Free My Beloved by Karen Ranney Page B

following the undulation of the river.
    She had known only two homes—the one in which she’d spent the first five years of her life and the convent. Neither had adequately prepared her for the castle of Langlinais.
    She had discovered in the last weeks that her chamber overlooked the kitchen garden. Its beauty was not merely ornamental. There were fruit trees and huge plots of herbs, in addition to a pond stocked with fish. The flower gardens boasted all sorts of flowers, most of which she didn’t recognize. But she knew the poppies, roses, heliotropes, and violets.
    She took a deep breath. The air was warm and seemed colored with scent.
    Langlinais was always filled with people who appeared to go about their occupations with enthusiasm and few signs of laxity. The young girls who weeded in the kitchen herb garden, the laundress and her helpers, the smith’s apprentices, the kitchen workers, all of them appeared industrious and each of them had a ready smile for her as she passed, even though they did not speak. There was not one cross word heard, and if there was criticism doledout, it was the type one friend gives to another in laughing jest. Indeed, laughter was the prevalent sound in the courtyard and bailey, not the muttering of complaints. There was no fear here, no sullenness, only the sound of contentment and from time to time a song joined and carried through the summer morning like the gentle breeze over the Terne.
    The path she followed was laid with crushed stone, glittering yellow-brown in the sun. A bee darted in front of her, flew away just as quickly. The air was warmed until it seemed heavy, perfumed by the scent of blossoming flowers and long grasses. The walls along the river were covered with green lichen. She wondered what color it would produce if coaxed to ink.
    She smiled at herself. Even now, she could not refrain from thinking of her work. Or of Sebastian.
    She’d had a friend at the convent for a short time. Anne had been sent there before her wedding, to learn of such things as the nuns could teach her. She’d been thirteen years old and destined to wed a nobleman. She and Anne had shared, for a few weeks, one of the small stone rooms. Set aside from the rest of the dormitory by a stone wall three feet high, it was a secure place for two giggling girls. Enough that she and Anne had lain awake, sharing their thoughts and fears of marriage.
    They had decided that life as a married woman would be a wonderful thing. They had gone so far as to conjecture what their wedding night might truly be like, imagining where there was only mystery. Anne, the young bride, had been wed a long time by now, while Juliana had not yet been taken to wife.
    Nor would she be.
    She did not understand. How many times had shethought that in the weeks she’d been at Langlinais? Too many. So far, the extent of her life at Langlinais was the beauty of being able to work all day long in her tiny scriptorium balanced by nights of confusion.
    At first, she’d thought her husband one of those men who mortify the flesh as a way of worship. Then she’d reasoned that he must have been wounded in the Holy Land, or badly scarred. But the man she’d seen had been so perfect in face that she’d felt almost shamed to be in his presence. Her own lack of grace seemed to scream at her as she’d left the chapel.
    Then what was the reason he wished no true union? Was there something about her he disliked?
    She rarely considered her appearance. Vanity was not an attribute at the convent. As long as she was neat and tidy, she was considered acceptable. She was not supposed to know about her body, even her bathing was to be done in the dark, but she supposed she was curved in all the correct places.
    Was it her birth? True, her father had not been noble, but he had owned property, and had been a loyal man to the earls of Langlinais. She had brought her dower lands to the Langlinais coffers, and a