Free A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger Page A

fairly and wisely in all things.
    Our knight kept a castle. Not a great castle; no one would have mistaken it for the alcázar of Pedro the Cruel, nor for Avignon’s papal palace, nor England’s palace of Westminster. Yet its walls of broad stone and heavy mortar kept our marcher lord well defended from the occasional marauder.
    Our knight had a wife. A beautiful wife indeed, so beautiful one might well have mistaken her for Helen, or Guinevere, or for the Laura of Petrarco. She was the daughter of a minor count of questionable lineage. A family of Moorish blood, not a few whispered, keeping the faith of Mahound while miming love of the Cross. Yet as the knight was trusted by his people, such whisperings were soon quieted, his small, dark wonder of a wife accepted into the circles of Castilian ladies gathered on occasion at court.
    Soon a daughter arrived. She was, like her mother, dark and small. She captivated her parents. The knight, of course, wanted a son. The wife was still young, and though years went by with no further issue, there was little doubt that God would someday reward them.
    It came to pass, when the daughter was approaching her seventh year, that the knight was summoned by his lord to battle. Not a minor border skirmish, but a major campaign in a larger war that threatened to conscript every able-bodied man from the Pyrenees to the port of Cádiz. You will know of this war: of Pedro the Cruel and Enrique de Trastamare, of brothers divided against themselves. When Pedro called, our knight gathered the might of his men, leaving only a small garrison behind.
    Word soon came of a bloody battle in Nájera, a battle in which King Pedro won back the crown of Castile from his bastard brother. Though this victory was to be short-lived, the tidings brought considerable joy to the castle and town, despite the additional news that the lord’s return would be delayed many months as King Pedro led his army to further battles against the lingering enemies of the crown. In her knight’s long absence the lady saw to the needs of his property and people, with an added touch of feminine grace that delighted those around her.
    On the Day of St. Dominic, as the lady and her daughter strolled in the castle’s herb garden, the scents of rosemary and lavender mingling in the hot calm of an August afternoon, a blotch on the northern hills caught the little girl’s eye. She squinted against the sun.
    Dust, yet not from a storm. The road from Burgos was dry, and any single horse would kick up a mass of saffron powder that might linger for hours.
    The cloud she saw now filled the horizon. Forty horses, perhaps fifty. She tugged at her mother’s dress. They gazed together at the approaching force, their hearts lifting against a darkening sky.
    The Day of St. Dominic. The day the strangers came.

Chapter viii
    Rose Alley, Southwark
    T he Pricking Bishop. Edgar Rykener shook his head at the painted sign, amazed that the Bishop of Winchester allowed such pictures in his liberties. Lord Protector of Whores, they called him up on Gropecunt Lane, defending his right to run as many houses as he pleased across the river in Southwark while the hardworking maudlyns of London got constantly harassed by the law. Joan Rugg would go on about it for half a day. Unlike Gropecunt Lane, the stews of Southwark embraced their natural filth, the half-pipe gutters stopped up with brackish water of a murky green, the conduits to the river long forgotten by the bishop’s underworked ditchers. Wobbly shacks had been built out into the streets to claim space for shops, while the oblong fishponds at the western end walled off the great houses on the riverbanks beyond. No sweepers or rakers to maintain the streets, nor regular dungcarts to haul away the most offensive waste.
    On the Bishop’s front steps sat a withered old maudlyn, barely there beneath her shift and smock. St. Cath was her name, Edgar recalled, still alive after half a century on her