“Are you all right, my lady?” Hannah said, giving her husband a swat. “Brautus will have that puppy’s head for this.”
“No, it’s all right. I’m all right.” She looked down at the wolf lying dead at her feet, its yellow eyes still staring. “He made the castle safe again. That is all that matters.”
7
Isabel sat by the hearth in the great hall, pretending to mend a torn stocking and watching Hannah fasten a wreath of spring flowers on Susannah’s head. “I like the other one better, the one with the rosebuds.”
“Do you think?” the maid asked, admiring her reflection in Isabel’s best silver mirror. “I’m afraid all that yellow will make my face look green.”
“Orange, more likely, from pure vanity,” Hannah scolded with a smile.
The May Night dance in the druid’s circle was a tradition far older than Castle Charmot. People came for miles around to dance in the grove of the ancients, or so Isabel had been told. “You mustn’t tease the Queen of the May, Hannah,” she warned. “She might put a spell on you.”
“You should come with us, my lady,” Susannah suggested. “You could even bring your cousin.”
“Do you think so?” Isabel said sarcastically, pulling a wry face.
“Hush,” Hannah scolded, giving Susannah a swat for good measure. “Lady Isabel has no interest in such goings-on, nor does Sir Simon.”
“But it’s nice of you to think of us, Susannah,” Isabel said.
In truth she couldn’t have invited Simon anywhere, even if she’d had the nerve or the inclination to do it. She hadn’t laid eyes on him in weeks. The last time she had seen him had been the night he killed the wolf and kissed her for his reward—for so the whole household had chosen to style it. Everyone thought the nobles, Isabel and Simon, must have quarreled about it afterward out of everyone’s hearing. They all guessed that she must have banished him to the catacombs for good for his impertinence. “That Irish devil’s intentions were plain enough,” she had heard old Wat laughing in the stables when he didn’t realize she was passing by. “A right shame it is Sir Gabriel brought our lady up to be so damned particular.”
But in truth it was Simon who had stayed away from her. Orlando had emerged from the cellars every day or so to fetch food from the kitchen, and many nights she heard Malachi galloping over the drawbridge long after she had gone to bed. But she had honored her promise to leave him in peace, and he apparently preferred to do the same to her.
“Don’t mind her; come with us,” Susannah persisted. She took the sewing from Isabel’s lap and replaced it with the rosebud wreath. “The woods are safe; Sir Simon has made certain of that.”
“I know,” Isabel said, trying to hand back the wreath. “It isn’t that.” No one else had been attacked since Simon had killed the wolf; not so much as a single lamb had been lost, and there had been no sign of the brigand knight, Michel. The men of the household were all convinced that Simon was patrolling the forests on his midnight rides. “He’ll scare off any beastie that dares to cross him, I’ll wager,” Kevin had told his wife, and Hannah had repeated his words to her mistress.
“Susannah, enough,” Hannah said now in a tone to put down any argument. “Go and see if Kevin has the wagon ready, why don’t you?”
“All right, all right.” Susannah took the wreath but laid it back in Isabel’s lap. “Just in case you change your mind.”
“You mustn’t mind her, my lady,” Hannah said when the other girl was gone. “She’s just a peasant and a child; she doesn’t understand your position.”
“It’s all right,” Isabel said, setting the wreath aside. “She meant well.” She picked up her sewing, trying not to remember that she and Susannah were nearly the same age or that her own mother had been a peasant lass herself. She must have danced in the druid’s grove before her Norman husband came to claim her, Isabel thought. But her daughter was born a noblewoman, the lady of Charmot.
She worked her way through a whole basket of mending as the rest of the household made ready for the celebration and left, all of them bidding her fair evening as they went. “Be careful tonight, young Thomas,” she called out to Tom as he walked through the hall with a cask of mead on his shoulder. “They say on May Night, the fairies come out in the wood.”
He grinned, blushing scarlet. “A man can only hope.”
Finally she heard the wagon roll away over the drawbridge, leaving her alone but for Simon and Orlando in the catacombs below and Brautus in his room above, or so she assumed. But just as she was about to go into the kitchen and find herself and Brautus some supper, someone came back in through the archway— Raymond’s wife, Mary, looking lovely in a pale green gown with her own wreath of flowers in her hair. “Forgive me, my lady,” she said, coming into the shadowy hall. “I need to speak to you.” She held out a fat little pouch. “I need to give you this. Raymond says I am a fool, but I’m afraid… I can’t go to the circle until you take it from me.”
Isabel took the ragged purse, a soft leather bag trimmed in brightly colored silk, wine and peacock blue. “Where did you get this?” Most of the people of Charmot and the villages around it never saw two coins together in their lives, but the purse was full near to bursting with copper, silver, even gold.
“That dead woman we found had it hidden in her skirt,” Mary explained. “The one the wolf killed.” Isabel looked up at her in shock. “We knew it was wrong to take it, but Raymond said…” She looked away. “We thought there might be a new lord at Charmot, that we might have to move away, and with that money, we could start over, maybe even go to London. I have a cousin there.”
Isabel could hardly blame them; she’d been thinking of running away herself that day. “That girl had this?” she said, more shocked at that. The dead woman had been a peasant; where could she have gotten such a treasure? Some of the coins she recognized as English in origin, the same as ones she had herself, but many of them were strange and obviously old. She tipped a pile into her hand, and a large gold piece embossed with the image of a Roman Caesar rolled out.
“Yes,” Mary nodded. The longer she talked, the calmer she sounded, as if the very act of putting the purse into Isabel’s hands had driven her fears away. “Raymond said she wouldn’t need it any more, and we did, or so we thought. But now that your lord… your cousin has come…” Isabel looked up at her again, and she blushed, but she didn’t look away this time. “You could give it to Father Colin.”
“I could give it to him?” She poured the coins back into the bag.
“Why me?”
“You’re the lady of the castle,” Mary said as if this were a perfectly obvious reason. “You might have such a purse yourself, left to you by your father the lord.”
“I don’t,” Isabel said with a laugh.