Beneath the sarcasm was a genuine hurt, and he took no offense. “Can I help?” he asked, and she shook her head, swiping at her wet cheek with the back of her hand, a gesture he found plaintively childlike.
“I did not mean to bite your head off,” she said. “You’ve always been right good to me, Lord Ranulf, and deserve better than that. I was crying because Lord Harry told me he is leaving.”
“I see,” Ranulf said, for he did. Her tears made perfect sense now. Of course she would be sorry to see their liaison end, for she’d achieved the pinnacle of success for one in her precarious profession: she’d found herself a highborn protector, one who was young and personable in the bargain. Little wonder, he thought, that the lass dreaded going back to her old life in Salisbury.
Lora could not read books, but she’d learned, of necessity, to read men. “I’ll not deny,” she said, “that I shall miss the comforts of a castle. Servants and a feather bed and a roof that does not leak and no lack of candles or firewood—who would willingly give up such ease? But whether you believe me or not, it is Lord Harry I shall miss the most. He never made me feel like a whore. Not once!” she added defiantly, as if to fend off his disbelief.
“Is that so uncommon, Lora?” he asked, and she nodded, marveling that a lord like Ranulf could ask so innocent a question; she did not doubt that Henry, even at sixteen, already understood more than his uncle about mankind’s propensity for careless cruelties.
“Very uncommon, my lord,” she said bleakly. “But Lord Harry has a good heart. Moreover, he truly likes women.”
“Most men do, lass,” Ranulf pointed out in amusement, and was surprised when she shook her head again.
“No, my lord.” She contradicted him with an odd smile, one that was both cynical and sad. “Most men like to lay with women.”
Ranulf felt pity stirring, and he hoped it did not show upon his face. “Harry truly has no choice, Lora. He must return to Normandy…but not for good. He’ll be back.”
The smile she gave him now was polite and practiced and far too knowing for her years. “Yes,” she said, “but not for me.”
“I RAN into Lora in the stairwell. She said you’ve decided to go. For what it is worth, Harry, I think you made a wise choice.”
Henry shrugged. “Well…my father always said that if you want to get invited back, you’d best know when to go home.”
Ranulf was not fooled by the levity. “It sounds to me,” he said, “as if you’re uneasy in your own mind about this.”
Henry shrugged again. “It is just that if I go now, Ranulf, all my efforts will have been so…so damned inconclusive.”
“You’re going home alive, Harry. What is inconclusive about that? For nigh on a year, Stephen and Eustace did their accursed best to hunt you down, but to no avail. You think that went unnoticed? All over England, there are men thinking to themselves: If they could not bring the empress’s son to ruination at sixteen, how are they going to fare against him once he reaches nineteen or twenty? No, lad, this campaign of yours was a rousing success, for you opened the door wide for your next foray. And you’ve got a powerful ally on your side—time.”
“I’ve a better ally than that. I’ve got Eustace, too,” Henry said, and smiled at Ranulf’s surprise. “Fortune’s Wheel has turned with a vengeance, Uncle. Why was it so easy for Stephen to steal my mother’s crown? The country was not full of men afire to put Stephen on the throne. They just did not want the empress, Geoffrey of Anjou’s wife. And now…now none of them can be utterly sure that I’ll make a good king.” His smile flashed again, sudden and sardonic. “But there’s hardly a soul in England,” he said, “who doubts that Eustace would make a bad one!”
RANULF accompanied Henry to Wareham, and promised to join him and Maude in Normandy after he paid a farewell visit to his Welsh kin. He and Padarn then started off on their long journey back to Gwynedd. Henry sailed with the tide for Barfleur.
Henry received a joyous welcome from his parents and partisans in Normandy. Geoffrey was pleased enough with his firstborn’s prowess to declare Henry legally of age. He then did something which greatly gratified his wife, horrified Stephen, alarmed the French king—newly back from the Holy Land—and astonished most of Christendom. He’d always contended that he was holding Normandy for Henry. But he’d won the duchy by his own efforts, and in their world, men rarely yielded up power of their own free will. That was what Geoffrey now did, though, relinquishing his rights to Normandy in his son’s favor. While still a month shy of his seventeenth birthday, Henry became Duke of Normandy.
45
Trefriw, North Wales
February 1150
IT was a typical February afternoon—raw and grey. Selwyn, one of the youths honing his skills of manhood in Rhodri’s service, had built a fire in the open hearth, burying a log in wood ash so it would burn slowly and steadily. Bechan, the serving-maid, was dipping candles in sheep’s tallow, for only the very wealthy and the very extravagant burned wax candles for everyday use. Olwen, who attended Rhiannon and Eleri, had positioned a spindle close to the hearth so she could spin flax in comparative comfort. And Rhiannon had brought a mortar and pestle to the table, where she set about crushing wood betony. The cook had been ailing, she explained to the curious Selwyn, and when mixed with honey, powdered betony leaves eased coughing and shortness of breath.
Selwyn was never satisfied with a simple answer and he wanted to know all about the other uses of betony. Rhiannon answered patiently as he flung question after question her way, for she liked the boy, but she was glad, nonetheless, when he fetched a whetstone and began to sharpen his sword. He was touchingly proud of the weapon—his first—for he was only fourteen, and he was soon so intent upon his task that Rhiannon and herbal remedies were forgotten.
Rhiannon welcomed the silence, for she’d awakened that morning with a headache that was so far resisting both sage and pennyroyal. She’d been able, though, to use the headache to escape accompanying Enid and Eleri on a courtesy call to a neighbor who’d recently given birth to her first child. Enid and Eleri had not objected, for the woman invariably fluttered around Rhiannon like a deranged moth, so acutely uncomfortable with Rhiannon’s blindness that she made everyone else equally uncomfortable with her.
Rhiannon had another—secret—reason for not wanting to visit Blodwen. She agreed heartily with Eleri’s caustic assessment of Blodwen as a woman “who has feathers where her brains ought to be.” She could bear Blodwen’s twittering and fidgety hospitality—if she had to. What she could not endure was that the Almighty had seen fit to give foolish, shallow Blodwen what Rhiannon would never have herself: a newborn son.
Snatching up his mantle, Selwyn muttered something about an “errand.” Rhiannon suspected he was off to the kitchen, for he seemed to spend half of his time there, trying to inveigle cider and honeyed wafers from the cook. He’d been gone only a few moments when the door opened again and a familiar voice bellowed out an unnecessary proclamation of his arrival.
Rhiannon was delighted; her father had been at Aber for the past week, attending his king, Owain Gwynedd. “Papa, you’re back early!” Pushing her chair away from the table, she started toward the sound of his voice.
The warning was not in time. Her father cried out her name, but by then she’d already stumbled over something out in the middle of the floor, something hard and heavy, something that should not have been there. As she fell, she felt a sudden surge of heat and she twisted desperately away from it. She avoided the open hearth, but hit the ground hard enough to drive all the air out of her lungs. Momentarily stunned, she lay still until her father reached her, with Olwen just a step behind.
“I am not hurt, Papa,” she insisted, and after she’d repeated it for the fourth time, he finally believed her. He was assisting her to her feet when Selwyn came back into the hall. Rhodri glanced from the boy to the offending whetstone, and then erupted. Ranulf had once told Rhiannon and Eleri about a legendary mountain called Vesuviu
s, said to belch forth fire and smoke. Rhiannon thought her father’s temper was like that volcano, usually so inert and sluggish that his rare explosions were terrifying. There was no doubt that Selwyn was thoroughly cowed, reduced to incoherent stammerings as Rhodri berated him furiously for his carelessness.
“The day I took you into my household, I warned you that you were never to leave things strewn about or to move furniture, did I not? You swore upon your very soul that you would be heedful…and so what happens? My daughter nearly fell into the fire because you did not put your whetstone away!”
Rhiannon eventually managed to reassure her father, assuage his anger, and spare Selwyn the worst of his wrath. By then she was exhausted, for she’d been more shaken by her fall than she was willing to admit. As soon as she could, she withdrew to the bedchamber she shared with Eleri, and lay down, fully clothed, upon the bed.
Her cheek was stinging and would likely bruise. But the bruises that troubled her were the ones on her memory. It would be a while before she could forget her terror as she felt the flames. What frightened her just as much was the reminder of how fragile the defenses of her world were. All it took was one misplaced whetstone to reveal how vulnerable she truly was.
When she finally fell asleep, it wasn’t peaceful. She was dreaming of Ranulf, but there was no joy in it, just unease and shadows and an ominous sense of foreboding, for they’d not gotten a letter from him in months, and Rhiannon had no proof that he was even still alive. She tossed and turned restlessly, and was glad to be awakened by the opening door.
It was a man’s footstep, too light for Rhodri, too heavy for Selwyn. Rhiannon sat up, puzzled, and listened again. Who else could it be but Papa or the lad? And then she caught her breath. “Ranulf?” she whispered, half afraid to let herself hope, and was rewarded with a sound sweeter to her than the heavenly harps of the Almighty’s own angels—Ranulf’s laughter.
“You are truly amazing, lass! How is it that you can remember the sound of my step after so many months?”
She could have told him it was because she’d heard those footsteps echoing through her dreams almost every night since he’d gone away, but of course nothing short of torture would have gotten that out of her. “I am so glad you’ve come back, Ranulf,” she said instead, and added a silent prayer that this time he would stay.
THE fortnight that followed was the happiest of Rhiannon’s life. She knew it couldn’t last, that sooner or later Ranulf would ride off again; he’d said as much, that he’d agreed to join Henry in Normandy. But she resolutely refused to think about that. He could always change his mind. For the moment, it was enough that he was safe and well and home.
Ranulf had returned in high spirits, bringing gifts and gossip from the world that lay beyond the mountains of Eryri. He enthralled them with dramatic accounts of the escape from Dursely and the triumph at Devizes. He horrified them with stories of the suffering Stephen had loosed upon his own subjects. And he fascinated them with reports of the scandal that had trailed the French monarchs all the way from Palestine.
Rhiannon and Eleri did not find Eleanor’s thwarted attempt to escape her marital bonds as surprising as Ranulf had; Welsh women enjoyed liberties unheard-of in the rest of Christendom, one of them being the right to walk away from a miserable marriage. They sympathized instinctively with the spirited French queen, were indignant that she should have been forced to accompany her husband from Antioch, and listened spellbound when Ranulf revealed the unexpected twist to this sad tale.
On their way home from the Holy Land, he related, they’d passed some days in Italy, as guests of the Pope, and the elderly pontiff had set himself a herculean task: mending the rift between these utterly mismatched souls. He had even gone so far, Ranulf divulged, as to escort them to bed and urge them to make their peace between the sheets. The Pope’s blessing seemed to have paid off, for Eleanor was now pregnant, for only the third time in thirteen years. The child was due that summer, and the French king’s subjects were waiting anxiously to see if, after a miscarriage and a daughter, she would at last bear him a son.
Each morning, Rhiannon awakened with the same subversive thought, one she quickly disavowed: Would this be the day that Ranulf announced he’d soon be leaving? But it was not Ranulf who brought this interlude to an abrupt end; it was her father.
A damp darkness had fallen by the time Rhiannon started out to the stables with a jug of milk, meant for the stable cat and her kittens. Cats were rarely kept as pets, except in nunneries, but Rhiannon was enchanted by them, for she did not need sight to appreciate their sleek lines and soft fur and lulling purr. She had just reached their well when Rhodri rode in. Hastily dismounting, he sent his horse off to the stables with Selwyn, and hurried toward his daughter.
“Is Ranulf within? I must talk to him straightaway, lass. I’ve come up with a way to keep him in Wales, here with us where he belongs!”
Rhiannon’s heartbeat picked up a quicker rhythm. “Truly, Papa? How?”
Rhodri reached out and gripped her by the elbows; she could tell by the tone of his voice that he was smiling. “I am going to name him as my heir and convince him to take Eleri as his wife.” He heard her gasp and enveloped her in an expansive hug; she found her face pressed against the wet wool of his mantle, the feel scratchy and smothering. “It is the ideal solution, Rhiannon. Where could I hope to find a better brother-in-law for you? And Ranulf and Eleri will have a good marriage, whilst making their home and raising their children on our land. I tell you, lambkin, it is well-nigh perfect!”
Rhiannon was too stunned to respond, but Rhodri was too jubilant to notice. “You’d best go feed those flea-bitten cats ere I decide to drown the sorry lot,” he teased. “But do not tarry longer than need be with the mangy beasts, for we’ll have much to celebrate this night!”
Rhiannon caught the edge of the well enclosure, held on so tightly that the stones left imprints in the palms of her hands. She needed the physical contact, a way of reassuring herself that there was still something in her world that was familiar, safe. She’d sometimes wondered what it must be like to be drunk, to have all her senses blurred by mead. Now…she knew. Reality as she’d known it had fled forever as soon as her father had begun speaking.
Gradually some of the shock faded, and her numbed brain started to function again. She could not let this happen. She must stop her father ere it was too late. She’d dropped the milk jug, tripped over it now as she moved away from the well, but managed to keep her footing. She’d gotten herself turned around, though, and when she started for the house, she was actually going in the opposite direction. It was not until she caught the smell of hay and horses that she realized her mistake. Spinning away from the stable, she began to retrace her steps, nearly weeping with frustration and fear that she’d not be in time. When she heard her name called behind her, she grabbed Selwyn’s arm as he came up beside her. “Take me to the hall,” she demanded, “quickly!”
Selwyn was surprised, for Rhiannon could be as prickly as a hedgehog when her independence was concerned. But he did as she bade, and led her back across the bailey, doing his best to avoid the worst patches of mud. Rhiannon would not have noticed had he steered her into a swamp, and she forgot to thank him when they at last reached the hall. “Papa,” she cried, “Papa, where are you?”
“Whatever is the man up to, Rhiannon? Never have I seen Rhodri look so full of himself, like a lad who’d discovered where his birthday present was hidden away!” The voice was Enid’s, amused and fondly indulgent. “He said nary a word, did not even shed his mantle ere he dragged Ranulf off to our bedchamber! Do you know what—”
Rhiannon heard no more. Turning away, she plunged through the doorway, back out into the blackness of the bailey. It was all she could think to do, for she could not go to her bedchamber; Eleri was there and would need one look at her face to know something was dreadfully wrong. She could not deal with Eleri or Enid now. She had to have some time alone, time to decide what to d
o. The afternoon drizzle had stopped and the air was dry but very cold. She stepped unheedingly into the puddles, getting her feet wet and her skirts muddied. She was shivering, and when she tasted salt on her tongue, she realized she was crying, too, but for the moment, all that mattered was reaching the stables, the only sanctuary she had left.
Stumbling into the stables, she called out repeatedly until she was sure she was alone, and then sank down upon a bale of hay. She heard nickering and snorting as horses craned their necks over their stall doors, hoping she’d brought treats again, and once the cats discovered her, the kittens began to pounce on her ankles and climb up her skirts. She felt leaden with fatigue, not moving even when they dug their needlesharp little claws into her leg. She could not let this marriage come to pass. Blessed Lady Mary, hear your servant Rhiannon’s plea. It must not happen.
She would have to tell her father. She’d fought so hard to keep her secret. Mayhap Enid suspected, but no one else did. She’d made sure of that. All for naught now. And once she spoke up…what then? She’d break her father’s heart by thwarting this marriage. And what of Eleri? What if she truly wanted to marry Ranulf? Ranulf. He’d have to be told, too, and nothing would ever be the same between them after that. Their friendship—all she’d dared hope to have from him—would be spoiled, poisoned by his pity. And then he’d go away again, and this time he would not be back.
She shivered again, as much from the anticipated humiliation as from the cold. How could she bear to do this? Casting aside her pride would be worse than being stripped naked. But how could she keep silent? How could she live under the same roof with Ranulf and Eleri once they were wed? Bidding them goodnight at the door of their bedchamber. Hearing the new intimacy in their laughter. Lying awake at night, unwillingly imagining their lovemaking. Awaiting Eleri’s announcement that she was with child. How could she ever endure it? How could she not give herself away a hundred times a day?