The Overlord's Bride. Margaret Moore
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Название: The Overlord's Bride
Автор: Margaret Moore
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
Серия: Mills & Boon Historical
isbn: 9781472039699
isbn:
“Shall I fetch warm water, my lady?”
“Do not trouble yourself. I am used to cold.” No lie, that, Elizabeth thought ruefully as she put on her warm stockings and then her gray woolen gown. With the speed of years of familiarity, she tied the laces while Rual began to gather up the bedding.
Thinking of the dried blood, Elizabeth hurried to wash her face and hide her silly blush. After all, Rual was a grown woman. She would know what had happened.
Everybody would know.
She splashed the water over her face, again and again, until she felt the heat diminish.
She picked up the small square of linen beside the basin and wiped off her face.
It smelled of him, her husband, Lord Kirkheathe….
“By our Lady,” she muttered. I don’t even know his first name.
“Do you need anything else, my lady?” Rual asked, holding the big bundle of cloth against her broad hip.
“No…well, yes,” she confessed as she went to the chest and found her scarf and wimple. She didn’t want to appear ignorant, but wouldn’t it be worse not to know? “I fear in all the hurry yesterday, I didn’t ask my husband’s Christian name,” she said as she put the scarf over her head and attached the wimple beneath her chin.
“Raymond D’Estienne is his Christian name, my lady, like his father before him.”
“Did you know his parents?”
“No. They both died well before my time here.”
“What do they say about them?”
The maidservant shrugged. “His father was reckoned a good man, although basely born.”
“How did he come to have such an estate then?”
“It was taken from another and given to him by the earl of Chesney.”
“You do not think he deserved it?”
“That is not for me to say, my lady. The earl thought he did.”
“And his mother?”
“She died giving birth to him. His father did not marry again, like he did.”
Elizabeth tried not to look shocked, but she suddenly felt off balance and unsteady, as if she were trying to cross a raging river on a fallen tree trunk.
Yet why should she be so surprised, she reasoned. He was not a young man. Of course he might have been married before, perhaps more than once. “How many wives has he had?”
“Just the one, other than you.”
That was something at least. “Did she die in childbirth, too?”
“No, my lady.”
“Was it an illness?”
“No, my lady. He killed her.”
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