Sing Me Home (2 page)

“Arnaud, we have a lady,” Colin began, gesturing to her, “who would like to join the troupe.”

“
Sacré,
if we were only blessed with as many patrons as performers, we’d be rich men.” The oversized man twisted the bone in his hand as he assessed her. “Colin will give you a warm bed, but it’s me who’ll give you a place in the troupe, if you’ve got any talent.”

Maura turned and narrowed her gaze on Colin. When she’d seen him fighting in the village this afternoon, so tall and brawny and full of chatter, she’d just assumed he was the leader of the troupe. He had such a straight-shouldered, confident look about him. Now she glared at him in accusation, but he just gave her a half-smile and a shrug.

“The lady,” Colin said, gesturing to Nutmeg chewing an acorn at her feet, “has a dancing squirrel.”

Arnaud shook his head. “We don’t need any more rats in this troupe, even trained ones.”

“I’ve earned many a coin on my own,” she lied, her heart tripping, “playing Nutmeg for the children in the village.”

“Children don’t have English coin. Or meat or ale to barter.” That black gaze, embedded in folds of flesh, made its way up and down her figure. “You’re a pretty one. What other tricks do you know?”

She felt her face flame to the roots of her hair, and could only hope that the glow of the campfire masked it.

“No swiving then?” The big man sighed. “A pity. You’ve the hips for it.”

The fat man turned around and headed back to his tent and she felt her hopes slipping away. This couldn’t be happening. Nutmeg with his bell-dances and little blue shirts had been the joy of the convent and the center of attention whenever she’d visited cottages outside the walls. She had been convinced that these players would welcome her and Nutmeg’s talents—and do it without question. And they were
minstrels,
not exactly the kind of people overly concerned about who they kept company with.

Yet she was being dismissed out of hand.

Maura’s throat tightened. What was it about her that put so many people off? It must be like a smell, she thought, like the faint scent of onions which always clung to her hands. Maybe she’d emitted this odor since birth when her own mother had abandoned her.

“Can you dance, Maura?”

She turned to find Colin very close, his eyes upon her. Blue eyes, she realized, as blue as the summer sky.

“Dancing,” she said, scooping Nutmeg back into his basket, “is the work of the devil.”

“Can you tell stories?”

“Aye, of the saints’ lives.”

“We don’t barter in those. Can you juggle? Tumble?”

A flush rose up her cheeks. She couldn’t help but glance at an acrobat by the fire slinging her own ankle over her neck, all but exposing her privates.

He persisted, “Can you sing?”

“What matter if I could sing?” Of course she could sing. She sang every day at the offices, at the Mass. Only a common dotard couldn’t sing. “You’re not the man I have to convince,” she said, jerking her chin toward the fat man tearing the last of the meat from a bone, hesitating at the flap of his tent. “
He
is.”

“Arnaud’s belly is empty, and when his belly is empty, he doesn’t think clearly.” Colin touched her chin to turn her face toward his. “If you’ve any hope of joining us, lass, you’d best lift that voice of yours in song.”

She blinked up at him, feeling the fascination of this man shimmer over her like the wash of rainwater during a sudden storm.

This is a terrible, terrible mistake.

She pulled away from his blue, blue gaze, her heart and her thoughts racing. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe she could still sneak back into the convent. It was almost Compline, when all the sisters would kneel in the chapel. That was no guarantee that the novices wouldn’t be twittering by the well, or whispering whilst they slipped through the gardens, or some other nosy creature would come out of the shadows to question her as to what she was doing, sneaking back into the convent after dark. She could still return to her home and escape this handsome man who looked at her as if he could see her naked.

But what would happen if she returned to the convent? She would take her place in the kitchens where she’d grown up, go back to making the meals for all the sisters and the laywomen in the community, be grateful as they always told her to be for having such a fine position. She could go back and continue to ignore the insistence that at her age she must choose between the veil or a marriage to someone like the butcher’s son who kept finding excuses to wander to the kitchen door with slabs of meat she hadn’t ordered, fine cuts that he’d put aside just for her.

Then Maura looked down upon the ring on her finger, twisting it, twisting it, twisting it, until it felt as tight as her resolve.

“Aye,” she heard herself say. “Aye, I can sing.”

She put Nutmeg’s basket on the ground and ignored the minstrels who circled her in curiosity. She filled her lungs with the spring air as the first bit of drizzle began to fall from the sky. She closed her eyes and imagined herself in church with its echoing rafters. A song rose in her heart—
Angelus ad virginem—
The Angel’s Address to the Virgin, one of her favorites. The music swelled in her head. She felt it pour through her body.

She opened her mouth and let it out.

Chapter Two

“
A
rnaud,” Colin said, chasing the leader of the troupe across the campsite, “you
cannot
let that woman go.”

“If I took on every wayward girl you had an urge to prickle,” the Gascon said, shifting a plug of pork to the other side of his cheek, “we’d leave a trail as long as Ireland itself.”

“She’s no whore.” That had been clear enough. “You’re a hard man, Arnaud.”

“A hard man, you say? Haven’t I enough charity here?” Arnaud waved toward Matilda Makejoy, the dancer of the troupe, sitting sideways upon a cushion by the fire, her belly swelling under the high-slung rope of her belt. “As it is we look less like minstrels and more like Mary and Joseph on the way to Bethlehem. Must we take in an abbess, as well?”

“Admit it,” Colin said. “In all your travels, you’ve never heard a voice as fine as that.”

Colin
still
heard her voice, even though she’d stopped singing, even though she’d raced back into the woods as soon as Arnaud had dismissed her. He could hear it as if the sweet tones still vibrated under the arch of the trees. Her voice had pierced through him, pure and clear and tremulous, the kind of voice that brought wild men to stillness, that made lions lie down with lambs, that made sinners see the face of God.

“Yes,
oui,”
Arnaud reluctantly confessed, “she has a fine voice—a singular voice—a voice worthy of the heavens. But is she to sing like that in an alehouse? She’ll leave our patrons with no stomach for Maguire’s riddles or the twins’ tumbling.”

“I’ll teach her love songs.”

“You’ll teach her love, I’ve no doubt of that, but a woman can’t sing with her quim.”

“Stop for a moment and think.” Colin stepped between the troupe’s leader and the tent he was trying to slip into. “That lass has a voice fine enough to open the doors of kings.”

“You’d have us singing at a royal court?” The Gascon paused in his chewing. “Us? Maguire with his dirty riddles? The twins with their legs in the air? Matilda dancing like a Saracen? You’d have the likes of us entertaining fine lords and ladies? Have you forgotten that we’ve been driven out of half the alehouses we’ve played in? That we had to leave the ripe fields of France because a certain someone swived the wrong man’s wife? And we had to leave Wales because Padraig stole the wrong lord’s gold?”

“France and Wales are worlds away. And English lords and ladies pay hard English gold, unlike the millers’ wives and bakers’ sons we entertain in these tiny villages. We’ll make more and better coin than what we’re taking in at rough alehouses and at crossroads.”

“I won’t do it, Colin.”

“You won’t do what?”

“I won’t braid the rope you’re going to hang yourself with.”

Colin’s jaw tightened but he held his tongue. Arnaud knew nothing about why Colin had convinced him to bring the troupe to Ireland, but the old Gascon was clever and smart, and increasingly curious. The old man had sensed something was up that black night on the shores of Wales over a month ago, when Colin had stared across the phosphorescence of the Irish Sea, thinking, thinking, as his homeland called to him like the sirens of those Greek stories his teachers had forced him to learn.

Poor Arnaud looked at him now, waiting. He didn’t know that the hangman’s noose already weighed heavy around Colin’s neck. It was simply a matter of time before it lay there in truth.

“Her voice is pure gold.” Colin clapped a hand on Arnaud’s shoulder. “And I’m going to fetch back the woman who’ll put that gold in your pocket.”

Colin turned on one heel and set off after the wench, ignoring Arnaud’s shouts of warning. It didn’t take long for him to see her crisp white coif bobbing in the woods by the light of the moon. He set his sights on that fine healthy curve of buttock and soon caught up beside her.

“A fine evening for a walk.”

She tilted her head and laid a bright hazel gaze upon him, and it was as if the evening crackled with sparks and lightning, like the false fire he’d once seen exploding in the air at a Christmas feast in Paris.

Then she whacked him in the ribs with a stick.

Air whooshed out of him. He skittered back as she gathered momentum for another swing, but not fast enough. She shoved the knotted end of the walking stick into his belly and sent him slamming against the trunk of a tree.

“Be off with you.” She stepped back and swiped the stick through the air in warning. “What evil are you bent on, following me like this?”

“A fine greeting you give a man,” he sputtered, “who follows you for your own good.” He held up an arm to forestall another blow. “You’re too pretty a lass to be traveling alone at night. Though you wield that stick well.”

“I’ve wielded enough weapons against your like.” She turned on a heel. “Now go back to your wretched troupe and leave me be.”

“And where will you be going, Maura?” He gestured in the opposite direction from which she was travelling. “The convent is back there.”

“I’m not going back to the convent.” Her expression tightened. “Not that it’s any of your affair.”

“You’re heading for the north road then.”

“Where else? There are few enough roads.” She turned on a heel. “And those roads are long enough for two people to travel apart.”

“And why would a convent-bred girl be traveling alone on the roads of Ireland?”

“Questions, questions, questions.” She swiped a curl off her shoulder. “So it’s curiosity that’s got you sniffing after me.”

“You don’t strike me as the kind to look for adventure.”

“And what do you know about my ‘kind?’ Nay,” she said, slashing a pale hand through the air, “don’t answer that. We’re not all like that redheaded woman of yours, you know.” She shifted the weight of her pack and that odd little basket upon her back as she continued her angry stride. “If it’s your curiosity that’s got you nipping at my skirts, then I’ll put an end to it and be rid of you. I’m off to St. Patrick’s Purgatory.”

Colin stopped in his tracks. She shot ahead of him, determined as ever, as if she hadn’t just announced she was going on a pilgrimage to the most sacred shrine in all of Ireland, a shrine that lay on an island in Lough Derg, about three weeks’ walk north.

He had to walk double-speed to catch up with her. “So you asked to join a minstrel troupe,” he said, “to travel to a shrine.”

She shrugged.

“Minstrels wander about, from village to castle to Irish homestead—rarely to a shrine. We go wherever luck and chance and a fair takes us.”

“All the better for my purposes.”

“And what purpose is that?”

“What matter is it to you?”

“People go on pilgrimages to purge their sins. I’d like to know what sin you committed that was so grave as to send you on the roads alone.”

“It wasn’t swiving, I’ll tell you that.”

“Oh, lass.” A laugh rose up to his throat but he choked it down. “I’d take off my hat to any man who found his way through the thorns on you.”