Almost Innocent (17 page)

“Then sleep.” He bent and brushed her brow with his lips. Her skin was cool, the earlier clamminess gone, and for a moment he was almost light-headed with relief. He was not going to lose her as he had lost Gwendoline. The comparison was formed before he could prevent it, and when he examined it, he knew it to be the truth in all its implications.

T
HE LITTLE FLEET
limped into Calais harbor in the early afternoon of the sixth day. Guy sent his squire ashore to see about accommodations and then conferred with his companions over the storm damage to men and horses. They had lost five horses, all of which had contrived to break legs in their wild, terrified trampling and pounding and had had to be put down. Two grooms had suffered injuries in their efforts to restrain the animals, but apart from the debilitating weakness engendered by ten hours of racking seasickness, Guy had reason to feel they had been let off lightly.

The squire returned with the information that the nearest abbey large enough to offer their entire party accommodation was at St. Omer, some twenty miles inland.

Guy frowned. They could not make twenty miles before dark. Magdalen was fully recovered; the miscarriage had occurred too early in the pregnancy for any extended ill effects, and youth and general good health had their usual advantages. But she had not left her cabin since that storm-tossed night, and he did not want to tire her with a journey of any distance, bumping over ill-paved roads in a horse-drawn wagon.

“Take the Lady Magdalen’s women and go to the largest inn in the town,” he instructed. “Arrange a privy chamber for the lady. Her women can see to its preparation with their own linens and hangings. Any kind of accommodation will do for myself.”

The men would have to fend for themselves. They could seek quarters with willing townspeople, or
unwilling as the case may be, or make camp on the beaches or in the surrounding countryside until the morning.

He went below, finding Magdalen sitting fully dressed on her pallet. She was brushing her hair, but she put the brush aside, a brilliant smile lighting her face when he entered the cabin.

“Are we to leave this ship now? I do not think I will ever again sail on the sea.”

“I fear you may have to,” he said, returning her smile, as unquestioning as she of the new bond they shared. “Unless you intend never returning to England. Come, I am going to carry you on deck.” He lifted her against his chest, and her arms went naturally around his neck, her head resting on his shoulder.

“I’m certain I could walk, but this is much more pleasant.”

There was a coquettish note to her voice, and her eyes sparkled up at him. His body stirred in response, but he said severely, “Magdalen, I am not interested in hearing such observations.”

“But I think you are,” she said softly, and that clear determination chased the coquette from her eyes, bringing to him a shiver of premonition, a heady intoxicating rush of blood. Before he could say anything further, she moved upward in his arms, her hands gripping his scalp with a fervent urgency as she brought her mouth to his in a heated conjunction that drove all else from his mind but the warm moistness of her mouth, the curve of her body beneath his hands, the press of her breasts against his chest. Her mouth tasted of honey, her skin smelled sweet as new-drawn milk, her body in his arms lay soft and tender as an infant’s, yet with all the pulsing ardency of aroused womanhood.

For too long he yielded to the moment she had orchestrated, the union she had compelled . . . yielded because she was drawing him ever closer to that center where swirled danger and passion beyond previous
knowing. This was a kiss in which a man drowned, he in her, she in him, a kiss bearing no relation to past kisses, which were as milk and water to the fire and ice of this joining of mouths.

But reality at last forced its way between them. He dropped her on the pallet as if she were a burning brand. “God’s blood, Magdalen, what devil drives you?” He ran his hand through his hair, touched his still tingling lips. “You are not a free woman. Would you embrace adultery? ’Tis a mortal sin.”

“I love you,” she said simply. “I do not see it as sinful. I said long ago, after the Lady Gwendoline died, that I should never have married Edmund, but you would not listen.”

“Stop this!” His voice shook with the fear of his own unleashed desires. “It is dangerous madness that you talk. Your wits are addled.”

Stubbornly, she shook her head. “They are not. I do not know what is to be done about Edmund, but perhaps I will be able to make him understand.”

Guy stared at her, for the moment convinced she had indeed lapsed into some madness, perhaps brought on by her ordeal. “Your husband is dead,” he said finally.

She shook her head. “If you believe that, then I do not understand why you would talk of mortal sin; but he is not dead. I know it.”

Guy turned on his heel and left the cabin, slamming the door behind him. His anger was directed as much at himself as at Magdalen. She had acted on an impulse that he should have been able to forestall, or at least cut short. But he had been lost, with neither will nor power to alter the course of those moments, and he knew without a shadow of doubt that he must keep away from her if he was to avoid a repetition.

Magdalen was carried up to the deck by a stalwart young squire and placed in a litter, her women walking beside her. She caught a glimpse of Guy giving orders to the sergeant-at-arms, but he did not glance in her
direction. At the Coq d’Or, she was put to bed in a chamber overlooking the market square. The sheets on the straw mattress on the square box bed were her own, as were the hangings, and the floor had been energetically swept by Margery herself when the lackadaisical efforts of the inn’s kitchen wench had failed to satisfy. These amenities were small compensation for the noise, however.

The chamber was directly over the inn’s main room, and shouting, laughter, the occasional burst of song drifted up through the cracks in the ill-fitting floorboards. From the square outside came incessant street noises, the rattle of iron wheels over the cobbles, the shouts of street vendors, the brawling of drunken sailors. The smell of fish was pervasive. The inn stood in the shadow of the church, and over all, the bells rang for the day’s offices, until Magdalen’s head was fit to burst and she knew even the bumpy road would be better than this.

She sent Erin to ask Lord de Gervais to visit her chamber, but the girl returned with the message that my lord was too busy to come to her. He would hear any message through her maid.

Magdalen chewed her fingernail in frustration. “Ask my lord, then, how long he intends that we should remain in this place, for my head is splitting.”

Guy was no happier with his own accommodations, a cramped and dirty loft where black beetles scurried into the corners and the reek of fish oil came from the great barrels set against the wall. However, he had no intention of continuing their journey until the morning, and Magdalen’s petulant message did nothing for his temper. He advised Erin, somewhat sharply, to tell her lady to put cloth in her ears if the noise troubled her.

Magdalen received this advice with a hiss of annoyance and announced her intention of getting up. “Oh, my lady, that were foolish,” Erin protested. “You’re still weak as a new-dropped lamb.”

“Nonsense. I am perfectly strong and will be more so if I cease this melancholy lying about. Help me with my gown, for I go to find my lord. If he will not come to me, then I must needs go to him.”

She was somewhat disconcerted, however, to discover how shaky her legs were when she stood upon them properly for the first time. She clung to the door frame for a minute, then resolutely stepped into the unsavory passageway. A rickety wooden stairway led to the inn’s main room, and she walked carefully down it, lifting her skirt from the piles of dust and other more unsavory debris in the corners. Her pointed-toe slippers stuck occasionally on the step and had to be pulled free of whatever grim substance held them.

The room below was crowded and reeked of sweat and stale beer, overlaying the fish. She felt a moment’s dizziness, then pushed forward through the throng, heading for the door to the square. Erin had said Lord de Gervais had been about to go out with his page, so presumably if she waited for him outside in the fresh air and sunshine, she would catch him on his return.

She sat down with some relief on the ale bench against the inn wall and closed her eyes for a minute.

“My lady, you will forgive the impertinence, but this is no place for you.”

The unfamiliar voice brought her eyes open, and she found herself looking at a man of middle years, booted and spurred as a knight. Her first thought was that she must have seen him somewhere before, because there was something about him that she recognized, although she could not pinpoint it. It was something about the eyes, perhaps; gray like her own. His face was thin and pointed, the nose large and dominating, his mouth barely there at all. She did not care for his looks in the least. Her second thought, more fanciful, was that, although he was bowing and smiling in the most unexceptionable fashion, there was a shadow over him, a strangely menacing shadow.

“Sir?” Her brows lifted haughtily, with pure Plantagenet arrogance.

“Sieur Charles d’Auriac, my Lady de Bresse.” He bowed again, taking her hand and bringing it to his lips. “Forgive my intrusion on your peace, but indeed the public street is no place for a lady. If you will accept my escort, there is a little garden a few paces from here where you may enjoy the sun without annoyance.”

“I had received no annoyance until now, sir,” she said, her rudeness arising as much out of uneasiness as out of irritation at his presumption.

His eyes darkened, and that shadow of menace became almost palpable. Magdalen was suddenly afraid. But she had no need to be, surely. The inn door was at her back, its noisy safety within easy reach.

“I can assure you I wish only to be of service,” he said, laying a hand lightly on her arm. “Pray permit me to show you the garden. You will find no one there but monks. It belongs to the presbytery, but they will be happy to offer you their seclusion.”

Why, when everything he said was so reasonable, when there was nothing about his attire or demeanor to give the lie to his claim of knightly status, why then was she so certain he meant her no good? Her eyes flickered sideways along the street as she felt the hand on her arm tighten just a little. Lord de Gervais and his page turned onto the square from the far corner just as she was about to wrench her arm free and plunge back into the inn without further ado.

“My Lord de Gervais!” she called loudly. Charles d’Auriac glanced over his shoulder, then he released her arm and strode off without a word.

Guy hurried over to her. “What are you doing out here?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “Since you would not come to me, it seemed I must come to you.”

He frowned and sent his page into the inn. “Who was with you just then?”

“A man I did not like in the least,” she said. “Sieur d’Auriac, I believe he said. He knew my name without my telling him.”

“That is hardly surprising. Calais is a small town, and one person’s business is everyone’s business.” He stood frowning down at her. “You should not be out here unaccompanied.”

“That is what he said. He wished me to go with him to the presbytery garden, where he said I could enjoy the sun without fear of annoyance.” She shivered slightly. “I do not know why, but he frightened me.”

“In what way?” Guy felt a prickle of unease.

“I felt he might have made me go with him,” she said, feeling for words.

“Abduct you?”

“It is folly, I know, but I felt it. I also felt as if I ought to know him, as if there was something familiar about him . . . almost like a memory . . .” She stopped and shrugged. “I cannot find the right words.”

Guy’s frown deepened. He could think of no reason why a French knight should threaten Magdalen, however obliquely, if he knew her for a lady. Had he believed her a woman of the town, taking her ease outside a tavern in open invitation to all comers, it would have been different. In such a circumstance, an element of roughly persuasive sport would have been perfectly natural. In addition, Calais was an English possession, and the lady but newly disembarked from an English ship, flying the Lancastrian colors. No Frenchman would have offered her insult or discourtesy if he knew she had come from that ship. Unless . . . But no, it was far too soon for the de Beauregards to make any kind of move on French soil.

“Go back to your chamber,” he said. “It must be clear to you by now that the open street is not a suitable place for you.”

“Will you not bear me company? It is sadly tedious on my own, and I really do not need to be in bed any
longer. Perhaps we could walk a little way?” She smiled hopefully.

De Gervais felt the ground slippery beneath him again. “I have no desire for your company,” he said brutally. “Go within. If you wish to leave this place in the morning, you will ensure that you spend the intervening hours resting.”

What little color she had drained from her cheeks, and the look in her eyes was the one she had worn when he had punished her all those years ago for causing Gwendoline such distress. It reminded him now as then of a betrayed and wounded fawn. Then she turned and without a further word went into the inn.

The bell for vespers rang from the church, but the noise from below did not lessen. Erin brought supper to the chamber, a dish of lampreys and an eel pie. “Why have they no meat?” Magdalen demanded palely from her pillow. “The stench of fish is trapped in my nostrils, and I cannot suffer the thought of its taste upon my tongue.”

“But ’tis a good pie, my lady,” Margery piped, looking up from her own platter. “And you will not regain your strength if you do not eat.”

Magdalen turned her head into her pillow and closed her eyes.

An hour later, the sounds of music and loud laughter came up from the square. “Oh, there are jongleurs, my lady,” Erin exclaimed, leaning out the window. “And mummers.”