Silken Threads (10 page)

She lifted the lid of the box, steeling
herself to its contents: a tangle of ladies’ stockings; a dozen or
more garters; a pink kid glove; innumerable locks of hair tied with
ribbons; hairpins of ivory and silver; a desiccated rose; a little
pot of lip rouge; a handful of earrings, mostly cheap glass; and
several chemise sleeves, some still redolent with their owners’
perfume.

One of the locks of hair was hers.

She slammed the lid on Prewitt’s collection
of souvenirs. What was it Hugh had called him last night? “Handsome
devil,” she whispered out loud.

Joanna dumped Prewitt’s clothes back into
the trunk, relocked it, and descended the ladder with the things
she’d put aside for Graeham. The leather curtain over the storeroom
door was closed. She pushed it aside. “I’ve brought you
some
—
”

She gasped. He stood in front of the cot,
completely naked except for the splints on his leg and the bandage
around his ribs, toweling his hair dry.

“I’m sorry.” She dropped the curtain and
backed up into the salle. “I...I...didn’t realize
you
—
”

“It’s all right,” he called through the
curtain. “Here. I’m covered up, more or less. Come back.”

Joanna stared at the curtain, hugging the
clothing and shaving gear to her chest. It had been five years
since she’d viewed Prewitt’s unclothed body, but what she
remembered of her husband was a far cry from what she’d just seen
of the man in the storeroom. Graeham Fox had the body of a soldier,
a body that had been molded into a weapon, hard and sinewy. He was
a formidable male animal, in every respect. Prewitt, although
several years older, had looked
—
in all
particulars
—
like an adolescent by comparison.

“Mistress?”

“Um...I brought you some clothes. I mean, I
brought you the razor, of course, but I also...I thought
perhaps...”
Babbling lackwit
.

Parting the leather curtain, she found
Graeham sitting on the cot, the damp towel draped over his lap, his
splinted leg straight out before him with his heel resting on the
floor.

“Um, here.” She took a few steps toward him
and reached out to hand him the items.
Fool
. Did she think
he was going to bite her?

He’d washed his hair, she saw; it was wet
and snarled, with tendrils sticking to his forehead. His face,
without its layer of grime from yesterday, glowed with vitality,
and there was something almost aristocratic about his high-bridged
nose and well-carved cheekbones. He looked younger and even
handsomer than she’d realized.

He held the braies up. “Perfect. These are
just what I need to fit over this splint.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He still struck her as naked, covered by
that flimsy towel and nothing else; Joanna was hard-pressed to keep
her gaze on his face. His chest was smooth and layered with muscle,
his legs uncommonly long. He shifted, and the towel slipped down an
inch, uncovering the upper edge of the patch of dark hair on his
lower belly.

“There’s a favor I want to ask of you.”
Graeham set the clothing next to him on the bed and laid out the
other things on the chest, frowning in a preoccupied way. “Not a
favor, precisely. A...proposition.”

“What kind of proposition?”

“From things you’ve said, I gather you’re
in...rather difficult circumstances.”

A mannerly way of asking whether she was
destitute. Joanna lifted her chin; if she wouldn’t share her
predicament with Hugh, she most certainly wouldn’t share it with
this virtual stranger. “Not at all. I live simply because I choose
to.”

Graeham looked at her, his eyes searingly
blue in the morning sunlight. “Because I can help you,” he said in
measured tones. “I have silver, as you know. ‘Tis my overlord’s, of
course, but I have the authority to spend it. Some of it could be
yours. Naturally...I’d want something in return.”

She stared at him, hoping he didn’t mean
what she thought he meant.

“I’d like to stay here,” he said when she
didn’t respond. “To live here for the next two months or so, while
my leg heals. Instead of going back to St. Bartholemew’s.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “That’s
all you’d want of me? To let you stay here?”

“Well...no. There would be something
more.”

She nodded, her jaw set. “I thought as
much.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I should have used that axe on you last
night,” she said, fury making her voice quiver.

“What?”

“Instead, I gave you refuge. And this is how
you repay me
—
insulting me in my own home.”

“By what manner did I...” His eyes lit with
sudden revelation. “Oh.” He stood; the towel dropped to the
floor.

She spun around and swept the leather
curtain aside.

“No, don’t leave,” he said quickly. “I’m an
idiot
—
I spoke clumsily. I didn’t mean...that. I would
never make such a proposal.”

Joanna stood with her back to him, gripping
the curtain in her fist. “You’re a soldier. Don’t tell me you’ve
never paid a woman for her favors.”

After a slight pause, he said, “Never a
wedded woman.”

Never a wedded woman
. But he’d have
no such compunctions if he knew she was widowed.

“Turn back round,” he said. “I’ve covered
myself.”

She turned around slowly to find that he’d
wrapped the towel around his hips. “What was the ‘something more’
you wanted, then?” she asked.

He dragged a hand through his sodden hair;
it caught in the tangles. “Well, meals, certainly, seeing as I’m to
do naught but loaf about on this cot all day. And there might be
the occasional small service or errand
—
I can’t foresee
everything I’ll need. But I promise I’ll try to keep my needs
minimal and not trouble you any more than necessary.”

Not trouble her? His very presence here
troubled her. Seeing him standing before her, virtually naked, in
all his dangerous, masculine splendor, made her heart flutter with
quiet panic.

“I don’t know, serjant. How would it look,
to the neighbors, for me to keep a man in my home?”

He sat on the bed and hefted his leg out in
front of him with both hands, grimacing. “I can’t believe there
aren’t other matrons in London who take in boarders. There must be
hundreds in West Cheap alone.”

There were, of course; it was a common
source of income for women, sometimes their only source. “Aye, but
such arrangements sometimes lead to talk,” she said. “I’ve managed
to maintain an unblemished reputation all these years, despite my
husband’s frequent travels. I can’t help but think it would be
compromised if folks saw you about. You’re a young man, after all,
and, well...”

“I’m a young
cripple
—
at
least for the next couple of months. That should help to allay
gossip. But who’s going to see me? I’ll be hidden away back here
for the most part. I’m as eager as you not to let my presence here
become too obvious.”

“Why?”

He looked away, unsettled for some reason.
“Let’s just say I’m looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet.
I’ve spent the last eleven years of my life living in a barracks
with a hundred other men, and before that it was the boys’ dorter
at Holy Trinity.”

“You were educated at Holy Trinity?” she
asked, surprised. The Augustinian priory, tucked against London’s
northeast wall, near Aldgate, housed one of the most celebrated
schools in England. An affluent, well-connected citizen might send
his son there, but not if the boy was destined for soldiering.

“I was brought up there,” he said. “From
infancy until the age of fourteen, when I went to Beauvais to serve
Lord Gui.”

“From infancy! I...I thought ‘twas just a
school. I didn’t know babies were sent there.”

“They aren’t, generally,” he said, his
expression dimming briefly, as if a cloud were passing over the
sun. “I was the exception. This
—
” he indicated the
storeroom with a wave of his hand “
—
is the first
bedchamber I’ve ever actually had to myself.”

“Not much of a bedchamber,” she said.

“But it’s mine alone,” he said. “Privacy is
rare and precious thing to me.”

“If it’s privacy you want, you may be
disappointed. Folks walk back and forth along that alley all day
long, and they like to look in the windows.”

“I can close the shutters if I’m so
inclined.” Graeham lifted his purse from the floor and tugged open
the drawstring the secured it. “I’ll pay you four shillings, in
advance, for two months’ room and board.”

“Four shillings,” she whispered
incredulously. “It’s...too much.”

“Gui of Beauvais is a wealthy man,” Graeham
said as he spilled pennies onto the chest and swiftly counted them.
“And generous. He would want me to pay you well. And, as I said,
I’m compensating you not just for the room, but for various
services as well.”

“Aye.” Joanna couldn’t wrest her gaze from
the coins. She counted them in her mind as he slid them one by one
into a separate little pile.
...Four-and-twenty,
five-and-twenty, six-and-twenty...Holy Mother of
God...eight-and-twenty...

“In fact, I need to write to Lord Gui and
let him know where I am. If you could provide me with a sheet of
parchment...”

“Parchment,” she murmured.
...Seven-and-thirty, eight-and-thirty...

“...and ink and a quill and some sealing
wax, I’d be most appreciative.”

“Of course.”

“Six-and-forty, seven-and-forty,
eight-and-forty.” He scooped the pennies off the chest into his
cupped hands and held them out to Joanna.

Four shillings. Joanna couldn’t remember
having had that much money in her possession all at once. Most of
her customers paid her in bread and milk and the occasional hen,
and now that she couldn’t deal in yard goods, there wasn’t even
much of that. Four shillings was enough to live on for a very long
time, if she was judicious in her spending. This money meant she
wouldn’t have to sell her shop, at least not in the foreseeable
future. It was a reprieve.

It was a godsend.

He was looking at her, his eyes translucent
in the dazzling sunshine streaming in through the rear window.

She took a step forward and held out her
hands. He smiled and filled them with the coins. They felt
remarkably heavy, and cool. She had nowhere to put them, she
realized. Her purse
—
empty, of course
—
hung on her
girdle, but she couldn’t open it with her hands full like this.

“Here.” Leaning forward, Graeham reached out
with his long arms and loosened the drawstring of her purse. It
felt strangely intimate for him to be doing this; perhaps it was
just his state of undress that made it seem so. He slid his fingers
inside the purse and pulled it open.

She carefully poured the pennies into the
purse, so as not to drop any; he cinched it closed.

“Oh,” he said, “and I’d be grateful for a
penknife and some cord, in addition to the other.”

“The other?” She rested a hand on her
bulging purse, savored its weight against her hip.

“The parchment and ink and so forth.”

“Ah, yes. Your letter. Are you sure you need
just one sheet of parchment? Isn’t there anyone else you should
write to? What about your family? Have you a...a wife back in
Beauvais?” Most military men were unwed, but there were exceptions.
Would a married soldier continue to live in a barracks, though?
Perhaps; how could such a man afford to maintain a home? The life
of a soldier’s wife must be even more miserable than that of an
impoverished merchant’s widow.

Graeham looked away, snagging his fingers in
his hair again when he tried to push it off his forehead. He lifted
Prewitt’s comb from the chest and rubbed his thumb over the teeth.
“Nay, I’m not married. I’m more or less...I’m alone. I’ve no
family.”

“No sweetheart?”

“There’s no one.”

“What about your family in Oxfordshire? You
said you were just passing through London on your way to visit
kinsmen.”

“They weren’t expecting me. There’s no need
to write to them.”

“Very well. I’ll bring you what you need,
but first I must open my stall.”

“Of course.” As she parted the leather
curtain, he said, “Mistress?”

She turned to face him.

He gestured with the comb toward Prewitt’s
shaving gear laid out on the chest. “Are you sure it’s all right
for me to use your husband’s things...to wear his clothes? He won’t
mind?”

He glanced up at her, his gaze so
penetrating, so astute, that she had to look away.

“Nay,” she said as she turned to leave. “I’m
sure he won’t mind.”

* * *

Joanna was outside opening the shutters of
her shop window when Hugh drove up in the two-wheeled cart he’d
borrowed from the inn where he was staying. He wondered why she was
so late getting set up. The other shops overhanging Wood
Street
—
those of the furrier, the rope maker, the
apothecary, and the many silk traders
—
were open for
business. The narrow dirt lane was swarming with pedestrians
searching for a bargain, street peddlers hawking their wine and
milk and soap, and the occasional pig snuffling for breakfast in
the refuse littering the drainage channel.

“Good morrow, little sister.”

“Hugh.” Joanna nodded at him and glanced in
a distracted way toward the cart.

Hugh reined in the mules harnessed to the
cart, jumped down and kissed her on the cheek. “Fine morning, eh?
Not a cloud in the sky.”

She mumbled something unintelligible.

Hugh reached up to hold the upper shutter
open while Joanna braced it on either side with two shorts poles,
forming an awning. “I trust our new friend was no trouble for you
during the night,” he said.