Wonderful

by Jill Barnett

  He glanced up at her, then cocked his head. “You look confused, my lady.”

  “I feel confused.”

  “Too many messengers,” he muttered.

  She took a long deep breath, then slipped her arm around the boy’s bony shoulders. She leaned toward him and with much patience asked, “What did you come to tell me?”

  “About the messenger.”

  “What about him?”

  “He had gold bells on his horse.”

  “You said that. What else?”

  “He wore the badge of the Red Lion.”

  “The Red Lion?” Clio stopped breathing.

  “Aye. Merrick de Beaucourt, the Red Lion.”

  Her betrothed. After so long she had almost forgotten he really existed. She was certain he had forgotten about her. For four years he was to have been gone.

  But four years had turned into six, with nothing but one message over a year ago, and that one insultingly directed to the abbess and not to her, his very own betrothed. She took a deep breath and asked, “What was the message?”

  “To prepare for his arrival. He and his men are but a few days away.”

  Clio didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Her mind spun from one emotion to another: annoyance and fear, anger and excitement.

  Thud and Thwack watched her and exchanged similar looks of surprise, then puzzlement. Thwack tugged on her gown and stared at her from a face too serious to belong to a boy of just ten. “We thought you’d be pleased. Have you nothing to say, my lady?”

  “Aye.” She turned around and faced the eastern landscape. A long bit of silence surrounded her while she remembered her wistful dreams dying as each day of those years passed her by.

  “I have something to say.” She stood straighter, stiff, like someone who expected to be hit. She stared at the east wall with a narrow-eyed look, one that did not bode well for her betrothed or for their marriage.

  All she said was, “’Tis about time.”

  The orderly little convent with its chalk-white walls sat huddled between ripples in the humpbacked English countryside. Founded over a century before and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of the Water Springs had the words Benedictus locus, “the blessed spot,” carved into its foundation stone.

  Today, more so than most days, the convent needed all the divine blessings it could get.

  “Madame.” Merrick de Beaucourt planted his hands on the desk of the abbess, leaned toward her, and pinned her with a black look that did little to hide his anger. “There must be some mistake. Lady Clio cannot possibly be gone.”

  The abbess stood her ground. “She left the day after your message arrived.”

  Merrick paced in front of the desk, glowering at the floor. “She left,” he repeated, then stopped in front of the abbess again. “Left? She just left? She is a woman. A woman cannot just ride off as she pleases.”

  “You do not know Lady Clio.”

  “No, I do not. But I know she was here under the king’s protection until I returned.”

  “She was under his protection. That is true. But he was occupied with the French king and we are a long way from London, my lord.”

  “God’s teeth!” Merrick slammed a fist on the desk.

  “Do not curse here, Lord Merrick.”

  He straightened to his full height. “She is a mere woman!”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Roger flinch.

  The abbess sat up as straight as the Holy Cross and looked down her long nose at him with an expression almost as haughty as that of the queen herself. “A mere woman? As am I.” Her voice turned even cooler than his own. “As was the Blessed Virgin and as is the queen, and I might add, as was your own mother.”

  At that, Merrick ran a hand through his black hair. He took a moment to seek patience from somewhere and inhaled in a long deep breath. “Back to the subject at hand, madam. That of Lady Clio, who was placed here under your protection and is now gone God knows where.”

  “I never said I did not know where she was. Only that she was gone.”

  The woman should have been a queen, Merrick thought, looking at her haughty and imperious stance. Brave knights cowered under his glare. His enemies begged for leniency. Yet this woman spoke to him as if he were a mere annoyance. Very slowly and quietly, he asked, “Where is she?”

  “Will you beat her?”

  “I have never hit a woman.” He paused, then scowled at the abbess. “However, there are moments when I must overcome the urge.”

  Roger groaned and slapped the heel of his hand against his forehead.

  “While I might be a mere woman, my lord, I am a woman of God, and a woman who wields some power. I fight my battles with prayer and am proprietress of the convent and its lands.”

  “As I have just said. I’ve never hit a woman and have no intention of doing so in the future, either to you or Lady Clio.” He planted his hands on the desk again. “Now will you tell me where she is?”

  “You won’t beat her?” the abbess repeated. She sighed and tapped a finger against her pursed lips. “I suppose it would do no good if you did.”

  Merrick and Roger exchanged a bewildered look.

  “The Lady Clio has gone to Camrose Castle.”

  “Finally,” Merrick said under his breath, and spun around.

  “Wait!” The abbess stood.

  One hand on the door, he turned and looked back.

  “I did try to discourage her from doing this.”

  “Apparently you did not try too hard.”

  The abbess smiled then and gave a wry laugh. “Lady Clio tends to do as she thinks best, my lord.”

  “Not any longer,” Merrick said curtly, and he left.

  Chapter 4

  Camrose Castle,

  Glamorgan, the Welsh March

  Old Gladdys swore to anyone and everyone who would listen that she was a Druid. This despite the fact that the Druid cult had been extinct for quite a few centuries. The old Welshwoman claimed she was a seer; she had the sight.

  When two ravens roosted in the elm tree near the cooper’s cottage, Old Gladdys told the cooper’s childless widow she would bear twins. Everyone had laughed until the barren widow visited the Michaelmas Fair, and there she wed a blacksmith from Brecon.

  Before three harvests had passed, she had four healthy strapping sons, born two at a time. For weeks afterward the village women flocked like doves to Gladdys for her predictions on everything from childbirth to love.

  The villagers were a fickle lot, though, and soon Old Gladdys and her prophecies were forgotten. But if someone had asked them who was the homeliest maid in the valley, every last villager would have said ’twas Gerdie the goose girl, who had the great misfortune to look like her geese.

  What no one else knew was that Gerdie had visited Old Gladdys during a full moon. Soon the goose girl rose every morning and washed her face with the dew from a tuft of pink valerian growing out of a rock in the river Wye, then broke her fast with turnip soup.

  A fortnight later, the most handsome troubadour to ever pass through the village of Clawdd fell passionately in love with Gerdie the goose girl and vowed to use his life and lyre to sing to the world of her rare beauty. The last the villagers had seen of them was the day after they wed, when the singing troubadour and a grinning Gerdie rode off in his cart, her entire flock of geese crammed into the cart bed and honking as the couple disappeared into the horizon.

  Afterward, Old Gladdys’ prophecies were seldom ignored. If she pointed at six black swans and said it was an omen, all would ask if it was fair or foul. If the wind changed suddenly, women entered their doors backward. If there was an orange moon rising, they would sleep with a sparrow feather beneath their pillows to ward off bad dreams that might come true.

  But to Brother Dismas, the monk at Castle Camrose, Old Gladdys was a heretic. And not all there in the head. Should someone mistakenly mention the mad Welshwoman’s claim of the sight, Brother Dismas crossed himself and said a few
Our Fathers, then extended the prayers of Terce by another hour. He tolerated her out of godly condescension for her weak head, his own benevolence and charity … and also because God told him to.

  It seemed that God talked to Brother Dismas. Every day.

  So that very night, when someone rang at the castle gate after midnight, Old Gladdys sat up in pallet and shrieked, “Trouble! ’Tis trouble! Four bells is trouble!”

  No one would answer the call.

  Except Brother Dismas. The Lord’s deep voice had commanded him to do so.

  The gate bell rang and rang, as if someone were beating the metal with a war hammer. Brother Dismas took a fat tallow candle from one of his shrines and lit it from a rush light near the chapel wall. He shuffled across the courtyard and moved toward the inner gatehouse, wondering why God would not let him sleep this night.

  Yawning, he stepped over a few sleeping dogs and looked around for the watch guard. He heard a loud snore. Instead of guarding the entrance, the porter was slumped on a stone bench in a dark corner, an empty ale cup in his limp hand.

  The bell clattered again, even louder than before. Brother Dismas winced when it rang clear through to his back teeth. He held up his light to the peephole and slid it open with an irritated jerk. He stared outside, blinked, then held the candle higher and took another look.

  A moment later he crossed himself and looked up to the heavens. “Merciful Lord, I think you forgot to tell me something.”

  Clio was in the solar at Camrose Castle, standing in front of a column carved with the likeness of William the Conqueror. The Welsh who had occupied the castle until recently had used the oaken column to hold their daggers. She had pulled four deadly looking two-pronged Welsh skeans from the column the day she first arrived.

  She stood back and eyed the likeness for a moment.

  William the Conqueror now had dimples.

  She turned and paced for a minute or two, the evening warnings of Old Gladdys still fresh in her ears.

  “Burn the candles bright this night,” Old Gladdys had said. “There were three hawks circling the tower at dawn, the wind this morn was from the east, and the cook found worms in the yeast.”

  Clio made it a point to ask her what those signs meant, but Old Gladdys only said that was for her to know and for Clio to find out. Cajoling her hadn’t worked. Old Gladdys had gone to a nearby hillside, lit a bonfire, then danced around it singing loud chants that sent Brother Dismas off to the chapel in a dither. He spent most of the day on his knees saying the Lord’s Prayer.

  So with her supper, Clio had passed on the bread, her mind’s eye seeing only wormy yeast whenever she looked at a loaf. She ate only a small piece of cheese and some green-pea pottage. Now, her stomach was soured and even fresh milk warmed with honey could not make her sleep.

  She paced the room, bored and anxious. As she passed the candle stanchion, her quick steps made the candlelight flicker in odd shapes over the stone walls. She watched for a second, then clutched her gown in her fists and spun around.

  On the wall, the outline of a shadow spun and wiggled in a bell shape that looked just like Brother Dismas did when he laughed, his plump belly shaking like eel jelly.

  She released her gown and shifted once, her hands crossed high above her head. The shadow appeared to soar up the walls in the shape of a hawk, easy and free. She could remember watching the birds from the window in her small, dull room at the convent and wishing she were a hawk or a falcon or even a lark so she could fly away.

  A noblewoman had no freedom. She was born to obey the wishes of men. For the hundredth time she wondered what her life would have been like had she not been born female.

  Clio walked over to the narrow castle loophole and opened a heavily studded wood shutter. She stared out at the dark night sky and wondered what it was like to be free like men. What was it like to go crusading, to lie under the stars at the other end of the world, to see places and people and lands that were not home?

  She wondered what it would be like to be a knight, and what her betrothed had done for all those years. And she tried to imagine what he looked like.

  Would he have a chin like an ax, hands like hams, and scars all over him? Was he called the Red Lion because his hair was bright red like the castle smithy’s? She hoped not. The smithy had hair coming out his ears and nose and it stuck out from his head like skimpy tufts of scallions.

  So many questions spun through her head that she could not possibly find sleep. No matter how she tried. She had just lain there, fitful, as she had for every night since she had arrived at the castle that had once been her home.

  But Camrose was not the same place she remembered from her youth. The castle had been taken by the Welsh shortly after her father’s death. She had thought of it as gone forever.

  Until she read the message her betrothed had sent to the abbess over a year ago. Camrose had been reclaimed by King Edward, who had been crowned the year before. Now both she and her lands belonged to her future husband by royal command.

  The castle did not feel like home. It was a strange place to her, cold and dark even in the light of midday. The walls were higher than before and now made of thicker, heavier stone, walls that made her feel as if she were locked away in a tower.

  There were solid shutters on the window openings instead of thinly tanned leather embellished with needlework of falcons twined with ivy and roses and inset into panes of polished horn. Her nurse had told her once that her grandmother had stitched those coverings herself, combining her grandfather’s coat of arms with that of her own family. Clio had loved the leather stretchings and panes because they had always allowed the light of the sun to come inside.

  But now even in the morning the chamber was dark and stank of smoke and must. The furniture was huge, roughly hewed and hard. There was nothing remaining that had belonged to her family.

  No tapestries. No fur rugs. No chests or fine linen sheets or goose-feather ticking. The bed was hard wood and thick rope and had a prickly hay tick tossed on it for a mattress. Atop it was one rough woolen blanket that still itched even after she had rid it of fleas.

  Sparrows and pigeons had been nesting in the window sills when she arrived and had flown freely in all the rooms from the looks of the filth on the floors. It had taken a few days for her and the few servants who had returned to the castle to clean it all out.

  There was little a woman could have pride in. Her children, perhaps her husband, and surely her home. For the sake of the women before her, she wanted Camrose to be as it had been. She wanted it to be lovely. But it wasn’t, so she kept to her old rooms, attending her own business while she waited for her betrothed to arrive.

  She tried to dispel the fear she felt deep inside at the thought of finally meeting the man face to face, a man known as the Red Lion. ’Twas not a name that conjured up a pleasant and tame image.

  But try as she might, she could not will her apprehension away. It was there, in her mind, clear and real and seeming like a bad dream from which you wanted to hurry and awaken so you could forget it. Though she could not forget, anymore than she could forget that her life and her future rested in the hands of a complete stranger.

  So she had decided to meet him on equal ground. She wanted to walk toward him with the same graceful swanlike motion of the ladies at the queen’s court, without fear, with only confidence. Her pride made her want to show him exactly what he had chosen to callously ignore.

  She tapped her finger against her mouth, closed her eyes, and thought about those elegant ladies. She tried to picture them in her mind, to capture the right image.

  After a moment she took two steps back, then two more. One deep breath and she lifted her chin, cocked her head for that confident and slightly arrogant air, then she slid her feet forward in “the glide,” a motion that resembled a swan atop a glassy lake.

  A few steps and she winced. The soles of her slippers grated against the stone floor and sounded like steel against a grindstone
. She could hear it from her ears to her teeth.

  She clasped her embroidered robe daintily in her hands, bowed her head, and said, “Welcome, sir knight.” She started to sink into a curtsy, then straightened, tapping a finger impatiently against her cheek. “No, no, that is not how ’tis done,” she muttered with a frown.

  She backed up again, squared her shoulders, and raised an outstretched hand, then let it fall—suitably limp for an aura of feminine frailty—before she slowly moved forward.

  “Sir Merrick. ’Tis wonderful to meet a knight of such renown.” She did her curtsy, then rose with a surprising amount of grace. “You must tell me, sir, what has kept you occupied these past four years? Lopping off heads?” She drew her hand across her neck in a slicing motion and made a face with her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Boiling people in oil?” She picked up a water jug near a window and poured it over the ledge while she feigned a wicked laugh.

  “Or …” She spun around with both hands clenched high over her head holding on to an imaginary weapon; then she did her best male swagger and twisted her face into a grimace. “… merely cleaving”—she swung her arms down and grunted loudly—”the sorry infidels with your battle ax?”

  She straightened once again to her courtly pose, faced the column, and smiled sweetly. “A mace, you say? With spikes? Why, no, I have not seen one used.” She fluttered her eyelashes like a dolt. “What is that you ask?” She threaded her fingers as if in prayer and raised them to her cheek. “Aye, sir knight. I can see your fine thick muscles.”

  Pausing, she widened her eyes in mock wonder. “Would I like to touch them? Certainly, but you will have to kneel, since I cannot reach your fat head from here. I am but a small, weak woman, good for nothing but waiting for to wed.”

  Clio heaved an exaggerated sigh and clutched her hands to her breast. “Waiting for a man is such a trial. Say you, sir knight, whenever did you decide to deign to come and wed me?”

  She looked beseechingly at the column. “Perhaps you were concerned that I might outgrow my childbearing years.” She nodded, raised one finger high in the air as if she were speaking to all the world; then she spun around. “Aye, ’tis so. A man must have an heir, now, mustn’t he? A male child, of course. And what, pray tell, will you do with our girl children?”