A Bed of Spices (10 page)

He shifted, stretching his legs out before him. On the river a barge passed, and the strong afternoon sunlight glinted on the coppery head of an oarsman. “You did not tell me where you came by your ideas,” he prompted.

“I came by mine as you did yours—by thinking.”

He grinned. “Such a strange pastime for a girl.”

“So it may seem.” Brushing crumbs from her skirt, she answered him more seriously. “I read what I could procure from the priest and watched my father to see when he grew ill. He cannot take much exercise, nor heavy foods. He improves when his diet is light and filled with fresh foods. He gets very hungry for berries.”

In her voice he heard the same sense of puzzlement he himself felt over the mysteries of illness and cures. He leaned forward eagerly. “It is no secret that fresh foods are better than salted and dried, but I’ve not heard of berries in use for a problem of the heart.”

“Heart?”

He glanced at the bread in his hands, cursing himself for talking freely. It was, after all, her father about whom they spoke. Restlessly, he pinched out the soft center of his bread and mulled his reply.

“Do I seem to you a fainting maid? What do you mean?”

He lifted his head and smiled. “I forgot myself, Rica.” There was a glint of steel in her eyes and he sighed. “Helga told me it is his heart. The tisane she makes for him helps to keep it strong, but it will not keep him so forever.”

She jumped up. “He is no invalid. He hunts and rides and oversees all of his holdings.”

“Yes. And will do so for many years to come.” He stretched out a hand. “Come. Do not fret—he is a hale man from all I hear. You need not worry.”

Her brow yet creased with a frown, she nonetheless settled back in the grass, her skirts pooling around her like water. A swath of gilded hair spilled over her shoulder and torso. For an instant, Solomon imagined his hands buried in that silken texture; he saw himself smoothing the shimmering tresses over the curve of her arm and the lush rise of her breast and the sway of her waist.

With effort, he willed his gaze away. “How came you to read Latin, Rica?”

“There is a priest in my father’s chapel who loves to teach,” she said. “Since my father had no sons, I am all he has to work with. He is not always happy with the turn of my thoughts, but he cannot resist teaching me anyway.”

Solomon laughed. “How well I can imagine! Do you torment him over matters of religion, as you torment me over matters of medicine?”

“Tis daunting enough to challenge you,” she said and lifted one perfectly arched brow, giving her face again that odd mix of knowledge and innocence. “He is patient, but if I say too much, perhaps he would take away his books—and that I could not bear.”

“Does he have many?”

“In truth, I suppose they are my father’s, but he has given them to the priest’s keeping.” She grinned. “And Father Goddard shares them with me.”

“I do not know another woman who reads Latin,” he said quietly. “It somehow does not surprise me that when I find one, it is you.”

She lifted one white shoulder, then shook her head slowly. “I think it does me no good.” Her expression sobered as she focused upon the dark blue spread of the Black Forest beyond the Rhine. “What will I do? If I were the son my father had wished for, perhaps he would have let me go to the university. For a woman, there is no such place.”

Solomon chewed his bread slowly, studying her with a dawning sense of surprise. Several times she had made barbed comments about the opportunities afforded him. He had not realized how truly envious she was. “Is that what you wish for, Rica? To go to university?”

Her gaze flew to his face and he saw the suspicion there—she was afraid he was laughing at her. After a moment, when he did not break into teasing or laughter, her guard eased. “I would read everything that has ever been written,” she said in a voice hushed with passion. “Instead I run the kitchens and tend my father and my sister…” She sighed. “Pay me no heed,” she said quietly. “It is the foolish dream of a child. I know that.”

Solomon saw the hunger for learning in her exquisitely beautiful face, saw once again the gleam of bright intelligence in her eyes. He touched her slim hand. “You would do well, I think.”

“Do not patronize me.”

By her downcast eyes, he could see she did not believe he meant what he said. She no doubt thought his words were just another form of seduction.

And somehow, the intellectual curiosity that so mirrored his own kindled his desire as keenly as the shimmer of her hair. The thought was so strange that he wanted to laugh, wanted to kiss her in exultation. “Ah, Rica,” he said, and lifted her hand to his lips. With all the curbed passion he could not elsewise express, he kissed her fingers, closing his eyes. From the road came the sound of travelers, and faintly the mournful and celebratory song of the monks floated over the Rhine.

He opened his eyes to find her looking at him with sorrow and hunger. Feeling as if there were no other choice, as if all the planets and mysterious forces in the heavens had ordained this moment, he took her hand and placed it on his jaw.

“I can’t,” she whispered in protest. But her fingers traced the edge of his beard and feathered along the edge of his eye, exploring.

He shifted closer, smelling the warmth of her skin and the crushed grass beneath them. A humming began within him. “You are more beautiful than stars flung across a midnight sky,” he whispered, touching her hair. “As brilliant as a blazing torch.”

“A poet,” she said with a tremulous smile. “Are we mad?”

“Utterly,” he said in a raw whisper. A need welled up within him, rising until it broke the threads of restraint he’d held over himself. Moving slowly and deliberately, he pushed gently at her shoulders until she lay amid the grass and buttercups, her hair spread out below her like an Arabian carpet.

“I am mad,” he murmured. “But I care not—for if madness brings visions such as these, I willingly leave the world.”

Closer and closer he moved, until their bodies touched from shoulder to ankle. With a hand that trembled, he stroked her hair, looking into her beautiful eyes.

“Rica,” he said and could think of no more. He touched her peach-colored cheek—only for a moment. One moment, stolen from all of time, was little enough to ask.

“My lord,” she whispered weakly, “I do not—”

“Nor do I,” he whispered, bending over her. “I do not kiss strange ladies, no matter how beautiful they are. But you have been no stranger to me since the moment I saw you in Helga’s garden.”

Overhead a grackle called in the blue, blue sky and a gentle, heated wind blew a lock of her hair over his shoulder, but Solomon felt only Rica’s rich curves against his body. She smelled of gillyflowers.

“Please,” she whispered, raising her hand to his face.

“Please?” he echoed. “Please do?” He bent his head closer, to whisper his words over her poised and waiting lips. “Or please do not?”

“Please kiss me, Solomon,” she breathed, grabbing his shoulders, “or I shall die of wanting.”

Yesterday, afraid he would frighten her, Solomon had only tasted lightly of this sweetness. Today, his control left him. He suckled her lips and thrust his tongue into her mouth to taste her. Her small teeth nipped sharply at his lips and a low cry escaped her throat, a sound that resonated through him, settling low in his groin.

After a moment, starved for breath, he lifted his head and touched her chin with his thumb. “No woman has ever made me willing to forget all that I am.” He swallowed. “I dreamed such dreams of you last night that I thought I would weep upon waking, to find they were not true.”

He kissed her again, longer now, more slowly. She eased against him. Solomon felt her hunger in the clutch of her fingers against his arms, in the protesting and passionate noises she made, in the fierceness with which she met him. She lifted a hand to his hair and he shuddered in reaction.

But after a moment, the madness of what they were doing seemed to strike her. “Solomon,” she said urgently. “It is given to women to—” She made a slow sound as he trailed his tongue around her lips, her body going limp.

She pushed at him weakly, but lost in the taste of her, he would not be calmed. He kissed her cheek and her ear, and rubbed his wrists against the silk of her hair.

“You must stop,” she whispered, but her hands trailed over his back and her eyes closed.

He lifted his head. “You do not wish me to stop, my love.” He covered her white throat with his palm to feel the silky warmth, to touch the source of her murmurings. With his thumb, he followed the path of an artery and he felt the furious pounding of her heart. “And may God forgive me, Rica,” he said against her mouth, “but I do not wish it either.”

With a small cry, she opened to him again, pulling him closer to instinctively arch against him. He groaned at the pressure, groaned at the sweetness and passion mingled here in this beauty.

He tasted her jaw and throat and shoulder, feeling the gilded hair brush against his face.

The screech of a magpie overhead intruded momentarily. The sound served, for Solomon found himself at war even as he touched her. She was a virgin, the daughter of a powerful lord, a Christian. And until his touch, she had not known the carnal hungers of a man.

He had told her yesterday it was not lust. But this fierce and biting madness was evil, whatever he called it.

Yet even as he thought these things, he found himself suckling her throat and tasting the rise of her collarbone. His hands of their own accord roamed over her back, gauging the curves below her velvet surcoat.

Suddenly, she shoved him away and rolled free. “No!” she gasped, and stumbled in haste to her feet. “We must not!”

Flung backward into the grass, Solomon stared at her, breathing raggedly. As he sprawled there, stunned into sanity, he saw that her lips were swollen, that his beard had left marks on the tender flesh of her jaw and along her neck, that her hair was tangled and littered with bits of grass.

All at once, he was deeply ashamed. He fell to one knee and took her hand, pressing his forehead to her fingers. “Rica, forgive me.”

Her free hand lit in his hair. For a moment, she said nothing, only stroked his head silently as he knelt before her. At last she said quietly, “The priest brought me the Bible last night, as instruction.”

He lifted his eyes.

She sank down to her knees, to look at him face-to-face. “I made a confession to him that I had spent many hours thinking of a certain man in ways that were not chaste.”

Solomon lifted his fingers, seared by this admission, but she caught his hand before he could touch her. “Father Goddard said there was more to God’s world than prayers,” she said, “and he brought me the Bible to read, with a place specially marked.”

Her eyes softened. “It was,” she said with an ironic smile, “the Song of Solomon.”

“Ahhh.” He closed his eyes and leaned forward to press his forehead against hers, feeling as if he might weep. “And yet, this is impossible, Rica. We cannot love each other.”

“I know.”

For a long moment, they simply remained as they were, their fingers tangled, foreheads pressed together, all else forgotten.

Solomon finally felt calm enough to stand, and tugged Rica to her feet. “We must take care of you before you return to your father,” he said.

“Take care of me?”

He nodded, shame still pricking his belly, and touched the reddened places on her chin. “Let me soothe these marks.”

She blushed. “All right.”

Growing nearby was a stand of comfrey. Drawing on the teachings of Helga, he dug a little of the root-stock and walked to the riverbank to rinse it clean, then bruised it with his fingers.

As he knelt before Rica, she lifted her face trustingly to his ministrations.

His heart caught and began anew its fierce pounding. With effort, he swallowed his desire and pressed the herb to her chin gently. She would see that he did not only wish to hold her splendid form in his arms; that his fascination for her stemmed from the nimble mind she owned as well as the lust of the flesh that carted away his reason.

But as he tended her, his hand shook with his restraint. After a moment, he paused and breathed deeply. Once, twice, three times. When he was calmer, he blotted her white cheeks with a bit of his tunic. “Tell me what you most like to study, Rica.”

“I do not know,” she said, and smiled at him. The gesture caused her dimple to flash, and the corners of her eyes turned upward. “In truth, I like the poems best, the stories of knights and ladies—there! Now you may laugh at me for the foolish woman I am.”

He found his hands had steadied with the conversation. “That is not foolish,” he said lightly, bending to retrieve the poultice. “Romance gives the world lightness and beauty. Even some of the great stories in the Bible your priest brings to you are stories of great love.”

“They are?”

He smiled. “Of course. David and Bathsheba—do you know the tale?”

Rica slowly shook her head. “Will you tell it to me?”

He looked at her, then at the sky, which showed clear and blue as far as the eye could see. But he could not sit indefinitely with her. Soon or late he would yield again to temptation. “Another day, perhaps.”

As if hearing his unspoken message, Rica stood and brushed loose grass from her skirts. “It is time I returned. Perhaps the astrologer has finished the task I set for him.”

She turned to call for Leo. The dog came pounding through the woods, tongue lolling. Rica smiled. “Would that I were so carefree.”

She settled her hat over her hair and tied it in place. For a moment she was silent. Then she lifted her chin and met his eyes. “This is a sin, Solomon,” she said quietly.

He waited.

“It is given to women to be the stronger.” She bit her lip. “I will not be alone with you again, my lord. Much as I want to see you, there is only tragedy ahead if we continue thus.”

His heart plummeted. “I wish it were not so.”

For one long moment more, she looked at him. He thought she would say something else. She opened her mouth—but then only closed it again. Turning away, she said, “Good day.”