“What happened?” Turstin asked.
“Donaghy said he wanted to make sure, since Hugh of Wexford didn’t keep to his oaths, that he would never hold a sword again. He brought in a chopping block and an axe and told some of his men to hold Hugh down so he could hack off his thumb.”
Raoul, suddenly sobered, paused to take a breath. Crickets sang in the grass as twilight descended; otherwise, not a sound could be heard.
Phillipa’s gaze was riveted on Hugh, who was studying the wine in his cup as he slowly twirled it.
“Hugh said he didn’t need to be held down—he’d betrayed his oath and ‘twas only right that he pay the price of that. He placed his hand on the block as calmly as you please and nodded to Donaghy to go ahead and lower the axe. Didn’t make a sound when the thumb came off, or even when they cauterized the wound with the red-hot tip of his own sword. Went a little pale, mind you.”
There came a murmur or two of nervous laughter, some soft exclamations. Phillipa, still watching Hugh, felt a pressure in her chest so heavy it almost brought tears to her eyes.
Raoul shook his head pensively. “‘Twas the damnedest thing I ever saw in all my years of fighting. Hugh always said you could cast pain away if you really wanted to, that you could—how did he put it?—rise above it.” Whacking Hugh on the back, he said, “I never believed it till I saw him lose that thumb.”
“What an inspiring tale,” Clare said softly, eyeing Hugh in a way that made Phillipa want to douse her in wine.
“We took Dublin and were released,” Raoul said, “and that’s the last I saw of Hugh. ‘Twas two years ago. What have you been doing since then, my friend?”
Hugh smiled as if it were an effort, which it undoubtedly was. “Keeping a close guard on my other body parts.”
Marguerite chuckled throatily. “Perhaps some of us could help you with that.”
Over a smattering of snickers, Hugh said, “I shall bear that in mind.”
“So, Sir Hugh,” began Turstin as the servants brought out the next course—trenchers of crustless white bread heaped with mussel stew. “What brings you to Castle Halthorpe this fine evening?”
What, indeed, Phillipa wondered. Had he come just to check up on her meager progress, or was there another reason? A trencher of stew was placed in front of her. She pushed it away, too preoccupied by Hugh’s presence here to eat.
“I’ve been visiting my sister,” Hugh replied, refusing the trencher that a wench tried to set in front of him. “But after a fortnight without my lady wife, I found that I missed her company.”
“How very touching,” Clare said smoothly.
Aldous rested a hand on Phillipa’s leg. She lifted it off.
Raoul’s look of anticipation as he was served a trencher of stew turned forlorn when Isabelle had it taken away, whispering, “Onions and leeks...you know what they do to you.”
Marguerite smiled at Hugh as she speared a mussel on the tip of her gold-handled eating knife, a diabolical little glint in her eyes. “Did you come here because you were worried that your bookish little wife might succumb to...temptations of the flesh, surrounded by reprobates like us?”
“Nay, I’m not much prone to jealousy.” Hugh averted his gaze the way he always did when he lied. Interesting... With a careless shrug, he said, “In truth, ‘twas simple restlessness that brought me here more than anything else.”
“You’re restless?” Marguerite brought the mussel to her mouth and touched the tip of her pointed tongue to it. “Methinks you’ve come to the right place. And I must say it’s fortuitous that you’re not the jealous type, because we tend to share rather freely at Halthorpe.” She glanced at Aldous and Phillipa as she slid the mussel between her lips, seeming to swallow it whole. “In fact, one night last week, while the good deacon here was entertaining me in his bedchamber, who should walk in—without knocking, mind you—but Lady By-blow herself, looking like a Venice courtesan and smelling like the perfume district in Paris. If I told you what she was wearing—or rather, not wearing...”
Jesu! Phillipa’s gaze shot to Hugh. He abruptly looked away, his jaw clenching.
“Mother of God,” Aldous muttered under his breath, lifting his cup to drain it.
“‘Twas obvious why she was there,” Marguerite continued implacably. “But I couldn’t very well just get up walk away after I’d gotten Aldous all trussed up like a roasted swan.”
Guffaws burst forth from the listeners, except for Aldous, who choked on his wine, Father Nicolas, who muttered disapprovingly and crossed himself, and the clearly mystified Orlando. Edmee, serving the table next to theirs, looked toward Phillipa in horrified puzzlement.
Phillipa closed her eyes briefly. Just help me to get through this...
As the hilarity was subsiding, Turstin said, “From the blackness of your expression, Sir Hugh, one might almost think you were subject to jealousy.”
“One would be wrong,” he said tightly. “If I seem out of sorts, ‘tis simply because I’m fatigued from my journey.”
“‘Tis a precept of l’amour courtois,” said the troubadour as he tore off a bit of his trencher to dip in the stew, “that true love is impossible without jealousy. What think you of this theory, Sir Hugh?”
Clare and Marguerite awaited Hugh’s answer with predatory smiles. He’d just maintained that Aldous’s having presumably bedded his wife didn’t make him jealous. If he were to defend the principles of courtly love just to avoid conflict, it would be tantamount to admitting that he felt no love for her.
“To be perfectly honest,” he said, “I’m not really very keen on l’amour courtois. This whole notion of a spiritual dimension to love strikes me as wishful thinking, at best. The fiction of romantic love is naught but the same fleshly hunger even the dumbest beast feels.”
“Mm...” Marguerite purred, shivering delicately. “Fleshly hunger...”
So, thought Phillipa. Hugh had opted for the truth, but the outcome was the same, a public admission that he felt nothing for her—aside, perhaps, for a measure of animal lust. But in the wake of their rapturous lovemaking, Phillipa knew that her own hunger for Hugh was as much of the spirit as of the flesh.
Turstin chuckled. “So you’re immune to love regardless of whether it can exist without jealousy.”
“That must be how you managed to escape its civilizing influence,” Clare observed as she licked the broth from the stew off her fingertips.
“You realize,” Turstin said around a mouthful of broth-soaked bread, “that l’amour courtois isn’t simply an idle fancy dreamed up by the ladies of the Poitiers court. ‘Twas derived from the romantic writings of a man named Ovid, who was a great Roman poet from the first century before the birth of—”
“I know who Ovid was,” Hugh said evenly. “Is it his Ars Amatoria you’re referring to, or the Remedia Amoris?”
Phillipa gaped at Hugh, along with Turstin.
“Er...the Ars Amatoria,” said Turstin, regarding Hugh with seemingly newfound esteem.
“Ah, yes.” Hugh nodded as he raised his cup. “His treatise on the art of loving. Have you read it?”
“Of course,” Turstin said irately, adding a bit more sheepishly, “in part.”
“A more comprehensive reading,” Hugh said, “would reveal that the whole thing is an elaborate jest, meant to ridicule illicit love affairs by setting forth the rules of seduction in a tone of the utmost gravity. But the gravity is all pretense, as are the rules. ‘Twas meant to be funny, for pity’s sake. Ovid would howl with laughter if he knew it had been adopted as the basis of a whole new philosophy of romance.”
In the silence that followed this impromptu dissertation, Phillipa felt her face heat slowly from within. Good Lord, all this time she’d assumed he couldn’t even read...
“You must excuse my surprise at your scholarship,” said Turstin. “‘Twas my understanding that knights are trained in the arts of war and little else.”
“That’s true for the most part,” Hugh rep
lied, “but my sire felt that the consummate knight’s mind should be as finely honed as his sword. From when I was four till I was dubbed at eighteen, he hired a series of learned clerics from Paris and Oxford to teach me at night after my military training was done.”
“At night?” Raoul asked.
Hugh nodded. “Till the chapel bell rang matins.”
“Matins.” Raoul shook his head in disbelief. “And you were up before dawn for your training, if your master at arms was anything like the rest of them. That doesn’t allow a great deal of time for sleep.”
Aldous, evidently recovered from Marguerite’s ribald little anecdote, snorted as he picked among the mussels on his trencher with his eating knife. “From what I know of William of Wexford, I’m surprised he allowed any.”
“William of Wexford?” Clare sat forward abruptly, showing more animation than Phillipa had ever seen her display. “You’re William of Wexford’s son?”
“I am.”
She smiled almost softly. “Lord William is a remarkable man. If it was his intent to mold you in his own image, you couldn’t have had a better exemplar. No wonder you’re so—” her tone turned coquettish “—exceptional, in so many ways.”
“Not so exceptional,” Marguerite ventured, “that a woman’s influence might not do you some good. I’m familiar with Ovid, too. That, and my complete moral dissolution are what came of a grueling convent education. I can’t argue with your interpretation of the Ars Amatoria, but I can tell you that in Ovid’s romantic vision, as in that of most men, ‘tis the man who schemes and seduces, and the woman who submits.”
It rankled Phillipa, for some reason, to discover that the loathsome, wanton Marguerite du Roche was not only well-read, but articulate about what she knew.
“In the world of l’amour courtois,” Marguerite continued, “woman is more than merely a vessel for a man’s lust—or, as the Church would have it, the Devil’s handmaiden.” She smirked in the direction of Father Nicolas, who was known for his low opinion of the fair sex. “At Poitiers, men have been lured away from their hunting and whoring and taught to embrace a more refined and elegant and, yes, feminine form of society. A better form, where women are revered, adulated.”
“And presumably obeyed,” Hugh said.
Marguerite smiled a secret sort of smile and lifted her shoulders. “Obedience is a natural consequence of reverence.”
“Can’t there be a middle ground,” Hugh asked, “with both parties equal—at least in matters of the heart?”
“Matters of the heart?” Turstin chortled. “You can’t mean ‘the fiction of romantic love.’” There was some appreciative laughter.
“Matters of the flesh, then,” Hugh amended. “Surely men and women can be on an equal footing in bed.”
“Someone must take the whip hand.” Marguerite stabbed another mussel. “Why not the woman?”
Aldous knocked over his cup, soaking his trencher with wine and spilling it in a crimson flood across the table. “Sorry...sorry,” he muttered, dabbing at it with his napkin. In a sudden outburst, he roared at the closest maidservant, who happened to be Edmee, “What are you waiting for? Come over here and clean up this bloody mess!”
Edmee scurried to do as she was told. Phillipa directed a sympathetic look at her; she managed a tentative smile.
“I still think Ovid had a great deal to say that’s of worth,” said Turstin. “Abbé Bernard and Peter Abelard both quoted from the Ars Amatoria in their teachings.”
“Abelard was a brilliant man,” Hugh said, “but he was just a man. He admitted himself in his Historica Calamitatum that he’d originally set out simply to seduce Hèloïse, employing guile and subterfuge of the type Ovid had described. This leads me to think his reading of the Ars Amatoria might have lacked the academic detachment required for a truly critical analysis. And as for Bernard...”
Groaning inwardly, Phillipa closed her eyes again, remembering her self-important little lecture in the orchard of Eastingham that evening... I don’t suppose you’ve heard of a woman named Hèloïse. She became notorious some fifty years ago in Paris for her love affair with a great philosopher and teacher named Peter Abelard...
Phillipa had been trying to explain her interest in courtly love; Hugh must have thought her utterly puerile—and not just because she had assumed complete ignorance on his part. For Phillipa knew now that romantic love as it was envisioned at Poitiers—and Halthorpe—had nothing in common with the intense and abiding passion shared by Abelard and Hèloïse.
She had wanted to understand that all-consuming passion. Now, at last, she did understand it, because, God help her, she felt it herself—for Hugh.
But there was a difference. Abelard had loved Hèloïse back. The ardor that had burned in the great woman’s heart was reciprocated in full measure, yet still it had destroyed her. How much more damage could Phillipa’s love for Hugh unleash, given that his interest in her didn’t surpass the realm of “fleshly hunger?” The lovemaking that had so transported her had been a mere diversion for him; as heartbreakingly tender and passionate as he’d been, she was, in the final analysis, just another in a series of women who had come apart in the arms of Hugh of Wexford.
The problem did not exist, Uncle Lotulf used to say, that could not be dissected and dealt with, if only one analyzed it logically without surrendering to murky emotion. Phillipa’s problem was that her love for Hugh, if she indulged it, could tear her apart. The logical solution: Don’t indulge it. Fight it. Sweep it aside.
But how to lessen the pain, how to make it bearable? By remembering, of course, that the object of her ardor did not care for her as she cared for him. Hugh of Wexford was a man with some fine qualities, or else she would not have lost her heart to him as she had, but he was also a man who had passed her off to another man as one would pass off a choice horse or hunting dog.
That he had been able to do that, even at Sir Richard’s behest, stung every time she thought about it. Whether it was easy or hard for him mattered not; he could have changed his mind, asked her not to go, but he didn’t. She should savor the pain that had caused her, nourish it within her until it drove out her ruinous love for him.
And until her unruly feelings diminished, she must keep them to herself. Sharing them with a man who didn’t return them would only worsen the pain by coupling it with humiliation.
Let him think you are sleeping with Aldous, and that it matters naught to you, or he’ll know how much you care.
What if he wanted to make love again? Much as the admission shamed her, she ached to feel his arms around her once more, to yield to the sweet invasion of her body by his, to experience that shuddering ecstasy she’d never even known existed. But if her intent was to steal her heart back from him, should she continue to give him her body? Could she, without falling even more deeply under his spell?
“Is something wrong?”
She opened her eyes to find Aldous regarding her with an expression of unctuous sincerity.
“Nay, nothing, I’m just...nothing’s wrong.”
Leaning in close, Aldous said, “It’s infuriating to have that bastard show up uninvited like this, and just when I thought...perhaps you were ready to forgive me and...”
“I’d planned on coming to you tonight,” she said, hoping she sounded convincing.
“Did you? Jesu, this is driving me mad! Come to me anyway.”
“I can’t, Aldous. Not while he’s sharing my bed.”
“He doesn’t care, he said so himself.”
From the corner of her eye, she saw Hugh watching them over the rim of his cup, looking as if he cared very much, indeed. But by what right did he feel possessive of her, after handing her over to Aldous?
“I still can’t do it. I’m sorry.”
“Do you think you could talk him into going back to his sister’s house?”
“I’ll try,” she lied.
“Try hard, my love. Remember, you’re the one—the only one.”
; When he reached for her hand, she let him take it.
Chapter 15
Hugh gritted his teeth when he noticed Lady Clare strolling toward him out of the darkness. He shouldn’t have let himself get so sotted; enacting his role in this strange little drama was challenging enough sober.
As the final courses of supper were being served—to the others, for Hugh had no stomach for food tonight—Halthorpe’s villeins had built an enormous Midsummer’s Eve bonfire in the middle of the outer bailey. Breaking out reed flutes and cowbells, they had danced around it in holiday celebration as Lady Clare’s guests, including Phillipa and Aldous, gathered to clap and sing—except for Hugh, who sat by himself at the table, watching from a distance as he emptied a jug of wine and started in on another.
A while ago, the music had taken on a more measured, haunting cadence, and Marguerite du Roche had stepped into the circle of onlookers, moving in a slow, sinuous, overtly seductive manner that had prompted the few remaining villeins to fall away. She had been performing this trancelike dance since. She swivelled her hips, caressed her breasts, whipped her hair like a fiery banner. In a trailing silken gown the color of fresh rust, with flames roaring behind her, her slit-eyed gaze lighting on one man after another, she might have been a succubus from the netherworld out to seduce their very souls.
“Marguerite’s like that in the bedchamber, as well,” Clare observed as she sat next to Hugh on the bench, her keys rattling, her right side snugged up against him although she was facing the other way; a kestrel now clung to her gloved left fist. “Completely loses herself in sensual abandonment.”
Hugh did not bother asking her how she knew this.
Leaning back against the table, her arms outstretched on it, Clare smiled at him the way whores did, the sexual promise crudely obvious. She was one of those women who strikes you as dramatically beautiful until you get close and realize that the hair is a bit too flatly black, the skin too marble-white—save for a bright pink smudge on each cheek. Phillipa, who’d been born with the coloring Clare emulated through artifice, had skin as translucent as oiled parchment, revealing the occasional little blue vein beneath; Hugh loved making her blush and watching hot color bloom within her cheeks.
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