Taming the Beast by Heather Grothaus Read Free Book Online Page A

since she’d come. They frequently ate meat with every meal. There was even a garderobe on the second floor, near the sleeping chambers. She wondered if such rich living would make her slothful at times, but she sincerely did not care. The skin on her hands was growing soft and smooth, and no one here dared speak poorly of her, under warning from the lord himself. Except when Lady Juliette came to visit, of course, but what could kind Lord Alan do with such a spiteful woman not under his direct rule?
    That handsome, kind, noble man…
    â€œWhat shall we do before your father returns and you’re off to bed?” Michaela asked, even the appearance of Lady Juliette unable to shake her feelings of contentment.
    Elizabeth made the now-familiar pantomime for sing as the two girls made their way to a grouping of chairs near the large hearth, but Michaela shook her head, glancing the way Lord Alan had disappeared with the land’s worst singer. She had no desire to push the limits of her and Lady Juliette’s tense civility.
    â€œNot tonight, Elizabeth.”
    Elizabeth crooked her arms and flapped her elbows.
    â€œI am not a chicken,” Michaela protested, giving the girl another fond pinch before flopping in a plush armchair—it was the lady of the keep’s chair, a miniature of Alan’s—which the lord had designated for Michaela’s use.
    She found it quite, quite comfortable.
    â€œWhat of a tale instead?” Michaela suggested. “A fable? Perhaps a bible story—you’ve not heard Daniel in the lion’s den for some time.”
    Elizabeth shook her head. Then she pointed to Michaela and then did the motions of pulling back a bow string.
    Michaela groaned. “Not that silly one again.”
    Elizabeth clasped her hands before her chest and batted her eyelashes.
    â€œOh, very well. Such nonsense, though. Pull your chair closer so I’m not forced to shout.” When Elizabeth’s chair was nearly touching Michaela’s, she began the story originally told to her by Agatha Fortune, one Michaela knew she must have recited to Elizabeth a score of times in the past five months.
    â€œIt was Yule’s Eve,” Michaela said, “and my mother and father had had a terrible row, although you would hardly think that’s possible, looking at them now, would you? My father is said to have at one time been a very hard man, again, difficult to believe, I know,” Michaela added, at Elizabeth’s expected skeptical look.
    â€œHe’d been into his cups that night, and was entertaining a band of rowdy soldiers in the hall—shouting and breaking things and carrying on quite dreadfully, according to Mother. She was heavy with me at that time, and the great noise was keeping her awake. Well. She decided that she had had quite enough of Father’s merriment and went into the hall to request that he bid his friends good night. She saw that they had the demesne’s meek friar cornered near the hearth and were using him as a target to throw bones and rocks and bits of my mother’s pottery at.
    â€œOf course, she rescued the friar first by flying to his side—getting hit by a half-eaten leg of lamb for her trouble—and then demanded that my father’s guests leave that instant. She told them all that they should be shamed of treating a man of God so poorly and that, were they not all careful, they’d be taken up by the Hunt as punishment. Well, my father was not agreeable to being ordered about his own hall by his wife, not to mention threatened with what he perceived as superstitious drivel, so he told my mother that if she did not care for the way he was entertaining his guests, she could be the one to leave.”
    Elizabeth was rapt, her knees drawn up in the seat beneath her gown, her fists before her mouth. She nodded quickly. Go on, go on .
    â€œWell. It being night, Mother was in her rail and robe, but she had slipped