Free The Love Knot by Elizabeth Chadwick Page A

trying to be tactful. Unfortunately the two did not marry.
    'I'm so sorry about your husband,' she said, after Catrin had reluctantly yielded the information that he had been killed in a fight. 'It must have been horrible to lose him when you had been wed so short a time.'
    Catrin fought the urge to snap at her companion. Edon could not know how deep the wound was, but she was doing an admirable job of grinding salt into it.
    Edon looked at her sidelong, and her face fell. 'I shouldn't have said that, should I?' She touched Catrin's arm in an apologetic gesture. 'Geoffrey's always telling me that I never stop to think.'
    'It doesn't matter.' Catrin's voice was ungracious.
    'Yes, it does, I can see that I've hurt you.'
    Catrin's needle flew. 'It is in the past, it cannot be changed, and there is no use in grieving.' She gave Edon a tight smile. 'There is no use talking about it either.'
    'No, no of course not.' Edon bit her soft lower lip and returned to her sewing.
    Catrin had said that she did not want to talk about the past, but now that it had been called to mind it was not so easy to banish. She could still see Lewis on the last day of his life with perfect clarity; his wind-ruffled dark curls and burnished mail, his hands on his mount's bridle, quick, clever and graceful.
    'The last night we were together we quarrelled,' she said. The words emerged of their own volition, as if the edges of the wound could no longer be held together. 'He had come late to our bed after a night of gambling and drinking with the other men. There had been a woman too -one of those dancing girls you sometimes see - and his skin stank of her scent. We had never argued the way we argued that night. I refused to kiss him in the morning before he rode away. I turned my cheek and I turned my back. By the time I had regretted the deed and run after him, he was gone.' She took three swift stitches. 'I never saw him again.'
    'Oh Catrin!' Once more Edon touched her.
    Catrin laughed bitterly. 'Reason and good sense were never mine where Lewis was concerned. I gave him my body before we were wed and he took it with never a second thought - my heart too, and that he broke.'
    Edon gave the suspicion of a sniff. 'I cannot bear anyone to be sad. I wish I'd never asked you.'
    Catrin was irritated, but tried not to let it show. It was not Edon's fault that she appeared to have feathers for brains. She was the kind who would weep over a minstrel's song in the hall and wax sentimental at the smallest opportunity.
    Although she knew that Edon wanted to be embraced, Catrin could not bring herself to such an intimacy so soon. 'Then let us talk about it no longer.'
    Edon nodded and sniffed again, her small nose pink. 'You're not angry with me, are you?'
    'No,' Catrin said. Irritated certainly, she thought. And yes, at her core, she was angry, but not with Edon. Biting off the thread, she selected a new strand. 'Tell me about yourself instead.'
    For the next half hour, Edon took Catrin at her word and poured such a glue of mundane trivia into her ears that she became almost insensible. Edon's husband Geoffrey was, it seemed, a paragon among men. He was tall, exceedingly handsome, gentle, witty, brave and kind. Catrin doubted that such a male existed, except in Edon's imagination. A man without flaws was one without a soul. But she kept her counsel and smiled in the right places whilst her eyes glazed and her jaw ached with the effort of preventing a yawn.
    She was rescued from purgatory when an elderly woman appeared in the chamber doorway.
    Edon ceased her litany of 'Geoffrey says', and put her sewing down with brightening eyes. 'Here's the midwife,' she murmured to Catrin. 'She's going to attend my lying in. I asked her to find me an eagle stone; I wonder if she's got it now.' Raising her arm, she beckoned.
    The woman had paused to catch her breath after the arduous climb up the winding stairs from the hall. She returned Edon's salute and, after a moment, came over