Catherine: One Love is Enough (Catherine Series Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

black eye, one bare and bleeding knee, and one of his sleeves had been torn right off. The fine green tunic with its white Burgundian emblem, which he had flaunted so proudly that morning, was now a sorry-looking, bedraggled garment. He had lost his cap, and his black hair stood stiffly up all over his head. But Catherine was beyond noticing these sartorial details. Wiping her eyes on a corner of her torn dress, she raised her small, tragic face to her friend’s.
    ‘Landry, help me, help me to save him, I beg you!’
    Landry gazed at the little girl in stunned surprise.
    ‘Save who? The Armagnac fellow whom Caboche plans to hang? You must be out of your mind. Anyway, what difference does it make to you whether they string him up or not? You don’t even know him!’
    ‘I know, I know. But I don’t want him to die. You know what happens when they hang someone. They string them up on those dreadful rusty chains between the pillars –’
    ‘Well, and why not? He is nothing to us.’
    Catherine shook her head violently, throwing back her long hair with an unconsciously graceful movement that touched the boy. Catherine’s hair and eyes were her only claims to beauty – but how beautiful they were! Her hair was a golden fleece such as can rarely have been seen on such a young girl. Where the sun caught it, it seemed shot through with light. Loosened, it hung about her like a magnificent cloak of soft, living silk, reaching almost to her knees and enveloping her in all the radiance of a summer’s day – a radiance that could sometimes be heavy to carry about.
    As for Catherine’s eyes, her family had not yet decided just what their colour was. In quiet moments they looked dark blue, with velvety purple shadows like Lenten violets. When she was happy they sparkled with golden rays like a honeycomb held up to the sun. And on the occasions when she flew into one of her rare, inexplicably violent rages, the pupils went a stygian black, from which her family had learned to expect the worst.
    In other respects she was like other girls her age, a child who had shot up too quickly. She had skinny arms, knees like a small boy’s, knobbly and perpetually covered with cuts and grazes, and her movements had the clumsiness of a young fawn that has not quite discovered what to do with its legs. She had a comic little pointed face with a short little nose and wide mouth, a bit like a cat’s. Her skin was fair, faintly golden and generously sprinkled with freckles. The general effect, however, had a distinct charm, to which Landry was far from insensible, though he would rather have died than admit it. Her whims and caprices grew daily wilder. But this latest notion was far and away the most outlandish yet …
    ‘Why does his life mean so much to you?’ he whispered suspiciously.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Catherine said softly. ‘I just know that if he dies I shall be very, very sad. It would make me cry a lot … for a long time.’
    She said this in a calm little voice but with such conviction that Landry simply gave up trying to understand. He just knew that he would do all he could to help, bitter as the pill might be to swallow. It was easy to say ‘Save the prisoner’. But his mind reeled at the thought of what those three words represented in reality. First of all they meant snatching the prisoner from his escort of archers under the very noses of the crowd, and particularly of Caboche and Denisot, both of whom were capable of flattening him with a single blow. Then, assuming they got that far, which was unlikely, they would still have to find somewhere to hide him, in a town where he and his like were being hunted down like dogs. They would then have to smuggle him out of the city, through barricades, padlocked gates and battlements bristling with men-at-arms. And at every stage they would have to contend with the possibility of spies, treachery and betrayal. Landry reflected that this was asking a lot, even of so