A Knight's Enchantment

by Lindsay Townsend

  She shrugged. “When I am free.”

  This territory was too dark. Hugh whistled to Beowulf and Lucifer and cantered on, giving the horse his head as they drove through a mess of oak and lime saplings growing as weeds in the middle of the track. He heard Joanna coughing at the raised dust and checked Lucifer, standing up on his stirrups to check where on the winding, sunken road they were.

  “There is the church. Not far.” He settled back in the saddle without mentioning that the village had set out trestles by the churchyard and laid out a dancing area. She would see it soon enough for herself.

  “Do you give your word, my lady, that you will stay with me today? No wandering off?”

  She studied her fingers hooked tightly into Lucifer’s thick mane. They were pale and a little chafed in places: she must have scrubbed them. He wanted to tell her that the stains were a badge of her calling, but she was answering his question and he needed to listen closely.

  “I swear that I will not wander off, my knight.”

  That was not the same as a vow to remain by him. She could swear that and then still try to flee for West Sarum, not wandering off but making straight for the palace.

  He did not fault her for it—he would have done the same in her place.

  “Soon you will meet the villagers. They are good people. Very observant.”

  “I am sure,” she answered primly, but he guessed the game was on between them.

  He would need to watch her closely—and hope the villagers did the same.

  The village of Manhill-de-Couchy was a scrap of houses clustered on a low hill, with water meadows and grazing lands about and woodland bordering all. In high summer the meadows would be bright with butterflies and dragonflies, Joanna guessed, and for now her heart lifted as the musky perfume of the churchyard orchids stole through the more basic scent of pig. One tawny piglet squealed at Lucifer, then turned tail, darting back into a thatched homestead where a flour-covered matron wielding a cloth chased it out again.

  The woman stopped, her bright color fading, and bobbed a rapid curtsy at Hugh, who nodded. “Fine day for your maying, Agnes,” he called out, and slipped down from the saddle to stroll beside his horse.

  “Why is she anxious?” Joanna whispered, swaying a little as she leaned down in the saddle and glad of Hugh’s steadying hand against her flank.

  “She fears I will tell my father’s steward that she is grinding her own wheat, not using my father’s mill or paying my father’s mill tax.”

  “Will you?” Joanna asked, hearing a child crying within the hut.

  “My father is rich enough already.”

  She heard the anger in his terse reply and recalled an earlier cryptic comment of Hugh’s.

  “What did you mean, the lad did not want to admit much in your father’s hall for fear of him demanding payment?”

  “Look ahead at the church porch.”

  Joanna glanced along the thatch of the simple wooden church to its tiny triangular-roofed porch and understood. Hanging from the inside of the porch, almost hidden by shadow, was a long dark ellipse, shaped somewhere between a funnel and a sphere. Even as she realized what it was, she also understood why the village was so silent; why no one had rushed up to greet them. “Bees!”

  She could hear them now: a muted low buzzing that might leap an octave any moment in a frenzy of attack.

  “An early swarm.”

  She looked at Hugh, inconsequentially realizing that his eyes were bluer than the sky about them. “That is important?”

  “Early swarms have a spark and mettle in them. They are much prized.”

  “And they sent for you to retrieve them.”

  “They know I can help—and I will help.” He winked at her. “Takes one ill-tempered brute to understand many little ill-tempered brutes, does it not?” He offered his hand. “May I help you down?”

  He took her silence as consent, lifting her from the saddle onto a narrow path running along the fronts of the houses. At ground level again, Joanna could see the villagers, crowded into their cottage doorways, their faces tense and expectant. From this viewpoint, the settled swarm looked bigger than ever, thrusting down into the church porch like some deadly unlit lantern.

  “How came it here?”

  “Bees like a calm, dark spot. And now that most churches must be closed because our pope and king are in dispute, this porch will be quiet.”

  Joanna thought of the excommunicated King John and shivered. Even in West Sarum the story was well known: how the whole of his kingdom suffered under the pope’s interdict so that almost all churches were closed. Folk could not marry in church now and must be buried in ditches and fields, not in holy ground. She shivered a second time.

  “Can I help?” It seemed right to her to whisper.

  He nodded. “I am going to fetch a sheet from my pannier. We can work together.” His face was solemn. “You will need that still patience of yours, not your quickness. Bees do not like bright light or loud noises. Come. We should use this daylight.”

  He was checking the position of the sun as he unfurled the sheet and Joanna sensed that that too was important. She followed on behind Hugh, skipping almost in her haste to keep up and all the while feeling the eyes of the villagers on her back.

  “How did you know what it would be? Really?” she hissed.

  “The lad they sent had pollen stains and a dozen bee stings on his tunic.”

  “You have good eyes,” she marveled. “Had I been in the hall, I would not have been able to see that.”

  Ahead, he rolled his large shoulders. “I can claim no virtue: ’tis my good fortune, or fate, but no more than that. In the tourney I need them.”

  He held up a warning hand. “Wait.” He stalked off to the left, crouching to enter a cottage, retrieving or being handed something and then returning. “We shall need this.”

  He showed her a wicker beehive, shrouded over in dark cloth. Hugh studied this a moment and then repinned the cloth. “They have forgotten to leave an opening,” he muttered. “The little beasts must flee somewhere.”

  When he had finished the beehive was closed off apart from a narrow opening on its side. He patted his belt, seemingly checking the pouch that was there, and looked round at her.

  “Will you bring me a basin of hot water, please? The elder’s house will doubtless have one ready. That’s the house with the biggest garden.”

  “Elder? Not Sir Yves’s man?”

  “He died last year. My father and his officers have forgotten this place for now: it never brought in much goods or money to him.”

  Would Hugh be any different, if he was their lord? Joanna found herself hoping that he would be fairer as she sped around the rows of beans and peas in a well-tended vegetable plot, aiming for another open door. There she discovered a wooden basin of steaming water already waiting for her on the threshold. She squinted but could see nothing except the central fire in the elder’s house: whatever folk were inside, they were hidden under the low eaves.

  She nursed the basin into her hands, whispered, “Thank you!” and returned by a different way, climbing through a patch of sage and rosemary toward a small gate that marked an entrance to the churchyard. Moving steadily so as not to slop the water, she walked to the porch.

  Hugh was there already, spreading the sheet directly beneath the swarm, weighting it with pebbles. He gave her a swift smile, his eyes glowing, and the lean chiseled planes of his face seeming to soften a moment as he took the basin from her. Setting it on the beaten earth floor beside the sheet, he dropped several pieces of a dark, thick, heavy-looking substance into the hot water, stirring it vigorously with a twig.

  “That is sugar, is it not?” Joanna knelt for a closer look. Rare sugar, more costly than pepper, was a thing she had heard of, but not seen.

  “I filched it from my father’s private store. He will not notice.”

  Joanna rather thought Sir Yves would but said nothing: she was too interested in what Hu
gh was about.

  “The sugar will tempt them. Out of their hive and safety, they will be hungry.” He added some clear water from a flask, to cool it, then began flicking the swarm with the sugar water, spraying the mass all over.

  The humming increased and the swarm seemed to flex itself like a dark fist, but it remained whole. A few solitary bees broke away but Hugh motioned Joanna to stay down and he himself kept still, allowing one bee to crawl along his arm and another to meander across his forehead. For herself, Joanna was full of horrors, imagining him stung in the eyes, but he remained quiet and motionless and the bees whisked off him.

  “Now it begins,” he whispered. “If you stay in the shadow by the church door behind the swarm, they will not see or trouble you. The sun is nicely bright and shining where I would have it, on the sheet, so we are ready.”

  “But what can I do?” Joanna asked as Hugh stretched up, very slowly, toward the narrow timber bisecting the porch roof that the swarm had settled on.

  “Watch that the sheet does not flap—if it does, weigh it down more. And pray for us, Joanna: me and the bees. Whisper out when you see one greater in size; that is the leader, the one we need to lure into the new hive.”

  The shroud-covered wicker hive was laid on its side with its opening facing upward, toward the swarm. In a moment of inspiration, Joanna scattered some sugar water about its shady entrance.

  “Good, good!” Hugh gripped one of the two upright beams of the porch and swarmed up it as if it were a rope, kicking a hole in the wattle by mistake as he climbed. With his long legs wrapped tight about the upright and his upper body blending with the thatch, he leaned out over the narrow roof space like an avenging god, above the pulsing swarm.

  “Let it go well,” Joanna prayed, chanting an ancient alchemical saying in her mind as she spotted a ripple in the sheet and rapidly pinned it down.

  Above her she heard the roof creaking and complaining as Hugh vigorously shook the narrow beam from which the swarm hung like some giant, rotting fruit. She looked up to see the whole mass tumble down onto the white dazzle of the cloth, the angry song of the bees now drilling into her ears. Her neck bones crunched as she jerked her head back farther and saw Hugh alive with bees. They rippled over his arms and torso like some terrible necklace, and the sound they made in the closed-in porch seemed deafening.

  Yet, astonishingly, they were not stinging him. They clung to him and moved over him as if he were another branch; a place of safety. Then when he gave the lightest of shakes, as if he were a branch tossing in the breeze, they too spiraled off, downward toward the sheet.

  “There!” Joanna hissed, amazed, as she saw the long, slow-moving leader of the bees, its entourage tight about as the great bee, seeking new shelter, flew magisterially down the inviting opening of the new hive. After it, obedient as courtiers, the other bees followed in flowing procession.

  Soon, amazingly quickly it seemed to Joanna, the whole swarm was snug in their new home and Hugh was carefully righting the wicker hive. He turned to her then, still kneeling, his face peaceful, as if in sleep.

  “Hugh?” She was reluctant to disturb his calm, but he shook his head, seeming to return to himself as he rubbed his fingers through his fine black hair, sending it this way and that.

  “Thank you,” he told her.

  “I did nothing.”

  “You stayed with me, you helped, you did not break away in panic. I have known warriors who would not have done as much; not when faced by bees.”

  Without thinking, she reached across and touched his forehead where the bees had wandered. “Pollen,” she said, as an excuse, brushing aimlessly.

  He took her hand in his and kissed her fingers. “Shall we meet the village?”

  Chapter 16

  The villagers were shy of her at first but not wary of Hugh at all. The men stalked up and shook his hand. The women egged on a stout matron in a checked head-rail to thread her way from the back of the small gaggles standing in the churchyard and plant a kiss on his bristly cheek. Everyone nodded at her when Hugh introduced her as “my lady Joanna,” but swiftly returned their attention to him, the hero of the hour.

  The new wicker hive and its bees were slowly carried off by two men on an old door, with Hugh strolling beside them, his fingers clasping hers. Joanna knew that to onlookers it would seem a gesture of courtesy and perhaps it was, but it also ensured she did not wander off.

  Hand in hand they walked the length of the churchyard, the children straggling along behind in mock procession, seeming to play a game of king, queen, and court. Most of the village remained in the grassy yard and were soon busy erecting trestles and bringing out benches and stools from their homes.

  “Is it a holy day here, for your local saint?” Joanna asked Hugh, glancing over her shoulder at the activity behind them. Although churches throughout England were said to be closed, such festivals still went on.

  “May-time, when we dance, when there is time to dance,” Hugh said. He gave her a warm, admiring look that brought fresh heat to her face. “I look forward to your dance, my lady.”

  “I will dance with every man in the village,” Joanna warned provocatively.

  Hugh’s smile broadened. “Even old Henri, with his two walking sticks?”

  “Yes, if he—”

  Joanna broke off as the men in front of them stumbled slightly on the track leading to the hives standing in a garden enclosed by a low stone wall. The bees in the new wicker hive thrummed like the strings of an out-of-tune harp and a few flew out.

  Hugh made the sign of the cross above the hive and murmured something to the bees. The low throbbing died away at once and the men were able to slide the wicker hive carefully off their carrying platform and onto a stand of turf. The two villagers remained a moment, standing alongside the hive, as Hugh slowly circled it, chanting softly under his breath.

  “What were you saying?” Joanna asked as the villagers left, bearing away the door.

  Hugh pointed to the other hives. “I was telling all the bees that here was their new home and here were their neighbors. Bees are all as curious as cats and want to know what is happening, like women.”

  Joanna ignored the jibe. She watched the few scout bees return to the hive.

  “Sit with me.” Hugh spread his cloak upon the beaten earth of the stone pen. “It is warm and snug here and the folk will be a while yet, fetching their drink and victuals.”

  She wanted to sit with him in this sunlight spot, listening to the distant sport of children and cheerful clatter of preparation, but there was always her deadline. “Should we not be returning to the castle?”

  “You will need to try the ale here,” Hugh remarked, as if she had not spoken. “It is potent stuff.”

  Drink and a festival. People happy, people carefree; Hugh careless: Joanna saw the chances in a flash. She had the gold from Orri’s hoard with her, sewn into the hems of her long oversleeves with the laundress’s needle and thread. She might escape.

  And if you do, what happens to Hugh’s brother?

  “Have you any word from the Templars?” she asked, hoping he would say yes.

  Hugh shook his head. He sat down on the ground beside the cloak.

  After a moment, Joanna joined him, sitting on the cloak. It was something of Hugh’s and she was glad to have use of it. She rubbed her hand along the fur collar and absently brought her fingers up to her lips, inhaling his scent.

  “Bees are said to be chaste creatures, but I do not think so.”

  Joanna’s eyes flew open. Hugh was watching the hive, not her, and for an instant she was disappointed. “Why not?” she asked. She could not escape now, she thought, and there was no harm in being civil. Indeed, she and Hugh had gone much further in each other’s company than mere civility. She felt she was beginning to know him, the real Hugh beneath the grim knight, and he was a man she liked. He dealt with the villagers here not as slaves, as Bishop Thomas would have done, but as people worthy of respect. He was ki
nd, and that was a virtue worthy of admiration.

  “You cannot say why not,” she added. He would stand being teased, too.

  “Is that a challenge, my lady?”

  “If you would make it so,” she quipped, feeling her heartbeat quicken.

  “Then I would answer you that bees are lovers of sun and sweet flowers and live in great noisy colonies. I think they are seekers after pleasure.”

  “Scholars would not agree.” Joanna smiled as Beowulf flopped beside her and dropped his large head into her lap. She was used to him now, too.

  “The hound likes you.”

  “I like him.” She ran her hand over the wolfhound’s coat, treacherously imagining it was Hugh’s hard, long body. “Will you tell me more of bees?”

  She was interested, she told herself. All lore was useful. It had nothing to do with talking with Hugh and definitely nothing to do with sitting here, in this quiet, private spot, their backs resting comfortably against sun-baked stones.

  He told her of bees, of collecting bees by “moving” their homes—if they had swarmed into a log, say—out of the forest and into a garden. How they looked like gold, dusted with pollen, flying back to their hives in the midday sun. How they were as loyal as warriors. How, if you allowed them to walk over you, they tickled.

  “Only one such as you would allow that, I think,” Joanna observed, leaning back and stretching.

  Hugh fought not to stare at her breasts. She was a bee herself: a hard worker, seeking the heart of things, and when she smiled that way she made all his senses fly.

  “I think it is time for the dance,” he said. “I can hear the piper and drummer starting up.”

  In truth he could hear neither yet, but if need be he would get the folk clapping their hands and whistling, so that he could dance with her.

  He rose and held out his hands, gladdened when she took them without hesitation. “Their honey is a kind of gold,” he went on, deliberately intriguing.

  He loved it when she tilted her head up to peep at him through those long, dark lashes. He loved the interest and keenness in her eyes.