In the Master's Bed. Blythe Gifford

more experience with them,’ Geoffrey added, with the gravitas of one soon to be wed.

      Henry punched his friend’s shoulder. ‘No, he won’t. No one understands women.’

      She looked to Duncan, but he remained silent, the whisper of a frown on his brow.

      ‘What’s so hard about understanding women?’ she asked. Even when she most despised her sex, she found them incredibly transparent.

      ‘Everything!’ Henry said.

      Duncan shook his head. ‘Not to a wise man.’

      ‘But Henry tried to kiss that girl, even when she objected.’

      Yet she looked to Duncan, expecting him to answer for all their sins.

      But Henry spoke instead. ‘If I had kissed her, she would have enjoyed it!’ Henry vowed, drawing her eyes again.

      And under her steady gaze, Henry’s ears turned red. ‘It didn’t mean anything.’

      ‘Not to you.’ She knew enough of women to recognise that one had wanted to either box his ears or burst into tears.

      Or both.

      Geoffrey took up the defence in a calm, scholarly tone. ‘But she’s a common woman. She’s been with lots of men.’

      Common woman. They had called her mother that. And worse. ‘But she said no.’

      ‘Sometimes a woman says no when she just wants some persuasion,’ Henry answered.

      ‘How did you know what she was thinking?’ Jane knew. That woman on the street had wanted nothing like persuasion.

      ‘John, when you read the masters, you will understand what Henry’s telling you,’ Duncan began, in his pedagogical voice. A women is weak and deficient, but that’s as nature intended. Man must rule over her because he is a rational thinker. Women don’t think, you see. They feel.’

      ‘And no one knows how a woman feels!’ Henry said, setting off a round of laughing.

      Jane did not laugh. Heartsick and confused, she felt too much like the woman she had never wanted to be.

      She had admired men, wanted to be like them, but she was discovering their knowledge had gaps she had never imagined when she lived in the same house with her sister’s husband.

      Safely beyond a woman’s gaze, men were totally different creatures. What happened after marriage, when the man and the woman were finally trapped in the same life together? It must be quite a revelation. The strong knight who belched at breakfast. The beautiful maiden who had a short temper during her time of the month. What a different world it would be if men and women truly knew each other.

      ‘You’ll see when you’re older, Little John,’ Henry said. ‘Women are lustier than men.’

      ‘Is that what you think?’ She prodded Duncan when he didn’t speak.

      ‘It’s not a matter of opinion,’ he began as if ready for a formal disputation. ‘Aquinas, Hippocrates and many other masters have written it. Women were created to be protected by men. They are a lesser creature and do not have the mind to understand intellectual things.’

      She chomped on the inside of her cheek and raised her eyebrows, as if considering his words instead of choking on them. Yet the Church, the University, they all said the same, things that were not true for her. She could not truly be a woman if she was so different from all the others of her sex.