Chapter Three
Stretford Castle
“Pick it up, Cissy! It will not bite you!”
It was late on a sunny day, warm with a summer breeze, as Lysabel sat in the kitchen yard of Stretford and watched her daughters as they tried to corral the chickens for the night.
Her words of encouragement were directed at six-year-old Brencis because was afraid of the chickens.
She didn’t want to be pecked. But her elder sister by two years, Cynethryn, didn’t seem to fear the chickens at all.
She was grabbing them two at a time to put them back into the coop.
“Pick them up around the body, Cissy,” Cynethryn said impatiently. “They cannot peck you if you hold them like that.”
But Brencis wasn’t certain at all. In fact, she watched her mother and sister gather up all of the chickens to put them back in the tall coop so the predators couldn’t get to them overnight. She felt rather useless, but it was better than being pecked.
“What else can I help with, Mama?” Brencis was eager to help but reluctant to do half of the things she was told. “Can I bolt the door to the coop?”
Lysabel stood next to the open coop door, wiping at her forehead with the back of her hand. She looked down at her youngest child, with huge blue eyes and curly blond hair. She looked so much like her grandfather, Lysabel’s father, that it was frightening.
“Of course you can,” she said. “That is the biggest task of all.”
Brencis beamed as she shut the door and threw the bolt. “Is that all?” she asked. “What else do we have to do?”
“Nothing, sweetheart,” she said, putting her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “We may go inside and prepare for the evening meal now.”
The sun was beginning to set, and the smell of baking bread and roasting meat wafted upon the warm summer air. It had been a beautiful day in a line of beautiful days, because every day for the past thirty-six days had been the best day of Lysabel’s life.
The only days in the past twelve years where she’d lived without fear.
Aye, the sky had never looked so blue, nor the grass so green.
Cynethryn and Brencis were starting to come out of their shells a little, no longer living in fear of their father and his violence.
Cynethryn still screamed at loud noises and Brencis still wept every night as she was put to bed.
But for the most part, Lysabel could see the beginnings of healing in her girls.
She knew it would take time. But with Benoit gone, they had nothing but time to heal lifelong wounds.
It was a hope she genuinely thought she’d never have – a hope for healing.
Crossing the dusty yard as the servants began to prepare for the coming night, their paths were crossed by a running dog and three growing puppies, which immediately lured her daughters like the call of a siren’s song.
Brencis captured a puppy with long legs, hugging it, while Cynethryn petted the mother dog.
Lysabel continued towards the manse, watching her children with a smile on her face.
It was so very good to see them happy.
A dream, she thought. I’m going to wake up and this will have all been a dream.
Lysabel had the same thought every day since that dark night when four men had burst into her chamber, trussing up her husband and then throwing him from the window. In truth, it had been Trenton who had tossed Benoit out of the window because she had seen it.
She’d seen everything.
Trenton had thrown Benoit to the ground two floors below and then informed her that her husband’s neck had been broken in the process.
He had been quiet and unemotional about it, as if he had been discussing nothing more than the weather, and then he’d climbed from the window and disappeared into the night.
The last she saw was the four men crossing the manor’s moat on a small raft before fading into the darkness, all the time carrying her husband’s body with them.
And that had been the end of it.
It was the night that had quite literally changed her life.
For several days following that event, Lysabel still couldn’t quite figure out if she’d imagined it or not.
But as the days passed and Benoit didn’t show himself, finally, she began to believe.
She prayed that it was true. She didn’t know where her husband’s body had ended up and she surely didn’t care.
All that mattered to her was that for nearly the first time in her adult life, she wasn’t living in daily fear.
All thanks to a childhood friend.
As she called the girls into the manse, leaving the dogs behind, Lysabel’s thoughts turned to the eldest de Russe son.
Her father was Trenton’s father’s best friend, and had been since they were children, so the de Russe and Wellesbourne families had always been quite close.
Lysabel was her father’s eldest child, but when she was born, Trenton had been at least eight years of age.
She remembered him from her childhood, seeing him on holidays and other occasions when the families converged.
And when he’d been fourteen years of age, he and his brother, Dane, had come to serve her father and the Wellesbourne war machine.
Trenton had been as big as a full-grown man at that age, very tall, a quiet and somewhat intimidating young man whom her father had taken under his wing.
There had been something inherently sad about him and she’d heard her parents whispering about his past, about a birth mother who had been a whore and a father who had stayed away because of it.
But neither Lysabel’s father nor her mother had ever told her anything directly about Trenton’s past, and all she’d ever heard were the whispers or rumors.
Some of the old knights used to say that his father had betrayed King Richard at the battle of Bosworth, and that her father, Matthew, had saved Gaston de Russe’s life.
Matthew had lost his left hand as a result.
Lysabel didn’t know the entire story, and she probably never would, but none of that mattered.
She was simply grateful to a very old friend who had saved her from a life that had become hell on earth.
She wondered if she’d ever be able to thank him for it.
But thoughts of Trenton faded as the great hall of Stretford Castle spread out before her.
The hall was on the ground level, with hard-packed earth as the floor and a ceiling that was supported by great arched beams. Lysabel took her daughters into the great hall to help the servants set out the coming meal.
It was their usual behavior at mealtime, considering Benoit liked all of the women around him to serve him one way or another, including his daughters.
They’d been a great disappointment to him when they were born, being that they weren’t male, and he made sure to let them know every chance he got.
Brencis hadn’t been beaten down by it yet but, at eight years of age, Cynethryn was starting to show signs of it.
Another behavior that Lysabel hoped she could help her daughters forget.
As the sun began to set, the servants built a large fire in the hearth that was tall enough for a man to stand in it.
Brencis was over by the hearth where a heavyset male servant was positioning the fire, taking kindling from the little girl because it wasn’t too heavy for her to lift.
Cynethryn was in the servant’s alcove, watching them prepare the trenchers that would be delivered to the family and also to the soldiers, men who ate at their own tables.
There was one table for the family, at the head of the room, and then two longer, well-worn tables where the soldiers ate.
Benoit had been welcoming to his men at mealtime, and liked for them all to eat in the hall, mostly because he wanted to preside as lord and master over them. It had made him feel important.
The reality was that Benoit’s men weren’t fond of him because he was irrational and heavy-handed, but they respected him simply because he put a roof over their heads and food in their bellies.
Benoit’s men were mostly from the surrounding area, with very few from outside of Dorset, and their loyalty to him was bought and paid for.
Nothing more than that. The night Benoit had died, Lysabel told her husband’s one and only knight exactly what Trenton had told her to say – that she’d been asleep and when she’d awoken, he had been gone.
When asked about the broken window in the master’s chamber, it had been easy enough to explain that Benoit had broken the window in his rage.
It wasn’t as if everybody in the entire castle hadn’t heard it.
Benoit’s men, for the most part, were numb to the way their lord treated his wife, but there were some who were sympathetic.
There were also some who fully supported Benoit’s right to do as he pleased and even enjoyed her pain.
For the past month, Lysabel hadn’t made any changes to her husband’s small army, or sent anyone away, simply because they were under the impression that Benoit would return.
So everything was just the way he’d left it.
For the time being, Lysabel was satisfied with that.
But she knew, at some point, the men were going to start asking questions.
She’d deal with it when the time came.
For now, however, she was happy. So very happy. She didn’t want to think about what tomorrow would bring, only what her life was like at this very moment. She was safe, her girls were safe, and that was all that mattered.
Bliss.