Almost Innocent (51 page)

So she went to neither of them.

She held out her hands in a gesture of mute supplication, her face deathly white under the sun, her eyes haunted with her terror.

“What is it?” Guy said softly. “What have they done to you?”

“I am to bring you both within the castle, or they will murder our child,” she said, knowing now that she could never have told him anything but the truth.

He looked up toward the watchers lining the battlements, then he turned away. “Come with me.” The instruction was curt, masking the depths of fury threatening to chase all reason from his brain. “You too, Edmund.”

They followed him out of the sunshine, into the first shadowed street of the town. There he stopped and turned to them. His eyes ran over them, assessing, and he knew Edmund could do nothing for Magdalen at the moment. It wasn’t a lover she needed with a lover’s needs to obscure her own. So he opened his arms to her. “Come here, pippin.”

She fell against him with an incoherent sob and he stroked her hair, gently soothing, as if she were again the little girl he had comforted and reassured. And she
gave way to the terror, dropping her defenses for the first time since they had parted in the chapel at Bresse and he had ridden away from her.

Edmund, from his own horror at what she had told them, watched without jealousy. He knew he could not give her what she was receiving from the other man, and the knowledge brought him sorrow but now no sense of betrayal.

“Enough,” Guy said finally, when her dreadful, wracking grief had yielded to gulping sobs. “Plantagenets do not give in or give up. Remember who you are, Magdalen of Lancaster.”

She raised her tear-streaked face from his chest. The faintest indentation of his mailshirt beneath the tunic showed on her cheek, so tightly had she been pressed against him. “I am the daughter of a whore, sent to do a whore’s work.”

Edmund exclaimed and Guy’s face darkened, but he said no words of denial. There were none. “How long have they given you to do this work?”

She was not hurt by the lack of denial. She had simply stated the truth, and the pain was her own. “One hour,” she said. Her tears had dried, and her body seemed to be emptied of all emotion, even fear. Only a cool, dark void remained within her.

“It’s not long enough,” Guy said, turning to Courtney Durand, who had been standing in the shadows, drawing his own conclusions from the scene. “What do you think, Durand?”

The brigand chieftain said nothing for a minute, wondering why, now they’d got the woman, they didn’t simply leave the place. Children were expendable, and that one was so young anything could happen to it in the next few years. But he hadn’t been paid to advance what he sensed would be an unpopular viewpoint, so he said finally, “The lady must parley for more time.”

“I do not know if I can,” she said.

“You must.”

“Magdalen?” Edmund spoke her name hesitantly.

She remembered that moment on the battlement when she had sworn to give her husband all she had to give, and she realized that in her desperate need for Guy’s strength she had not yet acknowledged Edmund. She went quickly toward him, her hands outstretched. “Forgive me.”

He gripped her hands, remembering painfully the violence of their last time together. “Forgive me for what I did to you,” he said in a low voice. “I have regretted it every minute—”

She shook her head in vigorous denial. “I have not thought of it . . . will never think of it.”

He longed to take her in his arms, but he could not, not here, so he just held her hands and devoured her face with his eyes. “I have been so afraid for you.”

“Edmund . . . Magdalen.” Guy’s voice called them to him softly. He and Durand had been talking to Olivier, who in customary fashion had appeared silently and usefully. “Magdalen, you must return and negotiate a further two hours before we will enter the fortress.”

“They will kill—”

“Be quiet and listen.”

Abashed, she fell silent, aware of the strangest resurgence of strength and optimism under the brusque, commanding tone.

“Olivier knows where the underground corridor is located,” Guy said. All well-constructed castles had them, narrow passages running from the dungeons of the donjon, beneath the walls and the moat to the outside. Only thus could supplies be brought in during a siege and couriers escape unseen. Such corridors could not provide egress for large numbers; they were narrow, low-roofed dirt tunnels, and their location was in general known only to the castle commander. But on one of his spying visits to Carcassonne, Olivier had contrived to discover the whereabouts of this one.

“Comes up in the saddler’s in the town,” Olivier
said, picking his teeth. “Starts below the armory in the garrison court.”

“We are going to send a small force through the corridor,” Guy said. “They must have time to get in place within the walls before Edmund and I enter. You will tell the de Beauregards that Edmund and I are prepared to discuss a ransom for you and the child and will come in peace to parley. We will bring our squires and pages and two knights banneret apiece as escort, and we will come in two hours.”

“And if they will not accept that?”

“You must ensure that they do.”

Magdalen absorbed the flat statement.

“Could we not send a herald with the message?” Edmund said tentatively. “Magdalen could stay safely here—”

“They will kill Zoe,” Magdalen interrupted, her voice shaking. “I thought you understood that. If I do not return within the hour, they will kill her. And if you do not enter the fortress, they will kill her.”

“I would not ask it of you,” Guy said gently, “but I can think of no alternative. You must trust that we will come for you both.”

“What else must I do?”

“If it is possible, you must get yourself and the child into the outer ward. We will raise the portcullis from within as soon as we are able, to admit reinforcements. When it is raised, you must leave immediately. You are not to concern yourself about anything that is happening within the courts. You are simply to save yourself and Zoe.”

“I will tell them that you have made it a condition of parley that you see both the child and myself on the parapet, unharmed, in an hour,” she said, a slight tremor still in her voice but her mind now clear and resolute. “That way, they must give Zoe back to me, and I will ensure they do not take her from me again.”

Guy nodded. “Return now, pippin. You must be strong for just a little longer.”

She paused, shaking her head infinitesimally. Her voice very low, she said, “No, Guy, you are mistaken. I must be strong for a lifetime.”

He knew what she meant, the final, absolute relinquishment of love. “And I also,” he said as quietly. “Go now.”

They escorted her back to the drawbridge. She crossed without a backward glance and slipped through the postern gate. The drawbridge was pulled up behind her. Her uncle and cousins awaited her in the
place d’armes.

“Well?” Bertrand demanded.

“I will tell you in a minute.” Magdalen put up her chin. “I have not broken my fast this day, my lord, and I am faint for lack of food.”

“By the Holy Rood, you are your mother’s daughter,” Bertrand said into the stunned silence. He gave a sharp crack of laughter. “Many times I have seen Isolde put up her chin in just that manner.”

“I am also a Plantagenet,” Magdalen said, thinking of all the minutes she was using up in this exchange. But she must not go too far. “May I eat?” She put the request in a conciliatory tone.

“They will come?” It was Charles who spoke the harsh question, and she turned to look at him, reading to her surprise a hint of anxiety in his voice, as if there was something personal riding on the success of this betrayal. She hid her satisfaction and dropped her eyes. Her voice was low, with a note of defeated submission.

“They will come. But there are conditions.”

“Come, there is no reason to discuss this in the open court.” Bertrand swung on his heel and strode to the donjon. “Bring meat and drink to the bastion room,” he instructed a page trotting at his heels.

Magdalen tried to eat as if she had not had a decent
meal in weeks, thinking all the time of the men crawling beneath the earth to shoot up where they were least expected, like the unruly suckers of a giant oak. But she could not procrastinate for long and finally told them of the conditions, making the telling long-winded and disjointed, as if the evidence of her success in this evil had to be dragged from her.

“You told them we wished to discuss ransom?” Bertrand cut a thick slice from the sirloin on the table. “A good enough invention, I daresay.”

“But they will not come if they do not see me and the child on the parapet first,” she said, trying to keep her desperate anxiety from her voice. She had to have Zoe again in her arms; without the child none of this was worth anything.

“What has the child to do with it?” Charles demanded.

Bertrand waved him down as he chewed solidly for a few minutes, and Magdalen waited, her eyes on the table lest they read her dreadful apprehension. “I see no reason why not,” her uncle pronounced finally. “A reasonable man would see that what he wished to ransom was ransomable. It simply indicates that he comes in good faith. Let her have the bratling. We can take it from her any time we choose, if it’s necessary to punish her failure or again compel her obedience.”

Cold dread at this calm statement was followed immediately by sweet relief. The two emotions turned her joints to butter, her gut to water, and she had to hold unobtrusively to the edge of the table until the weakness left her legs and belly.

“Why would they wait two hours?” Marc asked. “They are positioned outside the gates. They could ride in without such delay.”

“I think they wished the priests to celebrate a mass,” Magdalen improvised. “Lord de Gervais does little without prayer beforehand.”

Bertrand grunted. It was common enough. “Very
well. You and the child will show yourselves upon the ramparts.”

“And when they ride in,” Charles said softly, “you will be in the
place d’armes
to welcome them, cousin. So that you may see the welcome we accord them.”

She shuddered. They would force her to watch as the two men she had betrayed were cut to pieces under the flag of parley. They all saw her shudder, and the horror in her eyes was genuine enough to encourage the belief that she did not doubt such an outcome.

D
URAND, WITH THIRTY
men, followed the agile, speedy Olivier through the earth corridor. They carried no light. The fire of a torch would have been impossible to carry, bent double as they were, and would have reduced what little air they had. They were armed only with knives and wore only leather gambesons as protection against whatever weapons they might face when the fighting began. But there was no choice for a man who must make his approach on his hands and knees.

Outside the walls, Durand’s brigands in flat-brimmed siege hats, hide shields strapped to their backs as protection against missiles and arrows from the ramparts above, milled around in apparent idleness, yet they were prepared to run to the walls and light their faggot fires once the call to arms was blown from within. The men on the ramparts watched impassively. In the present state of parley, neither side would make overtly aggressive moves, but each was ready for the moment when, or if, they were called for.

Guy and Edmund sat their war horses, waiting to ride to the drawbridge. They were now in full ceremonial armor, lances fixed in the sockets to the right of their breastplates, visors up for the moment. Their escort, also armed, squires carrying the standards, gathered around, horses shifting on the moat’s narrow bank, scenting the possibility of battle. They all knew the trap into which they were about to ride. Guy
watched the sun, waiting for the second hour to be up. The great ball of midmorning heat lifted above the far rampart. He signaled, and the herald raised his trumpet and blew the note of parley.

They dropped their visors and rode forward as the portcullis was lifted, the drawbridge lowered. Within the
place d’armes
, Charles d’Auriac let his hand rest on his great sword. His uncle and cousins, also fully armed and mounted, did the same. A troop of pikers circled the court. Magdalen, holding the baby, began to step by inches into the sheltering darkness beneath the walls. So intently were they all watching and waiting, the small steps passed unnoticed.

A deep hush enveloped the court, as deep as the shadows cast by the fortress walls. Beyond the walls, sun shone and ordinary things were happening. Within, there was only the expectant hush before treachery. The clanging drop of the portcullis behind the entering men signaled the end both of silence and of waiting. Charles d’Auriac drew his sword with a great cry of challenge, but Guy de Gervais had his lance poised in the same moment and rode at him with his own war cry, savage and exultant, bursting from his lips. The lance hit true, toppling d’Auriac from his horse. His squires were hauling him to his feet as confusion erupted. Thirty men leaped from the shadows of the garrison court, knives in hand, their challenging cries mingling now with the clash of steel as the armed men in the center of the court engaged in combat. Guy was off his horse now, intending to pursue d’Auriac with sword and on foot, but before he could do so, Philippe was riding down upon him.

Magdalen screamed and Charles turned. He had pushed up his visor, and there was murder in his eyes as he saw her with the baby, clinging to the shadows. He came toward her, a hulking armored figure, sword gripped in his two hands, raised to cleave her in two.

“Treacherous whore!” The accusation rang out
above the battle noise, a mad, wild fury behind it. For precious seconds Magdalen was paralyzed by the sight of that great cleaving blade. Zoe was screaming against her ear. Then she turned and ran. Tripping over the cobbles, stumbling against the wall, clutching the child, she ran frantically as the massive figure lumbered behind her. She ran for the battlement steps, not thinking beyond the need to escape the clamorous murky confines of the court, up into air and space and sunlight.