“Of course.”
“Then why do you object?” the prior demanded.
Thorne stood and strode to the center of the room. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because that creature”—he pointed to Edmond, who looked up and glared at him—”will never be able to remarry after what he did to Lady Martine. Everyone at the castle saw her when I brought her back that morning. Christ, she looked as if she’d been attacked by a pack of wild dogs. All of Sussex must know about it by now.”
Father Simon took a step forward. “How Sir Edmond chooses to discipline his wife is no one’s business but his. This marriage must not be dissolved for the simple reason that it was solemnized under the eyes of God, and can only be rescinded by God’s will. ‘Twill end when Sir Edmond or Lady Martine departs from this world, and not a moment before.”
Thorne laughed humorlessly. “Since when did Edmond start caring about God’s will?”
Bernard crossed his arms. “We are prepared to offer a compromise of sorts, if the lady is prepared to listen.”
All eyes turned to Martine, who nodded hesitantly.
“Annulment, as I said, is out of the question,” Bernard stated flatly. “Understand, my lady, that without our cooperation, the struggle to obtain such an annulment could take years. During this ordeal, perfect strangers will be prying into matters of an exceedingly intimate nature. It could prove quite unpleasant for you, and there is no guarantee that your cause will triumph.”
“Your offer?” Thorne prodded impatiently.
“Providing you cease all efforts at annulment, my lady, you may remain here at St. Dunstan’s and return in your own good time to Edmond, who is prepared to forgive your lack of wifely humility and take you back.”
“Return!” She shook her head vehemently. “Never!”
“It’s our only offer,” Bernard said.
Martine rose. “I’ll pursue the annulment.”
Bernard shook his head. “I warn you, my lady, you’ll find us formidable opponents. My brother will emphatically deny all charges of impotence.”
“The lady states that the marriage was never consummated,” Matthew pointed out.
“Edmond will testify that it was,” Bernard said. Thorne saw Edmond glance uncomfortably at his brother and then nod, his gaze on the floor. “It’s a simple matter of her word against his.”
“Not necessarily,” Matthew said. “It’s perfectly within Lady Martine’s power to prove that she has never engaged in the marital act. All that’s required is that she submit to an examination by a physician.” Matthew turned to Martine. “I trust you have no objection to such an examination, my lady?”
Martine looked helplessly toward Thorne, who shook his head fractionally. Christ, what now?
“My lady?” Matthew prompted.
“May I speak to you in private a moment, Brother?” she asked.
Matthew led Martine out of the room. When they returned a short while later, the prior pinned Thorne with a quick, knowing look. To Bernard he said, “As it happens, Lady Martine’s tender sensibilities do, indeed, preclude such an examination. And as a lady of gentle breeding, it seems that she does not, after all, relish the loss of privacy required by a petition for annulment.”
Thorne exhaled heavily and shook his head. Defeat ill suited him.
Bernard smiled his mirthless smile. “Can I take it that means she accepts our offer?”
“Aye,” said Matthew, “as long as it’s clearly understood that the lady may remain as a guest at St. Dunstan’s for an indefinite period, and will not be abducted—”
“Certainly not,” Bernard said.
“—or pressured in any way to return to her husband’s home.”
Bernard nodded. “You have my word. And,” he added, seemingly as an afterthought, “my brother’s as well, of course.”
* * *
Martine waited gravely in the cool, dark stable as Thorne saddled up his white stallion in preparation for returning to Harford. It had been agreed that she would remain at St. Dunstan’s for the next year or two, until Rainulf returned from pilgrimage and could take her to Oxford with him. This went over poorly with Matthew’s superior abbot, but his reservation about allowing a woman to live at the priory dissolved when Martine donated to his abbey a few of the gold coins that Rainulf had given her. Nevertheless, the abbot had commanded Brother Matthew to establish a strict code of behavior for Martine. She was to dress as modestly as a nun, attend mass every morning, avoid the brothers as much as possible, and conduct herself in general with the utmost decorum. Any violation of this code would result in immediate ouster from St. Dunstan’s. As Matthew had explained it to her, a monastery was refuge for men who had given up all worldly temptations, including women, and it would therefore be cruel to expose them to what they couldn’t have.
It was Thorne who negotiated for her, who made the arrangements, who took care of everything. Martine appreciated his efforts on her behalf, but knew that he went to the trouble primarily to fulfill his promise to Rainulf. It was hard to fathom how he really felt about her. If he did care for her, it was surely not as deeply as she cared for him. It shamed her to admit to herself how much she did care, despite how he had wronged her, and to acknowledge how very badly she would miss him when he was gone.
When the Saxon’s preparations were finished, he came and took both of her hands in his. For a few long moments, he merely looked down at her, his eyes sad and iridescent in the semidarkness. Martine was afraid to speak, lest her voice betray the depth of her sorrow at his departure.
He turned her hands over and studied them as he rubbed her palms with his thumbs. “I’ll come back for a visit in the spring.”
Martine swallowed and nodded. The spring? It would be half a year before she saw him again!
“You’ll be safe here,” he said quietly. “Perhaps even happy. You’ll have Felda with you, and you like St. Dunstan’s.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He released her left hand to gently stroke her bruised cheek and lower lip, barely mended from where it had been split. “Does it still hurt?” he asked.
She nodded. “A bit.”
He trailed his fingers softly over her face, avoiding the worst of the wounds. “You’ll be completely healed soon. And then you’ll be even more beautiful than before.” She must have looked skeptical, because he chuckled and added, “Suffering enriches the soul, and it’s only those with the most complex souls who are truly beautiful.”
He lifted her right hand to his lips and kissed it, then pressed her palm to his cheek and closed his eyes. “I don’t want to leave,” he whispered raggedly.
Without thinking, she reached up to stroke his lip as he had stroked hers. He captured her fingers with his free hand and kissed them, then leaned down and brought his face close to hers. She withdrew her hands from his to push against his chest, thinking of her sore lip.
“I’ll be careful,” he promised, his arms encircling her. She closed her eyes as his mouth descended on hers. He was careful. The kiss felt warm and soft and heartbreakingly gentle, like a bit of down brushing her lips. Another feathery brush, and another... and then he closed his mouth tenderly over her lower lip, and she felt the light, wet sweep of his tongue over her sensitized flesh... a little healing lick.
“Martine,” he breathed, tightening his arms around her. Just as she moved to return the embrace, the stable door opened and they drew apart, breathless.
Brother Matthew paused in the shaft of sunlight from the open door. “I came to bid you farewell, Thorne. I didn’t mean to interrupt—”
“Nay, Brother,” Martine said, backing away from Thorne, whose gaze never left her. Matthew knew about them, of course—she had told him herself—but when he had outlined the rules she was to live by, he had explicitly asked her to remember that she was a married woman and must act the part. No sooner had she promised to do so than she had broken that promise! “I... we were just—”
“We were just saying goo
d-bye,” Thorne said quietly.
She nodded, feeling absurdly close to crying. “Yes. Well. I’ll see you in the spring, then.”
Thorne smiled a little sadly. “Yes.”
Martine turned and walked away, tears spilling down her cheeks.
Chapter 17
Martine re-inked her goose quill pen and leaned over the small sheet of parchment on which he was recording a recipe for an elixir of rosemary extract. It was for her Herbarium Medico, a project she had begun upon taking up residence at St. Dunstan’s and which, so far, had made the long winter months, if not less lonely, at least less tedious. Obligated to confine her movements to the monastery’s public buildings, and discouraged from talking to any of the monks except for Brother Matthew and Brother Paul, the infirmarian, she had only Felda and the other servants for company, and little to do.
It was drafty in her chamber, with nothing to shield her from the icy January breezes but a piece of translucent oiled linen stretched across the window. Matthew had given her one of those cunning little desks that the brothers used in the scriptorium—a combination chair and writing surface—and despite the chill, she kept it next to the window, the better to see by. But, although her vision benefited from this, her penmanship suffered; her hands, stiff with cold despite the fingerless gloves she wore, struggled hard to reproduce a semblance of the graceful lettering that the nuns had drilled into her.
Nevertheless, she concentrated hard this afternoon on the task she had set herself, trying to occupy her mind with the various plants and their medical uses—of tonics and elixirs and potions and powders—and not with the distant and disconcerting sounds from beyond the valley, the sounds of battle from the direction of Blackburn Castle.
Setting down her pen, she pressed both hands to the container of hot coals that hung from her girdle, letting the warmth travel up her arms and into her uneasy chest. The delicious, spreading heat made her think of a different kind of heat that had blossomed within her once, on a riverbank not so very far away, a heat that had roiled within her, consuming her in a white-hot flash.
It made her think of Thorne. She’d not seen him for three months, and she found that his image—his voice, his sky-blue eyes, the dimpled smile that belied the ruggedness of his face—clung stubbornly to her thoughts.
She cupped her warm hands around her face, now healed of its wounds, and closed her eyes. Was Thorne among those laying siege to Blackburn Castle? Of course he was. When Neville thundered back into Sussex on All Hallows’ Eve with his army of Welsh savages and seized Blackburn, claiming it for his own, Olivier summoned all of his vassals and every man who owed them fealty, to roust the cur. As Godfrey’s most skilled soldier, Thorne would be at the forefront of the siege. According to Brother Matthew, he would most likely command the archers.
The siege had been going on for weeks. Knowing naught of warfare, Martine listened anxiously to the faraway sounds that carried so well in the cold, thin air—the whinny of warhorses, the blare of trumpets, voices raised to bellow orders... or to howl in pain. Once, a multitude of voices screamed simultaneously, and Martine shivered in dread. Shortly thereafter three cartloads of Olivier’s men arrived at the monastery, groaning in pain from the burning pitch that Neville’s Welshmen had dropped on them.
Brother Paul and his assistants had been tending the wounded in the infirmary. Martine, experienced in treating injuries and knowing that the infirmarian’s expertise lay more in the arena of illness, frequently offered to help, but Paul always refused. She simply was not permitted in that part of the monastery, and so he asked her to serve them with her prayers instead.
The incessant tapestry of battle noise was punctuated by other, more mysterious sounds. The repetitive thudding, Matthew told her, was probably a battering ram being used to break down Castle Blackburn’s curtain walls. The occasional loud crash might be a missile hurled from either side by a stone-throwing machine.
From Brother Paul, Martine learned that the men in the infirmary regarded this as an exceptionally challenging siege. The castle, although unfinished, was superbly built and seemingly impenetrable. Although they had succeeded in filling in several sections of the moat with stones and logs so that they could cross it, they found the curtain walls immensely thick and well constructed. And then there were Neville’s Welshmen—a hundred or more ruthless brutes armed with crossbows for which they had a seemingly endless supply of bolts. They undoubtedly had provisions for a year or more, so it was quite possible they could hold out long enough against Olivier’s forces, and inflict enough damage, than the king would ultimately be forced to concede the barony to Neville despite his dishonorable method of acquiring it.
Martine picked up her pen and wrote until vespers, broke briefly for her solitary supper, then lit an oil lamp against the dying light and continued to work until she heard the chanting of compline at nightfall.
It was while she was putting away her pen and ink and parchment that she smelled the smoke—not the odor of woodsmoke so much as the smell of scorched flesh and something else, something raw and noxious.
Grabbing her mantle, she left the prior’s lodge and went to the front gate where Matthew and several lay brothers stood staring into the dark in the direction of Blackburn Castle. She saw no flames, just the pinpoints of torches on the battlements.
“What’s happening? What’s on fire?” she asked the prior.
“I’m not sure,” he murmured, squinting into the distance. He put a hand on her arm. “Come, there’s no point to standing out here in the cold. We’ll find out what happened in the morning.’
* * *
Martine had barely gotten to sleep when Brother Matthew woke her. “Sir Peter is here, my lady,” he said from beyond her chamber curtain. “He wants to see you.”
She threw a tunic over her shift and found Peter awaiting her in the hall, in full chain mail, his helmet in his hand.
“Sir Peter?”
“It’s about Thorne,” he said grimly.
“Is he... he’s not...”
“Nay, but he’s...” His stricken expression said it all. “I thought perhaps you might have something to ease the pain.”
Oh, God. “Where is he?”
“The infirmary.”
“Brother Paul won’t let me go there.” She looked imploringly toward Matthew.
The prior’s astute brown eyes seemed to pierce through to her very heart. “Brother Paul’s asleep, and I see no need to wake him when you can tend to Sir Thorne yourself—that is, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, thank you.” Taking her lockbox, she followed the two men outside and through the moonless dark, past the cloister and chapter house to a dimly lit building at the easternmost end of the monastery. Inside, it was all one long room with dozens of beds lined up against the walls, occupied by injured men, most of them asleep. A skinny, very young-looking monk greeted Brother Matthew and Peter respectfully, but gaped incredulously at Martine, his gaze lingering on her unveiled braids.
“It’s all right, Brother Luke,” said Matthew. “We’re here to see the knight who was just brought in.”
Brother Luke pointed to a curtained-off area in the far corner, near a crackling fire pit. “We’ve got him back where it’s warmest.”
“Mother of God,” Martine whispered when she pushed aside the curtains and looked down upon Thorne. Still in full armor, including a badly dented helmet, he was pale and sweaty, his breathing labored, his eyes glazed. Crossbow bolts protruded through the steel links of his mail hauberk from his right shoulder and forearm, and his leg on that side was twisted at an unnatural angle.
“Thorne,” she said softly.
He focused his eyes on her and then, for just a moment, his face relaxed and he actually smiled. His mouth formed her name, although no sound came out, but when he reached toward her with his damaged arm, his smile became a grimace of agony and he groaned, squeezing his eyes tightly shut.
Brother Luke came up with a tray bearing a basin of wat
er, a bar of soap, neatly folded linen bandages, a collection of surgical tools, and a jug of brandy, which he set down on a table next to the bed. Motioning Martine aside, he quickly unlaced Thorne’s helmet from the hood of his hauberk, then went to work undoing the complicated system of straps and buckles that kept his mail hose, elbow pieces, knee guards, and greaves in place.
That brandy, Martine knew, was the only anesthetic the monks ever offered; it would be a far sight more effective with a little sleeping draft mixed in. Setting her lockbox down on the table, she withdrew a mortar and proceeded to grind the requisite ingredients into a powder.
“The siege was successful,” Peter said quietly, his eyes on his friend, who seemed unaware of his presence. “We’ve retaken Blackburn Castle.”
“How did you manage that?” asked Matthew. “I thought the castle was impenetrable.”
“It is. When we realized we’d never get through those walls, Olivier started talking about a truce with Neville, but Thorne said compromise was an outrage after what that bastard did to Anseau and Aiglentine. So he came up with a plan, and Olivier agreed to it.”
The monk wrestled the big Saxon out of his heavy steel and leather armor, tossing it piece by piece onto the floor. Every time his efforts jarred the two firmly embedded crossbow bolts, Thorne flinched.
Peter said, “The first part of his plan was classic siege strategy—mining beneath the curtain wall. We set up a big tent covered with hides next to the wall, and put a team of men to work underneath it, digging a tunnel. They shored it up with logs soaked in tallow, and when it was finished, we stuffed it with straw and dead pigs and torched it. I never saw such a fire in my life. You can’t imagine the stink.”
“We were downwind of you,” Matthew muttered. “I don’t have to imagine. The point of such a fire, I take it, is to collapse the tunnel and thence the wall?”
“Aye, but that’s the thickest wall I ever saw. It never did fall. Of course, Thorne didn’t think it would.”
Matthew frowned. “He knew it wouldn’t work?”
Lords of Conquest Boxed Set Page 162