"Sara Douglass - The Troy Game 2 - God's Concubine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

Once he was in bed, one of the men handed him a goblet filled with spiced wine and
the raw, sliced genitals of a hare.
"Drink," said Godwine, "and my daughter will soon breed you a fine son."
Edward looked at the goblet, very slowly and reluctantly raised it to his mouth, made a
show of sipping it, then placed the goblet on a chest at the side of the bed.
Harold looked at Caela, caught her eyes, and tried to smile for her.
Across the room Swanne laughed, rich and throaty. She pulled her shoulders back,
aware that the eyes of most were on her, and splayed her hands over the rich roundness of
her belly. "I wish you well, my lord," she said to Edward. "I hope your screams of
pleasure, as those of your bride, keep us awake throughout the long hours of this wedding
night."
Tostig giggled, and Swanne shot her young brother-in-law an amused glance even as

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 Sarah Douglass - God's Concubin


Harold hissed at him to be silent.
As Tostig subsided, Aldred stepped forward, staggering a little djunkenly on his feet,
and raised his hand for a mumbled blessing. Then Godwine said something coarse,
everyone laughed (save Harold, who watched Caela with eyes filled with sorrow), and
then Swanne began to direct people out of the room.
"Our king's member can never rise with this many witnesses," she murmured, to more
good-humored laughter.
Swanne was the final person to leave. She stood in the doorway to the chamber, her
hand on the latch, and regarded the two stiff people in the bed with a gleam in her
wondrous dark eyes.
"Queen at last, Caela," she said. "You must be so pleased."
And then she was gone.
THEY SAT, STIFF, SILENT, COLD, STARING AT THE closed door.
Finally Caela, summoning every piece of courage she could, took her husband's chilled
hand and placed it on her breast.
He snatched it away.
"I find you most displeasing," he said, then slid down the bed, rolled over so that his
back faced Caela, and stayed like that the entire night.
IN THE MORNING, WHEN SWANNE AND THE REST OF
the (largely still drunken) attendants pulled back the covers from the naked pair, there
was a moment's silence as the eyes took in the unsullied bleached linens.
Swanne's eyes slowly traveled to Caela's white face, and then she smiled in slow,
malicious triumph before she turned her back and left the chamber.
CbAPGGR GUDO
Rouen, Normandy
N THE SAME NIGHT THAT CAELA, QUEEN OF EN-
gland, lay sleepless beside her new husband, Edward so also the duke of Normandy,
William, lay sleepless beside his new wife.
But where Edward and Caela's wedding night remained coldly chaste, William and
Matilda's night had been filled with much loving and laughter. Theirs had been a marriage
that they had made, and for which they'd had to combat the combined disapproval of most
of the princes of Europe as well the Holy Father in Rome to be able to achieve.
William lay on his side, his head resting on a hand, his black eyes gentle as he regarded