Hugh knew from her face she had known rapture and now he rolled her onto her side and entered her, adoring the way she was so tight yet so embracing. Dizzy with his own release, he tried to hold on, keep rearing and plunging, but she was too sweet, too comely, too much a harem girl dancer. He roared and flew with her, a pure masculine, primitive part of him howling like a wolf.
“The horses are restive,” he said, an uncounted, unknown time later.
“I have no doubt,” Joanna answered. Both of them were snug in the golden, prickly bed of hay, and she lay quiet in his arms, held hostage by his embrace.
And by her own desire, she admitted, as Hugh gave her a sleepy kiss and rolled his cloak into a ball for a pillow. She had not known such abandoned passion was real. But how could she? How could she feel so alive while her father was still under threat?
I should be trying to escape from Hugo, not snuggling with him.
Every day, that task seemed more impossible, as her feelings for Hugh became deeper. She did not want to hurt him. She wanted to please him.
Although not at the expense of my father.
While Hugh snored beside her, she lay awake, thinking.
Chapter 23
The Frenchman Mercury was outside her chamber when Joanna, accompanied by Hugh and Hugh’s squire Henri, returned to it at daybreak.
“I have a message from your father,” Mercury said in southern French, nodding to Hugh.
“What did he say to you?” Hugh demanded, stepping between her and Mercury.
Joanna repeated what the Frenchman had said, careful to translate it exactly. A tiresome three-way conversation ensued, with Mercury talking to Joanna and her translating to Hugh.
It seemed her father was well and the “red work” was going very well. Joanna took comfort in the thought that Solomon was back to pursuing his goal of finding the perfect elixir, the secret of life and all things, symbolized by gold.
“He thinks of you and prays for you every day,” Mercury added. “He may have added more, I forget.” He lowered his head, as if in penitence. “Do you forgive me?”
When Joanna did not instantly say, “I do,” Mercury dropped to his knees on the flagstones. “Sweet lady, let me know I am pardoned, or I die!”
“Of course.” Waving him to his feet, Joanna wondered how she had ever found Mercury charming. “How is David?”
Mercury’s blankly handsome face grew still more blank.
“The man imprisoned in the donjon with you.”
“Ah, the Templar! Good!”
“Is he in health? I heard he had been taken elsewhere.”
“As to that, I know nothing. He is back with me. More quiet than before, more moody.”
“Is he allowed out at all? Have any of his order visited West Sarum?”
Her urgent questions earned her another blank look. “He plays chess quite nimbly,” Mercury said at length, as if he was imparting a major secret.
And that was all Joanna could discover. Mercury did not claim loss of memory or ignorance: he did not say anything. Joanna wanted to shake him.
Clearly she was not alone in her feelings, for Hugh suddenly slapped the nearest wall with a hand and said bluntly, “I’m for the garderobe. Watch him, Henri.”
He stalked away, Beowulf padding along by his heels, and Joanna knew her chance had come. “I must get back to my father,” she said in the French of Languedoc, confident that Henri knew nothing of what she was saying. “I do not know how I can do it, do you?”
Faced with a direct appeal, Mercury took her hand and kissed it.
“My lady, you must not distress yourself. If I may help in any way, I swear to you I will. Smile now, so this fat youth thinks we are flirting.”
Joanna attempted a smile that she was sure was a grimace.
“Good! Now your father thrives and he is a good man: he was always kind to me.”
“But I do not know what is happening!”
“Smile, my dear. We are all in that state, are we not? I have no memory, but see? I trust in God and his saints. I have an amulet, a luck charm.” Mercury deftly tucked at the small purse on his belt and dropped a small green- and blue-striped stone onto her palm. “Take this from me. It brings good fortune.”
The stone was bright in her hand, and strangely, Joanna found herself touched. It was not much, but Mercury was trying. “Thank you,” she said.
“That is better! A lady as pretty as you should not despair: it pains your looks. All will be resolved.”
Joanna lifted the stone and held it up, as if admiring it in the light from the arrow slit. “I have to escape,” she said in Languedoc. “My lord has given me another month to work, but I cannot work properly here and I have to see for myself that Solomon is safe.”
“As is natural. You are a good child, and I will help you, if I can.” Mercury looked beyond her. “The man returns. Say no more for now.”
“Agreed,” Joanna said quickly, her spirits lifting as Hugh strode back toward them. Yes, he was a lightweight, but Mercury would want to escape as much as she did, so they were natural allies. It was not much but perhaps it was a start.
Before she could make any kind of plan, however, the page Peter came with a message that SirYves was waiting for them in the great hall.
The lord of Castle Manhill was happy: it showed in his gleaming eyes and the way he swept from side to side on the dais, waving his arms as Joanna, Mercury, and Hugh filed into the hall.
“Join us!” he called, beckoning to his youngest son, and now Joanna saw the others, standing beside the benches and trestles that were drawn to the walls of the hall. It seemed every servant in the castle, from the lowest spit boy and laundress to the grandest steward, had been summoned.
Hugh gripped his sword hilt. “What is this? What has happened?”
“Is it David?” cried Joanna. “Is there news?”
At once Hugh shook his head: he had less faith in his father than she.
“Has King John died? No? Then has he been readmitted to the church again?”
Hugh pointed discreetly with the smallest finger on his left hand to a man folded into a stool on the dais beside the lord’s central chair. When he stood up from the stool, Joanna guessed the stranger would be the tallest man she had seen: he was certainly the thinnest and most bald. The top of his high, domed head shone like a ram’s skull. Dressed in mud-stained cloak and drab brown leggings, he wore no badge, no rings, yet it was clear Sir Yves knew him.
“Here is Capet, come fresh from your eldest brother’s,” Sir Yves announced, while Hugh said in an undertone to Joanna, “That explains it. Nigel treats his messengers like the meanest of serfs: none stay with him for long. This Capet is new to me.”
Joanna looked at Capet more closely but could read nothing from the man’s smooth, skinny face. He must not have brought bad news; at least nothing bad for Sir Yves.
“How is my elder brother?” Hugh asked, but Sir Yves spoke before the messenger.
“Nigel is well, he is always well. He has sent me a fine pair of gloves and a fine leather belt, a brooch, very finely wrought…”
“Is there another word coming, I wonder?” whispered Hugh to Joanna, who kicked him softly with her foot.
“…and such excellent provisions! Rock samphire and pepper, the finest salt. Fresh morel mushrooms and spring black truffles from his wife’s family estates in Perigord. Even your strange fellow, who speaks only the language of the south of France, will know of such truffles. They are famous throughout Aquitaine!”
In an appalling, horror-struck flash, Joanna understood. Sir Yves had no news of David or of any great event: he had summoned them to the great hall in order to brag.
A squire was holding up each of the gifts as his lord spoke: first the embroidered gloves, then the bags of pepper and salt. He knelt by the fireplace to undo a small bag and the rich scent of truffles swept through the hall.
The servants standing by the trestles and wall hangings glanced at each othe
r and began a pitter-patter of applause as the squire rose to display the truffles. The dogs were yapping in excitement, held back from mobbing the squire by Hugh’s curt command. Hugh’s face was thunderous.
Mercury, meanwhile, the “strange fellow,” strolled up to the squire and put his face into the bag containing the small, dirty-looking spheres: the scent of the truffles was amazing but their appearance was a disappointment.
Mercury, his long nose still in the bag, inhaled deeply, then surfaced. “Good,” he said, in the language of the south. “Not as exquisite as some I have known but very good.”
“What does he say?” Sir Yves asked, his face reddened with pleasure.
“That they are exquisite,” Joanna said quickly.
Hugh folded his arms across his chest and tapped a booted foot. “How does he know?”
But before Joanna could ask Mercury that very pertinent question, the Frenchman flung an arm around a startled Sir Yves and tried to do the same with Hugh, who struck aside his reaching hand. Mercury shrugged and whispered in Sir Yves’s ear, who first looked startled and who then began nodding.
“The fellow does speak our French! He says he has just remembered it! That is as may be, but I think you should hear this, Hugh.”
Hugh looked at Joanna as he stepped toward his father and in that instant, glimpsing Mercury’s sanguine face, she knew.
Mercury, smiling, boyishly handsome, carefree Mercury, was betraying her confidences. He had suddenly and conveniently “remembered” how to speak Norman French and now he was telling SirYves and Hugh that she could not work properly at Castle Manhill, that she was still determined to escape. The man was only interested in himself and what he might win from such tale-bearing: he was not the least concerned what his “news” would mean for her.
I knew that he was charmingly selfish—why did I not consider how far that selfishness would go? Just because I would never tell a secret, why did I assume that all men are the same? Especially a man like Mercury?
Her heart felt as if it had dropped down within her body and the scent of the truffles seemed to clog her breath. She wanted to run from the great hall and keep on going. She felt people staring at her, marking her as different, strange, dangerous. She had not felt this way for years but she knew the dread too well: the stark yet creeping fear she and Solomon had struggled with, on and off, for all their lives.
On and on Mercury whispered, first in Yves’s listening ear and then in Hugh’s. Would he never be done?
Soon she would have to face her captors and give her own account.
Soon she would have to face Hugh.
Chapter 24
“Where are we going?” Joanna asked, as Hugh lifted her onto Lucifer and swung up behind her.
In truth she was glad to be getting out of the castle. Sir Yves had not spoken to her and would hardly look at her. Mercury had met her stricken look, smiled, and also said nothing. Hugh had hustled them from the great hall as if he had a pan of acid scorching somewhere that he must extinguish before it exploded. So far, he had not spoken either, except to warn her to watch her footing on the outside stone steps, still slick with rainwater.
As Hugh snapped on riding gloves she repeated her question.
“A place I know,” came back the scarcely informative answer. “It is some way away, so we must hurry.”
He snapped the reins and they were off at a smart gallop, Joanna hugging the horse’s mane as they burst through the standing puddles of the bailey yard. Their speed was such that she had no breath to speak: she was too busy hanging on.
The day was bright and cloudy about them, rainbow weather, where all the new bright leaves and grasses were silvered with rain. Hugh checked Lucifer into a steady canter and tapped her on the shoulder—a sign of fellowship, she hoped—pointing to a small spinney lush with bluebells. She mouthed “pretty” but still was surprised when he drew rein directly alongside the woods.
“You said we had a way to go,” she stammered as he unwound himself from Lucifer’s back to lead the horse to the gap in the banked enclosure surrounding the spinney.
“Changed my mind. Besides, stopping now will save your thighs. Here will do us just as well.”
“I do not mind,” Joanna said quickly. “We can ride on.”
Hugh shook his head and unlatched the hurdle gate, closing it behind them as they pressed deeper into the wood. Twisting round, Joanna could no longer see the track they had just left as the tall oaks, beech, and horn-beam loomed about her. In this dense grouping of trees the ground was bone dry despite the previous rain: Hugh’s feet cracked on dry old leaves and Lucifer stamped on dry branches riddled with fungus.
“Do truffles grow here?” Joanna asked, for something to say.
“No.” Hugh stopped by a fallen birch and tethered Lucifer to one of its prone branches. “Forgive me, I am a bear today. Nigel’s gifts have that effect on me: I loathe the way he flaunts his lands and wealth.”
Joanna knew she must have looked startled, for he smiled. “I suppose you want to talk about Mercury’s very selective recovery of his memory this morning?”
I would rather pitch off this huge charger, bear you to these dry leaves, and love you, again and again. Joanna said nothing. Women were supposed to receive and serve but not initiate.
Hugh rested his hand against her thigh. An idle touch, perhaps an accident, perhaps a more deliberate taunt. She felt her body tingle and tighten in response.
“Would you move your hand a little?” She was pleased with how she sounded: courteous, as a lady to her knight.
He brushed her leg lightly with his fingers, trailing his hand from her thigh to her hip. “Is that better?”
She managed to nod. “I did not know he could speak Norman French.”
“He will know that and English, too, when it is useful for him to recall it. When it serves him.” He squeezed her thigh. “I should think your bishop has made a guess as to who Mercury might be and so has passed him on before the fellow claims to have recovered all his wits. That way Thomas can say later that he did not know who he was holding, and made a genuine mistake.”
“He can say he meant no insult or disrespect,” Joanna said, understanding what Hugh meant. She was vividly aware of his hand on her leg: his touch made her thigh throb and the blood prickle in the tips of her toes.
“And if I or my father later mistreat the fellow, that will also work in Thomas’s favor.”
How could he speak so calmly when she felt as if her head was boiling? “Perhaps my lord thought Mercury worthless. A lowborn knight without—”
Too late she stopped, but Hugh finished for her. “Without lands or riches, like me? Perhaps. The Frenchman is certainly sly enough to play it that way, if he thought it would win him an advantage. He made a mistake with the truffles, though: admitting the kind of knowledge that only comes through wealth.”
“Unless he does not care anymore.”
“Or perhaps he thinks my father’s castle an easier place to escape from than the bishop’s new donjon. As it seems do you.”
They had come to it at last. Joanna straightened her spine and looked straight ahead into the lush canopy of trees. The sun flashed on the bright new beech leaves and her eyes pricked with tears in response. But she would not apologize. “You do what you feel you must. As do I.”
“Even though we are lovers now?”
His question twisted in the space beneath her heart but she refused to cry. She flung the challenge of emotion back at him. “We are lovers, yes. But you do not release me.”
Hugh sighed. He was still not angry, she realized, more disappointed. The sense of a blade being twisted just beneath her ribs increased. “You are disillusioned with me.”
“Never!” Hugh snagged her by the waist, tugged her to him, and kissed her hard on the mouth. “Never.”
He wrapped his arms about her and she her arms about him. She was hugging him and he was embracing her fiercely, whispering, “Never, never,” and kissin
g her over and over.
She was swept off Lucifer into Hugh’s powerful arms, tossed up into the air like a flapped blanket, and caught again. “Never,” he said firmly. “I would scour hell for you.”
“Yet you will not let me go!”
“Do you not know why? Have you not understood it?” Hugh sat down into a heap of leaves with her in his arms and now on his lap. He traced the line of her cheek with a finger. “Clever yet blind.”
Joanna caught her breath. “What do you mean?”
“Ask yourself. What kind of lover is Bishop Thomas if he does not truly release your father? Promise you his release and keep his word? What manner of lover is he if he does not strive for your freedom? He rode away without looking back! If I keep you, it is to keep you safe.”
He did not understand, the dolt. He was a man, and big and able, and he did not understand. “That should be my choice, Hugo.”
“In a world that is like heaven, yes, I agree. It should be your choice.” He nipped her ear with his teeth. “This is not heaven.”
He leaned back against the beech tree under which they sat while Beowulf yapped softly at Lucifer, making as if to leap at the horse. “Stay,” said Hugh to both, and they were still.
“If I could do what you can with beasts, folk would call me witch.” Joanna tapped Hugh’s sword scabbard with her heel. “They would not dare call you such.”
“As I say. We do not live in heaven.” Hugh moved her foot away from his sword. “But I would still scour hell for you.”
He wrapped his cloak about her. “You are so pale now. Too pale. You should be as brown as this beech mast.” He knotted the cloak strings for her.
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