She wrinkled her nose. He’d heard her? Heard her? When?
“Is something wrong?” he asked. “You look like you bit down on a bug.”
“I…” She scrambled for a likely excuse. “This tonic does stink.”
“It tastes worse.” He finished the cup and released her at last. Contemplative now, he asked, “You were thrown out of your holdings with nothing? You and your children?”
“Aye.” She wanted to move away, but she had to find out. “Did you understand my voice when you were close to death?”
“That’s not important.” He dismissed her question without curiosity. “How many children?”
“Two boys. And I think it’s important.”
“Do you?” She had caught his attention, and he stroked his chin. “How interesting.”
By the saints, she didn’t mean for him to think about it! “Probably not important.” She tried to smile. “Two sons, Parkin and Allyn. I didn’t know what to do when the prince’s troops came and put us onto the road with nothing but the clothes we wore.”
“The prince’s troops. Did they hurt you?”
“Rape me, you mean?” Unwillingly, she remembered that dreadful day. “Nay. The knight in charge had strict orders, and he followed them.” With scorn and haughtiness. “Throw me and anything that hinted of Robin’s possessions into the dirt.” She’d stood there among the pile of flags and tapestries marked with Robin’s crest and held the boys’ hands. “Prepare the castle for its new lord.”
“Who was that?”
“I have not heard the prince has awarded Jagger to anyone yet.”
“I know where he won’t award it,” Hugh said.
An odd thing to say. “Where?”
“To any of the lords who support de Montfort.” He suddenly seemed to taste the tonic. “Give me something to clear my tongue.”
She was glad to change the subject and helped him back onto his pillow. Wrapping a strip of padding around the clay pot warming on the oven, she brought it to his side and lifted the lid. The scent of herbs wafted into the air, bearing more than a hint of…meat?
Suddenly alert, he lifted his head. “What’s that?”
“Broth,” she said, grinning. “Wharton snared a rabbit and cooked it in a stew.”
He craned his neck and stared into the pot. “Where’s the stew?”
She understood him perfectly. “You can’t have pieces of meat yet. Your stomach’s not ready.”
“Nonsense. I’m starving on that porridge you’ve been shoveling into me.”
“I’m lucky to get that for you.” She dipped the spoon in the broth. “Do you want this, or not?”
He wanted to argue.
He wanted to eat.
He ate.
As she fed him, she said, “’Tis a great sin, not sharing the food with which God has blessed us. The others in the abbey long for meat also. But I didn’t think I could claim I had snared the rabbit in the royal forest while out looking for herbs.”
“Couldn’t Wharton have explained he snared the rabbit?”
“They already eye him with suspicion. Not that we don’t get vagrants hanging about the abbey, but your Wharton has an unusually rough edge to him, and they see him only in the dawn and the twilight.” She liked the way Hugh ate, quickly, savoring each drop, yet determined to let every spoonful settle before taking another. “He’s protective of his identity.”
“Aye.” Hugh looked grim. “There are many who would recognize Wharton and betray him for twelve gold coins.”
That made her squirm yet again. She tried to keep faith in what she thought was best, as Lady Corliss had instructed, but were there those who would wreak havoc on the abbey for sheltering these two men? Had she brought disaster on them all?
In a voice that sounded amused, he asked, “Are you really so inept the nuns wouldn’t have believed you could trap a rabbit?”
“I am not inept at all! But taking a rabbit from the royal forest is poaching, and our abbess takes a dim view of such dishonesty,” she replied.
“You could tell her it died at your feet.”
“I can’t lie to Lady Corliss. She looks at me so calmly through those blue eyes and—” At the memory of that kind gaze and the disappointment a transgression brought, Edlyn shuddered. “Nay, I can’t. Anyway, I really wouldn’t know how to explain I needed an extra helping to bring to the dispensary.”
He nodded, understanding that. “So what happened to the rest of the rabbit?”
“Wharton and I ate it.” She waited for him to snarl at her for her selfishness.
Instead his gaze swept her. “Good. You look like you could use a meal.”
A jab of gloom surprised her. She remembered a time when Robin had spent a whole day just gazing at her naked body, stroking her, admiring her. Her body was the best he’d ever seen, he claimed, and her body had been the one chain she thought would keep him bound to her.
Silly woman that she had been. His boundless delight in her physical appearance had never faded, but nothing chained Robin. And now Hugh looked at her without interest and called her skinny.
It was stupid to care or to let Hugh’s consistent indifference dig at her. After all, what had the man done but ignore her childish infatuation and go on with his life?
Reaching into her bag, she brought out a crust of bread she’d saved from her own meal and dunked it into the broth, then transferred it to his open mouth.
“Mm.” He closed his eyes and sighed as if tasting paradise.
Then he opened them, and she knew he had focused on a new problem.
“How old are your sons?” he asked.
“They have both seen eight winters.”
“Twins?”
She gave the answer she always did. “Two boys as alike as you would ever see.”
“So rare that both children survived birth.”
She didn’t answer that.
“’Tis time they were fostered.” He spoke briskly.
She answered in a like tone. “They have been fostered. Our abbot from the adjoining monastery has taken them under his wing, and even now they travel on their first pilgrimage.”
“A pilgrimage?” His brows lowered, and he chewed the new sop of bread thoroughly before he replied. “An abbot? You have placed them with an abbot?”
His incredulity galled her. “Who else would you suggest?”
“For the earl of Jagger’s sons? They should be pages in a knight’s household.”
“They don’t want to be in a knight’s household.” She pointed the spoon at him for emphasis. “They want to be monks.”
“The earl of Jagger’s sons want to be monks?”
His voice hit a note she’d never heard him use before, and she answered defensively, “They do.”
“A waste! The earl of Jagger was one of the finest fighters I ever met. Why, he almost defeated me!”
He jumped and glanced at her sideways while animosity swept her. “At one of the tournaments he frequented, no doubt, while he left me at home to raise money for his battles and raise his sons for the future.”
He took the bowl from her and blotted the last of the broth out of it with the remaining bread. He handed her the bowl.
She clutched it tightly and urged herself to stand, to put distance between them, to ignore him as the shallow pig deserved to be ignored. Instead she remained as she was and said, “You give me advice on how to raise my sons, but how much do you care for their fate? They are my boys, kept by me and nurtured by me. To you they are only a whim to interest you as you lie there, and you are subject to whims which are nothing more than itches. You scratch them, you’re done, you forget. But if I allowed you to, you would twist my whole world around for those itches, and when you had scratched and forgotten, my world would still be askew.”
“I am not so capricious!”
“All men are capricious. They have the power, why shouldn’t they be?”
He took a breath and when he spoke, he used t
he voice of reason. “It is not capriciousness which makes me realize that any sons of the earl of Jagger will be fighters. I knew Robin, Lady Edlyn, in the prime of his life, and I felt the power of his blade. I saw how his men worshiped him and how the ladies…well.” He cleared his throat. “You say his sons want to be monks. Perhaps, but perhaps if shown a different path, they would find themselves more fitted to knighthood.”
“Robin died in the prime of his life.” Her heart almost stopped its beating as she remembered the lively, handsome, heroic man and realized he would never again walk this earth. “I want more than that for my sons.”
“But what do they want for themselves?”
“They are eight years old. They don’t know what they want.” She stood and placed the bowl in the bucket with her other dirty dishes. “Other parents set their children’s feet on the path which they must follow all their lives. Why do you think I’m less capable?”
“Perhaps your father could give you advice.”
He hadn’t answered the question, she noticed. “My father doesn’t even know where we are.”
“Why not?”
She opened the bag she had taken with her into the woods that morning and shook the plants and roots out on the table. “I haven’t sent him word—nor has he sent to ask. When I married the first time, I was one of five girls. My mother gave birth to two more after that, all to be married or placed in a nunnery, all to be given some kind of dowry. I helped purchase husbands for three of my sisters, as I was expected to do.” She sniffed the mandrake root, then continued calmly, “Nevertheless, I hazard my father would not welcome me back into his home, disgraced as I am.”
“A sad state of affairs,” Hugh rumbled.
“Not at all,” Edlyn answered. “You were born to a family as poor as mine. Would your parents welcome you home again?”
“Nay, but I’m a man grown!”
“Too true.” Had he detected her sarcasm? She doubted it. He was too much of a man to ever conceive a woman’s thoughts. She was a woman grown and as accomplished as he in her endeavors. But they were not a man’s endeavors and therefore worth little.
It irked her, the way men plunged through life, assuming their way was the right way, secure in the world they had created especially to serve their own needs and wants. Women had to try to fit into that world, to understand their men’s thoughts and desires. If a woman failed, she was punished by her man. If a man failed, a woman was punished with her man.
“Perhaps Sir David would consent to give his opinion,” Hugh said.
He sounded more hesitant now. Maybe he was reading her after all. She could imagine the frown that puckered his forehead, the way the light hazel of his eyes deepened to green, the serious turn of his mouth.
She could imagine all that, and she cursed herself for that imagination. Why did she know him well enough to forecast his reactions? Oh, aye, she had spent hours as a girl studying him—his firm lips, wide with the promise of sensuality, the way his blond hair swept back from his face, how his eyebrows habitually lowered as he faced the challenges before him.
But she’d forgotten all that! It had been years ago. She did not, damn it, did not carry his image like an icon in her mind.
Which led her to another less than palatable thought. If she wasn’t remembering him, then she’d been observing him here in the dispensary. Observing him not as a patient, but as a man worthy of attention. She didn’t believe she’d been doing that. Yet here she was, prognosticating how he would act and react.
She hated this about herself. It was like thinking she had been cured of an infection only to find it lingered still in her veins.
“I hope you’re mumbling that I have a good idea.” Hugh didn’t sound as if he believed that.
Separating the trefoil, she stacked it into a pile and began plucking the crimson blossoms. “When I lived with Lady Alisoun, she and Sir David treated me with the greatest kindness. I have nothing but respect for their opinions, but I fear I am unable to apply to them for anything. It would not be acceptable to me.”
“Your pride is not seemly in a woman.”
Her hands clenched into fists, and the scent of spring clover assailed her. Opening her hands, she wiped the smears of red from her palms. In a low tone, she said, “My pride is all I have, and it has sustained me for a very long time now.”
“You’re too independent.”
“Whose fault is that?” Her movements jerky, she stretched a thin cloth over the table and dumped the blossoms onto it.
“Mine, perhaps.”
She almost didn’t hear him, and she didn’t understand what he meant anyway.
He said, “When this war is over, I will have several estates to go with my title. I could foster your sons then.”
She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t stand it. Hadn’t he heard one single word that she’d said? Was her determination so easily brushed aside? His offer demonstrated the truth of her thoughts—that men created war for the love of fighting and struggled against the civilizing influences of wife and home. When faced with the thought of two boys—boys he had never met—becoming men of peace, Hugh endeavored to save them as surely as the saints endeavored to win a sinner’s soul. She managed a polite tone, but the undercurrent, if he cared to hear, swept through dark and dangerous. “My sons have had too much disruption in their lives already. I am their mother. They will stay with me.”
Gathering the corners of the cloth, she lifted the trefoil. He tried to speak, but she walked past without giving a sign she’d heard and carried the flowers outside. In an area safe from the wind, she knelt and spread them to dry. In the winter they would provide infusions against fits of coughing.
In the winter, Hugh would be gone.
For the first time in her life, she longed for winter. Kneeling down among the herbs, she pulled the few weeds that threatened the comfrey. Last winter had been her first at the abbey. It had been very long, very dull, very cold. She’d longed for the spring as never before, but spring, with its easier travel and its rich landscape, had carried war on its temperate winds. Battle had come too close. The wounded had depleted her stores. A few of the rougher soldiers had threatened to sack the village, and in fact a gold chalice had disappeared from the church.
It took a desperate man to steal from God, and the experience alarmed the nuns. Edlyn thought it frightened the monks, too, untrained as most were in the art of war. Lady Corliss had suggested Edlyn curtail her ventures into the forest until the countryside had settled once more. Edlyn had explained that the season for trefoil was brief, and the leaves from the coltsfoot had to be collected now before they lost their vigor.
What Lady Corliss didn’t understand was that Edlyn needed to escape into those woods. There, no one watched her, no one mocked her for what she had been and what she had become. She could discard her shoes, hike up her skirt, and with a free conscience hunt for medicinal herbs, all the while breathing the air of freedom.
Of course, one time she had had the uneasy sense of being watched. The hair on the back of her neck rose, and she heard the crack of a branch beneath a man’s shoe. When she’d run into Wharton, bloody from skinning the rabbit, she’d been daunted until she recognized him. Then she’d been embarrassed, and he had enjoyed that.
Still, he had denied following her, and she was left with the fear of having been someone’s prey. After that, she had kept a stout oak walking stick close by her side.
She stood. Why was she worried about an imaginary presence? She had two big worries of her own.
She started toward the door when a drop of water struck her cheek. Looking up, she sighed in disgust and relief. Disgust that she had to bring the trefoil in again. Relief that the rain would set the new plants she’d placed in the garden.
She gathered the blossoms and walked back toward the door. As long as Hugh de Florisoun lived in her dispensary, she would have no peace.
He scarcely waited until she crossed the threshold before he said
, “I mean for you to come, too.”
“What are you talking about?” She feared she knew, and she dumped the cloth of blossoms onto the table before she gave in to temptation and threw them at him.
“I’ll foster your sons, and you will live with us.”
She had trouble catching her breath. “Live with you?”
“I will be good to you, Edlyn.”
“Good to me.” She tapped her foot, irritated and insulted.
“I’ll need a woman to tend the house, and you know how to do that, and right well, too.” He dredged up a charming smile—clearly he was used to getting his way. “You’d like that better than this task of digging plants out of the dirt and having to boil decoctions for strangers.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if he knew what she liked and what she didn’t.
“I would?”
“Of course you would,” he said confidently. “Edlyn”—he held out his hand, palm up—“you and I would be an invincible couple.”
“A couple of what?”
His hand dropped and his brows lowered. “A married couple.”
Panic hit her, twisting her stomach, making her want to retch. “Married?”
A tinge of irritation colored his tone. “What did you think I meant?”
“Not married, that’s certain.” Never married. Never again.
His voice rose. “You thought I would propose you stay with me as my mistress while your sons looked on? You thought I would take advantage of your lower status to dishonor you with a suggestion of impropriety?”
She subdued the panic and let irritation sweep her along. “In the past, I have not been impressed with any man’s integrity in the face of a woman’s misfortune.”
In a surge of fury, he rose to his feet. “I am Hugh de Florisoun. I am the living embodiment of chivalry!”
“Sure you are.” It gave her great satisfaction to layer her words with derision. At the same time, she hustled toward him and wrapped her arm around his. “Now lie down before you start bleeding.”
“You doubt me?”
His knees began to shake, and she answered hastily, “I don’t doubt your honor, Hugh. Now let me help you to lie down.”