Echoes of Avalon (Tales of Avalon Book 1) (39 page)

Patrick pretended great interest in the food, then gently grabbed her elbow and pulled her in closer. “And this?” he said, pointing to another plate. She leaned even closer and Patrick placed his hand in the small of her back as she described the various dishes. Her duties must have brought her close to the kitchen hearth, for in her clothes were the smells of thyme, hot butter, and rising bread. A sheen of sweat stood out on her brow and her blouse clung to her waist and shoulders.

The sound of pottery breaking rose over the din. All turned to see the Lady Katherina with hands to her mouth in a gesture of surprise. A bowl of food lay broken at her feet, and Sir Geoffrey was making a fuss: “Are you all right? That bowl shouldn't have been that close to the edge...servant girl, come here...”

Aimeé was gone, rushing over with a towel for the mess.

Patrick rolled his eyes.

The evening wore on, and before long Mark stood to make an announcement. “For our entertainment, we will have a display of dancing. Please welcome William of Monmouth, Trent of Jersey and company.”

The keep musicians carried out their instruments, followed by William, Trent and some other Guests who were dressed in bright costumes. There was applause, and the performers bowed. The musicians began to play, and the Guests moved airily about the room. Patrick had no idea that William was also a dancer. He wondered what his merchant father would think of all this.

After a while, once the rehearsed portion of the performance was finished, the dancers went into the audience and extracted more people. Before long most everyone in the hall had been conscripted into the dance. Patrick now understood why Wolfgang had gone to great lengths to train the Avangarde to dance; he didn't want his elite troops looking like oafs at a social occasion.

Katherina was indifferent to the dance. She sat with one leg crossed over the other, bobbing her foot out of time with the music. She grabbed a grape and chewed on it irritably.

Geoffrey leaned over to her and motioned to the floor where increasing numbers of people were joining the dance. Patrick drifted nearer.

Katherina looked at the knight languidly. “Geoffrey, you have something between your teeth.” She sat up and moved towards the exit while Geoffrey tried inconspicuously to see his reflection in a silver plate. She looked over her shoulder at Patrick before slipping out. He slipped out of the hall also.

He could see Katherina in the dark corridor, and when she saw him too, she picked up her dress and dashed for the stairwell. Patrick raced after her up the steps.

He ascended the dark stairway and found her up against the wall on the dim balcony above the dining hall. He went to her and tried to grab hold of her, but she pushed him away. She dashed across the balcony window that momentarily illuminated her bright green dress, but then pressed herself against the next wall.

The residents of Greensprings were laughing. They twirled and swooped in a colorful mass that rose and fell like the swells of an ocean. To them, the dance occupied their senses and they may as well have been the ocean, for they flowed and pulsated as a single entity. They exchanged partners and danced with each other as water is one in a fluid body: having mass, but no true form. It was a colorful and vibrant sight.

Patrick again went to Katherina, and again she pushed on him, but this time he did not let her go. He held fast to her arms, then slipped his hands up to her wrists and pinned them against the wall above her head. He leaned his face into hers. He could feel her breath on his face, then she turned her cheek to him.

Patrick released her wrists and took a step back. She immediately reached forward and clasped her pale hands around his neck and drew him closer. He took her waist in his big hands just above the curvature of her hips, and lifted her. She wrapped her legs about his waist, and he pressed her against the wall. Their lips met fiercely.

Patrick felt as if his heart would burst. He had envisioned this moment a hundred times, but never thought that this warm moistness he now experienced would be so stirring. He felt as if he could lose himself in the sensation as he moved his hands from her waist to her legs and pressed harder into the wall. He was inadvertently bunching up her dress and he could feel the bare flesh of her legs. He thought he was going to explode.

Suddenly, Katherina grabbed either side of Patrick's face and pushed back to dislodge their embrace. She took in a breath and her mouth was wet.

“Only friend, right?” she gasped.

Patrick kissed her fiercely several more times. “Yes, only friends,” he replied between them.

She grabbed his face and pulled it harder against hers.

#

There was a marked change in Sir Gawain's behavior. He had a certain bounce to his step that had not been there before; he more often acknowledged others while passing them in the keep corridors; he was more apt to smile and make conversation; and there was a definite sense of confidence in his attitude. Not only his behavior had changed, but he was now more prone to comb his hair, which was trimmed. His clothes were pressed, his boots dusted. He seemed to enjoy the attention these changes attracted, but he did not explain the sudden difference. When others offered their theories (which were often too close to the truth), he did not go out of his way to confirm them.

It was no secret, however, that he was spending much time with the Lady Katherina, just as it was no secret that King Mark was being flowered with the affections of the Lady Christianne Morneau. Yet no one mentioned it publicly. It was not truly forbidden by the establishment for staff and Guests to consort, but it seemed to be discouraged for obvious reasons. Sir Geoffrey did not win any support for Greensprings by wronging his former fiancée, the Lady Amy du Lac. Yet, oddly enough, no one talked about that, either.

Patrick was still learning the nuances of Greensprings etiquette. He didn't know where it was all going, or how long it would last, but he knew that he would be prepared when the time did come. In the meantime, he was going to enjoy it.

#

He took long walks with Katherina in the orchards, sat and talked in the gardens, dined with her, and went for afternoon picnics
―
as was the case today. He sat across from her and studied her closely. She chewed unceremoniously on a honey-spread biscuit, and honey smeared one corner of her mouth. Patrick frowned in puzzlement.
How could such a noble lady have such unladylike eating habits?

She wasn't always this way. Obviously, she could be very feminine when she wanted to be, and often used it to her advantage. But sometimes, when she was at ease, she seemed to let down a certain guard and her boyishness shone through. Patrick assumed it was this lack of refinement, this irreverent boldness that he found charming.

“Patrick, what are you staring at?” she asked. “Patrick? Patrick?” She leaned over and shook his shoulder.

He snapped back to attention. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“Where do you go when you do that?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“It seems at times that you are, at best, half-there,” she replied. “It looks as if you are in other world. So, where you go?”

Patrick shrugged. “I'm just thinking, I guess.” He picked up a cloth napkin from the picnic basket and wiped the spot of honey from her lip.

She pulled away like a child being cleaned at the dinner table. “What do you think about?”

Patrick shrugged again. “Stuff.”

“Like?”

“Stuff. Things that happened. Things that could happen. Things that could have happened differently if I had done differently. You know, stuff.”

Katherina leaned forward and cradled his face in her hands, her eyes looking into his. Patrick, in his reverie, saw his mother cradling his face in a similar fashion. She was standing before him next to his horse that was saddled and loaded. She seemed so tiny and frail in his arms. Who would have guessed that the woman was so strong?
She won’t take you back, Patrick, even if you return wealthy and famous
, she said, speaking of Kellie. He had sighed then, as if the last bit of his soul had rattled out of his ribcage.

“Sir Gawain? Patrick? You're doing it again.” Katherina looked concerned. She was stroking his raven-dark hair.

Patrick shook as he snapped out of his daze. He grabbed at Katherina's wrists to keep her from fussing with his hair and held them gently. “I'm sorry,” he said. He started to realize that he was saying, “sorry” often. “I don't mean to be a bad companion.”

“You are not. I just don't understand. Every now and again you have this faraway look in your eyes, and the play of emotions across your face is more...more...” Katherina struggled with the vocabulary, “...vivid. Why?”

Patrick put her wrists down and attempted to stand, but she maneuvered herself onto his knees and pinned them down so that he couldn't. She locked her wrists across the back of his neck. She was delicately built, but she had the ability to manifest her strong will into her limbs and grip.

“You are not going to pace like animal again. I won't let you run away this time. I hate it when you do that.”

Patrick sighed. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because I care. Is that so bad?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“What happened in Eire that was so bad that caused you to leave?”

Patrick swallowed hard. He gathered the little
Uhkraani
princess in his arms and placed his head against her breast. She unraveled her legs and surrounded Patrick's torso with them while stroking the back of his head. He was a long time in saying anything.

“It was a girl, it was failure, it was hopelessness. It was many things.”

“Tell,” Katherina encouraged.

“I come from a modest house. My father was a knight, and lord of a small estate handed down generation to generation. I have three brothers, all older, all to receive the inheritance before me. I had only the name Gawain as my legacy. I could have stayed at home, working for my eldest brother on the estate, but not as much more than a servant. You see, I had no future in that way. I opted to do what my uncle had done when faced with the same situation when my father took over after my grandfather passed away. I trained underneath him, as did my other brothers, to become knighted. I had dreams of finding my own lands and wealth, as my uncle had done.

“If I had stayed with my family, I'm sure that I would have been treated well, but the idea of never having anything my own irked me. Despite that feeling, I almost fell into that trap. I met a girl. Well, rather, I fell in love with a girl whom I had always known in the village. She was Kellie O'connor. She had eyes bluer than a summer sky, hair darker than midnight, and the face of a Madonna.”

Patrick had withdrawn his face from Katherina's warm bosom to look her in the eyes as he told his tale. He paused momentarily to swallow again. His eyes burned, but no tears spilled.

“I spent two wonderful years with her. She was my first love, my only love. I treated her like a princess, and she almost was in comparison to myself and my family. I thought I did all the right things, said all the right things. She said she loved me, even up to the end.”

“What happened?”

“She found God. She started to spend more time in church than out of it. She took to praying constantly. Even though we were betrothed to be married, she changed her mind. She said that she wanted to join the convent. She said that was where her destiny lay, in marriage to Christ, not to me.

“It was hard at first, but she spoke with such passion about it that I began to see that she indeed wanted this. And it did seem to me that something was missing in her life that I just couldn't fulfill. I thought perhaps that was what she needed. I wanted her to be happy. I didn't want my selfish needs to stand in the way of hers. So I gave her my blessing, and she went to the convent to ready to become a bride of Christ.” His grip on Katherina tightened and his voice was rough in his throat. “But then I learned that she changed her mind again. She met another man, and decided to marry him, and she did.

“I went to her and talked. Asked her why, how this could happen. She told me that we just weren't met to be. She said that she was sorry, that she still loved me, but not as before. She had the audacity to lecture me on the fickle nature of fate as if this all was no consequence whatsoever.”

He fell silent for a while. Katherina watched as the wheels of thought turned in his mind, animating the experience again and again.

“So you left then, for Crusade. To find fortune for yourself, and to be away from Kellie,” she said.

Patrick silently nodded, his eyes still burning. “Yes. I couldn't stand to see her every other day in the village, walking hand in hand with another man, knowing that I couldn't have offered her anything to have prevented it. As I said, I did all that I humanly could have. I knew that it was a matter of time before I saw her with child...his child. I knew that soon that Sean, my eldest brother, would be taking over and ordering me around. I had to leave.

“So, it was an easy decision. Pope Urban had addressed all the Christians to go on the Crusade the previous winter. I left immediately for Flanders, where I heard many of the Frankish princes were gathering to do just that. Adventurers, merchants, common men, nobility, everyone, was going. So I decided to do so, as well. It was hard on my mother in particular. But she knew as well as I that there was no better alternative.

“My reasons weren't entirely material. I thought that perhaps I could become closer to God by taking up this Crusade. I thought I could become a better person. I thought I could find it in myself to truly forgive Kellie like I should, like a good Christian. As it was, hatred and sorrow were consuming me. I needed the journey, so I went to Flanders across the sea from my Green Isle.”

“Did you? Become better Christian? Do you forgive Kellie now?” Katherina persisted.

He was silent for a moment. His mind still turning. “Yes, and no,” he said at last. “I am a better person, even a better Christian, but for completely different reasons than I had expected. As for Kellie O’Connor, I forgive her. I always did. I cannot be so arrogant as to expect life to bend to my will and do as I please. She took the path she had to. But, that knowledge does not lesson the pain any. It still hurts to this day, and always will. I will always love her... and hate her in equal measure. I would like to think that I will always remember the better times rather than the bad. But sometimes I wonder.”