Free The Illuminator by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

partridge on which he chewed.
    â€œI hope you find the sauce pleasing, Master … Finn.”
    â€œI find much to please me here, madam.” Was it his imagination, or did her face redden? He hastily added, “You are fortunate in your cook. The bird is well-seasoned.”
    She smiled at him—a real smile, not the strained grimace he’d seen heretofore.
    â€œAgnes has been with me since I was a child. She was my nursemaid. She is very loyal.”
    Finn saluted her with his knife, speared another bite. Agnes, he thought. A name worth remembering. It was always good to make friends with the cook. Nor did he want to incur disfavor with Lady Kathryn. If she prized loyalty, he must say nothing else to make her wary of his own, but he sincerely hoped hers was not one of those pious households where he would be constantly required to invent excuses for his absence from a numbing ritual of daily prayers. And he really did not want Rose to be influenced by an excess of religious fervor. He’d seen the dark underbelly of that kind of piety. Balance in all things was best, and especially in religion. That’s what he wanted for his daughter—devotion to the Virgin, yes, but balanced by intelligent reasoning. His life had been ruled by the sign of the cross—hadn’t he dedicated his art to it, even carried it before him into battle? But he had been born under another sign: Libra, the sign of the scales—reason in one, piety in the other.
    It would help if he knew why Lady Kathryn had agreed to board him and his daughter. He suspected more than loyalty to the Church; the abbot was probably making it worth her while. Hers was a prosperous household, if the silver cups and horn spoons tipped with silver carvings were an indication, but the table she kept, if respectable, could not be said to be extravagant, and he’d noticed the careful manner in which she directed the pouring of the wine. He and Rose would be served simpler fare in future. She was probably hard-pressed to stretch her income to meet taxes and tithes.
    He couldn’t help but notice that the widow had other pressures as well. The hawk-nosed sheriff on her right, with whom she shared cup and trencher, brushed her sleeve too often and would have buried his long nose in her cleavage had she not pulled back from him. Some might call her beautiful, but Finn’s taste ran to dark-haired, buxom girls with friendlier ways. This woman was too tall, and carried herself too proud, and despite the pleasing bulges above the neckline of her square-cut bodice, she could not be called buxom. Her hair was certainly her most remarkable feature. She couldn’t be more than forty, but her hair was gray—almost white—with one black strand above the left temple that threaded like a velvet ribbon through the intricate knot bound in a blue snood at the nape of a slender neck. He wondered what she would look like naked in the moonlight, the whole great mass of hair loosed and flowing over her breasts like melting silver. He was surprised how quickly this lecherous thought had inserted itself—he had not thought the woman that attractive.
    â€œA toast to Lady Blackingham.” Sir Guy raised his glass. “To the beauty of our hostess and the bounty of her table.”
    Fawning bastard, Finn thought. Was the sheriff toasting her thighs or her pasturelands? But he raised his glass so as not to appear ungracious. One insulted a sheriff at one’s peril.
    The room was warm, and he was vaguely aware of an odor of musk on his right. He noticed how the flimsy fabric of Lady Kathryn’s kerchief clung to her breasts. He felt a tightening in his loins and was glad he didn’t have to stand to drink the toast. He’d been celibate too many months. Celibate, not because he’d been on pilgrimage or fasting, no such nonsense—he’d leave that to the monks—but celibate out of convenience and squeamishness.