In the months since Lavoux, Alexander had discovered that his dedication to training had benefited his education in more ways than one. He had become capable of taking to the field as a competitor, could hold his own, and frequently enjoyed success. And with that success came advantages and pleasures, not least because of his freshness, his youth, and the dark good looks which the tourney circuit had yet to ruin.
There was a glamour about him, and he was discovering with some surprise and a great deal of gratification that women not only sought his company, they also sought his bed, or offered him theirs. It was still a novelty, and there were skills to be learned every whit as complex as those of warfare. The women used him, and he, in his turn, used them.
Monday had been speaking to him, and guiltily, he realised that he did not know what she had said.
‘I asked if you are returning to the field,’ she said impatiently, her slim hand competently clutching the bay’s bridle close to the cheek strap.
‘Yes, I was just taking a quick respite.’ It was a weak excuse since the mêlée had only just begun and men were still warming up. He set the helm back on his head, looked through the eye slits at the townswoman, who was watching him with amusement, and saluting her, spurred back on to the field.
Monday scowled at the elegant young woman and led the bay destrier away to Hervi’s horse picket, where she tied him securely beside the pack beasts. Alexander was certainly proving himself this season, she thought, but she hated the changes his increasing skills had wrought on his nature. His confidence had grown with each success, until on occasion he rode very close to being conceited. He drank measure for measure with the older knights and he talked more than he listened these days, frequently about himself. The women who simpered at his passing, who threw ribbons and flowers … and themselves in his path, had led him to believe that he was God’s gift to the female sex.
She had thought about reminding him of his arrival at their camp, half starved and in beggar’s rags, of the tending he had received from herself and her mother, the kindness and consideration. Yes, her eyes flashed.
Consideration
, that was the word. She doubted that Alexander had ever paused to think about others in his headlong rush towards glory. She could still taste that kiss at Lavoux, inept, clumsy and desperate. He had needed her then. He needed her now in the guise of servant.
Her lips tight with annoyance, Monday gave the stallion a clump of hay to keep him quiet and went to her tent to fetch her cloak. Although the ground was dry, the sky was heavy, and it seemed likely to rain before the contest was over.
A woman was lying on her father’s pallet, her naked body half covered by the blanket. A slack white arm was thrust beneath the pillow, and a mountainous blue-veined breast flopped over the side like a cow’s udder, the nipple fat and brown. The woman’s face was concealed, and all Monday could see was a mass of frowsy hair, the colour a brassy, alchemist’s yellow with darker roots.
Her father sometimes took women to his bed for comfort. Monday was not happy when he did, but she bit her tongue and bore with it, hoping that it would ease his bitter longing and make him more amenable. At least he did not drink so hard when he had a bedmate, but it was a sordid price to pay. This was not the first time that he had lain with this particular whore, whose name was Grisel, but it was the first occasion that she had still been here beyond the dawn.
Tears filled Monday’s eyes. She felt a stranger in her own domain. The woman was lying where her mother had once lain, defiling what had been a warm and tender place. Monday felt unclean even for breathing the same air. Her stomach queasy with revulsion, she tiptoed to her own pallet, took her cloak, and beat a hasty retreat.
‘Who was that girl you were talking to?’
Alexander forced open his eyes. A warm, scented bath, followed by a joust between the sheets almost as vigorous as that on the tourney field, had filled him with a pleasurable languor. The feather mattress beneath him was as soft as heaven, and the bedchamber of the town house prosperously appointed and airy. He could have stayed there forever.
‘What girl?’ he said, and yawned between clenched teeth.
His violet-eyed companion leaned over him and traced the contour of his lips with her forefinger. The tips of her unbound blonde tresses trailed on his naked chest and her thigh curved across his, her knee gently nudging his testicles. ‘The one at the enclosure in the grey dress, the one you gave the captured destrier to at the beginning.’
‘Oh, her.’ He pillowed his arms behind his head and looked at his partner. Her name was Sara and she was the widow of a wine merchant forty years her senior and four months in his grave. She was spirited, self-assured and as voracious as a lioness – a contributory factor to her husband’s demise. Given a choice after the tourney, between drinking around the fire with the other knights, or returning to the town with Sara to bathe in a hot tub and accept her hospitality, there had been no contest.
‘Yes, her.’ She nibbled at his chest and her thigh curved in a higher arc. He felt the wiry brush of her lower hair and the damp kiss of her sex. Arousal coursed through his body, winding around the languor.
‘She is the daughter of a knight who fights with us,’ he said with a shrug.
‘But you know her well?’
‘Yes – like a sister.’
‘She has a pretty face.’ The golden hair trailed over his stomach, following the touch of her lips. Gentle, fluttering kisses, the tickle of her tongue. Alexander closed his eyes and softly groaned.
‘I have never noticed,’ he said in a somewhat strangled voice, and arched his hips.
‘Then you are either blind or a liar,’ she said with amusement, and replaced the busy motion of her mouth with the moist heat of her sheath. ‘And what of me, do I have a pretty face?’ She sat upon him, barely moving, teasing him with the gentle squeeze of internal muscles. Had she done that the first time, he would have exploded, but he had more control now, and set himself to endure.
‘Lady, you are as beautiful as the sun!’ he panted.
She cocked her head and considered him, a mischievous smile in her eyes and on her lips. Then she ceased moving upon him, and taking his hands, cupped them over her breasts. ‘Show me,’ she said. ‘Touch me where I am beautiful; worship me.’
The ensuing exploration was both the most erotic encounter that Alexander had ever experienced, and also the most enlightening. Instead of taking his pleasure as a God-given right, he learned how to give it, and discovered that the giving greatly enhanced his own body’s responses.
Once more she began to move, rolling her hips in a slow but relentless rhythm. Through a haze of ecstatic sensations, Alexander wondered who had taught her the skills of this delicious torment. She had spoken of her deceased husband in dismissive tones as an old man – ‘with no steel in his scabbard’. She must have had other lovers, and she was perhaps ten years older than himself, a world more experienced; but he had the steel, and at the moment he was admirably filling her scabbard. There was a song in it somewhere, but he could not think of the lyrics. The only words that came to mind as her pace increased and his hands clamped upon her round white buttocks were as primeval as the thrust and pull of their bodies.
Sara left the bed and padded gracefully to the flagon set on the coffer, her blonde locks curling to meet the delectable curve of her bottom. Alexander watched her movements with lazy appreciation. His lids would do no more than half raise, he felt so tired and contented. She returned to the bed, a cup in each hand, and sipping from one, gave him the other.
‘I hope you like this,’ she said, arching a delicately plucked eyebrow. ‘It’s a great restorative following exertion.’
Grinning, Alexander propped himself up on the pillow. ‘To an oiled sword,’ he toasted, making her giggle and playfully slap him. The taste of wine flowed over his palate, and then the raw tang of ginevra. He struggled not to gag, forced himself to swallow, and put the cup aside.
‘You don’t like it?’ she queried with a moue of disappointment.
‘It’s the ginevra,’ he said. The taste was in his throat, making him want to heave. ‘I’m sorry. Even the smell of it makes me sick.’
She eyed him over the rim of her own cup. ‘Then you won’t want to kiss me again,’ she said playfully.
He looked down at the embroidered coverlet, his mood of contentment seeping away to leave only weariness. ‘Lady, I wish I knew what to say without seeming churlish. Truly I have an aversion to this drink.’
‘Will you tell me why?’
He glanced briefly at her, then back down at the bedclothes. ‘I once stole an entire flask of ginevra, drank the lot, and was as sick as a dog for three days. I was also whipped for the theft.’
‘Ah,’ she said, with a glint of comprehension. ‘Are those the marks of a lash I felt on your back earlier?’
He resisted the urge to look over his shoulder or contort his arm to feel the slender white ridges raised on his spine by the thongs of Brother Alkmund’s scourge. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said, hoping to dissuade her.
Sara was not to be put off. A gleam in her eyes, she set down her cup and knelt beside him, her breasts peeking between the strands of her silky blonde hair. ‘What is it like to be whipped?’ Her hands reached for him, smoothing over his shoulders to touch the highest of the scars in a whisper-soft caress.
Alexander was both attracted and repelled by the honeyed tone of her voice, the lurking purr of excitement. ‘Lady, you would not want to know,’ he said, and withdrew from her questing fingertips.
‘I might.’
Alexander reached for his shirt. The game had gone far enough, and in a moment it would cease to be a game.
Outside the house, clear in the evening still, came the sound of shod hooves ringing upon the beaten earth of the courtyard. Someone whistled jauntily, and seconds later a small stone struck the closed shutters with intentional force.
‘Sara, Sara, open up!’ cried a deep, masculine voice.
‘God’s bollocks!’ Sara cursed, and flung off the bed and to her feet, her gaze on the shutters.
A second stone struck the wood and clattered to the ground. ‘Sara, lass, open up!’
‘Who is it?’ Alexander dragged on his shirt, his lethargy replaced by a quivering tension.
‘Huon, the captain of the watch,’ she said. ‘He stops by sometimes to make sure I’m safe.’ She swore again.
‘Then tell him you are.’
She gave him a glittering look over her shoulder. ‘Don’t be a fool.’ She gestured brusquely. ‘Hurry, get dressed.’ Throwing on her chemise, she ran to the shutters, freed the catch, and threw them wide.
‘Huon, it’s late, I wasn’t expecting you!’ Her tone was full of reproach, but it bore a smoky intimacy too.
Dazed, Alexander flung on his garments. He could scarcely grasp that this was happening to him, although he had sung about it often enough in bawdy camp fire ballads.
The man shouted up some reply that Alexander did not hear, but Sara gave a throaty laugh in response. Then she closed the shutters and turned back to the room. By now Alexander was hopping into his shoes. ‘Your lover?’ he queried.
‘One of them.’ With efficient swiftness she smoothed out the twisted bedclothes and drew the coverlet straight.
‘One of them?’ His voice squeaked as it had not done for more than five years.
‘Sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose,’ she said pertly. ‘My husband would not have denied himself a casual tumble in the hay along his road – neither does Huon … or you for that matter. Why should I deprive myself of what pleases me?’ She took his barely touched goblet, tipped the mixture back into the flagon and wiped the dampness from the inside of the cup with the edge of his cloak. ‘There,’ she said with satisfaction, and gave him a push towards the door, ‘nothing amiss. Go on, go down. He will begin to wonder why I have not come to open up for him.’
She took the bemused Alexander downstairs, through the darkened main chamber and into a screened-off store room beyond. There was a large trap door in the middle of the floor. Sara raised it by an iron ring in the centre to reveal wooden stairs descending into a dark undercroft. ‘Wait here until it’s safe,’ she said, and gave him another push. ‘Hurry.’
Such was the urgency of the moment that Alexander followed her insistence, and it was only as she dropped the trap over his head, consigning him to a musty-smelling darkness, that he had the opportunity to inhale the atmosphere and begin panicking.
He could not stand upright, for the ceiling was a good foot less than his height. There were things hanging from the beams, things he could not see, only discover by the accident of touch in the pitch blackness – dried salted sausages, bacon flitches, bunches of herbs. Two small furry bodies – probably conies. A plucked chicken for the morrow’s table, its skin crepey and cold. He recoiled from that with a bitten cry of revulsion, his heart pounding and his palms icy.
The cellar terminated in a row of dusty casks. He blundered against them; the strength went from his legs, and he buckled to his knees on the gritty floor. Except for the lack of leather cords slicing into his wrists, he might have been back in the prison cell at Cranwell. It was a nightmare made into reality, and all the more potent for the pleasure that had preceded it. Punishment for a sin he had barely had time to commit, let alone confess.
What is it like to be whipped?
At first he was unable to think beyond his fear. It filled his head, made him mad, until he was almost prepared to believe that Brother Alkmund was standing before him, whip in hand. ‘No!’ he bellowed. The denial rang around the space of the undercroft and echoed back to his lips. The air fell around the cry and settled in claustrophobic heaviness. He wondered which would be worse: to stay here in the dark alone with his terror, or risk being accosted by the captain of the watch as he made his escape. The roar of his own breath filled his ears, shallow and swift. Think, he told himself. In Christ’s name, use your brain, not your gut. He scooped his fingers through his hair and swore. The curses bolstered his courage, made him bold enough to regain his feet. Making a conscious effort to breathe more slowly, he felt his way back down the undercroft. The cellar was a store room, not a prison, and the trap was not bolted. Beyond waiting for Sara and her guest to reach her chamber, he had no need to remain here.