Free A Knight to Remember by Christina Dodd

his image like an icon in her mind.
    Which led her to another less than palatable thought. If she wasn’t remembering him, then she’d been observing him here in the dispensary. Observing him not as a patient, but as a man worthy of attention. She didn’t believe she’d been doing that. Yet here she was, prognosticating how he would act and react.
    She hated this about herself. It was like thinking she had been cured of an infection only to find it lingered still in her veins.
    “I hope you’re mumbling that I have a good idea.” Hugh didn’t sound as if he believed that.
    Separating the trefoil, she stacked it into a pile and began plucking the crimson blossoms. “When I lived with Lady Alisoun, she and Sir David treated me with the greatest kindness. I have nothing but respect for their opinions, but I fear I am unable to apply to them for anything. It would not be acceptable to me.”
    “Your pride is not seemly in a woman.”
    Her hands clenched into fists, and the scent of spring clover assailed her. Opening her hands, she wiped the smears of red from her palms. In a low tone, she said, “My pride is all I have, and it has sustained me for a very long time now.”
    “You’re too independent.”
    “Whose fault is that?” Her movements jerky, she stretched a thin cloth over the table and dumped the blossoms onto it.
    “Mine, perhaps.”
    She almost didn’t hear him, and she didn’t understand what he meant anyway.
    He said, “When this war is over, I will have several estates to go with my title. I could foster your sons then.”
    She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t stand it. Hadn’t he heard one single word that she’d said? Was her determination so easily brushed aside? His offer demonstrated the truth of her thoughts—that men created war for the love of fighting and struggled against the civilizing influences of wife and home. When faced with the thought of two boys—boys he had never met—becoming men of peace, Hugh endeavored to save them as surely as the saints endeavored to win a sinner’s soul. She managed a polite tone, but the undercurrent, if he cared to hear, swept through darkand dangerous. “My sons have had too much disruption in their lives already. I am their mother. They will stay with me.”
    Gathering the corners of the cloth, she lifted the trefoil. He tried to speak, but she walked past without giving a sign she’d heard and carried the flowers outside. In an area safe from the wind, she knelt and spread them to dry. In the winter they would provide infusions against fits of coughing.
    In the winter, Hugh would be gone.
    For the first time in her life, she longed for winter. Kneeling down among the herbs, she pulled the few weeds that threatened the comfrey. Last winter had been her first at the abbey. It had been very long, very dull, very cold. She’d longed for the spring as never before, but spring, with its easier travel and its rich landscape, had carried war on its temperate winds. Battle had come too close. The wounded had depleted her stores. A few of the rougher soldiers had threatened to sack the village, and in fact a gold chalice had disappeared from the church.
    It took a desperate man to steal from God, and the experience alarmed the nuns. Edlyn thought it frightened the monks, too, untrained as most were in the art of war. Lady Corliss had suggested Edlyn curtail her ventures into the forest until the countryside had settled once more. Edlyn had explained that the season for trefoil was brief, and the leaves from the coltsfoot had to be collected now before they lost their vigor.
    What Lady Corliss didn’t understand was that Edlyn needed to escape into those woods. There, no one watched her, no one mocked her for what she had been and what she had become. She could discard her shoes, hike up her skirt, and with a free consciencehunt for medicinal herbs, all the while breathing the air of freedom.
    Of course, one time she had had the uneasy sense of