The Honor Due a King by N. Gemini Sasson Read Free Book Online Page B

the door. I glanced toward the choir and far transept, but saw no one there. My steps echoed emptily in the expanse as I moved toward the center nave. It, too, was empty.
    I nearly turned to go, thinking Marjorie must have merely passed through, when the bubbling murmur of voices in song – one airy and animated, the other softly lyrical, but resonating and deep – reached my ears. I paused behind the bulky support column that divided transept from nave, then took one silent step further. Half hidden by one of the lofty columns, Marjorie and James stood just within a bay of the south aisle, facing one another.
    “I’ve been in England eight years, James.” Marjorie braced her hands upon her small waist, her head cocked to one side. “Shut up in the nunnery at Watton, forced to utter vespers twenty times a day, sweep the floors and pull turnips until my hands were purple. Only hymns were permitted. I would have been punished for even a verse of such secular frivolity. You’ll have to teach it to me all over again, I’m afraid. Word by word.”
    “Very well. The refrain, again is ‘Ja m'amour ne te lerai’ .” He held up a finger, punctuating each syllable with a jab. “Once more: Ja m’amour –”
    “And it means what, precisely?”
    James heaved a sigh. “It means ‘Never my love shall I give you’.”
    “And I am to say this? Wait. You learned this as a boy in Paris? Did you truly go to school there or did you frequent taverns instead? I’d think you were making it all up, if it weren’t so absurd. This ‘Fauvel’ ... is a horse?”
    “That is my part, aye. And you are Dame Fortune. Now, you asked to learn a French romance. That is what I am trying to teach you.”
    “ Mon cuer vous doins sanz retraire .”
    He rolled his eyes in exasperation. “That is my part. It means –”
    “I know what it means. It means: ‘My heart I give to you without restraint’.”
    Silence stretched between them. Moments in which they drifted closer. I crept forward, piqued with a father’s protective curiosity.
    Marjorie forced a teasing frown. “How can I possibly concentrate when I’m so distracted?”
    He tossed back his head, breaking the trance, a rumble of nervous laughter escaping his throat. “By what?”
    “Have I been too coy?” Marjorie plucked at a loose thread on his tunic. “I thought it was obvious.”
    She gazed up at him then. But it was not with that same fluttering, girlish admiration she bore for him in her youth. And the look he returned to her now had a longing in it, something of desire. Not a look I was accustomed to seeing in the laconic, guileful soldier who was more comfortable slipping his knife between the ribs of Englishmen than wooing vulnerable maidens. For certain, it was not an innocent invitation that she extended to him as she slipped her arms about his neck.
    James touched his forehead to hers. With light fingertips, he traced one of her ears, then cupped her chin as he brought his mouth to hers.
    The church bells tolled prime, each clang reverberating from tiled floor to domed ceiling.
    “James?” I stepped fully into the open, my fists clenched in barely contained rage.
    With a gasp, Marjorie pulled back and clutched her hands to her breast. “Father, you frightened me. You should have made yourself known sooner.”
    “Should I? I think it is well I found you, before –”
    “Before what?” Her voice was sharp with indignation.
    James stepped further back from her, but did not, would not look my way. I wondered how far it might have gone had I not intervened. Or what more had gone on while I was tending to my sick wife, trusting in James, the one man I thought I could always rely on to keep my daughter safe. Marjorie was young, an innocent, impressionable. Again, I had failed to protect her. I gazed upon her, her lip quivering, chin held aloft.
    Abbot William shuffled around the corner and flapped his hands at his sides. I nodded in understanding and he ambled