Her lord bishop was pleased with her for the moment and, when she reminded him that she needed more supplies, he graciously allowed her to leave the household and go out into the city. Now, accompanied by two guards—a further sign of favor—Joanna almost ran through the main gate of Thomas’s palace. The day was bright, the sun was shining, she was out and free—

But for how long?

Hugh prowled about West Sarum, returning often to the high-walled stone enclosure that marked the bishop’s palace. He had sent his men and Beowulf on, into the dense oak woodland outside the city, while he lingered. He was, he admitted, watching the place, spying it out, looking for a weakness he could exploit. He had little faith in tomorrow’s meeting: he wanted a backup plan.

He marked the comings and goings. A fish seller with a handcart; a sweeper pushing away piles of horse and pig dung from the streetside entrance; an old man with an armload of clothes to sell greeting the guards as he passed into the palace courtyard. The morning was drawing on and the early dawn crowds had slackened to a trickle as people hurried back to their homes for the midday meal. Hugh inhaled the scents of boiling pork and pottage and told his grumbling belly to be silent.

Directly outside the palace gate were the city stocks and pillory—no doubt erected there for the bishop’s entertainment, Hugh thought grimly. He bought a venison tart from a passing pie seller and ale from a brewster selling it by the door of her freshly rethatched house and continued to stare.

Shooing away a browsing pig that seemed determined to befriend him, Hugh almost missed Joanna tripping through the palace gate. He saw the guards first, large, simple-looking fellows in their fathers’ old mail and helmets, strutting over the deeply rutted main street with an air of nervous belligerence. One cackled at the moldering gray wretch in the stocks, stopping abruptly as if he had been admonished.

By whom? To see more clearly, Hugh crouched down under the roof eaves of the house where he was standing and smiled. His guess was right: it was Joanna.

Watching her, he forgot to watch the entrance. She was carrying a basket, swinging it along. She looked happy to be outside and she had dressed for the occasion. There was no grubby glove on her hand now and her gown was freshly brushed, with new sleeves attached in a rich, subtle scarlet. Her pretty brown hair was caught up in a golden net and her belt was new. Wound twice around her slender middle, it was still long, with golden tassels that drummed against her legs as she walked.

The old man with the secondhand clothes came beside Hugh and sat down on a house step.

“Pretty, is she not?” he observed, in a clear accent that revealed he had been more than a clothes seller once. He scratched at the sore on his arm and two others on his bare legs. “Been with the bishop now for a year.”

Hugh gave the old man a coin. “What else do you know?”

“Of Joanna?” The old man tucked the coin into a ragged glove and leaned back against the wattle house wall. “Rumor says she’s the bishop’s leman. Some call her a necromancer.” His voice dropped. “She visits houses no decent woman would go near.

“Not the stew,” the old man added, following Hugh’s glance at the public bathhouse at the top of West Sarum’s main street, where even now off-duty guards cavorted outside with girls in soaking wet tunics. “She is no whore.”

“So?” Hugh prompted.

“Do you not want that pie?”

Silently Hugh handed it across. His companion took a huge bite and spoke with his mouth full. “She reads books,” he said with relish. “Strange books.”

Hugh tracked the small graceful figure down the street. Joanna was going away from the bathhouse, walking down the slop-filled lane in the direction of the southern city gate and the river. As she moved he saw a sparkle on her right wrist: slim metal bracelets. Given to her by Thomas?

Nodding to the old man, who was intent on his pie, Hugh stepped out into the road. Seeing the girl again, learning about her place in the palace, had given him an idea—a nasty, furtive idea, one that went against all tenets of chivalry. Whether he would act on it depended on opportunity, but for the moment he would follow Joanna and see where she went.

Whether she was a necromancer or magic-worker, she was certainly no fool, he conceded, keeping close to the guards as they wound their way down the steep main street. She remained with the pair as they spent a long time trying their hands at the city’s archery butts ranged on a pitch of spare ground by the square, squat Saxon cathedral—a place where Bishop Thomas never preached, Hugh wagered. She bought them both pies, but ate nothing herself and waited with seemingly endless patience as the thicker-set of the two haggled with a cobbler over the repair to a shoe.

Down the long street they went, Joanna scarcely looking at the many clothiers’ stalls or the brightly colored puddles outside the dyers’ workshops. She was obviously bent on leaving the city though the southern gate—to ford the river? Or to visit the small narrow settlement that had grown up just outside the walls?

Away to the south, beyond the meandering Avon, were hills green with woodland and beyond that, his father’s castle. That thought gave Hugh no pleasure as he drew a shabby cloak over his tunic and draped a hood over his head, grunting an acknowledgment at the gatekeeper as he followed his quarry through the open entranceway.

Here the ground leveled off into water meadows grazed by horses and cattle. There were stables and a hamlet of tumbledown houses with long stripes of garden and more rooting pigs. Grubby children playing close to the river called after Hugh and a few bolder ones tossed pebbles in his direction. None cast stones at Joanna, he noticed, although they jeered at her guards in a dialect so thick he could not understand it.

He assumed she was making for the ford, so was startled when she swung away from the well-worn track into a mess of old gardens and derelict house plots. Weaving through brambles and patches of nettles and tall grass, she led the way and the guards trudged after, perhaps wondering, as he did, where she was headed. None looked back although he trailed them at a long distance, skulking through this old warren of former dwellings like a burglar.

She had a saucy walk, he decided, watching her sway over a wreck of fallen house beams with the poise of a dancer. They were coming to more recent and crowded habitation: the grass path became small cobbles, the houses larger and the gardens of greens well tended. Here were people, sitting out of doors on benches, some eating their lunches, others making baskets of reeds.

Suddenly, where the houses were packed closest together so that the very sky became a mass of jostling thatch and roof jetties, Joanna spun about.

“What is it you want, Hugh de Manhill?” she called out, pointing directly at him so that every householder in the district stopped what he or she was doing to stare. “Why are you following?”

The girl had spotted him! By all the light of heaven, how had she done that? Her own guards were standing blinking in the dabbled shade of the houses, fidgeting with their sword hilts. They had known nothing of his pursuit. How had she?

With so many witnesses, he was forced to dissemble. “If you see my brother again today, will you give him a message?”

“It is no grief for you that I speak to him then, Sir Hugh?”

She had not forgotten or forgiven the glove. More justice to her, Hugh thought, amused at her twist of his own words, while he answered, “I am most sorry for our earlier confusion. But for David’s sake, I ask this favor.”

His appeal worked. Joanna put her basket down on the cobbles and spread her hands.

“Will you tell him I never forget him? Not at any moment? That I love him?”

She raised her brows at that while her guards relaxed, smirking at each other. The onlookers were wiser, saying nothing as Hugh closed the gap between them.

“Anything else?” she asked.

He was near enough to her now to pluck her basket off the ground and hold it out. “Only this: what do you think of my brother’s imprisonment, Mistress Joanna? Do you think it right?”

He had startled her afresh: a rush of color stormed into her eyes and face.

“I cannot speak for my lord—” she began.

“But you, yourself?” He wanted to know. If she was the bishop’s mistress, he wanted to know if she agreed with his brother’s captivity. “Do you truly think David is an evil man?” he asked softly. “A blasphemer?”

“I do not think so, but I am no expert.”

“But you have spoken with him, eaten with him,” Hugh continued relentlessly. “Do you consider him a witch?”

“No!”

Her denial was sharp, causing her guards to stop their gawping at a young woman outside one of the houses who was washing her long red hair in a pail, and glance at her instead.

Blushing deeply now, Joanna added swiftly, “No, what I mean, is—”

Hugh stepped forward, closing the last of the gap between them, and touched the narrow copper bracelets on her left wrist.

“How many of these has your master bought for you with the blood of innocent men?” he asked, speaking in French so only she would understand.

She snapped her arm out of his reach, putting it behind her back, as a child might. “You have no cause to say that to me,” she said, also in French.

“Why not answer my question?”

She said nothing, merely shook her head and looked at him in pity.

Sympathy from the bishop’s whore was too much—Hugh’s already fragile hold on his temper severed.

“You will not use the Manhills this way,” he said, through a clenched jaw, as the blood and his rage pounded in his head. For an instant he wanted to take on the guards, take on this whole settlement. But these folk he had no quarrel with, even the moon-faced guards he had no dispute with, but her, Joanna, the bishop’s thing—

“I will have satisfaction.” Making his words a promise, he tore off his brooch pin, tossing into the cobbles between them. “I will be back to redeem this, mistress, and when I do, you had best not be in my path.”

For the second time that day he turned his back on her and left, his shoulder blades prickling in expectation of a stone or dagger that never came.

But he knew, now, what he would do. She would be his key that would turn the lock on David’s prison and bring him out of the donjon. He would pick his moment, the time and place, and then he would kidnap Joanna, the mistress of Bishop Thomas. He would hold her and keep her as his prisoner, until Thomas agreed to a hostage exchange.

Smiling grimly at the thought, Hugh strode away.