Masters of Medieval Romance: Series Starters Volume 1

by Kathryn Le Veque

  “Three days ago in an ambush,” he said. “What will you do for her?”

  Mannig was a tiny man with a bushy beard and a bald head. He was also very old and had seen a great deal in his life, which meant he lacked tact at times. He simply spoke what was on his mind because he had no time for pleasantries.

  Moreover, he was looking at nine very big Norman knights and was quite puzzled as to their presence, especially in the heart of Saxon England, but that curiosity would have to wait. He had a sick woman on his hands and the knights wanted answers. When the knight who seemed to be the leader of the group asked the question, Mannig turned back to the bed where the woman was sleeping feverishly and fitfully.

  “She has the poison in her,” he said. “It is a matter of taking the poison out and healing her humors. She is in very bad humor.”

  He was speaking with a strange mix of his language and Latin terms, which gave the knights pause when listening to him. They were all multi-lingual, as was necessary in these times, but it took them a moment to decipher what he was saying. Even so, Gaetan already knew what the old man was telling them. He was impatient with a fool who spoke the obvious.

  “What will you do for her?” he asked again, trying not to sound angry or desperate about it. “And what can we do to help?”

  The old man glanced over his shoulder at the patient. “Everything depends on how much poison is in her body. If it is too much, then I can do nothing. But if there is a chance….”

  Gaetan cut him off. “Then examine her now. Waste no more time.”

  The old man dutifully went to the bed and bent over Ghislaine, peeling back the layers of clothing on her leg. The movement jolted her awake and she slapped her hands over the leg that the old man was trying to uncover, trying to stop him from moving her painful limb. Gaetan, Aramis, and Téo went to the bed, quickly, to calm her.

  “Be at ease, little mouse,” Gaetan said quietly, kneeling down by her head and pulling her hands away from her thigh. “We have brought you to a healer. He wishes to inspect your wound.”

  Ghislaine looked at him, her eyes big in her pasty face, and shook her head. “Nay,” she breathed. “It is nothing. I must go now.”

  She tried to get out of bed but many hands stilled her as the old man finished peeling back her cote and shift to get to the trousers she wore beneath. The entire time they’d been traveling, she’d never parted ways with her trousers, which she was comfortable with, but she’d continued to wear the cotes that Gaetan had given her, making for many layers and an awkward mix of clothing for the lady warrior who had never dressed like a lady.

  It had also been part of the problem when the arrow penetrated; there had been many layers to go through, taking many layers with it into her leg. There was a binding around her right thigh, stained with seepage, which the old man carefully unwrapped. All the while, Gaetan kept eye contact with Ghislaine to keep her calm.

  “We are in Worcester,” he told her softly. “The priests at the abbey sent us to this man. He will help you.”

  In just the past few hours, Ghislaine had gone from lucid and feverish to hardly lucid and burning with fever. The poison in her body was creating a muddled mind and her thought processes were affected.

  “The abbey?” she repeated. “Where is the abbey?”

  Gaetan smiled faintly at her. “Not far,” he said. “We took you there first.”

  “The abbey is still here?”

  He nodded to the odd question, stroking her forehead simply because he couldn’t help himself. She was so very sick and he felt so very miserable for her, an odd reaction from a man who had little compassion for anyone other than his men. Even when Adéle had been giving birth to his sons, he’d been away at the time and had spared little thought to the woman who was struggling to bring forth his children. It was cold of him and he knew it, but it was of no matter. There was no emotion involved when it came to his bedslave, a mere possession and nothing more.

  But with Ghislaine, the situation was much different. She brought forth emotion from him that he never knew he had, a depth of pity that he didn’t know he was capable of, but he was afraid to show any of it, afraid it might look like weakness. Still, seeing her so ill made him sick to his stomach and he felt foolish for it, wrestling with this sense of compassion he was unused to.

  She made him feel.

  “The abbey is still there,” he murmured. “Quiet, now. Let the apothecary look at your wound. He will know what to do.”

  Ghislaine simply nodded, her eyes never leaving his. There was that faith again, reflected in her gaze, faith he’d seen before and faith that made him feel stronger than anything he’d ever known. He continued to hold her attention as, down below, the apothecary took a sharp knife and cut away her trousers to inspect the wound better. Aramis and Téo hung over the man’s shoulder to see the wound for themselves.

  “You will not leave me here?” Ghislaine asked, her voice hoarse and weak.

  Gaetan continued to stroke her forehead as he gazed down at her. “I will not leave you here. You are part of us, Mousie. I would not leave you behind, not ever. Put your mind at rest.”

  Ghislaine sighed, relieved by his words. She clutched his hand tightly as if afraid to let him go. She was just starting to doze off again when the old man touched the arrow entry wound and she nearly came off the bed, shrieking in pain. Even de Moray and de Reyne rushed forward to keep her still because she was kicking so, throwing a knee right into Aramis’ chest as he stood over her. The man grunted as the wind was knocked from him. Now, everyone was rushing to still her as the old man peered more closely at the wound.

  “Keep her leg still,” he commanded quietly. “She is raging with fever and the leg is full of poison. Who cleaned the wound after she was injured?”

  Gaetan looked at him. “I did,” he said without hesitation. “It was doused repeatedly in wine before we stitched it.”

  “Did you remove any debris?”

  Aramis answered before Gaetan could; he was very worried for the lady. “It was a dirty wound,” he said. “We took out what we could find but there is always a chance that more was pushed deep that we could not get to.”

  The old man bent over the leg, inspecting the wound very closely as Ghislaine was all but pinned to the bed by the knights. When the old man touched the cat gut stitches that Gaetan himself had put into Ghislaine’s leg, pus began to seep out from between the strands.

  The knights all saw it and it was something no one had wanted to see. Pus meant poison, and poison would kill. The leg itself was swollen, the area around the stitches red and angry. The old man pushed again on the wound and more pus came forth.

  Now, everyone was looking at the apothecary, waiting for a brilliant answer on how to cure the woman, but the apothecary remained silent as he continued to inspect. He had de Reyne help him bend the knee up so he could get a look at the exit wound, which didn’t have the pus or swelling that the entry wound on the top of the thigh did. De Reyne lowered the leg down as the old man stood up.

  “There is poison in the wound, of that there is no doubt,” he said, “but the wound on the back of the leg is clean. That tells me that the poison has not spread.”

  It was good news as far as news of the wound went, but she was still in grave danger. He moved away from the bed as the knights watched him with a mixture of curiosity and impatience. He just seemed to be puttering around at that point. Even Wellesbourne, who hadn’t shown much interest towards Ghislaine one way or the other, was unnerved by it.

  “Well?” he finally demanded. “What do you intend to do?”

  The old man went to one of the long dilapidated tables in his hut and began knocking things around, evidently looking for something. Mice scuttled off of the table as he banged about.

  “I intend to cut the leg open and clean out the poison,” he said. “If I do not, she will die.”

  It was a simple statement, to the point, but it was something no one wanted to hear even if they
already knew that fact. The mood of the room had gone from one of great concern to one of sadness now as they realized their guide, the woman who had become part of them in spite of their rocky relationship with her, was seriously ill.

  As it often was with wounds, if the initial injury didn’t kill then the chance of poison after the fact often did. Now, they were facing that very situation and there wasn’t one man who wasn’t feeling pity for Ghislaine.

  Their little warrior was facing her most difficult challenge yet.

  “How will you clean out the poison?” Gaetan wanted to know, although he already suspected the answer. He simply wanted to hear the old man’s process. “What medicaments will you use?”

  The apothecary didn’t answer right away; he was pulling the items he needed off of his table. In fact, he had a handful of what looked like strips or straps, and when he rounded the table on his way to a second table over near the door, he held out the straps to de Winter, who was the closest to him.

  “Tie her down,” he instructed. “She cannot move while I am cutting her wound open.”

  Denis looked at the straps in his hand with a good deal of apprehension before looking to Gaetan for instructions. Would they tie her down? Or would they do as they were doing now, which was holding her down themselves. Gaetan saw Denis’ expression and he shook his head, faintly.

  “Nay,” he said. “We will not tie her down. We will hold her. Tying her down would only terrify her.”

  The old man was casual in his reply. “As you like,” he said, “but if she moves, I may cut more than needed. I may do further damage. Do you understand?”

  “I do.”

  “Straps will not touch her,” Aramis said in that threatening tone he used so often. “We will make sure she does not move.”

  Gaetan’s gaze moved to Aramis, who was standing down by her feet. He was reminded, yet again, that his knight, his longtime comrade, might be feeling the same thing for the lady that he himself was. Gaetan was starting to think that he needed to have a word with Aramis about it if Ghislaine survived all of this. If he was going to stake a claim, then he’d better do it quickly.

  Providing she lived.

  That was all Gaetan cared about at the moment.

  The old man wandered between tables, picking up what he needed by way of a cracked wooden bowl. He tossed a few things into it; a large needle, cat gut, two knives of different sizes, and a wad of boiled linen. He picked up a second bowl that had a cloth covering it that, when removed, filled the air with the stench of vinegar. Then he came back over to the lady on the bed, and the knights surrounding her, and began to hand things to the men who weren’t involved in pinning the lady to the bed. Wellesbourne and Jathan ended up holding the two bowls.

  “Now,” the old man said as he settled himself between de Reyne and de Moray, who were on the right side of the bed and pinning down the right side of her body. “This will be painful and she will not like what I am doing, but it is necessary. You must hold her as still as you can else she will do more harm to herself. Are we clear?”

  De Moray responded. “We are not fools, old man. Get to it.”

  Gaetan shot de Moray a disapproving expression; he didn’t want the apothecary insulted just when they needed the man to do a job. But the old man seemed not to notice. He simply peered closely at the infected wound and held out a hand.

  “Bring me my knives.”

  Wellesbourne came around and knelt down next to the old man, extending the bowl that had the knives and other sharp objects in it. Taking forth the larger of the two knives, he didn’t even warn them when he immediately began to cut the sutures on the entry wound of her thigh.

  Ghislaine stiffened with pain and those holding her clamped down. The apothecary went to work on his screaming patient.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‡

  I Cannot Take That Which Does Not Belong To You

  It was evening.

  The door to the apothecary’s hut opened and men began spilling out, forming a group of exhausted knights that gazed up into the clear cold sky as the world outside remained dark and still.

  It was in stark contrast to the screams and groans inside the hut. They’d come outside for a breath of air after the harrowing procedure on Ghislaine’s wound. Not one man had watched the event unfold and not felt a twinge of queasiness about it, though none would admit it. Men were meant to take such pain from wounds, but watching a woman go through it – and a strong woman at that – had been inherently wrong in many ways. She shouldn’t have put herself in harm’s way. She shouldn’t have taken an arrow on their behalf.

  But she had and she was paying the price.

  No one felt very good about that.

  The streets of Worcester were abandoned at this time of night, the only sounds those of nightbirds in the distance as they hunted near the river. The knights were weary and hadn’t eaten since morning, but that didn’t seem to matter at the moment. They were concerned about their little guide, who had only now quieted down and had fallen into a heavy sleep. She’d passed out during the cutting and scraping that the apothecary had done to her, only to be awakened by excruciating pain that she’d had to endure because she didn’t lose consciousness a second time.

  There came a point towards the end where she couldn’t even scream anymore, only flinching as the old man stitched a wound that was now at least three times as big as it had been before. He’d had to cut the wound to get down into it, so now there was quite a hole in her leg, but it was as clean as the old man could get it. He’d cut away, scraped away, and even found a small piece of leather that he believed had been causing the poison. He’d removed it, rinsed the wound with vinegar, and stitched it up with surprisingly small and neat stitches.

  After that, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

  Once the operation was finished, so was their task of holding Ghislaine down on the bed. The knights released her but they didn’t leave right away, watching her as the old man had her drink something he called “rotten tea”, a foul potion, before she fell into an exhausted sleep. Or, perhaps she had even passed out again. It was difficult to say, but at least she was reasonably at peace once the horror of the procedure was finished.

  St. Hèver and Wellesbourne were the first to wander away, the tough and most heartless of the group who ended up being the most sickened by the experience. They were eager to leave. Gradually, they all went outside except for Gaetan, Jathan, Téo, and Aramis. Those four lingered for a few minutes, perhaps to prove that they weren’t as squeamish as the others, until Téo and Jathan, finished with his prayers for the lady, finally went outside.

  That left Gaetan and Aramis, but Gaetan wasn’t going to leave before Aramis did. He sat at Ghislaine’s head, still holding her hand because she’d been squeezing it throughout the procedure. He was fairly certain she’d broken bones but he didn’t much care about that.

  He was only concerned with her.

  “That was an exceptionally brutal thing to watch,” Aramis finally muttered when they were alone. “I have been exposed to battle wounds my entire life but that was… rough.”

  Gaetan was looking at Ghislaine’s sleeping face, thinking he imagined something more than normal concern in Aramis’ tone. He struggled to keep his jealousy at bay, an unusual thing, indeed, when it came to his men.

  God, how he hated feeling this way, swamped with feelings he’d never experienced before. The last thing he wanted to do was upset Aramis but the man had to know how he felt. He couldn’t be upset with the man if he’d not been forthcoming about his feelings.

  He cleared his throat softly.

  “She is the most courageous woman I have ever known,” he said. Then, he tried to look at Aramis but found he was unable to. This was going to be a difficult admission. “I appreciate your help with the lady. In fact, you have been most kind towards her since that evening at Westerham.”

  Aramis nodded, his gaze on Ghislaine’s ashen face. “She was very cleve
r, your little mouse.”

  “You wondered if she could really fight. You received your answer.”

  “I did, indeed.”

  Gaetan paused. “Aramis,” he said. “I have been thinking about something. I do not wish to offend you, my friend, but I must ask. Do you have feelings towards the lady other than simple friendship?”

  It was a blunt question that filled the air between them. Aramis tore his gaze away from Ghislaine’s face. He didn’t look particularly surprised by the query. In fact, he’d been expecting it. Therefore, his reply was calm and truthful.

  “I know you do,” he said quietly.

  Gaetan looked at him, then. He felt foolish that his friend was more observant than he gave him credit for but, in truth, it wasn’t as if he’d been hiding it as of late. “Does it show?”

  “To me, mayhap.”

  “Do the others know?”

  Aramis shrugged. “I have not asked. No one has said anything if they do.”

  Gaetan wasn’t sure how he felt about that except that he felt as if he’d been keeping a secret from his men and that was something he’d never done. He didn’t like withholding information from them but, in this case, he wasn’t even really sure what he was feeling for her. How was he supposed to verbalize it to others?

  “You have not answered my question,” he said after a moment. “Do you feel something for her?”

  Aramis’ gaze lingered on Gaetan a moment before returning to Ghislaine. “Would it matter if I did?”

  “I would appreciate an honest answer.”

  Aramis was quiet for a moment before the answer came, soft and hesitant. “It is possible that I do.”

  Gaetan pondered the reply. Oddly enough, he felt relieved by it. Now, he could deal with it. It was the unknown that had him unbalanced. “I do not blame you.”

  “Nor do I blame you.”