In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,180

at the abbey. “The abbess is waiting to admit you.”

Eleanor and Ariel stepped apart, and in a halting voice, the princess bade a final farewell and thanks to Dafydd ap Iorwerth, Jean de Brevant, and Sparrow, astonishing the diminutive seneschal by bending down and brushing his rounded cheek with a kiss.

“Promise me you will see them all home safely. It is a charge I bestow upon thee most solemnly.”

Sparrow puffed a chest already wadded with bandages and gave the balance of his arblaster an imperious adjustment. “You may count upon me, Little Highness. As always.”

“Give my love to Mistress Bidwell. Tell her I shall pray daily for her continuing perseverance.”

Sparrow started to reply, realized it might be a veiled reference to his own recalcitrant nature, and accorded the request a muffled, “Harrumph!”

With Eduard on one side and Marienne on the other, Eleanor went willingly to her fate. She paused at the low, arched postern and, after a last word with Eduard, pressed something into his hand and walked through the portal with Marienne and was swallowed into the dark silence of Kirklees.

Eduard continued to stand alone, in the shadows of midnight, his head bowed, the dark waves of his hair blown forward over his temples. He turned slightly, angling his hand into the moonlight and uncurled his fist from around the object Eleanor had given him.

It was a pearl. A single white pearl, as large as a robin’s egg, as lustrous as the smile of joy that had been on Eleanor of Brittany’s face as she had walked to meet her destiny.

Epilogue

The safe return of the Wolf’s two sons to Chateau d’Amboise was cause for a week of feasting the likes of which the castle and village had not witnessed in years. The arrival home of Eduard FitzRandwulf with a new bride by his side sent waves of shock recoiling throughout the countryside, with tremors reaching as far as a cold, drafty room in a castle keep in Falaise. There William the Marshal sat before a crackling fire, a cup of mulled wine warming his hands, a wide and (truth be known) not altogether surprised grin warming his heart.

Behind him, snuggled under layers of fur to ward off the winter chill, was his wife Isabella. The countess and their ten children had arrived at Falaise only a few days earlier, led by an exhausted Sedrick of Grantham, who had packed the gaggle aboard a fast ship and sailed from Pembroke within hours of his arrival there.

Jean de Brevant had accompanied FitzRandwulf back to Amboise, claiming he had aught better to do than to pester Sparrow into an early grave. He had heard of Eduard’s famous sire—who of warm blood and living flesh had not? He took an oath of homage to Randwulf de la Seyne Sur Mer and was, in due time, made captain of the Wolf’s personal guard, a duty which, in turn, would include protecting his firstborn son and heir, Robert d’Amboise, when he gained his gold spurs of knighthood and declared his intent to return to England to fetch Marienne FitzWilliam home.

Dafydd ap Iorwerth played the part of Henry de Clare so well, an assassin’s arrow felled him not a month after their return to Amboise. As it happened, he was in the village at the time, pacing along the banks of the river Loire, trying to stoke up the courage to cast a friendly smile in the direction of the miller’s widowed daughter. Luckily the arrow struck the meat of a thigh muscle and the young Welshman was not only able to loose off an arrow of his own to kill his attacker, but he won the wide-eyed interest of his original quarry, Gabrielle, when she brought him back to her tiny cottage to nurse his wound. She proved to be an excellent care-giver, more so when she judged, by the frequency and intensity of his blushes, that he was yet a virgin.

Ariel had cause to suspect by the grin on her husband’s face as he recounted Dafydd’s plight that there was more to the story than met the casual eye, but she wisely kept her suspicions to herself. She had no reason to be jealous or envious of Eduard’s past liaisons, not when she had the heat of his body to warm her every night, and his unflagging energy and passion to guide her breathlessly through every day.

Which is not to say their union was perpetual bliss and contentment. Their battles were monumental and the