CHAPTER 10

Sir Balduin nearly collided with Triston as they rounded the curve in the stair from opposite directions.

“I was coming to look for you,” Triston said. “What is this about Lucianna leaving with her brother?”

Sir Balduin struggled to steady the angry breaths heaving his chest. “Where heard you that?”

“From Serafino. He asked me if he might take some food for their journey. He is in the kitchen gathering some now.”

Sir Balduin wondered if this reddish haze at the edges of his vision was how the world looked when Triston fell into one of his volatile bouts of temper. He did not even realize he had brushed past his young master until he heard Triston call out after him, “Where are you going?”

Sir Balduin did not answer. Too many curses hovered on his tongue to be certain one of them might not slip out at any delay that Triston caused him.

Serafino was alone in the kitchen, and it looked like food was not the only thing on his mind. While a basket sat on a table, spilling over with loaves of bread, fruit, pasties, tarts, and other easily transportable foodstuffs, he held a canvas(?) bag into which Sir Balduin saw him drop a slotted spoon that clanged against some metal object already inside, followed by a small iron pot he plucked from the cold stove.

Serafino had a frying pan in his hand when Sir Balduin said, “You’ll break your teeth on that. Iron makes a poor dinner, sir.”

Serafino started and turned from the stove, but recovered quickly from his surprise. “Don Triston gave me leave—”

“—to depart with some food from our kitchen,” Sir Balduin finished. He crossed the floor with his limping gait and swiped the bag from Serafino’s hand, opening the neck to gaze inside. “None of these items look edible to me. They might earn you several handfuls of silver, though.” He looked back at Serafino, silently villifying the eyes so near in shade to Lucianna’s. “I suppose this should not surprise me?”

“You mistake, signore,” Serafino said, politely but firmly retrieving the bag. “I borrow these, merely. I am not a rich man and I refuse to beg for, how do you say? Carità?”

“Charité,” Sir Balduin growled. “It is not so different from your own tongue, sir.” Unlike that blasted word for patience he could not recall how to pronounce. Italian’s odd and inconsistent Cs, their rolling Rs, their inexplicable Zs—he could hardly be blamed for his confusion. But this word was perfectly understandable in both their languages.

Serafino smiled, as though Sir Balduin did not know he spoke French almost as neatly as Lucianna did. “Si. Charity. I will not beg it of Don Triston after my sister has so wickedly deceived him. Our journey is long, and it may be that I will not be able to afford the cost of an inn for us both every night. Should necessity confine us to more humble refuge, I take these items merely that we may prepare a few simple meals. As soon as we are back in Venice I will resume my wool(?) trade, and at the first opportunity I will pay a trustworthy messenger to return these.”

“Liar.” The smile faded from Serafino’s face as the bald word burst from Sir Balduin. “You intend to sell those to indulge the vices Lucianna has refused any longer to support. Likely you will drag her home in rags—if you do not simply abandon her. I would not put it past your black heart.”

Serafino went very stiff. “Signore, whatever Lucianna has told you of me in an attempt to lessen in your sight her own guilt is, at the very least, a vast distortion of my misdeeds. I may have, on a rare occasion, requested a small loan from her, but its was she who chose to maintain her silence after I revealed to her the truth of her birth, so that she might not lose the many privileges she had acquired by beguiling a friendship with a wealthy merchant’s daughter. Perhaps I was wrong to help her maintain her deceit, but in truth, I saw it as a kindness. Imagine what her future would have been had Cosimo Gallo thrust her out, a young, pretty woman, into the streets of Venice?”

“Oh, I do not doubt in the least that is the very fear you preyed upon with her. A kindness? Pah! You are a scurrilous bully of a scoundrel. To call yourself her brother is to befoul the word.”

Serafino gave a dramatic sigh. “You are overwrought, signore, for which I cannot blame you. It was most certainly a terrible shock to learn how the woman you loved has deceived you. I cannot express to you the depths of my own disappointment, but what can one do? ‘Blood will out,’ as they say, and I fear she will always be a thief’s daughter. The moment I saw your ring in her hand and realized she had returned to her pilfering ways—”

Sir Balduin snapped his fist into Serafino’s face and watched with satisfaction as the blow threw him into a sprawl across the stove.

“Che diavolo!” Serafino exclaimed, dropping the frying pan so he could press his hand to the eye that Sir Balduin had clouted shut.

Sir Balduin resisted the impulse to close the other in similar fashion. Whatever whim of fate had thought it amusing to match the green hue of Lucianna’s eyes with this dastard’s gaze should be laughing a little less gleefully now. The auburn hair dusted with silver still mocked him, though, and kept his fist clenched in eagerness to deal another rebuke.

“Malign her again,” Sir Balduin warned, “and next time I will break your nose. You may well thank the heavens I am not wearing my sword.”

The eye that was not swelling behind Serafino’s palm flared with alarm. “Malign her? My only sin was in not telling you of her iniquitous character as soon as I arrived. For that, si, I confess myself at fault, and for that I will forgive this unwarranted attack of yours. But signore, it was not I who attempted to steal your ring. You saw her for yourself—”

“She had no need to steal my ring,” Sir Balduin cut him off. “I had given it to her freely. She could have fled with you and it in the middle of the night if she’d wished to make off with it, instead of flinging it back at me—twice.”

Sir Balduin took a step forward, prompting Serafino to scurry away from the stove, but not before he bent down to scoop up the frying pan again as he rolled his one good eye apprehensively in Sir Balduin’s direction. Sir Balduin’s blood had begun a familiar pumping, reminding him of the days before his injury when he had ridden into battle at the sides of the masters of Vere. Truly, his palm itched for the feel of a sword hilt in his hand.

“You, on the other hand,” Sir Balduin said, stalking Serafino around the edges of the kitchen, “comforted me in the garden while I bemoaned that disastrous song I sang to her. You asked, as I recall, rather probing questions about my means to support a wife, and then you embraced me with the assurance that you would help plead my cause with her. The ring was most certainly still around my neck when I rose from bed yester-morning. I recall feeling its weight against my chest as I dined.” Or more precisely during his melodic debacle. “So it must have been sometime after I retreated to the garden that it disappeared. Had a servant found it, it would have been promptly returned to me, for Sir Triston has made a thorough sweep of the corrupt hirelings of his father’s day. But your embrace—it startled me. Sufficiently so that I suspect I did not notice when you undid the chain’s clasp and slipped chain and ring together from my neck.”

“But signore,” Serafino insisted, “if that were true, you would have found it in my possession, not in my sister’s. It is more likely that she slid it from your neck while she held you distracted with the kisses Donna Siri and I discovered you engaged in in your chamber. Si, it was immediately after that that we found it in her hand.”

“That is impossible, since it was missing when I retired to my bed last night and I spent the entire night and half the morning upending my chamber in search of it. If it had fallen off there, I would have found it. Which means Lucianna could not have uncovered it in my chamber to steal it, because it wasn’t there.”

Panic shone clearly now in Serafino’s unbruised eye. “But—But you must have overlooked it, despite your search. How else would it have come into her possession?”

“That is a very good question,” Sir Balduin admitted. “And it is one I will ask her as soon as I have done thrashing you from head to toe.”

Serafino had backed into a corner from which he appeared to realize too late he could not escape unless Sir Balduin agreed to take several steps in retreat. Instead, Sir Balduin stretched out a hand to grasp the knave by the front of his surcote, with the intention of dragging him into a more open space to permit the promised trouncing.

Serafino reacted with a gasping curse and swung the frying pan at Sir Balduin’s head. Sir Balduin ducked. Serafino leapt past him, but Sir Balduin spun and caught Serafino’s shoulder to spin him about. The frying pan swooped again at Sir Balduin’s skull, again Sir Balduin dodged, but this time when he straightened he landed his fist in Serafino’s other eye.

“That is for breaking her heart with Vincenzo Mirolli,” Sir Balduin growled, heroically choking down his jealousy of Lucianna’s first love while simultaneously cursing and thanking the unknown man for spurning her, for had he not, she would never have entered Sir Balduin’s life.

Serafino deserved chastisement for her pain all the same, just as he did the blow Sir Balduin cracked into Serafino’s chin when Serafino scrambled up bleary-eyed with another wild swing of the pan.

“That is for all the years you bullied and terrified her with threats to as good as throw her into the streets if she did not bow to your grasping, predatory demands.”

Serafino recovered from a staggering stumble to make one last wobbling attempt to defend himself with his kitchen weapon. Sir Balduin sidestepped it easily, then heard a satisfying crack as his fist connected with Serafino’s nose. Serafino went down howling, dropping the frying pan with a clatter to try to staunch the blood flowing from his nostrils.

“And that one is for myself,” Sir Balduin said. “When I think how near I came to losing her because of you—”

He broke off, his voice shaking with emotion. For it had all become clear to Sir Balduin in his chamber when Lucianna had told her story, sealed on his heart when she had said, “Non più. No more. I would not let him wring so much as another denari(?) from me or someone I love.”

She had meant him, he knew it. Serafino had most certainly planned to exploit her as he had before if she married Sir Balduin. Serafino’s probing questions in the garden about Sir Balduin’s emerald ring, the silver needles, his future prospects as castellan of NAME Castle stood adequate proof of the knave’s intent in Sir Balduin’s mind. It had taken the tigress spirit he had always admired in her for Lucianna to defy this man she had stood in fear of for thirty years.

**For me. To prevent Serafino from taking advantage of me through her. Though she had rejected Sir Balduin again and again o’er the last few weeks, the one thing she had never done was deny that she still loved him, her passion affirmed by her ardent return of his kiss in his chamber. Her rebuffs, he realized now, had been an attempt to protect him from her reprobate brother, and to slip away from Poitou before Sir Balduin learned why. It had not been Siri’s judgment Lucianna feared as she revealed her birth and Serafino’s extortion. Again and again she had kept her gaze on Siri because she knew herself safe in the young woman’s love. It nearly cleft Sir Balduin’s heart in two that she had not felt herself safe in his.

“Stop blubbering like a baby,” Sir Balduin said gruffly as Serafino continued whimpering over his broken nose. He crossed to the table with the basket, then returned to thrust the container with its bountiful foodstuffs into Serafino’s arms. “That should get you well across the Norman border. See that you then send back the horse, unless you wish me to send men after you to fetch you back as a horse thief.” An ironic end that would be, Sir Balduin thought, if Serafino found himself at the end of a rope like Lucianna’s father.

From the shudder that shook Serafino, the same prospect appeared to occur to him.

“Here, you may take this along, since you seem so fond of it.” Sir Balduin picked up the frying pan and dropped it in Serafino’s lap. The cook might chide Sir Balduin’s generosity, but two more skillets lay in plain view about the kitchen. “You may sell it after you return the horse to finance what you can of the rest of your journey. After that, you and your despicable wits are on your own. Only I warn you not to let me see your face again, for I’ll not content myself with blackening your eyes and cracking your nose next time.”

Serafino groaned, his hand fluttering gingerly over his red, bulbous, still bloodied nose. “What about Lucianna?” he muttered.

“That is up to her. If she still wishes to return to Venice, be assured she will do so with every luxury Lady Siri can bestow on her and a trustworthy guard that shall keep her safe from fiends like you forevermore.”

Sir Balduin left the kitchen, then checked his angry strides, startled to discover Triston just without in the passageway that linked the kitchen to the hall.

“Sir!”

Triston lifted one of his ebony brows. “Is it settled?”

“Is what settled?”

Triston’s gaze dropped briefly to the bruises on Sir Balduin’s knuckles before returning to Sir Balduin’s face with a bit of a glint in his eye. “I did not catch all the words you flung, but I know the sounds of a fistfight when I hear it. I gathered you did not need any assistance from me.”

Sir Balduin rubbed his knuckles. He had not realized they were sore until Triston drew his attention to them. He hesitated. He supposed he would have to tell Triston everything eventually. But he had one more person to “settle” things with, first.

“If it would not be inconvenient, sir, might we lend Serafino a few knights to see him safely—” and permanently “—away from Vere?”

Triston nodded. “Certainly. Will Lady Lucianna be accompanying him?”

Sir Balduin felt his own brows snap down. “She will not.”

Triston smiled. “She is staying then?”

Sir Balduin sighed and his shoulders sagged a little. “That I do not yet know.”