A Knight’s Enchantment (4 page)

“Alchemy and what other secret arts?” Thomas cut across her. “What dark arts, Templar? You know a great deal of magic for a simple knight.”

Magic!
Hugh had heard enough. Amazed at David’s own academic idiocy—when would his brother learn to keep silent?—he pulled out the roll of parchment at his belt, presenting it seal first to the bishop.

“These are the names and pedigrees of the horses I will exchange for the release of my brother. If you look, there are some famous chargers. And this”—Hugh pulled out another parchment from his jerkin—“is a letter from the prelate of all England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which he vouches for my brother and gives me his support.”

That final piece of paper with its heavy seal made the bishop pause; Hugh saw his hesitation and rejoiced.

The audience chamber was silent except for the small crackling of the candles. The girl Joanna had flitted back into the shadowed part of the chamber and shed her sparkling cloak. She already knew the show was over for today, although she still wore his glove. When he had seen that first, Hugh felt as guilty as when his father first told him that he had caused his mother’s death. Seeing his glove again, on Joanna, he was mortified afresh, his victory over Thomas damped down in shame.

“I will need to study this,” said Thomas at last.

“Of course,” Hugh agreed. “Keep both: I have copies. I shall come again tomorrow.”

He knew it was the right time to go. Leaving the treasure to emphasize his wealth and pique Thomas’s interest and greed, he turned on his heel. With Beowulf shadowing and his men trailing behind, he strode away without looking back, thinking of the girl, the wonder-worker, Joanna.

Tomorrow I will seek her out and apologize.

Her lord bishop was pleased with her for the moment and, when she reminded him that she needed more supplies, he graciously allowed her to leave the household and go out into the city. Now, accompanied by two guards—a further sign of favor—Joanna almost ran through the main gate of Thomas’s palace. The day was bright, the sun was shining, she was out and free—

But for how long?

Hugh prowled about West Sarum, returning often to the high-walled stone enclosure that marked the bishop’s palace. He had sent his men and Beowulf on, into the dense oak woodland outside the city, while he lingered. He was, he admitted, watching the place, spying it out, looking for a weakness he could exploit. He had little faith in tomorrow’s meeting: he wanted a backup plan.

He marked the comings and goings. A fish seller with a handcart; a sweeper pushing away piles of horse and pig dung from the streetside entrance; an old man with an armload of clothes to sell greeting the guards as he passed into the palace courtyard. The morning was drawing on and the early dawn crowds had slackened to a trickle as people hurried back to their homes for the midday meal. Hugh inhaled the scents of boiling pork and pottage and told his grumbling belly to be silent.

Directly outside the palace gate were the city stocks and pillory—no doubt erected there for the bishop’s entertainment, Hugh thought grimly. He bought a venison tart from a passing pie seller and ale from a brewster selling it by the door of her freshly rethatched house and continued to stare.

Shooing away a browsing pig that seemed determined to befriend him, Hugh almost missed Joanna tripping through the palace gate. He saw the guards first, large, simple-looking fellows in their fathers’ old mail and helmets, strutting over the deeply rutted main street with an air of nervous belligerence. One cackled at the moldering gray wretch in the stocks, stopping abruptly as if he had been admonished.

By whom? To see more clearly, Hugh crouched down under the roof eaves of the house where he was standing and smiled. His guess was right: it was Joanna.

Watching her, he forgot to watch the entrance. She was carrying a basket, swinging it along. She looked happy to be outside and she had dressed for the occasion. There was no grubby glove on her hand now and her gown was freshly brushed, with new sleeves attached in a rich, subtle scarlet. Her pretty brown hair was caught up in a golden net and her belt was new. Wound twice around her slender middle, it was still long, with golden tassels that drummed against her legs as she walked.

The old man with the secondhand clothes came beside Hugh and sat down on a house step.

“Pretty, is she not?” he observed, in a clear accent that revealed he had been more than a clothes seller once. He scratched at the sore on his arm and two others on his bare legs. “Been with the bishop now for a year.”

Hugh gave the old man a coin. “What else do you know?”

“Of Joanna?” The old man tucked the coin into a ragged glove and leaned back against the wattle house wall. “Rumor says she’s the bishop’s leman. Some call her a necromancer.” His voice dropped. “She visits houses no decent woman would go near.

“Not the stew,” the old man added, following Hugh’s glance at the public bathhouse at the top of West Sarum’s main street, where even now off-duty guards cavorted outside with girls in soaking wet tunics. “She is no whore.”

“So?” Hugh prompted.

“Do you not want that pie?”

Silently Hugh handed it across. His companion took a huge bite and spoke with his mouth full. “She reads books,” he said with relish. “Strange books.”

Hugh tracked the small graceful figure down the street. Joanna was going away from the bathhouse, walking down the slop-filled lane in the direction of the southern city gate and the river. As she moved he saw a sparkle on her right wrist: slim metal bracelets. Given to her by Thomas?

Nodding to the old man, who was intent on his pie, Hugh stepped out into the road. Seeing the girl again, learning about her place in the palace, had given him an idea—a nasty, furtive idea, one that went against all tenets of chivalry. Whether he would act on it depended on opportunity, but for the moment he would follow Joanna and see where she went.

Whether she was a necromancer or magic-worker, she was certainly no fool, he conceded, keeping close to the guards as they wound their way down the steep main street. She remained with the pair as they spent a long time trying their hands at the city’s archery butts ranged on a pitch of spare ground by the square, squat Saxon cathedral—a place where Bishop Thomas never preached, Hugh wagered. She bought them both pies, but ate nothing herself and waited with seemingly endless patience as the thicker-set of the two haggled with a cobbler over the repair to a shoe.

Down the long street they went, Joanna scarcely looking at the many clothiers’ stalls or the brightly colored puddles outside the dyers’ workshops. She was obviously bent on leaving the city though the southern gate—to ford the river? Or to visit the small narrow settlement that had grown up just outside the walls?

Away to the south, beyond the meandering Avon, were hills green with woodland and beyond that, his father’s castle. That thought gave Hugh no pleasure as he drew a shabby cloak over his tunic and draped a hood over his head, grunting an acknowledgment at the gatekeeper as he followed his quarry through the open entranceway.

Here the ground leveled off into water meadows grazed by horses and cattle. There were stables and a hamlet of tumbledown houses with long stripes of garden and more rooting pigs. Grubby children playing close to the river called after Hugh and a few bolder ones tossed pebbles in his direction. None cast stones at Joanna, he noticed, although they jeered at her guards in a dialect so thick he could not understand it.

He assumed she was making for the ford, so was startled when she swung away from the well-worn track into a mess of old gardens and derelict house plots. Weaving through brambles and patches of nettles and tall grass, she led the way and the guards trudged after, perhaps wondering, as he did, where she was headed. None looked back although he trailed them at a long distance, skulking through this old warren of former dwellings like a burglar.

She had a saucy walk, he decided, watching her sway over a wreck of fallen house beams with the poise of a dancer. They were coming to more recent and crowded habitation: the grass path became small cobbles, the houses larger and the gardens of greens well tended. Here were people, sitting out of doors on benches, some eating their lunches, others making baskets of reeds.

Suddenly, where the houses were packed closest together so that the very sky became a mass of jostling thatch and roof jetties, Joanna spun about.

“What is it you want, Hugh de Manhill?” she called out, pointing directly at him so that every householder in the district stopped what he or she was doing to stare. “Why are you following?”

The girl had spotted him! By all the light of heaven, how had she done that? Her own guards were standing blinking in the dabbled shade of the houses, fidgeting with their sword hilts. They had known nothing of his pursuit. How had she?

With so many witnesses, he was forced to dissemble. “If you see my brother again today, will you give him a message?”

“It is no grief for you that I speak to him then, Sir Hugh?”

She had not forgotten or forgiven the glove. More justice to her, Hugh thought, amused at her twist of his own words, while he answered, “I am most sorry for our earlier confusion. But for David’s sake, I ask this favor.”

His appeal worked. Joanna put her basket down on the cobbles and spread her hands.

“Will you tell him I never forget him? Not at any moment? That I love him?”

She raised her brows at that while her guards relaxed, smirking at each other. The onlookers were wiser, saying nothing as Hugh closed the gap between them.

“Anything else?” she asked.

He was near enough to her now to pluck her basket off the ground and hold it out. “Only this: what do you think of my brother’s imprisonment, Mistress Joanna? Do you think it right?”

He had startled her afresh: a rush of color stormed into her eyes and face.

“I cannot speak for my lord—” she began.

“But you, yourself?” He wanted to know. If she was the bishop’s mistress, he wanted to know if she agreed with his brother’s captivity. “Do you truly think David is an evil man?” he asked softly. “A blasphemer?”

“I do not think so, but I am no expert.”

“But you have spoken with him, eaten with him,” Hugh continued relentlessly. “Do you consider him a witch?”

“No!”

Her denial was sharp, causing her guards to stop their gawping at a young woman outside one of the houses who was washing her long red hair in a pail, and glance at her instead.

Blushing deeply now, Joanna added swiftly, “No, what I mean, is—”

Hugh stepped forward, closing the last of the gap between them, and touched the narrow copper bracelets on her left wrist.

“How many of these has your master bought for you with the blood of innocent men?” he asked, speaking in French so only she would understand.

She snapped her arm out of his reach, putting it behind her back, as a child might. “You have no cause to say that to me,” she said, also in French.

“Why not answer my question?”

She said nothing, merely shook her head and looked at him in pity.

Sympathy from the bishop’s whore was too much—Hugh’s already fragile hold on his temper severed.

“You will not use the Manhills this way,” he said, through a clenched jaw, as the blood and his rage pounded in his head. For an instant he wanted to take on the guards, take on this whole settlement. But these folk he had no quarrel with, even the moon-faced guards he had no dispute with, but
her,
Joanna, the bishop’s thing—

“I will have satisfaction.” Making his words a promise, he tore off his brooch pin, tossing into the cobbles between them. “I will be back to redeem this, mistress, and when I do, you had best not be in my path.”

For the second time that day he turned his back on her and left, his shoulder blades prickling in expectation of a stone or dagger that never came.

But he knew, now, what he would do. She would be his key that would turn the lock on David’s prison and bring him out of the donjon. He would pick his moment, the time and place, and then he would kidnap Joanna, the mistress of Bishop Thomas. He would hold her and keep her as his prisoner, until Thomas agreed to a hostage exchange.

Smiling grimly at the thought, Hugh strode away.

Joanna looked over her new supplies, bought or bartered from Joseph of West Sarum in the hamlet that morning. Joseph, a herbalist and secret alchemist, had no suggestions for her. He had looked at her with pity when she admitted that Solomon was still in the donjon. “That is why I live and work here,” he said, “outside the city walls and the keen greedy eye of the bishop. But I know that is no comfort to you.”

“No,” agreed Joanna as she gathered up her things and left the cottage to find the guards watching a cockfight in the alleyway outside.

Sitting now at her workbench with her elbows braced amidst glasses and earthenware pots, she tried to concentrate on a parchment Joseph had loaned her. It was called “The Cure of Mercury,” and claimed many things for that element, including the prolonging of life. The crabbed letters and symbols kept blurring on the scroll as she fought and failed to pay attention.

At length she went to the top of the staircase and sat down on the top step, listening out for David’s voice from the floor below. What must it be like to have a brother like Hugh, so protective? So determined?

She glanced at Hugh’s glove at her belt—she felt it to be hers now, although she did not know why she did not burn it in her furnace. He had handled her twice now, without her permission: once over the glove and then today, in the hamlet, a brief, disturbing caress of her arm as he brushed her bracelets. Even through her sleeve she had felt his fingers, warm and strong and steady. Her whole arm had been changed by his contact, tingling and feeling lighter, as if some inner dross had been burned off by his touch. She wished she could have answered him honestly when he asked her what she thought of David’s imprisonment. Were her father not also captive, she would have said, roundly, that the holding of a man such as David was an abomination. Except for her father, he was the kindest, gentlest, most learned man she had ever known.

But it was not his fingers that her body remembered.

Joanna let the scroll roll up in her fingers and allowed herself to daydream. Hugh had challenged Bishop Thomas, called the man corrupt to his face. Even as she had goggled at that memory she had envied Hugh his free speech: he had said what she had longed to say and had never dared to.

Before Hugh, she had never seen a man with such blue eyes. Blazing blue eyes, sharp with feeling. He was passionate, easily angered, fiercely loyal. He would do much for those he loved.

Joanna sighed and tried to consider her work again. During her visit to Joseph, her fellow alchemist had mentioned a process of growing gold in the earth, seeding the ground with gold, cinnabar, mercury, silver, and lead. It must be special earth, purified by water and fire.

How often does Hugh bathe?

The question rose in her mind, insistent and magical as a salamander. He would be beautiful, nude, with his long, shapely limbs and toned muscles.

“Stop this,” Joanna admonished herself, trying to plan where, in the palace, she might seed the ground for gold. All places were too public: too many guards and petitioners and heralds. Even its gardens, of which she was allowed a small corner where she grew a patchwork of herbs and marigolds for her work, was busy with strolling priests.

On the floor below she heard the door open and stiffened, listening closely as she leaned down into the dark stairwell.

“…nor my daughter are privy to the bishop’s mind, but yes, he desires gold. What man does not?”

It was her father. He must be speaking to David, Joanna surmised. Hoping to catch more, she leaned farther forward on the cold step.

“I would say my brother wants other things than gold. Hugh can be wantonly generous.”

Ask him more,
Joanna mentally pleaded with her father, hugging her knees.
Ask him what Hugh wants from his life. Ask if Hugh likes girls
.
Ask if Hugh has a sweetheart.

“And you, a knight in a holy order, do not approve of his unworldliness?” Solomon teased. “You would prefer him to be a miser, perhaps?”

“I did not mean that, Solomon, and you know it. No, I—”

The rest of David’s reply was lost as the chamber door closed. Joanna waited a moment, trying to hear, then slapped the staircase wall in frustration. From two floors lower she heard a sudden, piercing shriek, then a ghastly, broken sobbing.

She fled down the stairs and pounded on the first-floor door. Sometimes guards were within the first-floor chamber, sometimes absent; right now she prayed someone was there. A guard thrust his head out. “You cannot come in now. Today, you must wait until sunset.” Always, her visits were strictly monitored and timed.

“But those men in the lower prison!” Joanna panted, just stopping herself from wringing her hands in front of the impassive guard. “Please, let me take them food and water! Please, as an act of Christian mercy—”

“Not today, Joanna.”

The door was shut and barred against her. She kicked it, violently, and yelped as her toes felt as if they had been nipped by red-hot pincers.

An image of Hugh stalking away, free, proud, powerful, inspired her to rebel. What use was it, hanging over her books and experiments, when her mind was so distracted, when her thoughts were full of a tall, strapping knight who would risk so much for love? She wanted to see him again. She wanted to tell him what she really thought about Bishop Thomas.

Of course it was not so easy. She could not leave on a whim. Permission must be sought. She found the steward and spun him a tale of river gold—such gold was rare, especially in these parts, but she made Richard Parvus blink and rub his palms together at the image of nuggets of gold as large as her fist. Later, she might have to explain why she had brought none back with her, but the excuse was sufficient to win her another release for the afternoon. She went off as she was, without cloak, or hat. Scarcely remembering her carrying basket, or the scraps of fleece which she needed to collect any river gold, she scampered so swiftly through the palace yard and then the streets of West Sarum that the guards with her grumbled at the pace she set.

Recalling her time spent far to the southwest, Joanna followed the river to a swifter tributary and then branched off to trace the stream to its source. She paid close attention as the vineyards, orchards, and open fields gave way to woodland, aware that the woods and all within them belonged to her lord bishop. At first she gathered herbs and bark there, then, as the land became steeper and the stream sparkled with a gurgling rush of water, she straddled the narrow banks to study the stream bed itself, paying close attention to the bends in the stream, where heavy gold might gather.

“How much longer?” asked a guard, leaning on his spear as he picked his nose. “Does your back not hurt, with you crooked over the water like that?”

“I am accustomed to it,” Joanna answered, although in truth her back and thighs ached like toothache and her skirts were becoming damp and clinging with water and spray. “I am going as quickly as I can,” she added, recalling that these men also worked in the donjon, where her father and Mercury and David were. Where Hugh would return some time tomorrow, probably early—

A piercing high-pitched scream, followed by a splash, drove all thoughts of Hugh and gold from her head. Tossing aside fleeces and carrying basket, she set off in the direction of the splash, forcing her numb legs to go faster as the screaming resumed.

“I’m coming!” she shouted, unable to see who had fallen into the stream as the woodland seemed to crowd in closer still and the ground rose almost vertically ahead of her. “Help me!” she yelled at the guards, dropping to her hands and knees to scramble through thick, lush grass and banks of flowering garlic and bluebells. Somewhere over the crown of this hill a woman or child was screaming, panicking, thrashing in the water.

“Hurry!” she urged herself and the guards, without wasting time in looking back. Snatching at a low-growing hazel branch, she pulled herself up the slope with it and finally reached a summit, where the ground leveled off for a space and the stream widened into a pool. Panting, her lungs feeling as if they were plastered against her ribs, Joanna anxiously scanned the ring of sparkling water—

—and saw the child, a dark tangle of flailing limbs and staring eyes. The boy was trying and failing to find a hand-hold on the bank while the swirling water battered his thin little body, threatening to drag him down beneath its bright, treacherous surface.

“Grab hold of this! Grab it!” Joanna untied her belt and cast one end into the stream. “Grab hold and I’ll pull you out!”

She tossed the belt a second time, willing the child to catch it. The little lad made a brave dive for the belt and seized it. Joanna heaved on her end, praying that it would not break. Her arms shook with effort as she fought the churning water and supported the child’s stiff, anxious weight, easing the belt through her numb fingers hand over hand as if she were climbing it. Each time she drew a little more of the belt closer, the boy dipped in the stream and seemed to drift farther away. And where were the guards? Was it their laughter and cheerful banter she could hear between her own spurting breaths? Joanna was not certain, but she dared not look round lest the boy disappeared under the water. Then she would be forced to dive into the pool, although in truth she was a poor swimmer.

“I have you now!” she called out, wishing she could be faster. Her teeth were chattering and her hands and feet felt to have sublimated into blocks of ice. If she felt this way, how must the little lad in the water be?

“You are safe now, but keep hold, and hold on tight!” she exhorted.

A shadow fell across her and she shook with relief, realizing that one of the guards had finally ambled up to the pool and had chosen to help. But the long, powerful arm that shot past her shoulder and caught the exhausted child was clothed in red, not serge.

“I have him.” Hugh Manhill lifted the boy clear of the water and wrapped him in his own cloak, briskly rubbing at the child’s arms and legs while speaking to him in a low monotone. Joanna heard some words but could no longer grasp what he was saying. Suddenly overwhelmed by weariness and a wave of rising heat and sickness, she sank down on the bank with her head hung over her knees.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, when she could speak.

Hugh acknowledged her thanks with a terse nod. “No thanks to these two.” He glowered at the guards, who were staring sheepishly into the trees. “They were laying bets on which of you would sink first.”

Hugh set the boy down gently, bracing him against his own body so he would not fall. “What brings you here?” he asked, now proceeding to peel off his tunic. “The lad needs warm fresh clothes,” he said, correctly interpreting Joanna’s silent question. “So, girl, why are you here?”

“I am not required to answer you,” Joanna replied stiffly, smarting afresh as his use of “girl.” “But for the sake of good manners, I will say that I am in my lord’s woods to seek herbs.” She did not mention gold. Neither the guards nor Hugh should know that.

She was distracted, too, by his casual disrobing.
We are not animals,
she longed to say.
How dare you parade your body?
He would deny it, of course, turn it back against her, claim he was acting in the child’s best interests—and how could she dispute that? Feigning disinterest, she raised her head, determined to look only at his face. “Why are you here, sir?”

“I happened to be in the district.” Hugh ran both hands through his short yet tousled black hair, trying and failing to rake it into some order. He offered his tunic to the forest child, who shrugged it on over his own patched clothes and then proceeded to drape the warrior’s massive cloak on top, seemingly delighted at how he was steaming in the dappled woodland sunlight.

“One happy outcome,” Hugh remarked, ruffling the boy’s hair and being rewarded by a gap-toothed grin from the child. “So, girl? Herbs with scraps of fleece?”

The brute was baiting her! Determined to show him exquisite courtesy, Joanna forced a smile. “Fleece is useful to collect seed heads,” she lied. Suddenly, she could not resist a tease in return. “Not all of us carry our own fleece on our bodies.”

Hugh gave a bark of laughter, and as he glanced at his hairy chest and arms, Joanna stole a glance herself. He was very handsome to look on, with his broad shoulders, lean muscled arms and flat, taut stomach. Between the dark swirls of jet-black hair over his torso and belly she glimpsed two long white tags: the drawstrings to his linen breeches, she guessed. Instantly, she imagined pulling on the strings, disrobing him further—

No! Stop this!
Joanna felt the heat pound into her face and she closed her eyes, shutting Hugh out. There were other handsome men in the world and she had never been tempted to tease them, so why was this man so different? Why did she have this insistent wish, each time she encountered Hugh Manhill, to touch him? And did he feel the same tug, the same desire, or was this her shame alone? Confused and alarmed, she studied the child, who was now contentedly making knots in Hugh’s cloak, and dipped her head lower to avoid encountering Manhill’s knowing eyes.

And there in the water directly ahead she saw a dull yellow gleam—not in the curve of the stream, as she had expected, but in the shallows of the “pool” itself. Without explaining, she moved forward, plunged her arm into the water, and her hand came up with gold in it—fragments too tiny to be called nuggets, but valuable all the same.

She flicked her other hand into the pool as a distraction, lifting out a fistful of weed and holding it aloft like a trophy. “This is excellent for all manner of ills,” she declared. “Would you bring me my carrying basket, please, Sir Hugh?”

If he was surprised at her request he showed and said nothing, slipping back from the stream into the woodland and returning with her basket. As Joanna swiftly deposited gold and weeds into the carrier, he paid more attention to the boy, asking the lad his name and if he did well now, and then remarked, “Here, I think, are Hacon’s parents.”