Medieval Mistletoe - One Magical Christmas Season

by Laurel O'Donnell

  “You did not drink tea, especially not Mistletoe tea. No one would just drink that. It’s a poison,” she corrected her father.

  He grinned at her. “Aye, poison it can be, but that’s not all it is. And I most certainly did drink it. Both your mother and I took the brew. She prepared it for us by her own hand.”

  “That cannot be true,” Avice protested, frowning at him. “If it was, then why have you never told this part of the story before today?”

  Her father looked at her askance. “Of course I’ve told you this before. I must have, for your mother and I most assuredly drank that tea.”

  “If you haven’t told her that part of your tale, my lord, it’s likely because your lady wouldn’t allow you to speak in front of your daughter of the properties of Mistletoe grown on oak,” came Lina’s cheeky call. “My own mother, God rest her, said knowledge of that plant and its effects are best guarded by old women and midwives, not given to innocent girls who might misuse its power.”

  Lord Henry glanced back at Lina. As he looked at her, his frown dissolved into an expression of quizzical humor. “Ah, I believe you’re right. I remember last year how my lady wife interrupted me as I started this tale to call for another dance in the hall. But that is such a strange thing. After all, Addie was barely more than a child when she first brewed it for us.”

  Avice glanced between them, feeling off-kilter, as if the world had suddenly shifted on its side. “Why would Maman fix such a brew and why would you both drink such a thing? What does it do?” she demanded.

  That set the soldiers to guffawing all over again. One man made a crude gesture that Avice knew indicated the joining of man and woman. “Makes you fall in love,” another crowed.

  “Nay, it’s no love potion, it’s a woman’s evil trap,” the eldest among them called. Although his words were hostile, his tone was amused. “It’s a wicked elixir that makes a man forget all control. He’ll plant his seed without realizing what he’s doing and the next day find himself standing before the church door, uttering vows that bind him for life.”

  Heat flushed Avice’s face. She looked at her father. He was chuckling along with his men.

  “You and Maman drank a—” the rest of her question got stuck in her throat. The words ‘love potion’ simply would not be dislodged. Thinking about her parents using such a concoction was somehow discomfiting.

  Her father winked again. “We did, and happy I was that we had done it, even though the stuff was so foul I still remember the taste. Once we’d swallowed it, she ceased to cry except in passion.” His mouth opened as if he meant to say more, but he had to hold his tongue while his men all groaned and hooted as he made claim to manly prowess.

  When their jeering ceased, Lord Lavendon continued, his expression softening. “And because I drank it, I learned to treasure your lady mother even before she came with child and gave me you, and your brothers after you. I’d do it again if she asked it of me, for no other reason than she asks and I know it would please her. Just as you please me by honoring Lady Coudray’s request that you care for her son over this season.”

  Avice lowered her head to again stare at Ysolde’s mane. More pretty words, all of them as empty as the wind. May God help her, she was doomed. The moment Jocelyn turned them away from Freyne, her life was over. Before they rode beyond the boundaries of Freyne Village, every soul within its walls would know of her shame. The instant she breached Lavendon’s gate, every man, woman and child who dwelt upon her father’s lands would be abuzz with the news of her rejection. By the end of the holiday, all of the shire would be laughing up their sleeves at her.

  It wouldn’t be Jocelyn her parents blamed for bringing shame down on their family name. Nay, it would be her, even though she had done nothing wrong. God help her, but she really was going to be sick.

  Jos stood on the raised porch before the hall door, his right arm bound in a sling to prevent him from inadvertently using it. The day’s stinging wind battered him, slinging tiny icy drops with enough force to pierce his tunic and shirt and prick at his skin. He hadn’t realized how foul the weather had become over the course of the day. If he had, he would have grabbed his cloak when his steward informed him that a small armed party approached Freyne’s gate.

  Whoever it was out there came with an ox cart in tow. Anyone traveling with a cart on so miserable a day was either desperate to reach their destination or determined to celebrate Christmas at a particular place. Whichever their original intention, if they were approaching his gate now, it was to beg respite from the breaking storm.

  Shifting to the edge of the porch, he leaned out until he could see the far edge of the gateway. The ability to do that was a temporary benefit of not having yet raised his inner ring of defensive walls, the one that would surround only the keep tower and his hall. He waited, watching that slice of the gateway, and wondered if the oncomers would dare brave Freyne’s makeshift bridge. The rickety construct—naught but a dozen planks lashed together—would be the only way across his recently expanded and mined moat until the new drawbridge was installed in spring.

  Another cutting blast hit him. Because he wore no cap or hood, his hair, grown overlong since summer past, streamed forward to blind him. By the time he pushed it back out of his face, a knight in mail and surcoat was guiding his horse up the mound toward him. The warrior was followed by a heavily cloaked female rider atop a pretty brown mare.

  Jos squinted at the sigil in the center of the knight’s surcoat. His breath streamed from him in an angry hiss. May God take his mother! She had refused to leave Freyne until he promised to spend his holiday at Lavendon. How had she known he was lying when he agreed to her demand?

  The better question was how she’d convinced Lord Lavendon to come to Freyne to fetch him. That made Jos curse his mother a second time as he realized the trap she’d laid for him. If Lavendon had come all this way to invite him to stay in his hall, Jos couldn’t refuse, not without offering his neighbor a grave insult.

  But refuse he must. Just the thought of the noise and bustle that was part of a normal Christmas holiday was enough to set his teeth on edge. His mother’s visit had left him craving quiet the way a starving man craved meat. To that end, he’d not only sent away his dam, he’d done the same with all his servants save for a few soldiers to guard his gate over the holiday. These four, volunteers all, had agreed to keep to the new gatehouse and the stables, where they could celebrate as they thought fit without disturbing him.

  Thoughts scrambling for some way to escape this conundrum, Jos took refuge in doing what every host must when a neighbor came to call. “Well come, my Lord Lavendon. Please, enter and take your ease in my…home,” he shouted out, stumbling over the last word. Until his return from Normandy, Freyne had never been his home, not even as an infant.

  “Well met, Freyne,” Henry of Lavendon shouted back, or so Jos supposed. At the same moment the older man offered his response, another frigid blast of air hit and sent his words sailing off in the opposite direction.

  Jos hunched his shoulders against the onslaught. This gust was stronger than the last and filled with more than just hints of sleet. As it tore at him, it pummeled the rider on the palfrey, catching her unprepared. The wind pushed her hood off her head even as she reached out to catch it.

  Avice.

  Although Jos hadn’t seen his promised wife in five years, not since his stepsister’s aborted betrothal ceremony, he still knew her. Then he frowned in surprise. It was Avice, but it was not. Although she yet retained her gentle cheekbones and round chin, all the childish softness he remembered was gone from her face, leaving behind a woman’s more sculpted visage. The cold had teased a pretty pink color from her skin. Her dark brows were fine and completely straight above eyes that his memory suggested were the color of dark honey. Why had he never before noticed that her lips were so lush?

  Just then, an ox bellowed from the other side of the gatehouse. Men shouted. A woman screeched about protecting so
mething.

  Both Avice and Henry turned in their saddles to look behind them, seeing something beyond Jos’s field of vision. Henry gave an upward jerk of his chin and spoke to his daughter. Every line of Avice’s body stiffened in reaction. Although she humbly bowed her head, there was nothing submissive about the set of her shoulders.

  Jos freed a breath of a laugh. Now, what could Lavendon have said to set his daughter to chewing at her reins in rage? More importantly, why had he never imagined Avice capable of such depth of emotion? She’d had always seemed so amiable, a biddable child.

  His gaze drifted down from her face to the curve of her body exposed in the gap of her cloak. Shame on him for thinking of her that way. Just as he was no longer Gilliam’s squire, she was child no more, but a woman full grown.

  “A little assistance, my lord?” Lavendon called out to him. “We’ve brought you some Christmas cheer, but the ox refuses to cross your bridge. I’ll send Lady Avice on up if you’ll send down folk to help us unload our cart and carry our gifts across the bridge.”

  Jos almost grinned in relief. If they were bringing victuals, then this wasn’t a kidnaping attempt and there was no need to worry over offering insults by refusing to be abducted. Moreover, with Christmas almost upon them, there was little chance that Henry and his daughter would linger here for long. He need only act the part of congenial host for the little while they would stay. Jos found himself praying that the storm wouldn’t break and delay their departure. Or worse, make it impossible for them to leave.

  “But of course,” he shouted back, then looked to the roof of the gatehouse tower and the watching workmen. They’d been setting the last of the slate tiles in place prior to retreating from Freyne Castle to their own homes and families. “Be quit of your jobs. Come you all down and give aid to Lavendon’s folk, then you can be away for the season.”

  “I will not go up there by myself,” Avice told her father, her shoulders squared and her jaw firm.

  As she spoke, and although she commanded herself not to do it, her gaze shifted to Freyne’s wooden hall. Raised upon a thick stone foundation, the hall towered well above the courtyard floor. Although it was taller than Lavendon’s hall, it wasn’t as wide or long. And it looked odd, what with the walls a patchwork of old and new wood, each with its own color. Unfortunately, once her gaze was on the hall, there was no stopping it from shifting to the porch and the man who stood upon it. God help her, but it wasn’t fair to send her up there to face Jocelyn and his rejection by herself.

  “Do as you are told and go to him!” her father snarled, as he roweled his mount into a turn.

  Before Avice knew what he intended, her sire landed a swat on Ysolde’s rump. Both she and the horse cried out in surprise. The mare leapt into a startled trot, nearly dislodging Avice from the saddle. By the time she fought her flighty pet to a standstill, they had reached the small cobbled patch of ground that surrounded the very porch Avice most wished to avoid.

  She raised her head and gasped. She was eye-to-eye with the man who was about to tear her heart from her chest for a second time.

  Gone was the slender boy with whom she’d traded vows, the almost too-thin lad with a fresh scar crossing his forehead. Instead, the man on the porch was taller than her sire, his shoulders just as broad. His face was narrow with high, jutting cheekbones and a strong jaw. His dark brown hair was longer than the fashion, falling well below his shoulders. He had once worn his beard in the manner King John had adopted, tamed to a narrow line that clung to the edge of his jaw and outlined his lips and chin; now, days’ worth of stubble ruined its previous precise form. Avice hadn’t remembered that Jocelyn’s eyes were so deep a brown or that his brows owned the same exotic lift as his lady mother’s. It made him look as if he were secretly amused.

  Self-pity joined shame in gnawing at her. No wonder he didn’t want her. He had become a very handsome man.

  He offered her a small smile, the spread of his lips slow. Golden lights took fire in his dark eyes. “Well now,” he said, his voice deeper than her sire’s, “I can honestly say that I didn’t expect to see you today, my lady.”

  His tone was friendly and without a hint of the scorn Avice expected. That didn’t stop her from honing her tongue to its sharpest. Jocelyn deserved nothing less after what he’d done to her last year. Didn’t her father always instruct his squires that it was better to mount a strong, swift offense than try to manage a prolonged defense?

  “And I can honestly say that traveling to Freyne was the last thing I wished to do this day, my lord,” she replied tartly, thankful that Lina wasn’t close enough to hear her. “But since our cart is filled with foods to help you celebrate the holiday and the morrow is Christmas Eve, it was come today or not at all, wasn’t it?”

  A crease formed between Jocelyn’s brows at her response. “You seem different than I remember,” he said.

  Indeed she was, and he had made her that way. Avice lifted her chin to a haughty angle, readying her next retort. Before she could utter the first word, the heavens opened with an almost deafening roar as mingled rain and sleet pounded them with bruising intensity. She shrieked, scrabbling to pull up her hood for protection while trying to control Ysolde, who was just as eager to find some way to escape an icy beating.

  Jocelyn, his head bowed and his shoulders hunched, caught the mare’s reins with his left hand. Ysolde stood. “Dismount,” he commanded in a voice that brooked no disobedience.

  Avice responded without thought, easily stepping from her saddle onto the porch. The moment she was afoot, he released Ysolde to her own devices and caught his arm around Avice. Before she knew what Jocelyn was about, she was tucked into the shelter of his shoulder and being swept toward the hall door.

  That thick wooden panel stood slightly ajar, left so to draw air within the hall to feed the fire. Two steps later, they were through the opening and standing in the chill safety of the narrow space between the door and the tall wooden panel that protected the hall from the brunt of those necessary door-drawn drafts. Startled, Avice pushed back from her betrothed, shedding bits of ice as she did so. Lord Jocelyn let her go to shove wet strands of hair from his face then brush at the frozen droplets sparkling on his now-sodden tunic.

  “My pardon for so rude a greeting, my lady,” he said, his voice raised so she could hear him above the din of icy rain hitting the roof above them. Then he turned his back on her and returned to the yet-open door.

  Avice watched him, her attention far bolder than her mother would have tolerated. He stepped into the opening and peered into the courtyard for a moment. When he retreated, he brought the door back to its usual slightly open position.

  Lowering her gaze in the pretense of modesty, Avice waited as he returned to her side. He stopped closer than she expected, then lowered his head until his mouth was near her ear so he didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard.

  “It’s coming down in buckets out there,” he said. “I see no sign of your sire. I wager he and the rest of your party took shelter in the gatehouse.” His lips almost brushed her cheek as he spoke.

  Avice caught her breath. Despite that his tunic was damp and water dripped from his hair, he exuded warmth. That heat flowed through her cloak, past the barrier of her gowns and shirt, and made her skin tingle. With each breath she took, that tingling increased until she forgot how cold it was in here. The sensation almost made her forget that the man next to her had done her grievous hurt and intended to hurt her once again.

  Almost.

  Then he added, “Come you within the hall while we wait for the storm to ease up and your sire to join us.”

  That shocked Avice right out of her need to repay him hurt for hurt. She forgot the tantalizing sensations he was awakening in her. She even forgot her pretense of modesty and raised her head to gawk at him.

  She’d been so certain he would refuse entry to anyone from Lavendon, but most especially to her. He watched her in return, waiting on her response when she
had no idea what to say. Nay, that wasn’t true. She knew exactly what her parents expected her to say. Oh good Lord! Why hadn’t she thought to ask what tale her sire planned to spout to convince Jocelyn that he should play host to his betrothed for the holiday? She could just imagine what it might be.

  ‘Good Christmas to you, Lord Freyne. Here is the fruit of our kitchen to warm your holiday table and, by the bye, my daughter will spend all twelve nights with you, will you, nil you. No need to be cautious about her repute on our behalf, mind.’

  Was it possible to die from humiliation?

  “My lady?” prodded the man who should have already been her husband, his brows yet raised in expectation of her response.

  Avice hesitated, then cursed herself for a coward. She didn’t want to enter his hall, not when she wouldn’t be the woman who ruled here. Moreover, if she stayed out of his hall, she wouldn’t have to see Jocelyn’s face when he realized her sire’s intent and ordered Lavendon’s folk to leave his lands.

  “I’ll wait here for my father,” she told Jocelyn.

  The man who would never be her husband shook his head at her refusal, confusion darkening his eyes. That crease reappeared between his brows. “Come now, it’s as frigid in here as it is outside. Have pity! I’ve no cloak to keep me warm. If you stay here, so must I. What if it’s another hour before the storm relents and your father can come up? Although there’s no Yule log, my fire is fine indeed, and very warm.” As he spoke, Jocelyn extended his uninjured arm in a formal invitation to escort her into the hall.

  Avice took a step back from him. “You’ll regret your offer,” she warned, her voice lifted so he could hear her above the noise of the rain. Of course the storm would choose that moment to relent a little. As the drumming of the sleet lessened, her words rang out more loudly than she intended, echoing strangely in this small space.

  Her betrothed studied her for a moment, his brow still creased. At last, he gave a breath of a laugh. “Regret offering you a place near the fire? Why should I regret that?”