Anger flashed across her face, slid off, and in a defeated tone, she said, “I fear I will not see Donnie again, that he will find other girls to…” She blew breath up her face. “…talk to.”
It was more than talk, but Lothaire kept his tongue. And waited.
“So Lord Soames, show me how you persuade Grandmother to bathe.”
Was it a kiss the almost twelve-year-old Donnie had filched from a nine-year-old girl? For certain, it was not jealousy that caused Laura to seek a husband she did not want for the home required to remove her daughter from a boy moving toward manhood faster than a girl moving toward womanhood.
“My lord?” said the shepherd, an outspoken commoner who did his job too well to begrudge him impatience that oft matched Lothaire’s.
“Watch, Lady Clarice,” Lothaire said. As he strode down the rise where the old ewe stood upon the bank, he was struck by the feeling it would not be enough for the girl to observe. But perhaps he merely cast her in the mold of a young Laura who had sat still only the one time he was first introduced to her in the company of Lady Maude and Lady Raisa.
To lessen the ewe's alarm, he led it backward, but once its hooves met water it began to struggle. Lothaire pressed onward and, thigh-high in the pool, gently tipped her. As she tried to get her legs beneath her, he pulled her to the center of the dammed stream where she came right side up and floated. Immersed up to his chest, he began loosening the dirt and other foul matter from her fleece. Once she abandoned her efforts to swim back to the bank, the workers led other ewes into the stream.
Out of the corner of his eye, Lothaire watched Clarice draw nearer, sometime later heard her screech when a ewe’s thrashing wet the skirt of her gown. But the wetting of her hem was of her own doing.
An hour later, she who liked pretty things was nearly as drenched and fouled by the dirt coming off the matted fleece as the rest of them. Standing in the water, she aided a young woman given charge of year-old lambs who had accumulated enough wool to make the cleaning and shearing worthwhile. And scattered across that bank were dozens of ewes whose much brightened fleece dried in the sun.
As Lothaire pushed a ewe back to the shallows where it dug its hooves into the gravel to heave its water-logged fleece out of the stream, laughter brought his head around.
The voice was more childish than that of the one to whom he had first been betrothed, but it sounded of Laura, just as her daughter’s smile summoned remembrance of the young woman he had senselessly loved.
In disposition, Clarice was more like her mother than she could know, she whom he should have fathered.
The pound of hooves and a shout turned Lothaire toward Angus whose appearance portended ill.
Soaked through, Lothaire stepped from the stream, strode between the dozing sheep, and halted atop the rise.
Angus swung out of the saddle and extended a missive. “Word from Wiltford, my lord.”
Lothaire stared at what remained of the wax seal—doubtless, broken by Sebille who, more than Lothaire and their mother, ached for the tidings likely inked by Baron Marshal.
He reached but drew back the hand over which dripped water from his tunic’s sleeve. “You will have to read it to me.”
Minimally proficient in letters, Angus grimaced as he unfurled the parchment. He cleared his throat. “Baron Soames, by this missive know the answer long awaited is given,” the knight melded the sounds into words and stiltedly strung them together to form a sentence. “That which your family lost has been found, placed in a casket with due respect and…ceremony, and shall be returned forthwith. As my father-in-law has taken ill, my lady wife shall accompany her lord husband to the barony of Lexeter. I trust you will receive us and our…entourage with good will. This missive travels a day ahead of our nooning arrival at High Castle.” The parchment rustled. “Baron Marshal signs his name.”
Lothaire stared at the dirt darkening about his feet as water ran from his clothes. Though glad his father could be properly interred, he almost wished the old baron’s return further delayed. It would be better for Lexeter to receive its lost lord when the disparity between its prosperity of twenty years past and now was not as great, and this was too near the wedding. Not that his marriage would be a joyous event, but it would be further dampened by the burial to take place only days before. Or perhaps it would not.
Lothaire ground his teeth. Sebille would not like it, nor their mother who would not be averse to her son's marriage being more overshadowed by mourning. However, this day a grave would be dug in the cemetery of the village of Thistle Cross so Ricard Soames could be laid to rest shortly after Baron Marshal and his wife arrived with an entourage Lothaire did not doubt would be sizable and well armed lest they were not received with good will.
“My lord?”
Lothaire met Angus’s gaze. “Ill timing,” he said. “Hardly am I returned from court and now this.”
The knight peered past him. “I will aid in cleaning the sheep so you may—” He blinked, nearly smiled. “There is a young lady washing the sheep, my lord.”
Lothaire looked across his shoulder at Clarice who had an arm hooked around the neck of a lamb the village woman bathed. The girl’s face was near the animal’s, and she appeared to be chatting with it. Then she laughed and kissed the top of its head.
He fought imaginings of Laura doing the same. And failed. She would have, even at the expense of a gown finer than her daughter’s. But no longer. She was too changed, surely by abandonment of the one who had made a child on her. And, dare he hope, regret over her betrayal of the one who had loved her? He had believed that last when he returned to her in the garden at Windsor and found her weeping, but after seeing her with Michael D’Arci and the more he learned of this older Laura from her daughter who believed her sorrow a result of being parted from her lover…
“I am thinking her gown is ruined,” Angus said, “but she does not look to mind.”
“She is much as her mother was,” Lothaire spoke aloud his thoughts and grunted when the knight narrowed his eyes. Not that Angus was unaware of what had gone between his lord and the lady. He had served the Soames family since his squire’s fostering at High Castle and been knighted by Ricard only months before his lord’s disappearance.
Years later, Angus had trained Lexeter’s heir in arms after Raisa refused to allow her son to earn his spurs with a fostering lord. Just as Lothaire had protested her decision, so had this knight who believed the loss of a father made it more imperative Lothaire be fostered—and all the better were he accepted by the Wulfriths. But Raisa had been determined to keep her son under her control, citing he might otherwise be led astray, becoming no better than her faithless husband.