'If he wakes or seems at all wandering in his wits, you promise to call me?' Lady Isabella commanded rather than asked, and Eva nodded.
'Indeed yes, my lady, but he is sleeping peacefully and has had another dose of the valerian posset.'
'Very well, child. Who better to look after a man than his own wife,' she added with an unusually tender smile, and left Eva to her vigil.
Determined not to fall asleep Eva spurned the pallet bed which had been brought in for her and sat on a small stool, leaning against the bed and resting her hands on the covers so that even should she doze the slightest movement from Sir Piers would rouse her.
The second candle was almost spent and Eva could see the faintest streaks of light through the narrow slit window when Sir Piers began to move restlessly. Eva took his hand in hers but he pulled it fretfully away. His eyes were open and she smiled uncertainly. He ignored her and whispered something in a low voice. She bent forward to hear better, and caught a few disjointed words which made her draw back in hurt astonishment.
'Blanche – you I love – when – said it would never – wench, you are false, your lovers laugh at me!' he concluded in sudden anguished vigour as he stared at Eva and tried to sit up in bed. Eva sprang forward to restrain him.
'No, my love, you will hurt the wound,' she said, and with a groan he lay back and turned away from her.
He was quiet once more and his breathing became even, but an hour later, when the candle had finally guttered, he awoke, this time his confused words were little more than odd sounds. Eva flew to fetch Lady Isabella.
'He is certainly feverish,' Lady Isabella said calmly and sent Eva rushing to collect balms and more bandages. The wound was an ugly red, the flesh puffy around it, and Lady Isabella shook her head dubiously. 'I will bathe it again, then send for Father Gregory. He is more skilled than I in wounds of such a nature, having been on Crusade.'
'Will he recover?' Eva asked in great fear.
'I doubt if a man of your husband's vigour will fall victim to a small wound, but the humours are unpredictable. I will send some food for you.'
*
Soon afterwards the priest arrived and smiled comfortingly at Eva.
'We'll restore your husband to you, my dear,' he said comfortingly, and began to inspect Sir Piers' wound closely. After a moment he stood up, a puzzled look on his face. 'This is a deliberate stab wound, I am certain. It goes too deep to be the sort of accidental cut a man receives when he falls onto a dagger. Besides, from the head bruise it is clear he fell on his back and this blow was delivered from the front, or above him as he lay. Unless some considerable force was behind it the cut would be more ragged and the mail would not have broken. I suppose someone was too carried away by the reality of the fighting and sought to dispatch an enemy.' He sighed. 'Well, we must pray.'
He bandaged the wound again and then turned to look at Eva, concern in his eyes.
'You must sleep. Indeed you must,' he added as she began to protest. 'If you do not who will care for your husband? He will recover the swifter if he knows someone he loves is beside him during the dark hours. Besides, I want you to do something else.'
'Very well, whatever is best for him,' Eva submitted.
'Sleep all day, there are many people able to watch here. He will be more restless tonight, I suspect, as the fever rises, and you will perhaps comfort him with your presence. At dawn tomorrow you must go and gather leaves of agrimony and winter savory, steep them for a minute only in boiling water, and then use them as a poultice. Gather enough to last through the day, changing the poultice two or three times. Lady Isabella will see to that. They are the main ingredients in the salve I have applied, and I will leave enough of it for Lady Isabella to use now.'
Most of the guests had left Holdfast by now, and Eva was given a small room nearby where she fell into bed, exhausted with her watching. She awoke when Blanche came in at suppertime carrying a tankard of ale and a dish of rice and mutton, flavoured with herbs.
'Piers, how is he?' Eva demanded.
'A little better and the fever is less. How are you? Eat this and then you will feel ready to sit with him.'
'I thought you intended to leave today?' Eva said as she began to eat the food, and as she recalled the words of love her husband had used when he had spoken of Blanche the previous night she tried to hide her distress.
'Sir Piers is such an old friend I could not go until I knew he was recovering. Besides, Lord John suggested he escorted me to my home,' she added with heightened colour. 'He is going to take the boys as pages when they are ready, you see, and he wished to meet them. He has business with some of Lord Henry's neighbours first, and must remain here a while longer.'
So Blanche would be sharing in the nursing of Sir Piers, Eva thought with a heavy heart. His words showed he still loved her. Had she any hope of winning that love for herself?
Sir Piers was still feverish, but Lady Isabella told Eva he had woken for a brief time and had recalled the tournament.
'He is sleeping now, and likely to sleep all night. Will you fetch me before you go out to collect Father Gregory's herbs?'
*
She left Eva to another lonely vigil, but Sir Piers, although tossing restlessly, did not wake. At dawn Eva donned a cloak and went into the herb garden to gather the leaves for the poultice.
She was stooping down behind a low hedge when she heard voices. She glanced through the bushes to see Gilbert and another man, Sir Matthew de Chaumont, pacing slowly towards her. He had come for the tournament, and she had seen him occasionally with Piers, although she had not spoken with him. Unwilling to face her cousin she moved so that she was better concealed, and hoped he would soon go away.
'When will you leave?' Sir Matthew was asking urgently.
'As soon as I can. I have unfinished business here, as you know,' Gilbert replied irritably.
His companion snorted.
'You bungling fool! With such an opportunity why did you have to deal only a superficial wound? He will be recovered in a few days, for him and his master to plague us again. Without Richard's help the King would long ago have given in to de Montfort.'
'The mail was too well-fashioned, and he wore plate as well. I could not reach a vital part,' Gilbert answered, and Eva listened in growing horror. These words could only mean that Gilbert had deliberately dealt Piers the wound which had puzzled Father Gregory, that stab wound made with a sword. And it was a political feud, it seemed, from the references to Richard of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort, the rebel baron. But Sir Matthew was speaking again.
'Simon is in France by now, waiting for us to join him. He needs the money you'll get when you marry the wench. Don't permit them to grant an annulment, we need the fellow dead, and his money too when you marry the sorrowing but rich widow. You did well to persuade her to agree to the marriage, you must not fail now.'
They turned and strolled back towards the gate and to Eva's relief she saw them disappear through it. She went on gathering the leaves, but her thoughts were busy with the startling conversation she had just heard. To whom could she turn? She was reluctant to expose Gilbert's treachery to Piers out of a lingering feeling of family loyalty, even if he had been well enough to take action. But he was in great danger while he lay helpless.
She rose hurriedly at this thought, decided she could gather more leaves later if necessary, and it was more important to repeat what she had heard to Lord Henry as soon as possible. Restraining her impatience she went to the kitchens and demanded boiling water, then glanced round the vast room which lay beneath the great hall while she waited for the leaves to steep.
She saw Magda emerge from one of the storerooms, dressed in her old blue gown, and with a basket over her arm.
The cook, a fat greasy fellow with a totally bald head, called to her to hurry.
'I must fetch the things my lady ordered,' Magda replied with a toss of her head, and walked with swaying hips past the table where Eva was dealing with the herbs.
Eva noticed the wide sleeve was caught on a broken strut of the basket, and then her eyes were drawn to a mark on the sleeve itself. At the edge there was a stain, and Eva felt herself grow first cold and then hot with anger.
The stain was blood, dried but fairly recent. If Magda had given Gilbert her sleeve and this was the very one he had carried in the last contest, when it would have been fastened to his right arm, the stain was evidence he had stabbed Sir Piers. She thrust aside her speculations about the reason for Magda's favour being given to Gilbert, and since the leaves were now ready hurried upstairs with them.
'Good, I will apply them and you must sleep,' Lady Isabella said briskly.
'I must see Lord Henry,' Eva told her. 'It is vital, please where may I find him?'
'In his business room I think,' Lady Isabella replied, looking at Eva in concern. 'What is it, child? You look dreadfully pale. Are you ill yourself?'
'May I tell you later, my lady? It is urgent.'
She smiled briefly and left without waiting for a reply. Lady Isabella stared after her in surprise. Eva had always been punctilious in matters of courtesy, it must be a powerful emotion which made her forget.
*
To Eva's relief Lord Henry was in his room and alone when she knocked on the door.
'Come in, is it news about your husband? Not bad news, I trust?' he added as he saw her expression.
'Lord Henry, I believe my cousin Gilbert Fitzjohn is plotting to kill Piers, and I think I have proof he stabbed him during the contest,' she said without any attempt to introduce such startling intelligence gradually.
To her relief Lord Henry did not waste time exclaiming it was impossible. He told her to sit down and bade her explain, interrupting occasionally to ask a question when he wished to clarify some point. Eva told him everything without reserve, how she had loved Gilbert, had tried to evade her marriage, and that Sir Piers had agreed to an annulment. All she concealed was the fact she now knew she loved her husband and not Gilbert.
'I once met Magda when I went out late at night to see how badly hurt Fleet was, after I fell in the river,' she explained haltingly. 'She said she had stepped out to see if the rain had stopped, but she could equally well have been coming from meeting Gilbert. He was in the stables.'
'That is something we can discover at once, whether it was her sleeve he wore,' Lord Henry said briskly, and went to the door to bawl for a servant.
While they waited for Magda to appear Lord Henry went over the details again, and reassured Eva a close guard would be kept on Sir Piers.
'I will of course arrest Fitzjohn and the other knight, but until we know how many of them were in the plot we must take every precaution.'
He grew more and more impatient until eventually Magda appeared. She was wearing a gown of dull brown homespun, and glanced nervously from Lord Henry to Eva.
At first she utterly denied having given her favour to Gilbert, and declared that she possessed no blue gown. When Lord Henry sent for her possessions to be brought to him and confronted her with the gown with its bloodstained sleeve, she insisted it was a gown she had borrowed from another maid, and refused to admit Eva had given it to her, breaking into noisy lamentations that she was always being blamed for things she had not done because all the other girls were jealous of her.
'You are being foolish as well as stubborn. The other maids will tell us,' Lord Henry said in disgust, and called in the man he had told to wait outside.
'Fetch the captain,' he said briefly, and they waited in silence until that man appeared.
'Fulk, arrest and place under strong guard Gilbert Fitzjohn and Sir Matthew de Chaumont,' he ordered.
The captain looked worried.
'My lord, I cannot,' he said. 'They both rode out a few minutes past, and took the road to the south. I suspected something, they were in so great a hurry, but I had no orders to detain them.'
'What? Send after them at once and bring them back!' Lord Henry roared, and the captain nodded and ran out of the room, shouting to his men before he had closed the door.
Lord Henry turned menacingly to Magda, but she was weeping hysterically.
'What do you know of this?' he demanded.
Magda had no more will to defy him. After a bitter tirade against faithless lovers who deserted the girls they had seduced she quietened sufficiently to tell her story.
'I was talking to him in the outer bailey. Lady Isabella had sent me for some things from the stalls still on the tourney ground,' she explained between gusty sobs. 'I was just coming back and I'd been telling him Lady Eva had been looking at my sleeve and had seen the blood, when the man came to fetch me here. Gilbert told me to hide the dress. I changed when I took my purchases to Lady Isabella. He's faithless, he promised he would take me with him when he went to France. Now he's gone and I'm with child! What shall I do?'
*
Eva turned away, sickened that her last shreds of respect for Gilbert had been trampled on. While protesting love for her he had been tumbling Magda. Indeed he must sometimes have come to her straight from the slut's arms. Yet despite her disgust she hoped he would escape, for she did not wish to see him dangling from the end of a rope on a gibbet. He was still her cousin, although he seemed to be more like his father and the uncles her own father despised than the girl Sir Edmund had loved so dearly.
Her wish was granted when at suppertime, after she had once more slept through the day, Lord Henry told her the men he had sent after Gilbert had returned empty handed.
'He gave them the slip, probably turned off the road and hid until the pursuit was past. I doubt if he'll come back to England, though, once he's safe in France, so you can rest easy. And your husband is better too, I hear. You will soon be able to set off for Granfort.'
Eva nodded.
'Father Gregory came again and said the wound was healing well, the poultices were drawing out the bad humours. Sir Piers will be permitted to get up in a few days.'
Those few days proved a strain for Eva. As Sir Piers no longer needed to be watched over at night Eva took over most of his daytime care. She slept in the small room still, saying she did not wish to disturb him, but she spent most of the daytime hours beside him, trying to win his love as she cared for him.
He was careful to thank her for all she did, but never smiled at her, only at the visitors who came frequently. Lord Henry told him of the plot to kill him and Gilbert's escape, but he made no comment. When Blanche and Lord John came to suggest they might travel with Piers and Eva when he was fit enough to ride, he agreed willingly, but Eva noticed he watched Blanche with a bleak expression in his eyes when she left the room.
Determined to win his love for herself Eva did all she could to make him comfortable, and was unfailingly cheerful even when his lack of response made her want to weep in an abandonment of despair. She even ventured the occasional tentative caress when she was near him, smoothing back his hair or resting her hand on his, and one morning when she came into the room and asked whether he had slept well, she dropped a light kiss on his cheek.
'Do you seek to change my intention?' he asked with barely concealed anger in his voice.
Eva looked at him, a trembling smile on her lips.
'I have come to value you,' she replied hesitantly.
He looked at her sardonically.
'Me, or the security I offer now your paramour has deserted you?'
'He was never my lover!' Eva snapped in despair that he would not accept her word, and he laughed harshly.
'I shall never know, shall I? His perfidy does not change my intention of arranging for an annulment. You are young enough and pretty enough, and have a fair enough dowry,' he added scathingly, 'to entice some other man into offering marriage. You'll not remain unwed for long if that is your fear, despite our disastrous attempt to live together.'
Eva was only too aware of her own fault in that failure, and did not believe she could ever convince him of her new love for him. He clearly considered her actions now were dictated by pure expediency after Gilbert's betrayal, although he knew of her own part in uncovering the plot.
One day she became so angry at his slighting references to her intentions she challenged him on this.
'Why should I betray Gilbert?' she demanded furiously. 'If it is as you say why did I not permit him to carry out his intentions, and marry him afterwards?'
Her husband looked at her and gave a wry twisted smile.
'I don't believe you would condone murder,' he said quietly. 'I suspect you acted impetuously when you discovered he had been involved with Magda. Your pride was hurt to share your lover with a serving wench!'
Eva ground her teeth.
'Do you wish me to swear the most solemn oath that Gilbert had done no more than kiss me?' she asked in exasperation. 'He was not my lover! And thank you for acquitting me of murderous intent!' she flung at him as she went hastily from the room, unable to remain there any longer without screaming out her love for him.
*
At last Sir Piers was pronounced fit enough to travel, and the four of them set out the following day, their servants following with the baggage. Now that the roads were dry and the weather good they could expect to reach Blanche's manor in two days, staying as before in the manor of one of Sir Piers' friends for the first night.
Sir Piers was silent during the ride, and Eva was afraid his leg, still weak but mending fast, was hurting him. She rode her own mare Fleet once more, delighted to be reunited with the mare and thankful no permanent injury had been sustained after the accident. For most of the time Lord John rode ahead with Blanche.
It was becoming increasingly obvious the two of them were very attracted to one another. Eva often caught her husband's glance resting on them, a brooding look on his face, and despite her own unrequited love for him she felt a twinge of sympathetic agony on his behalf that the woman he loved was in the process of falling in love with another man.
On the first night she and Blanche shared a room, for there were other guests also on their way home from the tournament who had rested there for some days, being kin to the host. It delayed the time when Sir Piers would once more refuse to sleep in the same room, a development which, when it inevitably happened, would shame her in front of their hosts.
It was fitting, she thought as she prepared for bed, that it seemed likely to happen when they were at Blanche's manor. There could be no excuse there but the truth, which she suspected Blanche already knew.
When they reached Blanche's home, however, Sir Piers accepted without comment the room Blanche escorted them to. He left Eva there and she had no opportunity of speaking alone with him until after supper when they retired to bed.
He was looking particularly grim as he closed the door behind him, and Eva spoke before he did. She could no longer endure the situation.
'My lord, can we talk? It has been the first opportunity.'
He raised his eyebrows slightly, and then sat on the stool near the small table.
'Well?' he asked uncompromisingly.
'Do you plan to seek the annulment at once?' she asked breathlessly.
'Does it matter?' he asked wearily.
'Yes,' she insisted. 'Have you not seen how devoted Lord John is becoming to Blanche? He will soon, if he has not already asked her, propose marriage.'
'Well?' he repeated.
'Do you not wish to prevent it?'
'To what purpose?' he asked blankly. 'She has been alone for too long, would you seek to deny her happiness at last? Lord John is a good man, not too old for her. He will make an excellent father to the boys.'
'Yes, but – '
'But what? I cannot understand your intent.'
Eva found it difficult to understand herself. After these last few days when all she had desired was the love of her husband for herself she had finally come to the conclusion he would never give it to her. She had watched his anguished eyes as he looked at Blanche and contemplated her growing liking for another man, and knew that at whatever cost to herself she had to release him. One of them should have the chance of happiness.
'Blanche would prefer to marry you if you were free,' she said at last in an expressionless voice.
'But I am not free.'
'You will be soon. I – will not make difficulties. I will go home to my father if that is best.'
He looked at her consideringly, and she turned away from that steady regard, fighting to suppress the emotion which threatened to overwhelm her.
'Best? For you?'
'And for you. It is clear we can never live in amity, and it seems wasteful to prevent your happiness.'
'Is that what you truly wish?'
'Yes,' she lied desperately.
'Do you plan to join Gilbert?'
'Oh, Gilbert, always Gilbert! Cannot you forget him? I care not what becomes of me, but if your life is also ruined through this stupid marriage I could never be easy again. You love Blanche, do you not?' she demanded, looking at him once more.
'I have loved no one since – for a very long time,' he said bitterly.
'But you wanted to marry her once, I know you did.'
'I have never said so.'
'You talked, the first night after you were wounded. I thought you were awake, but I have realised since you were asleep despite your eyes being open. It was then you said you wanted to marry Blanche. You cannot deny it.'
'I asked her once, yes,' he agreed quietly, and Eva swung quickly away to hide the anguish the confirmation of her fears produced in her.
'I don't know why she refused, if she did, but it was clear to me the very first time I met her that she was in love with you then. Was it soon after her husband's death when you asked her?' she persisted, unable to prevent the twisting of the knife in the wound she had dealt herself by initiating this conversation.
'Too soon, I suppose. I thought it would solve her difficulties but she did not agree.'
'She would now. She has turned to Lord John because she thinks you are not free.'
'You are in her confidence? That I cannot believe.'
'Of course not, but I can imagine how a woman who is proud will behave when she sees her real love is lost to her. Why do you not go to her? Now?'
'You are very anxious to order my life,' he said cuttingly.
'You have ordered mine, with little success for either of us,' Eva retorted hotly. 'I don't know why Blanche agreed to be your mistress after refusing your offer of marriage, and I don't wish to. Perhaps she is careful of appearances, and did not wish to marry too soon. But if you ask her again I am sure she will accept. Are you afraid to put it to the test?' she taunted.
He took a step towards her and then halted. After a long moment when he stared at her in silence he bowed ironically and swinging round left the room.
*