Rhuddlan (43 page)

Delamere had no love for her, she knew. A
thought occurred to her. “Sir Richard, may I speak privately with
you for a moment?” she asked.

“I haven’t any time. We’re almost ready to
leave,” he said, assuming she was going to further berate him for
giving her daughter a treat.

“Please. I only have one question.”

He looked annoyed but nodded. They moved
several yards away from the others, Eleanor tugging at a somewhat
resistant Bronwen, who was more interested in the huge beasts than
in her mother’s business.

Delamere didn’t say anything, just stared
expressionlessly at her, his arms crossed over his chest. Eleanor
began to feel nervous. She’d lived so long at the abbey that in her
mind she believed she could say anything to a man but Delamere’s
clothing, attitude and stance were so reminiscent of Hugh that the
words faltered on her tongue.

“Well?” he said finally.

She swallowed. “Sir Richard, Bronwen and I
would like to return to St. Mary’s. However, Lord William thinks
it’s not yet safe for us to do so. Do you think you might speak
with him and persuade him to change his mind?”

A sardonic grin slowly
twisted his lips. “If you knew Lord William for as long as I’ve
known him, you’d never even
think
to ask a question like that, Gwalaes. Besides,” he
added in Welsh, looking down at Bronwen with a more benign
expression, “I really don’t think your daughter wants to leave
Rhuddlan. Do you, Bronwen?”

The little girl shook her head vehemently.
Delamere laughed and walked back to the waiting men, leaving
Eleanor frustrated with the sudden realization—not felt since she
lived at Chester—that she was not in charge of her own affairs.

Teleri wanted to slap Gladys senseless.
Actually, she reconsidered, that would be difficult as it seemed
the slut was already senseless. She decided she just wanted to slap
Gladys for the pleasure of it.

Gladys had changed her mind. She was
frightened at the actual prospect of leaving the fortress. Her face
was red and swollen, ugly. Perhaps, she stammered, the situation
wasn’t as bad as it had originally appeared. She hardly ever saw
Gwalaes around Longsword anymore. She hardly ever heard people
gossiping about them—

“You don’t get out much, do you?” Teleri
interrupted. She raised a fine eyebrow. “I mean, you’ve been
especially ill lately, haven’t you?”

“It’s the weather, my lady,” Gladys said in a
miserable voice. “I always have trouble breathing this time of year
and it doesn’t do me any good to carry this weight around.”

“Of course you should rest
often!” Teleri exclaimed. “Don’t think I’m suggesting otherwise. I
only meant that if you
had
been out, you would have heard the
latest…”

Gladys looked interested, reddened eyes
notwithstanding.

“Gwalaes has asked Lord William’s permission
to return to her abbey…”

Gladys’ puffy eyes opened wide and she leaned
eagerly forward on the cushioned bench upon which Teleri had
generously allowed her to sit in order to ease the swelling in her
ankles.

“…but Lord William has refused it.”

Gladys’ breath swooshed out loudly. “He did?”
she gasped.

“We should have guessed that
when he had her child brought here, he had a definite reason inside
his small mind,” Teleri continued. She bent her head over a section
of needlework she had just finished and appeared to squint
critically at it. In reality she was watching Gladys’ reactions
from the corner of her eye. She noted with satisfaction that the
slut seemed suitably shocked. “It’s quite obvious that he wants her
around. There can be only one reason
why
.”

Gladys was too stunned to make very much
noise as she cried. The tears rolled down her face in steady
rivulets. Her mouth moved and Teleri thought she was about to speak
but it turned out she was only chewing the insides of her lips.

“Are you all right, Gladys?” Teleri asked in
a kind voice. She signalled to one of her women, sitting nearby
with disapproval on their faces, to bring wine over. “Don’t carry
on so; it can’t be good for the baby. Here, have a drink of this.
It will calm you. Do you know, I’d thought of the best of all
places where you could hide and make Lord William frantic with
worry and I’m a bit disappointed that you don’t want to go now. It
would have been nice for you…”

Gladys put her cup down. She sniffed. “Where,
my lady?”

“My uncle’s court.”

“The prince’s court!” Gladys sniffed again
and absently wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her gown.
“Truly?”

Teleri nodded and casually considered her
needlework again. “I would have given you a letter to Dafydd
stating that your husband had been one of the archers he had sent
to King Henry during the war. He’d returned with Lord William and
was in the garrison at Rhuddlan until he was killed in a hunting
accident. Your grief is so great that it pains you to be at
Rhuddlan and since you are one of my favorite servants, I’ve
decided to indulge you by sending you to the Perfeddwlad for a
while. It’s a story that can’t fail to move him—or his Norman
wife.”

“But, my lady, why must I pretend this isn’t
Lord William’s child?”

“Well, we don’t want the
prince to think badly of Lord William, do we? Which he’ll do if he
discovered Lord William shuns a lawful wife—who happens to be his
niece—in favor of an ill-bred servant. I think it will also make
him and his household more kindly disposed to
you
. You would never guess it by the
way I’m treated here, but in my uncle’s house I am the most favored
person.”

Gladys was silent, considering. She twisted
the now soggy end of her sleeve nervously. She gulped. “But how
long would I have to stay, my lady? I don’t want Lord William to
forget all about me!”

“Of course he won’t, Gladys! You won’t stay
very long, I’m sure; perhaps several weeks.” Teleri looked at her
sideways. “Although you might find you enjoy being at court. As
long as you use the story I gave you, the soldiers will take you in
and the other servants won’t ignore you or gossip about you as they
do here…”

“That would be nice…” Gladys whispered.

Teleri saw the wistful expression on her face
and was jealous. She still thought of the Perfeddwlad as her home,
she missed it dreadfully and was struggling to come to terms with
the fact that she was sending someone there while she herself was
forced to remain a virtual prisoner of a situation she hadn’t
manipulated.

She said suddenly, “Do you know, Gladys? I
wish I were going instead of you! I envy you so much…” and of all
the sentences she had uttered that evening, those three were the
only ones she spoke truthfully.

Chapter 30

May, 1177

Rhuddlan Castle, Gwynedd

There was a soft knock on the door and she
heard one of her women speaking in a hushed voice to someone.
Angrily, she strained her ears. Why did her servants whisper? Once,
she would have been mollified at such a display of tender concern
for her emotional state; now, she was annoyed. It didn’t change
anything, did it, for her women to be so solicitous? If she were
still at home and feeling melancholy, her uncle would devise some
amusement to raise her spirits. But here at Rhuddlan her husband
offered no such sympathy. And he was the one with the power; what
good did it do anyone else to try to make her feel better?

A hesitant shadow creeped over her field of
vision and she looked up from the piece of cloth on which she’d
been sewing in a disinterested manner with a sharp frown.

It was that healer who had saved her
husband’s worthless life. She darted a shy glance or two at Teleri
but mostly kept her head bowed as if she were unsure of her
reception. Her obvious awe lifted a few of Teleri’s spirits.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“My lady, I was told you’ve been troubled by
bad headaches,” Gwalaes said nervously. “I was asked to bring you a
poultice which you can lay across your forehead when you rest to
help ease them.”

Teleri smiled humorlessly.
“The trouble is not so much the headaches but being unable to rest
in the first place, Gwalaes.” She looked unfavorably on the folded
cloth in the woman’s hand. It was, she imagined, filled with
something that smelled vile. In fact, she thought she could smell
it already…or perhaps that was just the scent of the healer’s gown.
Still, her head
was
pounding…“You may leave it here.”

But instead of simply putting it down on the
table and going, the healer hesitated. Teleri looked up again from
her sewing impatiently.

“Why can’t you sleep, my lady?”

Her first instinct was to snap back some
angry reply. She certainly wasn’t about to admit the truth: that
she was feeling low because Gladys had successfully escaped
Rhuddlan a week earlier and Longsword hadn’t even noticed. It
seemed all her plotting had been for nothing. And now Gladys was
walking the same halls she longed to walk and talking to the same
people to whom she wished she might speak.

No one had said anything to her about Gladys.
Apparently, aside from her immediate circle, she was the only one
who was aware of the servant’s absence. It gnawed on her and made
her so unhappy that she was unable to sleep a night through.
Instead she lay awake, imagined arguments between herself and her
husband running through her head at top speed in which she
condemned his relationship with Gladys and he had no good answer;
in which she was scornful and blistering and made him, at last,
finally understand how beloved she was to everyone in her uncle’s
house and how shamefully he had been treating her. Sometimes, in
these imagined conversations, Longsword was so chastened by the
truth of her accusations that he capitulated and allowed her to
leave Rhuddlan.

For the past week she had tossed and turned,
silently cursing the fate which had forced her to marry Longsword,
forced her to endure the humiliation of Gladys’ pregnancy, forced
her to always be on her guard around her husband so that he
wouldn’t suspect her weakness and take advantage of it. When she
finally slept, it was a fitful rest which left her grumpy and
headachy all day.

No. How could she possibly admit to being
jealous of such a pathetic creature as Gladys?

“I have no idea,” she said instead. “Perhaps
it’s the change in weather.”

“I’ve got dried herbs and flowers—chamomile
and rose petals—that would calm you and help you to sleep, my
lady,” Gwalaes said. “But not here. In my storeroom at the
abbey.”

“I’ve heard that my husband won’t let you
leave Rhuddlan,” Teleri said curiously. “Is that true?”

Eleanor felt her face flush with shame. After
several years as her own mistress, she was more than aware of her
present situation of helplessness and she didn’t like it. The nuns
lived a strict and ordered life but never before had she felt as
free.

“It’s true, my lady. He says he worries for
Bronwen’s safety—and mine, of course.” She wondered why she was
making an excuse for him.

Teleri stared intently at her. “It’s a lie.
You know that, don’t you? We both know the true reason he keeps you
here…”

A thousand protests ran through Eleanor’s
mind but in the end she didn’t reply at all. Teleri struck her as
spoiled, capricious and impatient but not stupid.

Without warning, the Welshwoman jumped up
from her bench. “I hate him, Gwalaes! He’s ruining all our lives!”
she said angrily. “Why didn’t he just die from his arrow wound?
Anyone else would have died! I don’t think he’s King Henry’s son at
all—I think his father must be the devil himself!”

The women sitting nearby who were listening
to the conversation immediately started buzzing and one crossed
herself. Teleri glared at them. It was suddenly all too much for
her.

“Do you know that Gladys is missing?” she
demanded.

“Missing?” Eleanor echoed, startled.

“Yes, missing! Gone! Disappeared! Lord
William made her pregnant and then lost interest in her. Another
life he’s ruined! No one’s seen her in days!”

Eleanor didn’t remember anybody commenting on
the absence of Gladys but neither did she remember seeing the
servant in the last week. “But where could she have gone, my
lady?”

“Lord William had better
pray she
has
gone
somewhere!” Teleri said bitterly. “If I were her, I’d just kill
myself and get it over with! What is she without his protection?
Nothing! She’s totally at his mercy! As am I!”

The women protested their mistress’ avowal of
suicide until she snapped at them to shut up. And then, as quickly
as the emotion had burst out of her, it left her. She sank back
onto the cushioned bench. Her hands reached up to rub her temples
and she closed her eyes.

“How much more of this can I endure?” she
said in a low voice, almost to herself.

Eleanor couldn’t breathe. Teleri’s outburst
had struck a chord; although Longsword wasn’t the physically
abusive husband Hugh was, it was obvious that Teleri was as
miserable in her marriage as she herself had been. But while she
had had Gwalaes to comfort her, the Welshwoman had nobody.

“My lady—” she began, but was interrupted by
a sudden commotion down in the ward below. She could hear shouted
voices and the trample of hooves. “Maybe it’s news of Gladys,” she
suggested.

Teleri laughed shortly. “I don’t think so…”
Gladly accepting the diversion, she stood on the bench and looked
through the window above it. “A horseman has just come in through
the gate,” she reported to the other women. “A Norman, but not from
Rhuddlan. I don’t recognize him.” She turned back to the window.
“It’s odd; he’s just sitting his horse. Men are just standing
there. I think I can hear my beloved husband arguing at the top of
his lungs with someone. Probably poor Sir Richard…Gwalaes, you
speak that horrendous language; run and find out what’s going on
for me.”