by Nicole Locke
All the food smelled delicious, and she was starving. Yet every time she glanced at their trencher to carve some meat, or reached for her goblet, she watched Nicholas reach for his.
Why had she insisted on him attending this feast?
* * *
Nicholas had ignored Matilda through a few of the courses, and was finding the evening as long as he had thought it would be. Worse, he had garnered more than a few questioning glances from his tenants. He knew he was being rude, but he was loath to converse with Matilda when he’d drunk so much, was exhausted from the fields, and burned with the need for a revenge that would never happen.
More, he was loath to talk with Matilda when their only conversation so far had been filled with animosity. Sharp jabs at each other in the graveyard.
Yet as the meal wore on, and the mead wore off, he knew that sitting there with such a strain between them wouldn’t solve anything. Burying the past wouldn’t happen unless he could find some common ground. Even if only for this evening. But what?
He took a sip of the watered ale that tasted bitter after the fine mead. Why hadn’t he requested a few more flagons to share with everyone for this meal?
‘Is the ale not to your liking?’ Matilda asked.
Was he so transparent? He’d felt selfish when he had remembered that she liked mead, and now had to drink the same bitter ale that he did. However, did she ask him because she was a ‘friend’, for want of a better word, or because she was Bailiff and had control over such matters?
So much confusion between them... But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be cordial. ‘It’s well enough. The food, however, is very fine.’
He knew he’d said the correct thing when a little of her stiffness lessened. ‘Cook has more help, and for the most part she and I organise the meals while someone else actually prepares them.’
‘I’d forgotten how many of our meals went wrong,’ he said, and couldn’t help but smile. ‘Like the Great Goose Fat Debacle.’
‘How could you forget?’ she said. ‘Poor Bernice didn’t have eyebrows for a year.’
‘Which fact you didn’t let her forget for several years afterwards. You were relentless in teasing her. The things you would do and say!’
Matilda tore at some bread, but she didn’t raise it to her lips and she kept her gaze downward-facing.
He watched her as she continued to face away from him, a frown between her brows. She was suddenly quiet. Had he hurt her? Why would he care? He’d travelled many weeks in order to arrive here and hurt her, and now, with one turn of her head, he found himself with another goal. To make her look at him again.
It had always been the depth of her hazel eyes that took his breath—as if life shimmered there in all its glory, and he only had to stare long enough to understand it. For a moment, while they’d talked of Bernice, he’d thought he saw something familiar in them, but now the light was dim, as if she was purposely trying to dampen her spirit.
She glanced up at him. Briefly.
Though he didn’t understand it, he had clearly hurt her with that remark. Did she not want to remember past mischiefs when they were mere children? Those, despite all else, were still sweet memories for him. It was only after they’d grown up that matters had turned bitter.
He tried again. ‘The hall’s had changes...’
Matilda parted her lips as if she wanted to say something, then shook her head. It was as if she didn’t want to talk of the hall and all she had done here.
No matter. He could accept that she’d done well. There was comforts instead of austerity. Repair instead of debris. Numerous thick dark tables and benches filled the once empty space, and padded chairs graced both ends. His father had always held two high-backed chairs at one end. Now there were places for four people to be held in honour, and he didn’t need to guess who those four would have been.
Before his thoughts turned dark again, he said, ‘You made these changes a while ago?’
She shrugged.
He appreciated the extra sconces, and the heavy linens that surrounded the large entrance doors, but one change intrigued him. His father had repaired the hearth so that it functioned, but there was new masonry surrounding it, carved with horses. The horses were riderless, wild, and within the fire’s flames and shadows they seemed to soar across the masonry.
‘Your carvings are beautiful,’ he said.
‘My what?’
‘The horses on the mantel—they look as if they are riding free.’
Her eyes were wide. ‘How did you know I carved them?’
‘Who else reveres horses as much as you?’
She turned towards him. ‘I neither carved nor drew when you were last here.’
‘But you wanted to.’
‘You remember that?’
It was his turn to shrug.
She looked over his shoulder. ‘I did carve them, and I thank you for your compliment, but I no longer ride.’
‘I suppose not, with your pregnancy...’
‘Before then.’
Maybe it was the mead, still affecting him, but he thought he could not be hearing correctly. ‘I refuse to believe that.’
‘It wasn’t sensible.’
‘That was what Roger used to say,’ he scoffed. ‘You used to tease him about it.’
‘Maybe I saw the error of my ways.’
He shook his head. Now he knew he was hearing things wrongly. ‘Galloping across open fields so you could feel the whip of the wind against your face? That was an error? If so, you have surely depicted the joy of it with great care and skill on my fireplace.’
She gasped and turned pale.
Then the truth hit him. ‘You didn’t voluntarily stop riding. Roger made you.’
‘That’s not true.’
She was too quick in her denial, and he knew that she knew it when she grabbed her goblet and took a drink to hide her expression.
He wanted to laugh, but the laugh lodged in his throat. Denying Matilda the joy of riding would have been the perfect revenge. However, Roger or someone else had beaten him to it.
‘If Roger didn’t make you do it, then who stopped you? Because horses were your life. Jumping and clearing those hedges—that was the Matilda who seized life.’
Matilda stood, her chair scraping loudly across the floor. Those few still dining turned their heads to watch them. ‘That Matilda is no more. Pardon me, Nicholas. I am suddenly very tired from...my day.’
He wanted to argue, but now their conversation was no longer private. Instead, he popped some dried fruit in his mouth and watched her walk through the Great Doors. When they had closed behind her Nicholas waved his arm and requested a flagon of un-watered stout.
He’d probably be sick before morning, but he didn’t care. He wanted to get blind drunk, and in that he would succeed.
But he’d count it his only successes this evening. Travelling here, he’d wanted to hurt Matilda, and tonight he had—several times. Only he didn’t know why or how. He did know, however, that something inside him didn’t like it.
It was useless to take his revenge against a dead man and a pregnant woman. No matter how wronged he felt, something he hadn’t even been aware of rebelled against hurting Matilda.
When she’d stood up, there had been tears in her eyes before she’d bade him goodnight, told him how she was tired of him. She’d tried to cover up her words, but he’d heard what she’d truly wanted to say. And he knew it was the truth. Because she’d told him she was tired of him once before.
Matilda always had been able to slay him with words. It was what had felled him that first time. Not the sword gutting his eye, but Matilda’s words on a parchment, received while he lay on a pallet in Spain.
His injuries had been raw open wounds then, and Rhain had sat diligently by his side. No one had thought he’d live
—not even himself. Then, on that fateful rainy day when Rhain had returned to the room, Nicholas had known something was different because of the quickness of Rhain’s feet across the floorboards, when normally he trod carefully. Different, too, because of the smile on Rhain’s face as he’d sat down on a stool and showed him the correspondence.
In those early days he had hardly known his name through the pain racking his body. The feeling that knives still slashed his face. The agonising loss.
Yet even so he had recognised that Rhain held a missive from Mei Solis. From Matilda.
In that realisation there had been no agony. There had been joy. He’d stopped writing to her months before, to protect her from his enemies. Soon after she’d ceased writing to him. To receive a missive when he hadn’t expected one had given him hope when he’d had none.
He’d been fighting his pain, fighting not to die. But after a month of fever and the loss of blood, of foul poultices and prodding, and days when he hadn’t slept and weeks when he’d done nothing, he’d been losing the strength to continue. In those days he’d thought Matilda would be better without him. No woman would want a man as disfigured as he.
But when Rhain had sat next to him and showed him that slip of parchment it had been like seeing reinforcements hurtling over the hill in a battle he was losing. If he could have smiled he would have. He knew that tears had pricked his eyes while new strength had coursed through him.
And then had come that shadow over his friend’s expression as he’d opened the correspondence and viewed its contents. Slight, but enough. A shot of alarm had passed through him and he had demanded that Rhain read it. When Rhain had kept silent he’d struggled to rise from the pallet, to fight with Rhain, who had barked about his stitches as he’d held him down.
He hadn’t cared about himself because he’d been certain that something had happened to Matilda.
Rhain had known that, and had choked out the words.
Matilda had married Roger and wrote to tell him she would never write to him again.
Nicholas pushed his chair away from the table and surveyed the now empty hall. He’d stayed to the end of the meal and ensured that a defenceless woman carrying a child understood his hatred. He couldn’t even take pleasure in knowing that he’d tried to warn her. That if she’d only let him rest in his own chamber none of this would have occurred.
He took no satisfaction in the fact that he’d been right. For once he wished this long battle he waged with his past would cease.
But it wouldn’t happen tonight.
And most likely not tomorrow either.
Slowly, he walked up the stairs, finally to sleep, to rest, grateful that there were no servants blocking his way. He would obtain at least one relief tonight. In sleep, he’d have a few hours of reprieve from his memories. When he woke, it would all start again.
There had been a time when Nicholas would have offered both his eyes to keep Matilda. But with that one letter, with those few words from Matilda in her uneven handwriting, Nicholas had known that no sword could ever cut him deeper.
Chapter Seven
Early morning, and Nicholas’s head hurt like hell. But he’d asked for a meeting with Louve and Matilda, and it would be done.
No vengeance—and no fields to plough today. His body and his hands reminded him sharply that training to kill another man wasn’t the same as farming the land.
Farming. He owned this land, and it was his inheritance, but he’d fought against it all his life. Still, there were duties here, and conferring with his steward and his bailiff was one of them.
Although exactly what he would discuss at this meeting, he didn’t know.
When people saw him for the first time it was always the same. Some looked him straight in the eye, but he could see the tightness in their expressions as they attempted to be friendly. Some found the task more difficult, and gave open grimaces when they got close enough to see the scar on his neck. Always, always, they imagined it happening to them.
He always wanted to tell them that it hadn’t hurt. Not at first—not in the moment when it had happened. There had been only a void. A ringing in his ears as his body caved underneath the injury. He had felt the hard ground more than the sting of the gash.
That sting had come later, when they’d moved him. But not when he been lying on the ground. Then his body had thought him dead; he’d thought himself dead. No strength in his arms or his legs. His body hadn’t brought up the rush of pain until they’d put him on a pallet and rushed him off the battlefield.
And then that pain... He winced even to remember it.
There were times he felt it still, on the periphery of his memory. Pricking at him when he worked too hard. When he gave a certain swing to his sword that was similar to the one he had made that day it would flash back in his memory. Like a ghost that kept brushing against him.
In strangers, he expected and was used to this reactions. But, surprisingly, he somehow thought he wouldn’t receive those looks of pity or horror here in his home.
When Matilda had been betrothed to him, he had imagined her by his side—imagined their shared looks as they ate. Imagined how close they’d sit, the intimate touches of their fingers and hands above and below the table.
He was tired, but this—this meeting he wanted done or he’d never rest. His council had once been his close friends.
When he’d left he had believed such a meeting would be full of ale and talk. Full of smiles and relief. He would have returned with coin enough for Helena, and for Mei Solis. Enough silver to give everything he’d ever wanted to Matilda. He’d imagined Roger and Louve to have been betrothed, if not found wives. He’d imagined returning happy. Whole.
Instead, he was missing one eye and most of his heart.
‘Ah, here you are.’ Louve strode down the stairs and into the room adjacent to the hall. Smaller, more confined, it had a fireplace and a few chairs. A place to go on a chilly day in a draughty manor. ‘Is she not here yet?’ he asked.
‘You’re early.’
‘I didn’t mean to be. The sheer amount of times I had to piss in the night kept me awake. You didn’t have that problem, or I would’ve stumbled past you in the passageway. Why are you up early?’
Nicholas shrugged. He hadn’t been able to stay in his room and hadn’t been able to bear the conversations that would take place if he sat in the hall.
Louve collapsed in a chair. ‘Could we do this without talking numbers?’
‘Did you keep ledgers?’
‘Matilda insisted.’
‘I’ll look at them later.’
Louve slumped even more in his chair. ‘Since Matilda isn’t here, should we head down to the cellar?’
The cellar...where they kept the few weapons they had, and where iron bars protected their silver. There had never been any coin chests there except once, when Helena had arrived. At that time his father had built the bars and the shelves. Then he had carefully put the chests in the room, with the few swords and shields, locked them, and held the keys himself.
His father had expected that silver to grow, but coin by coin it had disappeared.
The cellar was dark—not only with lack of light, but with past disappointment. It was the last place he wanted to visit at Mei Solis. Though soon he’d need to. If only to give Louve credit for taking care of the manor.
‘You want to start there because there is no light to hurt your head?’ asked Nicholas.
‘Too true—but this meeting is official, is it not? We are to discuss what we have done for Mei Solis while you show us what is in those satchels.’
‘My satchels? They’re in the bedroom. Still full of coin.’
Louve’s brow arched. ‘Three satchels’ worth of coin and nothing to protect them?’
Three satchels’ worth and far more coin than Helena had brought with her
that day.
‘You haven’t been here for six years,’ Louve said.
‘Do you foresee a problem with that?’
‘No, but I find it fascinating.’
‘That I brought silver? Or that I think a bedroom is as secure as that dungeon my father created?’
‘That you now seem to trust. It wasn’t your strongest suit when we were children.’
He had his father and all his broken promises to thank for that.
‘How could I trust either you or Roger? The moment I let my guard down thistles were stuck in my braies or a bucket of piss was poured over my head.’
‘That bucket missed you.’
‘Not for lack of trying.’
‘True... I told Roger we should have had a back-up pail, so that when you stepped aside the other would dunk you, but you know what he was like...’
Pulling pranks but defending those he played them on. He shut those thoughts down.
‘You gave as good as you got...better,’ Louve continued.
Nicholas knew where this conversation was going. ‘You deserved that.’
‘To this day, I can’t believe I didn’t smell it.’
‘I made certain you couldn’t. You’d had a flagon of ale. A herd of horses wouldn’t have woken you.’
‘But the dung was spread all around my bed...’
Nicholas laughed. It was a good memory. ‘Not my idea! I only wanted to get you drunk and stick your hand in some water so you’d piss yourself. You stepped in it.’
‘Slipped on my backside in it!’ Louve said in mock anger.
‘As if you didn’t think it was funny!’
‘Only after I’d had my retribution.’ Louve shook his head. ‘That made up for the trouble we were in afterwards. That was what Matilda said, didn’t she? She was the devil, she was. Could talk us into anything.’
She had. With a dancing light in her eyes to let them know she wasn’t serious, but words as firm as any judgement day. Those three boys had followed whatever antics she’d thought up. Because they’d had the stupidity and the brawn to really cause havoc, and she’d had all the mischief. And the ideas...