Chapter 21 #3
She watched him without rancor, a slight smile playing at her lips.
Musicians entered the hall, the sounds of merriment began.
An Cleasaiche, the hall jester, arrived, and there was laughter all around at the little man’s antics.
Peter rose, lifting his chalice, saluting David of Scotland. The evening wore on.
Waryk excused himself early, having had Tyler make sure that he be given sleeping quarters in the castle. When he had retired for no more than thirty minutes, there was a tapping on his door, and he knew that Eleanora had come.
“So you are here alone,” she said, looking around.
“Aye,” he told her.
“Well, I suppose there is no way for me to be delicate, is there?” Eleanora said softly.
“You’re a married man, the king has arranged it.
I expected this day to come, and yet … I always knew that it would make no difference to me.
Adultery is a sin, so they say, but there are so many men and women guilty of it that the halls of hell must be quite crowded.
I can’t find it to be a sin. They also say that God has given us free will, but none of us seems to have free will to marry where he or she will. But your wife is young, isn’t she?”
“Aye, that she is.”
“With long golden hair and eyes bluer than the sea.”
“Aye,” he said simply.
Eleanora crossed her arms over her chest, looking at him. “Beauty itself cannot bind a man.”
He went to her, caught her, brought her gently into his arms and smoothed back her hair. He knew the feel of her, the scent of her, he’d known her so long. It would be so easy to be with her; the time he’d been gone from Blue Isle already seemed so long …
Yet …
He had wondered himself how he would feel when he saw her again.
They had been together, when possible, for years.
She was as familiar to him as his own hand.
She had not changed in any way, she remained a beautiful woman, one who had cared for him, one he had loved.
He had wondered if human nature would rear itself here, and if he would see her, and want her.
But he realized, holding her gently now, that he had wanted Mellyora with him.
Aye, he wanted her with him now, for many reasons, yet one more important than any other.
No matter how rational he had forced himself to be where Ewan was concerned, he had been jealous. Afraid to leave her with a young man who had proven himself brave, daring, resourceful—and moral.
Then …
He had watched her tend her would-be lover’s naked body, and before his injury, the MacKinny had been strong and fine, and he was somewhat amazed that the two never had culminated their love for one another. She had flatly stated her love for the man, and still …
But he hadn’t invited Mellyora to be with him because of anger, fear, jealousy, or any other such emotion. He had wanted her with him … simply because he wanted her.
And he had been able to leave her simply because it had been the only right thing to do. Because, against all odds, he believed in her.
He didn’t know how his emotions and desires had changed so swiftly and surely in the time they had been together.
Eleanora remained beautiful. It wasn’t that he had now been with another woman—there had been other women over the time they’d been together, too.
He had simply done the most outrageously foolish thing: He had fallen in love with his wife.
And he knew, quite suddenly, holding another woman, just how much he loved her.
His passion was overwhelming; he would die for her, not because he was a knight, a warrior, her husband, or the king’s champion, not for nobility, honor, or any other chivalrous concept.
He would die for her, because she had become his life.
So much was etched into his heart already.
He would never forget her, coming across the water in her father’s dragon-prowed boat, bringing him his father’s claymore.
He would never forget her face, her eyes, so many times, the way she had looked at him, defying him, loving him … if only just a little.
“Eleanora, you are a beautiful woman, you’ve meant so much to me, you’ve been peace and sanity to me over the years, but …”
She drew away from him, studying him. “You love your wife?” she whispered.
“I’m sorry.”
She smiled. “Don’t be. It’s a miraculous situation.”
“I care for you, Eleanora. You know that. I have never meant to hurt you—”
“I know that you care about me, Waryk. I know what I’ve meant to you. And of course, now, well, I am hurt, of course. Because I want you. Except that I don’t want to be with a man who wants another woman. And still …”
“Still?”
“If you ever fall out of love with your wife, please, my fine laird, come back to me. I’ll be here.”
“You may not be, you know. You may find yourself wed again.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been promised that it’s my choice from here on out. And I don’t see a marriage in my future.”
“The future can change. It remains elusive.”
“Aye, that it does.” She touched his cheeks, lightly kissed his lips. Then she slipped from his arms and left the room, and his heart felt very heavy.
The Celtic custom had been to shave the cheeks, but grow the mustache.
Normans tended to be clean-shaven. The old Anglo-Saxons, to Ulric’s mind, were simpletons, growing hair everywhere, but then, the Vikings, as well, tended to long hair and full beards, and he had been bearded when he had last been at Daro’s camp.
Therefore, he shaved, and had his hair close-clipped in a Norman fashion, then surveyed himself in a hand mirror and decided he had changed his appearance enough.
Those who had been with him before, except for Han, were dead.
An acceptable loss of life. As Han had said, Vikings fought for riches and honor.
Death in battle was noble. They had made their choices, fighting with him.
Perhaps the peasants and farmers he forced into service had not realized the honor of dying in battle, but as they sat in Valhalla, heroes from the field, they would understand.
He dressed handsomely to pay a visit upon his cousin’s daughter, Anne Hallsteader, now wife to Daro Thorsson.
The old family in Denmark were nobility; they had ruled areas of Northumberland in Britain, and had Renfrew only seized the MacInnish land and more a decade ago, Ulric’s father would have ruled on the border now, and Ulric would be heir to vast estates.
But because of the intervention of one incensed young boy, Ulric’s father had been killed, Renfrew had been killed, and all had been lost. Their followers had been left to eat dirt.
Renfrew’s son, Etienne, had spent the last decade rebuilding what his father had lost. It had only been in the last few years, since the trouble between Mathilda and Stephen in England, that barons in the north of England had begun to flex their power again with real force.
And though Etienne had been a slim, cowardly youth to Ulric’s way of seeing things, he had grown to be a cunning man, gaining aid from his neighbors through false promises and innuendo.
Through marriage, Etienne had gained the rich lands to the west of his homestead.
His wife, poor thing, had died after giving birth to their only son.
The birth had weakened her and she hadn’t recovered.
Some, said, of course, that she had been poisoned so that Etienne could take his second wife, who had brought him the manors of Fiffen and Hoar, and with them, their incomes.
Tall, thin, handsome, clever, Etienne wasn’t much of a warrior—he could barely wield a sword—but he could buy hundreds of swords, and through the deaths of many of the knights in his service, he gained ever more property, confiscating that which belonged to the men in his service who left no widows or children, and sometimes managing to take homes and land anyway, insisting that the knights had owed him for their expensive destriers or trappings.
Etienne watched and waited. He kept Ulric constantly abreast of what went on at the border; Ulric was aware of every military movement by Stephen, David, or Mathilda.
Etienne found the right time and place, and Ulric led sometimes unwilling armies in rebellions that caused David’s forces to remain on the move.
Any fighting man worth his salt knew that harassing an army could cause great damage.
Draw soldiers south, then plot an attack in the north.
Harry the coastline in the north, and wage a major attack in the south.
Chip away at morale, kill the bravest and the best.
Ulric had always been a warrior. He had been contemptuous of Etienne, but he’d been eighteen, in the fighting himself, when his father was killed in Lord Renfrew’s attack on the Scottish border.
Etienne, seventeen but with his tutors back at his father’s manor, had become Lord Renfrew, and therefore, Ulric had made his bond.
Aye, the old Lord Renfrew had hired on Viking mercenaries.
Just as the Scots had hired on Norman mercenaries; MacBeth, when king, had hired Norman mercenaries to fight Malcolm and the Norman knights who had come to take his throne during the last century.
Men and women, like all other commodities, could be for sale. Almost all had their price.
But though he still thought of Etienne as a poor excuse of a man and respected many of his enemies more, Ulric had learned from him.
The Viking way was to attack, to fight hard, to win on one’s own bravery and prowess, or so to lose.
Etienne was a thinking man who knew he hadn’t his father’s fighting power.
Etienne had taught Ulric the power of chiseling away at his enemies through treachery from within.