dear brother, for he had better know that already,” said Edith under her breath.

  She smiled at Lucy and Teodwin, playing dice sitting together on the great bed with her baby sleeping between them. Also lolling on the bed on his belly, Ranulf’s page Gawain was helping Lucy with her numbers, whispering the number on the dice each time it fell.

  Ranulf must know he can trust me, she thought, wishing he could see this cozy, domestic scene.

  She swept to the entrance and peeped out, hoping to catch a glimpse of him coming. It would not be for some time yet, she guessed.

  She closed her eyes and immediately saw the stranger again, flying in the air, knocked off his feet by the force of the spear. Giles would leave him to rot, but not Ranulf. Yet what could he do with the body? Were the mob still in the churchyard?

  She listened, hearing the crackle of fires, the yapping of dogs, the snorting of horses, and the low mumble of men. The usual sounds of any camp. The crowds of people from the church had not ventured here, she decided.

  “Is the moon still up?” Maria, jiggling her faintly mewling baby on her shoulder and walking up and down in the tent, now broke into her reverie with a very weary-sounding question.

  “Yes, and it burns like a brand,” she replied, stopping as she realized what she had said. What had the stranger told her? He is branding folk now . . . his own nurse . . . Ranulf much wronged . . . You did right to break out.

  The dead spy knew they had escaped from the church. Did Giles know, too? Was that why he had murdered the man? What had he done to Ranulf in her lord’s own homeland? And who, besides his own nurse, had Giles branded?

  Edith began to count off names in her head and on her hands. Villagers of Warren Hemlet who had chosen to go on farming, who had decided that was the safer way of life than following the tourneys. Were those Giles’s victims? But how, besides his own nurse, had he recognized them? Giles never knew any serfs, few knights ever did.

  Ranulf knows. ’Tis one of the many reasons why I love him.

  Ranulf was not in sight yet. Giles would surely not dare move against him, a fellow knight, a hardened warrior, but even so, she would be very glad when she could see him returning, safe and whole.

  She trusted him, but not Giles. She trusted her former master not at all, no, not at all. . . .

  Chapter 33

  “Why trouble yourself, Ran? The brute is damned. If you must have him buried, let your men do it.”

  “I will be quicker,” Ranulf grunted, digging on with the spade he’d had one of his men fetch from the camp. He had ordered the others out of the gaping hole because he wanted to put all his force into this and have no one in the way. The grave was still too shallow but he kept hitting tree roots that took much hacking. He sweated in the trench, loathing the dead man, despising his own useless, awkward oafs, and most of all distrusting Giles.

  “I am sorry for any discourtesy to your lady,” Giles said. He was leaning against a tree, paring his fingernails with a narrow knife.

  Ranulf heaved another gobbet of earth and roots out of the hole and did not bother replying. His shoulders burned and the callus on his sword hand was rubbing against the rough wood of the spade, but he kept on. A rough tangle of legs shifting nervously above him showed where his men stamped their slowly numbing feet and clustered in edgy little knots. He sensed their disquiet and the unease of Giles’s men, too. A spear in the back had the knack of making men uneasy, although Giles seemed as puffed up and happy as a well-fed owl.

  “My Lady Blanche is sick. A summer fever,” he remarked, stepping back as Ranulf chucked another spade-full of dirt out of the deepening grave. “And that unruly, unholy huddle at the church have vanished.” He gave a chuckle. “Moved on to better things, no doubt.”

  How does Giles know these things? Ranulf wondered. The news of the church, yes, one of his men could have spotted that, but how does he know about Blanche? No one else in the tourney camp has spoken of her sickness. He nodded as one of Giles�
�s men jumped down into the trench with him and began to shape the sides.

  No soldier does this for a stranger, he thought as he dug, hearing the other man panting beside him. He knew the fellow. Giles has killed one of his own.

  He did not believe Giles’s scandalous tale of ravishment for an instant. Edith had said she was unharmed and he believed her. She and the dead man had been yards apart.

  But why had she been alone? Why had the man approached her?

  Ranulf tossed the shovel onto the grass above his shoulders and scrambled out of the grave. This was the main reason he had dug: so he could dispose of the body and look closely as he did so.

  He slung the corpse over his back and climbed back into the trench, aware of a low burning ache in his back. He would have liked to have seized a torch from somewhere and studied the fellow, but Giles was watching—sighing and paring his nails, but watching all the same. He did not want Giles to suspect anything.

  Swiftly, he laid the body out and despoiled it, taking this moment, where Giles could not see into the grave, to look more carefully. The stranger’s limbs were cold now, his face pale and shrunken in death. Ranulf tried to recall seeing him around Giles’s camp, but he could not think of a single occasion when he had noticed him. Frustratingly, in death the man looked like a hundred others that he had seen on battlefields around France. His eating knife, his short dagger, his belt buckle were all serviceable but commonplace—perhaps Edith would know more, being a smith. Ranulf tucked them into his tunic, intending to question her later.

  “Anything worth keeping?” called a languid voice from above.

  “Nothing much,” Ranulf answered, appalled at his own easy lie. Giles was a fellow knight and he was as glib-tongued with him as his own maid-princess was to the rest of the world.

  I must teach her by example; show truth and loyalty and no lies, he thought, but not with Giles.

  “I go hunting tomorrow,” Giles said above him. “Will you ride with me, for the sake of old fellowship?”

  “Most gladly,” Ranulf answered, the words feeling like stones in his mouth. Was this how Edith felt as she lied? But his lies were needed, and if he could keep Giles away from his camp and Edith by hunting with him, then he would do so. “Shall I come to your tent on the morrow?”

  He began to scoop earth back into the grave, saying a swift prayer as he worked. The moonlight silvered his hands and gave Giles’s profile a ghostly look. The soldier in the trench helped him, but Giles would not dirty his hands.

  “Let us meet in Woodcock Wood, beyond the church,” his former friend suggested. “Just after sunrise.”

  “And what of the mob?”

  “They are long gone.” Giles flung back his head and stared at the moon, as if thinking. “If we catch a fine deer, Lady Blanche will reward us even from her sickbed.”

  “Aye,” Ranulf said. He seized the spade again, dragging more earth over the dead man. Giles’s device was naked to him, stripped bare by a new insight that was shocking. Before Edith, he had not thought it possible for fellow knights to lie; now he suspected everyone. Six months ago, he would have asked Giles directly, “Why did you kill that fellow?” Now he knew he would not get a true answer.

  Giles, though, he had suspected for some time—suspected without admitting his suspicion, reluctant to do so because they had been friends and comrades in arms in France.

  He tossed the spade to one of his men. “Finish this!” he barked, and stepped up out of the trench.

  He did not like to feel this way about another knight, a man he had called a friend. Why agree to go on a hunt, then? Again, he admitted reluctantly that it would keep Giles away from the camp, away from Edith. And a hunt would bring them meat.

  “Until tomorrow.” He thrust his hand out to Giles, who, after a small pause, took it. His clasp was firm, seemingly honest, Ranulf noted, as they both squeezed with sufficient force to crush a rat. Letting Giles think he had a victory, he released first.

  “Take care in this dark,” he said, stepping back. “There are strange ones about tonight.”

  Without waiting for Giles’s answer he turned away, his spirits firing as he did so. Now he had another liar to deal with, his little liar, and she had better be waiting for him in her tent. . . .

  “Where are the others?” Ranulf asked her in a low voice. He had entered her tent a few moments earlier with stark, unreadable eyes, but, finding her sitting alone, on a stool with only a small brazier blazing by her bare feet for warmth, he had softened.

  She hoped he had done so. Her silent plea had been not for pity but to keep the rest of her folk out of the range of his rage. Now she pointed to the curtain hanging across the middle of the great tent, mouthing, “Behind there.”

  “Eating their supper.” Ranulf’s nostrils widened as he inhaled. “A white porry?”

  She nodded, hoping her own stomach would not growl. She was also hungry, but their provisions were going down rapidly, so she had chosen not to eat. After what she had witnessed earlier that evening she had expected to have no appetite, but to her self-disgust the simple vegetable stew made her mouth water.

  Ranulf’s lips quivered. “I think we may do better than that.”

  He crouched and deftly unpinned her veil. “They can keep the brazier, but tonight you are with me, Princess.”

  Giving her no time to react or speak—although “Princess” was a good sign, a sign his earlier temper had cooled—he lifted her and the stool into his arms, moving swiftly and lithely to the entrance. She could feel the steady beat of his heart as she rocked against his chest, and now, safe in his arms in this curious embrace, she found her tongue.

  “The man you buried. I knew him. He was one of those who battened us into the church at Warren Hemlet.”

  That startled him; she felt his heartbeat quicken. “What is this?”

  Swiftly, before she was overcome by the memory of the event, she explained. “On the order of Giles, all the village was driven into the church and locked in there to die. Giles feared the pestilence, and when some of our villagers fell sick—”

  She stopped, seeing the revulsion, horror, and shame on Ranulf’s face.

  “On Giles’s order, you say?” he ground out at last. He lowered her and the stool to the floor rushes and stared at her. “Giles was your overlord, the one who deserted you?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I am one of his serfs, out of bond.”

  “From this Warren Hemlet.”

  “It is to the east of here.”

  Ranulf shook his head, as if that was nothing. “So here is your final secret. Here is why you feared and distrusted Giles so! Why did you not say this earlier? I asked you his name—why not say then?”

  “You and Giles were once friends, fellow knights. You might have found it too strange.” She tried to say false and failed. “Too outlandish.”

  “You feared I might think it a falsehood?” Ranulf cursed, then crouched and gave her a tight, enveloping hug. “I would believe you all on this, Edith, all.”

  They were still a moment together, in silence, both stunned. Finally, Ranulf spoke again.

  “So Giles did more, even, than desert you?”

  She nodded.

  “And this man tonight was one of those who blindly followed such orders? Then, ’fore God, his death is no great loss! How long did it take him to recognize you?”

  “He spoke of the priest and remembered him. He did not know that Gregory was my brother.”

  “Ah,” said Ranulf, and she felt him kiss the top of her head—a consolation, she assumed. She felt herself and the stool being picked up again and then Ranulf was moving, walking with her, easily and steadily, from her tent to his.

  “I did not seek him out. Rannie, I am sorry he is dead.”

  He tightened his grip. “Not by your doing.” He understood her fear and rebutted it strongly. “Once Giles knew I was out in the woods and closing, he wanted the man dead.”

  “But he was his own!” />
  “His own spy, I wager, and that is what killed him. But what did he know of Giles that Giles would not have me hear?”

  “Warren Hemlet—”

  “I am sorry, Edith, but Giles would not be concerned by that and he would not think me troubled by it, either.”

  Edith shivered, but knew he was right.

  “He said something strange, about your being much wronged by Giles, and that you should look at your homeland; something in your homeland.” Edith fought to recall the rest. Her memory, usually so reliable, was failing her tonight.

  “My homeland? I do not understand that.”

  She seized on what she knew for certain.

  “He is branding people.” She could not say the word runaways: it was too near her own truth.

  Ranulf shook his head. “Giles would argue such was his right,” he answered, with the casual ease of a lord free of the dread of such punishments. “It must have been something else, something touching Giles directly, perhaps this homeland thing.”

  Edith trembled at his accurate assessment, blinking as they entered into Ranulf’s tent to be met by a living wall of men and torches. Ranulf swept through them and his soldiers, grizzled veterans every one, by their looks, saluted and marched outside.

  “They will keep watch outside this night, though you will be glad to know the church mob seem to have melted into the earth—they are gone, at least.” Ranulf lowered the stool beside his own couch, plucked her off it, and sat on it himself, with her on his lap.

  “Giles has asked me to go hunting with him tomorrow.”

  “You must not go!”

  He raised his sandy eyebrows. “Is that a lady’s request?”

  She paused, sensing a trap.

  “Should I obey you? As you did my request?”

  Guilt overwhelmed her as she thought of the nameless spy, killed because he had spoken to her. Whatever Ranulf said, that death would always be on her mind. In a moment of weakness, she considered finding a priest to whom she could make confession.