The Wedding by Edith Layton

Author:Edith Layton [Layton, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Romance
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2017-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

“Do you want anything else, my lady?” a footman asked.

He couldn’t hear Dulcie’s soft answer, but Crispin allowed himself a dour smile at what it could have been.

Yes, would you lie down on the floor so I might walk on you? If she’d said that, he thought resentfully, the servants would probably have done so happily—any of the servants in or outside the hall. They doted on her. She hadn’t spoken to her lord husband for three days—three entire days, morning till dusk—and yet they fawned over her. He hadn’t even seen her, except for stolen glimpses, in all that time. She breakfasted in her room, went to bed early, and managed to avoid him during the hours in-between.

He didn’t know where she lunched or when she dined, for he had studiously avoided doing either at the hall since their kiss three nights ago. He was sure she wouldn’t have come down to eat if he had been there, yet none of his servants seemed to notice his absence. Whenever he heard her voice, he also heard how the servants leaped to attention for her and attended her with gentle voices and little sighs. They saved their reproachful glances and thin-lipped looks for him, as though he were a monster.

She was a penniless girl from Fleet prison, with no name except the one he’d given her, and no fashion except for the clothes he’d paid to put on her back. And yet they all clearly adored her. But then, they weren’t Londoners, nor were they enlightened.

Only a few generations back, Crispin recalled sourly, the lord of the manor would have kept company with his household staff, even to eating and sleeping in the great hall with them, like a tumble of pups before the hearth. He could actually have picked a wife from their ranks in those days, if the king didn’t order up one for him as part of some grand political scheme. The lord reigned, and his rule was absolute. But there’d been few real tyrants in the countryside since the day some lower lordlings got King John to swallow his pride and sign a charter limiting his power over them.

What held for the king of all England served for every lord as well. Unlike his French counterparts, an English lord did not own his serfs’ souls as well as their bodies. Since there was no droit du seigneur, he had no feudal rights to bed a virgin serf on her wedding night. In fact, he had no absolute authority at all, Crispin thought moodily. The lord built his keep with the help of his men-at-arms, and with them he protected his serfs, and that was the way of his world—in theory. Let him neglect them or his duty to them, however, and he’d find no food in his larder, no serfs in his fields, and no life in his body before long. A charge of murder needed witnesses to support it, and there were always more agreeable, ambitious lords to be found.

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