Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [68]
Once again, the dame was more embarrassed than I. She tried to throw her words, cloak-like, over this new nakedness. "You need not have come here, good madam," she said. "You need not have lowered yourself this way."
"Indeed?" I asked, again gesturing to the pair behind the blanket. "And hath not my husband already lowered himself?" Fride was barely fourteen years old and Leofric nearly forty. The girl knew nothing beyond Coventry's fields and farms; my husband was the confidant of kings and the leader of armies; armies that had laid waste whole villages, had left for dead mothers and babes.
"Men may have their way with poor lasses, madam," Ædre told me now. "'Tis the same as ever it has been. But—"
"But this shall be an end to it. These jewels will take care of the babe, better far than any father in this village could."
"We are to keep these, then?"
I was, of a sudden, angry—at the woman's thick peasant's face, at the way she continued to question her good fortune. And yes, at the picture this place had brought back: my Nayla, her lips wine-dark, her skin as white as the christening dress in which she was buried. "Do what you will with the stones," I snapped. "You may feed them to this chicken, for all I care." I stumbled over the fowl's plump body and strode to the door. "I will not come again." Leofric had been right, after all—this house, this babe, were nothing to me.
Still wrapped in the tattered garment my poor host had lent me, I set off on Felicity once more. I confess I hardly watched where I rode or cared who looked on us. The passion that had sustained me during my ride to town succumbed now to an exhaustion that overwhelmed my body and spirit. My horse walked on without my lifting the reins or digging my heels in her sides. As I yielded to an old sorrow, Felicity picked her way down the hill on which the village sat and headed toward the river Cune. I saw nothing around us, only Nayla's curled hands, her small body, the coffin fit for a doll. That tiny box had been covered over with a single shovelful of earth. In one stroke, my girl vanished, my daughter, my hope.
I already knew, then, what it was to lose everything at once. Perhaps this is why that very morning I had willingly left all I owned behind. When I told him what I planned, Leofric had refused to own the babe and bade me bring no thing of his to Fride's house.
"I shall not be part of this madness." My husband's color always rose when he was ill at ease. Now, despite his righteous words, his face and neck were all aflame. "You shall not drag me and my good name to perdition for your woman's pride."
"Forgive me, my lord," I had told him. "You mistake me. My mission in Coventry is not to punish, but to atone."
"'Mission'?" he had thundered. "'Atone'?" He followed me to my chambers, and there set his mighty frame against the door to block my way. "You sound like a very nun! Who are you to mount a mission on my behalf? To proclaim my guilt when I my self have not done so?"
"You have not denied it, sire." Nor can you, I might have added. I knew full well where he went when I turned him from my bed, when Nayla's cloud eyes haunted me and I dared not risk another babe.
"I have no need to account to gossips for my conduct."
I searched the countenance I knew as well as my own. "If not to gossips, Leofric," I asked, "then why not to your wife?"
He did not answer but, shamed, turned aside to let me pass. "Take naught of mine," he ordered as I pulled fast my chamber door. Not content with this, he pounded on the door until it shook and set to bellowing again. "Take naught of mine, I tell you. If you go, you go without my blessing or my purse."
He had thought sure to thwart me in this way, but my temper got the best of me. I opened the door when I should have bolted it, and I made a promise when I should have kept silent. "My liege,"