The Virgin, the Knight, and the Unicorn
Sir Gawain, poor and eager for glory, is on a quest to catch a unicorn. His reluctant companion, the virgin dairy-maid Matilde, hates the nobility and loses no time in clashing with the thoughtless young knight. Gawain believes that, as the man, his word should be law—a law he is quick to enforce on his companion. However, the impetuous Matilde is not easily cowed and confounds him by her unexpected responses, especially to his discipline.
As they travel on their quest, the hot-tempered couple learn more about themselves and begin to compromise. Respect changes to fondness, perhaps even to love, but what future can there be between knight and bondswoman?
When Matilde is taken by outlaws, Gawain realizes, almost too late, what she means to him. Can he rescue her? Can he and Matilde join forces to combat a deeper conspiracy that is ranged against them?
And the unicorn? The unicorn, too, has a part to play…
Genre: Historical
Length: 27,340 words
THE VIRGIN, THE KNIGHT, AND THE UNICORN
Lindsay Townsend
ROMANCE
www.BookStrand.com
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A SIREN-BOOKSTRAND TITLE
IMPRINT: Romance
THE VIRGIN, THE KNIGHT, AND THE UNICORN
Copyright © 2014 by Lindsay Townsend
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62741-982-6
First E-book Publication: July 2014
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2014 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
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DEDICATION
To my husband, with thanks.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
About the Author
THE VIRGIN, THE KNIGHT, AND THE UNICORN
LINDSAY TOWNSEND
Copyright © 2014
Chapter 1
Summer, England 1196
In the late summer semidarkness, snug and warm within their castle, the lord and lady whispered together. They spoke softly so as not to disturb their younger children, who lay curled asleep in the same great bed with them.
“She will go with him?” Lord John asked, squinting through the shutters at the rising moon.
Lady Petronilla huffed and pounded her pillow. “The girl should be glad to go.”
“But will she?” her husband persisted. “I know she is a bondswoman, but this is Matilde of whom we speak—Robert’s younger sister, with exactly his same cleverness, like his older sister Ivette.”
“Am I a reader of minds?” snapped his wife. “Very likely your turbulent knight will force Matilde to leave with him, and there is an end of the matter.”
The lord shuffled onto his back. “Yes, Sir Gawain is certainly most eager.”
“Greedy for treasure,” his wife sniffed.
“Treasure, yes. But he is a younger son and must make his own way in the world.”
“Did he steal his armor and that warhorse from a battlefield?”
“I did not ask. He did save my life in Normandy.”
“And you knighted him in thanks.” Lady Petronilla sniffed a second time. “Why is he not satisfied?”
“Gawain is ambitious. And the renown of capturing or slaying a unicorn, that also appeals to my knight.”
“Do such creatures exist?”
Lord John yawned. “Does that matter? Gawain is a troublesome fellow. A week or more slogging through the wild woods will curb his temper.”
“Our other people in the woods?” inquired his lady softly.
“That arrangement does not start until winter. Gawain and Matilde will be quite safe. Meantime their quest should bring Gawain down off his high horse.”
Lady Petronilla murmured agreement. “My ladies think him handsome, if lacking in courtesy. If he spoke more to them, Gawain would do well in courtly romance.”
Her lord grunted, then laughed. “Still, the wenches of the stew make no complaint against him. They appear to relish his visits in spite of how he uses them.”
“Hush!” warned his wife, glancing at their slumbering youngsters. Seeing them sound asleep, she added, “I hope he treats Matilde the same. That girl is too proud.”
“Unless he tries and Matilde kills him. Or he and Matilde kill each other.”
Lady Petronilla pursed her lips. “I would be sorry to lose such an excellent dairy maid.”
“The time of three milkings has passed for this year,” Lord John observed.
“But can you not see, my lord?” his wife continued. “We must ensure that Matilde is a long way from the castle when the king’s justice comes here after harvest. Ivette may protest at our plans, but she is by nature contemplative—I can foresee her becoming religious, or a nun. Her sister Matilde is very much of this world. In her way, she is as ambitious as your knight and angry at her low status in life. If she is still here, Matilde will argue furiously and dispute well. She may even know something important, some morsel of fact or law that we have overlooked, and so she will win.”
“I know. The girl could spoil everything, which is why I devised this quest for Gawain. I told him she was a virgin and so a fit lure for a unicorn. That is all he wanted to know. He never properly listens to anyone and he will not listen to her.”
Reflecting, Lord John closed his eyes. Like his wife, he was mildly disconcerted at the thought of losing their clever and frankly beautiful dairy maid, but Matilde was dangerous. She argued like a lawyer and she knew things. If anyone can track a unicorn, it will be Matilde. But she will never find it because Gawain will not listen to her.
Considering those two opposing points, he fell asleep.
* * * *
“The girl you want is weeding in the great field this morning,” Lord John told Gawain
. “You will know her by her beauty. Her name is—”
Gawain ignored the rest of his lord’s speech. The girl was a peasant, so why should he bother with her name? Did serfs have names? He gave a stiff bow of farewell to Lord John, nodded curtly to Lady Petronilla, and mounted his palfrey.
Riding to the great field, Gawain spotted the girl at once. She was the youngest, cleanest, and the prettiest of those peasants toiling along the rows of peas and beans. A small, slender blonde, she was nimbly weeding along the flowering rows of his lord’s field strip. Pleasantly surprised to find her so comely, he stood up on his stirrups and hailed her. “You!”
You plunged her hoe into the soil and looked up at him. Her eyes, gray as steel, flicked over him, a long, cool stare. Without speaking or bobbing a courtesy, she spun about on her bare feet and stalked away.
“Hey!” Gawain called, astonished that she dared to turn her back on him. Half of him wanted to ride her down, but that would mean trampling his lord’s crop, so he had to content himself with nudging his horse along the ridge between the field strips to follow her. Gaining on the disrespectful wench with his bay’s every stride, he watched her kiss a wizened field-worker on the cheek and pick up a neat cloth bundle clearly left at the end of the strip. Now I have you.
“Follow me, girl,” he ordered, smirking at the dust his horse raised as he cantered past her. When he looked round after a few paces, he saw her lagging way behind, making no effort to run. “Make haste!”
“I am,” came her instant reply. “Though I am a dairy maid, I do not yet have four legs. If I might ride with you, we would go faster…Sir.” Staring at him full in the face, she added his title deliberately late.
Scarcely believing her insolence, Gawain glanced at the other, crook-backed serfs. Had any been fit, he would have clubbed this wench to the ground and taken another but, looking properly at her fellow peasants for the first time, Gawain realized they were all old. There were no more maids in this field to take in her place.
Reining in, astonished afresh, he saw by the wench’s half smile that she knew this, that she had probably even planned it that way. Temper scorched through his body. Catching his darkening mood, his horse snorted and laid back its ears. He tugged the reins again. “Easy.”
“Do you speak to me, your horse, or to yourself, Sir Gawain?”
She spoke with a rough accent, her mouth soiling his name. Incensed that she should know it, he swung down from his horse and stepped closer.
The girl stood her ground. She was a foot smaller than him, dressed in patched but clean green skirts and an earth-colored tunic. Her blonde hair was partly hidden by a short veil, but her face was not hidden at all. She studied him as if they were equals, as if she had a perfect right to look at him.
For an instant her beauty cooled his anger, as a sparkling frost may coat and still a pool. Cloud-gray now, her eyes were fringed with long, golden lashes and shone with intelligence and life. Her skin was flawless, rich cream and roses. Gawain found his hand rising, seemingly by its own will, to touch her perfect cheek. Forget the unicorn. This wench beguiles me, but where is the treasure or renown in that? Quickly, he jerked his arm down and gripped his belt instead.
“Do we begin the quest, Sir Gawain?”
Gawain twitched, irritated afresh that she should speak to him. I should speak first.
“May I make a suggestion?”
“No,” growled Gawain. “I need nothing from you but your obedience.” Tired of talk, he snatched her off her bare feet, cast her over his shoulder, strode back to his mount, and slung the writhing, gasping girl across his horse’s neck. As she opened her mouth yet again to protest, he leapt into the saddle, spurred hard, and rode off at a canter, laughing when her head bounced against the bay’s muscled flank and she shut her eyes tight. Keeping her secure with a heavy fist in the middle of her back, he galloped for the woods.
The forest where I shall find and slay the unicorn, where this wench will be my lure, but first she will learn, indeed she will learn.
As he reached the end of the fields, where the trees began, Gawain was smiling.
* * * *
Pain drove its blunt knives into her head and sat like a stone in her stomach. The hard pommel of the saddle dug constantly into her flank, keeping pace with the horrible pounding of the horse’s hooves. Only her pack, which she had luckily kept clutched to her, saved her ribs from being bruised by the horse’s neck.
Sitting above this mental terror, this swirl and anguish of aching muscles, the knight laughed. Matilde, squeezing her eyes shut against the ground skimming and lurching a hand-span from her face, supposed he was handsome—if “handsome” was the word for a petulant, curly-headed, even-featured boy. He was the tallest person she had yet encountered, rangy and muscled, his blue eyes shining with vigor in his tanned, lean face. She felt his easy strength with the horse and for an instant knew terror. He does not think of me as human, merely a tool. He does not even want to know my name.
Other maids watched out for knights and squires, sighed over them, imagined themselves in love with them. Matilde had always been wary, as she was of any brute beast or force stronger than herself. And this brown-haired brute will never have known a hunger-headache in his life.
The old rage against the unfair ways of this world boiled in her, steeling Matilde afresh. Gnawing her lip against the pain, she vowed to herself that this handsome, careless man-boy would heed her, would learn from her. He must, or my family will starve by next spring.
Through a haze of nausea, she felt the horse slowing and risked opening her eyes. The knight spotted her looking.
“I shall deal with you presently,” he said, and reined in.
Moments later, Matilde tried to slide from the bay but was not given time. A muscular arm hooked about her narrow waist, hoisting her aloft. She kicked and her knight from hell dropped her straight down into bracken, a soft if undignified landing. Jerking from her back to her knees, she forced herself upright. Her companion approached, his lean face determined, his hands spread and crook-fingered. However he wants to deal with me, it will not be to my good.
Matilde crouched and scrabbled in the leaf litter, found a broken branch and jabbed it at the looming figure. “No farther, knight.”
He tried to snatch the branch but she whipped it away.
“I am Matilde!” She waved the stick like a sword. He laughed sharply and stopped, folding his arms across his chest, his eyes glittering with cold amusement.
“Do you expect to best me, girl?”
“God gave us speech to share, Sir Gawain,” she countered. “Call me by my name.”
“Share! What would I want to share with you? All women chatter too much.”
“Your mother never talked to you? Or did you not listen to her, either?”
For an instant, the years fell from his mocking face and he looked puzzled. “She sang. When I was small. I remember her singing.”
Pity swelled in Matilde. “Where is she now?”
“In heaven. A long time in our years.” The words seem to slip from him, for now he scowled. “Chatter is for cowards and fools. I will have no more of it.”
He grabbed again for her stick but she snapped it down, missing his knuckles by a whisker as he skidded sideways to avoid her clumsy blow. Before he could lunge at her a third time, she backed up, glancing round. Instantly she recognized the clearing, the steep, scree-studded banks surrounding it and the deep, muddy pool a spear’s length farther down. All were notorious in the village.
“Not here!” she panted, scything with the stick to keep him off, to make him listen. “Not here, understand?”
He swore in Norman French, caught the stick, and wrested it away. Anticipating a blow with it, she flinched but still repeated, “Not here! Listen to me—”
He hurled the branch into the undergrowth and charged. Matilde stepped back. “If you will not listen, then look!” She kicked the banking desperately with her heel.
At
first, she thought the roar was the knight, but then she saw his astonishment as a large section of the bank fell away and shuttered down in clouds of stones, soil, and grass, splashing into the pool.
“Bad place,” she gasped, before sucking in a large, steadying breath. “We call it the dragon’s tear in the village. One year, I almost lost a cow to the slippage of these banks.”
“Cow?”
“I am the dairy maid, Matilde,” Matilde said, through gritted teeth. “Do you ever listen?”
The knight was still staring at the litter of fallen stones. “My horse could have broken a leg in that.”
Finally, he talks to me and admits I know something! “If you want to stop, there is another clearing past those limes.”
“And beyond?”
“I do not know.” Matilde had never had the free time to explore father than that.
He turned his back on her and stalked to his horse. About to mount, he looked round. “Why do you linger?”
Though she knew she really should not do it, Matilde could not resist. In a deliberate echo of his earlier haughty, amused pose, she folded her arms across her chest. “I will not go another step with you unless you say my name, sir knight. And should you not thank me for preserving your horse?”
Suddenly, shockingly, he was beside her, bundling her off her feet and onto the horse—not over its neck this time, but onto the saddle with him. Sitting behind her and snaring her wrists in one large hand, he trapped her completely simply by crossing one long, lean thigh over both her legs and then sharply snapped the reins with his free hand. The horse sprang forward on the track and they were off again.
What have I done? Why can I not control my temper? Why must I always fight for the last word? What did he say, that chatter is for cowards and fools? Someone has taught him that kindness, gentleness, even speech are worthless. And he did not learn otherwise from his mother, for she is long dead. Now I come and challenge him, a challenge he understands only as a battle, as something to be won. What have I done? And what will he do to me?
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