In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,174

hearty breeding stock. Love had never been a consideration. Affection had never weighed as they mentally checked her teeth, gums, width of hips, and declared her healthy enough, wealthy enough for their purposes. Life with any of them would only have meant more restlessness, more emptiness.

Whereas life with Eduard FitzRandwulf d’Amboise would be a life filled with passion and excitement and love. Bearing his children would be her joy, not her duty. Sharing his destiny would be a challenge, a pleasure, a headlong rush into the unknown that made her heart pound just to think of it.

“I love him,” she said, answering Henry’s question in the simplest terms she could apply. “Nothing will ever change that.”

Henry’s response took another full minute to form, and it did so with a slow shaking of his head. “In a way, I suppose this is all my own fault. I should never have agreed to plead your case before Uncle Will. I should never have agreed to take you out of Pembroke, and surely never have agreed to take you to Normandy. I should have just given you to the Welsh prince of thieves then and there … rapped you on the head and put you in front of the altar too dazed to concoct any more of your schemes let alone draw me into them. But alas, I have never been able to say no to you, Puss, have I?”

Ariel moved forward, skirting around Eduard’s tall frame. She went to her brother and put her arms around him, resting her head briefly on his shoulder. “I am sorry about Cardigan. I know it meant a great deal to you to have the De Clare name restored to its proper place.”

“It never meant as much as your happiness,” Henry murmured, wrapping his arms around her in turn. “And I warrant”—his eyes rose and sought Eduard’s across the gap—“if having a Wolf’s cub is what will make you happy—?”

“Delirious,” she whispered.

A glance passed between the two men, leaving each with a mutual respect for the other’s commitment to Ariel’s happiness. In its wake came the glimmering beginnings of a genuine friendship.

In its wake also, came another sigh of exasperation, for it had all become too much for Sparrow to bear in silence.

“St. Bartholemew and all his blundering acolytes look down upon us with mercy!” he groaned, staggering out of the shadows at the mouth of the tunnel. “I lived through this once, with that selfsame Wolf whose cub, methought, had an even thicker layer of armour ’round his heart. I swore then I would not survive it a second time, God aggrieve me if I did not. I swore it, and now look you here: I am dead.”

With a dramatic flair that would have been the envy of a dozen swooning beauties, Sparrow clutched the shaft of the bolt that protruded from his shoulder and pitched face forward in a dead faint.

Kirklees Abbey, Nottingham

Chapter 25

The moon hung bright and cold in a velvet sky. The light it cast was as strong as daylight, washing the stone walls of the abbey a ghostly gray. A rising wind sent little swirls of silvery Stardust across the ground, for it had snowed earlier in the day, leaving a thin layer of crystalline powder clinging like hoarfrost to the frozen grasses and branches.

Kirklees sat upon the crest of a gentle roll of land. In summer, sheep grazed on the meadow below and a thousand birds built a thousand nests in the branches of the ancient apple orchard someone had planted a thousand years earlier. Behind the orchard, along a narrow gorge and beyond the crest of yet another graceful hillock, loomed the seemingly endless and impenetrable denseness of the royal forest known as Sherwood. Even in winter, with the huge oaks and ashes stripped of their glossy leaves, the woods were dark and forbidding. Spirits were known to dwell there. Demons and fiends, wizards and witches made the glades and gorges their homes and anyone with the wit or will to retain possession of his soul knew better than to venture into Sherwood alone.

Ariel huddled in the warmth of a thick fur robe, not so much chilled by the weather as by the proximity of Kirklees Abbey to the haunted glens of Sherwood. ’Twas a strong arm’s bowshot away from the ivy-covered walls, and she wondered at the courage of the nuns who lived out their lives under the devil’s eye.

She shivered under the weight of her own superstitions