The Longing (3 page)

“Then we would not know what I know.” Haltingly at first, then in a rush as emotions gave way to anger, he told all and glimpsed upon her face what he thought was fear. In the end, she assured him there was hope in Lady Blanche’s response to her mother’s wicked suggestion and reminded him that he mostly had control over his breathing attacks. Thus, she concluded that their only real worry was whether or not Queen Eleanor would grant Lady Richenda an audience.

Judas concurred, though he did not truly. Despite his aunt’s continual intervention and because of it—his punishments often falling upon her—his father had taught him well what to fear. And Lady Richenda was to be feared. Still, wishing to give Susanna comfort as ever she gave him, he let her believe she had eased his concerns.

“Sanna?” he said when they rose to start back.

She sighed and met his gaze. “The answer to what you would ask of me is no different from the other times I have answered, Judas—I do not know.”

“Lady Richenda believes you do, just as my…father did.”

“And, as is often the case, the lady is wrong.”

He drew himself up to his full height, for he had never before ventured as far as he was about to. “Then what do you
think
?”

She caught her breath and, as was her habit when pressed to account for the past, gripped through the material of her bodice the pendant upon its slender chain. “What I think,” she finally said as she lowered her hand to her side, “is that I have no right to guess at something so far beyond my reach.”

He did not want to accept her answer, but he could see he would gain no other. Not this day. But perhaps another day once he raised himself above the weak-kneed Judas de Balliol who had been so affected by what had passed between Lady Richenda and her daughter.

Resignedly, he nodded.

As they walked back to the manor house over which dusk had fallen, they agreed they would continue on as always. They would stay the course. They would keep watch.

CHAPTER THREE

Cheverel, England

May, 1160

She wished he would not look at her with such imaginings in his eyes. Though she told herself she ought to be at least somewhat accustomed to the regard of men who deemed her passing pretty, it was hard to forget she was no longer the plump, splotchy-faced girl who had gone in search of her friend, Judith, that day.

“Aye, I shall keep watch over him,” Sir Elias said and bent his head nearer. “But it shall cost you a kiss.”

And he would get it, though that was all. “If that is the price I must pay.”

He chuckled, winked, and stepped away from her.

She watched him wend among the fenced areas where a handful of men-at-arms and squires practiced at arms. When he reached the farthest area where Judas swung a sword against another of the few knights she trusted—an older man who had been her father’s man before her brother’s—she turned opposite.

With the crash and clang of blade upon blade sounding behind, her brisk steps making her skirts snap at her ankles, she followed the servant whom the cook had sent to fetch her. Another problem with the menu? A delivery of foodstuffs that had not arrived? Had Lady Richenda once more put the back of a hand to a kitchen boy? 

Vexed that it continued to fall to her to manage the household while Lady Blanche slid from her fifth week post-birth into her sixth, she entered the kitchen some minutes later. It was empty.

She turned to the servant who had fetched her. Discovering the girl had disappeared, she stepped back out onto the garden path by which she had gained the kitchen and called, “Hilde!” and twice more as she strode among the vegetables that would soon find their way into the kitchen.

“Milady?” The cook’s head popped up from behind a low-lying bush. “There be somethin’ ye need?”

Susanna halted. “I understood ’twas
you
who needed
me
.”

The woman sat back on her heels. “Nay, milady. All be well with my pots and spoons, roastin’s and stirrin’s.”

Had she misunderstood the servant? No, the girl had definitely said she was sent by Hilde.

Susanna heard it then—the absence of steel upon steel and grunts and shouts that had receded as she advanced on the manor house. Though diluted, those sounds should yet be present.

She snatched up her skirts and ran for the training field that lay downhill from the manor house.

Please, Lord!
she sent heavenward as she flew past the soldiers’ barracks, the smithy, the stables.
Protect Judas!

It was worse than the worst sight imaginable, for never had she seen him in such distress where he lay in the dirt on his back with knights, men-at-arms, and squires  gathered around as if the throes of death were a wonder to behold.

Scrabbling at his chest and throat, choking and wheezing sounds issuing from his gaping mouth, legs alternately kicking and stiffening, Judas de Balliol struggled to keep hold of life.

She shouted his name, and the brightly-clothed figure she pushed past caught her arm.

She stumbled, landed hard on a knee and, as she wrenched her arm to free herself, snapped her chin around and found the impassive face of Lady Richenda above her.

Susanna knew herself to no longer be the fourteen-year-old girl who gasped at any cruel word spoken in her direction, who hunched her shoulders up to her ears at the first sign of physical aggression, but until that moment she had not realized just how far she had risen—though some would say she had fallen.

She came up snarling and swinging and, an instant later, gave expression to the one who so lacked it. Taking no moment to savor the horror, pain, and crimson mist distorting the woman’s face, she sprang away and dropped to her knees alongside Judas.

“Breathe!” she commanded as she dragged him up into her arms. “In, Judas, in!”

His dark head lolled against her chest, and she nearly cried out, but then his lids fluttered and there came the thready sound of air being dragged in through his nostrils.

“That’s it. Hold it—just a moment.”

As he did so, she lifted his lax hand from the dirt, placed it in his lap, and began to trace the sign of the cross upon it. “Now breathe out…out…slowly…”

He parted his lips and exhaled. His next breath was stronger, as was the one that followed. And those who had stood around watching and doing nothing to save him, began to murmur.

She dropped her chin, letting her hair fall forward to curtain their faces.
Thank you, Lord. Thank you.

Judas’s fingers closed firmly over hers, preventing her from tracing crosses in his palm.

She raised her lids and saw he had tilted his face up to hers, the eyes with which he regarded her steady and reflecting none of the sickly fatigue usually present.

“Judas?” she breathed.

He smiled grimly, whispered, “Now we know, Aunt Sanna.”

“What?” No sooner did she ask than everything fit painfully, perfectly together. Lady Richenda was responsible for this—had sought to bring about what Susanna had tried to convince Judas that the woman would not do. Indeed, the lady had even tried to hold Susanna back. And Judas had used whatever opportunity had been given him to test his brother’s grandmother by meeting cunning with cunning, his ten-year-old heart corrupted by the need to survive.

Something inside Susanna broke, something she knew needle and thread would not put back together. The pieces were too hard, too sharp, too jagged. Thus, the sob that stole from her throat was followed by another, part relief that it had not truly been a near mortal attack he suffered, part grief over his stolen childhood, and—selfishly—part despair that this was her life. For years, her hell had worn the face of her brother. Though his hand had rarely landed a blow to her person, the constant beatings dealt by his hateful words had wounded deeply. But at least it had not been deadly—not like this new hell that wore the face of murder that could take from her the only being in the world who mattered.

She heard Judas’s voice and felt his arms come around her, but she could not stop crying no matter the spectacle she made of herself. Not until she heard another voice, one so hated it could not be ignored, did she drag herself out of her insides and back into the dirt of the training field.

“Poor child,” Lady Richenda said. “Certes, he must needs rest if he is to regain his strength. Help him.”

Susanna snapped up her chin. To the right stood the one who had been thwarted, though perhaps she would succeed another day.

When Susanna saw what her fists and nails had wreaked upon the older woman, it was hard not to laugh. Lady Richenda’s veil was askew, upper lip smeared with blood that had not been completely wiped away, and four livid scores ran down her left cheek onto her neck.

“And assist Lady Susanna,” she continued. “She is not herself, distraught as she is over her nephew’s illness.”

The two men-at-arms who stepped forward did so without conviction, as if uncertain of Susanna for her having attacked the other woman. Fortunately, their dragging feet provided the time needed for her to stand on her own and pull Judas up beside her.

“Aunt Sanna?” he said, his shortening of her name in the presence of others revealing how shaken he was. But, then, never had he seen her so reduced by emotion.

She swallowed hard against hiccoughs that, in her youth, had followed a torrent of tears. “I am fine,” she said and put an arm around his shoulders. As he leaned heavily against her, his foresight in doing so but another ache to her heart, she set her gaze upon the men-at-arms. “We do not require your aid,” she said and drew Judas with her to where Lady Richenda quite impossibly tried to look down her nose at them, squat thing that she was.

“If you ever again…” Susanna drew a deep breath. “…lay a hand upon Judas or me, I vow you will know exactly how
distraught
I can be made to feel.”

The lady’s eyes widened, showing yet more of the hatred she bore them.

“Test me if you dare,
my lady
.”
Susanna turned Judas opposite and, picking her gaze over those who had but watched, walked slowly past them.

Only when they were far enough ahead to not be heard by those who followed did Susanna ask Judas, “Where did Sir—?”

“My lady!” someone called.

She pressed her lips closed and continued toward the manor house.

“The boy is well?” asked the one who drew alongside.

She swung her gaze to the knight, identified him as one of the majority who had followed her brother’s lead in disparaging Judas over the years. Now he answered to Lady Blanche and her mother, though he and the others would answer to Judas once he was acknowledged as heir.
If
he was acknowledged.

“The
Lord
of Cheverel is well,” she clipped, “though we have not you to thank, have we?”

The man’s grimace seemed genuine, but she took only slight comfort in it, knowing that though he was not as hard-hearted as some, he would bend to whoever wielded power. And that was not yet Judas.

“I am sorry, my lady. We knew not what to do to help the lad.”

And had not even thought to try. However, the older knight with whom Judas had been at practice and the one to whom she was to have owed a kiss had known what to do. And they had not been among those gathered around Judas.

“I left my nephew in the care of Sir Elias and Sir George. Where did they go?”

The man shrugged. “They were summoned by Sir Talbot.”

The head of the household knights and securely under the thumb of Lady Richenda. It had all been planned.

Determining Judas could just as well answer her next question, Susanna said, “We are most grateful for your concern, Sir Knight. Good day.”

He opened his mouth as if to say more, closed it, and turned aside.

After confirming that Lady Richenda, who followed with a knight on either side of her, remained distant, and once they were past the smithy and the curious regard of those nearby, Susanna said, “How came you to lose your breath, Judas?”

He looked up, and a bit of a smile curled his lips. “You know I did not truly lose it, aye?”

She sighed. “Nearly too late for my heart to bear.”

“I thought it best you also believed,” he said, then answered, “When Sir Elias and Sir George were called away after you left, I knew something was afoot, but just as I decided to return to my chamber as you would have me do, Sir Morris said he would finish instructing me at swords.”

Susanna caught her breath, for though the knight was small of stature, he was quick and wily, so much that his skill at arms was as feared as that of the head of the household knights. Remembering his hard, bruising kiss—one not owed but stolen—and grasping hands, she swallowed bile.

“I was fair certain of what he had been set to do,” Judas said, no longer leaning as heavily upon her as they neared the manor house, “and full certain when I saw Lady Richenda at the fence. Thus, I let him push me hard until I felt the air grow thick.” He gave a dry laugh. “Then I gave the hag what she wanted.”

Susanna gripped his hand tighter. “Judas, I am sorry.”

He looked up at her out of eyes that nearly belonged in the face of a wizened old man. “It changes everything.”

She inclined her head. “I fear it does, meaning you had best stumble and give me your weight again.”

He did not hesitate, for he also knew they would not be watched as closely if he appeared too weak to rise from bed over the next several days.

“I did not expect it to be so easy to claim my reward,” Sir Elias murmured as he stared up at Susanna where she knelt beside his pallet. “My lady ought to exercise more caution lest she be thought overly enamored of my person.” Smiling sleepily in the light cast by the half moon outside the window, he brushed his fingers across her lips. “In the middling of night…beside my bed…alone…”

As much as she longed to clamp her teeth upon those fingers, she pushed his hand aside and rasped, “You have earned no reward.”