Chapter Twelve
Back when Jehan was a sell-sword, his evenings used to be spent on a horse blanket spread upon the cold ground, dreaming of smoked duck and salted ham, sheep’s cheese and roasted chestnuts, a generous bowl of pot soup. As one of the prince’s knights, he had swapped cold ground for a hay pallet and an empty belly for a full one, but he still spent evenings dreaming of the new things he craved: Fine swords and new armor. Stables full of horses. Cellars full of wine. Strong-walled castles and the lands to go with them.
Yet, right now, as the black of night lightened to gray and Aliénor still slept beside him, he could think of no greater treasure than the warmth of her in his bed, naked in his arms.
He pressed his nose against her hair and smelled the scent of musk and sunshine and the lingering fragrance of cut clover. She made a little noise and shifted her position under the furs. She slid against his body in ways that warmed his blood.
She murmured, “Is it morning?”
“Not yet, couret.” Her low, husky voice set his pulse leaping.
“It’s still dark?”
“Shhhh. Sleep.”
Defying him, she lifted her head from its burrow. Turning toward the arrow-slit window, she frowned at the hazy cast of a breaking dawn.
“If you keep your eyes closed,” he whispered, “it’ll still be dark.”
“But the servants will be awake soon.”
“Let them do their work, then.” He kissed her temple, his hair catching on his lips. “Lay abed with me.”
Her mouth curved as she rolled into his arms again. “How little you know of managing a castle.”
He thumbed a tress off her brow as she blinked open her beautiful dark eyes, his heart pounding to see them heavy-lidded with satisfaction.
“Fires must be lit,” she said, trailing a hand over his chest. “Meals must be planned.”
“How fortunate I am,” he said, “to have such a chatelaine.”
A shadow flittered across her face then disappeared, but not before it skittered across his heart like a tip of a dagger.
He couldn’t give her what a woman like Aliénor deserved.
But he knew how to make her happy.
Her lips tasted warm. They swelled beneath his. He ran a hand under the furs, his palm following the curves of her body. She made one of those sweet little noises in her throat that kicked his cock into alertness. Her rosy, tip-tilted nipple tightened under his touch. His blood flooded south.
“Tell me,” he murmured, sweeping his hand down her belly, “what you like.”
“You.” She pushed the pelts off between them in hurried enthusiasm and then reached between them. “This.”
On a gasp, he lost the ability to breathe.
Startled, she released him. “Did I hurt you?”
“N-no.”
“It’s so warm.” She ventured to touch him again, a teasing run of her fingertips along the ridge. “I can’t believe you fit inside me.”
He placed a warning hand on her wrist. “Aliénor.”
“You promised me.”
He couldn’t fathom what she was talking about while his cock was gripped in her hot, eager little hand.
“Last night,” she reminded him. “You promised I could touch you.”
He vaguely remembered he’d said something. Gathering what was left of his self-control he released her hand and gave her leave to explore. He tried to temper the blinding rush of his excitement. The manipulation of her curious fingers—all ten of them—made control very difficult.
“It’s throbbing,” she said, lifting her head off the pillow, all wide-eyed fascination, her skin made pearly by the dawn light.
He could manage nothing but a grunt.
“It’s hard but…smooth,” she murmured, leaning over him. “And so warm.”
Her soft stroking was making him lose the ability to speak, so when she slipped a hand below his root to explore farther, he grasped her wrist. “Enough for now.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You promised—”
“You got your wish, witch.”
“It excites you?” She gave him a light squeeze.
“Yes,” he said with strain in his voice, “but I want to excite you now.”
With one swift move, he rolled her flat on her back, her low, husky laughter like music in his ears. He gave her a taste of her own teasing as he swept his hand across the rise of her mons to rub his finger across her cleft.
Her laughter ended in a pleasure-moan. He rose up on an elbow so he could watch her in all her nakedness. Her slim, strong body arched and undulated against his touch. Her nipples peaked high and all but begged for kisses. The honey-brown triangle of her woman’s hair lay soft against his palm.
She was a wonder, reveling in the pleasure. He whispered, “Do you know how beautiful you are to me?”
She didn’t answer, only threw out her arms to grasp the furs tight. The trembling in her body told him how close she was to reaching her pleasure. With one nudge of his knee he stretched her legs apart, eager to slide his aching cock inside her, until he remembered the way she’d flinched last night at the first penetration.
For all her sensual abandon, she had been a virgin to his touch, and sure to be sore this morning. So he pulled his cock away from temptation, slipped down the bedding, and ducked his head beneath her knee.
“Don’t deny me,” she gasped, her fingertips scraping his shoulders. “No more teasing, Jehan—”
She choked on her words as he rubbed his lips over her rosiness. She made a surprised noise and went stiff, only to fall back all but boneless against the pelts when he kissed her more deeply with his tongue. He reached under and around her leg to grasp one breast, massaging gently as the nipple traced circles on his palm. As he tongued the nub of her pleasure, slick with desire, her hips began to roll in imitation. She grasped a handful of his hair. He kissed and sucked until she arched and cried out and her wet, tender flesh throbbed against his mouth.
Lost in the taste of her, he released his own pleasure in the linens.
After, he dragged himself up to lie at her side. Their breathing filled the room. With his arm thrown across his brow, he gazed blindly at the ceiling and yet noticed a thousand little details. The old, dark wood of the roof-beams. The mitering of the stone wall. The scratch of a tip of hay against his back. The warmth of her body and the scent of her sex. The sound of her hair as she turned her head against the pillow. The slip of her small hand into his.
Her brown eyes, soft with a contentedness that made his heart squeeze.
“That,” she said, “was different than before.”
“You liked it.”
She bit her lower lip. He stared, fascinated with the way her lips swelled around the gentle pressure of those lovely teeth.
“I thought it was always the same,” she ventured. “Every time.”
“There are many ways I can please you.”
“But,” she said, glancing down his body, “why didn’t you…”
“I took my pleasure just watching you.”
She curled to her side, one rosy nipple peeking over the bend of her elbow. “Is that possible?”
He nodded. His loins grew heavy just thinking of all he could teach her.
“I didn’t think…it would be like this.”
His mind vaulted back to swift tumbles in bawdy houses, lusty rolls in the fields, and pleasure taken behind haystacks and in vineyards.
He thought, it’s never like this.
He rolled to his side to face her, eye to eye. “Stay with me today.”
“I am with you.”
“All day. In this bed.” It seemed impossible to be aroused so soon, but already his cock swelled. “I’ll send Esquival to fetch us food.”
His thoughts vaulted forward to what it would be like to feed her with his own hands, to eat off the flat of her belly, to teach her the pleasures of honey, but those thoughts died as her gaze skittered away from his.
“I have duties, Jehan.”
She rolled to her feet in one swift movement. He watched the heart-shape of her backside as she strode to where their clothes lay in a tangled heap upon the floor.
“Aliénor,” he ventured, sensing a chill that had nothing to do with the weather, “the castle will not fall to pieces if you abdicate your duties for one day.”
“But my absence will be noted.”
She avoided his eye as she slipped into her shift. He sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, realized that there could be only one reason why she wouldn’t want her absence to be noted.
He murmured, “You want to keep this a secret.”
Her breasts lifted as she raised her arms to slip into her kirtle. “Is that such a terrible thing?”
“No, couret. But it isn’t possible.”
“Perhaps not.” She swept her hands over the wool of her kirtle to loosen rushes clinging to the fabric. “No doubt my maidservant has already noticed my absence. Surely Esquival heard us from where he’s sleeping just outside that door. Though we may prevent the two of them from talking, it won’t be long before some kitchen maid or man-at-arms notices me coming down from the tower in the early morning.”
She yanked upon her sleeve laces, looking everywhere but at him. Fresh guilt speared through him. She’d gone from heiress of the place to mistress of her one-time enemy, all within a few days.
He shouldn’t be surprised she’d prefer subterfuge, but the thought that she did left him feeling flayed, loathsome.
“I’m not ashamed,” she said suddenly, as if reading his thoughts. “I have chosen this, and I’ve done it willingly.”
How eagerly he latched onto those words as a salve against guilt.
“I will stand up in the mead hall and take your hand in mine,” she continued. “It’s just that there are some who will not…approve.”
“Thibaud?”
Aliénor shrugged and swept up her tippets to tug them up over her kirtle sleeves. Jehan figured Thibaud should disapprove, but the fierce knight struck Jehan as a man of the world. He would also respect his great-niece’s decision.
Then he remembered their discussion last night and the truth hit him hard. “Your brother,” he said. “It’s he who concerns you.”
She crossed the space separating them and fell to her knees before him in a heap of skirts. “Laurent will never understand.”
“You said he’s only a boy.”
“He is, but he’s so pious and overprotective. He’ll spend days petitioning you and praying for my soul.”
If her brother intended to be a monk, the boy needed to understand worldly things eventually. Yet how could Jehan blame a brother for worrying about his sister, the woman whose gaze now pled for a solution to an impossible problem?
And how long, indeed, could they keep their coupling a secret within a castle full of kitchen gossips and idle, wounded knights?
“It wouldn’t be forever,” she said, grasping his hand where it lay on his knee. “If we could just hold off the whispers until we send him off to the monastery in Toulouse, then the news will go over easier. Then he won’t be here every day, watching us. Brooding.”
“I could send a message to the abbot.” The prince’s army roamed the countryside and French knights gathered to counter-attack, making it a dangerous time for anyone to be on the roads, but a single messenger might avoid trouble.
“If you sent a message today,” she said, “then it’s possible he’d be on his way in a week or two.”
A week or two sounded like an eternity, but he supposed patience was necessary to earn her trust. “I’ll send a message. In the meantime, take your brother out of hiding. I would meet this boy you care about so much.”
Her face softened in relief.
He added, “Esquival will follow my orders about holding his tongue. Will your maidservant do the same?”
She bobbed her head.
“I warn you, Aliénor.” He leaned over to place his hands on her narrow shoulders. “You’re still sleeping here.”
She cupped his face. “I wouldn’t miss a single night.”
***
Jehan bounded down the tower steps, feeling lighter on his feet and more expansive of heart than he’d felt since long before the viscount’s attack. He breathed in the life in the donjon around him, noticing the fresh rush lights in the wall sconces, the servants chattering in the rooms he passed as they swept out ashes in the hearths and laid wood for later fires. He paused at the gallery, gripping the railing as he perused the mead hall and the men-at-arms scattered below, honing their swords, cleaning the links of their chain mail, mending their small clothes and hose, and sharing slices of veined cheese and thick, dark bread spread upon the trestle table.
All this was his, and Aliénor, as well, and for a moment—this moment—he stood inside the glamour of his own ambitions.
Then he caught the steady gaze of a certain white-haired knight in the mead hall below. Thibaud had taken to him from the moment Jehan had given him the freedom of the castle keep. The knight had made a point to sit beside him at table and regale him with stories, as if he were trying to make up for the viscount’s earlier violence with fresh courtesy. Still, a reflexive kick of guilt drove Jehan to re-examine the events of the morning.
Jehan was sure Aliénor hadn’t been seen when she left the upper room. Esquival and presumably Aliénor’s maidservant had been sworn to silence. And none of the men in the mead hall were waggling their brows in his direction or giving him a single leering wink. He was imagining things.
Nonetheless, Jehan put more gravity in his stride as he descended to the lower floor. He came upon Aliénor’s great-uncle leaning against a wooden gallery-post in deference to his wounded leg.
Thibaud thrust out a cup of wine. “You’ve lain abed.”
“A fine greeting, that.”
“Conqueror’s prerogative, I suppose.”
Jehan seized the cup and took a long sip, hoping Thibaud would assume it was from thirst and not an effort to hide his face while he remembered the conqueror’s prerogative he’d spent the night enjoying. When he lowered the cup, he gestured to the clean linen wrapping around the knight’s leg. “It pains you still?”
“It’s a scratch.” Thibaud slapped the wrappings with the back of his hand. “But this wound woke up an older one I received at Crécy.”
Crécy was a town in the north of France where, ten years prior, the English had crippled the French army, giving the English King Edward III his first real victory in this war.
“Yes, Crécy,” Thibaud said to his unspoken question. “I was there. Survived it, obviously.”
“Yet all the stories I’ve heard from you have been about your forays into the Italian states, fighting for Florence with the viscount.”
“Is it so hard to believe I fought proudly in King Phillip’s personal guard?”
“You’ve been holding back on me, Thibaud.” And not just by conveniently omitting any information about a certain grand-nephew hiding in the chapel. “So you were truly a king’s man.”
Thibaud shrugged a shoulder. “If I told you, you’d have the prince requesting ransom from the crown.”
“I may still.”
“It’d be a fool’s errand.” The older knight waved a hand. “My king has been dead for nearly five years.”
“King Jean has obligations to all his father’s knights.”
“King Jean as a boy saw me beg his father to be released from his service, which he might interpret as nullifying all obligations.”
Jehan narrowed his eyes. There must be a reason why Thibaud was telling him all this while blocking his route to the food his belly was rumbling for.
“Are you not curious?” the older knight said. “How I could go from fighting alongside the flower of French chivalry to fighting petty border wars for rich Italians?”
Jehan shrugged. “I know very well how a knight of good name and family can end up selling his sword to the highest bidder.”
Thibaud frowned and shook his shaggy white hair. “This is not the same. Your family lost everything a decade ago, you were barely a knight. But I lost nothing but pride after Crécy. I could have stayed in the king’s service.”
The knight was sinking into the tale, but Jehan’s belly couldn’t wait any longer. He brushed by Thibaud, saying, “Join me at table. Listening to one of your stories requires more than just wine.”
Thibaud’s hand curled around his arm. “This tale is best told in discretion, Sir Jehan.”
“These men-at-arms don’t care about—”
“I was not the only one wounded at Crécy.” Thibaud lowered his voice. “So was Aliénor’s father.”
As he spoke her name with that look in his eye, Jehan flinched. Whatever was on Thibaud’s mind, now he was sure it had to do with Aliénor.
“You’ll want to know this.” Thibaud released him and returned to the support of the gallery-pole. “It may explain how you found yourself the viscount’s prisoner, half-dead in the northwest tower.”
Jehan’s jaw tightened. “Speak your mind, Thibaud.”
“Aliénor’s father was found on the battlefield at Crécy bleeding from the head and all but dead. I found him myself. By the time we hauled him into the physics’ tent he’d been unconscious for God knows how many days.”
Jehan crossed his arms, waiting for the knight to get to the point.
“For a while, I thought we’d lost him.” Thibaud squinted off to some far place beyond the walls. “I dreaded telling my niece—Aliénor’s mother—of his death, should it happen. They were a love match, the two of them.”
The phrase struck him hard. He’d never considered if there even was such a thing, and now it resonated like the pluck of a violin string.
“But he woke up,” Thibaud continued, “and over the weeks I saw a different man emerge from the long sleep. He beat his horse when he struggled to climb on the saddle. He pulled a dagger on a man who’d done nothing but give him a sour look. He broke the wrist of a woman who delayed bringing him wine.”
Jehan remembered the viscount’s contorted face when the madman had killed his squire. The brutal and unrelenting attack had been like a starved wolf falling upon a wounded deer.
“The king as well as Count of Armagnac soon had enough of the viscount and his rages,” Thibaud continued. “The viscount was ordered away from court and back to his Gascon holdings, but I couldn’t bear to think of him returning in that condition to my unsuspecting niece. So I petitioned the king for leave. Then I bowed to and flattered the damn viscount as if he deserved my sword as protection. I lowered myself to being a mercenary for a man who could only function when he was in the fields, where murder was called war. And I did all this for one reason: To protect my niece and her family.”
“And you stayed long after she died,” he ventured, finally seeing the knot at the end of Thibaud’s winding yarn, “to protect her daughter.”
“As I still do.”
The knight nudged the pole with his shoulder to straightened up, his gray eyes so clear that Jehan could no longer pretend Thibaud didn’t know exactly what had happened in the upper room of the tower last night.
Between them the knowledge shimmered, the air growing thin.
The old knight said, “You will marry her of course.”
His heart squeezed as he lowered the cup. “I am betrothed to someone else.”
Thibaud’s hand went to his side where the hilt of his sword would have been, if Jehan hadn’t disarmed all of the viscount’s men and stored their weapons in a guarded shed. The knight’s narrow shoulders tightened and his lips went white, and for a moment Jehan saw him as he must have looked as a king’s man, hair flaring wild, ropy muscles flexing, senses blazing.
Jehan braced himself for a blow from Thibaud’s white-knuckled fist. He deserved such a punishment. But Aliénor deserved discretion, and a fight between he and Thibaud would raise questions.
“Challenge me if you will, Sir Thibaud,” Jehan said, squaring his stance. “But I won’t send away the woman I love.”
Surprise and confusion flittered across the knight’s face, followed by a deep rippling of his wrinkled brow.
Thibaud said, “So it’s love, is it?”
Jehan nodded and held his clear gray gaze. Thibaud’s anger seemed to seep out of him, like wine out of a punctured bladder-skin.
“Life has not treated Aliénor well,” Thibaud said, releasing a long, weary sigh. “If you truly love her, then I have to trust you will.”
***
Jehan found Aliénor in the small wooden chapel. She crouched before the altar. The long skirts of her kirtle pooled on the wooden floor, bathed in blue light pouring from the small stained glass window. As he entered and approached, she started to her feet. Only then did he notice the boy in rough weave sitting on the rise to the altar.
She dipped in a curtsey as he approached. “Sir Jehan.”
She was as cool as the autumn wind, he thought, but he suppressed a spurt of irritation. This mummer’s play was temporary, and per her wishes.
He turned his attention to the boy who still sat in a sprawling slump. “So, Aliénor. This is your brother.”
“Laurent,” she said, turning aside to open up the space between them. “This is Sir Jehan de St. Simon—”
“I know who he is.”
Jehan gave the sullen creature a look-over. His black, disheveled hair was blunt-cut, his face dirty, but in a deliberate way, showing the tracks of his fingers in the ashes. The hilt of a dagger jutted from a rope belt that drew folds of a long tunic against him, making it impossible to see the boy’s true size. The boy had the viscount’s eyes, as black as midnight, wary and resentful.
“Had I seen you before now,” Jehan said, “I’d have known in a moment you were your father’s son.”
“I am my father’s son.” The boy’s voice was a basso timbre, not a crack in it. “And I will hide no more behind pews and altars.” He tilted his chin at his sister like a dare. “No, Aliénor, not ever again.”
Pushing himself off the altar platform, her brother unfolded to his full height.
Aliénor had been mistaken.
This was no boy.
Jehan slid his gaze to where Aliénor stood, glaring at her brother with nostrils flaring. “Your sister is very protective of you, Laurent.”
“And I of her.”
“Please, Laurent—”
Ally,” the young man interrupted, pre-empting his sister’s retort in a sibling way that brought Jehan a pang of memory. “Do you believe I am as useless as our father thought me to be?”
“Of course you’re not.” She huffed in annoyance. “But already you’re acting foolishly overprotective.”
“You said I had reason to fear for my life. Are you to kill me, Sir Jehan?” The young man turned to him. “Will you hang me from the ramparts to get rid of any lingering doubt about who owns the land and title?”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
“So, Ally, who is the overprotective one?”
“I wasn’t wrong,” she argued. “It was the prince I feared, but he’s gone now. Sir Jehan has an obligation to me. He promises to protect us both.”
“I believe my sword,” Laurent retorted, “is the only proper protection against the English.”
“Stop.”
Aliénor laid a hand on her brother’s arm, but her brother strode away toward the altar rail. The tunic he wore was too long to see his crippled foot, but Jehan heard it drag across the wood in time with his jagged gait.
With a long sigh, Aliénor trained her attention on him. “You see, Sir Jehan, my brother speaks with great passion but little sense.”
“Admirably so,” he said. “A brother should worry about his sister. You mention a sword,” he said, raising his voice to get the young man’s attention. “How well can you wield one?”
“Well enough.”
“And what if I were to allow you possession of your sword,” Jehan added, “as long as you promised not to use it against me or my men, except in sparring?”
“Why would you do such a foolish thing?”
“It’s no foolish thing.” Jehan wandered to the altar rail, shifting a hip upon it to get a better look into this boy-man’s face. “If you are half as honorable as your sister, you will be bound by good behavior to keep it sheathed while remaining within the castle walls.”
Her brother gave him a look out of the side of his eye, all suspicion and wariness.
Jehan added, “Your sister tells me you want to join the church.”
“I’m bound to my family before all.”
“She says there’s an opening in the monastery in Toulouse.”
“You want to get rid of me.”
“Laurent!”
“I’m offering you future,” Jehan said, “one I was told you wanted. Have I been as misinformed about this as about”—he glanced over his shoulder and gave her a look with a lift of his brows—“as about certain other things?”
Laurent asked, “But what of my sister?”
Jehan tore his gaze away from her, bathed in blue light, her breasts swelling from the neckline with each breath, worry coming off her in waves. “What do you wish to know?”
“Is she to go to a convent or to the court of our King Jean?”
“Not to Paris,” Jehan said. “The roads are too dangerous for a journey to the French king’s court, and will be for the foreseeable future.”
“A convent then,” her brother said.
Jehan snorted. “I’d have to truss her good to bundle her off to a convent.” Was it his imagination, or did he see the boy’s lips twitch? “Your sister has agreed to be my chatelaine.”
“Like I have always been,” she piped up wearily from behind him. “Sir Jehan needs someone to run the castle. No one knows how to manage these lands better than me.”
“The prince shall summon me come the New Year,” Jehan added. “I’m to join his army when they return to Bordeaux for the winter. This castle and these lands need keeping. She has offered to do so in my name.”
“All the more reason for me to stay,” Laurent said. “I won’t be like my father, leaving her here with no one to protect her when an army comes pouring over the walls—”
“I will leave enough men to guard the ramparts. Thibaud will be her personal champion.”
Her brother found sudden interest in a scratch on the altar rail, staring at it with a furrowed brow. He scraped his bad leg against the floorboards and Jehan could all but see him frowning his way through the options as he struggled between duty and good sense.
“Join me at your proper place in the mead hall.” Jehan slipped off the rail and headed toward the door. “When you’re properly dressed and back where you belong, Laurent, you, your sister and I will talk more.”