She was quiet, then asked seriously, “Do you think someday you will regret us?”
“Nay. Never.” His lips brushed her brow.
“How do you know?”
He had his answer, and he smiled.
A shaftof light woke Ramsey from the dregs of a deep and dreamless sleep, and he turned away from the open bed curtains and reached out for Beitris. Her side of the bed was empty, and the linens were cool to the touch. As he lay there, he could hear her moving around their chamber, poking the wood in the fire, the slight clunk of setting something down on a table, the shuffle of her slippers on the stone floor, then suddenly muted by the carpet.
He tried drifting back to sleep, but his head throbbed, and when he took a deep breath, his mouth tasted as dry and trampled as a tourney field. Sour. Then he remembered the wine, goblets and goblets of undiluted wine. He sat up and winced, hunching his shoulders, and emitting a quiet groan. He felt as if someone dropped an anvil on his head. But he rose and used the garderobe before he burst.
He heard a gasp and looked over his shoulder to find a maid with her hands over her face. “Where is milady?” he asked the horrified maid.
“I am here,” Beitris said, standing in the door, capped and veiled and gloved…all imperfections covered, a ewer in her hand. “You may leave,” she kindly told the maid and shut the door after her. She crossed the room to a table near the bed and filled a goblet from the ewer. “I’m afraid seeing you, my lord husband, in all your morning power and glory was too much for her.”
He snorted and scowled at her, aware that his nose was numb. “I have a bone to pick with you, wife.”
“I can see you do.”
“Do not try to deflect the subject with sweet talk.” Ramsey shook his head and winced. “Inside my head there is a full battle going on.” He touched the tip of his nose and frowned again. “I cannot feel my nose. You got me drunk last night.”
She turned around to fidget with something but he caught her guilty look, at least half if it before she showed him her back.
Staring at her, waiting, he wondered how early she had risen.Time enough to hide half of herself from me, still, after all these years.The same ritual of hiding herself every morning and every night.“Beitris. I would know what you are up to.”
“Up to? Here drink this.” She held a goblet out to him. “You will feel better.”
He drank the potion down, handed her the empty goblet and swallowed a belch. “You have not answered my question.”
She stood with her back to him for a long time under the pretense of placing the goblet on the table, then turned finally around, her expression serious. “Glenna is with Lyall.”
His reaction to her news wasn’t immediate. But then everything about him had slowed down. “If I shout like I want to, my head will crack in half,” he said and sank down into a nearby chair, one hand holding his throbbing brow and the other resting on his bare knee. “I am too angry to speak.”
Naked, stripped to nothing but crapulence, he sat there exposed. Yet his wife was swathed in cloth and veils and caps, covered like a sister of God, well-hidden with the scars she would never love or trust him enough to let him see. They werelike two chess pieces at opposite ends of the board, one white, one black.
And the king’s daughter, his responsibility, in his protection, defied him, was no longer chaste and loosely wed to a scoundrel, his fool stepson, and both were down in his own cellars doing God only knew what together.
With the morn barely begun, what else would happen?
Beitris, who had remained silent, walked around the bed and stopped. “Donnald,” she said in a soft, frightened gasp, and he looked up in time to see her swoon.
“Beitris!” By the time he was at her side she had fallen on the bed, her arms flung back and limp beside her head, her breathing so shallow he had lay his head on her breast to hear it. He patted her face and kept repeating her name, then bellowed for her handmaiden, but his wife opened her eyes and said his name.
He held her hand and said, “Do not move. I want to send for the chirurgeon.”
“I am fine.” She started to sit up but he slipped an arm behind her back and helped her, noting her color was fine.
He poured her some of the potion she gave him and handed her the goblet. “Drink it.”
She wrinkled her nose and took a sip.
“You cannot be fine. You did swoon. I have never known you to faint. Have you done so before?”
“Apparently not often enough,” she murmured into the goblet, confusing him.
A guard outside the door called out for him and pounded. Donnald shrugged into his robe and opened the door.
“A rider has come with news, my lord. The earl of Sutherland is near. He and his party should be here before midday.
