Heather Graham (7 page)

He all but ran into Danielle, just outside the door. He touched her cheek gently.

“Thank you for my horse!” she told him.

“Care for her gently!” he said. He paused then, studying her. “My God, but you are a young beauty!” he told her, and strode on by. Then, with a great amount of tumult, he took his leave.

She didn’t want her mother to catch her up so late, so she went to bed and awaited Lenore, for her mother always came to see that she was safely in. But that night, Lenore did not come to her. There had been a fever outside the castle—a smith had died of it, along with one infant boy and an old peasant woman—and that night, the fever made its way into the house. Danielle dozed, then awoke when she heard running footsteps and cries in the night.

She crawled out of bed. Monteine was not in her adjoining bedroom. Danielle wandered into the hall, and saw that servants were rushing to and from her mother’s chambers. She ran among them, pausing in the doorway. She had stood there just hours before while her mother spoke with the French king in the vast space before the fire by the light of the windows. Now Lenore was far across the room in her massive bed, her black hair splayed out across the pillows, her features frighteningly ashen against the white linen sheets.

Danielle cried out, and rushed to her.

“The child!” someone shouted.

But Danielle had thrown off whatever hands tried to stop her and come to the bed, crawling atop it.

“Danielle, come away!” commanded a voice, and she realized that it was Father Giles, her mother’s friend and confessor. Doctor Coutin was there as well, gravely standing just away from her mother’s side.

“Mother!” Danielle cried.

Lenore’s beautiful eyes opened and fell upon her. She tried to reach for Danielle’s hand, but could not. Danielle caught her hand, crying out again. “Mother!”

“Dearest love!” Lenore managed to whisper painfully. Her eyes began to close again.

“Lenore, save your strength!” Jeanette entreated.

Danielle’s eyes fell upon those of Doctor Coutin.

“There’s nothing more to be done,” he said gently.

She looked to Fattier Giles.

He met her gaze, and found pity for her. “Lenore is dying!” he said sorrowfully, staring at the others. “Let her daughter speak with her. It is all they will have.”

Dying? Her mother? No, no, it could not happen! “Mother!” Danielle cried then, lying beside her, holding her, as if, with her own slender body, she could hold her mother to life itself.

Lenore was whispering again. “Yes, Mother, yes!” Danielle said, crawling closer to her mother’s lips. “Ask me anything, ask me anything …”

“The king,” was all she heard at first. “You must honor the king. Care for him, you do not know … he will care for you. Danielle, do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mother! Yes, but—”

“Honor him. Keep him safe.”

“Mother, I swear I will do whatever you say. But you mustn’t keep talking, you must rest. You can’t die …”

Her voice trailed away. Lenore was not answering her. And something about her mother had changed. Her body had been afire. It was as if that fire had suddenly been extinguished.

“You must come away now, Danielle,” Father Giles said. “Monteine, take your young mistress. She must leave this place of contagion!”

Monteine came forward to take Danielle, sobbing still.

“No, I cannot leave her!” Danielle cried.

“Child, she has left us already!” Father Giles said, not unkindly.

Tears sprang to her eyes. She tried to cling to her mother’s body. She was dragged away by Monteine and Jeanette while Father Giles gave orders to other servants as to the care of the body.

Danielle thought that she would never bear the pain. She sobbed herself into exhaustion, and from there, into sleep.

By the morning, she could no longer mourn, for the fever had seized her.

The plague had come to them, and throughout Aville, people fell sick—the poor, the rich, the peasants, and the nobles. A full half of those inside the castle fell ill.

And half of those who fell ill, died.

Danielle drifted in and out of light for days, sometimes knowing that she had lost her mother, sometimes knowing that she was close to death herself, and caring little. By the sixth day, however, the fever pustules that had formed on her burst. Her body began to cool. She was going to live.

She gained full consciousness one morning to learn that despite the fever that had raged all around them, the beautiful, beloved Lenore d’Aville had been buried with all care and ceremony.

Father Giles had waited until after the services to succumb to the fever himself, and perish.

Losing her mother was agony. For days, Danielle, still very weak, lay in bed and wished that she might have died and gone to heaven with both her parents.

Jeanette told her that it was a sin to want to die, that she was a countess, that she had to learn to accept God’s will with fortitude. She had always been so very wise and mature; she must be even more so now.

Danielle didn’t want to be wise or mature, and she didn’t know why she should accept anything about God—God had taken her mother. But she was too desolate to argue with Jeanette.

The weeks passed, and she gained her strength again. The dead were all buried; the fever had done its damage, and passed them by.

She became dimly aware that people within her household were talking about battles once more—it seemed that the English were ready to make war again. Danielle still hadn’t roused herself enough to care.

But she awoke one morning to discover that Monteine was in her room, her face damp with tears, muttering as she packed trunks full with Danielle’s belongings.

Danielle sat up and demanded to know what she was doing.

“Countess, we are going to the king!” Monteine said.

“The king?” Danielle replied, perplexed. She bit her lip, remembering that she had promised her mother she would honor the king.

“It seems that there are all kinds of legal documents,” Monteine said with a sigh. “Your mother made arrangements for your care in case of—in case of her death!”

“Why must we leave? Philip could care for me here—”

“It is not Philip who will care for you at all! Your mother has placed you into the care of your godfather, the King of England. Danni, your father was an English lord—you know that well enough. You have heard the stories over and over again, you have told them over and over again. And Robert of Oxford was a baron well admired by the king. But, oh God, that my life should come to this! The Lady Jeanette and I are to remain your retainers. We are duly summoned before the King of England—even as he plans another attack upon the French!”

At last, Danielle felt aroused from her pain and lethargy. She slipped from her bed and ran in her nightdress to Monteine, throwing her arms around her. “We’ll disobey such an outrageous summons! We will not stay with him. We—”

“Oh, Danielle!” Monteine said, and sank down before her, hugging her close. “You cannot disobey! There’s going to be a terrible battle, and if you were to try to run somewhere, it would all be the worse! Edward has great strength in Gascony. People would be up in arms, there would be more battles, more deaths. Forgive me! He is your guardian—he has the right of your life, of your future in his hands, and you must not anger him! I have been wrong to instill my feelings in you!”

Monteine was not wrong—Edward was a wretched monster with illusions to the throne of France. Everyone, even little children, knew that.

“You must honor him!” Monteine told her earnestly.

“I will never honor him!”

“Shh!” Monteine pressed her fingers to Danielle’s lips. “He has men here in the castle—you could cause us both grave harm!”

“But the King of France just came here!”

“To visit his lady cousin only, an act the English and the Gascons loyal to their duke could not rebuke, for though Edward is the superior here, by ancient rite, he holds these lands of the French king. And though he even claims that he is the French king, Philip rules in Paris, and it is doubtful that even such a warrior king as Edward of England will ever truly lay claim to all of France. He will never have the surrender of the French king and all of France.”

“He will never have
my
surrender!” Danielle assured her. “And I am convinced that we could escape—”

“To do what?” Monteine asked with dismay. “Starve in the streets? You don’t understand! Edward has prepared a great force against Philip once more. The English king has landed on French shores and begun to ravage the land again.”

“If he fights Philip, we should go to Philip,” Danielle said with simple wisdom.

“Trust me, my lady,” Monteine said softly, “Philip cannot help you now. He has no strength here, and he will be occupied with his coming battle with the English king.”

Danielle stood stubbornly silent. She watched as Monteine packed her things, feeling frozen in place. She felt like crying, except that she had cried so much over her mother, she just didn’t have any tears left.

I will never honor the Englishman! she vowed again to herself in silence.

And she thought again how she had sworn to her mother as Lenore lay dying that she would honor another king.

Someday, sometime, she would do so. She might be forced to go to the English king now, but she had given her mother a vow. A sacred vow. She would hold all the loyalty in her heart for the house of Valois—even if she was now being all but abducted by a foreign monster with illusions of grandeur.

Edward had not seen his natural daughter since the day he granted Lenore her freedom from English shores. Nor had he seen Lenore, Countess d’Aville, since that time.

Still, her death had grieved him more than he dared allow himself to show. It was natural that he should order numerous Masses said for her soul—she had been the widow of Robert of Oxford, his dearest friend and retainer. Yet there was no one he could tell that a small piece of him had perished as well, for the lady’s beauty and spirit had set a lock upon his heart. Even as life had gone on, as Philippa had continued to prove herself the best of queens, he had remembered the woman who encaptured him and defied him until the very end.

His thoughts, however, by necessity were deeply occupied by the masses of troops he had brought to these shores, and with his plans for strategy and battle.

He had almost forgotten that he had sent for Danielle when there came the sound of footsteps across the floor in the hall of the manor he had seized, and then the clearing of his steward’s throat to draw Edward’s attention from his intense study of the map before him.

He looked up, words freezing upon his lips, all else forgotten as he stared at the child who had come before him, just ten feet in front of her ladies.

He trembled suddenly. He had once thought that the child would force Lenore d’Aville to remember the King of England for all her days, rue her defiance of him, and remember well the nights they had shared. His pride had demanded that she do so.

Alas, Edward was the one who would now rue his own temper.

He would be the one who would never forget.

Emerald-green eyes blazed out at him furiously from a delicate face of perfectly formed beauty as she surveyed the king, her godfather. Her hair, sweeping down her back, was lustrous and black, deeper than a raven’s wing. Her smile, when she offered it to Lady Jeanette, who had come beside her to urge her to go forward and bow down to the king, was like the burst of a sun’s ray, sweet and seductive.

“Come to me, child!” the king commanded.

Her chin inched high as her green eyes surveyed him with defiance and wariness.

“Come, child,” Edward repeated, growing impatient. He had forgotten his war for a moment, but he never forgot that he was king. “Come closer!”

“I am here already, milord!” she replied serenely.

“Come closer.”

Danielle d’Aville took one small step toward him.

Indeed, the king thought, she was her mother’s daughter.

He rose, and spun on the two ladies accompanying her, Jeanette and Monteine.

“You have been entrusted with this young heiress, and you have been sorely lacking at your task, Lady Jeanette. By God, this is insufferable! I shall have you replaced—”

“No!” the girl cried suddenly, rushing before him then and falling down quickly upon a knee. “Sire, I humbly greet you!” she cried out, just as she had been taught.

Those emerald eyes touched him, but there was nothing humble whatsoever about her. She stood. “You mustn’t blame my ladies,” she said. “I have been properly schooled—they have taken great pains. But no one, King of England, can command another’s heart and what lies within the soul.”

Edward stared at her incredulously. So the little vixen had a will about her. But she also had some compassion in her—along with her reckless pride and courage.

But no child of his—acknowledged or no—was going to defy him for long.

“You!” he warned, pointing a finger at her, “are my ward, young lady. And you will learn in the future to do as I command as your guardian and your king. I know that you understand my words full well.”

“Indeed, I understand a great deal,” she replied. She stared at him with her blaming eyes, and he thought, by God, she is like Lenore, coming down from heaven for her revenge.

“I will make you honor me, girl,” Edward told her. She didn’t reply then, but Monteine stepped forward, urging her to do so. “You must ask the king’s mercy—for us all!”

But Danielle smiled, staring at the king. “If he is such a great king, he will be merciful. I do not beg mercy, my lady.”

The king felt a soaring streak of anger.

“You will now reside in my court, my little lady,” he informed her. “And if you give me too much difficulty, you will be beaten.”

She was staring at him, her fury ill-concealed, when Philippa suddenly swept into the hall, his wife who had willingly followed him into so many battles. She gazed at him, a brow arching at his obvious temper. Then she smiled at the girl. “Ah, it is Robert’s daughter at last, is it?”

With her motherly kindness, she did what Edward hadn’t dared, and embraced Danielle. “Oh, but you’re beautiful! Your mother must have been quite lovely, for you’re not a thing like your dear, departed father! You mustn’t fret—you will be with us until you are safely full grown and wed.”