Lords of Darkness and Shadow (22 page)

Ellowyn buried her face in his neck, trying to avoid the chain mail. “Except what?”

“Except… I am sorry I called you a whore when we first met.”

Ellowyn froze, her eyes flying open. Then, she pulled her face from the crook of his neck, looking at him with such surprise that her mouth popped open. Brandt looked back at her with equal surprise until she broke down into screaming laughter. Soon, the two of them were howling with laughter, so much so that Ellowyn was nearly weak with it.  She struggled to catch her breath.

“It was probably the best thing you ever did,” she chortled. “As sweet and slick as a marriage proposal.”

He shook with mirth. “I was at my most charming that day.”

She shook her head, wiping the happy tears from her eyes. “You are a devil, Brandt de Russe.”

He grabbed her face and kissed her soundly. “Aye, but I am
your
devil, Wynny. I am your devoted, humble, and loving devil.”

She sobered as he kissed her, the moment so warm and fluid between them. “Do you love me, Brandt?”

He slowed his aggressive kisses, running his hands over her soft cheeks. “I have never loved anyone before but I suspect that I do. What I am feeling for you could only be love.”

She grinned, returning his sweet kisses, until they turned amorous. The fire that ignited so easily between them roared to life. Brandt picked her up and headed to the bed, but she balked.

“Nay,” she breathed. “Not on that mess. It is filthy and full of bugs.”

Brandt hardly slowed down.  He began pulling off his gloves, unfastening the ties of her girdle with a free hand.   Ellowyn felt his sense of urgency, feeding off of it, and in little time she had her surcoat off, helping Brandt with his mail.  It was more cumbersome to undress him but they managed it, everything from the waist up.  His broad, muscular chest drew her lust and she kissed his chest, toying with his nipples just as he toyed with hers.

Brandt yanked the shift over her head, leaving her clad in her hose and boots.  She had a fabulous figure, soft and round in the right places, and already he was suckling her breasts and fondling her buttocks, pulling her up against him. She had such soft skin and he lapped it up, starving for her. Nothing on earth fueled him like she did.

Ellowyn, meanwhile, managed to unfasten his breeches but he had to lower them; he could do it faster, anyway.  With his breeches down around his knees, he turned her around, braced her arms against the bed post, and lifted her buttocks up against his pelvis.  His manhood, hard and demanding, thrust into her from behind.

Since he was so much taller than she was, he had to literally hold her up off the ground as he thrust into her. It was nothing for his considerable strength. Ellowyn gripped the bed post, wrapping her legs around him as he drove into her soft and yielding body.   He had a firm grip of her pelvis, holding it tightly against him, his gaze on her slender back and supple buttocks, driving him insane with desire.

Bending over, he wrapped a big arm around her torso, holding her against him as his free hand roamed her breasts, delighting in the silken texture.  Then his fingers moved to the curls between her legs, fingering her, listening to her gasp and groan as he stroked her.  He felt her release and he answered shortly, spilling his seed deep into her womb. 

Still embedded in her, he held her close, kissing her back, stroking her breasts gently, digesting everything about the woman that he was so closely joined with. Every tremor, every breath, every sigh was engrained in his brain. She was becoming a part of his very makeup, the fibers of his being.  As he stood there and held her, his body still joined to hers, his mouth was against her back.

“Aye, I love you,” he whispered into her flesh. “I will never love another.”

Eyes closed, trying to catch her breath, Ellowyn could only smile.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The dream was back, picking up where it had left off.

She had no idea what her grandfather was pointing at. Through the rain and mist, all she could see was mud and dead bodies. Even this far away from that horrid, smoking castle, the bodies were thick. So many dead.

Her heart was pounding in her throat, her hand on her belly as the child kicked.  The kicking was becoming painful, in fact, and she rubbed at her belly as she tried to see what her grandfather was pointing at.

There, Wynny, he said. Do you not see him there?

She was frantic as she tried to determine what he was talking about. There was something in the distance to catch her attention, something deep and dark and ugly. She could feel it. She wanted to know what he was pointing at but then again, she didn’t want to know.

Who is it, Papa?  she cried.

Her grandfather simply pointed, his handsome face edged with sadness.

Go to him, Wynny. You must save him.

Frustrated, terrified, she began to cry. The baby kicked, painfully, and she cried harder. But she could see something through the rain and mist beneath the trees in the distance. It was a man in armor, lying beneath the canopy. There was blood all around him, the color of a ruby  In an otherwise black and white and gray landscape, it was the only spot of gruesome color.

She tried to move towards him but the mud had become a great sucking cauldron, refusing to let her move.  She clawed at it, scratching her way towards the man lying beneath the trees. The hands of the dead began to sprout up through the mud, grabbing at her, clutching at her.

She screamed.

***

During those first few days of the duke’s return to Guildford, the servants, soldiers, and knights would be hard-pressed for an answer when asked who the sterner task-master was - the duke or his wife.  Popular opinion was leaning towards the formidable and lovely Lady de Russe as she took over the castle like a conquering hero.

The evening they took possession of the castle and keep, Brandt had sent four soldiers to assist his wife in making the keep habitable to her standards, which wasn’t a simple or quick task.  Ellowyn had very high standards.  The first thing she did was set a giant iron pot to boiling in the kitchen yard and ask the soldiers to find some lye.  A search of the entire castle didn’t turn up a trace of it, so Ellowyn set forth making some.  She’d seen the women at Erith make it dozens of times so she understood the simple process.  In order to effectively clean, she had to have lye.

One of the soldiers found her an old wine barrel, which she had propped up on some stones so that it was off the ground.  Then, she had the soldiers put rocks all over the bottom of the barrel and covered the rocks with a thin layer of hay before making a hole near the base and plugging it up with another rock.

With all of that done, she had them make a fire of oak.  The hard wood burned long and low, so it wasn’t until the next morning that they had the desired ash from the burning.  While waiting for the oak to burn down, Brandt had tried to talk her into sleeping on the dirty bed but she wouldn’t touch it, so he fashioned a pallet for them on the floor of the chamber and they slept on that.  His first night back at his castle had him sleeping on the cold, hard floor, but he didn’t mind. As long as he had Ellowyn in his arms, he was a content man.  However, she didn’t sleep very well at all. She had cried and muttered all night in her sleep.

At dawn the next day, Ellowyn made no mention of her restless night. She was more concerned with her chores.  The oak wood had burned away overnight and she had her pile of ashes, so she had the men scoop up the white flakes and pour it into the barrel along with gallons of rainwater.  The white mix blended, settled, and sat for three days while Brandt and the other men went about their business, watching Lady de Russe’s mysterious experiment carefully.  Ellowyn, too, went about her business of doing what she could to clean up the keep but everything was really dependent upon the lye she was making. It would be the key ingredient to a clean keep of her standards. 

At the end of the third day, Ellowyn took an egg from the chicken coop and, opening the barrel, cracked the egg into the murky water. Brandt, Dylan, Stefan, and her four helpers watched curiously as the egg floated on the top and Ellowyn declared her satisfaction. The lye was sufficiently leeched. Unplugging the hole and the bottom of the barrel, she had her assistants fill buckets with the white stuff, now ready to be used.

The giant iron pot was filled with water again and put to a boil along with a bucketful of the white lye concoction.  The bed linens were all thrown into the pot and the massive bed was broken down, brought outside, and scrubbed with lye. 

Meanwhile, Ellowyn and one of the soldiers went inside and began scrubbing the floors and walls down with the lye.   When Brandt caught sight of his lovely wife on her knees, scrubbing like a washer woman, he sent Stefan into the village to acquire servant women to do the dirty work. He had promised her, after all, and the truth was that it had slipped his mind until he saw her on the floor with a horse bristle brush in her hands. Then, he was fired into action.

Stefan returned with four women by the evening, a widow and her three daughters, and Ellowyn was thrilled. She had already managed to scrub most of the bed chamber but was happy to turn it over to someone else.  While two of the daughters got to work finishing the master’s bower, Ellowyn spoke to the old widow, Miss Maude, and discovered that she was mostly deaf but seemingly very willing to work and very knowledgeable.  Ellowyn put the old woman to work with the now-boiled bed linens while the third daughter, a surprisingly attractive red-head, started to work on scrubbing down the solar.

The keep was lit up with torches that the soldiers had ignited when the sun began to set.  The narrow windows of the keep made it a fairly dark place, even in broad daylight, so there were a variety of wall sconces for the torches and black soot on the walls above them.  Satisfied that her new worker women were proceeding nicely with their tasks, Ellowyn went in search of her husband.

Descending the long and edgy stairs that led down the motte and into the bailey, she headed for the great hall.  It was nearing supper time and she could smell the roasting meat.

A few soldiers and male servants were already in the hall, milling about.   It was a long and slender room with a greatly angled thatched roof and a massive fireplace built of stone against the southern wall.  The chimney wasn’t in good repair so smoke seeped into the room, clouding up near the ceiling.  Two long, well-used tables filled the room, each one of them seating at least thirty men. 

Ellowyn hadn’t really made it into the feasting hall since her arrival because she and Brandt had taken their meals in the keep, and she hadn’t much been out of the big stone structure.  But now, she looked about with interest as an old male servant put fresh bread upon the feasting table.  It was brown bread, course, but there was plenty of it. Ellowyn got the man’s attention.

“Have you seen the duke?” she asked.

The old man was very old and very tiny.  He shook his head. “Nay, my lady,” he replied. “He has not been here.”

Ellowyn’s face twisted thoughtfully. She looked around the room, her thoughts moving from one to the other.

“What is your name?” she asked the servant.

“Gilbert, my lady,” he replied.

“Who does the cooking here?”

Gilbert pointed to his right, towards a darkened alcove. She could see an open door at the end of the alcove.

“Servants, my lady,” he replied. “Men servants. They served the duke’s father.”

Ellowyn’s eyebrows lifted. “They must be very old.”

Gilbert simply nodded, both fearfully and eagerly, and skittered after Ellowyn as she proceeded through the alcove and out of the feasting hall.

The kitchen yard was vast, backing up all the way to the outer wall.  There were various small structures; chicken coop, pig pen, goats roaming free, sheep penned near the outerwall, a buttery that was made of uneven gray stone and resembled a bee hive.  There was also an enormous stone oven that was blazing in the early evening and a fire pit near the oven contained a carcass of a sheep, roasting on the open flame.

Everything was fairly open, unlike the kitchen at Erith that was actually enclosed on the lower level of the keep.   There were two big, burly men carting around sides of meat and other things, obviously preparing for the coming meal.  Gilbert, a nervous little man, made haste to run them both down and bring them to Ellowyn.

As the men drew near, Ellowyn could see that they were indeed quite old. If they served Brandt’s father, then they had to be nearly ancient. One man was big and bald, perhaps once muscular that had now gone to fat, and the other man had long gray hair, huge hands, and was missing an eye.  Ellowyn was a bit taken aback at the ‘cooks’ of Guildford. She had only known women cooks, not two old men who looked more like thieves or murderers.

“I am Lady de Russe,” she said, introducing herself. “I wanted to see who it was that prepares the meals for the duke.”

The two big men bowed to her while Gilbert fluttered at her side nervously.  “This is John, my lady,” Gilbert said, pointing to the man with the long gray hair. “His companion is Lune.   Lune cannot speak, my lady, but he will understand you.”

Ellowyn nodded in understanding. “I am told you both served the duke’s father.”

Eyeless John nodded. “My father served the duke’s father, my lady,” he replied. “I have served Exeter all of my life. We travel with his army.”

She cocked her head. “Truly?” she said. “I never saw you.”

“We did not go with the duke to Erith, my lady,” John replied. “We came straight from the docks.”

“Ah,” she understood. “Then you were with the group that Arundel sent away.”

“Aye, my lady.”

Ellowyn understood now.  She thanked the men and headed back to the hall, still on a quest to find her husband, but she felt as if she was coming to know Guildford a little better.  It was to be her home, after all.  It was important she understand the workings so she could better oversee the operations. 

The hall was staring to fill in with some of Brandt’s lesser knights, whom he had not yet introduced her to.  In fact, Ellowyn realized that he had mostly kept her to himself bottled up in the keep for the past three days.  Furthermore, whenever she had moved from the keep, he or another knight had been by her side. She had never been alone.  Just as she pondered that particular realization, she ran straight into Brandt, who was just entering the hall.

It was a collision of sorts as he reached out to keep her from falling over.  Startled, she gasped until she saw who it was.  Then, a smile lit up her face even though she saw that he wasn’t smiling in return. In fact, he looked rather perturbed.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded quietly.

She picked up on his tone but wasn’t sure why he was irritated. “I came to look for you,” she said. “The women are working on the keep right now but I need straw for the mattress.  There was no one to ask so I came to find you.”

He sighed sharply, looking around at the men milling in the great hall, and took her by the arm.  Leading her out into the deepening night, he spoke as he escorted her towards the motte.

“You must never go anywhere without an escort,” he told her. “Too much can happen and I do not want you in danger.”

She looked at him curiously. “What do you mean?”

He looked down his nose at her. “Do you remember when we were in the garden of Erith?” he asked, watching recognition register on her features. “I told you there are assassins in my ranks. You have seen the evidence with your own eyes. You should have thought about that before you went wandering around without an armed escort.”

She was contrite and defiant at the same time. “So I am to have no freedom at all?”

“You can have all the freedom you want provided you have a proper escort.”

She didn’t like that answer. “What about after you leave for France?” she demanding, coming to a halt just as they reached the stairs leading up the motte. “Am I to be kept caged in that stone prison of a keep until you return?”

He let go of her and faced her. “I thought we were not going to speak of my leaving for France.”

She threw up her hands. “Evidently we must speak of it because I must know if I am to be held a prisoner until you return.” She put her hands on her hips. “It is not fair to expect me to stay caged until you come back, Brandt.”

“Stop saying that you will be caged,” he said irritably. “That is not the case. I realize you are used to having free reign at Erith, but this is not Erith.  You must adapt, Wynny. You must understand your environment now. Dangers lurk everywhere.  It would destroy me if anything happened to you and you know it.”

She just shook her head in frustration; she wasn’t happy about it but she didn’t want to argue with him.

“As you say,” she said, holding up a hand to signal surrender, although they both knew it was not the end. “Now, back to my original question; may I have some hay so that I may have the mattress stuffed? As much as I like sleeping on a hard floor, I do believe I would prefer a real bed tonight.”