Almost Innocent (46 page)

“I do not think you dare to violate the daughter of John of Gaunt,” she declared, finding herself no longer frightened in the face of this tangible threat.

He sat back and laughed. “What care I for Lancaster . . . or his daughter? I owe no fealty to anyone, and I abide by no man’s laws but my own.” He sat looking at her for a minute that seemed very long to Magdalen. Then he shook his head. “I do, however, give loyalty to the man who fees me, for as long as I am in his pay. And I do not think the Sieur d’Auriac considers you to be a part of my fee. A man thinks twice before dipping his toes in waters rightly belonging to any de Beauregard.”

“The Sieur d’Auriac?” Horror stood out in her eyes. “I am not held for ransom?”

“Not by me, lady.” He shrugged his wide shoulders, and the intricate design of woven leaves on his tunic seemed to ripple as if touched by a breeze. “I have been paid to bring you out of the Castle de Bresse and deliver you and the child to the fortress at Carcassonne . . . in
good health,” he added, shaking his head again with a regretful chuckle. “So, if you will not play willingly, then I must leave you to your chaste bed, since any effort to take what you refuse to give can only lead to some diminution in your good health.” He ducked toward the tent opening. “I give you good night, lady. Since I value my fee at least as much as you value your honor, I will double the watch outside. They will have orders to restrain you, should you attempt to leave the tent without permission.”

But Magdalen was not listening. She was staring into the abyss, knowing now the ultimate terror. Every time she believed matters could not be any worse, they became so. She was in the hands of her cousin with no hope of protection or rescue, since no one knew the truth. And somewhere on the road to Calais, her lover and her husband would by now have met in bloody combat.

She looked upon an expanse of malevolence, felt herself wandering in a void of menace. She could not lay hands upon it, take the threat, examine it, disarm it with understanding. It simply cast its great black shadow over her, and instinctively she lay down on the pallet, curled tightly on her side beneath the blanket, and drew the sleeping baby against her breast.

Her cousin’s hand was now clearly revealed in all of this. It was he who had betrayed her to Edmund, his intention to achieve Edmund’s departure from Bresse in the short term, his death in the long term. There was now no representative of the Duke of Lancaster holding Bresse for England. She and the child were vanished and would never be seen again. The fealty of Bresse would revert to France as soon as Charles of France sent someone to take it. And she would be in her cousin’s hands.

She saw those white hands, beringed, manicured, somehow soft as if decayed. Yet she knew they were not soft. She saw his eyes, narrowed with that hunger that
sent the slug’s trails across her skin, brought the stench of the oubliette to her nostrils. She felt the aura of his evil enveloping her as it had done on that very first meeting outside the tavern in Calais. Her future seemed very certain.

Panic fluttered, grew bright and strong, and she fought it with muscle and sinew of body and mind until she had subdued it and it lay below the surface once more. She must face what was to come alone, and, for Zoe’s sake, she must face it with a mind cleared of the obscuring trappings of fear.

The days grew hotter as they journeyed south. They kept away from towns and camped in the countryside at nightfall. There were little breakaway excursions into solitary farms and small villages by small troops of Durand’s army. The men would return with a glazed, surfeited look in their eyes that sent shudders down Magdalen’s spine, and a drunken ribaldry that was somehow shamefaced. Their chieftain did nothing to prevent these diversions, but when two men failed to return to the main body of the army with their companions, he tracked them down, discovered them in a drunken stupor in a barnyard, and summarily hanged them as deserters before they were sober.

Magdalen rode her own horse, the babe cradled before her. Two pack mules bore her possessions. She had been instructed to bring all her clothes and jewels, which had not surprised her; she had expected to be robbed of them. Now it seemed she must put a different construction on the provision. Her women had not been permitted to accompany her, and Durand had offered her the services of a slatternly girl traveling with the baggage and at the service of any who chose to take what she had to offer. Magdalen had at first refused the girl’s services, but had realized rapidly that caring single-handedly for a baby on a march of this kind was not easy. She hadn’t realized how much washing had to be done, when all such things were seen to by Erin and
Margery. So she accepted the woman’s help for the menial tasks and struggled daily with the lack of privacy that made feeding the child and caring for her own personal needs a continual ordeal.

There was not a waking moment when she was not striving for a means of escape. Plans rose to be as quickly discarded. She looked longingly at the towns they passed. Surely in those crowded streets an opportunity would present itself, a sympathetic person would be found. But their road lay on the byways rather than the highways and she was kept so well guarded, surrounded by armed men at all times, that her chances of catching anyone’s eye were so remote as to be not worth considering.

The terrain changed as they left the lush, green, river-threaded lands of the Dordogne. The vineyards of Roussillon lined the dusty hillsides, and the Pyrenees threw their southerly shadow. There was a sense of limitless space that came with the presence of the sea, for all that it was too far to be more than a hint on the horizon.

They reached the great fortress of Carcassonne at the end of the fifth week of their journey. By that time, Magdalen was so wearied of travel that her fear of journey’s end had taken second place to the acute discomforts of every day. The only blessing was that Zoe appeared completely unconcerned by this change in her routine. She slept as easily to the gait of the horse as she had done in her cradle beneath the window at Bresse. She was awake a lot more of the time these days and would gaze around her with placid yet bright-eyed curiosity, sometimes sucking her fist, sometimes waving her arms in the air with gurgles of enjoyment.

Magdalen would not permit the slatternly servant to touch the child, so the two grew together in mutual dependence, the baby accepting only her mother’s care and the mother finding in the child the only reassurance, the only reminder that there was a world outside
this burning summer travel. Fear was lodged deep in her soul, and the dust caked her skin and hair, caught so deep beneath her fingernails it was impossible to imagine them clean again. Her throat was always dry and scratchy so that there was never enough water to lubricate it and never enough air to clear her nose of the hot trapped dust that made her sneeze constantly.

But in Zoe she saw what had once been and in Zoe she saw what must be . . . the future she must enable her daughter to have, whatever the future might hold for herself.

Her first sight of the fortress monastery dominating the mountainous countryside from its commanding hilltop position brought the terror alive and vivid again. The lilies of France and the hounds and hawk of Beauregard flew side by side from the donjon. It was a dark, menacing, massive pile of stone. The approach through the town sprawled across the hillside was a sunless ride through narrow, fetid cobbled streets overshadowed by the great walls of the fortress.

It was midday when Durand left the main body of his army encamped outside the town and rode with his prisoner and a small escort of pikers and archers up to the fortress. Magdalen’s arms tightened around the baby as they reached the drawbridge across a moat, wider and deeper than any she had seen. Durand’s herald blew his note. It was answered from within, and the portcullis rose slowly as the drawbridge was lowered.

A dark, dank stench of old never-dried stone floated from the entrails of the fortress as Magdalen and her child rode to face the horror it contained. She was trembling, and Zoe wailed in sudden sympathy, her little face screwed up with unidentifiable unease.

The cry strengthened Magdalen. “Hush, pigeon,” she soothed, lifting the child to kiss the plump cheek.

They rode beneath the arch, into the
place d’armes
, thronged with men-at-arms. Cowled monks in the brown corded habits of the Franciscans mingled with
the warriors, hurrying on their own business, God and war inextricably bound here as they were in the minds of all men.

They rode through the
place d’armes
and into the inner ward, where attendants hurried from the donjon to greet them. A woman in nun’s habit, a harsh-featured face beneath the stiff starched wimple, came over to Magdalen as she was helped from her horse.

“I am Sister Therese, lady. You will come with me.”

Magdalen followed the nun into the donjon. The air inside was chill despite the midsummer heat, and there were no floor coverings on the stone passages or wall hangings to block the draughts. The nun led her through a circuitous maze of passages, up twisting staircases, and stopped outside an iron-bound oak door.

“For the moment, you are to be lodged in this apartment.” She raised the heavy latch and opened the door onto a small, well-swept chamber. The only light came from a narrow slitted window high up in the stone wall and from tallow candles that burned on a long pine table beneath the window. There was no fire in the hearth, but the hangings to the bed looked clean, and there was a wooden cradle on rockers beside the bed.

“There is a latrine beyond the garderobe.” The nun gestured to the door in the outside wall. “You will be brought hot water for you and the child, and meat and drink. If you have need of anything further, there is a bell beside the door.” She indicated the hand bell on a table. “When they are ready to see you, I will come for you.”

Her face had remained set in its original, forbidding lines throughout this brief communication, her speech delivered with a degree of indifference, as if she were simply reciting by rote. She offered Magdalen no sign of fellow feeling, no hint of sympathy, and Magdalen’s questions died in the face of an impassivity that seemed to indicate little or no interest in the captive woman’s fate.

The door closed on the nun, and the heavy wooden bar fell into place with a dull finality. Magdalen examined her surroundings. The chamber was furnished with the bare necessities, offering no clues to the intentions of her captors. In a few minutes, the latch was lifted and a serving wench appeared with a steaming pitcher which she took into the garderobe. Beneath her arm, she carried a pile of toweling which she set beside the pitcher.

“My thanks,” Magdalen said. “I’ll be glad to wash away the dust of the road.” She smiled at the girl. “How are you called?”

But the girl merely stared at her with frightened eyes and scuttled from the chamber.

It was not reassuring, but Magdalen turned to the soothing tasks of caring for the baby. She was washing her when the door again opened, admitting this time two burly varlets, who deposited her own trunks in the middle of the floor.

There was something both comforting and discomforting about having her own possessions again. For the first time in weeks, she could change her clothes in the privacy of four walls, but the presence of her trunks, of the familiar possessions in this dim chamber, seemed to impart a finality to her present residence, as if she must learn to call this place home.

She had fed Zoe and changed her own clothes before the serving wench reappeared, this time with a tray bearing bread, meat, and wine. It was simple fare, but Magdalen found she could not eat. The meat would not be swallowed however much she chewed, and the bread settled in a solid lump in her throat. Apprehension was now filling the gap left by the accomplishment of her physical tasks. She drank a little wine, hoping it would give her some courage, and paced the small chamber, waiting.

It was late afternoon when the nun returned for her. The sun was still hot and bright, but the day might as
well have been dull and overcast for all the sunlight penetrating the little slitted window. Magdalen was chilled and rubbed her hands together as if it were midwinter. When she heard the latch being lifted, she turned to the door, and the cold was in her soul.

Sister Therese came in. Her eyes were a muddy brown, without depth or warmth. “You are to come now. They are ready for you.”

Magdalen bent to pick up Zoe, who sat propped against pillows on the bed, shaking a wooden rattle with an air of great concentration.

“The child is to remain here.”

“No!” Magdalen forgot her own fear in the face of this new threat. They would not separate her from her baby, not in this place. “The child goes where I go.”

“She stays here, lady.” The nun looked significantly over her shoulder to where two brawny men-at-arms stood. They stepped into the doorway.

“You will have to kill me first.” Magdalen issued the dramatic threat with composure now. She knew instinctively that for the moment she herself was to be unharmed, and if she stood her ground they would have no choice but to accede to her demand. Her arms were wrapped tightly around Zoe, and her gray eyes glared their implacable message.

There was a short silence when the coiled tension in the room seemed almost palpable. Magdalen did not move in her Plantagenet determination, and her eyes did not so much as flicker. Sister Therese touched her wimple; it was a gesture of uncertainty.

“The child will not be harmed,” she said slowly.

Magdalen’s eyes went to the two men standing in the doorway, and she said nothing.

“I swear to you that she will not be harmed,” Sister Therese said, and there was a placatory note in her voice.

Magdalen thought rapidly. She knew she would want no distractions when facing whatever she was
about to face. The child was her weakness, as well as her strength, and she could not afford to reveal that weakness to those she was about to confront. “You will swear on the cross you wear that my child will come to no harm in my absence.” Her voice was low and steady.