Page 37 of The Captive Knight
The realization returned a small portion of his sanity. He drew away from her mouth and buried his face in her hair, trying to do what was right while breathing in the green-field scent of new-cut clover in her hair.
His heart was still pounding in his ears when she pressed away from his chest to look up at him.
“Youarea good man,” she whispered.
Her dawning smile stole from him the power of speech.
“I’d hoped this was why you wanted to talk to me alone.” A soft laugh slipped from her lips. “It’s the only solution, isn’t it? The castle, the lands, and the title of Viscount of Tournan will be yours without question, once we’re married.”
***
When Aliénor was young and ill-supervised, when the castle swarmed with more people than now, she used to chase her brothers up to the ramparts as the broiling heat of the summer triggered violent thunderstorms. She and Bertrand and Gaston would race back and forth, opening their mouths to the sky, crying out as thunder shuddered the stones. She adored the noise and the roar and the soaking, and mourned when it all ended, left with nothing but the ghost of forked lightning against the inside of her eyelids.
Hope was like that. It roared and crackled and filled her with excitement before it crashed and burned to ashes.
Through the blur of new tears, she could still see the ghost of her hope reflected in Jehan’s eyes. She drew away, her feet scraping against the dried rushes, removing herself from his physical presence while burying her emotions in some back chamber of her heart.
How could she have been so wrong? He said he would not send her to a convent. He’d given Thibaud full access to the castle without restriction. And now he’d promised to treat Laurent with the same respect.
And he’dkissedher.
She pressed a hand against her swollen, tender lips, not from pain but from all-too-sweet memory. A numbness streamed through her body. Her experience with men was thin, admittedly, but hadn’t she been witness to enough kitchen-talk to know that all kisses didn’t feel like this? For most men, she’d been told, kissing was a matter of slobbering and pawing. Then she remembered he’d pulled away—though she’d been tugging on the doublet laces to remove what was left of his clothing.
“It is true then,” she blurted on a breath. “I’m cursed.”
“Aliénor…”
He stood as still as a stone statue in some bishopric church, so she turned her back to him. It had been all but impossible to keep her mind on their conversation before, when he stood before her with his doublet open, showing the hard planes of his chest. She could not look at him so undone now, when shame was creeping over her, when all hope for an honorable future was lost.
“If not wife,” she said, as she summoned what pride she had left, “then what would I be?”
“You’ll be the keeper of this castle.”
“Chatelaine,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I already am chatelaine.”
“A fine one, turning around an army-scourged fortress within a day—”
“My father made me chatelaine,” she added. “He kept me here, little more than a servant, while he marched off to war, while my prospects grew ever shorter with the years.” Until now, when there were no prospects at all. “And when you take a wife and bring her here, Jehan, what will happen to this poor penniless chatelaine? Shall I serve your wife, too?”
She waited for his answer in silence broken only by her breathing. On the floor by the wall splayed his armor, gleaming dimly. Arm braces, metal shoes, the dark glimmer of chain mail. She looked at her hands and saw them covered with the white fur she’d pulled from the tippet of her surcoat.
A scraping in the rushes alerted her to his approach. She tensed as a warm weight lifted from her shoulders. By the gentle tugs she felt against her scalp, he was holding her hair, combing it with his fingers.
Like a child.
“In all my years in the prince’s court,” he said, “among the prince’s courtiers, their sisters, their daughters, and their educated wives, I have never met a woman quite like you, Aliénor.”
She stared blindly into the moonlight pouring over her through the arrow-slit window, warning herself against soaking up his words.
“Even in the cell, when I was beaten and bloody and full of vengeance, you looked me straight in the eye. And when I found you in the courtyard, after the army overran this castle, you didn’t beg or cry or wail but faced me like a knight determined to stand his ground.”
Foolish courage, she thought. Fruitless defiance was her only bulwark against a fate over which she had no control.
“Everything you do, everything you say,” he continued, “begs for me to tell you the truth, as harsh as it may be, so you can prepare and not be surprised by something worse. Your courage makes it very hard for me to save you from…”
