“My mother wasn’t able to oversee anything. When I arrived at Langthorne, she was huddled in filth, starving, afraid to come into the sunlight.”
I doubt she even recognized me. She is a woman with a woman’s mind and now that mind is mired in demons. She is quite mad, Graelam. She could not hold Langthorne together. She could not do anything save whine and huddle in her own excrement. Why would I expect anything different from this Hastings? From any woman? What do you mean she isn’t like her mother?”
“Her mother was faithless. Fawke found she had bedded the falconer. He had her beaten to death. Hastings isn’t like her mother.” He thought of the girl Severin had wanted to wed, this Marjorie. He had spoken of her long ago, with a dimmed longing. Did he think little of her also?
“We will see.”
Severin was a hard man but he was fair, at least he was fair to other men. Graelam knew there was nothing more he could do. He missed his wife and sons. He wanted to leave as soon as these two were married. He rather hoped Hastings would approve her father’s choice, though that didn’t particularly matter.
m
Sedgewick Castle
Richard de Luci stared down at his wife’s vomit-stained night shift. He
wished it was a shroud. When would she die, damn her? She moaned, her back bowing upward. Pain rippled the slack flesh of her face. Her mouth twisted and opened.
He wished he could just throttle her right here and now, but the priest was standing at his elbow, four of her women hovered next to her bed, and his steward hadn’t left the odorous chamber for three hours.
He knew that Severin of Langthorne must be drawing near Oxborough. He knew of the negotiations and that King Edward had given his permission. But once he had Hastings of Trent it wouldn’t matter if the Pope himself had given his blessing. The man who took her first and wed her would be the victor.
He flexed his fingers. Why hadn’t he just poured all that white powder into her wine? Surely that would have felled her immediately, not brought her puking to this bedchamber, lying in her own vomit and filth for the past day and a half.
If she had complained that she didn’t like the taste of the wine, he could have simply ordered her to drink it, pouring it down her throat if necessary. She’d been reciting one of her interminable prayers as she
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sipped at the wine into which he’d stirred that wondrous white powder the £VPsy had slipped to him. In return Richard had parted with the red silk scarf he had given his bride when they’d married seven years before.
What if she didn’t die? He twisted his hands together so hard the knuckles were white. Damn the bitch, he would hunt down that gypsy and gullet her.
She moaned again, lurching upward.
“Lie still, my child. Lady Joan, lie still.” The priest pressed her back. She was heaving now, sucking hard for breath. Richard hoped she couldn’t find any. He hoped she would choke to death on her own vomit. Hurry it up, damn you, he wanted to scream at her.
Then, suddenly, with no warning, with no more retching and gagging, she was dead. The last gasp for air caught in her throat, leaving her mouth gaping open, her eyes wide, staring up into his face.
“It is over, my lord,” the priest said. He closed Lady Joan’s eyes and tried to press her mouth shut, but her lips parted again. He stood and pulled the cover over her head. “It is done,” he said. “The poor lady suffered so with the grippe of her belly, but now she is with our Lord, her immortal soul free of its fleshly agonies. I am sorry, my lord.”
Richard de Luci realized the man wanted him to do something, to say something. What? Fall over her meager body and moan his grief? He said to his wife’s women, “Prepare her for burial and clean away the filth in this chamber.” Then he forced himself to bow his head a moment at his wife’s bedside. But a moment later, he strode from the bedchamber, nearly crashing into his small daughter, Eloise, who was crouched beside a chair near the doorway. She shrank back beneath the chair. For once he did not notice her.