Read Spider Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Savignac Castle

Late March, 1196

“Out with it, Bertran,” Mellisande de Savignac said. “I can’t bear watching you squirm any longer.” Honestly, the man was behaving like a boy fidgeting outside the confessional. It wasn’t a good sign.

Her ward, Sir Bertran de Born, baron of Hautefort, grimaced, then half smiled, “You mustn’t be so…so direct, Mellisande, it’s not genteel.”

What? Bertran’s concept of gentility was a notorious slave to his convenience. Picking on her manners was going too far, even for him. She looked away, fighting the temptation for an acid response.

The evening meal had ended and they sat in relative privacy by the hearth amid the clatter and bustle of post-dinner cleanup. Bertran had spent the past quarter hour picking out unfinished tunes on her lute. It had begun to feel like he was plucking at her nerves. Something was definitely amiss and if he didn’t explain himself soon she’d drag it out of him, gentility be damned.

She blew at a wisp of pale hair floating about her face. Bertran winced again. Yes, yes. He didn’t like her way of looking vaguely untidy, never altogether sleeked down or finished. Or at least he claimed he didn’t.

“If I hadn’t learned to be direct, this place would have gone to rot. It’s bad enough as it is.”

She gave a pointed glance at the musician’s gallery with its smashed balustrade, the result of an artistic dispute between her late husband, Henri, and a viol player. And there, far down the hall Pepin, the man who should have fixed it over year ago, had one shoulder against the wall, tracing a finger down a kitchen girl’s arm. The girl jerked away, stalking towards a group of older women.

Pepin looked up, caught his mistress’s gaze upon him, and oozed away from the wall with the hint of a shrug. Her eyes narrowed and she felt her lips tighten. Pepin flashed a servile smirk and scurried from the hall.

Anger rose in her and she jerked her gaze back to Bertran who, this time, positively wriggled in his chair. “You are definitely up to something,” she accused. “Out with it.”

De Born took a breath and looked up from the lute, brown eyes wary. “I have a message from King Richard,” he said.

It was as though a trap sprang shut around her. A message from the king could mean only one thing. She covered her face with her palms then lowered her hands to skewer de Born. “It’s another bloody husband, isn’t it?”

No, no, no. It was too soon. In fact, no husband ever again would be perfect. She’d only had a year and a half of freedom from a husband’s tyranny.

De Born, the coward, would not look at her. “Yes, my dear,” he said, “but…”

“What’s the life expectancy of this one,” she cut in. She supposed Bertran didn’t think women should interrupt, either, but at the moment she didn’t care.

He gave up all pretense of playing her lute and sat back in his chair. “Don’t be cruel,” he said. “As a matter of fact, he’s survived quite well all these years, though he had some bad luck recently.”

“Of course he did,” she snapped, rising from her chair to stand facing the fire, hands knotted behind her back. “He’s going to marry me. I hope he goes to Mass regularly. I’ve buried two husbands. He’ll need daily absolution unless I find a way out of this.” And just what did ‘all these years’ mean? Dear God, what if he was some gray-headed dotard?

“Well,” Bertran said in his most careful tone, “in point of fact, you won’t be getting out of it.” The finality in Bertran’s voice spun her to face him. “You are already married.”

“I am what?” she demanded, and saw de Born shrink a little in his chair. At least he had the grace to quail.

Bertran’s tone firmed. “I gave Richard your consent last week. The charter has already been signed. You are Sir John FitzAlan’s wife.”

And that, his expression said, was that: finished, complete, his errand done. He had the absolute gall to look pleased with himself.

“You gave…Holy God, Bertran, what of my right? My choice?”

She struggled to think. She could fight the marriage. By canon law, her freely given consent was needed. Without it, there was no marriage. She bit her lower lip.

Bertran’s expression went cold. “Don’t be foolish, Madame,” he said quietly.

She jerked away from his gaze, hating him in that moment. Hating him because he was right. She could fight the marriage, and even win, though it would be a shallow victory. The outcome would be the same, win or lose. She had exactly one choice; the husband or the convent. Life at her beloved estate, or the penitential poverty that was the fate of rebellious women, canon law be damned.

Her head dropped back of its own will and she found herself staring at the dark exposed beams of the hall roof until tears blurred her vision. “Where does this fellow come from?” she demanded. “FitzAlan is a Norman name. My people don’t like Norman ways.” And neither did Bertran, damn him. He was willing enough to mock them in his poetry, so why saddle her with one?

“Ah, my darling, my beauty.” Bertran came to put warm arms around her and pull her close. “I had to step in,” he said, his lips against her hair. “I found out Richard was getting pressure and promises of loyalty from the Viscount of Limoges. He had in mind marrying you to the Count’s pompous son. He’s another Henri. Did you want to bed him and bear his children?”

She burrowed her face against his chest. “I don’t want to have to bed anyone.”

“Nonsense, girl, you’re too much woman for that. I’ve seen you look at the knights. You’ve had some bad luck, but it’s time to move on.”

Move on to what? To some stranger who would control her life and her body with no regard for either one? The year and a half without Henri’s cruelties and ineffective rutting had been like drinking the finest wine: layered, complicated, no two sips exactly alike, richly satisfying. She never thought to reach the dregs of that cask and now it was gone, snatched from her hands and poured onto the ground as though in penance because she had dared to enjoy it. The wine of freedom was for men.

“Are you listening to me?” Bertran demanded.

She gripped his arms above the elbows. Though he had long since turned gray, Bertran felt hard as a piece of iron and, as she knew, in some respects no more yielding. She lifted her head to stare gravely at him, then gave him a little shake.

“Bertran, don’t you know what they call me, down in the village? The White Spider because they say I kill my mates. Two dead husbands isn’t ‘bad luck.’ When Henri died in bed the way he did, I thought the people would lynch me.”

She shuddered at the memory of the frightened, angry people who had lined the narrow, twisting road from the castle down to the village that dark night. Word of Henri’s death had spread as though carried on the wind. By the time the cart containing his body came down the hill, they were all there, muttering and pointing, the bolder among them making the sign against the evil eye where she could see it. The harsh breeze had flattened the flames of their torches, whipping past her as though the fire recognized its intended victim

She’d walked behind the death cart wrapped in her cloak, in the hope her shivering would be thought the fault of the late October cold, her tears grief, and not the sheer terror she felt at the pressing menace of the peasants who crowded the track. It was the night before All Souls Day, when the dead were said to walk to the earth, and some of the people cried out that they saw Henri’s ghost pointing at her, accusing her.

“Virgin’s Tits,” Bertran snorted, “what do you expect from ignorant peasants? They are jealous because you are two and thirty and still have your looks.” He caressed her head. “You have hair the color of moonlight and the body of a maiden.”

How like Bertran to think a woman’s looks outweighed any other consideration. “They probably blame that on witchcraft,” she muttered, “God knows that’s what they thought when Henri died.”

But Bertran had not been there, so he could not know her sheer relief when at last her senior vassal Sir Jordan de Manaurie arrived and pulled her up behind his saddle to be carried back to her castle in the midst of ten armed men.

Bertran made a rude sound rocking her gently side to side. “John will put that lot to rights. Come, my darling, you were born to this station and you bloody well know a woman can’t sit on a barony and expect to be left alone, were she a toothless hag or still in nappies. With your beauty, you are double the prize. So. Marriage it is.”

“Why didn’t you marry me?” God, she sounded pathetic, like a child needing reassurance. As though to enforce the notion, she wrapped her arms around him again.

Silent laughter vibrated against her. “I am not sure I could do that to someone I actually liked. I am a score and ten older than you and I have more than enough sons. It’s confusing enough that my second wife christened our son ‘Bertran’ before I could stop her, in spite of the fact that my firstborn was already named ‘Bertran.’ God help us if we had to deal with yet another. Do as I ask for a change. I want to see you happy before I go to join the monks.”

He had been threatening for years to join the monastery he helped support. “Must you go, Bertran?” The thought that he would be gone from her life, never to be seen again, filled her with loneliness.

“Yes. It is time. I need to get out of my sons’ ways and I have much to atone for.” He pulled back from her and ran his thumbs across her cheeks. “Now, wipe your face and let me tell you about your new husband.”

She swiped at her face with a sleeve in a show of courage. Like most men, Bertran hated tears. Tears meant he couldn’t pretend she wasn’t frightened of this sudden change, or that she wasn’t bloody furious at him for his part in it. At the moment, she couldn’t decide which was stronger, the anger or the fear, though it was surely fear that made her knees feel wobbly.

Bertran ran the back of his hand under her chin to catch a stray drop, then pulled her against him as he told her about John FitzAlan: his birth as the younger son of an Anglo-Norman lord, his fine swordsmanship, his high place in King Richard’s favor. Well, that all sounded good. A fellow had to have manly grace and competence to please the king. Savignac could use a fighting lord for a change. A relaxing sigh poured out of her. Perhaps she had a chance for some form of peace after all.

Then, like the stone from a trebuchet crashing the roof of her hall, Bertran destroyed her optimism. “He is a professional soldier, lord of a private army, second only to Mercadier in Richard’s service.”

Whatever she had expected in a husband: a long-time courtier to whom Richard owed a great favor; the son of a much-needed ally; an acclaimed warrior; even, even by God, a man of the lower classes who had risen to distinction on pure merit; nothing could have prepared her for this – to be married to the lord of the most hated class of soldiers in all of Christian Europe. It was…inconceivable. She felt suddenly airless, caught between breaths, suspended, as though her feet no longer touched the earth.

A woman was the mirror of her husband. If he was a lord, she was a lady. He a merchant, she no higher, though she had been born a knight’s daughter. But if he was a villain… She forced herself to drag in a breath and face her ward, her traitor. “Holy God, Bertran, you have married me to a – a routier,” she whispered, using the repugnant term that meant ‘ravager.’

Ravaging was what mercenaries did; they pillaged and destroyed the land and the people of their enemies. This was not knightly combat, man to man in defense of king or fortress, it was the unalloyed destruction of orchard, vine, and livestock, the calloused murder of peasants forbidden by law to possess weapons to defend themselves.

She had seen first-hand the smoking, bloody horror the soldiers left behind. The memory of that hideous stench: of death, seared flesh, burnt thatch, of shit and blood everywhere. It rose to gag her as though she was still there. What kind of man could order such a thing? Do such a thing? No wonder the Pope had excommunicated the lot of them.

It wasn’t Savignac that had been raided, thank God, they had, so far, escaped involvement with Richard’s enemies. It was one of Montignac’s fiefs. Old Montignac had never been loyal to the English kings and had suffered for his stubbornness.

It was on a day when she, her father, and their escort were returning from a fair. The smoke had drawn her father’s attention and they had ridden to investigate, her father not considering that he had his twelve year-old daughter in tow. It was the day after the raid, before there was time to bury all the dead people and animals. Some of the larger buildings had still been burning.

The nightmare vision had seared into her brain, forever. The sight was so frightening, so alien to anything she'd experienced, she’d almost puked on her horse. Even now, her stomach gave sympathetic roil at the thought, and she had to force an uncomfortable swallow.

“Stop it, Woman!” Bertran pulled her away from him and gave her a little shake. “Listen to me! Like it or not, we have need of men like John. It takes all of King Richard’s might to hold this duchy together. He rules by the sword, yes, but if he didn’t, it would be like the dark times when lord preyed upon lord and men counted their survival from harvest to harvest. Your peace here in Savignac comes at the blood of men like Mercadier, John, and the other so-called ‘routiers’ who serve Richard. Do not judge what you do not understand.”

The war between her anger and her fear ended when the dam of her anger broke. “God’s Blood, Bertran,” she hissed, for fear of screaming, “do you think my people will understand? They have seen the fires from afar. My father took in people who ran from fiefs that were attacked and you can be sure the survivors told their stories.”

She pushed away from him to stalk to the hearth, then spun to face him. “The people hate the mercenaries for what they do. You know that! The priests denounce them, call them rapists and murderers...how shall the people accept such a lord?”

Her hands clenched into fists. She wanted to hit him. A man could do that, could take his anger at betrayal and plant it right into that place between nose and eye, and relish the pain of knuckle against bone. For women there were only tears.

Her tears didn’t come, though, because a thought had burst upon her, an idea so mad she nearly giggled. “You’ve done it this time, Bertran. Don’t you see? You’ve married the White Spider to another killer!”