Hard on the heels of her dislike followed hope. Hugh at this moment was already in West Sarum, carousing and calling, acting the part of the rich, drunken, red-headed fool.
As for herself—Joanna flicked her mud-stained gown and scowled.
“May I go to bathe, please?” she asked, playing the role of escapee to the hilt. “I long to wash him off my skin. He was vile.”
“Hugh Manhill gave you the means to practice alchemy.”
“That was his father.” About to add that Sir Yves loved gold, Joanna stopped herself in time. With Bishop Thomas sitting at a huge desk in his private solar, running his hands through the heap of chains, coins and nuggets that she had spread before him, she did not think it wise. “I thought of flight all the time. Every day, each night, I waited for my chance to get away, to return to you.”
I should have called him My Lord. What is wrong with me?
“You seized the moment. Well done, Joanna.”
There was a dryness to Thomas’ tone that she did not like. He had not questioned her about her escape. He had not asked after Mercury, the hostage he had "gifted" to the Manhills by a ruse. He had not asked if she was injured, or thirsty, or hungry. He did not even inquire if she had walked all the way.
“You will be able to resume Solomon’s work? Pick up where he has left it?”
She gave a small bow, avoiding his avid eyes, hoping to hide the revulsion that welled in her. “If I am allowed to see him. If I can ask my father what assays he has already performed, my own work will go quicker.”
Thomas yawned, a sign he was no longer listening. "Why is some of this gold marked with the heads of kings? Kings from long past?"
"It is how it grew. May I see my father?"
"Later, perhaps."
"Thank you." At least Thomas was no longer asking after the provenance of Orri's hoard. “It is good to be home.”
Thomas stroked the cool, gleaming gold. He was mildly hungry, although not certain what he fancied. Perhaps it was merely the girl. She had returned dusty and care-worn, quite broken-down and untidy, and yet at the same time, different. He recalled how she had walked into his solar, glancing at the guards, smiling at them. There was a brighter colour in her face, a merry glitter in her eyes. She was desirable again.
"You may bathe," he conceded, anticipating her transformation. "I will send maids to attend you. Come to me at supper. You can tell me then how yours and Solomon's work progresses."
She bowed out of his presence. Dimly, he was aware of a clerk at the other end of the long table, staring after her over bundles of scrolls and parchments. He cracked his knuckles together, smirking at the scribe’s discomfort.
The girl was back, with gold. He had her, and her Jew-bred father, exactly where he wanted them. Soon he would have a potion to get the truth out of the Templar and then he would have the relics, too.
Life was good to him.
Counting guards, checking who was armed as she mounted the donjon staircase, Joanna knew that Bishop Thomas expected to bed her that night.
Then I must take the ancient story of Penelope as my guide. Thomas is my unwanted suitor. Like Penelope with her unlooked-for suitors, I must delay the bishop without him realizing what I am about.
She quailed at the task ahead of her, her feet slowing as she climbed the narrow spiral of the donjon. How could she delay? How many days and nights would she have to delay?
I may have to lie with him. What if there is a child? I will not know if he or Hugh is the father.
You know potions and elixirs. Use them!
Because she knew the guards would report it, she did not pause on the first floor but kept going. She did not glance at the iron-studded door and gave no sign of having heard a muffled cough from within the chamber.
“Be calm and easy,” she told herself under her breath. The bishop ruled by spite and fear. If she asked the guards beside the door about Solomon, Thomas would know her question within the hour. She must appear content to be at “home” inside the palace and keen to resume work.
Stifling a sigh, she stepped into her old alchemical chamber, seeing at once that her father had left his favourite cup on top of her leather apron. The pit of her stomach felt to drop by another hand-span. She touched the earthenware beaker, hoping against all sense that it would be still warm; that some essence of her father lingered. Guilt dropped onto her like a mouldy cloak. Yesterday, Solomon had been free, drinking his fruit tisanes, pottering about this workplace, studying the star charts. Today he was in the donjon. Did he know she was back in the chamber above his? Had he been told anything?
Joanna closed the door on the lingering guard, crouched in a corner with her father’s cup, and wept.
On the first night, at supper, she drank a loving cup with the bishop that had him snoring as soon as his head rested on his bed. She had eaten charcoal and bread beforehand, so the sleeping draft did not affect her. She dozed on a chair and slipped out of his chamber in the pre-dawn chill. The guards and servants, accustomed to such behaviour from the bishop's latest leman, did not stop her.
On the second afternoon, she sped to the kitchens for a fresh manchet loaf. More than ever, she was glad that as an alchemist the guards and castle servants were wary of questioning her, and even the haughty steward Richard Parvus would not condescend to ask her anything on a subject in which he knew nothing. No one troubled her as to why she needed the bread, or noticed when she stuffed part of the loaf, now soaked with a sweet sleeping potion, into the body cavity of a partridge. Later, she saw the bird being glazed and decorated for the bishop’s own trencher and knew she would be undisturbed that night.
On the third morning he went hunting water fowl and was gone all day and most of the night.
By day four, Joanna sent word by a page that she had reached a stage of vital sublimations and the work could not be left.
The following day, a delegation from the Abbot of Glastonbury arrived at West Sarum. At their coming, Bishop Thomas became an instant model of piety. Less than twenty years earlier, the monks of Glastonbury had spectacularly recovered the bodies of the great King Arthur and his queen Guinevere. Thomas was eager to acquire a sacred relic from the body, bones or clothes of the pair.
"For how long do they stay?" Joanna asked the maid who brought her a leek pie in her tower chamber.
"Four nights. So no meat or treats till they are gone." The maid blew out her cheeks in disgust. "A pity!"
"It is indeed," Joanna agreed. her spirits soaring as she thanked the maid for the ale and pie. Four more nights of peace.
While the bishop and the party from Glastonbury Abbey were busy at high table with the grandest of ceremonial lunches, she took two copper cups and filled both with ale, adding a pinch of volatile salts to each to make them bubble and foam. This would be her chance to speak to her father and to David and for that she would play the role of alchemical wizard to the highest order, until the guards believed her very robes breathed smoke and gold. Her head high and the blood storming in her ears, she sped down the staircase to the first floor and knocked on the iron studded door with her foot. The two guards playing chess outside the door hurried to unlock the door.
"For Sir David Manhill and my father," she announced, as she swept into the chamber. "I bring them the gift of a restoring elixir from my lord."
My lord. The face that flashed before her as she spoke was not the sleek, pale features of Thomas but the lean, tanned face and bright blue eyes of Hugh. How did he fare? Where was he?
Hugh leaned against the pillory right outside the bishop's palace and took a slow drink from a flask. A young vendor of old clothes, carrying a large bundle of robes under one arm, glanced his way, spotted the flask and veered off in the direction of the fish market.
"Not good enough for you, am I?" Hugh bellowed after the scurrying youth. Slipping on imaginary pig dung, he smacked down onto his backside on the cobbles. An old woman gripping a basket of fish heads crossed the street to avoid him. He
leered at her, then drank again.
He had already been put out of five ale houses in as many days. He was renowned as West Sarum’s worst “rich” drunk, generous in his ale-buying but deep into his cups by midday.
He was not as drunk as he pretended to be but he was still drunk. Thinking was hard and his feet hurt. Not his haunches, which was strange. He peered at his toes, thinking them a long way off, and tried to consider his position.
It was the quiet time of day in the city, when most decent folk were at their meat. The motley crowd of hangers-on who clustered round him in the grimier ale-houses were begging for scraps at the houses of the rich. It was a good time, he decided. What it was a good time for, he could not quite remember.
He must—make a show. A show for the guards.
There were no guards about, although there had been plenty of men at the brewster's house, where he had kicked the legs off a table. Three gold coins had kept him out of prison then: he aimed for no common jail. He wanted the bishop's prison and for that he needed the bishop's men.
"Come on, you," he growled to no one, fisting the pillory.
Do not be taken too soon, Joanna had warned. There must be no connection between us that any can guess at. I must be known as the girl who escaped her captor. You have to be the drunk, rich sot.
It had been amusing at first, a falling back into a miss-spent youth that, in truth, he had never known, being too busy fighting and winning. Now he was bored. The taste and smell of ale bored him. Tottering along the cobbles bored him. His face ached, where he had smeared the stuff Joanna had given him—he had not heeded her warnings about it smarting and now he regretted using so much: his cheeks felt to be burning and popping like roasted chestnuts. The screeching of a metal-wheeled cart, lumbering up the high street, further set his teeth on edge and his head pounding.
"How are you, friend?" asked a carter, as Hugh walked deliberately toward him and his devil's cart.
"Stop," said Hugh to the mules drawing the cart. They did so at once and he allowed them to nuzzle him, stroking their heads and necks.
"Hey!" The carter strode up to him. "You are in the middle of the road, friend. Stand aside and let me pass."
Hugh planted his feet more firmly, feeling the stones beneath his heels. "Your beasts are taking a rest with me," he said.
"Yes, I see that, but we can rest in the bishop's bailey yard, so why do you not release the mule's bridles and let us go on?"
"Friends should talk." Hugh heard the carter mutter about a "big brute, could turn ugly," and knew he could start his show soon.
He turned, ran to the corner of the high street and plucked a long pile of entrails from the bloody slop under a butcher's table.
"Oi!' bawled the butcher's lad, trying to menace him with a cleaver then standing like a statue as Hugh tapped his wrist and knocked the blade from his hand. Hugh grinned, wrapped the entrails like a scarf about his neck and strolled back to the carter, who was busy urging and failing to persuade his beasts to stir.
"Master, master!" cried the butcher's boy behind him, "A fellow is making off with our offal!"
"Move, will you?" roared the carter, gripping the mules’ bridles and tugging on them.
"Shall we dance the May in, friend?" Hugh cavorted toward him, watching the man's face change from a bewildered smile to horror as he grabbed the carter by his tunic. From the high walkway around the bishop's palace he heard the first shouts and drumming of rushing feet.
Soon, soon, he told himself, dropping the carter back onto the road and spiralling about to face the oncoming assault.
"Your bishop is the devil!" he roared. "Devil and spawn of the devil!"
Here they came, the bishops' little guards, eager to prove their loyalty.
Hugh laughed and burst into song. He was still singing the refrain when six guards smashed him to the cobbles and planted a boot on his face.
Chapter 32
She was hurried into the chamber by the two bored-looking, scarred guards she did not know. The smaller of the two knew Joanna, though, or thought he did.
"You have a visitor," he told David and Solomon, as soon as the door was re-bolted. "The lady of my lord bishop. You will conduct yourselves accordingly. None of your odd, Eastern manners!"
To her, he said, "If you will but sit on the bench before the fire, my lady, I will bring the men to you."
David and her father might have been half a league away, not a few paces. So simple and tempting it was, to cross the dusty floor tiles and ancient strewing herbs to where Solomon was, in his favoured place, standing beneath the arrow slit and torch. He had been reading a text by torch-light, but now he rolled up his parchment and smiled.
Shalom, he mouthed as the guard turned to beckon David, a greeting which wrung tears of longing to her eyes. Eagerly she marked the tiny changes in him. His beard had a few more grey hairs. His fingers were stained with sulphurs and his own favourite herb, alkanet. His face was more fleshed out. His dark eyes twinkled at her.
That he was hale and whole and in possession of his wits was better than she had dared to hope. She had been so afraid for him, so terrorized at the thought of the malice of Bishop Thomas against him, especially when she was held hostage by Hugh. For so long this slight, stooping father of hers was all she had.
To stop herself doing something foolish or giving herself away—for this new guard did not seem to know that one of the prisoners was her own father—Joanna forced herself to step to the fireplace.
She could sense David and her father watching. Solomon was still smiling.
Does he not recognize the danger we are now in? The thought made her annoyed, then ashamed. Her father was other-worldly, with his mind on the starry heavens. Perhaps it was a blessing he was as he was: he could cope with imprisonment as he had coped with the many blows life had dealt him: with a mild, sanguine heart.
David was different. With the grace she remembered in him, he strolled to the bench with the guard. As he paused, awaiting further orders, his face remained impassive, no longer open and boyish. He had, she realized with a pang, some new grey hairs amidst his fair hair. A legacy of his time in the prison pit? Was he pleased to see her? She did not know.
"I bring news from your brother!" she wanted to burst out. "We are striving to free you!" Their previous ease, when she and David had spoken of Jerusalem and the great Arab scholars, seemed impossible to recover.
“You, sit here,” said the smaller guard to David, pointing to one end of the bench. “You, there.” He pointed to the other end of the bench.
The two men settled where indicated and she was perched between them, all three of them staring at the two cups in her hand and then at the small fire in the grate.
“Sir, have you another two cups, please?” Joanna asked. “Then we might all partake of the bishop’s bounty.”
Panic crawled over the guard’s face. The ale had stopped foaming, but it was clear he believed it a lethal brew. He stared at the copper cups with hesitant fascination.
“I will see if there is another cup for you,” he said, stepping away from the fire with alacrity.
"You escaped my brother," David whispered in Latin. "Pray God that you do not fall into his hands again."
The harshness of his voice chilled Joanna.
"I am here because of Hugh!" she began, desperate to explain.
David shook his head, his thin mouth a wire of disapproval. "Not on my account," he replied, misunderstanding her. "You do nothing for others, my lady."
"That is not true!" To her horror, she realized that she and Hugh had erred. They had not thought of any message or token that she could deliver to David to show her true intent. How could we forget, she berated herself, but knew the answer all too well. For the last mile of their journey she had been consumed with dread for Hugh.
"We are striving together in this," she said, but David turned away from her on the bench, as if he blamed her for his imprisonment in both donjon and prison pit.
>
"It is good you are home safe, daughter," Solomon spoke for the first time, holding out a hand to receive one of the cups.
Joanna leaned toward him. When their hands touched, she wanted to kneel at his feet and wail forgiveness for having been away and now, with her return, for being the reason he was back in the donjon. All she could think to say was the bald truth. "I am truly sorry you are here."
"No matter. You will continue the work." Solomon drank from the cup, giving a sigh of pleasure. "When he is ready to speak to me again, David and I will continue our disputations."
The guard was returning from turning out the contents of a chest, carrying a pewter cup.
"That will not do," Joanna said at once. "I am sorry, but the bishop said that for this potion to work, the cup must be the colour of the sun, either gold or copper."
Together, the two guards glanced at the scatter of objects beside the chest. "There are none such here," said the smaller one.
Joanna, her heart hammering afresh as she told lie upon lie, spread the fingers of her free hand. "I am very sorry. The bishop was most insistent on the point."
The guard looked ready to kick her and the useless contents of the chest about the room.
"I have two more copper cups within my chamber." Joanna rose from the bench. "If you allow it, sir, it is the work of moments for me to fetch them. I am sorry, indeed, that I did not think."
"Go then," the guard interrupted, mollified by her apology.
Before he or his companion changed their minds, Joanna moved to the door.
Running upstairs, she found the cups and wrote a hasty note for her father. Returning to the first floor chamber, she fretted outside the door until the guards re-admitted her.
Love and Chivalry: Four Medieval Historical Romances Page 79