At no time did he ignore or slight Elizabeth. He included her in every phase of the discussion, even pointedly asking her opinion and her backing for some of his remarks. He was unfailingly courteous, painfully polite—as polite as he would have been to a stranger.
At one point in the evening Elizabeth decided she could bear no more. Unwilling to come to grips with Roger and expose his shame to the rest of his family, she claimed weariness and suggested retiring to bed. Lady Hereford and Catherine were instantly solicitous, Roger plainly surprised both by their concern and by Elizabeth's confession of fatigue. His surprise, however, was nothing to what was mirrored in the expressions of his sister and mother when he let her go.
"Do you not go with your wife, Roger?"
"Go with her? Why? Oh." Hereford laughed, misconstruing completely his mother's thought. "It is true that I have been several weeks away from her bed, but, after all, if she is eager, waiting will make her more eager, and if she is weary, it is kindness in me to let her rest before I tire her further."
"Roger!" Lady Hereford protested. Perhaps she did not like her daughter-by-marriage even now, but what was right was right. "A woman more than five months gone with her first child deserves more consideration than you are showing her."
"Five—what?" Hereford blinked and shook his head as if he had been hit. The room receded infinitely and then, all at once, became his hall, his own familiar hall, not some immense cold place of tiny spots of brilliant color filled with little people he didn't really know and little sounds all very far away.
"Did she not tell you?"
"No," Hereford got out. "No, she—good God, she must have thought—"
Hereford cut that off. His mother, of course, did not know he had taken Elizabeth as a vassal, and, to his mind, it was none of her business, but he felt then that his wife had concealed her pregnancy because she considered that a "woman's reason" for not performing the duties he had ordered.
"But Roger, could you not see? She is swollen with it already. Surely you are not such a fool that your eyes did not tell you she was with child."
"Fool! I am ten times a fool about everything. No, I did not see anything. I have been so taken up with—with other matters."
"What matters? Roger, what have you been doing?"
"Not now. Besides, it is not a woman's affair." He stood up almost reluctantly, thinking how angry Elizabeth would be and that he had no more strength left to use in calming her. "I had better go to her."
Elizabeth was not yet in bed. Her maids were brushing her long black hair, but Hereford dismissed them with a gesture and took the brush into his own hand. She did not turn to face him. If she saw those eyes fixed on some infinitely distant point again, she knew she would not be able to control herself enough to help him. For a while he brushed in silence, long, strong strokes that made the hair crackle and rise to follow the brush. The scent of her hair came to him and suddenly he dropped the brush and lifted an armful of the shining black mass to bury his face in it.
"Why did you keep this a secret? Elizabeth, are you with child?"
The voice was different and Elizabeth would have turned, but Roger held her hair. "Yes."
"Why did you not tell me?"
"I—do not be angry, Roger. Somehow the time was never right. When I first knew, I had just received your orders to travel north with my father, and then, somehow, I could never find the right words for a letter. I started to tell you in Gloucester, but—but you were so overburdened already, and I did not wish you to have any further cause for concern."
"Elizabeth! You might have done yourself some hurt with all that riding."
He did not sound angry now and she uttered a soft laugh. "Oh, no. I am very strong, and your heir, if it be an heir, is safe."
"I do not care for that."
At that instant it was no lie, for Elizabeth's voluptuous curves, in spite of the thickened waist and coarsening lines of the body, were more desirable than ever. He had been thinking only of her, not of the child.
Now she pulled her hair from his grip and turned. "I am not sure I care either. Roger, in God's name, tell me what has happened. You cannot say to me that Henry has left you and nothing else. Why? Did you quarrel with him? Did you suffer some great defeat?" That was as close as she could come to her fear that he had, in his madness, committed some act of great cowardice. "What will become of us? What will become of this poor child?"
Hereford's face contorted with pain, for the peace of rejection of all feeling which he had made for himself had been broken by his fierce pleasure at hearing of his wife's condition. He was fond of children, attached to his natural daughters even though he had never cared much for their mothers, but he was surprised by the violent surge of protective emotion that tore him in reply to Elizabeth's questions.
Still he could not bear to face squarely that agony of frustration and futility he had experienced in Devizes, and he turned away, fighting to retain his distant peace. Now too there was Elizabeth's frustrated ambition to face. He could hear her before she spoke, the bitter questioning of why he had done no more to keep Henry, why he had refused to capture Eustace and take the power into his own hands.
"Is not the earldom of Hereford sufficient to satisfy your ambition for your child?" he asked harshly.
"If it be held with honor, more than enough,” Elizabeth retorted. “What have you done, Roger, that you are ashamed to tell me of?"
That turned him toward her, and the horror and terror of her expression betrayed what she had been thinking.
"Why do you always think the worst of me?" he snapped.
"I do not. I do not. But what other reason can you have to refuse to speak?"
"None of import to you," he lashed out bitterly. "Only the pain it costs me to recount in my own mind and to my ears with my own voice the blood and substance I have lost, the wasted years of battle and bloodshed— He left me, left his land and his word, left me to court a woman and gain a rich dower."
His voice broke and he covered his face with his hands. It was too late for peace, the dam he had built to keep back his grief and disappointment, his rebellion in the face of God's will to the idea that Henry would desert his given oath to seize a richer prize, was broken.
"Oh Roger, Roger." Elizabeth ran to him and took him in her arms. "So long as our honor is not smirched, so long as you have done nothing of which to be ashamed, I do not care." There was a moment's pause, and Hereford dropped his head so that his cheek rested against Elizabeth's hair. "Nay," she continued, surprising her husband by the note of fierce joy in her voice, "I do not care. I am glad. Glad, do you hear. Let them kill each other and burn each other. Let Satan gobble up all this accursed land. Only let us live in peace and be together. My husband," she put up a hand to stroke his hair, "my beloved husband, go no more to war. Stay and give me the comfort of your presence."
They stood awhile longer, Hereford's tears wetting his wife's cheek and hair. Finally Elizabeth broke their embrace gently. "Let us go to bed, Roger. I will ask you nothing, ever. Forget and be at peace."
In the intimate dark behind the bed curtains, clasped again in Elizabeth's warm embrace, Hereford found his tongue and also an urgent need to unburden himself. Haltingly at first, and then more easily, he began to explain what had happened, not the events, although he did describe those, but what had happened to him. He spoke at last of his early and increasing foreboding of preordained failure and its cause, of the freezing terror of his dream, of his release from that fear, and of the culmination of victory in the final loss of all he had striven for.
"Radnor said that Stephen was God's anointed king and that it was wrong to try to wrest that power from him, but that man has free will and must do what he thought right. He said that it was possible that I would be God's instrument to change this land's destiny. Well, I was not. Still, though, I must bow to the Infinite Wisdom, and though I was warned so many times, I must believe that Henry is the rightful king of this realm. No better, i
n some ways mayhap even worse, than the man who is before him, but still the rightful king."
"You cannot know, Roger. Mayhap you have changed the destiny of this land. Have you ever seen Stephen display the energy and determination he has shown in this last half year? Perhaps God used you to create the miracle of making Stephen a better king. I too believe Henry is the rightful heir to the throne, but now I think it is plain that he must come to it in peace. If Stephen can bring quiet to England by better management, and Henry follows him under the crown, then you have succeeded, not failed, and succeeded without the sin of wresting the crown from the king by force."
Hereford did not reply to that. He did not believe Stephen could change, but he thought wearily that if the great barons could be welded together, they themselves could bring quiet to England. After a while he sighed deeply and slid his hand down to Elizabeth's swelling abdomen. Under his hand the child quickened, and Hereford felt the faint flutter of life. A smile, uncertain at first and then gladder and more sure, illumined his face.
"I doubt you are right, but yet, there are other ways to achieve the same end. Christ is merciful and the Father just and good. It must be so. Do you feel the child, Elizabeth? I cannot tell you why, but that little life makes my heart sing. I will not give up. I will but rest a little until I am less weary and then I will tell Henry that I will make my peace with Stephen—unless Henry should call me to arms again, which I have promised—and strive still, but in different ways to make a better land."
"Roger," Elizabeth said softly, reaching under her pillow, "now we are at peace, give me leave to return this to you." He took the glove that was the symbol of her vassalage with a slight stiffening of surprise and apprehension, but she continued speaking before he could question her. "There was never need for it. Whatever you commanded, I have done for love. I never thought once of that oath. You have taught me many things, Roger. I do not desire to rule the world, nor, even you. I wish only to be a woman and live in peace."
There was only one way to thank her and accept that sacrifice which was no sacrifice.
Later, smiling but a little regretfully, Hereford said, "Does that mean you will rail at me no more, Liza my love?"
And Elizabeth laughed and kissed him, and replied, "You have taken all the covers from me, you clumsy clod, and I am freezing. You are an oaf, and a dolt, and have no notion of how to treat a woman properly."
"Have I not?" her husband answered, drawing her back into his embrace. "Then I will have to practice."
Knight's Honor Page 45