The Mistress of Normandy

“Did you think your uncle of Burgundy would let him stay?” Chiang asked, his dark eyes trained on a bubbling stew of Peter’s salt that boiled in a crucible over a coal fire.

A warm spark of relief hid inside her. Ignoring it, she said, “Uncle Jean had no right to order Lazare to Paris.”

“Not having the right has never stopped Burgundy before.”

“Why would he send Lazare to swear fealty to King Charles?”

Chiang shrugged. “Doubtless to keep the man from your bed.”

She nearly choked on the irony of it. Lazare had taken care of that aspect of the marriage himself. And now that he was gone, she could not place him between herself and the English baron.

“Burgundy has left also?” asked Chiang.

“Aye, he claimed he had some private matter to attend to,” said Lianna glumly. “He had no right,” she repeated. She studied Chiang’s face, admiring his implacable concentration, the deep absorption with which he performed his task. His eyes, exotically upturned at the corners, seemed to hold the wisdom of centuries. He had a stark, regal face that put her in mind of emperors in the East, a distance too far to contemplate.

“You know he has it in his power to do most anything he wishes. Pass me that siphon, my lady.”

She handed him a copper tube. “That is what worries me about Uncle Jean. He also refused to send reinforcements to repel the English baron. He will not risk King Henry’s displeasure.”

Carefully Chiang extracted the purified salt from the vat. “Will the Englishman press his claim by force?”

“I know not. But we should be prepared.” She sat back on her heels and watched Chiang work, his short brown fingers handling scales and calipers with the delicacy of a surgeon. Sympathy, affection, and respect tumbled through her. Chiang had been a fixture at Bois-Long since the days of her youth. Like the man himself, his arrival was a mystery. Fleeing the capture of a mysterious ship from the East, he’d washed up on the Norman shore, the sole survivor of a vessel whose destination and mission Chiang had never revealed.

Only the Sire de Bois-Long, Lianna’s father, had protected the strange-looking man from a heathen’s death at the hands of superstitious French peasants. With his timeless knowledge of defense and his meticulous skill at gunnery, Chiang had repaid Aimery the Warrior a hundredfold.

But even now, the castle folk who had known him for years regarded him as an oddity, some gossips falling just short of denouncing him as a sorcerer. The men-at-arms begrudged him this small workroom in a corner of the armory and never failed to sketch the sign of the cross when passing by.

Chiang peered at her through wide-set, fathomless eyes. “And are you prepared, my lady?”

She hung her head. During the two days of the duke’s visit, she’d prayed and worried over a difficult decision. “Yes,” she said faintly.

He set aside his sieves and calipers and gave her the full measure of his attention. “Tell me.”

She tapped her chin with her forefinger. “I’ve sent a missive to Raoul, Sire de Gaucourt in Rouen, asking for fifty men-at-arms.”

“Did you consult Lazare in this?”

“Of course not. He knows nothing of diplomacy and politics. It matters not anymore. He is gone.”

Chiang showed no surprise at her defiance, yet she read disapproval in his calm, steady gaze. In appealing to the Sire de Gaucourt, she had betrayed her uncle. Gaucourt did not openly side with the Armagnacs, yet he was known to be sympathetic to Burgundy’s enemy.

“Was I wrong, Chiang?” she asked desperately.

He shrugged. His straight dark thatch of hair caught blue highlights from the coal fire. “You have shown yourself to be a poor judge of character, but Burgundy’s niece nonetheless. The duke himself would have done no less. Remember his tenet: ‘Power goes to the one bold enough to seize it.’”

Bolstered by Chiang’s counsel, she gave him a glimmer of a smile. “Very well. Shall we try the culverin?” The piece was new and had three chambers for more rapid firing.

He looked away. “I plan to do so. But alone.”

“What?”

“Your husband forbade me to work the guns with you.”

She leaped to her feet. “The salaud. How dare he dictate what I may and may not do?”

“Your laws dictate that you are subservient to your husband—or his son in his absence. Gervais has already said that he will enforce his father’s command.”

“We shall see,” she muttered, and left the armory to search for Gervais and tell him exactly what she thought of his father’s interdict.

In the hall she found the women at their spinning. Fleecy balls of carded wool littered the floor, and women’s talk wove in and out of the clack and whir of the spinning wheels. Edithe sat by the hearth, idly eating a pasty.

“What do you, Edithe?” Lianna asked, struggling to keep the irritation from her voice. “Why are you not helping with the spinning?”

The girl wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Lazare released me,” she said, a faint gleam of smugness in her ripe smile.

Lianna stared. The wooden sounds of the wheels stopped, leaving an echo of expectant silence in the hall. Lazare had singled Edithe out to vent his lust; apparently all knew of it. Covering her dismay with anger, Lianna ordered the women back to work with a clipped imperative, then turned her attention to the idle maid.

Edithe made an elaborate show of finishing the pasty and licking the crumbs from her fingers. Fury welled like a hot powder charge within Lianna.

“I see,” she said, her throat taut as she exerted all the control she could marshal. “I wonder, Edithe, if you know where Lazare has gone.”

“Mayhap the mews,” the maid replied. “He does enjoy falconry, you know.”

No, Lianna didn’t know. Lazare had shared nothing of himself, and she had never asked. She didn’t care; she had his name, and that was all she needed for now. Still, his open infidelity stung her pride. With great satisfaction she said, “Lazare is no longer at Bois-Long, Edithe. He has gone to Paris.”

The maid’s eyes widened. Lianna smiled. “Lazare excused you from spinning. Very well, you are excused.” Edithe looked relieved until Lianna added, “You will do needlework instead. Aye, the chaplain needs a new alb.”

Edithe’s face crumpled in dismay. “But I am so clumsy with the needle,” she said.

“Doing boonwork for the church is good for the soul,” Lianna retorted, and strode out of the hall. Climbing the stairs to the upper chambers, she tried to formulate a speech scathing enough for Gervais. Keep her from her gunnery indeed. Her dudgeon peaked as she arrived at the room he shared with Macée. She raised her fist to knock.

A sound from within stopped her. A moan, as if someone were being tortured. Nom de Dieu, was Gervais beating his wife? But the next sound, a warm burble of laughter followed by a remark so ribald Lianna barely understood it, mocked that notion. Cheeks flaming, she fled.

Her fury deepened into an unfamiliar sense of helpless frustration. Shamed by the tears boiling behind her eyes, she rushed to the stables and commanded her ivory palfrey to be saddled. She rode away from the château at a furious gallop.

Please be there, she prayed silently as the greening landscape whipped by. Please be there.

Twice during her uncle’s sojourn she had managed to slip off to the place of Cuthbert’s cross; twice she’d found the coppice empty. No, not quite empty. The first time she’d found a single snowdrop lying on the cross, its waxy petals still fresh. The second time she’d found the emerald-tipped feather of a woodcock. She kept the flower and feather in her apron pocket, and often her fingers stole inside to touch the evidence that Rand had gone seeking her. Evidence that he wasn’t just a dream conjured by her troubled mind. Evidence that one man found her desirable.

But today a token would not suffice. Encased by the icy armor of betrayal and confusion, she needed Rand—his generous strength, his tender smile, the liquid velvet of his voice. She needed to gaze into the same green depths of his eyes.

He was there.

Lianna checked her horse, dismounted, and tethered the palfrey to a bush where Charbu grazed. Rand sat leaning against the cross. His winsome smile reached across the distance that separated them, to beckon her.

Her heart lifting, she hesitated, then approached at a slow walk. The scene was almost too perfect for her worldly presence to disturb. Rand sat cross-legged, surrounded by an arch of trees and meadow grasses that nodded in the breeze. An errant shaft of sunlight filtered through the budding larch boughs, touching his golden hair with sparkling highlights. In his lap he held a harp. The fingers of one hand strummed idly over the strings. Stepping closer, she saw that his other hand cradled a baby rabbit. I nearly slew its mother, she thought absurdly.

Rand’s eyes never left her. At last he spoke—to the rabbit, not to Lianna. “Off with you, nestling,” he said, and set the creature down, giving it a nudge with his finger until it scampered away. Then he laid aside his harp and stood.

She stayed rooted, frozen by new and awesome sensations that pulsated through her like the wingbeats of a lark. Rand was a deity in a dream garden, and suddenly she feared to enter his world. Lazare’s duplicity and her uncle’s scheming had soiled her. She couldn’t belong here.

But that was Belliane, an inner voice reminded her. To Rand she was Lianna, brave and unsullied in her anonymity.

He stepped forward, put out his hand, and brushed his knuckles lightly over her cold cheek, an inquiring gesture, one that demanded a response.

The restrained tenderness and gentle warmth of his touch melted the ice encasing Lianna. Thawed by his kindness, a single tear emerged, dangled on the points of her lashes, then coursed down her cheek. He traced its path with his thumb, caught the second with his lips, and then the broad wall of his chest absorbed the hot floodtide that followed.

Four

Stricken by her grief without understanding it, Rand wrapped the small, shuddering girl against him. Whatever he’d expected—a shy smile, a tentative greeting—was swept away by the depth of her naked emotions. For long moments he stood holding her, stroking her tense back, her rounded shoulders, bending to touch his lips to the wind-cooled silk of her hair. “Hush, pucelle,” he whispered. “Please don’t cry anymore.”

He’d felt guilty coming here, giving in to an impulse he knew he should not indulge. Now her need drove away the guilt and filled him with a powerful sense of rightness. Although pledged to Lianna’s mistress and bound to style himself the girl’s overlord, he could not withhold his comfort.

He tightened his throat against speaking further, for to speak now would be to admit to emotions he had no right to feel. Instead he cradled her small, quaking body against him.

At length her weeping subsided. She clung to him, kept her face buried in his tunic. When Rand curved his fingers under her chin and lifted her face to his, she stiffened and resisted. But the gentle force of his will won out, and he found himself staring into the battered silver of her eyes.

The pain there was so deep, so vivid, that he felt as if a fist had reached down inside him and squeezed his heart.

“Tell me, pucelle,” he whispered.

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

His finger caught the sparkling drop of a tear from her cheek and brought it to his own lips; he tasted the faint, bitter salt of her grief. “I’d break a hundred lances if the deed could drive the sadness from your eyes.”

That brought a tiny smile. “I am no damsel in a chanson de geste. I need no dragons slain for me.”

“What do you need, Lianna?”

“A friend.” Her voice sounded faint, as if she were reluctant to confess such a human necessity.

He touched his lips to her hairline, breathed in the light scent of her fragrance. Soon enough he would be forced to betray the childlike trust that softened her features. “I’ll be your friend, pucelle,” he said.

She unwrapped herself from his embrace. Long, loose strands of her hair clung to his arm, linking them. Gesturing at his harp, she said, “Sing me a song.”

He smiled. “I was prepared to break lances for you.” He brought her to sit by the cross and took the harp in his lap.

Fascinated, Lianna watched his strong hands close around the frame of ashwood worn smooth by years of handling. Long masculine fingers caressed the gut-spun strings, bringing forth a sweet shiver of sound. The tones lifted to mate with the spring breeze, and Lianna felt an odd sense of intimacy, as if the notes were whispered in her ear. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms about them.

He sang an old troubadour’s lay of unrequited love. He had a voice like none other she had heard—vibrant, clean as rain, powerful as the wind singing through the crags.

Only when a breeze cooled her cheeks did she realize she was crying again. But the new tears came on a release of pain, as if Rand’s singing had drawn a thorn from her flesh.

He watched her expectantly. She swallowed. “How can you sing like that? As if—as if your soul were touched by God.”

Laughter rippled from him. “Not by God. By you.”

They weren’t touching, but Lianna felt as if she’d been caressed. I think I love you, he’d called to her, and she’d wondered about that for days, questioning his honesty and her own worthiness of it. No man had ever said those words to her, had those feelings for her. Did he still feel affection for her, or was the emotion only a passing fancy? She feared to ask, but what she saw in the pure, liquid green of his eyes made her hear the words in her heart over and over again.

He set down his harp and walked to her horse. “Let me guess,” he said, stroking the palfrey’s satiny neck. “You’ve stolen a horse and you’re running away.”

“I am allowed certain liberties,” she said quickly, leaping up to join him. His eyes were so clear, so all-seeing. Did he know she lied? She felt guilty deceiving him. Quickly she justified it. This knight-errant would never befriend the Demoiselle de Bois-Long; no one ever had.

He ran his hand over the palfrey’s withers and down her leg, pushing aside the grass to examine the iron curve of her shoe. “The horse is well tended.”

“Of course.” Lianna’s chin lifted. She tolerated no sloth in her stables. Catching Rand’s curious look, she added, “The marshal is most exacting.” Only, she thought, because he knew she’d put him out to the rye fields if he shirked his duties. She tugged at Rand’s hand. “Let’s walk.”

Gratified by her lightened mood, Rand followed. Her hair played in the breeze like threads of moonlight spun by fairies. As they fell in step together, the hem of her heather smock brushed against his leg, sending a sweet, forbidden thrill to the center of him. The browns and greens of the new season colored the landscape, and he forced his attention to the pollarded willows and stunted poplars that nodded in the wind.

“I’m convinced this was a pirate path of the Vikings,” she said, leading him over the hill that sheltered the glade. “I used to play Helquin the Huntsman when I was a child.”

He smiled. She spoke as if her childhood were long past, yet in his eyes she was a child still. “Who is Helquin?”

“Ah, you do not know the legend in Gascony.” Her arm sketched the sweep of the landscape. “All the way from the cold white country of the north Helquin came, bearing the shrieking souls of the damned on his shoulders.” She shivered and looked as though she enjoyed the sensation. The thought crossed his mind that Justine would never have savored such a gruesome tale.

“When the wild birds cry out over the marshes, the peasants say they echo Helquin’s long gallop through the centuries. I’d pretend to see him burst through the woods with all the battalions of hell at his heels.”

Rand grinned. “Would you run in terror from Helquin?”

“Certainly not. I would pretend to blow him all the way to the Zuyder Zee with a sixty-pound ball.”

He stopped walking, took her by the shoulders, and rolled his eyes. “I do not approve of your penchant for gunnery.”

Scowling, she struck him lightly on the chest. “Doubtless you would have me cloistered in a lady’s bower, carding wool.”

I would have you folded in my arms, he thought. Next to my heart. He gave her shoulders a squeeze. “I cannot dictate what you should or shouldn’t do. That’s not how it is between friends. But I would prefer you didn’t work with guns. I’ve seen the destruction they can wreak.”

“Very well, Rand the Gascon,” she said, her eyes glittering a challenge, “how would you defend a château?”

“With the might of men-at-arms and archers.”

“Knights.” She spat the word. “They indulge in looting and ransom.” Color rose to her cheeks, and Rand realized he’d discovered a topic she had often pondered, and not happily. She planted her hands on her hips. “Chivalry is but an empty spectacle, an excuse to plunder the weak.”

“Unscrupulous men, not the laws of chivalry, are to blame.”

“Chivalry is but a cloak to hide the excesses of their chevauchées.”

A sudden hideous thought struck him. “Have you been hurt by knights, Lianna? Is that why you disdain chivalry?”

She lowered her gaze. “Anyone who has smelled the smoke of a burning orchard, seen a baby spitted on a sword, heard the cries of a terrified woman, has been hurt by these men who call themselves knights.”

He swallowed hard. She was French; she’d seen these horrors, lived with them all her life. Still, she challenged everything he believed about knighthood. “Do you include me in your censure?”

She looked up. “Do you do those things?”

“No,” he said. “Never. Do you believe me?”

“I think you truly wish to protect the weak and uphold the faith. But I also think you are wrong to believe you can achieve this through chivalry.” She softened the blow by touching his cheek, adding, “You are that rare man, Rand, a man who cannot be touched by corruption.”

Her statement sent him into a spiral of self-reproach. Every lying word he told her would soon come back to haunt him. Unable to extricate himself from the dilemma, he started walking again, then surprised himself by asking, “What think you of archers?” Jesu, was he truly having such a conversation with a girl?

“Rabble,” she said. “Undisciplined rabble.”

“Can you dispute the success of the bowmen at Crécy and Poitiers?”

She glared. “A fine way for a Frenchman to speak, lauding English victories.”

Fool, he said to himself, she’ll find you out even sooner if you don’t guard your tongue. “I laud not the victories, only the way in which they were won. How many arrows could a master archer let fly in the time it takes to load and discharge a cannon?”

“A hundred arrows cannot bring down a stone wall. A single gun can.”

“What good is a firearm that hides the enemy in smoke?”

“What good is an arrow in a strong wind, a bowstring saturated by rain?”

Her vehemence delighted and disturbed him. Deliberately he sidestepped the challenge. “What good is arguing with a maid too precocious for her own welfare?”

She scowled, but he held her with a look of amused affection until the corners of her mouth tipped up in a smile. “You will never defeat my logic in this, sir knight,” she stated. “I am far too quick for you—in more ways than one.” She turned and ran down a grassy slope.

Laughing, he followed her lead past great elms, old yews, giant beeches, over half-buried stones and purplish mud, until he glimpsed the sea through rows of wind-torn hedges.

His caution swept away by her capriciousness and the lithe grace of her movements, he lunged forward and caught her around the waist. Her soft gasp tickled his ear as he swung her in the air. They tumbled together into the soft grass until, with gentle force, Rand pinned her beneath him. One hand bound her delicate wrists and held them above her head, while the other tiptoed in light caresses down her rib cage until she fairly shrieked for mercy.

“Who is the quicker now, pucelle?”

She clamped her mouth shut, refusing to yield. His fingers found and tickled each rib in turn, sending little shocks of awareness through him as her form and the warmth of her flesh came alive beneath her homespun smock.

Boldly he teased the flesh of her neck, his fingers rippling beneath the dense silk of her hair. Her skin was as smooth as ivory, as lustrous as a pearl. Wildly he wondered if she could feel the simmering heat of his desire, if she knew how close he was to letting his passion devour them both.

Sudden guilt flayed him. He was betrothed to another. Yet with Lianna his vows of chastity, of chivalry, flew on the wind, beyond the reach of reason.

As of its own accord, his touch changed to searching caresses, his fingers tracing her cheeks, her shoulders, the dainty line of her collarbone. He explored her form and texture, wanting to stamp her image on his soul. She stirred, and a small whimpering sound escaped her. “Who is the quicker now?” he asked again, forcing lightness into his tone. “Who?”

“You...oh, you,” she gasped.

Immediately Rand released her wrists, but he touched her still with languorous strokes. Bringing his face very close to hers, he studied the clouds of pink color in her cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes.

“There is naught so heady,” he whispered, “as a battle won.”

“You do not play fair,” she replied breathlessly.

“Where you are concerned,” he said, “I forswear fairness.” The wind stirred the hedges, and a shadow drifted over her face, deepening the color of her eyes to opaque silver. She shifted beneath him, the slight movement bringing his every nerve to a state of burning aliveness.

“Lianna, I haven’t stopped thinking about you since the moment we met.” He touched his lips at random over her flushed and startled face. “You make me want to forget who I am, to forget there’s a world and a time beyond this moment.”

She took a deep, dreamy breath, and he caught it with his mouth, absorbing the warm sweet nectar of her lips. The times he’d held a woman in his arms were few, but had he kissed a thousand women, he knew not one of them could seize his soul as Lianna did.

She lay still, naive, accepting. Her lips felt like moist velvet as he brushed them with his own. She tasted of morning dew and mystery, as if her body held some secret just out of his reach. He burned for her, longed to unlock the person she was, to peel away the layers of her outward identity and cast them aside like petals plucked from a daisy.

Madness, he thought, feathering kisses over her brow, into her hair. Madness to indulge in this forbidden tryst. But oh, how he wanted to explore the insanity. His hand found the sweet curve of her breast. He lifted his head. She eyed him with soft inquiry. Her lips were moist, love-bruised.

“We’d best start back,” he said reluctantly.

Wistfulness darkened her eyes. “Why?”

“Because you are a funny little pucelle who enjoys guns and tries my convictions, and I am a knight-errant bound where my travels take me.” He forced himself to speak easily as he helped her up. “Did your maman never teach you better than to consort with strange men?”

“I am an orphan, and you don’t seem like a stranger to me.”

Although she spoke matter-of-factly, he recognized the glint of pain in the sea-silver depths of her eyes. He drew her against him, startled anew by her smallness, her sturdiness. He whispered, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

She nuzzled her cheek against his chest. “You’d never hurt a woman. You told me so.”

Desire swelled in him; he choked it off with a fresh dose of guilt. Before long she would learn who he was, and he’d never have the gift of her trust again.

At a leisurely pace they started back toward their horses, easing into a relationship that Rand knew could flourish only for a few more days—even hours, perhaps. He showed her a bittern’s nest occupied by four brown-speckled eggs. She showed him a limestone deposit and a ruined Roman aqueduct. He wove a crown of wildflowers and placed it on her head. She fashioned a tiny catapult from a green ash bough and showed him how to fling a stone fifty paces.