The Champion. Suzanne Barclay

lords!” Lady Odeline burst into the hall, her face white as new snow, her eyes wide with horror.

      Crispin raked his eyes over the lush figure so scandalously displayed by her tight, low-cut gown. Her presence in the bishop’s residence was an affront to all that was decent. Since her coming, the confessionals had been crowded with clerics and students tainted with the sin of lust. “What is it?”

      “My brother…he…” She clasped a hand to her heaving breasts.

      “The bishop is ill?” Crispin was on his feet at once.

      Odeline’s perfect chin wobbled. “He…he collapsed.”

      Ah, joy. Crispin schooled his features to reveal none of the excitement that coursed through his veins. “Is he…dead?”

      “Nay. He is breathing,” Odeline cned. “But so still—”

      Brother Oliver exclaimed in dismay, charged across the room and pushed past her. “Fetch Brother Anselme,” he shouted.

      “Of course.” Crispin turned to send Gerard on that errand…slowly, of course. But the spot to his left was empty, and he recalled having set Gerard to watch in case Linnet should defy his orders and try to see the bishop.

      “Go for the infirmarer,” said Prior Walter to the young cleric who attended him.

      “Thank you, brother.” Crispin looked into the prior’s cold, measuring eyes and felt a chill move down his spine.

      He cannot know anything. But the words brought scant comfort. “Come, we must attend our fallen bishop.” Even as he swept from the room, Crispin was conscious of the prior’s measured tread at his heels. Drat, what ill luck that the sharpeyed Walter should be here at this critical moment.

      “Take care you do not trip on your hem,” Walter said softly as they mounted the steep, winding stairs.

      “I am ever cautious,” Crispin replied, his agile mind already leaping ahead to the things that must be done. A funeral to arrange, letters to send to the archbishop at York…

      Brother Oliver’s scream cut off his thoughts.

      “Quickly, brother.” Walter pushed on his back, urging him up the stairs. Together they burst into the upper corridor and hustled the few steps to the bishop’s withdrawing room.

      There, on the disgustingly flamboyant carpet sprawled the body of Bishop Thurstan, his limbs flung wide, his mouth contorted in anguish, his head resting in a pool of crimson blood.

      Bile rose in Crispin’s throat. “Is he dead?”

      Walter knelt beside the bishop, felt in the folds of his neck and looked up at Crispin. “Aye, he is.” Turning back, Walter began murmuring the prayers that would ease Thurstan’s soul into the hereafter.

      Crispin sent his own prayer after it. I was not here and cannot be blamed for this. The words only marginally eased the burden on his conscience.

       Chapter Three

      Drusa clomped up the stairs with water and towels. “Let us see where ye are hurt, dearling.”

      “It is nothing. A bump on the head, a bit of a scrape on my elbow,” Linnet insisted. “I can tend my—”

      Drusa clucked her tongue. “Always did want to do everything for herself.” She smiled wryly at Simon and set to work.

      Simon leaned his shoulder against the mantel and watched the woman tend Linnet with the gruff tenderness that bespoke years of caring. The old longing curled in his belly. What would it be like to be loved like that? He shook it off with practiced ease and set his mind on the present, not his troubled past.

      Covertly, he studied the woman he had run down. When he’d bent over her on the dark path, something about her had seemed familiar. But now, seeing her m the light, that sense of recognition faded. Perhaps it was the scent of roses she wore that had struck a chord with him. She was certainly beautiful enough to make him wish he knew her.

      Linnet’s delicate profile was so perfect it might have been carved from marble, marred only by the bits of dirt Drusa was gently washing away. The maid had also loosened Linnet’s braids, so her hair tumbled over her slender shoulders and down her back in a honey-colored river, glinting like gold in the firelight.

      He guessed her age at twenty or so, which would have made her ten and six when he left on Crusade. Old enough to have attracted his eye when he’d been in town on Lord Edmund’s business, comely enough to have merited a second glance. Her brown eyes were warm and expressive. They sparkled with two things he valued in men and women: intelligence and wry humor. And when she had smiled, her whole face had seemed to glow, as though lit from within.

      Linnet the Spicier was a woman he would know better.

      But that was not the only reason Simon lingered in her cozy little solar. The vulnerability and the fear she could not quite hide worried him. She had been fleeing something when they collided. Or, more likely, someone. The aura of danger aroused the protective streak his friends had often teased him about.

       You have problems enough of your own.

      Simon shoved them aside to be considered later. Part of him, the soft side few men saw, hoped Thurstan would send word to him. The tough shell he had developed as an orphaned youth warned him not to care. He had been six when he arrived at Lord Edmund’s household as a page. Though he had not been abused, neither had he been loved. There had been no father to shield him when the older pages taunted and teased him, no mother to dry his tears when he was hurt in practice. The only true friends he had were the five knights of the Black Rose.

      “There.” Drusa set her cloth in the basin. “I’ve put betony cream on those scrapes, and the bump does not look grievous.”

      “Thank you,” Linnet grumbled, obviously irked at the fuss.

      “I am much relieved to hear you have suffered no serious harm, Mistress Linnet. I feared you might set the sheriff on me,” Simon teased.

      Linnet shivered. “That is the last thing I would do.”

      Interesting. Sheriff John Turnebull was a fair man, if Simon recalled correctly. Did she fear the sheriff would ask questions she tlid not want to answer?

      “If ye will sit with her a moment, sir, I will put these things away and fetch some ale.”

      “You do not have to watch over me,” Linnet muttered.

      “It is no hardship at all, I assure you. And the ale would be most welcome. You may have recovered, but I still feel a bit shaky,” he said dramatically. “In fact, I think I had best sit.” Simon pulled over a stool and plopped down at Linnet’s feet, stretching his boots toward the fire.

      “Just so. I’ll be back in two shakes.” Drusa hurried off.

      Linnet snorted and rolled her eyes. “You, a fearless knight returned from the Crusades, are shaky?”

      “The sight of a woman in distress does affect me most severely. And the thought that I might have caused you grievous injury…” He put a hand over his heart and sighed mightily. It was a pose Nicholas struck. It never failed to make women melt.

      Linnet laughed. The sound was musical, captivating. The merriment transformed her features from comely to striking. Firelight picked out the gold flecks in her eyes and made her hair shimmer. It was as though the sun had suddenly come out from behind a cloud to shed its radiance on the world, to banish darkness and cold.

      Simon had an unexpected urge to pull her onto his lap, to kiss her breathless, wrap them both in her glorious hair and see if she could measure up to his dream. Already he could feel his body responding, his pulse leaping, his loins quickening in prelude to a chase as old as time. But