So Great A Love (20 page)

“I dare ask for nothing in the name of
heaven,” he said, instantly becoming all ice and chilly distance.
He stepped away from her. “If you were a wise nun, Lady Margaret,
you would refuse to accept anything from me.”

“Then offer me nothing,” she cried, close to
tears of frustration over his peculiar actions and her own nearly
uncontrollable impulse that urged her to go into his arms. She
ached for him to kiss her, for him to sweep her up in his arms and
carry her to the lord's chamber and lay her down upon his bed – or
even lay her down right there, in the stillroom, on the
worktable.

How could she be thinking of such a thing?
She did not want any man to put his hands on her – not ever again.
Out of fear and painful memory she spoke words that expressed the
exact opposite of what she was feeling. “Do not kiss me or touch
me. Leave me alone!”

“Are you two quarreling? No, you may not; I
won't allow it.” Catherine came into the stillroom, as Margaret had
warned she might.

“It's no quarrel,” Arden said at once. “I
came here to ask Margaret to make a scented soap for me and we were
merely discussing what is suitable for a man of my character.”

“Arden cannot decide what he wants,” Margaret
said. With difficulty she repressed the urge to remark that sulphur
and brimstone might be the most appropriate fragrances for him.
Surely, only a demon could make her feel so many strong,
conflicting emotions at the same time.

“Once, I would have made up my mind without
serious thought or question,” Arden said, his gaze on Margaret's
eyes carrying a message she could not interpret. “Now, I doubt if I
will ever be able to decide.”

“If you ever do,” Margaret said, looking
steadily back at him, “let me know.”

* * * * *

Arden left the stillroom horrified by what he
had almost done and by what he had revealed. He could not in honor
involve Margaret in his guilt or his eventual punishment. He could
not,
must not,
care for her! Yet every time he was with her,
he felt more drawn to her. And now he had reached the point of
seeking her out, for it was only to see her that he had gone to the
stillroom in the first place. It was madness.

What made matters worse was his growing
certainty that Margaret could see beneath his distant and composed
exterior, could see his guilt in his eyes, that she knew he had
wisely set himself apart from the society of honest men and women.
Or had she, perhaps, seen only his grief and pain and, seeing them,
had she decided to come to his aid as she had come to
Catherine's?

It was plain to Arden that Margaret was
motivated by love. It was her love for Catherine that had enabled
her to break through his sister's unhappiness and succeed in
cheering Catherine out of illness and the loss of her youthful
dreams. But Arden knew Margaret would not succeed with him as she
had with Catherine, for his sister still retained her innocence,
whereas he – he had all but lost his immortal soul.

The wind whined around the corners of the
manor house and its outbuildings, shaking doors and windows,
sounding like the forlorn wails of the ghosts who were said to walk
abroad on All Hallow's Eve. But harvest time was nearly two months
in the past; this was midwinter, and it was snowing again.
Snowflakes swirled in the wind, forming eddies thick as fog,
impossible to see through.

Each time someone opened a door the glow of
light from candles or oil lamps or rush-lights turned the dancing
flakes into sparkling golden particles that blew inside and
promptly melted, leaving slippery puddles on the floor. For this
reason, and to avoid admitting the bitter cold outside air into the
carefully husbanded warmth provided by fireplaces or charcoal
braziers, the doors were opened as seldom as possible, and wise men
and women kept indoors.

The folk of Bowen were growing restive at
their enforced inactivity. Every inside chore saved for the
wintertime, that a man-at-arms, a squire, or a stable lad could
possibly do had been done, and then done again just for the sake of
having a purpose for each day. The women had cleaned the interior
of the manor house until it was spotless except for the mud and
water daily tracked in by the men. One or two of the maidservants
actually dared to grumble at the men-at-arms for not wiping their
boots on the straw laid for that purpose in the entry hall.

With no fresh meat left in the larder and no
possibility of a hunting party setting out any time soon, the
cook's temper was growing shorter. There was plenty of food stored
in the cellars, so no one would go hungry. Even so, the menu was
more limited with every meal. Cabbages, onions, carrots and
parsnips teamed with pickled or dried meats soon became monotonous.
There were dried apples and pears aplenty, raisins imported from
more southerly climes, baskets of walnuts, and enough dried herbs
to season stews and puddings until midsummer.

But there were no fresh meats, no crisp
greens available for salads, and by the odor in the cellar room
where they were stored, some of the remaining fresh pears were
already overripe and would have to be used quickly if they were not
to be wasted. Unfortunately, the chickens were laying few eggs that
could have been incorporated into a pastry or the filling for a
pudding to use up the pears.

Margaret was unhappily aware of all of these
domestic details because she was once again acting as chatelaine
while Catherine was ill. After three successive days of venturing
out of doors into cold sunshine and bone-biting wind, Catherine had
taken another severe chill. Her nose ran constantly, she suffered
fits of sneezing, and her throat was red and sore, a development
not helped by her frequent coughing spells.

Having recently insisted that Catherine must
rise from her bed and undertake her proper daily activities,
Margaret was now in the position of advising her friend to keep to
her room. Margaret sent a maidservant for a basket of charcoal and
when it came, she saw to it that a brazier was placed close to
Catherine's bed to keep her warm, and she instructed Aldis not to
be niggardly with the fuel.

Descending to the kitchen, Margaret ordered
the cook to kill one of the few chickens left in the coop and to
make a nourishing broth for Catherine from its carcass.

“What Lady Catherine doesn't eat of it you
may use to flavor a dish for the midday meal,” Margaret said. “If
you need me, I will be in the stillroom, compounding some fresh
medicines.”

Back to the too-small, inadequately supplied
stillroom Margaret went, to search among the jars and bottles on
the shelves, as well as among the hanging bunches of herbs. In the
absence of a lady at Bowen, the stillroom had for some years been
the cook's provenance and she used what herbs grew in the garden
primarily for cooking purposes. Margaret had already used most of
the horehound during Catherine's first illness. Employing the last
bits of the herb, she made up a new batch of syrup in hope of once
again easing Catherine's wracking cough.

There were several bundles of mint hanging
from the rafters, with more than enough leaves to brew into a hot
drink that would clear Catherine's clogged nose and ease the pain
in her forehead. Glad to have a reason, even if only for a short
time, to put everything out of her mind except the process of
making a medicine to help her friend, Margaret set to work.

With stillroom, kitchen, and nursing chores
consuming her time, she did not see Arden all day until, coming out
of Catherine's room into the solar, she found him standing beside
the table where he and his sister usually sat of an evening. The
chessboard was not set up. Arden's fingertips rested on the empty
surface of the table and he was regarding both his hands and the
tabletop with a puzzled expression.

“I have heard about Catherine's new illness,”
Arden said when he saw her.

“Her cough has eased and she is sleeping,”
Margaret said. She was uncomfortably aware of the fact that in her
haste to dress that morning she had not taken the time to put on
her wimple. Aldis had wakened her early with an urgent request that
she come and check on Catherine's condition, and so Margaret had
merely bound her long, black hair into a thick braid and let it
hang down her back. From Catherine's room she had hastened down to
the great hall and thence to other duties and had not returned to
her own bedchamber until suddenly it was late afternoon and she
still had not found the time to cover her hair.

“So, there will be no chess played tonight,”
Arden said, his hand moving across the tabletop.

“Will you miss the game so much?” Margaret
asked. “I am glad to know your nightly attendance upon Catherine
was not only the result of my insistence.”

“I find the game engrossing for its own
sake,” Arden said.

“Even when your opponent plays at your
sister's level of proficiency?” Margaret asked with a slight
smile.

“Will you play with me?” he asked.

“I am sadly untutored in the game,” she
responded. “I scarcely know which piece goes where.”

“You could learn.”

“The ability to play chess is hardly a
suitable accomplishment for a cloistered nun,” she objected.

“I suppose not,” he said, “though it seems to
me that you possess a surprising number of un-nun-like skills. Lady
Margaret, I do believe you will have to become an abbess
immediately upon completion of your vows, or else you will be
forced to give up all that you are and become the most humble of
postulants.”

His eyes caught hers, their glittering icy
blue piercing into her mind and heart. Margaret suddenly understood
that they were no longer talking about chess. Perhaps they never
had been talking about it. In his own way, Arden was trying to
answer the question she had asked of him a few days before, in the
stillroom. He was trying to tell her what he wanted of her, and yet
he could not be direct about it. The distant, lost quality in him
would not permit him to speak his true thoughts or his true
wishes.

She could not think why it was so. Arden
could be remarkably blunt when it suited him. Unless…unless there
was a secret reason why he could not be open with her, a reason
connected to the unhappy alteration in his character.

Staring harder into his eyes she caught a
flicker of emotion behind his cold gaze, an emotion she interpreted
as fear. But what could Arden possibly fear? Then it occurred to
her that in his oblique way, he was asking her for help. Help in
what?

To release him from an evil
enchantment.
She almost laughed aloud at the thought. It was
not that she didn't believe in magic or enchantment. Margaret's
great-grandmother had been a Welsh princess, and part of her
inheritance from that lady was a willingness to consider the
possibility of magic. However, the Church strictly forbade such
belief, calling it pagan and ungodly. As a prospective nun,
Margaret knew she ought to reject all such pre-Christian beliefs as
quickly as they arose in her thoughts. Furthermore, she ought to
perform a stiff penance for having such thoughts.

Yet she could not think of any other
explanation for the invisible strictures that bound Arden and kept
him from being the whole man he once had been. For he was not
whole. A part of him was missing, stolen away by she knew not what
evil. Whatever it was, it had something to do with the years he had
spent in the Holy Land.

He continued to stare at her, his eyes boring
into hers, until Margaret could not help but wonder if he could
discern her thoughts.

By the kindness of her own nature, as well as
by the precepts of the conventual life she intended to lead as soon
as she was able to leave Bowen, Margaret was bound to come to the
aid of those who were diseased or wounded or in pain. Arden
suffered from an interior pain so great that it had made him its
prisoner. Margaret did not know what caused the pain but, having
seen it reflected in his eyes several times, she did not doubt its
existence. She put out her hands to him.

“We could talk,” she said.

“Talk?” He gave a bark of scornful
laughter.

“I am capable of intelligent conversation,”
Margaret declared, not troubling to hide her indignation at his
reaction to a suggestion that was kindly meant. “I can read and
write. I'll wager that you cannot. Most knights can't,” she
finished on a note of triumph. To keep him talking to her she was
about to tell him what a help she had been to her late husband's
steward because she could read and write, and count, too.

“You'd lose the wager,” Arden said, cutting
off the proud words she would have spoken. When her eyebrows rose
in silent surprise, he continued his explanation.

“It's true enough that scholarly pursuits
were not encouraged among the squires fostered at Cliffmore Castle.
I learned to read and write later. Elsewhere.” He snapped out the
last word in a way that made it clear he was not going to expand
upon the circumstances of his schooling.

Seeing his gaze turn inward and his mouth go
hard, Margaret guessed that his learning had taken place in the
Holy Land. Recalling the deep scar on his thigh, she wondered if he
had whiled away the days of his convalescence from that wound with
a tutor.

“My lord,” she said, retreating into the
safety of formality, “unless your sister is present and we are
concerned with her welfare, you and I seem to do naught but quarrel
when we are together. Therefore, I think we should remain apart
until Catherine is well again.”

“We did not quarrel the night we met,” he
said. “Nor on one or two occasions after that first time.”

“I bid you good night, my lord.” Unwilling to
pursue that disturbing subject any further, Margaret turned to
leave.