Excerpt of Matilda's Song by JoAnn Smith Ainsworth

Enjoy the excerpt:

* * * * *

1120 A.D., Britain

Matilda’s heart threatened to escape it was beating so hard. Panic invaded every corner. If Sir Loric discovered her deception, it could be the end of her life. And that of her cousin.

“Hurry!”

She urged her mother and younger sister Nellopa to store the last bundles of clothing and household goods into the wooden cart so she could lash everything down. Her older brother Hylltun and Cousin William were hitching the ox. They kept their voices low and made as little noise as possible to avoid waking neighbors.

“You must be well away from here before Sir Loric knows you’re gone,” her mother said.

It was nearly midnight in early spring. Matilda and her middle-aged cousin were journeying to his home village of Caelfield where they would live the lie of a newly married couple. They must live this deception until the vindictive knight who demanded her hand to secure his loyalty to the earl saw fit to marry someone else. At eighteen, she was sacrificing all that was familiar to her—family, friends and home village—to evade this knight’s attentions.

“You're a saint, William,” her mother whispered, “to agree to this sham marriage.”

“I could never let the family down,” he replied matter-of- factly.

When her blacksmith father died last year, the earl invoked his right to choose a husband for her. While the law forbade a lord from marrying a woman to a man beneath her station, it didn’t require the husband to be loving, generous or even to her liking. Her skin crawled when Sir Loric just looked at her. He won honors on the battlefield, but off the field he was a lout and a brute.

To escape, she was sacrificing a dream of a love so breathtaking her heart would sing. The lie protected her from a politically motivated betrothal, but it destroyed any prospects of finding and marrying the “man of her dreams”—a reality as bitter and chilling as the night air.

She gave one last tug and tied off the rope securing all her worldly belongings. Her brother—the village blacksmith upon their father’s death—finished the harnessing and fed the ox a handful of grain while Nellopa strapped Matilda’s most prized possession—a Simple Chest filled with healing herbs— under the cart’s seat.

“I’ll miss you, Daughter.”

Her mother’s love reached out and awareness of that loss almost broke Matilda’s resolve. She compressed her lips to keep a sob from escaping.

“The earl may never forgive you for this,” her older sister said. “It will embarrass him. He may even withdraw my dowry so I can’t marry.”

Tension built across Matilda’s back. She couldn’t sacrifice Ingunde’s happiness for her own.

“I won’t have you hurt. I’ll come back if he withdraws your dowry.”

“If you return, the earl would have no choice but to give you to Sir Loric,” her brother said.

“Surely, he wouldn’t harm Ingunde,” their mother assured them. “If for nothing else, to honor his late wife, my dear cousin.”

“But he might not let Matilda return to us,” Hylltun said, “even if that bastard marries.”

Matilda shuddered. She missed her family already and she was not yet gone.

She pulled her cloak closer around her neck.

“The sooner we leave here, the safer I’ll feel,” William said pragmatically as he took the lead rope and angled the ox toward the moonlit roadway.

Her older sister spoke urgently.

“Go!”

Matilda quickly hugged each one. Her mother’s comforting scent of herbs and potions lingered when she tore herself away and caught up with her cousin who was already leading the ox down the rutted lane. Lashed to the cart, her wedding dowry—all her worldly belongings—teetered and wobbled.

As the ox-cart lurched over a large stone uprooted by the spring thaw, she clung with one hand to its wooden side. She looked back, searing her family’s shadowed outlines into her memory until the darkness swallowed them.

Chapter Two Thundering hooves chewed chunks of the packed earth out of the manor house courtyard as the baron brought his enormous, black warhorse to a lurching halt. Lord Geoffrey de la Werreiur of Greystone, Norman baron, knight to the king and ruler of three former Saxon villages, leapt from his lathered stallion, handed off the leather reins to a patient groom stationed nearby and strode briskly toward the entrance of his residence. His white linen tunic stuck to the sweat on his muscular chest.

“Keep riding that hard and you’ll break your neck,” his elegant sister, Lady Rosamund, admonished from the expansive steps of the manor house. “Then we’ll have no heir to continue the de Werreiur line.”

Her delicate, beaded, red silk slippers took a beating on the stone pavement, but she insisted on walking outdoors in them.

The baron’s brown leather breeches scraped as he rapidly advanced toward the stairs. Knee-high leather riding boots carried the dust of his exploits. His loose tunic flapped wetly in a breeze caused by his rapid strides.

Rosamund thrust her hands onto her narrow hips, a determined expression on her face.

“When are you going to do your family duty and marry? You’re almost five and twenty.”

Geoff looked at his sister—who probably sought refuge from her domineering husband more than holding a desire to visit her brother.

“You cannot expect me to marry one of those mealy mouthed females you brought with you.”

He cringed at the thought of those insipid females, then turned stormy.

“They look at me and calculate the value of my lands. I want a wife who loves me for myself.”

Rosamund haughtily defended her friends, her chin rising as she spoke.

“It’s their family duty to marry well.”

The baron angrily advanced toward the entrance.

“Their eyes glaze over when I discuss the welfare of my tenants. They have no interests except money and fashion.”

“You wrong them,” Rosamund cried out as he brushed past her to enter the manor through the massive wooden door being held open by a retainer in green and brown livery. “Any one of them can run a manor house.”

“I already have an excellent housekeeper,” Geoff flung over his shoulder. “I’m looking for a wife. Find me a spirited woman of good birth. Then I’ll consider doing my family duty.”

“Unrealistic,” Rosamund called out as the door slammed shut.