by Jill Barnett
She started to speak, but he shook his head, warning her.
“I will know where you are, Clio, at every hour of the day, and especially at night. I will sleep in this bed.”
She opened her mouth to argue, and he jerked the coverlet from her clenched fists, which shut her up.
He crawled into bed and pulled the covers over him with a hard yank. “I am not in the mood to argue with you.”
She scooted over to the very edge of the opposite side where there were no covers and sat up. A moment later she pulled the coverlet off him and up around her chin.
This from the woman who had dropped her towel. If he hadn’t been so blasted tired, he’d have laughed out loud.
“You cannot sleep with me! I am a maid!”
“Good, then I won’t have to worry about another man’s bastard, now will I?”
She was quiet. Too quiet. He could almost hear the cranking of her brain.
“Are you going to …” Her voice trailed off.
He punched his pillow a few times, then plopped his head back down, facing away from her. He closed his eyes. “I’m going to sleep. Not ravish you.”
She was quiet, blessedly so. He was drifting off to sleep and almost there …
“Then I was right that day in the bailey when I said I do not appeal to you.” Her voice was annoyed.
Damn her. “Do not start with me.”
“What? All I said was that I was right.”
He turned to her and pinned her with his hardest look. “I suggest that you do not question my manhood, woman, when I am in the same bed with you. It would not be a wise choice.”
“Do you always threaten people when you do not get your own way?”
“Aye, the way you always change the subject when you have no good argument.”
“I do not do that!” She paused. “I always know what subject I’m speaking about.”
“Perhaps you do, Clio, but no one else does.” He yawned, then added, “I think you know exactly what you do when you are doing it.”
He had her then. She could say nothing because if she changed the subject again, she would prove him right. He closed his eyes again, knowing he’d won this battle.
She jerked hard on the coverlets. “You took all the covers.”
He smiled to himself, then said, “Clio.”
“Aye,” she said in a snippy tone.
“You changed the subject.”
Morning sunshine spilled into the chamber in bright golden light, the kind that made you see double. Clio waited for her vision to clear. She moaned a little, some part of her wishing it were still night so she could go back to sleep.
Sighing, she closed her eyes again.
A blast of hot breath hit her neck. Her eyes shot open and she slowly turned, wincing with a small groan as she remembered just what was in her bed. A huge and hairy male arm was clamped around her body, and her back was pressed against his hot belly.
His hard knee poked her in the derrière. Still annoyed, she picked up his heavy arm and dropped it on his hip. But before she could scoot out of the bed, his thick leg sprawled across her hip and waist and left her pinned to the mattress again.
She was stuck and had little to do but stare at his foot poking out from the coverlets. Bored, she wiggled until her own foot was sticking out below his.
She stared at their feet.
She turned hers this way and that, eyeing it. She had short feet and stubby toes and her second toe was longer than the biggest one. She barely even had a toenail on her smallest toe, which had a fat top and a skinny little bone. Her feet were uglier than a basket of eels.
What was the purpose of toes?
One did not pick things up with their toes as did the monkeys at the Michaelmas Fair. When she walked, ’twas on the balls of her feet. Did her toes help her keep balance? Birds used their toes to hang on to branches or a falconer’s glove. What good were toes?
She looked at his toes, which were long and more even than hers; they were like gate guards lined up according to size. Regimented and in order. She should not have been surprised. Leave it to Merrick to have perfectly formed toes. Except for the black hair on them.
She had bald toes, yet hers looked like a row of jagged teeth, not unlike the old Roman walls that randomly dotted the countryside. And rather like her life, with ups and downs and filled with dips and wrinkles.
Perhaps toes were something that gave clues to your what your life would be, the way Old Gladdys swore that you could read your future in the lines of wee brown sunspots across your nose, or the way your hair waved when it was damp from May dew.
Toes might be there solely to help you understand the direction your life would go. After all, she thought with great insight, you were born with toes. You didn’t grow them, like you did hair and breasts. She decided she would have to remember to examine the toes of her babes when they were born.
Her babes.
She turned and looked at the man who would father them. In sleep he did not look like an infamous and ruthless knight. Nothing about him gave clue to the man who was known as the Red Lion, the man she herself had seen wield a battle sword.
He was a quiet sleeper. She was certain he had no idea that Cyclops was curled against his back, so close that it looked as if her cat were growing right from the small of Merrick’s broad back.
His hair was slicked back and past his shoulders, and he had grown a thick black beard in so few days. But the thing she noticed again with a stunned fixation was the length of this man’s eyelashes. In sleep she could see how thick and dark they were, and she understood why when his eyes were open they looked so very very blue.
He breathed evenly in sleep and did not snort through his nose as her father had. For years the whole castle would awaken to what sounded like wild boars in the keep.
It had only been her father snoring.
She missed him. Her father had been a good man, kind and loyal to his king, Henry, even when the other barons had risen and followed de Montfort against the king they had sworn fealty to.
Her father believed in oaths taken. The one single oath he had made her give him was that she would obey their king and marry the man chosen for her. She had given her father that promise about wedding the knight called the Red Lion.
She had not known that same knight would hurt her so fully by treating her as if she did not matter to him.
Those long days in the convent hurt her deeply. But like her father, she would not disregard her oath, even though he was dead; she took pride in the fact that she had his sense of honor.
She told herself with complete assurance that her oath to her father was why she agreed to freely marry Merrick.
It had nothing to do with the fact that he no longer ignored her. That he had saved her life and that his kisses made her want more, and forget about pride and oaths and honor. Surely her agreement to wed him had nothing to do with the fact that Merrick treated her as if she did matter to him.
She turned to look at him.
He stared back at her, wide awake and looking as if he could read her deepest and most private thoughts.
It took all of her will to not look startled. She stared at his eyes, then looked at his mouth. She remembered those kisses.
“If you keeping looking at me like that, woman, you will not be a maiden for long.”
“Get off me, you oaf!” She shoved at his legs, angry because he could read her mind.
He kissed her hard on the mouth and she stilled for a moment. His beard was not scratchy, as it looked, but soft, and it tickled her face as he kissed her more deeply.
He smelled of thyme soap and musky sleep.
She almost slid her arms around his neck, but the fool raised his big head and grinned down at her. “Is that what you wanted?”
She bucked against him. He laughed. She kicked her feet out and heard him grunt. “Let me go! You are all hammy hands and bony knees!”
He still laughed at her, then rolled away
and threw back the covers in one graceful motion.
Except Cyclops was there.
The cat screeched like the banshees.
“Christ in heaven!” Merrick reached for his sword. But he was wearing only the breechclout. He looked dazed, then he scowled at the floor. Cyclops was safely under the bed.
He muttered a curse, then strode across the room.
There was something about Merrick in that loincloth that did strange things to her. Things she liked and hated. Her gaze followed him as if her eyes had a mind of their own, and she had to force herself to look away.
It did no good and she found herself watching him again, the taste of him lingering on her lips. The clean soapy smell of him.
In one corner of the room was a studded chest that she could have sworn had not been there before. He opened it and shrugged on a linen work blouse and his leather jack and he then donned and tied a pair of softly sueded brown braies. He sat in a chair and pulled on his boots, then stood beside her.
“Do you plan to lie in that bed all day?”
“I had thought you intended to chain me to your side.”
He gave her a long, hot look. “Perhaps I’ll get back into bed with you and finish what we started.”
She threw back the covers and strolled from the bed. “I have things to do.”
“Such as?”
“I have ale to brew from the Trefriw water.” She paused pointedly. “Bridal ale.”
“Ah, only one night in bed together and you are already rushing toward the wedding with such enthusiasm.”
She spun around. “Would you just leave so I can dress? I would like some privacy. Take your hammy hands, that irritating grin, and those bony knees of yours and leave!”
He made a mocking bow and strode toward the doorway.
She shrugged on a deep emerald robe, muttering, “That is, if your big head will fit through the door.” She wanted the final word.
He said nothing, but opened the chamber doors and walked out near the stairs.
“De Clare!” He bellowed. “De Clare!”
A few minutes later Tobin and Thud came barreling up the stairs.
“Aye, my lord.” Tobin stood before Merrick, and Thud mimicked him, sticking his small chest out, positioning his feet the exact way the squire did, and raising his chin so he looked as arrogant as Tobin de Clare.
Merrick looked around. “Where’s Thump?”
“Who?” Tobin and Thud asked simultaneously.
“The other one.”
“Here I am, my lord. I’m coming. Twenty-one … twenty-two …” Thwack was slowly trudging up the stairs.
With the slow passage of Thwack-time, all three lads eventually were lined up in front of the chamber door.
Merrick turned to look at Clio, then looked back at the boys. “Your duty today is to guard your lady Clio. She is not to leave the castle and you are to protect her and watch over her every move.” He turned back to her and pointedly said, “I want you safe, Clio. Inside the walls of Camrose.”
She caught her breath and narrowed her eyes while she looked for something to throw at him.
He had given her keepers!
He started to leave, so she said with utter nonchalance, “I had no plans to leave the castle this day. I will be in my brewery.” She paused, then added, “Where there are no bony knees.”
He just gave her a look that said he knew exactly what she was doing, and he disappeared out the chamber door.
She stood there, feeling everything from relief to anger to something that felt like desire, the desire to clout him a good one.
There was a quick rap at the door.
“Aye!” she called out.
Merrick stuck his big head back inside. “I forgot to tell you something.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and tapped her foot impatiently. “What?”
He grinned. “That wasn’t my knee.” Then he closed the door just as her boot hit it.
Chalybeate Ale
Mix malted barley, Trefriw water, and brewers yeast.
Ferment until ripened to pale ale.
Add a flacon of Cowslip flowers,
Three pinches of Sweet Marjoram,
Two stalks of crimson Bell Heather,
A handful each of:
Angelica, Eccony, and Sweet Mint.
Ferment for two more days,
Add Fennel, Juniper, Apples,
Pears, Figs, and Rose Buds to taste.
—Medieval Bride Ale
Chapter 25
It was one of those rare and wonderful days when the air turned clover-sweet and blue as the sky. Snow white doves cooed in the castle eves and geese honked as they flew overhead in flocks shaped like huge black arrows.
The hour had come when the villagers brought their baskets to the castle to barter with their freshly picked crops for tin, iron, tools, and cloth goods—things to which only the marcher lord had access.
The bailey was teeming with women, children skipping at their sides joined hand in hand. The mothers had baskets hitched on their hips and filled with pearly white turnips and sweet leafy collard, dark emerald spinach and crimson crab apples.
There were crude carts with studded wheels that rattled over the moat bridge and were piled with chopped wood and hard coal. Fish and hay wagons rumbled inside with freshly mown hay stacked high as a hut and huge wooden barrels of flounder, monkfish, and herring that made the air smell like the sea.
Local fishermen had their fat round fishing coracles tied to their backs like giant walnut shells, the long ash oars strapped to the boats and sticking out from behind them like the feelers of a water beetle.
Wide and finely tied fishing nets hung like harem veils from the paddles and looped around the men’s floppy broad-brimmed hats. They pushed along squeaky carts filled with willow baskets of slick eels, brown-speckled trout, and stacks of fresh salmon.
With gaming bows slung on their shoulders, the hunters, dressed in the colors of the forest and pointed hats, carried pikes speared with such game as hare and squirrel, or bigger baggage of buck and boar.
Near the laundry hut, a young wash maid was hanging out the clean linen. It flapped and snapped in the light warm breeze. The bake house had fresh rye bread and stone-milled wheat loaves cooling on the window shelves, while wide, hollowed bread trenchers and plump meat pies were lined up in the hundreds and stacked on metal baking trays.
As always there were the incessant sounds of building, the pounding of pegs and nails, the chipping away of stone work for the bridges and the walls, the hammering of iron for sturdy gates and drain piping, for weaponry or heavy locks and hinges, anything strong that would protect Camrose from an enemy siege.
Just before Sext, Clio’s red wagon had lumbered through the gates loaded with the spa waters. So now, Clio sat on a wobbly stool next to the brewery window, where she could see the whole inner bailey. To pass the time, she watched the hubbub, resting her chin in her palm while she waited for the ale pots to begin to boil.
Old Gladdys had lined up her jars and jugs next to Clio’s herbs and lichens. For this batch of ale, the old Welshwoman arranged the ingredients in the order of the stars during the summer solstice, claiming that anyone with half the sense of a barn sparrow would know that the stars and moon held secrets and magic just waiting to be discovered.
Tobin and Thud had finished unloading the water barrels while Thwack stood guard on Clio. ’Twas rather silly, considering she could outrun him. Anything weighing under a hundred stone could outrun him.
The sound of raised voices made her turn away from the window. “What is the matter?”
“We’re arguing over whether ‘time’ rhymes with ‘fine,’ “ Thud said.
“Why?”
“’Tis a game, my lady, between the squires and the pages.” Thud paused, then added quickly. “Throughout the ages.” He grinned proudly. “For all of today we must speak in rhyme.” He paused again, frowning for a long moment
Tobin
took a menacing step toward him.
Thud’s face lit up like one of Old Gladdys’ bonfires. “Until tomorrow at Prime.”
“Aye.” Thwack nodded. “Through the day and night. We must keep speaking rhyme, for a small passage of time.”
“Good lad!” Thud patted Thwack on the back. “I’m glad.”
All Clio felt at that moment was faint-headed. “Seems a silly game to me.”
“Nay, my lady.” Tobin de Clare stepped forward and stood before her in his usual proud stance. “’Tis the first thing a page must learn. When Lord Merrick taught me rhyming, ’twas a full fortnight of speaking such. These lads will do so every third day for a month.”
“Why?”
“It might seem foolish to you, my lady, but the exercise teaches how to think quickly. Lord Merrick says a knight must be as quick with his head as he is with his sword. Sir Roger and many of the other knights use the same training.”
Tobin looked from Clio to the table where Old Gladdys was working. He watched her for a long time, then walked over to her. Thud mimicked his strides and was following so close at his heels that he kept stepping on the backs of Tobin’s boots.
Old Gladdys looked up and eyed Tobin, obviously dismissing him, since she did not wink at him or mutter in Welsh. She just looked at him. “You want something, boy?”
“I am ten and six. I am no boy,” he told her with disgust.
Gladdys shook her fuzzy head, then pinned Tobin with those sharp black eyes. “I am three score and nine and after all those years, lad, I know a green boy when I look at one.”
“Where is Sir Roger?” Tobin demanded.
Old Gladdys paused for just the inkling of a moment, then began to wipe her gnarled hands on her black cloak. “I do not know.”
“But the earl sent him with you and he did not return with you.”
Old Gladdys shrugged. “The last time I laid these old eyes on Sir Roger, he was running with some blond bitch.” Dismissing Tobin, she looked at Clio. “Is Brother Dismas in the castle?”