Chapter 21 #2
Lady Agnes looked more impatient than sympathetic. “Don’t know what that Eudo thought he was doing here. Wringing his hands about everything like an old woman.”
“Not like any old woman I know.”
As her grandmother chuckled, her mother looked up. “Has that man left yet?”
Claire knew she didn’t refer to Eudo. “Summerbourne is his now, Mother.”
Lady Murielle reached out to seize her wrist. “You mustn’t marry him, Claire, not even for Thomas’s sake. Promise me you won’t. We’ll be all right.”
Claire patted her hand, fighting tears at hearing the words she’d wanted to hear days ago. Words now so pointless. “I’ll do my best.”
Her mother let her go, and dabbed at tears. “You’re a dutiful daughter, Claire. You know how much I love you, don’t you? Now, I must mend this. Clarence will need it come winter.”
Claire couldn’t stand this. “Father is dead, Mother.”
Lady Murielle looked up. “I know that. We buried him. In wool. But I must finish this.” She went back to stitching the seam.
Lady Agnes shook her head. “Expect no sense from her just now. It’s guilt, as much as grief. She pushed you into marrying him and wants to deny it. She’s pretending she did her best to protect you.”
“You pushed me, too.”
“Ah, but I don’t suffer any burden from it. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll stick to the marriage.”
This was why Lady Agnes was no counsel. She still played the same tune.
“It would be wrong.”
“Wrong.” Her grandmother snorted. “It doesn’t matter how they die. Battle, ordeal, or an arrow in the woods. They’re still dead. It’s women’s work to keep things going.”
“Some work is just too hard.”
Her grandmother frowned up at her. “What do you find so horrible about him? He’s handsome, courteous. Charming when he wants to be. And he looks at you like any woman wants to be looked at.”
Snake words. “Perhaps that’s just it. If he was unpleasant, I could accept it as a cross to bear. It seems wrong to fall weakly into pleasure.”
Lady Agnes shook her head. “You know your trouble? You’re eighteen. You’ll grow a thicker skin around your conscience soon, but it’ll be too late.”
Claire couldn’t help but laugh, and she leaned down to kiss her grandmother’s cheek. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to find a way so you’ll be taken care of.”
Lady Agnes touched her cheek. “I know you think I’m a wicked, heartless old woman, but don’t rush into anything, Claire. You have a month. Time heals.”
Claire left, guiltily aware of a letter on its way, and a feeling of having been in this spot before. She remembered. It had been when she’d been planning to escape Summerbourne to persuade Felice to marry the ogre.
Who said the wheel of fate did not run backward?
Claire took part of her grandmother’s advice and gave herself a rest from the constant fretting. She had most of a month. Until she heard from the bishop, there was nothing she could do anyway.
Routine summer days, however, did little to make her decisions easier.
Renald was becoming part of Summerbourne. She could no longer quite imagine her home without him and his boisterous men. Even their bawdy songs, loud laughter, and rough play became part of her daily life.
The news that he’d killed Lord Clarence had been a shock, but Summerbourne had recovered quickly. The servants had accepted it as another of those things that happen in life. After all, as one man had said to her, “Lord Renald is clearly a good man, lady.”
She knew his acceptance here had been part of his plan. He’d hurried here through a storm so that people would know and like him before they learned the truth. It had worked, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t a good man.
She watched him for vices, seeking something she could use to barricade her weakening heart.
She found only virtues. He was considerate of all.
He didn’t demand unreasonable service. He rarely raised his voice, and never without cause.
He’d even kept his promise and apart from the inevitable effect of his presence, he’d preserved Summerbourne as a place of peace.
She never saw him in an act of violence. She never saw his armor or his sword.
She assumed he trained his men, but it was done well away from her home.
And yet, without violence or bluster, his nature changed everything, perhaps even for the better. People came to Summerbourne now from far around seeking help with predators—animal or human. Claire had never realized in the past how strange it was that they didn’t.
When some unruly knights harassed nearby Sherborn, the townsfolk sent to petition for Renald’s help.
He came to tell her of it. “This matter should not take more than a day, my lady.”
“You leave now?”
“I must, before more people are abused.”
“What will you do?”
“Whatever needs to be done.”
She puzzled over that, for he was in wool. Then she realized that he would arm himself out of her sight. Fear stabbed. He went to fight. “Take care, my lord.”
He looked at her. “Do you want me to return safe?”
“Of course!”
His hand moved, as if he might reach for her, but then he simply said, “That is our tragedy, isn’t it?” He bowed and walked away.
She watched him go without the kiss a man should expect when he went into danger, without any tender farewells. She sent them after him silently, symbol of all that was amiss.
She didn’t really think he’d come to harm in such a matter, but she still lived in fear until he and his men returned. She watched secretly from a window as they rode in, and saw how they all bubbled with the excitement of action. Renald glowed in a way she’d never seen before.
Except, perhaps, on their wedding night.
For the first time she realized the truth of his words in the garden—that time so long ago. He truly did enjoy fighting, and she forced him to hide all trace of it.
He came to her later, unarmed and bathed, no hint of violence on him in blood, wound, or glow. “The matter is taken care of, my lady.”
“What happened?” she asked resolutely, ready to show that she could at least accept his warlike nature.
“Little enough. It was nothing.” And he spoke of minor estate matters before leaving her.
Once, she would have insisted. Now she wasn’t sure how.
She heard all about it, of course. The Summerbourne people were mighty proud of their lord, and keen to talk of how brave he’d been, how fearsome, how he’d killed the leader, who’d been an armed man bigger than he, and how the followers had fled or been captured.
“Well?” asked her grandmother at the dinner table, before he came to take his seat. “Is such a man not worth holding to?”
“Yes,” said Claire. “If I only knew how.”
She spent restless nights chasing her conscience around and around, but she couldn’t escape the basic truth. Her father had fought over Henry Beauclerk’s seizure of the throne and unfairly lost. Something about that had to be very wrong.
Renald hid his martial exercises so well that Claire would hardly have known at all if not for the scrapes and bruises his men—including Thomas—sometimes brought to the tables. She noted, but never mentioned them until the day she saw Thomas limping.
He twitched out of her hold. “It’s nothing.”
“What’s nothing?”
“Claire, don’t fuss!”
She put her hands on her hips. “Thomas of Summerbourne, like it or not, I’m lady here. The welfare of all is my concern. What injury do you have?”
He eyed her. “Lord Renald said not to bother you—”
“Oh, did he? What?”
“It’s just a cut in my foot—”
She grabbed his sleeve and towed him along to her simple room, where all the herbs and ointments were kept. “A cut like that could fester!”
“He’ll be angry,” he muttered when she pushed him onto a bench.
“I’ll tell him it wasn’t your fault. Show me.”
Pulling a face, he took off shoe and hose, revealing a bandage. When she unwound it, she found a nasty gash just beginning to knit. “Did they put anything on it?”
“No. But it’s all right.”
She washed off some dirt. “Yes, it is, but more by luck than skill. Who’s taking care of wounds, then?”
He shrugged. “Anyone. Lord Renald bandaged this. And told me to wear shoes when walking on rough ground.”
She spread a healing salve on a new cloth and bound his foot again. “Come back and let me look at it in a couple of days. And if it starts to hurt—”
“I know. I know. I’ll tell you straightaway.”
She wanted to hug him and protect him as if he were still a baby. “Take care, Thomas.”
He pulled his hose and shoe back on, and limped away. “Remember to tell Lord Renald that I didn’t let on!”
Claire put away her medicines thinking that if she truly wanted to protect her brother, all she had to do was surrender to Renald. She could lie to him. Tell him she was easy in her mind.
She shook her head. That was the serpent whispering, offering the juicy apple.
She could at least handle a simple problem. This nonsense about the wounded had to stop.
She found him in the stables. Sigfrith noticed her first, making Renald turn. For a moment, something flashed in his eyes, stinging her like a whip, and she realized she had never sought him out since that time with Josce.
When he came over to her, however, he was calm and controlled. “You wish to speak to me, my lady?”
“What did happen to Aidan?” she asked, reminded of a thread left hanging from long ago.
“Who?”
“My father’s horse.”
“The king has him.” He watched her with painful care. “It was his right and he liked the horse.”
Claire could have wept that he thought she’d be hurt by that. “I was only curious.” She wanted to touch him, soothe him. She did not dare.
“You didn’t come to ask about Aidan.”
“No.” She considered how to put it. “My lord, I know I gave the impression that I did not want martial matters in Summerbourne, but you are carrying it to extremes.”
“Extremes?”
“Wounds,” she said. “I may not want fighting within the walls, but it is my duty to tend to the wounded.”
“Thomas,” he said, with a quirk of the brows that could break her heart, so familiar it seemed. So long unseen. “Does his foot fester?”