Knights Read Free

along the rutted road that curved around the lake like the languid arm of a lover. The lane disappeared into a dense forest of oak and emerged, at length, before the gates of Kenbrook Manor.
    Dane smiled. Built on the site of a Roman fortress and boasting one squat tower, that forbidding pile of stones had been in steady decline for centuries. The roof had collapsed here and there, and in winter, icy winds swept the passageways, extinguishing lamps and torches. There were ghosts prowling about, it was said, truculent ones lacking all charms and graces. On occasion, the wolves got in and made a den of the place.
    For all its shortcomings, the manor was Dane’s by right, and he had always loved it. He would set about making the place habitable, and by the time he was free to take Mariette to wife, Kenbrook would be restored to its original glory. Dane meant to sire sons within its walls and raise the lads to be knights, stout fighting men to take up the cause of justice and make a father proud. He hoped for daughters, as well, pretty, accomplished girls who might make fortuitous marriages.
    With a sigh, he turned to look down into the exquisite face of the young woman beside him. Resplendent upon her small dapple-gray palfrey, fresh and unruffled despite several grueling days on the roads and the turbulent crossing from Normandy before that, Mariettede Troyes favored him with a sweet, demure smile. Then she lowered her eyes, lashes fluttering.
    Dane’s heart swelled with pride and an emotion he reckoned to be pure adulation. “Look, Mariette,” he bid her quietly, pointing toward Kenbrook Manor. “There stands our home.”
    Mariette adjusted her elaborate headdress, a pristine wimplelike affair that hid her hair, her crowning glory, from everyone except her servingwoman and Dane himself. Although he had not been intimate with Mariette—she was gently bred and had passed her tender years in a French nunnery—he
had
caught illicit glimpses of those lush ebony tresses on occasion. One day soon, when His Holiness had granted the proper decree, thus dissolving the sham marriage to Gloriana, it would be Dane’s privilege to see and touch that splendid mane of silk, to run his fingers through it and bury his face in its fragrant softness, night and morning.
    “It seems a place of sorrow,” Manette ventured to say, in a timid voice.
    One thought having led to another, Dane had become so intent upon the various prerogatives of a husband that, for a moment, he didn’t know what she was talking about. Following her gaze—her eyes were a soft shade of hazel—he saw that she was surveying the hall.
    He felt the vaguest twinge of disappointment, far down in his belly, and disregarded the sensation immediately. “Yes,” he said, rather solemnly, thinking of his unborn sons, forgetting for the moment that a score of men were rallied behind him with their ears cocked. “There has been much grief at Kenbrook over the centuries, but that time is now past. We shall fillthe place to its beams with children, Mariette—our sons and daughters.”
    The blush in her cheek made a fetching contrast to the snowy white cloth of her headdress.
    Dane took her reaction for maidenly virtue and wheeled his glistening charger about, that he might face his men. They were grinning now, a gap-toothed lot, covered in grime from the tops of their shaggy heads to the soles of their soft leather boots and smelling worse than their horses. Dane felt heat climb his neck, but he gave no other indication that he regretted speaking of personal matters within their hearing.
    “A welcome awaits you at Hadleigh Castle,” he told them, in a voice raised to carry. “Avail yourselves of it, but mind your manners. My brother is master there, but the rules of the company still hold, and you flout them at your peril.”
    The men nodded in accord and, at a signal from Dane, wheeled their mounts round and plunged—whooping at the prospects of ale and women-down the