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wanted to know the servants began offering food
and Giles started his own polite interrogation.
    “Have you always lived at Wroxley?” he
asked.
    “No.” Mirielle sensed that he intended to
direct their table conversation into the areas where he wanted it
to go. Very well, let him lead. She would follow with apparent
docility, while not giving away any information that might
compromise Brice, or Wroxley Castle and its inhabitants. “I was
born in Wales. Sir Brice is my cousin. When my parents died, I
became his ward.”
    “Then Sir Brice is also Welsh?” Giles glanced
at his host as if he were trying to recognize him but could not
recall a previous encounter.
    How odd. Mirielle did not think the two men
had ever met before. Or had they?
    “Like me, Brice is half Norman, part Welsh,
and part Saxon,” Mirielle said. “A very mixed heritage.”
    “You appear to have inherited the best
qualities of all three races.” Giles smiled at her. The effect on
her ability to think clearly was devastating, making her forget the
questions she had been planning to ask of him.
    “I have never heard it said that Normans
thought well of either Welsh or Saxon.” Irritated by her own
reaction to the man, Mirielle responded rather too sharply. Oh, why
could she not turn her eyes from his?
    She had a piece of meat in her fingers. She
was holding it over the trencher she and Giles were sharing, while
she let the gravy drip from the meat back into the trencher so it
would not stain the tablecloth. Giles reached for a succulent
morsel for himself and the back of his hand brushed across hers.
Mirielle shook with an emotion she could not identify. A tiny spot
of fatty brown gravy soiled the white linen. She stared at it,
appalled by this evidence of a lack of self-control on her
part.
    “Tell me how you came to Wroxley,” Giles
urged, apparently oblivious to her discomfort.
    “It is an ordinary tale.” What was wrong with
her? She had been properly schooled in manners and she had acted as
Brice’s hostess on many previous occasions. She knew how to make
light conversation with passing guests who would be on their way
within a day or two, never to be seen again. Why should this
evening be different? Why should this one man affect her so
strongly? She knew why it was so. Sir Giles was connected to the
image she had seen in her crystal globe. Something about this
stranger tugged at her heart—and something about him started a
warning bell ringing in her mind.
    “Ordinary or not, I would like to hear your
story.” Again that smile, that flash of remarkably even, unbroken
white teeth, accompanied by a glint of humor in his blue eyes. His
deep, mellow voice was so persuasive that Mirielle had no desire to
resist what he asked of her. “How old were you when you were
orphaned, Lady Mirielle?”
    “I was thirteen.”
    “And you became Sir Brice’s ward
immediately?”
    “It was his wish. Brice has been kind to
me.”
    “He has not found you a husband.” The words
were disparaging; the slightly raised brow that accompanied them
was even more so.
    “I have no desire to marry,” Mirielle said,
annoyed. “Being the daughter of a poor nobleman, I have no dowry,
so no one is likely to ask for me. At age twenty-three, I am too
old to think of marriage any longer. I am grateful to Brice for
bringing me to Wroxley when he came here. It is charitable of Lady
Alda to allow me to stay.”
    She stopped, asking herself why she was
talking so freely to a man she did not know. She had sounded like
the fox in the old fable, who declared he did not want the grapes
he could not have, because they must be sour. She did not feel that
way about marriage. She wished she could have a good husband, but
since she could not, she would make her spinster’s life as useful
as possible.
    “Forgive me if I speak improperly, my lady,
but I have noticed how the servants follow your bidding as if you
were in charge of all domestic arrangements. I do believe you