Wonderful

by Jill Barnett

  “’Tis a woman’s due in life. To wait for a man.”

  Roger snorted, then laughed out loud as if he could no longer hold it in. “’Twill be an interesting first meeting between you two. Not even for sweet Elizabeth would I miss it.”

  Merrick loved Roger like a brother, but there were times when, like a brother, he would have liked to beat that grin off Roger’s face. This was one of those times.

  Fortunately for Roger’s fine, noble nose, Merrick could hear the sounds of his men-at-arms coming down the hillside: the clink of harnesses, the creaking of leather, male laughter, and another bawdy joke. He rode out of the trees and into sight; then, with one arm raised, he signaled to his troops to move west.

  Roger and Merrick talked of horses and past battles while the two of them rode side by side. They had ridden this way for years and each had owed the other his life on more than one occasion. Despite the differences in their manner, they were each other’s closest friend.

  As he rode beside Merrick, Roger wore the look of a man pleased with himself and his life. There was no doubt the fair Elizabeth de Clare was the person who had given him that look.

  At times Merrick envied him. Roger could fit into any situation, meet anyone, even a stranger, with casual ease. It wasn’t that simple for Merrick. He was used to taking responsibility. He was a leader and warrior. So, wherever they went, Roger would blend in affably and Merrick would barge in and take over.

  They rode in silence for a while; then Merrick admitted, “I’ve had done with crusades and deserts and the East. Edward wants our home borders protected. And I want some peace in my life.”

  Roger leaned one arm on his saddle pommel and grinned at him in that irritating way he had when he thought he knew more than Merrick. “You want peace, so you are wedding a woman and fortifying a castle on the Welsh Marches?”

  Merrick grunted some response.

  Roger gave him a wry look. “Neither one will bring you peace.”

  “Lady Clio will be meek. I’ll most likely have to pull her away from her prayer beads to bed her. She has been in a convent for these past six years.”

  “Aye, two years longer than promised.”

  They rode for a few silent minutes.

  Roger turned to him. “What have you heard of her? How are her looks?”

  “I care nothing for the quality of her looks.” Merrick could feel his friend’s gaping stare.

  “You will if she looks like your horse or if she can fit in your armor.” Roger settled back in his saddle. “What if she needs a razor?”

  Merrick turned to Roger. “Then I’ll teach her to shave.”

  Roger laughed at that. “Seriously, what have you heard of her? Is she dark or fair?”

  He had no idea what his betrothed looked like. He knew only that she had become a ward of Henry, Edward’s father. “I never asked. She comes with Camrose and she’s a nobleman’s daughter. There is nothing else I need to know.”

  Roger whistled.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Merrick could see him shake his head.

  After some silence, Roger said, “Elizabeth has black hair. Dark as a starless night … As dark as polished onyx. As dark as the deepest ocean … As—”

  “Dark as my anger if you don’t cease that witless romantic prattle.”

  Roger just laughed again, an irritating habit that could annoy Merrick sometimes. Like now.

  “You might be surprised at what you’ll want from marriage, my friend.”

  “I know what I want. I want peace of mind and a quiet life.” Merrick glanced ahead of them at the hillside, where he spotted a clump of bright heather. He turned back to Roger. “Lady’s Clio’s hair could be purple for all I care.”

  “Interesting. Purple hair. I wonder what the Church would say of that.”

  “Why would the Church care about the color of my lady’s hair?”

  “The latest papal proclamation. I heard of little else when I was in Rome.”

  “No doubt you heard little else because you spent your days with the ladies.”

  “The nights only.”

  “Aye, your few days must have been spent fending off challenges from a line of cuckolded husbands.”

  “’Few days’?” Roger gave him a mock look. “Surely you have not forgotten how long I was gone?”

  “I did not forget.’Twas quiet, then. No one was pestering me with questions about my future wife.”

  “Ah, you missed me,” Roger said without a pause.

  “Continue with this papal proclamation or whatever it was.”

  “The Church proclaimed a new philosophy regarding a woman’s hair.”

  Merrick was mildly disgusted. The Church and its attempt to control the life of every man was something that had always confounded him. It seemed to him that those men of God could spend their time better praying for man’s soul rather than trying to control him. “Have they nothing better to do?”

  Roger shrugged. “Probably not.”

  “So what now? What bit of heavenly knowledge were they now privy to that we poor doomed souls need interpreted?”

  “It seems that fair hair is much prized in Italy, as it was in the East. So prized that ladies would spend whole days bleaching their hair in the sun. Some wore crown-less hats and rubbed lemons and urine in their hair. The Church proclaimed that such practice damaged the female brain and imperiled their souls.”

  Merrick could hear the laughter in his friend’s voice.

  “Lady Clio of the unknown hair color might well have an imperiled soul or, worse yet, a damaged brain from dipping her head in the privy.”

  Even Merrick had to laugh at that image.

  “Don’t you wonder who you are wedding, my friend?” Roger said as they rode into a clearing.

  Merrick glanced at him. “I’m wedding a woman. I assume she’ll behave as such.”

  But Roger wasn’t listening. He was staring off at nothing, lost in thought. “Clio,” he murmured slowly, then paused. He spoke her name as if he were tasting it.

  Merrick scowled at the horizon. He was not certain he liked it that Roger was thinking so hard about his betrothed.

  “I believe, Merrick, that Clio sounds like the name of a fair maid, one with pale hair.”

  Merrick said nothing.

  Roger looked at him. “Have you nothing to say?”

  “I don’t think about her hair.”

  “You might want to. She could be like the Egyptian Queen, with hair as black as sin. Or …” Roger paused, laughter in his voice. “… she might have a beard as black as sin. At night you could take turns using the razor on each other.”

  “Another jest and I’ll show you a new way to use my razor.”

  “Come now, my friend, I’m only glad to be home. Makes my mood light.”

  “Your mood is always light.”

  “Aye. ’Tis a good thing, too. Elsewise we’d be sent packing the moment you began to bark orders at everyone you meet.”

  “Some of us were born to be leaders.”

  Roger laughed loud and hard.

  “And others,” Merrick said pointedly, “were born to annoy and pester and seduce every female who happens to cross his path.”

  “Not every female, my friend. Only the ones with all their teeth.”

  “Which eliminates children and grandmothers.”

  “Great-grandmothers.” Roger grinned.

  Merrick laughed then. He liked this banter. It made him feel light of heart, too. He prodded his mount forward, down a path that grew steeper and was choked with ferns and gorse and gnarled oak trees. He stopped high atop a sloping hillside above a valley so green it almost hurt his eyes to look at it.

  Merrick half stood in his stirrups and looked out at the land before him for so long that the horizon blurred together, until all he could see were the images in his mind.

  This was nothing like the last time he’d come home. Years ago. A time when Merrick had been young. Though to him, he had not seemed
so young then. Looking back now, he knew he had been a green youth. The years had taught him exactly when it was that youth ended; it ended the moment you stopped yearning to be older.

  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.r />
  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 …”