To Touch The Knight Page 14

  “Princess.”

  He was back, still carrying the child. Puzzled, Edith automatically glanced at the leaf-strewn grave, and he laughed softly and shook his head. “Look, you are wrong. ’Tis a miracle.”

  There in his arms, snug in a patched but clean tunic, was a newborn.

  “I found him by the church porch when I went to leave an offering. A new, whole babe!”

  “But the mother—”

  “Do you not understand? Whoever the mother, this is a sign from God! The young mother we saved tonight will have milk, and here is a living babe for her milk! She need never know her child was lost, for now he is found, and made new!”

  Edith sat down by the grave. Many would indeed soon have milk. This way, she would have a baby. Did Ranulf truly think it a miracle? She thought it more likely to be an illicit love-child, or the leaving of a desperate mother of ten, who could not feed another mouth, or a new widower.

  But she had learned her lesson. She would ask Teodwin to listen out in the tourney camp for any mother or father wishing to reclaim their infant, but tonight she would not contradict.

  “Perhaps it is so,” she said carefully. Perhaps it is. A living baby, left at the very place where we have come. . . .

  “Let us go back.” Ranulf tucked the sleeping infant into a dark, cozy nook of his arm, smiling at the babe as he did so. He caught her hand and swung it as they began to walk back to the camp. “Will Teodwin keep faith with this? No others know, nor need know.”

  “He will keep faith,” Edith agreed. A baby. . . . Is this a miracle?

  Chapter 20

  In the great tent where Edith and her fellow villagers slept, Many was safely resting. Bathed and in a fresh shift, she stirred only to sigh with contentment when Ranulf laid the slumbering foundling baby beside her. Teodwin had placed her on a small pallet in the great tent and put screens around her. Maria and the youngsters, Mary, Simon, and Gawain, kept trying to peep at the young woman, and Teodwin had been shooing them away with his carved walking stick.

  “They think it a game,” he told Edith wearily, “and you are not done yet.” He studied her bedraggled appearance: the gown with the missing sleeve, her bare feet and uncombed, drying hair. “You have been summoned tonight to Castle Fitneyclare. Did you return by way of the woodland path?”

  Startled by the question, Edith nodded. She had been watching Ranulf watching Many and the baby. He had called the young mother a witch, but he now stroked her damp hair quite tenderly. Ranulf, she was coming to recognize, was ever moved by the plight of others. Had he not saved his page Gawain and been more than happy to take in Mary and Simon, two peasant children of no pedigree?

  “We came the back way from the church,” she mouthed to her steward, conscious of Maria hovering close. So far, Maria had accepted Edith’s hasty story that she and Ranulf had taken Many’s baby to the church to be baptized. Edith wanted that story to hold.

  “As well you did, and used the back entrance to return.” Teodwin gestured with his thumb. “Sir Giles is waiting outside at the front, to escort you.”

  “That is for me to do,” said Ranulf, stalking up behind Teodwin.

  Relief poured through Edith, sweet and golden as honey. On their silent, hasty march from the churchyard, where they had been forced to keep their eyes on the faint track and their ears pricked for footpads, she had been afraid. She did not want Ranulf to think less of her, or worse, despise her, for not believing as he did. But it seemed that he still cared for and accepted her.

  “She is my prize,” he clarified, dashing her hopes. He looked her up and down. “A bedraggled one. I think the gown would be improved by another sleeve, and your makeshift veil is not at all appealing, my lady.”

  It was the first time he had truly commented on her new gown and perversely, although she recognized the justice of his remark, Edith was hurt and angered anew, the more so as Maria giggled.

  “We should both change,” she said stiffly. “I am sorry about the new gown.” She was, too, very sorry. I have not even seen it myself by day. . . .

  Ranulf bowed, his dark eyes twinkling. “No matter as for that,” he said lightly, with a nobleman’s ease about clothes, “I will return for you.”

  “Send your squire,” Edith answered. “You will need longer to change than I. Your tunic and boots are both amiss.”

  Instead of being indignant, as she hoped, he merely glanced down at his crumpled tunic and scuffed boots and laughed.

  “True, true,” he said, still chuckling. “I must indeed send Edmund to recover you while I beautify myself.”

  Edith bit her tongue on two possible answers: the first that he needed no beautifying, the second that Edmund would need to stand his ground with Giles. The first response stoked Ranulf’s vanity too much, the second gave her former master too much importance.

  Edmund is a noble squire and I am an Eastern Princess. Sir Giles will not be allowed to pester me.

  Sir Giles saw his former friend leave the Lady of Lilies’s tent. Ran looked as he had before with Olwen, preoccupied and happy, thoroughly smug and irritatingly joyful. That was before he had worked on Olwen. He had taken her bright dislike and fashioned it into a new and shiny desire.

  Then why did she refuse you in the end? whispered a dark voice in his mind, but he ignored that.

  Strong hate, strong lust: two sides of the same blade. He would work on this Eastern Princess, too. Women were easy to charm. Why not? Was he not entitled to pleasure? Carefree times and the best kind of contest, where his opponent did not even understand that they were in conflict. He would win this latest girl from Ran, of course: prove again he was the cleverer, more cultured man.

  She was emerging. Giles paused to scan her strange dress: a billowing wrap of some kind over billowing pale skirts, and a long headdress and veil. Ran’s lanky page was with her, but he would be quickly disposed of, sent on an errand of some kind. Giles smoothed his hair and strode forward, stopping in a patch of moonlight to show off his fine profile.

  “My Lady of Lilies. It is a wonder for me to meet you at last.”

  He bowed, planting himself more firmly in the middle of the track before the small, veiled figure and her gangling, pimple-cheeked escort.

  “Sir Ranulf needs your assistance, Edmund, so I will take the lady.”

  “My lord instructed his squire to remain with me, Sir Giles.”

  He was surprised at her speaking at all, and startled by the exotic timbre and accent of her voice. Recalling the many rumors of her beauty, he smiled. Charming Ran’s “prize” into becoming his own would be a sweet triumph.

  First get rid of the squire. . . . “Take my cloak, Edmund.”

  He tossed the fur cloak at the startled squire, who instinctively put up both hands to catch it, and swiftly offered his own arm. “My lady.”

  She took his arm, of course, and he moved them off along the track, deliberately choosing the most well-trod. In moments their progress was checked by great streamers of mud and standing water, visible even by moonlight. “I fear I will need to carry you along this part.” He fought to keep the smile from his voice and lips. “Allow me, my lady.”

  She remained perfectly still, while Ran’s squire was open-mouthed.

  Learn from a master, boy! “Lady Blanche is eager for your company,” he prompted, dropping a pebble into the ooze. Let the little madam see how filthy this is. He turned so the moonlight would catch his smile and gently squeezed her hand, aware that in seconds that soft, pliant body would be in his arms.

  “You led us here, sir.”

  To his amazement, her exotic voice held a tinge of censure, and worse, he actually saw her shrink back. Irritated by her cool response and her haughtiness—who was she to berate him?—he was instantly tempted to rip her veil away, to roll her in mud and to have his servants retrieve her later and haul her to his tent. There he would teach her the value of good manners.

  “Ah, you should forgive me, Lady.” You will find it best to
forgive me—“I was overcome by your beauty.”

  She did not ask, as women always did, how he knew she was beautiful, so he could not use his best line. Instead, she plucked a flat stone from the murk and laid it across a vein of dirt. Even as he was astonished by what she was doing, she flew from him, leaping lightly from his side over the stone and onto the tough, dry grass. He saw her bare feet were not even marked, a further insult.

  “If you use the stone, you may come, too,” she told him, the insolent filly. “How fare you, Edmund?”

  She asks a squire ahead of me!

  “We should make haste,” he ground out.

  “Why, sir?”

  Why did the bitch not say his name?

  He was already justly aggrieved, but there was worse.

  “As I consider this, I wonder. Why should I hasten to the castle tonight, when my Lady Blanche has never asked me to her castle on any other night? Why are you her messenger, sir?”

  “Do you call me liar to my face?”

  “It takes one to know one. The lady Blanche, I mean. She will understand why, as a lady, I will not obey her summons.”

  Her brazen answer made no sense. Outraged, he lunged through the standing pools of water toward her, conscious of nothing but a need to have his way.

  A shadow hunted over the moon and became solid, became Ranulf, almost as tall as he was and faster, harder. Before he could react, a fist that felt like a boulder smashed into his gut and he was eating mud, gasping for breath and eating mud. Through a dull roar in his ears he heard his former friend.

  “That is enough, Giles. You have drunk too much wine at high table, and that is enough.”

  He closed his eyes on his humiliation and would not answer. Slowly, he heard them leave. Soon, only a scent of lilies was left.

  Chapter 21

  “How much did you see?” she asked. “I was stupid, Ranulf, so stupid. I should have known the summons was false.”

  “None of us realized—shh, Princess, you are not to blame.” He was carrying her and could feel her trembling. He strove to calm her even as the greater part of him longed to return to Giles and beat him to a pulp. Swiftly, he pointed an elbow at Edmund, who, being a squire with sense, took off sprinting in the direction of their camp. Tonight, this moment most of all, he wanted it to be just Edith and himself.

  “I do not desire him. I have never wanted him.”

  “I believe you.”

  She gasped and he wished he could see her face, see her expression.

  “I know your vision of truth is apt to be more fluid than mine, Princess, but I believe you utterly in this.”

  “You did not, before.”

  “Now you are being deliberately stubborn. If I ever doubted you over Giles, I know better.” He remembered Olwen: their foolish, bitter quarrels, his petty jealousy. Regret tasted in his mouth, bitter and corrosive as rust.

  “I know better,” he repeated, bending his whole attention to the living woman in his arms. “It is time, would you not say?”

  His heart beat very fast as he asked the question, and his mouth dried to salt. The youthful lad in him longed to blunder with his prize to the nearest haystack or bush and have his way with her. The man knew it must be her choice.

  It was only a slight movement, but he saw her nod. He clenched down hard on the howl of triumph. “Yes, sweeting?” he murmured as she whispered something.

  “May we go to the river?”

  At once he too felt the rightness of it. “We shall, my Eastern maid. Princess and maid.”

  He felt her relax, her pert lines softening in a delicious way that made his fingers itch to explore more of her.

  “You have guessed for so long, Ranulf?”

  “I may be but a man, but I am not stupid, Edith. That first day, why did you not approach me? You were tempted.”

  Even by moonlight he saw her blushing and tickled her for good measure.

  “Stop, stop!” She was helplessly flailing in his grip, so abandoned and trusting that she would have fallen into the grass had he not caught her back. “I chose not to,” she admitted. “I wanted it to be more between us, to mean more.”

  He kissed her forehead. He felt the same as she, the same need for meaning, but selfishly he was glad that he did not have to admit it.

  But she had not finished yet.

  “I have a friend who may need me. She is very close to her time.”

  “Maria is fast asleep.”

  “And our other young ones?”

  He smiled at her use of “our” and strove to put her heart at ease. “My page Gawain is sleeping hand in hand with the little girl from the pestilence village. The little boy is using Maria as a soft cushion as he sleeps. Many is feeding the baby—her baby now. All is well, Edith, believe me.”

  “I do.”

  He smiled again, glad he had asked after the ragtags. Now with his Princess at ease, she was truly his for the night.

  Ranulf strode with her down the huge field to the river, passing tents and campfires, wagons, wandering dagger-girls, and stray dogs. He did not pause or glance at anything, not even when a firebrand flamed out of the darkness and fell at his feet. Edith stiffened, expecting him to drop her onto her behind and go storming off after the youthful miscreants who were sniggering somewhere close in the dark, but he simply shrugged and stepped over the spluttering mass of fire.

  “Squires’ horseplay,” he remarked, strolling on, easy as a minstrel. “They should take care, though, that they do not set the whole hill ablaze with their folly. I imagine in your home you had little time for games.”

  “In the summer there was time,” Edith confessed. She did not want him to pity her.

  “In summer if the hunger did not get you,” Ranulf replied, and chuckled at her start of shock. “I know well of the hungry month before harvest. Our parents loved us, but even they could not make bread from nothing.”

  “But you are a knight!”

  “A knight with lands more suited to sheep than men. ’Tis Giles with the rich, easy lands, not I.”

  His earnestness made her want to weep for pity and shame. I saw only the armor, the knightly status, not the man.

  “What games did you play?” he asked.

  “Hoodman blind. Follow the leader. Catch me if you can.” She smiled at his nods. “I see you know them.”

  “What of the other games? Kiss my dear? Sweethearts’ embrace?”

  “You are making those up!” she laughed, then caught her breath as his lips kissed hers through the veil, as he had done before.

  “Am I?” He cocked his head at her, his burnished eyes gleaming. “You do not really know. I wager you were married then, beyond all love games.”

  Edith’s easy facility for devising stories deserted her then. She remembered instead: being wed as a scared, sweaty fourteen-year-old to Adam. After that it had been work and bed, with some joy. She had liked it best when Adam held her in bed and called her his good girl.

  “I have been married and widowed,” she confessed. “I was betrothed, too, after my widowhood. But Peter died, before the pestilence.” A wiry, tough farrier, Peter had demanded, once they were betrothed, that she lie with him. Not that she had objected, for all that Peter had been rougher in his wooing than Adam—save for that one time, when she had felt so sick and begged Peter to stop but he had not done so. He had taken his due, as he called it.

  She had known two men, Ranulf thought. Two hasty, careless men, he guessed, for she was as stiff as a post in his arms. She had made that slip, too, which he did not comment on. “Peter” was no Eastern name.

  “Wait here.” He set her down by the tree close to the river—their tree, under which he had first spotted her. “I will be away but a moment. I will fetch us some things.”

  I need bedding, guards at a discreet distance, snacks, a lantern, some more items. . . .

  He did not say any of this—he wanted to surprise her.

  Edith sat beneath the tree and hugged her knee
s. The night was warm and still, the moon riding high and white above the castle battlements in the distance. She was not sure if she was feverish or chilled, her skin was so sensitive. She was sure in her mind and quite calm.

  Tonight she would give herself, all of herself, to Ranulf. It was the one true gift she had to give, the one gift she could grant totally, without thought of return. He had proved he trusted her over Giles. Tonight she would reveal in turn, in the most complete way she could, that she trusted him.

  Not quite, Gregory muttered in her head. You are not going to tell your black knight that you are all villagers out of bond from Warren Hemlet.

  “Even in love I cannot afford to be a fool,” she whispered.

  Are you not a fool over Ranulf ? He has not truly given an account of what befell his wife.

  “Leave me alone, brother. You are dead and I have made my choice.” She rose to her feet and scanned the riverbank, eager for Ranulf’s return.

  He was coming. Her heart seemed to jolt and she felt dizzy for an instant, recognizing that tall, stalking shadow and his rapid, graceful walk. On he came, carrying goodness knows what slung over his broad shoulders, waving and lengthening his stride. She threaded her way through the branches and stepped out onto the grass to meet him.

  Swiftly, before her courage failed, she plucked the pins from her veil and threw them into the grass. The pale veil fluttered down and rolled toward Ranulf’s feet and she felt a new wave of heat storm up her face. Never had she felt so naked, so exposed.

  Silently, he flung aside his bundle and yanked her into his arms. His grip was fierce but his mouth was tender as he kissed her eyes, nose, cheeks, and lips.

  “My maid Princess,” he muttered against her ear, tracing the line of her cheek with his thumb.

  His touch made her voiceless: she could only feel.

  “Lovely.” He brushed her eyelashes gently with his fingers.

  A moth felt to be fluttering within her stomach, moving lower as his fingers roamed again across her cheeks.