A Knight to Remember (22 page)

Sincerity shone from her, and Hugh took her words to heart.

Then she raised her voice. “A little public gratitude wouldn’t go amiss wi’ yer lady. Try it, m’ lord, an’ ye’ll see.”

Hugh glanced up. His men stumbled out of the alehouse. Ethelburgha didn’t want them to hear this scandal.

He didn’t either. Raising his voice to match hers, he said, “Mayhap I will.”

“Try givin’ her th’ same loyalty ye espouse fer th’ king.”

Hugh glared and stomped toward the castle.

“Or more!” she yelled.

He pretended not to hear.

Hugh and Edlyn met at the foot of the stairs going into the keep. They stood, two wet, miserable people who happened to be married, and stared at each other as if unsure what to say. Behind them were Burdett and Neda, Wharton, Dewey, Sir Philip, Sir Lyndon, and all the men of Hugh’s retinue, and they stared at the couple with an interest heightened by the recent revelations.

Edlyn wanted to speak, then wondered if she should allow Hugh to speak first as a gesture of respect.

Hugh wanted to speak, but he didn’t know what to
say to a wife he’d been alternately fighting with and making love to since the day of their wedding.

Finally, driven by the west wind, the increasing rain, and a strong sense that someone had to do something, he stepped back with a slight bow and indicated the stairs.

She smiled, a slight curve of the mouth, and started up ahead of him.

“Mama! Mama!”

The boys’ shouts spun her around.

“I fought Allyn with a sword and won!” A mudcovered boy—was that Parkin?—danced in the puddle at the side of the stairway.

“He did not!” Allyn, just as covered, kicked water at his brother. “I let him win.”

Edlyn stood immobile. The two urchin boys who had fought in the mud with sticks were her sons. Hers!

“Yeah?” Parkin said.

“Yeah,” Allyn answered.

“Liar.”

“Tattlemonger.”

“Lads!” Edlyn might not know what to say to Hugh, but she knew what to say to her sons. “Stop right now.”

“But—”

“He said—”

“Not another word.” She started to descend the stairs, but Hugh stood in her way, and he didn’t budge.

“Do you mind if I handle this?” he asked.

His deep voice startled her, and the concept startled her more. Since the day of the boys’ births, she’d had sole responsibility for their behavior and their discipline. Now this man, this husband, had offered to help.”

“I have trained many a page and squire in my day.”
He seemed to read her hesitation as more than surprise. He seemed to think she didn’t trust him. “I will not hurt them, but I’ll end this squabbling and have them clean with no trouble to you.”

She stared at Hugh and saw him, not as husband, lover, or foe, but as a knight able to curb her sons where she could not. To allow him to chastise and instruct her boys would be more than a gesture of faith. It would be an unconscionable relief. Making an abrupt decision, she said, “With my blessing.”

The boys had fallen silent. They stared at her with wide eyes as if she had betrayed them. Aye, let them realize how the upheaval that they’d so welcomed would topple their expectations of unlimited freedom.

Hugh snapped, “Get out of those clothes! Bathe yourselves in the rain! Wash your clothes in the horse trough!”

The boys began to sputter, then to cry.

“My lady.” Neda took Edlyn’s elbow. “Let us go inside.”

Edlyn didn’t object. She turned away from the sight of her wide-mouthed, bawling lads with no sensation of anything but contentment and climbed the stairs to the keep. Hugh wouldn’t abuse them, but he would teach them.

With Neda’s help, she changed into dry clothes—nothing from Richard’s men, she made sure—and when Hugh entered, she was sitting by the fire in the great hall, spinning thread from a spindle while the servants hurried to set up the trestle tables for dinner.

She rose at once from her chair. “Praise the saints you have returned, my lord.” She stripped off his wet cloak and handed it to the maid who appeared at her elbow. “You saved me from a fate I detest. My spinning skills have not increased during my time at the abbey.”

“Then leave the spinning to the maids,” he said, obviously bewildered by her offhandedness. Glancing around at the scurrying servants, he added, “There are enough of them.”

“Perhaps I will.” She smiled at him, determined not to ask what he’d done with her sons.

Hugh didn’t wait. He just told her. “They’re clean, they’re getting dry, and they’ll be along to beg your pardon for going out without your permission and for quarreling.”

“My thanks to you.” She’d never meant it as much as she did now. He’d lifted a weight off her shoulders, a weight she’d never hoped to share, and she was grateful. “If you would like, my lord, I took the liberty of laying out your dry clothing in the solar.”

Steam began to rise from his clothes as the fire heated him. “Not yet. First I think we should talk about your sons…” He peered down at her, almost embarrassed but completely determined. “Our sons.”

She had indicated to herself her willingness to share her children, and now he took responsibility for them and called them his own. That bond between them—the bond of parenthood—helped demolish the sense of helplessness she’d experienced since the time of her marriage. Curious, she said, “You could easily enforce your will about Allyn and Parkin, but you do not. Why is that?”

He stared as if she had openly called him a bully. In shocked tones, he said, “You are their mother, while I have come late to the role of father. I bow to your greater experience.”

He
was
a bully, of course, but not one prompted by cruelty or meanness, and he’d changed without even realizing he had. “I was previously a wife, while you came late to the role of husband, yet you forced me to marry
you as if I were a child in need of guidance.” She thought she detected movement from Hugh—could he be fidgeting? “At the time I thought you truly believed it.”

He looked her in the eye. “If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t do it any differently. Although, mayhap, I would do it for different reasons.”

“You would still force me to wed you?”

“I had no time to court you, Edlyn, and as you have said, I thought you showed a remarkable lack of intelligence in not wishing to wed me.”

She wanted to laugh, but he seemed to be serious.

“Now, however, you’ve proved your superior wit time and again, and so I have to suppose your hesitation was nothing more than a woman’s natural caution when faced with a momentous transition.”

He could irritate her even as he sought to compliment her! “Could it not be, as I said, a sincere desire to avoid the grief that accompanies a marriage to a warrior?”

“That wouldn’t make sense, and you are a sensible woman.”

Another compliment, another irritation. Didn’t he understand that some emotions didn’t respond to reason?

She stared at him, so solemn, so earnest.

Of course he didn’t. He lived in his man’s world as the ultimate specimen of success, and illogical emotions had no place there. Edlyn could talk until next week, and until he experienced the pain of worry when a lover stood in the way of danger, he would never understand.

Recognizing defeat, she sank down on a bench and indicated the place beside her. “Tell me what you think about our sons.”

Instead he dragged a stool forward and placed it facing her. Seating himself, he took her hands. Immediately,
the work in the great hall slowed and all the servants found a reason to linger close.

Neda’s voice called them to attention. “Get you to your chores!”

They scattered, and Hugh spoke. “I think little of your plan to place the lads in the monastery.” She tried to interrupt, but he said, “Let me finish. While I know you have your reasons, I see the fire and spirit of Robin in each of the lads. Parkin’s a wild man, and he needs to be trained to control that wildness. Allyn’s kind and thoughtful, but he has a temper he must learn to control. I fear if they were placed in the monastery, their father’s fire and spirit would be extinguished forever. Certainly their father’s line will be extinguished, and I know you loved Robin too much to allow that to happen.”

She knew what he was saying, and she spoke around the lump that formed in her chest. “You want them to be trained for the knighthood.”

“It is the right and fitting thing to do.”

She didn’t know what was right and fitting anymore. She’d made her decision to have them become monks, but Allyn and Parkin had hated the idea. Although she had previously rejected Hugh’s counsel in this matter, his sincere horror at that fate, even for the sons of his enemy, had given her pause. And the monks themselves seemed to have reservations about the boys’ fitness for the contemplative life.

Her indecisiveness made Hugh eager. “Let them settle here,” he said, “and know this place for their home. Then when they know we will be here when they return, we’ll send them out to be fostered.”

Hugh didn’t comprehend the impossibility of what he proposed. Picking her words with care, she said, “Noble sons are sent away to strange households to be raised and trained by other men for one reason, and
one reason only—to strengthen the ties between those two families. Once a knight has fostered a lad, he’s almost a godfather. The families are close. Their influence is as one.”

“That’s true.”

“Allyn and Parkin are sons of a traitor to the king.”

When Hugh realized she was actually discussing this in a reasonable manner, his eagerness knew no bounds. “You place too much importance on their being the sons of a traitor. Because of my position, we can get anyone in the kingdom to foster our sons.”

Her head buzzed as she strove to move old prejudices and paralyzing fear aside and act as a mature woman would. “I have no doubt you can use your influence and get Allyn placed, but who’s going to foster Parkin? Who’ll take care of my rambunctious lad?”

“Just because he’s high-spirited—”

“Not because—” She took a breath. She had to tell him, but such confiding went against the years of reticence. “They’ll take a traitor’s son perhaps. But a traitor’s bastard?”

Hugh just stared. He acted as if she were speaking a different language suddenly, or as if she had changed the parameters that ruled the world. “A bastard?”

“Parkin isn’t truly my son. He’s the son of my…of the earl of Jagger and my maid.” She saw the moment it all made sense to Hugh, and she couldn’t bear his shrewd expression.

“A bastard off a commoner,” he said.

“Robin got bored waiting for me to calve, as he so charmingly put it, and she was sleeping beside our bed anyway, so he…” She hadn’t felt this pain for a long time. She thought it over and done with. But Hugh’s reaction brought it back.

He dropped her hands and rose. He circled her,
water dripping from the hem of his surcoat as he walked.

She appreciated his need for movement. Right now she would have given anything to hold that spindle, to have something to occupy her hands and her eyes while Hugh stared at her. But the spindle remained on the other side of the fireplace, and she didn’t think she could rise.

She hated that Hugh pitied her, yet the woman she was now also pitied that lass she had been. Robin’s wife, with the swollen ankles and the distended belly and the mate who found her so repulsive. She had been young and so grateful to Robin for marrying her, but the gratitude had faded when his grunts of pleasure had combined with her virgin maid’s sounds of pain. Her maid’s shame and guilt had made Edlyn look at Robin in a new light, and her love had begun its slow death.

In sooth, Edlyn had been a poor, odd creature when he’d wed her, but even
she
deserved a husband who went outside their bedchamber to ease his overfull loins. So she cringed as she remembered her early anguish, but she kept talking. “So I knew the baby was Robin’s right from the beginning. When Parkin’s mother died in the birthing, Allyn was only four months old.”

“They’re not twins.” Hugh still wrestled with reality.

“I had milk, and Allyn wasn’t well. Every day I feared he wouldn’t wake from his sleep. I kept remembering how she’d suffered in the birth, and I couldn’t condemn Parkin when death hovered so close to my own child.” She glanced up at him. He’d stopped pacing and just gazed at her now. “That’s what would have happened if I’d given him to one of the other women to nurse.”

“Is Parkin the only bastard that Robin has?”

She laughed. “Heavens, nay. He scattered his seed everywhere, like a farmer standing in the wind. But as far as I know, all their mothers live still.”

“Do the lads know? Does Parkin—”

“Of course. Did you think anyone who lived in Jagger Castle would keep that quiet?” Hugh’s amazement had faded, and she explained as much as she could as quickly as she could. “That’s why Parkin demands attention, and why Allyn lets him. The busybodies have told Parkin he’s not truly mine, and he worries. Allyn is more secure, and he loves his brother.”

“You treat them alike so they won’t grow to hate each other like those nuns. Like Lady Blanche and her sister Adda.” Hugh swiped his damp hair off his forehead. “No wonder your trust is a flimsy thing.”

“I trust you,” she answered immediately. “Am I not listening to your counsel about my sons?”

He sat back down, facing her once more. “Aye, you trust me with your sons, but not with yourself.”

Did she? Was that true? What kind of mother would trust a man with the well-being of her sons but not with her own happiness? Or did she trust him, and was her defensiveness nothing but a frail bulwark that she longed for him to breach?

“You could tell me anything, Edlyn, and I would understand.”

He sounded strangely compelling, as if he knew her secrets.

He whispered, “What must I do to prove I will never abuse your love when you give it to me?”

“I…you…” She glanced around, seeking escape.

He glanced around, too, and saw a dozen faces
peering at them. “If you don’t have anything to do, I’ll give you something to do!” he roared, sounding so much like Sir David of Radcliffe, Edlyn broke down and giggled. Disgusted, he said, “They’ve done it, now, haven’t they? They’ve distracted you.”