Tyrant of the Mind (3 page)

Chapter Four

Baron Adam of Wynethorpe drank from his cup of steaming, mulled cider and stared into the dancing flames of the hearth. He was a tall man whose lean and muscular frame suggested he was too young to have three surviving children, all grown into their third decade of life; yet gray had begun to dull his fair hair and a battle injury had stamped his walk with a pronounced limp. Such were the limits of observable human frailty.

He was not known for weakness. Like most military men, he had little patience with inactivity, but the austerity with which he chose to ignore the pains of his old wounds exceeded that of almost all his fellows. He rode daily when he could and paced nervously when he could not. After he was no longer able to swing a sword in battle, he had turned to the games of the king’s court and played them with equally cold precision and unemotional practicality in the service of his liege lord. Indeed, many might have said that strength was a virtue he sometimes took to obstinate excess. Few could remember the last time the baron had laughed with abandon. No man could claim he had ever seen him weep.

Weaknesses he had, of course, albeit ones known best to God and to his own soul. Had those in his circle of acquaintance been asked what chinks the baron might have in his armor, some would have pointed to his code of honor, which he would not bend for solely personal gain. Others might have suggested it was his passionate loyalty to king, friends, and family. Had this been brought to his notice, he would have smiled and shaken his head. To him, his greatest vulnerability was love.

Since the death of his adored wife almost fifteen years ago, he had lost all tolerance for stabs to the heart. Physical pain from a sword or mace was naught compared to the pain of her loss or to the possibility of betrayal because of love. As a consequence, he guarded against expressing the emotion with the ferocity of Cerberus, the three-headed dog standing at the gates of Hell.

There were exceptions. His grandson knew he loved him. After all, a six-year-old boy could do little to hurt him, except die, and Adam had reacted quickly when the lad had sickened, demanding a healer whose reputation was rooted in fact, not rumor. On occasion, Adam had shown his boys how dear they were to him, for he was lucky in his sons. As children, Hugh and Robert had always been both obedient and loyal to their father. They had also grown into good men.

Eleanor was different. He had adored her above all his other children from the moment of her birth, but, since the death of his wife when Eleanor was six, he had been unable to look at the daughter without seeing his beloved Margaret. Whatever joy he felt when Eleanor stood beside him was instantly balanced by the ever-fresh pain of his wife’s death in childbirth. Thus the love he bore his daughter had become the one emotion he feared most, his greatest weakness, and the one he kept most carefully hidden. Especially from Eleanor.

***

“My lord father.”

Eleanor walked into the dining hall, accompanied by Sister Anne. As the baron bowed out of respect for her vocation and she curtsied in acknowledgment of his rank, she felt herself tremble. She still felt reduced to the status of a child in her father’s stern presence despite her taking office as the head of a sizable priory.

“How fares my grandson?” he asked, emotion roughening his voice.

“Well, my lord.” Eleanor gestured to the woman beside her. “Sister Anne has brought her fine skills to bear. Richard has passed the crisis.” Once again she folded her arms into the sleeves of her habit and grasped her arms to stop the shaking. Sister Beatrice, her aunt, had oft told her she was foolish to react so to her father, but his deep voice had always sounded so formidable to her young ears.

“As soon as I let him out of bed, Richard will play havoc with any calm here, my lord,” Anne added. “You might find greater peace fighting the Welsh.”

Eleanor watched her father smile, the relief painting his face with a glow she saw only when his grandson was the object. In truth, she felt no jealousy of her nephew. Still, her heart did ache on occasion when she saw her father smile at Richard, and she wondered if the memory of the baron looking on her in such a fashion in the years before her mother’s death was only a fancy born of longing.

After her aunt had taken Eleanor to Amesbury to raise, he had visited her, but she soon began to wonder why he bothered. Whenever she had run to him, arms open as had been her wont in a happier life, he would step back and greet her with formal severity, his dark eyebrows coming together like armies engaging in battle. Although he did hug her at the end of these short visits, the gesture was abrupt, and he would quickly depart, leaving only the scent of leather and horses in her empty arms.

The baron’s voice broke into her musings. “I am deeply in your debt, sister,” he was saying to Sister Anne. “Ask what you will, and I will give it to you if it is within my power to do so.”

These words brought back the one memory that Eleanor kept close to her heart for those times she most doubted her father’s love. It had been the winter after her mother’s death. She had been not much older than Richard, and, like her nephew, had had a dangerously high fever. She thought she was having a vision when she looked up and saw her father bend over her bed, then lift her up into a fierce hug, his cool tears falling in great drops on her fevered neck. Later, when she told her aunt of this thing, Sister Beatrice said it had been no fevered imagining at all. When he had gotten the news of her illness, she told her, the baron had ridden without a stop from Winchester to Amesbury in a torrential rain to be at his daughter’s bedside.

Why then, Eleanor had asked, did he never show her such love at other times? As her aunt took the thin little girl onto her lap, she had explained thus: “Because your mother took both your father’s heart and the babe she died of with her to the tomb. You look so much like your dead mother that he can never see the daughter without seeing the ghost of the wife.”

Sister Anne’s voice brought Eleanor back to the present once again. “You should ask God for what He wishes, my lord,” the tall nun was saying to the baron. “Your grandson’s return to health is His doing, not mine. I am only the instrument of His grace.”

“It seems that He and I must work out due recompense then.” Adam smiled and nodded at his daughter. “Perhaps the Prioress of Tyndal will act as mediator.”

Eleanor caught herself smiling back at her father with the eager pleasure of a child just given rare acknowledgment. Indeed, she had had nothing at all from him, either encouragement or family news, since she had left Amesbury to take her new position until Richard’s illness. Yet Sister Beatrice had told her that tales of her cleverness in keeping Tyndal from debt after the events of last summer had reached the court. Surely, her father must have heard the stories. After all, how many prioresses had ever been faced with a priory full of resentful monks and nuns, a murdered monk in their cloister, a hard winter of reduced revenues, and all at the same time? Even if any other women had been so tested, how many had successfully surmounted each difficulty with skill and wit? If she had not brought wealth to her family by consenting to a good marriage as her father had wished, had she not at least brought honor?

Anne touched her arm. “If I may be excused, my lord,” she was saying to the baron, “I will return to your grandson and leave you and my lady to speak in private.”

“Good sister, you must take some refreshment first. Food and wine will be brought to you. I’m sure Richard’s nurse can watch over him for a few more hours while you take your ease. She may be a fluttery woman, but she is competent enough in her care of the boy. You need the rest.”

The tall nun bowed her thanks, smiled at Eleanor, then left father and daughter alone.

“She is clever, your nun,” the baron said as he gestured for Eleanor to sit in one of the chairs at the high table. “Where did she come by her training?”

“Her father was a physician who shared much of his knowledge with her, I believe. She and her husband also had an apothecary shop before she came to Tyndal, although I have heard from a reliable source that their success at it was due most to her skill in the healing arts.”

“A physician’s lass then, and an apothecary’s widow too? Death must have had a hard time wresting her husband from her with her fine skills. How did he manage to die on her?”

“She is not a widow, father. Her husband wished to become a monk and she followed him to Tyndal.”

“Nor would I have thought her so compliant! I have heard tales at court about the rough treatment she deals out to any patient who fails to follow her direction.” His lips twitched into his usual humorless smile, but she saw no mockery in his eyes. “Does she long for the world?”

“She is content.” Eleanor bit her tongue from saying more. Sister Anne’s past was her confessor’s concern, not her father’s. As a rule it was none of hers either, for whatever grief and secrets Anne kept close within her soul, the nun had proven to be a loyal friend as well as a talented healer. Like her father, Eleanor cared much for loyalty and honored the private places in the hearts of others, unless her instincts sensed a festering therein that must be lanced before contagion was spread to the innocent.

She glanced up. Her father had been silent while she reflected on Sister Anne’s past. He was studying her.

“Well and good,” he said at last, “but there are more important things than your nun’s history. I have something to discuss with you, daughter.”

Eleanor raised a questioning eyebrow. “I hope I may be of service to you, my lord.” Her trembling returned and, again, she hid her hands in the sleeves of her robe.

“Well said,” he replied, eyes sparkling with brief amusement before his eyebrows bent once more into their usual stern expression. “Since your arrival, you have been so busy caring for your nephew that I have not had the chance to tell you of my plans. I am arranging a marriage between your brother and the daughter of a friend and former comrade-in-arms.”

“Hugh will not come back from the Holy Land for any marriage, father. I hope this happy alliance can wait.”

“Robert, it is, not Hugh. I’ll settle my eldest when he comes back, unless Prince Edward wants to marry him off to one of his close relatives.” He grunted. “That was a jest, mind you. The prince knows too well that our loyalty is secure. He would never waste such a marriage on Hugh.”

“Perhaps our good king would instead grant the hand of one of his queen’s Savoyard relatives to Hugh?” Eleanor suggested, attempting to match humor with humor. Despite her father’s eagerness to arrange advantageous matches for his children, he had adamantly refused his liege lord’s offer of a similar match for himself. Not many men of his age would have rejected such a profitable alliance that brought with it the comforts of a warmer bed. Nor had she heard any rumors about any longtime leman, whether hidden in the nearby village or in the servant quarters. Not that she would have begrudged him that, but she was touched nonetheless by such fidelity to her dead mother.

Adam’s brief smile faded rapidly. “Our good king is getting old, as are we all, my child, and has lost interest in his queen’s relatives. Now his waking hours are spent dreaming about a shrine to his beloved St. Edward the Confessor.” He lowered his voice. “I admit that I wish our king’s son was not off fighting the Saracens. The Lord Edward should be here to ease his father’s burdens and give comfort to his people.”

King Henry III was suffering from more than just a few inconvenient infirmities related to age and her father knew it well, Eleanor thought. What she had heard from her Amesbury aunt, a woman of extraordinarily good sources, was that the frail monarch was now showing signs of senility and was so ill that a letter had been sent to the Lord Edward begging his immediate return. Many at court were worried about the still unsettled peace in England. Should the king die, civil war could well break out again unless the heir was home to take firm control of the throne. The land could ill afford another such rebellion. It was still bleeding from the last one.

“You mentioned the arranging of a marriage for Robert, my lord. Have you spoken with him about this?”

“I am not without concern for my son’s future happiness, Eleanor,” the baron snapped. “As you would do well to remember, I allowed you to take the veil much against my own wishes.”

Indeed he had, but then few had ever won an argument with his elder sister, Beatrice, she thought. “I remember with gratitude, my lord. Who is the woman and what does she bring to this marriage?”

“Do you remember Sir Geoffrey of Lavenham?”

The name was familiar, but the man she knew was a poor one. Was she mistaking him for his elder brother? She shook her head.

“Perhaps not. I think it was your fifteenth summer when you last saw him. He and I were pages together, and we fought de Montfort at Lewes and Evesham.”

“I was not aware that he had lands to give a daughter.”

“Indeed he was a landless knight at the time you knew him, but his elder brother died of tertian fever some years later and Geoffrey inherited all Lavenham lands and title. His elder brother was a good enough man, but I must say his death was timely, soon after Geoffrey suffered the jousting... Did I not write you of Geoffrey’s accident?”

“Robert did, father. He lost his hand, if I recall, and I do remember him well. He had two sons and a daughter. George is my age…”

“…and would have made you a fine husband, if you had but listened…”

“…and the other two were, indeed I may hope that they still are, a few years older? Yes, that year I lived at Wynethorpe before I took my vows, we all spent much time together.” Eleanor smiled. “There was a young ward, I think, and I also remember Sir Geoffrey’s sweet wife. He was so devoted…”

“The mother of his children is dead. He has since remarried. To the Lady Isabelle.”

Eleanor blinked at the harshness of his retort but chose to ignore it. “The only Isabelle I remember was his ward, his daughter Juliana’s good friend.”

Adam’s face reddened, then he turned away and walked toward the huge stone hearth cut deep into the wall just behind the high table. His limp was marked, made worse with the cold, Eleanor thought, and it pained her to watch him struggle not to grimace. For a long time, he stood in silence, his back to her as he heated a poker. When he thrust the glowing iron into a nearby pitcher of cider, the hiss was like that of a trebuchet flinging a stone at a castle wall, but the cold air soon grew warm with the pungent scent of spices. Eleanor watched and waited for him to speak. As he passed her a steaming cup, she noticed that his hands were shaking ever so slightly.