“Who’s the food for?” Thomas asked when she came out of the kitchen.
“Shh.” Joanna glanced toward the storeroom window, wondering if Graeham was watching her from within; he was hard to see from outside. “A friend,” she whispered. “I don’t want the serjant to know.”
Thomas frowned. At least, she thought he did; it was hard to tell, what with his disfigured face. “There’s a great deal you don’t want him to know, it seems,” he said softly. “I don’t like keeping secrets from friends, mistress. Especially when it’s another friend asking me to keep the secret. Secrets are naught but lies one is too cowardly to tell outright.”
Joanna nodded, touched despite Thomas’s gentle censure that he considered her a friend. “I know. I’m sorry. I won’t put you in this spot again.”
His one good eye took on a faraway look. When he spoke, his voice was low and raw. “Seven years ago, when the first few sores appeared on my face, they wrapped me in a shroud, read the burial service over me and pronounced me dead to the world. I was told I might never again enter a church or monastery, an inn or tavern or bakehouse, a shop, a mill, a home such as yours—anywhere healthy people might be about. I’m not to bathe in streams nor walk on narrow footpaths. I’m forbidden for the rest of my earthly existence to eat with others, take a child in my arms, make love to a woman.”
Joanna was speechless; Thomas had never discussed his plight with her, except to make light of it.
“That’s the worst of it,” he said. “Not being able to touch, or be touched. The rest...” He shrugged. “One learns to make do. But to be so...apart from others that you can’t reach out and take someone’s hand...” He shook his head. “Of course, even if someone did touch me, I wouldn’t feel it, the condition I’m in—but at least I’d know I was being touched. I never gave much thought to being close to people when I was healthy. I took it for granted. You may find this hard to believe, but there was a time when I didn’t lack for the company of women.”
“I don’t find that hard to believe at all,” she said.
“‘Twas the harp, I think—women were drawn to the music. Everywhere I played, ladies were eager to grant me their favors. I fell in love with one once, in Arundel. Her name was Bertrada. She wanted me to stay there and marry her.”
“What happened?”
“I was young and arrogant and foolish. Much as I loved her, I decided I wasn’t ready to settle down. I liked traveling about, playing my harp in grand castles and seducing beautiful women. So I pushed Bertrada away, using lies and secrets. It worked—I was a free man again. I missed her horribly, but I kept telling myself that someday, when I was ready to be tied down, I’d meet another woman, someone just as sweet and giving and quick-witted. Four years later, the first signs of my disease ap-peared. The service of the dead was read over me and I was told I could never touch a woman again—unless, of course, I was already married to her. But I’d seen to that, hadn’t I?”
“Oh, God, Thomas.”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Bertrada of Arundel, yearn for her, all throughout the day. At night I can’t get to sleep unless I imagine her arms around me, her head on my shoulder.” He chuckled grimly. “Who knows—if I’d stayed in Arundel and married her, I might never even have come down with this cursed affliction.”
“I am sorry, Thomas.”
“I didn’t tell you this to solicit your pity.”
“I know why you told me. It’s just that...my situation...it’s different. It’s complicated.”
He smiled, more or less. “It’s always complicated. That’s the kind of creatures we are.” Planting his staff in the dirt, he raised himself awkwardly to his feet. “I must be off. If I sit still too long, I’m afraid someone will decide to dig a hole and bury me with the trash.”
After bidding goodbye to Thomas, Joanna walked down the alley to Milk Street, through Rolf le Fever’s front gate and straight up to his bright red front door, hesitating only when she came face-to-face with the iron knocker—a rather lascivious-looking gargoyle with a long, curved tongue.
Looks like le Fever. That thought gave her the courage to knock on the door. A plump maidservant answered. “Good morrow, mistress.”
“Good morrow. I’m here to visit with Ada le Fever.”
The maid looked nonplussed. “Mistress Ada, she can’t receive visitors. She’s that ill.”
“I know she’s ill. I’d still like to—”
“Aethel, who is it?” called a man from within—Rolf le Fever.
Aethel closed her eyes briefly in a way that implied both resentment and fear. “‘Tis...a visitor for Mistress Ada, sire.”
Joanna heard footsteps pounding down the stairs, and then Rolf le Fever shoved Aethel aside and said, “You.”
Joanna raised her chin. “I’ve come to—”
“Tradesmen—and women—enter round back.”
“I’m not here as a—”
“But don’t bother coming round there,” he added with a sneer. “I told you, we have no use for your wares.”
He slammed the door shut. From inside came his footsteps on the stairs.
Raising her voice so it would carry through the thick oak door, Joanna called out, “I suppose I’ll just go and visit my friend John Huxley, then.”
The footsteps ceased at the mention of the alderman le Fever had cuckolded. Presently she heard them again, much slower, as they descended the staircase. The door swung open. The guildmaster scrutinized her with his queer crystalline eyes, as if he were trying to read her very thoughts. “I didn’t realize you and Alderman Huxley knew each other.”
“Aye, we’re old friends,” Joanna lied, both proud and ashamed of her newfound skill at fabrication. “We met when I served the baroness Fayette de Montfichet.” They did, but she’d been a child; he would hardly remember.
“You know,” le Fever said, “when I saw you at the Friday fair, in your finery, it occurred to me that perhaps you’d discovered there was more profit to be made on your back than bending over that embroidery frame of yours. Is it John Huxley who’s keeping you, or someone else?”
“I’m no man’s leman,” she said.
“Come now.” His strangely lucid gaze crawled over her, making her shiver. “A pretty wench like you, you must have men begging to slide their swords into that sweet little sheath.”
“When they do, I can generally find some convenient place to slide my sweet little dagger,” she reminded him.
“I should have let you cut me that day,” he said in a menacingly soft voice. “‘Twould have been worth losing my nose to watch you choke to death at the end of a rope.”
Joanna marshaled her features, unwilling to give him the pleasure of seeing how unnerved she was. “I’d like to see your wife now. Or, if she’s so indisposed that she can’t receive me, I’ll go pay a call on Master Huxley. We always have so much to talk about.” She smiled.
Le Fever’s already pale face lost a bit more of its color. Turning away, he said, “Go ahead up there. She’s damned poor company. You two ought to get along fine.”
* * *
When Joanna arrived home later that morning, she found Master Aldfrith in the storeroom, substituting a new, shorter splint for Graeham’s old one. Hugh was there, too, holding together the new splints—which came up only to Graeham’s knee—while Aldfrith wrapped them in linen.
The serjant was clad in his drawers and nothing else; the bandage around his ribs had been removed. Joanna hadn’t seen him in a state of undress since he came here over three weeks ago, and the sight unsettled her. His confinement and its attendant inactivity had in no way diminished his musculature. He had a soldier’s body still—powerfully proportioned, lethally hard.
Merely being in his presence made her feel starved for air. She tried not to look at him, lest she stare. The last thing she wanted was for Graeham Fox to find her ogling him.
“How does that feel, then?” Aldfrith asked as he tied off the linen bindings.<
br />
Graeham sat up and gingerly lowered his resplinted leg over the side of the bed. He stood with the help of his crutch and flexed his leg at the knee. “Stiff.”
“Your muscles have tightened up from disuse. You’ll be able to get about better with this half splint than with the old one, though. And then, in another month or so, perhaps it can come off altogether.”
“And you’ll be good as new and on your way to Oxfordshire,” Hugh said.
Graeham exchanged a look with Joanna. They hadn’t discussed what to reveal to Hugh about his purpose for being in London.
Joanna took the decision out of his hands. “Not Oxfordshire,” she said.
Hugh looked back and forth between them. “I beg your pardon?”
“I was never on my way to Oxfordshire.” Graeham lowered himself to the side of the bed. With a glance toward Aldfrith, packing up his supplies, he said, “I’ll explain later.”
“He’s healing nicely, mistress,” Aldfrith declared. “You’ll have him out of your hair in no time.”
“I’m glad he’s doing well.” From the corner of her eye, Joanna saw Graeham watching her in that penetrating way he had that made her shiver hotly. He’d seemed pensive since Robert’s visit yesterday. She wondered at first about how much he’d overheard, but on reflection she’d swept her worries from her mind. Surely if he’d figured out that she’d been keeping Prewitt’s death from him, he would have told her. No doubt he would have relished the opportunity to rub her nose in her own duplicity after the way she’d reproached him about his.
As Graeham was paying Aldfrith for his services, Joanna said to the surgeon, “I was by to see Ada le Fever...recently.”
“Were you now?” Aldfrith counted the coins under his breath. “You’re a friend of hers, then?”
“Aye,” she said. Hugh frowned in confusion; Graeham smiled.
The surgeon shook his head as he stowed the silver in his purse. “Poor woman’s been indisposed since Christmastide. Master Rolf called me in. Said she had a rheum in the head, which she did.”
“Are you sure it was just a rheum in the head?” Graeham asked.
Aldfrith shrugged. “She was sneezing and sniffling something fierce when I first looked in on her.”
“She’s not sneezing anymore,” Joanna observed.
“An excess of black bile is complicating things,” Aldfrith said, “but Master Rolf assures me it’s just a head cold.”
Graeham said, “Master Rolf assures you? You’re the surgeon.”
“I’ve no call to start questioning Master Rolf’s judgment. He lives with the woman.” To Graeham he said tersely, “I’ll be back in a month to take that splint off. Send for me if you have any problems in the meantime.”
After he left, Joanna said, “He wants le Fever to let his son-in-law into the Mercer’s Guild. That’s why he’s toadying up to him, I’ll wager. He’d say Ada le Fever was suffering from an excess of...of monkeys living in her head if it would keep him on le Fever’s good side.”
Graeham grinned. “Monkeys living in her head?”
Hugh shook his head in evident exasperation. “Will someone please tell me what you’re talking about?”
Joanna and Graeham filled Hugh in about his mission—or as much of it as Graeham was willing to disclose—and her visit to Ada le Fever on Saturday. She declined to mention this morning’s visit, not wanting Graeham to know that she intended to pay a call on Ada every day, bringing food she’d prepared with her own hands. Thinking of that bowl of broth, she’d beseeched Ada to eat and drink only what she brought to her from now on, forgoing anything from her own kitchen.
Despite what Joanna had told Graeham about le Fever’s having little reason to harm his wife, the fact remained that he was an unprincipled wretch. Who knew what he was capable of? She would bring Ada safe food and keep an eye on things in the le Fever household, but to her own ends, not Graeham Fox’s. She cared about Ada’s welfare—how could she not?—but she’d be damned if she’d serve as Graeham’s spy after the way he’d made her his unwilling pawn.
Hugh was unamused by Graeham’s deception, but being Hugh, he let it pass when it became clear that Joanna had put the matter behind her. Her brother was never one to hold a grudge.
“I didn’t know what to think when I got here this morning and saw that the shop wasn’t open yet,” Hugh said.
“I...went marketing,” Joanna said, dismayed that her net of lies was growing to encompass Hugh, as well.
“Yes?” Hugh nodded toward her empty basket. “Didn’t find what you went out for, I take it.”
Graeham was looking at her, his gaze too inquisitive, too discerning.
“Nay,” she said, backing out into the salle. “If you’ll excuse me, I...I have to open the shop now.”
Chapter 17
“What’cha doin’?”
Graeham looked up from reading the Mystère d’Adam by the dying afternoon light to find the small, sooty face of another Adam peering in through the bars on the alley window. The boy materialized every few days for a bit of idle conversation, always vanishing in a heartbeat.
“I’m reading,” Graeham said.
“You can read?”
“Aye.”
“You a cleric?”
“I was educated to be one, but I became a soldier instead.”
“Wish I could read.”
“You’re young. You can still learn.”
Adam snorted. “Who’d teach me how to read?”
That was a good question. “How do you spend your days, Adam?”
The boy shrugged. “Roamin’ around here and there. I do odd jobs sometimes, for money—mending clothes, weeding folks’ gardens...”
“Mending? You can sew?”
Spots of pink appeared beneath the filth on Adam’s face. “Boys can sew, too.”
“I suppose.” But not many of them did.
“That lady,” Adam said, inclining his head toward the front of the house, where Joanna was waiting on a customer. “Is she your wife?”
“Nay.”
“Sweetheart?”
Graeham sighed. “Nay.”
“Do you have a sweetheart?”
“Nay.” He’d never even met Phillipa, so she could hardly qualify as a sweetheart.
Adam squinted at him. “‘Tisn’t boys you fancy, is it?”
“What?”
“There are men who like boys,” Adam confided in a tone that suggested Graeham might find this revelation hard to believe.
“Yes, I know,” Graeham said, “but I assure you, I’m not one of them.”
“Good,” the boy said without a trace of humor. “I didn’t think you were. There aren’t really many of that sort. Most of the...the bad men...they go after girls.”
“So it would seem.”
“If that lady isn’t your wife or your sweetheart, why are you living here?”
It was a good question, given Graeham’s lack of progress in advancing his mission. A week had passed since Joanna’s visit to Ada le Fever, and although he’d broached the subject several more times, he’d had no luck convincing her to go back. And although her attitude toward him had thawed at bit since their quarrel Saturday over his “using” her, they had yet to regain the rapport he’d felt previously. And he missed it.
Most days he didn’t even see her till midmorning, when she came back from her daily marketing trip—curiously empty-handed more often than not. She’d open up the shop then, and for the rest of the day they would scarcely interact at all, save for two cursory meals featuring little in the way of conversation.
He shouldn’t pine so for her company, shouldn’t strain for glimpses of her, shouldn’t listen for the squeak of her bedropes when she retired at night. She was betrothed by now, or would be soon enough. So was he.
This was lunacy.
“Does she, do you think?” the boy was saying.
“What?”
“Does she have any odd jobs for me?” he said. “The shop la
dy.”
“Her name is Joanna Chapman,” Graeham said. “And I doubt it.” A model of frugality, Joanna did everything herself.
“Do you, then?” Adam asked. “I’m fresh out of silver.”
“That depends,” Graeham said. “What can you do? Besides sew and garden—I’ve no use for those skills.”
“I can deliver messages, fetch water from the river, mind the cook pot, mind children, keep a fire going, go marketing, feed pigs and chickens...”
“Go marketing?”
“Aye. Do you need someone to market for you?”
Graeham closed the book and set it on the chest. “Nay. Mistress Joanna does it in the mornings. That is, I think she does. It’s what she says she does.”
Adam looked at him as if he were daft.
“I wonder...” Graeham began. “Do you think you could...follow someone?”
“Follow?”
“Trail behind them without being seen. Take note of where they go and what they do and report back to me.”
“Sure, I suppose.” Shrewdly Adam added, “‘Twould cost you, though.”
Smiling, Graeham reached for his crutch and rose from the cot, a maneuver that had become much easier since his splint was shortened last week. He dug four pennies out of his purse, hanging on a peg, and handed them to Adam. “Will that do?”
“I should say so!” the boy exclaimed, gaping at the coins. “Who is it you want me to follow then?”
With a quick glance toward the shopfront—Joanna was still dealing with that customer—Graeham said, “Mistress Joanna.”
The boy cocked his head as if he hadn’t heard right.
“I want you to do it tomorrow morning.” Graeham sat on the edge of the cot. “She leaves here by the back door very early and walks up to Milk Street. She comes back around terce. I want you to stay behind her, keeping in the shadows so she doesn’t see you, and find out where she goes. Don’t lose sight of her. Then come back and tell me where she’s been. Think you can do that?”
“Nothin’ to it.” Adam slipped the coins into a little pouch tied around his waist.
Lords of Conquest Boxed Set Page 21
