“Except me, my lord.”
“You must love her deeply to go to so much trouble.”
“I promised her to find out the truth,” said Golde. “It is the only way to put her mind at rest.”
“The truth might destroy her peace entirely.”
“No, my lord. Aelgar has many frailties, but she also has an inner strength. Uncertainty is what will gnaw into her soul. She must know. Who killed her man? And why? However ugly the facts, she is ready to confront them.”
“And you, Golde?”
“Me?”
“Can you stare the hideous facts in the face?”
She nodded. “It would not be the first time, my lord.”
A wolf howled in the distance, but neither of them even heard it now. They were too locked into each other to listen to anything more than the words that were spoken between them. Ralph felt strangely coy. He wanted to reach out to take her in his arms, but he was almost tentative.
“Why did you never marry again?” he asked.
“Because that is no route to happiness for me.”
“When did your husband die?”
“Three years ago, my lord.”
“You have never looked at another man since?”
“I have looked at several and found them wanting.”
“Did they not measure up to your husband?” he asked. “Is that why you have remained a widow? Because you are still mourning the one man who made you content?”
“No,” she said, softly. “There was no contentment in my marriage.
I was a faithful wife, but I could never love my husband. Companion-ship was the most that I could hope.”
“Not love him? Why, then, did you marry him?”
“Of necessity.”
“You were forced into this match?”
“It was arranged for me. I protested in vain.”
“Could your father be so unkind?” said Ralph, earnestly. “Did he have no concern for his daughter’s feelings? What made him wed you to a man whom you wished to put aside?”
“You, my lord. You and others like you.”
He understood. Golde’s father was one more victim of the Norman occupation, a proud Saxon thegn whose wealth and position had been reduced to insignificance. Where he might have offered the hand of his elder daughter to the son of another noble house, he was instead compelled to marry her off to a brewer from Hereford. Golde was accustomed to a life of recurring loss. She was resilient enough to survive, but it had given her a slightly cynical edge.
“Thus it stands with me, my lord,” she said with a resigned shrug.
“I knew misery with my husband. I sometimes wonder if it is even possible to be happy in marriage.”
“It is,” said Ralph. “I have known that joy.”
“Then I envy you.”
“Perhaps I should envy you, Golde.”
“Why?”
“Because you were able to put your marriage behind you and start afresh. Your life is better without your husband.” He turned away with a sigh. “Without my dear wife, mine is far worse. I still grieve over the loss of that brief joy.”
Ralph was astonished. He never talked about his wife to his friends, let alone to strangers. When he was standing alone in the moonlight with a beautiful woman, his marriage was the last thing he wanted to think about. Yet his words had come out so naturally. He felt no embarrassment. Golde had confided in him and produced an answering confession.
She touched his shoulder with the tip of her fingers. Ralph took her hand and kissed it tenderly. When he tried to enfold her in his arms, however, she held him off.
“This is not the time, my lord.”
“I want you,” he whispered.
“There are too many other things in the way.”
“That is the only reason?”
“It is reason enough.”
“Then you are not offended?”
Golde moved in close to brush her lips against his.
“No, my lord,” she said. “I am delighted.”
Pain and exhaustion finally overcame him. Gervase Bret fell asleep with his back up against the wall and his legs in the straw. Slumber was no escape from tribulation. His dream tormented him afresh. He was riding across Richard Orbec’s land once more when rough hands fell upon him and he was bound securely. Instead of being tied to a horse, however, he was strapped to the back of a huge red dragon, which galloped along the Welsh border, breathing fire and defiance in equal measure. Gervase was helpless. The creature’s spikes dug into his body. Its scales rubbed his skin raw. Its long tail curled up to thresh his back unmercifully until it ran with a waterfall of blood.
The dragon seemed to get bigger, the ropes tighter, and the pain more excruciating. Gervase had never known such agony. His gro-tesque mount was racing faster than ever. It suddenly stopped beside a river and rippled its whole body. Gervase was thrown high into the air before sailing down towards an outcrop of rock. He yelled in terror.
The cry and the bump brought him awake. The fiery dragon was no more than a gentle old man, plucking at the strings of his harp. The blood down his back had been the trickling moisture that ran down the wall. Thrown from the scales of a giant beast, he had simply fallen sideways and hit the ground in the dungeon.
Gervase collected himself and sat up again.
“I am sorry if I startled you, Omri.”
“Nothing can do that.”
“How long was I asleep?”
“Long enough.”
“Is it night or day?”
“Still night,” said the Welshman. “Day will poke a finger of light in at you if you stay where you are now.”
“There is a window?”
“High in the wall behind me. When they put me in here, I felt my way around every inch of the cell. If you have no eyes, you learn to see with your fingers.” He put the harp aside and groped for something in the straw. “We are not alone down here, Gervase. We share this mean lodging with a tenant of much longer standing.”
“A tenant?”
“Here he is.”
Omri pulled the skull from the straw and offered it to Gervase. The latter shrank back for a second then mastered his fear. He took the skull and brushed the tufts of straw away from it. A beetle crawled out of one of its eye sockets.
“Who do you suppose he was?”
“Yet another nameless prisoner of fate,” said Omri.
“Where is the rest of him?”
“In the far corner. I covered his bones with straw.”
“Poor man!”
“He has not been very talkative,” said Omri with a wry smile. “That is the trouble with the dead. They do not speak Welsh.”
“He was thrown in here and left to rot!” said Gervase with sudden alarm. “The same ordeal may await us.”
“I think not, my friend.”
“They’ll let us starve to death in this hole.”
“We will live. That much is very clear.”
“Why?”
“Because our enemies do not need to kill us slowly when they could have done it much more swiftly on the road.” He gave a chuckle.
“Besides, they have fed me twice since I have been in here. Bread, water, and the remains of a chicken. This form of starvation is a tasty way to die.”
Gervase was reassured. As he shook the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes, his mind cleared. His captors had gone to great trouble to bring him across the border into Gwent. Had Richard Orbec feared that Gervase might see too much on his clandestine visit to the disputed land? Or had someone else decided that the best way to halt the work of the commissioners was to remove one of them from the scene? Monmouth Castle was a Norman citadel on Welsh territory.
Had it been taken? Was the red dragon on the rampage again?
Omri the Blind might hold some of the answers.
“Only two of you survived,” he said. “Two from ten.”
“That is so.”
“Then where is your companion?”
“I do not know, Gervase.”
“Locked in another dungeon?”
Omri measured his reply. “My companion is … somewhere in the castle. But not in such a miserable condition as us.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Instinct, my friend.”