Reckless (Age of Conquest #5) - Tamara Leigh Page 0,126
To ensure you have much time to resolve yourself to it, Daryl, I have an undertaking of singular importance upon which you shall embark.”
Vitalis glanced at Daryl and saw from the set of his face he dreaded the details.
“We shall speak ere supper.” William turned and waved a hand that caused the onlookers to disperse.
Relieved he had done nothing he would long regret and repent, and dissatisfied he had not done more to assuage the worry he would carry on his back every day knowing he must not only protect himself but Nicola, Vitalis strode toward the portcullis down the path opened by warriors disassembling the wall made of them.
Muscles aching, skin stinging, stinking of sweat, all he wanted was to carve out privacy with his wife in this place abounding with men who had been the enemy this morn and were now allies. As impossible as that seemed, he had to believe that just as Hawisa had adjusted and thrived with the aid of the Normans who became her family, he would as well.
England would never be the same. He would never be the same. But perhaps the same had offended the Lord. Perhaps different would prove His way of making all things new here. Painful and cruel, but how else to explain what felt the Lord’s abandonment of Saxons? How else to draw near Him again when it felt God was the one who walked away?
Nicola, Vitalis thought as he set eyes on the D’Argent men who awaited his return to the outer bailey. Together, we will find our way through this new England.
“He may have too much honor,” William muttered as he moved toward the gatehouse steps.
Nicola did not know if she was meant to hear that, but when she caught his arm as one ought not a king’s, he turned sharply.
Lowering her hand, she glanced at Richard whose frown told he also questioned his sire’s words. “You think Vitalis has too much honor?” she said warily.
“It appears.”
“That is a bad thing?” Her voice pitched high, a warning she needed to think before speaking.
“Only if it prevents him from staying true to me, my lady.”
Well at least you are aware of your own shortcomings—and they are many, Nicola thought what she managed not to speak.
“But there is a way to resolve that,” William said.
With dread, she asked, “What way is that?”
He lowered his gaze down her with just enough of the predator about him to make her feel hunted, but not in a sexual way. Eyes on her belly, he said, “I am thinking your firstborn son should be given the privilege of being fostered high.”
She gasped. “You would hold him hostage? Threaten him to ensure his father stays true? Use a child—a little one!—to do what it is for a man to do? What it is for you to do to be worthy of—”
“Lady Nicola!” Richard gripped her arm as if to draw her from fire whose heat she ought to feel for how near she was to being burned, but she wrenched free and stepped nearer the king.
Now it was William’s hand on her arm—firm and heavy, though not to the point of bruising. Now his face very near. “As you know, Lady Nicola, hostage is the wrong word.” Saliva flecked her face. “It is called fostering, and as ever it has strengthened alliances, ever it shall. In this instance, it is of more import for what shall be entrusted to a rebel leader who was among my greatest enemies.” His face came nearer still. “Something precious for something precious.”
He was talking in riddles, but he frightened her enough she could not even think words she would need to suppress.
“Fostering,” he put between teeth surprisingly clean and straight.
“Fostering,” she acceded in a whisper. Then trying to calm her heart, she told herself it was true, that such means of raising noble children in Normandy, England, and elsewhere was common. But she feared this would be different. Many boys were fostered when they began training as pages, while others when ready to progress to a squire’s training that ended in knighthood. William did not say it, but she would not be surprised if Vitalis’s first son was fostered well before the age of six or seven.
The king released her. “I think it best you keep that from your husband—for now.”
He spoke of betrayal. And yet, Vitalis might never touch her if he knew.