“Mary appears to be a font of wisdom. She is the one I could understand fearing men, not you. You don’t fear me anymore, do you?”
That stiffened her back just as he’d known it would. “I never feared you. I merely didn’t wish to have a man know me the way you did last night. I am not stupid. What you did to me—it is what my father does to every comely maid within Croyland’s walls.”
“Mayhap, but it is no concern of yours now what your father does or doesn’t do. You will accustom yourself, for I will touch you until I leave this mortal world. There will be no other comely maids, just you.”
“I do not know if I can do that, Jerval,” she said, then kicked her heels into Wicket’s back and galloped ahead of him. He heard her yell, “I don’t know that you can do it either.”
She rode so well, like a boy raised on horseback. Of course she had been, but she wasn’t a boy. She was his wife. Perhaps he had changed, a bit.
He cursed, but he didn’t give it much heat. Over time she would come to believe him, to trust him. As for her not wanting him to bring her pleasure, he discounted it. No one, having once experienced that sort of pleasure, ever wanted to have it disappear. He would get her used to it; he would have her anticipating his hands and mouth on her.
His fingers itched to touch her. He was on the point of swearing, he was so hard, when Rolfe rode up beside him to tell him about two drunken men the night before who mistook each other for females.
CHAPTER 13
Castle Camberley, Cumbria
Chandra had never before traveled this far north of Croyland. The winding lakes of Cumbria twisting between the lush forests, dotted with small islands and set against rolling mountains, were wild and beautiful. There were very few people; they’d passed only one village, and it sat at the base of a small castle.
“Look, Jerval, the mountains yon are still covered with snow.”
“Aye, the Cumbrian Mountains. Many years the snows do not melt from their caps until early summer.”
“I had not guessed that such beauty lay only four days from Croyland. Indeed, I never believed that any other lands could compare to ours.”
“There are many beautiful places in England. Mayhap we will visit them together.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I would like that. I have dreamed of seeing more of the world than just our small corner of it.”
He merely cocked an eyebrow at her. He felt the same way.
They cleared a gentle rise, and Jerval straightened in his saddle. “There is Camberley,” he said, and there was emotion in his voice, a good deal of pride, of possessiveness.
Chandra shaded her eyes with her hand. They were descending into a gentle valley, and just beyond, high atop a craggy hill, she saw the massive castle of Camberley. Its stone walls were a deep red-brown in the fading afternoon sunlight, and four majestic towers, squared, not rounded like those of Croyland, rose like mighty sentinels. Within the walls, the circular keep rose some sixty feet upward. Two hundred yards of land on three sides of Camberley was cleared to prevent any attacker from reaching the walls unseen. A small, winding lake bounded the eastern side.
“It looks impregnable,” she said.
He smiled at her. “Trust you to see the strategic advances before anything else.”
“It is the most important.”
He only nodded. “The last siege was in the early days of Henry’s reign, when my grandfather was ill and prey to the rapacious de Audley clan. The granite rock upon which the castle is built made it impossible for them to tunnel beneath the walls. Even their war machines could not destroy the walls. They tried to starve my grandfather into surrender, but even that failed, for the harvest that year had been excellent.”
“I have never heard of the de Audleys,” Chandra said. “Did your grandfather kill them all?”
“He did. When my grandfather regained his health, he led a surprise attack upon their main fortress and killed every one of them. With Henry’s permission—or rather, I should say, with de Burgh’s, the earl marshal’s, permission—the de Audley lands were forfeited to the de Vernons, with of course a healthy payment to the king. The only price to be paid was a de Vernon wedding the last de Audley daughter. My grandfather bequeathed the lands to my father’s younger brother, and it was he who wed Eleanor de Audley. Since that time, our only battles have been with the Scots.”
“You are as close to the Scots as Croyland is to the Welsh.”
“Aye, and they are more dangerous than the Welsh when roused. We cross swords sometimes three or four times a year, when their hunger drives them to raid our demesne farms.” She was sitting forward in her saddle, all her attention on him. “They scream a hoary battle cry when they attack, and move like shadows. When we fight them, we shed our armor, for it makes us too slow. They are not knights and do not fight as such.”
“How I look forward to crossing swords with them,” she said.
He knew it had to be said now. He was her husband, responsible for her now, and so he said slowly, “You will never fight any enemy. You may practice with the men, but the Scots—you will never even consider crossing any weapon with them. Do you understand me, Chandra?”
“You have changed, and I don’t like it.”
She kicked Wicket in the sides and rode away. He stared after her. He heard Mark tell Mary about the village of Throckton that was just to their right, nestled amid rich farmland, before they climbed the narrow, serpentine road that led to Camberley.