By Possession (5 page)

“The fee for you is two hundred pounds.”

Two hundred pounds! She almost upbraided him with scathing words that could earn her a public whipping. “Then I ask the amount of the merchet for a woman who marries.”

“On the manor or off? ”

“Off.”

“Who is the man?”

“I will find one.”

“Not from what I hear.”

Laughter waved through the crowd. Her face burned. Dear God, he had already heard about that. Probably from Raymond.

“Not all men are superstitious.”

“Indeed not. I, for one, am not superstitious at all.” Some women clucked their tongues at this more blatant suggestion. “If you find another, on the estate or off, I hope that he is rich and extremely enthralled, Moira. The merchet for you is one hundred pounds.”

Fury almost strangled her voice. “That is not within the customs of the manor.”

“Do not presume to instruct me, woman. If you marry off the estate, it is the same as losing your services through freedom. The price should be two hundred then, but since you will pay a yearly fee while absent I have decided to be generous. In the old days I could have refused permission for you to marry at all, but the Church has interfered with that. Still, it is my right to set the amount.”

More for the crowd to chew on. The rumbling comments grew into a low roar. She rose with humiliated exasperation and turned to the jurors. “I ask a judgment then. My mother and I were freed upon the last lord's death. You all know this.”

The twelve men squirmed. Addis stood. “The woman claims this, but even if it is so, it does not apply. Her mother was bonded to Darwendon and even though Edith moved to Hawkesford when she married the falconer, her tie was to this land. And this land was given to me before Sir Bernard died. This freedom, even if the woman speaks the truth, is invalid.”

Her jaw clenched and she faced Addis down. “My mother was born here, but I was not. Bernard's freedom may have been invalid for her, but not for me.”

“At best your situation is ambiguous and you owe obligations to both Hawkesford and Darwendon. As to Bernard's freedom, is there anyone here who will pledge for you, Moira? Anyone who will swear that they know you speak the truth?”

Even if there were, they would hardly come forward
with that hard countenance challenging them. “I will find a pledge. I ask time until the next hallmote to do so.”

The jurors began agreeing with relief, glad for the delay. She waited tensely until Addis nodded. “It will be so, but until then, you will serve me any way that I order.” Suggestive coos emerged from women at that. He stepped closer and spoke to her ears alone. “Until you find the proof or the pledge, do not challenge me again.”

She made sure only he could hear her reply. “I will challenge you every way that I can about this,
my lord
, until I break these bonds that you have illegally placed on me.”

“I am within the law and my rights and you know it,” he said sharply. “You should be glad for my protection. Freedom has its perils for a woman alone.”

“I managed well enough, and have no need or interest in whatever protection you imagine you can give. Until I can undo this outrage, I will serve you according to a vil-lein's customary obligations, but do not interpret my doing so as acceptance. And if you ever think that I challenge your rights and power, then do your worst.”

The words poured out in a seething whisper and when she had finished she glared at him. He looked at her long enough that her defiant stance began to feel a little ridiculous. Then his lids lowered over lights of surprising warmth. He found her dare amusing!

“I am pleased to find you so willing to submit. You will continue caring for the boy, and you will help Leonard by supervising the women in the manor house.”

Submit! “I will gladly care for Brian. As to the rest, that is your lady's duty.”

“I have no lady, so you will do it, and the women will obey you because I say so. I'm sure that you know how it is done. Your years at Hawkesford as Claire's Shadow should have taught you.”

He was reducing her to a manor servant! It was the
final insult. She turned on her heel without waiting for his dismissal.

She halted with the first step, startled by the silence and rapt expressions surrounding her. A field of eyes had been watching their private confrontation with fascination.

He had claimed that he wanted her to care for Brian, but that became irrelevant when three mornings later he instructed her to pack the boy's garments. She listened to his abrupt order and her heart split.

“You are taking him away?”

“He is not safe here.”

“Where is he going?”

“Only I will know where.”

“When do you leave?”

“At once.”

He stood at the threshold of the house, looking out over the yard, his unscarred profile facing her. A sickening anticipation of loss hollowed out her insides. She resented that this man did not feel the same thing. Easy for him to send Brian away. He had barely paid the boy any attention at all since he found him. She examined the unwavering expression that said he privately contemplated many things, but not his son or her grief.

He had changed more than time could explain. The smiling, happy youth had become encased in impenetrable layers, much like the insects captured in a few of the amber crystals that decorated his primitive tunic.

And yet she could see that boy in him still and could picture the fuller face before it had matured, could remember the generous mouth when it was mobile and quick to laugh and not an uncompromising line more frightening than the scar. And the eyes—how their golden lights had danced when he was young! Now they glinted
with danger and caution, full of tiny bonfires no one could see behind.

They were all afraid of him. The servants, the peasants, even Raymond. The piercing regard could reduce them to puddles of obedience. The severe expression brooked no defiance. The lean strength of his body and the pale slashing scar eloquently announced that he had survived far worse than any of them could offer. He still wore the buckskin garments sometimes, but even when he donned woven cottes and tunics his aura remained slightly foreign and mysterious, as if the barbarian ways had seeped into him in ways he could not shed so easily as clothing.

They were terrified of him, but she was not. At least not in the ways that the others were. That, more than his orders, had established her authority with the women. It surprised them. Sometimes, when he spoke to her and she did not fluster and tremble, she wondered if it surprised him too. But she could never be afraid of a man after she had held his grief and despair in her arms, even if he did not remember that she had done so.

He turned suddenly. “You think that I should have told you sooner. The pain would have been no lighter if you had known.”

Nay, no lighter, and certainly longer. Perhaps it had been a mercy that he hadn't warned her. She had been able to enjoy the few days' reprieve.

“When he is gone, I assume that this will be over?”

“Over?”

“My imprisonment and slavery here.”

He looked at her much as he had at the hallmote, with a combination of anger and amusement and curiosity. Her throat dried. Nay, he did not terrify her the way he did everyone else, but this intense attention badly unsettled her and she worked not to show it.

His silent appraisal drew out and turned invasive, as if
he sought to learn something about her that his eyes could not quite see. She resented this inspection, but she could not turn away from it and sever the peculiar connection it created between them.

“You do not know what you speak of, Moira. Perhaps I should tell you what happens to women who are truly imprisoned and enslaved.” He reached out and fingered a strand of her hair escaping the front of her veil. “Be glad I do not show you.”

For a moment they stood there, his fingertips barely grazing the feathery hair, his arm spanning the space separating them. A frightening, thrilling tension throbbed through that instant. Then he stepped forward abruptly, away from her, so that she barely saw his face. Only then did she realize that she had frozen into breathless immobility.

“It is over when I say it is over. Now prepare the boy. It is time for him to leave here.”

It is time.
Raymond had said that in her cottage. Well, now it was truly time.

She packed Brian's things. His young eyes solemnly watched her while he comforted them both in his childish way, reassuring her bravely that his father had promised he would see her again.

Addis awaited with two horses. The privilege of being permitted to ride his own mount obliterated Brian's sadness. He joyfully let his father lift him up and became absorbed with the saddle, barely looking at her until their farewell kiss.

She watched them ride out with a breaking heart and stood at the gate almost an hour until their specks disappeared over the southern horizon.

And then Brian was gone, and with him her purpose in life.

She stayed there for a while longer, absorbing the numbing grief of what had just occurred so quickly. Then, since no one seemed inclined to stop her, she walked down the road to the village.

Cottages and longhouses angled this way and that off the lane, each with its small toft in front surrounded by a ditch or fence and filled with pecking poultry. Men were returning from the fields for dinner and their women appeared in the doorways to greet them. She pretended not to notice the unusual amount of attention that her presence raised.

Paul the cooper fell into step beside her as she passed the alewoman's house. A handsome young man with a lanky strength, Paul had been the one to coin the title “the virgin widow.” One night some men had dared him to test the superstition he had helped create and he had come to her house in a drunken stupor, determined to prove his fearlessness. She had been forced to knock him unconscious with an iron pan.

“So you've the lord's favor now, have you?”

“Nay. Do not start on that, Paul.”

“Two hundred pounds he put on you. Makes a man wonder what a woman could offer that's worth that much. No wonder those old husbands died.”

“We barely speak. He has no interest in me in that way, nor I him. There is nothing like that between us.”

She spoke with more conviction than she felt. To be sure, Addis had done nothing specific to raise her concerns. Unlike Raymond's, his eyes did not undress her and he did not find excuses to sidle too close. And yet, sometimes she would turn and find him there, looking at her with that intensity he had shown again today, contemplating her as if his mind followed some debate toward a judgment. A peculiar pull would tug between them that
unnerved her more than any leer from Raymond ever could.

Her woman's instincts had grown alert even while her mind kept rejecting the possibility. This was Addis de Valence, after all, and she was Claire's Shadow. But all these subtle attentions had made her feel wary when he was present, and not nearly so fearless as she appeared, but for reasons that had nothing to do with his power as the lord and everything to do with those old feelings that kept wanting to surface.

“We all heard him under the oak tree. All saw him and you and how cozy things were,” Paul said, leering.

“You are drunk again.”

“Word is that he has you sit at the table with him and run his household. Quite the mistress of the manor, from what is said.”

“I take care of Brian. I …”

“We men in the village aren't good enough for a fine lady like you, eh? First a gentry knight and then a townsman and then the image of virtue for four years, but in a blink you go whore up the hill.”

That, of course, was the crux of it and the reason for the looks and whispers that had followed her progress down the lane. The villagers took such things in stride if it was among themselves. A woman who coupled out of wedlock with a man of her own degree did so for love or pleasure, but if she went to the bed of a lord or knight it was probably for gain, and she was a whore.

That had been the assumption about Edith despite the affection she and Bernard had shared, and it looked as if it was becoming the judgment about her. If she ever returned to her cottage the men would probably start lining up in her garden, jingling the coin in their purses.

Well, she had already decided she would not return,
nor would she remain in the manor house. The reason for staying had just ridden through the gate. It was time to get on with her life, and not the life Addis de Valence had decreed with his insistence that she belonged to him.

She would simply leave. Others had done so. Her father, and Claire's servant Alice. Rare was the lord who pursued.

She shook off Paul's company, and strode past the last of the village and on to the cottage inherited from her mother. It was another of Bernard's three gifts. No time now to sell it or the field, but land made as good a dowry as coin, so that shouldn't matter.

Aye, she would leave, and she would go far away. Far from the stupid rumors about her husbands' deaths, far from the memories of Brian that tore at her composure, and very far from Addis de Valence, who wanted to own her for reasons she couldn't fathom.

Years ago I would have accepted shackles of iron, Addis. But I am not that awestruck girl and you are not the boy whom I admired.

She would speak with Tom Reeve tonight, and trade him the use of her own virgate and this house in return for his extra donkey and cart. She would leave tomorrow. Addis expected to be gone at least a week, but she wanted to be far away before he returned.

She bent to the hearth and probed at some rocks near its base. One shifted and she clawed it away. Feeling into the recess, her hand closed around a little leather sack. She pulled it out, then sat on the bed and emptied it.

A heap of coins fell into the fabric between her thighs. She didn't need to count them to know they amounted to eight pounds, five shillings, and ten pence, the profits from planting her virgate and selling her baskets and living very frugally for four years.

She sifted the coins away from what lay beneath them. She lifted the small object and a light beam from the window fractured its red watery planes into a display of brilliance.