A Knight’s Enchantment (11 page)

Hugh called to a passing page, “Bring us some bread and soft cheese, any pottage that is heated, and a jug of ale, if you please.

“We shall eat in your workshop,” he said to Joanna, guessing she was too hungry still to refuse. “And then I will show you how to wrestle out here. I know your work and bed space is no place to roughhouse,” he added, pointing to the furnace and the many basins, jars, and glasses in the room.

“Roughhouse,” Joanna murmured, as if she was tasting the term. She raised her brows. “Should we not do that before food?”

“Of course, you are right,” Hugh said quickly, happy to agree.

They ate a little first, anyway, while standing outside in the corridor. Hugh as a further delaying tactic had asked for more torches to be brought to light the space and, as these were placed in the wall sconces, he encouraged Joanna to taste each of the dishes the maids and pages had carried up to the chamber. As she was eating, he dragged her pallet out into the narrow landing between her room and the stairs.

“Somewhere for you to fall, my knight?” Joanna queried from the doorway, pointing with her slice of “poor knights”—toasted white bread loaded with honey, pine nuts, cinnamon, and pepper.

In answer, Hugh teasingly threatened to bite off part of her “pokerounce,” chuckling as she rapidly devoured it instead.

“I am surprised your teeth are not rotten to the gums, given your love of sweets,” he observed. “And as for the pallet, I would not have you bruised, my lady.”

With her mouth full, Joanna could not answer at once, but then she swallowed. “Nor would I have you required to make an account of your hurts to your squires, my knight.”

Hugh noted her smile and took another sip of ale. “You are very confident, my lady.”

“I have every reason to be so. You are trained in arms, my knight.” She folded her arms across herself. “Without a lance or sword you are no different from anyone.”

“Perhaps not from any
man,
my lady.”

“If you think me so disadvantaged, then you should wrestle as a one-armed
man.
” Still smiling, she leaned forward on her toes. “You should also pay me a forfeit each time I win.”

“What manner of forfeit?”

“A chain or coin from Orri’s hoard.”

“You drive a keen bargain,” Hugh replied, momentarily disconcerted by such a practical, mercenary answer. “It is custom for a lady to pay by kisses, and accept the same in return.”

“Oh, I will pay and receive those, too. I always honor my debts.”

Disquiet coiled in his mind. Was she so eager for gold?

No. She seeks gold as the symbol of wisdom and healing.

Then why did she want it?

A face hovered in his memory: a man’s face, dark, with bright eyes. David had spoken of him, though he had not paid heed at the time and could not recall what his brother had said. But he knew that he had seen the fellow in the bishop’s donjon. Joanna’s kindred. Was he, too, like David, imprisoned and dependent on the whim and favor of Thomas? Would Thomas do such a thing to his own mistress?

No sooner thought than answered….

“You may have the hoard,” he said. “All of it.”

He took another drink of ale to avoid looking at her, ashamed now of how he had glibly assumed that she needed no wealth save trinkets.

“I will bring it to you,” he said, still without meeting her eyes. “And then I will return your bed to its proper place. It is too late now for any match between us.”

He left before she could answer, wishing again that he could achieve his brother’s freedom by some other way.

I will send another message to the Templars and offer all my prizes to the order, if they will but intervene on behalf of David and the other prisoners.

He could only hope and pray it would be enough.

Days passed. Joanna worked, missing her father, anxious about him, wondering how he was. Hugh spent time with her every evening, bringing food up from the kitchen himself and coaxing her to eat. She no longer spied on him when he practiced in the bailey yard. She had no time.

He had brought her Orri’s hoard, leaving it on her workbench wrapped in a rough cloak. He brought her colored stones in the hope that they would contain rare ores. When a traveling artist came to SirYves and offered to repaint the keep’s great hall with a frieze of running stags, Joanna helped the man to make his paint and Hugh, who had a good eye for an amateur and would gladly have wielded the paintbrush himself, was persuaded to take his father hunting so they could work undisturbed.

He cares for me,
Joanna told herself at night, watching the rising, fattening moon and loathing its bland, silvery face. But still she knew he would not release her.

Then a messenger returned to Castle Manhill, along with one of the bishop’s men, a priest Bishop Thomas sometimes used as a clerk. Joanna knew nothing of this until Hugh brought the man to her chamber.

“You will know each other,” he said as the grizzled, bearded priest wheezed in the muggy atmosphere of the room. “Why not go out on the battlements and talk in the fresher air? It is a very bright and sunny day today. If you come with me—”

The priest, wary of Beowulf sniffing at his crotch, was already backing away, but Joanna was determined to speak to him. She caught up with his burly figure as he stepped after Hugh onto the battlements and tugged at his travel-stained cloak.

He turned to her, a protest forming on his lips, but glad enough to pause in the relative shelter of the keep while he gathered his breath to complain.

Swiftly, Joanna spoke first. “Father Paul, have you news of Solomon, please? Does he still enjoy
‘Ego Sum Laedunum’
?” She switched seamlessly to Latin, chanting her words as if repeating the lines of a song. “I will soon have much gold for my lord and am progressing well with my greater work,” she sang in Latin. “I will be most glad to return to my lord’s household, especially if I know that my father is in good health—he and the other guests,” she finished, thinking of David and Mercury.

Hugh, who had been watching a flock of rooks rising from a nearby woodland rookery, baiting and playing on the rising breeze like black balls of fluff, now turned to regard her with a mild, quizzical expression, as if he knew exactly what she was doing.

Father Paul stared at her, then Hugh, and answered stiffly, in English, “Solomon the alchemist is living and working at present within the palace of West Sarum. He sends his good wishes.”

“And were you going to tell Joanna that?” Hugh asked, still mild, but with extra grit in his tone that had the priest swinging round and glancing with longing at the narrow door off the battlements. Beside Hugh, clamped as close as a burr, the wolfhound Beowulf growled softly.

“That, and also that her lord is most eager for her return.”

“And the gold?” Hugh prompted.

Before Hugh could admit that she had gold now—and then the priest would demand to take it, the one thing she dared not allow to happen—Joanna pointed over the crenellations. “See! My lord’s standard!” She clapped her hands, allowing the priest to think she was in bliss merely at the sight of the flapping pieces of flag-cloth displayed below them in the bailey yard, where even now the horses of the priest, messenger, and guards were being tended.

“I will tell our lord that you are looking forward to returning to his service. And that you, sir”—the priest bowed stiffly to Hugh—“are ready to go ahead with the hostage exchange for your brother.”

“Most ready,” said Hugh, touching his sword belt. “But I see my father waving—we should go down to the hall.” He glanced at Joanna. “Will you come?”

She shook her head. She had no time for a formal greeting and meeting and now, as they walked back along the narrow walkway, the priest muttered in Latin, “You have until the full moon, Joanna. Our lord told me to remind you of that.”

“I have it always in my heart,” said Joanna, feeling sick again as her stomach rolled with anxiety and her mind tumbled with dread.

Afterward, Hugh returned to her chamber earlier than usual, a few hours after lunch but before sunset. He leaned against the wall, watching her using her small bellows to tease the furnace into a steady, baking heat.

“I am no fool, even if I cannot read,” he said. “I would not have told that priest about the hoard. He would have then taken it and you gained no advantage. What did he say to you on leaving? And do not give me the name of a song.”

“He told me again that my father is well,” Joanna lied. She laid aside the bellows, ashamed of her deception but feeling she had little choice. Her first concern had to be for her father, just as Hugh’s must be for David. At times those desires worked in tandem, but there might be an occasion when they were in conflict. However much she longed to share with Hugh, she dared not.

She sighed, rubbing at her aching head.

“Come out with me today,” Hugh said. “At Manhill-de-Couchy, over the hill, the villagers have sent word to me asking for help. Why not leave this for a space and take a Sabbath?”

Joanna flinched at the word, wondering if he had guessed that aspect of her past, but his face was thoughtful and still. “The break will do you good,” he said, inhaling deeply and frowning.

She breathed in, too, and almost choked: the fume here was so dense.

“I have just readied the furnace,” she murmured. “It would be a sin to waste it.”

“Do what you can, so it can be left, then bar the door. I will set a guard and we can go. It is not far to ride,” he added.

I shall be riding with him, pillion. My arms around his waist or his around mine.

Joanna nodded and so it was agreed.

“What is this quest they want from you?” she asked later as they rode out of the keep’s long gatehouse and longer shadow, pillion as she had hoped, with her sitting on the saddle before Hugh.

“The lad would not say before my father, for fear of his demanding payment, or wary of his ridicule, but I know. It is the season for it.”

Ridicule Joanna understood, and Sir Yves was a master of it. Yesterday, going to the kitchen for a pail of water, she had found Sir Yves berating the cook, scolding the bald, harassed, skinny man for scorching a curd flan.

“Can you not even do a simple dish?” Sir Yves had asked, hooking his fingers into his belt as he hitched it over his bulging belly. “Is it a new fashion now? Will you be frying my pottage next?”

Joanna had interrupted the tirade by deliberately stumbling across the flagstones, but she had remembered it, and now she thought of Hugh, of his having to endure such scorn when he was a child.

Spare your pity, he is grown up,
she reminded herself, but she could not help touching his hand, a silent comfort that he would not even know was such. “What is it, then?” she asked.

He squeezed her waist. “You will be surprised.”

“A wolf, raiding stock? A wild boar? A deer in the wheat? What?”

She sensed him smiling.

“You will see.”

He hugged her again—any excuse—and reluctantly spurred Lucifer on. The village lad had been pale and in a hurry, even refusing a bite to eat in the kitchen in his haste to return to tell the elders of Manhill-de-Couchy that help was coming.

And if it was what he suspected, he would need his wits about him, not be distracted by Joanna’s warmth, the scent of her hair, the dazzling rush of inner light and weightlessness that exploded in him each time her thighs brushed slightly against his. He tried to gather himself.

She is your lady and you are her knight. Treat her with all courtesy.

He asked after her health. Was she warm enough? Too hot? Would she like a drink of mead from his flask? Did she have any questions for him? Would she like him to do anything for her?

“Tell me the local name of that flower,” she answered, swinging about and fixing him with a steady look, as if she knew very well what he was about.

He stared at the thistle she was pointing at, growing out of a cart rut like a spear from a fallen warrior, and gave a grunt of laughter. “Shall I pick it for you, my lady?”

“Only if you wear a glove.”

“When are you going to stop mentioning gloves?”

She shrugged. “When I am free.”

This territory was too dark. Hugh whistled to Beowulf and Lucifer and cantered on, giving the horse his head as they drove through a mess of oak and lime saplings growing as weeds in the middle of the track. He heard Joanna coughing at the raised dust and checked Lucifer, standing up on his stirrups to check where on the winding, sunken road they were.

“There is the church. Not far.” He settled back in the saddle without mentioning that the village had set out trestles by the churchyard and laid out a dancing area. She would see it soon enough for herself.

“Do you give your word, my lady, that you will stay with me today? No wandering off?”

She studied her fingers hooked tightly into Lucifer’s thick mane. They were pale and a little chafed in places: she must have scrubbed them. He wanted to tell her that the stains were a badge of her calling, but she was answering his question and he needed to listen closely.

“I swear that I will not wander off, my knight.”

That was not the same as a vow to remain by him. She could swear that and then still try to flee for West Sarum, not
wandering off
but making straight for the palace.

He did not fault her for it—he would have done the same in her place.

“Soon you will meet the villagers. They are good people. Very observant.”

“I am sure,” she answered primly, but he guessed the game was on between them.

He would need to watch her closely—and hope the villagers did the same.

The village of Manhill-de-Couchy was a scrap of houses clustered on a low hill, with water meadows and grazing lands about and woodland bordering all. In high summer the meadows would be bright with butterflies and dragonflies, Joanna guessed, and for now her heart lifted as the musky perfume of the churchyard orchids stole through the more basic scent of pig. One tawny piglet squealed at Lucifer, then turned tail, darting back into a thatched homestead where a flour-covered matron wielding a cloth chased it out again.

The woman stopped, her bright color fading, and bobbed a rapid curtsy at Hugh, who nodded. “Fine day for your maying, Agnes,” he called out, and slipped down from the saddle to stroll beside his horse.

“Why is she anxious?” Joanna whispered, swaying a little as she leaned down in the saddle and glad of Hugh’s steadying hand against her flank.

“She fears I will tell my father’s steward that she is grinding her own wheat, not using my father’s mill or paying my father’s mill tax.”

“Will you?” Joanna asked, hearing a child crying within the hut.

“My father is rich enough already.”

She heard the anger in his terse reply and recalled an earlier cryptic comment of Hugh’s.

“What did you mean, the lad did not want to admit much in your father’s hall for fear of him demanding payment?”

“Look ahead at the church porch.”

Joanna glanced along the thatch of the simple wooden church to its tiny triangular-roofed porch and understood. Hanging from the inside of the porch, almost hidden by shadow, was a long dark ellipse, shaped somewhere between a funnel and a sphere. Even as she realized what it was, she also understood why the village was so silent; why no one had rushed up to greet them. “Bees!”

She could hear them now: a muted low buzzing that might leap an octave any moment in a frenzy of attack.

“An early swarm.”

She looked at Hugh, inconsequentially realizing that his eyes were bluer than the sky about them. “That is important?”

“Early swarms have a spark and mettle in them. They are much prized.”

“And they sent for you to retrieve them.”

“They know I can help—and I will help.” He winked at her. “Takes one ill-tempered brute to understand many little ill-tempered brutes, does it not?” He offered his hand. “May I help you down?”

He took her silence as consent, lifting her from the saddle onto a narrow path running along the fronts of the houses. At ground level again, Joanna could see the villagers, crowded into their cottage doorways, their faces tense and expectant. From this viewpoint, the settled swarm looked bigger than ever, thrusting down into the church porch like some deadly unlit lantern.

“How came it here?”

“Bees like a calm, dark spot. And now that most churches must be closed because our pope and king are in dispute, this porch will be quiet.”

Joanna thought of the excommunicated King John and shivered. Even in West Sarum the story was well known: how the whole of his kingdom suffered under the pope’s interdict so that almost all churches were closed. Folk could not marry in church now and must be buried in ditches and fields, not in holy ground. She shivered a second time.

“Can I help?” It seemed right to her to whisper.

He nodded. “I am going to fetch a sheet from my pannier. We can work together.” His face was solemn. “You will need that still patience of yours, not your quickness. Bees do not like bright light or loud noises. Come. We should use this daylight.”

He was checking the position of the sun as he unfurled the sheet and Joanna sensed that that too was important. She followed on behind Hugh, skipping almost in her haste to keep up and all the while feeling the eyes of the villagers on her back.

“How did you know what it would be? Really?” she hissed.

“The lad they sent had pollen stains and a dozen bee stings on his tunic.”

“You have good eyes,” she marveled. “Had I been in the hall, I would not have been able to see that.”

Ahead, he rolled his large shoulders. “I can claim no virtue: ’tis my good fortune, or fate, but no more than that. In the tourney I need them.”