With Her Kiss (Swords of Passion) Read Online Free Page B

as he wished. By dawn, with a downpour soaking through his layers of clothing, he urged his men onward. His nine knights, drenched to the bone, had left their own exhausted or injured animals tethered to tree limbs near a farrier’s hut as gifts in trade for the poor man’s steeds. When songbirds filled the morning air with news of a sunny day, Geoff sent out Reginald, the sergeant of his guard, in advance to gather any news of raiding Welshmen or supporters of John. Thankfully, he returned, reporting to his retinue that he had met none.
    The path unimpeded, Geoff led them into the town of Bath at breakneck speed to the Benedictine monastery where Henry Gervais presided. The man had once stood by his side on the battlements of Acre and on the sands of Joppa in the Holy Land. He had fought like a heathen and afterward, had given up his warring nature for the love of God. This short, jovial man with a plump face looked even rounder with his hair shaved in a tonsure. Once he had answered to the name of Henry and was now known as Domine James.
    Geoff did not reveal much to James. The fewer who knew of his aims the better. But he told his friend of his need for him to accompany him to Bristol, then paid him well for ten sets of white robes and black cloaks. James, eager for the bright gold, had readily turned ten of his flock nude. Then Geoffrey and his men, attired in their new guise as monks, looked their part save for their long and unruly hair.
    Geoff led his band and James northward towards Bristol and the Abbey of St Augustine. Here as they sat at the crossroads into the town, James told him that the nuns were a secretive bunch who feared Welsh raiders. Since the last invaders had come a few years before and massacred half the order, the remaining nuns had taken a perpetual vow of silence and toiled sunrise to sunset in theircloistered garden. James surmised that the reason they had taken in Katherine to do the King’s dreadful bidding was to earn gold coin.
    “Poverty,” Domine James told Geoff with a rueful scowl, “eats at one’s integrity.”
    “And favour from a king can cure it, no matter the crime they must commit,” Geoff added with sarcasm and spurred his horse towards the town.
    Geoff and his men, girdled with leather belts, carried their short swords and their daggers, items no friar should possess. But Geoffrey rode on with the furies at his back. His guiding vision was of a slim, chestnut-haired beauty whose doe-eyed innocence had captivated him decades ago, but who now, by her Sire’s orders, gasped for water, yearned for bread and lay dying of neglect.
    At each fork in the road, at each priory, to each yeoman he met, he asked for local gossip. At dusk as he and his men rode through the town of Bristol and drew nigh to St Augustine Abbey, he stopped to talk to a carter and ask about the good nature of the nuns.
    The man tipped his cap to the flock of men he thought were priests and proclaimed the women bewitched. “They hold a lady chained in the nunnery’s cellars. How can they do that and call themselves the brides of Christ?”
    James agreed with the man, then asked if he knew who the prisoner was or why she was there.
    “She’s a witch, Domine. Why else do we have floods? The crops are washed out this spring. This lady is a curse on us by our King and when she dies, there’ll be an end of days.”

    * * * *

    “What do you think, my lord, of the villagers’ superstitions?” Reginald, Geoff’s sergeant at arms, queried him as he pulled his steed next to James and him. Their cloaks high over their heads at Domine James’ instructions to hide their shoulder-length hair, the group slowly walked their horses past the porter at the Abbey Gatehouse. Inside the enclosed gardens, black-robed women looked askance at their visitors, then quickly bent to their spindly plants, picking and pruning. None of the women looked younger than fifty. All appeared stooped, eagle-eyed and wary of the eleven men