by Faris, Fiona
“Shush!”
Joan’s sharp warning hiss woke Margaret from her reverie. She looked up enquiringly.
“I hear movement over in the Park. Horses. Men.”
The women retreated further into the cover of the trees, and parting the branches, peered like curious kittens back across the river.
“There!” Joan whispered, pointing to the promontory above the Boat Pool.
Six men emerged from the trees and strode out onto the flat of the promontory: two knights, their squires, and a pair of pages, Margaret judged by their garb.
“Who are they?” Joan asked in a low voice, shading her eyes against the glare off the water.
“I have no idea,” Margaret murmured, her eyes fixed on the dark-haired knight, who was clearly the leader of the band.
The men were laughing and joking. Their surcoats were grimed with dust and leaves, and their boots were splattered with mud. It looked like they had traveled a long way and were clearly relieved to be taking some respite from their journey. They were in high spirits.
“The water looks cold,” the dark-haired knight said to his sandy-headed companion.
“Refreshing,” the second knight replied.
“Bracing,” the first countered.
The two squires grinned around the edge of their superiors’ intimacy.
“There is only one way to settle this, Sir Patrick,” the dark-haired knight suggested.
“And how is that, Sir Gilbert?” Patrick replied.
“We must toss in a page to gauge the temperature.”
The two knights spun around and laid hold of the slower of the two pages. They wrestled him easily to the ground. Gilbert gripped the poor lad by the shoulders, while Patrick had the ankles, and they carried him squirming and squealing to the lip of the promontory.
“One!” Gilbert shouted as they swung the lad forward.
“Two!” Patrick continued on the second swing.
“And… three!” they both bellowed, as the page flew through the air, his arms and legs waving wildly, his shrill scream filling the air, before he crashed into the pool with an enormous splash and surfaced with a plume of water spurting from his lips.
“Report, Wart?” Gilbert commanded.
“The water is… lovely, sire!” The boy spluttered. “But very wet!”
The knights and squires roared with laughter; the other page, judging he was safe now, edged back onto the promontory with a smirk on his face.
“Then hold forward, men!” Gilbert cried out and started to shed his boots and clothes.
“My goodness!” Margaret gasped. “They are undressing.”
Joan grinned, her eyes alight with excitement.
“So, they are,” she confirmed. “But do not worry, sister sweet; they will likely stop at their drawers – more is the pity!”
But they did not stop at their drawers. With a whoop, the men dropped and stepped out of their linen braies before running and leaping far out into the pool, sending long plumes of spray flying across the river towards the women.
“Oh dear!” Margaret breathed, holding her chest and shielding her eyes.
Butterflies, and lots of them, were beating frantically in her stomach. Her breath was coming in short, shallow draughts. She had dropped her hand, and her eyes were wide and gleaming in the shadow of the trees.
“Look!” Joan hissed in eager anticipation. “They are coming out to jump in again.”
Margaret dropped her horrified look to the sward immediately in front of her, placing her fingertips to her temples and making blinkers of her palms.
“I’d rather not… look.” She gulped, but she looked anyway.
Water streamed from Gilbert’s back and limbs as he hauled himself out of the pool and onto the bank. Without pausing, he sprang to his feet and scrambled up the bank and back out again onto the promontory rock.
The sight of the firm muscles of his finely shaped buttocks and thighs as he scrambled up the bank, and the merry dance of his penis and testicles as he padded out onto the table of the rock, flooded Margaret’s vision. She could not take her eyes off of the plump rounded tip of his flaccid cock as it nodded this way and that, like the heavy head of one of the fiery red asphodels her mother cultivated in the castle’s garden. She felt a warm tickle in her groin.
Patrick followed hot on Gilbert’s heels. His private parts were haloed by the same sandy hair that surmounted his close-cropped head. He was slimmer and less solid than Gilbert, but just as handsome as his dark-haired companion and just as impressive in his endowment.
Margaret heard Joan groan at her shoulder and looked around to find her staring slack-lipped and hungry-eyed at the two knights.
“Come!” Margaret whispered. “We should not be watching this.”
She placed a hand on her sister’s arm as if to draw her back into the trees, but Joan shook it off impatiently.
“They will spy us if we move,” she murmured huskily. “And, in any case, this is the best entertainment we have had at Neidpath for many a day.”
“Have you no shame?” Margaret scolded, but her voice sounded empty as her eyes were drawn once again to Gilbert as he clambered out of the pool for a second time.
Joan gave her sister a superior smile.
“Oh, come now,” she said. “You are enjoying this just as much as I am. Do not deny it!”
“I do deny it!” Margaret protested, though it did not sound convincing even to her own ears.
Joan snorted.
“Look at you!” she said. “You are shivering like a mare who smells the stallion. And no doubt your coney is pulsing like the mare’s does too.” She gazed back across the water. “I know mine is.”
“Joan Fraser!”
Margaret spun around and stared determinedly into the depths of the forest. Behind her, she could hear the shouts and splashes of the interlopers. Beside her, Joan’s breath came deep and heavy, with the occasional little catch and whimper. Margaret was a lady, she kept reminding herself, the future mistress of Oliver and Neidpath; she would behave like a lady, with as much dignity and decorum as she could muster and as the situation allowed. If her sister wanted to behave like a poxy whore, then let her.
At length, the men had now had enough of their capering in the water and lay down on the table of the promontory to dry in the sun. Margaret and Joan still dared not stir from their hiding place, lest the men hear them, especially now that the splash and clamor of their sport had subsided.
Margaret sat back down on a grassy hummock to await their departure. Joan stood on tiptoe and peered through the bushes.
While the squires and pages withdrew to the back of the rock to sort through and straighten the company’s hastily discarded clothes, the two knights lay flat on their backs and bathed in the sunshine.
They have fallen asleep, Margaret thought. We could be here for hours.
But suddenly, the sandy-haired one rose on his elbow and considered his companion with a look of perplexity on his brow.
“I meant to ask,” he said. “Where did you disappear to in the middle of the night? I stirred before cockcrow and had to rise to take a piss; your bed was empty.”
The dark-haired knight raised both his hands and made a frame of them in which to catch the sun.
“Yon serving wench, the buxom doxy with the bonnie brown hair,” he replied by way of explanation.
Patrick flopped back down on his back.
“Ah, you were wenching. I might have guessed. And was she worth rising for?”
Gilbert sniggered, placed his hand on the crook of his elbow, and made a lewd gesture with his fist and forearm.
“I had no difficulty ‘rising’ for her.” He laughed. “She was a winsome piece and no doubt. Breasts like firm autumn fruits fresh fallen from the tree and thighs as soft and creamy as milk still warm from the udder. The mere scent of her had my lance quivering.”
The page boys giggled and were cuffed by the squires for their trouble.
&n
bsp; “And did she hang her favor on your lance?” Patrick grinned, continuing the conceit.
“Aye, that she did.” Gilbert sighed contentedly at the memory. “That she did, with soft kisses and skillful fingers, before taking me as her mount and riding me across the field of the hayloft to her tilt, where we jousted for three strokes of the lance.”
“And did your great helm not frighten the lass?” Patrick asked, raising his own tightly clenched fist in imitation of a swollen cock-head.
“Perhaps,” Gilbert replied, pursing his lips as if he could not make up his mind on the matter. “But she was very accommodating.”
At this, even the squires burst out laughing.
By this time, Margaret had her fingers in her ears, and her eyes clamped tightly shut.
“Well,” Patrick concluded, “let us hope you have not left the poor lassie with child. I doubt the innkeeper would thole a bairn being dragged around his hostelry on the ends of her apron strings.”
“Let us just say,” Gilbert said cryptically, “that my seed was sown not in her ferny cleuch but in the sweet glen between her paps.”
Joan snorted and clamped her hand over her mouth.
“And what of you, Sir Patrick of the Ball-Headed Club?” Gilbert continued. “Where have you been swinging your morning star recently?”
“Oh, here and there,” Patrick replied evasively.
“Here, there, and everywhere, so I have heard,” Gilbert observed. “Did you really fuck Lady Beaumont, Countess of Buchan, when we were guests of the Comyns?”
Patrick looked sheepishly at his fingernails.
“I had little choice,” he admitted. “Widow Alice took rather a shine to me and probably would have fed me to her wolfhounds, had I refused her.”
“But she is but a lass yet,” Gilbert pointed out. “A little plain; but, still, it cannot have been too onerous a duty.”
“She grunted like a pig.” Patrick blanched at the memory,
“A prettily formed pig, to be fair,” Gilbert added. “Shapely haunches and generous dugs.”
“Aye, but with a snout and whiskers to match.”
Gilbert laughed uproariously and slapped his naked thigh.
“But surely it would have been dark in her chamber, man?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Patrick skelped Gilbert’s shoulder. “I had my eyes tight shut and was holding myself fast to the saddle like grim death.”
Joan tugged Margaret’s hand away from her ear.
“Did you hear that, Margaret?” She hissed excitedly. “The Countess of Buchan took her pleasure of him, and she’s a lady like yourself – an aristocrat, even.”
“I do not want to hear.” Margaret hissed back. “We should not be listening. It is rude.”
Joan looked her sister up and down with disdain.
“Listen to yourself!” She sneered. “Do you honestly think you are better than the Lady Beaumont? She could be a queen.”
Margaret just shook her head and covered her ears again. Joan turned back to the conversation on the rock across the river.
“I hear Sir Simon has two daughters,” Gilbert was saying.
“Poor bastard!” Patrick exclaimed.
“What have you heard of them?”
Sir Patrick considered it.
“They are said to be pretty – beautiful, even. Very tall and fair. As alike as twins, only there is something like two years between them. And, of course, whoever wins the hand of the fair Margaret will inherit Sir Simon’s estates – since he has no heir of his own. And those would be tasty morsels.”
Gilbert pondered this, nodding thoughtfully.
“But, by all accounts, the sisters are tasty morsels by themselves,” Patrick continued. “Tall and fair, as I said, young and very beddable. The elder, Margaret, is considered a spirited mare, outwardly pure and virginal, but beneath her demure surface runs deep and treacherous waters, a maiden who knows her mind and will stop at nothing to win what she desires, which is to be in due course lady of her father’s estates. The younger, Joan, by contrast, is a bit of a wildcat, all teeth and claws, who can match any page in a mêlée on the training field and would, it is reckoned, make a fiercesome bedmate.”
Joan turned, beaming, towards her sister. She looked like the cat that had gotten the cream and made clawing movements in the air between them, baring her teeth in a silent hiss and spit. She was much amused and approved of Patrick’s metaphor. Margaret huffed, finding the whole situation tedious.
At length, the men arose and began to dress. The squires and pages had already garbed and assisted the knights, as was their duty.
“Has anyone seen my braies?” Patrick asked, casting around the rock in search of them.
The squires and pages adopted a hang-dog look; their masters’ clothes and equipment were their responsibility, and it would be their fault if anything had been mislaid. They set to searching in earnest, but to no avail. The braies were nowhere to be found.
Gilbert eyed the vassals sternly, but Patrick just shrugged.
“They are probably halfway to Berwick by now,” he said with a rueful laugh, indicating the flow of the river. “I’ll just have to go without them.”
“Then let’s hope you do not go arse-over-tit in some lady’s presence, or they shall have a fine view of your knighthood,” Gilbert said grimly, then added in a low voice so that the others would not hear: “You are far too lenient with your underlings, Patrick. They require a firm hand, else they will seek to take liberties.”
“Christ! It is but a pair of braies, man, hardly a thing of worth,” Patrick whispered back.
“Ah, but it is the principle of the thing,” Gilbert insisted. “They should know their place and be reminded of it in the breach. A twist of a page’s ear would mind them of your authority.”
“It would cast me as a petty tyrant, not a knight. Pettiness is hardly a chivalric virtue.”
“Neither is weakness and laxity. If you do not show them the natural order of things, they shall start to forget themselves.”
Patrick picked up his plumed cap and pulled it over his head.
“I will show them in things that matter,” he insisted shortly, “and not over a pair of shitty braies.”
And with that, he strode off down the slope towards where they had tethered their horses.
Chapter Two
When the men had gone, Margaret and Joan scurried back along the path and up around the castle rock to enter Neidpath by the postern gate. Once inside the thick red sandstone walls, they hurried upstairs to their bedchamber in the solar and collapsed, flushed and perspiring, across their beds.
“What an adventure!” Joan gasped.
“What an ordeal,” Margaret contradicted. “I thought we would never get away. I don’t want to have to go through anything like that ever again.”
Joan pushed herself up on her elbows.
“Away!” she said. “It was a bonnie sight, two knights in all the glory of their fine manhood, entertaining us with their bawdy tales. And did you see the size of their shapely cocks? I thought the time flew by all too quickly. I could have gazed upon them all day.”
Margaret pushed herself up and scowled.
“You would, you shameless hussy. I don’t know which I found more humiliating: having to listen to such unseemly talk or watch you swoon over their every word and slobber over their nakedness.”
Joan threw herself back down on the bed and watched the scene unfold again on the chamber ceiling.
“Ah, but they were fine bodies, especially the sandy-haired one,” she crooned. “Not that your dark-haired one was lacking in any way,” she added quickly.
“He is not ‘my’ dark-haired one,” Margaret said haughtily. “I would not own such an ungallant as he. Bedding a serving wench, indeed!”
“Ach, Margaret,” Joan scolded. “Don’t lie to me. Your eyes were drinking in the sight of him like those of a parched man in a desert, all those well-hewn muscles and that gorgeous prick of his.
You caught him in an unguarded moment, that is all. I’m sure he’d be as gallant as you need him to be when gallantry is called for. We caught a rare glimpse of men as they are when they are not in the company of women, as they really are when the masque is dropped, in all their metaphorical as well as all their physical nakedness. Did it not excite you? Christ knows, it excites me.”