When Christ and His Saints Slept (108 page)

“That is an honest answer. I can see the sense in what you say. But tell me this, Ranulf. Why Rhiannon and not Eleri? Why choose the harder road?”

“If you were to start hunting a husband for Eleri, you’d have no trouble finding a hundred men willing—nay, eager—to take her to wife. Eleri does not need me. Rhiannon does. I can give her what no one else will, what other women take for granted—a home and children.”

“Are you sure, lad…truly sure this is what you want?” When Ranulf nodded, Rhodri bounded out of his chair, raced around the table, and grabbed his nephew in a loving choke-hold. “You’ve won me over,” he chortled. “Now go win my Rhiannon!”

RANULF
eventually found Rhiannon in the stables, seated on a bale of hay, a sleeping kitten in her lap. “There you are, lass! Why are you sitting out here in the dark?” Hearing his own words, he laughed ruefully. “Hellfire, I’m still doing it!”

“Well…at least you’ve stopped flinching every time you use the word
see
in my hearing.” Try as Rhiannon might to keep her voice level, it sounded suspiciously husky and strained to her ear; most sighted people were not as sensitive to tones, though, and she hoped he’d not notice. She’d known that sooner or later someone would come looking for her. But she’d not expected it to be Ranulf, and she stiffened as he moved toward her across the straw. She was not ready for this, nowhere near ready.

Ranulf hung his lantern on an overhead hook and sat down beside her on the bale. “I had the most astounding talk tonight with your father. It is as if my whole life was turned upside down in a matter of moments—just like an hourglass!”

He laughed again and Rhiannon discovered that she couldn’t swallow; there was an excited edge to his laughter that she’d never heard before. He did not sound to her like a man who’d just rejected a marriage proposal. She could think of nothing to say that would not betray her and listened in growing despair as he said, “I’d not realized until tonight how much I wanted to stay in Wales. When I came back, it was like coming home. Passing strange that I could not see that for myself, that I needed to have it pointed out to me.”

“I know,” Rhiannon said faintly, “about…your talk. Papa confided in me beforehand.” Her words seemed to come of their own volition, and she felt a sudden dizziness, as if she were teetering on the edge of an abyss. But she was less afraid of falling then of prolonging this torment. “Then…you accepted Papa’s offer?”

“No…I could not.”

Rhiannon sat very still, as if one false move could send her plummeting off into space. “Why?”

“Because he offered me the wrong daughter, Rhiannon.”

She’d not dared to move. Now she dared not speak, either. Had she misunderstood? If only God would restore her sight, if just for a moment, long enough for her to see his face and judge for herself if she’d heard him right.

“Rhiannon…you did hear what I said? I am making a botch of this, I know. Mayhap I’d best say it straight out. I want to marry you.”

Her heart was pounding so loudly that she was sure he could hear. At the touch of his fingers on her cheek, her pulse jumped. “Why?” she whispered. “Why me and not Eleri?”

“That is what your father asked, too. I could tell you that it’s because Eleri is not yet sixteen and I’m thirty-one and I want to marry a wife, not raise one. Or I could tell you that whilst I am very fond of Eleri, my feelings for you run much deeper. And it would all be true, Rhiannon. But what matters more than any of that is the way I felt when Rhodri offered me Eleri. There was no need to choose. I just knew. You were the one I wanted.”

He’d taken her hand as he spoke, and now he pressed a kiss into her palm. “Do you need time to think about it, Rhiannon? I realize this took you as much by surprise as it did me, but—”

“No…I do not need time. My answer is yes. I would be honoured to be your wife.”

Even then it did not seem real to her, though, not until he tilted her face up and kissed her gently, first on her cheek and then on her mouth.

RHIANNON
awoke the next morning with an irrational fear that she might have dreamed it all. “Eleri? Olwen?” Getting no response, she slid out of bed. But for the first time in years, she’d forgotten to lay out her clothes for the next day. Retrieving her chemise, she pulled it over her head and moved to their washing laver, shivering as she splashed cold water onto her face. She’d begun to brush her hair by the time Eleri returned.

“I fetched you some buttermilk, Rhiannon. I’m putting it on the table, in the right corner.”

“Thank you. Eleri…did anything out of the ordinary happen yesterday?”

“Nothing that comes to mind. It was a day like any other, as far as I recall. One of the goats strayed off, Selwyn’s tooth was hurting him, Ranulf asked you to marry him, and we had that wretched salted herring again for dinner.” Turning, she saw that Rhiannon had sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed. “You are not going to tell me, girl, that you forgot!”

“Of course not!” Rhiannon bit her lip. “I was just so afraid,” she confessed, “that it had all been a dream.”

When Eleri sat down on the bed, too, Rhiannon gave her a quick hug. Eleri knew that Ranulf had chosen Rhiannon over her, for in his exhilaration, Rhodri had not thought to keep that to himself. She’d seemed genuinely joyful about the marriage, but Rhiannon could not bear for her sister’s pride to have gotten even the slightest scratch, and she needed to be sure that no shadows lurked in the corners of Eleri’s certainty. “Eleri…are you truly content with this?”

“‘Content’? That is such a tame, bland word to describe what I’m feeling! Unless…you did not really think I would ever have married Ranulf, do you? By Corpus, you did!” She sounded suddenly and highly indignant. “How could you have believed that of me, Rhiannon? I would never have betrayed you like that, never!”

“You…you knew?”

“That you were utterly daft about the man? Of course I did!” Eleri snatched up a pillow and smacked her sister with it. “That is for being such a prideful fool and this is for not confiding in me!” Another whack with the pillow. “Not that I needed to hear you admit it, for you melted every time you said his name. Of course I knew! Did you forget which of us is the blind one?” she needled, and Rhiannon grabbed for the pillow. They engaged briefly in a tug-of-war, but then Eleri let go unexpectedly and Rhiannon went over backwards onto the floor rushes. Eleri tried to catch her, only to lose her own balance and go tumbling off the bed, too.

It had been a long while since they’d had a pillow fight, and sprawled now in the floor rushes, her mouth full of feathers. Rhiannon remembered why she’d given it up. “I’m too old for this sort of tomfoolery,” she complained good-naturedly. “I landed right on my tailbone, you brat! And where are all these feathers coming from?”

“Usually from ducks,” Eleri drawled, getting up on her knees to retrieve the torn pillow and loosing another flurry of escaping feathers. Rhiannon inhaled a few, sputtered, and then began to laugh. So did Eleri, and they clung together, laughing until their cheeks were streaked with tears and the air was so feather-filled that it seemed to be snowing and Enid was standing in the doorway, gazing down at them in consternation.

“What in Heaven’s Name is going on here? Look at you, rolling about on the floor like a couple of puppies and…and the room is full of feathers!”

“I guess the duck died,” Eleri quipped, and that nonsensical answer set the sisters off again, while Enid looked on in disapproving bafflement. Rhiannon was still giggling when Eleri called out cheerfully, “Come on in, Ranulf. You’re missing all the fun!”

Rhiannon didn’t really believe Ranulf was in the doorway; that was the sort of prank Eleri loved to pull. But then Enid gave a dismayed cry. “Ranulf, do not look! It is not fitting that you should see Rhiannon in her chemise!”

“Why ever not?” Eleri held out her hand so her stepmother could help her up. “Once they’re wed, he’ll see her in her skin, will he not?” She managed to get Enid out by the simple expedient of refusing to let go of the older woman’s arm. By then Rhiannon had been able to scramble to her feet and was brushing ineffectually at the feathers clinging to her chemise. It was not until she heard Ranulf say her name that she was sure he was still in the room.

Rhiannon was slightly embarrassed; Ranulf was the last person she’d have wanted to catch her playing the fool. But she had a far more pressing concern than her dignity, and the only way she knew to dispel it was to confront it head on. “Good morrow,” she said, although she thought such formality sounded silly, coming from a woman with feathers in her hair. “There is something I must ask you, Ranulf. Now that it is the morning after, have you had any second thoughts?”

It was an awkward question for Ranulf, and one that showed him just how well she knew him, for upon awakening that morning, his first thought had indeed been, What have I done? It was not so much that he regretted his marriage proposal as that in the cold light of day, he fully comprehended the magnitude of what he’d be undertaking. His earlier joke about an upended hourglass no longer seemed funny, for that was exactly what he’d done—turned his life upside down. Marriage was one of God’s Sacraments, a lifelong commitment, and marriage to Rhiannon would have its own unique pitfalls. Because her vulnerability was so much greater, so much greater, too, would be his sense of obligation to her. She deserved all that he had to give. But what if it was not enough? He still felt that what he’d done was right, but it could not have hurt if he’d taken a little more time to think it through. If God let him reach his biblical three score years and ten, would he still be jumping off cliffs without ever looking to see where he’d land?

His hesitation stirred up Rhiannon’s anxiety into outright alarm. “You must tell me if it is so,” she entreated. “If you have misgivings, better that we talk about them now…ere it is too late.”

“No, it is nothing like that, lass.” Stepping toward her, he reached for her hand. “I am not sure how best to explain this. Until I walked through that door and saw you thrashing about in the floor rushes, I admit I was feeling some unease, fear that I would let you down or cause you hurt. I was thinking of our marriage in sobering terms—responsibility and commitment and duty. What I should have remembered, though, is that I am still getting to know you…and you are constantly surprising me.”

Rhiannon tilted her head, listening as much to his intonation as to his words. He did not sound as if he were weighed down with regrets, but mayhap she was hearing only what she wanted to hear. “I am not following you.”

“There seem to be so many Rhiannons. First there was the nurse, striving to save my life. Then my cousin, who soon became my companion and confidante. Even my confessor,” he said, and for a moment, they both remembered that summer afternoon by the rushing waters of Rhaeadr Ewynnol. “But now…well, now I am seeing you in an altogether different light.”

He could not help smiling then, for he saw she still did not understand. But she did not realize how she looked—barefoot in her chemise, russet hair in beguiling dishevelment down her back, wispy white feathers kissing her cheek, her throat, the curve of her bosom. Half waif, he thought, and half wanton, a woman to cleave unto, as Scriptures said.

“What I mean,” he said, “is that I am of a sudden seeing you as a bedmate, Rhiannon.”

He could see a blush tinting the whiteness of her throat and cheeks, but there was nothing shy in the smile she gave him. “Well, then,” she said happily, “we’d best be married as soon as possible.”

THEY
were, much to Enid’s chagrin. She argued in vain that such a hasty wedding would be sure to give rise to scandal, but her protests fell upon deaf ears. Rhodri did not believe that anyone could think ill of his Rhiannon. Eleri took the opposite tack, pointing out with cynical but accurate insight that the marriage was bound to cause gossip in any event. And Rhiannon and Ranulf cared only about getting married before the start of Lent, when marriages were prohibited. They settled upon Shrove Tuesday, beating the Lenten deadline by one day, placating the indignant Enid by agreeing to have a lavish celebration after Easter, then upsetting her anew by not bothering to post the banns.

They were wed in a simple ceremony at Llanrhychwyn, a small stone chapel in the hills above Trefriw. It was nothing like the great cathedrals where Ranulf had witnessed the weddings of his Norman-French kin, but it was newly whitewashed with lime, aglow with candles, fragrant with scented floor rushes, and in the secluded stillness, they could hear the rustling of yew trees in the wind, the clarion cry of a soaring hawk, even the distant howling of a Welsh wolf.

Afterward, they had a quiet wedding dinner back at Rhodri’s manor, attended only by the members of his household, a meal of roast goose and baked trout and mead and harp music. Instead of the usual raucous bedding-down revelries, Rhiannon’s sister and stepmother then accompanied her up to the wedding chamber, where they made her ready for Ranulf, while he enjoyed a final flagon with the man who was now both his uncle and father-in-law.

As a king’s son, Ranulf had witnessed more than his share of weddings, and he knew from experience how bawdy and boisterous the bedding-down revelries could get, the humor both explicit and uninhibited, a carnal and often crude celebration of life and lust and the anticipated pleasures of the marriage bed. But Ranulf felt sure that their bedding-down revelries would have been dreadfully different. They would have been subdued and decorous and seemly enough to have satisfied the most pious of priests, for the wedding guests would not have known how to deal with a blind bride. They’d have been painfully polite, offering Rhiannon their pity instead of their lewd mockery, and Ranulf was very glad she’d been spared that. She already knew full well that others viewed her as an oddity. Tonight he hoped to show her that she was a desirable woman to the only man who mattered, the one she’d married.

That proved to be very easy to do, for once they were lying together in their marriage bed, she soon discovered incontrovertible proof of his passion, and he discovered in his turn that her other senses were functioning perfectly. She was eager to touch what she could not see, eager to please him, and afterward, he felt confident that her deflowering had been as satisfying for her as it had been for him. “I did not hurt you too much, did I?” he asked drowsily, surprised to realize how much that mattered to him.