~ Roses In The Mist ~

by

Blair Bancroft

Prologue

June 1160--Somerset, England

The sun rose over the garden wall, transforming the dew drops on the pale pink rose into glistening pools of rainbow fire. Sunlight shimmered off the child’s tears as well. She was nine years old. And desolate.

Alecyn de Beauclaire sat on a turf bench in a corner of Castle Rocheford’s walled garden, her blue linen gown tucked up around her. Her dark hair, inherited from a Norman ancestor who was one of William the Conqueror’s knights, was confined in a single braid which fell to her waist. The low-lying mist, as yet untouched by the early morning sun, provided a curtain for the bare knee that peeked out beneath the linen’s rumpled folds.

When Alecyn had wakened to the predawn light, before the chapel bell tolled Prime, terrible memories of the last six weeks flooded over her. The news of her parents’ death on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The determined ride of her father’s garrison knights who were attempting to take her to the safety of the Amesbury Abbey. The glint of armor, the thunder of hooves, the screams of her women, the ominous thud of lances against chain mail, the clank of swords. Her own scream to her knights to lay down their arms. The battle, against overwhelming odds, was hopeless. Why should good men die for no reason?

So here she was, captive--and now ward--of Simon de Lacy, Earl of Rocheford. She, Alecyn de Beauclaire--child heir to the castles and lands of Wexford, Chichester, Daneham and Avonlea with all their lands and villeins--was totally cut off from the safe, ordered world she had known for nine years. The twelve-foot curtain wall surrounding Castle Rocheford was as effective at keeping young girls in as it was in shutting the enemy out.

The women of the household, headed by the Countess Sybilla, had not been unkind. Merely indifferent to her grief. They had swept her into the bevy of other young girls of noble birth sent to Castle Rocheford for training. For six weeks now Alecyn had refused to speak to any of them. A childish conceit. And against all the training she had received at her mother’s knee. She had heard whispers that Beatrix de Warenne had come to Rocheford as a hostage for her father’s loyalty to the Earl. And Enide FitzAlan had been intended for a priory until stolen, like herself, by Simon de Lacy. Perhaps, Alecyn conceded, she had been too hasty in rejecting their tentative offers of friendship. Too stubborn. Certainly, her parents had often said so.

Her parents. Alecyn caught a welling tear on the tip of her finger. For a moment she stared at the shimmering drop before letting it fall onto the pink petal of the rose in front of her. The peaceful beauty of the garden was all she had left. Here, she could hide in the early morning mist, safe from stern admonitions, querulous instruction, or speculative glances. Here, before the sunlight chased away the fog, she could make believe she was home again, her mother hovering just behind that swirl of mist by the fountain. Her father riding into the bailey with a clanking swarm of proud knights behind him.

A cloud skidded across the sun, darkening the lingering fog, extinguishing the tiny rainbows shimmering in the dew drops. Alecyn snapped back from the realm of dreams. Richard and Blanche de Beauclaire were gone. Lost on pilgrimage to Spain to beg Saint James for a son. A son to inherit the honors of the Beauclaires, to reduce Alecyn to just another young girl of noble birth for whom a suitable marriage would be arranged. No longer an heiress of such substantial proportions that her betrothal could start a minor war.

But raging fever had caught her parents on the far side of the Pyrenees, and the Lady Alecyn de Beauclaire had become an all-too-tempting rich prize. So now she belonged to the Earl of Rocheford, who would enjoy all the income of her estates until he finally allowed her to marry.

If he allowed her to marry.

Judith of Daneham, Alecyn’s faithful nurse and companion, had been allowed to remain with her in the Earl of Rocheford’s household. As tart-tongued as she was protective of her charge, Judith of Daneham did not hesitate to criticize Lord Simon. Her young lady, she declared, should be a ward of the king. If King Henry were not so busy taking back the lands that had once belonged to his grandfather to bother about heiresses at the moment. Particularly an heiress seized by one of his staunchest supporters, which the Earl of Rocheford surely was.

“Wait, child,” Judith told Alecyn one day when they had both escaped to the garden. “The king’s no fool. Only nineteen he was when he married Eleanor of Aquitaine and gained the largest province in Europ along with her. He knew what he was about, that young fire-eater. King at twenty-one was Henry and, now six years later, he’s won back all the lands King Stephen lost. No need to fear, lambkin. He’ll turn his attention to heiresses soon enough.”

“But, Judith,” Alecyn frowned, “I have never understood how he could marry Queen Eleanor. She was wife of the King of France.”

The plump middle-aged nurse lowered her eyes, clicked her tongue. “Great men have strange ways, my little one. ’Tis said Louis divorced her because she bore him no sons.” When Alecyn’s brown eyes, huge in her piquant face, continued to stare at her, Judith readjusted her bulk on the turf bench while she searched for the right words. “Some say,” the nurse admitted cautiously, “that Eleanor took one look at Henry of Anjou and had little objection to being divorced.”

At the time Alecyn had simply nodded. But one of the few pleasures of being a child meant that no one paid any attention to her unless they were criticizing her embroidery or telling her she would never make a proper chatelaine if she couldn’t remember which herbs were for the pot and which for the pestle. The ladies’ solar in her father’s castle had buzzed as furiously with talk of the king and his wife as did the ladies’ solar at Rocheford. Queen Eleanor had given her young husband four boys in the space of five years, with a girl thrown in for good measure. A great joke on Louis of France, the women thought. Alecyn, too, had smiled. Most of the people she knew might have French names, they might speak French, but it was nearly a hundred years since William, Duke of Normandy, had conquered England. And now they were all English. And proud of it.