Ana Seymour - Maid Of Midnight

She smoothed her fingers over the rough fabric of the torn habit and stared into the kitchen fire. She had no intention of looking for such a world. The only way she would glimpse it within these walls was if it would come to her.

Ranulf’s initial thought was that another bird had shot out of the brush, this time knocking off the small leather helmet he was wearing. He hadn’t brought his full armor to France. The wars were over and he had no desire for more fighting.

Almost immediately he realized that it had been no bird that had hit him, but an arrow. Before he could so much as reach for the sword in his saddle scabbard, they were on him. Four, at least, maybe more.

He flailed about with his arms, which were hard as an ironsmith’s hammer. Even before the years of the Crusade, the three Brand brothers had honed their strength in friendly competition, always eager to match their mettle against their siblings.

With the sheer force of his blows, Ranulf knocked two of his assailants from their horses, but another, a big man dressed in a black breastplate and black metal wristlets, took their place. Ranulf’s gloved fist hit the black metal, sending a shock all the way back up his arm. The man brushed Ranulf’s arm away as though it were a noisome fly, then he turned in the saddle and lifted the weapon he held in his right hand.

The last thing Ranulf remembered was the sight of a wicked star mace and an arm encased in black wristlets descending toward his head, blotting out the bright Normandy sun.

“Brother Alois says we can’t risk having you tend the man, Bridget.” Francis’s expression was worried.

“Nonsense. He’s been out of his head, raving, for nigh on two days. The Holy Father himself could be nursing him and he’d not know the difference.” Bridget finished stirring the mug of herbal tea at the edge of the hearth and rose to her feet. “Don’t worry, Francis, if he starts to come around, I’ll scurry back into the shadows like a little spider.”

Francis’s smile was sympathetic. “You know that if anyone outside learned of your presence here, you’d not be allowed to stay with us.”

“Aye, I’m well aware of it.”

Bridget scooted around the bulky monk, making sure not to spill the tea. It was one of the rare days when the brothers’ overprotective ways irritated her. She was sure her dissatisfaction had something to do with the young man who lay unconscious in the monks’ sleeping quarters. She’d caught a glimpse of him when Brother Ebert and Brother Alois had first brought him in the previous day. They’d found him on the road on their way back from market day in Beauville.

“I’ll go with you,” Francis said, giving a little puff as he lifted himself from the kitchen bench.

“You’ll not,” Bridget replied firmly. “I can’t tend the patient and my stew at the same time. Just sit there and give it a stir every now and then.”

Francis looked doubtfully from the young woman to the bubbling kettle and back. “You won’t…touch the man, will you?”

Bridget rolled her eyes. “’Twould be quite a feat to feed tea to a senseless man without touching him, don’t you think?”

“I should go with you.”

“You should mind the stew. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and if those carrots are scorched to the bottom of the pot, I’m sending you to dig me some new ones.”

With a little sigh of relief, she ducked out the low door of the wooden kitchen and walked across the yard to the low brick dormitory that housed the Cistercian monks of St. Gabriel. When she was a child, growing up within the walls of the abbey, this building had been forbidden to her, but the practicality of her efficient housekeeping and sense of order had long since overcome the monks’ scruples about allowing her access to their bedchambers.

Nowadays she had the run of the entire abbey, and used both smiles and a firm hand to keep it operating with the precision of the water timepiece Brother Ebert had invented. She rarely had problems, since the monks adored her, but some of them were a little…absentminded was the kind word, she decided. So she made it part of her routine to give gentle reminders when it was time to feed the animals, tend the vegetables, remove the week’s baking from the oven, pour the tallow into molds before it boiled entirely away….

She smiled as she walked inside the building into the largest sleeping room. Around the walls were sixteen beds, lined up perfectly and with covers folded and neatly stacked on top of each cot. Before she’d taken charge, the monks had never had individual beds. The neatness had taken some doing, but it had now become routine.

Remembering her mission, she walked quickly through the other two sleeping rooms to the far end of the building where two individual chambers held single cots reserved for brothers who were ill. Bridget had often tended to sick brothers in the past, though she knew that her charges were never entirely comfortable with her ministrations.

They’d placed the stranger in the rear chamber. A single candle flickered on the stand next to his bed and more light filtered in from the small window at the far end of the room. For a moment, she stood in the doorway, studying him.

There had not been a new novice to enter the order at St. Gabriel in Bridget’s lifetime, which meant that the youngest of the brothers who had raised her was old enough to be her father. When the odd visitor had entered the abbey walls, the monks had always bustled her away into hiding before she could be seen. This was the first time, Bridget realized, that she had ever been in the same room with someone young. The man lying so still on the cot in front of her looked to be not much older than she herself.

His head was swathed in bandages and his face was stark white where it was not streaked with crusted blood. His eyes were closed, and appeared sunken in his skull. All in all, he was a rather gruesome sight, she decided, but fascinating for all that.

Brother Ebert and Brother Alois had found the man stripped of anything that could possibly identify him. He’d been beaten and left for dead. Such things happened in the outside world, Bridget knew, which was just one more reason why she should be content with her tranquil life behind the walls.

The tea was growing cold in her hands. She walked over to the bed and placed the mug on the candle stand. The stranger lay so still that for a moment she wondered if he was breathing. Then her eyes moved to his chest and she saw an almost imperceptible rise and fall. He wore a thin under-tunic that was stiff with dried blood. The sight of it, along with his bloody and battered face, gave her a shiver. Before anything else, the man could stand a good cleaning.

With sudden resolve, she spun around and marched back out through the monks’ chambers, across the yard and into the kitchen. A dozing Francis bolted upright in his seat.

“I’ve stirred it well, lass,” he said, the words thick.

Bridget paid him little attention. “Pray continue to do so, Francis. The fate of tonight’s supper is in your hands.”

Then she took an iron pot lifter from the wall and retrieved a kettle from the back of the fire.

Francis leaned forward. “What are you doing?”

“I need hot water.”

“For more tea?”

“Nay. I mean to bathe the man.”

Francis’s jaw dropped. “Bathe him?”

“Aye. He’s filthy with blood and dirt. How can we tend his wounds if we can’t even see them?”

“’Tis an outrageous plan, Bridget. For one thing, a bathing could finish what the brigands started. And for another…why, child, you can’t seriously be thinking of…” He stopped and clasped his hands together under the long sleeves of his habit.

Bridget spoke briskly as she wrapped her skirt around the handle of the kettle and started out of the room. “Just forget that I ever told you about it, Francis. And mind the carrots,” she called over her shoulder.