Knights (11 page)

“Yes,” Gloriana said, spearing another bit of cheese with the point of her knife. “We are friends. She is quite aggrieved at spoiling my marriage—it seems she expected me to have warts and wrinkles—and wants very much to return to France. I begged her to remain here, of course. The sooner we have severed the bonds of our unholy matrimony, the sooner I may go about making a life for myself.”

Dane took another swallow of wine, an audible gulp this time, which might have meant she’d gotten under his skin—or merely that he was thirsty. A night of aleswilling and carousing undoubtedly made for a parched tongue, as well as a headache and a roiling stomach. Gloriana hoped so, for St. Gregory’s sake.

“We have already discussed the matter of your ’life.’ Pray, spare yourself the trouble of making one, as a suitable vocation will be provided for you.”

Gloriana’s smile was angelic, beatific, blinding—she meant it to be so. “The devil take you,” she said adoringly. “And all your pompous plans for tucking me away in some genteel and luxurious prison.”

Kenbrook gave a long and ragged sigh. “I truly think you are my punishment for forgotten sins,” he said.

“Mayhap,” Gloriana agreed cheerfully. “I’m not surprised that they’ve slipped your mind—your misdeeds, I mean—for their number is surely beyond counting, like the stars in the heavens.”

“It is a happy thing for you, milady,” Kenbrook said, beaming upon the hallful of happy breakfasters as he spoke, “that I do not believe in raising my hand to a woman. Oh, to absent my own principles just long enough to take you across my knee and whack some sense into you.”

“While that may be where you keep what sense you have been blessed with,” Gloriana countered, “my own resides in my head and heart.” She sighed in a deep and worldly fashion. “Alas, I confess that I suffer from a similar scruple to yours, my lord. Were murder not a mortal sin, I should put an arrow through your treacherous heart and dance for joy before all Creation.”

Gareth, who had apparently been listening to the conversation from its inception, interceded at last. “Stop this sparring at once, or I swear I shall have you both clapped in irons and carted off to the dungeons, leaving the rest of us in peace.”

Dane started to protest, but Gloriana, who remembered that she loved Kenbrook, touched his arm to prevent him. Beneath the green-and-white-checked silk of his sleeve, his muscles felt like tempered steel.

“This is Edward’s day,” she said quietly. “I would not spoil it with our discord.”

Dane hesitated, and she thought she saw pain in his eyes as he regarded her, along with barely suppressed annoyance. “Nor would I,” he agreed. “Shall we call a truce, Lady Kenbrook?”

She nodded, her mouth curved into a smile. “Until the morrow,” she said,

Kenbrook laughed and raised his wine goblet. “Until the morrow,” he replied.

“How fleeting,” Gareth remarked dryly, “is this sweet harmony.”

Neither Gloriana nor Dane offered a comment.

Once the friends and family of Edward and his fellow aspirants had taken their breakfast, a trumpet sounded from the courtyard. Dane rose and offered his arm to Gloriana, who took it in a suitably meek and docile manner.

Just the touch of her fingers on the swell of his forearm sent unsettling tremors through his muscles and along his bones. Kenbrook wanted, at one and the same time, to thrust her away from him and to draw her close. The thought of bedding her, assiduously avoided these many years since their sham of a wedding, thundered in his mind and lay like a molten weight in his groin.

Dane was many things, but he was not a liar. From the moment he had seen Gloriana that first day, reclining in her tub, blanketed in yellow rose petals, he had desired her with an ardor no amount of reason or bad English wine could assuage. The night before, after Edward and the others had staggered off to the chapel to keep the required vigil, Dane had taken himself to the lake’s edge, there to swim naked in moon-dappled waters. Even the chill had not relieved him—only one thing could do that.

He watched Gloriana out of the corner of his eye as he escorted her with some ceremony from the great hall and into the sunny courtyard, with its fluttering banners of every color. Gloriana was pure, Dane reminded himself, for all her saucy tongue and improper ideas, and he did not intend to despoil her—no matter what her attractions.

The decision was not entirely noble, for if Dane bedded this fiery woman, their marriage could not rightly be broken, and a divorce would become necessary. The little chit might even be trying to entice him, despise him though she surely did, just to ruin his plans and delay her own consignment to a nunnery.

Grimly, Dane set his mind to ignoring his virgin wife. His body was considerably less obliging; it knew Gloriana’s slender, agile frame for a perfect counterpart, and ached, in the most primitive of ways, to join itself with her.

Fortunately, the celebratory nature of the day offered no little distraction, for even as Dane and Gloriana took their places in the courtyard, standing side by side, trumpets blared over the tunes of minstrels wandering through the crowd. With Gareth and Friar Cradoc, the fathers, uncles, or brothers of Edward’s fellow novices mounted the improvised dais with appropriate pomp and decorum.

Although his relationship with Edward was prickly, Dane felt a rush of pride fit to bring water to his eyes. He quelled the response before it could do him dishonor and watched his young brother lower himself to one knee, along with the other lads, his head bowed for the friar’s prayer. The minstrels fell silent, and the onlookers folded their hands reverently and pondered the ground.

In a ringing voice, Cradoc enjoined the God of heaven to look with favor and mercy upon these brave soldiers of the Cross, to purify them, to sustain their valor through every trial, and finally to grant them a holy peace when at last they lay down their swords to await the Resurrection. After adding a plea for a good harvest, the priest ended his discourse with God, and the young soldiers on the platform raised their eyes to him, but did not rise from their positions of ceremonial humility.

“Do you swear loyalty to your God and your liege lord?” the holy man asked of each novice in turn, in a thunderous yet somehow tender voice.

Dane felt his heart constrict, thinking of the perils these brave and hopeful boys would face once they went soldiering. Even the graphic and often bawdy tales of the old soldiers now tending Gareth’s horses, guarding the gates, and walking the parapets could not prepare the lads for the singular sorrows and glories that lay ahead of them. The varied faces of war, sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideous, and very often merely tedious, were unfathomable to anyone who had not looked upon them personally.

“I swear,” Edward vowed in a clear and solemn voice in his turn, “to uphold the laws of God, honor the will of my lord brother, Hadleigh, and preserve my honor until the moment of my death and beyond.”

Gareth was holding a ceremonial sword, a family heirloom said to have a piece of St. Andrew’s heel bone sealed within its hilt. He stepped forward, touching Edward’s left shoulder with the gleaming blade, then his right. “I dub thee Sir Edward St. Gregory, knight of the realm and brave servant of Christ.”

In a swift, sidelong glance of Gloriana, Dane saw a tear shining on her cheek.

Edward kept his head down, as was required of him, and did not speak.

One by one, the other lads were dubbed by the male heads of their own families with other swords, no doubt containing other relics. The fathers, brothers, and uncles were, every one, vassals and knights in Gareth’s own service.

The boys rose gracefully to their feet, their youthful faces flushed with the knowledge of their new and hard-won status. Most had been training for this day
from the age of seven or eight, first serving as squires to an elder knight, then learning to ride and to fight tirelessly with lance and sword and mace. The course of preparation was a long and arduous one, involving many bruises and broken bones, and none but the most doggedly persistent of the lads saw the ordeal through to its finish.

There was still the ritual called the buffet to be performed, and Dane, feeling Gloriana tense beside him, waited in silence.

Edward stood before his eldest brother, looking lithe and small-boned in his white silk garments, his head high and his gaze level with Gareth’s. Without revealing a hint of reluctance, although Dane knew Hadleigh felt exactly that, the master of the keep drew back his hand and struck Edward such a blow that, despite the boy’s effort to withstand it, he reeled. Blood streamed from his nostrils and trickled from one corner of his mouth, the droplets staining his otherwise pristine tunic.

Righting himself, Edward stood proudly before his brother and his lord, and a cheer of jubilation and pride rose from the crowd.

“Beasts,” Gloriana muttered.

“Must I explain,” Dane retorted pleasantly, “that the buffet is a necessary part of the rites, designed to assure that the knight remembers his oath?”

“You just did,” Gloriana pointed out. “And I still think it is brutal and barbaric.”

Dane did not respond. These lads, he knew, would suffer far worse than a hard cuff from a man of their own blood.

After Edward, each of the other boys was struck in just the same way, not by Gareth, but by the man who had dubbed the boy and heard his promise to serve
honorably. Gloriana stood by staunchly through it all, although Dane could tell she wanted to turn her head, and he knew a certain admiration for her courage. Few women were blessed with the kind of mettle he sensed in her.

The formal part of the ceremony was now ended, with great shouts of joy that seemed to reverberate from the keep’s ancient walls. The trumpets declaimed, dazzling in the sunshine, and the minstrels played their lutes and lyres and pipes again, and out of the merry cacophony came a strangely harmonious refrain.

Edward, having wiped his bruised face on the sleeve of his shirt, searched the gathering from the platform. When his gaze found Gloriana and his face lit up, Dane felt the sting of brief but venomous envy. Kenbrook slipped an arm around his bride’s waist and dug his fingers into her rib cage when she made to pull away.

When Edward reached them, however, Gloriana sprang forward and flung her arms around the lad’s neck, and he embraced her in an unsuitably familiar fashion, whirling her round and round as they laughed together. Dane ground his back teeth and reminded himself that he didn’t intend to keep the chit anyway and that Edward had earned a bit of female adulation.

“I have a gift for you,” Gloriana said, beaming up into Edward’s face, which was incandescent with joy and pride. “I’ve been saving it since the summer fair, and it was so hard not to tell you!”

“Show me,” Edward said, still holding her hand, and he finally glanced at Dane.

Kenbrook offered him quiet congratulations. Later, perhaps after supper, he would give Edward the jewel-handled dagger and leather scabbard he had bought for him in Italy. Gareth would present the boy with a
horse, lance, and armor later, in another far less formal ceremony on the tilting grounds.

Edward murmured his thanks for his brother’s good wishes—he and Dane had made a beginning at mending their differences the night before—but he did not resist when Gloriana pulled him away. Though younger than Gloriana, Kenbrook thought as they rushed off to examine whatever gift she meant to offer, Edward would make a suitable husband for her. He had no lands of his own, of course, and no fortune, but Gloriana was rich enough for both of them. Although tenderness was not normally a consideration in such cases, Edward plainly worshipped the little troublemaker and would no doubt trade his very soul to bed her.

Dane could not think why he balked at the idea of handing Gloriana over, along with the exquisite dagger. All he knew was that he would have died first. No, his original plan had been the best one: Gloriana was bound for the nunnery, where she would be safe and comfortable …

And untouched by a lover’s hands.

Muttering a curse, Dane thrust his fingers through his hair and searched the throng for Gareth. Before he could take a step toward his brother, however, someone grasped his shirtsleeve.

“Monsieur?”

It was Fabrienne, Mariette’s maid. Dane waited out a flash of irritation and then met the plain woman’s accusing gaze. They had never been friends, but neither were they enemies. That would have required an effort they were not willing to make.

“How fares your gentle mistress?” Dane asked, as worry for Mariette replaced his impatience.

“She is well enough, my lord,” Fabrienne replied, in careful, deliberate French. Although Dane was fluent,
and she knew it, she generally addressed him with haughty precision, as though speaking to a dog or an idiot. “Though you neglect her sorely.”

Kenbrook wasn’t about to explain the obvious: that this day belonged to Edward and the other newly minted knights. He had invited Mariette to attend the festivities as an honored guest, and she had batted her lashes demurely and refused.

It troubled him, that timidity of hers.

“What do you want?” he asked bluntly. Fabrienne smiled. “Some tribute for Mademoiselle, to show your regard for her. A trinket, a ribbon—a penny, perhaps?”

Dane had neither trinkets nor ribbons, neither being a normal part of his personal accoutrements, but he opened his purse and took out the requested coin. Fabrienne snatched it from his palm, eyes glittering, and dropped it into a pouch suspended from her girdle.

Kenbrook offered a mocking bow; both of them knew Mariette would never see the penny. He had bought a brief interlude of peace, and while he wouldn’t miss the coin, he resented the necessity of paying it. The first thing he would do once he and Mariette were married—well,
practically
the first thing—was send Fabrienne back to France.

“My lady Mariette may wish to join us on the tilting ground,” he said.

Fabrienne made a contemptuous sound and trundled away toward the castle.

“What a noisome creature,” Gareth commented, startling Dane, who had not been aware of his approach. “Why did you pay her? What hold does she have on you?”