“Do you feel disloyal when either of your
suitors kiss you?” he asked. “Or is it only with me?”
“They have not kissed me, not the way you
did. I just told you, you are the first since Hugo.”
“Do you intend to refuse to marry both
Redmond and Clodion out of loyalty to Hugo? If so, you ought to
tell them now and not keep them dangling in suspense. Clodion,
especially. I have a feeling the man could turn nasty if he’s
thwarted.”
“I have not decided yet whether to marry or
not.” She wished he had not asked those questions. Michel was
forcing her to think about a subject she had avoided since learning
of her father’s wish that she should decide whether to marry or
become a nun. She thought about it now.
She would never willingly marry Clodion. Of
that much she was certain. She found Clodion repulsive. But she
could marry Redmond, or return to Chelles to live with no
disloyalty to Hugo’s memory in either case. At Chelles she would
remain a virgin all her life and dedicate herself to good works in
service to God. She did not think Hugo would have objected to such
a decision. If she married Redmond, Danise could still remain loyal
to Hugo, for Redmond, much as she liked him, did not and never
could engage her heart as Hugo had done.
As for the man standing before her here in
the forest, he was a dire threat to her love for Hugo. Danise
sensed that if she allowed her reactions to Michel to guide her, he
would soon eclipse Hugo in her thoughts. She could not allow that
to happen. Hugo had loved her with a deep and tender devotion. He
had died a hero, doing his duty for his king. She had a duty, too,
a duty to keep Hugo’s image bright in her memory for as long as she
lived. However compelling Michel’s attentions to her might be, she
could not allow him to take Hugo’s place.
“Danise.” She tried to look at him without
being captured by his brilliant eyes, but it was an impossible
task. “If I can learn my true identity, and if I prove to be the
nobleman your father and all the others I have met here at Duren
seem to think I am, or if I am in some other way a worthy person,
would Savarec accept me as one of your suitors? Would you?”
She could only stare at him, unable to speak.
Thrilled and terrified at the same time by his suggestion, she
began to shake her head, to reject his idea.
“Answer me,” he prodded gently. “Tell me what
you are thinking.”
“I do not know what my father would say,” she
whispered.
“And you? What would you say?”
“That you disturb me. That you make me feel
things I ought not to feel. That you threaten to turn my life
upside down until I do not know what to say to you, or how to
act.”
“As soon as I was well enough to think about
it.” he said. “I wondered if mv attraction to you was just a
classic case of a patient becoming attached to his nurse.”
“Perhaps it is.” Eagerly she grasped at the
possibility he offered. “I was the person who was with you most
often during the time when you were terribly confused and ill, so
it would be natural for you to begin to depend upon me, rather than
upon my father, or Guntram, or even Clothilde. I have heard of this
sort of thing before. It is not unusual for wounded warriors to
think they care about the women who nurse them back to health. It
happens all the time, even when the attachments are most
unsuitable. When the men are well and back in armed service once
more, they sometimes joke about their former emotions. So I have
heard.”
“This is no joke,” he said, stopping the
nearly desperate flow of her words. “I cannot believe that what I
am feeling is no more than an injured man’s dependency.”
“Yet it must be so,” she insisted. “As your
body recovers from your injuries, so will your emotions.”
“What if I don’t want to recover?” he
demanded. “Through all the confusion and the uncertainty since I
came here, the one thing I know is that I want to hold you in my
arms. I keep telling myself it’s crazy to feel this way, but I
can’t stop wanting you.”
She stared back at him, unable to tear her
eyes away from his intense face.
“Danise. vou can’t be seriouslv thinking of
going into a convent. You are too young, too intelligent, and far
too beautiful to give up on life.”
“I have not given up, I am merely undecided,”
she replied. “Sister Gertrude would tell you that a decision to
enter a convent is not a rejection of life but a positive act.”
“It would be a rejection of your womanhood.
Would Hugo want you to be lonely and unfulfilled? If he was the
kind of man you could love so deeply, then I think he must have
been unselfish enough to want you to be happy. So, I ask you again,
if I can discover who I am, will you accept me as one of your
suitors?”
Danise felt weakened, her maidenly defenses
battered by Michel’s tenacity of purpose. Could he be right? Would
Hugo, if he could speak to her, tell her to let another man share
the innermost space in her heart where until now only he had lived?
As was her custom, she took refuge in honesty.
“I am as confused as you were when first I
met you,” she said to Michel. “You use incomprehensible words and
your foreign ideas disturb me. But I ought to be as fair to you as
I would be to any other man who offered for me. If my father has no
objection to your suit, then neither will I object. Beyond that, I
can promise nothing.”
“It’s enough for now. We’ll have to take it
one step at a time,” he said. “The first step was getting your
agreement. The second step will be finding my identity and my
memory. After that, well decide what to do next. In the meantime,
may I ask one favor of you?”
“What is it?”
“One kiss more, so you’ll know what you will
be getting in me.”
“You have already kissed me twice,” she
protested. “Neither Redmond nor Clodion has yet kissed me on the
lips. Nor would I allow it if they tried,” she added, thinking of
Clodion with a shudder.
“Grant me this favor and in the future I will
behave with the utmost propriety. I swear it.” He smiled at her,
his rather plain features coming alight with humor and warmth, his
remarkable eyes sparkling. “It will be difficult, but I will keep
my word. I warn you, if you refuse this one request, I will pursue
you relentlessly and kiss you more than once, when and where I find
an opportunity. Public or private places will be all the same to
me.”
“You are threatening me.” She did not sound
as severe as she wanted to sound. His smile was too contagious for
her to remain shocked or angry for more than a moment.
“Are you afraid?” The laughter lines at the
corners of his eyes crinkled more deeply.
“Certainly not.” Instantly she rose to his
mocking challenge. She was usually a person of some spirit, and she
was chagrined by how cowardly she had appeared to be during this
trying afternoon. She
was
afraid of his effect on her, but
she did not want him to know it.
“You may kiss me, Michel. But only once.”
“A kiss cheerfully given by me and willingly
received by you,” he murmured, reaching for her. “Let’s not delay.
I don’t want you to change your mind.”
“I am not a woman who breaks her word. It
will be an honest kiss.” She went into his arms willingly, as he
had asked of her, and lifted her face. His mouth touched hers,
withdrew, then pressed hard. His arms caught her, holding her
tight, while her hands crept upward around his neck. Danise stood
on tiptoe, opening her lips to his thrusting tongue, responding
honestly as she had promised.
There was sweetness in Michel’s kiss, and
warmth and tenderness, too, but no terrifying passion and no
demands she could not accept. In some deeply buried segment of her
mind she understood that he was skilled in romantic matters and was
taking care not to frighten her. Part of her was grateful for his
consideration, but another part of her, a rebellious, treacherous,
well-hidden part, wondered what it would be like to be kissed by
him when he was not being so careful. And because she was entirely
too aware of that most unmaidenly bit of her own character, she
reacted to his kiss by scolding him when it was over.
“You promised to take but one kiss,” she told
him. “Once again, you have taken two kisses. You count poorly,
Michel.”
“Ah, Danise, Danise.” He held her lightly
now, resting his cheek against hers. Thus, she could not see his
face, but when he spoke again she knew he understood and forgave
her inner turmoil and her fears. “How I wish we could have met when
my memory was clear, and your heart was whole.”
“Savarec, bring your friends and join us,”
called Charles from his place at the trestle table set in front of
his tent. “We are discussing plans for the building of my new
palace at Aachen. I want the site of my old hunting lodge to become
a great and beautiful capital.”
“With an important church at its heart,”
added the tall, stoop-shouldered man in cleric’s robes who sat
beside Charles.
“Of course,” Charles responded. “We must
create the finest place of worship to be found anywhere in Francia.
I saw a church in Lombardy during my campaign there a few years
ago. Beautiful columns. Lovely marble. If I could but bring those
columns to Francia … hmmm.” He paused, his thoughts on a building
far to the south, on the other side of the Alps.
In her chair set on her husband’s right hand,
Hildegarde stirred uneasily. Danise bent to adjust a pillow for the
queen, and Hildegarde smiled up at her.
“Always Charles talks about this new palace,”
Hildegarde murmured. “It will take so long to build that I wonder
if any of us will live to see Aachen completed.”
“We can at least be grateful,” said Sister
Gertrude, “that when men speak of building, they are not discussing
the possibility of going to war.”
“Yet I do believe there will be a short
campaign against the Saxons this summer,” Hildegarde said.
Michel was aware of what the women were
saying, but most of his attention was fixed on Danise. This morning
she had wrapped her braids into a silver halo about her head, and
her green gown clung to her softly rounded figure. Her mouth curved
into a smile as she looked from her father to Redmond to Michel,
greeting each of them in turn. Michel was stung by a vivid memory
of kissing those richly tinted lips. He grew warm just looking at
Danise. She met his eyes briefly before she glanced away, blushing
a little. He wondered if she was also recalling with pleasure the
way he had kissed her. He hoped she was.
“Must we endure the presence of that dreadful
man?” Sister Gertrude demanded of Savarec.
Thinking she meant him, Michel regarded the
nun with some surprise, unaware of having done anything to offend
her, unless Danise had felt a need to confess that they had kissed
in the forest on the previous day. Somehow, he did not think Danise
would talk about their tender embraces. He quickly realized that
Sister Gertrude was not referring to him at all, but to Count
Clodion, who was approaching the group surrounding the king.
“I believe Clodion intends to speak to
Charles, not to Danise,” Savarec said with his usual patience when
dealing with Sister Gertrude. “You cannot banish him entirely from
this gathering, so I must beg you to treat him with the respect due
to his title.”
“Respect must be earned,” Sister Gertrude
retorted. When Savarec moved on to intercept Clodion and direct him
toward Charles, she muttered, “I would banish Clodion from Francia
if I could.”
“I perceive that you like him no better than
I do,” Michel said to her in a low voice.
“I like Clodion not at all,” Sister Gertrude
told him. “Nor did I like Count Autichar any better.”
“Redmond has told me how Autichar left Duren
in a huff,” Michel said. “I cannot imagine any man willingly
walking away from the possibility of marriage to Danise.”
Sister Gertrude regarded him with the same
puzzled expression he was growing used to seeing on the faces of
other Franks to whom he used words or phrases perfectly natural to
him but foreign to them. Michel smiled to himself, imagining he
could see her thinking through and interpreting what he had just
said.
“I also find it difficult to believe that
Autichar would leave Dureñ so easily,” Sister Gertrude said. “I
would not be at all surprised to learn that we have not seen the
last of him. I cannot understand why Savarec, who loves his
daughter so dearly, would allow either Autichar or Clodion to court
her. He cannot wish to see one or the other as his son-in-law.”
“Perhaps Savarec thought Autichar and Clodion
would make Redmond look more attractive by comparison,” Michel
said.
“A clever idea on your part,” Sister Gertrude
responded after taking a moment to interpret the meaning of his
words. “However, Savarec is a straightforward man who does not
think in such devious ways. No, I believe he was more interested in
the titles and the lands that Autichar or Clodion could bring to a
marriage. But neither man would make Danise happy. Why must men be
such fools?”
“Perhaps because we do not think like women.”
When the nun’s dark eyes opened wide at this statement, Michel
smiled at her. “You love Danise as if she were your own
daughter.”
“I will admit to a certain fondness for her.
Danise has been an excellent student. Still, she can be willful,
and at such times she must be sternly admonished for her own
benefit.”
“You love her,” Michel repeated, still
smiling. “More important, you understand the pain she has endured
since Hugo’s death. You see Danise’s life mirroring your own.”
“How can you know about my life?” Sister
Gertrude demanded.
“From Savarec. I asked him. Danise herself
told me about Hugo.”
“I am astonished. She has scarcely mentioned
Hugo’s name since the day of the funeral service at Agen.” Sister
Gertrude looked hard at Michel. “Why would she reveal her deepest
pain to you?”