The Love Knot Read Free Page B

circuit of the burned-out settlement.
    Kneeling beside her former mistress, all signs of the bloody struggle cleared away, Catrin sniffed and knuckled her eyes. She had been fond of Amice, who had taken her in, a soldier's widow with nothing more than two silver pennies and a roan mule to her name. For almost three years Catrin had sheltered beneath Amice's generous, mercurial wing, turning a blind eye when a blind eye was required, being a companion and confidante, sometimes a scapegoat, but always needed - if not by Amice, then by Richard. What would happen to her and the boy now she did not know; she could only hope that Robert of Gloucester would have the compassion to take them in, penniless dependants as they were.
    A shadow passed between Catrin and the fire. She glanced up in alarm, then breathed out in relief as she saw it was the knight, Oliver Pascal.
    'I didn't mean to frighten you,' he said, and crouched at her side, adding when she did not speak, 'I'll keep vigil now while you go and rest. I'm taking you and the lad with me to Bristol on the morrow and it will be a long ride.'
    Catrin eyed him warily. 'I suppose Amice asked you.'
    'She did, but I'm bound there anyway. I serve the Earl and I've to report to him.' He looked at her curiously before leaning over to replenish the fire. 'Amice said you are a widow without kin, but surely you must have had a home once?'
    Catrin watched him select and arrange the split logs. In all the earlier conflagration it was ironic that the wood pile had not been touched. 'Chepstow, I suppose, since I was born there, but there is no one left in that place to welcome my return,' she said with a shrug. 'My mother was Welsh, my father a serjeant of the Chepstow garrison, but they are both dead. My husband was also a soldier there.' She compressed her lips, her mind filling with a vision of Lewis's thin, dark features and blazing smile. 'And he too is dead.' 'I'm sorry.'
    The predictable response. She had heard it from so many lips by now that it was irritating and meaningless, a stepping stone to buffer the discomfort of others. 'Amice came to Chepstow a six-month after my husband's death,' she said, eager to have done with her story. 'When she left, I begged to go with her rather than dwell alone with my memories.'
    He positioned the last piece of wood and dusting off his hands, rested them on his thighs. 'I too am a soldier, one of Robert of Gloucester's hearth knights,' he said after a while, 'although not by choice. My family lands lie close to Malmesbury and my older brother lost them, together with his life, when he declared for the Empress Mathilda. I'm his heir - his dispossessed heir.'
    'I'm sorry,' she said in the same polite tone he had used to her, paying him back in the same coin. Then felt honour-bound to add, 'And I'm sorry about your wife. Amice told me about her.'
    He gave her a long, level look. 'Sorry doesn't help, does it?'
    Catrin blinked and turned away. Mary Mother, she was not going to weep in front of this man. 'I must go to Richard,' she said and started to rise.
    Oliver grimaced. 'Be warned then; he was angry - with her, not me - and because of the anger, the grief is trapped within him. He asked me if I had lain with his mother like "all the others".' He glanced grimly at the dead woman's shrouded figure, the red shadows licking the hem of her gown. 'How many "others" were there?'
    'Because it matters to you or to him?'
    She saw the twitch of his brows, the knotting of muscle in his jaw. 'Obviously it matters to him,' he said stiffly. 'I am not about to sit in judgement if that is your fear.'
    'I do not fear your judgement,' Catrin snapped angrily. What else was he doing but sitting in judgement? 'Yes, she liked the company of men, yes, she took them to her bed when she would have been wiser to abstain, but Richard was always well cared for. Her heart was too soft and she sought for love in all the wrong places, but if that is a sin, then more than half of