Christmas inglenook.
“How long will the storm last, do you think?” She bent to warm her frozen hands.
Giles came back from the cave entrance. “’Tis a nor’easter. They usually blow ’emselves out in a couple of hours.”
“And it’s four hours’ ride to Granville Castle?”
“Four hours
fast
riding. But we’ll be lucky to do more ’an two miles an hour through the drifts.”
It was a bleak prospect. Portia shivered, hugging herself convulsively.
“What did the bastard Decatur want wi’ you, mistress?”
“He wanted to know who I was,” she replied to Giles’s question.
Giles frowned. “And ye told ’im and ’e brought ye back ere?”
“Basically,” she said, realizing that she didn’t wish to talk of Annie’s cottage and soup and pig’s cheek and fire in front of these men, who, on Rufus Decatur’s orders, had been tormented and humiliated and robbed.
Giles grunted, but he seemed to know she’d left much unsaid. He left her and returned to the mouth of the cave.
Portia felt the eyes of the men on her. They were clearly speculating, and they were now rather less friendly than before. Obviously, to receive anything other than ill treatment from a Decatur gave rise to suspicion, although she couldn’t imagine what they were suspecting. Consorting with the enemy … fraternizing with an outlaw brigand?
It was all very uncomfortable and she was overwhelmingly glad when Giles announced that the blizzard had let up enough to enable them to leave. The men rode their horses bareback, drawing their cloaks tightly across their opened jackets in a vain effort to keep out the piercing stabs of cold.
They rode in the same formation as before, Portia with Giles sandwiched between the other four. It provided Portia with a windbreak, but the morose silence of her companions was little comfort. They rode through silent shuttered hamlets like ghosts in the night. Not even the taverns showed a welcoming light.
“Is this still Decatur land?” Portia ventured after they’d been riding for an hour.
“Half an’ ’alf,” Giles replied. “But we’ll not risk askin’ fer succor until we’re well into Granville territory.”
“It’s wretched weather for armies on the move.” she said.trying to make conversation, to turn their minds to broader issues.
“Like as not, they’ll be ’oled up someplace.”
“I hope so for their sakes. King or Parliament, you wouldn’t want to be fighting more than the weather,” Portia observed, steadying Patches as he stumbled into a drift up to his hocks. Giles merely grunted in response, reaching over to grab her bit to haul her horse forward through the snowbank.
Portia abandoned conversation and let her mind wander into a world where fires burned bright and hot, tables groaned under laden platters of meat and pitchers of wine and ale, beds were deeply feathered with thick quilted comforters atop. It was a fantasy she’d often employed in the past to deal with the grimmer reality and was so adept at it she could actually taste the food on her tongue and feel the warmth licking her limbs.
The snow had stopped, bright starlight now filling an achingly clear sky when they reached Castle Granville. Portia stared upward at the forbidding gray structure, with its donjon and keeps, its parapets and battlements. It bore no relation to a family home, and she remembered the gracious half-timbered manor house on the banks of the Thames where Cato had married his second wife, the impossibly beautiful and elegant Lady Diana Carlton.
It was hard to imagine that lady making a home for herself here.
As they clattered over the drawbridge that lay across a wide frozen moat, the iron portcullis was raised to admit them into the outer bailey. The opposing armies might be holed up by the warmth of their separate fires, but the country was still at war and Lord Granville’s castle was closed to the outside world.
Men ran forward to take their horses, shouting
J.A. Konrath, Bernard Schaffer