With Her Kiss (Swords of Passion) (3 page)

“What treachery is this?” Geoff retorted, his mind running rampant through logic that defied his friend’s statements. “You cannot believe this, Will. I certainly cannot. Nay. This woman in your hall is delusional.”

“She gives no outward sign of it, save the gaunt look of one starved and abused. She speaks well and tells stories of the lady Katherine which have a ring of truth to me.”

Geoff scoured his friend’s expression for signs of fantasy. Will had heard Geoff speak of Katherine when both of them were young, when the wounds of her rejection of Geoffrey were a stigma to any joy in life or service to his friends or King. Aye, Will knew stories of his beloved Katherine. “What tales are these?”

“The mightiest is one I will recount with no words.” Will struggled to his feet and strode to the far table. There, he unrolled a silken cloth and brought forth a curved metal blade, the circumference as large as his chest. He held it before him like a shield.

“Christ in His Grave,” Geoffrey rasped, stuck in his chair as if pinned by a sword. “Could that be Ibrahim’s?”

“Aye, the Arabic proclaims it so. It was his gift to you.”

“And mine to Katherine. I gave it to her after I returned from Jerusalem many years ago.” He shot from his chair. “Let me see it.”

With both hands, Will carefully surrendered the blade.

Geoff traced his trembling fingertips over the inscriptions on the broad flat metal handle. They were each one as he remembered them. All were prayers that Allah would bless the holder of the blade and smite the owner’s enemies. Marvelling that he could see this once more here and with this appalling story, he found the voice to ask, “How does this maid say this came into her possession?”

“She says she knew the importance of it to her lady and to you. Knew if she brought it to you, you would help her lady. Free her.”

Is that not fantasy to think I have that power?
He worried his lower lip.
“Does this maid have a name?”

“Old Bess.”

Geoff’s head spun. Bess. Bess of the owl’s eyes. Bess of the wagging tongue. How could he forget the woman who had discovered Kat and him in bed together? How could he forget the person who had told Katherine’s father of how they had spent nights and days bound as one? Bess. Aye, Bess was the old maid’s name. Geoff’s blood boiled. “This is my scimitar. I gave it to Katherine when she ordered me to leave and I cursed her. I would have thought she had buried it soon after. Heaven knows, she wanted to bury it in my back.”

“You could have done nothing for her then. She was already married.”

“Aye. But she blamed me for forsaking her.”

“She was young, untutored in the ways of power. What could she expect of you? You had no land or title then.”

“True.” Geoff frowned, memories swirling, lost in yesterday’s failures.

“Listen to me, for time is of the essence. The maid Bess says Katherine was at first imprisoned in her own castle. But days later, her Welsh friends along the border attacked it to set her free. To do John’s will and probably to protect himself from persecution, Ferrer’s men secreted her out from her own dungeon and spirited her away. They put out the rumour she was dead.”

“I could believe that the Welsh came to save her. Their princes liked her. Kat purposely kept good relations with them and Ferrer is a new unwelcome neighbour planted there by John. But Will, no one in the Marches believes Kat is still alive.”

Will pursed his lips. “This Bess does. She says her lady has been removed to a cloister of Benedictine nuns. There, they are ordered by Ferrer to starve her.”

Geoff cursed the man Ferrer who bowed and scraped to John like a foolish boy. “If this be true that she is imprisoned, why am I not surprised that he takes the coward’s method of murder?”

“More to the point, Geoff, if it is true Katherine is in the nuns’ hands and they follow orders to deny her sustenance, that means she will die within a week or two. Time is short. Unless, of course, you decide to do nothing to save her.”

Geoff glared at his friend. He would not leave a woman to starve, least of all one he had loved. The only one he had ever loved. “She damns my name.”

“For taking her son from her? That she knows was John’s doing. The King wished to set her blood to boil. What finer way than to make her older boy hostage in the home of the man she once adored?”

“The man whom she curses for taking him.” Geoff recounted how he had argued with John, then realised there was no better place to protect the Harleigh heir than close at his own side.

“Can that man ignore the possibility that she lives?”

Geoffrey stared at the sparks flashing in the hearth. For what they had been together—fire and heat, sweet savage succour—he could not ignore the possibility that Katherine lived or that she might be saved from a hideous demise. “Where is this abbey?”

“St Augustine’s. In Bristol.”

“Northwest of Bath.” When Will nodded, Geoff’s heart raced with a small hope because he knew the man who presided there over a monks’ quarter. “Is that not where our old friend Henry Gervais now wears the cloth?”

Will nodded, warmth in his one blue eye. “The very same. He will give you aid.”

“I’ll ask for more than that.” His mind racing with a plan, Geoff thrilled to the task and quickened to the goal. “Better yet, this St Augustine’s is close by a river, is it not?”

“You know it is.”

“And Bristol is not far from Chepstow.” He would need a large castle, impervious to attack by a small or inexperienced force. He’d need a safe place to lay Kat down, nurse her, coddle her, cajole her towards recovery.

“William Marshall’s household would welcome you, Geoff.” Will cocked an eyebrow, a sly smile teasing his lips at the mention of their friend, the most powerful man in the realm save John. “Plus, as I recall, you do favour escapes by water.”

“Aye. Would that this once I could walk on it!”

“Take a strong retinue, Geoff. Your best men. I know you would wish to surprise them, but you cannot risk tricks by John. We know not who goes there at his orders.”

“You are right, but a group slows me and I cannot tarry.”

“Ride them hard, Geoff,” Will demanded. “Better to go prepared with a force, than lose before you have begun the battle.”

Geoff ran a hand across his mouth. “Five days without food or water, six, seven at the most, and a human dies of starvation. You remember that from our days with Richard in Acre and on the shores of Joppa.”

“Aye, when Saladin’s forces tried to bottle us up along the Mediterranean and we nursed the dying with olives, wheat and wine. You must be careful, too, how you begin to feed her. She’ll be in pain from lack of nourishment.”

Geoff’s mind spun with plans. To feed her, he’d need milk, untainted water and a thin gruel of oats. To save her mind, he’d need a priest. To save her body from more of John’s savagery, he’d use his friend the priest in novel ways. And in the doing, he’d ask his old comrade in arms to act in all ways holy and not. “I pray that she will not kill me for the service.”

“Oh, John would like that. Two of you dead in one blow,” Will declared with disdain for their King. “I have sent word to Simon and his countess of your need for his support to save Katherine. He has the ear of the northern lords and you may well need their friendship, along with my own friends in the mid country.”

“You know John will not take lightly to my meddling in his plan to let Katherine die.”

“Aye, he will be on you in a fortnight or even less if he can summon local allies to capture you.” Will smirked. “I always thought you liked the Tower too much.”

Geoff’s frequent internments in the King’s dungeons had marked his body in ways he was reminded of whenever he stretched his shoulders. He did now and the scars of John’s lash still smarted. For the King’s treachery to friend and foe and family, Geoff vowed the man would now pay for his perversity to helpless females. “To put our King in the Tower is now my fondest ambition.”

“Treason falls too easily on all our tongues these days,” Will mourned. “What future have we if we cannot persuade our ruler to govern us with justice?”

“A question John must answer. Now or in hell.”

Chapter Two

Wild with impatience to be gone, Geoff left with his men within the hour. He had more than seventy miles to cover, a ride that would normally take seven or more hours, keeping his horses at a steady trot. But he could not drive his mounts like that without a break. Nor could his men survive such an ordeal without hazard to their health. Geoff knew he would need gold coin and plenty of it. Plus he’d need a thief’s hardiness to make that distance in cloak of night and preferably before dawn. But he tried.

None of his fine Arabian horses served him or his men as well as he wished. By dawn, with a downpour soaking through his layers of clothing, he urged his men onward. His nine knights, drenched to the bone, had left their own exhausted or injured animals tethered to tree limbs near a farrier’s hut as gifts in trade for the poor man’s steeds. When songbirds filled the morning air with news of a sunny day, Geoff sent out Reginald, the sergeant of his guard, in advance to gather any news of raiding Welshmen or supporters of John. Thankfully, he returned, reporting to his retinue that he had met none.

The path unimpeded, Geoff led them into the town of Bath at breakneck speed to the Benedictine monastery where Henry Gervais presided. The man had once stood by his side on the battlements of Acre and on the sands of Joppa in the Holy Land. He had fought like a heathen and afterward, had given up his warring nature for the love of God. This short, jovial man with a plump face looked even rounder with his hair shaved in a tonsure. Once he had answered to the name of Henry and was now known as Domine James.

Geoff did not reveal much to James. The fewer who knew of his aims the better. But he told his friend of his need for him to accompany him to Bristol, then paid him well for ten sets of white robes and black cloaks. James, eager for the bright gold, had readily turned ten of his flock nude. Then Geoffrey and his men, attired in their new guise as monks, looked their part save for their long and unruly hair.

Geoff led his band and James northward towards Bristol and the Abbey of St Augustine. Here as they sat at the crossroads into the town, James told him that the nuns were a secretive bunch who feared Welsh raiders. Since the last invaders had come a few years before and massacred half the order, the remaining nuns had taken a perpetual vow of silence and toiled sunrise to sunset in their
cloistered garden. James surmised that the reason they had taken in Katherine to do the King’s dreadful bidding was to earn gold coin.

“Poverty,” Domine James told Geoff with a rueful scowl, “eats at one’s integrity.”

“And favour from a king can cure it, no matter the crime they must commit,” Geoff added with sarcasm and spurred his horse towards the town.

Geoff and his men, girdled with leather belts, carried their short swords and their daggers, items no friar should possess. But Geoffrey rode on with the furies at his back. His guiding vision was of a slim, chestnut-haired beauty whose doe-eyed innocence had captivated him decades ago, but who now, by her Sire’s orders, gasped for water, yearned for bread and lay dying of neglect.

At each fork in the road, at each priory, to each yeoman he met, he asked for local gossip. At dusk as he and his men rode through the town of Bristol and drew nigh to St Augustine Abbey, he stopped to talk to a carter and ask about the good nature of the nuns.

The man tipped his cap to the flock of men he thought were priests and proclaimed the women bewitched. “They hold a lady chained in the nunnery’s cellars. How can they do that and call themselves the brides of Christ?”

James agreed with the man, then asked if he knew who the prisoner was or why she was there.

“She’s a witch, Domine. Why else do we have floods? The crops are washed out this spring. This lady is a curse on us by our King and when she dies, there’ll be an end of days.”

* * * *

“What do you think, my lord, of the villagers’ superstitions?” Reginald, Geoff’s sergeant at arms, queried him as he pulled his steed next to James and him. Their cloaks high over their heads at Domine James’ instructions to hide their shoulder-length hair, the group slowly walked their horses past the porter at the Abbey Gatehouse. Inside the enclosed gardens, black-robed women looked askance at their visitors, then quickly bent to their spindly plants, picking and pruning. None of the women looked younger than fifty. All appeared stooped, eagle-eyed and wary of the eleven men who rode in double file towards the abbess’s main door.

Geoff fixed the scratchy Benedictine robe at his neck, then eyed Reginald who looked as uncomfortable as Geoff felt. “Natural of them to blame the nuns. No godly woman starves another. Let’s see. I’d count twenty of them. They are in such poor health, we will have no fight.”

“We hope no more patrol those cellars.” Reginald slid his gaze to the far corner of the cloisters where a small door led down to a lower level. “The carter in Bristol told me more than forty nuns fled when Prince Llewellyn came to call four years ago to claim the land for the Welsh.”

Geoff shivered in his sopping wet clothes.
What must conditions be in that dark and morbid cellar?
“Did they not return?”

“No, my lord. Off they went, he said, some to marry and forsake their vows.”

“So easily they renounce their calling?” Domine James exclaimed, his face drawn with sadness.

“The church starved them and taxed them,” Reginald said so quickly that he looked sheepish when James shot him a reproving glance.

Geoff shook his head in misery. “Then John came along and did the same. No life to be a woman.”

Reginald frowned at his master, giving no remark, for Geoffrey and he had oft exchanged comments about the abuse of women by church, state and men.

Geoff scanned the buildings. “I see no guards here. Go in. Find the abbess. Tell her we are the King’s priests come to rest for the night.” Geoff checked James’ expression. “No objection to the lie, I hope.”

“I serve God, Geoffrey. If what you say is true and we find a woman starving here, then the man who put her there deserves no loyalty or honour.”

Reginald spurred his horse forward. A tall lean man who resembled a raven, Geoff’s steward was a man of humour and cunning. Reg had been but a boy of ten when Geoff had taken him from John’s household as his page. In the ensuing twelve years, the lad had learnt how to parlay with rogues and nobles alike. Geoff had only to wait for Reg to work his clever tongue.

Within the hour, the man rode back, his thin face grim.

“What say you?” Geoffrey prodded him.

With a nod of sad apology to Domine James, he said, “Harpies, all.”

The news burned Geoff’s stomach like bile. “And?”

“The abbess invites you in but demurs to say she cannot keep us longer than a night.”

“Because?” Geoffrey asked his man, his eyes on two fat nuns who scurried down the pebbled lane to meet him.

“They have not means. Little food. No money.”

“I’d say they have more sustenance than they let on. Lies avail them little.” He smiled down at the two women like a man with all the authority of his sovereign. “I bid you good evening. I am Dom Gregory and this is my brother in Christ, Domine James—God’s prelates to the King’s courtiers and to that noble man himself. We travel on business and seek lodgings with you for the night.”

The older woman, head high, cast speculative eyes upon him.

“I am most sorry, dear sirs,” said the older and fatter of the two. “I am abbess here. Your man has told me of your needs, but I have no pallet to give you. We are so poor. If you but travel one more mile to—”

“We cannot, good lady. I am most weary, soaked through from the rains, and need the rest now. A few of our brethren are very ill.”

“But Dom Gregory, if you but ask at the monastery, they will host pilgrims of your import. And men.” She pulled her cloak tighter at the neck, a protective measure from men’s prying eyes. “Whereas we are only women who—”

He could have laughed at her fear that his men might desire the nuns for a bit of pleasure. “I assure you my retinue are too tired to think of anything more than rest. If you can put us near a good fire, we have our cloaks to comfort us on your dry stone floors. But I can share our flagons of red wine and if you share your bread and oats, I have coin to offer in gratitude.”

Both nuns fluttered their lashes, sparkling at the offer of money and spirits.

The abbess smiled, her yellowed teeth a ghoulish sight. “You are most kind to compensate us.”

Geoff tossed her a gold piece from his purse. “A token of my appreciation.”

She caught it with agility and bit the precious metal to test its validity.

“Fetch what we need,” Geoff demanded. “We require fresh water for one of my men who needs a wound cleaned. For the rest, we want a bath. Near your hearth. Be quick about it, will you?”

The old abbess could not get enough of admiring the coin. “Of course.”

“Your name, righteous lady? I shall be pleased to tell our King how kind you were to aid us in our hour of need.”

“Thank you, Dom. I am Sister Ursula.”

“Lead on, kind Sister,” he urged her and they followed behind her and her companion, assessing the size of the nunnery, the path to the front entry and that side entrance accessed by stone steps to the cellar.

“What crops do you grow in your little yard?” he asked with a congenial curiosity.

The abbess glanced back at him, her good nature now ensured with the purchase. “Vegetables and herbs. Whatever we might get the soil to yield, which is not much.”

“You grow no vines for grapes?”

“We have tried. Alas, it is too cold in these climes.”

“Pity. Wine fetches good coin.”

Her companion glanced back at him, her round face alight with her response. “We have four cows. Milk is our sustenance.”

How wonderful to learn.
He smiled at her, building a friendship that he would use to his own ends. Within the hour, when the women took to their beds, Geoff would milk those cows and feed the lady whom these witches kept in chains.

“Put two men to stand guard at the door of the cloister, two at the porter’s gate and two with the horses,” Geoff told Reg and James in a whisper. He led his band towards the main door. To a third young man, he was particular. “Matthew, do not spill that milk. We’ll need every drop.”

Geoff exited the front door of the abbey, Reginald, James and Matthew close behind. His skin crawled with anxiety. He had hastened, fought all the elements of weather and distance to find her, and now, if she had left this earth before he could claim her? What then? He pushed away the horror of it.

He ran across the cloister garden. Clouds obscured the light of the moon and the soil was a sodden mess, sucking at their boots. At the door to the cellars, Geoff tried to open it. As he had prayed, the door had no lock. Yet it was swollen shut by the recent rains, a more effective means to lock a portal than any iron lock might be. The thick rough-hewn wood would not give. But Geoff saw the ill-fitting bars sat in a frame that was rotten and would dislodge with pressure.

“Get me two horses and have them pull out the bars,” he ordered Reg and Matthew.

He waited, the time interminable. Yet his men were efficient and just as useful, quiet.

The horses were neither and yet their efforts brought results. As the wall gave way along with the bars, Geoff rejoiced, stepped over the rubble to the inside. “Light your braziers now. This is a hell-dark hole.”

“My lord,” Reg offered, “let me lead. We know not what awaits us here.”

“She knows you not, Reg. I go first. Besides, no guards are posted in this miserable place,” Geoff told him, a lump in his throat for the loathsome creatures they would find here, biting and crawling and swimming in this mire.

He stepped inside, his boots slopping in water to the ankles.
Kat, dear God, do you sit in this? I swear from now on you will sit before a blazing fire every day of your life. Just live. Live and I will treasure you.

He marched forward, sloshing in the muck, the floor surprisingly even until he stumbled down a stone step. “Careful here. We descend.” Like walking into hell. Blind in the barren depths, he felt his way along, one hand to the slimy wall, down more stairs, hearing the trickle of water, feeling the ooze of walls too rough, too cold for human habitation.

Suddenly, the ground flattened and a faint ray of light from a hole in the stone wall above shone on a huddled mass in one corner. Silent, still, the dark creature reached out a limb. A hand. And put up a palm to ward him off.

“Katherine?” he asked of the filthy heap burrowed into a niche.

Reg moved closer with a light.

Matthew groaned at the sight.

The being stirred. Two dark eyes stared at Geoff from a wizened face, once oval, now taut from torment. “Katherine,” he whispered and rushed to her, bent over to reach into the alcove where she hunched.

A low animal’s moan met his ears. Not a word, yet all her meanings to him were clear.

“Nothing to fear. Not from me, Katherine. I won’t leave you,” he promised, at once turning to wave Matthew closer with the pitcher of milk and the clean cloth with which to feed her.

Geoff put a hand to her shoulder, sank his fingers into her matted hair at her nape. She was soaked through, her flesh thin, her bones frail, and at his touch, she flinched. Not dead. Not past saving, yet requiring all his delicacy to rescue her.