There were no archers but his shoulders pricked as he lengthened his stride, striving not to break into a run. A running man attracts attention, and so far these guards were bewildered. They had not marked that their bishop was missing, nor that his prize hostage of months was out in the bailey.
Doing what? What exactly was David about? He could see Joanna moving in the shadows like the clever wench she was, carrying a bag over her shoulder as she guided her father smoothly to the postern. David was standing by one of the abbey carts, looking up at the cloudless blue sky as if the arch of heaven was new-made for him.
“Give a Templar a nail and he will try to use it as an astrolabe,” Hugh muttered. Exasperated, he moved out of the palace wall shadow to recover his errant relative for the second time.
“David.” He had reached the cart.
“I had forgotten how blue.” David lowered his head and looked at him, his wide eyes puzzled. “Are you sure we should leave?”
Are you gone mad? Six months ago, Hugh would have said it, but being with Joanna had taught him to consider words. He took David’s arm. “We have only a little way to go now. Joanna and Solomon are there already.”
They were, too. Joanna was speaking to the postern guard, pointing to the distant glitter of the river, and did not seem to be making much headway. The guard was shaking his head and motioning her back.
“Come,” he said to David, wanting to be with Joanna. He had other, quicker methods of persuasion.
David rubbed at his eyes and yawned. “I am for my bed at this time; a sleep before midday. She will leave you, once she is free of here. Why should she stay with you? No other woman has.”
“That is in God’s arms, now go.” Hugh gave his brother a mighty shove, possibly harder than was needed, but he had no stomach for their father’s old complaints. “Move or I cut you,” he growled, and that threat stirred David into a lumbering run.
Finally—
And behind him, now, at last, he heard a sudden crash as the lock on the first cage shattered. Twisting round, he saw ragged prisoners pouring into the yard. Some made for the main gate, others were struggling with the monks to seize goods off the carts, a few made straight for the guards, swearing vengeance.
“Stop them!” shouted a new voice. “No, you fools! Them! Hold them!”
It was the fat steward. He had appeared by the postern, returning to the palace from the town, and was now blocking the narrow gate. Even as Hugh sprinted for the fellow, barging through knots of straggling, blinking men, the steward snatched a bow from the postern guard and notched an arrow.
He is aiming at Joanna!
Hugh plucked a book from one of the carts and threw it. “Not her!” he roared, charging for the man.
The heavy volume struck the steward in the middle of the chest. He tottered, but did not release the bow.
“No!” Joanna dropped her sack and launched herself at him.
“Stop!” Hugh’s desperate warning came too late. The world about him seemed to slow down, turn to dust and stone, as he strained and strained to reach the enemy first, as he dropped the sword to avoid striking Joanna, as he reached, arms outstretched, to seize the man’s throat.
The steward was yelling something he could not hear, his mouth jerking into an ugly scowl, and then he fell like a cast stone slingshot. He hit the postern cobbles and sprawled in the gateway, silent and still. The guard had already chosen his path and was gone.
“I hit him with this,” Solomon remarked, staring down at the unconscious steward with an expression of mingled delight and dread. He looked to Hugh like a small boy caught eating an apple in an orchard. “When I saw you throw the book, it gave me an idea.” He shook the sack. “I hit him with these,” he said. “Pestle and mortar and a crucible. Did I do right?”
“You dropped this,” said a voice behind them. Hugh turned to find David with the sword. He looked less abstracted than he had earlier, and seemed to have more sense, which was a start. “What?” he asked now, glancing round as one of the monastery carts crackled into flames. A group of prisoners was dancing round the blazing cart, buffeting the monks aside.
“Keep that for the moment and keep moving.” Hugh picked up the sack in one hand and plucked Joanna off her feet with the other. Ignoring her protests—“I can walk as well as you!”—he stepped over the sleeping steward and walked out of the palace into the town.
“Let me go!” Joanna tried to nip at his ear with her teeth. He tightened his grip about her middle until she gasped. “Unfair!”
“Yield, then, wife. Wife-to-be,” he amended. In the victory of the moment, delighted to have Joanna snug in his arms again and determined to keep her there, he turned to Solomon. “If that is acceptable, sir?”
This was not how he had planned to ask, but the question thundered out of his mouth with the force of a warhorse charge. He could not stop it and now he could only wait with stopped breath and sweating palms for the answer.
Say yes, say yes, say yes….
“You have my blessing,” Solomon said at once.
Thanks be to God and all the saints of Christendom! Hugh kissed Joanna lightly on her round, astonished “O” of a mouth, swung her higher into his arms, and kept on walking.
Chapter 39
“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!”
Chapter 40
“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 accus
ations, 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.
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