CHAPTER 1

“The wedding is off, carissima!” Lucianna announced. She held her head high as she swept across the sunlit chamber to where her former charge, Siri de Brielle, sat painting an elegant prayer book.

Siri looked up, her jewel blue eyes radiating dismay. “What, again? What happened this time?”

“He called me paffuto. I will have you know that my gowns fit me just as neatly as they did twenty-five years ago.”

A cup of wine and plate of cheese sat on a table to the side of the window so that Siri could refresh herself while she worked. Lucianna set these items aside, picked up the tray and buffed the metal surface with the wide green sleeve of her surcote, then examined her blurred reflection. She could make out little of her features, but her figure remained undoubtedly trim, despite her passing her fortieth-and-fourth year last month.

“Perhaps you should stop trying to teach Sir Balduin Italian,” Siri said. “I am sure he did not mean to call you plump.”

“If he loved me as he says, he would pay stricter attention to my lessons. I have shown him the courtesy of learning his tongue. One would think it a small enough request that he should learn mine.”

To an unfamiliar eye, the frown that pulled at Siri’s full rosy lips would have appeared a pout, but Lucianna had known her since she was a babe and discerned the reproof Siri directed at her.

“Lucianna, you learned French with my mother in a nunnery in Venice before she married my father. Our minds are nimble when we are young. Sir Balduin—”

Lucianna cut off Siri’s defense of the gray-haired knight with an impatient gesture. “Oh, si, he says he is too old to learn new things. ’Tis merely an excuse that will haunt our marriage. If he is too old to learn the difference between paffuto and pazienza, then he is too old to learn how to please a wife.”

Siri’s pout dissolved into sudden merriment, setting aglow the golden face that had bewitched their neighbors far and near and held her husband, Triston, joyfully smitten.

“Then perhaps,” Siri said, “Sir Balduin forgot the word because you are not in the least pazienza. You know you are not, Lucianna, you are not patient at all!”

Lucianna gave a haughty sniff and put the tray back down. “Is it my fault the men of Poitou are so trying? When they are not kissing or trying to abscond with you behind my back, they are provoking quarrels with one another or reciting nonsensical poetry. The land is filled with hommes fous.”

Siri dipped a tapered brush into a vial of red paint and resumed filling in the flowing scarlet dress of Mary Magdalene, clearly dismissing the seriousness of Lucianna’s indignation. “They are not madmen. And I do not know why you were so cross with Acelet’s verses when he came for Christmas. We had poets in Venice, too. Some of them turned your eyes quite dreamy.”

Lucianna swept over to the window that overlooked the castle’s bailey. Sir Balduin stood below, conversing with Siri’s husband, Triston de Brielle. Lord Triston they called him now, since he had inherited the barony that had come to Siri through her late father. Sir Balduin was not as tall as his young master and his hair may have turned the color of slate, but he maintained an athletic physique despite the limp an enemy knight’s sword blow had left him with.

Lucianna had long given up thoughts of falling in love when she had left her native Venice to accompany Siri to the new home in Poitou named for her in her brother’s will. Love. The very idea was absurd for a woman Lucianna’s age! But as Siri had worked out her tumultuous relationship with her new guardian, Triston de Brielle, Triston’s most trusted advisor, Sir Balduin, had quietly but persistently begun an unexpected wooing of Lucianna. She had scoffed at his attentions at first, as she at everything in her new, foreign home, but the rough-tongued soldier had gradually overcome the emotional defenses she had built around a heart she admitted was sometimes uncomfortably proud for those around her.

She wished now that she had clung to that pride instead of letting Sir Balduin’s admiring glances and entreating smiles set her head spinning like a silly girl’s.

Lucianna took a quick step to the side of the window frame as she saw Sir Balduin turn his head to glance over his shoulder. It would not have been the first time he caught her gazing down on him from Siri’s workshop. If he cast another of his earnest, apologetic looks at her, Lucianna would not be able to maintain her resolve.

She turned away from the window. “Your memories are flawed, carissima. I have not been dreamy for twenty-eight years.”

She fixed a brooding study on the tapestry on the opposite wall, a graceful boating scene. Though the construction of the vessels was different from the gondolas that had ferried her from place to place for the greater part of her life, the waves of the sea and swooping seagulls(?) combined to stir nostalgic memories in her breast. She guessed a similar sentiment had prompted Siri to request its placement in her workroom.

“What happened twenty-eight years ago?”

Siri’s bright voice startled her. Lucianna bit briefly down on her lower lip. She had not meant to be so careless with her words.

“Nothing happened,” she said. “I was a silly girl with romantic notions in my head, such as all young girls have, that is all.”

Siri set down her brush and swiveled about on her work stool to gaze into Lucianna’s face. “You never tell me about your girlhood. Why? I know story after story about you and my mother when you were in the nunnery together, but they are all about her. I know my mother loved and trusted you, that she asked you to care for me before she died, that you have been as a second mother to me, but—”

“You know all you need to,” Lucianna cut her off. “Our families sent us to be educated in the Abbey/Convent of NAME, where your mother and I became the best of friends. She was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, I was not. She had a dowry to wed your father, I had not a florin to my name. I am now as I was then, a spinster who did not wish to be a nun, so your mother took me into her home with her when she became a wife.”

“But—”

“Do not be tedious, carissima. There is nothing of interest to tell. I am content as I am. Or I will be once I return to Venice.”

She waited for Siri’s protest, prepared to counter every plea and argument as she had twice before. It was not entirely unsatisfying that Siri, a new young wife herself, still longed for Lucianna’s companionship. But returning was the only solution Lucianna could see, though she could never admit the reason to Siri.

But this time Siri’s face crumpled with laughter, rather than entreaty. “Lucianna, do not be absurd. Because Sir Balduin misspoke a word of Italian? That is your silliest reason for calling off the wedding yet!”

“I could not agree more.”

Lucianna did her best to quench the tremor that wove through her at the sound of Sir Balduin’s voice. He must indeed have glimpsed her from the window and came now to confront her. Like Siri, he had called their argument absurd, but Lucianna had no other choice. She loved him too much marry him.

“Is it silly to wish to be admired by my husband, rather than likened to a maiale?”

Siri’s gasp raked across the puzzlement on Sir Balduin’s face. “Lucianna! I do not believe Sir Balduin called you a pig, even by mistake!”

Lucianna tried to take advantage of Sir Balduin’s horror to sweep past him while he was too stunned to stop her, but she heard the uneven tread of his footstep as he followed her through the doorway. She quickened her pace, but he caught her at the head of the stairs and pulled her around to face him.

“Lucianna, I know my tongue is clumsy—too clumsy to please you by learning the language of your birth. But in French I call you truly sweetheart, dear one, beloved, angel! Our wedding is on Friday. Do not let us quarrel again.”

She almost let him draw her into his arms. No one had ever called her angel! But when she reached out a hand to set it to his waist, it fell upon the leather pouch that jingled at his belt. She wiggled away before he could kiss her.

“No. I have given you three chances and you have failed them all. I will not marry a man who refuses to trust me with his thoughts—”

“That is not true,” Sir Balduin protested. “What cause have I given you to think I do not trust you?”

“Last week when you sat with me in the gardens while I plied my embroidery, I asked you what you were thinking and you said you were thinking of nothing. You would not share the truth with me no matter how I begged you, and when I persisted you grew annoyed with me.”

“Exasperated, not annoyed,” he said, “because I was not thinking of anything except how the sun was making me sleepy. I told you that, but you went all cross and said it was impossible to have a mind so empty and that you could not marry a man who would not confide in you, and the next thing I knew you said the wedding was off.” A small, mischievous smile that he had not shared with her until weeks into their courting played now across his lips. “But then I leaned over and nuzzled your ear and you changed your mind.”

He bent forward, clearly aiming again for that same, vulnerable spot, but she ignored the eager thump in her breast and took a vigorous step out of reach.

“Si, I forgave you, and how did you repay me? With base inconsideration.”

Sir Balduin sighed. “Lucianna, I have apologized a dozen times for missing dinner. If I had known that Lord Laurant would be out hunting when Triston sent me to speak with him, I would have waited to leave Vere until after we dined.”

“You might have sent a servant to tell me you would be late.”

“I did not think it important.”

Lucianna’s always precise posture snapped even more rigid.

Sir Balduin, recognizing that he had offended yet again, said quickly, “Forgive me, my love, it was thoughtless and selfish of me, as you say. But in fairness, how was I to know you had asked the kitchens to prepare my favorite dish?”

“It was to be a surprise. Oh!” She flung up her hands. “You are hopeless! You refuse to confide in me, you have no respect for my feelings, and now you call me fat! I will endure no more of this.”

She turned towards the stairs.

“Lucianna—”

She twitched her arm away from his reaching clasp. “No. As soon as I arrange for an escort, I am going back to Venice. And that is finale.”

She ran down the stairs, ignoring his calling voice, pausing only when she knew herself safely out of his sight to stop and dry her tears with her sleeve. She knew if she lingered too long he would follow her again, so she turned her steps to the castle’s exit. Her fingers found and caressed the great stone of her ring again. She ought to return it to Sir Balduin, but she had no money of her own to hire escorts and she refused to borrow from Siri. That had been the source of all this trouble to begin with. Sir Balduin would be horrified when he learned she had sold the gift of his love, but it could not be helped. In truth, it would be for the best if he thought her obstinate, irrational, ungrateful and mercenary, and never forgave her at all.

Lucianna sniffled dolefully, her eyes so full of a fresh swell of tears that she did not recognize the man standing in the bailey with Triston until Triston’s shout checked her path to the stables.

“Lady Lucianna! You have a visitor, come all the way from Venice.”

Lucianna’s hand clenched against her stomach. He would not dare. She turned, hurriedly blinking dry her eyes as Triston crossed the courtyard to join her. At his side strode a man with a face like an angel, haloed with thick auburn hair a few shades darker than her own. It was not merely that his hair remained free of the silvered temples that had graced her tresses at his age, but the cheating way Nature had refrained from sullying his beauty with even a hint of the lines and creases that a forty-year-old man ought to bear, that made him look so deceptively youthful and virtuous.

“Cara!” He swept her into his arms, briefly smothering her against the fine, fresh linen of a bright blue surcote Lucianna had helped him add to his shabby wardrobe a week ago. “Sorella! Don Triston tells me you are about to marry. I have come just in time.”