Catherine: One Love is Enough (Catherine Series Book 1) (41 page)

‘You might have said you were there!’

‘I would have hated to disturb you,’ Xaintrailles retorted. ‘Don’t pay any attention to me, please! I’m just going to finish peeling this armour off and then I’ll be away.’

He went on removing the various parts of his armour as he spoke. He had now reached the thigh pieces, which was one stage further than his friend had got; Arnaud was still wearing his. Catherine leant against Arnaud’s shoulder and watched him with a smile. She felt not the slightest shame or embarrassment at having been surprised in the arms of the man she loved. She and Arnaud belonged to each other, and it would have made no difference to her if Garin himself had walked in! He had encircled her with his arms once more, holding her close as though he were afraid she might run away, but he went on watching Xaintrailles as he undressed.

‘What about Rebecque?’ he asked. ‘What’s become of him?’

‘He is going to have trouble sitting down for some time to come, and he will have an enormous bump on his head, but apart from that he is all right.’

‘You spared his life?’

‘Indeed, it was all the cowardly knave deserved! If you had seen him: he handled his axe as if it had been a church candle! ’Pon my word, it brought tears to my eyes!’

Xaintrailles had now removed all his armour. Clad only in his shirt and tight hose, he now proceeded to make a hurried toilet, starting by shaking half a bottle of perfume over his red hair. Then he took a short doublet of silver-embroidered green velvet out of a coffer and pulled on a pair of immensely elongated pointed shoes of the same cloth. This done, he addressed a deep, formal bow to Catherine.

‘I kiss your feet, most fair lady! And I go somewhere else to bemoan my unlucky star – and your lack of taste! I shall at the same time renew my acquaintance with that good Beaune wine of yours. One thing to be said for these accursed Burgundians – they know how to make wine!’

And on that note he swaggered out, a majestic and arrogant figure, sighing like a furnace! Arnaud burst out laughing and Catherine with him. The immense happiness she felt just then made everything and everyone connected with her beloved dear to her. The red-headed Xaintrailles amused her. She felt she could easily have grown to love him, for Arnaud’s sake.

Arnaud meanwhile had turned back to her. He made her sit down on the camp bed with him and cupped her lovely face gently in his hands to study it more closely. Then he bent toward her.

‘How did you know I was crying out for you,’ he murmured, ‘that I needed you desperately? Back there, when death seemed a hair’s-breadth away, I wanted to leap up into the stands and snatch a kiss from you so that I might at least leave this world with the taste of your lips on mine.’

He began kissing her again and covered her face with soft little kisses.

Catherine looked at him adoringly. ‘Then you hadn’t forgotten me?’ she asked.

‘Forgotten you? Never! I cursed you and hated you … or at least I tried to. But how could I forget you? What man having once held Beauty in his arms could ever forget her? You can never know how often I dreamed about you, dreamed I was holding you close to me, caressing you, making love to you … But,’ he added, sighing, ‘it was always a dream, and dreams must end.’

‘It need not end now,’ Catherine cried ardently. ‘This time it really is me and not a dream that you are holding in your arms. You know that I am yours …’

He did not answer, but smiled, and Catherine could not resist dropping a kiss on those smiling lips. No-one else in the world smiled like that, so warmly and boyishly. His white teeth lit up his dark-skinned face like a flame. Arnaud stood up swiftly.

‘Don’t move,’ he whispered to her.

One by one, with patient, skilful fingers he removed the pins that secured Catherine’s headdress and placed the fragile confection of satin and lace next to his helmet. Then he loosened her hair, which cascaded like a silken, golden waterfall onto her shoulders and down her back.

‘It’s incredible!’ he exclaimed rapturously, plunging his hands into the waves of living gold. ‘No woman can ever have had a more glorious crown!’

He had come to her, and now he took her into his arms again. His lips brushed her mouth, throat, shoulders. The heavy necklace of brilliant purple amethysts she was wearing irked him, so he took it off, throwing it on the ground like a worthless bauble. Then he began unfastening her gold belt with impatient fingers. But then, abruptly, Xaintrailles reappeared. He was no longer smiling.

‘Not you again!’ cried Arnaud, furious at being disturbed. ‘Now what do you want?’

‘Forgive me, but I fear that this is not the moment for loving dalliance. There is something seriously wrong, Arnaud.’

‘Wrong?’

‘The Scots have all vanished. There is not one of our men to be seen round this tent, or indeed anywhere on the list.’

Arnaud sprang to his feet, disregarding Catherine’s efforts to keep him beside her. The young woman’s sharpened sensibilities in anything to do with her lover told her that something ominous and sinister had happened. Her love was threatened, and the apprehension hit her like a sharp physical pain.

‘If this is your idea of a joke –’ Arnaud began.

‘Do I look as though I am joking?’

Xaintrailles was pale and his face betrayed his anxiety. But Arnaud scoffed at him, still trying to persuade him to leave them alone again.

‘They must have gone drinking with the Burgundian soldiery. You surely can’t suppose that they would have left without us?’

‘I don’t suppose anything. I am simply stating a fact. Our squires and pages have vanished too.’

Arnaud reluctantly crossed over to the entrance of the tent. Before he reached it, the flap was thrown back by an arrogant-featured individual, who remained stood on the threshold looking in. Catherine could just make out the gleaming weapons and breastplates of a troop of soldiers behind him.

The newcomer was young, not more than thirty. He was sumptuously clad in armour damascened with gold and a red brocade tunic. But Catherine found herself disliking and mistrusting him. She remembered now having vaguely noticed him in the Duke’s entourage. She disliked his thin lips, tightly folded above an aggressive chin. They remained closed when he smiled. He was smiling now, and it made him look cruel and gloating. His eyes, which were somewhat protuberant, were so cold that they seemed quite colourless. The ruthlessness and cruelty of Jean de Luxembourg, Commander-in-Chief of the Duke’s armies, was common knowledge throughout Burgundy. He stood examining the two knights, looking rather like a cat about to devour some mice.

But, disquieting as his expression was, it seemed to have no effect on Arnaud or Jean de Xaintrailles. The latter hailed the Burgundian General in his bantering way.

‘The Seigneur de Luxembourg, eh? To what do we owe the honour?’

Luxembourg dropped his casual attitude and stepped forward, followed by his men. They trooped in one after the other and posted themselves around the tent with their weapons at the ready, completely encircling the two men and the young woman, on whom the General’s glance lingered thoughtfully.

‘Methinks you have overstayed your welcome here, messires,’ he remarked, with a heavy northern accent. ‘Messire de Buchan and his men took off for Guise long ago at full gallop.’

‘That’s a lie!’ Arnaud retorted confidently. ‘The Constable would never have abandoned us like that.’

Luxembourg began to laugh, and the sound froze the blood in Catherine’s veins.

‘I will be quite frank with you. He is actually under the impression that you have ridden on ahead. We managed to make him believe that you had made haste to depart in order to rejoin some lady disconsolate with love for you. As for the men who were guarding your tent, we had no trouble with them.’

‘May I ask what’s behind all this?’ Arnaud inquired haughtily.

‘It means that you are my prisoners and that I intend teaching you the respect due from knights-at-arms to my Lord Duke. It would really be too absurd if just anyone could come and insult people in their own homes and then calmly ride off again.’

Enraged, Arnaud leapt for his sword and made as if to threaten the Burgundian leader with it. But before he could do so, four men threw themselves upon him and overpowered him. Four others meanwhile closed in upon Xaintrailles. He allowed them to proceed with admirable coolness.

‘So this is how you respect the rules of chivalry and hospitality!’ Arnaud shouted. ‘So much for your master’s word of honour and safe conduct!’

‘Let him be,’ said Xaintrailles contemptuously. ‘His master spends his time tearfully lamenting the fate of chivalry. He proclaims himself its most ardent supporter. Yet he marries his sister off to the Englishman! He is a Burgundian, that’s all that needs to be said. We behaved like idiots in allowing ourselves to trust rabble like that.’

Jean de Luxembourg went pale. He raised his hand and would have struck Xaintrailles if Catherine had not leapt between them.

‘Messire,’ she cried, ‘do you know what you are doing?’

‘I do indeed, madame. May I add that I am surprised to find you here with these people, you whom the Duke honours above all with his love. However, you need have no fear. I shall say nothing of your presence here. There is no need to distress the Duke unnecessarily. Besides, I owe you my thanks for having so effectively detained these gentlemen.’

Arnaud’s angry voice interrupted him. ‘So that’s it, is it?’ he challenged Catherine. ‘That’s why you came here with your dewy eyes and soft words, you filthy little whore! ’Pon my word I came within an ace of believing you! You almost made me forget my murdered brother, my vow of vengeance and the hatred I have sworn to your entire family.’

‘It is not true! I swear it is not true!’ Catherine cried despairingly, flinging herself upon the young man whom the archers held pinioned by the arms and shoulders. ‘I beg of you, don’t believe a word of what he is saying! I am not Philippe’s mistress, I didn’t know they had laid a trap for you! You won’t believe me now, Arnaud, but I love you …’

She tried to put her arms round the young man’s neck, but he stiffened and recoiled from her, raising his chin so that she could not touch his face. His eyes sought Jean de Luxembourg’s over her head.

‘Sire,’ he said coldly. ‘If you retain but a shadow of the respect you owe to your brother knights, either take us away at once or get rid of this slut, who may have found favour in your Prince’s eyes but whose proper place to my mind is in the whorehouse. I must request that you remove her, since I cannot do so myself.’

‘Very well,’ Luxembourg answered. ‘You there, take the woman off and escort the prisoners to the castle.’

Two of the men-at-arms went up to Catherine, who was still clinging desperately to Arnaud, tore her away from him and then threw her roughly on to the bed, while Luxembourg stood by watching.

‘The unfortunate Garin de Brazey really doesn’t deserve the fate Monseigneur has bestowed on him,’ he observed. ‘To be forced to take a common wench as his wife is bad enough, but then to be cuckolded several times over seems a heavy cross to bear!’

Her body racked by convulsive sobs, Catherine watched in despair as the guards took Arnaud away. His face seemed to have turned to stone, and he left the tent without so much as a glance in her direction. Xaintrailles followed between his guards, as insouciant and cheerful as ever. He was singing the song she remembered from earlier:

‘Oh fair one, what are you thinking?

‘Do you ever think of me?’

She was left alone in the blue silk tent, alone with the discarded weapons and all the masculine odds and ends that Jean de Luxembourg’s soldiery would doubtless return to pillage sooner or later. But she was oblivious of everything just then. She lay huddled on the low bed, with her head buried in her arms, mourning her shattered hopes and her love that had been so cruelly buffeted, spurned and vilified … He had been so quick to reject her, so prompt to accuse her! He had accepted Luxembourg’s calumnies unhesitatingly, for the sole reason that the general, though an avowed enemy, was a nobleman and a knight like himself. Arnaud de Montsalvy would never hesitate for a second between the word of a peer and the solemn promise of a humbly-born girl like herself, however passionately he loved her! How harshly and contemptuously he had cast her from him! The insults he had flung at her seared and scorched her heart like whiplashes, and her tears failed to soften the smarting pain. They soothed her nerves a little, perhaps, but the other wounds were still too recent!

She stayed there for some time, while oblivious of time and place. She was prostrated by grief and despair. Nothing seemed to matter now that Arnaud had spurned her, now that he hated her … At last, however, the moment came when her eyes grew weary of weeping and her tears dried up of their own accord. Something concrete had emerged from the sea of misery into which she had sunk, and this was the notion that there were more important things to be done than weeping. She was one of those highly emotional people who are easily moved to extremes of feeling in one direction or the other. She was terrifying in her rages, suicidal in her griefs, but this very violence was its own safety valve. It is hard to abandon all hope while one is young, beautiful and in good health. At last she lifted up her head. Her eyes were red and sore with weeping and did not focus very distinctly. The first thing she perceived clearly was her white satin headdress stood beside the helmet with its fleur-de-lys crest on top of a nearby chest. She sensed something symbolic in this juxtaposition, as if Arnaud’s head were still enclosed by the royal emblem and her own surmounted by that delicate, charming confection of satin and lace …