Secret Song (Medieval Song 4)

“Excellent. If she isn’t, then I will kill her and you as well, de Tournay, and I will keep her dowry for myself, since there is nothing else for me.”

Roland believed he would most certainly try. He nodded curtly and remounted Cantor. He was on his way to London now, to see the king; then he would ride to Cornwall. He needed to see Graelam de Moreton; then he wanted to visit Thispen-Ladock, just to look at the stone walls and the green hills, just to stroll through the inner bailey and speak to all the people, and know that what he was doing would make this possible for him. He had the time, and in the next two weeks he would make all his plans. He would travel northward from Cornwall to the southeast corner of Wales to Tyberton Castle, domain of the Clares since Duke William’s conquest of England. He knew now how he would present himself to Edmond of Clare. He smiled, seeing himself in this new role. He also admitted, his smile widening, that he had a bit of studying to do before he arrived at Tyberton Castle.

Tyberton Castle, on the River Wye

May 1275

Ena lightly slapped the folds of Daria’s silk gown into a more pleasing shape. “There, it’s lovely ye are now. But the man will find ye lovely as well, the good Lord above knows that. Ye’ll take care, won’t ye, little mistress?”

“Aye,” Daria said. Ena’s warnings, admonitions, and portents were daily fare and their impact had dimmed with repetition. Edmond of Clare was surely bent on ravishment, and today would be the day. But he didn’t ravish her, and the days went by. Slowly, so very slowly. She wished to heaven that Ena wouldn’t call her “little mistress.” It was what he called her, and she hated it. She’d been here since the twelfth of March, nearly two months now, and she wanted to scream with the boredom, the fear, with the awful tension that would never leave her. She was a prisoner and she didn’t know what her captor wanted of her. At the beginning, she’d spoken from her terror, not measuring the possible consequences of her words. She asked him, fear making her voice harsh, “If you ransom me, will you let me go? Is it just my dowry you want? Why don’t you say something? Why don’t you tell me?”

Edmond of Clare had slapped her, not really all that hard, but hard enough so that she’d felt the pain of it throughout her body and she’d reeled with the force of it, nearly falling to her knees. He watched the pain take her for a few moments, then said easily, this matter of her impertinence duly handled, “You will do as I tell you and you will ask me no more questions. Now, little mistress, would you like to eat some delicious stewed lamb?”

He baffled her. She feared him, yet he hadn’t struck her since that first time. Of course she’d tried to give him no provocation. She saw violence in him, leashed in her presence, but she could feel it, just as she’d always felt it in her Uncle Damon. She saw his control tested once when a servant had spilled some thickly sauced meat on his arm. She saw the vein jump in his throat, saw his clenched fists, but his voice issued forth mild, and his reproof was gentle. Then why, she’d wondered, had the servant looked like he was shortly to die and was wonderfully surprised when he hadn’t? She still didn’t know anything. If he was ransoming her, as she had to assume that he was, she didn’t know what he’d demanded; she didn’t know if her uncle had responded. She didn’t know anything, and it was infuriating and frustrating. And then she would think: all he did was slap me. And she decided she would ask him again. She wouldn’t demand, she would ask softly, something she should have learned to do with her uncle. Ah, but it galled her to be the supplicant.

Ena stepped back and folded her arms over her scrawny chest. “Ye’ve grown, a good inch taller ye are, and look at yer ankles, poking out over yer feet, and that gown of yers pulls across yer breasts. Ye must have new gowns, at least cloth so ye can sew yerself something that will fit ye. Ask the earl to fetch ye some nice woolen cloth—”

“That’s quite enough, Ena. I won’t demand cloth for new gowns. I care not if my ankles offend you—it matters not to me.”

“Ah, if only we could leave here and ye could wed with Ralph of Colchester as ye were supposed to.”

Daria shivered at that gruesome thought. “I would rather become a nun.”

These sarcastically spoken impious words brought a loud groan from Ena and a quick crossing over her chest. “Ralph of Colchester was to be yer husband. If he was weak, he would still have been yer husband, and that makes all the difference. He’s no savage marauder who should have been a priest, a crazy man who holds ye prisoner and makes ye pray in his damp chapel until yer knees are cramped and bruised red.”

“I wonder,” Daria mused aloud, ignoring her maid, “I do wonder if Ralph of Colchester will still wish to marry me. It’s a matter of the size of my dowry, I think, not the question of my virtue or my captor’s virtue. That and how much his father needs my coin. It’s an interesting question, though. Mayhap I’ll ask the earl.”

That brought a louder shriek from Ena, and Daria lightly patted her arm. “Nay, I jest. Don’t carry on so.” She turned and walked to the narrow window, only a narrow arrow slit, actually, with a skin hanging above it to be lowered when the weather was foul. For the past three days the sun had shone down warm and bright.

But Daria shivered. She stared down into the inner bailey of Tyberton Castle. It was a huge fortress, its denizens numbering into the hundreds, and there were people and animals and filth everywhere. The only time there was quiet was on Sundays. The earl held services and all were required to attend for the endless hours. Until a week ago.

Edmond of Clare was devoutly religious. He spent the hours from five in the morning until seven on his knees in the cold Tyberton chapel. Then his priest held a private Mass for him and only for him, for which all the castle folk were grateful. The earl had been on a rampage for the past four days, for his priest had left Tyberton during a storm one night and no one knew why.

Daria knew why, as, she suspected, did most of the inhabitants of Tyberton, though they would never say so. The priest had no calling for such sacrifice as Clare demanded. He was fat and lazy and all the services had finally ground him down. He’d hated the cold dark chapel, hated the endless hours of absolving the Earl of Clare. Daria had heard him mumble about it, complaining bitterly that he would die of frozen lungs before the winter was out.

Well, now the chapel was empty. There was no mumbled illiterate Latin service to suffer through, no chilled bones from the damp cold air blowing through the thick gray stones from the River Wye. No more suffering for the nose, for the priest had smelled as foul as the refuse pile at the back of the castle. The fellow was gone. All were relieved except the earl.

Daria had found it odd, though, that the earl, such a fanatic in matters of the soul, didn’t

speak a bit of Latin. The priest had slurred his words, creating them from the sounds he knew the earl would accept, for he himself couldn’t pronounce half of them properly and the earl seemed not to notice.

Daria spoke and read Latin, as did her mother, who’d been her teacher. She’d said nothing to the earl about it.

She turned at the knock on her small chamber door. It was one of the earl’s men, a thin-faced youth named Clyde who had the habit of looking at Daria as if she were a Christmas feast and he a man begging to stuff himself. She simply stared at him, not moving.

“The earl wishes to see ye,” he said, and as he spoke, his eyes traveled down her body, stopping only when they reached the pointed toes of her leather slippers.

She merely nodded, still not moving, waiting for Clyde to leave, which he finally did, his expression sour. Once she’d moved to do his bidding, only to feel Ena’s hands on her as she passed.

“Ye be careful, young mistress,” Ena hissed in her ear. “Ye stay out of his reach. Pray until yer tongue falls out, but keep away from him.”

“Please,” Daria said, shook off Ena’s hand, and left the chamber. She lifted her skirts as she stepped carefully down the deeply cut stone steps that wound downward into the great hall of Tyberton. There were only three men in the hall and one of them was Edmond of Clare. He was speaking in a low voice to his master-at-arms, a Scotsman named MacLeod. Daria watched Edmond make a point with his hands, and shivered, remembering when his right hand, palm open, had struck her cheek. He was a big man, with the fierce red hair of his Scottish mother and the dark Celtic eyes of his father. His complexion was white as a dead man’s. He usually spoke softly, which made it all the more unsettling when he suddenly exploded in a rage. He was a giant of a man, his chest the width of a tree trunk, the lower part of his pale white face covered with a curling red beard. He was handsome in a savage sort of way, Daria would give him that, but she’d heard that his wife, dead for only six months now, her infant son with her, had lived in fear of him. She was inclined to believe it.

She didn’t move, but rather waited until he noticed her, which he did. “Come hither,” he called. “I have gained us a new priest. His name is Father Corinthian and he will say Mass for us tomorrow. He is a Benedictine.”

Daria walked forward, noticing the priest in his cheap wool cowl for the first time. “Father,” she said.

“My child,” said Father Corinthian. He pulled back the hood from his monk’s cowl and took her hand. Daria felt a shock that drove the color from her face. She wanted to pull her hand away, but she didn’t. She looked into the priest’s dark eyes and she knew him.