“Do I interrupt your prayer?” he asked her.
She shook her head slightly, running a finger along the edge of the page.
“I was not praying. I looked for a verse I heard once, but I think it is not here. It is scripture, though I cannot say where I heard it.”
“What is it? None would call me an overly pious man, but haps I have heard it too.”
She closed the little book and rested her palm on it, and spoke to the jeweled cover. “I was poured out like milk, and then curdled like cheese.” The words in her mouth sounded almost wistful, though her lips were set in a grim line. Then she shrugged her shoulders, a little gesture that tried to say it was unimportant. “The words were like that.”
He put his hand over hers where it rested on the book, careful to move slowly, giving her time to pull away. When she did not, he felt hope leap up in him. “What lays so heavy on your mind, cariad?”
This is where she would turn cold and distant. He waited for it, cursing himself in the little silence for calling her his love. But she did not turn cold. She pressed her lips together in something between a grimace and a smile, and she laid her other hand over his.
“Cariad,” she said, her eyes large in her face as she looked at him. “No one has called me that since you. I cannot remember…” She faltered, looking down at her hands on his, and spoke in a whisper. “In some moments I can scarce believe I was ever that person you loved.”
Only her mood stopped him from the wry remark that his mind threw up like a spiked defense. He would not be angry at her, not when the word cariad was in her mouth and she held his hand. Not when she spoke of the past without scorn.
“You were that person,” he told her, turning his palm up against hers, curving his fingers around her hand. “You are. I see her in you still.”
“Do you?” Her mouth lifted in a sad semblance of a smile. “I do not see her at all.”
He waited a long moment, remembering her laughter and dancing earlier tonight, remembering all the little moments in the last weeks when she had let down her guard and he had glimpsed the Eluned of old. He did not speak until she looked up at him.
“When you are not sure of the answer to a question of great importance, do you still look into the sky?” It startled a little laugh from her, and she nodded. He pulled the cloth away from the window next to them, letting in the light from a full moon. “As do I. I learned it from you. You said it was good to remember how vast is the universe, and how many possibilities there are that we can only guess at.”
She looked up at the night sky, and her face in the moonlight deprived him of words for a long minute. He had seen many women whose comeliness could stop his breath, many who were more beautiful by far, but no woman he had ever known could match the sight of Eluned as she turned her eyes up to the stars.
“Will you tell me more?” The Welsh lilt was more pronounced, turning her voice to music, her words drifting to him like a sweet sad song. “Tell me what I was. I cannot remember.”
He spoke slowly, twining his fingers with hers. “The girl I knew was daring and bold. At times her temper ran ahead of her reason, but her wits would always save her. She could charm anyone at all if she remembered to try, but she had no talent for hiding her impatience with fools – and so she rarely tried to charm a fool.” He watched a smile dimple her cheek. “She looked very much like you, her face was the same despite the many years. Except that every last hair of your head was dark – and your skin was more pale, I think, or else your mouth more red.”
She let out a breath of a laugh, wrinkling her nose in amusement. “Neither. I used to hold crushed berries to my lips to color them, when I knew I would see you.”
“Did you really?” he laughed.
“Yes, and I would bathe my face in milk, and brush my hair for hours on end.” She pushed the psalter off her lap and, one hand still entwined with his, pulled her feet up onto the seat between them. She tucked her legs beneath the heavy robe, relaxed and natural. “I remember your kindness. Do you remember when that boy saw us, and you ran after him? I thought it was to frighten him into silence, because that was my instinct. But you gave him all the food you had, and some coins, and you asked him to forget he had seen me at all.” She looked up at him, all trace of amusement gone. “My artifice and your kindness. Haps we have not changed so very much.”
He shook his head. “Nay, I will not let you say you were all cunning and calculation, though I loved that part of you as well as any other. It was that part of you which left the little stone for me, to tell me you would slip away to be with me. I would never have had you otherwise.”
His words put heat in the air between them, the reminder of those naked afternoons together. It flared up amid the comfortable warmth, turning the reminiscence of friends into the awareness of lovers.
Her eyes stayed fixed on their clasped hands. “What if that is the only part of me that lives still?”
If he had not wondered the same thing, he would not have a ready answer. “Never could your fire give way entirely to cold calculation. And there was such a fire in you, Eluned, that I have never seen its like.” He leaned closer, pulled their joined hands to his heart. “I would swear on my life it burns still.”
She looked at her fingers in his, pressed lightly to his chest. “Aye, it has burned and burned. Until I am left with naught but ashes.”
She gave the barest shake of her head, silencing whatever he might say. Her hand rose to his face, fingertips stroking the hair from his temple and drifting down to touch his mouth. He could not think how to answer her. He could hardly breathe when she was this near, when she touched him and he was aware of her body beneath the robe every instant.
“Robin,” she said, so soft that he strained to hear it. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against his. “It was only with you that she lived, that girl. These many years, she has been a dream no one else remembered.”
He slid his hand up beneath her heavy braid, holding her to him. “I remember. You are no dream.”
Her skin glowed with moonlight, yet he could almost feel the sun of a lost summer on his shoulders. He was a nervous boy again, amazed that she had come to him, terrified she would pull away. “Will you kiss me, Eluned?”
She made a mournful sound, a choking laugh of recognition as her fingers spread into his hair. “I will.” And her lips were a tentative flutter on his for only a breath, before her tongue was hot in his mouth.
The effect was instant. He had forgotten. That was the only coherent thought as he kissed her. He had forgotten the wildness, the melting, the utter obliteration of everything that was not her. He drank her in and she went to his head, the strongest wine he had ever tasted. How could he have forgotten? It was a blaze that would consume him, and he wanted nothing more. He wanted nothing else. There was nothing else in the world but her mouth, her arms around him to pull herself nearer, her hands low on his back, urging him.
He found his feet, his mouth still on hers, pulling her up with him to stand. The tie that held her robe closed – could it be so simple? One little pull on it, and the heavy cloth came open and fell to the floor at a push. There was only a thin shift beneath, so thin he could see the outline of her breasts beneath the loose fabric. Her mouth was at his throat, hungry and hot, her breath against his skin. He wanted all of her, all at once – every inch of her body and every sigh, every scent, every taste. He went to his knees, sliding down her body to open his mouth over her breast. She inhaled sharply, cradling his head against her, as he tasted her through the linen. It slid over her skin, wet and dragging against the hardened nipple beneath his tongue.
“Robin.” It was a gasp, high-pitched and sweet, a voice he remembered. He took his mouth away and looked up at her face in the flickering lamplight. Her lips swollen with kisses, her hair coming free, desire in every feature. This was Eluned. This. Not a cold, untouchable statue of a woman dressed in rich clothes, but a reckless and greedy wanton who gasped his n
ame.
He rose, carrying her shift up with him to bare her legs to his touch. Her hands came to his belt, resting on the stiff leather for a bare instant before pulling it through the buckle and dropping it to the floor. She took his tunic in her hands, gathering it in bunches to pull over his head and he said, “The bed. I would have you in a bed.” He had used to dream of it, when they lay together on the grass.
He carried her there now, at last, finally. His only regret was the darkness, no way to see her away from the lamplight. But there would be time, he told himself as he hastily removed the last of his clothes and bent over her. She was his now. There would be no more hiding away, no stolen hours. In darkness, daylight, and firelight, she was his and he was free to find the tender skin of her inner thigh, to rake his teeth along the softness and hear the keening sound she made. He thrust his tongue into her heat, his hands sliding under to grip her and hold her up to his mouth like a ripe fruit.
The taste of her, the sounds she made and the feel of her under his tongue reminded him. He knew her, what she liked and how she wanted it. He came up, stretching himself over her, pulling her leg up high over his hip. There was a moment, suspended above her, when he was unsure. There was only blackness, he could see nothing of her at all. She was all sensation, and he could only feel her absolute stillness beneath him. But then her hands were on his belly, moving downward until she found him and guided him into her.
He moved in her, his mouth open on hers, both of them panting, reaching. He forced himself to focus on her, exerting a ruthless self-control, following her every reaction, every cue. He could feel her struggling, fighting against release or fighting for it, he could not be sure. He gripped her leg, pulled her knee up and held it as he shoved himself deep. “There,” she gasped, a harsh inhalation at his ear. “There, don’t stop.” He drove on, her breath hot on his neck as she clenched around him, her voice rising higher while he lost all thought, all control, her body arching up to his as he let go, let everything flow into her.
He was only dimly aware, as he sank down onto her, that she was still moving. His arms came up, dead weight obeying his slow brain, but they did not close around her. She was slipping away, sliding from beneath him. It was only later – minutes that felt like hours – that he realized she was gone. Gone from the bed, gone from the room, not a sign of her in the blackness that surrounded him.
Delight and dismay pulsed through him as he gradually comprehended it. For a moment he thought he heard her in the outer room, but then he was sure she was gone. He gulped air, felt his sweat turn cold in the frigid night air.
His hand closed around her discarded shift, the only outward sign she had been in his bed. He pulled it to him, knowing himself a pathetic, lovesick fool but unable to stop himself. She had been here, with him. She had called him Robin and took him inside her, all flame and passion, every inch of her alive.
And then she left him.
He gripped the fabric of her abandoned shift, a bellow of rage and confusion strangling him. He would have loosed it into the night, but his fingers found a hard little lump among the cloth. If he had not run his fingertips across it every day for eighteen years, he would not have known it in the dark. It was the button from her shoe. The button he had handed to her on their wedding night. She had sewn it into her shift. Just below the collar on the inside, where it would rest against her heart.
He curled himself around it in the blackness, a tangle of hope and despair twisting inside him through the long hours of the night. Alone. Clinging to the evidence that he meant something to her, even if it was something she fled from, and abandoned.
Chapter 9
The Opening
She could not stop it. She could only command her legs to move, move quickly, do not make a sound, do not let him hear the awful racking sobs that had begun in the first breath after she had convulsed in release beneath him.
It was appalling. She stopped at the seat beside the window and shoved a pillow hard against her mouth and was stunned to find she could not control it. It was outside all her experience of herself. She was no stranger to weeping, had known tears enough for a lifetime – but this was something more, something that terrified her. Frantic, she pulled her heavy robe over nakedness, biting her lips together in an attempt to contain the sounds that leapt from her throat. If he heard her sobbing, he would come to her. He would comfort her and ask why she wept and she had no answer. She only had her mortification and horrible, uncontrollable, inexplicable sobs.
In the lamplight she saw her thick slippers and did not pause to put them on. She only picked them up, transferred them into the fist that still held the cushion pressed to her mouth. With her other hand, she took up the lamp and left their rooms, desperate to be somewhere he would not follow. She must not see him until she had some control, or until she could understand why the sobs would not stop.
She stumbled down the hall, down the stairs, no idea where she might find any corner where she could be alone until she was outside a little chapel. It was the queen’s small chapel, where she and her ladies said their prayers when they did not wish to trudge through the cold air to the larger church. It looked at a glance to be empty.
Eluned left the lamp just inside the door and retreated to the darkest corner, her arm braced against the wall. There she hunched over herself, a curl of misery around some wound that left her weak and gasping. There was no stopping the sobs, so she no longer tried. She wept and wept, muffling the grief in the pillow, a storm of anger and sadness that ripped through her and left her confused and helpless and humiliated.
It was like any other storm; she must wait for it to pass. But it lasted so long that after a while she sat herself down on the floor and pulled the slippers over her numb toes, buried her face against her knees and soaked the heavy robe with her tears. At last, when her face was swollen and her throat parched with thirst, the tears slowed to a trickle and she tried to make sense of it.
Robin, she thought, my Robin. There was no reason for her to weep. It had felt like a miracle, his skin hot against hers, the feel of him moving in her, every inch of her awake and exulting. He touched her, and she felt like a song being sung. Impossible as it was, it had truly been her – her body, her heart – transformed into something sublime. He could make her into that. How stupid she was, that she had believed it would only be a comfort. A little tenderness, perhaps a little excitement. Not the same wild, pagan pleasure of their youth. She would never have suspected it could be that. She wanted it again, now – his mouth on hers, his arms around her. But even as she thought it, the hot tears slipped down her face anew.
It softened everything in her, to think of him. Better to think of something with no soft edges.
Poison, she told herself. An accident. The blade. But that pulled a fresh sob from her, so she pressed her hand to her mouth and drew slow and steadying breaths. She no longer knew herself.
Full of fire, he had said. Cold and calculating, daring and bold. Alive. He remembered her. He knew her. And still he looked at her with love. Still he wanted to lie next to her in the night.
The tears had stopped. She put her hand to the wall and found a niche there, a statue of some saint inside. She levered herself up by its toes, then retrieved the lamp. There was oil enough inside it for a few hours, at least. There were woven rush mats on the floor of the chapel, a beautifully embroidered cushion meant for kneeling, and little else. She picked up the cushion, taking it back to her dark corner. In the quiet here, now that the tears had subsided, she would calm herself. Lamp in hand, she saw that the statue in the niche was of the Madonna. It was carved from wood and looked at her with sweet, forgiving eyes.
For a moment, she was back in the chapel at Ruardean, laying prostrate on the stone floor through the night while her husband described the evil spirits that tried to steal her soul and drag her to Hell. She could hear his voice even now, promising he would save her from them.
“Too late,” she said softly to t
he Madonna, to Walter’s memory. “They have got me, in the end.”
Spots of pain appeared along her jawline, the size and shape of his fingertips pressing into her flesh. The old anger was a distant throb, as familiar and unremarkable as breathing. Years of her life, the shape of her soul, all formed by those few hours. Deception and trickery, heartless strategizing, hard choices that had made her hard. She did not think Robert could fool himself into admiring her still, if he could have seen her through those years.
But he did love her, and she felt it like a pain all through her. Within a fortnight, she could be assured that Mortimer had returned the hostage safe home. Ten days, say. At the Epiphany, the boy would be safe home and she could act against Mortimer. She could have those ten days with Robert, loving him as freely as she had always wanted. But it would be ten days spent hiding the ruinous hatred that lived in her, and hiding what she planned to do. She contemplated it for the barest instant.
No. She could not do it. It would be too much like that time with Walter, manipulating him into her bed, giving her body while hiding her heart. She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed at the tickle of phantom tears that had once dripped into her ears. Even the memory of it made her feel foul and loathsome. That had been done out of necessity, because she must do it to survive. There was no such need with Robert.
And more than that: she loved him too well to let him bed a lying murderess.
She sat under the watchful eyes of the Madonna until the dim light of sunrise began to filter in. Her tears were spent. Her fingers ached with cold. She pressed her hands to her body beneath the robe for warmth and when they were thawed, she could feel the brush of Robert’s hair against her palms. It was silky, soft as a baby’s – a detail she had forgotten.
But she could also feel cold flesh. She could feel her uncle’s lifeless hand in hers, and Madog’s. She wished she could forget the feel of them. She wished it. But she could not.
Fair, Bright, and Terrible Page 15