Almost Innocent (45 page)

But he could not follow the thought any further, however much he believed he deserved the self-flagellation. He must return to the camp, send Edmund off to his wife, and put on his own life. There would be work for him to do in England, and in that work he would find surcease.

He gave order when he reached the camp that they would remain until after dinner and resume their travels at noon. The horses of the de Bresse party would be sufficiently refreshed by then, and for himself it mattered little if they only made a half-day journey.

If any speculated as to what had caused the precipitate pursuit of Edmund de Bresse, they kept their speculation to themselves. It was clear enough at dinner that the two men were in accord, that there were now no gauntlets about to be thrown, no challenges issued and taken up. The food was good, the wine flowed freely, the shade of the willows kept the midsummer sun from roasting the diners, and if there was a haunting sadness in the blue eyes of Lord de Gervais, then it was no concern of his guests.

The lone horseman careening down the ridge to the encampment was seen first by one of the men-at arms standing watch on the perimeter of the camp. He called out the alert that was then taken up by the herald.

Guy stood up, shading his eyes against the sun. He had little difficulty recognizing the figure crouched low over a long-tailed gray stallion. Olivier rode abysmally, slouching and jouncing like a flour sack. Apprehension took solid form. Only news of Magdalen could have brought Olivier, riding so recklessly, upon them.

“Who is it?” Edmund stood up, too, his hand still around his wine cup.

“My servant, Olivier,” Guy said shortly. “I left him to . . .” He swallowed the rest of the explanation. Edmund would not want to hear that Guy de Gervais
had left his own man to keep watch over Magdalen with instructions to bring him immediate word should any ill befall her.

“He is in some sort a spy,” he said. “He had instructions to watch the doings of d’Auriac and the de Beauregards as and when he could.”

“Then he brings ill news?”

“It is to be assumed so.” Guy was already moving away from the table, his voice clipped with worry. Edmund followed him across the flattened grass of the meadow to where Olivier had ridden into the encampment. He had met no challenge from Lord de Gervais’s watchmen, being well known, and now tumbled in an ungainly heap from his horse as a groom took the bridle.

He stood rubbing his back, a frown of discomfort on his swarthy brow. “‘Tis a scurvy means of travel, my lord. I’ve ridden nigh on a hundred miles in a day and a night.”

“For a man who detests riding, that is indeed some feat,” Guy said as easily as if he did not know that Olivier could only bring disastrous news. “The Lady Magdalen . . .?”

“Taken, my lord.” Olivier bent double, his face screwed with pain.

“Taken? God’s nails, man! What does that mean?” Edmund, agitated beyond containment, stepped forward.

“Give him time.” Guy waved him down. “He has not ridden this far and this fast to keep it from us.” He gestured to a hovering page. “Bring wine and set a platter of food upon the table. Come, Olivier, you have need of food and drink and rest while you tell your tale.”

“I’ll not sit, my lord,” Olivier said frankly, moving to the table, where he leaned heavily upon it for a minute before he took the cup of wine the page held for him and drank its contents in one swift gulp, his throat
working. Then he sighed with relief and put the empty cup on the table.

“Two nights ago, the tocsin sounded from the town. The garrison went out in answer. In their absence, an army laid siege to the castle.”

“An army? Frenchmen in a time of truce?” Guy refilled the wine cup, his voice incredulous.

“Brigands,” Olivier said, taking the cup again. “That bastard knight, Courtney Durand.”

“Durand?” Courtney Durand was an English knight turned mercenary. His company of brigand knights were at the fee of any who could pay them, and they were notorious for their ferocity, their success, and their lack of scruple. They terrorized wherever their fee took them, from the Swiss Alps to Naples, from Paris to Rome.

“Courtney Durand has taken my wife?” Edmund was whiter than milk. “How could he breach the walls of Bresse?”

“The garrison were lured away, my lord,” Olivier explained, passing a hand wearily over his face where sweat and dirt caked hard. “Then engaged in battle beyond the town. There were some three hundred lancers, pikers, and archers who laid siege to the castle. They breached the walls with bombards, sent fire arrows over the battlements. Lady Magdalen directed our own archers and we did some damage, but nothing to the point. The savages were in the town, too.” A shudder of distaste rippled across his face. “They sacked the town . . . You could hear the screams, smell the burning . . .” He paused to refresh himself from the cup again, and Edmund swore violently. He should have been there to defend his castle, his vassals, his wife.

“Go on, Olivier.” Guy’s face was strangely still, and he ignored his companion’s intemperate and guilt-ridden outburst.

“Well, as I said, the Lady Magdalen did what she could, but in the end it was surrender or be sacked. She
knew the rules. If the castle yielded, there would be mercy. If she held out . . .” Olivier shrugged. Those were the rules of war. Everyone understood them. “They demanded only herself and the child. She parleyed for the safety of the rest and immediate withdrawal from the town.”

“And did they agree?”

“Yes, my lord. Very courteous it was, after that, almost as if they weren’t after plunder at all.” Olivier rinsed his mouth with wine and spat a red stream upon the ground, as if to indicate his opinion of such a ridiculous idea. “If you’d seen the town when they’d left you’d take their courtesy at its proper value.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, adding, “My lady showed much courage.”

Guy nodded, unsurprised. “She is a Plantagenet.”

“They have taken her for ransom,” Edmund said in tones of one struggling to understand.

“The hand of the de Beauregards is behind this,” Guy said impatiently. “And employing such a force, there is no doubt but they intended to succeed this time. There is no question of ransom, although that is what you and the rest of the world are to believe. How did you escape, Olivier?”

“Through the underground passage.” The spy shrugged as if such means of egress were quite ordinary, as indeed they were to those who knew of them. “But you are correct, my lord. They have taken the lady and the child to Carcassonne.”

“You heard this said?”

“Of course, my lord. I would not leave until I knew where they were taking them.”

“No, of course you would not.” Guy, even in his preoccupation, managed the flicker of a smile. “I did not mean to doubt you, my friend.”

“We must go after them!” Edmund spoke in stifled tones. “Immediately.”

“Yes,” Guy said. “We must and will. But let us make
plans first. Nothing will be gained without due thought and attention. We must match their care with our own. She is in the hands of the de Beauregards, and that is no light matter, Edmund.”

He kept to himself what he feared might be planned for her at the hands of Charles d’Auriac, whom he knew to be the force behind the abduction, because it would do Edmund no good to share in those fears.

T
HE BOLT FROM
a crossbow found its mark with an ugly dull thud. A scream rose, unearthly in its extremity of anguish. Such dreadful damage they did, those great bolts, much worse than the clean piercing of the arrows of the longbowmen; but not as bad as the spiked head of a mace, or the dreadful double blade of the battle-ax that was now rising up before her, wielded by a figure encased in plates of armor, his visored face a metal blank. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came forth.

Magdalen woke in an icy sweat, shaking with the terror images of her dream. Tonight they had been dream images, but two days ago they had been reality. She lay on the thin pallet, straw crackling beneath her when she moved to pull the blanket up to her chin, staring upward in the darkness at the canvas roof of the tiny tent. Roistering, drunken shouts came from outside her flimsy shelter, voices raised in song and frequently in altercation. She heard a woman cry out, and she shuddered. Two days ago, women from the town of Bresse had cried for mercy from sunup to sundown.

Beside her, Zoe slept peacefully, oblivious of the noise and the intrinsic threat it held. Magdalen assumed that if she and the baby were being held for ransom, no harm beyond their captivity would befall them. But while her head told her this, her heart heard the riotous sounds from the camp outside, the violent edge to the merriment, and her head would not rule her heart.

Pushing aside the blanket, she got to her knees and crawled to the tent flap. The night outside was lit with braziers and pitch torches of this brigand army. A rustle of cloth, a shuffle of booted feet on the grass sounded to the right of the tent, and she ducked back inside instinctively, then cautiously peered out again. An armed piker stood in the shadows of the tent, his back to her. There was something about his stance that told her he was not idling there. He had a purpose.

As if aware of the watcher, he turned around. His eyes were incurious as they rested on Magdalen’s face framed palely in the tent opening. Then he turned frontward again, standing with his legs apart, one hand closed over the pike at his side.

A watchman, Magdalen decided, retreating again. Whether he was there to keep her in or others out, it mattered little. Someone had a care for her safety, and that in itself was comforting.

She sat cross-legged on the pallet, all desire to sleep long gone, wondering for the hundredth time since that terrible debacle whether she could have done anything to avert her present captivity or to save the lives that had been lost. The alarm had come in the dark hour before dawn and the garrison had ridden out, exactly as they had done that time when Guy had led them to repel a brigand attack. Remembering that incident, she had thought little of this expedition, had simply directed the preparations for receiving the returning warriors and tried to keep under control the memories of that last occasion, memories that brought stinging tears to her eyes. But once the garrison had left, a second, massive force had appeared from the woods at the rear of the castle. They had gone through the town like a knife through butter, and the screams and the fires had begun.

She had known what was expected of her. As lone chatelaine of the Castle de Bresse, it was for her to direct the defense. She had stood on the battlements, and
men had died beside her with the bolts from the crossbows ripping through flesh and bone, unhindered by the links of chainmail. Fires had started all around from the fire-tipped arrows pouring in from across the moat, and the pounding mortars from the bombard had set the walls shaking. It was the noise she remembered most vividly . . . that and the moment when the walls were first breached. Armed men had poured into the
place d’armes
, giant figures embodying violent death with their maces and their cleavers, and, unable to bear further slaughter, she had instructed the herald to blow the note for parley . . .

Footsteps sounded outside the tent, and her heart jumped into her throat. The tent flap was pushed aside.

“The watchman seemed to think you had need of something.” It was the brigand chieftain, the Englishman who had set the terms for the surrender; a big man with a gray-flecked beard and shoulder-length hair, and the eyes and mouth of one who followed no code of morality or of honor. Yet his voice was soft, and his manner had been courteous from the moment she had surrendered herself, the child, and the castle.

He ducked into the small space and sat down, unbidden, on the end of her pallet. “You’ll be ill advised to show your face beyond that opening again this night.” He folded his arms and regarded her with a certain avidity. “My hold’s tenuous at best, and nonexistent when the drink’s in them.”

“And the bloodlust,” she said coldly. “But you’d think they’d had their fill of rape and murder at Bresse.”

He laughed. “An appetite that once whetted only grows, lady.”

Magdalen recognized the look in his eye. She had seen it in the eyes of men before, men who loved her and men who simply lusted. She pulled her cloak more tightly around her.

Leaning over, he moved a finger beneath her chin.
She drew back, but there was nowhere to go. So she sat rigid, trying to stare him down. He laughed again and ran his finger over her lips. She jerked her head to one side. “Will you emulate your men, then?”

“Why should I not?” he asked softly. “There’s something powerfully arousing about you, sweeting. Offer me a little softness, and there’s no knowing what I may be able to offer you in return.”

“My freedom?” she shot at him.

“No, not that, I fear. That is not in my gift.” Before she could question this statement, he had caught her chin between finger and thumb, and his mouth was coming down on hers.

She brought her knee up into his stomach, not hard enough to do any damage because of the smallness of the space and the awkwardness of her position on the pallet, but he drew breath sharply nevertheless and abruptly released her.