tears. “Rhiannon? Have I let you down? Mayhap I ought to have talked it over with you first, but I thought we were in accord on this. You do want us to go back to Wales?”
“Yes,” she said, “dear God, yes!”
“Well, then,” he said, “after Christmas, we’ll go home.”
The January sky was a glazed, boundless blue, and Bermondsey was adrift in a sea of snow, glistening like crystal as the sun rose overhead. The air was cold and clear, the wind stilled. “You’ve a good day for travel,” Henry said. “Take care of my uncle, Rhiannon. Any man who’d turn down an earldom needs looking after!”
Rhiannon heard laughter, caught an elusive hint of summer roses, and was then enveloped in a brief, perfumed embrace by England’s queen. “Godspeed,” Eleanor said warmly. “Yn iach, Rhiannon.”
Rhiannon flashed a startled smile. “Yn iach,” she echoed, touched that Eleanor should have taken the trouble to learn how to bid her a Welsh farewell. Ranulf was now back beside her, and after he’d assured her that Gilbert and Gwen were settled into the horse litter, she let him assist her up into the saddle.
Ranulf was bantering again with Henry, who was about to depart in a day or so for Oxford, telling Eleanor that if Harry did not get back in time for the birth of their babe, she ought to have sole say in picking the name. Eleanor agreed, and warned her husband that she might be tempted to name the child Stephen, or mayhap even Louis.
Rhiannon politely joined in the laughter, but she marveled at Eleanor’s sangfroid. Had Ranulf not been there for Gilbert’s birth, it would have been a far greater ordeal. No, as much as she liked Harry and Eleanor, they were a breed apart, this king of twenty-one and his celebrated queen, surely the only woman who would ever wear the crowns of both England and France. She wished them well, but she was so very glad to be going home with Ranulf, who did not yearn to soar up into the heavens, who felt no need to see how close he could get to the sun without being scorched.
“Are we ready?” she asked, and Ranulf made one last joke, wished Eleanor a safe and easy lying-in, and promised to be back ere the new babe could learn to walk. Swinging up into the saddle then, he reached for the lead attached to Rhiannon’s mare, and they started off on their long journey back to Wales.
Ranulf had no regrets about what he was leaving behind. After nineteen years of fighting over the English throne, he had no doubts whatsoever that the most dangerous quarry was neither wild boar nor wolf. No hunt was so hazardous as the pursuit of power. Fortunately, his nephew Harry was a skilled huntsman, one of the best he’d ever seen.
He glanced back once. Henry and Eleanor were still out in the snow-blanketed bailey. They waved as Ranulf turned, and that was to be the memory he would carry into Wales: the two of them, standing together in the bright winter sunlight, smiling, sure that the world, like the English crown, was theirs for the taking.
