Daughters of the Grail

by Elizabeth Chadwick

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Thirteenth-century France: Bridget has grown up mastering the mystical gifts of her ancestor, Mary Magdalene, whose unbroken female lineage has kept a legacy of wisdom alive for a thousand years. But the all-powerful Catholic Church has sworn to destroy Bridget for using her healing talents and supernatural abilities. Her duty to continue the bloodline leads her into the arms of Raoul de Mountvallant – a Catholic. But when the Church's savage religious intolerance causes Raoul to turn rebel, a terrible vengeance is exacted. As war rages on, it is the children of these passionate souls, Magda and Dominic, who must strive to preserve the ancient knowledge for future generations…

Release date: August 6, 2009

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 448

Sample

Outside the mountain cave in which they were sheltering, a summer storm raged across the High Languedoc. Bridget felt the lightning within herself and saw its vivid flicker through her hot, tired lids. She had been born during just such a storm, and the power of the lightning was in her veins. It was a sacred life-gift, a manifestation of the forces of the One Light. But tonight it came to take her mother.

‘Don’t leave me,’ Bridget whispered in a tear-choked voice. ‘Please don’t go; I’m so afraid.’ She bent her cheek to her mother’s hand. The fingertips were crusted with blood, only raw flesh where trimmed pink nails had recently been. The slender wrists wore weeping red bracelets where manacles had abraded the skin. Those wounds would have healed in time, but not the one upon Magda’s forehead where the priests had branded her to the bone with the sign of the cross she had refused to kiss. Witch and heretic, they had called her; foul devil’s whore. Her poor mother, who had never done or wished anyone harm in her life.

Her mother’s eyelids fluttered and lifted. ‘You have many years to live,’ she whispered, ‘and a duty to fulfil; you are the last of my line.’ Her throat moved as she struggled to swallow. Bridget helped her to sip from a small wooden cup filled with water from the spring at the back of the cave.

Magda drank, although most of the liquid dribbled down her chin. Her grey eyes were wide and bright, all her remaining life force concentrated in their gaze. ‘You must find a consort when the moon time is right to seed your womb. That is the way it has been since the great stone circles were raised, before the holy thorn was planted.’

‘But Uncle Chretien . . . ’ Bridget started to say, and cast an involuntary glance over her shoulder towards the dark cave mouth.

‘Your uncle will not stand in your way. He is a Cathar, and for him it is necessary to be celibate; but he knows it will not be that way for you.’

Bridget listened for the sound of footsteps outside, but heard only the wind hissing through the stunted trees on the mountainside and the lash of the rain. Her uncle Chretien and his companion Matthias had gone to find shelter for the horses. There was no room in the cave, but Matthias had noticed a derelict goat shed lower down the slope. Although it was closer to the village, no one was likely to be abroad to see them in this weather.

The fire she had kindled earlier was dying, and her mother’s hand resting in hers was icy. Bridget set more firewood on the embers. Closing her eyes, she reached down inside herself and drew forth her life energy in a lightning-bright thread. Flames surged beneath the outspread hand she passed over the fire, leaping as if on strings to her command. The strange animal paintings on the cave walls rippled with an illusion of life in the clambering flare of light and contrast of shadow. Bridget knew if she sank deeper into her trance, she would see small, olive-skinned men marking the walls with fire-blackened sticks, painting pictures of their prey to invoke success in the hunt. She would hear their sacred chant and taste the smoke of their fire, burning where hers now burned.

Flame to flame, she felt the connection before she withdrew her hand and turned once more to her mother. ‘It is so difficult to bear,’ she said softly, and heard her own voice echo off the walls with the forlorn note of a lost child.

Magda lay more motionless than the paintings. Although her mother’s lips did not move, words entered Bridget’s mind with precise clarity. ‘The path of our bloodline has never been otherwise. Always you will find stones cast in your path, but if you turn them over, you will find the love and courage to endure.’

A tremendous flash of lightning sundered the night, shaking stones loose and rattling them down the mountainside. Thunder crashed overhead, and, as the echoes surged around the cave, Bridget felt the warmth of a kiss upon her cheek and then on her brow in tender blessing.

‘Mother!’ Bridget’s anguished cry mingled with the tail of the thunder and outlasted it, but Magda did not respond. Her abused, exhausted body was slack and lifeless - an abandoned shell. Bridget whimpered, then stifled the sound behind compressed lips. Her mother was with the One Light now, was free of pain and persecution. The only reason to weep was for herself.

She kissed the bruised, hollow cheek and gently removed a silver amulet from around her mother’s neck, hanging it around her own where it clinked softly against an identical token - an incised design of a six-pointed star within which a dove rose out of a chalice.

At the cave entrance, she heard masculine voices raised against the storm. One was rich, deep and confident. The other, lighter voice bore the exotic tones of Outremer. Soaked to the skin, the two men stooped under the low overhang at the cave entrance and entered within. Their conversation ceased as their eyes fell upon Bridget. Her uncle Chretien sucked in his breath as his gaze went from her to the still form by the fire.

‘May she walk in the Light,’ he said compassionately. ‘She had a perfect spirit.’

His smaller, grey-bearded companion approached Magda’s body and crouched on his heels. His right hand was badly mutilated, missing two fingers and a thumb, the stumps a puckered, angry red. He touched Magda’s glossy black braid with his remaining fingers.

‘She was still so young,’ he said in a voice that was close to breaking. ‘They should have taken me instead.’

‘They would take us all if given the opportunity.’ A deep weariness in his eyes, Chretien opened his arms to Bridget and, with a small, wounded cry, she ran into them, pressing herself against him, uncaring that he was drenched from the storm. She had always known the path she trod was lonely and dangerous, but never had she felt it so keenly as now.

Later, after she had washed and prepared her mother’s body for burial, Bridget sat before the fire, a cup of fortified wine between her hands, and looked through the smoke at the two men who were now her only family - Matthias the scholar and Chretien, her father’s younger brother. For six years she and her mother had been travelling with them, visiting the villages to preach the Cathar way and offer healing and comfort to the sick. As their fame had grown, so had the hostility of the Roman Church, to whom Catharism was a cancerous heresy to be excised at all costs.

Her father had been of the Cathar persuasion. He had died of a fever when Bridget was ten years old, but at least in his bed and unpersecuted. Cathars had been able to move openly then, without fear of being harried by the Church of Rome. Now it was a different matter. Her gaze flickered to the body of her mother, shrouded in a threadbare blanket.

‘When the storm has passed we must leave,’ she said to the men. ‘There is nothing for us here.’

Chretien looked troubled. ‘Where will we go? Only the remote high places such as Roquefixade and Montségur are safe these days.’

As he said ‘Montségur’, a vision of a castle engulfed by fire flickered across Bridget’s inner eye. She saw a night sky crowned in lightning and heard the cries of hundreds of people raised in suffering. ‘No, not Montségur,’ she replied with a swift shake of her head. ‘We still have many friends who will give us shelter and protection.’

‘And I must obtain fresh parchment and quills,’ Matthias said. Unconsciously he rubbed his mutilated right hand with the fingertips of his left.

Chretien nodded, but his frown remained. ‘Niece, I would be happier if you stayed in the mountains. There are too many prying eyes in the towns of the plain.’

‘No,’ Bridget answered with resolution. ‘It is not yet time. If I retreat from the world now, I will not find the father of my child and it was my mother’s dying wish that I take a mate.’

Chretien looked into the fire without speaking, although his jaw tightened. Bridget sighed softly. To Cathars such as her uncle, begetting a child was the trapping of an immortal spirit in sullied flesh. To her mother’s more ancient religion, it was a sacrament. She knew that while Chretien disapproved, he would not press her to change. In equal respect she did not seek to persuade him of the necessity of her cause.

In the lingering silence, another image blinked across her mind - of a vigorous, sturdy woman in her middle years, red-cheeked, with heavy braids of iron-grey hair and a huge, toothy smile. ‘We will go to the lady Geralda at Lavaur,’ she said with quiet decision. ‘She is a staunch Cathar and she will succour us for the moment.’

Chretien raised his hand to rub the heat of the fire from his face. ‘If you will not go into the hills, then Lavaur is perhaps the next best alternative,’ he said with a reluctant nod. ‘Matthias?’

Bridget heard Matthias’s hesitant agreement, and knew that with or without the men’s approval, she was going to Lavaur. The town itself was not important; she had grasped nothing of its essence in her vision, but the road leading there was. A feeling tugged at her core, twisting and tightening her soft inner organs as if the child her mother desired her to bear were already kicking in her womb. As she pressed her hands to her flat stomach, the feeling vanished, but not the certainty that the decisions taken now were all-important to the future.

He slid a restless glance at that reason - his bride, Claire, to whom he had been betrothed since childhood. He had last seen her when she had a gappy smile and mud upon the hem of her gown from splashing in the bailey puddles after a summer rainstorm. Her smile today was dazzling and complete. The hem of her gown was embroidered not with mud, but with lozenges of gold thread glittering against a background of sumptuous green samite. Her hair, brushed down to proclaim her virginity, glowed like silk on fire, and Raoul wanted to run his fingers through its ripples to discover if it was as soft as it looked. She kept darting him swift glances, her eyes the rich brown of woodland honey. Raoul tried to think of something to say that would not seem trite or banal, but found himself at a loss. The beautiful creature at his side bore no resemblance to the skinny girl he remembered. The knowledge they would soon be alone together, in bed and naked, robbed him of all coherent thought.

Although he had no vast experience of women, Raoul had sometimes visited the maisons lupanardes of Toulouse, where one of the whores had taken a fancy to teach him that there was more to pleasure than the brief, rough simplicity of his first encounters. Claire, however, was innocent, a virgin, unlikely to help him if he fumbled. She was also very desirable, and he was hot for her to the point where he doubted his own control. He reached for his cup, remembered it was empty for that very reason, and rested his hand flat on the table instead.

‘Champing at the bit, eh?’ laughed Father Otho, the priest who had officiated at their marriage in the castle’s dusty, neglected chapel. ‘I don’t blame you - I wouldn’t mind saddling her up myself!’ He bit into an apple comfit and chewed lasciviously.

Raoul clenched his fist and thought about punching it into the priest’s overfed face. Father Otho was a lecherous glutton, caring for his own pocket and pleasure above the needs of his flock, who, through his slovenly mismanagement, were few and indifferent. ‘Then it is a good thing you are sworn to celibacy,’ Raoul snapped.

The priest belched. ‘There’s always room for interpretation, I say. To know sin, you have to wrestle with it first. That’s it, boy, fill it up, fill it up!’ He gestured imperatively to the squire, then raised his brimming goblet and leaned towards Raoul’s father. ‘A magnificent cellar you keep, my lord!’

Berenger de Montvallant gave Otho a tepid smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

‘And he’ll drink it dry before the night is out,’ Raoul muttered to his father as the cleric’s attention settled on a pretty maidservant attending the bride.

‘If he weren’t my second cousin and I hadn’t promised his father I’d give him a living here, I’d have turned him off long ago,’ Berenger said with a grimace. ‘Is it any cause for wonder that the Cathars flourish among us when lard-tubs like him rule the clergy?’

Raoul watched Otho’s pudgy hand crawl over a dish of sugared almonds, grasp, convey to wet lips and cram into greedy mouth. His gorge rose and he looked away. Three pilgrims had just arrived in the hall, their cloaks and broad-brimmed hats dusty with travel. Alein, his father’s usher, found them a place to sit among the crowded trestles near the door. There were two men, one in his forties, the other about ten years older. Seating herself between them and thanking Alein with a warm smile was a young woman. The bones of her face were too strong for beauty, but there was something beyond her looks that was totally arresting. Filled with curiosity, Raoul studied her, wondering where she had come from and where she was going. Pilgrims occasionally stopped at Montvallant on their way to Toulouse, but usually they claimed hospitality at the church in Villemur.

A serving maid leaned across the trestle to dish out bread and wine, hiding the young woman from Raoul’s sight. He craned his neck, trying to keep her in view. The musicians who had been playing softly through the various courses of the feast changed their tempo, and the lively strains of a traditional jig filled the hall. His father nudged him.

‘Are you not going to dance with your bride?’ Berenger teased. ‘People are waiting for you to lead her out.’

Raoul became aware of the expectant stares of the wedding guests. Flushing with chagrin, he hastily rose, and, turning to Claire, extended his hand to assist her to her feet. Blushing, she placed her slender fingers in his. The new gold of her wedding ring shone like a promise. Raoul forgot the pilgrim woman as he led his bride to the cleared space on the floor, forgot everything but the feel of her supple body lightly touching and leaving his as they stepped and turned in the age-old patterns of celebration.

She smiled a refusal. ‘I couldn’t eat another morsel.’

The dancers swirled towards her, the young bridegroom trapped in a group of other young men. He was laughing as he tried without any great effort to escape their clutches. Bridget’s breath caught at this closer sight of him. She felt the magnetism of his vigorous young body and the joy surging through him. Her own body responded like a plucked harp string. She lowered her gaze to the board and stared at a dark wine stain on the wood, her heart quickening and her skin tingling with sensation.

The hall erupted with cheers and shouts, approving whistles and cries of encouragement as the groom was borne towards the tower stairs.

‘What’s happening?’ Bridget asked a woman sitting at her trestle.

‘What’s going to happen, you mean!’ the woman chuckled. ‘Time for Lord Raoul and his bride to be put to bed to do their duty!’

‘Ah,’ Bridget said. That was why she had felt his vigour just now, but tonight it already had its focus. The new wife, surrounded by her women, was being led from the dais to a different set of stairs. She had the graceful gait of a doe, and the same shy, startled manner.

Silently, Bridget wished the couple well.

‘Niece?’ Chretien leaned towards her, a look of concern on his face. ‘What is wrong?’

Bridget forced a smile. How could she say that her body was tingling with the desire to be in the bride’s place tonight? ‘I am overcome by all this bounty,’ she said, ‘and very tired. It is past time I sought my pallet . . . No, finish your wine. I would like a little space alone first.’

She pressed his arm, and absented herself from her uncle’s shrewd scrutiny.

Outside, the warm evening air bore the scent of hot charcoal and cooked meat from the extra braziers burning in the courtyard. The sound of lute and pipe, the thrusting beat of tabors, followed Bridget relentlessly, pounding through her groin in dull waves of longing. She stopped to lean her forehead against the cool stone of the castle wall, and breathed deeply, seeking to be calm.

‘Bridget? Bridget, my dear?’

She looked up to see a tall woman hurrying towards her. ‘Geralda?’ Bridget took a step forward and was engulfed in a strong, maternal hug.

‘I have just seen Chretien and Matthias in the hall, and they told me I would find you out here. Let me look at you!’ Still holding Bridget by the shoulders, Geralda of Lavaur examined her thoroughly. ‘So much like your mother.’ Tears shimmered in her dark hazel eyes. ‘Chretien told me she had been killed. I’m so sorry.’

‘She is one with the Light.’ Bridget blinked on tears of her own. ‘She was caught healing a sick woman in one of the hill villages by two travelling friars and put to the torture.’ Her voice faltered. ‘I miss her so much.’

Geralda’s embrace closed around her again and Bridget shuddered within it, giving vent to a storm of grief and tears while Geralda held and soothed her like a child. Finally, drawing herself together, Bridget made a determined effort and pulled away.

‘Did my uncle tell you we were on our way to you at Lavaur?’

‘Indeed he did, and you are most welcome to stay. I have some new manuscripts I want Matthias to look at. The people will want to hear Chretien preach and visit you for healing. The friars will not dare to interfere with me!’ Her eyes glittered with ferocity.

Bridget knew Geralda had every right to be confident.

Shivering, Bridget started to walk towards the small shelter that she and her guardians had pitched against the bailey wall near the main gates. Her feeling of foreboding increased as she and Geralda walked past the well housing. In a moment Bridget knew that if she allowed it, the vision would come with dreadful clarity and show her what she did not wish to see. She closed her mind, pushing the premonition away, squeezing it from existence. As a distraction, she asked about the wedding.

Geralda was only too pleased to hold forth. ‘I’ve known Raoul since he was a babe in arms,’ she said fondly. ‘He’s my godson, you know . . . or he was when I was of the Church of Rome. He and Claire have been betrothed since they were little - they seem well suited, don’t you think?’

Bridget murmured that they did indeed. Her inner eye would not be denied and filled with another image, and she saw Raoul de Montvallant and his bride, limbs entwined upon cool linen sheets. Feverish body heat. As Geralda continued to gossip, Bridget watched the moon rise above the castle walls, haloing the sky with silver, and saw a man and a woman, saw light and darkness and fire.

The great bed of walnut wood dominated her awareness. Hangings of blue and scarlet damask were drawn back to reveal a coverlet of dark blue sarcenet worked with moons and stars of thread-of-silver. The maids had folded it back upon a bolster and sheets of pristine white linen awaiting the inscription of her virgin blood. If her legs had not been trembling with fear, she would have run from the room.

A servant had set an infusion of wine and spices to simmer over the hearth. Beatrice, Raoul’s mother, drew Claire to the fire and bade her stand on a mouflon rug while the attendants undressed her.

‘This is a happy day for me.’ Beatrice kissed Claire warmly. ‘I am more than proud to call you my new daughter.’

Claire tried to smile but her stomach was clenched in a hundred knots. She liked Beatrice, but she was no substitute for her own mother, Alianor, who was going to ride away tomorrow. Claire’s anchor was now supposed to be her new family, but she felt as if she had been cast adrift on a wide and perilous ocean.

Thinking about Raoul made Claire feel queasy. What were they going to say to each other? Or were they going to talk at all? The maids were giggling as they scattered the bed with herbs to promote fertility. Claire was not ignorant. Alianor had taken her aside several weeks before the wedding to explain all about the joys and duties of being a wife. She had seen animals mating in the yard and cockerels treading hens. Once, in the stables, she had caught a groom raising himself from between the spread legs of a kitchen maid, so she knew how men were made when aroused. Her mother said the act was supposed to be a pleasure, but Claire could not imagine how. If there was supposed to be blood on the sheet in the morning, surely there would be pain?

Her attendants unpinned the gauze veil and chaplet of stiff gold flowers from her hair, and her mother took a comb to the chestnut-gold waves to tidy and burnish them. ‘Child, you are beautiful,’ said Alianor mistily. ‘I’m so proud of you. I wish your father were here to see your wedding day.’

Claire swallowed, unable to respond. Usually she remembered her father, dead these past five years, with gentle, sad affection, but tonight she had room in her mind for nothing but her own fear. Obediently she raised and lowered her arms to the commands of the women, and watched the garments gather upon the clothing pole until she was naked. Near the fire, it was not cold, but her skin was covered in goose flesh. Cool silk slithered upon her shoulders as she was urged into a loose bed-robe, and her hair was rearranged over it in a sheaf of glowing colour. She felt numb. People spoke to her, but she didn’t hear what they said.

The door burst open upon a rowdy shock of men, Raoul jostled in their midst and naked beneath his cloak. A din of noisy laughter and good-humoured jesting filled the room. Risking a glance at Raoul, Claire saw that his colour was high, and the smile on his face as fixed and nervous as her own.

Beatrice pressed a cup of hot wine into Claire’s hands. ‘Drink and take heart,’ she whispered.

Claire raised the cup and sipped. The taste of cinnamon and hot red grape flowed over her tongue. Raoul joined her and taking the cup from her hands, set his lips to the place where she had drunk. He put his free hand lightly at her waist. The young male guests, and some of the older ones who were in their cups, cheered encouragement. Claire blushed. Raoul’s palm seemed to burn through the thin silk robe into her spine.

Father Otho elbowed his way forward to perform the benediction that would cleanse and purify their marriage bed and bless any fruit that came of it. He was drunk, his black eyes glittering and unfocused.

‘Well, well,’ he leered at Claire, ‘it hardly seems a moment since you were a tight bud on the stem, and now behold the open rose, ready to be well and truly plucked!’ He pushed the thumb of his right hand into the clenched fist of his left in a gesture that was unmistakable.

Anger and shame welled in Claire’s breast. Light jesting she could accept; it was all part of the nuptial tradition. Every bride and groom were teased on their wedding eve, but not by the priest, his face congested with drink and lust. Raoul started to lunge, but was restrained by his mother’s grip on his arm.

Berenger de Montvallant said through his teeth, ‘Father, I suggest you confine yourself to the words of the benediction. ’

Otho tried to draw himself up, but only succeeded in lurching into one of the guests. ‘No sense of humour,’ he muttered, pushing himself precariously upright. His lower lip thrust out like a sulky child, he approached the bed and began the blessing. He slurred the words and used neither the correct order nor form before sprinkling the bed haphazardly with holy water. Breathing as stertorously as a mastiff, he presented Claire and Raoul with a cross to kiss.

Claire felt sick. She would not have been surprised to see the tip of a forked tail twitching beneath the skirts of Otho’s habit. Unable to bring herself to touch the cross with her lips, she kissed the air above it. Raoul, too, kissed the air, his face taut with leashed temper. The gold clasp on his cloak flashed and flashed with his rapid breathing.

Father Otho belched. ‘You can get to work now, lad,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a good bloody sheet to show in the morning, eh?’ His lewd amusement terminated in a squawk as Raoul seized him by the throat.

‘A pity you won’t live to see it!’ he snarled.

Otho’s complexion darkened. A rasping noise emerged from his windpipe, and he scrabbled at Raoul’s fist, the veins in his forehead bulging. After a moment, Berenger intervened, and with an effort prised his son’s grip from his victim’s mottling flesh. Otho collapsed on the floor, clutching his throat and wheezing. ‘Let him go,’ Berenger said, ‘you don’t want to sully your wedding night with murder.’

‘Don’t I?’ Flexing and clenching his hand, Raoul glared at the semi-conscious priest gasping at his feet.

Berenger gestured peremptorily to a couple of servants. ‘Take Father Otho outside and leave him there to sober up,’ he commanded. ‘As near to the midden heap as his behaviour dictates.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ Grim satisfaction on their faces, the men lifted Otho and carried him out of the bedchamber, carelessly bumping his head against the wall on the way.

Berenger made apologies all around, his colour still high. ‘Time, I think, and well past time to leave bride and groom in peace,’ he said gruffly and ushered the guests from the room. Then he turned back to embrace first Raoul and then Claire with tenderness. ‘You must not let this spoil tonight for you.’

‘No, sir, you can be sure that I won’t,’ Raoul said with a forced smile.

The final guests departed, and the latch fell on the door. To keep herself from panicking, Claire went to the flagon the maid had left warming on the hearth and, tossing the cold dregs of her last cup on the fire, refilled the goblet. The hiss and splutter of evaporating liquid shocked the silence. Half in a trance, Claire stared into the jagged turrets of flame. When she tasted the wine, it was like drinking the heart of the fire. Heat scorched her face, but she could not tear her eyes from the gashes of light and the prowling darkness behind.

Raoul returned from barring the door and was horrified to see her so close to the flames. Crying that she would set her robe alight, he hastened to draw her away. Claire blinked up at him through a hundred mirrored tongues of flame and put her hand to her forehead.

‘Claire?’ He held her shoulders and looked anxiously into her face.

‘I’m sorry.’ She lowered her hand. Her head felt light, and at the same time far too heavy for her neck to support. ‘It has been a long day, that is all.’

‘In more ways than one.’ Raoul grimaced. ‘I swear I would have felt no remorse at strangling Father Otho.’

The memory of the way the priest had defiled her wedding chamber when he should have been blessing it added to her distress and weariness. An aching lump swelled in her throat, impossible to swallow down. She tried to bite back a sob, but the effort jerked her shoulders and gave her away.

‘Claire, don’t, I cannot bear to see you weep.’ Raoul pulled her against his strong young body. Claire pressed her face to his cloak and stifled her sobs upon the prickly soft wool.

‘I had a feeling of dread when I looked into the fire just now,’ she whispered against the steady thud of his heart, ‘as if the whole world was burning and I could do nothing to prevent it. I used to have nightmares about fire when I was little. Once a priest came to our castle and preached a sermon about the flames of hell that awaited all heretics. My mother said I did not sleep properly for months afterwards.’

‘Priests!’ Raoul said with disparagement. ‘I know for certain that hell must be full of them!’ He pressed his lips to her herb-scented hair and nuzzled lightly down to her fire-hot temple. Cupping her face in his hands like a chalice, he kissed her salty cheek, the corner of her mouth and finally the softness of her lips. ‘Ah Claire,’ he said with a catch in his voice, ‘you are so beautiful.’

His sea-blue eyes were bright and narrow, his breathing swift. Claire felt as if she were about to be devoured. The taut hunger in his expression frightened her, but at the same time a strange new excitement tingled through her breasts and loins.

Murmuring reassurances, his hands moved upon her body and if they were trembling with excitement, he knew where to touch and stroke to evoke response. He continued to kiss her - light butterfly kisses that explored her eyelids, cheeks and jaw. He nibbled her throat and sucked upon the hollow behind her ear until she shivered and gasped. Stealthily he reached to the tie on her bed-robe, and then his hands were inside, gliding upon her naked skin, drawing her hip to hip against him.

Claire made a small, panicked sound as she felt the thrust of his penis, hot as a branding iron against her belly. She tried to pull away, but he held her still, one hand upon her buttocks, the other stroking her hair and the valley of her spine.

‘Don’t struggle,’ he pleaded. ‘Dear Jesu, I’m as frightened as you are.’

Wide-eyed, she stared up at him, holding her breath.

‘I promise, I swear to God, I’ll try not to hurt you,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Please, I want tonight to bring us both joy.’

Claire swallowed. ‘I want that, too,’ she answered, her voice barely audible.

They stayed as they were for a moment longer, locked together in anxious uncertainty. Then Raoul swept her up in his arms and carried her to