A Knight's Vow (5 page)

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.”

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?”

“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.