Knight's Lady, page 2
part #1 of Tenebrae Series
But he cared little about what they thought on that subject. Those guys didn’t know Lindsay. They’d never understood the power and passion a strong woman could bring a man. And he guessed, by the medieval culture that prized social status over love, neither had ever been with a woman who loved him. Alex thought that fairly pathetic. Those guys didn’t know what they were missing.
In spite of the high fire in the hearth, chill air moved him to draw the corner of the down comforter over himself and his wife. The room had warmed up from the revived fire, but the castle was drafty and the early spring morning played over his skin. Exhausted though he was from his voyage — not to mention the greeting he’d received — he didn’t sleep, but instead lay with Lindsay in his arms to feel her breathe. Each rise and fall of her chest against him eased his soul. He’d missed it these past weeks. Normally she would have gone with him, to be by his side and fight there if necessary, but this trip to Cruachan had been only administrative and short, and she’d been needed at the keep to oversee those household knights who had been left behind for security. It was her first time ramrodding the troops without Sir Henry as her proxy, and Alex was curious to find out how it had gone. But the warmth of her and the soothing rhythm of her breaths lulled him.
Just as he dozed, Lindsay disengaged herself from him and slipped from under the comforter, donned her dressing gown, and went to the anteroom door to ask after breakfast. Alex heard as if distant the murmuring voice of her maid, who informed her the meat was nearly ready and the household would gather soon in the Great Hall above. The master could be served there, or in his chamber if he preferred.
Lindsay raised her voice to ask him, “Which do you fancy, Alex? Do you think your courtiers will require their earl’s presence right away?”
Alex replied, sleepy, low, and dull, “No. Bring me my breakfast here and tell them I’m chasing my wife around the bedchamber. That’ll amuse them more than watching me eat would.”
Lindsay chuckled, ordered breakfast in, then returned to the chamber and stoked the fire again. Maintaining such things within the lord’s sanctum was a chore, but the alternative was to give up privacy and allow the servants free access to the chamber. Their modern sensibilities balked even more at that than at doing for themselves. The locals, particularly those living on these islands so far removed from the mainland and the Scottish upper classes, didn’t seem to care for the attitude, as they disliked anything that was unfamiliar. It raised commentary that the earl and countess required their servants to sleep in the anteroom, to knock before entering the bedchamber, and to perform cleaning duties only while the room was unoccupied. “Strange ways,” they said in whispers sometimes overheard. “They’re Hungarian; I think I would dislike to live in the eastern mountains, for it would be too lonely.”
Alex knew they would be even more horrified if they were aware of the truth of his origins: that he and Lindsay had come from the twenty-first century. As a U.S. Navy fighter pilot he’d once routinely commanded enough firepower to lay waste to every farmhouse on this island in minutes, and the closest he’d ever come to the “eastern mountains” was flying air patrols over Kosovo in search of surface-to-air missile sites.
He rolled over in the bed to watch Lindsay poke the fire. Her movements were smooth, lithe, and he knew her to be as deadly to her enemies as the large cat she resembled. That excited him in ways he’d once thought impossible. Not long ago Lindsay had killed a man in a fair fight, then cut off his balls before he was quite dead. Appalling in its cold-bloodedness, but in the final analysis Alex knew this was a woman he wanted on his side, and he was proud to be the one she called “husband.” He lusted for her even now, though he was unable to do anything more about it. Nevertheless he enjoyed feasting his eyes. “Why did you bother getting dressed?”
“You know why.”
He cast his glance toward the anteroom. “The servants wouldn’t care.”
“I would. Besides, it’s cold.”
“Come here and warm up, then.” He held up the covers in invitation, but she only came to sit by him on the mattress and he laid them back down.
She asked, “Do you reckon we’ll be needed in the Borderlands this summer?”
“I think we can count on a summons, either to the Marches with Douglas or Ireland with King Robert. Given a choice, I’d rather go to Ireland. It’s been too long since Robert has laid eyes on me. Don’t want him to forget why he made me an earl.”
“He made you an earl because James Douglas likes you. God knows why; you treat him like a disease.”
Alex gave her a sideways glance. She knew why he didn’t like Douglas. The man was a rake, and entirely too friendly with Lindsay. Even before she’d been outed as a woman, he’d liked her way too much, and Alex didn’t want him around. Better to ride with Robert, who was as horny as Douglas, but had prospects among noblewomen of far higher status and greater conventional beauty than Lindsay. Robert certainly had no interest in Alex’s Hungarian commoner wife.
She waited for him to reply, but he wasn’t about to. They’d been over this before; further discussion was unnecessary. She changed the subject. “How did the trip go?”
“Henry Ellot has a handle on things now. I hate to lose him as my X.O., but I need a tacksman on Cruachan and he’s all I’ve got I can trust.”
There was a silence, and Alex knew they were both thinking the same thing. Trefor should have been that tacksman. Finally, Alex said, “Any word from the kid?”
“He’s hardly a kid.”
“He should be.” A note of bitterness crept into his voice, and he tried to cough it away, but it was no good. “By my reckoning, he should be about six or seven months old. He should be nursing, drooling, and crapping in diapers.”
“In that case he would hardly be much good administrating your lands on Cruachan, would he?” Lindsay smoothed the hair away from his forehead. Her voice was soothing, as if she were talking to a child. “We can’t help what was done. He grew up in a different century. Without us. There’s no changing the... past.”
Alex lay back on his pillow and grunted. Then he glanced sharply up at her, the monthly question in his eyes, but she shook her head.
“No. Not yet.” No baby, though they’d been trying since last summer, when they’d learned their newborn was a grown man.
He grunted again and looked past her to the fire. “Well, I thought he wanted to be part of things here. He was all hot to plant himself in my household, call himself cousin, and be my tacksman. Where is he?”
“His men are all wondering the same thing.”
“Have any of them left for greener pastures and a less impulsive master?”
“He might be dead. We can’t know for certain what has happened to him.”
Somehow that thought struck Alex’s heart as sharply as if he’d known Trefor the entire twenty-seven years of his life and raised him as he would have if Trefor had not been stolen from his crib. “He’s not dead.”
Lindsay didn’t reply to that, and Alex wondered whether she cared one way or the other. She said, “In any case, Henry will serve well on Cruachan and you’ll find another second in command. Myself, perhaps.”
“You know that can’t happen.”
“I know no such thing.”
“The men barely tolerate your presence on the field as it is. They’d be mortified to take orders from you during a battle.”
Her face set to the hard anger he knew meant she was no longer listening to him. Arguing further would be pointless, but she pressed. “They took orders from me this past month.”
“Was the castle ever under attack?”
“I told you it wasn’t.”
“Then you’re still untried. Nothing matters to these guys except battle.”
“They know I was giving orders to Ellot during the MacLeod-Breton rising, and they respect that.”
He sat up and rested an elbow on one knee. “They accepted it because no mistakes were made. Furthermore, they assume no mistakes were made because Ellot was here. Unless you plan on being pure D perfect all the time, you’ll need a mouthpiece for dealing with the men. I can’t have you for my second. You can fight, but you can’t lead because they won’t follow. Not gonna happen.”
“It’s humiliating to ride behind the squires.”
That made him chuckle, for she sounded exactly like the other knights, who wouldn’t be caught dead at the rear of any battle. She was one of the guys in more ways than anyone thought. “It’s the way it’s got to be. I can’t help it.”
“Would you if you could?”
That made him blink, and he cast about for what she could have meant by that. “What, you think I’m afraid of you? That I’m holding you back? That I would bother holding you back?”
Her expression was a firm scowl, and he took that as a “yes.”
“Think about this, Lindsay.” He bent his head to look her in the eye. “Just for a moment, think hard about the reality here. In this time — this culture — your status hangs entirely on mine. As long as I’m alive, you can’t take my place. There would be no point in holding you back.”
Her eyes hardened further, for she disliked the fact of her position, and he wished she would just accept it and move on. There was nothing either of them could do about the times in which they lived. Not anymore. “You don’t take me any more seriously than they do.”
“I still don’t know why you want to fight.”
“We’ve been over this before, and you do, too, know why. I want it for the same reasons you do.”
“It’s my job, and I’m good at it.”
“I’m good at it also.”
“But it’s not your job. Yours is to keep the castle from going to hell.” He glanced at her belly, then away, but it was too late to pretend he hadn’t almost said her job was also to have children. Harder to accomplish here than it had been in the twenty-first century where Trefor had been born, and the image that often came of Lindsay on horseback, wielding a sword, with a hauberk bulging at the front with pregnancy, appalled him. Even more frightening, if she were to conceive in these circumstances she might lose the baby before ever knowing about it.
The anger rose from Lindsay in palpable waves, and she rose to go sit in a chair by the hearth. “Stop treating me the way An Reubair did.”
Now it was his turn to be angry. “Don’t you say his name in this house.” Castle. This was his castle.
She peered sideways at him. “He wanted me to marry him and make babies for him, just like you.”
“I said I don’t want to hear it.”
“Of course you don’t. You don’t want to hear anything that annoys you, or reflects badly on you. All you want is to have everyone around the fire carrying on about what a great warrior is Alasdair an Dubhar MacNeil. God forbid there should ever be a murmur of criticism.”
In an effort to appear insouciant, he resisted the urge to leave the bed. He swallowed his rage. The hand draped over his knee wadded into a fist, and he dug his nails into his palm. He said, “I just don’t want to hear about that Danann ass.” His voice gave him away, he was sure. Even he could hear the temper in it.
She fell silent, and he trusted it was because she had nothing more to say about the faerie knight. She was part Danann, but more human than faerie, and she’d not even known of her fey ancestry until six months ago. He counted on her loyalty. An Reubair was an arrogant pig, a border raider like Douglas. Alex had to have faith that Lindsay saw Reubair for what he was. He struggled to keep it, but faith in anything came hard these days.
Two
It was March and the weather had mellowed from winter. Work on a bathhouse had begun shortly before Alex’s trip, and today he spent the day observing its progress. Privately, he didn’t think the convenience worth the expense, particularly since there were servants to fill and empty the small iron tub he and Lindsay had been using in the bedchamber, but he did like the idea of a tub large enough to hold them both at once. Small as it was, the little tub had been astonishingly expensive just for the iron, and never mind the trouble it had taken to get the village blacksmith to construct it. A larger one was out of the question. This new wooden construction would be the next best thing to a Jacuzzi back in the States. Alex appropriated a corner of the Great Hall for it and had workmen begin chipping space from the living rock that formed that wall.
This seemed quiet, restful work to Alex, for whom construction had always meant loud machinery and sawdust. Here there was only the tink-tink of chisel and stone as workmen excavated at a pace Alex thought criminally slow. Every so often someone would cart away a bucket of stone to the village outside the castle gate, to be broken further for use as gravel. Nothing was ever wasted among Alex’s vassals. There was barely a dent in the wall. This was going to take forever.
The tub wouldn’t be large, but it needed to be built beneath cisterns on the roof of the Hall. Knowing how to pipe water and heat it was one thing, but having the tools and materials necessary for it was another entirely. Royalty had running water these days; he was only an earl who lived in the sticks. The sewage pipe he’d laid through the lower barbican last fall had been incredibly expensive. Well worth it for the sake of not having a steaming pool of raw human waste directly beneath his bedroom window, but the pipe, which had to be shipped in from Glasgow, and the labor had nearly tapped him out. This bathhouse would do the same, and for a lesser need. But he did it to make Lindsay happy.
As he supervised the work, other castle residents and some servants also watched. They paused in a cluster near the stair, or slowed in their progress through the room, lingering as long as they thought they wouldn’t be noticed by their master. Most were puzzled by the project, curious to see what a bathhouse might look like. If Alex noticed anyone loitering too long, he turned to them with a bland gaze until they would realize they had better things to do than gawk, and would move along like rubberneckers at a car accident.
Father Patrick, however, lounged freely in a cushioned chair he’d moved from the high table and sat back with his hands folded over his belly and his outstretched legs crossed at the ankles. His filthy, bare toes flexed and pointed, flexed and pointed, in a tick of barely contained energy. He was a young man, barely out of his teens, and Alex marveled that such a kid could dedicate himself to the church so fully as to become a priest. And a good one, near as Alex could tell. For some it was a case of having nowhere else to go, but with Patrick it was a personality quirk Alex hadn’t yet figured out. He was a skilled and enthusiastic fighter, and it remained a mystery to Alex how the priest had become as deft with a sword as himself. Perhaps even better, for Alex had never wielded one until three years ago. Patrick had proven himself competent in his religious vocation — more so than most priests north of the channel — otherwise Alex might have thought him a knight masquerading as a man of the cloth.
Alex said to him, “Ever see one of these before?”
“A hole in the side of a rock face? Aye, I’ve seen my share.” The priest grinned a bit of mischief at his joke.
Alex snorted. “A bathhouse. Ever seen a bathhouse?”
“Nae. I heard tell of one once, in France during my studies. I might have gone for a look, but it would have been an expense beyond my means.” His tone suggested he thought this project also a frivolous expense. “I’m not that sort of priest.”
Alex guessed that had fed Patrick’s curiosity about the construction. His chapel priest wanted to know why so much money was being spent on something so unnecessary, and explanation would be difficult. The only Middle English Alex knew that came close to “hygiene” translated as more like “cleanliness,” but he tried to make himself clear. “It’s healthful to be clean.”
“I keep clean enough with my ewer and bowl, I think. A simple and affordable habit, and not so grandiose as immersion. God gave us streams and ponds good for that, in any case.”
Alex said, “The water here will be heated.”
Patrick’s eyes went wide. “Warm water, you say? Even more wasteful. And enervating, It weakens a man to wash in hot water. God will certainly take you to task for it.” There was no humor in his voice. He sounded absolutely sincere in his belief, and annoyed in the bargain.
“Waste not, want not?”
“Indeed.” Patrick was a straightforward man. Less so than the island vassals, who were no more than simple Scottish farmers and never minced words with each other or with their laird, but more plainspoken than the knights in Alex’s household who were cagey nobles of mostly Norman descent. The earl took the priest’s meaning for what it was worth and let the subject go. Patrick was a spiritual shepherd, not Alex’s financial advisor.
But the priest continued in that vein. “Waste is a terrible thing, and you should be alert to a certain temptation you’ve created among your vassals, who are stealing it.”
Alex frowned, puzzled. “Stealing... what? Waste?”
“From your new pipes that move the dung from your garderobe to the sea, through the barbican. You don’t attend to the collecting of it yourself, and that leaves it for the common folk to steal.”
At first Alex wanted to know why anyone would steal sewage, but instead he asked, “Father, you haven’t just passed along someone’s confession, have you?”
Patrick was shocked, and even blustered a little at the offense. “Certainly not, and shame on you for suggesting it! The theft is common knowledge in the village, and fights break out among a number of farmers who from time to time dig away the mounds of dung beneath the pipe outlet on the rocks by the quay. An argument arose over the practice of putting a large bucket under it while the garderobe is being flushed out. Some distinguish that as stealing — as opposed to picking up the waste from the ground — where others do not. It’s become a source of great debate amongst your villagers. You would do well to put an end to the bickering over your castle dung so nobody is hurt over it.”
