Radulf stroked her hip, but did not smile in return. “Why did you stop loving him?”
She gave him a long, cool look. “He betrayed me.”
Radulf nodded. He understood how that would kill love, no matter how strong. “Your Hew is a weak man. He abandoned you to Vorgen, then again when I defeated them in battle, and finally he left you at Trier. I would not have done that, mignonne. I do not abandon mine.”
Something liquefied in her chest, trickling down into her stomach and her limbs. She had an unbearable urge to lean her head against him and give up all she had fought and struggled for and against. His strength was so great. Instead she took a shaky breath and reminded him, “You fell in love?”
He had read her confusion in her eyes, but he didn’t pursue it.
“The woman—for she was no girl—was older than me. She was very beautiful—as you say, an angel, Lily. An angel of goodness, I thought.” He laughed with bitter irony. “We struggled, but I think I always knew that was just part of the game. One night she came to my bed and said she could struggle no longer. After that, I was lost.”
Lily read his reluctance. “It was Anna,” she answered her own question.
“Yes, it was Anna.”
“She was one of the women who lived at the castle?”
Shame brought color to his cheeks, and he bowed his head as though he were too embarrassed to meet her eyes. “Nay, Lily, she was my father’s second wife. And the fact that each time I was with her, I was betraying him, did not stop me. I could not stop.”
For an older, more sophisticated woman to se-duce a boy was repugnant enough—it would be like Lily taking Stephen the squire to her bed— but that the woman was married to the boy’s father was beyond disgrace. “She tricked you into her bed,” Lily said hopefully.
But honestly, reluctantly, Radulf shook his head. “No, it was no trick. I was more than willing to find my way there at every opportunity. I was a young stag in rut, and she was my ever-willing doe.”
Lily felt sick with the bitter shame and regret she read in his eyes, but there was also a stab of jealousy. She did not want to think of that fine young heart and body squandered on such a woman.
“And then your father discovered you?” she asked swiftly, to block out the pictures in her mind.
“He discovered both of us.”
Radulf took a ragged breath and turned his face away, so that Lily could see only the masculine curve of his cheek with its line of uneven stubble, and the white scar near his eye, a reminder of the thing he had done.
His vulnerability was like an ache inside her, and she had to bite her lip to prevent herself from crying out at the injustice of what she knew he was about to tell her.
“He found us together, indulging in our usual carnality. We rarely spoke—there were no words to say. If there had been a joining of minds as well as bodies . . . But we were as animals.” He shuddered, and Lily wondered if his fever was increasing. Gently, she brushed her fingers across his brow, but he did not seem any hotter.
“Anna saw him first, over my shoulder, and when I turned my head he was standing above us. I got up off her. I was naked, and somehow that shamed me more than anything else, when he was fully clothed. My legs felt as weak as watered milk and I was stuttering my apologies, as if that could make it better.”
He gave a soft laugh, a man looking back at the self-deceits of youth.
“He struck me. The heavy ring on his finger sliced open my face. I was fortunate he did not take out his dagger and cut me into ribbons, although I did not think myself fortunate at the time. I stood before him, blinded with my own blood, while she wept that it was my fault, that I had formed a calf-love for her and pestered her and, when she still wouldn’t give in to me, that I had taken her by force.”
“And he believed that?” Lily gasped. Despite Radulf’s heated body close to hers, she felt cold.
As if he sensed the change, Radulf pulled her closer.
“No. I don’t think he did. I think he saw through her lies that time. He had been blind with love until then, so saturated with it that he showered her with an endless array of riches. Everything she asked for, he would find and give to her. He had doted on her, an old man’s autumn madness for a much younger and beautiful woman. Maybe he thought if he gave her what she wanted she would dote on him in return. Now the scales had fallen from his eyes and he was confronted by a stark and terrible truth. And I think it was as much that truth as his son’s faithlessness that destroyed him.”
Outside the chamber, voices had risen in a friendly squabble. Jervois shouted for them to hush and remember their lord. When silence fell again, Radulf resumed his monologue.
“He told her to leave. He sent her back to her family—even then he could not bear to abandon her entirely. As for me . . . he turned from me without a word. He left and took sanctuary in a monastery in the north, and that was where he died six months later. We never spoke again, and I have no doubt he died cursing me.”
Lily found her voice. “And what of Anna?”
“Oh, Anna would never have curled up and died of her shame. She remarried, first to some old French baron, and then last year to Lord Kenton. I followed William of Normandy and became his Sword, and have been rewarded for my loyalty. In truth, I have shown William more loyalty than I did my own father.”
“So when you saw Lady Anna at the castle, you were not shaken by remembered love for her,” Lily whispered, amazed. She had tormented herself with a fantasy of her own making.
“‘Remembered love’?” Radulf retorted angrily.
