Sing Me Home (7 page)

She turned away from the minstrels and strode headlong up the road, far ahead of the plodding donkey, trying in vain to outrun her thoughts. The sisters had always warned her that the world was a sinful, dangerous place, but it kept revealing itself stranger and more treacherous than she’d ever imagined.

One thing was becoming glaringly clear. In the convent, she’d been raised a fool.

Colin slipped up behind her like a thief. She fixed her gaze on the mud sinking beneath her feet.

“Maura—”

“Don’t.” She couldn’t bear to hear apologies, soft explanations,
pity.

“All’s well that ends well,” he said. “You’re still in the troupe.”

“They’re all going straight to Hell.”

“Most likely.”

He sounded so unconcerned. For her, the immortal state of her soul had been the center of her upbringing. Yet it bothered her how foolish she sounded for trusting every last thing she’d been taught.

“That troupe of yours,” she sputtered, “is the very embodiment of the seven deadly sins.”

“Are there only seven?”

“Matilda Makejoy looks in every craftsman’s shop in every town with eyes of the deepest green. She is envy.”

“Envy?” Colin cocked his head. “By the way you blush each time you look at her belly, I would have thought you’d assign her a different sin.”

“That boar you call your leader, he’s gluttony if I ever saw it.” The words rose up, pressing against her throat. “And that drunken harpist of yours makes double the sin.”

“If enjoying meat and drink is sinful, Maura, I’ll never be saved.”

“Maguire is avarice,” she continued, “and don’t you tell me he lost that ear by accident, I know a poacher’s mark when I see it.”

“Clearly, there’s no telling you much.”

“The twins are vanity in the flesh. And that piper is sloth. I’ve seen cats who sleep less than he.”

“In better beds, no doubt.”

“And you,” she said, reckless, “you are lust.”

One dark brow arched and that smile slipped across his face. “Lady, you do me wrong.”

“So were you searching for Heaven’s Gate under that woman’s skirts yesterday?”

He shrugged. “The two can often be easily mistaken.”

“Only by a man who thinks with his beef.”

She twisted away. Tears prickled at the back of her eyes. Why couldn’t she control her own tongue? She hardly knew what she was saying, but she knew she sounded like a judgmental fool. She strode away from Colin, away from her shame, baffled at the strange ways of the world, furious at the sisters for raising her with blinders like a skittish horse.

“It’s a blessing we took you on, Maura,” he shouted, “because we’re missing one of the deadly sins.”

“Anger,” she conceded. Her breath felt hot as she blew it out of her nostrils. “I have good reason to be angry.”

“Not anger,” he corrected. “Pride.”

***

After his accusation, Colin watched the anger leech out of her like ale out of a burst bladder. She refused to talk to him so he gave up trying. She didn’t look at him for the rest of the journey, even as they camped, even as she set a knife to the wild onions and roadside herbs that she’d ripped from the verges of the road, brewing up a thin but flavorful soup as she brooded.

He felt as guilty as if he’d kicked her chattering little pet.

“Dinner’s done,” she announced, knocking the wooden spoon on the edge of the pot. “It’s hot, so mind your tongues.”

The minstrels made their way to the fire, dug their spoons out, and fell upon the stew. She marched over to where she’d deposited her pack and Nutmeg’s traveling basket, a bit away from the campsite, under the shelter of a tree.

He watched as she made a fuss brushing the mud off the hem of her skirts. The bright yellow ribbon that hemmed her kirtle had already faded under the rain and dirt. Her sleeves sagged, showing off the gleam of her pale shoulders.

Damn it all to Hell.

“And what do you want?” she asked before he had even reached her side.

She was sitting with her knees up, stroking the white belly of her pet, who sprawled across her lap.

“We’ve been invited to the castle of the O’Dunns,” he said, pausing a few feet away. “These are Irishmen, Irish lords, not English, and we have to come up with a way to entertain them.”

“Irish lords, English guildsmen,” she muttered. “Matilda says they all piss in the same sort of pot.”

He raised his brows. He’d seen her walking beside Matilda’s donkey today, but he hadn’t realized they’d been talking.

When he’d accused her of pride, he’d plunged the arrow deep.

“They do,” he conceded, “but an Irish chieftain expects a different level of play-acting, and Arnaud has promised them the entertainment of a fine young songstress.”

“I heard as much when Arnaud came upon the O’Dunns’ man on the road.” She scratched the squirrel under the little tuft of his ear while the squirrel’s black eyes fluttered closed. “I suppose you won’t let me sing
Angelus ad virginem
.”

“Arnaud would prefer some song of love to please the ladies.”

She took a deep breath, those white shoulders rising and falling in a way that pulled on him, and not solely in his braies. Innocence, he thought grimly. He’d forgotten what it looked like. He’d forgotten, too, what it was like to be that young, constantly surprised by the strange ways of the world.

“Will you teach me a song, Colin?”

She tilted her face. Her cheeks and forehead were beaded with steam and flushed from the heat of the cooking fire. Her lower lip trembled. He wanted to touch that lip, prove to her that the world could be a sweet place. He wanted to feel that lip give under his own mouth when sharp words weren’t rolling past it.

Damn, he had an itch for her.

“Walk with me,” he said, gesturing toward the deeper woods. “I’ll teach you a song but we’d best do it away from the mockery of these minstrels.”

Rising, she deposited the sleepy ball of fur back into the woven basket she’d hung on a branch, and then fell into step beside him.

“I suppose ‘Holy Trinity Save Me’ wouldn’t be considered a love song?” she asked, as they wove through the trees.

“It’s not hymns that we’re singing, lass.”

“Well, if it were, I’d prefer ‘Sin Threatens Our Ruin.’”

“Aye, I could see how you would,” he said, casting her a smile as he remembered their earlier conversation. “My favorite hymn is ‘My Body Is My Soul’s Foe.’”

He caught her surprised look.

“Well, then, if it were hymns we were choosing,” she added in a small voice, “I think I’d best learn ‘Answer Not Insult.’”

He heard the oblique apology in her words, but she did not meet his gaze. They walked in silence for a few minutes, long enough for him to notice the flecks of dirt that speckled her skin, making her look freckled and mussed and earthily appealing.

“Teach me what love song you will,” she finally said, in a rushed little voice, “but please
not
the ‘As I Roved Out Into The World’ song I heard Maguire singing yesterday. There were endless rounds of that, and I believe my ears are still blistered.”

“We can find you something better than that.” He riffled through his memory, going back to his student days at the school at Emain Macha, the royal seat of Ulster, when he spent hours sitting around the peat fire listening to a wizened bard chant old poems.

He asked, “Do you know the story of Deirdre and the three sons of Usnach?”

“Aye. Sister Agnes used to tell us that one, and stories of the Fenian warriors, too.”

“I know a song about Deirdre’s farewell to Naoise, when he insists on returning to Ireland—”

“—despite Deirdre’s dream that he will be betrayed as soon as he steps foot on his homeland.”

He paused. “You know the song.”

“Only the story. I had an education of sorts, living amid the nuns. Though it hasn’t served me well outside those walls.”

She filled her lungs with air, and he watched the rise and fall of her full bosom, the nipples well delineated against the wool kirtle.

His cock took notice, too.

“Teach me that song,” she said, “before I have second thoughts.”

Colin paused by a thick oak and ran through the song in his head as he traced his hand over the furrowed bark. “Matilda’s voice is better than mine, but I suppose I can muddle my way through it.”

So he began. “
‘Farewell, dearest love, the tide doth rise …”

He spoke-sang the words, transported back to the springtime woods of his student days, composing verse to be chanted to the strum of a harp. He remembered the feel of the strings beneath his fingers, the coaxing of the music from his mind, the thrill of simple composition.

“
‘A hundred thousand times farewell, yet stay awhile …’”

Those days felt like a hundred thousand years ago. It must be the woods that brought back such memories. In a vague way he remembered this place, the roll of the land and the slant of the starlight through the trees. He could have passed through these woods ten years ago and not remarked upon it. They were not far from Connemara now, not so far from the salt spray of Galway Bay.

He imagined he could smell brine on the wind as he sang the last verse,
‘No—I shall cry no more. No, I shall cry no more.’

Maura stood in silence for a few moments after he was done. “Is that the whole song then?”

“Aye.”

“It’s a simple love song. If I’d sung something like that yesterday instead of you and I playing that farce in front of the church, I can’t imagine I would have gathered half such a bag full of farthings.”

“You were very good in front of the church yesterday, but this will bring in coin from the ladies instead.” He stepped away from the oak and approached her. “You need to memorize the words, Abbess.”

Once again he spoke the words, line by line, making her repeat them until she could recite them alone. He watched her lips as she mimicked the melody. The hollow of her throat quivered. Her voice had a strange quality to it, stranger all the more for how she could turn it, in her fury, to a screech harsh enough to shave a man’s beard.

“Do you think you know it now?” he asked, when she’d repeated the words twice.

“It’s simple enough.”

“Then I’ll hear it again, with feeling, lass.”

She launched into the song just as the moon peeped out behind a cloud. Her voice was ephemeral—weightless, yet as powerful and invasive as sunlight through water. He’d heard many a voice in all his years of traveling. A fine Italian songstress he’d known had once brought the whole court of Toulouse to tears. Maura’s voice had such a quality to it—an undefinable thing, elusive and infinitely engaging. This was no ball-and-cup trick—she had real magic in her throat. But now he noticed that her voice carried only a shadow of that magic.

In the silence after her rendition, he clucked his tongue in disapproval. “Where’s my songbird of
Angelus ad virginem?
You won’t be pleasing the O’Dunns using your little girl voice.”

She hiked her hands onto those magnificent hips. “Are you complaining, Colin?”

“You have an Irish harp of a voice, Maura, but just now you plucked it like an untrained boy.”

“That crunching gravel you call your voice is better?”

“I never claimed to be a singer. But I know what you are capable of.”

“
‘Angelus’
is a song worthy of the effort.”

“And this isn’t?”

“It’s just a simple love song.”

“Love, my lass, is never simple.”

“No doubt you’ve taught many a poor woman that lesson.”

A shadow crossed her face and she took a step away from him, but it felt like she’d stepped back a hundred leagues. Indeed, he couldn’t deny it. He’d had his fill of women, too many faces in too many places. For the past ten years he’d drowned his sorrows in what pleasure there could be had. Strange that standing before this innocent, he couldn’t remember the look of a single one of them.

Then he remembered that, raised as cloistered as she was, Maura had likely never had a kiss.

“You know nothing of love.” He heard her breath catch. “Don’t deny it.”

“What difference does that make?”

“When you sing ‘
Angelus,’
you’re singing about a devotion you understand.”

“So you’re saying I must know love to sing about it?”

“It helps.”

“You’ve years of wantonness on me, Colin. If that’s what it takes, I may as well stop trying right now—”

“Are you quitting on me, lass?”

Those hazel eyes narrowed, her little nostrils flared, and Colin could tell by the tightening of her jaw that he’d found a weakness.

“I sang your love song,” she said. “What more do you expect from me?”

“Passion.”

Her sharp intake of breath left her mouth open. He felt the familiar slide of weight into his loins. He rasped his palm over her cheek, across her ear, to rake his fingers deep into her hair. The curls sprung soft against his fingers. He heard a slight tear of her coif as he plunged his fingers too deep. He lowered his head before she could think, speak, or stop him from doing what he’d wanted to do since she’d marched so boldly into the campsite outside of Killeigh.

He pressed his mouth against those soft, soft lips. They pillowed beneath his. She tasted of salt and fresh herbs. He sensed the shock that arced through her, sensed, in its wake, a weakening of her spine, a suppleness in the way her body leaned into him. Fragments of poetry sifted through his mind like so many broken promises.

He nudged her lips apart, wanting to be the bellows to prod this spark of passion into a fire, wanting to feel her shudder against him in the pleasure he knew he could give her. But what he tasted as she made a sound in the base of her throat was something he’d not tasted in so many years so as to forget the flavor. What he tasted, as her fingers worked their way up his chest between them, was a surprise so sudden, so sweet, so fresh that it made him weak in the knees.

Innocent passion.

By God’s blood, he wanted this one in his bed. He wanted to lay her down on the ground and feel her tremble as he dragged his hands up her thighs. He wanted to burrow his head between her legs and taste her until she arched up in pleasure. He wanted to slip his aching cock deep into her cleft and move inside her until she cried out for more.