Others were less comfortable. Standing apart from the crush of guards and clerics, under a thin arrow slit, the girl scowled, then schooled her face into placidity. Hugh had not noticed her move to there but he marked how she looked at the stranger nicknamed Mercury and then at a sallow-skinned, balding man who had joined her by the donjon wall.
A relative surely, he surmised, thinking them both small and skinny. He wanted to dismiss the pair of them, especially the girl, who was already tainted as part of the bishop’s entourage. She had made the fellow rose water, no less! Why should he care if she was on edge, all color stripped from her face and her eyes wide and bright with fear? It was no concern of his if her father or uncle had fetched up in this prison: David should be his sole interest.
David spoke now. “Mercury asks if Joanna may stay to soothe his spirits with her company.”
Around him, Hugh noticed many quickly suppressed smiles but the girl—Joanna—was talking, saying something in Latin that had David nodding and the bishop frowning. As the bishop drew in breath to doubtless refuse whatever urgent plea Joanna had made, Hugh stalked across to his brother and clasped him firmly by the shoulders.
“Not so well met, in very truth, eh, David?” he asked softly, startled and alarmed by how thin his brother was. He could feel all his ribs. Turning swiftly before Bishop Thomas could frame a protest, he said, “Name your ransom.”
Mercury said something—a witty pleasantry, perhaps, topped off by an elegant wave of a finger. Staring at the man more closely than before, Hugh could see no mark anywhere on Mercury’s narrow face or wiry body and decided that the man would be much improved by some. “My lord bishop?” he prompted, before the Frenchman could interrupt afresh.
“What price a man’s soul, Hugh de Manhill?” Bishop Thomas answered, pointing at him with a gloved, ring-studded hand. “There are many who speak against the Knights Templar. Word has reached me that your brother has committed many deadly sins of witchcraft and blasphemy.”
Hugh laughed. “My brother is the most holy man I have ever known.”
“Then your knowledge is sadly lacking,” snapped the bishop, “and you are either a fool or a blasphemer yourself. Who else would dare to lay hands upon my own people in my own city?”
You would not have granted me an audience without such persuasion, Hugh thought, but this was too obvious to speak. “How may I make amends for David?”
“Bring me the relics he has stolen! The treasure he has kept from me!”
Hugh had no idea what the bishop was talking about. Keeping his face very still, he tried a second time. “I have gold in abundance.”
“And have you also the blood of Saint George? The swaddling cloths of our lord Jesus Christ?” Thomas looked directly at the girl Joanna: a hot and at the same time reptilian glance. “Have you the secret book of the Jews?”
Hugh narrowed his eyes. “On what specific charge do you hold my brother?”
Bishop Thomas flicked a long sleeve at one of the milling dogs, catching the beast across its nose. “Such things as an honest Christian would dread to whisper. He knows.”
“Hugh, enough,” said David, but Hugh ignored him. David was his elder by scarce two years and they were equal in arms.
“Why do you claim he has such relics?” he persisted, just as Mercury bounced to his feet with another beaming smile and another mellifluous, incomprehensible inquiry.
“The relics. How?” Hugh asked again.
At his brusque demand, the bishop hissed like a disturbed adder and drew back in a swirl of brilliant silk. “It is not for you to interrogate me!” In his sudden fury, his pallid face became even more corpse-like. “Take him!”
But he spoke to air. Hugh had already anticipated the order and reacted. In an explosive series of movements he barged through the guards, hurtled to the eastern wall, and grabbed the girl. Whistling to the barking dogs, he slid a dagger from his boot with the speed of a snake’s tongue and flicked it to and fro before the bishop’s seething face.
“God’s blood, he has a killing knife!” shouted one man.
“’Gainst all courtesy and honor!” wailed a priest, crossing himself over and over.
“The hounds blocked us, my lord—”
“Can no one silence those blessed dogs?” roared Thomas, glowering at Hugh as if he wanted to cast him into the lowest reaches of hell.
Hugh whistled and at once the yammering dogs fell silent, turning trusting faces to him. Other faces, blank with shock, also stared.
“I am leaving now,” he said, ignoring David’s murmured disapproval and hauling Joanna off with him as if she were a squirming puppy. “I shall return tomorrow, with my brother’s weight in gold and, possibly, this girl. Then we negotiate.”
Still brandishing the killing knife and with his back always to the wall, Hugh moved to the door. No one spoke as he motioned the two guards outside the chamber to step within it—although they were two against one, neither was keen to tackle him, even with an armful of girl. No one seemed to breathe as he motioned to the dogs and set them at point in the doorway.
He had hauled Joanna, panting and furiously protesting, halfway down the stairs before a new tumult erupted above their heads, shouts and bodies colliding and pounding feet while Thomas’s voice was raised in loud complaint.
“Get those dogs away! Get after him! Away!”
Carried off under Hugh Manhill’s brawny arm like a parcel of clothes, Joanna struggled fiercely and silently. There was no point in appealing to the donjon guards, who rightly feared this brigand, but who also distrusted her, her father, and their alchemy.
But it was humiliating to be so trapped and helpless! Wasting no breath or energy on pleas, she kicked back at her kidnapper, blow after blow on his shins that made her heels ache. Speeding down the staircase at a dizzying clip that was turning her sick, she coiled about in his brazen, hairy arm, trying to break free of his rib-smashing embrace.
Sensing his head lowering toward her, she tossed back her own, seeking to crush his nose. He avoided her attack easily and blew a squelching kiss against the back of her neck.
“No grief to me, Joanna, if I drop you on these steps, but your backside will smart.”
“Release me!”
“No.”
His husky voice close to her ear vibrated up and down her spine, making her even more aware of his greater power and strength. Skimming above the stones, flailing out uselessly with her arms as she scrabbled against the tight spiral stair for any purchase, Joanna was tempted for an instant to give in, to twist and rest her aching, bouncing head against his shoulder.
Appalled at her own useless girlishness, Joanna kicked out harder. Manhill merely grunted, stopped on top of the trapdoor on the ground floor, dropped her, and then tossed her over his shoulder. He was striding even faster now, and the half-light of the donjon gave way to sudden, brilliant sunlight.
“You shall not take me!” Joanna bawled, pummeling his back with her fists as her stomach hurt from being squashed against his shoulder blade and her chin smacked painfully against his spine. There were surely other men in the yard, men whose wives and children she knew, whom she had helped in the past. Surely they would not leave her lolling over this man’s back!
“Help mmmm—”
Her cry was stifled as Manhill swept her off his shoulder into his arms, bearing her into a shadowed corner beneath some scaffolding that had not yet been taken down from the base of the donjon. There, amidst benches, and planks of wood, workmen’s tools, and a ripped and dusty old cloak, he set her down, tipped back her head, and engulfed her mouth with a massive hand.
“You will listen!” he said urgently.
She tried to knee him in the groin. He shifted too quickly and took the blow on his thigh, without any obvious discomfort.
“Now you will listen,” he growled, giving her a teeth-rattling shake. “I have no interest in harming you.”
“As say all kidnappers!” Joanna rasped out behind his
hand.
He smiled at that, a brief softening of his lean, tanned face. “If I take my hand away, will you scream? Yes, I think you will,” he went on, answering his own question. “A bucking little mare like you will always rattle the rafters with your complaint. So I will leave you here, Joanna, to cry for your loathsome lord, who even now has sent his men to the main gate when I am leaving by the postern. His guards are slack: too much wine and food and easy duty.”
Speaking, he manacled her wrists in his other hand, released his numbing grip on her jaw, and thrust a woolen glove past her gasping lips. She gagged afresh and he pushed her down onto her knees.
“Until tomorrow.”
He left her amidst the scaffolding, sprinting for the postern gate while she clawed the glove from her mouth. She tried to yell but her coughing, muted alarm was lost in the greater whirl of rushing bodies as Bishop Thomas’s men pounded futilely after their quarry and Hugh Manhill escaped.
Chapter 2
Losing the bishop’s men in the narrow, crowded streets of West Sarum was nothing, the work of moments, but afterward Hugh felt guilty. He wished he had not gagged Joanna with his glove, nor handled her so roughly. She was half his weight, an unarmed, untrained girl.
Very brave, man, to take on such an enemy. Why not terrorize the little dogs, too?
David would be ashamed of him, and he would be right. He should not have done it. He ought not to have pushed that old woolly mitten into her mouth. A mouth made for talk and laughter and kisses—
“He let you go,” said Bishop Thomas. He and a guard Joanna did not know, a new one, had climbed the donjon steps with her to her chamber in the tower. Between scratching his stubble and acne, the skinny young guard kept peering at her star charts and distillation vessels and crossing himself. Joanna longed to tell him to stop, but she dared say nothing. The bishop was already in a foul mood.
“He released you,” Thomas repeated. He stripped off a glove and stirred a finger in the cooled rose water, his neat face as impassive as on those rare times when he read scripture. “Why should he do that?”
Joanna felt a rush of inner heat singe her cheeks and ears. To admit the likely truth—that she was too much trouble and too worthless for a man like Manhill to drag off with him—was too mortifying and too revealing.
“No, my lord. I escaped him,” she lied, her voice firm enough to disguise her inward trembling. Accustomed to respect from alchemists and scholars, she was still shocked by the ease with which she had been taken by Manhill. Truly in matters of brute strength, it was a man’s world. “When your guards came, he fled,” she added. “And he is returning tomorrow.”
“So he claims. With gold.” Bishop Thomas flicked one of her glass flasks, making it ring. “Gold. Which I do not see here.”
“On your instruction, I am working on other elixirs, my lord,” Joanna swiftly reminded him. “I have great hopes for several, and my father agrees. If he could rejoin me, my work here would be done in twice the time.”
The bishop smiled and shook his head. “Solomon has his uses where he is.”
Joanna bit her lip to stop herself from crying out, What uses in prison? For that was where her father was: in the donjon, with David Manhill and the mysterious Mercury, whom she herself had named for his quicksilver charm and dazzling smile. “Should I see Mercury again today? If I can help his headaches, he may recover his memory more quickly.”
Thomas gave a snort of laughter. “And you see your father also, and that blasphemer Manhill. What do you find to talk about with him? I know you do so. The guards tell me you always have your heads together.”
“Of learning from the Arabs,” Joanna said, and left it at that. She was too seasoned in dealing with the bishop to question his assessment of David, whom in truth she admired and who was easy to talk to. Trying to help him, she did venture, “Tomorrow, though, if his unruly brother brings a fine ransom—”
“It will make no difference. That Templar is mine and he has things of mine, things I want.”
“But what if it is as David claims? What if he has nothing from Outremer but a few more battle scars? Would it not be a mercy, or prudent, to release him? The Templars are a mighty order.”
Bishop Thomas slammed both hands on her workbench, causing the glasses to ring out afresh in shrill protest. “Manhill has my relics! He carried them back from the Holy Land, relics and treasure, and he has stubbornly hidden them! You should look to your own concerns, girl, before you take his side!” A leer glinted across the man’s pallid face like a flash of lightning. “Or are you now in league with that big brute, Manhill’s brother? If so, you have lost your way! Hugh Manhill has no lord or lands: he is a tourney knight, intent on winning prizes, jousting from tournament to tournament. I know his type, the kind who brings a killing knife to a sacred negotiation!”
“My sole interest, my lord, is with the red work and your well-being,” replied Joanna, hating to refer to the search for gold, the “red work” of all serious alchemists, but desperate to remind the man that she was still useful to him. “Both my father and I—”
“Will be together, in the lowest part of the donjon unless I see some results before the end of this month! Before the rising of the next new moon, Joanna!”
Bishop Thomas turned on his heel, knocking an earthenware bowl of sulphur onto the floor timbers with a trailing sleeve. On her hands and knees, urgently sweeping up the precious material before the slouching guard could tread in everything or it was further corrupted, Joanna heard the lord of the church leave. The door slammed after him and she was alone again, with her father, Solomon, still a prisoner, David still unfree, and Mercury still a living mystery.
And now she had less than eight and twenty days to find the secret of producing gold.
After that, she tried to work but her hands shook too much for the exacting measurements required. As the day drew on she pottered about her workshop, cleaning, recording, and desperately thinking. When the bells of West Sarum cathedral pealed out and she knew her lord would soon be at his lunch table, she ran to the kitchens. In the hubbub of preparations she was able to gather a basket of fresh manchet bread, cheese, green salad and verjuice, beer, and a whole baked trout on a platter for Mercury, keeping fish and cheese separated by the jug of ale. The chief cook saw and nodded to her—they had an understanding, she and Walter. Last winter, Joanna had nursed Walter’s wife and twins through the greater pox when no one else had dared go near lest it was the smallpox. Now all were thriving, but the cook had never forgotten. He even sent a spit boy with her, with a second basket for food for the guards, to clear a passage through the kitchen smoke and crowds and, later, to announce, “Victuals for the prisoners!” within the donjon.
Crossing the trapdoor on the ground floor of the tower, Joanna paused and, when the guards were marching elsewhere, she pushed some of the bread through a small gap. It was not much, but it was all she could do for the poor wretches beneath her feet, whose names and crimes were unknown to her. She thought she heard a wild scrabbling somewhere in that fetid dark, but now the guards were marching back and she sped swiftly up the staircase, following the spit boy.
Within the first-floor chamber, Mercury was playing dice on his bed, but he came quickly, seeing the platter of fish. Sweeping it from her with a grin of thanks, he returned to his bed to eat.
While the guards crouched and rummaged in their own basket, Joanna and Solomon had a moment in private. David tactfully hung back as Solomon approached the table where she was setting out the food.
“Shalom, daughter,” he said softly in Hebrew. Neither of them knew much of the tongue of their forebears, but what they knew they kept alive.
“Are you well?” Joanna whispered, passing him a chunk of bread and clasping his hand—the only contact they could smuggle for themselves without the guards manhandling them apart.
“I could be far worse, my daughter.” To prove his point, Solomon took a healthy bite of the bread, his dark brown eyes li
vely and twinkling at her. Starry eyes, Joanna had always thought them. She could stare at his tanned, mobile, jaunty face all day.
“How goes the work?” he asked, prodding the dish of salad toward her.
“I will eat later,” Joanna lied. She wanted Solomon to eat as much as possible. She wanted to be hopeful, to give her father respite from care, but she could not lie about alchemy: it was a sacred task. “It goes slowly,” she admitted.
“Our lord still desires gold?”
“Amongst other things.” Joanna glanced at David, who was standing with his back to them, slowly pouring himself a beaker of ale.
“You fear for David against our own Goliath?” Solomon asked. “David and Solomon. It is apt we are together, is it not?”
Joanna nodded, trying not to smile. Her father said this at least once each time she was with him. But then he was very old: at least sixty.
“We spoke of the temple today. He has seen it, Joanna! He has touched its living walls! But something has happened.” Solomon scanned her face and sighed, the straight set of his wiry shoulders drooping for an instant. “You are in greater fear than yesterday.”
“No, Father.”
“I say you are. You are as taut now as wise King David’s lyre string.”
She would not tell him of the terrible deadline. To speak instead of the Goliath of Manhill, of Hugh, who had bested lord Thomas’s alaunts and stood against the bishop like a living tower of stone, was a strange relief. She liked talking about him, Joanna discovered. She wanted to talk about him—without mentioning the matter of the glove.
He will apologize for that, she vowed.
As if sensing the content of their conversation, David turned and beckoned to her. “A beaker of beer for your father?” he asked.
The question was nothing the guards could object to, and it was natural for Joanna and her father to join David. Leaning over the table as he poured two beers gave them all a chance to put their heads together.
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