Chapter 24
Claire tried to decide whether FitzRoger was a handsome man or not. There was something about his elegant features and dark hair that said yes, but the harsh overlay and a scar or two made him something else.
If Renald was granite, FitzRoger was black marble.
His smile was pleasant enough, however, as he greeted her, and turned startlingly warm when he spoke to Renald. Claire winced at her own misjudgment. Like brothers, she remembered, as she watched them embrace.
Then Imogen pulled Claire in for a greeting kiss.
“Is everything all right now? It must have been terrible.” She wrapped an arm around Claire’s waist and led her up the wooden steps that climbed the outside of the stone keep.
“Everyone was upset about your father. And your hair! Isn’t it strange?
I’m growing mine, of course, but I must admit it’s a great deal easier to have so much less of it. The queen is so excited.”
“About your hair?” Imogen hadn’t changed entirely. She’d always been a chatterbox.
Imogen chuckled. “No! About your wedding! Or your wedding night. She loves weddings. Come and make your curtsy.”
In all the turmoil, Claire had forgotten to prepare to face Henry Beauclerk.
She was glad to have her vow to Renald to guide her.
She curtsied low before the chair upon which the king sat, then raised her head to look at him.
On the surface he hadn’t changed. Dark hair framed bright eyes in a comely face marked quite distinctly with ruthlessness.
“Lady Claire, we are pleased to see you. Rise, and sit beside me.”
Claire obeyed, taking a stool by his chair, as he greeted Renald. “How goes Summerbourne, my lord?”
“Well, sire. May I present Thomas, son of Lord Clarence.”
Thomas looked flushed, though whether with excitement or nervousness, Claire couldn’t tell. She worried still that he might suddenly turn rash, but he knelt properly.
The king leaned forward to raise his chin. “Young Thomas. You’ve grown into a fine lad. Will you like being a page in my household?” Claire saw the king’s searching look, and knew what he checked for. Rebellion.
Thomas frowned and hesitated, and Claire’s heart missed a beat. Then he said, “I don’t know, sire. I don’t know what to expect.”
Henry laughed. “A sensible answer. Do you like horses and hawks? Swordplay and fighting?”
“Oh, yes, sire.”
“Then you will like my household as long as you are obedient and work hard.” The king crooked a finger and a lad of about Thomas’s age hastened forward to kneel.
“Bruno, this is Thomas of Summerbourne. Take care of him.”
In moments, Thomas was gone, swallowed up in the king’s enormous household. Claire resisted a weak urge to reach out and hold him back.
“I will have a mind to him,” said the king, clearly seeing her concern. She looked at him, remembering Renald’s words. He probably meant what he said, though she was still sure he must have an uneasy conscience over whatever he’d done to be sure that her father could not win.
“The Summerbourne angels,” Henry said, studying her. “I called you two that, you know.”
“Yes, sire. As in the story about Pope Gregory.”
“Indeed. That was how I felt when I saw you at your father’s knee. Such pretty children, and so very English in your looks. I was born in England, you know, and I have an English wife.” He patted the hand of his fair-haired queen. “Perhaps our children will be little angels, too.”
Before Claire could think what to say, he frowned. “I am not pleased, however, by this new fashion for ladies to chop off their hair.”
Claire couldn’t help but share a glance with Imogen.
“Nor,” said the king, “with a certain boldness we detect among the young women of the kingdom. Lady Imogen, at least, should have learned her lesson.”
To Claire’s surprise, at this casual reference to her whipping, Imogen just smiled.
Henry shook his head and raised his queen’s hand to his lips. “You would both do well to take the example of my sweet wife.”
With soft fair hair—properly long—and large, gentle eyes, Queen Matilda did seem sweetly docile. “It is a shame,” she said, “that your hair is so short, Lady Claire. But hair at least grows. Poor Imogen is blemished.”
Claire hadn’t noticed, but now she saw a pale scar down Imogen’s cheek. Her mouth went dry. More brutality of her husband’s?
Suddenly she wavered with doubts. This was a world as unreal as the pictures she drew on parchment. The king seemed gentle and benign, but everyone knew him to be ruthless. He’d proved it when he’d arranged an old friend’s death.
The queen seemed content, but she, too, was a forced bride. The only reason for the union was that she carried the blood of the old royal house of England in her veins.
Imogen seemed to be a happy bride, but she couldn’t be, could she, when she’d been beaten and scarred, and had tried to escape. Perhaps she had to pretend for fear of more of the same?
So, what did this say about Thomas’s fate, and her own?
“With your leave, sire,” said Imogen, “Lady Claire must be exhausted after such a long journey. May I take her to rest before we eat?”
Claire realized that she must have sat in dazed silence for far too long.
The queen leaned forward to pat her head as if she were a dog. “Of course. We certainly want the bride well rested before tomorrow night.”
Claire rose and curtsied, happy to escape.
Tomorrow night. And now doubts were coming back to crush her.
Imogen led Claire and her maids up a wide inner staircase to the upper floor, then through a maze of rooms to a small chamber in a corner of the keep.
It could just hold one large, curtained bed and a bench beneath a narrow window.
Herbs hung in bags to sweeten the air, however, and the hangings were rich.
“I’m afraid with the king and his court here, we’re desperately short of space. If this wasn’t going to serve as your wedding bower, you’d be five to a bed like the rest of us.”
Claire sat on the bench, suddenly exhausted. “I’m still not sure …”
“No?” Imogen’s glance was sharp. Oh yes, she had definitely changed. “The king is set on it.”
Was that fear in her voice?
Claire dismissed her maids. “Imogen, what happened between you and your husband?”
Imogen perched on the edge of the bed. “Happened?”
“Your marriage. Was it forced?”
“Not exactly … Oh, do you think I was dragged to the altar screaming? No. I needed a man to protect me, and FitzRoger was an excellent choice.”
“So you could have said no?”
Imogen grinned. “No. But by then I didn’t really want to.”
“You love him?”
“Of course.”
“But he whipped you!”
Imogen wriggled back to sit cross-legged on the bed. It was a childish position, but there was nothing naive about her manner. “Who told you that?”
“Isn’t it true?”
“Yes and no. I simply wondered what form of the story was out there.”
“I was told you knocked him out, and in retaliation he locked you up and whipped you.”
“Interesting. And mostly true.” She looked astonishingly cheerful about it. “The long story will have to wait, but the short one is that we were imprisoned by Arnulf of Warbrick. De Bellême’s brother?”
Claire nodded with a shudder. She’d heard Warbrick was as bad as his monstrous brother.
“It was awful. But when we had him at our mercy, Fitz-Roger was set upon fighting him to the death. One of these man things. No one else would stop him, so I knocked him out.”
Claire blinked at the prosaic words. “You didn’t think he’d win? Renald says he never loses.”
“Normally, he doesn’t. But he was wounded. When we had Warbrick in our power it seemed wrong to give him even the smallest chance. But you know men …” She shrugged.
Claire wasn’t sure she did, or not the wolfish sort of men, but she could see that Imogen’s interference wouldn’t have gone down well. “What happened?”
“Well, after I’d had Warbrick killed—”
“What?”
Imogen dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “I simply ordered our men to fill him full of arrows. So, after that, Renald carried me off to Cleeve. That’s FitzRoger’s castle—”
“Imprisoned you, you mean.”
Imogen laughed. “Oh, poor Renald. How can you think it? He just wanted me out of reach of FitzRoger’s first rage. It was probably as well, though I wanted to nurse him.”
Claire rubbed her head, feeling dizzy. “But then when FitzRoger did recover, he put you on trial and whipped you.”
“No. The king put me on trial, pressured by the other barons. They really wanted my skin. For some reason,” she added with a wicked glint in her eye, “men don’t like to hear of a woman knocking out her husband to make him see sense.”
Claire couldn’t help but laugh. “But surely Lord FitzRoger didn’t have to whip you.”
“It is a grievous offense. Attacking a husband is bad enough, but attacking a vassal of the king is the same as attacking the king himself.”
Claire crossed herself. “But even so—”
“But even so, he managed to make it symbolic. Only one stroke, and over my clothes.” She rolled her eyes. “He was so angry! He wouldn’t have had to do that if I’d taken the oath.”
“The oath?”
“Never to do such a thing again. Henry and he had set it up, you see. A way out. But I would do it again. Better a whipping than to see him dead. I couldn’t take a false oath.”
“No. Of course not.” Claire stared at a hanging on the far wall. How close this was to her father’s case. He hadn’t been able to take a false oath, either, but Henry hadn’t tried to make the punishment symbolic.
Or rather, she realized with sudden insight, Henry had again come up against someone who wouldn’t take the easy way out.
Henry and Renald. Now she understood Renald’s anger at her father.
Just as FitzRoger had been angry at his wife for making him whip her, Renald was angry at her father, angry at being forced to be an executioner.
What’s more, if Claire had thought to stop her father, stop him physically as Imogen had stopped her husband, all this might never have happened.