“Where are we going?” Joanna asked, as Hugh lifted her onto Lucifer and swung up behind her.

In truth she was glad to be getting out of the castle. Sir Yves had not spoken to her and would hardly look at her. Mercury had met her stricken look, smiled, and also said nothing. Hugh had hustled them from the great hall as if he had a pan of acid scorching somewhere that he must extinguish before it exploded. So far, he had not spoken either, except to warn her to watch her footing on the outside stone steps, still slick with rainwater.

As Hugh snapped on riding gloves she repeated her question.

“A place I know,” came back the scarcely informative answer. “It is some way away, so we must hurry.”

He snapped the reins and they were off at a smart gallop, Joanna hugging the horse’s mane as they burst through the standing puddles of the bailey yard. Their speed was such that she had no breath to speak: she was too busy hanging on.

The day was bright and cloudy about them, rainbow weather, where all the new bright leaves and grasses were silvered with rain. Hugh checked Lucifer into a steady canter and tapped her on the shoulder—a sign of fellowship, she hoped—pointing to a small spinney lush with bluebells. She mouthed “pretty” but still was surprised when he drew rein directly alongside the woods.

“You said we had a way to go,” she stammered as he unwound himself from Lucifer’s back to lead the horse to the gap in the banked enclosure surrounding the spinney.

“Changed my mind. Besides, stopping now will save your thighs. Here will do us just as well.”

“I do not mind,” Joanna said quickly. “We can ride on.”

Hugh shook his head and unlatched the hurdle gate, closing it behind them as they pressed deeper into the wood. Twisting round, Joanna could no longer see the track they had just left as the tall oaks, beech, and horn-beam loomed about her. In this dense grouping of trees the ground was bone dry despite the previous rain: Hugh’s feet cracked on dry old leaves and Lucifer stamped on dry branches riddled with fungus.

“Do truffles grow here?” Joanna asked, for something to say.

“No.” Hugh stopped by a fallen birch and tethered Lucifer to one of its prone branches. “Forgive me, I am a bear today. Nigel’s gifts have that effect on me: I loathe the way he flaunts his lands and wealth.”

Joanna knew she must have looked startled, for he smiled. “I suppose you want to talk about Mercury’s very selective recovery of his memory this morning?”

I would rather pitch off this huge charger, bear you to these dry leaves, and love you, again and again. Joanna said nothing. Women were supposed to receive and serve but not initiate.

Hugh rested his hand against her thigh. An idle touch, perhaps an accident, perhaps a more deliberate taunt. She felt her body tingle and tighten in response.

“Would you move your hand a little?” She was pleased with how she sounded: courteous, as a lady to her knight.

He brushed her leg lightly with his fingers, trailing his hand from her thigh to her hip. “Is that better?”

She managed to nod. “I did not know he could speak Norman French.”

“He will know that and English, too, when it is useful for him to recall it. When it serves him.” He squeezed her thigh. “I should think your bishop has made a guess as to who Mercury might be and so has passed him on before the fellow claims to have recovered all his wits. That way Thomas can say later that he did not know who he was holding, and made a genuine mistake.”

“He can say he meant no insult or disrespect,” Joanna said, understanding what Hugh meant. She was vividly aware of his hand on her leg: his touch made her thigh throb and the blood prickle in the tips of her toes.

“And if I or my father later mistreat the fellow, that will also work in Thomas’s favor.”

How could he speak so calmly when she felt as if her head was boiling? “Perhaps my lord thought Mercury worthless. A lowborn knight without—”

Too late she stopped, but Hugh finished for her. “Without lands or riches, like me? Perhaps. The Frenchman is certainly sly enough to play it that way, if he thought it would win him an advantage. He made a mistake with the truffles, though: admitting the kind of knowledge that only comes through wealth.”

“Unless he does not care anymore.”

“Or perhaps he thinks my father’s castle an easier place to escape from than the bishop’s new donjon. As it seems do you.”

They had come to it at last. Joanna straightened her spine and looked straight ahead into the lush canopy of trees. The sun flashed on the bright new beech leaves and her eyes pricked with tears in response. But she would not apologize. “You do what you feel you must. As do I.”

“Even though we are lovers now?”

His question twisted in the space beneath her heart but she refused to cry. She flung the challenge of emotion back at him. “We are lovers, yes. But you do not release me.”

Hugh sighed. He was still not angry, she realized, more disappointed. The sense of a blade being twisted just beneath her ribs increased. “You are disillusioned with me.”

“Never!” Hugh snagged her by the waist, tugged her to him, and kissed her hard on the mouth. “Never.”

He wrapped his arms about her and she her arms about him. She was hugging him and he was embracing her fiercely, whispering, “Never, never,” and kissing her over and over.

She was swept off Lucifer into Hugh’s powerful arms, tossed up into the air like a flapped blanket, and caught again. “Never,” he said firmly. “I would scour hell for you.”

“Yet you will not let me go!”

“Do you not know why? Have you not understood it?” Hugh sat down into a heap of leaves with her in his arms and now on his lap. He traced the line of her cheek with a finger. “Clever yet blind.”

Joanna caught her breath. “What do you mean?”

“Ask yourself. What kind of lover is Bishop Thomas if he does not truly release your father? Promise you his release and keep his word? What manner of lover is he if he does not strive for your freedom? He rode away without looking back! If I keep you, it is to keep you safe.”

He did not understand, the dolt. He was a man, and big and able, and he did not understand. “That should be my choice, Hugo.”

“In a world that is like heaven, yes, I agree. It should be your choice.” He nipped her ear with his teeth. “This is not heaven.”

He leaned back against the beech tree under which they sat while Beowulf yapped softly at Lucifer, making as if to leap at the horse. “Stay,” said Hugh to both, and they were still.

“If I could do what you can with beasts, folk would call me witch.” Joanna tapped Hugh’s sword scabbard with her heel. “They would not dare call you such.”

“As I say. We do not live in heaven.” Hugh moved her foot away from his sword. “But I would still scour hell for you.”

He wrapped his cloak about her. “You are so pale now. Too pale. You should be as brown as this beech mast.” He knotted the cloak strings for her.

“What is it, Hugh? What are you working yourself up to say?”

“I have treasure. Not a vast amount, but some. I hoped Thomas would bargain with me for David, but to tell truth, your bishop will not let David go so long as he suspects my brother has relics hidden away somewhere. I think he may be happy to trade for your father.”

He took her hands in his. “Let us get one of our kin out of there.”

He would do this for her. Joanna felt a great wave of feeling rising in her chest and up her throat. She bunched her hands into fists, trying not to cry. He would do this for her. No one had ever offered so much.

“I—I—”

Now the wretched, blistering tears were coming, tearing out of her eyes. She could no longer hold anything back—the memories, the vileness was all rising in her mind again. She sat on his knee and sobbed, weeping with a passion she had never dared to show before.

“Sweetheart! Please, do not cry. We can do much, there is no need to cry.” Hugh cradled and rocked her, horrified at what he had provoked. If he could, he would wrap her into his own heart to soothe her. “Do not cry, please do not cry.”

She was talking, the words bursting out of her. It made him think of the bee swarm; a dark mass, hurtling through the air, faster than the flight of birds. She was incoherent: between the speed of her speech and her sobbing he could make out nothing. He waited until she had stopped shivering, and brought out his flask of mead.

“Drink.”

She did so.

“I have a pie in a cloth: I filched it for breakfast this morning from the kitchens and only ate half. You have the rest.”

She did so.

He clasped her, stroking her limbs as he might do a startled horse. He whispered a charm to calm her. When she sighed, he said, “Will you tell me?”

She shook her head. “It is a maze. All things, all together. My mother and the bishop and my father and our life.”

Her mother, who had died. Not easily, he guessed. “For how long have you and your father—Solomon? How long have you and Solomon been on the run? That is what it is. There is something different about you both, quite apart from the alchemy.”

She looked at his hands and then his face and said nothing. He sensed a long habit of silence and of flight.

“What is a puffer?” he asked, to break the silence. If she answered this, she might begin. “You told me once that you were no puffer.”

“Someone who plays at alchemy. Or worse, who fakes it.”

“Were you ever accused of being such?”

“There were other accusations.”

She lapsed into silence. Hugh waited, recalling a doctor he had encountered once at a tourney, one who was dark like Joanna and sallow like Solomon. The doctor had been highly skilled, setting limbs himself instead of reading from a text and leaving the work to others. His nickname round the camp was “Hands-Washer” but he was much sought after. His patients survived. Hugh’s own Jewish healer, Simon, was much the same.

He said the word Joanna had spoken in the moment of her rapture. “That is a Jewish word, I think. A Hebrew word.”

He saw her blush. “It is a holy word and I should not have said it,” she replied.

“You are Jewish?” Hugh asked. He wondered why he had not seen it before, her likeness to Simon. But Simon was off in France and he had always thought of folk as from somewhere: from London, from Winchester, from West Sarum. He had never thought of race.

“I think my family was. Father does not speak of it much, it upsets him too much. I think his grandfather was forced to convert. I know some prayers, some words. Not enough.” She put her head in her hands. “Father and I are part of the lost.”

The poignancy of the phrase brought tears to Hugh’s eyes. He felt ashamed of his own unthinking faith. The Jews had killed Christ: that was all he had been taught, by a priest. A priest in the same church as Bishop Thomas.

“And your mother?”

“She was small, like me, but very handsome. Dark hair. Blue eyes. A strong face. She could sing. She knew many songs, many Hebrew songs. I hear them in my dreams but I cannot remember them properly by day.”

“What happened to her?”

“We were living in York. My father sold herbs and cures, my mother sold books.” A small smile tugged at the corners of Joanna’s mouth. “She taught me to read. She once showed me the name of God.”

Without thinking, Hugh crossed himself, then wished he had not. Joanna, deep in the past, did not notice the gesture.

“One day a priest came to our lodgings and wanted a book. He would not pay for it. He said we were people who should give everything, because of what we had done to Christ. Father and Mother talked after that and packed their things, everything we could carry. Even as a child I knew it was time we moved on.

“We went out of the city before curfew but the priest came back. He was on horseback and he rode ahead of his congregation. He wanted all my mother’s books. He pursued us.

“It was evening. A bloodred sunset. The trees were bare, I think. No, that cannot be right: there were burning haystacks. I cannot remember. I remember my mother running, Father running, me running. I do not know where we ran. I only knew we must not let the mob catch us.

“We came to a village where a troop of men drank at a tavern. They joined in the chase, and more: they burned parts of the village and sacked the bigger houses and burned their haystacks. Those people lost everything, because of us, and we were still running.”

Hugh could picture it too well. With shame he thought of his own men firing crops in Picardy, simply in high spirits. Why had I never thought of the farmers?

“In the end my mother dropped her sack of books and we finally escaped the troop and the raging priest, although our clothes were black with fire smuts. But on the road south of York she collapsed and died. Father said later that her heart must have burst with the effort.”

Joanna closed her eyes. “That priest must have all her books.”

She leaned her head on Hugh’s shoulder, turning her face toward him. He held her, breathing very slowly, very carefully. He wanted to smash that priest and even more smash himself, for being so thoughtless in his own past, and so blind to hers.

They sat together in silence, while birdsong returned to the woodland.