Free The Lute Player by Norah Lofts Page A

sheltering shadow of the great castle, I could build a house without defences, a comfortable house to live in with a glass window and a shelf for my books and an herb garden to scent the air outside the door.
    And no steep stairs, I thought grimly, for we were now at the foot of the Queen’s Tower and the steep, badly worn stairs loomed before me. I knew very well that Blanco, who lived in the little kennel-like room at the top of the flight, would come at a call and carry me up as easily as though I were a kitten but such a procedure humiliated me and never, in health, did I take advantage of his services. Alone, I swarmed up on all fours like a crab; under observation I climbed slowly, clutching the wall and hating the places where it had worn smooth and slippery. Conscious of this, and not wishing to make a spectacle of myself before the boy, I signalled to him to go ahead of me. ‘Up here,’ I said, and waited.
    Any other boy picked up in the market place would have obeyed me thoughtlessly; but this boy, with a little smile, stood aside, flattening himself against the turn of the wall. Where had a strolling player picked up such manners? I wondered as I set myself to face the climb.
    At the third step he was just behind me and at the fourth his hand was under my elbow. I had a vision of that hand as it had lain between the ears of the bear—slim, young, browned by the sun and, I remembered, most noticeably clean. My elbow fitted into the palm of it and with each painful effort I made it was there, warm, supporting, surprisingly strong.
    Was it at that moment that I fell in love with him? I do remember that, mounting the stairs, helped by his hand, I was stricken anew by the cruelty of my plight. Oh, I thought, to be ordinary, shaped like a human being, to be looked at and touched with affection, desire! Even this crumb of contact, offered from a courtesy tainted by pity, was so sweet!
    As we neared the top of the stairs Blanco, the huge black eunuch looked, like a guardian dog, out of the tiny room, not much larger than a kennel, in which he spent his doglike life. He looked at me with dumb reproach because I had eluded him and gone out alone. He loved to be taken into the street as escort; it was one of the diversions of his life which was, if possible, more dull and monotonous than that of the ladies he guarded. And at that moment the sight of Blanco blended most dismally with my secret feelings. He was a man, unsexed by his fellow men; I was a woman, unsexed by God. We would both have been better dead.
    ‘Blanco,’ I said, ‘I have forgotten to order my new slippers. Run, will you, and say that I have decided upon red leather lined with wool. The apprentice who brought up the patterns will know which I mean.’ His great black face split like a melon with joy at the prospect of a thirty minutes’ jaunt into the sunshine. The boy and I went on into the solar.
    Having since seen the interior of several castles, I realise—as I did not then—that we women of the court of Navarre lived in circumstances of almost oriental luxury. Our grandfather had brought back with him from the East not only the disease which finally killed him but a great baggage train of treasures as well as a number of notions about comfort. There were no rushes on our floors, instead a great plenty of dark, silky rugs; there were divans, soft with cushions; rich curtains shrouded the bare stone of the walls and we five women owned among us no fewer than three silver looking glasses.
    The occupants of the solar were sitting exactly as I had left them: Catherine, Maria and Pila idly stitching away at a piece of tapestry. The fourth corner, mine, was held up for their convenience on a stool, so the whole picture was spread out, easily visible, and even as I moved into the room, crying in a lively way, ‘Look what I’ve brought you! A lute player who knows all the prettiest songs,’ I glanced from habit at the amount of progress they had made.