A Lady Under Siege

34

They passed the better part of an hour chatting amiably, while Mabel made a bed for herself on a divan in the corner, and kept to it discreetly. Daphne did not stir, but sleep seemed to benefit her, and a little colour gradually returned to her cheeks. Thomas felt relieved, and when he stood at one point to stretch his limbs, Sylvanne announced, “It’s time for me to be abed. Will you accompany me to my door? I don’t like to be unchaperoned with any one of these guardsmen of yours.”

Thomas carried a single candle to light their way along the passage to her chambers. When they arrived he unlocked the door and bade her enter.

“I’ll thank you to come in, and help me light the candles,” Sylvanne said to him. “It’s a task always left to Mabel, and now that she’s absent, I’m almost afraid to be alone.”

“Shall I stay on, keep you company awhile?”

“That would please me very much.”

With the flame of his candle he lit another on a small table, then set his own on the mantle of the hearth. Sylvanne moved toward her bed, toying with a ribbon in her hair.

“What shall we do to pass the time?” Thomas asked.

“I yield to your suggestion.”

“I don’t know. Do you play chess? I have a lovely board with soapstone pieces. I could send for it.”

“I’ve never been one for games of the mind,” she replied.

“Haven’t you?”

“No. I prefer action over thought. There’s beauty in movement, in a gesture,” she said, lifting her hand and turning it delicately in the air, like a songbird in flight. “The poets might try to capture it, but they always come up short.”

“They rely on words,” Thomas noted. “Words are not always true to thoughts.”

“Aren’t they?”

“What are your thoughts at this moment?” he asked her.

“I’m thinking how handsome you are.” She pulled at a ribbon, and let her hair tumble and cascade freely down over her shoulders. “And you, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I should make love to you.”

Their eyes locked. Thomas thought he could hear his own heart beating.

“Then let action win out over thought,” she said.

They came together and their lips met. Although tempered at first by an underlying wariness, his desire was real, and from the lusty way she met his kisses with her own, he was almost convinced her passion was sincere. He took her head in his hands and stared searchingly into her eyes. Once again he thought he saw Meghan there, and desired to reach her, and felt the heat of his lust stoked and redoubled by a feeling like love. He began to undress her, slowly, worshipfully. Sylvanne compliantly let his hands strip her dress from her shoulders, let his fingers and his palms explore the smoothness of her breasts. He bade her sit on the bed, and knelt before her, pulling her dress down around her calves and ankles, then lifting her feet to slip them free. As he rose she wrapped her arms around him and desperately pulled him to her, falling back upon the bed sheets.

“What’s your hurry?” he teased. “We have all night.”

“I want it done.”

“So it shall be.”

He reared up from her, standing before her as he shed his own clothes. She covered her body with a sheet. As he made himself naked she saw that he was aroused. “Come warm this cold bed,” she whispered. He climbed into bed beside her, and as before she clutched at him urgently, and fell back upon the pillows, pulling him on top of her. He rained kisses down upon her face, her neck, her breasts. For a moment he felt disoriented, and it came to him suddenly that she smelled of his wife’s perfume. This maddened him—it fed his arousal and made him an animal, a dog rising to the scent.

“Let me,” he demanded.

“I will.”

“Then let me.”

“Now who’s impatient?”

“Let me now,” he said forcefully.

He was so much stronger. The weight of his body trapped her beneath him, and he reached down with both hands to take hold of her thighs when a knife blade suddenly glinted golden in the candlelight. A sharp flicker of pain grazed his side—he saw her raise the knife again and instinctively caught her hand by the wrist, adeptly twisting her arm over the side of the bed. His two strong hands quickly stripped her of the knife. It fell, clattering harmlessly against the stone floor.

“I couldn’t do it,” she wailed. “I’ve spared you!” He was still on top of her, he still controlled her. He was so much stronger that his actions could be assured, yet almost gentle. He moved her to the middle of the bed and straddled her, pinning her arms while he looked down at the ragged rise and fall of her breasts, her flushed, reddened face distorted by humiliation.

“The knife came out earlier than I expected,” he said, catching his breath. “Why didn’t you wait?”

“I couldn’t stand to make a gift of myself to you,” she hissed at him. “I couldn’t stand to give you something you haven’t earned.”

He was strong enough to imprison both her wrists with one hand, and with his free hand he checked his side where the knife had grazed him. There was a trace of blood, but she had barely broken the skin. “You came ever so close to doing me damage, my dear,” he muttered. “An inch or two deeper and I’d have been slit open just the way a pig is bled. A more confident slice and I would surely now be dying—and you, trapped beneath me, would be drowning in a torrent of red. But though it stings, this scratch is nothing—I suffer worse on any given day of training for the jousts.”

“I spared you, don’t you see that?” She began to softly sob. “I could have plunged it deep enough to finish you.”

“Is that your story, now that you failed?” he demanded. Yet he wanted to believe her, and looked for evidence of her sincerity in her anguished face. She refused to meet his gaze. “Why do you hide from me?”

“Leave me alone,” she whimpered.

“You just tried to kill me, yet you pretend I should be grateful to you that you didn’t.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I’m trying to understand what transpired.”

“Go ask your Meghan.”

“I will. She’s told me already how turbulent and troubled your emotions are—that you’re torn between a widow’s pledge to a dead husband, and something else. A new life, perhaps—the potential for a future of happiness with a new man.”

She lifted her eyes to him. Her look of surprise told him what he’d said was true.

“If you know everything, why do you toy with me?” Sylvanne cried. “Why did you come here if you knew there would be a knife?”

“Your maid told me it would come out later.”

“That was her idea—and she almost persuaded my vacillating mind. My maid is a traitor.”

“Not a traitor. She wants to see you happy.”

“If she wants me happy, it’s so she may abandon me in good conscience.”

“That’s very perceptive. I admire the sharpness of your thoughts. Do you know what would make me happy?”

“To be alive.”

“Yes, that, of course. I’m happy to be intact. But what would make me even more happy would be to make love to you. Not to your surface thoughts, but to a deeper soul within. I speak of Meghan, of course. Hold still, damn you.” She had turned her head away, and now he forced her again to look into his eyes. He looked searchingly into hers. “I’m going to call you Meghan. I’m going to say I love you. I love you, Meghan. I want to make love to you now, in gratitude.”

He loosened his grip, and lay beside her, as if expecting his words to be enough to turn her into a willing partner. But Sylvanne would not be compliant, or yielding. She raised her mouth to his shoulder and bit him savagely, her teeth deeply puncturing his skin. He cried out in pain and shoved her roughly away from him. “Damn you to hell,” he howled. “Your mouth has proved more dangerous than the knife!”

He climbed off the bed. Sylvanne pulled the sheet up to cover her nakedness. He knelt by the bedside and poured water from a bucket into a basin on the floor, then dampened a cloth and dabbed at the scrape on his side where the knife had barely broken the skin. Then he attended to the more serious bite wound on his shoulder, where her teeth had done real damage.

“Likely this mangled flesh is better left alone,” he said, examining the gash in the faint candlelight. “I’ll put a shirt over it, and let it dry on its own.”

He came back to where she lay curled upon the bed. Sylvanne turned her head away again so as not to look at him. “I’ll say one more thing, to Meghan, if I may,” he pronounced. “Dear Meghan, before the knife came out, in those candle-lit moments while Sylvanne so beguilingly playacted the temptress, I felt you watching. I felt your presence in a new way, as vibrations from some secret place. But then the blade glinted like a candle’s flame, and suddenly what might have been beautiful turned ugly, and violent. Still, I did my best to reach you, to give myself to you.”

He took Sylvanne’s chin in his hand and forced her to look at him. “I need to meet your eyes. Meghan, I want to say I love you.”

“Your love is too strange,” Sylvanne muttered.

“So it might seem to you,” he answered her. “Please understand that in a way I feel love for you too. Love in the form of admiration. Beyond your undeniable beauty, the depth of your loyalty to your husband is a testament to your fine character. I’ll leave you now.”