Catherine: One Love is Enough (Catherine Series Book 1) (17 page)

‘I am sorry if he was,’ he said sadly. ‘He was a fine boy.’

While he spoke, Abou-al-Khayr went on with his work, occasionally interrupted by groans, half of pain, half of rage, from his patient. Patience was clearly not the outstanding quality of Arnaud de Montsalvy.

Catherine, meanwhile, devoured Arnaud with her eyes. It was as though heaven had performed a special miracle for her by resuscitating the man she had never ceased to love and would never forget. Between Arnaud and herself a bond was being forged with each passing moment, each look they exchanged strengthening and deepening it. Every time the wounded man’s feverish eyes fell on her, which was often, she felt as though something exploded inside her. Her cheeks grew hot. Clearly the knight had but one desire: to be left alone for an instant with this young girl, whose beauty, as he made no attempt to hide, had dazzled him. So he protested violently when the doctor raised to his lips a little gold cup in which he had mixed a mysterious draught. He tried to push it away.

‘My dear young knight,’ said the Moor severely, ‘if you wish to recover your strength quickly you need sleep. This will help.’

‘My strength? But I must leave tomorrow! There is the Dauphin’s message … I must go to Bruges.’

‘You have a broken leg. You must stay in bed,’ cried Abou-al-Khayr.

‘Besides,’ Catherine interpolated gently, ‘it is possible that you might not find the Duke at Bruges any longer. He is on his way to Dijon, where he had many things to attend to. And Dijon … is where we are going ourselves.’

As she spoke, Arnaud’s sombre gaze lightened.

When she had finished, he stretched out his hand to seize hers, but found he had hold of Mathieu’s garment instead, and frowned. Then he regained his good humour, smiled, and declared that nothing would make him happier than to travel with her.

‘I suppose,’ he added, ‘that it would be possible to find a litter.’

‘We will see about that tomorrow,’ interrupted Abou. ‘Now drink this!’

A few minutes later, under the influence of the powerful opiate, the knight’s eyes closed and he slept peacefully. Everyone left the room save for one of the black slaves whom the doctor left in attendance on his patient. The two slaves were both dumb, which diminished the likelihood of their quarrelling with him. As the doctor confided to Mathieu, Arnaud was a patient who seemed as irascible as ‘a scorpion disturbed in its hole’.

Catherine was the last to leave, sighing regretfully.

Abou-al-Khayr’s company proved much more amusing than Catherine would have supposed, notwithstanding his obstinate refusal to acknowledge her presence. He was, in fact, a young man, despite the long white beard, which, he explained to Mathieu, was the distinguishing mark of doctors, professional men and other Islamic notables. In the Muslim countries middle-class men were entitled to wear a shorter beard, which could be dyed blue or green. The whiteness of this fine beard, and its maintenance, were a constant preoccupation to the Cordoban doctor, who lavished much care upon it; as, indeed, he did upon his entire person, which was of a fastidious cleanliness. He complained bitterly of the lack of comfort in Christian sanitary installations.

‘Those bath-houses of yours,’ he said scornfully, ‘would be considered fit only for slaves in Cordoba.’

But, despite this drawback, he was prepared to concede that Christianity had its good side; that it was of great interest, and provided a doctor with a huge field for experiment, because people hacked each other to pieces far more often than they did in Islamic countries. Especially in the kingdom of Cordoba, where things were too peaceful for much medical progress to be made.

‘Here one can find corpses at every crossroads,’ he concluded with an air of great satisfaction. Despite his age, he had travelled widely, from Baghdad to Kairouan, from the sources of the Nile to Alexandria, always in search of the same thing – knowledge. His plan now was to seek the Court of the powerful Duke of Burgundy, the great Duke of the Western world, whose fame was already spreading across mountains and seas.

‘This encounter means I shall no longer pursue my journey to that town by water,’ he told Mathieu. ‘I shall travel with the wounded man, and thus I shall be able to keep an eye on him till we reach Burgundy. He has need of it. But we shall not leave for two or three days. This inn is not too bad a place, it seems.’

It appeared that the little doctor had a soft spot for good food. He was now tucking hungrily into a chicken cooked with herbs, which he washed down with copious draughts of local wine, overlooking the precepts of the Koran in favour of the celebrated vineyards of Sancerre.

‘In that case we will meet at Dijon,’ said Mathieu, who was also tucking in to a hearty meal, ‘because my niece and I and our servants will be leaving tomorrow. We are already overdue at Dijon.’

Catherine did not join in the meal. She had drunk a bowl of milk and was nibbling absent-mindedly on a honey cake. These last words, however, instantly brought her out of her reverie.

‘It would be more amusing if we all travelled together,’ she said.

At this, Mathieu for no apparent reason flew into a rage. ‘No!’ he shouted, thumping his fist on the table. ‘We leave tomorrow! If you must know, I didn’t much like the way that knight looked at you. And as for you, there you were smiling at him, almost making advances to him, upon my word! And it is high time you told me where you met him before!’

‘I shouldn’t pin too many hopes on that,’ Catherine said coldly. ‘I have nothing to say, except that I have never seen the knight before. He is very like someone I used to know once, that’s all. And now, good night, Uncle Mathieu!’

Dropping a hurried curtsey to the cloth merchant and his new friend, she hastened across the room before Mathieu could catch up with her, climbed the wooden stairs and then went down the narrow passage leading to the bedrooms. All the doors opened onto an outside balcony. She stopped in front of Arnaud’s room, where a little light showed under the door. She felt a passionate longing to go in and look at him as he slept. Her own little room was at the far end of the balcony, opposite the one occupied by this fascinating wounded knight.

She stood there for a moment, buffeted by the wind and sleet. The rain splashed right into the gallery itself. The storm really had risen now, and a fierce wind was blowing, whipping up the surface of the puddles down below. The spray looked like clouds drifting across the ground; tormented trees writhed this way and that in the gale. Catherine shivered under the coat she had thrown over her shoulders.

She loved the wild weather that night. The fury of the elements matched the other storms that raged within her. She was a little frightened by the violence of the passions that had so suddenly been unleashed in her. She had never before felt this wild longing to be near, to touch, to embrace a creature of flesh and blood. In a few seconds the old Catherine, who met the passionate avowals of the young men of Dijon with such cool composure and unconsciously cruel laughter, had turned into a passionate woman for whom a man’s love had suddenly become the whole meaning of existence. Even that Catherine who had trembled with pleasurable distress when Philippe of Burgundy had kissed her was far away …

What would Mathieu say if he found her in Arnaud’s room? Catherine put that awkward thought out of her mind by telling herself that he was going to be sleeping in the stable, and would therefore be unlikely to come up again. Why should he? No longer able to resist the longing that impelled her, she put her hand on the latch of the door and went in.

4

The Wounds Of Love

Arnaud and the black slave were both asleep. The great body of the Sudanese was stretched across the hearth, curled up like a large dog. The wounded man lay motionless on the bed. The bandages round his head looked like a helmet, but snow-white. The odd contraption made of strips of wood and linen bandages soaked in flour paste that the Cordoban doctor had strapped round his broken leg meant he had to lie stretched out flat on his back – lending his stillness a rather corpse-like air. Catherine paused for a moment and leant against the bed to get a closer look at the sleeping face with its closed eyes. A wooden bench strewn with red cushions stood alongside the wall. She tried to pull it closer to the bed, but it was too heavy for her, so she merely sat down upon it, letting her hands fall loosely clasped on her lap.

The sound of the wounded man’s slightly laboured breathing filled the room. He did not appear to be in pain. As she gazed silently at him, Catherine decided that he really was handsomer than Michel. This was possibly because he was more of a man, more virile, whereas Michel had been little more than a boy. He looked about 23 or 24. Under the somewhat bizarre headdress the Moor had concocted for him, the harsh but infinitely pure lines of his face stood out as clearly as though they had been carved. With its haughty nose and square, determined chin, blue-shadowed now by an unshaven stubble of beard, it was a face with no trace of softness about it apart from a set of uncommonly long, thick lashes. But it had considerable charm. Catherine had still not recovered from the shock of finding just how powerfully his charm acted upon her. She was still bewildered by the strangely disturbing feeling that welled up from deep inside her. It swept her body irresistibly, bringing sudden inexplicable blushes to her cheeks.

A burning log fell out of the grate in a shower of sparks and rolled in front of the hearth. Catherine got up and put it back on the fire with a pair of tongs. The black slave stirred, muttering something unintelligible in his sleep, but Arnaud had not moved. With a sigh, the girl leant against the back of her seat. The fury of the storm seemed to have passed. The rain still drummed a tattoo on the roof, but inside the little room it was cosy and sheltered.

Little by little the monotonous patter of falling rain set Catherine’s head nodding, and soon she was fast asleep stretched out along the bench. She did not see the door open and the little doctor’s immense turban appear. His sharp eyes darted about the room, rested briefly on the wounded man and then, having made certain he was asleep, moved on. A curious expression came over his leathery features as saw Catherine sleeping on her bench. His first impulse was to go and wake her, but halfway across the room he stopped and shrugged. His lips curled in an ironic smile, and he left the room as quietly as he had entered, shutting the door softly behind him.

Nor did Catherine know that the little doctor, meeting Mathieu in the gallery, had expressly forbidden him to go into the knight’s room, explaining that his feverish condition made him a light sleeper. The cloth merchant went down to his straw bed in the stable without suspecting for a moment that his niece was sleeping in the knight’s room.

Toward 4.30 in the morning Catherine opened her heavy lids. Day was breaking, and in the inn’s poultry-run a vociferous cock was trying to persuade everyone that he was crowing the sun back into existence. Arnaud had not moved by a hairsbreadth from his position of the night before, and the Nubian slave still slept, snoring doggedly in front of the cold ashes of the fire. Catherine got up stiffly, grimacing slightly. She went silently over to the window and opened it to look out.

The rain had stopped, though on the ground there were still great shining puddles, in which the rosy morning sky was mirrored. The trees and leaves all looked as though they had just been varnished. There was a smell of warm stable and wet earth; a good country smell that the young girl drew in with long, delighted breaths. She stretched herself with the slow graceful movements of a cat, yawned, then calmly began undoing her plaits to let her hair loose in the cool air. She ran her hands through it, shook it out and fluffed it up, happily enjoying its silky feel against her skin. Then she closed the window and went back to the bed.

The wounded man still slept soundly, his eyes shut, his firm lips turned down slightly at the corners and a fine line drawn from the corner of each nostril. He looked so young and touching like that, so disarming, that Catherine surrendered to an irresistible impulse. She slid to her knees by the bed and leant her cheek against the brown hand that lay palm upward on the bedcover. The hand felt warm, but its skin, hardened by the daily handling of weapons, scraped a bit. Catherine pressed her lips to it with a passion that took her by surprise. There was a lump in her throat, and she wanted to laugh and cry all at once. But, more than anything, she wished that this moment of intense sweetness could last forever. The world around her seemed to fade away, leaving only Arnaud and herself locked together in a charmed circle against which dull reality crashed and crumbled away. For a moment he was hers, hers alone …

Absorbed in the enchantment of the moment, Catherine did not notice the hand stirring under her lips, and another stretching out to stroke the mass of hair spread out over the bed. But when the two hands suddenly came together and cupped her face, raising it up, she realised suddenly that the wounded knight had woken. He lay on his side, half raised on one elbow, and looked steadily at her. Then he began drawing her slowly toward him. She gave a little cry and tried to free herself.

‘Messire … let me go … please …’

‘Sssh!’ he said. ‘Be quiet!’

Subdued by his authoritative tones, she fell silent and stopped struggling. She had neither the desire nor the strength to resist. Her heart thumped so wildly in her breast that she could hardly breathe. She was hypnotised by those passionate black eyes, which were coming nearer and nearer to her own. The young man’s hands no longer held her face. He clasped her now in both arms, pulling her hungrily toward him on the bed …

When he held her against him, pressed against his hard chest, Catherine shivered from head to foot. Arnaud’s brown skin was damp with a fine sweat. He smelt of warm bed, fever and something else she could not quite place, possibly the balm that had been spread over his wound. He was breathing hard and the sound filled his willing captive’s ears. She heard him curse between clenched teeth when his immobilised leg got in the way. She did not try to resist. Unconsciously she had waited all her life for this moment …

But she moaned when his hard mouth swooped on hers, forcing it open with the ferocity of a starving man. A peal of bells rang out in her head, a joyful carillon as ancient as the Earth itself. Without even being aware of it, she yielded herself to the hands that moved over her, searching out the truth about her young girl’s body.

For a man so close to death only the night before, Arnaud de Montsalvy showed a remarkable vigour. He wasted no time on niceties or pretty speeches. His quick, masterful movements were those of a soldier for whom every minute counts. And yet, in this violence of his, which robbed her of all will to resist, Catherine found an extraordinary gentleness. She gave herself up to him, completely abandoned and already contented. Their kiss seemed to go on forever, became more passionate, arousing the girl’s blood to madness. She was no longer aware of what Arnaud was doing. He unfastened her bodice and unlaced her dress. It was not until his lips left hers and he buried his head between her breasts that Catherine found she was half naked in his arms. But the sight of her own flesh, rosy in the dawn light, still rosier in contrast with the black hair that emerged from Arnaud’s turban of bandages, did not embarrass her in the least. It was as though, from all eternity, she had been created merely to give herself to this man; as though she had been made for him alone, for his pleasure and happiness.

With greater gentleness now, he undressed her with one hand and caressed her with the other. His fingers seemed to hesitate before each new discovery. Then, in joy and wonderment, they closed fiercely on each new conquest. He murmured broken, disconnected words that Catherine did not understand. Then, for a moment, his face came near to hers. She saw his features harden with desire, his flashing black eyes seek hers.

‘How beautiful you are!’ he groaned. ‘How sweet and soft and rosy!’

Passionately he sought her mouth again and pulled her supple body under him, arching her round waist. Catherine moaned again; a soft moan that was almost a call.

Suddenly in the inn courtyard a great shout was heard: ‘Catherine! Catherine! Where are you?’

‘Heavens! My uncle!’

Abruptly recalled to her senses, Catherine sat up, pushing the young man away. For the first time she became fully aware of her nakedness, of the door that might open at any minute, of the Nubian who was beginning to stir and would soon be awake. Crimson with shame, she tried to pull on her clothes and disengage herself from Arnaud’s embrace. Surprise had made him let her go for an instant, but now he was pulling her toward him again, with a groan:

‘Stay here, with me! I want you! I’ll kill anyone who comes in.’

‘I can’t! Oh, let me go, for God’s sake!’

Supple as an eel, she somehow managed to slip out of the bed. While she pulled on her clothes with shaking, clumsy fingers, she kept on looking at him. He was so white! His face was drawn like a famished wolf’s, and his hands, without his realising it, stretched out to her in a pathetically imploring gesture. All his strength and violence seemed to have drained out of him. He was just a man cheated of a pleasure his hands had not been strong enough to clutch on to. Then, abruptly, and quite unexpectedly, he started to laugh giddily.

‘I won’t always be bedridden, my beauty! I shall find you again! By St Michel, I believe you have driven me out of my mind!’

‘Please forget what has happened, messire, I beg you,’ Catherine implored him as she finished lacing up her dress. ‘You made me lose my head …’

Once again he burst out laughing. A clear, light, young laugh that laid him out flat on his back again. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun, as he stared at Catherine again with a gravity in which there was a challenging, passionate note.

‘Forget that I saw your eyes change colour and felt your body tremble under my hands? Forget your beautiful body and the sweet taste of your lips? If I lived to a hundred, that would be asking too much of me. Catherine … your name is music to my ears, and you are the loveliest woman born of woman. The only woman I want …’

Tom between a desire to hear more and the fear of angering her uncle, Catherine hesitated before leaving the room. Then she took a step toward the door.

Arnaud implored her, ‘Go then, if you must … but first give me one more kiss, just one!’

She was just about to go back to him when the little doctor’s black slave, now wide awake, stood up and began raking the ashes to try to start the fire going again. He paid no attention to them and did not even look their way. Catherine was about to fling herself into the knight’s arms when a clatter of horses’ hooves outside checked her. Then they heard the rattle of armour. Instantly on the alert, Arnaud turned away from Catherine:

‘What is that? There are armed men down there …’

She ran to the window and looked down into the courtyard. There she saw a company of soldiers that appeared to have just ridden in. There were about ten of them, and over their armour Catherine recognised the half-black, half-grey gold-embroidered tabards worn by the men of Philippe of Burgundy’s bodyguard. The fronts of their tunics were embroidered with the Duke’s arms and motto: ‘I shall have none other.’

‘They belong to the Duke of Burgundy’s bodyguard,’ she said. ‘There is an officer with them …’

Just then a tall knight, crested with white plumes, dismounted and went up to Mathieu Gautherin, who was nervously pacing about the courtyard with Abou-al-Khayr at his side. The girl recognised the newcomer’s slightly nervous manner and resonant voice.

‘Why, I believe it must be Messire de Roussay!’ she went on.

Arnaud grimaced. ‘A plague on it, my darling! You are well informed about these accursed Burgundians. Upon my word, you seem to know them all!’

‘You forget that I live in Dijon and am a subject of the Duke’s.’

Meanwhile, down in the courtyard, Jacques de Roussay went up to the cloth merchant, and his loud voice boomed out on the still morning air.

‘I am happy to have found you, Maître Gautherin. I was looking for you, in fact.’

Mathieu bowed so low that he almost fell over, momentarily forgetting all about his niece, whose absence he did not trouble to explain.

‘For me? But this is a great honour indeed!’

‘For you, and your lovely niece. Monseigneur Philippe was suddenly afraid that you might meet with undesirable company along the road, especially when you are travelling through the parts that are infested with English and do not belong to Burgundy. Therefore he sent me to escort you and demoiselle Legoix as far as Dijon.’

Catherine heard no more, because behind her a voice of thunder roared out:

‘Legoix! Who is called Legoix here?’

Whirling round, she saw Arnaud sitting up in his bed, his face whiter than the sheets. His eyes flashed fire and he was beginning to push back the covers with a shaking hand, ready to leap out. When the black slave saw this, he ran and threw his powerful arms round him to hold him down. Imprisoned by those black arms, Arnaud struggled like a maniac.