Web of Deceit Read Free

the state of her mistress’s locks, knotted into snarls by the fingers of the wind. Ygerne’s cheeks were flushed from the cold air, and excitement gave them the high colour of a girl. Gorlois was at the gates: her heart lifted at the thought of her doting husband and his huge, beautiful brown eyes.
    Herded into the fortress by her maidservants, Ygerne consented to be combed and polished, dressed and prodded, until her women were satisfied with her appearance. But Ygerne was careless of her beauty, being ignorant of the worth of a face of such delicacy of bone and shape that men ached to own her. She set little store by surface appearances, and possessed few traces of guile or vanity. If anything, she distrusted the quality and depth of her character and the strength of her personality; her superficial attractiveness was an accident of birth.
    Then Gorlois was in the fortress and she could hear his iron-heeled boots striking the stones while his huge, generous nature filled the walls so that the castle rang and echoed with his laughter.
    ‘Ah, my beloved wife, you are as beautiful as ever. My eyes have hungered to see you,’ he shouted as he picked her up and swung her easily off her feetuntil she was dizzy and giggling.
    ‘Gorlois, my lord – enough!’ she laughed as her plaits began to unravel and curl all over again. ‘My maid will be cross with me now, for she’s only just straightened my hair.’
    Gorlois held her close and breathed in the perfume of that knee-length hair and the shimmer of gold and russet in its nut-brown waves. He loved his wife’s hair and could play with its long tresses for hours once the sharp pang of his physical need was satisfied. Ygerne always smelled of lavender and roses, although as a mere male the king had no idea how she managed to be so sweet and clean. He was content to languish in her arms and to luxuriate in her never-failing beauty.
    ‘Put me down, Gorlois,’ she whispered, tugging playfully on his greying beard. ‘What will Ceri and Valmai think to see the master and mistress cavorting like newly promised lovers rather than an old married couple. I am nearly seven and thirty, so I am well past the age for such behaviour.’
    ‘You will remain lovely forever and I have missed my wife during my absence,’ Gorlois muttered into her soft white throat, his voice thickening with desire. He had ridden with Ambrosius, the High King of the Britons, throughout the spring and summer as they drove the barbarous Saxons back to Londinium, but he had yearned for his wife through every weary mile and in each ugly conflict as if she were the most potent and addictive of wines.
    For all her protestations, the queen retained her extraordinary appeal despite the approach of old age. She was very tall for a woman, but any appearance of robustness was nullified by an extreme slenderness that suggested fragility. Her skin was remarkably thin and very white, so that the contours of her face held a blue tinge from the flood of blood through the surface veins. Her features were so symmetrical and cleanly sculpted that her appearance could easily have seemed bland, but her huge, lambent blue-grey eyes created an incandescencethat seemed as frail as new grass and as crystalline as clean water. From her long, delicate fingers to her elegant, narrow feet, every aspect of Ygerne’s appearance was pleasing to the eye.
    ‘I have received word from King Lot, beloved,’ Gorlois told her later, as they luxuriated in the king’s great bed under a coverlet of bearskin. ‘Morgause quickens with child once more.’
    ‘Another? So soon? Our daughter will populate the north at this rate. Still, I do long to see her bairns , as her dull husband calls them.’ Ygerne giggled like a girl into her husband’s masculine shoulder, which still smelled faintly of horse. ‘Why are Morgause’s children given names that are so similar? Gawayne, Agravaine, Geraint . . . heavens! It’s hard to remember them all, I