Almost Innocent (47 page)

The nun touched her crucifix. “I swear it. She will come to no harm while you are gone from this chamber. If you wish it, I will remain with her. You are to go with the men.”

Gently, Magdalen laid the baby in the cradle, tucking her up securely. Zoe blinked sleepily and seemed not ill content with the arrangement. Magdalen kissed her brow and then straightened.

“Very well,” she said. “I leave her in your charge.” Strangely, their roles seemed to have been reversed and she was in control, making the decisions instead of having them made for her. It gave her courage.

She walked out of the chamber, and the nun closed the door gently behind her. The gentleness reassured Magdalen since it seemed to indicate some consideration for the child, a desire not to startle her with a sudden noise. The two men-at-arms silently fell in on either side of Magdalen, forming an escort.

They progressed in silence down endless passages, past hurrying pages and anxious servitors. Couriers and men-at-arms moved with a stolid purpose, cowled monks with measured pace. None offered the woman and her escort more than a passing glance, and Magdalen wondered if such sights were common enough in this vast fortress dedicated to so many purposes, both religious and secular.

At a door set into a bastion wall, her escort stopped. One of them rapped with his staff. The door was opened, and the man who stood there smiled his thin smile at Magdalen.

“Such a pleasure, cousin,” Charles d’Auriac said, bowing. “I bid you welcome.” He gestured sweepingly that she should enter the tower room.

Magdalen felt his evil, but she was accustomed to it and had prepared herself well for this first encounter. She was not, however, prepared for the massed wall of malignancy that seemed to shimmer before her eyes as she walked past her cousin and faced the four other men in the round chamber.

They were sitting at a rectangular table in the center of the room. Fingers of light came from the slitted windows set at eye level around the wall. A branched candlestick in the middle of the table augmented the light and threw golden shadows. Four pairs of gray eyes regarded her as she stood uncertainly just inside the doorway.

“I bid you welcome to your mother’s family, Magdalen, daughter of Isolde.” A heavy-set man, older than the others, spoke from his place at the head of the table. None of the men rose at her entrance. “I am Bertrand de Beauregard, your mother’s brother and the head of this family. You will accord me the reverence due your uncle and the head of your family.”

He was her uncle. She could read it in his face, in the resemblance they shared. He did not look in the least like her, yet something told unmistakably that they were of the same blood, as she had known it with Charles d’Auriac. And courtesy decreed that she make her reverence.

She ignored courtesy. “I have been brought here under duress.”

“You were removed from your mother’s family without consent and have been brought back to them.” His voice was harsh, but she sensed that the grating note was habitual and that he was not at the moment angered by her refusal to obey his demand.

“I have never known my mother’s family. I do not understand how I was removed from them.” She held herself very still, aware of Charles behind her, so close she could almost feel his breath on her neck. Her skin crawled at his proximity, but he was a known danger
and for the moment she put him aside, concentrating instead on the unknown embodied in this burly man, whose gray eyes pierced the world from beneath massive shaggy brows above a large, pointed nose.

“That will be explained to you. For now, you will acknowledge your place in this family.”

“I am the Duke of Lancaster’s daughter,” she said, lifting her head. “It is to him I owe filial reverence.” She had moved to the end of the table and now stood facing him, her hands flattened on the cool oak surface.

There was a flash of blood-red as something caught the pointer of sun from one of the window slits. The next instant she was staring in disbelief at her hands on the table. Between the middle and index fingers of her right hand a dagger shivered, the ruby-eyed sea serpent glinting. It was impossible to believe that the dagger was not pinning her finger to the table, yet she felt no pain and could see no blood. Her eyes lifted slowly, appalled, to the man at the end of the table.

“Pay attention,” said Bertrand. “You talk too much and listen too little.”

She swallowed, moistened her dry lips, gingerly moved her fingers apart. A tiny bead of blood showed where the dagger had nicked the skin of her middle finger. The silence in the chamber was profound.

“My lord uncle,” she acknowledged finally, bowing her head.

Charles d’Auriac reached over her shoulder, pulled out the dagger, and sent it skidding across the table to his uncle. Magdalen noticed distantly that the entire surface of the table was scarred with incisions like the one just made. Her sense of unreality increased. What had happened was clearly accepted as a usual method of discipline in this group.

Bertrand laid the dagger on the table at his right hand. “Niece,” he responded. “You are most welcome. My sons, your cousins . . .” His hand moved in leisurely fashion, indicating the three men at the table.
“Gerard, Marc, and Philippe. Your cousin Charles, you already know. His mother was sister to myself and to your mother.”

“What do you want of me?” She managed to frame the question, to keep her head raised, despite the deep chill of terror in her belly.

“Why, your allegiance to the de Beauregards, niece,” Bertrand responded gently, leaning back in his chair. “You are one of us. You belong to us, as your mother belonged to us. We would embrace you.”

The embrace of the serpent. Her eye fixed on the serpentine head of the dagger, and the malevolence of her mother’s family swirled around her in choking possession. “I am a Plantagenet,” she said, summoning the last drop of defiance, her eyes never leaving the dagger. Next time, she knew, it could draw real blood.

But Bertrand made no move toward the weapon. He leaned back in his chair, looking up at her with narrowed eyes. His voice was suddenly quite soft. “You were born in this very chamber, daughter of Isolde.”

“Here?” She had always known she’d been born in France, but beyond that had neither asked for nor been offered further information. “In this room?”

She looked around the bastion room, its thick stone walls, flagstone floor, and great hearth, empty now, but on the winter night of her birth a fire would have been kindled. A shiver lifted the fine hairs on her spine. She was standing in the room of her birth, among her mother’s family. And she had known only the cool green lands of England, the drear wilderness of a border fortress, the lush arrogance of the Plantagenet court. Only these had informed her sense of herself, of who and what she was, of her place in the world. And now she was standing where some woman had gone through the agonies of birth to bring her into the world . . . agonies she had gone through herself . . . agonies that she knew welded a mother to her child. The sense of the room seemed to seep into her blood, through her pores,
like the presence of the mother she had never known. Had Isolde de Beauregard died in this room? Had she died here in the moment of birth, or afterward, in some other chamber?

“Did she die here?” She uttered the question on the thought.

Something in Bertrand’s gray eyes flickered, a serpent’s darting venom. His voice was still and cold, almost disembodied, as if it emerged from the mouth of a corpse. “Your father poisoned her in this room . . . and here she suffered her death agony at the moment of your birth. Lancaster took you from her dying body.”

The horror swirled around her. She grabbed the edge of the table, her knuckles whitening as she hung on to the hard solidity in an effort to keep upright as she absorbed what had been said. “My father killed my mother?”

Softly, his words falling into the cool light of early evening, Bertrand told her. He told her of her mother’s gifts, her power to bewitch men, the way they had harnessed those gifts, that power, to work for the good of the family. He told her how Isolde had set out to entrap Lancaster and how her plan had been foiled by the prince. He told her her mother cared nothing for Lancaster, had seduced him simply to achieve his death for the greater good of France and the aggrandizement of the de Beauregards. The words were soft, but their meaning was as marble, ice cold and indelible. She had been conceived in hatred and born of a murderous revenge.

So this was the secret Guy de Gervais had kept from her. She understood then so much . . . understood that dreadful moment when John of Gaunt had rejected his eleven-year-old daughter . . . understood his continuing aversion . . . understood the strange, oblique remarks Guy de Gervais had made about her resemblance to her mother, how he would never expand, would stop as if he had already said too much . . . understood his recoil
when she had blindly stated her belief in following the dictates of passion. She understood then that the effect she had on men, the hungry gazes of the men at her father’s court, the lusting of her cousin, of the brigand chieftain, the passionate loving and lusting of Edmund and Guy, was the effect her mother had had on men. She was the daughter of Isolde de Beauregard, and these men, Isolde’s family . . .
her
family . . . intended to put her to the same use to which they had put her mother, employing the same innate powers.

And all the love she had felt from anyone was suddenly tarnished like old brass, green and spoiled. It was aroused from tainted roots, despoiled and despoiling. She felt as she had done all those years ago, when Guy de Gervais had told her that John of Gaunt was her father. The same desperation, confusion, excoriating hurt of the soul swamped her. And this time there was no loving, understanding figure in whom she reposed absolute trust to lead her to understanding.

But she was no longer a child. The same experience could not engulf her as it had once done, and she had no need of an omnipotent guardian to make sense of the world for her. She had a core, her own core, and she clung to it, facing these men with their uncanny resemblance to herself, these men who were telling her she was of them and belonged to them, telling her that she would work for them because she owed them family fealty as her mother had done. She would reject their taint.

“No!” she said.

She recoiled with a gasp as the dagger drove into the very edge of the table a fraction of an inch from her belly.

“Pull it out and give it back to me,” Bertrand said, his voice as cold and calm as ever. She obeyed because she could not imagine doing otherwise, drawing forth the blade, seeing its keenness shimmer in the candlelight
as she pushed it along the table so that he would have it to use again.

“There comes a time, niece, when I grow awearied of make-believe,” Bertrand said almost casually, polishing the ruby eye with the end of his dagged sleeve. “Have a care.”

“I have a husband—” Magdalen began shakily.

“Edmund de Bresse is dead.” It was Charles d’Auriac who spoke. He had been standing behind her, but now he moved round the table so he could see her face. “You know he is dead. He has challenged your lover, the man who betrayed his marriage bed. There could be but one conclusion to such a combat.”

“Guy de Gervais would never deliberately have Edmund’s blood upon his hands.” She spoke with the clarity of absolute confidence and felt the sudden attention from the men in the room. This was not something they had ever considered. The recognition brought her renewed courage, and an imprudent touch of scorn laced her voice. “Having wronged Edmund as he believed he had done, he would never take his life in fair combat.”

“What nonsense is this!” Charles exclaimed, but they could all hear the hint of uncertainty in his voice. “What possible choice could he have? He is far and away the stronger combatant.”

Magdalen’s eyes met his. “I do not know what choice he would have,” she said quietly. “But I do know he would be more likely to choose his own death than Edmund’s.” It was the truth and it tore at her to say it, but because it did, her conviction was unassailable. The quality of the silence in the room changed, sharpened, and she could feel Charles’s unease.

“The courier has not yet returned with confirmation?” Bertrand raised an eyebrow.

“Not yet,” Charles said. “Something must have delayed him upon the road. But there is no doubt as to
the outcome. No man would choose his own death over another’s.” He managed to sound dismissive.

“You couldn’t imagine it, could you?” Magdalen looked at him with contempt, then her gaze ran around the table. She forgot her fear under a surge of contemptuous loathing and the belief that while blood ties might connect her with these men, those ties were as nothing compared to the ones that connected her with the Lord Bellair, Guy de Gervais, Edmund de Bresse, and John of Gaunt. Those ties had their roots in shared codes of honor and morality, in the knowledge of what was right and wrong, in the knowledge that people would in general prefer to behave well rather than ill, even if their own goals were not served thereby.

“None of you could understand it,” she said. “Because it comes under the name of honor—something you do not understand, something you cannot—”

The dagger buried itself in the door behind her. It had sped past her ear, so close she could feel the air vibrating with its passing, so close the skin of her cheekbone burned in response and her right eyelid fluttered uncontrollably at the thought of what nearly had been.

Nausea rose in her gorge, her shock so powerful she was afraid she would be sick where she stood. She fought it, closing her eyes tightly against the image of the right side of her face sliced cleanly with the dagger, losing herself in this private struggle to bring her shattered nerves into alignment again, to quell her heaving belly, to still the violent tremors of her knees and hands, the wild pounding of her heart.

Her face had a gray cast, blue tinged her set lips, and the five men watched her struggle with interest. They all knew the fear of that dagger, even for those accustomed to it, even for those who were no strangers to the battlefield horrors of mutilation, the pain of wounds.