“Did you get my message?” he said shakily.
Her eyes were very large in her small face. “You wanted me to come here,” she said. “I felt it.” She went to him. “I also felt that things had not gone well.”
He reached for her.
“Oh God,” he said. “Cristen.”
His arms closed around her.
After a moment, she said in an eminently practical voice, “Your hauberk is extremely hard.”
His grip loosened instantly. “I’m sorry.”
She leaned back in his embrace and looked up into his face. “I gather that he said nay.”
“He said nay,” Hugh agreed. In the light of the brazier she could see that his eyes were glittering.
“I thought he would,” Cristen said.
“I have even worse news,” Hugh told her bitterly. “He has made arrangements for me to marry Elizabeth de Beauté, the daughter of the new Earl of Lincoln.”
Cristen’s slender body went rigid.
A faint smile of satisfaction touched Hugh’s mouth.
“Well, you’re not going to marry her,” she informed him fiercely.
Hugh’s smile deepened. “Now you know how I felt about that Fairfax fellow.”
After a few beats, her face relaxed and she smiled back. “I always understood how you felt about Henry Fairfax.”
Without further speech, the two of them sat down side by side on the bench along the wall next to the shed door. Hugh pulled off his glove, reached out and took Cristen’s hand into his bare fingers.
She rested her head against his arm. “What are we going to do?”
“We have two choices,” he replied briskly. “I can go to the Earl of Gloucester and offer to join with the empress’s party if he will sanction our marriage. Gloucester needs Wiltshire as much as Stephen does. Actually, he needs it more. If he proclaims me the rightful earl, he can march on Wiltshire and hope that those men who still remember my father will rise for me.”
I will see the whole world go up in flames before I will lose you.
Those words of Hugh’s came into Cristen’s mind as she leaned against him in the aromatic closeness of the herb shed.
“And the other choice?” she said quietly.
“We can go to Keal, the manor in Lincolnshire I inherited from my foster father, and be married there by the parish priest. Keal is a nice property, Cristen. We can live there very decently.”
Cristen shut her eyes. “I would live with you in a forest hut. You know that. But I do not want you to give up your heritage.”
“Then I must go to Gloucester,” Hugh said.
She didn’t want him to do that, either.
“If you joined with Gloucester, what would happen if he decided to attack Somerford?” she asked.
He rested their entwined hands on his leg and regarded them somberly. “Your father would have to choose between Guy and me.”
Cristen opened her eyes and stared straight ahead. “He has already chosen you over Guy. He did that when he brought you to Somerford and told you who you were. What you would be asking him to do would be to choose you over his sworn oath of loyalty to the king.”
Hugh ran his thumb up and down the length of her small, tense hand. “Cristen, the easiest way out of this is for us to go to Keal and be married there.”
“We would have to run away.”
He pointed out practically, “We will have to escape from Somerford no matter where we decide to go.”
She removed her head from its resting place against his arm. Her eyes were fixed on the jar she had been filling with medicinal jelly. “I feel as if I am robbing you,” she said in a low, troubled voice.
At that, he swung around to face her. “Don’t you understand? Nothing means anything to me if I cannot have you! You are…you are what ties me to life. If I lose you, I lose my very soul. It would be better for me to be dead than for that to happen.”
She gazed up into his passionate face. Her lips trembled. “I know,” she whispered. “Oh, Hugh, I know.”
He pulled her against him and buried his mouth in her hair.
Hugh’s wool cloak was rough and the mail hauberk he wore under it was unforgiving, but this time she made no complaint. Instead, she drew in a long, unsteady breath and said, “All right. We’ll go to Keal.”
Cristen and Hugh were forced to delay any elopement plans, however, as two days after Hugh’s return to Somerford, Nigel came down with a fever. He fussed with his midday dinner, and when Cristen taxed him with his lack of appetite, he confessed to not feeling well. When she put her hand upon his forehead, it was burning hot.
Cristen put her father to bed and made a potion of borage and blackthorn bark to try to reduce his temperature.
For three days and nights, the fever held Nigel in thrall, ebbing and flowing as the herbs did their work and then wore off. As there had not been a resident priest at Somerford since their old chaplain had died six months before, Cristen sent to the abbey at Malmesbury for a priest so that Nigel could confess and be given the Last Rites.
During the days that her father lay ill, Cristen barely ate or slept. She spent all of her time sitting beside her father’s bed, her beloved dogs, Cedric and Ralf, keeping vigil with her.
When he was not filling in for Nigel about the castle, Hugh sat with her as well. At times the fever subsided, and Nigel recognized the two of them, but when the fever raged he thought that Cristen was her mother.
Some hours after midnight on a frigid winter morning, the fever finally broke. Hugh, wrapped in his mantle, was dozing in a chair in Nigel’s bedroom when he heard Cristen cry, “It’s broken. Oh, Hugh, the fever’s broken!”
Hugh came instantly awake and went to join her by the bed.
Sweat was pouring off of Nigel, drenching the sheets under him and the blankets over him.
Cristen turned to Hugh and gave him a blinding smile. “Thank God,” she said. “I have been so afraid…”
He put his arm around her and she leaned against him. It took less than half an hour for the sweating to lessen, and Hugh lifted Nigel so that Cristen could put dry sheets under him. Then they wrapped him warmly in a wool blanket and covered him with a fur rug. They had moved a charcoal brazier into the bedroom, but the January night was very cold and they did not want him to take a chill.
Then Cristen said, “Go to your own bed, Hugh. Father is going to be all right.”
Hugh refrained from pressing Cristen about their elopement, realizing that she would never leave until her father was once more hale and hearty and back on his feet.
A week went by, and Nigel was finally out of bed and sitting in front of the fire in the great hall.
Ten days after his fever had broken, the lord of Somerford was well enough to get into the saddle and ride to church in Malmesbury.
Hugh had just about decided that the time had come for him to talk seriously to Cristen about eloping, when a messenger arrived at Somerford with news that upset his plans even more thoroughly than Nigel’s illness had done.
It was Sunday afternoon and the Somerford household had finished dinner and were disposed comfortably around the great hall, listening to Reginald’s mellow baritone. The hall door opened and one of the knights on gate duty came striding across the floor to where Nigel, bundled in a warm, fur-lined mantle, was ensconced in a chair by the fire.
“There is a man here from Lincoln, Sir Nigel,” the knight announced. “He says he is bearing news for Lord Hugh from one Bernard Radvers.”
Hugh was sitting on a footstool with his back propped against Cristen’s chair. He straightened up, and his black brows snapped together in a formidable frown.
“Send him in,” Nigel said.
Hugh recognized the stocky, middle-aged messenger immediately. He was John Melan, a knight who had long served as one of the guards at Lincoln Castle.
John’s sword clanked as he strode across the rush-strewn floor. He carried his helmet under his arm, and had pushed back his mail coif to reveal fine brown hair that had begun to recede from his high forehead.