“I cannot marry him,” Joanna said a third time to Elspeth. They were at Elspeth’s manor, kneeling in the bright warmth of the walled garden, pounding and preparing powdered chalk and water to make whitewash. It was a beautiful, sunny day, perfect drying weather. Elspeth wanted her wall pictures in the great hall and solar re-painted, and Hugh had volunteered them all as helpers.

Joanna guessed the real reasons why he had done so, and it was not for the sake of friendship, or generosity. David was still strange, shutting himself whenever he could into the privy, as if still imprisoned. He would scarcely talk to anyone.

“Then help me paint flowers,” Hugh said. He had David in the great hall with him now, washing brushes and muttering to the faded paintings on the newly dusted walls.

“He can draw, as I can,” Hugh explained, when Joanna questioned him. “If he cannot speak of his time as hostage, maybe he will paint it out.”

She was impressed by his logic, but she knew there was more to their staying than that, or even care for his withdrawn sibling, changed so profoundly by his time in the oubliette.

“He keeps us here to persuade me,” she admitted. “I am a guest-hostage.”

“A most useful one,” Elspeth remarked, puffing a wisp of auburn hair away from her sun-reddened forehead. “And Hugh! I did not know he had it in him.”

Joanna dare not ask if her companion meant his enthusiasm with brushes and paint, or his proposal to her. Or was she turning on this point because it was all she could think on?

“How can I say yes?” she burst out, startling a blackbird in the nearest flower bed. “I have no lands, no title, nothing a rising knight requires. To the church I will always be suspect for what I am. If we stay as we are, he may marry an heiress.”

That thought shot a pillar of ice through her heart, but she persisted.

“I can be his mistress. Better that, than we marry and he comes to resent me as a woman without lands.”

“You are an alchemist!”

“Gold is not land. For a knight, land is what matters.”

Elpseth gave the whitewash another stir with a stick and tapped it on the bucket before looking up into Joanna’s face. They were kneeling very close together, stirring and pounding the dusty chalk in one bucket, and her freckles were all obscured by white. She looked as pale as a ghost. She looked as she felt, thought Joanna.

Elspeth reached away from the bucket and took a drink of ale to clear her mouth. “You have said as much to Hugh?”

Joanna nodded as a sick heat of shame rose in her throat. “For a woman like me, to be Hugh’s mistress is, is…” She faltered. Her eyes smarted and the nodding cowslips in the border blurred, doubtless due to the clouds of chalk dust.

“As much as you should expect? That puts you very low, Joanna! How does Hugh answer this?”

Joanna closed her eyes. How had he answered? She could not remember. She gripped the narrow brush until her hand hurt but still no clear thought came.

“But then I am surprised you have had time to talk. He scrubs and sketches and you busy yourself about the manor with me, and your nights together in the solar are busy in other ways, are they not?” Elspeth smiled at Joanna’s startled stare. “You are lusty enough for newlyweds.”

In her mind Joanna returned to the solar, in the warm dark, with Hugh making love to her. He called her his harem girl, his squirrel, his own. Last night, before pulling her back into his fierce embrace to sleep, he had tongued over her breasts and murmured, “I love these. I love you.”

He had fallen asleep before she had time to answer, but she had lain awake for many hours.

“He loves you, Joanna.”

“I know. He told me so.”

“And asked you to marry him.”

“David says he is not constant.”

Elspeth sat back on his heels, wafting impatiently at a passing fly. “I would not trust David to lace my shoes. Are you gone mad, too?”

Joanna gawped at this forthright speech, but Elspeth was not finished. “What if there is a child by all these vigorous unions? Would you have a son or daughter as a bastard? Have you entirely lost your wits?”

Joanna tossed her brush into the whitewash and jumped to her feet. The sudden movement caused her breasts to brush almost painfully against her gown, but she ignored the discomfort. “How can I work, though? If Hugh is at joust after joust, winning and fighting, what do I do?”

She paced up and down beneath the fruit trees, the mellow cooing of pigeons in the nearby dovecote an accompaniment to her every anxious step. “How can I assay gold in a tent full of chattering gossips? How can I investigate the secrets of the cosmos and the stars when I am forever slumped on a horse’s back, jogging from place to place?”

“How will being Hugh’s mistress instead of his wife change any of that?”

“I—” Joanna had not thought so far. She realized, with a jolt, that she had been thinking as a wife, of wifely duties, of being with her man and caring for him and putting his needs ahead of hers. And I have been reluctant to do so, although I love Hugo with all my heart.

“I know not,” she said dully. “The whitewash is ready.”

“Only when you remove that stick,” said Elspeth, also rising to her feet. “Talk to Hugh,” she said. “Tell him you need a place, a settled place. How many months are you prepared to travel with him? Half the year?”

“More, to be with him,” admitted Joanna, relieved to discover that to be the utter truth. “I need a place, for me to work, for my father.”

“I agree. Solomon is getting too old to be jaunting with you round England and France,” Elspeth said tartly. “So this is what I propose.”

She paused as a crash and cursing came from the great hall. “Hugh, dropping his brush again,” she remarked. “He will come hurtling out here in a moment to find something to scold you for: it is ever a husband’s way, so you may as well accustom yourself.”

She took hold of Joanna’s hand. “I will grant you a parcel of land, for you and your father. I know the very place. In return, you will give me the rent of a posy of cowslips each spring; a flask of that useful aqua fortis; a cupful of your white powder for when my head aches, and some fine red dye and blue dye to dye my cloth. You may live and work there in the winter months, when tournaments are nothing but mud and blood, and have a place for Hugh to return to each Michaelmas, to take his ease and feast and count his blessings.”

“I do not know how to cook,” Joanna stammered and then stopped her mouth with her hands. In the face of Elspeth’s miraculous offer, what was she saying?

Her companion laughed. “For a woman who bakes gold, all other cooking will be easy. I will teach you. But look, here is Hugh, and I am leaving now. I have no wish to be mauled.”

She strolled away, shaking the chalk dust from her skirts, and vanished between the fruit bushes and trees, chattering to the pigeons in the dovecote.

Hugh knew he was in a mood to rip heads off and he did not care. “Elspeth! Come you back. I want you to hear this!” he yelled, not caring if the gardener stopped his weeding to back out of his way. “Do you know what my fool brother has done? Only gone and sent a message to our father! We are here, quiet, no one knows, the bishop and his creatures know nothing, and David sends a single squire to our father with a written message!”

Joanna dropped the bucket of whitewash she had been bending to pick up, a splash landing down the front of her gown in a spreading stain as the bucket rolled away into a mat of speedwells. “Written?” she whispered. “But what if he is stopped?”

“I have sent swift riders after the lad,” Hugh went on grimly. “They will fetch him back.”

“Your brother was perhaps fulfilling his filial duties?” Elspeth remarked. She had returned, in that quiet way of hers, but Hugh was not listening.

“We will set forth tomorrow, for Castle Manhill. David wishes to greet our father and fulfill his duties as his son, and so he may, in person. My father can do his part for a change and give us shelter if the bishop’s men come calling. I have left David grinding up the paint now and he knows he is to finish it. Solomon is with him, to help, and my hound.” To keep watch, he almost added, but did not say it.

“Good!” Elspeth smiled at him and whispered something in Joanna’s ear. “Now go with your lady. I have told her the way, and I do not want either of you back before sunset. Go. It is a lovely day. Go on!”