by Alison Adare
Contents
Title Page
PART ONE Spring
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
PART TWO Summer
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART THREE Autumn
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Notes on Time and Place
About The Author
THE BLACK HILL
Alison Adare
This story takes place in a place not unlike Britain, at a time not unlike the 15th century.
~o~
Copyright © Alison Adare 2015
Cover image by Skitterphoto, used under CC0 1.0 Universal license
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without permission of the author, fair use excepted.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
~o~
Thanks to Christina Hollands for her insightful comments and suggestions on early drafts of this manuscript.
Thanks also to my proof-readers and copy-editors, Hannah Hembree and Carol Kee, tireless in the pursuit of typos. Many errors have been avoided thanks to their diligence: those which remain are my own fault.
And lastly, to everyone who kept telling me to take a deep breath and jump in the deep end. Some of you are old friends, and some of you are screen-names on Internet forums. All of you have been generous with your praise and consistent in your encouragement. Thank you. This book would not exist without you.
PART ONE
Spring
Chapter 1
This is absolutely the worst idea ever.
Janet Cooper shifted her weight in the saddle, trying to ease the ache of muscles unused to so much riding. She pulled her cloak more snugly around her neck. It did little to keep out the rain, which was more a persistent dampness in the air than an actual shower. Every part of her was drenched, from the hair that straggled into her eyes to her chilled toes.
She felt at her neck for the blessed medallion of Saint Sebastian, patron saint of soldiers. Not for the first time that day she thought that she should have invested in one dedicated to Saint Scholastica, invoked against rain, as well.
She raised her voice a little. “Remind me again why I’m here?”
Sir Thomas Lynhurst glanced sideways at her from where he rode with, Janet noted enviously, no sign of the discomfort that made her own backside feel like the bones of her arse were in direct contact with the spine of her horse. At least he looked as wet as she felt, fair hair darkened to bronze and dripping water from the ends. “To serve the Crown as a loyal subject?” he suggested.
“No, that’s you,” Janet said. “Try again.”
“Travel to foreign places, meet interesting people?”
“No, that’s why I should have run away to sea.”
The corner of Tom’s mouth twitched up in as close to a smile Janet had seen from him for days. “You get seasick.”
“There’s that,” she agreed. “Oh, wait, I remember now. I’m in this God-forsaken wilderness, soaked from the skin out, because you asked me. Whoreson.”
He chuckled softly. “You were the one who agreed, Jack. You could have said no.”
She couldn’t have, though. Which is about seven-eighths of why this is absolutely the worst idea ever.
Janet — or Jack as Tom knew her — had served under Sir Thomas Lynhurst’s command and done the duties of both page and squire when required. As a knight, even a simple knight, he should have had men to serve as both, but he himself had come to war as a squire. Knighted on the field for his bravery after the defeat at Rowan, he had not had the means to better equip himself and support his own squires. In consequence, knighthood had meant little. As the defeats came thick and fast and the army streamed back towards the coast, there had been no opportunity for any of them to enrich themselves with the spoils of war. Then the captain who’d raised Janet’s company had succumbed to fever, and Tom had been put in his place.
He’d chosen Jack Cooper to be his runner and general dogsbody. Jack was cheerful and competent, quick at figuring supplies. Good, too, at talking around recalcitrant quartermasters or troops made surly by poor food and no pay. Tom had relied on Jack, had come to trust him. When his Company had been cut to pieces at Forminey because Tom had ordered them to stand and not to fall back, it was Jack who had seen Tom praying to the Virgin Mary for forgiveness, tears streaming down his cheeks as quickly as the words tumbled from his lips. When, during the bloody, frantic retreat to Bayew, Tom had sat frozen on his horse, it was Jack who had shouted the Captain orders you advance as if he’d given instructions only she could hear. When he had been ill, Jack had tended him. When he had been wounded, Jack had held him for the surgeon’s knife.
It was to Jack that Tom had confessed the nightmares troubling his sleep. It was Jack, sleeping on a bedroll in his tent who had woken, night after night, to his low whimpers of they’re being slaughtered, all of them, my fault, my fault. It was Jack who had murmured reassurance in the dark until he was still.
In the mud and blood and fire of the final year of the last disastrous campaign, they’d been almost friends.
As much as a common soldier and a man born to be a gentleman and knighted for bravery on the field of battle can be friends.
As much as two people can be friends when one of them is lying to the other with every breath.
But still, she could have said no to a friend, when Tom’d come to her door four months after the army had finally been brought home and sent on their individual ways. The Protector’s sent me west to Camray, he’d said. There’s land and a title, if I can hold it.
I don’t speak the language. I don’t know the people. For all it’s been quiet since the last King settled the rebels, I could use someone I can trust with me there, Jack.
She could have said no to a friend, but she could never say no to Thomas Lynhurst.
~o~
The war across the water had been going on in one form or another for so long that Tom’s great-grandfather had fought in it. When it was finally and irretrievably lost, what was left of the King’s forces limped home and went their separate ways. Janet had expected to be relieved. It had not been any wild desire for adventure that had prompted her to put on her father’s breeches and shirt. It had not been out of an eagerness to fight that she had bound her breasts flat and shorn her hair, and presented herself to the muster. It was, quite simply, that with her brother Will gone with the army four years earlier, and Jim just thirteen, there was an urgent need for someone in the household besides their father to earn some coin.
Janet was tall for a woman, and strong. If she’d been a son, by her age she’d have been well apprenticed in her father’s craft as a locksmith. She would have been earning enough to keep them fed. If she’d been a son, she could have taken other work for wages. No-one thought a sturdy build and a plain face a disability in a stable-boy or drayman. As it was, she’d been raised to take her mother’s place and run the business. Though she’d picked up a little from her father over the years, she was far less skilled than all but the rawest apprentice. Her atrocious needlework, tendency to burn any meal she touched, and utter lack of decorative appeal put paid to any thought of trying to find a p
lace as a servant. All in all, she had little opportunity to bring anything into the house but her appetite.
And the King’s Captain had a fresh indenture in his hand, and was not familiar with the Coopers as their neighbors were. They would have known instantly what was afoot had a new Cooper son suddenly presented himself to them seeking work. The King’s Captain saw only a strong young body to fill out his Company.
It had been an easy decision to become Jack instead of Janet, for all that it was a crime, and almost as easy to persuade her parents of the sense of it.
She had escaped detection, even in those first terrifying days when she had no idea how she was going to manage in the face of communal jakes and shared quarters. At first, as their Company marched towards the coast, they were small in number. She could always find privacy. When they reached the sprawling, seething camp of men and horses preparing to embark across the water, Janet had been sure she had only days or even hours before she was discovered. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder if they’d send her home in disgrace or simply hang her. Lying to the King’s man was surely an even greater crime than wearing men’s clothes.
When a small thickset man with a shock of black hair said Come with me to Janet as she queued for her pottage that night, she had known the worst had happened. She followed him with resignation. It was only when the man led her well away from the officers’ tents to the empty drilling ground and rummaged in his codpiece that she had realized there might be worse outcomes and worse choices for a woman among soldiers than she had imagined.
And then the soldier had produced a cone of boiled leather and said, “You need to make yourself one of these, first of all. And you need to learn to curse.”
Mark — for Janet had known her only as Mark just as Mark had known Janet only as Jack — had explained how to fashion one similar. Once Janet had, Mark had shown her how to hold it so any onlooker would see only her hand. Mark had taught her, too, to mix ash, dirt and grease and rub them on her cheeks and chin — not evenly but in convincing streaks and patches the way men’s beards really grew.
By the time the army embarked, Janet had not only learned to drill with a pike, muscles toughening until she could heave the heavy length of it around as swiftly and surely as any of the men in her Company. She’d also learned to make sure she was seen shaving with her knife every few days to explain why her stubble never grew to a beard. It was Mark who pointed out to her that there was invariably a pile of bloodied bandages behind the surgeons’ tent waiting for the laundresses, where she could unobtrusively drop the rags stained by her monthly blood. Mark assured her that if she prayed every day to Saint Eugenia, Saint Thecla and Saint Theodora, all of whom had worn men’s clothing in the service of the Lord, her courses would eventually cease to come. After a few months Janet found that was as true as everything else Mark said.
By the time Janet faced her first battle, she had marched until her feet were like to fall off and then marched still further. Her long legs made nothing of eight miles at double time in rain and mud. She’d learned, too, to always sit with her legs apart, to lean against a wall in a convincingly male fashion, to belch and fart unapologetically. Under Mark’s tutelage Janet learned the casual use of words and phrases that would have made her mother faint to hear them — and which, when she became closer to Sir Thomas Lynhurst, invariably made that gently-born Captain blush and protest.
When Janet had her neck and chest laid open during one bloody skirmish, it was Mark who bandaged her. It was Mark who covered for her with a story about congestion of the lungs so no-one would call the surgeon.
And when Mark was struck down by camp fever, it had been Janet who had nursed her, refusing all help, so nothing Mark said in the ravings of fever would betray her secret. It had been Janet who stripped and shrouded her body for the grave.
If any of the men around her ever guessed — and Janet thought some must have, after months of her never taking off her shirt even when they were all set to digging fortifications in the July sun — they never spoke of it and never betrayed her. Jack Cooper stood firm in the face of a charge, and that, Janet understood very well, was far more important to a pikeman than what Jack Cooper might or might not have between his legs.
And she had found her brother Will, and brought him safely through even the last bad months, in no small part because of her slightly privileged position as Sir Thomas Lynhurst’s ‘boy’.
So it should have been a relief to turn her back on the port where they’d landed and set out for the city. She was with Will and they both had what little pay the King had been able to summon after decades of war had bankrupted the country. They had been burdened by neither pike nor sword. Winter lay ahead, and neither of them would spend it shivering under canvas with an empty belly, praying to survive the week. Nor would they be among the many soldiers they saw along the roads, men with no family to take them in, their only hope against starvation employment in some Lord’s retinue, or else robbery.
No, Janet and Will would spend the winter snug and safe, at home.
But home had been smaller and more cramped than she had remembered. After years of breeches, skirts tangled her ankles and hampered her stride. The streets were hardly more crowded, nor the men any more coarse, than any army camp. Jack, however, had been both invisible and accepted. Janet had to learn all over again not to hold her head too high or look too boldly, lest she attract unwelcome attention. Her mother did faint, or at least sit down and fan herself, when an oath accidentally tumbled from Janet’s lips, and her father had threatened to thrash the devil out of her if she couldn’t control her tongue — although he thought better of it when Janet looked at him with Jack Cooper’s steely veteran’s stare.
Mending and sweeping, cooking and laundering, all cooped up inside the house, had chafed on her like ill-fitting boots. Each day, she was almost glad when her mother needed water and she could escape for the time it took to walk to the nearest pump. Will had felt the same way, back working with their father, although neither he nor Janet spoke of it. Sometimes she’d surprised the same look on Will’s face that she felt occasionally on her own, stiff and sweating and wide-eyed. Will had flung out of the house at those times, had taken himself off to somewhere under an open sky. Somewhere, Janet had guessed, without quite so many people. Janet, not being a man, could not do the same. She could only keep her eyes and her mind on whatever task lay before her until her heart stopped pounding to the rhythm of the war-drums and her fingers ceased trembling with the anticipation of a battle that would not come.
She heard Will dreaming, through the wall at night. She guessed he heard her, too — but while a soldier might mention such things to a comrade-in-arms, it would be weakness for a man to confess them to a woman, even a sister, so that too was something never spoken of between them.
And Janet had found she missed — not the war, or the hunger, or the cold, no. But she had missed, with a dull, useless misery, the easy, coarse camaraderie. She had missed the satisfaction of a pike drill done entirely right, all her Company moving as if one mind controlled them. She had missed the weight of a sword on her hip that she had become used to once Tom had decided his runner had better learn to use some weapon that could be toted around more easily than a polearm.
And, so secretly and privately that she barely admitted it to herself, she had missed the thing that had made all those other things sweeter and keener, so sharply that it was a constant small pain in her chest. She had missed Sir Thomas Lynhurst.
Because, also secretly and privately, friendship was neither the beginning nor the end of her feelings for Tom. She had known it since long before he’d picked her out of the ranks, asked if she could read and write, and given her new work to do. She’d known it even before then, known it since the day she’d found herself going the long way around on her way to queue for that day’s ration of beans because it would take her past Tom’s tent and she might see him. She’d known it beyond any doubt or denial when
they’d parted for the last time on the docks and she had felt something she had no word for tear open in her chest at the sight of him striding away.
In the privacy of her own head was the only place she was ever going to admit it. He — quite literally — didn’t know she was alive, didn’t know any such person as Janet Cooper existed. And how would he feel if he found out? The young man he’d trusted and relied on, who had nursed him through illness and wounds, who had been there with a joke when the weight of command bowed Tom’s shoulders and chilled his eyes … how would Tom feel if he found out that young man had been a consummate, continual liar? Found out he was no man at all?
If there had not been that barrier … Janet was a craftsman’s daughter. Sir Thomas Lynhurst was a gentleman by birth and favored by the King, bound for far higher things. It was insurmountable. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, Janet had imagined Tom learning her secret, being delighted rather than horrified, but her imagination ran up against that difference in their station in life and stopped dead.
And there was the fact that years spent soldiering did little to improve one’s ladylike appearance. Janet’s skin, as her mother often reminded her, pressing on her one remedy or another, was coarsened and darkened by sun and wind. Her shoulders were too broad, her feet too big, her hips too thin, her breasts too flat. She had been, at best, handsome before the army. The most her mother had ever been able to say about her brown hair was at least there’s plenty of it, and even that was no longer true until it grew again. Her gray eyes, her mother claimed, were her best feature, but that was not saying much. Janet had always been the sort of fine strapping lass a man might take for a wife if he valued a strong back and a good head for figures over a pretty face. Even without the scar that still showed a little above the unfashionably high collars her mother sewed to her frocks, few would call her handsome now.