He managed a small smile and closed a hand over both of hers. “Let me.” She slid her hands out of his. He undid the buckle and whipped the belt off, then sat up. “Ohhh...” He covered his face with his hands.
“I know, Rainulf. I know.”
“Help me with my tunic?”
Between the two of them, they managed to get the heavy garment over his head. The shirt came with it, leaving him in naught but his chausses.
“Are you comfortable?” she asked, trying to keep from staring at his bare chest. “Do you need some water?”
He shook his head and groaned. “Oh, God. I just wish... God, I wish everything would stop moving.”
“I know.” She tried to rise, but he reached out and took her by the upper arms, pulling her with him as he lay back down.
“Stay,” he pleaded, wrapping his arms around her and forcing her to lie next to him. “Just until it stops. Till everything is still.”
He held her with her head on his shoulder. Thinking her gold circlet must be digging into him, she pulled it off and tossed it aside, then lay stiffly, wondering what to do with her outside arm.
“Here.” He took it and draped it across his stomach, then tightened his arms around her and held her close.
As his breathing slowed and steadied, and his arms around her grew heavy, she began to relax. It was quite wonderful, really, lying there in Rainulf Fairfax’s embrace, even if he was dead drunk and only wanted her for a bit of comfort. She was glad to be of comfort, gratified that she could make his world stop spinning long enough for him to get to sleep.
She yawned, thinking she would have to get up and return to her own chamber before she succumbed to the drowsiness that was creeping over her.
Just a few more moments
. She closed her eyes and settled against him, feeling the heat from his half-naked body through the thin silk of her gown.
* * *
Rainulf stood at St. Mary’s high lectern and looked down on the faces of hundreds—no, thousands—of young, black-robed scholars, staring up at him expectantly. No, not scholars, he realized... birds, little black baby birds, their mouths agape, waiting to be fed.
He wanted to feed them, but he hadn’t any food, not the right kind, anyway. They’d trusted him, but they shouldn’t have. He was consumed with doubt, and his doubt made him unworthy. He’d deluded them, gathered them here under false pretenses...
He shook his head violently. “I can’t,” he muttered, his voice dull and distant. “I want to, but I can’t. I have nothing for you.”
A soft rustling... the beating of thousands of tiny wings. He felt their silken feathers brush his skin as the birds flew into the air, gathering around him, their beaks wide open, begging for food. Begging, begging...
“Nay!” He lashed out at them, fighting them off as they closed in on him, wanting what he had no right to give...
A whisper: “Shh... easy.”
His fist connected and one of them cried out. No, it wasn’t one of the birds, he realized, growing still as soft hands closed around his wrists. The cry had been that of a woman.
“Rainulf... Rainulf, open your eyes.”
With a great effort, he slitted his eyes open and saw her in the darkness, hovering over him... an angel come to rescue him. Her eyes were huge, her face iridescent in the moonlight. She released his wrists, and he reached up with both trembling hands, taking her face between them. He’d never thought an angel could feel so soft, so real... He stroked her lips, traced the inky brushstroke of an eyebrow...
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “Nothing’s wrong. Go back to sleep.”
She touched his eyelids, and they closed. He felt her cool fingers around his wrists again as she gently lowered his armst. “Sleep.”
He sensed her weight easing off him, heard again that delicate, silken rustle as her wings lifted her into the air, felt the lack of her, the emptiness where she had been.
The last thing he heard before unconsciousness reclaimed him was a door softly closing.
* * *
Rainulf opened his eyes and squinted at the midmorning sunlight pouring through the window. He lifted his head and fell back with a groan, squeezing his eyes shut against a blinding spasm of pain. “Damn.”
His mouth tasted sour; his stomach roiled. He thought back to last night, concentrating. The last thing he remembered was drinking wine at supper. He must have drunk too much, far too much. This was his first hangover since his university days.
He covered his face with his hands and sniffed, breathing in the scent that clung to them, and—perplexingly—to his arms and shoulders and chest... night-opening flowers and Oriental spices... sweetness and sensuality and the wisdom of the ages...
Corliss.
A longing unfurled within him, tainted with uneasiness. How had he come to have Corliss’s perfume on him? He sat up slowly, wincing, and looked down at himself, bare-chested atop rumpled bed coverings. Reaching behind him for a pillow, he brought it to his nose and inhaled the exotic fragrance with which it was imbued. Corliss’s fragrance.
The longing intensified, gathering in his loins and taking shape as a rigid, aching need. With a moan he lay back down and rested a hand on his throbbing groin, feeling a demand so sudden and intense as to be painful. Surrendering to that pain, he untied his chausses to relieve it—an indulgence he generally disdained, but could not resist in the face of this overpowering need. He closed his eyes and imagined that it was Corliss’s hot, tight body closing around him, coaxing the pain from him and replacing it with pleasure.
Relief came quickly, but it brought little real solace. He still felt empty, and so needful.
And he still wondered how Corliss’s maddeningly arousing scent had permeated his bed, and him.
He washed and dressed, his movements careful in deference to his queasy stomach and pulsing head. Voices from outside drew him to the window. Shielding his eyes, he peered down into the garden that took up a good part of the bailey to the east of the keep—Martine’s precisely laid-out, geometrically designed herb garden.
His sister was there, and next to her, Corliss kneeling over a row of something Rainulf couldn’t hope to identify. Martine pulled weeds while Corliss drew on a wax tablet. Both women wore aprons over their kirtles, and wide-brimmed straw hats such as villeins wore in the fields. Despite his body’s miseries, he smiled. No one would think that these two hardworking, humbly dressed women were a baroness and her houseguest.
Martine looked up and saw him, then grinned and nudged her companion. Corliss lifted her head and followed Martine’s pointing hand. She met his gaze and held it for a moment, her expression inscrutable. Rainulf raised his hand, then froze, staring at a dark spot on Corliss’s jaw—a bruise. She must have seen his dismay, because she reached up to touch the purpling blemish, then looked away quickly.
Too quickly.
Rainulf gripped the windowsill, appalled. Had he given her that bruise? No... it was impossible. He could never hurt her.
He scoured his memory, straining to remember anything about last night, anything after all that drinking. Had she really been in his bed? Was it possible he had simply imagined the perfume? Closing his eyes, he conjured up a vague recollection of seizing her and pulling her down, forcing her to lie with him. He could still feel the liquid-smooth whisper of silk against his naked skin, the soft pressure of her breasts on his chest, the heat of her cheek against his shoulder.
He turned and looked toward the bed. Something glimmered on the floor beneath it, half-hidden by the edge of the quilt. Crossing to it, he crouched and picked it up; it was the golden circlet that Corliss had worn last night.
God, no
. What had he done? He struggled to remember as he returned to the window. Corliss glanced back up at him and then lowered her head over her tablet. Had he tried to force himself on her? Was that how she’d gotten hurt? If so, he hadn’t been successful; he was certain of that. After eleven years of abstinence, if he had bedded a woman—particularly Corliss—he would surely remember, regardless of how much wine he had drunk.
But had he tried?
Never in his life had he taken an unwilling woman, or attempted to. The idea disgusted him and, in truth, he’d never had the need. As a young scholar in Paris, they’d come to him—even wellborn girls betrothed to others. Their coy flirtations quickly metamorphosed into heated whispers and secret meetings. He never lied to them, never pretended to feelings that didn’t exist. Yet still they would press his hands to their breasts, unlace their kirtles, and raise their skirts. He’d been young and unfettered by vows, and what they offered, he took.
But he’d always waited until they gave their bodies freely; he never pushed the matter. He’d never had to. Then.
Had he changed so much? Was he now capable of such shameful behavior—toward Corliss? He thought of himself as a good man, a principled man. Disgustedly, he shook his head. He thought of himself as better than other men, holier, more in command of his animal nature. As usual, the sin of pride weighed heavily on him. In truth, he was just a man, with a man’s weaknesses. Just how weak had he been last night?
Damn
, if he could only remember!
He closed the window’s glass panels and leaned his forehead against them. He must keep his distance from her. He must. His desire for her had grown too unruly. He mustn’t think about her as a woman, mustn’t indulge his body’s carnal needs while imagining that it was she who touched him, she who took him inside her.
Even if he hadn’t tried to take advantage of her last night, he feared he was capable of doing so—a chilling prospect. She was ever on his mind, ever stirring up thoughts and desires best left dormant.
He was worn-out, used up. All he wanted in life was to be appointed Chancellor of Oxford and then to live out the rest of his years in a kind of numb, unthinking repose. Until Corliss came along, he’d never questioned that goal. But she’d touched his heart, made him itch for things he’d given up wanting long ago, made him question his well-laid plans. And that was not a good thing.
He would spend the day at St. Dunstan’s. And perhaps tomorrow as well. Let Peter go hawking with Corliss. Let him flatter her and charm her and court her. He didn’t care. He couldn’t afford to.
Corliss watched Rainulf back away from the window, his eyes trained on her, and then turn and disappear. When she lowered her gaze, she found Martine staring at the bruise on her jaw. “How did that happen?”
Her expression carefully neutral, Corliss scratched another daisylike flower onto her sketch of the foul-smelling plant Martine called feverfew and praised as a strengthener of wombs. Corliss had promised to ink it onto parchment for the young baroness’s new herbarium of curatives for female disorders. Taking a deep breath, she said, “I’m clumsy, that’s all.”
Martine sat utterly still for a long moment. Very quietly, she said, “Please tell me Rainulf didn’t do that to you.”
Corliss looked up at her; Martine was ashen. “He was having a nightmare,” she explained quickly. “He didn’t know what he was doing. He would never hurt me on purpose.”
His sister expelled a long sigh. “Thank God. He’s the last man on earth I’d think capable of striking a woman, but for a moment there...” Clearly relieved, she stretched and rubbed her back, then slid a little weed out of the dark, crumbly earth, shook the soil from its roots, and tossed it into her basket. “I could give him some anise to chew before bedtime. ‘Tis said to be very effective in warding off nightmares. Does he get them very often?”
Corliss moved on to the leaves, which she drew with painstaking care, trying to get their jagged edges just right. “I wouldn’t know.”
Two more weeds joined the mound in the basket. “Does he toss and turn in his sleep?”
Corliss’s stylus slipped and she ruined one of the leaves. “Um... I have my own bedchamber. We don’t... It’s not like that between us.”
Smiling, the other woman patted Corliss’s arm. “You needn’t keep up appearances with me. I just want Rainulf to be happy. I’m delighted that he’s found you.”
Corliss tried to rub the mistake out of the wax. “No, you don’t understand. Rainulf and I aren’t... We don’t sleep together.”
Martine’s eyebrows—dramatically dark, like her brother’s—rose sharply, and she smiled. “You slept with him last night, did you not?”
“Only for a couple of hours.”
Martine chuckled.
“No, I mean... That is, he just needed me for a while, and then I went back to my...”
Laughing, Martine took her hand and squeezed. “You needn’t explain. I’m not judging you, Corliss. You’re obviously good for him. From the moment I first saw him yesterday, ‘twas clear how much he’s changed since you came into his life. He’s more content, more—”
“I’m not his mistress!” The words tumbled from Corliss’s mouth as she stared at the wax tablet in her lap. “We are not lovers. We’re just friends, nothing more. I don’t want to be chained to any man, and Rainulf wants to be Chancellor of Oxford, and that means... that means he’s got to remain celibate. And even if he didn’t, he wouldn’t want—” She took a deep breath. “He’d pick someone else, someone more...” She shrugged and bit her lip, painfully aware of Martine’s sad, knowing gaze on her.