Patricia Ryan - [Fairfax Family 01] (24 page)

It was like a fever of the brain, these feelings she had for him. She didn’t want these sensations of longing and adoration—and, yes, infatuation—yet, paradoxically, she craved them. Never had she felt so alive, so full of excitement and wonder, as if anything were possible.

But, of course, many things were impossible. For her to think of Sir Thorne in this way was not only unwise, but potentially disastrous. She had contracted to marry Edmond. Rainulf needed for her to marry him, and marry him she would. Allowing her infatuation with Sir Thorne to take root could only bring her pain.

Refocusing her mind through an effort of will, she carefully placed the little cutting in her shallow harvesting basket and looked around for other plants she might like to propagate.

St. Dunstan’s herb garden, maintained by Brother Paul, the infirmarian, boasted a good variety of medicinals: chamomile, yarrow, feverfew, valerian, foxglove... There was also angelica, known as the root of the Holy Ghost, and dill, and rue, all of which were said to guard against witchcraft. There was quite a lot of St. John’s wort, which Brother Paul recommended not only for lung ailments, but for exorcising evil spirits. Martine had yet to be convinced that it benefited the lungs. And as for the other, perhaps when she began to believe in evil spirits, she would be able to believe in a cure for them. Until then, she would concentrate on those herbs whose value had been proven.

Thus she returned her attention to the knitbone. A warm poultice made from its pulp and applied to a fracture caused the broken bones to heal like new. She had seen this work like magic on a young girl in Paris whose leg had been crushed beneath the wheels of a cart. It was also said that the root, boiled in a pot with pieces of severed flesh, would join them as one. Resolving to try the experiment for herself, she dug in the black earth with her fingers until the thick, white root revealed itself, and began cutting away at it. Of course, she still needed the severed flesh... Perhaps Cleva would see fit to donate a hen for the sake of scientific inquiry. After all, if the experiment didn’t work, it could always be used for chicken soup.

Martine scooped the black earth back over the knit-bone’s roots and patted it in place, then gathered up the pieces she had cut off and deposited them in her harvesting basket with the cutting.

Was he still watching her?
As casually as she could, she turned and looked back over her shoulder toward the meadow.

Thorne saw her look directly at him. Unable to do otherwise, he met her gaze for a long moment—too long—before wrenching his eyes from hers and abruptly turning away.

He looked down at Rainulf, who was crouching over one of the spaniels and scratching its belly. “When did you find out about her?” His friend looked up, puzzled. “I mean when did you... when did you find out you had a half-sister?”

“Ah.” The priest stood, and now it was he who turned and stared in the distance toward the herb garden. They both watched as Martine, standing now, pinched a leaf off a plant, crushed it between her fingers, and brought it to her nose. She smiled as she inhaled its fragrance.

“I was sixteen,” Rainulf began, “and home from Paris for the Christmas holidays. One afternoon I went for a long ride with my brother, Etienne. He was nineteen and, well, very sophisticated. Very worldly, compared to me. We went to a little village some distance from our home, on some errand. I can’t remember what it was now. Etienne pointed and said, ‘Look there.’ It was a blond girl coming out of church with a baby in her arms.”

Rainulf shrugged. “I asked him if he knew the girl. He said he’d never met her, but he’d heard whispers about her. She had a lover who was much older and lived far away. The babe in her arms was his bastard.”

“Adela,” Thorne murmured.

Rainulf nodded. “Only I didn’t know about Adela then, and neither did my brother. She must have been fifteen at the time, but she looked much younger, much too young to be anyone’s mistress, certainly too young to have a baby.” He sighed. “Etienne told me it was time I had a woman. Our father had bought one for him when he was but fourteen, and now he intended to do the same for me. He thought this girl was a likely prospect. The man who kept her was gone most of the time, she would be lonely... I did want a woman, it was something I thought about constantly, but a
woman
. Someone older and experienced, someone with flesh on her bones. Not a skinny little child.”

Thorne saw the glint of Martine’s little knife as she cut some spiky blue flowers off a plant. “So you refused.”

“Aye, but it made no difference to Etienne. He’d made up his mind. He cornered her and offered her a handful of coins if she’d take me home with her. ‘Twas horrible. Her baby was crying, and she looked terrified. Later I found out that she knew who we were. Can you imagine how she felt, being propositioned by the sons of the man who had fathered her child? She ran away, and I held my brother back so he couldn’t follow her.”

Martine sniffed the little bunch of flowers before adding them to the basket. He wondered what they smelled like. “I take it he was angry with you for spoiling his plans.”

“Aye. He even complained to our father, told him all about it.”

“Did your father tell him who the girl was?”

“Nay. But the next morning he ordered us to saddle up, and we followed him to a little wattle-and-daub cottage in the woods near that same village where we had seen her. He brought us inside, and there she was, standing in the corner with the baby on her shoulder. Etienne was delighted. He nudged me and whispered, ‘You see? He’s bought her for both of us!’ My father said, ‘It’s time I made introductions.’ He rested a hand on the girl’s shoulder and said, ‘This is Adela.’ My brother was impatient. He tossed his mantle onto a chair and began unbuckling his belt.”

“What did your father do?”

“He calmly took the baby from the girl’s arms and brought it over to us. He said, ‘And this is your sister. Her name is Martine.’”

Thorne said nothing as Rainulf gazed across the years with unfocused eyes.

“At first I didn’t understand, and neither did Etienne. For a moment, no one spoke, and then, when comprehension hit, Etienne just... he became furious. He was purple with rage. He screamed horrible things at my father, even accused him of giving our mother poison to make her sick. He called the girl a whore, and worse. He said the baby should have been left in the woods to die. He grabbed his belt and his mantle and jumped on his horse and left.”

“And you? Did you leave?”

“God, no. I was... mesmerized. I just kept staring at that baby in my father’s arms. My sister. I had a sister! She was so pink, so impossibly small. Etienne’s outburst had upset her, and now she was screaming. Father looked helplessly toward Adela. I had never seen him look helpless before. He held the baby out to her, but I came forward and took her instead. She was lighter than I thought she would be, and warm, and she smelled of milk. Without thinking about it, I began to rock her. I spoke to her very softly, saying, ‘There, now, settle down. Settle down.’ And she quieted. She fell asleep in my arms. It felt so... It’s hard to describe.”

“I know the feeling,” Thorne said, his throat tight. “I had a little sister, too.”

Martine pinched a delicate pink flower off a plant, reached behind her to drape her single braid over her shoulder, and threaded the flower’s stem through the ribbon that secured it. Thorne had never seen her adorn herself before, and for some reason it pleased him.

Rainulf nodded. After a pause, he said, “That was the last I saw of my sister for ten years. I had returned from the Crusade and was teaching at the university when a messenger came from Rouen. My mother was dying. I returned home, of course, and, well, you know the rest. My mother died, my father married the lady Blanche, and Adela—” he shook his head slowly, “Adela tied a sack of rocks around her neck and walked into the lake.”

Thorne followed his line of sight to the distant form of Lady Martine, stooped over a low hedge.

“And Martine,” Thorne supplied, “was left to starve to death.”

Rainulf shook his head, his face drawn. “When I found her, she was already half dead, just this wet, shivering little skeleton in a kirtle. Well, not little, precisely. For ten, she was actually rather large, with long, gangly arms and legs. I could tell she was going to be tall. I would have known her anywhere. She resembled my father to a remarkable degree. She wasn’t what you’d call beautiful, and I suppose she still isn’t, but there was something about her, something very compelling. A light behind her eyes, a spark. I suppose that sounds very fanciful.”

“Nay,” Thorne said softly. “I know exactly what you mean.”

What he didn’t say, though, was that Rainulf was quite wrong about her not being beautiful. He watched her as she waded toward them through the meadow, the basket dangling from one hand while the other lifted her skirts above the tall, waving grass. Tendrils of pale, silken hair, loosened from her braid, danced in the warm breeze that flowed through the valley. She smiled, and he desperately wanted to know why so that he could share her pleasure. Her cheeks were flushed from the sun and hard work, and her eyes glittered with a spark that was not only compelling, but irresistible.

She wasn’t just beautiful, she was exquisite. She was complicated and unpredictable and unique. She was both soft and sharp, warm and cool... she was endlessly fascinating.

And she was Edmond’s.

*   *   *

Thorne swam up through the blackness of sleep to the distant clanging of bells. He opened his eyes and lay still in the dark. It was midnight, and the sacristan was summoning the brothers to matins. He heard the whisper of a light rain in the courtyard outside.

From the little chamber next to his, he heard Rainulf stir, getting ready, as usual, to join the brothers for midnight prayer. Why he bothered with it, when he was merely a guest and not obligated to observe the holy offices, was beyond Thorne. He thought it particularly unwise the night before a long journey. Tomorrow they would return to Harford, and in Thorne’s opinion, Rainulf would do well to rest up for the journey instead of standing half the night in church chanting streams of Latin. Most likely he’d be up at first light for lauds, as well.

From beyond his chamber’s leather curtain he heard Rainulf greet Brother Matthew, and then the two departed, and all was quiet once more. He rolled over and closed his eyes, but, as was often the case in recent nights, he found it impossible to get back to sleep. It was a problem he had never encountered before, and it displeased him greatly. For his body to refuse to sleep when he commanded it made him feel weak.

He arose, lit a lantern, and pulled on some chausses. In the downstairs kitchen he poured a goblet of wine and brought it back up to the table in the main hall. A volume of Euclid’s
Elements
, which he had just finished, lay on the table, and he sat down and picked it up.

The prior’s lodge was a large house built around a central hall on the upper level. Four sleeping chambers opened onto the hall, one of which was Brother Matthew’s, the other three reserved for high-ranking guests. The servants spent their nights elsewhere, so at present, the house was empty save for Thorne—and, of course, the lady Martine, asleep in her own little cell. No sound came from there. The bells did not appear to have awakened her.

He opened the book and leafed through the yellowed parchment pages, each one densely inked in minuscule, carefully penned Latin, but his eyes did not see the words nor note their meaning. He saw only her eyes, lit from within with blue fire... heard her liquid, musical laughter... felt her hand, so cool and small in his. He could not will these images from his mind, could not command himself to think of other things.

He had never felt so helpless.

By Christ, he would miss her when they left this place. Never again would they be together as they had this past month. Every morning when he rose to the bells for prime, his mind was filled with her. As he dressed and washed his face, he thought,
Soon I will see her
. All through the day, he contrived to be with her, just for the simple physical pleasure it gave him to be in her company. When he was close to her, he reveled in her scent, which was like a wild, untended meadow, earth and grasses and sweet blossoms all warmed by the sun.

But when she wasn’t there, as now, he ached with wanting to be near her. How he ached. He had never ached like this, never felt so needful.

It was a cunningly cruel joke of God’s, and he had to admire it. For the first time in his nine and twenty years, he’d been shown how it felt to have his emptiness filled by a woman... only she was a woman he could never have. He would return to Harford all the more empty for this brief taste of the unattainable.

God must still be punishing him for having abandoned his family to their cruel fate. Hadn’t he already paid for his mistake? Hadn’t
they
? Hadn’t little Louise? With an oath, he snapped the book shut and slammed it on the table. In the numbing silence that followed, he thought he heard something—a whimper. A child?

He waited, listening. Nay. He was imagining things. It was thinking about Louise that—

There it was again.
A halting, fretful moan.

It had come from behind the leather curtain of Lady Martine’s chamber.

After a moment’s hesitation, he rose and carried his lantern to her doorway, listening. Presently the silence was broken by another muffled cry. Was she having a nightmare?