The Mistress Of Normandy

by Susan Wiggs

  “Not quite.” He began adding pebbles and leaves to her structure. “You’ve forgotten the cow byre and stables. And here, a nursery.”

  “That’s really not necessary.”

  “Why attack a keep that houses no people or livestock?” He glanced at her. “They know not that your science could kill them at any moment.”

  She scowled. “How would you breach the walls?”

  He nibbled her ear. “I might charm my way inside.”

  “Rand!”

  “Very well.” He flipped aside a bit of bark. “I’d storm the gate.”

  “Ha! With fifty archers shooting at you? You’d never make it.”

  “It’s been done before.”

  “Well, I’ve a better way.” Working diligently, she tunneled a path up inside the log. “The miners clear a passage.”

  “What about the moat?”

  A shiver of fear passed through her. “They’d swim it. With proper wrapping in wax-boiled leather, the powder would stay dry.” She put some powder in a bit of parchment, fit the tiny charge under the log, and took out a piece of hemp. “Slow match. It’s been soaked in quicklime so it will burn evenly until it reaches the charge. Here, you do it.”

  He surprised her by placing the slow match perfectly. She realized that, while he disapproved of explosives, he was a man well versed in military matters. Despite his inattentiveness, he’d been quick to grasp each detail of the operation.

  “I’ve used a very small charge, for corned powder explodes fiercely,” she said, her eyes fastened on his deft fingers. “We don’t want to destroy the keep, only provide a way inside. Now, light the slow match.”

  He smiled and took the flint, steel, and charred linen from her. Striking a spark, he held the smoldering linen to the end of the fuse. It ignited with a crackle and a plume of sulfurous smoke.

  Lianna got quickly to her feet and gave his arm a tug. “Come away. We must get ourselves clear of the explosion.”

  He continued to crouch, staring at the sizzling fuse.

  “Nom de Dieu,” she snapped, “move.”

  When it became clear he meant to stay close and watch, she threw herself on him, counting on the force of her motion to override his solid strength. They tumbled back onto the grass just as the charge exploded in the log. Chips of wood sprinkled her back.

  “Damn you,” she said fiercely, “why did you not move?”

  He stared at her with sad and serious eyes. “Does the miner have an equal chance to get clear of the explosion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Always?”

  “No.”

  He moved toward the log and examined the destruction. The pebbles, sticks, and standard lay in disarray on the forest floor. “So,” he said, “you’ve breached the castle.”

  She looked with satisfaction at the ragged hole in the log. “Much more effectively than storming the gates would have done.”

  He cradled her chin in his palm, her jaw between his fingers and thumb. “But at what cost?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He released her and began picking up the leaf bits, one by one. “When an army storms a stronghold, men kill and they die. When a gunner blows up a wall, the dying is not just for fighting men. Your charge could have killed women and children, livestock—”

  “Only if improperly placed and ill timed,” she said defensively. “Only if the besieged are foolish enough to leave the keep.”

  “There is much room for foolishness in battle,” he said quietly.

  Chastened, she looked down at her hands. “Such concerns do not trouble the generals of today.” She brought her eyes up to meet his. “Chivalry is dying. You are a rarity these days. You were born some two hundred years too late.”

  “Honor and humanity will never be outmoded.”

  “Aye, but there are no more dragons to slay, no more damsels to rescue. Grâce à Dieu,” she finished thankfully. “Woman fare far better defending themselves than waiting for a man to come along.”

  “Are you truly as fearless as you would have me believe?”

  “No. But neither am I helpless.”

  “What do you fear, Lianna? Tell me.”

  She could have given him a list as long as her uncle of Burgundy’s muster roll. She was afraid her control of Bois-Long was slipping. She feared the English baron would return to claim her. She dreaded her uncle’s reaction to Gaucourt’s presence at Bois-Long. Most of all, she was terrified of losing Rand, because one day they would be discovered, or worse. He might learn the truth about her.

  “I’m afraid of water,” she said simply.

  He started to smile, then stopped, as if he understood how much she loathed the unreasonable weakness. “Are you? Why?”

  Knitting her fingers together, she said, “Someone I loved very much drowned in the Somme. I’ve never been able to bear any water that’s not confined in a jug or a shallow tub.”

  He smoothed a lock of hair back from her brow. “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  “Oh, God,” he breathed. “Did you see it happen?”

  “I...yes. I was but four years old at the time. I remember so little—just fragmented images and things later told to me. My mother used to take me on frog hunts down by the river. She...slipped, fell. I screamed for help, but Maman’s heavy skirts hauled her under.” Lianna shivered as a faint, half-buried image blossomed into horror. “Her hair spread out around her like the fronds of a fern. Someone came, dragged her out. Her eyes and lips were wide open. I remember thinking, She can’t be asleep, because she looks so still....”

  Rand held out his arms, and she moved into his embrace and cried, and cried, until she’d spent her tears of loss and despair against the warm fabric of his tunic.

  * * *

  Much later, Rand thought she’d drifted off to sleep. He tried to pretend that the moment would last forever, that tomorrow they would meet and love again. Tomorrow he would marry the Demoiselle de Bois-Long, and soon after that Lianna would learn betrayal at his hands.

  “Lianna.” He awakened her with a whisper. “Always remember one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you, and come what may, I shall ever love you.” He bent and kissed her face, her neck, her breasts. “Take my love, and keep it with you always.” He wanted to give, and give, and give, until she held all that he was, so that Lianna—and not the other—had the best part of him.

  Afterward he had to resist pouring out all his regrets. She nestled sweetly against him, trusting him and, he suspected, loving him in her way, although she protested she could not.

  “Where do you go each day after you leave me?” she whispered.

  He held her tightly. “In these uncertain times I’d not burden you with the knowledge. Just remember that I am near.”

  “For how long?” she asked, sounding fearful. “There is sure to be fighting soon between the Armagnacs and Burgundians. Will you go?”

  “No. That is not my feud.”

  A curlew wheeled in from the sea and cried out. Lianna stirred, looked up at him. “How loath I am to leave you.” She sighed. “But we have tomorrow, do we not?”

  Nay, sweet maid, he thought. Today I am your lover. But tomorrow I needs must become your lord.

  Eight

  “You’ve been taking too much sun,” Bonne said as she removed Lianna’s smock. “Your skin is turning as brown as a walnut.” Tossing the garment aside, the maid led her to the bath in front of the hearth in her solar. A log dropped, the fire flared, and Bonne gasped. “By St. Swithin’s entrails, you be brown all over!”

  “Stop gawking,” said Lianna. Sinking swiftly to her neck in the tub, she felt a hot blush turn her body from sun brown to mortified red.

  Avidly curious, the maid pulled Lianna upright. “It’s true,” she said wonderingly. “Your breasts, your belly—Sainte Vierge, mistress, what have you been doing?”

  “Working in the garden,” Lianna snapped.

  “In the al
together?”

  “Mayhap I was bathing in a stream.”

  Bonne shook her head. “Not you, my lady. You’d sooner dance on hot coals than go near the water.” Glumly Lianna hugged her knees to her chest. Bonne crouched down and patted her shoulder. “I spoke out of turn.” The maid leaned closer. “But you’re keeping something from me, aren’t you?”

  Part of Lianna longed to share her joy; another part wanted to keep Rand folded into her heart, her secret, her private ecstasy. “Why do you think I’m hiding something?”

  “Because you’re away in the afternoons. And you seem untroubled by Gervais’s presumption that Bois-Long will one day be his. It’s as if you know something.... You’ve been meeting someone, haven’t you? Tell me about him? Who is he?”

  “He exists only in your unwholesome fantasies.”

  Bonne jumped up and clapped her hands with glee. “No, a lover explains too much. Your new contentment, your desire to grow flowers, the way you sing in the hall when you think no one is listening... Could he be one of Gaucourt’s men?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “Aye, they’re louts, and would boast of it.” Bonne squinted. “Are you with child yet?”

  Lianna gripped a cake of soap hard. “I...I don’t know,” she said.

  “You can tell me,” Bonne reassured her. “I’ve a reputation for being loose, but not with my tongue.”

  Lianna tried to smile but failed. Then she tried to look stern and succeeded. “You know the danger I court.”

  Bonne shivered. “Aye, Gervais wishes nothing to stand in the way of his usurping, and your uncle seems intent on driving Lazare from your life.”

  Quelling an inner flutter of trepidation, Lianna rolled the soap in her hands. “Do you really think I could be...”

  “With child? From the look in your eyes, I’d say your lover’s done his manly part,” Bonne said sagely. “And judging from the amount of time you’ve spent lolling in the sun, you’ve been at it more than once.”

  Blushing again, Lianna dipped her hair in the water and began soaping it.

  Bonne took over the scrubbing. “Women say the first sign is a subtle tenderness in the breasts. I know these things. I’m the eldest of nine, and my mother was noisy about the discomforts of childbearing.”

  Lianna stifled a gasp. Had she not experienced the feeling just that afternoon with Rand? At the time she’d thought that new ache a product of their ardor. Drawing a deep breath, she gripped the sides of the tub.

  Bonne gave a lusty laugh as she sluiced water over Lianna. “Perhaps ’tis true. You’ll miss your monthly time. Then comes a fierce hunger and retching sickness.”

  Lianna must have been wearing a mask of awe and fear, for Bonne laughed again. “Your Lazare will come home to a surprise. He’ll be too proud to deny the child is his.”

  “It’s not his,” Lianna said fiercely, settling her soapy hands protectively over her middle. The idea of pretending Rand’s child was Lazare’s filled her with distaste. But was it not what she’d planned all along? Rand had said he could offer her nothing; she’d accepted that. “My child will have but one parent,” she quietly vowed.

  * * *

  “Easy on those oars, Jack,” Rand whispered. Through a gloom of cloud-shrouded moonlight he watched his scutifer angle the oars with more care, slicing them silently into the inky surface of the water.

  “Silent as a goddamned pall,” Jack grumbled under his breath. Sudden lightning glazed the château in silvery light. “Sweet Mother Mary,” said Jack, “no wonder good King Harry covets such a prize.”

  Rand’s eyes traveled up the outer wall of the stronghold. The slender finials that decorated the merlons glinted, daggerlike, against the sky. “’Tis more imposing by night than by day. The Lionheart did know how to build a castle.”

  “Aye, that’s one thing he did like a man.” Jack’s sneering words echoed in the watery gloom. “Bloody poofter.”

  Rand grinned.

  “Quit smiling, my lord,” Jack warned. “Your teeth gleam like a beacon.”

  A breeze soughed through a willow at the water’s edge, and Rand’s smile disappeared. His cheeks, stiff with the mud he’d smeared on them for camouflage, felt dry. The back of his neck prickled; he imagined the scrutiny of unseen eyes. His soldier’s instincts alerted, he scanned the shores on either side, then the causeway and walls above.

  “Hobelars?” Jack asked, massacring the word. “Goddamn it. I thought we’d given Gaucourt’s scouts the slip.”

  “Piers and Dylan were to distract them. But a few—”

  “Might be aiming their crossbows square at our backs.” Jack shivered and applied his oars more diligently.

  As they neared the château, Rand made a silent check of their equipment. A coil of thick hempen rope, a generous supply of hopsacking, steel grapples for securing a hold on the wall, a folded square of linen for a gag. The instruments of abduction raised a burn of distaste in his throat. He yearned for the knightly exploits of pitched battle. Instead he was about to steal into the castle, stuff an unsuspecting woman into a sack, and spirit her away in this leaky rowboat.

  A sudden image of Lianna turned his bitterness to aching sweetness. Shifting restlessly in the boat, he pictured her as she would be now, sleeping on a pallet alongside the castle women. Then he envisioned her as he’d last seen her, lying on the grass in their forest bower. Of all the victims of this unholy plot, she was the most innocent, the least deserving of his betrayal.

  It had taken all the strength of his will not to spirit her away with him today, to find some corner of the world where they could live and love in peace. His need for Lianna challenged his loyalty to King Henry—the man who had raised him from bastard to noble, who had given him title and lands. Only the certainty that Lianna deserved more than marriage to an outlaw, a dispossessed knight, had stayed his impulse.

  “That way,” he whispered, dragging his mind from the punishing thoughts. He pointed. “There’s a stand of reeds to conceal the boat.”

  Jack rowed toward the angled batter at the base of the wall. Moments later they had the craft secreted away. Laden with gear, they stood. The boat listed with their motion; Jack emitted a bright blue oath.

  “By St. George,” said Rand, “don’t tell me you’re seasick.”

  Jack swallowed hard. “Damned if I’m not, my lord.”

  Rand splayed his legs to steady the boat. Its rocking gentled. The night seemed more still, more dangerous, than ever, the smell of rain. Thunder rumbled and lightning seared the night sky with cold white light. Well enough, he thought. A storm would surely drive the sentries to the shelter of the barbican. Drawing a deep breath, Rand tied a grapple to the end of the rope. Counting silently, he found the fifth merlon of the south wall. According to Burgundy, one battlement there had been damaged some years ago when a gun exploded. Who had manned the gun? Rand wondered. A stubborn and precocious maid? The thought sluiced like brine over a raw wound.

  The sentries avoided that damaged section of the wall walk. Therefore it made a perfect point of entry for two English invaders.

  Hefting the coil of rope and holding the grapple, he took aim at the spiky finials. The hook shot skyward, the rowboat lurched, and Jack sat down with a grunt. The grapples scraped down the outer wall and splashed into the water.

  Sucking in his breath with a hiss of frustration, Rand reeled in the wet rope and stood still, listening intently. He heard only the rattling of the reeds and a distant burr of thunder. But no call to arms, no tramping of sentries’ boots on the lofty wall walk, reached his ears.

  He tried again, failed. The third time the hook caught between two finials and held, as if Rand had willed it there with the sheer force of determination.

  “Well done, my lord,” Jack whispered.

  Rand gave a firm tug on the end of the rope, then hoisted himself, testing its hold with his weight. He slashed a humorless grin at Jack. “We’re off, my friend.” He paused, glanced at Jack’s maimed h
and. “Can you make it?”

  Jack puffed out his chest. “You’d be surprised what this hand can do, my lord.”

  Scaling the towering curtain wall, Rand gained a full appreciation for the grandeur of its height. The rough rope burned his palms; the cold wall pressed against his feet as he hauled himself up. The muscles of his neck and shoulders bunched and strained. He clamped his jaw against an explosive sigh when he gained the top at last.

  The wall walk was indeed crumbled, just as Burgundy had warned. Rand found himself hugging the edges of a merlon, his toes clinging to the narrow ledge of an embrasure. He turned to scan the battlements and bailey. Finding them deserted, he jerked the rope to signal for Jack to follow.

  Long minutes later the scutifer appeared, sweating mightily and swearing softly. His eyes widened with dizziness as he gazed down at the inner ward. “Lady Mary,” he said through clenched teeth. “We’ll likely plunge to our deaths.”

  “God be thanked that Burgundy told us of a safer way to get out of here once we have her.” The duke had spoken of a secret passageway leading out through the water gate. Normally reserved for escape in times of siege, the passage would aid their abduction tonight—but only if they could reach the apartments.

  “You’ll have to subdue her, my lord.”

  “I’m prepared to do so.” Rand felt a familiar wave of distaste. His hand strayed to the inner pocket of his doublet. A wooden pommel, wrapped in lamb’s wool, hid there. He’d learned to wield the weapon during campaigns with the king’s brothers, but he’d never struck a woman. By applying the pommel to a vulnerable spot behind the ear, it was possible to subdue a victim in silence, imparting unconsciousness but little harm. The demoiselle, so free with her whip, would surely fight. Yet he despised the idea of overpowering her. Pulling a gulp of rain-heavy air into his lungs, he looped the rope around one shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  Moving gingerly, they edged along the walk until they’d passed the ruined section. Clouds shrouded the moon, snuffing the light. Rand moved by touch, calling upon the plan of the château he’d studied until the map was stamped upon his brain.