Before her vision cleared, he grabbed the front of her tunic and wrenched it in two. The effort cost him, and he bent forward, clutching his arms high across his chest. She would never know whether he failed to see she still held the knife or whether he believed he had incapacitated her with the blow.
This time, she did not hesitate. Gripping the hilt with both hands, she plunged the blade straight up under his breastbone. The room reverberated with his single scream.
For one long and terrifying moment, he hung suspended above her, an expression of surprise on his face. Blood seeped in a thin line from between his lips. It gushed down her arms from where her knife was planted below his chest.
He fell forward on top of her, his chest on her face. The hilt of her blade pressed painfully into her shoulder, and she could not breathe. Frantically, she pushed against him with the strength of a madwoman to get his weight off her belly.
Grunting with the effort, she rolled him off her, only to find him lying face-to-face beside her. His cold dead eyes stared into hers. Screaming and weeping, she shoved at him with both her arms and legs until she sent his body over the edge of the bed. She heard the hard thud as it hit the floor.
Drawing her knees up, she curled her body into a protective circle around her baby. Only then did she let the darkness take her.
Chapter Thirty-four
His heart racing with terror, William ran up the stairs to the family’s private rooms.Please, God, let me not be too late!As he climbed, he heard the shouts and clatter of swords of the men fighting below. He hit the solar door running and slammed against it. It would not open. Howling with frustration, he rammed his shoulder against it again and again.
He was pounding it with his fists and calling her name when Stephen shouted, “William, move aside!”
He turned to see Stephen and three other men with a log from the hearth to use as a battering ram. He stepped back.
On their third run at the door, the hinges gave way and the heavy wooden door scraped against the floor. William was through the gap before they set the log down. He stood in the center of the solar, frantically looking back and forth in the near blackness.Where is she? Where is she?
Stephen pushed past him and lit the lamp on the table. William swept his eyes over the empty room, searching for clues. An empty flask on its side on the table. Catherine’s embroidery frame on the floor.Please, God, no. His eyes went to the open door to her bedchamber.
She was in there; he knew it.
And he could smell blood.
He never felt fear in battle. When he fought, a cold determination settled over him, and his mind was sharp and clear. But he felt fear now. In every fiber of his body and deep in his bones. It took more courage than anything he’d ever done to walk toward the darkness beyond that open door.
He took the candle Stephen thrust into his hand and waved his brother back. Ignoring the signal, Stephen followed hard on his heels with the lamp. As soon as he entered Catherine’s bedchamber, he saw Edmund’s body sprawled across the floor in a dark pool of blood.
Stephen knelt beside the corpse, but Edmund was of no concern to William now. He couldn’t kill a dead man.
His eyes traveled slowly from the inert body to the blood-smeared sheet that hung down the side of the bed. He followed the sheet up to the high bed, where the light from Stephen’s lamp did not reach.
He caught the glint of a single strand of golden hair curling over the side of the bed. Unable to move, he strained to see into the shadows of the rumpled bedclothes. There was a form on the bed. A form that was much, much too still.
Oh God, oh God, oh God. The candle fell from his hand as he cried out her name. In another moment, he was holding her lifeless body against his chest and keening over her.
She was dead. Catherine was dead.
At the sound of his brother’s harrowing cry, Stephen jumped to his feet and ran to the bed. He sucked in his breath. At the sight of so much blood, he nearly dropped the lamp. It was everywhere. Dark swaths of it covered the bed—and the limp body cradled in William’s arms.
Casting a look back toward the door, he saw the men who crowded into the room behind them were backing out. He turned back to the bed and saw what they saw: William hunched over Catherine, weeping; Catherine’s head lolling over his arm; her blood-soaked tunic ripped asunder, gaping open.
Swiftly, Stephen swung his cape off and draped it over her exposed breasts and swollen belly.
“Thank you,” William whispered.
The misery in his brother’s eyes when he lifted his gaze for that brief moment would haunt Stephen always.
“Is she alive?” Stephen’s voice came out as a croak.
When William did not answer, he asked the question again, more insistently. Still, his brother did not respond.
Stephen reached out and touched Catherine’s cheek with the back of his fingers. A dead person should not feel so warm. Edmund did not. With growing hope, he found her hand under the cloak and felt for a pulse at her wrist.
“She is alive!” When William stared blankly at him, Stephen gripped his arm and said in a louder voice, “William, I tell you, Lady Catherine lives!”
