Free LADY UNDAUNTED: A Medieval Romance by Tamara Leigh Page B

Maynard’s uncle. God willing, she would return to the palace before her absence was noted—and Edward’s anger fell upon her.
    Slipping out of the palace proved easier than expected. Under cover of her unadorned woolen mantle, she joined a group of women servants, none of whom received more than a cursory glance from the guards. What did not bear thinking on was how she was to make her way back into the palace without drawing attention.
    As she crossed the second of three drawbridges behind a procession of carts, hay wains, pie makers, and fishmongers, she peered up from beneath her hood at the outermost bastion of the stronghold’s defense—the last she must pass to reach the outside. Appropriately named the Lion Tower, it was a massive structure liberally studded with men-at-arms.
    She moved her gaze to the left and saw suspicion on the face of a soldier who eyed her. Blessedly, he was distracted by the toppling of a commoner’s cart that loosed flapping chickens from woven cages.
    Joslyn pushed past the others, and not until her slippers were dusted with the dirt of the road leading away from the palace did she expel her breath.
    Dear Lord, I have done it! she silently rejoiced as she hastened into the city of which she knew so little. Fortunately, during the ride to the monastery where Oliver had been left in the care of monks before Father Ivo and she had continued on to the palace, she had heeded her surroundings. Thus, she could find her way back to her son.
    Winding west, she hurried past crowded shops capped with cramped housing, men and women who called for her to touch and taste their wares, and children who played in the streets as if fields of grass were beneath their feet. Then the street she traversed ended—as it should not.
    She turned fully around. This morn there had been the option of going forward as well as left or right. Or was she mistaken? Oliver’s chatter had distracted her a time or two, but surely not so much she should lose her way.
    She peered down the street that jutted left, then looked right, and finding the latter familiar, moved in that direction. Minutes later, the decision proved a poor one, the street narrowing and darkening for want of sunlight.
    Though she preferred to find the monastery without compromising the commoner she appeared to be, she would have to ask someone to set her right.
    Pausing in front of a shop offering fish that smelled well past consumption, she looked about for a woman to approach.
    They were nearly all men, and several stopped to cast eyes upon her as if she were edible.
    Revisited by the alarm she had felt when Liam Fawke had set himself at her across the green, she hunched into her mantle and wished the short sword Maynard had gifted to Oliver were at her waist. Knowing it would be unseemly to wear it upon her person at court, she had left it at the monastery.
    Looking back the way she had come, she had just resolved to retrace her steps when a screech brought her head up and around.
    In the window of the third floor up from the street stood a woman with shoulders bared and a bearded man in her embrace. He laughed, she laughed, and the lovers dropped out of sight.
    She was in a place of ill repute—a place into which no lady would even dare toss her slipper.
    “Whatcha hiding yourself fer, girl?” a gruff voice asked.
    She jumped back and came up against a barrel of reeking fish.
    “Ye an ugly one?” The thickly jowled, pockmarked man stepped nearer. “I don’t mind, ye know. Same to me, especially if it costs less.” He reached for her hood.
    Joslyn sidestepped and turned to flee, but he pulled her back.
    “I may not be handsome and strappin’, but me coin’s good, wench.”
    Feeling every beat of her heart, hearing every draw of her breath, she searched for words that would free her from the man’s attentions. “Keep your distance! I have the pox.”
    Disease a thing to be feared nearly as much as a dagger to one’s throat, especially