Pretender's Fate Ch. 01

But was he conscious enough to realize he had come inside her? She had been vocal and had made him answer back to her as he thrust inside her, calling him out as a coward for not doing his duty of producing sons. He had fucked her in anger. But all that was important to Madeline is that Sir Thomas had been inside her and spurt his seed—and that he remember he had done so. He had been too drunk to release his full fury on her, which was a good thing. If need be, later Seth could help Thomas remember the date of lying with his wife as sometime earlier than tonight.

* * * *

Lady Madeline Howard, accompanied by her handmaiden, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth's husband, Seth—for protection and as Sir Thomas's eyes and ears—removed herself, at her husband's insistence, to the nunnery at Lismore in the late spring of 1295. Madeline had a very special Christmas of 1295 indeed. In February of 1296, the three, plus a baby boy, to be christened William when Sir Thomas finally settled on a name for his first son, returned to Castle Ayr, where Elizabeth placed Thomas's "month-old" son in his trembling arms. The birth had been difficult, Seth told Sir Thomas, and had come two weeks before the nuns had expected it. He congratulated his lord for having the foresight to protect his wife's health by lodging her with the nuns. As Sir Thomas remembered it, though, he had been delighted to have his wife out of the castle for a while to smoothen his hunting campaign among the young squires in the castle.