Silken Threads (15 page)

“To my way of thinking, yes.”

“Perhaps,” she said coolly as she carried
the trayful of dishes toward the back door, “that’s where you and I
are fundamentally different.” At the entrance to the hallway, she
turned and asked, “Will you be needing anything else before you
retire for the evening, serjant?”

“Nay, there’s nothing I need.” He rose
awkwardly and reached for his crutch, leaning against the bench.
“Good night, mistress.”

“Good night.”

* * *

Graeham awoke to the muffled thump of the
back door closing. He lay still in the dark, his ears tuned to the
sound of soft footfalls in the hallway next to the storeroom.
Someone was entering the house.

An intruder? Perhaps. Whoever it was clearly
was endeavoring to make as little noise as possible.

Joanna’s upstairs.
And Graeham was
all but completely crippled. Could he defend her if he had to?

He sat up, heart hammering, and used both
hands to lower his splinted leg off the bed. Pulling himself up
with his crutch, he grabbed the big knife he’d appropriated from
the cur who’d lured him into the alley last week, the one who’d
called himself Byram. And if the knife was taken from him, there
was that axe Joanna kept tucked away in the salle for protection,
the one she’d threatened him with that first night.

As Graeham hobbled slowly to the leather
curtain, a thought occurred to him. Perhaps the intruder was
Prewitt Chapman, home from his latest sojourn. How would the silk
merchant react, he wondered, upon finding a crippled, half-naked
stranger
—
for Graeham slept in naught but his
underdrawers
—
accosting him with a knife in his own home in
the middle of the night?

How late was it, anyway? He remembered
hearing the bells of curfew as he was readying himself for bed, and
then he’d fallen asleep. Prewitt couldn’t have gained entrance
through the city gates after curfew, so it probably wasn’t him.

Striving for silence, he parted the leather
curtain, just slightly, with the tip of the knife, and peered into
the candlelit salle. His breath caught in his throat.

Joanna, standing in profile to him, her
single braid draped over one shoulder, was shimmying out of her
unlaced brown kirtle. It pooled on the rush-covered floor, leaving
her in her undershift of thin, worn linen, which was sleeveless and
came only to her knees; her legs, exquisitely shapely, were encased
in black stockings.

The drawstring that gathered the shift’s
neckline, he saw, was still untied. When she bent over to pick up
the kirtle, it slid down one shoulder and fell open, baring a
softly gleaming breast for the interval of a heartbeat.

Graeham’s hands twitched; desire settled
heavy in his loins.

She was preparing for a bath, he saw. The
table had been dismantled, its top leaning against the wall while
the round base had been overturned to form a bathtub. Next to it
sat two steaming buckets. The benches that normally flanked the
table still stood to either side of the tub. Joanna’s white silken
wrapper, a towel, a dish of soap, a large ivory comb and a small
vial lay on one of them.

She draped her kirtle over the other bench,
next to her girdle and veil, then sat and kicked off her
slippers.

Graeham knew he shouldn’t watch her
unawares. It was dishonorable. There was no excuse for it. He would
close the curtain and turn around.

Soon.

Raising her shift to mid-thigh, she slid the
garter off and set it aside, then began rolling the stocking down
over her knee and calf. The hosiery gleamed with silken luster in
the flickering candlelight. There was something oddly touching
about this humbly clad woman with her luxurious silken hose and
wrappers that only she ever saw
—
and of course her husband,
when he deigned to come home for a visit.

Close the curtain, you pathetic
bastard.
Yet he could not wrest his gaze from her as she slowly
peeled off first one stocking, then the other. The shift slipped
off both shoulders as she leaned forward to work the snug hose over
her feet, exposing the satiny upper slopes of her breasts almost to
the nipples. Her legs parted for a fleeting moment; the black
shadow at the juncture of her thighs appeared and vanished in a
blink.

Graeham closed his eyes, clenched his
jaw.

When he looked again, she was on her feet,
lifting one of the buckets with both hands, her arms quivering with
strain as she poured the hot water into the tub. By the liquid
splashing, he could tell there was already water in
there
—
probably cold water from the well that she was
heating up with water she’d boiled in the kitchen. She poured in
the second bucket, then unstoppered the vial and carefully added
two drops of its contents
—
a thick oil
—
to her
bathwater.

Leaning over the tub, she swirled the water
with one hand while holding the other pressed to her chest to keep
the shift from slipping down. She closed her eyes and smiled as the
fragrant steam rose around her. Graeham inhaled as the flowery
scent wafted toward him, and he smiled, too; so this was how she
managed to smell like a wild, rain-washed meadow in the middle of
London.

Graeham didn’t think he’d ever seen anything
more captivatingly sensual than Joanna Chapman at this
moment
—
her eyes closed, her smile one of dreamy
anticipation. She straightened, her smile fading, her gaze
unfocused as she contemplated the steaming water. She stood
absolutely still, her hand still resting on her upper chest, for so
long that Graeham wondered what she could be thinking to absorb her
so.

Gradually her hand drifted downward over the
curve of a breast, her fingers lightly shaping its roundness
through the flimsy linen of her shift. Absently, as if she were
mesmerized, she stroked her thumb across the nipple, which
stiffened.

Graeham stood rooted to the spot, his heart
pumping painfully in his chest, heat flooding his loins as he grew
erect.

Joanna’s dreamlike countenance never altered
as she skimmed her hand downward, over her stomach to her lower
belly. Her eyes drifted closed as her hand came to rest between her
legs. She didn’t caress herself, merely stood in heated silence,
lost in thought.

When she opened her eyes, Graeham was
unnerved to find them glimmering wetly. Her expression suddenly
troubled, she whispered something that sounded like “Fool.”

She swiped her hands over her eyes, then
swiftly untied her braid and unwove the plaits. Standing with her
back to Graeham, she combed through her rippling dark gold hair
until it hung in a luxuriant sheet nearly as long as her shift.
Tossing the comb onto the bench, she shrugged out of her loosened
shift, which fell in a puddle of linen at her feet.

She was naked now, entirely naked, although
the silken blanket of her hair concealed all but her legs from
view. Graeham closed the curtain with a sigh of disgust at himself.
Only a week ago he’d promised Hugh he wouldn’t compromise his
sister, and already he’d spied on her toilette, like some callow
youth who’d never seen a woman in his life
—
a callow youth
of base character, for only the lowest churls peeked at women while
they undressed.

Graeham had always prided himself on his
soldierly sense of honor. But abstinence, as Hugh had pointed out,
tended to rob a man of his scruples.
How could any normal man
live in the same house with a woman like Joanna and not become
tempted?

Graeham limped back to the little cot and
sat, carefully so as not to rustle the straw in the mattress and
call attention to himself; God forbid Joanna should discover that
he’d been peering at her through a gap in the curtain! He grimaced
as he lay on his back, his broken ribs and leg grousing about all
this activity in the middle of the night.

Straining, he could just make out the hushed
liquid sounds of Joanna bathing
—
soft trickles, little
splashes. He pictured her reclining in the perfumed steam, naked
but for wet tendrils of hair clinging to her like golden snakes,
gliding her soap-slicked hands down her chest, over her breasts,
and lower...

“By the Rood,” he whispered into the
darkness as he felt himself grow harder still, “I’ll never make it
two months.”

He took a deep, calming breath and closed
his eyes, commanding himself to sleep...but all he could see was
Joanna, her head thrown back on the edge of the tub, arched and
trembling as she gave herself the pleasure her husband wasn’t here
to give her. Did she touch herself that way? he wondered. It
excited him to think of a woman pleasuring herself. Once, in Paris,
he’d even talked a pretty little whore into bringing herself to
climax while he watched; it had cost him half a sou.

But as arousing as it was to imagine a woman
gratifying herself, Graeham could not bring himself to ease his own
lust, no matter how frustrated he became. Partly it was because of
all those ceaseless lectures by the brothers at Holy Trinity about
the sin of self-abuse. But mostly it was simply that he’d slept in
dormitories his entire life; if threats of hellfire won’t teach a
man to sublimate his sexual hunger, lack of privacy generally will.
In the past, Graeham had found tourneys and sport fighting useful
in diminishing his physical passions
—
when no accommodating
woman was available, of course. But such exercise was off limits to
him for quite some time.

‘
Twould go far to reassure me of your
good intentions,
Hugh had said,
if you’d tie a string around
that window bar every once in a while instead of trying to store
your seed the whole time you’re living here.

Graeham had tried to imagine tupping Leoda,
but despite her brazen flirtatiousness, he didn’t find her that
desirable. Perhaps it was that he’d come to view her as a friend of
sorts. Or perhaps he’d simply had enough of “women of the town,” as
Joanna so quaintly referred to them. Whores and laundresses had
pleased him well enough when all he’d wanted was a bit of
indifferent bedsport. But he wanted more now...so much more than a
woman like that could hope to give him.

By September at the latest, he’d be married
to Lady Phillipa and settled in Oxfordshire, and then he would not
be lying awake nights pondering the problem of how to vent his
lust.

From beyond the leather curtain he heard a
little musical splash of water, and then something that sounded
like a sigh.

“Go to sleep, you sorry bastard,” he
muttered to himself. “Dream about tournaments.”

* * *

But he didn’t dream about tournaments. He
dreamt that he was back at Holy Trinity, awakening in the middle of
the night in the boys’ dorter. He knew it was a dream. Odd, he
thought, that he should dream of Holy Trinity after all these
years. Perhaps it was because he was back in London.

“Serjant?” The voice was an airy whisper,
distant, pleading. But it was a woman’s voice, and women weren’t
allowed in this part of the priory
—
ever, but certainly not
at night.

Graeham sat up on his little cot, one of
many
—
hundreds, perhaps thousands, for he couldn’t see
where they ended in either direction
—
lined up in two long
rows against the dorter’s east and west walls. Moonlight poured
through the narrow, arched windows, illuminating the cavernous
chamber in strips of hazy silver-blue.

He was all alone, he realized with a
childish surge of alarm. The other beds
—
the innumerable
little neatly blanketed cots
—
were empty, every last one.
They were gone, all the other boys. Where had they gone? Why had
they left him here alone?

He drew his legs up and hugged himself,
shivering; for some reason, his was the only cot without a
blanket.

Had the other boys taken his blanket?
No
—
they’d never even been here. They hadn’t left him here.
He’d always slept here alone. He’d been alone since the
beginning
—
from as long as he could remember. How could he
have forgotten?

“Serjant?”

A bench stood in the middle of the dorter,
between the two rows of beds. There was something tossed onto it,
something made of white linen. His night shirt?

Graeham looked down at himself; no, he was
wearing his night shirt. He squinted at the linen garment on the
bench and saw that it was a lady’s undershift.

He felt a quickening
—
down there.
Squeezing his eyes shut, he whispered his Latin drill in an effort
to make the feeling pass, as the brothers had advised. When he
opened his eyes, the bench was gone. So were the cots, except for
his. The dorter was filled with water; it lapped at the walls like
a lake. His cot swayed slightly, and he realized it was
floating.

His sense of panic worsened when he saw that
the stone walls no longer existed. The sky had turned dark and
bruised and moonless; the water, which extended endlessly in all
directions, was black as ink. His cot rocked on the suddenly
bucking waves; he clawed at the straw mattress, trying to keep from
falling in.

A thick mist rose from the turbulent water,
and from somewhere in its vastness, Graeham heard her again. “Help
me, serjant.”

“Are you drowning?” he called out.

“I’m unhappy.”

He had to go to her. He had to save her.
He’d learned to swim in the horsepool, when he was a boy. He was a
man now, and he hadn’t swum in years, but surely it wasn’t the sort
of thing you forgot.

Graeham seized his shirt
—
her
husband’s shirt
—
and whipped it over his head. He tore off
Prewitt’s braies and drawers, and the bandage around his ribs,
leaving himself naked save for those damned splints.