The Rose of Blacksword

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  About the Book

  Lady Rosalynde of Stanwood has the power to entice men to deeds of reckless daring. And none is so rash and bold as the condemned outlaw known as Blacksword. In return for safe escort to her ancestral castle, Rosalynde is forced to marry the rogue, never dreaming that holy wedlock will fan the flames of unholy desire.

  Wielder of the coveted Blacksword, with the fate of his noble name resting on his massive shoulders, Sir Aric of Wycliffe lives to bring death to his treacherous nemesis – until his heart is bested by the enchanting maiden who saved him from the hangman’s noose. Bound together by ancient custom, the brazen knight demands nothing less than Rosalynde’s total surrender. But even as revenge and honour war within him, he is undone by the most seductive conqueror of all: wild, irresistible love.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  About Loveswept

  Excerpt from Jessica Scott’s Because of You

  Excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s Ride With Me

  Excerpt from Annette Reynolds’s Remember the Time

  Excerpt from Juliana Garnett’s The Vow

  Excerpt from Iris Johansen’s This Fierce Splendor

  Excerpt from Sally Goldenbaum’s The Baron

  Excerpt from Sharon and Tom Curtis’s Lightning That Lingers

  Excerpt from Debra Dixon’s Tall, Dark, and Lonesome

  Excerpt from Deborah Smith’s Legends

  Excerpt from Adrienne Staff’s Spellbound

  Excerpt from Gayle Kasper’s Tender, Loving Cure

  Copyright

  I fondly dedicate this book to all those who have contributed so much to my writing career.

  SALLY LIVERETT, who read my first efforts with such wonder and enthusiasm;

  PAMELA GRAY AHEARN, agent extraordinaire, who kept her faith in my writing even when I had lost it;

  TERRY MCGEE, aka Emilie Richards, who coerced me into joining her writers’ group;

  RUTH GOODMAN, aka Meagan McKinney, who formed our first critique group;

  BEVERLY WALSDORF, who gained me the job I needed to support my writing habit;

  MARK GROTE, who was so wonderful to work for—supportive and understanding at all times;

  DEBORAH GONZALES, aka Deborah Martin and Deborah Nicholas, who is much more than simply a critique partner;

  and the SOUTHERN LOUISIANA CHAPTER OF RWA … especially the historical group.

  If even one of you had not been there for me, I believe I would have given up writing long ago.

  Prologue

  1992

  When the breeze is right and the flowers are in full bloom, the fragrance of roses permeates even the far reaches of the battlements at Stanwood Castle. The enduring stone, hard and unyielding, seems an unlikely setting for the romantic mood created by the gently wafting scents. Yet it is those very incongruities that contribute to the idyllic setting, for the forbidding protection of those ancient stone walls provides the environment that coaxes such exquisite blooms from the extensive rose gardens.

  The castle is a popular stop for tourists and is well-known for its gardens, which are said to have been tended without break since the time of King Henry II. A formal herb garden laid out by an early chatelaine still provides milfoil and vervain, lungwort and sallow root. A small stand of beautifully espaliered pear trees are said to be descended from an original planting from the time of King Stephen.

  But the castle’s true claim to fame is its roses. No modern hybrids, these—grown for their long, spindly stems in regular rows for ease of cutting. Stanwood’s roses bloom in riotous abandon, climbing up walls, clambering along eaves, sprawling over the outside stairways. They spring up in crevices and flourish in the most outlandish places. Even in the dead of winter there is bound to be some tenacious Rosa bravely putting forth blooms along a protected south-facing wall.

  But one area above all others within Stanwood’s mellow walls seems to beckon to the observant visitor. In a level spot at one end of the bailey, a thick hedge of Rosa Gallica surrounds an inviting green lawn. A solitary walnut tree shades a pair of carved stone benches at one end, while an ancient cast-bronze sundial stands at the other, supported on a simple fluted column and surrounded by a thick carpet of creeping thyme.

  The years have given the bronze a deep patina, burned in by the sun and washed clean by centuries of English drizzle. But the letters on the sundial gleam as brightly as if they were newly cast. They are worn down, of course, and in some places barely distinguishable due to the many hands that have rubbed the message engraved there. A tale, so old that no one knows its source, promises long and happy life to those newlyweds who trace the sundial’s aged words.

  A rose made sweeter by the thorn,

  A sword forged mighty by the fire.

  A love kept sacred by a vow.

  It’s a legend many have come to believe in.

  1

  England, A.D. 1156

  The spindly rosebush was more thorns than foliage. Devoid of even a bud, it looked forlorn against the barren soil. It might have been only a dead stalk, not worthy of all the care being lavished upon it. But to Lady Rosalynde the meager bush was everything in the world she had left to give her little brother.

  Her face was pale and sober as she knelt on the ground. She was unmindful of the dirt that stained the light blue of her celestine overtunic. She only concentrated on digging a suitable hole in the rich black earth, then added a generous portion of well-rotted stable sweepings to it. She wiped at her face with the back of one hand, leaving a black smudge upon her tear-streaked cheek, but she did not pause at her work. A sob escaped her, and then another as she centered the shrub. By the time she scraped the mound of soil back into the hole, she was weeping openly. But that did not deter her in her task. With hands now grimy and nails ruined quite beyond repair, she packed the soil firmly around the roots. It was only then that she sat back against her heels and stared pensively at the lonely little grave before her, marked now by the thorny rosebush and a new stone marker.

  Beyond her, standing bareheaded and awkwardly gripping his Phrygian cap, the young page, Cleve, watched his mistress. He was hesitant as he approached her with the wooden bucket of water he had drawn from the garden well.

  “Shall I water it now, milady?” he asked in a hushed tone.

  Rosalynde looked up at him. Despite her own all-consuming grief, she recognized that he too was sorely distressed by young Giles’s passi
ng. But he blinked hard against any threat of tears, and she gave him a sad and rueful smile. “I’d like to do it myself.”

  He gave her the bucket without argument, but Rosalynde could not mistake the concerned expression on his normally matter-of-fact face. She knew everyone thought she was behaving most strangely and that they were all humoring her only because they did not know what else to do. Death always seemed to make people uncomfortable, as did dealing with the surviving family. When she had told Lady Gwynne that she wanted to plant a rosebush at Giles’s grave, her poor aunt’s eyes had filled anew with tears. But she had only wiped her eyes, compressed her lips tightly, and nodded. When Rosalynde had told Cleve that she would plant the rose herself—she wanted no one to do it but herself—he too had accepted her wishes and silently acquiesced. But now as she carefully poured water around the spindly plant’s roots, she felt as if this gesture of hers toward her only brother had all been for naught. The rosebush changed nothing. The fact that she had labored so hard at it would not undo what had happened.

  She drew the empty bucket against her chest and gripped it tightly to her. Giles was still dead, still lost to the fever that had racked his frail body for three torturous days. Giles was dead despite all her frantic efforts to save him, and she had never felt more alone. First her mother. Then, for all practical purposes, her father. And now Giles. Despite her aunt and uncle who had been so good to her, she could not help but feel utterly abandoned.

  Cleve shifted uneasily and once more his cap made the slow twisted circuit through his hands. Aware of his discomfort, Rosalynde took a slow, steadying breath.

  “ ’Twill bloom in his place,” she said softly, as much for her own comfort as Cleve’s. “I know it looks quite meager now, but by summer’s end …” One last sob caught in her throat and she forced herself to look away from the lonely little grave.

  “Please, milady, come along now. Let me see you back to Lady Gwynne and Lord Ogden. Your aunt was most concerned that you should rest.…” He took a hesitant step toward her small, bowed figure. “You’re finished here now. Come away.…”

  He trailed off as she turned a pale and haunted face up to him. Her eyes became even more brilliant than usual, their pale gold and green centers glistening with her tears.

  “I am finished here,” she agreed in a soft, wistful tone. She rubbed absently at the dirt clinging to her hands as the thought that had been lurking in her mind these past two days now became clearer. “I no longer need tend my little brother. There’s truly no reason for me to stay here at Millwort Castle any longer, is there?” She sighed and looked down at her hands, unaccountably frightened by what she realized she must do. “Giles is beyond all help now. It’s time that I went home.”

  “Home?” Cleve ventured nearer the mourning girl. “But, milady, this is your home. You needn’t leave here. Why, my Lady Gwynne would be quite distraught to lose you. And anyway, until your father hears of Master Giles’s death—” He hesitated and then made a quick sign of the cross. “Until he is told and decides what to do, then you mustn’t think of leaving here atall. No, not atall,” he stated quite firmly.

  Rosalynde pushed a thick tendril of her dark mahogany hair back from her cheek. “And who’s to tell the Lord of Stanwood about the loss of his son if not I? If not the very one he entrusted his only male heir to?” She turned her face back to the little mound of earth that was her brother’s grave and to the scrawny rosebush that marked its presence. She remembered well her father’s parting words to her despite her tender age so long ago. He’d said it that first time he had left her off at Millwort with her infant brother. And he’d said it each of the few times he had visited them these long eight years since. “Take good care of your brother,” he had told her. “Take good care of your brother.”

  She had tried very hard to do just that despite Giles’s weak constitution. But she had failed. For all that she had tried her best to save him, she had failed.

  New tears started and fell unabashedly down her pale cheeks, and she was hard-pressed to know whether they were caused by sorrow or an inexplicable dread of seeing her father. Yet she knew she could not avoid him. Her eyes grew wide as she stared bleakly at her brother’s grave. “I am the one who must do it. I must tell my father that his heir is dead.”

  Rosalynde took one last look about the cheerful chamber that had been her own for the past eight years. It was much more home to her now than was the castle where she had been born and lived her first eleven years. Lady Gwynne and Lord Ogden had been good to her since her mother died. They had opened their home and their hearts to a frightened girl and her newborn baby brother. When her mother had died in childbirth, it had seemed to Rosalynde that she had lost both of her parents, for her father had become an angry, unreasonable stranger after that. Then as soon as the tiny baby had been able to be moved, they had both been sent to live at Millwort Castle. Lady Gwynne had welcomed her only sister’s children, and in the intervening years she had been as much a mother to them as was possible to be.

  For Giles, Lady Gwynne and Lord Ogden had been the only parents he had ever known. The silent, scowling stranger who had visited them only three times through the years had hardly seemed a father to him. But Rosalynde had never forgotten her true parents. Her father’s brief stopovers at Millwort had been joyfully anticipated but heartbreakingly cruel. All the old wounds had been opened each time by his aloofness, by the distance he kept between himself and his children. All the feelings of abandonment had become fresh once more, blinding her to everything but her private pain.

  Giles had not understood. Lady Gwynne had only shushed Rosalynde’s tears, telling her she expected too much, that a powerful knight like Sir Edward, Lord of Stanwood, could not be expected to display the sort of soft affection she wanted of him. Men simply weren’t like that, she had explained.

  But Rosalynde had known otherwise. She remembered a father who had swung her up on his shoulders despite her mother’s laughing objections. She remembered a father who had carved two wooden horses for her—a mare and a stallion. He had promised her the foal as well. She recalled clearly when he had made that promise: Her mother had lain abovestairs, struggling to have a child while her husband and daughter had waited nervously below in the main hall.

  But over the long hours of that day, into the evening and then the night, their hopefulness had turned to fear and then to awful dread. The babe had finally come, tiny and frail, hardly expected to last out the night. But her mother, the beautiful laughing Lady Anne, had simply faded away. No words to her husband or child. No complaints or even cries of anguish to the women attending her. She had just slipped away quietly, leaving in her wake a gloom that very likely still lingered at Stanwood.

  Rosalynde sighed deeply and rubbed her burning eyes. Perhaps that was what had affected her father the most, she speculated unhappily. He had not had the chance to bid good-bye to the woman he had adored. As a consequence, he had turned a hardened heart to everyone, his children included.

  But how was he to react to this latest loss? she wondered. How would he respond when she arrived unannounced with such awful news? Although he had never indicated the slightest feelings for the babe that had been the cause of his wife’s death, Rosalynde was certain this new blow would hit him hard. Despite his emotional remoteness, she knew he cared deeply about his children’s welfare and about his eventual heir. That was why he had sent them to Millwort. Rosalynde was to be well trained in the wifely arts, and Giles, when he was old enough, was to be trained in his letters and all the manly pursuits. She was to become a suitable man’s wife. Giles was to inherit Stanwood Castle and the surrounding demesne.

  As the years had gone by, however, her father had neglected Lady Gwynne’s appeals that he decide on a husband for Rosalynde. He had delayed and delayed, although never with any real reason to do so. The good Lady Gwynne had fussed that he simply did not want to believe that Rosalynde was old enough to be wed.

  Rosalynde had been secret
ly relieved, for she had no desire to be removed to another home, far away from the only security she knew. She was happy at Millwort. Besides, although she knew her marriage to some lord of her father’s choosing was inevitable, she did not look forward to it at all. She was content to live at Millwort Castle with her aunt and uncle. She learned her duties gladly and even participated in Giles’s lessons. As a result she had learned to read and to letter quite proficiently. The somber monk who had taught her brother had been particularly outdone that a girl could cipher so well. Not at all proper knowledge for a lady, he had grumbled time and time again. But Lady Gwynne had always soothed him with extra sweets from the kitchens, and so the years had passed in relative peace.

  Only now it had come to an end.

  Rosalynde slid her hand lovingly one last time along the satin-stitched coverlet that adorned her high wooden bed. She and Lady Gwynne had labored long over it. Well, maybe one day she would return to its comfort, she told herself. Perhaps she might be back at Millwort before very long at all.

  But deep inside Rosalynde did not believe it. She was going to Stanwood Castle because she felt she must. What was to come after that she could not begin to imagine.

  “You need not go,” Lady Gwynne beseeched Rosalynde one more time. “You still may change your mind and let Lord Ogden send the news to your father by messenger.”

  “It must be me who tells him. I owe him that much,” Rosalynde replied earnestly to her aunt’s concerned expression. “He left Giles with me—”

  “He left Giles with Lord Ogden and myself,” the good lady interrupted almost angrily. “You were but a child yourself, and only a little more than that now.” Then her tone softened and she pressed her palms affectionately to Rosalynde’s wan cheeks. “It was our heavenly Father’s will to take Giles, Rosalynde. We may not question His purpose.”

  Rosalynde stared at her aunt’s kindly face, wishing she could feel that same unshakable faith. But although she knew her aunt was right—indeed, prior to Giles’s passing she would never have questioned God’s will—now she was not so sure. She sighed and managed a weak smile.