by Falcons Fire
Rainulf said, “I thought Edmond would be with them.”
“Ah... I’m afraid he was delayed away from the castle. I know he would have wanted to greet you personally—especially my lady.”
He nodded in Martine’s direction. She held his gaze for a moment that seemed to stretch beyond time. Her eyes, blue as midnight, searched his, just fleetingly, as if seeking something precious that she’d lost. Thorne stood transfixed, remembering his first glimpse of her just a short while ago, and feeling the same connection, the same uncanny sense that she knew things about him, and he about her, that they couldn’t possibly know.
He blinked, she looked away, and the moment ended. By the time he’d taken a steadying breath, she had already mounted Solomon, brushing off Albin’s awkward efforts to assist her. The rest of the party mounted up as well, and they set off. To Thorne’s surprise, Martine handled the assertive stallion with easy assurance, as if he were the tamest mare.
Thorne steered the group away from the disreputable lanes that surrounded the harbor, in deference to the lady’s sensibilities, but smiled inwardly at his own misguided chivalry. It was quite absurd that he should want to protect her from the sight of taverns and brothels, since she had doubtless seen many such establishments in Paris, and she didn’t strike him as the squeamish sort.
The streets were congested with people that afternoon, even though it was not a market day. The rain had forced them indoors all morning, and now that it was clearing up, they swarmed out of the overhanging shops and town houses to attend to postponed business. The roads were narrow seas of mud. The stench of excrement mingled with that of woodsmoke, roasting meat, and boiling fish. Pigs wandered idly among the pedestrians, snuffling through the filth in the sewage channels and scattering with panicked squeals before the party on horseback. Thorne could not imagine why anyone who had a choice would live in a town.
He swiftly guided the group north, out of Hastings and into dense and tangled Weald Forest, where they rode double-file along the narrow, well-used traveler’s path. Although the sky had cleared and the sun shone, little of its warmth and light filtered through the leaves. That which did fell in dappled patches of gold on the meandering dirt track, like a handful of scattered coins.
It was August, and the woods were ripe with growth. Ferns and mosses competed with gnarled vines, wild mint, and colonies of tiny blue violets. Thorne opened his ears to the breeze-riffled leaves and the trill of myriad birds and insects. He breathed deeply of the scent of loamy earth and the sweet, musky fragrance of plants about to go to seed.
Ahead of him, the lady Martine and her brother rode side by side. From time to time, Rainulf would lean over and touch his sister’s hand, sometimes speaking softly to her, as if comforting a frightened child. Most curious, since she struck Thorne as exceedingly self-composed, if enigmatic.
When they were several hundred yards into the forest, he quietly unsheathed his sword. Albin, riding next to him, and Guy, bringing up the rear, promptly followed suit. Peter, up in front, cocked his head at the whisper of steel against leather, then withdrew his own weapon. Thorne saw the lady Martine direct a questioning glance toward her brother.
Rainulf peered into the dense foliage on either side of the path, then looked back over his shoulder at Thorne. “Expecting trouble?”
Thorne glanced at Lady Martine’s back and hesitated, not wanting her to feel unsafe. “Not really. Just standard precautions in a dark forest.”
Still staring straight ahead, Martine said coolly, “Sir Thorne, since you’ve placed me in a dangerous situation, kindly do me the favor of telling me what that danger is so that I may be prepared in case it comes. Don’t compound the problem by pretending it doesn’t exist.”
Peter stifled a chuckle, and Rainulf turned and grinned at his friend. Thorne suddenly felt the fool for having taken the trouble to spare the lady’s feelings, since she clearly had total command over them.
“So,” he said, “my lady has a tongue, after all.”
Martine’s back stiffened. Good; he had raised the vixen’s hackles. Now, as a gesture of civility, he would smooth them. “In truth, the danger’s not so great as my lady fears. There was an incident in this forest not long ago involving bandits, but it’s unlikely such men would attack a party of this size.”
That should satisfy her, he thought, but only momentarily, for she said, “Of what nature was this incident? Who were the victims?”
“A baron and baroness from northwest of here. The young Lord Anseau and his wife, Aiglentine.”
“They were robbed?”
Persistent wench. “Aye.” Thorne wondered what it would take to melt her frost, and decided to try to find out. “And their throats were cut.”
Rainulf crossed himself and Martine nodded, still without turning to look at him.
“The barons are outraged, of course,” Thorne said. “And Olivier, our lord earl, has vowed to find the men responsible and inflict the worst tortures you can imagine before giving them to the hangman.”
The lady made no response to this.
“And find them, he will,” the Saxon continued. “He’ll have to. Not only to serve justice, but to satisfy the king’s chancellor.”
“Thomas Becket?” Rainulf said. “What’s his interest in this?”
“The lady Aiglentine was the daughter of a close friend of his, and he was quite fond of her. Becket wants these bandits caught and an example made of them. Olivier has organized every man, woman, and child in Sussex, and beyond, to look for them. They will most assuredly be caught, and God have mercy on them when they are.”
“Yes, God have mercy,” Rainulf murmured thoughtfully.
Thorne said, “The men who were Anseau’s vassals are up in arms, as well. He was a respected overlord, strong but compassionate, and everyone loved the lady Aiglentine. At the time of her murder, she was heavy with child. The baby died as well, of course, so in fact, there weren’t two victims, but three.”
Martine half turned toward him, as if she had wanted to say something, then thought better of it. She wore a grim expression, and when she briefly sought out Thorne’s eyes before turning away, he saw such abject sadness in them as to take his breath away.
She bewildered him, this humbly clad baron’s daughter. She was aloof and ill humored, yet her eyes—those fathomless eyes—drew him in.
He mentally shook himself. He could ill afford to be too curious about Martine of Rouen. She existed merely as a thing of value, a commodity to be exchanged for... for his very future. As such, he needed her desperately. Or rather, he needed desperately for her to marry Edmond of Harford.
Then would come his reward, his land. Land for which he had clawed and struggled for ten long years, land which he had deserved long before this... land which would, God willing, finally be his.
* * *
As they left the forest, Martine saw the knight in front of her sheathe his sword, and Sir Thorne and the others followed suit. She realized that she had been holding herself rigid in her saddle for some time.
“You can relax now. The danger’s past,” her brother assured her. She smiled at him, and in the act of smiling, the tension that had gripped her melted away, and she actually did relax.
It had been cool in the forest, but now that the sun warmed her, her woolen mantle was stifling. She unpinned it and draped it across her arm.
They rode westward through rolling pastures and occasional small woods, finally coming to a dirt road leading north, which they followed. The riders now had room to regroup and spread out, Sir Thorne and his squire riding well ahead of Martine and Rainulf, and the others well behind.
Seizing the opportunity for a private conversation with her brother, Martine said, “Do you think he can read? Sir Edmond?”
“Nay,” Rainulf said. “Otherwise Thorne would have mentioned it in his letter.” He smiled indulgently at her groan. “You’ve spent the past year in the company of Paris scholars and seven years before that at St.
Teresa’s, so you take reading for granted. But the fact is, most men can’t.”
“Sir Thorne can. And he’s a Saxon!”
“‘Tis because I taught him.”
“You taught him? When? During the Crusade?”
He nodded. “We spent a year shackled in leg irons next to each other in a hot, stinking little underground cell. We had to do something to keep busy.” He spoke in too light a tone; in his eyes, Martine saw a glint of something dark and unforgiving.
“You never speak of those times,” she said.
He stared into the distance. “I’m ashamed.”
“Ashamed of having been captured?”
“Nay. That couldn’t be helped. I’m ashamed of the things I did before I was captured. The men I killed.”
“But they were the enemy. Infidels.”
“They were men,” he said quickly. “Men like myself, men who believed as fervently as I did that they were fighting for a true and just cause.”
“But you were!” she insisted. “You were fighting for Christ.”
He laughed shortly. “That’s what I thought. But I was gullible. We all were. In fact, what we unwittingly fought for—and died by the thousands for—was power and riches, the protection of lucrative trade routes to the East. The only good the experience did me was meeting Thorne when I was taken prisoner by the Turks.”
“Was it just the two of you, then, being held?”
“God, no. There were dozens of us—in the beginning, that is.” He paused, and Martine sensed that he was considering whether to tell her more, to speak of those things that he would rather forget.
Finally he said, “They were French peasants, most of them, but there were some Germans. Thorne was the only Englishman. This wasn’t really England’s Crusade, and only the most zealous among the English joined us. He was young—seventeen, I believe—but the most accomplished bowman I’d ever seen. His size helped. It takes a big man to handle a longbow. He spoke very little French, and I didn’t understand a word of English, but we became friends anyway. ‘Twas good to have a friend in that hole, I can tell you. Especially one who managed to stay alive. The others kept dying off. Their corpses were removed once a week, along with the other refuse.”
“My God,” she whispered. She began to understand his reluctance to speak of these things.
His voice became a low monotone. “‘Twas hell on earth. Those who didn’t die were all driven mad eventually. They’d howl and weep... Some would even laugh hysterically, hour after hour. ‘Twas their minds seeking to escape what their bodies could not.”
“But you didn’t go mad. Did you?”
“Nay. Nor Thorne. We kept our sanity by occupying our minds. We taught each other our native languages. I learned that he was a Saxon freeman, the son of a woodsman. He’d followed Louis out of idealism but soon became just as disillusioned as I. Thorne asked me to teach him what I’d learned at Cluny and Paris. I introduced him to the fundamentals of logic, the ideas of the Greek philosophers, geometry, arithmetic, and, of course, theology. I taught him to read French and Latin by scratching letters into the sandy floor with my crucifix.”
“How did you get away from there? Did you escape?”
His eyes were grim. “Death was the only way to escape that place. Nay, ‘twas Eleanor. She managed to locate me and paid a ransom for my release. I demanded that the others be let go as well, and our captors must have been bored with us, because they obliged with very little fuss. I brought Thorne back with me to Paris and introduced him to Eleanor. He adapted remarkably well to court life, although he didn’t like it very much. He admired Eleanor, but he had complete contempt for the silly romantic intrigues of her lords and ladies. And as a Saxon, he was an oddity. He told me he felt like Charlemagne’s elephant—an exotic, primitive beast on display for the curious to gawk at.”
Martine studied the big Saxon’s distant form and imagined him towering over a gaggle of wide-eyed, overdressed courtiers.
“Also,” Rainulf continued, “he missed his family in Sussex and was anxious to return to them. I asked Eleanor to write him a letter of introduction to Baron Godfrey, whom I’d met in Paris years before, and it must have been a good one. Godfrey knighted him six months after his arrival at Harford Castle, and made him his master falconer soon after that. They say he’s the finest falconer in southern England—perhaps in all of England.”
Up ahead, Sir Thorne pointed out something in the countryside to the young man next to him. On either side of the road stretched rows of narrow cultivated fields planted with wheat and rye and separated by turf banks. The stooped peasants toiling in the fields stood up as the party rode past, shielding their eyes to get a better look at the travelers.
Martine recalled how the Saxon had looked standing on the pier in the gray mist, his face glowing with mysterious light, his sky-blue eyes smiling at her. She took a deep breath. “I was wondering something. Sir Thorne is such a good friend of yours, and he is a knight, after all, so he’s a nobleman, even if he isn’t of noble blood. I mean, I was just wondering—”
“Why I didn’t betroth you to Thorne?”
Martine blinked, suddenly self-conscious. “Not that I would have wanted you to, I just—”
“He’s landless. There are others like him in England, bachelor knights who live in their overlord’s household because they’ve yet to earn a manor of their own. They can’t marry, because they’ve no home to bring a wife to, and nothing to offer the family of a noble girl in the way of a bride price.”
“Do you mean that even if he wanted to marry, he couldn’t? How awful for him.”
“I suppose so,” Rainulf allowed. “But my primary concern has to be for you, not him. I had to betroth you to someone with property. ‘Twould be different if you had holdings of your own. Then I suppose you could marry whomever you wanted. But I gave all my lands to the Church when I took my vows, and I’ve none left to settle on you.”
One of the field laborers, a hunchbacked old man, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Sir Falconer!”
The Saxon waved, calling out something in that guttural language that sounded so odd to her ears. She had heard men speak Danish, and also German. English sounded very much like these tongues, but it had a different cadence to it, and the words, when put together, had a different sound. Not as musical as Danish, nor as gruff as German.
“To be perfectly frank,” Rainulf said, “I doubt Thorne would have agreed to marry you even if I’d proposed it. You’re quite a marriage prize, but your value as a bride is largely a matter of status.”
“My supposedly legitimate relationship to the queen.”
“Exactly. For a man who already has property, you’re very much the catch. But Thorne has nothing. And even if he someday earns a manor and is free to marry, he’ll want to increase his holdings. He intends to find a woman with property of her own to marry. He’s told me as much in his letters.”
“I see,” she said, her voice gone hard. Far up the path, Thorne and Albin laughed at something. She did see. She saw it all too clearly now. “He’s an ambitious man, your friend,” she said quietly.
Rainulf glowered at her. “Martine, you know perfectly well that noblemen marry for property, not love.”
“I should,” she snapped. “‘Tis a lesson I learned in a cruel way at a tender age.”
“Thorne is not Jourdain,” he said. “Just a man trying to make the best of his life.”
“At my expense.”
“What?”
“Why do you suppose he was so eager to marry me to the son of his overlord? Merely to accommodate you?”
“Aye. Why else?”
She sighed irritably. “You said yourself I have great value as a bride. Sir Thorne’s arrangement of this marriage will undoubtedly put him in good stead with Edmond’s father. And that, in turn, will put him one step closer to earning a manor, which he then intends to supplement with some young girl’s inheritance. The idea of being used like that, ju
st to further someone else’s ambition, makes me feel—”
“Thorne is a man of high ideals. He’d never use a sister of mine to such ends.”
“You’ve both used me to suit your own ends, and I daresay my betrothal has worked out rather nicely for both of you. We’ll know how it worked out for me when we get to Harford and I meet Edmond.”
Chapter 3
They rode in silence until the late afternoon sun formed a low orange ball in a sky of unearthly blue. Martine couldn’t remember ever having seen a sky quite that extraordinarily blue in France. If there were skies such as this in England, perhaps she could be happy here, after all. The setting sun gilded the ripening grain with its fire and sliced long shadows into it. A warm breeze scented with hay drifted over the fields, which the villeins were beginning to abandon for home and supper.
Presently the sun winked out on the horizon, staining the sky the color of peaches—a beautiful color, but Martine missed that special, English blue. The breeze that had been warm before sundown now chilled her, and she decided to put her mantle back on. She slowed Solomon to a walk and shook out the long cape. But as she did so, the breeze caught it and sent it sailing ahead of her. Martine cursed inwardly and braced herself for the possibility that the stallion would shy.
Indeed, as the mantle sailed past his eyes, Solomon’s head flew up, his eyes rolling white. Martine instinctively wanted to grab both reins and hold on tight, but instead she seized the inside rein and pulled the startled animal in the same direction he had shied, forcing him to dance in a frenzied circle. She caught a glimpse of Thorne’s restraining arm before his squire. Sensible of him; Albin would only have gotten in the way.
Solomon executed one last complete circle, snorting in frustration, before she could rein him in. Sighing in relief, she leaned over and patted his neck. Thorne nodded respectfully in her direction. Albin looked sheepish.
Her mantle had landed in a heap on the road. She began to dismount, but settled back into the saddle when she saw Albin jump down from his humble mount. He picked up the mantle, handling it as if it were the shroud of Christ. After gingerly dusting off a few spots, he carried it toward Martine, only to have it snatched from his hands by Sir Thorne as he rode past.