She heard only bits and pieces of the long, solemn mass of the Trinity, as, she suspected, did Jerval. He kept shifting from one foot to the other. She wondered if his shoes pinched as hers did.
At last Father Tolbert drew near the couple and pronounced his special blessing. Chandra nearly swallowed her tongue at his words.
His voice rang out, loud as church bells. “Let this woman be amiable as Rachel, wise as Rebecca, faithful as Sarah. Let her be sober through truth, venerable through modesty, and wise through the teaching of heaven.”
“By the blessed saints,” Jerval said out of the side of his mouth, “you will be all that?”
“He should have told me to be as strong as an Amazon queen.”
“I doubt he has ever heard of the Amazons since they did not have their adventures in the Bible.”
The mass ended. Father Tolbert chanted the Agnus Dei, then stepped back. It was the first noble ceremony he had performed since coming to Croyland, and he was quite pleased with himself.
Lord Richard was thinking about other matters—the various gifts he would be expected to distribute among the guests, gifts that had cost him dearly. He heard the Agnus Dei, and brought his attention back to his daughter. She was behaving well, her bearing proud, her manner gracious. More important, she seemed to have accepted the inevitable. He was suddenly aware of a tensing in Lady Dorothy. For a moment, he believed the bitch would announce that Chandra wasn’t the daughter of her womb, but a bastard foisted off on her. He grasped her hand and squeezed. She made a small, pained sound, nothing more.
He watched his son-in-law embrace his new wife, watched her arms slowly go around his waist.
He felt immense relief, and immense pain.
A loud cheer went up from the wedding guests, signaling the last silent moment of the day. The jongleurs Richard had hired for the wedding puffed their cheeks against their flutes and began to dance among the laughing guests. Jerval, feeling as jubilant as their guests, pulled Chandra close to him and led the procession back to the Great Hall. “You are the most beautiful bride I have ever had,” he said loudly, to be heard over the raucous singing of the jongleurs and the guests.
“I am your only bride,” she said, looking straight ahead, and he shouted with laughter. “I am also the only bride you will ever have, so you can lock away all your man’s dreams.”
He pulled her around and kissed her mouth. “Every dream that invades my brain is of you.”
He kissed her again, hard, and prepared to suffer through at least another six hours of feasting before he could have her.
* * *
It was nearly seven hours before the huge wedding feast at last drew to a close. Jerval never wanted to see another bite of food again. The haunch of roasted stag, the larded boar’s head with herb sauce, beef, mutton, legs of pork, roasted swan and rabbit were strewn about on the tables, now little more than meatless carcasses, or tossed to the boarhounds, who growled happily, pulling the bones through the reeds. He was ready to throw his bride over his shoulder and run as fast as he could up the stairs when the servants staggered into the hall carrying yet more food—rabbit in gravy spiced with onion and saffron, roasted teal, woodcock, and snipe, patties filled with yolk of eggs, and cheese, cinnamon and pork pies.
He cursed.
Chandra was eyeing the pork pies when Sir Andrew, nearly as drunk as his wife, shouted, “Jerval, how will you go about bedding your warrior bride?”
“Aye,” came another drunken shout. “Will the bride remove her armor?”
“Will you challenge her for her maidenhead?”
“Aye, now that’s a challenge I would willingly accept,” Sir Stephen yelled out.
Chandra looked ready to leap from her chair and run her sword through them all. Jerval laughed at her. “Let them bray, sweeting. It means nothing. Besides, it is a guest’s obligation to tease and jest and get drunk at a wedding.”
“A man’s rod is his wife’s dearest friend,” Sir Malcolm’s wife, Joanna, called out, her voice slurred after a day of drinking wine.
“How would you know, my lady?” Sir Andrew yelled. “That old man you’re married to wouldn’t know what to do if he discovered what he had between his legs.”
“On and on it goes,” Jerval said, and fed her a bite of pork pie from his fingers. “I had expected this much sooner, but it doesn’t matter. That’s right. You’ve eaten very little. Open your mouth.”
“Look yon, Jerval feeds her.”
“That is because he cannot yet feast his mouth between those long legs of hers. Aye, he’ll see to it that she is well eaten.”
Jerval grinned as he listened to the ladies and men alike, and he saw himself indeed kissing her between those legs of hers, and quickly gave her another bite of pork pie.
He doubted she even knew what they meant. That pleased him. She would learn soon enough because he would teach her. Tonight. He could nearly taste her. He sucked in his breath—and choked on his wine.
Why would Jerval wish to eat whilst he was between her legs? It made no sense to her. Chandra chewed slowly, smelled the sweet scent of mulled wine on his breath and felt the warmth of his body as he pressed close to her. She’d drunk a goodly amount of wine herself. She didn’t feel any fear, any distaste, at the closeness of him.