Catherine Coulter (12 page)

He watched Merry skip down the stone steps, watched her speak first to Miggins, then to every single woman she passed. They all nodded and smiled. She was the mistress, he thought, and they accepted her as such. She’d taken over so effortlessly. He wondered for an instant what it would be like if Merry weren’t here, if it was only Miggins. It was a thought to make him shudder. Ah, but he had a brain, a rich and cunning brain according to the king, and he would have managed. Garron saw that Burnell was watching her as well.

She called out to him, waving a small rolled parchment. “Here is my list, my lord. I have consulted all the women and compared my list to the goods the queen sent us. I have heard Winthorpe is an excellent marketplace, much larger than your closer towns, although I think it wise to purchase as much as possible from your towns since you will want them to flourish. You will be able to hire men to come back with you and I—”

He held out his hand to silence her and she immediately shut her mouth. She proudly handed him the scrap of parchment he’d given to her the previous evening. He unrolled the parchment and looked at the beautiful script. There were no ink splatters. Couldn’t she have made at least one mistake? His writing looked like a savage’s in comparison.

He scanned the list, then pulled out his own very different one.

He broke out with a laugh when he realized they had both written soap near the top of their lists.

“It is probably the least useful item on our lists,” he said. He sniffed her. “Ah, you smell like the soap I gave you. Is there any left?”

“Nary a bit. I did offer the soap to Miggins before I used it. I thought she would faint she was so revolted. She told me her mother bathed once a year and had to spend a week in bed afterward to recover.”

“So the gracious Lady Anne taught you the glories of bathing?”

She grinned at him shamelessly. Bless St. Cuthbert’s boiled bones, there was humor in his voice now. She remembered there’d been no humor in her father’s voice the sicker he became.

“Just so,” she said.

“Ah, you have written down a score of herbs I have never heard of.”

“There is no healer here. The queen sent some herbs—rosemary, bramble, betony, chamomile, and horehound—but I will need—”

“How do you use horehound?”

Burnell cleared his throat. “Horehound is used for stomach pains, for colds in the head, and to counteract various poisons.”

Garron wasn’t surprised Burnell knew about horehound. In his experience, the man knew a bit about everything. He raised an eyebrow at Merry. “So you feel I must find us a healer?”

“Perhaps not. I had begun lessons with our healer, even though he didn’t wish to teach anyone what he knew, but he knew he would die soon, so even though he hated it, he began my lessons. I learned enough to make a difference.” Merry thought of her father’s devastating stomach pains, the constant vomiting at the end, the wasting of both his mind and his body, and how the little she’d known about herbs hadn’t helped. She’d sent a message to her mother since she’d been told her mother was vastly learned in the ways of herbs and their powers, and the power of other things as well. But her mother had not even acknowledged her message.

“The cloak you are wearing, it belonged to Lady Anne?”

She nodded and gave it a tug since it, like the gown, was too short, and its overlong sleeves made every task difficult. Merry didn’t care. It was beautiful.

Ten men and one woman rode from Wareham an hour later, Burnell looking down at them from the ramparts. Merry rode on Garron’s right, Sir Lyle of Clive on his left. He wanted to get to know the man. However, he knew he wanted to know about Merry more. Exactly who she was didn’t seem so important at this moment.

He hadn’t been around women all that much, the ladies at Edward’s court, certainly, and he’d enjoyed several of them when they’d cast him their sloe-eyed looks, but he’d never understood them, these soft-skinned creatures with their beautiful bodies who seemed to enjoy stroking him. He remembered his first girl, Con-stance. He’d been twelve, she an ancient fifteen, married to the fat draper, twenty-five years her senior. She’d died the following year in childbed. He remembered the draper had remarried three months later.
So very young
, he thought, and he heard her laughter in that instant, remembering how she had shown him what pleased her. He gave a sideways look at Merry. Her face was raised to the sun, her eyes closed. Did she yet know anything of a man’s mouth caressing her? He didn’t think so. When she’d told him the night before that he was well made, there had been no knowledge in her voice or her eyes.

She was riding one of the horses they’d taken from the dead robbers. He worried the coal-black brute was too big for her, too vicious, but she was handling him well.

Garron wasn’t wearing armor today. His tunic was dark gray as were his trousers, his sword fastened to the belt at his waist, his stiletto snug in its sheath inside the right sleeve of his tunic, strapped to his forearm. He wore dark hose and boots. He was bareheaded. He felt good. The morning breeze cooled his face, ruffled his hair. Tupper had been right—the storm that had raged throughout the night was gone, and in its place was a beautiful day. He heard a quiet laugh and looked at Merry.

He said, “The horse you are riding belonged to a robber. I don’t know the horse’s name. If you like him, you can name him.”

Of course she knew the horse; she’d ridden on it, seated in front of that huge villain with his foul breath and heavy fist, now dead, thanks to Garron. She remembered his name was Bollon. She cocked her head at Garron, and the hood she wore fell away. She wore her red hair in her typically neat braids twined atop her head, blue ribbon plaited through it. He remembered the ladies at court tended to wear their hair in coils over their ears, or if they were maids, their hair was loose, with silk bands around their heads.

He frowned. He was becoming an idiot.

He gave a start when she said, “To honor his former owner, I will name him Satan.”

For an instant he didn’t realize she was talking about the damned kidnapper’s horse.

A horse whinnied and he turned in his saddle to see Gilpin’s horse bite the neck of the horse next to him. For a moment, there was pandemonium, horses rearing, shouting, and ripe curses, until a ferocious-looking man with a pocked face separated them.

Garron turned to Sir Lyle. “Your man, his name is Garn? He handled the horses well.”

“Garn is a magician with horses,” Sir Lyle said. “I would say he is better with horses than he is fighting, and thus his worth to me. He can break them, train them, determine their abilities. He told me your man Hobbs is also excellent with horses.”

“Aye, he is.” Wareham’s head stable lad had been killed, and there was no one to take his place. Hobbs was in charge of the stables at the moment, but Garron needed to hire a new head stable lad. He’d forgotten to write it on his list. He saw that Merry was looking at the trees surrounding them, so at ease he feared she might fall off her horse.

Garron felt a punch of lust as he looked at her damned hair. One of those ridiculous ribbons had come unthreaded and was dangling in front of her ear. Hair was hair, who cared? Was that a small braid he saw twined in that ribbon?

He said, “You don’t have freckles.”

She jerked in her saddle and he reached out his hand to steady her. “What? No, I do not. Neither does my mother—I mean, my mother didn’t either, so my father once told me.”

So now I am a party to your lies and you expect me to swallow them
. He realized he would. He said to her with a good deal of dislike, “I will leave you be, so long as you are useful to me.”

T
hey stopped briefly at the two small towns now under Garron’s protection. Thanks be to St. Allard’s beautiful voice, neither Abbenback nor Stour had been visited by the Black Demon, but both towns had heard what had happened at Wareham. They welcomed the new earl enthusiastically, particularly when they realized he was buying goods. Everyone treated Merry like his wife.

They spent the night near Stour after Garron sent back three men with goods purchased at both towns bound for Wareham.

Late the next morning they arrived at Winthorpe, a much larger trading town set at the mouth of the Porth, a short snaking river that fed into the North Sea. Winthorpe’s protector was Baron Norreys, a foul man Garron had met when he was but a young boy, a man no one considered friend, including, Garron remembered, his own father.

The road that bisected the town was hard and dry. Clouds sat high in the sky, the air was warm and ripe with the smells of bodies, manure, fish, and, oddly, jasmine. There was activity and noise everywhere. Stalls filled both sides of the main roadway. Haggling was loud and fierce, the very air pungent with arguments and insults.

He learned quickly enough that Merry could bargain with the craftiest of merchants. When he was satisfied she would spend his money wisely, he left her with the four mules and the three men he’d assigned to assist and protect her. He found skilled laborers, including a master carpenter to join Inar, a smith, and an assistant mason. He offered them all steady work until Michaelmas, with the possibility of remaining at Wareham. Twenty of them accepted.

He was rubbing his hands together, praying Merry hadn’t spent all the coins he’d given her, when he spotted her near a stall at the very end of the vast trading center. She was surrounded by his men, the pack mules now piled high with roped bundles.

As if sensing his presence, Merry looked up and gave him an excited smile.

“What have you got?”

“It is Book One of
Leech Book of Bald
, written two hundred years ago. Our healer told me about it, told me how amazing it is, how he’d studied from it, but did not have a copy. I was told my mother also has—had—a copy. And now here it is in Rabel’s stall. This is Rabel, my lord. He told me it once belonged to a monk who stole it from his monastery many years ago. He says its infusions and decoctions are still as effective in this modern day as they were in William the Conqueror’s time. Look, in Chapter Sixty-three, it says to cure lunacy one must add a goodly number of different herbs to ale and drink it for nine mornings. Hmmm, it also says to let the lunatic give alms and earnestly pray to God for his mercies.”

She raised her face to his, holding the book tightly to her chest. “Rabel sells all the herbs I will need as well.” She drew a deep breath. “I think it would be wise to have this book and the herbs.”

“Would it also be wise to see if Rabel wishes to live at Wareham?”

“Why did I not think of that?”

But it was not to be. Rabel, nearing his fiftieth year, his stiff white hair haloing his head and his seamed face, could not leave Winthorpe. He lived with his daughter and her husband and three boys, and helped support the household.

“With this amazing book, my lord,” Rabel said, “the lady will be able to become a fine healer.”

“There are not many pages in it,” Garron said as he paid out surely too many of his few remaining coins. “How many illnesses can you cure with so few pages?”

“Look here, Garron, fennel is used for insomnia, indigestion, and vomiting. And just look at the beautiful illustrations,” Merry said, pointing. “One can see exactly what to do. Rabel is right. I can learn, my lord. I will learn.”

“I now have barely enough coin to buy the additional tools to repair the barracks at Wareham.”

“To make a man well again is surely more important than giving a sick or dead man tools, my lord.”

He eyed her with dislike, as Rabel, trying not to look too pleased with himself, carefully wrapped white linen around the book and reverently handed it to Garron. “You will guard it, my lord. I am glad it is now yours, in your protection. I feared someone would steal it. It was my own grandmother who bought it from the monk. She was a witch, a very good one.”

Garron looked down at Merry. “It appears to form a circle since it comes to a witch.”

“A witch’s daughter.” She came up on her tiptoes to say close to his ear, “I read that if a poisoned man drinks old wine with the ooze from the white horehound, the poison will soon pass off. Now you are safe, my lord.”

“It is a pity my brother did not know this.”

She frowned. “Miggins said it happened so quickly there was nothing to be done.”

He told her of the twenty workers and their families he had hired to come to Wareham.

“I trust the families will bring sufficient clothing and bedding. Ah, we must build dwellings for the families. The unmarried men, how many are there, my lord?”

“Six are unwedded.”

“Where will they live?”

“We will add to the soldiers barracks, a large dormitory, perhaps.”

“Are any of these men older?”

“Aye, three are, and they are masters at their crafts.”

“We must build them dwellings as well. They will not want to spend their time with heedless young men, cursing and spitting and butting heads.”

When Garron stopped a moment to examine a handsaw, Merry, standing just behind him, saw Sir Lyle speaking to one of his men. The man nodded and slipped away. What was that about? She didn’t like Sir Lyle, hadn’t the moment she’d met him, hated the way he’d looked down his nose at her as if she were worth less than nothing.

But she forgot Sir Lyle when Garron began discussing each of the new workers he had hired, and where they would build their dwellings.

Night was falling, warm and clear, when Garron heard the sound of a stream and called a halt. Pali found a nearby clearing large enough for all of them, the mules and the horses. Merry watched the horses docilely follow Hobbs to drink from the stream. He returned humming to the camp, again, the horses following him. Garron smiled at Damocles, that mean irritable animal who would delicately eat a dried apple from Hobbs’s hands. Gilpin removed all the bundles from the mules’ backs, fed them, and led them to the stream.