Dark Maiden (12 page)

Privacy or secrets?
Yolande wondered as Geraint slipped outside.
But why should the priest here need either?

Bertha gave a helpless shrug. “William did not like the old priest’s cottage. He said it was too cramped. We moved here last winter as soon as the lord gave him leave to do so.”

“I understand,” Yolande answered, but did not. “And who hung the cat bones from the tree?”

“William did in the summer.” Bertha shuddered. “He said it would give him more knowledge, that he would break open every secret.”

One of
those
priests. Forbidden lore was always a draw to some, especially clerics.
Perhaps he meddled too deeply, woke or summoned something with his hanging charms.

Geraint stole back inside, stacked the dripping pots on the trestle and began to tend the fire.

Yolande pointed to a bench beside the hearth and swept it quickly with the edge of her tunic before nudging Bertha toward it. “Let us sit together and share a soothing tisane. Your brother will be well again, I promise.”

“You should send her to the church.” Breaking sticks over the flaring fire, Geraint looked like a wild-haired Welsh angel. “Let her have a night in peace for a change.”

He bowed low over the flames, so close Yolande was convinced his eyebrows would smoke, and addressed Bertha directly in English. “Mistress, my lady and I must cleanse this place. Allow me to escort you to the church, to join the other good womenfolk of Halme.” He smiled, Yolande thought, far too generously. “My lady is sending some sleeping herbs to the maids and I must deliver them. Might we stroll together, Bertha?” He rose and stepped across the fire, holding out his hands.

Yolande had to rummage quickly in her pack for the herbs. “What are you about?” she hissed at her glib companion.

“You need to work on this house and I want to work on you,” he answered in Welsh.

“Work on me?” For an instant, she wondered if she had understood properly.

He guided the dazed and unresisting Bertha to the threshold and stepped out into the starlight, only then turning to look at her.

“What do you mean?” Yolande asked.

He blew her a kiss or two. “To court you,
cariad
, what else? A man usually woos a maid before he weds her.”

He went out and left her astonished.

Geraint discovered the church packed with villagers. Bertha was swiftly gathered in by a balding, mustached, bandy-legged neighbor, who glared a possessive
this-one-is-mine
stare at him. Geraint was glad of the fellow since he suspected Bertha might be a clinger.

And you are not?
taunted his conscience, a rare voice for him and usually ignored. Less easy to ignore were the questions from the villagers.

“How is your lady doing?”

“Do you know why no one dreams in church?”

“Can we light a proper fire as well as the braziers?”

“For how long will we have to stay here?”

“You do not need to,” replied Geraint flatly to the last questioner, irritated by the
male
smith’s bullying. “You are not womankind.”
Why the devil is the smith in church anyway? To catch up on his prayers or because his soul matches his lumpy, graceless form and he loves to stir up trouble?

The other urgent inquiries he fended off, turning down the request for a “proper fire” lest that burn the building down, but relieved Yolande’s instinct that the maids would be safe and dream free in church had been right.

Any other time, he might have juggled and played for the scattered crowd, but he wanted to get back to his woman.

“Has she talked to the priest yet?” That was Godith asking, just as he sidled out through the church door.

“Before God, she is speaking to him now,” he answered blithely, uncaring if Yolande was or not. If he knew her, she would be speaking plenty, to Father William included if he made the mistake of reappearing at his house. But she would be busy too, as he intended to be.

* * * * *

She had found a rat’s nest, a dead mouse and half a rotten loaf at the priest’s house, but no evil herbs or charms or parchments of spells. Using a broom with most of its bristles missing, Yolande swept the mess out of the door to bury later and prayed throughout the building, her arms raised to the rafters. Inhaling slowly, she smelled no sulfur or old blood but caught a scent instead of musk and peppermint.

Geraint returns.
Hurrying to finish, glad she had shaken the bedding earlier and put lavender and hyssop under the pillows for sweetness and protection, she moved the table close to the flickering fire.
I am like a housewife awaiting her man from the fields.

And here he was, stooping under the lintel, closing the door, holding out handfuls of flowers—white and pale-cream hellebores.

“The Christmas rose, to drive out evil,” she remarked, about to ask where he found them, when a muffled oath made her break off. Half amused, half stricken, she watched Geraint fall with his precious blooms, facedown, smack on the newly swept earth floor, one hand raised to protect the flowers.

He was cursing in Welsh, something about tripping over nothing. She left him to find his feet again. He did so and thrust the white mass of petals at her. “You could have helped me up.”

“And spoil your pretty gesture?”

He gave a sharp bark of laughter as she took the flowers from him and buried her face in their cool white hearts. “So much for courting you,
cariad
, with me as fine as a clumsy dancer. Should I fall on my arse next?”

“Hush. They are beautiful.” They were her first from any man and a tide of emotion robbed her of more speech or even thanks.

Understanding, he softened at once, brushing a fingertip across a roselike flower. “I did not steal them, either, leastways only from the common woodland.”

“I was not going to ask.”

“Here.” Somehow in his mad caper he had rescued a flower and kept it. He trailed it delicately across her forehead, the fleshy petals as lush as a caress. “Or here?” He tickled the flower down her cheek and neck, to nestle between her breasts.

He kissed her deeply. She had her legs coiled about his waist and they were naked, flushed and burning. Aware of a pounding, sweet itch between her legs, she clamped her thighs higher and tighter about his middle, straddling him, sheathing him. A pulsing in her ears was either her tongue registering beats of rapture or her blood singing.

“With me again,
cariad
?” Geraint snapped his fingers at her. “I thought flowers melted a maid’s heart, not made her faint. Next time I will bring two armfuls and have you in ecstasy. By the way, why can I not have these voluptuous dreams?”

“I was not—” Yolande began then stopped, admitting to herself she had been dreaming awake. A wave of sticky heat and sickness surged up her throat as she dropped the flowers. She reached blindly behind herself and snatched at an inner roof timber, gripping it tightly. Only pride prevented her from tottering. “I have been invaded,” she whispered.

She made it to the hut doorway before she threw up, aware of Geraint holding her hair out of the way. “Do not touch me,” she warned him, feeling unclean,
penetrated
.

I was ripe for this, with my own sin and wicked desires.

“Never,
cariad
, you will not do that. You will not push me away, put me aside like the house cat.” He brought his face close to hers, ignoring her shameful sickness, and gave her chin a sharp flick with his finger. “Hear me on this, woman.”

His eyes blazed with stubborn, cussed male pride and something else, a hurt she recognized and one she could not help responding to.

“I do not mean to hurt you.”

“Nor I you, Yolande, but we do because we care. Would you have it otherwise?”

They were of a height and she wrapped her arms about him, laying his head on her shoulder. He let her do it too.

“I cannot help but think of sin,” she admitted. “The smell of you, the sight of you…”

He laid his head on her other shoulder. “We shall marry and not burn.”

She knew the line from scripture,
better to marry than burn
, and tried to match his quiet reassurance. “Not quite yet, though, not with the priest who knows where.”

“Possessed by who knows what,” Geraint agreed.

“And I am distracted,” Yolande confessed, wondering why she spoke of such an obvious thing.

Geraint looked up. “I can help you. We can help each other and still be chaste.”

Panic and desire warred in her but what emerged from her mouth was the sulky, “You never mentioned this before.”

He grinned. “I have my reasons.” He caught one of her hands and kissed the tips of her fingers. “Come then, beloved.”

His “beloved” or his kiss or both made her lightheaded and slowed down the world. Part of her coolly thought,
Why not? You have done enough tonight. And remember to collect your flowers.

“But not here,” she insisted, turning first to retrieve her blooms.

I do have my reasons, and one, cariad, is that if I ease that ache in your loins too much then we shall go on too long as we are, and I want more.

Geraint wanted her as his, completely his, with his ring on her finger and his seed blooming in her belly. He followed her out of the priest’s house, noting she clutched the Christmas roses again. Her action gave him an idea of where to guide her next. “I shall take you to where I gathered the flowers.”

“More courtship?”

“It is new for me also. Do not mock, my maid.” He sped up to her, tucking his arm though hers as they walked, with her bow flexing between them like a living creature and a good reminder of what she was.

My own Bathsheba, who can exorcise devils with a smile. She is married to her work but I am winning her. ’Tis a balancing act and a juggle but none the worse for it.

First he gave her his flask of ale to clear her mouth, his thoughts running ahead like squirrels after pine nuts. He was no seducer, only a tumbler who in the past had spent carefree nights with widows and the wives of absent sailors and soldiers, easy on both sides and no harm, only pleasure.

I am virgin at dealing with a virgin.

But she was a queen, his queen, so he threw himself on her mercy. “How may I please you, lady?”

She stopped on the woodland path, her eyebrows raised. “What happened to ‘I can help you’?”

“Yes, yes, when we come to that, but there should be finesse in the performance, anticipation, tension as well as skill.”

“I am no performance, Geraint.”

Christ knew he was saying this badly. Tumbling was always far easier than words. “No, for sure you are not, just as I am no bard,” he gabbled.

Agitated, he released her arm, threw a backflip and came up grinning with a ripe juniper berry between his teeth.

“Fool.” She took the berry all the same and he breathed a little easier, especially when she bit half and passed the other to him.

“If I were a Welsh prince of story, this berry would change into a feast,” he said, flipping the stone into the bush and eating the tart, fragrant flesh.
Her flesh will be the sweeter and more fragrant to kiss.

“Give me a Welsh dragon, instead, to sort here,” Yolande replied.

“Have you dealt with dragons?”

“Not yet but if these are indeed the end of days, perhaps soon.”

“How is your back?”

She stopped dead on the track. “What are you gossiping about?”

“I am no gossip,” Geraint retorted, relieved all the same that his chatter had diverted her from the end of the world.
Even I cannot compete with that, although in truth she has not dreamed of such misery for months.
“But if your back aches, I could massage it.”

“As you have before.” Wistful for an instant, she rolled her shoulders and looked about. “There is a swing tied to that beech tree.”

“There is.” The other Christmas roses bloomed nearby but if she was enchanted by the swing, better still. “Sit on and I shall push you.”

She glanced at him. “We could go together.”

And with my present luck in loving, no doubt break the rope and crash into those nettles.

“Or there is this log where we could sit.” Placing her Christmas roses carefully at one end of the fallen timber, she skipped a few steps and straddled it, about to lower herself down on the very spot he had chosen as a trysting place.

And who is courting who here?

“Hold.” He strode to her, brushing an invisible, unreal twig off her shoulder, anything to keep her in position so he could do this…

“Hey!” She was giggling as he caught her up, tossed her in the air, caught her in his arms. Breathless, she laughed out loud as he sat on the log with her on his lap. “I am too heavy.”