Susan Wiggs - The Mistress of Normandy

She shrugged. “I probably would have missed anyway. My aim is imprecise, the weapon passing crude.”

Like a parent wiping away a child’s tear, he daubed the delicate flesh beneath her left eye. “Your eyes are silver, pucelle.”

“Gray.”

“Silver, like the underside of a cloud at dawn.”

“Gray, like the stone walls of a keep during a siege.”

“Argue not, pucelle. I’ve a sense about such things. Stone does not capture the light and reflect it, while your eyes—” he cleansed beneath her right one “—most assuredly do.”

* * *

Bit by bit, Rand uncovered the face beneath the soot. As he worked, his amazement and fascination grew like a bud warmed by the sun. He’d come to survey the area for brigands and have a glimpse of his barony. Instead he’d found a beautiful girl and a deadly weapon, two surprises and one of them curiously welcome.

Moving aside a pale lock of hair, he brushed the last of the soot from her cheeks. Black dust clung stubbornly to her brows and lashes, but at last her face was revealed to him. The cloth dropped from his fingers as he stared.

Sitting in the nest of her blue homespun surcoat, she stared back with huge, unblinking silver eyes. Her face was a delicate, pale oval shaped by fragile bones and small, fine features. Despite a lingering shadow of soot, he could discern that her skin was the ivory of a lily, with the shade of apple blossoms at her cheeks and lips. His body quickened at the sight.

An unexpected thunderbolt of awareness struck him. He desired this girl; he burned for her with a yearning Jussie had never aroused. Calling up all the strength of his vow of chastity, he resisted the idea that they were alone, unchaperoned, far from anyone else.

It was not so much her maidenly beauty that called to him, but the expressiveness in her features. Her eyes held a deep intelligence yet seemed haunted by shadows in their silver depths. Her mouth was full and firm, yet the way she worried her lower lip with her small white teeth hinted at vulnerability.

Years of celibacy faded beneath the onslaught of vivid desire. Rand laid his big hands on her cheeks, letting his thumbs skim in slow, gentle circles. “I’ve never seen a face like yours before, Lianna,” he said softly. “At least not while I was awake.”

Alarm flared in her quicksilver eyes. She drew back. “You are not from around here. You speak like a Gascon.”

He smiled. His father’s legacy. “So I am a Gascon, at least part of me is. And you are from around here. You speak like a Norman.”

“Are you a brigand? Do you burn, pillage, and rape?”

He chuckled. “Preferably not in that order. Are you a poacher?”

She stiffened. “Certainly not. I’ve every right to hunt the lands of Bois-Long.”

Suspicion shot through Rand. “You hail from Bois-Long?”

“I do.”

Sweet lamb of God, Rand mused, she’s from Longwood. He had to duck his head to hide a flash of curiosity. A gunner’s daughter, she’d said, yet she’d have to be of noble birth to hunt. Despite her homespun garb, her speech and manners marked her as no one’s servant.

“Your father was a gunner,” he said slowly. “Was he also a man of rank?”

“No.” She eyed him warily.

“You’re well spoken.”

“I am well schooled.”

“What position do you hold at Bois-Long?”

“I am...companion to the chatelaine.”

He nodded. “I see. It’s common enough for a gentlewoman to surround herself with younger girls, common for those girls to learn polite accomplishments.” One eyebrow lifted. “Gunnery is hardly a polite accomplishment.”

“But far more useful than spinning and sewing.”

“And far more dangerous. Does your mistress know of your experiments with guns?”

A small, tight smile. “Certes.”

“She approves?”

A regal nod. “Most heartily.”

Rand loosed a long, weary sigh. What manner of woman was his bride-to-be that she’d let this girl, clearly little older than a child, dabble in weaponry?

Lianna was staring hard at him. He sensed his questions had aroused her suspicions and so left off his queries. Instinctively he’d kept his identity from the girl. Now he was glad. Soon enough she’d learn he was Enguerrand Fitzmarc, the English knight come to claim the demoiselle and the château. Until then he merely wanted to be Rand to her.

“You’re trespassing,” she said matter-of-factly, pointing to a line of blazed poplars in the distance.

“So I am,” he replied, looking at the boundary of trees. He took her hand and helped her to her feet. Her hand felt small but strong and seemed to fit his own like a warm little bird in a nest.

“Come,” he said, “I want to be certain your gunshot didn’t frighten my horse all the way to Gascony.” Dropping her hand, he bent to retrieve her cloak and apron. The weight of the apron surprised him. He peered into the pocket, then stared at Lianna. “I don’t know why I expected to find winter stonecrop blossoms in here,” he said. “You’re a walking arsenal.”

She picked up her gun and stood while he tied the apron at her waist and draped the cloak about her shoulders. He let his hands linger there. “Your mistress is wrong to allow you to venture forth with a gun.” Silently he swore to stop Lianna once he took possession of the castle.

“My mistress understands the necessity of it.”

“Necessity?”

Her little wooden sabots kicked up her hem as she walked by his side. “We’ve had no peace since Edward the Third crossed the leopards of England with the lilies of France.”

What a curious mixture of innocence and worldliness she was. At once fragile, forceful, and forthright, she awakened powerful desires in him. She looked like a girl immortalized in a troubadour’s lay, yet her behavior contradicted the image. Jussie, he recalled, had never concerned herself with affairs of state.

“France is more at war with herself than with England,” he said. “King Charles is drooling mad, and the noble houses bicker like fishwives while the peasants starve.”

“And will subjecting ourselves to Henry’s usurpation improve our lot?”

“Better a sane Englishman than a mad Frenchman on the throne,” Rand said.

She stopped walking, whirled to face him. “Under whose banner will you fight? What cause do you champion?”

He swallowed, then affected a rakish grin. “Widows and orphans, of course.”

She sniffed. “A convenient reply.”

Discussing intelligent subjects with a woman, he thought, was not altogether unpleasant. “You speak ably of affairs that most men know nothing of.”

“I’m not one to hide myself away and pretend ignorance. ’Tis exactly what the English god-dons would like, and I’ll not oblige them.”

It’s not what every English god-don would like, he thought, watching the sunlight dance in the silvery mantle of her hair.

They found his horse grazing placidly on salt grass in a glade of water beeches. Nearby stood a weathered stone marker, its four arms of equal length marking it as St. Cuthbert’s cross. The horse looked up, ears pricked. His dappled flanks gleamed in the heatless light of the March sun.

Lianna stopped walking to stare at the hard-muscled percheron, then at Rand. “I think you should explain who you are,” she said. Her gaze slipped from the top of his blond head to the spurs on his mud-caked boots. “You are simply dressed, yet that horse of yours is no plowman’s rouncy.”

Inwardly he winced at the distrust in her tone. She was too straightforward to be easily deceived. “Charbu was a gift.” His hand strayed to the lump created by the amulet beneath his mail shirt. Henry had given him Charbu as one of many gifts and another thread in the web of obligation he’d woven around Rand.