The Maiden Bride (9 page)

Eleanor could hardly see the woman through her streaming tears as she held her away. "I know the reason, Hannah."

"Do you?"

"Aye. You stayed behind to rescue
me."

Hannah chuckled and waved away the notion. "Oh, ho. Me, my lady? Rescue you, after all you've done for us? Nonsense."

"I need you sorely, Hannah. And Pippa does, too. And Dickon and Lisabet." And a particularly prickly steward. "Your children were well loved, and like it or not, you have a new brood to care for, and we do love you already."

"And I love you, dear girl. Right from the start." Hannah's smile was watery as she opened a drawer of peppercorns and sighed with joy. "You must miss him greatly, milady."

A question from nowhere at all. "Who is that?" Eleanor snuffled back her tears and dropped to her knees in front of another trunk, fishing around with her iron pick inside the interior of the flat-faced lock, feeling for the catch that would spring the hasp on the sugar safe.

"Your husband, my lady. Do you miss him?"

"Do I—" She stopped, only because she might have laughed heartily, and that would have sounded bitter and selfish.

"I've known you only these few hours, but you seem the kind of woman who loves fiercely and forever."

She missed William Bayard like she would miss a boil on her backside. But Hannah had suffered unfathomable loss, a dear family that she must ache for with every breath. She deserved a softer truth. "To be honest, Hannah, by an odd twist of fate, I never actually met my husband."

"What? How does that happen?" The woman sat down on a cask, brushed her palms together, and sniffed at them. "Was he an old man and didn't quite make it up the church steps to take you?"

"No. He was thirty and a bit, or so I was told. And able enough to climb any church steps he came across in his pillaging—to sack the sanctuary and the altar beyond. I doubt the man ever heard a full mass in his life, marriage or otherwise."

"Dearie me. A scoundrel?" Hannah looked too stunned for Eleanor to go into the gruesome details of her husband's blighted career as Edward's Holy Terror.

"A soldier. William Bayard and I were married by a proxy arranged by my father. After which the pestilence came, and then the next thing I heard about my husband was that he had died. In
Calais
, I believe."

"You don't know for sure."

"I know of a certainty that he's dead. But I can't really say that I miss him when I never set eyes on the man, or communicated with him in any way." A fact that rankled more with every cloud of dust she stirred.

Hannah was as persistent as she was insightful. "So you and your husband never shared a marriage bed?"

"No, we didn't." All the heavens be praised. Then a jangling unease rolled across her shoulders, and became a nagging fear that settled like a snake in her stomach.

A marriage unconsummated wasn't quite
complete
in the eyes of the church or in the common laws of the country. So if she'd never been completely married to Bayard, how the devil could she still be his widow?

And if she wasn't his legal widow, then her claim to Faulkhurst was—

Invalid? No. It couldn't be.

Oh, bloody, bleeding hell, to quote her steward.

Chapter 8

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E
very muscle in Nicholas's body ached as he crossed the sun-drenched bailey toward the keep. He was too old to be sleeping in chairs—though he welcomed the chance to practice. A monk's cell couldn't be any less sterile or uncomfortable. Not that a pallet on the gatehouse floor or even a plush feather bed and all the silken trimmings would have left him any better off, or in a less abused mood. Against all of his convictions, and twenty years of expertly overrunning ill-fortified castles, he had dutifully opened the bloody gate wide, had checked on Figgey—his wife's new plowing marvel—and had steeled himself to face her willful crusade with one of his own. One whose sole intent was to repair her castle,
his
castle, and then be gone to the monastery and to solitude—as swiftly and as
distantly as possible.

Distant
seemed more possible in the broad light of day. She'd hardly left him alone all night, had ambushed him round every corner of his dreaming, feeding him ripe plums and warm-skinned peaches, beckoning him, kissing him again and fully, breaking his will a hundred times. A stunning temptation that had roused him near dawn to a brisk walk on the ramparts.

Aye, today would begin their separation, and his solitary walk toward his monastic calling.

He was already practicing chastity with a vengeance. He was serving the less fortunate well enough with her wayfarers, and as for poverty, he hadn't a coin to his name.

Not so impossible, after all.

He climbed the portico steps and entered the great hall, expecting to find it chaotic, stuffed with the child's rambunctious squealing and the lad's blustering. But the hall was empty of people, and as still as a crypt. A strong, familiar silence slipped lead through his veins and slowed his breathing, thickening the cool air with weighty memories.

Of clouds of thyme and juniper collecting in the timbered ceiling, of pungent, medicinal smoke billowing from dozens of braziers round the clock, stationed like hellish sentries between the cots and the pallets, between the dying and the newly fallen.

He'd called on every resource that he could buy or beg or build, anything that would ward off the terror that seemed to slip over the ramparts on the wind: first, vinegar and rose water to wash the floors and the walls. Then, unshuttered windows to let in the unaffected air. Then sealed windows to forestall the invading miasma. He'd prayed on his bare knees, he'd sopped brows, dug and filled grave after grave, had blackened the daylight with burning linens from the pallets of the dead.

He had offered up every prevention prescribed by the priests and the scholars and the doctors—everything but flight from the carnage or seclusion. This battle had to be played out in the open and to the death—between himself and his God.

He'd had little time to learn their names, had come too late to know their dreams, and they had all been too close to death to understand his gratitude for tending his crops and filling his coffers through the years, while he'd been out cutting his way through other villages, sieging and sacking other castles, spending other lives.

And just when he had begun to believe that he'd served his penance, when he'd had nothing left but the son that he'd come to love so late, he discovered the true price of sin.

The boy had lasted a night, and went so quietly that Nicholas hadn't known he was gone until those small, precious fingers had slackened around his own. The loss still ached like fire in that burnt-out part of him.

Faulkhurst had been totally deserted by then, by God and by any goodness that had ever dwelled there. The village was a shambles, its commerce as bankrupt as his soul.

He'd locked the gates, and every storeroom, every door. Then he'd tossed the ring of keys into the sea.

He'd spent a year of private atonement here on the edge of the world, finishing the chapel in his son's name, preparing himself for a life of penance in the brittle solitude of a monastery.

And then she had come flouncing through his castle gates, bringing her hopes and heresies and her irresistible anarchy.

It was the lack of that now, the silence, that disturbed him even more than the echoes ever had.

It ached of loss and nothingness.

Yet there was a sweet scent curling about him, slipping from the kitchen hall to scrub away the remembered reek of the hospital, a scent as foreign and familiar as moondust.

He was drawn down the passage toward the kitchen by the fragrance of newly baked bread, and the muffle of soft laughter.

He saw his wife first, standing at the end of the cook's table, dawn-fresh
in
her determined joy as she cut a thick slice of bread and placed it in Pippa's upturned palms.

"For Fergus, sweet."

"Here's for you, Ferguuuus!" The girl ran with her offering to the end of the table and plopped the bread in front of the old man, who smiled with his grandfatherly eyes.

"Thank ya, child."

"And for Dickon, Pippa." His wife had animated his kitchen with the sounds that he was certain he'd never hear again. And it frightened him to death.

As he stood in the doorway he wondered if he were invisible to them, if yesterday's haunting had been only a figment of his imagining, the lonely dreams of a madman.

If none of this was quite real. Not even the kiss that still scorched his cheek.

But that unthinkable possibility came apart in the next breath by his wife's uplifted gaze as it found him, by the startling tenderness that he saw there, and the surety that her prayers were being answered as quickly as she could pray them. That he was one of those she had waited for.

"Good morning, steward."

His heart leaped and the words 'good morning, wife' hung in his chest.

Dickon stood abruptly, scraping the bench against the stone floor, and took up sentry duty beside Eleanor, his hand on the hilt of a fine-bladed dagger—stolen no doubt off a lord who should have known better.

Then he was surrounded by noise, like waves lapping at his knees. He was tugged toward the end of the table, directly opposite his wife, by a warm little hand that fit like his memories into his own, tugging with such insistent, undaunted strength that he had to follow.

"Come, Sir Graystone. We missed you. Will you help us fix the bakehouse? See, I told you he wasn't a mean ghost, Nellamore."

"You were right, sweet. But his name is Master Nicholas." The woman's voice was gently beguiling, but her gaze was bright with the enormous challenge she'd brought upon herself, flushed with an invitation that staggered
him speechless. "Will you give him some of
Hannah's bread, Pippa?"

"Oh, yes!"

He hadn't expected to be besieged so early in the morning; would rather have had a moment alone with her, to devise a battle plan before her battalion appeared. But a moment later a thick slice of bread was being held up to him, as sweetly scented as his wife.

"Here, Sir Gargoyle." The bread sagged and then tore through its fragile middle, opening a window to three cherry-stained fingers, and then a pair of blue, grinning eyes. "Ooops!"

His wife sent a nudge his way with one of her quick frowns, as though he were shunning some sacred morning ritual and would cause an outrage if he didn't cooperate.

"Hannah made the bread this morning, Sir Gargoyle." The still-steaming slice tore through to the hard crust just as he rescued it.

"Thank you," he said, feeling like a trained bear in the market square, with everyone watching him as he put a corner of the crust into his mouth and bit down.

Hannah chewed in tandem with him, the artist steeling herself against her patron's critical opinion, when in truth it was the greatest pleasure he'd had in a very long time: the civilizing taste of the bread, the scent, the texture, the embracing warmth of the kitchen.

"Faulkhurst's first loaf, Master Nicholas,"
his wife said, taking the last of it for herself: a steaming part of his own. "It pleases me—all
of us—to have you here to share in it."

A woman who made ceremonies of the everyday, who stood at the head of his scarred kitchen table in her plain, russet green chemise and work-worn kirtle like a queen presiding over her motley ministers, as though she believed they could bring about miracles.

Not that he had imagined a queen would ever kiss cheeks and brows, or console her ministers as they sat round her council table, nor would she fondly ruffle their hair with a touch that he craved.

"My compliments to your baker, madam." He turned from his wife's steady gaze and gave the elderly woman a nod.

"Oh, thank you, sir." Hannah blushed as pink as a young woman and he couldn't help but smile back at her as she gathered Pippa's hand. "Come along with me, Pippa, Lisabet. We've mint and thyme to gather out of all those weeds."

They left his wife smiling after them, until she turned it on him and sent his heart spinning, branding his cheek again with the memory of that unaccountable kiss.

"You'll never know how blessed we are to have Hannah with us, Master Nicholas. I'm an utter calamity in the kitchen."

Hardly a calamity, he wanted to say. Damp and dewy as she'd been last night among the kettles, and brimming with all the scents of a spice cabinet as she was just now.

"And to that end, sir, very near the top of my long list is the bakehouse. It's fallen down. Did you know that? The roof caved in, at least."

"Aye, I'm aware of the state of the ovens and the bakehouse." He'd seen it collapse in an elegant shower of glassy, red sparks that he'd doused to keep his bailey from catching on fire while the earth pitched and swayed. The village hadn't been as fortunate.

"The kitchen oven is large enough for the few of us, but scarcely big enough for the hundreds of loaves we'll soon need every day."

Hundreds, indeed.
The arrival of Fergus and Hannah had been a divine jest.

"We need a mason, Master Nicholas."

"I'll fix your bakehouse, madam."

"Can you truly?" She looked equally pleased and skeptical when he nodded, and retrieved the sheaf of paper she'd been working on last eve.

"I've had some practice." A whole chapel, nearly finished.

"Practice enough to shore up an undercroft vault, I hope."

"Why do you ask?"

"I don't know much about the ways of buildings, Master Nicholas, but the arch beneath the west curtain wall doesn't look quite plumb. And the passage beneath it—"

"Beneath the west wall?" Damnation. He knew the extent of the
damage
all too well, and suffered a horrific image of his wife lost to the cave-in. "Don't tell me you've been tromping around down there? I barricaded that passage last night against just that sort of trespassing."

"I'm not a fool, and I wasn't tromping or trespassing, or treading on your barricades. I was looking for my husband's food stores. With all due caution, I assure you."

"I don't care if you were looking for Bayard's massive treasure of gold and silver—"

"Oh? Do you think he might truly have a treasury, Nicholas? We could surely use one."

"I don't know, madam—but the west curtain wall is dangerous and out of bounds from now on. Do you understand?"

She drew herself up, queenly again in her squared shoulders and glare. "Aye, steward, it is dangerous. At least until it can be fixed—which I hope is very soon. Which is another matter high on my list."

"Add defense to that list of yours, madam. I
want a guard posted in the barbican at all times."

"At night only." She added something to her list with a flick of her quill. "I can't spare anyone."

"It's not a matter of sparing—"

"That be my job, my lady," Dickon sputtered suddenly. "Guarding the castle. You said so." He'd been hovering behind her, as though he thought she was in imminent danger of being accosted. Now the lad stepped bravely between her and Nicholas, his hand on his dagger. "I'm milady's constable."

"You?" Nicholas looked between Eleanor and the lad.

"Me!"