by Jill Barnett
She waved her arm around in the air as if she were swatting at a bothersome fly. “No doubt toss the useless creatures into the moat until you have a son you can train to be as insensitive and boorish as yourself.”
Clio raised a hand to her cheek in mock concern. “Oh dear, I did forget. How very foolish of me. Of course you will foster your sons out to some other churlish oaf so that they will learn nothing of a mother’s love. For surely ’twould make them sniveling cowards and certainly not true men.”
She gripped the seams of her woolen robe in each hand. “We women being such flighty and useless creatures, good for little else but childbearing and female sport.” Shuffling on her tiptoes, she spun in a circle, holding her robe out as if it were a gown of silken velvet, then sank to her deepest curtsy.
It was at that very moment that she heard the applause.
The loud applause.
She shot upward and whipped around so quickly one of the rush lights flickered out, casting dark shadows in the room from the one light still burning.
Two tall knights stood in the chamber doorway. One of them was leaning against the doorframe. He was laughing.
The other man looked as if he had never laughed a day in his life.
She stood there, her feet suddenly feeling like boulders. She looked from one man to the other, finally choosing to keep her eyes on the handsome man with the reddish hair who was laughing and walking toward her.
He took her hand, then bowed gallantly. “Sir Roger FitzAlan of Wells, my lady.” He straightened and gave her a wicked wink. “And my companion …”—he nodded at the other man—”the Earl of Glamorgan.”
Later when she thought about this moment, she supposed when she heard the title “earl,” she had made some sort of a small courtesy dip, but she could not be certain. For it was a horridly embarrassing moment she would have liked to have forgotten. So she had kept her gaze on the handsome red-haired knight.
Still smiling, he turned to the other man and said, “She won’t need your razor.” He kept grinning.
The other knight was not amused.
She tried to hide her apprehension. She did not know who these men were nor why they were here. Unable to look away, she stared into the hard, ridged face and the icy blue eyes of the tall black-haired man, looking for answers, for something.
“You are the Earl of Glamorgan?” she asked, almost wincing when her voice caught a little. She thought she sounded frightened and so she raised her chin and tried to look regal and fearless.
“I received the earldom this past year.”
Now that he finally spoke, it was in a deep, clipped voice that was as icy as the look in his eyes. He slowly walked toward her, looking taller and bigger with each step he took. She refused to move, even though instinct told her to run as fast as she could.
He stopped when they were barely a foot apart.
Everyone and everything seemed to melt away. The room grew suddenly thick and stuffy, as if the shutters had been closed and all the air sucked outside.
A second later there was movement at the door. The earl spun around so quickly she almost fainted. His hand was on the hilt of his sword and he had drawn a dagger in his other hand.
Thud, in all his clumsy glory, scrambled into the room, clad in a woolen nightshirt. His thin legs and knobby knees stuck out like a chicken’s, and his oversized bare feet looked like long loaves of shepherd’s bread.
He stopped, standing stiffly with his bony chest stuck out. “I shall protect you, my lady.” He waved a wall torch as if it were a sword.
Sir Roger raised a hand. “There is no need to make bonfires of us, lad. No one will be harmed.”
For a second she thought she heard the earl grunt something under his breath, and she stared up at him. His eyes were still on Thud, but he had sheathed his dagger.
Thud looked at both men skeptically. “Why should I believe you?”
“The Earl of Glamorgan does not lie.” He spoke for only the second time.
“An earl?” Thud had only seen one knight in his life, an event about which he spoke constantly. He stared up at the earl with the same expression a pilgrim would have had looking at his first holy relic.
“Aye,” Sir Roger said. “But ’tis a new title, lad.”
Thud was still staring at the dark knight. “Did you receive the title for valor, my lord?”
Roger reached out and tousled Thud’s brown hair. “He did. The king seldom bestows earldoms on cowards, lad.”
The earl said nothing this time, just turned those icy eyes down at Thud with an unreadable look.
The moment seemed to stretch out for an eternity.
If he hit the boy, she’d kick him, then dart behind the kind-looking Sir Roger for protection. She doubted he would kill them. He wouldn’t be here unless he wanted something. He looked like a man who would easily take whatever it was he wanted.
There was no doubt in her mind that this tall, dark knight could earn ten earldoms on the battlefield. When she looked at him, she wanted to disappear. She could well imagine what it would be like to face him when he was astride a huge warhorse and had a weapon in his hand.
She sank into a fine curtsy, with her head deeply bowed. Then she rose and looked up at him. “What brings you to Camrose, my lord?” When he did not answer her, she offered her own. “Shelter?”
He gave a sharp nod.
“I see.” She paused, but he was silent. “Provisions?” she added.
Another nod.
She did not know if she wished him to speak or to just leave. “I have only been at Camrose for a few days, my lord. I know not what we have stocked and ready.” She started to take a step, but he reached out and clasped her arm.
He stared down at her. “There is no hurry. We will be here for a long while.”
She glanced down at his hand on her arm and looked back up at him from narrowed eyes. She raised her chin but did not pull away. “What makes you think you are welcome, my lord?”
He released her and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked from her to Sir Roger, then back to her. “This castle is mine.”
“This castle belongs to the lord of Camrose and my betrothed. I believe that neither Sir Merrick nor the king will allow you to take Camrose, my lord.”
There was glint in his eye that she could not identify. For all she knew, he could draw his sword and chop off her head at any moment.
“I am Merrick de Beaucourt.”
Thud’s eyes grew even bigger. “The Red Lion? Himself?”
“Aye.” He turned from Thud and pinned Clio with a dark look. “The Red Lion with the ‘fat head.’”
She wanted the stone floor to split open like the bowels of hell and swallow her.
He took a step toward her.
Sheer instinct made her take two steps backward.
He followed her.
She took two more and more, and he moved with her as if stalking his prey.
She took one more step and backed against the cold wall next to the window. She flattened her hands against the stone and braced herself as she looked up at him.
He raised his hand toward her face.
“Do not strike me.”
She heard Sir Roger swallow a laugh and her gaze flashed toward him. His look was kind, not cruel, and he shook his head slightly, saying with a gesture that Merrick wouldn’t harm her.
Her betrothed stared down at her, silently, his hand near her cheek. “I do not strike defenseless females.”
Instead of reassuring her, his words annoyed her, made her sound weak and stupid and capable of doing little without his help. For the briefest moment she almost wished he had slapped her instead. A whack didn’t seem so bad compared to the condescending words he spoke.
He used his knuckle to raise her chin, so she had no choice but to look into his face. He was not a beautiful man. He was a warrior. A man whose life was armor and war and weapons. And one look at him left no doubt that his manhood had been molded o
n the battlefield.
His hair was as black as one of Old Gladdys’ prophetic ravens, and his brows looked like angry slashes across his broad and weathered brow. His nose was long and straight; his jawline and cheeks appeared as if they were sheared from the hardest flint. A thin scar sliced downward from his brow to his earlobe and was shades lighter than his skin, which had been baked brown by the desert sun of the eastern lands.
He was dark. Everything about him. From his coloring to his black expression. Except for his eyes. They were blue. Not the deep blue of a summer sky. Not the blue-gray of the sea at dusk. But light blue, and clear, like the icicles that hung from the stable roof on the coldest winter mornings.
Once when she was small, she had peered through a long, sharp icicle that poked down from the eaves of the buttery. What she saw through the ice was a twisted view of what lay beyond. Blurred images that showed things misshapen.
So who or what was this man in whose hands she must place her life and lands? It was obvious he was a man to be feared. She had seen a few warriors like him before, but she knew them little. He appeared to be nothing but a warrior, all cold mail and sharp as the edge of a battle ax, someone with no human emotion. She wondered if she would find a heart inside him or only a blurred and twisted vision of what a person should be.
He shifted closer to her and planted his hands on either side of her, pinning her between arms that were the size of a smithy’s.
She just stood there with her back against the cold stone walls, unable to move as she fought for something to say.
“You are by the window, woman.”
Her mind seemed to have deserted her.
“Don’t stand too close to the opening.” He gave her a humorless smile and traced her cheek from temple to chin with one callused finger. “I’ve not had nearly enough practice tossing useless creatures into the moat.”
Chapter 5
He didn’t throw Clio in the moat. But he certainly looked as if he had wanted to. Instead, he arrogantly informed her that the following morning he planned to acquaint himself with the castle. He expected her to accompany him.
She had no chance to give her reply, aye or nay. By the time she had found her voice and realized he had been toying with her about the moat, he and Sir Roger were gone from the solar as swiftly and as silently as they had come.
So it might have seemed odd that the next morning Clio went toward the great hall with a small jig in her step. She finished her wedge of cheese with one big bite and hummed with her mouth full as glanced back at the water clock she’d bought from a Venetian merchant at the Michaelmas Fair.
Time was dripping away.
She closed the door to her bedchamber and moved toward the stairs. She did a little dance down the stone steps, three steps down, one back up … three steps down and one back up, all the way down the circular staircase.
At the bottom she hummed a nonsense song, off-key as usual, spun around, and tossed a shiny red apple in the air. She caught it with a snap of her wrist and took a huge juicy bite.
Hmmm. So good.
She glanced up at one of the high windows in the wall, where an iron-studded shutter stood open. The high sun sent bold yellow light spilling onto the gray floor stones and made them appear as if they were made of pure gold.
This morning was one of those rare mornings when everything felt right with the world. Yes, it was a very good day.
Because she was two hours late.
During her sleeplessness the previous night, she had concocted the most wonderful idea! Rather like her own version of the delay tactics of Fabius the Cunctator. Only Clio’s Hannibal was her betrothed, the Earl of Grim, who had seen fit to leave her in a convent to languish for two years longer than promised.
Just to keep things fair between them and to wield her own sense of power, Clio decided she needn’t rush to do his bidding. By her calculations, she could be two hours late every day for the next twenty years and still not have evened their score. Although she certainly intended to try.
She wanted to see the earl’s face when she came into the hall. She went along a dark stone hallway where only one stub of a candle was lit and past a niche where a huge Flemish tapestry had once hung. Now there was nothing there but an expanse of plastered wall and the old iron rungs for the tapestry rod. Chips similar to those in the Conqueror’s likeness pocked the smooth plaster wall, as if those who had stolen Camrose had practiced their battle-ax skills against it.
She mourned for the tapestry her grandmother had been so proud of. No one knew where the tapestry had gone, but she had vowed to make certain her home was restored with the fine things that had always made it a home, the furnishings so cherished by the women in her family.
And if Lord Merrick turned out to be a nipfarthing, no matter. She would use the profits from the sale of her Welsh ale. She would not grovel to a man for the things she wanted. Should she master the recipe for heather ale, well, she need not apply to her husband for anything.
She brushed the cheese crumbs from her saffron yellow tunic; the color made her look so pale the abbess had once asked her if she was ill. Early that morning she’d made a fillet of old marsh reeds by twisting the twigs together, and she’d fixed her hair in the same way as the ladies in the queen’s court.
Clio had so much hair that the knots by her ears were huge. She yanked on her sleeves, which were too long and made her look smaller and weaker.
Just like a “defenseless female.”
For the final touch she fixed her face in an expression of careless innocence—that “What? Me late?” look. In an utterly nonchalant manner, she rounded the corner and faced the great hall.
She stopped cold.
The room was empty. No languishing men-at-arms. No meal laid out. No servants running to and fro like caged birds. No clink of the platters, no spilt wine and beer. No irate, red-faced earl.
She planted her hands on her hips and looked around. There was not even a hound snoozing at the hearth. Did they not know how she had planned? Humph!
A moment later she marched through the great hall and down the stairs, where she went out the huge wooden doors and into the bailey. The geese and chickens pecked at the ground while a rooster with a red plume strutted and crowed and behaved in manly fashion along the gutter drains near the wall. The chickens ignored him.
She could see Cyclops hiding behind some broken staves near the abandoned cooper’s hut with Pitt perched on his feline head, wings spread and looking like the gaudy plumed helm of an ancient god.
She wondered what those two were stalking now. With all the mice to be caught, she’d hardly seen them since coming back. But both her pets looked plumper already, and their eyes had the lazy and overly satisfied look of the kitchen hounds after a Christmas feast.
In the bailey, there was no one. She walked through to the outer bailey and met the same emptiness. It was almost as if she were the last person in the world.
The portcullis had been cranked open and she could hear noise from beyond. She moved through the gates and over the long wooden planks that spanned the moat.
Every member of the castle, every villein, every serf, and a huge horde of men-at-arms were assembled in what looked like battle lines along the rolling grassy fields, where, toward the rear, a huge tent stood in an encampment.
At each corner of the tent flew silken pennants marked with the Earl of Glamorgan’s distinctive charge blazoned sable a cross argent a lion rampant gules—a black field, white cross, and rearing bloodred lion. Whenever the breeze picked up, the flags rippled and waved and made the red lions look as if they were prowling.
She tried to see what was happening, then spotted Merrick walking along in front of the lines. He wore no helmet or battle armor, only mail under a long black tunic that was belted with leather trimmed in thick silver chain. His sword and its sheath hung at his side.
A light breeze picked up the thick black hair that hung down to the back of his neck. For just an in
stant, that dark hair flashed silver in the bright sunlight; then the light shone off the silver sword sheath.
It hurt her eyes and forced her to shield them with her hand. His hands were locked behind his back as he walked in front of the lines, stopping to speak with each person. The servants did not appear to be cowering … yet. None were on their knees, nor were they prostrated before him.
Clio moved toward them and felt the stares and glances of some of the people and caught a few of his men turning their heads in her direction. Ignoring those looks, she searched about the crowd for Sir Roger’s golden-red head, but it was nowhere in sight.
So much for a spot of high dry land in a flood, she thought.
Stopping a few measures away from Merrick, she stood there, expecting some response from him. A snarl. A cold glare like the night before. Or a roar might be more in character for someone called the Red Lion.
She kept waiting.
What she did not expect was him to ignore her. Which was what he did.
Some perverse part of her wanted to march up to him and kick him, but she wasn’t stupid, just annoyed because her wonderful idea was not working as she decided it should.
She stood there for the longest time, so long that people started looking at her out of pity and shared embarrassment, which made her feel even more conspicuous, more humiliated. Her betrothed was speaking to a villein, Thomas the Plowman, who held the most acreage and every year planted barley, wheat, and hay. Thomas was telling his lord about the land, about the water, soil, and the best crops to plant.
She kept waiting, and waiting. She shifted her weight, then forced her chin even higher so no one would know she was feeling embarrassed.
Lord Merrick would have paid more attention to a fly.
She sought to occupy her mind with something, anything. She began to do ciphers, the way she had learned in the convent, only with new variables. If she had two maces, four battle axes, and a war hammer, how many hits in the head would it take to get the Earl of Grim’s attention?