Chapter Fourteen
“How can this be, Jehan?”
From the hurt in her voice, Jehan knew that Aliénor didn’t want an answer—at least not an honest one. She still hadn’t lifted her gaze from the parchment trembling in her hands as she re-read it by the light of the hearth fire. It was a missive from Toulouse, confirming once again that Aliénor’s brother had never arrived at the monastery gates.
“All these months,” she murmured, absently refolding the parchment. “Where could he possibly be?”
The sadness and anxiety had returned to her voice. She kept running her fingers along the parchment seams. Having spent the long, gray months of winter living as her husband in all but name, he had prided himself on thinking he’d helped subsume her feelings of grief and guilt and regret. Mostly by holding and kissing and touching her until her face bloomed with as much joy as he felt, being the man she chose to love.
Yet, watching her now, he couldn’t help but wonder. Would she be as sad and anxious if the missive in her hand were exchanged for the one crinkling in his pocket, the message from the prince demanding his presence in Bordeaux?
She said, “We must find him, Jehan.”
He exchanged a glance with Thibaud, sitting grimly across the trestle table, and then just as quickly looked away.
“As if we haven’t tried,” Thibaud grumbled, clanking his cup on the trestle table. “You won’t find your brother now.”
“But we must.”
“Woman, after he took off on his own, we searched every bastide from Pavie to Mirande. We asked at every monastery, every village, and every church in between, while riding on Lenten rations, constantly on guard, sleeping in the coldest rain—” Thibaud closed his mouth and sighed hard through his nose. “He left after Twelfth Night and now it’s past Easter. He could be halfway to Rome.”
“He’ll return. Maybe not on his own,” she added, turning on Thibaud as if daring him to defy her words. “He’s wearing a nobleman’s clothes—any brigand or sell-sword will notice. Maybe he’s been taken prisoner and will be returned here with a demand for ransom.”
Aliénor’s wild gaze traveled to him and then skittered away. She knew, he thought, but she couldn’t bear the thought. Months missing, yet no ransom demand had arrived. And now, with the turning of Easter, armies were gathering, both French and English, taking sell-swords into their ranks and clearing the roads of the worst of dangers. If sell-swords or brigands wanted to ransom a young Tournan, they’d have come to Castelnau long since. All during the month they searched, Jehan and Thibaud and his men hadn’t been seeking the angry young man who had left his sister in worry and distress.
They’d searched for a corpse.
With a scrape of her heel, she turned back to the hearth. The light of the flames cast a halo around her. Thibaud looked to him, his bushy brows pushed high. Like Laurent, Thibaud hadn’t been happy with the arrangement between Jehan and Aliénor, but Thibaud was a man of the world. His rheumy eyes followed the two of them always, and now, Thibaud’s pointed look said it was Jehan’s responsibility to comfort his distraught kinswoman.
Jehan shoved his goblet of wine away and swung his legs over the bench to join her at the hearth.
As he gripped her shoulders, she sank her head back upon his chest with a sigh that seemed to emerge from the bottom of her lungs.
“He’s not dead, Jehan.”
He pressed his lips into her hair. “You have great faith to believe so.”
“I know so.” Beneath his palms her shoulders trembled. “When Laury was little, I knew when something was wrong. When he fell off his pony on his tenth birthday, I felt the bruise in my own side. When he defied our father, the terror I experienced was an echo of his own. If Laurent were dead,” she said, tapping her breast with the fist still gripping the parchment, “I would know it here.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about.”
“I’ve already lost two brothers,” she whispered. “Bertrand. Gaston.”
He knew they’d died during the plague. She’d whispered stories about them to him during the dark winter mornings, when lovemaking had made them languid but the long night had already filled them with sleep.
“I cannot bear the thought,” she murmured, “of losing the only one I have left.”
He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, holding her close, wishing he could dispel these shadows. But for this trouble, their life had become a wonder: A series of calm, ordered days followed by warm, sweet evenings. How he loved the lazy breaking of fast in their bed, crumbs from fresh-baked loaves falling into the linens. Their joy seemed to spread throughout the castle, for the maidservants bustled, gossiping, in the buttery, the men-at-arms laughed as they sparred in the courtyard or cleaned their chain-mail by the fire while the fragrance of the oil filled the air. Plain but hearty dinners lingered for hours as the light sifting through the arrow-slits waned, running into suppers of wine and soup, with Aliénor sitting by the fire, bent over needlework with the flames making gold of her hair.
All his life he’d wanted nothing more than peace and security for himself and his men, but he had not really known what it meant until he took this woman as his own. This was what kept him in Castelnau despite the duty that now lay in his pocket.
“Ride with me today,” he said. Her heart was always light after she’d raced over the hills. “You can bring your sparrow hawk.”
“How I would love to.” She slipped her soft hand over his forearm. “But today is the first Monday of the month. You must mete out justice to your vassals.”
He’d forgotten. Every month he sat in the carved oak chair as one villager after another argued about whose chicken belonged to whom and who’d slaughtered someone else’s goat. Personally he thought it would be more efficient to distribute swords among the garrulous peasants and allow them to settle their differences in blood, but he knew he should value a moment when the most important trouble was whether someone had moved a border stone one step deeper into someone else’s holding.
“Perhaps after,” she said, turning in his arms and mustering a brave little smile. “A ride on the hills would be lovely, now that the weather is turning.”
He sifted a curl of her golden hair between his fingers, tempted to kiss the lingering sadness from her lips.
He was halfway there when the door to the courtyard burst open.
“My lord!” Esquival raced in. “Armed men are marching on the castle.”
Jehan barked, “How many?”
“Two dozen, at least. Riding fast.”
“I’m coming.”
Jehan followed his squire into the courtyard with Aliénor at his heels, his uneasiness rising. He hadn’t told her about the parchment he’d received, the direct order to come to the prince’s side. It would be just like the prince to send a dozen men to demand obedience, to escort him to his liege lord to take punishment for insubordination, and he didn’t relish that happening within her sight.
On the ramparts, the guards congregated, staring off to the east. Cloudy skies cast a pale gray glow over the greening hills of Gascony, but no fog concealed the approach of the group of armed men. One look at the hard-riding group and Jehan breathed a sigh of relief. Only a few wore armor bright enough to gleam in the dim light. The others rode without helmets; their horses bare of war trappings. Several followed on foot, carrying pikes.
Not the prince’s men, of that he was sure.
“Esquival,” he commanded, knowing that his young squire had the sharpest vision. “Can you make out the symbols on the pennant?”
Esquival leaned between the crenellations to get a better look at the approaching men. Aliénor clutched Jehan’s arm and he could all but feel hope and expectation bubbling through her.
“I see it, my lord,” Esquival said. “I see the colors.”
“My God,” she said breathlessly, leaning dangerously against the ramparts while the wind tossed her hair, “I see him!”
Then Jehan noticed, too, the twisted foot of the forward rider who carried high the pennant of Tournan.