Bond of Blood (50 page)

"When I am there, may I have someone with me?"

"Who? If it be reasonable, my darling, you may have anything you want, anything I can get for you."

"I care not who, so long as it be a noblewoman of good character, or two perhaps, older than I." Leah began to cry again softly.

"You are lonely, my sweet. You miss your mother." A pang of jealousy passed through him, and he smothered it. "Poor child. You are so wise so often that I forget you are but a child. Do not cry, love. I will take you home, to your own keep, if you desire it, to see your mother." He did not remind her that Pembroke was dead. "Perhaps she will visit Painscastle for a while until you are comfortable there."

"I do not wish to go home. I would like to see my mother, but it is not that I miss her. I am happy with you alone."

"Then what do you weep for, Leah? You know I could not refuse so reasonable a desire as for womenfolk of your own class around you."

"When we return to Painscastle, will Beaufort still live with us? Did you not say you needed a castellan for Radnor Keep? Can he be trusted with such a task?"

There was a moment's stunned silence as Radnor's weary mind tried to take in the jump from one subject to another. "Of course he— Why should you ask such a question about my man?"

"Let me get up for a moment." Leah bent down by the bed, then walked out of the light of the candle into the darkness. When she returned, she took a deep, shuddering breath and stood looking down at her husband. "Because he cannot be trusted, with me." She threw herself down upon Radnor knocking him flat as he started up, gasping, "No, my lord, you cannot rise up and kill him. I have taken away your shoes. Be still. He did me no harm. There was nothing but words. He did not even kiss my hand."

This last was not true, for Sir Harry had forced her so far as to kiss her lips before she fought free of him. That she would never tell because it would have been the man's death warrant. On one pretext or another, Radnor would destroy anyone who meddled with his property. Leah wanted to protect Beaufort because she felt, guiltily, that she had encouraged him. She thought her husband would be paralyzed without his special boot, but she had underestimated his determination and ability. Enraged as he was, he did not even feel the pain as he flung her off him and started across the room. Leah leapt at him again, clinging like a limpet and trying to trip him. At first he only thrust her away, but her insistence in keeping him from his objective finally pierced his fury.

"What did he want? What did he say?" Radnor snarled at his wife, gripping her arm brutally.

"Cain, he is very young. He is very unhappy. He—"

"You would like an exchange, perhaps?"

"Ohhhh!" Leah shuddered.

"He is years younger than I and not so marked. Thus he is even more—beautiful. Why do you protect him? Why?" He shook her until her teeth rattled, the pressure of his hands leaving red welts on her shoulders. "Nay, I need no answer. Your eyes go there and elsewhere too, I hear. You are only too lily-livered to take what you want like all the other sluts so you come sniveling to me. Damn you! Curse you and rot you and damn you!"

He lifted one hand to strike her, and she wrenched herself out of his grip, ran across the room, and threw his shoes at him out of the dark. "Go, go kill him if you will. I tried to protect him because I know if you slay him you will bear the burden of regret all your life. He did you no wrong. A man cannot help loving, no more than a woman can." Perhaps he did not even hear her. He was dressing, his back coldly turned. "Love is a thing that comes unaware, against the will," she sobbed. "So did I love you from the first time you kissed me in the tower room at Eardisley, though I knew that my love must bring me pain and grief. I did not will it; I could not help it. Cain, do not give credit to the name you bear. Do not destroy a man who saved your life three times. Send him away. Give him a castle. Find him a wife. What could give me greater pain than that if I did desire him," she cried despairingly as her husband straightened up and dragged his mail shirt over his head.

Leah moistened her lips at the sight of his face, but she could not make another sound, not even cry out with terror. Her husband groped behind him and his fingers closed on the broad belt that fastened his surcoat together.

"Beaufort's fate is for me to decide, justly or unjustly, but I will teach you once and for all that your will must not cross mine. I will teach you to protect those who have sought to shame me. I will teach you to look with lust upon another man. I will teach you to make my life a misery to me with your complaints and your clinging. Afraid, were you! I will teach you where to fear truly."

The belt cracked and Leah winced. It cracked again, curling around her shoulders. Her lips parted stickily, but she still could find no voice. A harder blow made her stagger and fall against a chair. A still harder one made her reel towards the bed.

"Stop, oh stop! Have mercy, do not beat me." Leah sank to her knees. Radnor's belt came down again. The pain was dreadful, but it was one with which Leah was very familiar. She might even have endured it to the end without protest, knowing that once his wrath was spent on her Beaufort would be saved, but she was afraid that if he beat her until he was tired she would be sick, sick enough to miscarry.

"Stop, my lord," she shrieked, "in the name of God, stop. I am with child."

The raised belt sank slowly. Leah watched the rage drain out of her husband's face and an expression of overwhelming terror take its place. She knew what was coming and slid flat on the cold floor, panting like an animal. The rain had stopped and the sound of a rushing wind filled the room. That, and Leah's panting breath, were the only sound for several long minutes.

"Whose?"

There was nothing more calculatedly cruel he could have said. Lord Radnor did not doubt that the child was his. She would never have mentioned Beaufort's attack if she had such a guilty secret. Cain would have killed Leah, not beaten her, if he had the slightest real doubt of her physical fidelity. It was that with her confirmation of the rumors and smiling hints of pregnancy  he had so long ignored, his own smoldering fear had been ignited and he was driven by his terror to inflict pain in return.

The blow had fallen—the final rejection of the prize she had offered. At the moment, for all Leah cared, Cain was welcome to kill her as well as Sir Harry. She got slowly to her feet and met his eyes. Even that night in Oxford Castle when she had fainted, Radnor did not remember her being so white. He turned on his heel and left the room. Below in the guardroom, Beaufort came face to face with him, white as Leah, wordless but not defiant, offering himself for the punishment he knew he deserved. His presence hardly impinged on a consciousness filled with a far deeper agony.

Lord Radnor struck him down with a single blow, and flung orders at Cedric to hold him in close confinement. He left the house, rode through the howling wind bare-headed and without his shield, rode back to the hospice where his father was, and lay down on the floor beside his father's bed.

Chapter 21

When the Earl of Gaunt woke in the morning, he almost stepped on his sleeping son. Without a flicker of expression, he lifted his feet and gazed for a long time at Cain's ravaged face. When he was satisfied, he kicked Cain awake and, without comment or question, began a long and involved discussion about future political plans and arrangements for circumventing the effects of the coming famine. His only response to his son's abstraction and deep expression of trouble was a spate of irritable insults and several sharp blows.

The hours dragged by. From time to time a particularly cruel remark or painful bruise would rouse Radnor and he would apply himself to the topic in hand, but his mind soon slipped away, and when he rose from the dinner table to escape, Gaunt made no attempt to stop him. Cain did not know what he wanted. The pain he had run to, which in the past had eased or erased all other troubles, had failed him. Perhaps somewhere dark and quiet he could find the shaft that was tearing at his gut and wrench it out.

There was a chapel, empty and silent, but Radnor found that this fear was not like the arrow he had once torn from his own flesh, fearing to die but knowing he could not live with it in him. This fear could not be torn out, nor conquered, nor destroyed; he must live with it in him. He burst from his solitude into his father's presence crying aloud for work.

The old man looked impassively at his son and shook his head. "There is nothing more to do. You must see the queen and find if you can bend her to our will before we can even plan our next move. Sit down and stop behaving like an idiot. I will give you a game of chess."

They played equally badly. The Earl of Gaunt should have been more satisfied with the situation than he was, for politically matters were going in his favor, but some disaster had overtaken his son, and for the first time in his life he did not know what it was that troubled Cain or how to help him. He thought again of the bitter recriminations thrown at him the night before. Had he been wrong to have forced the boy, beating him and frightening him, into an absolute pretence that his deformity did not exist?

Honestly Gaunt admitted that he had begun the process because he could not help himself, because he hated the child for the death of the mother and less for the death of the perfect twin. As the years passed, however, and the boy showed the promise of the fine man Cain had become, Gaunt had continued his harshness to protect the child from the cruelty of others. And when his son was finally a man, it was he who would not let the matter rest, he who returned again and again to the bitterness between them.

He had done right; Gaunt was sure of it. Why then was his heart so heavy? Why did he long to speak and be spoken to—to receive the kiss of peace from his child? He was getting old, he thought, nearly three-score years, old and soft. He shook himself, as if to free himself from a physical encumbrance, and knocked the chessmen out of place.

"Go," Gaunt snarled, "you are useless to me and the dinner hour is passed. Go to the court and hear what people say. From one hour after the sun sets until dawn I will wait for you at the main gate."

The court was very gay and everyone was glad to see Lord Radnor. A dozen men fell upon him with questions—jesting questions, idle questions, and desperately perceptive questions. He dared not let his tongue slip, and the fear in the foreground of his mind sank into a steady twisting misery in the background. It was very late before Radnor was able to seek his audience with Maud, because he wished to be sure she would be free of Stephen. When he sent a page up to her quarters with his request for admission, however, he was not refused. Lady Shrewsbury came out into the antechamber to tell him that Maud would soon be with him. She had offered to go out to Radnor, this being the first opportunity she had of private communication with him since the tourney, and Maud had agreed very willingly. To watch Joan being refused in the way Radnor was likely to refuse her was one tiny bit of salve that Maud could safely apply to her lacerations.

"Tell him," Maud said dulcetly, "that I will receive him in a few moments." Joan nodded and moved towards the door quickly with the eagerness of triumph. Maud bowed her head to conceal her bitter smile, reopened the door that Joan had closed, and stood listening.

"Did you receive my letter?" Joan of Shrewsbury came up close enough so that her scent reached Radnor. His nostrils spread as he breathed it, and his body stiffened as he resisted the impulse to step back.

"Ay."

Joan misread the stiffening and the restraint of the voice. "You need not fear to speak. Our voices will not carry." She glanced upwards at the frozen face archly. "Well, first you must say your thank you for the risk I ran—then—"

"What risk? You told me little enough."

So he was angry still. "Will you never forget a mistake? What more can I do to redeem myself? You have never given me an opportunity for even a word with you."

"Mistake?" The face was blank, the voice indifferent. "Oh, I have forgotten everything. My mind is washed clean of all such matters now."

Color flew into the smooth white cheeks and the blue eyes glittered. "You think that mawkish idiot you married—"

Radnor's eyes narrowed and his lips twisted with pain. He would gladly have let matters rest, for if the woman had hurt him once the fact was insignificant to him now, but if she dared even name Leah— Radnor cleared the huskiness from his voice and raised it so that it traveled quite clearly.

"Do not do it, Joan. Say nothing to me of my wife. So long as you talk about yourself or me or on indifferent subjects I can force myself to bear you. I will not have you soil my Leah's name by speaking it with your mouth. My temper is not to be trusted, Joan, and it would make for peculiar explanations if you make me lay you out with a blow. I assure you," he added, cruelly and crudely, convinced that there was no other way to deal with this woman, "that I have no desire to lay you out any other way. Hold your venomous tongue—and keep it and yourself away from my wife."

Behind the door Maud smiled. Joan of Shrewsbury had met her match and it had been a privilege to hear it. The smile faded quickly and she prepared herself to go out. It was entirely possible that she too had met her match. When, without even replying to her courteous greeting, Lord Radnor plainly and bluntly asked for Chester's release and told her that his prisoners and Hereford were beyond her reach, she knew the worst. She stood silent for a moment, her eyes on the floor, whipping up her courage and her rage. When she spoke at last, her words were uncontrolled and vivid. She used every expression a long life and exposure to all kinds of people had taught her, but her fury beat unavailingly against the big man's stolidity. Finally she talked herself silent, gasping for air and searching for a single sign that she had pricked a raw spot. Radnor's expression, however, held nothing but a mild distaste for her gutter language, a mild regret that a great lady should so demean herself.