‘If you dismount, I’ll leave you,’ I snapped.
‘Fuck you,’ my erstwhile squire said, but it was more of a moan of protest than a curse. Marc-Antonio made me smile, and that’s a good thing when you have fear all the way to the marrow of your bones.
‘No one ever died of lack of sleep, lad,’ I said. ‘Change horses.’
Twenty leagues short of Turin, a day’s ride past the abandoned chapel where I’d slept twice, there is a Benedictine house high in a mountain pass. We were allowed into the guest house after I showed my pass on the order and let in with a swirl of snow at the very close of day when there was only enough light in the sky for owls. We were wet through, so tired we must have seemed like drunkards, so cold that my hands and feet hurt like torture as they warmed.
Marc-Antonio was asleep as soon as he sat to take off my boots. I put a damp wool cloak over him and undressed and a monk brought me water.
I shocked the monk by stripping naked in front of him, and shocked him more by bathing with a sword by my hand. He brought me good wine, good bread, and a bowl of something with rabbit in it that was superb. Or perhaps hunger and fatigue rendered it superb. I ate that bowl and another and drank the wine and fell asleep in the bath, and the monk awoke me silently – he had some vow or other – and got me on to a pallet in a cell.
That’s all I remember, except that I kept my sword by me.
Emile had a town house in Geneva. I learned as much from the monastery’s abbot, and as soon as he said it, I realised that I was a fool, for I’d heard her speak of it as the place she spent the autumn and winter and lay in with her babies. More comfortable than her damp castles, she had said with her laugh that hid pain and pleasure equally. Few knights go to battle as well armoured as my Emile is in her laughter.
But the passes were closing with snow …
I left Marc-Antonio with money and all my letters except those for local men, and I left my riding horse and took Jacques. I rode for Geneva.
I was three days too late.
That said, remember that it was Emile’s courage – well, and her beautiful body – that first attracted me, and her good sense that held me. I was three day’s too late to stop her abduction: luckily, she never needed me to save her.
I arrived at the door of her town house in as pretty a town as ever you need see, on the shores of the most beautiful lake in the world. The door had been hacked about.
The steward himself was in half-harness, and he only showed his face through a grill at first. I suppose that shaving might have helped me, but I looked like a routier after three days on the road, except for my scarlet surcoat. That got the gate open. Her steward still didn’t like the look of me, and behind him in the entry way, I could see a brown blood-splash on the whitewashed stone.
‘You say you are a knight of the order—’ he said.
‘Emile!’ I roared. Or perhaps I squeaked it. I don’t know. I got past the man in half-armour, roaring her name.
I might have expected that her husband was there or had let the attackers into the house.
I made it as far as the solar above the entryway, and I saw her.
She was wearing a breast and back, and had a sword in her hand. And the ice-cold feel of a sword pricked the back of my neck, too.
Some princesses rescue themselves.
It is very unsatisfying when two people in armour embrace. There is no warmth to it.
We managed.
I put my lips on hers and she turned her head away so that I kissed the nape of her neck clumsily. I stepped back.