Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [303]
“Have you considered the prospect of making a new alliance?” he asked.
She smiled.
“Marriage you mean? I suppose so?”
He smiled with self-satisfaction. “I’ve a candidate. A fine catch.” He blew out his cheeks complacently.
“Really? Already?” She could not help laughing. “Who?”
“A knight with a splendid estate.” He paused for effect. “Jocelin de Godefroi. He is most interested.”
For Jocelin de Godefroi, at the age of fifty-seven, had emerged from his grief at the loss of his son to the realisation that he must begin his life again – not for himself, but for his little grandson.
“The boy’s three,” he considered as he looked at the child his son had left behind. “If I can live seventeen years, he’ll be twenty. Just about able to fend for himself.” But could he do it? In seventeen years he would be seventy-four, and few men reached such an age at that time. He still had his health though: he must try. But as he gazed at the child, he knew something else was missing. “The child needs a mother and this place needs a woman,” he decided. “I must find a wife.”
And so he allowed the fact to be known and waited to see what happened. It was not long before Le Portier approached him.
The idea of the Le Portier girl attracted him – not a noble family admittedly, but respectable enough; besides, she’d been the wife of Geoffrey de Whiteheath for twenty years and she knew about managing an estate. And she was only thirty-six. As he thought about it, for the first time in many weeks his face broke into a smile.
Perhaps he could give her a child! He certainly felt capable of it.
“I’ve two estates after all,” he considered. “I could leave one to my grandson Roger and the other to the child, if it’s a boy.” And so he sent for Walter and told him: “Bring her here to take a look at me.” And he made preparations.
Alicia was standing at the corner of the market place, by Blue Boar Row, when Peter Shockley saw her. He stood quite still, staring at her, hardly able to believe that it was she. He had been out at the Shockley farm where his father now liked to spend the summer and had not been in the city for several days. He had known nothing about either the death of her husband or her own return. In a few long strides, he was in front of her.
“You have not changed.” He smiled down at her.
Alicia started. She had almost forgotten him. No one had been further from her mind at that moment – she was sure of it. But there he was, a little stouter, but a remarkably good-looking man, she could not help admitting.
It only took him a few moments to learn her story; and also the fact that she was going to see Godefroi that very day.
“He’s looking for a wife,” he said thoughtfully.
She smiled. “I know.” And then, rather to her own surprise she heard herself say, as she gazed straight into his blue eyes:
“But perhaps he won’t find one.”
The courtship of Peter Shockley took one week.
He had told himself that he had not been waiting for her twenty years: it was surprising to him now how comfortably that lie fell away. He found a sense of joy and excitement that he had forgotten suddenly awaken now in her presence; and when on the third day he took her hand and drew her to him in a kiss, it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
“It’s as though we’d always been together,” he said simply.
“I know,” she replied.
But it was not the truth. For her, their meeting had not been – as it was for Peter – an act of fate. And the idea of marrying Shockley had not really occurred to her until later that day, when she had been eagerly ushered by her brother into the great hall at Avonsford and seen the perfectly preserved knight, his grey hair carefully curled with heated tongs, advancing towards her. He was old. In his eye, she saw at once, was a sadness. She had known both before.
“My answer is no,” she told Walter afterwards, to his great distress.
It was nothing to his distress a week later when she announced that she would marry