The Maiden and Her Knight Read online

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I could be your squire.”

  “Edmond!” she cried, aghast at his bold request.

  “Flattered as I am by your offer,” Sir Connor replied without condescension as he addressed Edmond, “I cannot afford a squire.”

  Edmond’s eyes flashed indignantly. “A squire doesn’t get paid.”

  “Edmond, you are too young.”

  Her brother ignored her. “I could be your page.”

  Had Edmond taken leave of his senses, or forgotten she spoke for their father? Or was it that Sir Connor made him also feel the world was upside down and the young could disobey their elders. “No, you could not.”

  “There are pages here as young as Edmond,” Isabelle pointed out, smiling at Sir Connor. “I think it would be wonderful for Edmond to be Sir Connor’s page.”

  “Much as I would welcome his assistance, and proud as I am that the heir of Montclair wishes to serve me,” Sir Connor said before Allis could reply and quell this sibling mutiny, “I cannot provide for another. Besides, there are others of higher rank for Edmond to serve, as befits his station.”

  “But you were on the Crusade,” Edmond protested. “I saw the cross on your surcoat. Nobody else here has been on Crusade.”

  Allis put her hands on her hips and frowned. “Edmond, we are not going to quarrel about this.”

  “I am our father’s heir, not you, so you can’t order me!”

  “He’s right, Allis,” Isabelle said. “You’re always telling us what to do.”

  She took a deep breath. She didn’t want to have a family squabble in public. “I know what my place in the world is, Edmond. Now come along to mass.” She turned to leave.

  “I’m old enough to be a page, and if you won’t let me, I’m going to ask Father!”

  She whirled around and glared at him. “No, Edmond, you will not—”

  He stuck out his tongue at her, then ran toward the castle, as fleet as a deer.

  Calling for Isabelle to follow, Allis hurried after her brother, while Sir Connor went to pat Demetrius again, a thoughtful expression on his face.

  Neither of them noticed Isabelle looking back over her shoulder with every step she took.

  Allis hustled Edmond and Isabelle into the solar, then shoved the heavy door closed, setting the tapestry on the wall beside the jamb rippling. “Don’t you dare go to our father and bother him with this!” she ordered Edmond.

  “I want to be a page. There are even some pages as young as nine, and I’m twelve,” Edmond retorted as they faced each other. “You probably won’t let me be a squire, either. How am I to be a knight if I cannot be a squire?”

  Allis struggled to keep her voice calm. “There is plenty of time for you to be both page and squire after I’m married.”

  “So you keep saying, but you aren’t even betrothed!”

  “He’s right,” Isabelle said as she sat in the chair nearest the window. “I know Father isn’t well, but Edmond has to become a knight, and I have to—”

  “What do you have to do?” Allis demanded, arms akimbo.

  Isabelle tossed her head defiantly. “Find a husband. I don’t want to wait until I’m as old as you.”

  “Is there anyone you have in mind?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Sir Connor, perhaps?”

  Isabelle frowned and crossed her arms.

  Allis marched toward her. “Listen to me, Isabelle. That man cannot be your husband. He is poor, and the baron tells me he was sent back to England after quarreling with the king. Clearly, he is not worthy of marriage to the daughter of the earl of Montclair.”

  Any daughter. In spite of the way he made her feel, or the emotions he inspired. Despite her yearning for him to kiss her, and hold her, and keep her safe, so that she need never fear again.

  She turned back to Edmond. “Yes, he was on the Crusade, but that seems to be the best that can be said of him, and there are other things about him that make him unsuitable.”

  “What things?” Edmond demanded.

  “Percival says he’s very skilled in the arts of war,” Isabelle offered defiantly.

  “That may be, but he has no land and no money, and he has quarreled with the king. Now, as to the matter of my marriage, that you are both so keen to have me make,” she said, looking from one to the other, “yesterday I agreed to become the baron’s wife. He will formally announce it when he has chosen the day.”

  Her brother and sister exchanged surprised looks.

  “After that, I will try to find a suitable knight for you to serve as page, Edmond, and Isabelle, I will try to find a husband for you.”

  “I want to find my own husband.”

  Her self-control, stretched to the limit, finally snapped. Her hands balled into fists. “Then do it,” she cried, bringing her fists down as if striking an imaginary table, “just as long as it is not Sir Connor of Llanstephan!”

  Edmond and Isabelle stared at her, as well they might. She looked and sounded like a peevish child, not the chatelaine of Montclair. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m tired.” She rubbed her temples. “It’s the strain of the tournament.”

  Isabelle hurried to embrace her. “No, I’m sorry. I know you’ve been putting off getting married because you hoped Father would get better.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” Edmund said, taking her hand. “I won’t bother Father, or you, about becoming a page or squire anymore.”

  Allis pulled them both into her arms and hugged them tight. This was why she was marrying Rennick DeFrouchette—for Isabelle and Edmond, and their father, too. When Edmond started to squirm, she moved back and smiled at them. “I promise I will act upon these things. You two go to the chapel. I’ll be along in a moment, after I see how Father is.”

  They nodded their acquiescence and departed.

  She did not immediately go to their father. She needed a moment alone to restore her equilibrium, if that were possible, or at least calm herself. Although she loved her father dearly, it was difficult to see him so different from the father she had grown up adoring, a man of strength and power, yet good humor, too.

  Last night he had paced around his chamber like a caged beast. Then, as always, the footfalls ceased, to be followed by the sound of his crying. He wept for their mother every night, and every day, he prayed to die.

  Edmond and Isabelle didn’t know that. She made sure of it. How could she explain that he wanted to leave them and join their mother in heaven when she didn’t understand it herself? Were they not worth staying on earth for?

  Last night, when she had told him of her agreement to become Rennick’s bride, he had immediately started to weep, bemoaning the fact that her mother was not alive to see her daughter become a wife. No questions for her about her feelings for Rennick, no wishing her happiness.

  She quickly forgave him, because his questions or his blessing wouldn’t have made any difference. She was destined for misery when she became Rennick’s wife.

  Connor stood in the dim shadows at the back of the chapel, watching Lady Allis and her family. The quarrel with her siblings had obviously been resolved, and happily, for they stood close and intimate, not as if they were still angry with one another. Her father knelt on the stone floor throughout the whole of the mass. Lady Allis was quietly attentive, but he ignored her and kept his head bowed in silent and fervent prayer.

  Connor had seen grief, had known it himself, but never had he witnessed a man more broken by it. Yet, as unsettling as it was for him to witness it, it must be a hundredfold worse for Lady Allis.

  Also unsettling was the way Baron DeFrouchette loomed over Lady Allis. With his hawklike visage and long black robe, he reminded Connor of the vultures who circled battlefields, waiting.

  One day she must marry, and someone other than he. He knew that as surely as he knew his disgraced name, yet he could not bear to think of her married to a man who would do cold-blooded murder. He must discover if his suspicions about his lance ha
d any basis.

  The mass concluded, he tore his gaze from Lady Allis and left the chapel. Outside, the sky had cleared, promising a fine day for the squires’ melee, which would take place when all had broken the fast. Then the squires serving the knights who had been in yesterday’s melee would face each other. They, too, would try to win ransoms and prizes, and begin to build a reputation for themselves, perhaps hoping for a place in the king’s service or to please a father’s pride, just as he had done all those years ago.

  “Sir Connor? Sir Connor of Llanstephan?”

  Halting at the sound of his name, he turned to look at the older man who addressed him. He didn’t recall seeing the plump, pleasant-faced man at the welcoming feast, but he looked slightly familiar nonetheless. “Yes?”

  “What a delightful surprise! I am Lord Oswald of Darrelby. I believe you knew my brother in the Holy Land.”

  Knew him? Why, Osric of Darrelby had been with him through the worst of the fighting, steady and truer than even Demetrius, and had saved his life more than once with a well-aimed blow or warning cry.

  What he had thought was familiarity was a family resemblance. Osric had had the same nose and the same wide mouth as Lord Oswald, but he had been skin and bones when he died. “I am very glad to say I did.”

  Lord Oswald surveyed his injury. “I arrived yesterday after the tournament and heard you had been wounded, so I didn’t wish to trouble you last night. You are feeling better, I trust, since you came to mass.”

  “Yes. I had excellent care. I am delighted to meet you, my lord. My father spoke of you often, too, when he returned from his visits to Wessex.”

  “Your father and I were great friends, and how he bragged about you! He thought your elder brother a fine fellow in his own way, he always said, but when he spoke of you…well, I never saw a man more proud. A great pity he died while you were away from home. And your mother, too, I understand?”

  “Yes, my lord, he died shortly after she did.”

  “Truly unfortunate.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Lord Oswald clapped a beefy arm around Connor’s shoulder and steered him toward the hall. “Osric was lucky to have you for a friend, especially at the last. He said so in his last epistle. We thought it must have been written on his deathbed.”

  Connor nodded, and wondered if he should tell Lord Oswald the particulars of Osric’s death, when he had been sick of fever and starved because of the neglect of his king. Richard took every care to make sure he himself was comfortable; he spared considerably less thought for his men. “I was with him when a priest wrote the letter at his behest.”

  “I am glad he was not alone among foreigners.”

  “There were many Normans sick and dying with him.”

  Before reaching the hall, Oswald turned him toward a corner of the courtyard which was relatively secluded. “I would speak to you in private a moment.”

  Once in the alcove, Lord Oswald dropped his arm and faced him, his brow furrowed with concern. “I have heard that the Crusade was not conducted as one might expect, given the amount of money raised for it. I also heard that you said as much to the king himself, and suffered for it.”

  How many other people believed that had been the cause of their quarrel, as if he were some kind of miser keeping watch over coins? “It was not of money I spoke, my lord. It was the massacre of the unarmed prisoners at Acre that caused me to criticize my king.”

  “As a man of honor, you could do no less.”

  Although he was delighted to have someone agree that he was right, this was dangerous ground, as he well knew, for such talk could be accounted treason. “Many would say it was not my place to upbraid our sovereign.”

  “Then they mistake the duty of a knight. Sometimes a man of honor must speak to those above him who lack it.” Lord Oswald slid him a glance that was at once shrewd and curious. “There are many of us who do not believe our king and his military adventures should be paid for by exorbitant taxes or by making bargains with our enemies. Why, he undid the treaty with the Scots king, a just punishment for their rebellion, in exchange for ten thousand marks. And he has said he would sell London, if he could, to finance his grandiose schemes.”

  “I am a loyal subject of my rightful king.”

  “Despite what he has done to your family?”

  “My family?”

  The nobleman’s brow furrowed with puzzlement, as if he couldn’t believe Connor didn’t know something of vital importance.

  His chest constricted. It had been two years since he had left his home a second time, and he had not written or heard from them since. Surely Caradoc wouldn’t be stubbornly silent about anything serious. He would have sent word—if he had known where to find his roving brother.

  “The taxes on your family’s Welsh estate are three times that of similar estates in England.”

  Not death. Not illness. Not arrest or imprisonment. Thank God.

  Then the significance of Lord Oswald’s words struck him. “Three times?”

  “No other Welsh estates are taxed as your family’s has been since you were sent from the king’s presence.”

  He had ascribed Caradoc’s barely controlled rage during their final argument to anger about his banishment from the king’s retinue because of the disgrace to the family, as well as the old conflict about the cost of his knightly equipage, but nothing more.

  Connor slumped back against the wall. It wasn’t like Caradoc to spare his younger brother’s feelings—unless he had not had the chance. He had walked out during the argument and departed Llanstephan immediately. Perhaps Caradoc had not had time to get to the taxes.

  “I am sorry, Sir Connor. I thought you knew. I also assumed you knew that Richard can be vindictive. This kingdom would be better off if someone would rid us of such a ruler.”

  Was he talking about assassination?

  “Perhaps God will take him sooner rather than later, eh?” Lord Oswald said with a chuckle as he once again put his arm about Connor’s shoulder and turned toward the hall.

  Not assassination, but only wishful thinking.

  “Enough talk of Richard. I would rather hear about the Crusade. Osric never spoke of it in his letter, except that he was glad to be out of the fighting.”

  He didn’t want to discuss Richard or describe the Crusade. He wanted to ride home at once and find out for himself from Caradoc if what Lord Oswald said was true.

  He would be a long time in the saddle getting home, and he knew from experience that could make a healthy man’s body ache. Perhaps the holy brother could supply him with a salve or ointment to lessen the pain. “If you excuse me, my lord, I believe I should seek out Brother Jonathan for something to ease my aching shoulder.”

  “Of course I excuse you, and I am sorry to hear that your injury troubles you, Sir Connor. I hope the good brother can be of assistance.”

  “As do I, my lord, as do I.”

  Connor headed across the courtyard toward the dispensary. He would go to the king’s justiciar and demand…ask…request…that something be done. He could not go to Richard, even though the king was in England for only the second time in his reign.

  For Richard had sworn to charge him with treason and have him executed if he ever saw Connor’s face again, and he didn’t doubt Richard meant that as much as anything he had ever said in his life.

  Yet he must do something.

  If there was anything to be grateful for in Richard’s vindictive vengeance, it was that he had given him even better cause to leave Montclair, before his feelings for Lady Allis grew any stronger, weaving tendrils of desire and hope about his lonely heart.

  Chapter 9

  As he stepped through the tent flap, Connor hoped Lady Allis wasn’t there waiting to help with any of the squires’ injuries. Just seeing her would tempt him to linger in Montclair, and that he could not do.

  Thankfully, Brother Jonathan was alone, muttering as he took account of the items on the long trestle table
before him.

  He peered at Connor as he approached. “Ah, the shoulder out of joint,” he said, as if that were his name. “How do you fare today?”

  “It is not too painful, unless I move it, but since it is my intention to leave as soon as I can pack up my things, I was wondering if there was a salve or ointment you could provide to dull the pain. I can pay you, of course.” If it is not too expensive.

  “I see. Give me your right hand, please.”

  He obeyed and Brother Jonathan felt his pulse. “Payment will not be necessary, for you should not ride.”

  “I must.”

  “Make a fist, please. Urgent business calls you elsewhere?”

  “Yes, extremely urgent.”

  “Ah. Now with the left.” Brother Jonathan pursed his lips. “Although I can perceive no serious damage at present, I would urge you to wait at least a fortnight before traveling.”

  Impossible.

  Brother Jonathan let go and regarded him gravely. “By God’s grace, there is no damage to the flow of your blood, or lack of sensation. However, if you do not let the joint and muscles around your shoulder heal properly—and that means gradually—you could do lasting harm, and the ball is much more likely to slip out again. Every time that happens, it will mean more trouble, until you may be permanently crippled.”

  Crippled. He forced away the images of knights missing eyes or limbs, wracked with pain, barely alive. “I can grip with my knees for a very long time, Brother. I have been hours in battle, when I held on only with my knees.”

  “You may be able to stay upon your horse, Sir Connor, but have you considered that an injured man will be a target for every outlaw and thief along the road?”

  Never having traveled alone while injured before, he had not. He could not help his family if he was dead.

  Brother Jonathan seemed to realize he had made his point. “Beginning tomorrow, you may slip the sling from your arm and move it upward a little. Then a bit higher the next day. By the Sabbath, you can lift some small objects.”

  It sounded like a species of slow torture. “As gradual as that?”