Later Joanna stirred. “Love me,” she whispered. “Love me, Hugo. I did not know what loving was, until I was with you.”

Pity and desire warred in him, the one dampening the other, but then she began to kiss him and burrow her fingers into his tunic.

“Teach me, Hugo.” She was coiling her fingers over his flanks, tugging his body hair. “Show me more.” She giggled. “Show me your lance.”

He raised his eyebrows at that and she laughed afresh.

“Please, Hugo?”

He heard the tension in her voice, and the inexperience. How had he ever thought her a mistress of any man? She was a babe in such matters.

Still, it was gratifying to have her asking him to teach her, and he was glad to go along with her game. “I would see you first,” he countered.

Instantly she blushed a fiery red and her hands flew between her legs.

“My lady is not going first?”

She shook her head, adorable in her confusion. All that intellect, squirrel, and you know less than a young tavern lass.

“Then you must pay a forfeit of my choosing.”

He clasped her wrists. “Perhaps I should tie you up in ribbons, harem girl, and then release you at my pleasure.”

He meant it as a jest, no more, but she stiffened in his arms and suddenly he had a girl as unyielding as a log in his lap. Instantly he released her. “Did I hurt you?”

She was breathing quickly, her color fading. He brushed her arm and found it cold, her face the same. “Whatever it is, I do not blame you,” he said urgently, keen to reach out to her through whatever hell she was now reliving. “Whatever was done to you, whatever act you were forced to do, I do not blame you. Tell me or not. Whatever brings you ease.”

Joanna looked into his anxious, loving face and was ashamed. She had told no one. But she wanted Hugh to understand.

She closed her eyes. “He forced me. One night he summoned me. I was so naive then! I thought I was going to him to answer questions about the movement of the stars. I never expected what I found.” Joanna lowered her head. “My father never knew. Why give him grief over what he could not stop?”

Bishop Thomas had ordered her into his bed. He had bound her wrists and gagged her—not to stop her from struggling or crying out, because she would have dared do neither, but because in some way seeing her tied thus had excited him. He had used her in that way for a month, then cast her off.

“He called me cold.” She had almost believed it. How could she do otherwise? Until she had met Hugh, Bishop Thomas had been the only man she had known in an intimate way. “Cold and useless in a man’s bed.”

“You are none such.”

“I know that now.” Joanna opened her eyes and looked at him. “I was never his true lover.”

“Nor was he yours.” Hugh kissed her hands, one after the other. “If he were, he would not keep you, or your father, in doubt of your safety.”

“It is worse than that,” Joanna admitted. “The reason I have been so keen to work, the reason I have tried to—to leave, has been because of this.”

Hugh said nothing but waited patiently.

Joanna took another deep breath and told him of the dreadful sentence she and Solomon were under. “I know I am your hostage, but I am in truth also the bishop’s. My father is out of the bishop’s donjon for the moment, but my lord made it clear that if I do not give him gold or the elixir to everlasting life within this month, then he will take Solomon away from his work and cast him into the prison pit, the oubliette.”

Hugh’s brows drew together in a frown. “Where is this pit again?”

“It is under the donjon floor. There is a trapdoor—”

“Truly, then, an oubliette,” Hugh muttered. “The worst kind of prison. And he cast David into it for a time.”

Joanna said nothing. She was thinking of her father and of the month. How many days now did she have left? How much longer had Thomas allowed her? She could not remember.

“This pit. How many are in there?”

She shook herself. “I do not know. I try to pass them water, bread, when the guards allow me to. The guards think it a great jest to open the trapdoor to a hand-span and have me drop things down into the dark.”

“Hell’s teeth! And David was down there. My dreamer of a brother, cast into that dark.”

“Yes. It must be a kind of hell.”

“We must stop this. There must be a way.”

“How?” asked Joanna. “How? I can use my skill to unlock the doors of the donjon, if need be, but I do not have the strength to fight the bishop’s guards. I could drug them, but they will be wary of my potions and perhaps ordered by my lord not to drink them.”

“Leave that to me,” Hugh said, and his mouth set into a grim line.