Knights of de Ware 03 - My Hero

by Glynnis Campbell

  She should have been pleased. It was her intent, after all, to involve Garth in demanding labor to give his frustrated muscles an outlet for their restlessness. And he was doing remarkably well. Not even her servants worked so industriously. But did he have to be so damnably focused on duty? Why it irritated her, she didn’t know, but Garth didn’t give her a second glance all morn.

  And now the air felt as fierce as dragon’s breath. The sun’s flames, directly overhead, steamed the earth and scorched the back of Cynthia’s neck. The humid heat, along with her inexplicable pique, combined to drive her to the brink of madness. She mentally cursed the heavy wool kirtle she’d chosen. All that wool belonged on a sheep, not a person. She might very well roast in it on a day like this. Inside her boots, her toes were ready to mutiny.

  Wiping her dripping forehead for the twelfth time, she decided she’d had enough. She speared the ground with her small spade and tore the wimple and veil from her head. They hit the sod with a thump like a downed pigeon. She shook loose her fiery curls and lifted them off her neck to cool it.

  “Ah!” she sighed, that small change effecting a world of difference. “I’d vow I was baking in a woolen tart.” She laboriously pulled the boots from her grateful feet and wriggled her toes in the moist soil. “That’s better.” She wiped her dirty face on her discarded wimple.

  Then she glanced at Garth. Droplets of sweat had welled along his forehead and beneath his nose. Wet patches discolored the neck edges of his robe. If her surcoat was stifling, his cassock must be near suffocating.

  “I wouldn’t think you remiss,” she confided, “were you to loosen your trappings. You must be roasting beneath them.”

  Garth stiffened visibly. He looked as if he’d rather perish in his cassock than bend the rules of propriety by removing what tenuous obstacle remained between the two of them. He shook his head once, grimly, and returned to his annoying diligence.

  They toiled in silence, except for the incessant drone of insects and the papery rustle of bulbs going in the ground. The forest birds were too hot to stir or sing, and not even the suggestion of a breeze teased the still air.

  Cynthia began to feel as withered as an old rose. She tucked one last bulb into the soil, then went to fetch the watered wine she’d brought. It was only a quarter gone, no thanks to Garth. He hadn’t taken a swallow. She uncorked the wineskin, took a long swig of the musky drink, then forced it into Garth’s hands. He hesitated, then wiped the rim of the skin with his sleeve, as if her heathen lips might soil his holy ones, and took one modest sip.

  Vexed by the heat and her scratchy kirtle and Garth’s self-righteous nonsense, she bid a farewell to propriety altogether and brashly tossed off her surcoat, leaving only her clinging underdress. This she hiked up, belting it high to cool her legs. She untied the laces at the back and loosened the neck, pulling the sticky cloth away from her body.

  Garth had congratulated himself, thinking he’d been doing well, tolerating the lady’s presence with exemplary stoicism. He’d endured the fire burning outside and within him, melding them into a discomfort he could blame entirely on the sun. It was simply his purgatory, he maintained, the suffering of the flesh that would purify him in the end.

  But this—this was beyond purgatory.

  Cynthia’s legs, lanky and smooth, shone with sweat. From his vantage point, crouched in the mud of the garden, his gaze involuntarily traveled up their full length, from shapely ankle and muscled calf to rounded knee and smooth thigh, stopping where they disappeared beneath her bunched skirts. Her kirtle, devoid of its modest surcoat, snugly embraced her every curve. Her neck, where the hem had been pulled away, was chafed by the wool, and he had an insane longing to kiss the pink flesh there. The fire burgeoning within him had nothing to do with the sun, he knew, and it created a burning thirst in him that no drink, save that of her affections, could quench.

  Yet he couldn’t slake that thirst. He was a friar, he reminded himself, though even that concept fluctuated in his head like a desert mirage. Agitated, he rose abruptly to his feet and poked hard at the soil with his planting stick, willing away the image of the bare-legged goddess toiling beside him.

  Alas, he stood up too quickly. The world wavered and shifted in his sight. Peripheral shadows blurred his vision. He vaguely sensed the stick falling from his nerveless fingers.

  His last thought was that a de Ware never fainted.

  Then his eyes rolled, and his bones turned to jelly. The horizon tilted, and everything went black.

  Cynthia recognized the vacant look in Garth’s eyes. Bloody hell, he was passing out! His eyelids fluttered as he swayed on his feet. She dropped her spade and rushed forward, catching him about the waist. For a long moment, they teetered on the brink of balance, Garth completely limp and Cynthia gritting her teeth and oozing into the soft mud beneath her heavy burden. At last, his dead weight was too much for her, and they sank to the ground in their odd embrace, Cynthia nearly crushed by his large, lifeless body.

  She gasped for air, spluttering against the itchy brown wool of Garth’s cassock. She wriggled beneath him, but he had her pinned, and all her squirming only made a bigger mess of the newly planted cowslip they’d squashed in their fall.

  Suddenly, Cynthia fought the unbearable urge to giggle. How ridiculous they must look, this great bear of a man flattening her like meadow grass. Sweet Mary, she prayed, snickering helplessly, don’t let Roger find us like this. That made her laugh all the more. She’d be discovered dead by her steward, suffocated by a friar, a ludicrous grin plastered on her face.

  She wiggled her hands around until they were against Garth’s chest, and then pushed with all her might. He budged, and with a groan, she rolled him off of her onto a row of violets.

  But her levity faded when she looked at Garth’s unconscious face. She didn’t need her divining gift to tell her he needed to get out of the sun. The bull-headed fool. He’d labored all morn in the blistering heat in those heavy robes with scarcely a swallow to drink.

  She clasped his thick wrists and, shaking her head in regret, dragged him unceremoniously and with great effort across the furrows she’d just seeded, into the shade.

  His face was flushed, but he no longer perspired. His skin was hot and dry. When she placed two fingers along his throat, she could feel his heart racing. Wasting no time, she untied the cord at his waist and flung open his robe. She blew cooling breaths across his face and chest and fanned him with her discarded headpiece.

  He needed water. Slicing a sizable rag from the cleanest part of her surcoat, she dipped it into the watering pitcher and let a small stream trickle between his lips. Then she used the cloth to gently sponge his brow, his neck, his chest.

  Eventually his heartbeat began to slow.

  The danger past, Cynthia perused Garth’s body at her leisure as she moved the cooling cloth over him. How different it was from her late husband’s. John had been wrinkled and pale. Garth was smooth and strong, like a two-pronged buck she’d seen once in the wood. His chestnut mane was thick and shining, gloriously defying the strictures of a friar’s pate. His freshly shaved jaw was strong, his neck broad, and now that his formidable chest was laid bare, she could see, near his shoulder, a jagged white scar that might have come from the slash of a sword. Though his flesh was spare, he most definitely possessed not the body of a friar, but that of a warrior.

  Soft brown hair made a line from his breastbone to his navel and further, interrupted only by the top of his linen loincloth, and she felt a fleeting perverse urge to follow that furred path.

  But he was rousing.

  From the darkness, Garth could hear his own heart beating forcefully in his ears, feel it pounding in his hot temples. Yet a chill breeze caressed his jaw, his forehead. He drifted in and out of awareness. Before, he’d imagined he was in the privy garden, suffocating in his monk’s cassock. But now it seemed as if he lay nude upon his back.

  Confused, he scowled and cracked his eyes open just wide enough
to see the woman staring down at him. What did she want? After an endless moment of painful disorientation, he remembered. He was in the garden. He’d been working when… His head felt weighted with lead as he lifted it to determine his condition.

  Satan’s claws! He was half-naked. What the devil..?

  His nostrils flared. He snatched up the edges of his cassock, flapping them together like the wings of an angry gyrfalcon. He ground his teeth. Damn his vow of silence! He wanted to upbraid her soundly. He was a priest, for the love of Peter! What had possessed the woman to…

  Just what had she done? He pierced her with his eyes.

  “You fainted,” she explained limply.

  Which only made him angrier. De Wares, this wench should know, did not faint. He tried to sit up, but to his chagrin, he tottered weakly, forced to settle back onto his elbows.

  She fetched wine for him then, clasping the back of his head to help him drink, as if he were an invalid.

  Humiliated, he shook off her patronizing hand, grabbed the wineskin from her, and took a quick gulp. Too quick.

  As Cynthia bent forward toward him, her kirtle gaped at the loosened neckline. Nestled down inside the garment, perfectly revealed for his pleasure, was a lovely breast, the skin creamy and smooth, the nipple set upon the full, pale mount like a tiny and precious rosebud.

  He choked on the wine, tearing his eyes away from her tempting flesh, but not before the throbbing in his loins began.

  Bracing himself against the rock wall, he glowered out the archway of the garden to the field beyond. Somewhere in the distance, though he couldn’t hear them, he knew the monastery bells tolled. With each imaginary ring, he mentally forced his arousal to subside, retreating into the discipline of his office.

  Dispassionately, he tied the cord of his cassock, rose to his feet, and, refusing her assistance, placed the implements solemnly into the wheelbarrow. Then, without a backward glance, he wheeled it out the gateway.

  Behind him, Cynthia made a noise like the sizzle of a snake.

  “You. Ungrateful. Sanctimonious. Bastard.”

  He froze, startled by the depth of her anger.

  “Is that the thanks I get for saving your life?” she demanded.

  He sighed, gathering his strength, set the wheelbarrow down, and slowly turned to face her. Standing with her arms akimbo, she looked as fiercely beautiful as an avenging Fury. He battled to maintain his bland expression.

  “Don’t look at me like that!” she hissed. “As if you were not a man, but some stuffed quintain’s effigy!”

  He tightened his jaw and narrowed his eyes, but in an instant reined his irritation back in again.

  “Oh!” she groaned, exasperated. “The food I brought today gone to waste, and my flowers… Do you know you crushed all the cowslips and most of the violets? You almost crushed me when you fainted!”

  The woman had no idea how tenuous his control was at this moment. He was trying not to think about this ravishing, wild-eyed hellion rebuking him like an avenging angel, her skirts revealing more than they covered, one satiny shoulder exposed above the neckline of her gown. He tried not to visualize his body atop hers, as she said it had been moments ago. He tried not to imagine what she’d done with that damp cloth. He forced himself to listen only to the illusory monastery bells and prayed they would save him from himself.

  “What’s happened to you?” she whispered. “You were once so full of life, so compassionate.”

  The maid could no more contain her thoughts than one could keep wine in a cask full of holes. And now, were those tears brimming in her eyes? Bloody hell, anything but tears.

  She yanked her underdress back down, and then snatched up her soiled surcoat and struggled into it. “How could the church do so much damage to a man’s spirit?”

  Within the stony shell of his body, Garth shuddered. Wariness crept in, the wariness of a man whose most secret door has been unlocked by a woman. She was half right—he was damaged—though it wasn’t the church that had damaged him. But she was treading too close to the truth, trespassing into his heart. And that he couldn’t allow, for her own protection as well as his.

  He gazed at her with schooled mercy and calmly, deliberately made the sign of the cross, blessing her errant soul.

  “Don’t you bless me!” she cried. She crossed her arms smartly across her chest, but a tear traced a muddy path down her cheek. “You’re the one who needs saving.”

  She swept up her wimple and would have stalked off then, he was sure, leaving him in the dust of that singularly feminine alloy of fury and hurt. But her new maidservant came hurtling toward them as she turned to go.

  “My lady!” young Mary cried, nearly bowling Garth over. “It’s Meggie, my lady! Elspeth says her babe is coming!”

  “Meggie?” Cynthia dropped her own worries like a hot coal. “Shite!”

  She streaked past him, and he watched her all the way across the sward until she was swallowed up by the great gray stones of Wendeville Castle. Then he sighed.

  Providence had once again favored him. It seemed the woman was always rushing off to see to someone’s ills. To be sure, he’d owe extra prayers to the patron saints of the sick on the next Sabbath.

  Staring up at the chamber Cynthia had made into a makeshift infirmary, he briefly wondered if there was something he should do to help. He hoped not. He’d had about all the temptation he could endure for the day. Surely even Adam hadn’t been so tormented by Eve. He supposed she’d manage well enough anyway. After all, birthing was a woman’s affair.

  A parchment of seeds had dropped from Lady Cynthia’s pocket. He picked it up, brushing the dust off the letters scribed on it.

  Marigolds.

  His lips hardened into a grim smile.

  How could he forget someone with hair the color of marigolds?

  Somehow, he thought, rubbing his thumb across the word, Lady Cynthia Wendeville was familiar. But it must have been years since they’d met, and he wasn’t about to go digging into the past. He’d sealed his old life away into a safe tomb four years ago, and he was loath to call that Lazarus forth now. No matter how persistent she was.

  And she was persistent, flitting from cajolery to reproach as easily as a sparrow from branch to branch, trying to jar his memory of the secular world. Well, whoever she was and whatever she’d meant to him in the past, the relentless lass had certainly shaken him to the core. He tossed the packet of seeds into the wheelbarrow and prayed that God would strike him dead if he ever forgot just how dangerous she was again.

  Cynthia tossed her soiled tunic over her head as she hurried through the great hall, dropping it on the rushes.

  “Leave it!” she commanded as Mary hesitated to pick it up. “I’ll get it later. I need you to come with me now.”

  She plunged her hands into the large basin of water beside the pantry screens. “The babe wasn’t due till summer,” she murmured mostly to herself. She scrubbed hard, leaving the water muddy, and dried off on the linen hung above the basin. “Is she in the infirmary?”

  “Aye.”

  “Come then.”

  Elspeth met them halfway up the steps, her brown eyes as round and sunken as river pebbles. She looked twice her age. “Oh, my lady,” she whispered in misery, crossing herself, “Jeanne says the babe…the babe is dead.”

  Behind her, young Mary gasped.

  Sorrow pierced Cynthia’s heart. It was Meggie’s first child, and her husband was away on pilgrimage. But such was the way of life and the will of God. There was no time for tears. She straightened. “Then we must save Meggie,” she stated. “Mary, you fetch clean linen, and tell Cook we’ll need the water he’s boiling for stew. El, my herbs.”

  As Cynthia reached the top of the stairs, a weak scream issued forth from behind the closed door. Bracing herself for the worst, she took a deep breath and entered the chamber.

  The young mother’s eyes rolled like a frightened calf’s. Her forehead was dotted with sweat. Her stomach, exposed
like a silvery half-moon in the dim light, writhed with cramps. The linens at the foot of the bed were stained crimson with blood. Jeanne the midwife was beside her, holding Meggie’s hand tightly, trying to comfort her, but her own face was lined with guilt and frustration.

  Cynthia pressed the door closed behind her. She went to the window and slowly opened the shutters to let in more light. Then she came up beside Meggie.

  “My lady,” the girl gasped.

  “Meggie, I’m going to see you through this,” she said, speaking soothingly as she rubbed her hands together, palm to palm. “You understand, don’t you, lass, that the babe isn’t…?”

  Meggie’s haunted sable eyes were answer enough.

  “There was nothing you could do for the infant, Jeanne,” Cynthia murmured to the midwife, who looked up in despair. Her hands began to tingle with heat. “But I’ll need your help with the mother.”

  A faint scratching on the door announced Mary’s return. She bore an armload of linen and a small but heavy cauldron of steaming water.

  “Now, Meggie,” Cynthia said, stroking the girl’s forehead, “it’ll be over before you know it. We’ve got to make quick work of it so you’ll begin to heal all the sooner.”

  Cynthia closed her eyes and rested her palms on Meggie’s head, patiently letting them guide her. Blurs of color circled lazily in her mind’s eye, coming slowly into focus. Images flashed past in a blaze of white light—monkshood and shepherd’s purse—and, after a moment, she envisioned Meggie whole again, surround in a halo of healthy blue.

  When the warmth in her hands subsided, she shook them like a hound shaking off water. Then she wet a linen rag and gently swabbed the blood from Meggie’s thighs.

  Elspeth arrived with the herbs.

  “Monkshood, El,” Cynthia murmured.

  Jeanne gasped, her eyes wide. “Monkshood?”

  Mary made the sign of the cross and looked on fearfully.

  The other two women might have hesitated at her request for the deadly herb, but Cynthia knew she could rely on Elspeth. El had seen too many miracles at her hands to question her judgment.