The Night Dance (8 page)

Was this another vision? The scene Rowena had just witnessed was so unbelievable—what else could it be? Surely her mystery knight was not actually there at that very moment, staring down at her with an expression of complete amazement.

“Are you a witch?” he demanded gruffly, shifting Excalibur back into his good hand.

“I could not say,” Rowena answered truthfully. Up until the other day she would have been sure that she was no such thing; she might even have taken offense at the question. But these visions of him combined with her ability to see into the strange bowl had made her wonder about herself.

“If I am a witch,” she added, “I mean you no harm.”

“Then you did not send that soldier made of rocks to attack me?”

“Never!” she cried. “That was truly frightening. This forest is full of strangeness.”

“And you are not a part of the strangeness?” he asked warily.

“The first I knew of any strange power in me was when I saw you in battle.”

He backed up in surprise. She knew from his stunned expression that he understood—even if he could not quite believe it—what she was talking about. He studied her face as if deciding if he trusted her.

“I saw you, as well,” he told her after a moment.

She smiled at him, appreciating his honesty. “Then are
you
a wizard?” she asked, teasing.

“Can’t you see that I am a beggar?” he countered.

“A wizard might disguise himself as a beggar…or as a knight. It does not answer my question,” she replied.

He relaxed and loosened his grip on the extravagantly jeweled sword that he held. “I am not a wizard. I have no explanation for why we seem so connected in this strange way.”

“Neither have I,” she said as she sat on the boulder.

Replacing his sword, he sat beside her.

“What is your name?” she asked him.

“Bedivere,” he answered. “But my sisters called me Bedwyr. It’s the way they say it in the North Country, where I was raised.”

“Were you close to your sisters?” Rowena asked, sensing that he wanted to tell her about them.

“We used to play for hours in the hills by our home.”

“What was your favorite game?” she asked.

He smiled as he recalled his boyhood. “What I loved to do with them more than anything else was dance. They taught me their folk dances.” He laughed
in a self-deprecating way. “They told me I was the best dancer in all the hill country.”

“Are you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered lightly. “I have not danced in a long, long time. Of course I’ve partnered ladies at balls and the like, but I haven’t really kicked my heels in the air since those carefree days.”

They sat side by side without speaking for a moment. “Your face is bloodied from your fight,” she observed after a while. She pushed the hair from his forehead. “But I cannot see where you were injured.”

He touched his temple. “It’s true,” he murmured. “The sword I hold is said to heal the wounds of its bearer.”

“It’s healed your wound then,” Rowena surmised.

“It appears so.” His expression darkened as some unhappy thought came upon him. “Though when fighting against enchanted foes it cannot be relied on.”

“What are you saying?”

He revealed to her that he held the great Excalibur and told her the story of how he had been entrusted to return it to the Lady of the Lake. Rowena excitedly told him what Eleanore had said to her just a day earlier—about the lake that had once been there. “It seems to me,” she added, “that if the lake were still here, this is where it would be located.”

“How could a lake disappear?” he asked.

Rowena shook her head, having no idea.

A sudden neighing of horses made them both
whirl toward the sound. “My father!” Rowena said, gasping. “Hide!”

Bedivere resisted her command, seeming to feel hiding was unmanly. “No. I’ll explain to—”

She grabbed his tunic and yanked him down behind the boulder beside her. They watched together as her father, the goose boy, and another man Rowena did not recognize headed toward the manor house. The third man’s appearance made Rowena think he must be some sort of artisan.

“I’d better return home,” Rowena said. “He sometimes wishes to see my sisters and me after he returns from a trip away, even if he’s only been gone for a few hours. If he suspects that I am missing, he will question me until he learns that I have been out in the forest.”

“And then I would have no chance of ever seeing you again,” Bedivere realized.

“Not in the flesh, like this,” she answered as she began to rise cautiously. Her foot slid on a stone and she fell backward slightly. He reached out to steady her, wrapping his left arm around her shoulder. She noticed the odd immobility of his hand as it touched her shoulder and looked at him with a questioning expression.

“A battle wound,” he explained succinctly, averting his eyes in shame.

She observed the raised, twisted scar that ran across his palm. Filled with tender compassion for his injury, she reached across herself and pressed her hand into his crippled hand.

He turned back to her suddenly and swept her up with his right arm and kissed her passionately. She returned his kiss with equal fire.

From inside the courtyard, a door slammed forcefully.

“Rowena!” her father bellowed.

Rowena sprang away from Bedivere. “I have to go. He cannot find me out here!”

“Meet me again tomorrow,” he pleaded. “Right here.”

“I will,” she promised as she ran back toward the wall.

When she got to the wall, she pressed her back against it, trying to get some sense of where in the courtyard her father stood. She didn’t hear anyone walking. Perhaps he’d gone back inside.

Her mind was racing. If she was lucky and fast, she could bolt across the courtyard and through the kitchen door. From there she could take the back staircase up to the sewing room and say she’d been there the entire time.

Kneeling first, she dropped flat to the ground and rolled to her side. She stuck her bare feet through the opening. Then, pulling the folds of her gown tightly around her body, she wiggled the rest of the way through.

As her shoulders and head came into the courtyard, she instantly became aware of her father’s boots. Stiffening with anxiety, she slowly dared to look up only to see that her father was glowering down at her, his face red with fury.

Gripping Rowena under her arm, Sir Ethan yanked her roughly to standing. “Now I see how you girls have been escaping,” he yelled. “Are all your sisters cavorting in the forest at this moment?”

“They don’t know about the opening,” Rowena spoke with a quavering voice. “I’m the only one who has gone out this way.”

Sir Ethan let her drop out of his grasp. “Do not lie to me. I saw your slippers this morning. All of you have been out.”

“No, truly,” she insisted, “it’s just me.” Intimidated as she felt, she would not tell him about their adventure underground. She couldn’t presume to make that decision for all of them.

“I have returned from town with a locksmith who will fit every door with a sturdy bolt,” he said. “Tomorrow I will hire a mason to repair this wall. This will put an end to these adventures.”

He began to storm toward the manor and Rowena trailed after him, finding her nerve once again. “Father, why do you keep us locked up like this? Would it hurt if we went into town occasionally? Might we have a party sometime? If we could see the world and meet others we might not feel so desperate to go out.”

“You have books, you have instruments, beautiful clothes, fine foods,” he replied. “The world holds nothing that you lack.”

She stayed with him as he strode in the front door and headed toward the bedchamber the sisters
shared. “We are not little girls, Father,” she pointed out boldly. “I am almost of the age to be a wife—and I am your youngest daughter!”

These last words stopped him. He regarded her as if seeing her for the first time. “Perhaps it
is
time that I begin to seek suitable matches for you girls,” he said with thoughtful deliberation.

Suitable matches?

Now what had she done?

She panicked as alarming images of balding, bejeweled dukes and portly merchants in fur-trimmed robes formed in her head. “Wouldn’t it be better if we could meet young men we might grow to love,” she suggested.

Her words seemed to awaken a disturbing memory within him. “To marry for love is foolishness. No good can come of it,” he snapped, resuming his walk toward the bedchamber.

She wanted to point out that he had married for love and the twelve children he so wanted to protect had come from that union. But there was an ominous darkness in his expression, and he was so angry that it didn’t seem wise to press him any further on the subject.

He reached the bedchamber where the locksmith was installing an iron bolt to the outside of the door. “What?” Rowena exclaimed when she realized he meant to lock them in their room from the outside.

She followed him into the room where her sisters still appeared sleepy-eyed, though they were awake.
Mary was there, too, distributing new slippers from a straw basket to each sister.

“Here is how it will be from now on,” he announced to his daughters. “Every morning Mary will open the door and you will line these new slippers up outside the room for my inspection. She will then return the slippers to you and escort you girls to the sewing room. There, servants will bring you your meals except for supper, which you will take with me in the dining hall.”

“It’s as if we are in a prison!” Eleanore objected.

Sir Ethan shot her a severe, warning glance. “You are being kept safe.” Whirling back toward the door, Sir Ethan departed.

“This is your fault!” Eleanore confronted Rowena. “I know you have been going out. You were just out now, weren’t you? He caught you, didn’t he?”

Rowena dropped her head as tears brimmed in her eyes. This was so awful—trapped like a bird in a cage, held more tightly than ever, just when the world had seemed to be opening as never before, in the very same hour in which love had come to her.

“Leave your sister alone,” Mary scolded Eleanore as she walked toward the door. “Your father caught me trying to burn your ruined slippers. That’s why he’s on this rampage.”

“And he also caught me coming in from the forest,” Rowena murmured, her head still hung. The opening she’d worked on so hard and so long—that was gone now too, all those hours wasted.

“Does father think we were all in the forest?” Brianna asked.

“I told him it wasn’t so, but that’s what he thinks,” Rowena admitted.

“Then he doesn’t know anything about the opening in the floor?” Helewise mentioned.

Rowena shook her head.

“Caverns sometimes lead to the surface,” Eleanore said. “I recall a romantic book from France I once read where the lovers escaped an evil sorcerer by running into a cavern. If there was a way in, there was a way out.”

“So you’re saying that we might still be able to find a way to get out of here by traveling through the tunnels,” Chloe said excitedly.

Eleanore glanced at the closed bedchamber door. As she turned, they could hear the new bolt clanking shut. Together, the sisters scowled at the locksmith they knew was on the other side.

“It doesn’t matter,” Eleanore assured them. “I believe that the figure Rowena saw in the bowl was our mother.” This news was greeted by a wave of murmuring, some of it excited, some disbelieving. Eleanore shushed them and continued. “If she still lives, it’s up to us to find her. I’ve always been angry because I believed she abandoned us, but if she is in trouble we must go to her.”

“Do you think it’s possible that she is alive?” Helewise questioned.

“Anything is possible,” Eleanore replied. “But if
she is in the next life and comes to us as a spirit, then we still owe it to her to uncover her intention in contacting us.”

“But the tunnels are dark,” Cecily reminded them with a shiver in her voice. “If it hadn’t been for that mouse, we might be in there still.”

Rowena reached in her pocket, remembering the earring Millicent had handed her. “The new servant found this and gave it to me,” she told Eleanore, handing it to her.

Eleanore took it from her. “What did you think of her?”

“Unpleasant.”

Eleanore nodded and then turned back to Cecily. “We will carry lamps next time,” Eleanore told her. “As long as we bring enough oil, we will have light.”

The sisters began to plan their next descent into the tunnels, but Rowena couldn’t keep her mind on the discussion. Instead she gazed out the window at the courtyard bathed in the soft light of an early spring evening. The goose boy had once again put on his now-clean boots and was stretched on a mat in front of the opening. No doubt Sir Ethan had stationed him there to guard it.

Where was her Bedivere now? She saw again his beautiful face in her memory, once again felt his kiss. Her eyes closed as she recalled the sweetness and warmth of it. She relived the feel of his arm enfolding her, and saw anew his crippled hand with its twisting scar. Even in its ugliness, it made him dearer
to her. She winced to think of the pain he had felt when it happened, and somehow she understood the humiliation it caused him now.

He wanted to meet her in the forest tomorrow. He would be there, but she would not. Would he think she did not care to come to him? The thought of him misunderstanding formed a knot that tightened painfully in her stomach. This was an unbearable torment. How would she go on if she could never see him again? She simply could not endure life without the possibility of seeing him.

“Rowena!”

Her sisters were all looking at her. “Pay attention please! We’re going down through the trapdoor again tonight,” Eleanore told her. “Tonight after supper we’re going to try to sneak an extra lamp or two out of the dining hall. The small lamps at the tables by the doors might suit perfectly. Each of us will wear a shawl to supper so that we might hide a lamp under it.”

Rowena nodded. The idea of going into the tunnels was no longer as thrilling as it had once been. All that mattered now was Bedivere, her beautiful love from the North Country.