The Longing (5 page)

“Squire Joseph,” he introduced himself with a curt bow. “I am to show you to your chamber.”

Then they would not simply be granted an audience? Of course, it was not yet day, so perhaps they would be made to wait.

The gatehouse knight turned as if to depart, paused, and narrowed his gaze on Sir Elias. “You would do well not to test that one.” He jerked his head in the direction of Squire Joseph. “There is a good reason he was sent to you.” Then the man strode away.

“I bid you come,” the squire said and began his ascent.

Susanna put a foot on the first step only to pull it back at the sound of hooves thundering across the land. They had come…had not been put off the scent…would be near to bringing their prey to ground if that prey had not been let into Wulfen Castle.

Ride on,
she silently beseeched as she peered over her shoulder at the walls that showed no evidence this night was unlike any other uninterrupted night.
Pray, ride on.

“They have gone past,” Sir Elias said moments later and took her elbow. “Come, my lady.”

She did not want his hand upon her, but the relentless ride—far different from the leisurely pace to which she was accustomed from atop a sidesaddle—kept her from rejecting his assistance. And as he guided her up the steps, each one seemingly taller than the last, she gave him more of her weight.

The great hall they entered was dark and quiet, though not so much that the numerous bodies upon pallets could not be seen and heard. Guessing here were the sons of nobles whose fathers vied to place them at Wulfen, Susanna paused inside the great doors.

“This way,” Squire Joseph said quietly and started toward more stairs. Blessedly, they had only to ascend the first flight.

“You are to remain within,” the young man said as he pushed open a door and motioned them inside.

Susanna stepped into the chamber, pulled out of Sir Elias’s hold, and turned to face the squire. “I must needs speak with Sir Everard. When will he see us?”

He raised his eyebrows. “I know not when
Lord
Wulfrith will see you, but I trust you will find the accommodations acceptable until he grants an audience.”

Much depended on how long they would be made to wait, for there was only one bed. Dare she ask more of her host? Of course, if ever there was a time to do so, it was now before
Lord
Wulfrith learned who was under his roof. “I thank you, Squire Joseph, but we require two chambers—providing another is available.”

The squire looked from her to Sir Elias. “You are not husband and wife?”

She raised her chin. “Sir Elias is my protector. And friend.” That last he was not, but if such a claim disposed him toward delaying his reward, it would serve.

“I shall inform my lord of your request,” the squire said. “By what name might I tell him you are called?”

She swallowed. “I will myself tell your lord my name.” The better to ensure she gained at least a few minutes’ audience.

After a brief hesitation, the squire said, “Very well,” and closed the door behind him.

“Now what?” Sir Elias asked.

“We wait.” Struggling against fatigue that threatened to make her knees give way, she turned to Judas who stood erect despite a face lined with the exhaustion of two days of hard riding broken only by snatches of sleep. “You must rest,” she said and stepped forward to assist in the removal of his mantle.

He drew back and dropped into the chair that sat before an unlit brazier. “I shall wait with you.”

She did not argue, for to do so would only cause him to try harder to keep his eyes open. “Of course,” she said.

An hour later, the dark still thick outside the window, Sir Elias having carried a sleeping Judas to the adjoining chamber that he and the boy were to share with a household knight, Susanna counted herself fortunate that the savior she had bought had not returned seeking payment. Of course, he had never struck her as being of a foolish bent, and it would not be wise to compromise her while she awaited
Lord
Wulfrith.

Continuing to ignore the longing to seek her ease in the chair lest the man she waited upon found her asleep, she held out her hands to the glowing, coal-heaped brazier that Squire Joseph had lit for her when he had delivered her pack—no doubt riffled through to confirm it held no weapons.

When would Everard Wulfrith come? And when he did, what would he see? Though tempted to try to put order to her appearance, it stank too much of vanity and concern for what he thought of her. Besides, she already knew what those thoughts were—the same as they had surely been these past eleven years.
If
he had thought of her at all.

She fingered her face. Finding the familiar, angular planes, she thought how sad it was that her wish to be as slender as Judith had been granted. Not that she missed the padding beneath her skin that had earned her fourteen-year-old self the secondary name of “plump,” but she had never wished to be this thin—“gaunt,” according to her brother.

The door opened to her right, and Susanna stilled.

Was it him? She had only to shift her eyes to look near upon the one who stood in the doorway, but she could not without first recovering words rehearsed over and over since fleeing Cheverel. Thus, as she rooted around inside herself, she sentenced him to remain unacknowledged.

But it was not a sentence he was willing to serve, for he stepped inside and said, “My lady?”

That voice…

Realizing she still had a hand to her face, Susanna lowered it and looked across her shoulder into eyes that had last looked so near upon her not with suspicion as they did now, but surprise, then alarm.

It was he whose shaved head had reflected moonlight. And it was also
him
.

Hardly able to breathe, she reached to the base of her collarbone against which the pendant rested beneath her bodice and closed her fingers around it.

“You wished to speak with me,” Everard Wulfrith said.

He was eleven years older, face grown a bit coarse, shorn of the hair Judith had pulled her fingers through, but he appeared much the same. And though not of the mythical proportions he had seemed to the girl she had been, he was very tall and broad.

He frowned, narrowed his eyes.

“Forgive me for staring so boldly.” She released the pendant and turned to fully face him. “’Tis just that you have changed, and yet not so much that I would not know you.”

His frown deepened.

Tamping down the longing to drag her teeth over her bottom lip, she said, “But you do not know me, do you?”

“I do not.”

No hesitation. No attempt to look nearer upon her.

“Thus,” he said, “as I have much to attend to ere dawn, tell me what I can do for you, my lady.”

She clasped her hands at her waist. “I require your aid to right a wrong—if a wrong has, indeed, been committed. And methinks only you can tell me that.”

His shoulders rose with a long breath that told he exercised patience. “Speak, lady-who-will-herself-tell-her-name.”

Wishing the rehearsed words were not lost to her, that she did not have to form from scratch what she must tell, she said, “It has been many years, but you knew me as Susanna de Balliol.”

Everard felt every muscle tense. There was that cruel blade again. As it went deeper, he nearly cursed himself for not knowing her. In the chapel where he had gone after ordering the drawbridge lowered, it had occurred to him the boy could be Judith’s, the two accompanying him tasked with delivering the long-departed woman’s son to the man who should have been his father. But that possibility raised the question of where Alan de Balliol stood in all this. Now, however, the greater question was why that man’s sister, the same who had come between Judith and himself, stood before him.

Of course, perhaps this woman who wafted the scent of roses, whereas once it was sweet woodruff that had whispered in the space between her and others, was not Lady Susanna. It would certainly account for the reason she was so unrecognizable. Was a game afoot?

“Am I so very changed?” she asked softly.

Determined to put an end to this farce so he might sooner see her and her companions away from Wulfen, Everard strode forward. He halted so near that she was forced to tip her head back to hold his gaze, giving him the perfect vantage to compare his memories of Alan de Balliol’s sister against this woman who called herself by that name.

Her hair was no longer dark blond woven through with strands of lighter blond. It was lightest brown—that of a stirred-up river as he had thought when he had looked down from the battlements. However, the light of the brazier was kind to it, imparting a cast of honey wherever it flickered. Her soft, round face was no longer soft, no longer round, cheekbones prominent as if she did not eat well. Lips that had bowed and flashed pearly teeth each time he had looked her way, knew no curve. And, as also previously thought, she appeared to be of an age beyond the twenty and five she would be.

He settled upon her eyes. They were still the golden-brown of amber. And in them, he saw her. “Susanna,” he conceded. “I do not think I have ever known anyone so changed.”

She looked down, but not before he glimpsed what he did not wish to believe were tears. And it was good he was not prepared to believe it, for when she lifted her chin, there was no excess moisture. “As you, yourself, can attest, Lord Wulfrith, eleven years is a long time and can much alter a person.” Her gaze flicked to his head.

He stiffened. Not at the possibility she believed age had caused him to lose his hair, but lest she hit upon the true cause of its absence. After all, she had seen Judith and him together that day, and he was fairly certain she had heard what had been spoken between them.

He took a step back and saw her shoulders ease. “What do you think I can tell you that will right this wrong of which you speak?”

“The boy with me is Judith’s son. He is called Judas.”

Everard knew he had not misheard, but still he asked, “Judas?” for who would burden a child with that?

“My brother named him,” she said, “after Judith died following his birth.”

“Why?” he rasped.

She frowned. “I am thinking I do not need to tell
you
, Everard Wulfrith. But if I do, then perhaps you have already told
me
what I need to know.”

Everard knew he was gifted with intelligence alongside the capacity to fight well for his life and the lives of others, but in that moment he felt dull-witted. In the next, he was alert to another’s presence.

“I will ask it if you cannot, Aunt Susanna.”

As the lady swept her gaze to the doorway, Everard turned to face the boy who stood with a shoulder brushing the doorframe. Alan de Balliol’s son was well versed in stealth, having made so little noise in gaining the chamber that Everard had become aware of his presence only a moment ahead of the words that announced it. Though Everard was hardly himself in the presence of this woman, that was no excuse, for such an oversight he would not accept from a knight-in-training.

“Return to your chamber, Judas,” Lady Susanna said. “We will speak later.”

The boy shifted his gaze to Everard, and in his eyes shone something like accusation. “I know who my father believed you to be.”

Rather than indulge him with a response, Everard set about assessing him as came naturally to one who had spent much of his life training boys into men capable of defending their lives and the lives of those it was their duty to protect.

“Judas?” Lady Susanna stepped forward, but the boy held up a hand that made her halt as she drew alongside Everard.

“My father may never have spoken this man’s name to me in your hearing, Aunt Susanna, but he told it to me after revealing Lady Blanche was finally with child—and that he would soon have a son.”

“You did not tell me.” She sounded hurt, as if the boy’s silence were a betrayal.

He shrugged. “It changed naught—only let me know the reason you asked Sir Elias to deliver us here.”

As the lady and her nephew fell silent, as if there were no more pieces of the puzzle to be tossed about, Everard summed up the boy.

He was a good size that bespoke he was nearer thirteen years of age than the ten required for him to be Judith’s son, but that was not enough to dismiss him, for Everard and his brothers had also been of greater height and breadth than their peers. Though Judas de Balliol’s bearing was erect, gaze direct, and speech precise, those things could also be explained away, especially in light of the absence of a glimmer or a twitch of playfulness about his face. And then there were the bruises of fatigue beneath his eyes…

If Judith
had
borne him, and Everard had not so distanced himself that first year that he had been unaware it was a son she birthed upon her deathbed, then this boy was likely amongst the emotionally scarred ranks of those who were nearly as difficult to train as the rebellious ones. Of course, Judas de Balliol might number among those who came too late to Wulfen, but Everard would have to reserve judgment until he could look nearer upon him.

A moment later, the opportunity presented itself when Judas stepped forward and placed himself in front of Everard. “My father hated you. Perhaps more than he hated me.”

The world was not right, Everard thought as he imagined how black a soul must be to so deeply impress its hatred upon a child, let alone a child of its own making—in this case, an infant given the name of the one who had betrayed Jesus. Everard had known Alan de Balliol to be grasping, self important, and unworthy, but this?

He scrutinized Judas’s face that did, indeed, bear traces of one nearer the age of thirteen. But of greater note were his eyes, the depths of which revealed soft spots of vulnerability—rather, humanity. All was not lost. Yet.

Judas pressed his shoulders back. “I would know, did my father have good cause to hate you?”

Everard felt the tug that, if he allowed it, would draw him back eleven years to when he had last held Judith.

“Are you my father?”

It took everything in Everard to contain himself. He had not thought this encounter could take a more twisted turn, but it had done so with such speed he felt the wind of it. Forcing his face to remain impassive, he said, “I am not.”