A Knight’s Enchantment (9 page)

Somehow, the matter of the chaperone had been forgotten, but Hugh decided not to mention it.

Three days had passed. Her father was three days closer to being cast down into the prison pit. Surely the bishop would not expect her to keep the deadline now, while she was a hostage? How long would it be before the messenger returned? What would he say?

Joanna rolled over and sat up in her bed. She was alone in the chamber, with the shutters on the small window opened to their widest, to admit fresh air. Earlier in the day, Hugh had complained of the stink in the room and she did not want him moaning tomorrow. The chamber was more pleasant, she was forced to admit. She had become used to the scent of sulphur and had not noticed, until Hugh pointed it out.

Hugh had come every day after his practice to help her. He had even washed bandages, a job she secretly disliked because she did not care for the sight of blood. He seemed determined to prove he was a good knight.

His father, Yves, she noted, treated him with cool formality, speaking to his son only when necessary. Once, rushing to the garderobe, she had overheard Yves spit at Hugh, “Do not speak to me of David! He made his choice! You gave your mother none!”

Listening to the servants, she had learned that Hugh’s mother had died soon after giving birth to him. His father had disliked him ever since.

“Called him a devil when he was but a young lad, scarce able to toddle about,” the laundress Bertha told Joanna, over a cup of ale when Bertha came to collect Joanna’s gown for washing. “Always hard on him, though in truth the master was at fault, too. Mistress had birthed easy before and so the master did not send for the midwife until things began to go badly. Mind, have you seen the knack Master Hugh has with creatures? There is something devilish there, I warrant.”

Joanna, who had also been called a devil in her time, said nothing.

That evening, when Hugh came, she did not goad him quite so much, did not remind him that he had snatched her from her home, or that he was an ungentle knight for trampling Sir Tancred like a broken doll.

The following day she was aggrieved with herself. Hugh was her captor; she owed him no courtesy. That day she asked for and was given permission to leave her work and join Sir Yves for lunch. She was even allowed to sit close to him, on the high table. There she flaunted all the courtly manners she could recall from seeing embassies at the bishop’s palace and let it be known she was indeed the mistress of Lord Thomas. In the evening, Hugh’s face was dark with suppressed anger.

“I say nothing and then you tell the world you are that man’s whore!” He stabbed at a pair of small bellows as if they had attacked him. “Have you no decency?”

“A mistress is no whore!” Joanna retorted, seething at the suggestion but also glad that he was so put out. Yet when Hugh left early, storming off with a curse and Beowulf following with his tail between his legs, Joanna soon stopped work. She felt out of sorts all evening, and her dreams that night were evil.

Now that she was awake again, Joanna admitted she was ashamed. To be a noble lord’s mistress was not unworthy, but for her to broadcast that she was leman to a man like Thomas? Was it seemly? Yes, she enjoyed goading Hugh, working out the frustration of her captivity on him, but did that help her work?

“It does not,” Joanna admitted softly, staring down at her bare legs. They looked ghostly and insubstantial, not at all lean or tanned, and she was naked in bed, as was the custom. She thought of Hugh—Where did he bed down? In the corridor outside? She had no way of knowing: the castle walls were thick and icy cold, even with the wall hangings. Although it was spring, she was glad of the small new furnace in her room and glad it remained warm as she “baked” and dried off some newly washed bandages, a trick of healing she had learned and tried from an Arab text on alchemy and medicine. She cautiously touched its domed surface, wondering from where Yves had acquired it. For now, SirYves remained amiable, but if he turned against her, would Hugh protect her?

Thinking of Hugh, she rubbed her bare legs, guessing that he too would be naked. What would he look like? Long and lean? Would he be long and lean all over?

Why are you interested? What are you to him, apart from a means to an end?

“He likes me,” she said aloud. “I think.”

But that was before she had confessed to the world that she was the mistress of the bishop. Now, in the fastness and quiet of the night, Joanna admitted that she loathed the idea of being Thomas’s leman, especially where Hugh was concerned. Or was he sleeping soundly with another woman?

If he is, why do you care?
Gathering the blanket he had handled earlier, she draped it across her back and sat on the edge of her bed. The rough warmth of Hugh’s cloak was a comfort and, when she sniffed, she thought she caught his scent: musky, intensely masculine.

What would it be like to be Hugh’s leman?

She leaped off the bed as if her mattress was on fire and strove to dress as rapidly as possible. Looking out through the window, she saw the bright star Venus, the sign for female and all that was mutable, a signal for growth. The work must save her and her father. Nothing else mattered.

And she must charm Hugh back.

Later that same day, around midday, Sir Yves appeared with a page who handed her a bucket containing three dirty-looking lumps of ore. “Can you assay this for gold?” Yves asked.

“I can,” Joanna replied. “Do you wish me to try for gold and silver, or purely gold?”

“Oh, purely gold, I think.” He gave her a broad smile that he probably thought was charming.

“I can do that, too.”

“Good! I shall leave the task in your capable hands.”

He hurried off, no doubt to his lunchtime table, but the page lingered. He was a lanky, curly-headed, curious boy whom Joanna had seen before, loitering in the corridor outside.

“Do you wish to stay and watch me?” she asked. The work was no secret and simple enough.

The lad nodded, the freckles on his forehead and chin showing up like blisters as he colored with excitement. Joanna smiled: she, too, had once been this keen.

“Very well—”

“Peter,” the lad supplied.

“Peter. If you pay heed to all I say we shall see wonders together. But you must stay back when I tell you. Substances that are undergoing transformation can be very volatile and dangerous.”

“I know. I have watched smiths at work.”

There was something about his glib answer that she did not like, but then she decided she was being overprotective. When she began her studies in the art, she had been far younger than the page.

“This is a process called cupelation,” she explained, showing Peter the small clay vessels or cupels which she would use. “It draws the impurities from the lead, leaving any pure gold behind.”

“I know,” Peter said.

“You have seen it done?”

“I have heard of it already. Where do you keep your unicorns?” Peter prodded one of the flasks with his dagger, his bottom lip jutting in disappointment as the flask refused to emit a unicorn or any other magical creature.

“I do not study that branch of the art,” Joanna answered, torn between amusement and exasperation. “Careful,” she warned when he hung over the furnace as she opened its door to stoke it. “You must stay back. Vessels can explode.”

“Only if they are faulty,” Peter replied.

She debated then whether to ask him to leave, but he took up a place by the end of the table, far from the furnace, and she decided to give him another chance.

“Look, ask, but do not touch,” she warned again.

“I know.”

Peter did not speak again, or move, and soon Joanna was lost in the assay, adding salt and barley husks to drive off any silver and using bellows to blow air over the molten metal. Intent for any sounds of cracking or scents that would warn the assay was not going well, she watching the walls of the cupel discolor as the impurities were oxidized and burned off.

“This is dull stuff,” said Peter, yawning and rubbing his belly. “I am bored with it.”

Joanna did not remind him that it had been his choice to stay. “It will not be long now,” she said, pointing to the cupel and explaining the significance of the discoloration, “but you must stay where you are when I fully open the furnace door.”

Moving carefully in her bulky leather apron and heavy gloves, she heard the chamber door open. To her surprise, for he was not usually so early, she sensed Hugh entering, knowing him by that peculiar thrill low in her belly that she always felt whenever he was nearby. Sometimes when she looked at him she expected the very air between them to crackle, so loaded did it seem with expectant possibilities. This noon, busy with her task, she merely nodded and kept her eyes on the cupel as she lifted it clear of the furnace.

The page was not so restrained. “We are making gold—look, look!” He flung his arms wide and lunged toward the furnace, forgetting Joanna’s instructions and ignoring her shout of alarm.

Hampered with gloves and tongs, she could do nothing as the lad lurched closer to the scorching, dangerous sizzle of the furnace, but Hugh seized the lad’s collar and yanked him back, clear of the fire.

“You want to be burned, or worse?” he demanded, giving the page a rough shake. “Stay where your mistress bids you!”

“You can both look now,” Joanna said, glad that her voice was steady as she turned the blackened cupel on its side to reveal the small bright pearl of gold lying at its base.

“Thank you, Hugh,” Joanna said later. Unscathed and a little more thoughtful than he had been in the morning, Peter the page had gone to report to Sir Yves, and she wanted to say something while she and Hugh were alone. “I realize you are here early today and I am glad you came when you did. I had told him to take care. I am most grateful. You saved him.”

“Only from his own idiocy,” Hugh growled, sitting on the bed with his back against the wall. “But then that bold young fool takes no notice of anyone.” He raised his cup of sage tisane to her. “I am glad to have been of service, my lady.”

Joanna raised hers in turn—it had become a custom of theirs to drink a cup together while mulling over the day, and this midafternoon was no different—“And I thank you again, my lord.”

A new look of challenge burst into Hugh’s handsome, saturnine face. “May I claim a kiss, in fellowship and peace?”

“Of course, my knight.” Chaste embraces and kisses were part of the courtly game that she had instigated. And she could, after all, tease him: an added bonus.

A single kiss, she thought, kissing her fingers and extending her hand. “Here is your kiss. You need but claim it.”

“Before Beowulf does? Away, hound!” Hugh clicked his fingers and the dog approaching her padded back and jumped onto the bed, sprawling as his master rose. Joanna’s heartbeat accelerated as Hugh closed on her, her hand raising in a half-gesture of defense.

“Fear not.” He smiled down at her, touching the tips of his hand lightly against hers, trailing his fingers into the soft shadowed hollow of her palm. “A single kiss, ’tis all, and from you, Lady, enough.”

His large, battle-hardened hand drew up and down her narrow fingers, smoothing and caressing, his touch tingling her from her hands to her feet. He was smiling, his mouth curved and generous, his blue eyes soft as the down of ducklings. His fingers swept over hers again, swirling, tickling, making her whole spine prickle with delight.

“All this from a kiss?” he said softly, as she swayed a little on her feet. “How would we be if you allowed more, eh?”

Still smiling at her, he lifted his hand away from hers, leaving it hanging in the air between them like the sacred promise of a saint, painted on a church wall. He withdrew as deftly as a herald, backing from the chamber without colliding once with chest or stools or earthenware vessels, his eyes never leaving hers.

The following day the messenger returned to the castle. Bishop Thomas had gone to Oxford on church matters and the messenger had missed him. Now more horses must be found for the messenger to try again, to trail after the bishop’s party and, pray God, catch them soon.

Joanna heard this news from the castle laundress, listening in appalled horror as the woman recounted how Sir Yves had hurled a mutton bone at the hapless messenger in the castle great hall.

“Dislikes his dinner being interrupted by bad news,” the laundress concluded. “Shall I take this headscarf? It is stained along the edge.”

“Thank you.” Joanna waited until the slim, dark woman had sped from the room and then she began her work afresh, grinding, testing, burning, mixing. The air in the chamber became thick with smog and still she worked, first by daylight and then by star- and candlelight.

I must find something.

She labored on through the night. The white powder, a mixture of chalk and other mineral compounds, was ready in its presentation box: an elixir to cure the ills of the stomach and head. Joanna knew she should find a better title than this but she could not think: she was too fretful and weary. SirYves and Bishop Thomas would be pleased with her elixir, yes, but they wanted gold. They wanted that most rare, most precious, most perfect of forms and she had only a few scant pieces from Orri’s hoard, the nugget from her assay of the previous day, and odd grains from the river.

She tried a new experiment, with the blackened cupel left from her assay from the lead and silver ore. Perhaps if she heated this to white heat, the purifying element of fire would grow her more gold from the dross of the silver and lead. She set to using the bellows with a will, pumping furiously into the furnace until her arms ached like the toothache and the very walls of the castle chamber seemed to be sweating…

“Hey, hey, you will tear yourself to shreds.”

Hugh took the bellows from her and she tottered, scrabbling after them. “Give those back! I am no puffer!”

She snatched for them, just as the table and furnace seemed to turn over and slide away. Feeling as if she was falling off the edge of the world, Joanna tumbled down. She yelled and struggled to surface through a haze of blackness, tasted soot and then wine.

“Taste the wine again. It will restore you.”

Hugh was holding her somehow, and they were outside—not merely of the chamber but of the castle.

“Where are we?” she croaked.

“The garden. I returned from West Sarum this evening to find you huddled over your furnace like a fighter with his last lance. What is going on? The servants tell me you have not eaten or slept all of yesterday or today.”

Joanna took another sip of wine and tried to recollect. “Have I been so long?”

“It would seem so.”

“And you have been away?”

Hugh smiled. “So much for asking if you missed me. I never knew so intent a maid, once you are lost in your work.”

“Do you stop when you are in mid-joust?”

He laughed and waved a chunk of cheese before her eyes. “Eat. Do not talk for a space. Feed yourself and I will tell you of West Sarum, although in truth, there is little to say.” Frowning, he took a drink of wine himself. “I trawled the town for news of David and found none. No one would talk, not even for coins. There were guards around—not many, but enough, and their presence quelled all gossip. And before you ask, I was not stopped or questioned because I was disguised as a herbalist.”

“But—but what wares did you have?” Joanna stammered, trying and failing to imagine Hugh as a herbalist.

“None!” came back the cheerful answer. “I knew I would sell nothing; the West Sarum folk are careful with their chattels. Though I did tell many a goodwife and carpenter about your sage tisane.”

He had remembered that. Joanna felt a rush of tender feeling unbuckle her body. To her horror, her eyes blurred with tears. “Stupid woman!” she muttered, smearing a hand across her face.

“Hey, I know that you like David, but you need not fret. No news means no change.” Hugh dangled a piece of white bread before her. “Agreed?”

Joanna opened her mouth to say that no news meant nothing of the kind, but she felt too dispirited to argue. “You do not need to tempt me like an ailing horse, Hugh.”

“That would make you a nag, eh? Now I know you are not yourself; you would never have left such an easy opening for me, else.” He nodded as she took the bread and began chewing. “So are we agreed?”

“David is not alone in the donjon.”

At her quiet observation Hugh put down the cup of wine. “You do not mean that French fellow, do you, but the older man who is with them. Is he your father? And why, if you are the bishop’s woman, is he in prison? What did he do that was so terrible?”

“He is innocent and has done nothing! We have never done anything, yet we are harried and hunted—” She was so furious that she could no longer speak: the very words seemed to be choking her.

A wall came about her, warm and steady, with a living, beating heart: Hugh, drawing his arms around her waist and easing her so that she rested with her head tucked comfortably into his shoulder. She was on his lap, she realized—how had she simply accepted this before? She had not even struggled!

She thought of squirming now, decided it would be absurd, and wondered again how she had noticed but not noticed her position. Comfort, she thought. She felt comfort and a tingling safety in Hugh’s arms, which was a powerful contradiction. She was his captive, yet she felt safe with him. More than safe. It was pleasing to sit on him, to feel his muscled thighs beneath hers, to sense, by his powerful tension, that he was attracted to her.

After peace, a reckless sense of goading, of pricking him, overcame her. “Are you jealous of the bishop?” she breathed.

He stiffened further and she almost cheered. “I was before,” he said.

It happened between them. Joanna lifted her head and Hugh lowered his and their lips touched.

Volatile yet permanent,
Joanna thought, sighing as she closed her eyes and kissed him. For a wild instant she imagined a whole heavenload of stars, shining gold and silver above them. Her eyelids fluttered and she glimpsed Hugh’s eyes, also closed, his lashes dark and lustrous as rare black silk. It was twilight, and the sky was the color of Hugh’s eyes, and the herbs about them were as fragrant as his breath.

“Lovely,” Hugh whispered, tracing her eyebrows, nose, and the gentle curve of her face with his thumb. “A grace of God in truth, and a worker of wonders, besides. I can only destroy, but you—” He kissed her eyes and nose and mouth. “You make, you heal, you read—”

“My father, too,” Joanna prompted, smiling as Hugh smiled at her. The world between them was so all-embracing she wanted to float in it forever, but she must not forget Solomon and he must not forget David.

“Tell me about him,” Hugh said, but now Joanna heard Sir Yves’s heavy tread on the path behind them. She skimmed down from Hugh’s knee onto the bench and they were sitting modestly side by side when Hugh’s father hailed them.

“Hello! Taking in the fresh air? How are you, Joanna? Have you grown more gold?”

“I am in hopes of doing so,” Joanna answered, the reply she had often given the bishop. “I have your elixir ready, my lord.” Seeking to escape before Yves could ask more searching questions, she stepped away from the bench. “I will bring it to you directly.”

“A page can surely do that,” Hugh said, glowering at his father. So far, the two men had not greeted each other.

“I will be quicker.” Joanna moved off, though not before she heard Hugh saying to Yves, “Why must you be always so impatient? Is Joanna not doing enough that you must harry her?”

“Pah! You cannot recognize work when you see it! Not everyone has your lazy streak—”

“I am no more idle than you are a cowardly glutton, Father.”

“How dare you, sir?”

“Say that with our combined forces we might storm the bishop’s palace? Why not? It is the truth.”

“And where are the Templars in this grand plan of yours? Why do you not ask them and hear their answer? You know what it will be because it is madness and cannot be done, yet still you berate me, as you have always done….”

“I berate you? I berate you, Father, when you have filled my days with a thousand, thousand complaints?”

Alarmed that she was the cause of this quarrel, Joanna wove back along the garden path toward the castle, flinching as a moth flew straight out of a lavender bush and fluttered past her head. Above her the sky was now the black of night, sprinkled with stars, and a slender moon.

The moon was new, but it was there now, and it was rising and growing. And when it was full, Lord Thomas would cast her father into the prison pit.

God help me!