The thought of sitting knee to knee, naked, with Duncan in a bathhouse tub stole her breath. ‘No, you go without me.’ She waved him away, praying he would come no closer. ‘I’m done. I don’t need another bath.’
‘Ah, don’t be daft, John.’ He took another step. ‘You smell like the King’s Ditch in August.’
‘No!’ She cursed the shrill panic in her voice. ‘No closer!’
He paused, praise Mary. ‘Why not?’
Why not? ‘I’ve an injury.’
Her words released him. ‘I’m studying medicine. Let me look—’
‘No!’ She shouted this time. ‘It’s an old one. I don’t want…I mean it’s not…’
He held up his hands and took a step back. An embarrassed red tinged his cheeks and clashed with the teasing lift of his brows. ‘War injury?’
Her cheeks, and something lower, heated. ‘Accident.’ Sometimes, men’s few words were a blessing.
Something in his face shifted and the smile disappeared. ‘Take your time, then.’ He turned and went inside.
She slumped lower in the tepid water, glad she had enjoyed her bath. There would not soon be another.
And next time Duncan looked her way, she would have something stuffed in the front of her breeches that looked as if it belonged to a man.
Little John was a strange one, Duncan thought, uneasy, as he took inventory of the precious bound volumes in the hostel’s library. He’d had an unusual sensation, seeing the boy in that tub. Almost as if—
He slammed the door on the thought.
An injury, the boy said. Duncan had seen no limp, no deformity in the lad, but it must be something severe to make him so sensitive.
He nearly dropped Cato’s Distichs.
Something that would make the boy less than a man.
He shuddered, glad he had not forced the lad to confess his shame. Such an injury would be rare, but if that’s what troubled the lad, it would explain the pitch of his voice.
At the thought, his own manhood inconveniently stirred to life. The war, the journey, his meeting with the King, had all conspired to make him neglect his own needs these past weeks. But to live without them, if the boy truly had lost his manhood—the thought swept over him with a kind of agony.
He enjoyed the life of the mind: new ideas, arguments with colleagues. But he also loved the life of the body: to walk the hills, to swing a spade and, he was not ashamed of it, to join with a woman.
What defined a man, after all? Strong arms, sharp mind, strong drives. Deprived of any one of those, why would a man want to live?
All the better, he told himself, when guilt threatened, that his brother had died, rather than live as a cripple.
And if something had happened to John, he would need the protection of a University life.
No matter what the boy’s wound, he’d discover it in time. The lad would lose his womanish modesty soon enough. There were few secrets when thirty men lived side by side.
Young men arrived with the morning bells and kept coming all day.
Jane stood back, watching everything they did. Loud, boisterous, they slapped each other’s backs, punched each other and hugged, performing a sort of greeting ritual.
They filled every corner of the hostel, but they occupied more than physical space. Their vigour reached beyond their bodies, penetrating every nook of the house until she felt even her thoughts could not remain untouched.
She kept Duncan in sight so when he needed someone, she was close at hand, ready to bustle purpose-fully to fetch clean linen or inform a scholar that he would be sharing a room of three this year instead of two.
‘I’m here for the principal,’ she would announce, to anyone who would listen. It sounded as important as for the King.
And she tried hard not to look down at the rolled-up linen she had stuffed in the front of her breeches. Just in case anyone glanced below her waist.
Late in the day, she was wishing she could scratch the place between her legs where the linen roll had shifted when two scholars appeared at the door.
When he saw them, Duncan dropped his principal’s demeanour. He embraced the taller man, slapping his back, then broke and put up his fists to engage the shorter, stockier man in a mock battle.
Here again, at last, was the exuberant man she had met on the road. She blinked at the transformation. These men must be special to him. She eyed them carefully, trying not to call her interest jealousy.
‘Oust fettal?’
‘Ahreet, marra. Owz it gan?’
‘Bay gud!’
Her ear had learned to follow Duncan’s tongue, but she could not understand this babble. They spoke the tongue of the north, though she thought she caught a Latin word or two.
‘Come,’ Duncan said, finally, ‘the house is settled for the day. Let’s celebrate before the term starts and the beadles start patrolling the alehouses.’
‘Get your gittern,’ the shorter one said.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said, without waiting for permission, and ran up to Duncan’s room.
As she came down the stairs, cradling the precious instrument, the shorter man, with reddish hair, turned. ‘And who’s this?’
Duncan glanced over his shoulder. ‘That’s Little John,’
She stuck out her chin and her hand.
He took it, seeing her as Duncan did, blind to the girl beneath the tunic. ‘Henry. Of Warcop.’
The taller one had stooped shoulders, thinning hair and a narrow face. ‘Geoffrey of Carlisle.’ He turned back to Duncan. ‘Opening a grammar school, eh?’
Duncan sighed. ‘It’s a story to share over a tankard.’ She handed him the gittern, careful not to brush his fingers. He barely glanced at her. ‘Come. I want the news from home.’
She cleared her throat, then coughed.
‘Well, come along then, whelp,’ Duncan said over his shoulder as they walked out of the door.
She scampered after them and kept her mouth shut as they settled around a corner table and sipped their ale.
She studied them as if they were a Latin lesson, these friends of Duncan’s, sprawled around the table. Each staked a space with his elbows. She glanced below. While her knees were neatly matched, their legs were spread wide.
Opposite her, Duncan’s legs were as wide as if he had mounted a horse. She let her knees fall apart a hand’s breadth. The linen roll slipped lower and wedged between her legs. She snapped her knees together and glanced up, quickly, but no one was watching.
She put her elbow on the table and leaned on her forearm, carving herself a few more inches of the tabletop. It brought her within touching distance of Duncan. She tightened her fingers, but didn’t pull back. She would not shrink in the corner like a girl.
Below, out of sight, she crossed her legs.
‘This dry-bellied goat’s betrothed,’ Henry began, nodding at Geoffrey, then swatting the serving woman.
The woman assessed him with a look he didn’t see, but her eyes met Jane’s as she set the other tankards on the table.
Jane