For My Lady's Heart (33 page)

She leaned forward. “The abbey should have warded him! Or better yet the
king!”

The two stood silent before her vehemence.

“But if they had,” she said fiercely, “they would have made short work of
thy troop of minstrels sojourning here!” She swept her hand wide. “Lord
Ruadrik would have held the land of his own right long since—but instead you
have made him surrender his real claim, and try to win it back by foolish
errantry, for fear his wards would cast you out!”

“My lady, be it nought in our power to make His Lordship do anything!”

She stood up. “Nay, you have some unholy clutch upon him! What is it? Why
should he withhold his name from those who could help him, if not to hide
something? He is a baron, by God’s bones, and he married a burgher’s
daughter as if he could do no better! You have battened upon this place
somehow, a troop of worthless common minstrels, and he protects you by his
foolishness, and you care not that you drag him down!”

“Madam.” Ruck’s voice arrested them all, cold and soft. “I asked you for
love of me to esteem my people.” He stood in the doorway, dressed in a black
doublet and hose, a golden belt about his hips, his hair uncovered and his
face angry and tired. “Ne do I demand obedience as your husband,” he said in
English, “but I expect of a princess the honor of your word, that ye gave me
nought a few hours since.”

Melanthe felt a fire of mortification rush into her cheeks. She had
promised—but the state of this place outraged her.

In the silence he said, “Ye does nought know what clutch they haf upon
me, in troth, nor can knowen, did ye ne’er come on your home to finden it a
charnel house. The death annihiled in this country, my lady; took it nought
one in five or one in three, but nine in ten—of every living thing down to
the sheep and the rats, for what sins I know nought.” His breath frosted in
the cold room. “Came I home from the household where I was fostered as a
page, but the pestilence met us on the road.” He gave an ugly laugh. “Ye
speaks of warding. Oh, I was well warded. I had me full eight years of life
and wisdom, lady, and dead men all about me. Ne did no passerby, ne friar
nor knight, halt or linger, but stoned me for fear of my contagion if I
approached them, but until I met this troop of worthless common minstrels.”

“Then in faith,” she answered coolly, turning to the window. “I wish thy
minstrels as well as any men under God, for their great charity to thee.”

The jealousy was there again, the envy of his loyalties to anyone but
her. Her hands were freezing, but she refused to clasp or warm them, only
holding them at her sides. She wished to explain, to tell him that it was
his welfare and his rightful place that she would defend, but pride held her
tongue, and the apprehension that if she made herself offensive to his men,
it was she who might be sent away.

She was not accustomed to making herself agreeable to servants. To turn a
smile and wiles on them to win affection .. . well, she had performed more
difficult counterfeits for less, but already the need to deceive seemed a
distress, an old and fatal misery. She could not, at that moment, even
summon the will to begin it. She said no more. Instead she found herself
turning to walk quickly to the door. She did not look up at her husband as
she passed him. Lifting her skirts, she ran down the spiraling stairs,
seeking the courtyard.

Ruck watched her from an arrowslit in the gate tower that commanded the
whole of the meadow and the lake. His first foolish thought had been that
she was leaving—but of course she would not, could not, alone. She would not
have been able to find her way from the valley even if she had commanded a
horse.

Knowing that, he had not followed her. He was hotly aware of Bassinger
and Little Will; of how this impossible marriage must appear. Since his
first warning of plague, he had thought of bringing her here for security,
though more in his fantasy than in seriousness. Not once had it ever entered
his head that he would bring her to Wolfscar as his wife.

But in the crisis, trapped between the hounds and the sea, he had gone by
his secret way for the one place he could be certain of. He knew the
decision now to be as witless as their exchange of vows—had realized it in
full when he saw his castle and his people as they must look to her. Already
she disdained them.

Nodding stiffly to Will and Bassinger, Ruck had left the ladies’ chamber
with its cobwebs and echoes, acting the lord just as if he had not cleared
ditches and drunk ale and planted palisades shoulder to shoulder with the
Foolet while Bassinger gave advice and complained of his back. Ruck did not
wish to seem to chase her, but he could not face his old friends, either, or
justify what he had done. Standing now in the empty garret, he felt utterly
alone, as if he had executed his own banishment.

He leaned his forearms against the angled cut of the arrow embrasure,
resting his head in the crook of his elbow so that he could keep her in his
sight as she carried the gyrfalcon into the sheep pasture. She strode across
the snow-crusted grass. A train of children followed, tramping behind with
their arms swinging, until Hew Dowl chased them off to a proper distance.
She was a hooded sweep of emerald green in the dirt-gray landscape, leaving
the motley colors of the children and the austringer behind her. She
stopped, and Ruck saw her beckon.

Hew ran to her, his shoulders stooped in reverent submission and his eyes
fixed on the ground. As Ruck watched, she spoke to the austringer. Hew’s
head came up. His face was too distant to see clearly, but his whole body
cemed to expand. He donned his glove and held out his arm to take the
falcon. They talked for a moment, Hew raptly attentive as she handed him the
jeweled lure.

As the princess stood back, Hew hid the lure and struck the hood,
removing it. For a few moments the gyrfalcon sat motionless on the man’s
upraised arm; then it bounded free.

Ruck lost sight of the bird. From his arrowslit he could only gaze at
Melanthe as she shaded her eyes and followed the flight. It felt mockingly
suitable that he stand hidden, staring out at a narrow view from this crack
in stone-thick walls. He grew angry at his own cowardice as he thought of
it. Afraid of her contempt, afraid of his own friends—ashamed of his home.

He thrust back from the embrasure and paced across the garret, the bare
planks reverberating beneath his feet. For twenty years the haunted
frithwood and fate had protected Wolfscar; there had been no need of a
garrison or armed watch and none to man the towers anyway. He had not
reopened the mine, he had not reclaimed the road; he had done nothing that
might draw attention, waiting for the day when Lancaster his prince would
call for the Green Knight and ask him what reward he would have for some
marvelous deed—and then, Ruck had dreamed, he would reveal himself, and say
his claim, and Wolfscar would be his without dispute, without abbots or
haughty monks or any question of right.

It was all a boy’s fine fantasy, built of the songs the minstrels sang,
of Gawain and Lancelot, adventure and glory, of troth and loyalty between a
man and his master.

He had long ago learned the way of the world. But he had been committed
by then, and making a name with Lancaster, and there were tournaments and
war—if not as glorious as the adventure of his imagination, at least
opportunity for advancement and future, until Lancaster had dismissed him.
Because of her.

Princess Melanthe could purchase Wolfscar ten times over. Ruck would have
been more of a saint than he was, he reckoned, if the thought had not
crossed his mind. But he could hardly stay apace with his own feelings.
Outside, he had been bewildered and humbled by her vow to be his wife, but
here—here, he did not want to give up his sole mastery, he did not want to
explain himself and his life, he did not want to submit to her authority, he
did not want everything he was to depend on her, he did not want to give her
up, he did not want to deny her anything, he did not want to sleep alone
again— and he did not,
did not
want her to leave him.

He returned to the arrowslit in time to see Gryngolet pounce upon the
lure that Hew threw down on the frozen grass. It was a simple method, the
usual way a towering falcon would be brought down. In its very simplicity,
with plain Hew making in to the bird like any countryman’s falconer, the
sight brought the image of Melanthe lifting her jeweled gauntlet and lure,
unbearably vivid, the sky and the bird and the fire of emeralds and white
diamonds as the gyrfalcon came to her hand. She had been weeping and
laughing, beautiful and not, a dream within the compass of his touch.

He watched her as she bewitched Hew into a hound in human shape. The man
heeled to her with panting devotion, nodding and gazing and nodding again as
she spoke. While the gyrfalcon ate, he pointed about the valley, obviously
discussing the hunting.

Ruck felt his heartbeat rise. If she thought to hunt the bird, then she
did not wish to leave anon. He wouldn’t have taken her even if she desired
to go, not until he could better assure her safety, but he had not relished
a quarrel with her about it.

He rolled on his shoulder and put his back to the tower wall, leaning
there and staring at the gash of light that fell across the floorboards from
the defensive slit. The stone was so frigid that the cold seeped through his
doublet to his body, but he did not move. He knew he was not thinking
clearly. Weariness misted his wits. Had it been warfare, he would have
distrusted any humor or inclination now, holding himself back from hasty
action.

But it seemed that he had done naught but hold himself back for all of
his life. Hard-won habit ruled him: he had only to think of her to want to
couple again, and his next thought was that he must not—and only in the
eternal struggle to conquer his bodily passions did it come to him that
there was no longer a contest to win.

He stared so hard at the patch of light on the boards that his eyes began
to water.

He had made a particular study of the sin of lust, with careful questions
to the priests, and a certain amount of reading in confession manuals when
he could examine one in French or English. He felt himself rather a master
of the subject. Even on marriage, the religious did not always agree among
themselves, which meant there was a little space for preferring one set of
advice over another amid the thickets of clerical admonition. All admitted
that there was no sin if the intention was purely to engender children, but
a few maintained that any pleasure at all in the marriage bed could not be
without sinful fault. Others judged that the conjugal debt was a pious duty
between spouses to prevent incontinence, and the marriage act only a deadly
sin if there was excessive quest for pleasure—with many fine computations of
what might constitute excessive pleasure.

Ruck found his tired spirits lifting. He was clearly incontinent, or like
to be if he thought on his wife at any length at all, and the very notion of
begetting a child on her sent him into a hot ardor of perfectly sinless
passion. Not excessive ardor— but iwysse, if he waited too long, he judged
his soul would be in certain danger.

He pushed away from the wall, finding a new vigor in the gloom.

Melanthe refused to allow herself to hesitate as she opened the door.
When she had returned from the mews, a girl had been waiting with the
message that Sir Ruadrik asked Princess Melanthe to honor his unworthiness
by her presence in his chamber—courteously worded as a request, it was true,
but still her hand had lacked a little steadiness as she coaxed Gryngolet
onto her perch.

She entered the lord’s chamber expecting to be confronted by all three of
them, including the two Williams, for it was always the way with favorites
that they wished to be present when their rivals were diminished. But Ruck
was alone. He rose from a chair as she closed the door behind her.

“My lady,” he said, “I would have you eat now.”

He placed the chair by the chimney corner, where a white linen cloth lay
over the table, already laden with a meal. In his black weeds he was tall
and formidable, the green of his eyes intensified by the night-hue of his
clothes and hair. A fire crackled actively, warming the chamber, and
fresh-cut boughs of pine drove out the stale atmosphere with their fresh
scent. In the late afternoon a candle gave the table extra light.

She was hungry indeed, but the flutter of dread in her stomach made the
food unsavory. She released the pin on her cloak, and tossed it over a
chest. “What did they sayen of me?” she asked haughtily, meeting the matter
on head so that she might gain the upper hand by surprise.

He looked up at her. “Say of you?”

She washed her hands in a basin beside the door. “I warn thee, sir—is a
poor master who is ruled by his servants. But of course, they will say thee
otherwise, that to be ruled by a wife is worse.”

He gazed at her, a shadow of a frown between his brows. She paced to the
table and sat down, scowling at a dish of wheaten frumenty, well aware that
he stood close behind her.

From the edge of her eye she could see his arm, the velvet rich with
light and shadow on the black curve of his sleeve.

She took two swallows of the frumenty, which was nearly cold and only
barely palatable, before her throat closed and she could not eat more. She
put down the spoon. “I ne cannot eat, ere I hear thy decision.”

“My lady,” he said, “what decision?”

“Wilt thou send me hence?”

He walked away. Melanthe slid a look after him. He stood at the window,
his back to her. “Send you hence?” he demanded harshly. “A’plight, then why
haf I troubled to bringen you here, in the stead of drowning you like a
kitten in a bag, for to spare myseluen the toil? If that be the decision you
would hear—nill I take you hence, nay, nor any here show you the way. In
good time, when augurs it safe enow, then will I see you to your hold.
Henceforth until then, thou moste biden here, though it displease.”