A Knight’s Enchantment (25 page)

“I cannot marry him,” Joanna said a third time to Elspeth. They were at Elspeth’s manor, kneeling in the bright warmth of the walled garden, pounding and preparing powdered chalk and water to make whitewash. It was a beautiful, sunny day, perfect drying weather. Elspeth wanted her wall pictures in the great hall and solar re-painted, and Hugh had volunteered them all as helpers.

Joanna guessed the real reasons why he had done so, and it was not for the sake of friendship, or generosity. David was still strange, shutting himself whenever he could into the privy, as if still imprisoned. He would scarcely talk to anyone.

“Then help me paint flowers,” Hugh said. He had David in the great hall with him now, washing brushes and muttering to the faded paintings on the newly dusted walls.

“He can draw, as I can,” Hugh explained, when Joanna questioned him. “If he cannot speak of his time as hostage, maybe he will paint it out.”

She was impressed by his logic, but she knew there was more to their staying than that, or even care for his withdrawn sibling, changed so profoundly by his time in the oubliette.

“He keeps us here to persuade me,” she admitted. “I am a guest-hostage.”

“A most useful one,” Elspeth remarked, puffing a wisp of auburn hair away from her sun-reddened forehead. “And Hugh! I did not know he had it in him.”

Joanna dare not ask if her companion meant his enthusiasm with brushes and paint, or his proposal to her. Or was she turning on this point because it was all she could think on?

“How can I say yes?” she burst out, startling a blackbird in the nearest flower bed. “I have no lands, no title, nothing a rising knight requires. To the church I will always be suspect for what I am. If we stay as we are, he may marry an heiress.”

That thought shot a pillar of ice through her heart, but she persisted.

“I can be his mistress. Better that, than we marry and he comes to resent me as a woman without lands.”

“You are an alchemist!”

“Gold is not land. For a knight, land is what matters.”

Elpseth gave the whitewash another stir with a stick and tapped it on the bucket before looking up into Joanna’s face. They were kneeling very close together, stirring and pounding the dusty chalk in one bucket, and her freckles were all obscured by white. She looked as pale as a ghost. She looked as she felt, thought Joanna.

Elspeth reached away from the bucket and took a drink of ale to clear her mouth. “You have said as much to Hugh?”

Joanna nodded as a sick heat of shame rose in her throat. “For a woman like me, to be Hugh’s mistress is, is…” She faltered. Her eyes smarted and the nodding cowslips in the border blurred, doubtless due to the clouds of chalk dust.

“As much as you should expect? That puts you very low, Joanna! How does Hugh answer this?”

Joanna closed her eyes. How had he answered? She could not remember. She gripped the narrow brush until her hand hurt but still no clear thought came.

“But then I am surprised you have had time to talk. He scrubs and sketches and you busy yourself about the manor with me, and your nights together in the solar are busy in other ways, are they not?” Elspeth smiled at Joanna’s startled stare. “You are lusty enough for newlyweds.”

In her mind Joanna returned to the solar, in the warm dark, with Hugh making love to her. He called her his harem girl, his squirrel, his own. Last night, before pulling her back into his fierce embrace to sleep, he had tongued over her breasts and murmured, “I love these. I love you.”

He had fallen asleep before she had time to answer, but she had lain awake for many hours.

“He loves you, Joanna.”

“I know. He told me so.”

“And asked you to marry him.”

“David says he is not constant.”

Elspeth sat back on his heels, wafting impatiently at a passing fly. “I would not trust David to lace my shoes. Are you gone mad, too?”

Joanna gawped at this forthright speech, but Elspeth was not finished. “What if there is a child by all these vigorous unions? Would you have a son or daughter as a bastard? Have you entirely lost your wits?”

Joanna tossed her brush into the whitewash and jumped to her feet. The sudden movement caused her breasts to brush almost painfully against her gown, but she ignored the discomfort. “How can I work, though? If Hugh is at joust after joust, winning and fighting, what do I do?”

She paced up and down beneath the fruit trees, the mellow cooing of pigeons in the nearby dovecote an accompaniment to her every anxious step. “How can I assay gold in a tent full of chattering gossips? How can I investigate the secrets of the cosmos and the stars when I am forever slumped on a horse’s back, jogging from place to place?”

“How will being Hugh’s mistress instead of his wife change any of that?”

“I—” Joanna had not thought so far. She realized, with a jolt, that she had been thinking as a wife, of wifely duties, of being with her man and caring for him and putting his needs ahead of hers.
And I have been reluctant to do so, although I love Hugo with all my heart.

“I know not,” she said dully. “The whitewash is ready.”

“Only when you remove that stick,” said Elspeth, also rising to her feet. “Talk to Hugh,” she said. “Tell him you need a place, a settled place. How many months are you prepared to travel with him? Half the year?”

“More, to be with him,” admitted Joanna, relieved to discover that to be the utter truth. “I need a place, for me to work, for my father.”

“I agree. Solomon is getting too old to be jaunting with you round England and France,” Elspeth said tartly. “So this is what I propose.”

She paused as a crash and cursing came from the great hall. “Hugh, dropping his brush again,” she remarked. “He will come hurtling out here in a moment to find something to scold you for: it is ever a husband’s way, so you may as well accustom yourself.”

She took hold of Joanna’s hand. “I will grant you a parcel of land, for you and your father. I know the very place. In return, you will give me the rent of a posy of cowslips each spring; a flask of that useful
aqua fortis;
a cupful of your white powder for when my head aches, and some fine red dye and blue dye to dye my cloth. You may live and work there in the winter months, when tournaments are nothing but mud and blood, and have a place for Hugh to return to each Michaelmas, to take his ease and feast and count his blessings.”

“I do not know how to cook,” Joanna stammered and then stopped her mouth with her hands. In the face of Elspeth’s miraculous offer, what was she saying?

Her companion laughed. “For a woman who bakes gold, all other cooking will be easy. I will teach you. But look, here is Hugh, and I am leaving now. I have no wish to be mauled.”

She strolled away, shaking the chalk dust from her skirts, and vanished between the fruit bushes and trees, chattering to the pigeons in the dovecote.

Hugh knew he was in a mood to rip heads off and he did not care. “Elspeth! Come you back. I want you to hear this!” he yelled, not caring if the gardener stopped his weeding to back out of his way. “Do you know what my fool brother has done? Only gone and sent a message to our father! We are here, quiet, no one knows, the bishop and his creatures know nothing, and David sends a single squire to our father with a
written
message!”

Joanna dropped the bucket of whitewash she had been bending to pick up, a splash landing down the front of her gown in a spreading stain as the bucket rolled away into a mat of speedwells. “Written?” she whispered. “But what if he is stopped?”

“I have sent swift riders after the lad,” Hugh went on grimly. “They will fetch him back.”

“Your brother was perhaps fulfilling his filial duties?” Elspeth remarked. She had returned, in that quiet way of hers, but Hugh was not listening.

“We will set forth tomorrow, for Castle Manhill. David wishes to greet our father and fulfill his duties as his son, and so he may, in person. My father can do his part for a change and give us shelter if the bishop’s men come calling. I have left David grinding up the paint now and he knows he is to finish it. Solomon is with him, to help, and my hound.”
To keep watch,
he almost added, but did not say it.

“Good!” Elspeth smiled at him and whispered something in Joanna’s ear. “Now go with your lady. I have told her the way, and I do not want either of you back before sunset. Go. It is a lovely day. Go on!”

“David is ever sour and asserts himself most when he knows that he is wrong.”

Although Joanna knew the way, it was Hugh who pounded ahead up a steep track, kicking up clouds of pebbles and dust. He had been grumbling ever since they had left Elspeth’s garden.

“Not a single word of thanks have I had from him, not one word! He moans like an old woman: he complains to you that I change my womenfolk more often than my breeches, to Solomon that I loathe all those who are foreign born or bred, and to me that you will leave me!”

Hugh halted so abruptly that Joanna smashed into him. It was like striking an angry, living wall.

“Why should he say such things?”

Joanna tried to clasp his hand but he was off again, his long, rangy strides devouring the chalk path.

“He is foul.”

“Your brother is in pain,” Joanna panted. Her feet hurt from rushing and kicking through the stony path, trying to keep pace. “He is abandoned by his father.”

“Not by me!”

“And by his own order. Listen to me, Hugo—”

Her voice cracked across the hillside and now he did turn and wait for her to catch up, but not to embrace, as she had hoped.

“How can you defend him?”

His face was blank with hurt, his blue eyes dark with bewilderment. Seeing him so, Joanna bit down on her own furious retort. “I was angry with him at first, too, but then I realized. He is released from a long imprisonment when his very life was in danger. He was for a time in a very place of hell—do you remember the foul stench from the oubliette? It sickened us both and we were above it. David was down there for who knows how long, in the dark. Now he is confused. He has no clear place anymore in the world. Who wants him? David is to be pitied.”

“Pitied.” Hugh folded his arms across himself and tapped a foot. “You pity him but will not say yes to me.”

Joanna, already breathless from the relentless climb, now felt her jaw sag but Hugh was still speaking.

“What is it? Am I too rough for you? Unlettered, uncouth? I know I cannot read yet, but you could teach me. I know some alchemy now and I could help. I want to help. You say you love me, yet you will not marry me! Why not?”

She gasped at this spate of questions and accusations, promises and hope, love and rage. Trying to conceive a reply, she did not watch where she was going, brought her heel down hard on an unyielding flint, and slipped on the hillside. Falling hard, she bit her tongue with her teeth and her heart felt to be jarred right through her ribs. Though she tried to stop it, a high, sharp cry broke from her.

“Eow!”

Hugh knelt beside her. “Let me see.”

Joanna spat out a bit of blood and shook her head.

“At least come here, squirrel.” He lifted her off the tough grassland, gesturing with his eyes. “You were perched on an anthill.”

Twisting, Joanna saw that he spoke the truth and promptly burst into tears.

“Hey, there, I did not mean to make you weep, Joanna. I am not angry with you, I swear it. There.” He was patting her arms and head, rocking her. Joanna luxuriated in his baking warmth and strength and wept harder.

“What? What is it, sweeting?”

“I do not know. Truly. So much noise. So much pain.” She pressed her breasts, which for these past few days had felt overlarge and overtender, she now admitted to herself. “Perhaps it is my monthly time.” She blushed, to be confessing such a thing to a man, horrified, too, at her overreaction. What was amiss with her? A little tumble in the grass should not have her crying like this. “We have so little time together, just for us. I wanted it to be perfect.” She tried to stifle her sobbing, disgusted with herself. “I can do nothing right!”

“Why perfect?” he breathed into her ear. “Have you something to tell me?” He swung her down lightly onto her feet, looking always into her eyes. “Something perfect? A little sweet?”

He thinks I am with child, and that thought delights him.
Joanna’s aches and her sore breasts were forgotten in a giddy rush of joy. “You are pleased, truly pleased,” she said, astonished and grateful that he should be so. She had known for a long time that Hugh respected her and her father, and that although her grandfather had been raised in the Jewish faith, he thought no less of her. This was more, though: this was blood and sinews and heart; this might be a baby, their baby.

“Pleased, happy, and proud.” He grinned, the sun glinting on his dyed hair. “Now you will have to marry me. It would be sin, else.”

“Since when were you so concerned with sin?” She caught a lock of his hair and tugged at it. “I cannot marry you—”

With your hair that shade of red,
she meant to say but was forestalled. Hugh stepped in front of her. “Horseman, over there, breaking cover from the woods. A Templar.”

Joanna’s mouth went dry with fear. “David sent out two messages?”

“Or someone has asked some clever questions in West Sarum and has tracked us.”

Joanna tried to start down the hillside but found herself blocked by Hugh. His arm was as strong and unyielding as his sword.

“He has seen us. I will speak.” He checked his dagger, testing its edge with his thumb. “That will serve. Remember, you say nothing.”

If nothing else, his unconscious arrogance irked her so much she felt too aggrieved to be afraid of the closing knight.

“You do not prefer me to snivel behind that hawthorn, my lord?” she asked. “Or perhaps await his coming and let you use me as a footstool?”

Hugh laughed. “I think I preferred you weeping.”

“You will not kill him?” she persisted, no longer fearful but still worried at this uncertain meeting, worried that Hugh had misunderstood her, and most worried at this moment for the stranger himself.

“Have no fear, mistress sour. I would not bring that trouble to Elspeth. Listen now, he is shouting something.” He held up a hand and frowned. “No, the wind takes it.” He glanced at her. “Still stubborn to be free, eh?” He lowered his arm and ran his fingers across her flank, a half-smile playing on his lips as she leaned into his caress. “We shall see.”

Somehow, with that swiftness of movement, he had come alongside her and continued to touch her even as he waved to the closing horseman. The Templar would see nothing; he would merely think them standing close, side by side. He would not see Hugh’s large hand skimming the small of her back and then dipping lower.

“Hugo! The knight!”

He cupped one cheek of her bottom, lifting her slightly so she was almost on the tips of her toes, and she had to widen her stance to keep her balance.

“We are hostage to each other,” he said, still waving.

His other hand slipped between her thighs. Even with her long skirts between her and his smoothing, questing fingers, Joanna found her sight becoming hazy, clouded by a sweet mesh of desire.

“Stop it!” she hissed, but she did not move away. Her heart leapt and hammered and the ache in her breasts was replaced by a delicious tingling. “I cannot reason!” she protested, as he lowered his waving arm and “accidentally” brushed her flank. At once her whole side flamed. “Don’t!”

This time she broke away, stumbling forward, promising herself to pay Hugh back in kind when they were alone.

“Stay back!” Hugh hollered, and for an instant she thought he meant her. Careless of the courtesies, she sank onto the hillside, putting her backside out of reach of his devious honey and bee-sting hands.

“I will attend to you later, madam,” he remarked, but she knew that he was not as calm as he sounded. She flicked a speedwell at him and made herself pay attention to the approaching stranger.

She stiffened but Hugh remained relaxed, save for the jutting front of his tunic. “Yes, he brings dogs. Did you not hear them earlier, or spot them? Or were you busy?”

Refusing to add to his conceit by replying, Joanna pushed down on the turf with her fists.

“Stay down. I swear they will not touch you.” To emphasize this point, Hugh strode forward. “To me, lads!”

He whistled and the three pounding wolfhounds yipped and flew to him, gray whirling arrows, their tails a blur of wagging. They danced about him in a tight spiral, reminding Joanna of the honeybees. She smiled at the memory, her face warming, and not only with the bright morning sun.

“Manhill!” The Templar charged, his bay horse galloping up the rolling curve of the hill like a kite tugged on a string. Whatever curse he was chanting was lost in the breeze and the harsh, high cry of a buzzard.

Joanna grabbed a fistful of flints and scrambled to her feet, but the duel was already over. Hugh ignored the dogs, ducked under the Templar’s flailing sword, and punched the horse’s head. It screamed, rearing and plunging, and Hugh yanked the man off its back. In a welter of dust he smacked the stranger to the turf and stones, stamping on his sword arm and dropping on him. As Joanna ran closer she realized he had his dagger to the man’s throat.

“And now I would know your name, sir.”

“Let me up, damn you!”

Hugh rammed a knee onto the man’s belly, leaving him to writhe and choke. “Joanna, is the horse standing?”

She did not know what to make of the question but answered at once. “It is.”

Hugh nodded and spoke to the stricken Templar. “Yours is a good bay, a fine palfrey, but no destrier. You do not wage war on a untrained horse, and you do the beast no service by using it so. Do you yield?”

“Yes, damn—”

Hugh put more of his weight onto the knight. “Do you yield, man?”

“Yes, yes!” The Templar wheezed and clutched at his chest, going very red, then pale. “Truly, your brother was right, you are the very devil in arms.”

Joanna felt no sympathy for the man. He had come and tried to attack Hugh: he deserved what he had. She peered about the grassy hill and lush water meadow below but could see no more movement. Above, only the buzzard flew and cried again, its shrill note piercing against the stranger’s gasping breaths.

“Why are you here alone?” she said. “Where are the rest of your order from Templecombe?”

The man gargled, and she said quickly to Hugh, “I pray you, my lord, to let him up, if he gives his word to be still.”

The Templar nodded, turning red in the face again. Hugh released him and stepped back, glancing into Joanna’s face and mouthing,
All well?

Yes,
she whispered back, and they turned as one to the stranger, who had rolled onto his side and was touching his jaw and then his shoulders and arms.

“I broke no bones of yours, man,” Hugh said, sitting cross-legged on the turf. He tilted his head to Joanna, smiling at her with his eyes while his mouth remained still. She was glad of his notice and concern, and more glad that he did not pull her down with him. She wanted no distractions now.

Sprawled on the turf as if it were a bed, the stranger broke the silence between them. “How did you know I am of Templecombe?”

“I did not,” answered Hugh, seemingly as blithe as a soaring lark, though Joanna saw the lines of tension in his neck and shoulders. “You must direct yourself to my lady.”

The knight was in no position to protest, but made his displeasure known by refusing to look at her. Addressing her with his eyes tightly closed, like a child about to count down a game of hide-and-seek, he repeated his question.

“My lord understands horses and weapons and men,” Joanna replied, wondering if she should be as peevish as this middle-aged, florid knight and lean in to give him a pinch. “He saw you riding without warhorse, helm, or armor, and he made what he would of such matters. I see writing and symbols. Your cloak is embroidered with a cross standing in a dark, low valley. The combe or valley where your order has its preceptory. Why did you attack my lord?”

That made him open his eyes. Beside her Hugh chuckled. “She is ever to the core of the matter, and you must accustom yourself.” He flipped his dagger and caught it, stroking a hound under its gray throat. “Your reason interests me, too, and your name.”

The knight looked from one to the other of them and sagged, shaking his head. When Joanna spotted his lips moving in prayer, she thought she understood.

“Did David send you a message saying his brother was bewitched?” she asked, smiling as the knight stared at her. “Nothing else would account for your folly.”

“And how do you know me?” Hugh put in. “We have never met.”

“David spoke of your skill with animals,” the knight replied, in a heavy, despairing way. “I recognized you from that.”

He said nothing more and did not give his name. Understanding him and his fear more than these latest actions of Hugh’s brother, Joanna now leaned in and touched the cross on his cloak. Gently she recited the creed, and when the knight began to echo her, she knew he had accepted her.

“I am no witch,” she said then.

“No, you are not,” said the knight. “But when I saw you at our preceptory, and later, received David’s message, I was in dread.” He sat up and extended his hand to Hugh. “I charged to draw you away, as I thought, though in truth I was not thinking clear at all. Your brother also spoke of your battle prowess. I am Sir Brian of Templecombe and Outremer. I knew David in the Holy Land.”

He and Hugh shook hands and Sir Brian went on, “A lad came to Templecombe this morning and sought me out. He did not know the message he carried: David had put it in writing on a scrap of old parchment.”

“I thought he had taken that to use in the privy.” Hugh kicked his heels into the hillside and muttered a curse Joanna had not heard from him before.

“There is more,” she said quickly. “Why did you come alone, Sir Brian? Was the message strange?”

Sir Brian nodded. He rolled his heavy head and stretched his arms above his head, seemingly glad to relax, to talk.

“I knew David in Outremer. A quiet, steady man, courteous and learned, even-tempered. I recognized the writing as his but not what was written.” He sighed. “Demons and witches. Hostages to a demon. Ancient evil clad in a loving shape. I do not recall the rest. I burned the note. But I knew I must do something, so I came to see for myself.”

“David has excelled himself this time,” Hugh muttered.