The Penwyth Curse by Catherine Coulter Page A

the third wolfhound in the line came forward, tail wagging, to curve his huge body against Lord Vellan’s leg. “Madelyn was angry with me and told her mother I had struck her again. I’m not a codsbrain—naturally I didn’t ever strike her again. As for Meridian, she cursed her husband once too often. He wasn’t stupid, he knew if she became really angry, he’d be dead. So he killed her in her sleep, stuck a knife in her gullet, took her heart and buried it fifty feet from her body. A cautious man, was Sir William.” Lord Vellan chewed thoughtfully on his cheese. “Now Madelyn roams about the castle, pours lime in the jakes, sleeps on the ramparts when the weather is warm, stitches small shirts for Beelzebub so that her cheese will remain sweet, and prays every morning to the ancient ones to bring rain. She told me you would bring rain. She says she felt it.”
    Bishop was a straightforward man. He disliked artifice and guile. He watched people, observed what they did. He also observed various phenomena—he loved violent storms as much as he admired rainbows—and tried to understand what it was he was observing. When he listened to another person, be it the king himself, he knew and understood the words that were spoken, knew exactly what to think, knew what to do. But here? At Penwyth? He almost shuddered. He drank some ale, which was really quite good. He said, “I can’t bring the rain. I have not that gift. I merely forecast it.”
    â€œHow?” Merryn asked.
    Bishop frowned a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just there, a sense of it inside me. It’s part of me, I guess you would say.”
    â€œBoth one and the same,” said Lord Vellan. “Both a mystery to man. Call it what you will.”
    Merryn said, “Did my grandmother scare you to the roots of your hair?”
    â€œShe confused me more than scared me,” he said, knowing he wasn’t telling the exact truth. “She did not make a great deal of sense.”
    â€œYou just don’t know how to listen to her properly. She tells me her brain is seasoned from so many years dealing with this earth. A seasoned brain, she tells me, is a brain that can comprehend the meaning of a leaf that lies atop a rock.”
    Bishop rolled his eyes. “I am tired of this.” He turned to Lord Vellan. “My lord, I wish to hear what you think about the Penwyth curse. If there is really no curse, then mayhap you will tell me that it is poison, that you have saved Penwyth and your granddaughter by poisoning the men who have forced their way in here. It is one or the other, my lord. It is time you told me which it is.”
    The great hall fell quiet for the second time. More old faces than he could count, all seamed from years in the sun, were alert, their eyes fastened on the lord’s table.
    Lord Vellan cleared his throat, drank more ale, then said in a voice that carried to the blackened beams overhead, “I did not poison any of the four husbands. Even though I struck my wife once, I more than paid for it. I am guilty of nothing else.”
    Lady de Gay called out as she floated across the vast stone floor toward them, “I will tell you, Sir Bishop, all about the curse. It came from the spirit of an ancient Druid priest, B’Eall was his name. He was bloated with the blood of many sacrifices. He had held scores of dripping hearts in his hands, caressed them, squeezed them, the blood flowing through his fingers, until there was no more blood in them. B’Eall said he knew when he stood on this land, looking over the rocks and the hills and beyond to the sea, that it was his duty to proclaim this land sacred. He buried many bloodless hearts in this earth to make it so. And so it happened.”
    Lord Vellan shrugged. “Who knows?”
    â€œIt is deep and complex, this curse,” Merryn said, and sneered at him. “Beyond a