Chapter 20
In the great tent where Edith and her fellow villagers slept, Many was safely resting. Bathed and in a fresh shift, she stirred only to sigh with contentment when Ranulf laid the slumbering foundling baby beside her. Teodwin had placed her on a small pallet in the great tent and put screens around her. Maria and the youngsters, Mary, Simon, and Gawain, kept trying to peep at the young woman, and Teodwin had been shooing them away with his carved walking stick.
“They think it a game,” he told Edith wearily, “and you are not done yet.” He studied her bedraggled appearance: the gown with the missing sleeve, her bare feet and uncombed, drying hair. “You have been summoned tonight to Castle Fitneyclare. Did you return by way of the woodland path?”
Startled by the question, Edith nodded. She had been watching Ranulf watching Many and the baby. He had called the young mother a witch, but he now stroked her damp hair quite tenderly. Ranulf, she was coming to recognize, was ever moved by the plight of others. Had he not saved his page Gawain and been more than happy to take in Mary and Simon, two peasant children of no pedigree?
“We came the back way from the church,” she mouthed to her steward, conscious of Maria hovering close. So far, Maria had accepted Edith’s hasty story that she and Ranulf had taken Many’s baby to the church to be baptized. Edith wanted that story to hold.
“As well you did, and used the back entrance to return.” Teodwin gestured with his thumb. “Sir Giles is waiting outside at the front, to escort you.”
“That is for me to do,” said Ranulf, stalking up behind Teodwin.
Relief poured through Edith, sweet and golden as honey. On their silent, hasty march from the churchyard, where they had been forced to keep their eyes on the faint track and their ears pricked for footpads, she had been afraid. She did not want Ranulf to think less of her, or worse, despise her, for not believing as he did. But it seemed that he still cared for and accepted her.
“She is my prize,” he clarified, dashing her hopes. He looked her up and down. “A bedraggled one. I think the gown would be improved by another sleeve, and your makeshift veil is not at all appealing, my lady.”
It was the first time he had truly commented on her new gown and perversely, although she recognized the justice of his remark, Edith was hurt and angered anew, the more so as Maria giggled.
“We should both change,” she said stiffly. “I am sorry about the new gown.” She was, too, very sorry. I have not even seen it myself by day. . . .
Ranulf bowed, his dark eyes twinkling. “No matter as for that,” he said lightly, with a nobleman’s ease about clothes, “I will return for you.”
“Send your squire,” Edith answered. “You will need longer to change than I. Your tunic and boots are both amiss.”
Instead of being indignant, as she hoped, he merely glanced down at his crumpled tunic and scuffed boots and laughed.
“True, true,” he said, still chuckling. “I must indeed send Edmund to recover you while I beautify myself.”
Edith bit her tongue on two possible answers: the first that he needed no beautifying, the second that Edmund would need to stand his ground with Giles. The first response stoked Ranulf’s vanity too much, the second gave her former master too much importance.
Edmund is a noble squire and I am an Eastern Princess. Sir Giles will not be allowed to pester me.
 
 
Sir Giles saw his former friend leave the Lady of Lilies’s tent. Ran looked as he had before with Olwen, preoccupied and happy, thoroughly smug and irritatingly joyful. That was before he had worked on Olwen. He had taken her bright dislike and fashioned it into a new and shiny desire.
Then why did she refuse you in the end? whispered a dark voice in his mind, but he ignored that.
Strong hate, strong lust: two sides of the same blade. He would work on this Eastern Princess, too. Women were easy to charm. Why not? Was he not entitled to pleasure? Carefree times and the best kind of contest, where his opponent did not even understand that they were in conflict. He would win this latest girl from Ran, of course: prove again he was the cleverer, more cultured man.
She was emerging. Giles paused to scan her strange dress: a billowing wrap of some kind over billowing pale skirts, and a long headdress and veil. Ran’s lanky page was with her, but he would be quickly disposed of, sent on an errand of some kind. Giles smoothed his hair and strode forward, stopping in a patch of moonlight to show off his fine profile.
“My Lady of Lilies. It is a wonder for me to meet you at last.”
He bowed, planting himself more firmly in the middle of the track before the small, veiled figure and her gangling, pimple-cheeked escort.
“Sir Ranulf needs your assistance, Edmund, so I will take the lady.”
“My lord instructed his squire to remain with me, Sir Giles.”
He was surprised at her speaking at all, and startled by the exotic timbre and accent of her voice. Recalling the many rumors of her beauty, he smiled. Charming Ran’s “prize” into becoming his own would be a sweet triumph.
First get rid of the squire. . . . “Take my cloak, Edmund.”
He tossed the fur cloak at the startled squire, who instinctively put up both hands to catch it, and swiftly offered his own arm. “My lady.”
She took his arm, of course, and he moved them off along the track, deliberately choosing the most well-trod. In moments their progress was checked by great streamers of mud and standing water, visible even by moonlight. “I fear I will need to carry you along this part.” He fought to keep the smile from his voice and lips. “Allow me, my lady.”
She remained perfectly still, while Ran’s squire was open-mouthed.
Learn from a master, boy! “Lady Blanche is eager for your company,” he prompted, dropping a pebble into the ooze. Let the little madam see how filthy this is. He turned so the moonlight would catch his smile and gently squeezed her hand, aware that in seconds that soft, pliant body would be in his arms.
“You led us here, sir.”
To his amazement, her exotic voice held a tinge of censure, and worse, he actually saw her shrink back. Irritated by her cool response and her haughtiness—who was she to berate him?—he was instantly tempted to rip her veil away, to roll her in mud and to have his servants retrieve her later and haul her to his tent. There he would teach her the value of good manners.
“Ah, you should forgive me, Lady.” You will find it best to forgive me—“I was overcome by your beauty.”
She did not ask, as women always did, how he knew she was beautiful, so he could not use his best line. Instead, she plucked a flat stone from the murk and laid it across a vein of dirt. Even as he was astonished by what she was doing, she flew from him, leaping lightly from his side over the stone and onto the tough, dry grass. He saw her bare feet were not even marked, a further insult.
“If you use the stone, you may come, too,” she told him, the insolent filly. “How fare you, Edmund?”
She asks a squire ahead of me!
“We should make haste,” he ground out.
“Why, sir?”
Why did the bitch not say his name?
He was already justly aggrieved, but there was worse.
“As I consider this, I wonder. Why should I hasten to the castle tonight, when my Lady Blanche has never asked me to her castle on any other night? Why are you her messenger, sir?”
“Do you call me liar to my face?”
“It takes one to know one. The lady Blanche, I mean. She will understand why, as a lady, I will not obey her summons.”
Her brazen answer made no sense. Outraged, he lunged through the standing pools of water toward her, conscious of nothing but a need to have his way.
A shadow hunted over the moon and became solid, became Ranulf, almost as tall as he was and faster, harder. Before he could react, a fist that felt like a boulder smashed into his gut and he was eating mud, gasping for breath and eating mud. Through a dull roar in his ears he heard his former friend.
“That is enough, Giles. You have drunk too much wine at high table, and that is enough.”
He closed his eyes on his humiliation and would not answer. Slowly, he heard them leave. Soon, only a scent of lilies was left.