A Knight's Vow Read online

  The sight of her roused struck Guillelm with a low bolt of pleasure deep in the pit of his stomach. Her eyes glittered as she spoke and her natural high color was back, stung into her cheeks and lips by indignation. Her earlier weariness flung off, she paced the length of the kitchen floor, his cloak snapping at her heels. She was so pretty that for an instant he was tempted to make her angrier than ever, but answered mildly, “And do Etienne the Bold and Walter of Enford now claim they are “acquiring” Hardspen as loyal followers of Stephen? That they will wrest it from Maud’s men and hold it for the king?”

  “Something very like,” muttered Alyson, her light footfalls making an interesting counter-rhythm with the falling rain outside. She stopped abruptly and turned to him, lifting her head. The determined, lost look on her face reminded Guillelm of men he had seen in battle, casting themselves into the thick of the fray when all hope of victory was lost. It chilled him.

  “What is it?” he asked softly.

  “The day Walter and his troops appeared, I put him and the Fleming off by begging their leave for us to bury and mourn your father with all due honors,” she said, twisting the edge of his cloak between her fingers until she clearly realized what she was doing and tucked her hands out of sight. “They left us in peace for three days after that”

  “Ingenious and not so far from the truth,” Guillelm remarked, wondering at her put him and the Fleming off-why her? Why not one of the men or, God forbid, the as yet unseen widow of Hardspen castle? Guillelm shrugged off the last thought. Although the widow, if real, was one of those he must see tonight, he was beginning to seriously doubt the existence of such a female. “And then?” he prompted.

  Alyson closed her eyes a moment, then opened them. “I had the men daub a mixture of mud and pig’s blood on their faces and hands and let it dry so that it scaled. I myself appeared on the battlements with my face veiled. I told the herald that the fever, which still raged within the castle, had left us this way. Walter of Enford is very particular in regard to his person,” she added apologetically. “I hoped our play of blistered faces might dissuade him from too hasty an attack. We had sent messages to the empress by then. With every hour that passed, we hoped for a relieving force to come to our aid.”

  “I see” The Walter of Enford he remembered had been as vain and strutting as an Eastern peacock, Guillelm thought, his lips itching to laugh aloud at Alyson’s clever deception. “And how long did your device win you?”

  “Another day.” She sighed and resumed her pacing. “In truth, there was real sickness still within the bailey and we were sorely pressed.”

  “Of that I have no doubt,” remarked Guillelm, quiet and serious again. “Did my father’s steward die during that time?”

  “He did-as did many of his people, which is why my poor Sericus, who is less than nimble, is now seneschal. There was no other left but Sericus with the necessary experience and who could also be spared from possible fighting duty.” She was still and staring at the floor again, her earlier brightness dimmed. “All my tending and potions-I could not save them.”

  It pained Guillelm that she seemed ashamed. “You did all that man or woman could. Do not reproach yourself.”

  Still she would not look at him. The men follow her orders, he thought. Why? Because she has wit and beauty? Those alone, although excellent, surely would not be sufficient inducements for grizzled veterans to obey her, even with the castle reeling with sickness. A dark suspicion bloomed in his mind, one he swiftly ignored.

  “So the herald of Walter and Etienne returned the following day,” he went on, “and presumably he was no longer prepared to wait on any more delays. What reply did you give when Walter and the Fleming demanded that Hardspen should now be held as a castle of King Stephen’s? Did you agree and hold them off with your answer?”

  “No!” Her eyes flashed pride. “What do you take me for? Lord Robert held Hardspen for the empress. Should I then deny his loyalty and cynically change sides?”

  “Men have done such things before.”

  “Then men are wrong! Oh, I know you think me a child,” she went on, jerking her head up to face Guillelm, “but I am one and twenty, two years older than you were when you traveled to Outremer. I have seen the world.”

  Guillelm whistled one soft low note to himself, a habit when greatly touched and determined not to show it. With her avowal, Alyson reminded him of himself as a youth, idealistic and ardent, but matters did not ring true here.

  “Events did not fall out that way?” he asked in seeming innocence.

  “No! No” She swallowed and even in the dim light of the horn lantern he could see the beginnings of a blush.

  “There were two heralds,” she admitted guardedly. “One from each commander, coming at different times. put them both off by saying I needed proper due time to consider their offers, but they have grown impatient.”

  “They are not alone in that,” said Guillelm warningly. She was still not telling all she knew, and time was passing.

  “I am supposed to give my answers tomorrow,” Alyson said despairingly. “Today,” she added, glancing at the closed kitchen shutters, through which the gray wet night was beginning to lighten.

  Again she lapsed into silence. Listening to her quickened breathing and the unearthly call of a nightjar in the pounding rain, Guillelm was struck again by the quiet of the castle: a quiet filled with tension and dread. Striving for the ordinary, he placed the scrap of cheese he had found in one of the earthen crocks onto the table and, in an act of deliberate trust, offered Alyson the eating knife from his belt.

  “Let us eat. You cut and I will choose my portion.” They had done this many times in the past.

  “You remembered,” she said softly, taking the knife from him and halving the cheese with a swift deftness he also remembered. A smile tugged briefly at her lips. “And you also found food”

  “As I always do” Guillelm took the smaller half of cheese, biting into its dry saltiness. It seemed all rind, but Alyson, he noticed, ate her portion with care, as if telling herself to be slow. She was too thin, he thought with pity.

  As she returned him his knife, hilt first, he asked lightly, “Those two commanders outside the gates asked for your hand in marriage, did they not? That was their final offer: a wedding or a siege. And who will you choose? Walter or Etienne?”

  “Neither, for neither pleases me, nor the rest of the people in Hardspen, which is why we have been preparing for a siege after I tell them both no, and the worst ” She broke off. “You tricked me into answering! Because I let my guard down when we shared food!”

  “I am an experienced campaigner with quite as many ruses as you seem to have,” Guillelm replied, amused afresh by her ready indignation and pleased and relieved by her refusal of both men. He pulled an empty barrel out of the shadows and sat down on it amongst the spits of the cold and dusty fireplace. Now, with his face level with hers and looking closely into her eyes, he said, “Sir Walter and the Flemish mercenary each offered you marriage. I tell you frankly, Alyson, that I am wondering why they should do this-unless as a means to secure the castle and its lands.”

  Under straight and level black brows she met his look boldly. “I have my own lands.”

  “Yes, and I remember Sir Henry’s manor as a well-maintained place with good farmland. But you are at Hardspen and the men here appear to be following your orders. Why is that? Tell me, please. Tell me the truth”

  Faced with his direct appeal, Alyson knew she must speak. Hoping he would understand her near-betrothal as, marvelously, he had understood and sympathized with the rest of what she had done, she caught up her courage. “Your father, Lord Robert, graciously-“

  “Are the rumors true?” he interrupted suddenly. “That somewhere in this keep there is a new mistress? No doubt she is very comfortable and idle in her solar out of the rain and weather as she counts the gold of her widow’s dues. I will need to pay my respects soon to the grieving chatelaine.”
<
br />   His cynicism shook her and she blurted out, “But I am Lord Robert’s intended! Your father asked me to marry him and I accepted! We were to be betrothed. Does that make me mercenary?”

  Guillelm folded his arms across his broad chest. “My condolences on your recent loss, my lady,” he said, without looking quite at her, his voice as flat as the water on a millpond. “Had you told me this earlier, I would have shown you the honor that you deserve”

  “I was going to tell you, as soon as I could-“

  Guillelm rose to his feet and stepped back. “You seemed in little haste to do so. Were you hoping to gull me, too, my lady?”

  His formality hurt Alyson but she was determined to defend herself. “I have told you now,” she said, shrugging off his he thought her foul, then she should not wear or touch anything of his. “My father made the match with yours”

  “And you agreed.”

  “Yes” After much anxious pleading and more from her father. In the worsening turmoil of the growing civil war Sir Henry had wanted a strong ally and so had offered Alyson’s hand to Lord Robert. Failing to bend her to his wishes by the threat of violence or semistarvation, Sir Henry had painted a terrible picture of what would happen to the people if marauders were allowed to roam unchecked over their land, and in the end, Alyson could not bear the thought of their suffering. “I agreed, but asked that our betrothal might be held off, at least until my older sister was safely settled,” she whispered, ashamed afresh that she had ever given way.

  It was bad enough to hear this, Guillelm thought, but to have Alyson calmly confess that she had consented to a union with his father was another blow. Upon leaving for Outremer he had never spoken of his boyish hopes of marriage to Alyson, never entreated her in any way to wait for him, but now in a fit of possessive temper he found himself asking, “How long were you betrothed to my father?”

  “We were never formally plighted … it was an understanding, for the last five months. There had been no news of you from Outremer for three years” She had mourned him as dead, had finally given way to her father’s bullying and wishes because she thought Guillelm was dead, but now Alyson would not admit that and expose herself to more of his cold mockery.

  “And before that you had been plighted to no others?”

  Did he really think her so easy in her affections? Turning from him toward the kitchen door, Alyson replied coolly, “Until my father proposed the match, I had given serious thought to joining the church. Indeed, my older sister, Matilda, had a true vocation and she has joined the sisters at the small convent of Saint Foy.”

  Alyson sighed, thinking of Tilda, whom she had not seen for five months. Tilda had been desperate to join the nuns but Alyson knew that without the generous dowry their father had given to the convent, her shy and withdrawn elder sister would have fared far less well-the money, grants of land and jewels had given Tilda a high status at Saint Foy’s, and muchneeded protection. Here had been another pressing reason for Alyson herself to accept Lord Robert’s suit, since her own father could not afford two such dowries and Guillelm’s father had waved the whole matter aside. “Alyson will give me more sons,” Lord Robert had said.

  Hearing her sigh, Guillelm dismissed his earlier ideas of wooing Alyson to be his wife. It was hopeless-she wanted to enter the church, as Sir Henry had warned him all those years ago. But she agreed to be my father’s bride, even if she was not actually betrothed to him, he thought, and a fresh blaze of anger and jealousy ran through him.

  “So you have the choice of two proposals,” he remarked through clenched teeth. “I offer you a third, my lady. Hardspen is mine and all who dwell within its bounds. I can and will defend it against all comers and yet it is clear to me that you have ingratiated yourself with the people here”

  “Ingra-How dare you? I have done no such thing!”

  He held up a hand and overrode her exclamation of protest. “It will be easier for me if you remain as chatelaine, not as Lord Robert’s intended betrothed or widow but as my wife. You say you were never formally plighted, so there will be no consanguinity, or spiritual affinity. The priest will marry us ”” He spoke as if uttering a threat.

  “Forgive me if I do not fall to my knees as I offer you my hand in marriage,” he went on, as Alyson stood with her back to the kitchen door, scarcely believing what she was hearing, “but the morning is almost on us and I must return to my men outside the castle. Before I go, I would have your answer. Will you be my wife? What do you say?”

  Chapter 3

  “I must be mad,” Alyson said to herself, stalking to and fro on the battlements at noon the following day. “Why did I agree to anything last night? Why did I allow him to take over?”

  In truth she had been given no choice. Leading the way from the kitchen and returning to the keep with her hurrying to keep pace with his long-legged stride, Guillelm instantly began to give orders. When Sericus and a few others looked to her, Guillelm said bluntly, “This lady is soon to be my betrothed and she agrees with me ””

  Before she could draw breath even to suggest alternatives, let alone to argue with him, he turned to her, lowered his head and said in a steely voice, over the ragged applause of the startled but obviously pleased defenders, “I tell you this now, my lady in private I may give way to you but you will never contradict me in public before my followers. That would make me look a fool and you a scold; it would bring neither of us credit.”

  “I understand, my lord.” Alyson was almost too angry to speak, and Guillelm increased her fury by saying in a carrying voice, “But you are weary with toil, my lady. I pray you, return to your solar and take your rest while you may.”

  “Try my name, why don’t you?” Alyson had hit back. “You will find it quicker than saying `my lady’ at the beginning or end of your every command”

  “As you wish-Alyson.” Guillelm’s eyes glinted with scarcely concealed mirth as he added, “Soon you and your maids will be busy with preparations for our forthcoming marriage, and I would not have you wear yourself out before our wedding night.”

  So she had been forced to withdraw, amidst many whispered and no doubt suggestive comments. Storming into her chamber, she was unable even to give vent to her feelings by the childish slamming of the door-not when she spotted the pale sleeping faces of Gytha and Osmoda in her bed.

  Joining them on top of the covers, hardly expecting to close her eyes, much less to sleep, Alyson was amazed when she stirred only several hours later, finding herself still on top of the bed but with her maids gone from the chamber and with Guillelm’s cloak spread over her. When she later found Gytha and asked her how she had come by the cloak, her roundfaced former nurse, as small and plump as a robin and as scarlet-breasted in her russet gown, gave her a shrewd look and a large smile.

  “I neither saw nor heard a thing, little mistress, but they do say love is winged, do they not?”

  Caught between exasperation and a chill despair, Alyson hid her true feelings and shook her head. “I think they are wrong, Gytha”

  “Time will tell,” came the comfortable answer as Gytha, moving slowly while she recovered her strength after her fever, carefully shook out their bedding over the battlements. By then the enemy forces had already begun to melt away and the people within Hardspen felt free to go where they wished.

  Now, from her high vantage point, Alyson could watch the departing forces of Walter of Enford and Etienne the Bold trundle slowly away over the downs, their battle standards hanging limp in the damp, still air. It was no longer raining, but their passing horses, carts and men had churned up great seams of thick brown mud, and the pale patches of dying grass where they had pitched their tents were clearly visible. Watching them leave gave her a strange sense of anticlimax and unreality, as if these fighting men with their drooping shoulders and bedraggled arms were no more than wool merchants and pots and pans traders, leaving after a fair. Straggling groups of children from the castle and local farms, released from the gloomy safety
of the keep’s store room, were already outside the castle walls, picking over the shattered pots and broken arrow shafts of the routed enemy.

  “What did he say to them, that they should leave so readily?” she muttered, looking over the deserted enemy camp in vain for Guillelm’s bright head. When she had last seen him over an hour ago as she and the other castle women swept out the aleand food-spattered rushes from the great hall-a task impossible in the frantic preparations for a had been shouting orders in the bailey. He was without his helmet then, so that all should see and recognize the new lord of Hardspen.

  Leaning against the battlements, the stones warmed by a pale primrose sun, Alyson turned toward the woodland growing close to the eastern side of the bailey walls. From there she could see a steady stream of men and horses emerging from the trees and entering the bailey in a shining, well-disciplined array. Battle-seasoned troops, she recognized, noting their tanned faces, gleaming horses and sharp, bright weapons-Guillelm’s own men, whose sudden appearance must have given Walter and his ally a considerable shock.

  They were wise to give way without a fight, Alyson thought, but she still wondered what Guillelm had said to them. She doubted that she would ever learn what had happened, while she was asleep and Guillelm met the heralds of Walter and Etienne. Had he said, “So be it,” when they reached agreement, as he had to her the previous night when she said yes to his unexpected, shocking proposal?

  “Why did he ask me to marry him? He does not love me” The spoken words brought her no comfort or understanding. Searching for Guillelm amidst the large and increasingly noisy throng in the bailey, she recalled with a shiver how he’d looked at her when she whispered `Yes.’ His handsome, chiseled face was impossibly suave and unreadable. By no stiffening or even the slightest movement of his large, muscular body or lightening of his watchful dark eyes had he shown any emotion, not even satisfaction.