Read In the Shadow of Midnight Online
Authors: Marsha Canham
In the Shadow of Midnight (55 page)
“Henry …?” The unspoken question was snatched away on a frosted breath, but the answer was plain enough to see.
“Laugh if you like,” he said stubbornly, hunching his shoulders against a chill. “It would be no less than your due after the way I reacted to you and FitzRandwulf.”
“But … the Princess Eleanor …” Trying to think of the gentlest way to say it, Ariel was eased of the burden when Henry said it himself.
“Longs only to show her love for the Church, yes, I know. And I would not even try to dissuade her, for that love is as pure and shining as any I have seen. Nay, I would be content just to be near her, to see her now and then, to speak with her
of harmless things.” He looked away again, staring at the gray walls of Kirklees as if he knew they would soon be enclosing his heart.
“Have you told Eduard?”
“I have told him,” he nodded. “I have also told him he has little say in the matter, little choice either, for he can waste no time returning to Normandy. The quicker he is known to have left England, the quicker the wind will carry the news and the name of his new bride to the king’s ears. What is more, John will hear that Henry de Clare is in Normandy as well—a little darker in appearance and speaking in a broader accent than might be expected, but—”
“Dafydd?”
“He has agreed to play me for a while, if only to throw his own brother’s hounds off the scent.”
Ariel whuffed a soft, misty breath into the stillness. It was obvious he and Eduard had discussed everything most thoroughly and she could expect small success in trying to persuade him to reconsider. It was nonetheless a shock to realize he would not be returning to Normandy with them, and a greater shock to realize she might not see him again for a very long time.
“Are you certain this is what you want to do?” she whispered.
“I have never been more certain of anything in my life … except, perhaps, knowing that I will miss you.”
Ariel went readily into his arms. “No more than I will miss you. You will be careful? You will do nothing foolish to draw attention to yourself?”
“I will be as careful as careful can,” he promised. “And you … you will have to learn to obey this new husband of yours; he does not seem to me the type to tolerate your schemes and rebellions with as much humour as the other men you have managed to tame into mere shadows of their former selves.”
“I have no wish to tame him,” she admitted honestly. “Although I confess, the prospect of
being
tamed holds great appeal.”
Henry held her out at arm’s length and frowned. “By God, I believe you really do love him.”
“Enough to forgive you for even doubting me.”
The faint crunch of footsteps prompted them to turn and follow the progress of the cloaked figure of Eduard FitzRandwulf as he walked down the slope from the abbey gates. The small group waiting by the horses, comprised of the Princess Eleanor and Marienne, Robin, Littlejohn, Dafydd, and Sparrow, stirred as well, and together with Henry and Ariel, converged on the descending knight as he reached the bottom of the hill.
“It is settled. The abbess has agreed, most heartily, to welcome Eleanor into their midst. She has also agreed to guard her anonymity, even amongst the other sisters, who will be told only that the new novitiate is the orphaned daughter of a noble who fell out of favour with the king. A common enough story these days, it seems.”
“What did you tell
her?”
Henry wanted to know.
Eduard responded with a smile. “That the lady was in fear of her life. That she was indeed an orphan, persecuted by the king, and if word of her presence here—even the merest hint of a whisper were to reach the royal ear, not even the cloisters of Kirklees would be sacrosanct. It tended to raise her hackles a little, as I had hoped it would. She was ever a fearless old grisette; the only one of my memory who dared to challenge the Lord of Bloodmoor Keep’s
droit du seigneur
with the village maids who chose to marry themselves to the Church rather than submit to his lusts.”
“Did she remember you at all?” Eleanor asked.
“If she did, she kept it confined to the gleam in her eye. And if she suspects our lady’s identity, I have no doubt she will keep the secret with her unto the grave.”
“Eduard …” the princess stretched her hand across the darkness. “How can I ever thank you? How can I ever begin to thank any of you?”
“Your happiness is more than thanks enough,” Eduard said, pressing her slender fingers against his lips.
“And yours,” she whispered, “is all that I could have hoped for.”
“You still have the ring,” Eduard reminded her firmly. “If you ever need me, for any reason—”
Eleanor smiled. “I will dispatch it to Amboise with all haste, I promise. But between Lord Henry and Marienne, I doubt if even so much as a flea would dare trouble me.”
Robin’s gaze burned through the gloom and held Marienne’s for a moment, only to lose it in the next as she lowered her eyes. Eduard did not miss the pinched expression that came over the young squire’s face. Nor did Eleanor, with her strangely heightened perceptions, fail to detect the sudden tension that quickened her maid’s breath.
“Marienne is still young,” she said to no one in particular. “But she is old enough to know the Church is not her life, as it has always been mine. A year or two from now, when she is convinced I am content and at peace, she will be able to choose her own way in the world.”
Robin’s expression brightened. “She will be free?”
Eleanor laughed softly. “She is free now, Robert. A convent is not a prison, it is a place of peace and tranquillity. Marienne will be free to leave any time she wishes.”
Robin muttered a hasty pardon and, snatching up Marienne’s hand, pulled her to one side where they stood with their heads together, a flurry of whispered promises passing between them.
Still smiling, Eleanor tilted her head slightly to acknowledge the source of another bemused sigh. “Lady Ariel?”
“Your Highness?”
“I must needs thank you as well, for more than you can possibly imagine. With the exception of Marienne, I have never had the pleasure of female companionship before—none that I would care to call ‘friend’ by any rood. And I would so like to think of you as my friend, and to know that you might smile with fondness sometime when you happen to think of me.”
“I …
we
… shall think of you all the time, my lady,”
Ariel insisted, tossing protocol to the wind as she leaned forward and gave the last Angevin princess a fervent hug.
Startled, and overwhelmed to the verge of tears, Eleanor squeezed Ariel’s shoulders just as tightly, her voice ragged against her ear. “I had almost forsaken all hope of Eduard ever finding a woman willing, or surely even able, to convince him he is worth loving. Indeed, the most fearsome opponent he ever defeated on or off the battlefield could have crushed him afterward by uttering but a single word: bastard. Love him, Ariel. Love him with all your heart and you will not regret it, not for one single moment.”
“I do not regret it now,” Ariel said earnestly. “Nor will I ever.”
Beside them, Eduard cleared his throat and glanced up at the abbey. “The abbess is waiting to admit you.”
Eleanor and Ariel stepped apart, and in a halting voice, the princess bade a final farewell and thanks to Dafydd ap Iorwerth, Jean de Brevant, and Sparrow, astonishing the diminutive seneschal by bending down and brushing his rounded cheek with a kiss.
“Promise me you will see them all home safely. It is a charge I bestow upon thee most solemnly.”
Sparrow puffed a chest already wadded with bandages and gave the balance of his arblaster an imperious adjustment. “You may count upon me, Little Highness. As always.”
“Give my love to Mistress Bidwell. Tell her I shall pray daily for her continuing perseverance.”
Sparrow started to reply, realized it might be a veiled reference to his own recalcitrant nature, and accorded the request a muffled, “Harrumph!”
With Eduard on one side and Marienne on the other, Eleanor went willingly to her fate. She paused at the low, arched postern and, after a last word with Eduard, pressed something into his hand and walked through the portal with Marienne and was swallowed into the dark silence of Kirklees.
Eduard continued to stand alone, in the shadows of midnight, his head bowed, the dark waves of his hair blown forward over his temples. He turned slightly, angling his hand
into the moonlight and uncurled his fist from around the object Eleanor had given him.
It was a pearl. A single white pearl, as large as a robin’s egg, as lustrous as the smile of joy that had been on Eleanor of Brittany’s face as she had walked to meet her destiny.
T
he safe return of the Wolf’s two sons to Chateau d’Amboise was cause for a week of feasting the likes of which the castle and village had not witnessed in years. The arrival home of Eduard FitzRandwulf with a new bride by his side sent waves of shock recoiling throughout the countryside, with tremors reaching as far as a cold, drafty room in a castle keep in Falaise. There William the Marshal sat before a crackling fire, a cup of mulled wine warming his hands, a wide and (truth be known) not altogether surprised grin warming his heart.
Behind him, snuggled under layers of fur to ward off the winter chill, was his wife Isabella. The countess and their ten children had arrived at Falaise only a few days earlier, led by an exhausted Sedrick of Grantham, who had packed the gaggle aboard a fast ship and sailed from Pembroke within hours of his arrival there.
Jean de Brevant had accompanied FitzRandwulf back to Amboise, claiming he had aught better to do than to pester Sparrow into an early grave. He had heard of Eduard’s famous sire—who of warm blood and living flesh had not? He took an oath of homage to Randwulf de la Seyne Sur Mer and was, in due time, made captain of the Wolf’s personal guard, a duty which, in turn, would include protecting his firstborn son and heir, Robert d’Amboise, when he gained his gold spurs of knighthood and declared his intent to return to England to fetch Marienne FitzWilliam home.
Dafydd ap Iorwerth played the part of Henry de Clare so well, an assassin’s arrow felled him not a month after their return to Amboise. As it happened, he was in the village at the time, pacing along the banks of the river Loire, trying to stoke up the courage to cast a friendly smile in the direction of the miller’s widowed daughter. Luckily the arrow struck the meat of a thigh muscle and the young Welshman was not only able to loose off an arrow of his own to kill his attacker, but he won
the wide-eyed interest of his original quarry, Gabrielle, when she brought him back to her tiny cottage to nurse his wound. She proved to be an excellent care-giver, more so when she judged, by the frequency and intensity of his blushes, that he was yet a virgin.
Ariel had cause to suspect by the grin on her husband’s face as he recounted Dafydd’s plight that there was more to the story than met the casual eye, but she wisely kept her suspicions to herself. She had no reason to be jealous or envious of Eduard’s past liaisons, not when she had the heat of his body to warm her every night, and his unflagging energy and passion to guide her breathlessly through every day.
Which is not to say their union was perpetual bliss and contentment. Their battles were monumental and the entire household came to be wary of the sight of flaming red hair and flashing green eyes stalking through the baileys and keeps. They came to watch, expectantly and with bated breath, at just what point during a meal or muted conversation the Wolf’s cub would fling his patience aside and snatch up his bride by the hand or sling her like a sack of grain over his shoulder and carry her up to their apartments, there to remain until they both emerged, subdued and markedly weaker about the knees, their differences either resolved or forgotten.
They remained at Amboise until Ariel was delivered of their first child—a daughter, Eleanor, born with flame red hair and eyes so green they were like crystals plucked from the sea. The day of her birth marked the second time Ariel saw tears spill freely from her husband’s eyes—no match for the flood that poured from her own when he presented her with the pearl their daughter’s namesake had given him, mounted in a necklace of fine gold circlets, each containing a perfect cabochon emerald.
Eleanor was born in the late summer, the same time Philip’s armies overran Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and most of Poitou. He met no resistance from the black and gold devices of La Seyne Sur Mer, for in March of that year, the dowager queen had died at Fontevraud. Philip, relieved he would not have to face Lord Randwulf’s army, nevertheless
cut a wide berth around Amboise and its surrounding territories, preferring to leave sleeping wolves lying undisturbed.
With Normandy under French rule, John’s search for Eleanor of Brittany effectively ended. It galled him to know she had been stolen out from under his nose, but it was not as if she could ever challenge him for possession of the throne. He reacted to the loss of his niece and the loss of Normandy by spending the next year in an orgy of feasting and debauchery. He was all but convinced William the Marshal was behind the rescue, but with no direct proof, he had to settle for seizing any and all estates deeded to the De Clare traitors. Most of these, he discovered to his further rage, had been placed in trust with the Countess Isabella of Pembroke, who was just as adamant as her husband in decrying the youthful passion and misguided zealousness that had led her niece and nephew astray.
As to Guy of Gisbourne’s description of the scarred knight who had left him a cripple, there was little doubt in the king’s mind it was Eduard FitzRandwulf d’Amboise, even before he heard of the marriage of the Wolf’s cub to Ariel de Clare. Realizing he must have passed within arm’s length of them on the road to Corfe threw the monarch into such a frothing fit, he was nearly a month in bed recovering his senses.
Having seemed to simply vanish into thin air, Eleanor of Brittany was referred to thereafter as the Lost Princess of Brittany. Stories, songs, and legends of what
really
happened to her were rekindled occasionally, each with eyewitness accounts of either her demise or her appearance as a ghostly spectre in the king’s chambers. All of the stories were related by the tawny-haired monk who visited Kirklees faithfully each and every week for the next seventeen years. So familiar had he become to the peasants who worked the fields around the abbey, that after the first few months he rarely troubled himself to change out of the drab brown cassock he wore. A stranger passing through the greenwood might have thought it odd to see a monk practicing with a sword and bow, odder still to see the collection of outlaws and misfits he collected into his fold. But there were few strangers who ventured into the heart of Sherwood,
and none who emerged if the forest residents did not like the look of them.
Occasionally, messages arrived from Normandy and were also shared in the sunny garden of Kirklees. News that Ariel and Eduard had moved to a fine castle of their own near Blois, where two strapping sons and another daughter were born in successive springs, put smiles on their faces and joy in their hearts. News of Robert d’Amboise’s rise through the ranks of knighthood set a third face blushing more hues of red than a summer sunset.
Marienne FitzWilliam had blossomed into a beautiful young woman. Because she had not taken any vow of seclusion, she was often sent to the market in Nottingham to trade the linens woven by the nuns of Kirklees. It happened one day, she was caught in a circle of sunlight, frowning in concentration over a selection of needles and spindles, when the bored and lecherous eyes of a town official happened to settle on the abundance of glossy chestnut curls. His name was Reginald de Braose and he was in the service of the new sheriff of Nottingham …
But that, dear reader, is another story.
