With a heavy heart and full of worry, I washed his skin using the warm basin that Angelica had left outside the bedroom door. Then I helped him pack his things and saddle his horse, and as he kissed me goodbye on the front porch of the little cottage, he slipped his hunting knife into my hand. “For your protection while I’m gone,” he said.
“Come back to me.”.
“You’re my home,” he said, gazing down at me, making me almost woozy with need. “You are where I belong.”
After one more long, lingering kiss, he mounted his chestnut stallion, and I watched him ride down the King’s Highway, tears prickling my eyes, terrified that I would never see him again.
Sara
I stayed behind at Angelica’s, waiting for Bors to return as he promised. The moments were slow to pass, and I found myself checking the window over and over again to see if, by some strange miracle, he’d changed his mind and returned to me already.
“I promise you, he’s riding hell-for-leather to get back to you,” Angelica said. She sat at the big pine table in the center of the kitchen, with bundles of dried herbs and plants around her, ready to be made into poultices and other medicinal potions and salves. On the hob above the fire simmered something in an iron pot, bubbling up with steam, making the room smell of lavender and sage. “I’ve known him many years and I’ve never seen the look in his eyes I see when he looks at you.”
Though I wanted to believe what Angelica said, these feelings were so new and overwhelming that I didn’t know what to think. I sat down across from her and took a sprig of dried sage from the pile, plucking the tiny leaves off the stem. I was lost in my thoughts and found myself drawn back in time to the long summer afternoons when my sister Eden’s now husband was courting her, and she’d spend hours plucking daisy petals.
He loves me, he loves me not…
A noise from the garden startled both of us, lost as we were in our simple work. The crash of an overturning grain bucket was followed by the nervous clucks and warbles of her hens outside. Angelica raised her eyes to mine. “Are you expecting anyone?” She asked softly, in a barely audible whisper.
I shook my head and swallowed hard.
Angelica rose from her chair, careful not to let it squeak as she stood to look outside.
A flat-handed thumping on her door made my heart jump into my throat. And then I heard it—the awful sound of my father’s voice. “Open this door, whore! You’ve no right to keep my daughter. She’s my property!” He sounded enraged with drink and I was terrified of what he might do. I heard other male voices, too, and knew he wasn’t alone.
I pressed my hands to my face for a quick second, praying against hope that this was all just a nightmare. But I knew in my heart it wasn’t.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow, moving quickly. A moment later, a fist-sized stone crashed through the window over the wash basin and landed with an ominous thud on the floor. “Open the fuck up,” my father roared again. “I’ve come to take back what’s mine, you wizened old crone. I won’t let you defile her with your morals, or your dark magic.”
Angelica pushed aside the rough woolen rug on the floor. She crouched low and wiggled two of the old pine floorboards free to create a space that was just large enough for a person to pass through. She pointed at the opening and I did as she’d signaled. As I lowered myself down into the crawl space below the house, I reached up and extended a hand for her to join me. But as soon as I’d suggested it, I knew it was foolish; Angelica clearly wasn’t even willing to abide such naivete, and within seconds the floorboards had been secured back in their place with the rug blocking the light from the knot holes in the floor. I crouched low on the cold, damp soil, listening to her footsteps and then the creak of the front door.
“Afternoon, lads,” she said. “So, the fresh mead at the tavern has gotten your blood up, has it? It’ll be six schillings each. But ten for you, Milo. Even a woman like me has her standards.” A pause. “And you’ll each have to wait your turn, I’m not as young as I once was.”
I heard a man’s laugh, then my father snarled: “You shut the fuck up!”
The hard thumps of boots on the floor told me that there were a number of men with him. For years, I’d been nothing but a nuisance, but now that I’d begun to grow into a woman, here he was with a mob of drunkards trying to take me back. It made me feel disgusting and ashamed.