By Possession (27 page)

“Nay! You will tear it open!” She rushed to the end of the bed and pressed her weight against his shin, forcing him to stop.

He sank back, closing his eyes against the defeat. She waited until she believed he would not try again, then replaced the pillow under his knee and covered him.

The stressed breaths calmed and his eyes remained closed. She hoped that he had fallen asleep, but in time the lights glimmered at her again. Not all golden this time, but mingled with black fires in an expression that disturbed her.

“Has he had you yet?”

The question stunned her. “Had me?”

“Raymond. Are you yet a maid?”

“Of course. You are mad from the fever. Raymond is like a brother to me.”

“He may be like a brother to you, but you are not a sister to him and he knows it. He saw you with new eyes when he came home last year.”

Addis de Valence had barely spoken to her over all these years, and this sudden personal conversation unsettled her. He was in a delirium after all, just articulate instead of rambling. He spoke what entered his mind, oblivious to normal restraints.

Something in his aura bothered her too. A strange mood emanated from him, like a heavy presence born of dark emotions. Hatred for Claire?

“He is to wed soon,” she said, trying to shake her sudden unease.

“Aye, but the lady does not suit him. He will do it as Bernard requests, but she is not his choice. He thinks to find better pleasure with you, little Shadow. He would have you like Bernard has Edith.”

“You are mistaken.”

“He watches and waits, Moira, but you are what, five and ten now? You will have to decide soon. He has told the squires that you are his, and the village boys.”

She had noticed Raymond warning boys off, but had assumed it was a brother's protection. “You are wrong, but if you are not it will not be so.”

He shrugged. “You are probably wise. Raymond is a good man, but such women have no rights. A man's mind changes and his lehman is cast adrift, scorned by her own people and forgotten by his.”

She needed no instruction on that. A lehman's daughter knew the same insecurity.

“Should you not rebandage it?” he asked, gesturing to the hip.

She fetched the basket of clean rags. He watched as she washed the gash and pressed cloths along it. He held the basket while she found lengths to cut for binding and took the knife from her when she had finished with it. That indefinable dark presence seemed to grow, like something thick and misty exuding from him. She bent to tie the binding around his thigh and his phallus swelled with her close touch.

“Damn,” he muttered. “Still, it is good to know that the sword did not unman me.”

Face burning, she quickly finished her work and covered him. He did not seem embarrassed at all.

“Too much to hope that my wife would come ease me.” He smiled. A strange smile. Hollow. He watched her carefully and she did not like the dark fires taking over now. “Do you know Eva, the whore who lives by the foundry? Go and tell her that I ask her to come.”

“You cannot…”

“Go and get her, girl. I will find no rest now.”

“You are very ill.”

“I am damned uncomfortable and since Claire is praying and you are a maid … go and get her.”

The fever had made him irrational. “You cannot move. How can you …”

“She will use her mouth, little fool,” he snapped.

She swung away with shock and embarrassment.

“I am sorry. I am not myself and forget you are a good girl. But go and get her, Moira. It is my bidding.”

If it would ease him and bring rest, who was she to lecture on virtue? Reluctantly she nodded and walked from the chamber. At the door she looked back and saw him staring blindly at the ceiling with a peculiar, determined expression.

In the passageway, free of the oppressive air of the chamber, she saw that expression again. It loomed sharply in her head while she began descending the stairs. Suddenly, as if a door opened, she understood it, and understood too that odd mood that had been issuing from him. He did not really want Eva. He wanted her gone so as to be alone!

Turning on her heels she ran back.

She found him leveraged up on one arm, the sheet cast aside, the bandaging knife grasped while he pressed fingers to the inner flesh at the top of his crooked leg, seeking the mortal vein.

“You will not!” she cried.

He glared at her, then continued his search. “Be gone, girl.”

“Nay!” She lunged, throwing her weight against the arm that held him up, grabbing at the hand that held the steel. It swung away and the blade flew, skittering across the floor when it landed. He thrust her off and collapsed, cursing her.

She cowered on the floor beside the bed, choking on tears of shock. An awful silence filled the chamber.

A hand touched her head. “Go and get it for me,” he ordered softly.

“Nay,” she mumbled into her knees.

“It is better this way. Normally such things are handled by comrades on the field. How many crippled knights have you seen?”

“You do not know that you are so badly maimed. Your leg was straight when Edith sewed the wound. Once the skin heals, maybe it can be straight again.”

“You will not help me? Then go and get Claire and tell her what I want. For this she will come.”

She raised her eyes to his and shook her head. Dark fires consumed him. He pushed up despite the pain and swung his good leg to the floor. She jumped up and forced him down and he proved too weak to resist for long.

“I will not get her. Nor will I leave here again, unless my mother takes my place. You are too sick to know your mind and too weak to fight despair.” She sat on the bed beside him, her arms imprisoning his shoulders. “Rest now.”

“Damn you!”

“Rest.”

He stared with anger but slowly, under their connected gaze from which she would not flinch and with which she announced her determination, the dark fires extinguished one by one. It seemed half the night had gone before the last one died.

“Maybe it can be straight again,” he said into the silence. “We will see.” He closed his eyes. “Sing, Moira. Not a religious song though. I am not feeling friendly to God this night. Lie beside me and sing. Perhaps I will rest then.”

Her voice could fill a hall, but now it only traveled the small space between their heads. She stretched alongside and embraced his shoulders and sang about love until his fevered face nodded against her breast and he sank back into his oblivion.

She shook into awareness. The basket in her hands was finished and she did not even remember completing it. Through blurred eyes she examined it for mistakes.

A movement. A presence. A man intruded on her dreamy mood. She looked up into kind blue eyes.

The wrong man.

Her smile of welcome hid her sigh. She had never known living could be this hard.

Rhys handed her a small sack and she quizzically looked inside. “Cherries! Where did you find them?”

“Best not to ask. They should stain your reeds as well as berries though.”

“I dare not waste them so. Jane and I will make them into a pie and you must have some.”

“They were for your baskets, but a pie would be nice.”

He sat beside her. “Do you not rest on Sundays, Moira? Even peasants do.”

He subtly criticized Addis with the question. “Peasant
men
do. Someone must still cook and clean. Besides, I am resting now. These baskets are not work.”

He stretched out on his back, his wiry strength propped on his elbows. For the hundredth time she examined him and told herself how fortunate she would be to have such a husband. Decent and good and sober and skilled. She should welcome his attention and look forward to these visits that had continued even after the repairs were completed. He still came despite that night in the kitchen.

His embrace and kiss had turned her to stone. She had wanted so desperately to want him that she had invited the intimacy, only to experience no warmth at all when it happened. She might have been the virgin bride in James's bed again, passive and objective and embarrassed. Feeling some excitement would have simplified many things, but her lack of response had been so obvious that she had not even had to ask him to remove his hand from her breast. He had simply done so, separating just as Henry entered with Addis's summons.

They never spoke of it, but still he returned.

“He has left?”

“Aye. You knew it would be today?”

He nodded. “It will get dangerous from here, and this journey is the least of it. What will you do if something happens to him?”

“I have a freeholding at Darwendon. Perhaps I will go back there. I will probably look for Brian. He is a child I cared for when we thought Addis was dead. He has hidden him, and will not tell me where.”

“Sir Addis's son?”

“Aye.”

He hesitated thoughtfully. “And yours?”

“Nay.” She told him about her place at Hawkesford and Simon's threat, and how she came to live with Brian.

“That explains much, but not everything,” he said. “I came here today for a reason, Moira. I knew that he would be gone and thought that you might speak freely. I have been thinking that you would make a good wife, but I sense that your place here is not the normal one. I would know the truth lest I make a fool of myself. What is between you and Sir Addis?”

A gentle way to ask the question, much kinder than James's blunt query. She had answered with indignation to James, but she could not do so with Rhys.

She thought of the responses she and Addis had playfully tested that night in the hay mound. Only the last would suffice. “We have not fornicated.”

He appeared amused, which relieved her tremendously. “An odd answer. Amazingly precise.”

“It is, isn't it.” They might never wed, but she could not lie to this man.

He swung up to sit cross-legged in front of her. “Moira, you are not a girl and I am not a boy. It is not lack of a home or work that has left me unwed, nor greed regarding a dowry. I have bided my time because I sought no ordinary woman. I like your manner and honesty and I think that we could make a good marriage. I would have offered already, but for Sir Addis.”

“It does not sound like you offer now either.”

“Nay, I do not. It is not a judgment, Moira. I expect no explanations and hold you to no blame.” He took her hand. His was strong from grasping a mason's tools. “For good or ill, what begins with his journey today will resolve very quickly. A month from now we will be either dead or victorious. The chance for the former is reason alone not to offer. If by some fate I live and he does not, this may be
an easier thing. I will even accept the boy Brian into our home if you wish it. But if he lives, he will leave here soon after and you may have to make a choice because then I probably will offer. I will make this marriage happen if you accept me, no matter what his claims on you.”

She smiled at him with true affection. A clever, honest, understanding man. He meant what he said. He would make it happen somehow, even if it meant giving Addis one hundred pounds. No words of love though. Nay, Rhys would not lie to her any more than she would lie to him.

There was nothing for her to say. She merely nodded, and he lay back down and talked to her about simple things, a practical man tilling soil for which he might one day have seed. A patient man biding his time, counting on her pride leading her to the only sensible decision.

CHAPTER 14

M
OIRA WAS KNEADING BREAD DOUGH
when Richard entered through the garden door. She stared at him and then at the empty threshold, straining hopefully to hear the approach of another man.

“Where is he?”

Her voice conveyed her concern. He had been gone longer than she had expected, longer even than the week he had said would be the limit of the journey. She had not slept well the last few nights while she agonized over fantasies of him cut down on the road or being tortured in Westminster's dungeons.

Richard lifted a reassuring hand. “He was wounded but he lives.”

“Wounded!”

“We were attacked on the road back.”

“Why didn't you bring him here? If you left him I will—”

“He lies in a house in Southwark. He thought it best not to enter the city gates right now. He asked that you come.”

Asked that she come! As if the entire King's Guard could keep her away!

“Carry a basket and pretend that you go to market, Moira. I will wait for you at the pier west of the bridge.”

He left and she hurriedly washed her hands and scrambled to decide what she should bring. Had his wounds been cared for? Were there salves in that house? Did he need clean garments? She cursed Richard for disappearing before she could quiz him.