Almost Innocent (42 page)

Baffled and frustrated, he left her finally, the door shivering on its hinges with the force of the slam. Zoe jumped at the bang and wailed. Magdalen picked her up and rocked her, humming soothingly. But it was as if the child felt her mother’s agitation and fear, and she would not be soothed.

Magdalen stood at the window, looking down on the inner court. In Guy’s absence and d’Auriac’s presence, she felt more vulnerable than she had ever felt in her life. She understood Edmund’s hurt, but she could not help it. Edmund de Bresse was as a film of parchment against the power of Charles d’Auriac to hurt. She knew it in the deepest recesses of her soul; the knowledge flowed through her body with her blood. And her terror grew with the recognition that she did not know why he would wish to harm her, or how he intended doing so. She knew he lusted after her, knew that it was this hunger that crawled like the sticky slime of a
slug’s trail across her skin, that filled her head with the terrifying images of the oubliette. But she also knew it was not just her cousin’s concupiscence that threatened her.

There was some secret here that Guy had known and had chosen not to share with her. And he had ridden away, leaving her in ignorance and fear, to face her cousin’s malevolence without his protection. Tears of anger mingled now with the tears of loss she had been shedding all morning, mingled and were indistinguishable as the emotions became indistinguishable.

Magdalen did not know it, but her refusal to see her cousin played perfectly into his hands. Had she been beside her husband, the hints and innuendo would have found less fertile soil. But in estrangement, Edmund had no counterbalance for d’Auriac’s clever malice.

Edmund’s pride was hurt that he had failed to compel his wife’s obedience, and more so that he had failed because she did not trust in his strength. He knew d’Auriac possibly posed a threat, either to Magdalen or to himself, but like Guy de Gervais, he could not imagine how he could put such a threat into practice from within the walls of the Castle de Bresse. There was always poison, of course, but Edmund ate only from the dishes d’Auriac ate from first, and he knew Magdalen’s women prepared her food themselves. Knives in the night were too hard to cover up afterward, and d’Auriac could not stand openly accused of the murder of John of Gaunt’s daughter or son-in-law. So for the moment, there was nothing to fear.

But Edmund was a man of action and of limited imagination. He saw threats only in terms of the physical. An honest man, a guileless man, he could not plumb the devious depths of an evil mind and was no proof against d’Auriac’s whispers.

It was a word here, a word there, but it was relentless. D’Auriac talked of little else but Guy de Gervais and Magdalen de Bresse, and whenever Edmund was in
his wife’s company the whispers were reinforced by her patent unhappiness and by his earlier recognition that something had changed her from the friendly companion of the past into this remote and rather forbidding woman. She no longer refused him her body, but he knew she was absent in spirit. Even her gentle kindness in their bed, he began to feel as a form of tolerant pity rather than the promise of a future love, and the cold steel of wounded pride twisted in his gut.

“It is interesting your daughter should have such unusual coloring,” d’Auriac remarked on the third morning as they rode through the outskirts of the forest of Compiegne, a pack of lean deer hounds in full cry ahead of them. “But of course she has the de Gervais blood in some measure, does she not? That red-gold hair is so distinctive.”

Why had he not remarked on Zoe’s hair coloring? His own was black as night, Magdalen’s as dark and richly brown as sable. A wild fury surged in the young man’s breast at the soft, insidious words of his companion, but no insult had been given, no statement made that could be challenged. He was related to Guy de Gervais and so, therefore, was his daughter, although the shared blood would be running thin in his children. But the poison seeped, and his arrows flew awry throughout the day.

Before supper that day, he stood above his daughter’s cradle, examining the sleeping child with the poison corroding his soul. Her hair promised to be thick and wavy, glinting red and gold in the evening sunlight. Her eyebrows were faint lines, but they were straight and fair. He glanced at his wife, sitting in contemplative silence by the window. Her eyebrows were the same rich sable as her hair, and they were delicately arched. His own he knew were black and unruly, almost meeting over the bridge of his nose.

“You will come down to supper,” he said to Magdalen.

She shook her head. “Not until my cousin takes his leave of us.”

“You are neglecting your household duties as well as those of hospitality.”

“The seneschal and the chamberlain can manage quite well without me for a few days. If any has a question, I am here to answer it.”

“I bid you, as your lord, to come down to supper.” He didn’t expect the command to have any effect, anticipating it would slide off that smooth, resolute composure like water off an oiled skin.

But Magdalen said simply, “Very well, my lord. If you so command.”

His surprise was evident in his slackened jaw, the widening of his eyes. He tried to find satisfaction in her submission but could not and heard himself bluster that it was time she learned obedience. And then he felt foolish and stood in awkward silence before saying, “We will go to vespers together.”

“As you wish, my lord,” she replied in the same flat tone.

Even more baffled and frustrated by this abrupt capitulation, he strode from the chamber completely un-gratified. In truth, Magdalen had yielded because suddenly it seemed not to matter. Her grief and loneliness had become so all-pervasive in the days since Guy’s departure that she had ceased to fear her cousin; or, rather, her fear had ceased to be important.

Erin and Margery were so relieved that their mistress had decided to bring an end to her enforced seclusion that they chattered like magpies as they helped her dress for the evening. If it hadn’t been for their encouragement, she would not have troubled unduly over her dress, but they were so shocked at her inclination to attend in the great hall in the simple tunic she had been wearing all day that she let them have their way and stood compliantly while they clothed her in cream damask and a scarlet surcote trimmed with silver fox.
They brushed and braided her hair before fastening her headdress of cylindrical gold cauls attached to a gold head-band over her brow. A filmy white veil stood out at the back, brushing her shoulders bared by the wide, low neckline of her gown.

All the care of her women, however, could not disguise the shadowed hollows beneath her eyes or add color to her pale cheeks. Charles d’Auriac, seeing her for the first time since Guy de Gervais had left, was jolted by the ethereal quality sorrow lent to the previously vibrant, glowing countenance. It lessened his lust not a whit, because in no wise was the distinctive nature of her sensuality diminished by her stillness and her pallor.

He watched her during the evening office, and he saw the restless anxiety of her husband, the covert looks he sent in her direction, the questioning, uneasy glances of a man no longer certain. Charles d’Auriac was satisfied. It would not be long before the man would challenge the woman, and he did not believe the woman in her present distress would be able to dissemble adequately to persuade the man of her innocence.

At supper, he was at some pains to be pleasant to his cousin. She responded with the habitual level courtesy she had shown him ever since she had recovered her manners after their first meeting. But as always he could feel her revulsion, the shrinking of her skin when his arm brushed hers as he passed a platter or reached for the great dipper in the tureen of broth. His own anger rose with a powerful purity that she should treat him in such fashion, but it added zest to his desire. It would not matter in the end how she felt, how deeply she was repelled by him.

Magdalen heard the voices in the hall as a dim buzz, the plucking and twanging of the minstrels in the gallery as a barely noticeable resonance. Between the anxious, speculative glances of Edmund on her left and the ill-concealed, predatory hunger of her cousin on her right, she felt as if she were being pressed to death
between heavy stones, as she had heard tell they did to the felons in Newgate. Her eyes were fixed on her cousin’s white hands, the long white fingers encrusted with jewels. There was something almost effete about his hands, yet she had seen him wield a great sword and place a lance with a strength to match any knight’s.

As soon as the platters of peeled nuts, medlars, fruit wafers, and marchpane pastries had been passed with the jugs of hypocras, she rose from the table.

“I beg you will excuse me, my lords. I am a little fatigued, and the child will soon need feeding.”

Charles d’Auriac paused as his dagger slowly peeled away the brown decayed skin of a medlar. His gray eyes flicked sideways and upward to where she stood beside him. “Do you pay another midnight visit to the chapel, cousin?”

“I do not understand you.” Her lips were bloodless.

“Oh, I thought you were in the habit of taking your child to the chapel after matins.” He smiled, aware of Edmund’s close gaze. “I saw you leave there with the child the other night as I was leaving the hall on my way to the guest hall.” He turned his dagger in his hands, smiling still. “Lord de Gervais had the same need for late-night prayers, it seemed. I daresay he was keeping vigil before taking his leave the next morning. It is, after all, the custom of many knights before setting out upon a journey.”

“I know nothing of my Lord de Gervais’s customs,” she said steadily, although her stomach was quivering and she was aware suddenly that this was the threat, that she was looking into the abyss of his malice. But it made no sense that he should betray her to Edmund. “I do not know if he kept vigil or not. I bid you good night,
mon sieur.”
With the exercise of immense self-restraint, she managed not to look at Edmund, to see how he was reacting to d’Auriac’s strange statement, because she knew if she looked at him he would read her dismay, a dismay that could only be explained by guilt.

She left the hall, her step measured, acknowledging the salutes of the household still supping in the body of the hall. Outside, she drew breath desperately, trying to rid herself of the suffocating feeling. The air was still warm, and she longed for the cold, purifying blasts of winter, for ice crackling beneath her feet and the purity of snow. This air was too hot, too clammy, too clinging, and it would not fill her lungs properly. Smells of cooking hung heavy, and a wave of nausea rose with shocking suddenness. She blundered into a dark corner of the ward and vomited.

Afterward, she stumbled up the outside stairs and along the passage to her own apartments. Erin and Margery exclaimed as she staggered in, holding the long pointed tippet of her sleeve to her mouth, her face deathly white beneath the gold headdress.

“My lady.” Erin leaped to her feet. “Whatever has happened? Are you ill?”

“Something I ate at supper,” she said, sinking onto a stool. “Bring me clean water to drink and some mint leaves to chew.”

She drank greedily of the water they brought her while they undressed her, murmuring sympathetically even as they shook their heads over the splashes on her gown and slippers. But finally she was in her robe, her hair brushed, her face and hands clean, her mouth freshened with spearmint.

“Leave me now. I would sit up alone awhile.” They left her seated beside the window, gently rocking Zoe’s cradle. Something dreadful was going to happen . . . something more dreadful than the great pit of loss in which she had been struggling to keep afloat for the last weeks. She tried to gather strength, to prepare herself, and when Edmund came in, his face livid, his eyes blank, as if the person who normally inhabited them was somehow absent, replaced with only a spirit of despairing rage, she greeted him calmly, as if she did not see his desperate hope that he was in error
and his equally desperate certainty that there was no error.

“Why would you go to the chapel . . . take the child to the chapel after midnight?” His voice rasped painfully.

“I explained that Zoe was restless,” she said. “I thought a walk would soothe her.”

“Why would you walk her in the chapel?”

“I felt the need for some solace.”

“Solace with Lord de Gervais?”

There had been no solace with Guy de Gervais that night. She shook her head and spoke the truth. “No, I did not seek solace with Lord de Gervais.”

“But he was there?” He stepped toward her, his hands open, but whether to reach for her in threat or need she could not tell.

She tried to lie. “I do not know if he was or not.” But she knew the truth was in her eyes. She had sworn on the bones of St. Francis to do or say nothing to lead Edmund to suspect the truth, but
she
had not brought him to this point. And how could she help it if her eyes would not lie?

His hands caught her upper arms, pulled her to her feet.
“He was there!”

“Edmund . . . Edmund, please, do not do this,” she heard herself whisper as they drew closer to the edge of the abyss.

“Why would you take my child to the chapel at midnight for a tryst with Lord de Gervais?” His fingers gripped so tightly the blood throbbed against the vise they formed.

The child in the cradle stirred, whimpered softly in her sleep.

Abruptly, Edmund released Magdalen. He swung toward the cradle, staring down at the sleeping child. “Whose child is she?” There was so much pain in his voice that Magdalen, even in her own pain, wanted to reach for him, to offer him what comfort she could. But
as she struggled for words, he swung round again, his eyes great burning holes in his ghastly countenance. “Eternal damnation on your black soul!
Whose child is she?”

Her hands opened in a gesture of defeat, of acceptance, of despair.

“Tell me she is not mine, damn you, tell me!” His voice had dropped to barely a whisper, but the force was undiminished.

But she could not tell him because she had sworn not to. So she just stood there, helplessly silent, unable either to deny or to confirm.