In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,23
the same meandering path her hand had taken downward.
“Will I see you again before you return to Blois?”
“I cannot say for certain,” he admitted honestly. “We have been gone from camp a week; too long for a troop of restless knights to remain calmly on their own side of the river.”
“Have your father’s wounds healed?”
“My father is made of iron, in flesh and in will. His leg began to heal the instant Lady Servanne set her hands to it.”
“Mmmm … You have been gone from Amboise three months? I warrant it was not the laying on of milady’s hands that wrought such miracles.”
Eduard closed his eyes and pressed his head back into the rush-filled mattress. He could not argue with Gabrielle’s theory; his father and stepmother were as much in love now as they had been when they had married fourteen summers ago. The slightest look or most innocent touch could still send them hurrying behind closed doors—where they had, in truth, spent most of the past seven days and nights.
Eduard himself had managed to resist such fleshly pursuits until today, until the sights and sounds and smells of a lusty autumn day had sent him wandering across the draw and down into the village of Amboise, to the tiny mud and wattle cottage where he knew he would be welcomed without any questions, without any demands of any kind.
Well, hardly any demands.
He drew as much air as his lungs could hold and tried to steady himself, tried to ignore the lapping, wet heat that was determined to show no mercy this day. He heard a muffled laugh and he cursed, knowing he had gone too long without a woman to count on any measure of control now.
The taste of success made Gabrielle’s mouth bolder and the shock sent his hands down, sent his fingers curling into the black waves of her hair. Her zeal was genuine, her energy boundless. Gabrielle had been widowed three times in nine years by men who, it was generally agreed, had wasted away from sheer exhaustion—all with deliriously wide grins on their faces. She was four years older than Eduard, looked ten years younger, and made no secret of what she considered to be the fountain of youth.
It was well over an hour later when Eduard ducked beneath the low-slung lintel of the door and stepped out into a cool rush of shaded air. The sun had already dipped below the tops of the trees, casting long, slender shadows across the surface of the nearby river. The village, nestled securely in an elbow of the Loire, was all but completely swallowed by the silhouette of the castle that dominated the high ridge above. When viewed against a hazed, blood-red sunset, Amboise’s ramparts, towers, and spires were magnificent and magical; seen emerging from the vaporous morning mists, it was a cold and menacing display of Norman military efficiency.
As Eduard walked up the steep and narrow approach to the enormous barbican towers that guarded the entry to the castle grounds, he grinned at the lingering weakness in his limbs. It was not the first time he had cursed the height of the earthworks surrounding the outer walls, nor the first time he paused at the drawbridge to catch his breath and glance back down at the thatched roof of the widow’s cottage. In fairness, he should not have strayed today, not after leaving his men strict orders to work themselves and their horses through their paces. The past seven days and nights of inactivity had left him restless, and while the others had made good use of their wives and whores the first few days of their arrival home, Eduard had raised a sweat with sword and lance, practising from dawn until dusk.
As much as he had missed the peace and serenity of Amboise, lengthy periods of inactivity were a curse he found increasingly difficult to bear, especially when he knew the French were pressing hard to advance into the province of Touraine. In the past month alone, he had led two skirmishes that had driven Philip’s army back across the Loire; he had won a resounding victory in a third when French knights had attempted an ill-planned assault on their encampment. Eduard and his father had returned to Amboise a sennight ago, neither in the keenest of spirits to do so, but Lord Randwulf had been sorely wounded in the ambush and it had taken all of his son’s considerable powers of persuasion, plus his