The growing infant wearied her so, and the weight of the things she did not know, and the things she knew and could not talk about. She was entombed in silence, the same silence that had entered her at the abbey, but now it was a burden, not a relief. Do you think I want to be the kind of woman who does not care about my child? she had asked him. Yes, she thought. That is exactly what I wanted. What I still want, may God forgive me.
A peasant woman stepped out into the street, directly in their path. She held something in her arms, wrapped in a blanket.
Celeste shivered and pulled her cloak around her. She did not like the look of the woman. A peasant should step aside for nobility.
The woman came closer. “Look.” She held a bundled child directly in front of Celeste. “My little one, my Jeanne. Look at her.”
Celeste stopped, shocked. The woman thrust the babe closer.
Beads of sweat stood out on the pale little face framed by the blanket. Tiny eyelashes fluttered against her fevered cheeks; her little rosebud mouth opened, panting for air. Celeste shrank back.
“Move aside!” Lord Bernard said. He encircled Celeste with his arm, drawing her away from the fevered child.
The woman stood her ground. “I have something of yours, My Lady,” she said. Shifting the child to one arm, she held out her closed fist to Celeste.
“No!” Celeste’s voice quivered. She forced herself to be calm, to sound scornful. “Take your begging somewhere else.”
“Perhaps you know what I have? Perhaps you would rather speak to me alone?”
“She will not,” Lord Bernard said.
A boy ran out from the corner of a building. “Please! Listen to her,” he cried.
“Go back, Simon,” the woman said.
Celeste opened her mouth but could not make a sound. No, she thought, staring at the boy, oh no.
“What do you want here, boy?” Lord Bernard demanded.
Simon ran to his mother’s side.
“No,” Celeste whispered, looking from him to the woman.
“What have you to do with my wife? Tell me, boy!”
“I… I held the horse when it reared…”
The woman stepped in front of her son and opened her hand.
A large ruby winked up at them, a spark of fire against the peasant’s rough palm.
“No!” Celeste cried, stumbling backward. She felt Lord Bernard glance at her, but she could not look away from the ring.
“That is a rich bauble,” Lord Bernard said. “How did you come by it?”
How casual he sounded, as though he did not know his own ring.
The boy stepped up beside his mother. He looked at Celeste.
She opened her mouth to deny the ring, but the boy’s expression stilled her voice. They were all watching her, the woman and the boy and Lord Bernard. What did they want of her, the woman’s expression so accusing, the boy’s so earnest and trusting? She had done nothing wrong, not to them.
“Take it back,” the woman said, her face calm and unafraid. “We do not want it.”
They had planned this, the woman and her son, had set a trap for her so she would have to take the ring back. They were not innocent. Perhaps the peddler had even put them up to it, told them to demand money. She saw again his greedy face leering over her. What trick was he playing now? She flushed, and drew herself up proudly. She was no longer vulnerable, as she had been then. She could condemn them all, could claim they stole the ring. Lord Bernard would believe her, and have them punished. Her lips parted, but she could not give words to the lie.
The babe cried, a pitiful, fevered sound. Her small hand rose and fell back weakly into the folds of the blanket. The mother parted the blanket and kissed the child’s pale forehead. Wisps of fair hair framed her thin little face and lay in damp curls against her cheek.
“She is innocent,” the woman said. Her voice trembled. “She is my child, my baby, and she is innocent.”
“What has that to do with me?’ Celeste cried. “I have not failed that child.” She flushed, realizing what she had said.
“You know what you have done,” the woman said. She held out the ring. “Take it back.”
“I cannot!” She would be consumed by grief again. And when this second babe died—
“Enough!” Lord Bernard took the ring from the woman’s outstretched hand and turned to Celeste. Her hand lay helpless in the cloth sling. He slipped the ring onto her finger. “Reclaim your past,” he said quietly.
She stared down at the ruby, winking slyly on her finger. Nothing: she felt nothing. No tide of memories washing over her, no madness of grief, no despair. She let her breath out slowly. The ring was a pretty jewel, nothing more. She flushed, furious with herself. How foolish she had been, letting her head be filled with nonsense.
The woman reached into the pocket of her sleeve and withdrew a shiny black nail.
Impossible! Celeste shrank back. It could not be the same nail. How had they journeyed here together? A ring would be guarded. A ring might change hands any number of times and not be lost. But a nail, a common nail, along with it? Yet it was her nail—she could see it lying in her bloody hand as she had dreamed it, remembered the feel of it, cold and cruel, when she held it out to the peddler, and the relief when he accepted it. The hairs on her neck prickled. It was an evil thing, she would not take it back!
The woman moved closer, holding the child so Celeste could not help but look at her. “You will never know peace if she dies.” Her voice was low and fierce. “How could you ever be happy, carrying such guilt?”
“You go too far,” Lord Bernard warned, stepping between the woman and Celeste.
I have done nothing to her. She opened her mouth, but the words caught in her throat. This woman was the peddler’s wife! She had sold him her sorrow, and now his child suffered as Etienne had.
No, Father Jacques said it was not possible, the Abbess, also—
The Abbess said it was a sin. Was that why God had not heard her prayer? Because of her sin?
“Take your sorrow back,” the woman said. She held her head up, looking directly at Celeste, not peasant to nobility but woman to woman, mother to mother. She believed Celeste could save her child.
The infant whimpered. Celeste looked down at the pale little face in the blanket.
What if her babe was a girl, the one she could not care about, the one she had tried to abandon in Jerusalem?
It could be anyone’s child, she had told herself. She looked at the child struggling to breathe, her cheeks flushed with fever: Anyone’s child.
The child turned her head, and lay still. As still as Etienne, feverish and weak in her arms.
Could she save this one?
The little girl opened her eyes. They were startlingly blue, as blue as the sky, as blue as the sea to Jerusalem…
She fumbled to untie the money pouch on her belt, one-handed and awkward in her haste. “Take it,” she said, thrusting the pouch toward the woman. “I do not know which coin is his. Take them all.”
The woman accepted the pouch. She pressed the nail into Celeste’s left hand, lying in the cloth sling. It touched her palm, cold and hard, its black point falling across the gold band on her finger…
***
Something has wakened her, although it is not yet dawn. Etienne is lying beneath her arm. Why is he so still? She touches his face, shivers at the coolness of his skin. A terrible foreboding fills her. She holds her hand to his nose and mouth, feeling no movement of air. But his fever had broken! She shakes him gently, then with increasing urgency, crying “Etienne! Etienne!” He does not wake, not even when she begins to scream.
“Quiet!” Raimond’s voice breaks through her terror. “Lord Bernard will set you aside if you tell him. You have killed his son.”
***
“No!” she screamed, remembering, remembering everything. “I cannot undo what I have done!”
The nail dropped from her hand.
“Help me, boy,” Lord B
ernard cried, catching her as she fell.
Celeste opened her eyes. She was in the guest room of the hostel.
Lady Yvolde, on a chair beside her bed, looked up at her movement. “Is there any way you can avoid excitement?”
Celeste touched her belly.
“He has survived. But it would be best if you could stop falling.”
Celeste struggled into a sitting position. Her arm, in its sling, lay across her waist, the ruby gleaming on her finger. She winced and looked away.
“Would you like a drink?” Lady Yvolde gestured toward a jug of small ale on the table.
Celeste stared at it. A nail, bent at the end, lay beside the jug. “That nail was from my bed,” she said. Raimond’s hands on hers. He had found her digging into the wood with her little knife, her fingernails broken and bleeding, and had used his larger knife to dig out a nail from the bed where Etienne had died. She remembered everything clearly now, neither consumed by grief nor oblivious to it.
“I was not honest with you,” she said. “I am in mourning, as you thought. My son died.”
“You need not talk of it if you do not wish to.”
“I must tell someone.” She looked down at the ruby. “He was very ill. My husband sent for the priest to secure his soul to heaven.” She paused, feeling again her grief as she cradled his limp body and listened to the priest.
“Afterward, I could not bear to lay him in his cradle, which I had ordered brought into my bedchamber. I took him to my bed, and lay him beside me, so weak, so hot, struggling for every breath. I watched him all the night. I drew a breath with every breath he took, and blew my own breath into his mouth when he faltered.” She paused. “And in the morning, his fever broke. He drank a little milk, and smiled at me.” She smiled, remembering her joy.
“That evening, I went to my husband’s bed, and we were happy together.” She stopped. She had been with her husband. It was possible the infant she carried was Lord Bernard’s! She touched her belly, smiling sadly. If so, she had been trying to protect him from the wrong parent.
“In the night I woke, thinking of Etienne, and was afraid for him, and went back to my room. He was asleep in his cradle. I carried him to my bed.” She frowned. She did not remember doing that. Why, when all else had returned, did she not remember taking him into her bed again? But she must have done so. What else did she not remember about that night? Could it be worse than what she did remember? Her throat tightened, unable to say the rest.
“Do not berate yourself for falling asleep,” Lady Yvolde murmured, taking her hand. “Even the saints succumbed to exhaustion.”
She began to weep. The tears burned her cheeks and fell onto the sheet and onto Lady Yvolde’s hand, covering hers. She had not wept when Etienne died. What right do the faithless have to weep? She turned her head so she would not see Lady Yvolde’s face, and forced herself to continue. “It is not that I fell asleep,” she said, “but in my sleep, I rolled over.”
He might have lived. God had spared him, for his innocence, for the sake of her prayers. His fever had broken. It was not God who failed him; it was his mother.
She wept bitterly, uselessly. Tears would not bring him back. She could weep down Noah’s flood, and still he would be dead and gone from her forever.
It was guilt, not sorrow, that had pursued her, that she had tried so desperately to escape. But guilt cannot be cast off. It had seeped into her bones and blood with every breath she took until it permeated her very being. She would never be free of it, no matter how far she ran or how much she forgot or how little she cared about anything.
“He is with God now,” Lady Yvolde said gently.
“He missed so much.”
“You missed so much. And I am truly sorry for all the joy you could have taken in him. But what did he miss? He was born, he lived and he died. That is all any man has. He was loved and cared for and mourned. That is more than many men receive. He was baptized and sealed to heaven. That is as much as any man can hope for.”
Celeste leaned back against the pillows, closing her eyes. And what of the other? He had not yet lived at all. He was neither loved nor wanted, not even by his mother. She would love him now, if she could.
Lady Yvolde released her hand and brought a damp cloth from the washbasin. “You have suffered enough,” she said, wiping Celeste’s face gently. “It is time to forgive yourself. Lord Bernard does not blame you; he is distracted with concern for you.”
“I have never told my husband. Raimond found me in the morning.” Lying on top of Etienne. She could not say it. “He put Etienne back into his cradle, and told everyone that he had died there.”
Why had he come into her bedchamber? Twice he had done so. “Another secret,” she murmured.
“Perhaps you should tell this one,” Lady Yvolde said.
***
“Shall I help you dress, My Lady?” Marie asked, poking her head through the doorway soon after Lady Yvolde had left.
Marie! Oh, dear heaven, Marie! She had sold this child, with little more hesitation than she had sold Blackie and Honey. And she had done so knowing Marie would be treated less gently than the horses. She looked away, ashamed.
“May I help you?” Marie asked again, hurrying in.
“You have been a good and loyal maid to me while I was ill,” Celeste said, nearly choking on the words. “I will… I will buy your pony back.” She prayed the girl would never learn her mistress had sold her, too.
Marie dropped into a deep curtsey. “Oh! I love you, Lady Celeste!”
“I have not deserved your affection.”
“You have,” Marie insisted. “You have, My Lady.”
Celeste smiled down at her. She patted Marie’s round cheek. “Well, I will do so from now on,” she promised. “And now you may help me dress.”
“Oh, I had forgot,” Marie said, when Celeste was dressed. “Raimond sent me to tell you he wishes to talk with you.”
“I am going to the stable to make sure Honey and Blackie have not been sold. Tell him he will find me there.”
***
“This is a strange meeting place, Lady Celeste,” Raimond said, approaching her in front of her horse’s stall.
She flushed. “I wanted to talk to you alone. About the night Etienne died.”
His charming smile disappeared. “You know as well as I.”
“Raimond—” She turned toward the stall, too embarrassed to look at him. “I do not know. I cannot remember taking him to my bed.”
He watched her a moment, then smiled chidingly. “It is not necessary to deny it to me. I will not tell your secret.”
“Is that our secret?”
“What else?” There it was again, that tension she had felt in him the other day. As though he were threatening her, beneath his mild tone.
“Marie told me you were there that night. She says you made her leave, that we were alone together.”
He arched one eyebrow. “What are you thinking, Lady Celeste?”
She blushed a second time. Had she never noticed the mockery behind his jests? She drew herself up straight. “What happened that night?”
“Ahh. You believe we had a tryst.” An expression of cool amusement crossed his face. “My Lady, you are the wife of my Lord Cousin. I would not dare presume you bear me more than the kindest friendship. Perhaps you have been confused by dreams during your illness.” He bowed ironically. “If so, I am honored.”
His smile was mocking, but in his eyes she saw… anger? She had seen that anger before. Yes, soon after she arrived at her Lord’s castle. Raimond had approached her alone, he had—touched her. She had moved away at once, shocked; and he had looked then as he did now.
But he had never given a sign of it again. They had forgotten it, had become friends…
“Why were you in my room when I woke up?” she demanded. This smirking, arrogant man had never been her friend. A terrible thought occurred to her. “How did Etienne die, Raimond?” she asked, even while s
he thought, No, it cannot be.
“You took him to your bed and in your sleep, rolled onto him,” he said in a low, tight voice. “You smothered him.”
All this time she had believed it. But he did not; she saw that in his eyes watching her, judging whether she had taken the bait this time.
“That is a lie.” Her mind reeled. She had not killed Etienne.
“Who are you, to accuse me?” In two quick strides he was beside her, his arm raised to strike her.
“Do not dare,” she gasped.
He laughed. “Oh, I dare. You would be surprised how much I dare.”
She opened her mouth to scream, but he clasped his hand over her mouth and nose. She kicked him, struggling to breathe.
“And now,” he whispered into her ear, “I will have to kill you, also.”
She bit his hand, sinking her teeth into the flesh until she tasted blood. With a cry he released her. She screamed.
He struck the side of her head, sending her reeling into the wood slats of a stall. She gripped the wood to keep from falling. She would die. She would die here.
She pushed herself from the stall and ran toward the stable door. He grabbed her skirt and pulled her back, throwing her to the ground. She struggled against him, desperate, grabbed a fistful of straw and threw it into his face. He swore, loosening his hold to brush at his eyes. She twisted sideways, reaching for her knife, but he grabbed her again, pinning her down with his body.
“You thought yourself too good for me! An untitled girl, too good for me?” His hands circled her throat, squeezing.
Her lungs were on fire, desperate for air. Pinpoints of light exploded before her eyes. She fumbled at her side, found her knife in its small sheath, plunged it into his arm—
Air! She gasped, sucking it deep into her, coughing and gulping it in frantically.
He cursed and slapped her, knocking her head sideways.
The Sorrow Stone Page 28