Chapter 32 #2
“Then perhaps we should both sit. It would certainly be more comfortable for me.” He limped heavily to the bench.
“An accident when boarding the ship to England,” he said with a wave of his hand.
“I may be an old warhorse, but I’m usually sound of wind and limb.
” He eased himself carefully down and she saw his eyes tighten with pain.
Since it would have been ungracious to continue standing, Isabelle reluctantly followed suit, glad that the full skirts of her gown prevented him from seeing how much her legs were trembling.
She forced herself to meet his eyes. Fine lines were etched at their corners as if he smiled a lot, or spent time narrowing his gaze against the weather.
Their hue was that of a stormy winter sea.
“My lady, I do not know if you remember me. My visit to the Tower was brief then, and we met for a few minutes only.”
Isabelle touched her throat. “Yes, I remember it. You came for Heloise and I thought that you were going to marry her.”
He opened his hand. “I thought so too, but matters changed.”
He had a pleasant voice, neither high nor deep, but well modulated and without any particular accent—unlike her own which bore the cadences of her Irish childhood.
“Heloise wrote to me and said that you were not of a mind to wed her.”
“Did she?” He raised an eyebrow but didn’t look particularly disturbed. “I know that she wrote to you: she told me herself; but I never asked what she had the scribe write. It seemed to me that she was entitled to a little privacy.”
Isabelle eyed him, uncertain whether to approve or feel slighted.
Giving a little privacy sounded suspiciously like placating a potentially fractious child with a sweetmeat, yet having lived with none of late, such a gesture would feel like consideration beyond price.
“Are you going to ask me what she wrote?” she asked.
“Since it was from her to you—no.” He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully.
“I dare say if I had married her, we would have tolerated each other’s failings—either that or driven each other mad and settled for different households once our heirs were begotten.
I’m still fond of her and I hope she remembers me with a smile too.
” He studied Isabelle. “In truth, for more than two years my mind has been set on a greater prize.”
Isabelle stiffened. “Heloise’s northern lands must pale in comparison to the estates that come through me,” she said.
“I was offered Denise de Chateauroux instead of the lady Heloise, but I refused because I knew what I wanted…and, truth to tell, had wanted since I laid eyes on you.”
Her face grew hot. He was a courtier; such words came easily to him. Any landless knight would desire her for the lands and prestige she brought, irrespective of her person. “And if Heloise had been the lady of Striguil?” she asked.
He spread his hands and she noticed that his fingernails were clean and that he wore more rings than a soldier, but fewer than a court fop.
“Then we would have learned to live with each other. I may have a few romantic bones in my body, but not enough to overthrow reason…However, one always hopes for the best of both worlds.”
“And what of me?” Isabelle asked. “What choice do I have?”
“How pragmatic are your own bones, my lady? You have no choice in the matter of your marriage, even if the Church plays lip service to the fact that you do. Your lands and yourself have been entrusted into my keeping. You can make the best of your bed or shroud yourself in martyrdom.”
Isabelle returned his stare and then lowered her lids.
Anything was better than remaining here and, as he said, she had no choice in the matter.
“I do not know you,” she murmured, “nor you me.” She wondered if her parents had ever spoken thus.
Her mother too had been a prize. She had seldom spoken of her marriage to Richard Strongbow, and on the rare occasions she had made mention of it, she had done so with a tight mouth and sad eyes. Isabelle didn’t want to look like that.
“That’s a remedy I have no cure for except time, my lady. I swear to you that I will treat you with all the honour and deference due to your rank, if you will do the same for me as your husband.”
Isabelle tried to steady her panic by breathing slowly. She felt sick and the palms of her hands were cold. Slowly she raised her head. “I do not know how pragmatic my own bones are,” she said, “but I will try.”
He was careful to exhale without making a sound, but she saw the long movement of his chest and realised that he too was under considerable strain, although he was better at concealing it.
“Thank you,” he said and, pushing to his feet, reached out his hand to her.
She saw the beads of sweat on his brow and the way he held himself.
She didn’t want to place her hand in his for then he would know how frightened she was, and her mother had said that one should never show fear in the face of challenge.
Soon it would be more than just the joining of hands; soon they would be sharing the bed of which he had just spoken.
Not that she knew much concerning that aspect of marriage.
Her usually forthright mother had been singularly uncommunicative on the matter.
Heloise had been a fount of information, but Isabelle was unsure how much of the detail was the result of an over-active imagination.
Thinking swiftly, she laid her hand to his sleeve instead, in the manner of the court, and saw his eyelids tighten, but whether in amusement or displeasure was hard to tell.
“I have a boat waiting. If you are ready, we can go now.”
“Now? This instant?” Isabelle shot him a questioning look. “What about my household and my baggage?”
“How great a household do you have?”
Isabelle pursed her lips and then said decisively, “Two ladies, a chaplain, and a scribe—although in truth they are all in my lord Glanville’s employ not mine.”
He nodded. “Do you wish to keep them?”
She shook her head. “Not if I can have the choosing of others.”
“It is for you to say and order your own household as you desire.”
Isabelle felt a stirring in her solar plexus as if some part of her that had gone to sleep in chains was now awakening and discovering that its fetters had vanished.
“Then I will have new maids,” she said. “There’s a chaplain, Walter, who has been kind to me.
I would reward him with an offer of service. My baggage will fit in one coffer.”
“Then let it be forwarded and I will ask Theobald Walter to arrange for your clerk to come to our new lodgings if he desires employment.”
She frowned. “Is such haste necessary? Am I truly in danger?”
“Not you, my lady, no,” William said, “but I would be happier to be away from this place and among friends. If you have no objection to leaving immediately, then I would like us to be on our way.”
It was a command couched as a polite and deferential request. Isabelle noted it and wondered what would happen if she baulked and said that she wanted to supervise her own packing and that she was going nowhere with him.
Not that she had any intention of cutting off her nose to spite her face.
She would give anything to go beyond these imprisoning walls.
She was the key to his wealth and status, but he was her key to freedom.
“No,” she said, lifting her chin. “I have no objection.”
William handed Isabelle down into the boat.
The weedy smell of the river was strong in her nostrils and the water lapped against the sides of the vessel in small green tongues that occasionally burst in a white saliva of spray.
He had lent her his cloak, for although it was a bright summer’s day, the wind off the river was stiff.
She seated herself on one of the benches along the boat’s sides and watched him gingerly do the same.
Behind them, the Tower was a great, limewashed bulwark and it was the sight of the massive walls rather than the breeze off the water that made her shiver and hug the double woollen folds of the cloak around her body.
“Cold?” he asked solicitously.
Isabelle stroked Damask who had curled at her feet, and shook her head. “Some walls protect, and some imprison,” she said. “I was little more than a child when I came here, but it has never been my home the way that Striguil and Leinster are.”
William nodded. “There are always places of the heart,” he said absently, his own gaze upon the great walls of the Tower as the boatman and his crewman pulled away upstream.
Isabelle looked over her shoulder once and then fixed her gaze on the gulls and cormorants wheeling above the water.
She wondered where his places of the heart were, but it was too soon to ask him such a question.
She could sense his tension, and see it in the way he kept his hand on his sword hilt.
It was only as they continued upstream with nothing more untoward happening than a bare-legged pair of urchins on the riverbank casting stones at the boat that he breathed out and relaxed.
She risked a glance at him from beneath her lashes.
Now they were in the full light of day, she could see the shadows under his eyes and the gaunt hollows beneath his cheekbones.
She had seen that look before—on her mother’s face in the days following the death of her brother and her own forced departure from Striguil.
It came from the strain of bearing up, of shouldering burdens of grief and care and still managing to go on.
Ranulf de Glanville had looked like that too in recent days.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To the lodging of Richard FitzReinier.”