Lady of the English - By Elizabeth Chadwick Page 0,97

hound came Will D’Albini, his stride long, but measured and deliberate. Adeliza suppressed the urge to run away. After all, she had summoned him here.

“Madam!” Adam attempted a bow while the dog strove to lunge after a cat that had been sleeping in a flowerbed. “I have brought you a visitor!”

“So I see.” She faced Will with a pounding heart, but her tone was calm and gracious, betraying no sign of her flustered state. “Messire D’Albini, you are welcome.” He performed a small, serious bow. “Madam.” He smiled and indicated the dog and child. “Both have grown beyond measure.”

“Indeed, they are thriving.” Adeliza dismissed Adam with a word of thanks, and as he and his charge ran off, dragging each other by turns in their preferred directions, she walked along the path and sat on a bench away from her women. He joined her side, and as he took a moment to adjust his cloak out of the 241

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way, she cast a swift glance at him in profile and noticed the healing cut along his jawbone. He had lost weight and his hair was shorter, although it still retained its curl.

“Your letter reached me in the field with the king,” he said.

“This is almost the first time since midsummer I have been out of my armour—and I do not suppose it will be for long.” An attendant brought them wine and napkins containing dainty hot wafers sprinkled with rose water. The breeze ruffled the leaves of the cherry tree and the scent of lavender and gillyflowers wafted from the borders.

“Were you at Shrewsbury?” she asked in a tight voice. “Is that where my letter found you?”

He grimaced. “Yes it was. I know your connection to the place, and I am sorry. The king had reached the end of his patience.” He stared into the distance, and his eyes grew bleak.

“These are difficult times. I want to protect you and keep you safe.”

Adeliza looked down at her cup. “But the walls of Shrewsbury castle were no defence for its garrison, were they?”

“They were soldiers who took their chance, not women,” he said. “They had rebelled against the anointed king.” A usurper king, she thought, but said nothing. Something must have shown in her expression, because he said, “You wrote to say you had decided to accept my offer of marriage.

Have you then changed your mind?”

She could feel his tension and her own matched it. Even now, even when she had committed herself in written words, she was still unsure.

“I swear if you accept me, I will do everything I can to be fair and just.” He took her hand in both of his, making a warm, enclosing shell.

She shook her head. “I have not changed my mind. I have asked God for His advice and He has sent you to me. I have 242

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thought about taking holy vows, but there are things beyond the cloister that I must do.” She gave a troubled frown. “It is such a difficult step to leave these walls and take up the reins again.” He stroked her captive hand with a gentle movement of his thumb. “My own choice was very simple,” he said.

After a moment, she raised her free hand to touch his face in a gesture as light as a breath. “Then I hope you have made the right one.”

“I am certain of it.” He took one hand from hers and curved his arm around her shoulder, and she felt herself fit into the cup of his palm as if it was meant to be. Tentatively, she leaned against him.

He continued to stroke her hand as he gazed across the tranquillity of the sunny courtyard. “We will have days like this, together,” he said. “You and me, and our children. I promise you that.”

She made a small sound in her throat. “If you can give me those things,” she said, “then indeed I will know my choice is the right one.”

ttt

Adeliza gazed down at her shoes. They were of soft lilac fabric with fashionably pointed toes and were stitched all over the surface with silver thread and gems. The shoes of a queen. She had not worn them since the last occasion she and Henry had sat together in state at a court feast before he left to go hunting and never returned.

She had spent the morning in prayer with Herman her chaplain before the altar in the chapel at Arundel and, although