Wonderful (3 page)

But he had been young then. It had been early in winter, that part of the season when the trees had no leaves and the twilight turned everything purple.

Ice was on the ground, and thorns were on the path where he had been bothered by a hornet or two. Beneath his horse’s hooves the leaves had lain wet and dying under scattered remnants of an early snow, and everything from the sky to the land looked gray and barren.

He’d come back to England after being in France, where he’d won his way through tourney after tourney to earn enough gold and horses to pay his men. And it was there Merrick’s life took a different course. He and Prince Edward became friends, a friendship that had lasted through treachery and tourney, through political upheaval and crusade. A friendship that had taken him far from home.

Edward’s father, King Henry, had only contempt for the alliance of his heir with a de Beaucourt, a family still tainted with dishonor. There was no love lost between the Plantagenets and the de Beaucourts, mostly due to the fact that over a hundred years before, some great-grandsire de Beaucourt had stupidly supported the wrong side.

Yet even the king’s disdain could not affect the friendship between Edward and Merrick; it was an honorable bond of mutual respect and trust between two strong, independent men.

It was that bond that had changed his life. Though it had taken him away for long periods of time, Merrick no longer had to seek means to pay his troops.

He had a good horse beneath him, the weight of his sword at his side, soon he would be married, and like Roger and most of his troops, he, too, was finally home.

It was enough for the moment. He did not know what the future would bring. Yet he knew he would not chew over it today, for today he could do nothing to change it.

He had his horses, his sword, land and a title, and the best of his war prizes—Camrose Castle and all that came with it, a future filled with peace and quiet, and the certain knowledge that a woman, his woman, was waiting.

Heather Ale

Summer came to the country.

Red was the heather bell;

But the manner of the brewing

Was none alive to tell.

In graves that were like children’s

On many a mountain head,

The Brewsters of the Heather

Lay numbered with the dead.

—by Robert Louis Stevenson

Chapter 3

The Convent of

Our Lady of the Water Springs,

Somerset, England.

Clio was on her hands and knees in the middle of the convent herb garden, her pale blond braids trailing a rippled, snakelike pattern in the dirt as she crawled along burying her nose in the herb plants. She moved slowly, row by row, smelling the fragrant leaves, the flowers, and plump dark berries, searching for the right plant.

A fat orange cat with only one eye sauntered across the cobbled courtyard and plopped down on a pair of thick wooden pattens. He yawned and stretched out his paws so his toes spread wide and his claws showed long and curved; then he pulled back a paw, licked it once, and tucked them both under his furry chest. After a minute he languidly turned his slanted eye away from the misty sun and stared at a gray-and-brown-speckled goshawk perched on the crooked handle of a willow basket.

Neither cat nor bird moved.

“There!” With a sharp snap Clio broke a green sprig from one the plants and sat back on her bare heels. “This is the one!” She held the herb up to the sunlight.

Dirt still damp with morning dew pressed up between her toes and made cool, wet rings on the rough homespun gown stretched under her sinking knees. She squinted at the herb for a long moment before she muttered, “Perhaps ’tis not the one.”

Sitting back on her heels, she frowned for a moment. She should have listened more closely when Sister Amice was explaining her discoveries. The leaves on this plant were not quite heart-shaped and the inside of the stem was not bright green but strawlike and pale. Chewing her lip thoughtfully, she stared at the plants in the garden, twisting the sprig and feeling uncomfortably confused.

None of them had the heart-shaped leaves she needed for her latest ale recipe. After a few quiet seconds she studied the herb twig again, then tossed it into the willow basket and knelt there twisting her mother’s ring and thinking.

Clio’s tutor at the convent, Sister Amice, had been convinced that if the Greek navigator Pytheas wrote of heather ale in 250
B.C.
, then it had to have existed, for Pytheas never wrote a lie. However, the good sister died before she could perfect the recipe.

But Clio was determined to make that ale. Whoever was fortunate enough to discover the secret recipe would be wealthy in less time than it took to blink an eye. Discovering the recipe for heather ale was Clio’s latest “wonderful idea.”

It was also her chance for independence. A woman could brew and sell ale and not lose respectability. In fact the best brewers in the land were women, most of them nuns. For her, the key to her independence, to controlling her own life, lay in Sister Amice’s unfinished notes on the lost recipe.

So Clio moved along the rows of herbs, taking some of each plant and tossing it into the basket until it was full. She turned just as the goshawk paced in a rocking gait across the basket handle.

The hawk eyed her for a moment. She tossed the last herb toward him. He swung down like a pendulum, caught it in his beak, and swung back up on his perch.

Clio laughed and shook her head. “Pitt, what will you do with that herb?”

He squawked in answer, flapped his wings, and hopped off the basket with the herb clamped like prey in his beak. Pitt strutted in front of the cat with his breast so puffed out he looked more like a stuffed duck than a fierce bird of prey.

Pitt
was
more like a duck than a hawk. He did not hunt. As far as Clio knew he had never even flown; he just flapped his wings and hopped and waddled and tried to annoy Cyclops, her one-eyed cat.

The hawk had come to the convent on the shoulder of a traveling acrobat who claimed he’d been sold a worthless bird at the Nottingham fair. Clio happened to hear him negotiating to sell the hawk for mere coppers to the village pieman.

“Turn him into a hot pie! He’s not worth a pittance!” the acrobat had claimed. Which was how Pitt, Pittance, came by his name.

“Lady Clio! Lady Clio!” A lad with bright red hair that stuck out from his head like marsh weeds sped across the courtyard, shouting as if God Himself were just around the corner.

The boy leapt over a fishpond and tripped on his big feet.

He crashed into a fountain shaped like a chalice. Water spilled over the fountain lip into the garden, hit the dirt, then sprayed outward.

He skidded right through it. Facedown, and stopped at her knees.

She had mud everywhere. She wiped her eyes, stood up, and scowled down at him. His name was Thud. No one ever questioned how he came by his name. Within minutes of meeting him, you knew why.

He raised his head and looked up at her. His eyes shone like two full moons through the mud; he looked as if he’d been dipped in it. He spit out a mouthful of dirt, then sneezed a few times.

“Are you hurt?” Clio bent over him.

He shook his head vigorously. Mud clods flipped from his hair.

She stepped back and swiped the mud from her clothes, then moved over to the cat and poked him with her bare toe. “Up, Cyclops.”

The cat just lay there.

“Get off my shoes.”

He opened his feline eye and gave her a withering look. She wedged a foot under his fat rump and slid into the wooden shoe. He stood with lazy ease, his tail arching back over his head. He turned and gave her an annoyed look, then sauntered over near the basket.

Thud finished wiping off the mud, then stood there and fidgeted, shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other.

She pinned him with a stare that said, “Hold still.”

He froze.

“What are you so excited about?”

“A message arrived.” He began to fidget again. “Visitors are coming to the convent.”

Clio slid on her other patten and glanced at Thud over her shoulder. “Unless ’tis the king himself, I doubt you need to rush about so.”

“But he’s finally coming! A rider brought the word. Just now. He was on a horse with shining golden bells on its trappings.”

She straightened at that, aware only the king himself or the richest of noblemen had messengers who rode with golden bells. “The king is coming here?”

Thud frowned for a moment. “The king? Him too? No one told me he was coming.”

“I meant of the rider with the golden bells. The messenger.”

“Oh.” Thud scratched his head, frowning. “He was the king’s messenger, too? I didn’t know that.”

Clio stood there for a moment and wondered how long it would take to find out just who was coming.

Thwack, Thud’s brother, came lagging along. If Thud was there, Thwack was soon to follow … at his own speed—sometime between now and the end of the world.

For all that Thud was forever in a rush, Thwack never was. He turned to Thud. “The king’s messenger was here?” He looked around. “Where?”

Thud shrugged. “I don’t know. Lady Clio said the king was coming.”

“And I missed it?” Thwack gave a slow disappointed sigh. “Two messengers in one day.”

Clio looked from one boy to the other. “I’m so confused.”

“Aye. Me too,” Thud said with great seriousness. “We did not know of the king’s visit.”

Clio counted to ten, then twenty. At fifty she said, “Tell me about the messenger.”

“I didn’t see the king’s messenger,” Thud said, bending back and looking over his shoulder as he wildly slapped at the mud still on his back.

She gave him a moment, then tried again. “Who’s coming?”

“The king. You told me so.” He stared at the mud on his hands, shrugged and wiped them off on the front of his tunic.

“Thud …”

He glanced up at her, then cocked his head. “You look confused, my lady.”

“I feel confused.”

“Too many messengers,” he muttered.

She took a long deep breath, then slipped her arm around the boy’s bony shoulders. She leaned toward him and with much patience asked, “What did you come to tell me?”

“About the messenger.”

“What about him?”

“He had gold bells on his horse.”

“You said that. What else?”

“He wore the badge of the Red Lion.”

“The Red Lion?” Clio stopped breathing.

“Aye. Merrick de Beaucourt, the Red Lion.”

Her betrothed. After so long she had almost forgotten he really existed. She was certain he had forgotten about her. For four years he was to have been gone.

But four years had turned into six, with nothing but one message over a year ago, and that one insultingly directed to the abbess and not to her, his very own betrothed. She took a deep breath and asked, “What was the message?”

“To prepare for his arrival. He and his men are but a few days away.”

Clio didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Her mind spun from one emotion to another: annoyance and fear, anger and excitement.

Thud and Thwack watched her and exchanged similar looks of surprise, then puzzlement. Thwack tugged on her gown and stared at her from a face too serious to belong to a boy of just ten. “We thought you’d be pleased. Have you nothing to say, my lady?”

“Aye.” She turned around and faced the eastern landscape. A long bit of silence surrounded her while she remembered her wistful dreams dying as each day of those years passed her by.

“I have something to say.” She stood straighter, stiff, like someone who expected to be hit. She stared at the east wall with a narrow-eyed look, one that did not bode well for her betrothed or for their marriage.

All she said was, “’Tis about time.”

The orderly little convent with its chalk-white walls sat huddled between ripples in the humpbacked English countryside. Founded over a century before and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of the Water Springs had the words
Benedictus locus
, “the blessed spot,” carved into its foundation stone.

Today, more so than most days, the convent needed all the divine blessings it could get.

“Madame.” Merrick de Beaucourt planted his hands on the desk of the abbess, leaned toward her, and pinned her with a black look that did little to hide his anger. “There must be some mistake. Lady Clio cannot possibly be gone.”

The abbess stood her ground. “She left the day after your message arrived.”

Merrick paced in front of the desk, glowering at the floor. “She left,” he repeated, then stopped in front of the abbess again. “
Left
? She just left? She is a woman. A woman cannot just ride off as she pleases.”

“You do not know Lady Clio.”

“No, I do not. But I know she was here under the king’s protection until I returned.”

“She was under his protection. That is true. But he was occupied with the French king and we are a long way from London, my lord.”

“God’s teeth!” Merrick slammed a fist on the desk.