by Deborah Hale
Before she left this chamber again, he would have to erase it from her face. Perhaps forever.
She set down her healing burden on top of a low chest near the head of the bed. Then, perching on the edge, she bent forward to press her cheek against his. “Our Lady has answered my prayers, Rowan. Brantham is free once more and you are on the mend.”
He tried to raise his arms to enfold her, but when the right one painfully protested, he settled for letting his left do the work of both.
Cecily smelled of fresh herbs. Sweet, but with a provocative tang. With all his heart, Rowan ached to hold her there forever.
“Can you ever forgive me?” she whispered. “If not for my folly rushing into the fight, you never would have taken your wound. If I have to devote my whole life to cultivating prudence, I will never see you come to harm again on my account.”
She, asking his forgiveness? After all he had done? The very notion wrung a low moan from Rowan DeCourtenay. Never in a proud life had he felt so humbled.
Yet it carried none of the sting he had expected. There was a world of difference, after all, between humility and humiliation.
“If there was anything to forgive,” he murmured, stroking her hair, “I would in an instant. The wound Fulke gave me is but a scratch. The one you purged and healed when you offered to exchange Brantham for me…” His throat squeezed shut.
She drew back, to stare him in the eye. Much as he wanted to flinch from her frank gaze, Rowan could not look away.
“I could do no less. You are all the world to me, Rowan DeCourtenay. I love you better than Brantham. Better than my freedom.” A brooding softness came over her face. “Better than my next breath.”
“Not that much, dear heart.” Rowan hung his head. He had been wrong to covet pride of place in her heart. The more she cared for him, the greater power he had to hurt her. It was a kind of power he would rather not possess. “I am not worth such esteem.”
She hushed him with a featherlight fingertip on his lips. “Why not let me be the judge of that?”
Oh, she would be the judge. And how could she help but condemn?
He gulped a deep breath. Never on the eve of battle had he wanted for courage as he did now. “I must tell you how it was with Jacquetta and me—all of it. I may not have hurled her from that tower, but I am far from blameless in her death.”
“Tell me, then.” Cecily clasped his hands in hers, as though to give him heart. “Father Clement says it will speed your recovery to lighten your mind. I swear it will make no difference in how I feel for you.”
“Where is that prudence you vowed to cultivate?” His lips lifted briefly in a sad, tender smile. “Don’t make rash promises you may be forced to break.”
He could not look her in the eye and say what he must. Instead, he stared at their coupled hands. His so large, hard and brown. Hers so deft and slender. Both strong and able, but in such different ways. Joined, they partook of each other’s power, growing stronger still.
What would he be without her? More than he had been before, but still lacking.
“I did not know about Fulke and Jacquetta until after it was all over.” The words came out of him reluctantly, painfully. Like a barbed arrow being drawn from his flesh. “Callow fool that I was, I never suspected she would play me false. Perhaps Fulke was right to place the blame on me. When the Empress looked on me with favor, I danced to her tune. Slighting my betrothed in the process.”
“Why did Jacquetta let the wedding go forward?” Cecily blurted the question. How many had she hoarded up over the past weeks, waiting for him to volunteer the answers?
Rowan shrugged. “I do not know. Perhaps she would have eloped with Fulke if he’d asked her. If he did not ask, what else could she do but wed me and hope I’d be too young and green to question her honor?”
Never before had he tried to see those painful events through Jacquetta’s eyes. To his wonder, his heart moved with pity for the woman who had betrayed him.
It increased his own burden of guilt tenfold.
“I sensed something was wrong during the wedding feast. When I tried to kiss her, she turned her face away.”
“As I did,” whispered Cecily.
When Rowan dared a fleeting glance at her face, it was ashen.
He squeezed her hand. “No matter. You could not know. As for Jacquetta, I thought it no more than a bride’s natural apprehension. Later in our marriage bed, I should have guessed it was something more.”
A searing blush prickled to the roots of his hair. “She did not return my ardor. But I was too gauche to guess what it meant and too eager to contain my lust. Afterward, she wept and would not let me comfort her. I heard such weeping later, in the Holy Land. After a battle, when a town would be sacked and the women raped.”
“Did she push you back, stay your hand or say you nay?” asked Cecily in a whisper.
Rowan thought back, examining those impossibly painful memories carefully for the first time. “No,” he admitted at last.
“Then how could you understand? Perhaps you misread her weeping, too. She might have regretted her lapse with Fulke and felt besmirched for you. Perhaps she feared what you would say when you found out she was unchaste.”
Was Cecily disposed to pardon him? Before he could digest the wonder, he remembered there was more. “When I woke, she was gone. I’d overheard enough gossip to know there should have been blood on the sheets. I went looking for her with murder in my heart. When I found her, she was dead already—limp and broken at the foot of the tower.”
“She did away with herself?” Cecily’s voice was tight and hushed with horror.
Rowan nodded. “Whether because of what I had done, or because of what she feared I would do, I will never know this side of the grave. Either way, I drove her to her death. When it was whispered about that I had pushed her, I did not bother to deny it. The least I could do to atone was to see she received a Christian burial. So I compounded my prior sins with another—willfully allowing a suicide the rites of the Church.”
There. It was out. The secret he’d carried in his breast all these years, feeding upon his heart. Though it might cost him Cecily’s love, he felt a strange lightness, as though a massive burden had shifted from off his shoulders.
Gently she untwined her fingers from his, as he’d known she must. “Now you have told me all?”
“All.” He sighed. “Is it not enough?”
Stretching out one hand, she stroked his cheek and nudged his chin aloft so their eyes must meet. Though he shrank from it, Rowan faced his final penance.
But her wide warm eyes held none of the condemnation he’d expected to find there.
“You spent years under a cloud of suspicion, just so the wife who betrayed you would not be denied Christian burial. How can that be a sin? And how can you know beyond all doubt that Jacquetta willfully took her own life? She might have fallen in her haste, or leaned too heavily upon a weak bit of stonework. I pray Our Lord shows the poor creature more mercy than you have shown yourself, Rowan.”
Surely he must not have heard her aright. Or… “If you can excuse me so easily, you must not understand.”
“Perhaps it is you who do not understand, Rowan. You who cannot forgive. My forgiveness—even our Lord’s—will mean nothing if you cannot acquit yourself.”
Could it possibly be that simple? Rowan resisted the seductive notion. “I have fought and striven for everything else I’ve ever wanted in this life. Even then I did not always gain the prize. Something in me mistrusts what comes too easily.”
“Did you strive for Con’s friendship or my love? The most important things in life are a free gift, DeCourtenay. You must learn to accept them with good grace.”
Armed with his newly learned humility and his pity for Jacquetta, he opened his heart and silently begged one last time for absolution.
No chorus of angels sang. No heavenly radiance outshone the October sunbeams. Yet Rowan DeCourtenay felt truly at peace f
or the first time in years.
All the tension ebbed from his body. He felt spent and exhausted. And whole.
“I do have one quarrel with you, husband.”
His stomach clenched in knots again. He should have known this was all too good to be true. “Only one?”
She nodded. “What took you so long to tell me of this?”
Rowan thought hard before answering. “I’m not sure I can fathom the answer to that myself. Pride is probably the truest answer, though there is more to it. I’d buried the memories so deep, I almost believed I had killed her. Then there was your background. I doubted that a woman who once longed to take the veil could understand any of what I had done or why. Let alone forgive it.”
“The Lord is my shepherd.” Cecily’s soft smile cocked into a roguish grin. “But you must know by now I do not follow Him like some meek, stupid sheep.”
The very thought of it brought a Bible verse to Rowan’s mind. “No, you come to him like a wild hart that longs for sweet water.”
She bent close, her lips within reach of his. “I have always loved that psalm.”
They kissed.
Tentatively at first, as though finding their way back to each other after a bitterly regretted separation.
Then tenderly, asking and receiving pardon for all old wrongs. Promising a fresh beginning.
At last they turned fast and fevered, kindled by memories of the delight they had found in each other. Eager to explore uncharted reaches of bliss.
As his body roused to Cecily’s blatant invitation, Rowan disengaged his mouth from hers just long enough to gasp, “Use me gently.”
Epilogue
The rushes on the floor of Brantham’s great hall whispered under footfall. Their soft rustle was scarcely audible above the crackle of the hearth fire and the shrill keening of winter wind outside the keep.
The woman heard them, though. She jumped at the sound, spilling a slate of household accounts from the lap of her green wool gown. Flying across the room, like an arrow loosed from the bow of a skilled archer, she threw herself into the waiting arms of a tall, dark man. His cloak was damp and beads of melting snow clung to his hair and beard.
Their lips came together in a deep ardent kiss that kindled more heat than the hearth fire.
“What news from Gloucester?” Cecily DeCourtenay gasped at last, drawing her husband toward the fire.
Rowan dropped gratefully into the chair, smiling fondly when his wife fetched him a flagon of mulled cider.
“The exchange of Earl Robert for the King was effected at last, with quite advantageous terms, if you ask me.”
Cecily settled herself on a stool beside his chair. “Then we are back where we started, before Lincoln.”
“Not quite.” Rowan passed a caressing hand down her thick plait of chestnut hair. “The earl dispatched Con ap Ifan to Gwynedd to plead our cause with his prince. A few well-timed border raids could keep the King’s men in Salop too busy to harry Chester.”
“You will miss him.” An unasked question hung in the air. Did he still harbor any jealousy toward the Welshman?
“We will miss him. He has been a true and loyal friend to us both. Which is why we can rejoice for him.”
A questioning smile raised her lips and brow. “Rejoice?”
“Aye. He received word that the lady he once loved is now a widow. Which is why I suggested Earl Robert send him on the mission to Gwynedd.”
Cecily leaped from the stool and into Rowan’s lap, almost knocking his cider flagon to the floor in her eagerness.
Would she ever learn prudence? He smiled to himself, hoping not. He had wariness enough for them both.
She clasped him around the neck, nuzzling his beard in a way that made him long for bedtime. “I hope he will find her, woo her, win her and be as happy as we are.”
“There cannot be a man in the world happier than I, Cis. But I pray Con may come close.”
At that moment, heavy booted feet thundered up the stairwell and Ilbert Fitzwalter burst into the hall.
“Beg pardon, my lord, my lady. We’ve just had this message from Oxford.”
Rowan took the roll of parchment and bid FitzWalter away, with his thanks. He held it out that Cecily might read it with him.
“The Empress trapped in Oxford!” Cecily gasped. “Surrounded by Queen Mathilda’s troops.”
Rowan let the letter drop to the floor. “I have never seen the equal of that woman for getting herself wedged into a corner. With this snow, Earl Robert will never be able to marshal a force from Gloucester to rescue her.”
Cecily sat bolt upright. “I have a plan.” In a rapid burst, like hailstones on a slate roof, she rattled on about stealing into Oxford, snowstorms and white fur robes.
He shook his head. “I will not command you, dear heart, but I will entreat. Brantham needs you. I need you. Run headlong into danger if you must, but I will dog your heels every step of the way to keep you from harm.”
His words seemed to strike her dumb for a moment. Then she slid his hand over to cover her belly and smiled with a radiance that turned January into June. “You are right, Rowan. I have responsibilities now. Ones that outweigh even my fealty to her grace.”
As understanding dawned on him, Rowan fought back tears. He drew Cecily’s face close, for a slow, tender kiss.
“I do owe Maud a debt for bidding you wed me,” he murmured at last. “Let us discuss your bold plan and see if we can find a way to bring it off without risk to you.”
Snuggling deeper into his embrace, Cecily pressed her lips to his ear and whispered, “I think much more clearly when I have been well bedded.”
DeCourtenay’s bellow of laughter rose and rang in the rafters, and his heart rose with it. “And to think I met you in a convent garden!”
ISBN: 978-1-4603-5965-5
THE ELUSIVE BRIDE
Copyright © 2000 by Deborah M. Hale
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