The Elusive Bride. Deborah Hale

stone found its mark, smiting the nose of Fulke’s mount. When the big beast reared, he was hard put to master it. Cecily watched his contortions with vicious glee.

      By the time he got his animal back under control, Fulke was panting slightly from the effort. Though he continued to bait Cecily with pretended courtesy, his strident tone betrayed an effort to curb his temper.

      “What pious language girls pick up in convents nowadays. Perhaps your exile to a religious house explains why you’ve never learned the proper way to welcome a suitor.”

      “Suitor?” Cecily sneered. “I wouldn’t have you for a suitor even before you betrayed your oath to the Empress. There is nothing on God’s earth that would make me accept you now. If that is the only reason you are here, you might as well leave.”

      “And let some other ambitious baron pluck the fair heiress of Brantham?” Fulke shook his head. “I think not. You will open your gates to me. We will wed and I will gain Stephen’s favor by offering him the jewel of Berkshire to fortify his hold on England.”

      Cecily opened her mouth to scoff that it would do little good to curry favor with an imprisoned king. Then she recalled the rapidly changing fortunes of war. With Maud’s ablest general, the Earl of Gloucester, captured at Winchester, the Empress would have no choice but to ransom Stephen for him.

      With so much else in doubt, Cecily clung to a pair of constant certainties. “I will never open Brantham to you. And I will never take you for a husband, DeBoissard. Now be gone!”

      “You may hesitate to take me for a husband, Lady Cecily, but I’ll take you to wive—willing or no. Consider carefully before you resist. It holds a certain piquant appeal for me.”

      The blatant threat made Cecily’s knees go vexingly weak. She reached for the solid stone of the window casement to steady herself. The Holy Church had tried for centuries to impose Christian principles on the sacrament of marriage. For all that, marriage by rape remained distressingly commonplace.

      “You have an hour to decide,” Fulke declared in a smugly triumphant tone. “After which Brantham will be under siege until you experience a change of heart. Be warned, though, I am not a patient man. Once I take Brantham, I will put one of your people to the sword for every day you have held out against me.”

      With that, Fulke and his attendants wheeled their mounts and rode out of arrow range.

      The sour taste of fear clung to Cecily’s tongue. She was no coward. The thought of physical pain scarcely troubled her. Yet she shrank from imagining what Fulke would do with her and the perverse pleasure it would give him to subdue her struggles.

      Drawing a slow, calming breath that didn’t work, she turned from the window. With her father lost in the dark pit of his grief, responsibility for Brantham and all within its walls had fallen on her shoulders. It weighed heavier than she had expected. For herself, she could face almost anything, but leave it to Fulke to exploit the one chink in her armor—her urge to protect those she loved.

      Looking from the castellan to the marshal and back, she posed a question as difficult to ask as it must be to answer. “Can we hold out against them until help arrives?”

      Both men had known and doted on her since her earliest childhood. Now they shuffled their feet and cleared their throats. Stubbornly, they avoided her searching gaze.

      “Our walls are as stout as any in five counties.” The marshal’s tone belied the hopeful nature of his words. “I doubt DeBoissard has the means at hand to breach them.”

      Fleetingly, Cecily thanked God that her grandfather had squandered the old king’s bounty erecting the thick stone shell that housed Brantham Keep. This was no time for blind optimism.

      “But?” She uttered the word she knew both men were thinking.

      Before either could reply, she intercepted a furtive, hopeless look that passed between them. In it she read her doom.

      “We’ve brought in less than a tithe of the harvest,” admitted the castellan. “With all the extra mouths to feed…”

      He left her to draw the obvious conclusion.

      “As for our crops in the fields—” the marshal shook his head dolefully “—DeBoissard will put ’em to the torch by sundown if we say him nay. Then…”

      Cecily needed no help to reckon that sum. “Then, even if we withstand the siege or drive Fulke off, Brantham will starve this winter.”

      The men confirmed her dire prediction with grudging nods.

      “Then there’s no help for it.” Cecily tried in vain to quell her roiling innards. “I must make ready to wed.”

      “No!” gasped Piers Paston. “There has to be another way.”

      In fact, one had occurred to her. A desperate measure to be sure, but this was a desperate situation. She dared not take a soul at Brantham into her confidence. Their only safety lay in innocent ignorance.

      “My hand is not worth the lives of all my people.” She strove to look apprehensive but resigned. “I must go to my chamber and pray for strength to bear God’s will.”

      “This is no will of God,” muttered the castellan bitterly.

      “In that case,” replied Cecily, “I must pray for Our Father to show me his will in this. On no account disturb me until preparations are complete for the wedding. One concession I would have you beg of DeBoissard—that he let the refugees depart in peace, immediately. This is not their fight. They have suffered too much already.”

      “Very well, ma’am. Surely even a churl like DeBoissard can show that crumb of compassion.” His jaw clenched tight, the castellan looked at Cecily with eyes glowing in admiration.

      She cracked a wry grin in reply. “Where Fulke’s concerned, you’d do better to count on his self-interest. I doubt he’ll want a ward full of refugees and lepers underfoot.”

      Laying a hand on the castellan’s stout arm, she wordlessly charged him to tend Brantham and her father faithfully until she could return.

      As she slipped out of the gatehouse, Cecily heard the marshal calling for a messenger to deliver Brantham’s terms for surrender. Fighting to curb her eager stride, she recrossed the bailey and entered the keep. Any castle folk who saw their lady gain the stairs might have been forgiven the assumption that she was bound for her private chamber above.

      Instead, after checking to make sure she was not observed, Cecily descended the spiral staircase, moving deeper and deeper into the cool, deserted cellars. Pulling a burning brand from one of the wall sconces, she squeezed past barrels of wine and piles of timber. At last she came to a small door, which she quickly opened and entered.

      On the packed earth floor of the dungeon cell lay the stiff corpses of two lepers who had died on the previous day. To preserve the bodies until graves could be dug, Cecily had ordered them to be stored here. Finding a resting place for her torch, she knelt by the taller of the two corpses. Her gorge rose at the thought of what she must do now.

      “Which would you rather, Cis?” she scolded herself. “Peel the clothes off a dead leper, or suffer Fulke DeBoissard to peel the clothes off you?”

      With that, she began to divest the body of its coarse, pungent garments. As she saw what sore mutilations the disease had wrought upon the dead man, her distaste soon muted to pity.

      “Forgive me for this last indignity, Old Father,” she whispered to the corpse as she eased the clothes from his waxy, withered limbs. “I pray your soul now dines at Our Lord’s table, clad in ermine and samite.”

      When she had changed into the leper’s garb, Cecily took her own mantle and folded it carefully around him—like a mother tucking her child into its cradle.

      Stealing through the cellars once more, she climbed a ladder and slipped through a trapdoor into the stables. In the distance she could