He reached the room and opened the door. When his son saw him, his cries grew more hysterical and he jumped from the bed then leaped under it.
“Son.”
More screeching.
Perhaps your lord should think about cutting off all that hair so that he does not frighten his poor child!
He lifted his fingers to his hair. He had grown it long living the life he’d led, going where the wind led him, even as far south as hell, living in huts along the Marañon River. In some customs, long hair like his signified strength. He guessed it was because of Samson from Father Timothy’s Holy Book. A favorite story of his.
But where was his strength while he hid in his room earlier?
His son continued to cry for the next three hours.
Rauf shot Nicholas some dark glances. The other men were quick to snap at companions. Most ran from the keep. Rauf and Donald stayed. Nicholas was grateful for them. They managed to get the child to eat, at least.
“Nicky, please, hear me,” Rauf pleaded in the great hall that night when the boy finally fell asleep. “I know where the lass is stayin’. Let me go fetch her. She—”
“No.” Nicholas shook his head.
“Who is she? I dinna understand why ye are so dead set against her.”
“She is Julianna, Rauf.Julianna.”
His friend looked off to the side somewhere in his memory and then found her. “The one ye used to cry oot fer in yer sleep.”
Nicholas nodded and sipped his ale. He didn’t know if he’d cried out or not, but Cain and the others knew her name, so he must have. “She was at St. Peter’s Abbey when we went there for Elizabeth, Aleysia’s friend.”
Rauf nodded as if he remembered and rubbed his hand down his bristly face. “What is she doin’ lookin’ fer a way to earn coin?”
“I do not know. I do not know what she wants.”
“She wants to take care of Elias,” Rauf told him.
“She cannot.” He turned his gaze away from Rauf’s searching one. “She does not know who I am. She thinks I am Nicholas MacPherson.”
“But,”—Rauf looked as if he might cry.–“ye are Nicholas Mac…hell, Nicky, did ye pick up some sort of malady that is eatin’ away at yer head? D’ye think I have it?”
Nicholas smiled beneath the hair on his face. Rauf had always remained by him from the day Cain and the men found him beaten and left as dead on the road outside Berwick four years ago. Rauf had never left him. When they had returned from Nicholas’ pilgrimage, Rauf had been named his commander.
“Beneath all this fur,” Nicholas told him, “…if she saw me, she would know me as William Stone. She does not know who I am. You must not tell her.”
“But Nicky, she had a way with the lad. She was patient and tender with him and she told me of her nurse, Berengaria, who by the way is another person ye have never mentioned.”
Berengaria. A name Nicholas couldn’t say correctly until he was five, perhaps six, and stopped saying altogether when he was twelve, after she left him. He’d loved her with his whole being, and she left.
Nicholas didn’t know whether to shout in frustration or whisper his plea. He’d put Berengaria out of his mind since she’d left. He didn’t want to hear about her now. “I know I am asking much of you and of the men,” he said, “but do not ask me to bring Miss Feathers—all this—back into my life.”
“All what?” Rauf stared at him for a moment, as if waiting to discover something he didn’t know after the years they’d spent together. “Why have ye not told me of Julianna, Nicky? Ye let me put her oot of my thoughts because ye never spoke of her. Not once. And yet, ye see her now fer a moment and yer feelin’s fer her are so strong ye canna be near her? Not even fer Elias’ sake?”
“My feelings for her are not strong,” Nicholas disagreed.
“Aye, they are, Nicky. I think ye love her, lad. I think ye have loved her all along.”
Sometimes, Nicholas wanted to strangle Rauf. Times like now when Nicholas had no rebuttal. If everything he felt about love and life was her faultall alongthen wasn’t it best to face that terrible beast head on? No. He didn’t want to. He’d faced enough beasts in his life. This one was the biggest, the most ferocious. It had been born of misery when he was a babe, beaten and left alone to cry until it drained his heart dry. Until a year later, when the governor’s wife had a child, a girl called Julianna, and hired a wet nurse to tend to the babe.
Berengaria had heard him crying in the servants’ quarters and went to him. She’d cared for him there from then on while she nursed the governor’s new babe. She took him as her own and called him William.
He’d grown up with Julianna, not as a sibling, for they were not equal. He had been taught from an early age that she was his master’s daughter. He must always remember. He had, and he also remembered her red hair and spirited demeanor, how, when she was willing to go head to head, she bristled and had to then blow a curl or two away from her face.
