Not customary at all. Yet in the midst of a foreign city and a war, a twelve-year-old maiden and a twenty-six-year-old man had been careful enough to find a witness who conveniently appeared and then disappeared. Who?
And why?
* * *
Anne sat in the inn’s common room all morning, stitching another new emblem for the Prince’s bed hangings, lifting her eyes occasionally to see today’s hopeful pilgrims passing by on their way to the Cathedral.
Agatha had begged leave to go with Eustace and buy her own token of her visit to Canterbury and Anne had let her go. She suspected the maid’s sudden desire for a pilgrim’s badge had more to do with Nicholas’s squire than with piety, but their absence relieved her of the need to talk.
Soon, Nicholas would return from his visit with the Archbishop. She could only pray he had received what he needed and that they could return to the court, where she knew what her life must be and what was expected of her and she could be invisible Anne again.
He had seen her and did not shame her or revile her or look at her with pity. He saw her and accepted, even respected what he saw. He saw Anne and not Anne’s limp. When had anyone done that?
Her father had seen nothing but the limp, so he wanted not to see her at all.
Even her mother had seen her lameness first and arranged Anne’s life around it, particularly after her father had died and left them with little. When she searched her memories of her mother, all she found were worries. Was Anne safe? Was Anne in pain? How would Anne live? The entire, elaborate web of secrets, all because she did not think Anne could make a life. Not because she was Anne.
Because she limped.
Anne was fortunate, she supposed, that she had not been drowned like a kitten or that people had not cursed her and her mother both for God’s punishment, for there were those who still believed that such ills were retribution from God. Yet the pestilence had taken bishops and children, the evil and the good.
But until she met Nicholas, how long had it been since anyone had touched her? All these years, alone, since her mother’s death. Years in which no one but Lady Joan would come close enough to risk brushing her skirt or her skin. She had donned invisible armour, strong enough to ward off any approach. Strong enough to make Anne herself disappear.
While Lady Joan, the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, floated through life on a sea of admiring glances, no one saw Anne. No lingering looks lifted her gracefully through the day. No knight, no page, not even the man who emptied the night waste had ever looked at her and smiled in delight at what he saw.
Until now.
Yes, people had averted their eyes. So had she. She did not want to look, to know the thing.
But this man, rife with his own buried pain, had seen that which was hidden, touched the untouchable, acknowledged what no one else would.
Dangerous. So dangerous to be so close to a man who really saw her, beyond the obvious, beyond her limp. There were things he must not see. Things that must be as hidden as her twisted foot.
Things that made Nicholas the most dangerous of all men.
Late in the afternoon, sun rays slanted in the window. She looked around to check the room was empty, then raised her skirt to look at her foot, safely hidden beneath red hose.
As Nicholas had said, sometimes the healing did not happen immediately. Sometimes, people waited near the healing shrine until they recovered. Or died.
Maybe—
At the sound of the door, she dropped her skirt, picked up her needle, and looked up to see Nicholas, scowling, at the inn’s door.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said, not waiting for a greeting. ‘Didn’t the Archbishop find the document?’
‘He found it.’
‘Did he find something wrong?’ A question she should never have asked. Nothing could be wrong. Not after all these years.
‘He did not. It will be summarily blessed by a gathering of bishops, purely for the sake of spectacle.’
‘So all is well.’
He growled. ‘For them, yes.’
‘And for you?’
‘There was a witness to that wedding.’
Her heart started pounding, as if a ghost had finally escaped the dungeon she had hoped would hold him for ever. ‘How do you know that?’ Her words were as shaky as her leg.
‘It said so. In the petition.’
‘Did it say who?’
‘No.’ He looked at her, then, as if seeing her as a link to all that had gone before. ‘Do you know?’
‘Why would I know?’ She wanted to say she was sorry she must lie to him. ‘I was no more than four.’
‘But don’t you find it strange? That a clandestine wedding should have a witness?’
She shook her head and looked down at her stitching, yet another copy of the emblem of the Prince of Wales. White feathers. The motto Ich Dien. I serve.
And that was what Anne would continue to do.
‘Not so strange,’ she said. A risk, now, but she must take it. She must steer him away from that wedding and back to this one. ‘I witnessed her wedding to the Prince.’
He stared, as if struck dumb. ‘What? Why?’
‘Because she asked me to.’
Shock quickly merged with anger. ‘And you didn’t tell me?’
A shrug. As if it were of no significance. Now meet his eyes, as if you have nothing to hide. ‘Is it important?’ Last night’s kiss still burned on her lips, lips she would use to tell him all about this wedding.
The one that didn’t matter.
‘That night, Lady Joan woke me and asked me to come with her. She did not say why. But when we entered the chapel, I saw the Prince and then—’ another shrug ‘—they exchanged their vows.’
‘You knew the marriage was forbidden.’
You mustn’t. You cannot! The King, you are too close... ‘The entire court knew that.’
‘Then why didn’t you stop them?’
Laughter came easily then. ‘Am I to tell the Prince of Wales and the Countess of Kent what they cannot do?’
‘But you knew what would happen, how grave the danger, to their souls, to the kingdom!’
‘I did, but what I did not know is how deeply it would trouble Sir Nicholas Lovayne to be called on to resolve the issue.’ He had barked at her as if he, not the kingdom, had been affronted.
‘That is not what troubles me.’ Hurried words. Angry.
And as his temper rose, hers must fall. ‘Then why are you so angry?’ Yet as she asked, she knew.
He stood and she could see him wrap himself in calm, as protective as a cloak. ‘When next you witness their wedding, you will see one the church can bless,’ he said, letting her question lie unanswered. ‘We return to the court in the morning.’
She rose, eager to retreat to her room. ‘I will be ready.’ Ready to leave this man who had a habit of goading her to say too much.
Or perhaps it was her own weakness that made her say things she should not? How had she kept the secret all these years, she wondered, as she climbed the stairs to her room, when after a few days and a few kisses he had her babbling of things she should not?
Yet how could she have understood the freedom of being away from Lady Joan? All her life,