Elizabeth Chadwick (35 page)

Audulf nodded, reassured if not entirely convinced. Maude took Fulke’s arm. “I have had a hot tub prepared for you in the kitchens and I have told the maids to make you a pallet beside Alain so that you can be within reach. Come,” she said. “I can see you are almost sleepwalking.”

He did not consciously yield, but let her lead him out of the room and under a covered wooden walkway to the kitchens. A cauldron simmered over a banked fire and there was a steaming bathtub to one side. Through exhaustion as heavy as a pile of blankets, he was aware of Maude helping to undress him, of stepping into a tub so hot that it almost scalded his flesh, and then, as he grew accustomed to the heat, of the lapping, exquisite comfort. The aching band across his forehead eased slightly. She gave him an infusion of willow bark to cushion the pain of his bruises and anointed them with a soothing balm. The tension had been a scaffold, keeping him on his feet. Now, beneath Maude’s ministrations, it was demolished and weariness tumbled down on him.

When he left the tub, she rubbed him down with a large towel and helped him dress in a clean tunic and chausses. Everything became a blur. He had no recollection of returning to his chamber, nor of lying down on the pallet she had made up for him. The darkness took him like a mother and enfolded him in dark, comforting arms.

He woke deep in the night to the sound of a child’s crying and a woman softly hushing it. Disoriented, he blinked, not knowing where he was. Memory slotted reluctantly into place from what seemed a far distance. He heard the murmur of voices and sat up. His bruises made him stiff and he turned his head awkwardly in search of the sounds. His brothers were all asleep on pallets arranged around the room. Maude was seated at the side of the great bed, a gurgling Hawise in her arms, and Alain was propped up against the bolsters, his eyes open and lucid. As Fulke stared, Alain managed a weak smile.

Palace of Aber, Wales, August 1203

Another daughter,” Fulke replied to Llewelyn’s inquiry. “Born on Midsummer’s Eve and christened Jonetta for Maude’s mother.” He was at the Welsh court to perform his obligatory feudal service to the Welsh Prince.

“Midsummer’s Eve?” Llewelyn gave him a sidelong look.

Fulke twitched his shoulders. “Yes, I know, the feast of St. John and damnable timing,” he said wryly.

“But Maude and the babe are safe and well, or you would not be here.”

Fulke grimaced and took a drink from the cup of mead that Llewelyn had offered him. Eight months ago, Llewellyn’s common-law wife Tangwystl had died in childbirth, long enough to dull the edge of Llewelyn’s guilt and pain, but the subject remained touchy “Yes, sire, both are well.”

Maude had begun her labor at dawn and they had been kindling the evening bonfires when she was delivered. His apprehension had been turning to fear when the midwives placed the damp, howling bundle in his arms. “I did not care whose feast it was, nor that the child was another girl,” he said quietly, “only that they should live. I am sorry for your bereavement. If it had been me, I would have gone mad.”

Llewelyn drank his own mead and glanced around the sun-washed walls of the great hall. “I did and I pray you never have to know such grief.” A harshness entered his voice. “When she died, I rode a good hunting horse into the ground for no more reason than my own rage.”

“I am sorry, sire,” Fulke murmured, ill at ease. He did not think that the words existed that would comfort Llewelyn.

“Don’t be.” Llewelyn’s mouth curved in a bleak smile. “If Tangwystl was my heart, then Wales is my soul. I may have lost the one, but I still have the other and I intend to keep it.”

He paced to the hall doorway and looked out on an arch of August-blue sky. Fulke followed him but held a slight distance, giving him space if not privacy.

Llewelyn looked over his shoulder. “I have had several marriage offers,” he said. “Men desiring to console my grief and consolidate their position by offering me their sisters and daughters.” He clenched his fist on the iron-studded door.

Fulke made a sound of polite inquiry.

“From Scotland, from the Manx King, from other Welsh princes and marcher lords, including Ranulf of Chester.” Llewelyn’s mouth twisted bitterly. “Do you not wish to join them, Fulke? Offer me one of yours?”

Fulke did not know whether to feel pity, anger, or take the remark as a form of backhanded flattery. “I know that men frequently find husbands for their daughters while the infants are still in the cradle, but I am not one of them, my lord,” he said in a tone that, although neutral, conveyed reproach.

Llewelyn cleared his throat. “Pay me no heed. I spoke out of my own ill temper, and I owe you better than that. Your daughters deserve better too.”

Llewelyn left him, making it clear that he desired solitude. Fulke went to finish his mead and watch the clouds chase each other across the sun as it burned down toward the straits of Mon. His daughters. He tried to imagine them as grown young women, ripe for marriage, but the thought sent such a pang through him that he dismissed it with a shake of his head.

Behind him, he was aware of the bulk of the mountains, Eryri, the natural castles that kept the Normans out of Wales. Wild, beautiful, forbidding. Him on one side, Maude on the other. Watching Ivo tease and cajole a Welsh girl in the shadow of the stable wall, he felt a frisson of Llewelyn’s loneliness and it was too much.

***

It was a wild November day and Maude had opted to remain in the warm, well-appointed bedchamber above the hall with her embroidery. She was embellishing Fulke’s feast-day tunic of blue wool with a border design of running wolves. It was painstaking work, but the finished result would be worth it, as she could tell from the length already completed.

Needle suspended, she paused to rest her eyes and studied her daughters, who were playing on a large square of stitched sheepskins near the bed under Barbette’s close supervision.

Hawise, at almost two, was a robust child with Fulke’s eyes and a profusion of auburn curls. She was sturdy rather than graceful, but quick of movement and temper. Five-month-old Jonetta was a pea from an entirely different pod: placid, swift to smile, indolent, and easily placated. What hair she possessed was FitzWarin black. She had beautiful feathery eyebrows and eyes that were turning from the kitten blue of birth to a lucent agate-hazel.

Maude’s gaze softened. Her love for them was so strong that sometimes it almost brought tears to her eyes. She would remember her childhood and her own mother’s weary indifference, and she promised herself that never would her daughters suffer for want of affection.

The curtain rattled on its pole and Fulke entered the chamber, his hair windblown and his stride energetic, as if imbued with the motion of the blustery weather. In a twinkling of legs, Hawise was off the rug and at his side, clinging to his chausses and clamoring to be lifted. Jonetta rolled over and squealed at him, showing her two new teeth.

Maude laughed. “I am reminded of your jousting days, when women would throw themselves at you without shame,” she said as he lifted Hawise into the crook of his right arm and bent to scoop the baby into his left.

He grinned. “You kept a tally then?”

Maude pretended to put her nose in the air.

Hawise had been fiddling with the ties on Fulke’s cloak. Now her small fingers found a package tucked inside the wool.

“What’s that?” Maude asked, seeing the edge of it as their daughter tried unsuccessfully to wrest it free.

Fulke shifted his grip on the baby and reached awkwardly into his cloak. “A letter from your father,” he said. “The messenger’s wetting his throat in the hall.”

“My father?” Leaving her embroidery frame, Maude came to him and took the package. Her father’s seal, impressed in red wax, secured its privacy. She turned it over in her hands as gingerly as if it contained a snake. He seldom wrote, although he had sent a christening gift of a silver cup at Jonetta’s birth and an exhortation to Maude to do her duty and bear a son next time. “Did the messenger say what it’s about?”

Fulke shook his head. “You know your father. It’s more than any servant’s life is worth to ask his business.” He swung the girls in his arms until they shrieked, then sat down with them on the rug and drew them into his lap. “You won’t know unless you open it,” he said with a shrewd glance.

Gnawing her lip, Maude broke the seal. Her father’s writing was an untidy, barely legible scrawl. That he could read and write owed more to his determination not to rely on a scribe rather than to any desire to be educated. He had only seen fit to give her the power of literacy to increase her worth in the marriage market.

“Well?” Fulke said. “What does he want?”

“It’s a wedding invitation,” she said in a stunned voice. “He’s getting married.”

Fulke stared at her. She held out the letter to him. “To Juliana de Rie.”

“Do you know her?” His eyes narrowed in concentration as he tried to decipher the lines.

Maude shook her head. “Only what he says, that she’s Thomas de Rie’s widow.”

Fulke snorted. “Likely she’s rich and of child-bearing age.” He read further down the page, pulling it close, holding it away. “The wedding’s at Christmastide,” he deciphered at last and, passing the letter back, rubbed his jaw. “Do you want to go?”

Maude thought of the reasons to stay at home: the discomfort of traveling the roads in winter, the danger from John and his minions, the tepid relationship between herself and her father. Weighed against them were the burdens of guilt and family obligation—and curiosity concerning her new stepmother. She hesitated. The answer to Fulke’s question was both yes and no.

“It would be politic to do so,” she said at last. “Even if I have quarreled with him in the past, he is still my father and he has never seen his granddaughters.”

Fulke nodded. “Politic—you have it in a nutshell. There are bound to be some powerful barons present, and it never does any harm to mingle with them. It’s a foolish man who burns all his old bridges without building new ones—as Hubert Walter is always lecturing me.”

“A foolish woman too.” Her smile was pensive. “I wonder if I will like my stepmother.”

***

Juliana de Rie was nothing as Maude had imagined. She was perhaps about thirty years old, and of a diminutive stature with straight brown hair, heavy-lidded blue eyes, and ordinary features. Her voice was quiet, her manner unassuming but certainly not brow-beaten. Nor was she particularly in awe of her bluff, overbearing husband.

“Your father likes to think his bite is as frightening as his bark, but it is not true.” She smiled at Maude as the women sorted through the wedding gifts on the day following the marriage. The men were out hunting the forests of Wharfedale, hoping to bring fresh venison to the table.

Maude looked at a collection of silver-gilt goblets that had been a gift from Earl Ranulf of Chester. “Even so, it is not pleasant to be on the receiving end,” she replied and thought of her father’s greeting on their arrival.

He had kissed her on either cheek, embraced Fulke, and scrutinized his granddaughters with a critical eye, remarking that red-haired girls were less favorably regarded in the marriage market because the color was indicative of a hot and unruly nature. Then he had berated her for producing female children instead of the necessary male heir. Fulke had replied in a tone of deadly calm that Hawise’s red curls made her all the more precious since they were a reminder of her grandmother and that, sons or daughters, he valued his children on their merits, not their sex. Her father had given a disparaging grunt but mercifully said nothing more.

Juliana clucked her tongue. “He does it because he thinks that to praise or show pleasure is weak. He is a very proud man, your father.” She folded her arms and considered Maude. “I think perhaps he is a little afraid of you also.”

“Of me!” Maude gazed at her stepmother in astonishment. “Whatever gives you that impression?”

“The way he speaks to you, the way he circles you from a distance without approaching too close. And the way he looks at you when you are unaware. I think he can hardly believe he has begotten you.”

Maude gave a mirthless laugh. “Indeed, that is true!”

“Do not be so awkward,” Juliana said impatiently. “He is daunted by your beauty.”

Maude stared at her.

“Oh, come now. You must have seen your reflection in a gazing glass, the envious looks cast by other women. The way men follow you with their eyes.”

“I pay such things small heed,” Maude said stiffly. “Besides, I have neither the time nor the inclination to stare in a gazing glass or notice men other than my husband.”

Juliana ignored the rebuke. Instead, her lips twitched in amusement. “With a husband like yours, small wonder,” she said, then brought herself back to the subject in hand. “By all accounts your mother was a beauty too, and some men are afraid of such women. They feel they do not have the strength to hold on to them, except by ‘keeping them in their place.’” Juliana smoothed her hand over a bolt of wine-red silk that had been a wedding gift from Fulke and Maude. “One of the reasons for his interest in marrying me, apart from the suitability of my dower, is that I am no beauty. He can look at me across a room and not feel intimidated.”

“I intimidate my father?” Maude’s voice rose. When she saw some of the other women guests glancing her way, she ducked her head and lowered her tone. “How can you say that when all my life he has tried to crush my spirit?”

“You are not listening,” Juliana said impatiently. She gestured at Maude. “Look at you. Strong, willful, the kind of looks to dazzle men’s eyes. Your husband is a rebel, an outlaw, and one of the most talked-about and secretly admired men in the country. Of course your father is intimidated. And because it is unmanly to show weakness, he blusters and belittles you.”

“So it is my fault,” Maude said, her face setting like stone.

“No, of course not, it is his, the fool.” Juliana gave an exasperated shake of her head as if dealing with a dull-witted child. “Perhaps he will never come to terms with it. He is not the kind of man to look inside himself and make changes. But if you know his reasons, then perhaps you will find it in your heart to be more forgiving.”

Maude swallowed. “As you say, my mother was beautiful,” she said bitterly. “He used to beat her and belittle her in front of everyone. I was ignored because I was a girl child and not the longed-for son. I cannot do as you suggest. It is too late, and I have learned not to shoulder the blame for the weaknesses of others.”

Juliana eyed her somberly and Maude felt that she had to say something more. She was never going to be fond of Juliana, but that did not mean they had to be on bad terms. “I wish you both well of this marriage,” she said. “Although perhaps you will understand if I am not a frequent visitor.”

“Yes, I understand, although I am sorry.” Juliana sighed and folded her hands in the hanging sleeves of her wedding gown. “A rich man’s widow is never a widow for long—as you have cause to know yourself. The match may seem strange to you, but I believe I can live in amity with your father, and he is comfortable with me, whatever has happened in the past.” She gave a little shrug. “Some marriages are disasters from the beginning; some burn like fire; and others are as comfortable as an old pair of shoes.” She gave a small, introverted smile. “I count myself most fortunate to have the last.”

From the corner of her eye, Maude saw Hawise reaching to the tail of Lady de Vesci’s snappy little lap dog. By the time Maude had dived to the rescue of both and laughed about the near incident with the other women guests, the moment of intimacy had passed, and Chester’s wife, the Countess Clemence, was engaged in conversation with Juliana. Maude tried to imagine marriage to her father being as comfortable as an old pair of shoes and gave up. However, it was easy to equate herself and Fulke with the image of fire.

***

The forest of Wharfedale reminded Fulke of Wales with its wild, deep greenery, the fern-clad chasms and gullies of rushing white water and outcrops of lichened rock. Wolves still roamed in its heart and the wild boar was not as rare as it had become in the south. It was King John’s forest, but Robert le Vavasour had the right to hunt and take game within its bounds, a privilege recently granted by John on his return from Normandy.