Laurie Grant - My Lady Midnight

“Le Gros, I think it’s time you left the hall—alone.”

None of them had noticed the other man’s approach, but now Haesel looked up to see Lord Alain’s squire, Verel, standing behind Hugh.

“What do I care what ye think, ye young pup? Go dry yerself off behind the ears,” Le Gros said with a rude guffaw, but his eyes narrowed dangerously and his hand balled up in a fist.

“Come now, Le Gros, you don’t want to get yourself banned from the hall by swinging at me, do you?” Verel asked reasonably. “Just take yourself off, and bother this woman no more. I’m sure there’s at least one other female within these walls that likes your sort of man.”

Le Gros continued to glare at the young squire for an endless moment, but when the seneschal drew nearer, Le Gros looked away and lurched unsteadily to his feet.

“Meddling young pup!” grumbled Hugh, the wine he’d consumed nearly causing him to fall against Claire as he got up from the bench. “Ye’re makin’ a pother about naught.”

“Ye’ll think it’s naught if my lord turns ye out of the castle for your roistering ways!” Annis hurled the words at him. “I know very well ye’ve been warned about yer manners at table—aye, and yer lechery too—before. Now ye’ll just leave Haesel alone, Hugh le Gros, or ye’ll answer to me as well as Verel. Do ye hear me, ye fat Norman popinjay?”

His mumbled answer, as he staggered off, was a series of Norman-French obscenities that Claire remembered just in time she wasn’t supposed to understand.

“He’ll leave ye alone now, I trow. I fancy he be afraid o’ me,” Annis boasted with a smirk.

Claire saw the squire’s mouth turn up in amusement.

“Thank ye,” Claire said, “thank ye both. I—I’m grateful.”

“You’re very welcome,” Verel said, bowing, then smiling at her. “Actually you’ve done me a service. ’Tis not good for a squire to go a day without a chivalrous deed.”

“And this was yer chivalrous deed?” Claire asked, smiling back. She liked the young squire. He was as sunny and amiable as Lord Alain was suspicious.

Just then she saw the children jump down from the dais and run to her, sweet wafers in hand.

“We’ve done eating, Haesel, have you?” Peronelle asked. “It’s not quite dark yet—please, let’s go into the bailey garden and play hoodman blind for a little while!” she begged. Guerin seconded his sister’s pleas. Nothing in their eager faces gave any indication they had even been aware of the moments of tension that had just passed.

“Will yer lord father mind?”

“Oh, no, Haesel!” Guerin said. “Ivy always lets us— let us—” he corrected himself soberly, “play outside after supper in summer if the weather was fine.”

Lord Alain strode out of the northwest bartizan, one of two turrets that projected out over the inner curtain wall on either side of the main gatehouse, and onto the catwalk, leaving behind a sullen Hugh le Gros. He narrowed his eyes against the setting sun as he leaned on a merlon to gaze out at the deepening shadows spreading over the wood beyond the south wall, conscious of an irritability that would rob him of sleep if he did not rid himself of it.

He had already been angry at himself for the number of stolen glances he’d taken in the direction of the table to which Haesel had gone. By the rood, the woman was naught but a serf, and yet he could not avoid looking at her, as if he were some moon-mazed peasant! He was careful to look, of course, only when he could be sure she would not notice his eyes upon her. It would not do to give the girl jumped-up ideas about herself.

He had become furious with himself, however, for noticing that the burly Norman man-at-arms had been attempting to woo the new nursemaid throughout supper, let alone for caring enough to come to the guard tower to deliver a stern warning to Hugh that he was to leave Haesel strictly alone. Saints, what was it to him?

It was not as if he wanted the girl to warm his bed! Gylda took care of his needs very skillfully when it suited him. And since he more often went to her modest but comfortable wattle-and-daub cottage at the base of the castle’s outer curtain, rather than summoning her to his own bed, he had the added advantage of being able to leave when he wanted to. He suspected the auburn-haired Gylda was just as content with the arrangement; it left her more free to take other lovers when her lord was occupied elsewhere, a possibility that had never bothered him in the least.

Peste! He had no need to covet the girl’s body, so why was he feeling so prickly after watching Hugh flirting with, then trying to fondle Haesel?

It was useless to tell himself that he cared only that a female within his walls be safe from any male attentions she did not want, or that his children be cared for by a woman who was not being distracted by a lecher’s flattery, for even he had recognized the spark of rage that had threatened to grow to a flame as he watched the soldier drooling on her neck. He had wanted to jump over the high table and drag Hugh out of the great hall by the collar of his jerkin, and beat him to a senseless mass of bruises in the bailey!

Just then he heard the sound of children’s laughter in the bailey behind him, and, turning away from the orange ball of the sun sinking below the tree line, he peered out into the open area that surrounded the keep from behind the concealing battlement.

Below, Peronelle and Guerin were turning a blindfolded Haesel round and round. As he watched, they released her, shrieking with laughter as the English girl reeled about like a drunken alewife, her slender arms outstretched in an effort to catch them as they circled her. He could hear her calling out dire threats of what she would do if she caught them, which only made them giggle all the more.

At last, however, his daughter ventured too close to the seeking hands and she was seized by the sleeve of her kirtle and reeled in, screeching protests, into Haesel’s arms, where Peronelle was very thoroughly tickled.

He felt a grin replacing the tightness of his face. Perry certainly appeared to be enjoying herself. In a moment, before the tickles could become bothersome, they turned into a hug. Then Haesel bent and kissed his daughter’s dark head.

He felt his heart warm at the affectionate gesture, which seemed to come as naturally to Haesel as breathing. As Alain continued to watch, he became aware of Guerin standing on the periphery of the hug, looking wistful, envying his sibling the embrace but not wanting to act less than manly by asking for it. Just then it seemed as if Haesel became aware of Guerin too, for she raised her head from Peronelle’s and beckoned with her hand.

Lord Alain watched, enchanted, as both children were enveloped in the English girl’s embrace.

Unused to sleeping on a lumpy, straw-filled pallet, Claire lay awake long after the children’s soft, regular breathing told her they slept. She lay between Guerin’s bed and the truckle bed on which Peronelle slumbered.

Ah, well, a humble English nursemaid couldn’t very well expect a soft feather bed on a rope frame, fine linen and a coverlet of soft furs, could she? If she were really Haesel, bedding like this would have been her lifelong lot, not just during the short interval she would be residing in Hawkswell Castle! Since Ivy had used this pallet before she died, Claire hoped she had been a clean woman and had not left it infested with lice.

After dismissing that thought with a shudder, however, she was just about to fall asleep when all at once she remembered Ivo and Jean. She had been so immersed in settling in that she had forgotten all about the two men who had been taken prisoner! She sat bolt upright in the darkness. Had they been tortured to discover why they had been near the castle? Lord Alain had said they were to put in “that locked room below the cellar.” Were they lying right this moment in some cold, dank cell beneath the ground, their bodies broken and racked with agony? It was common to torture prisoners to extract information.