Fairest of Them All Page 2

  “It appears I’ve overstayed my welcome. Good day, my lord,” he said, drawing his cloak around his narrow shoulders. His eyes caressed Holly’s face in unspoken challenge as he snapped open a silver brooch and secured his cloak with a vicious stab. “Till we meet again, my lady.”

  After he had departed, his minstrel dragging at his heels like a chastened pup, a shroud of appalled silence fell over the solar. Holly eased from her seat as if an economy of movement could somehow render her invisible.

  “Sit!” her papa barked.

  Holly sat. Elspeth edged toward the lancet window. If her father hadn’t replaced the ancient wooden shutters with colored glass the previous spring, Holly was convinced her nurse would be perched on the ledge.

  The earl paced to the hearth, bracing his splayed hands against its stone hood. He rocked lightly on his heels, as if even unmounted he could feel the rhythm of the countless steeds that had bandied his squat legs.

  Holly considered bursting into tears, but quickly dismissed the notion. The merest hint of moisture in her limpid blue eyes had been known to drop both knaves and princes to their knees, but her father hadn’t lived with her for eighteen years without learning to resist such ploys.

  When she could bear his unspoken reproach no longer, she wailed, “He said I had ears like a rabbit!”

  Those ears rang as her father swung around and roared, “Montfort has the king’s favor. He can say you have ears like a jackass if it so pleases him!”

  “And we all know how he curried His Majesty’s favor, don’t we? By overtaxing his poor villeins. By purchasing rotten foodstuffs for their tables and barren seed for their fields. By outlawing their precious feast days and spending the profit to buy the king’s ear.”

  Realizing too late that her ire was a match for his own, her papa raised a placating hand. “That does not mean he would make you a poor husband.”

  “He made that unfortunate heiress he married a rather poor husband. Especially if you recall that the child tumbled out a tower window only hours before my eighteenth birthday. Are you that eager to see me wed?”

  He rubbed the top of his head, ruffling his sparse hair. “Aye, child, I am. Most girls your age are long wedded and bedded, with two or three babes at the hearth and another on the way. What are you waiting for, Holly? I’ve given you over a year to choose your mate. Yet you mock my patience just as you mock the blessing of beauty our good Lord gave you.”

  She rose from the bench, gathering the skirts of her brocaded cotehardie to sweep across the stone floor. “Blessing! ’Tis not a blessing, but a curse!” Contempt thickened her voice. “ ‘Holly, don’t venture out in the sun. You’ll taint your complexion.’ ‘Holly, don’t forget your gloves lest you crack a fingernail.’ ‘Holly, don’t laugh too loud. You’ll strain your throat.’ The men flock to Tewksbury to fawn and scrape over the musical timbre of my voice, yet no one listens to a word I’m saying. They praise the hue of my eyes, but never look into them. They see only my alabaster complexion!” She gave a strand of her hair an angry tug only to have it spring back into a flawless curl. “My raven tresses!” Framing her breasts in her hands, she hefted their generous weight. “My plump, tempting—” Remembering too late who she was addressing, she knotted her hands over her gold-linked girdle and inclined her head, blushing furiously.

  The earl might have been tempted to laugh had his daughter’s tirade not underscored his terrible dilemma. Holly serene was a sight to behold, but Holly in a fit of passion could drive sane men to madness. Not even fury could mar the angelic radiance of her profile. Her black hair tumbled down her slender back like a nimbus of storm clouds. His heart was seized by the familiar twin pangs of wonder and terror. Wonder that such an exquisite creature could have sprang from the loins of a homely little troll like himself. Terror that he would prove unworthy of such a charge.

  He bowed his head, battling the pained bewilderment that still blamed Felicia for dying and leaving the precocious toddler to his care. Holly had passed directly from enchanting child with dimpled knees and tumbled curls to the willowy grace of a woman grown, suffering none of the gawkiness that so frequently plagued girls in their middle years.

  Now she was rumored to be the fairest lady in all of England, all of Normandy, perhaps in all the world. Strangers came from leagues away in the vain hope of catching a glimpse of her, but he allowed only the wealthiest, most reputable noblemen the boon of an audience. ’Twas not concern for her complexion that kept her locked within the castle walls, but his deep and abiding fear of abduction. His secret conviction was that some man would carry her away and defile her innocence without troubling to obtain the rightful blessing of both he and his God.

  The obsession gnawed at him until he awoke in the still, dark hours between dusk and dawn, reeking of stale sweat and quaking like an old man in his bed. He was an old man, he reminded himself without pity. Nearly fifty. His bones creaked in complaint when he mounted his destrier. Old wounds earned battling both Scots and Welsh in the king’s defense throbbed a dirge at the approach of rain. He’d done as well as he knew how by his only daughter. ’Twas past time for him to relinquish the burden to another man. Before he grew too feeble to stand between her and the avaricious world clamoring outside the castle walls.

  “I’ve arranged for a tournament,” he said without preamble.

  Holly jerked her head up. Tournaments were common enough affairs, she thought. An opportunity for knights and noblemen to flex their brawny arms and secretly compare the size of their swords. So why had a gauntlet of foreboding closed steely fingers around her heart?

  “A tournament?” she said lightly. “And what shall be the prize this time? A kerchief perfumed with my favorite scent? The chance to drink mulled wine from the toe of my shoe? A nightingale’s song from my swanlike throat?”

  “You. You’re to be the prize.”

  Holly felt the roses in her cheeks wither and die. She gazed down into her father’s careworn face, finding his gravity more distressing than his anger. She towered over him by several inches, but the mantle of majesty he had worn to shield him from life’s arrows since the death of his beloved wife added more than inches to his stature.

  “But, Papa, I—”

  “Silence!” He seemed to have lost all tolerance for her pleas. “I promised your mother on her deathbed that you would marry and marry you shall. Within the fortnight. If you’ve a quarrel with my judgment, you may retreat to a nunnery where they will teach you gratitude for the blessings God has bestowed upon you.”

  His bobbing gait was less sprightly than usual as he left Holly to contemplate the sentence he’d pronounced.

  “A nunnery?” she echoed, drifting toward the window.

  “No one would gawk at ye there, my lady.” Elspeth emerged from her own self-imposed exile, her hawkish features softened by concern. “Ye could cover yer fine hair with a wimple and take a vow of silence so ye’d never have to sing at someone else’s bidding.”

  Dire heaviness weighted Holly’s heart. A nunnery. Forbidding stone walls more unscalable than those that imprisoned her now. Not a retreat, but a dungeon where all of her unspoken dreams of rolling meadows and azure skies would rot to dust.

  Sinking to her knees in the stone seat, Holly unlatched the window, gazing beyond the iron grille to the outer bailey where the quadrangles of her father’s lists lay like a lush green chessboard. Soon warriors bearing their family standards would come pouring into those grassy battlegrounds, each prepared to lay down his life for nothing more than a chance to offer her his name and protection. But would any one of them dare to offer her his heart?

  What are you waiting for, Holly? her papa had asked.

  Her gaze was drawn west toward the impenetrable tangle of forest and craggy dark peaks of the Welsh mountains. A fragrant breath of spring swept through her, sharpening her nameless yearning. Genuine tears pricked her eyelids.

  “Oh, Elspeth. What am I waiting for?”

  As Elspeth
stroked the crown of her head, Holly longed to sniffle and wail. But she could only cry as she’d been taught, each tear trickling like a flawless diamond down the burnished pearl of her cheek.

  “A comely wife is a pox upon her husband’s fortunes,” Sir Austyn of Gavenmore called over his shoulder as his destrier’s blunt hooves tore grassy divots from turf dampened by a recent spring rain.

  Arguing philosophy with his man-at-arms gave him an excuse to steal a glance over his shoulder, something he’d been compelled to do with increasing frequency since leaving behind the sheltering bracken of the Welsh forest. He could ill appreciate the beauty of the verdant countryside while expecting an English arrow to pierce his hauberk and embed itself in his back with every breath.

  Carey drew alongside him, leading a string of pack horses and bearing the oaken staff from which the Gavenmore standard proudly rippled. A gust of wind molded its faded crimsons and greens to his face. He slapped it away, snorting harder than his piebald gelding. “Fie on you, Austyn! Would you rather bed an ugly woman than a comely one?”

  “Bedding and wedding are beasts with different backs. For the one, a man might tolerate fairness of form, but for the other, a plain girl of gentle disposition will prove a jewel in her husband’s crown. After all, ‘Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman that fearest her lord, she shall be praised.’ ”

  “Stop mangling the scriptures to bolster your cause. ’Tis ‘a woman that fearest the Lord.’ ” Carey’s voice dropped to a wary mutter. “Although if a Gavenmore is her lord, she’d do well to fear him.”

  Sawing at the reins to slow his horse to a walk, Austyn shot his companion a baleful glare. Over the past eight centuries, the notorious Gavenmore jealousy had provided fodder for scores of legends. His own grandfather had kept his grandmother imprisoned in a tower for ten years after she had dared to bestow a smile on a traveling jongleur. The fate of the unfortunate acrobat was never confirmed, although it was rumored in discreet whispers that his final performance was rope dancing of a more lethal nature for his appreciative host.

  “I’ve never lifted a hand to a woman,” he growled.

  “You’ve never married one either.” Carey was not intimidated by Austyn’s thunderous glares. He’d tolerated them since boyhood and had yet to feel the lash of threatened lightning. “Suppose this Tewksbury wench is as fair as they claim?”

  “Ha! No mortal woman could be as fair as they claim her to be. If she were why would her father be offering such an extravagant dowry? I’ll wager she has teeth like a horse and ears like a hare.” He added hopefully, “Coupled, of course, with the loyal disposition of a hunting hound.”

  Carey shrugged. “Perhaps she’s exceedingly fair, but possessed of a shrewish temperament or a fickle nature.”

  Austyn felt himself pale beneath his beard. His gauntleted hands flexed on the leather reins as if to warn him of the monstrous deeds they might commit should his bride prove less than constant.

  Let beauty be your doom.

  The damning indictment of the faerie queen Rhiannon, falsely accused of faithlessness by his Gavenmore ancestor, tolled in his ears. As he spurred his horse into a canter through a meadow dotted with purple heartsease, his gaze lifted to the parapets of the castle drifting in a haze of clouds on the far horizon.

  “Then God help us both,” he whispered, more to himself than to his man-at-arms. “For I intend to win her.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Holly paced the parapet walk outside her chamber. Greedy gusts of wind tore at her cloak and mocked the silver fillet she had slipped over her brow to tame her unruly hair. Her head felt swollen with unshed tears and the narrow band seemed to tighten with each step. She finally jerked it off and cast it into the night, letting her hair whip where it pleased.

  She had fled to the parapet to escape the excited chatter of the ladies-in-waiting her papa had summoned to attend her at tomorrow’s tournament. The former haven of her chamber now swarmed with a half dozen well-meaning aunts and a bevy of Tewksbury cousins, all flinching beneath the direction of Brother Nathanael at his most caustic.

  The spring wind was balmy, but the wintry pearl of a moon suspended in the north sky better reflected her mood. Pale stars frosted the canopy of the sky, their radiance dimmed by the greedy glow of the campfires scattered around the castle walls.

  The hillside was awash in a sea of colorful tents and fluttering pennons. Tomorrow at dawn, the drawbridge of Castle Tewksbury would be lowered, the portcullis raised, and the gates thrown wide to welcome all challengers, including the man who would claim her for both his prize and his bride before the day was done.

  Holly shivered as the wind carried a snatch of song and drunken revelry to her ears. She knew little more of men than she had a year ago when they’d began to woo her. Other than her suitors, her father had kept her cut off from masculine company, refusing to expose her to the smitten stares of scullion and groom. Her suitors showed her only their prettiest faces, but she had glimpsed the hunger lurking beneath their masques of courtesy when they thought she was paying them no heed—a sideways glance, a lowered gaze, a wetting of the lips as if in anticipation of sating their appetites at some dark and mysterious feast.

  She gripped the rough, familiar stone of the parapet to steady her hands. Tonight she’d only been cast from her chamber. Tomorrow she was to be exiled from the castle itself. She wished for the dubious comfort of blaming her father, but found she could not. Most marriages were arranged by ambitious fathers when their daughters were only babes. Her papa had given her ample opportunity to choose a husband, yet she had failed them both.

  The scattered fires winked at her, mocking her swelling panic. A distant rumble of masculine laughter sent a chill of despair shooting down her spine. Tomorrow she would be forever bound before God and man to a stranger. Tonight might be her last precious taste of freedom.

  Casting the candlelit window of her chamber a furtive glance, she drew up the hood of her cloak to shield her face and melted into the shadows of the outer stairs.

  “Oof. You’re standing in my ear.”

  “Sorry,” Austyn said, bracing his booted foot against Carey’s sleek head. “If you’d stop squirming, I might be able to get some purchase on the rope.”

  “You’d squirm, too,” Carey gritted out between clenched teeth, “if you had a full-grown ox standing on your shoulders. And it wasn’t you who took that nasty plunge off the raft and into the moat.” He wrinkled his nose at his own pungent scent. “I’ve little doubt now what the earl’s guards have been using it for. I found it far more offensive than defensive.”

  Austyn grunted in triumph as the far end of the rope sailed from his hands to hook itself over one of the sturdy stone teeth crowning the inner bailey wall. When he’d judged it competent to bear his weight, he began to shimmy up its length, leaving Carey to sink to his knees in the damp grass, panting for breath. The pale face and hair bequeathed to him a century ago by some rapacious Norse invader gleamed up at Austyn from the shadows.

  “This is madness, you know,” he offered earnestly when Austyn paused at the first slim arrow loop to assure himself that the raucous cacophony of drunken celebration and petty squabbling from the hillside encampment had muffled their trespass.

  A high-pitched giggle, unmistakably feminine, wafted to his ears. The Englishmen were wenching as if each of them were to take a wife on the morrow, Austyn thought. A full-fledged siege would have probably escaped their lecherous attentions. Remembering Carey’s supplicant posture just in time, he resisted the urge to spit in disgust.

  “Madness it may be,” he called down softly, “but I must judge this lady with mine own eyes.”

  “And if she is as fair as they say?”

  Austyn had no answer for that but to continue climbing.

  Carey scrambled to his feet, cupping a hand around his mouth to muffle his shout. “If you’re caught looming over the fair maiden’s bed without benefit of a priest’s blessing, you’ll be h
anged, you know.”

  Austyn swung one leg over the wall before gathering the end of the rope to drop it down the other side. “Then you may help yourself to my armor, my arms, and that sprightly little mare you’ve had your eye on for so long.”

  Carey clasped a hand over his heart. “Sir, in truth, your ill estimation of my devotion wounds me sorely!”

  “Then consider yourself fortunate.” Austyn’s crooked grin belied the gravity of his words. “We Gavenmores usually kill those we love.”

  Leaving his friend with a jaunty salute, he swung away from the wall and dropped into nothingness.

  Holly eased back the folds of her hood as she slipped into the walled sanctuary of her mother’s garden. The budding canopy of elm and oak muted the masculine clamor of voices from outside the castle walls. Even though her heart was heavy, the magical iridescence of the air possessed the power to lighten her step. Her throat tingled as she drank in a nourishing breath of it.

  Moonlight silvered the tender shoots prodding their way through the rich, black soil, demanding birth. Beads of dew trembled on the unfurling petals of sweet violet and primrose. Holly paused to bathe her finger in one of the plump droplets, tracing the curling edge of a leaf impatiently awaiting the kiss of dawn.

  A wistful sigh escaped her. She had been forbidden the pleasures of sunlight for fear it would mar her creamy complexion, but here in this garden, she became a creature of moonlight. Here she found the solitude denied her by the flock of chattering magpies her papa had appointed as ladies-in-waiting.

  As a little girl, she had skipped and jumped along the winding paths as any child would, trusting that the soft loam would cushion her knees without betraying her folly should she stumble.

  She wished she could recapture the delicious glee of scampering through the garden, the sense of freedom gained from being rid of prying eyes and expectations. Realizing with a pang of loss that this was the last time she would know such freedom, she sank into the broad wooden saddle of the swing dangling from the branch of a young elm.