The Marriage Test

by Betina Krahn

  “Yes, milord.”

  “Yes, milord?” He had to focus more directly on her in order to see if she was mocking him. Damned if she didn’t look perfectly sincere. “You went to all of the trouble of hauling my bed up all those steep steps and through that miserably narrow passage, and now you’re just going to haul it all back down?”

  “Certainly …”

  She was being entirely too reasonable.

  “… first thing tomorrow.”

  “Ahhhh.” There it was. “And just where am I suppose to sleep tonight?”

  “You’re welcome to join me in the lookout tower.” She smiled sweetly. “Which, by the way, is where we’re having supper.”

  A bolt of alarm shot up his spine.

  “The hell we are. I’m taking my supper in the hall.”

  He pivoted and stomped back down the stairs to the hall … with a nagging sense that something was wrong. It was the silence, he realized as he stepped into the hall. He rubbed his eyes but the view remained the same; there wasn’t a soul in the place. And not a single cup, spoon, or crust of bread, either.

  He stomped back up the stairs to demand an explanation, but when he reached the landing outside the master chamber, she was gone. He jammed his hands on his waist and turned around … and around … before he spotted something lying on the step where she had been standing.

  It was piece of linen … a folded napkin … on which sat a lump of coal. Clearly, she had left it there for him to find. Knowing that she had, he would be mad to pick it up. But something wouldn’t let him walk away. He bent to pick it up and found that instead of a hard, glossy bit of mineral, he held a velvety black vegetable sphere. An edible sphere. His stomach slid.

  In the dim passage he ran his fingers over it and fought the urge to take the band from his nose and inhale the dark, earthy fragrance that had always meant freedom as much as food to him. His hand hovered briefly over the band, but the next instant he was taking the steps two at a time with it still in place.

  She stood in the evening breeze on the balcony, her burnished golden hair teased and caressed by some invisible sprite. She heard him and turned.

  “You changed your mind.” She smiled and took a seat at the dining table.

  “What the hell is this?” He held up the truffle.

  “A treasure.”

  “It’s a truffle.”

  “Exactly. The ‘treasure of the south forest.’ A truffle.”

  “How do you know that?” He glanced briefly at the table set on the balcony, seeing his cup and tray, pristine linen, and even a few heliotrope and phlox in a flower bowl. He turned to see his bed and was surprised to find it fit better in the chamber than he expected. It was spread with freshly washed linen and rose petals and piled with multicolored silk pillows.

  “In Grand Jean’s book, he refers to arguments over how to claim the treasure of the forest,” she said, spreading what appeared to be butter with shallots and truffles onto a delicately browned white flour roll. “Well, I think I had one of those arguments yesterday, when I was out collecting truffles. It started me thinking. Truffles grow in the south forest, and the people who harvest them hold vastly different opinions on whether it’s better to use pigs or dogs to harvest them. Milord, why don’t you pour us both some wine?”

  She spread more truffle butter on her roll and groaned as she took a bite.

  “It’s so obvious that it’s astonishing we didn’t see it sooner,” she continued. “After all, truffles are on your coat of arms.”

  “They are not.” He set a cup of wine down before her.

  “Then what are those little dark lumps on the third chevron of your arms?”

  “I … they’re coal.”

  “Where on your land, milord, has anyone ever dug coal?” When he had no response, she smiled. “Yet, truffles have been dug here for nearly a century. And Grandaise’s animal of choice for locating the truffles in the ground is the pig … which is also on your coat of arms … and on your grounds.”

  He spotted Grand Jean’s large black book on the nearby food table and opened it to stare at the coat of arms in astonishment. It was so obvious; how could he not have seen it until now? Truffles, pigs, and grapes. Grandaise had always been a feast for the senses.

  Frowning, he sat down hard on the bench.

  “Verdun, by the way, uses dogs. Dogs have an equally keen sense of smell, but are enthusiastic diggers and can tear up the mother plants under the ground. Pigs are more gentle, but they have the same taste for truffles we do … so they often eat whatever they harvest.” She smiled and shook her head. “The things you learn when you’re trying to find a crack in your husband’s stubborn heart.”

  He froze in the midst of reaching for a piece of the roll she had buttered.

  “Tell me what happened in Thibault’s hall the other day,” she said quietly.

  “Leave it, Julia.” He drew back his hand and gripped the edge of the stone bench on either side of him.

  “Are you afraid if you talk about it, it will come back to haunt you?”

  “I don’t want to remember or to talk about it,” he said emphatically.

  “Because you killed people?”

  He felt his heart beating harder and his breath quickening.

  “It was battle. Kill or be killed,” he ground out.

  “I understand that. Tell me what happened.”

  “Why would you want to hear such horrors?”

  “Because they’re lodged in your heart and mind, no matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise,” she said. “They’re a part of you. And if I’m to be a part of you, I need to understand them. Help me to understand.”

  Her appeal shook him to the core. He’d never imagined talking with someone about what had happened. Especially a woman. Women didn’t understand the necessities of battle … or the way men had to deal with it after.

  “Tell me what happened that made you want to lock your heart away.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this nonsense,” he said angrily, rising and starting for the door.

  “That’s right, you don’t.” She shoved to her feet and followed him to the middle of the chamber where he stopped with his back to her. “You don’t have to listen. You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to love or to care or to trust me with your problems. You don’t have to share anything with me. That is your choice. But if you choose that, you’ll be choosing something a lot colder and more lonely than the life you were meant to have. Is that what you want for you? For me?”

  He was trembling. Emotions were stirring beneath his becalmed surface.

  “This has nothing to do with you, Julia,” he said fiercely.

  She darted around him and planted herself between him and the door, her shoulders back and her head held high.

  “Begging your pardon, milord, but it has everything to do with me.” Her expression hardened with a hint of anger. “It was me who peeled the blood-soaked clothes from your body and bathed the sweat and blood from you when they brought you home. It was me who found another nose band to help you rest, and then sat with you for two long days while you slept. It was me who watched over you … praying for your heart and your mind to heal and for you to return to us.”

  She edged closer, raising her face to his, making him look at her and deal with her presence, making him acknowledge her place in his life. Then came the words that shot truer than Old Thibault’s crossbow … piercing his heart … striking sparks of light in the depths into which he’d retreated.

  “And it is my heart that leaps at the sight of you, and my heart that aches with misery each time you turn away.”

  The ache in her was visible through the prisms of tears in her eyes.

  “I love you, Griffin of Grandaise. Talk to me. Let me be the partner of your heart.”

  He could feel his emotions roiling, surging nearer the surface than he’d thought. Panic gripped him at the force of that rising. The magnitude and the intensity of it. He could
feel his heart drumming faster and his hands beginning to tremble. His skin was suddenly cold, even though he could feel a bead of sweat trickling down the middle of his back. His eyes began to burn from staring at her so fixedly that he forgot to blink.

  He could see his silence wounded her, but he had no words to collect the turmoil and pour it out of him in a way that might make sense to her.

  In the middle of that rising panic, he focused desperately on her eyes and felt one strangely calm fragment of memory surfacing in him. During the fight, in that awful moment he realized he was outnumbered by more men than he could count and would likely die, his final thought was of Julia and home. In that moment he had seen her face, felt her presence in his mind, and understood in a way too deep for words what would be lost if he were defeated: all of the possibilities of life … of joy and passion and discovery … of sharing each moment and living each experience … of love … with her …

  Julia watched the hollowness of his eyes transforming, filling, reflecting the light she was trying to bring to him. Seizing that as cause for hope, she ventured one more step.

  “Griffin, the band was gone from your nose when you arrived at home. How did it come off? What happened to it?”

  She watched him grappling with the question and could see from the turbulence it cause in him that it was close to the heart of the matter.

  “Lost,” he said thickly. “It was lost.”

  “How did it come off?”

  For a long moment he didn’t speak. She could feel the trembling of his hands in hers as shards of shattered memory reassembled in his mind. Her chest ached as his eyes darted over the horrific images returning to him. She squeezed his hands.

  “Can you remember losing it?”

  He shook his head, his eyes widening, his body stiffening.

  “I didn’t lose it,” he said hoarsely, astounded by what he saw in his mind’s eye. “I took it off.”

  His entire body quaked as for a moment he was there again, reliving that moment of desolation and decision. His eyes began to fill with tears.

  “I took it off. I did.” His voice strengthened and rose. “I reached up”—he acted out the movements as he recalled them—“and I grabbed it and ripped it off.”

  In horrified wonder he looked down at his empty hand.

  “You took it off?” She had to swallow the lump in her throat. “Why?”

  He shook his head, unable to form words to express what he could barely bring himself to recognize.

  “Because you knew what would happen,” she said for him, reeling from the insight. “You knew it would unleash the Beast.”

  “I—I couldn’t think … I saw them coming … so many of them. Just like that time in Spain …” He grappled with the thought, turning first one way and then another as if looking for an escape, unable to bear the thought that he could do such a thing intentionally.

  “You knew what was inside you … the power to fight and to survive … and you chose it.” She squeezed his hands and pulled him back to her, making him look into her eyes and see that there was no judgment, no revulsion in them. “Don’t you see. Griffin, you chose it. You knew what was inside you … the power to fight and to survive … and you used it to defend yourself and others, too.” Her voice rose as the warmth of love poured through her heart, displacing the chill of fear. “It’s not like Spain at all. You weren’t mad with bloodlust or sick in your heart or even overcome by the smells. You did it to survive. You summoned it out of your depths …”

  He looked at her through a haze of tears and whispered the truth he now knew.

  “So I could come back to you. I did whatever I had to do … to come back to you.”

  The tension in his face as he said it betrayed his hope that she would understand and his fear that she might not. She understood and honored the risk he was taking … the gift he was offering … full access to his aching heart.

  With tears streaming down her face, she threw her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. He clasped her to him, holding her fiercely against him, letting her stubborn love melt away the shell that separated them.

  “Oh, Griffin, I love you. With all that I am. With all that I can be.”

  He kissed her softly, reverently, acknowledging the preciousness of the bond strengthening between them. Then his kiss deepened and grew exuberant, celebrating the freedom that with her help he had just discovered and claimed.

  “I love you, Julia of Grandaise … more than I can ever say.”

  Through her tears she smiled up at him.

  “Then don’t say. Show me. Touch me. Love me.”

  He picked her up in his arms and swung her around, laughing.

  Breathless, they sank onto the bed and began to remove and discard garments with an eagerness that at any other time would have shamed them. But this was no time for decorum and expectation … no place for rules … except the rule of love. They kissed and nuzzled and loved each other, exploring the sensations of touch and taste …

  Then as he braced above her on his arms, looking at her tousled hair and pale, sleek body, he groaned and pulled the band from his nose.

  “Wait,” she said, pushing him back up when he sank over her, “I have to get a truffle …”

  “Oh, no,” he said, countering her force until she sank back on the bed. With a husky laugh he lowered his nose to the base of her throat and inhaled deeply. “You smell like Julia … the warm scent of ‘woman’ about your hair … the lavender and soap on your skin … a tang of salt and a little musk … that roe-like scent when you’re aroused …” Then he looked up with a liquid glimmer of desire in his eyes. “Why would I need truffles, when I have you?”

  She laughed and pulled his head down to demand another kiss.

  They lay together in the lingering sweetness of loving, warm and complete, with the night breeze kissing their naked bodies. They had made love and then drank wine and ate Truffled Eggs in Pastry, and goose stuffed with grapes and truffles and covered with a truffle cream sauce, and Baked Truffled Brie en Croute. She fed him blueberries and sugared almonds and his favorite sweetened custard topped with flamed sugar.

  “You know”—he looked around at the cozy chamber and relaxed back as the air slid over him, drawing heat from his body—“I like this. Having our bed here. Of course, it will probably be a little drafty in winter.”

  “Then we’ll just take the bed apart again and move it back downstairs.” She grinned and rubbed the side of his leg with her toes. “We’ll have a summer chamber and a winter chamber.”

  When his chest rumbled against her cheek but he didn’t speak, she raised her head, knowing he had something that needed airing.

  “What is it?”

  “What if it happens sometime that I haven’t chosen it?” he said, sharing one last echo of doubt.

  “It won’t,” she said, running her palm across his chest. “The two times it’s happened you’ve been in battle and fighting for your very life. How likely is that to happen again?”

  He took a deep breath and thought of all of the people and events that could conspire to drag him and the folk of Grandaise into the quarrels of the age.

  “It’s not impossible to imagine.”

  She took a deep breath, too. And looked up at him with that stubborn smile that never failed to make his heart skip.

  “If it happens again … at least you’ll be better prepared.” The love in her heart shone through her eyes. “And whatever happens, we’ll face it together. We’ll always face it together.”

  It was late the next morning when Julia and Griffin emerged from their bower and descended to the hall. Everyone from the duke to the lowliest servant could see that tensions between the two had been laid to rest. Julia glowed with health and the happy air of a well-loved woman. Griffin beamed with strength and vitality and the relaxed air of a man sated with loving pleasures.

  Sophie and Sir Martin were still casting wistful, longing glances at each other, and Julia
laughed sympathetically and gave Sophie a tight hug.

  “It will be worth the wait,” she whispered. And she knew it must be true love when salty, impatient little Sophie sighed and looked across the hall to Sir Martin.

  “I know.”

  A joint wedding celebration, that was what they needed, the count of Verdun declared when he arrived in the hall that morning. He was still weak, but not so weak that he couldn’t contrive to pass off some of the expense of a wedding feast onto his neighbor and longtime rival. Julia embraced the idea straightaway, and Sophie—as soon as she was assured the vows themselves wouldn’t have to wait another two months—was delighted to be able to share her celebration with her best friends.

  Julia was just giving Griffin a parting kiss, heading for the kitchen to consult on the day’s menus when a runner came from the gates, saying that a party of travelers approached … two men and a cart full of nuns.

  Julia looked at Griffin, who looked at the duke, who—after a moment—took refuge in his ducal authority and sat a bit straighter in the master’s chair. A cart full of nuns, his air of confidence said, was not necessarily a bad thing.

  He changed his mind, a short time later, when a trio of nuns in black habits sailed into the hall demanding to be shown into the presence of Griffin of Grandaise and looking like a trio of angry crows.

  “Welcome, Sisters,” Griffin declared, rising. “I am the lord of Grandaise. What can I do for—” He stopped dead as a pair of venomous brown eyes fixed on him. “Reverend Mother. Well … this is certainly a surprise.”

  “Where is my cook, Grandaise?” the abbess snapped, seizing the long silver crucifix that dangled from her belt and looking for all the world as if she was considering stabbing him with it.

  “Well, Reverend Mother … um …” He looked to the duke, who blanched and slid lower in his chair, as if trying to make himself a smaller target.

  “I got a message from Avalon saying something about a marriage and an annulment and the king—” A twitch from the head table drew her all-seeing gaze and she recognized and pounced on the duke. “So, there you are.” She stalked toward him with her veil flapping. “Where is my cook? What has the wretch done with her?”