To Touch The Knight Read online

  “Spices and sugar-cone,” he whispered into her mouth, running his tongue across her teeth and embracing her deeply. His mouth teased and puckered and kissed against hers as his hand feathered and fluttered and circled through her intimate curls. When he brought his other hand to mirror the same caresses on her breasts, Edith moaned aloud.

  She was on his lap and felt as if she was flying. Wanting to touch him everywhere at once, she wrapped her arms around his back, pressing herself tighter against his thighs and manhood. His breath stopped for an instant with the impact of her closeness, but then he won control of himself, boosting her up, allowing the water to cushion her, to be a soft, sensual break and link between them.

  “So soft you are,” he murmured, gliding his fingers lower and deeper between her thighs, stroking her and swishing the water to stroke her, too. His other hand gently squeezed her breasts, then her bottom, remaining there as his intimate caresses quickened.

  Edith tongued his nipples and lashed her wet hair—as well as she could in this dark, molding, delicious lavender-scented water—against his lean belly and flanks. It was all she could do when he endlessly blocked her hands, muttering, “Serve you first. Your pleasure first.”

  He circled her bottom slowly with his hand. “Be a princess.”

  His other fingers, smoothing, circling, stroking, now entered her, suddenly and decisively, shocking in their power and purpose. Heat and more pleasure rose as one within her as she strained against him, taut with a building release.

  “Pretty Princess,” he coaxed, and he kissed her mouth and breasts. “Pretty everywhere. Snug little jewel box—” His fingers mimed the act of love within her, bringing her close and closer.

  “Lord!” she gasped. Her feet were off the bottom of the bathtub and she was half floating in the water. She writhed as she tried to follow his tormenting hands. It had been months, months, since she had been with a man, and it had never been like this. “Ranulf!”

  His name seemed to spur him to swifter, deeper thrusts and the whole evening seemed ablaze with light and the heavy, salty perfume of sex as the roaring wave crested inside her.

  “Edith, you must come and help! She is bad in childbirth—they left her too long alone and now they panic!”

  Edith howled: part horror, part frustration. The wave within her throbbed and stretched out, leaving her lonely, unsatisfied.

  Ranulf called out, “She is dressing, Teodwin. Take that message and torches back. Get my folk to bring wine and straw and aught else that is needed.”

  He lifted her, dripping, from the water, then stepped with her out of the tub and began to briskly towel her. After a moment, she took the towel from him.

  “Maria is healthy,” he said. “She will be all right.” But we need to hurry, ran his silent plea that Edith could sense as if he had bawled it out around the camp.

  She nodded, still dazed by what had happened. Ranulf was still aroused—painfully, almost comically so—and her wits were scattered and her loins still heated.

  Maria’s babe comes when it must, she reminded herself as she and Ranulf piled on their clothes, he trying to yank on her shift by mistake until he could bring it no farther than his neck. Groping in the dark, she flung on her gown without the shift, leaving it unlaced, and wound her head-square and veil roughly round her sodden hair and face. Unable to find her shoes, she left them and blundered from the bathing area toward the glow of torches.

  Ranulf caught up with her as she stumbled against a tent post, falling heavily onto her hands and knees. “No broken neck, either,” he warned, dragging her to her feet.

  “I know!” she snapped.

  “Get on,” he snapped. They were both irritable, partly with frustration, partly with dread. Edith wished she had the faith to pray, then began a check in her mind of all that her mother, who had been a midwife, had told her. There was so much to remember, so much that could go wrong.

  Ranulf still gripped her hand and limped a pace ahead. In the grayness he was a crouching black shadow. He was not leaving her, nor leaving it to her, she realized, and she was grateful for his solid presence, even if he could not walk as swiftly as he might wish.

  She sniggered, appalled at her own bad taste, and he growled again, “Get on!” And “We should be hearing more by now.”

  Chill doused her spirits. She could see torches ahead, and Teodwin’s peering, anxious face, which meant they were surely close to her tent, so why could she hear only whispering? Why was her tent not ablaze with light?

  “This way.” Teodwin beckoned, away from her tent. “As I say, they left her too long and when they came to our camps they hurled their message like a slingshot and fled. I think the whole business very bad.”

  “It is not Maria, then,” Ranulf said. As if heartened by that news, he took a torch from one of his men and now straightened, striding out more. “One of the camp followers, perhaps? But why come to my camp?”

  “Not for you, for her,” Teodwin answered. “Folk know of Maria, see how she thrives. The princess is known as a healer.”

  “She had best be a midwife, too,” Ranulf said.

  I know more than most, Edith thought, feeling her wet hair flapping unpleasantly against her back and along her arms, but what am I going to? And where?

  She saw standards and banners hanging limply in the evening gloom and crossed her fingers against mischance, but guessed she was too late.

  Chapter 19

  The woman stricken in childbirth, whose hoarse moans she could now catch through the low mumble of evening talk, the crackle of campfires, and the spitting of Ranulf’s torch, was one of Sir Giles’s servants. They were within the bounds of her former master’s camp.

  She glanced at Ranulf, who had already stopped, standing as stiffly as a statue cast in bronze.

  “I did not know it would be here,” she said.

  “The wench needs you,” he answered, and handed her the torch. “My men and I will stand guard. You will not be disturbed.”

  “Your friend—”

  “I do not call him so now. Besides, he will not be within a thousand miles of a birthing, even a good one.”

  Unbidden a phrase of her mother’s rose in Edith’s head: Only a man calls any childbirth good.

  She wanted to say thank you to him, even so, for she was grateful. He had been unexpectedly understanding. His face, with its chiseled, almost grim features, was still set and tense, and in the flames of the torch she spotted raw bands of color along his cheekbones and forehead. Like her, he had won no small or great release tonight, no respite.

  She blushed at the thought and stepped closer to him when a throaty keening broke through the uneasy chatter of Giles’s camp followers. With no word to Ranulf, only a despairing glance of apology, Edith hurried on into the tent she had sworn she would never venture near.

  A pitiful scene met her. In an unlit corner of the tent with broken pots, spilled buckets, and filthy rags scattered round her and, most terrible, the tracks of people who had abandoned her, a young woman lay half sprawled in mud. As Edith approached she spotted a flicker of movement as two more huddled figures scurried from the tent: Sir Giles’s people, she guessed, glad to be escaping.

  She recognized the raw sobbing and tried to steel herself. She had come too late—other mothers who had lost children wept in this desolate way, beyond all comfort. She looked about the broken pots and spills and saw the bloody mess of the afterbirth; a rat had already found it and was chewing. Sickened, she lifted the torch.

  She almost recoiled, and only the terrible visions of what she had already witnessed in pestilence villages gave her the strength not to back away. The mother, naked and streaked with excrement and blood, with matted hair and vacant, weeping eyes, crouched against a tent post. She was trying to suckle a babe that was a monster. It had an oddly shaped head and no proper back and its limbs . . . were wrong. It sagged in its mother’s trembling arms, without moving, without breathing.

  Edith shuddered, kn
owing the fish-headed infant was dead. She had seen such horrors once before, but she never had to persuade a woman to relinquish such a pitiful, ghastly creation.

  If you are there, God, how dare you make this!

  Anger spurred her, gave her energy. She wanted to march to the nearest forge, fashion a blade, and strike and strike. . . .

  She clutched the flagon Teodwin had handed to her just before she had entered the tent. Within was a powerful potion against pain. It would serve, too, as a sleeping draft. She looked at the torch Ranulf had handed her. He was outside. It was so tempting to call him, to ask for his help. . . .

  Women’s business is for women, her mother warned in her memory and Edith obeyed, ramming the torch into the earth floor of the tent and crawling into the tiny, blood-spattered den of leaves and grass that the woman had made for herself under a mass of tent poles and ropes.

  “Drink this.” She pulled down her veil to show her face and took the girl’s shaking shoulders, turning her to the light. “Let me take your young one while you drink.”

  The young woman, perhaps understanding or simply responding to a kind voice, handed over her “baby” without complaint.

  “Won’t feed,” she said, crying afresh as she took the flask. “I be evil, must I?”

  “A first is always hard,” Edith lied. Desperate to hide the strange-limbed infant, she repinned her veil to cover her mouth so as not to breathe in its foul miasma and ripped off one of the detachable sleeves of her new gown, bundling the half-formed thing into it. “You drink now. It will help your milk. Drink it all.”

  The girl sucked it down and stretched out grass-stalk-thin arms.

  “Your baby sleeps,” Edith lied again. “Let me look at you. Lie down for me, dear one.”

  To her relief, the young woman obeyed without a murmur, stretching out on her leaves as if it was the finest bed in England. She was not torn or bleeding overmuch. She was too thin and clearly spent by a hard, possibly lonely labor. Edith found some hay to clean her up and looked about for a blanket, some more rags, any cloth that she could use as a covering.

  “What is this place?” she whispered. She thought she had entered Giles’s tent, but it was too lowly and bare.

  “A place to bed down only,” said a voice behind her. A large hand dropped a piece of torn cloth before her. “Wrap her in this. I will take her out.”

  Edith scrambled round. “You should not be here!”

  “When the cries stopped, I came. I had to know what was happening.” Ranulf knelt beside her and nodded to the unmoving bundle. “Does this come, too?”

  “I—I do not know,” Edith confessed. Should she bury the creature at once? Allow the mother to hold it one final time?

  “I will take it out, too,” Ranulf decided, as she could not choose. “What is her name?” he asked softly. “The mother?”

  She had not had time to ask. She did so now.

  “Many,” came back the sleepy response. Clearly the draft was working; the young woman rolled onto her side and put her thumb in her mouth.

  “I gave her a sleeping potion, to ease her,” Edith said as her charge began to snore. “Many? That cannot be her name.”

  “’Tis a poor jest, but doubtless apt,” Ranulf remarked, his mouth set in a grim line. “The lass will be no one’s and everyone’s. If you want to help her without bloodshed, we should take her with us now.”

  “I can carry her,” Teodwin volunteered.

  Edith twisted round. “How came you here?”

  “I will take her,” her steward repeated, ignoring her question. Edith stared at him: a former pig-man who had never done anything for anyone but his masters before, and then always grudgingly. He sniffed the fetid air and brought out a pomander to hold under his nose. “I will bathe her, too, and pray God she does not ooze before we reach the tub.”

  “Teodwin, for pity’s sake—” Edith began, but her steward added, quite testily, “My clothes are precious to me, as yours are to you, and I will treat her kindly. I do not lie with birth-mothers, even the Manys.”

  Ranulf folded his arms across his chest and stared at the sleeping girl. “See that you do not.”

  “My steward needs no lessons from you,” Edith snapped, then snarled at Teodwin, “Why are you here? Is it Maria now?”

  “Maria and the children sleep. I came to help. The servants of Giles have vanished for this evening; perhaps they are with their master at the castle.” He took a step back, holding the pomander rigidly under his long nose. “But if you do not require me—”

  “Peace, steward, I meant no insult.” Ranulf gently tucked a cloth that Edith now recognized as a bath hanging about the snoring Many and plucked her from the dirt floor. Handing her directly to the startled Teodwin, Ranulf added, “Your Princess and I must tend a darker matter.”

  “Ah.” With the sleeping woman in his arms, Teodwin somehow slipped the pomander into his purple mantle and tapped the side of his nose with his fingers. “I did wonder when the crying stopped.”

  “Off you go.” Ranulf walked to the entrance and called for his squire. “Edmund will torch you back.”

  Edith waited with happy anticipation for her steward to argue, but Teodwin was too busy threading a long streamer of Many’s hair into her rough blanket, and he stepped out carefully without a word.

  “You would think he was bearing gifts, not a whore,” remarked her companion.

  His cool judgment enraged her, even if a moment ago she had been secretly checking to ensure that no hated fleas had sailed from Many onto her. Conscious of being in one of Giles’s tents, Edith compelled herself to be silent. Ranulf, damn him, was right that they should leave quickly, before the straying servants returned or, worse, Giles and his soldiers appeared. And they had a dead baby to bury.

  She did not want to touch the infant and put off the moment, rising slowly to her feet and kicking carefully through the rough nest of leaves.

  “What do you seek?”

  “Signs that a birth-mother was here.” Swiftly she found the placenta again and buried it in the hard-packed earth, using her dagger as a spade. “I want whoever comes next not to be sure; so that the poor girl and babe are quickly forgotten.”

  “Seeing they left the wench alone, her child unbreathing, unbaptized, and herself half-dead, I think that more than likely.”

  Grimacing with distaste, Ranulf picked up the dead baby and the torch and glanced at the bundle. His fingers tightened on the torch so hard that Edith heard the wood crack.

  “Great balls of God! ’Tis demon-spawn.” A spasm ran over his powerful frame as he flipped the end of the sleeve Edith had used as a swaddling cloth over the still, misshapen face. “We must be rid of it quickly, and tell your steward to float its dam for a witch.”

  His color, which had dropped away like a cast stone, now returned and with it, Edith guessed, his voice and knightly arrogance. She crossed to his side in less than four long hops and stamped on his foot.

  “We do not say a word to anyone,” she hissed.

  “Ow! But a witch—”

  “Have you ever seen a cow with a ruined calf? A young cow, especially, set too early to breed and fed on poor hay?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It is the same with us. Would you call such a cow a witch?”

  “Our priest would say it was, and who is to say he is wrong?”

  Terror plunged through her at his blind, mystic certainty. She switched tactics. “Would Giles want this known? How far, too, would the taint of witchcraft be spread? What if they come for you, as his known ally? Are you a demon?” Edith pointed to the dagger on his belt. “Do you fight so well because you have made a bargain with the devil?”

  “I argue with you, do I not?”

  Both of them started to laugh, then stopped, frozen, as a shout issued from somewhere within the camp. Edith strained to hear more, listening for more calls of alarm, but the night was still again.

  “We must leave,” she urged, when she h
ad breath to speak.

  “I shall take it to the church.”

  “Not the priest!” Edith tried to seize his arm but he sidestepped her easily.

  “I will bury it in the churchyard, under cover of dark.”

  “I will come with you.”

  “Want to be sure I do it and tell no one, eh? You should know a knight keeps his word.”

  Ashamed of her own fears, Edith did not answer. Ranulf looked at her a moment. His features were in shadow, as if he wore a veil. “Come if you must,” he said, then turned and left.

  After he had gone a few paces, she trotted after him.

  The churchyard was black with shadows and deathly quiet. Disconcerted by the silence and what had happened, Edith clung close to Ranulf. Perhaps he felt something of the same, for before he lay the child in the shallow grave that he dug with his knife and bare hands in the farthest corner of the yard, he shed his cloak. Swaddling the half-child in it, he turned and spoke.

  “My mother made this for me. There is a flaw in the weaving that she did not see, for her eyes are no longer true. I have worn it with pride and never told her.” He touched the shrouded head of the baby. “Perhaps a mother’s gift will help.”

  “If it comforts you,” said Edith, before thinking. She watched his eyes darken and started to apologize. “Forgive me, that was ill said and unkind.”

  “Say no more.” He swatted aside her words. “We will not agree, but sometimes, Edith, you should hold your tongue.”

  She knelt before the open grave and held out her arms. He ignored her placating gesture and placed the child in the grave himself, saying a swift prayer and making the sign of the cross. He allowed her to help pile the earth back but did not invite her to pray. Her sense of shame and discomfort increased. “I am sorry,” she said again.

  “Help me gather leaves and grass. We must cover this new grave,” was all he said.

  There was a stand of oak trees close to the church and Edith ran there to gather fallen leaves. When she returned with a full skirt, moving clumsily with her load, she found Ranulf gone. With a heavy heart she scattered the leaves, wishing she had never said what she had.