“I know. I just…” She touched her bodice above the stain, plucked at the material as if to pull it off her skin. “I want this gone, but I would be unclothed.”
“I shall collect your gown and bring it to you.”
“Would you?” She nodded. “Aye, bring it to me.”
He strode beneath the tree to where she had spread the garment as if to make a bed for them. But as he swept it up, he heard her gasp and swung around to see the white puddle of her chemise on the shore, and just beyond it her bared back as she waded into the cool night-darkened lake.
“Laura!” He ran, dropped the gown, and plunged into the water.
He was nearly at her side when she slipped beneath the surface, nearly caught hold of her hair whilst it floated atop. But then she was somewhere beneath and beyond him.
He dove under, reached wide, but only laid hands on water. Dark, hungry water.
Surfacing to replenish his breath, he cast his gaze around. No sign of her, but as he started to dive under again, she came up in front of him.
“Laura,” he groaned. “What do you?”
She did not resist when he drew her to him. Gripping his tunic, she raised her streaming face to his. “Am I clean, Lothaire?”
Emotion flooding him, he choked, “You have ever been clean. It was not you who betrayed me, was it my brave love?”
Her spiked lashes swept down, then up. “I did not mean to. I was only trying to get away. But I should have known—should have yielded naught.”
He did not care what she had yielded. She was not at fault, and it made him sick that her silence and evidence of her pregnancy had caused him to condemn her.
“Laura love, let me take you back to the shore. We shall sit and talk for as long as you wish. And you will tell me only what you are able to.”
“You do not want to know. You said—”
“I did, but you need to tell me, and I need to listen. Come back?”
“I am cold.”
“I will warm you.”
They were so near the shore it was only moments before his sodden boots found purchase. Then he lifted his wife, and she slid a hand around his neck and pressed her bare breasts to his clothed chest as he waded ashore.
He carried her to where he had tossed aside her gown, lowered to sitting, and drew the garment over her. As he waited for her to speak, he held her close and watched the moon’s languid movement across the sky and thought it like his mantle of blackest blue except someone was busily poking holes in the one above, but not as if to cause ruination. Rather, to give hope that on the other side of this dark could be found light.
Laura stopped shivering, but it was some minutes before she said, “It happened in the cellar at Owen.”
He ought not be surprised, here the reason she would not venture into the one at High Castle.
Lowering his chin to the tip of her nose, feeling her breath on his neck, he closed his eyes and beseeched the Lord’s aid in concealing the wrath rising through him which would be entirely impotent against a man long dead.
“But it did not begin there, Lothaire. It began nearly six years before when Si—” She gulped. “When Simon was ten and I was nine, he asked to kiss me and I said he could. I did not like it, and he agreed—said he did not understand why men and women did it. Still, he told we would wed when we were older and said I must promise to be his wife. Though I thought him a friend, it seemed a good thing to spend my life with one I liked, so I promised. Then he went away to begin his knight’s training at an age much older than most boys since Lady Maude could not bear to part with him sooner. Two and three times a year he returned home, and each time he was more changed, but not…”
Feeling her draw a shuddering breath, he stroked her wet hair, certain even one word from him would make it harder to tell what Simon had done.
“Not in a good way,” she whispered. “He was angry, and where he had liked to talk before, he preferred silence and sometimes stared so long at naught he fell asleep. I tried to pull him out of his dark mood by encouraging him to show me all he was learning, but he told me to leave him be. So I did, and it seemed to please him until…” A low whimper sounded from her. “The day before you met him prior to his return to his fostering lord, he learned you and I were betrothed. I could see he was displeased, but I was not prepared when he caught me alone on the stairs. He said I had promised to wed him, and I told him that was years in the past when we were children.”
As she drew another breath, Lothaire gathered her nearer.
“He pushed me against the wall and tried to kiss me, but I ducked under his arm and ran to the hall where I stayed at Lady Maude’s side the remainder of the day.” She tilted her head back, met his gaze. “I had good reason to suspect it was him at the pond—not a dragonfly—that nearly struck you. Certes, ’twas a stone.”
Lothaire nodded.
“I did not see him again during your subsequent visits to Owen, and I believed anger kept him away. But he came again when you were unable to visit because your mother took seriously ill. You remember?”
Hardly forgettable, not only since it was during that time he was cuckolded—when Laura should have been with him, not the one who got her with child—but because by the time he discovered his mother’s turn of health was a ploy to keep him from Laura, it was too late to journey to Owen. And Lady Raisa had been pleased, she who had believed him too entranced, she who had attacked Laura in her chamber.
“I remember.”
She flinched.
Now the tale was begun, the waiting was harder for his imaginings of what had happened in that cellar, but finally she said, “I would not see you again for five months, and when you saw me…” Her voice caught, and she shivered, though surely not from the breeze sweeping off the lake. “…you saw what Simon did.”
“Enough is told, Laura. I need hear no more.”
“You do if you wish the truth, all of it though ’tis uglier yet. And I would not have a lie between us.”
“A lie?”
“That I am innocent.” She gripped his tunic, caught up some of his skin beneath. “Had I not encouraged him, I might have prevented what he did.”
Lothaire was not expecting that, and before he could think better, he said, “You encouraged him?”
“With what I thought good reason.”
“I do not understand, Laura. What good reason could there be?”
“Hold me closer, and I will tell,” she whispered. “And pray I need never tell it again.”
Chapter 31
Barony of Owen, England
Winter, 1152
It should be Lothaire come to Owen, but it was Simon. And Lady Maude, who had been so happy to see her long-absent son, had cried last eve when he snapped at her for treating him as if he were still a child.