In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,54

part, will not consent to the marriage until Eleanor is safely ensconced in Powys. To answer the second question, Gwynwynwyn hates John with a passion that has even chilled my blood on occasion. He will safeguard Eleanor if for no other reason than to know he has helped put the English fox’s neck in a snare.”

“Nor will he overlook the possibility of having one of his sons chosen as her consort,” Alaric added wryly.

“I will not deny, he is one of the candidates,” William admitted.

Eduard felt another ripple of tension. Eleanor would indeed have to marry, and marry well if she were to pose any kind of threat to her uncle. Gentle, sweet Eleanor. Sadder and more solemn than a princess of eighteen years should have been, she had already suffered immeasurably from her family’s political maneuverings. In the past five years alone, she had been betrothed three times to three rulers in exchange for promises of future alliances. Each time she had been supplanted by a more favourable candidate. Here was a proposal for a fourth, and the promise this time was freedom—but freedom to what fate? Eleanor was sunlight and music; Wales was darkness and barbaric clan wars. Could he embark on this rescue only to see her banished to a bleaker prison?

As the Lady Ariel had so tactfully pointed out, he was bastard born and as such should not even dream of a marriage with noble blood, let alone royal. It did not stop him from loving Eleanor, however, or from caring deeply about her happiness—something he could not see her obtaining in the arms of a rutting Welsh bull.

Yet, even as the image took shape in FitzRandwulf’s mind, it was not the helplessly pinioned body of the princess he saw being cruelly ravished; it was the flame-haired Lady Ariel de Glare who was crying out in rage and despair, desperately imploring him for help.

Chapter 7

Ariel could not sleep. She paced the narrow confines of her chamber, her robe gathered tightly around her shoulders, her sandaled feet making soft slapping sounds on the plank flooring. The room was small, located in a tower that abutted the main keep, and cool in spite of the iron brazier full of hot, glowing coals.

There was only one window in her chamber, the embrasure tall and thin in design. The opening was barely the width of a pair of slender shoulders, and so deeply recessed into the wall she had to sit on the stone ledge and crane her neck well forward to see even a portion of the sprawling grounds below. There were wooden shutters afixed to either side, and a woven arras hooked above the window which could be lowered in the winter months to keep out the winds, or in the long days of the summer to keep out the heat and stench from the moat. Tonight the room had been muffled against the threat of an approaching storm, but even though the shutters were a snug fit, the arras moved like a woolen lung, alternately swelling and sucking inward as the wind buffeted the outer walls.

The furnishings offered no relief for her restlessness. A bed, built in the style of the French court, sat on a raised platform and was enclosed in a thick swath of curtains which rose in an elegant twist above the top of the frame. There was a writing table and two chairs, a leather coffer for storing clothes, and a small pallet tucked beneath the bed where a page or maid—neither of whom Ariel had with her at present —could sleep.

A crucifix was hung prominently on one wall, but Ariel had already said her evening prayers and could see no benefit in overtaxing her knees. On another wall, someone had painted a gay profusion of tulips and roses over the whitewashed blocks, but after a while they seemed more of an irritant than a comfort, assuming the shapes of twisted, deformed faces that leered at her on each walk past. A tall, multibranched candelabra stood by the table, the five thick candlesticks blazing lustily in the errant drafts. Someone had sprinkled fennel leaves over the coals in an hospitable attempt to give the chamber a mellow, sweet smell, but Ariel found it cloying in a room already burdened with the odour of tallow and cramped tidiness.

She had accompanied Dafydd ap Iorwerth into the gardens after supper, the residue of her anger keeping her warm as they wandered the well-tended paths of flowers.