sigh. Just a moment. She would take just a moment’s ease.
Are ya still breathing?
A harsh question Duncan had asked. And a harsh man, when his eyes carried anger’s thunder.
He had offered his help, so she had expected that as soon as she asked, he would take ‘John’ as a student. If she had known she’d be working as a servant and rele-gated to studying Latin again, she might never have risked being so near him and his all-too-perceptive grey eyes.
She had told him how hard she had tried. She had explained how unfair and difficult it all was. But all he could say was Are ya still breathing?
He was no more understanding than the rest of the masters she had met. Well, when she was a clerk to the King, he’d be sorry he had been so rude. In fact, since the King was coming to Cambridge, she would introduce herself. The King might even—
‘Little John! What are ya doing in that tub?’
Chapter Four
Her eyes flew open.
Duncan stood across the yard, hands on hips, fresh shaven, the menacing set of his jaw exposed.
Startled, she started to stand, then, just in time, crouched lower. Her tunic would cover her, but damp as it was, it would mould to her body, making it obvious she was missing what would make her a man.
‘Come no closer,’ she said, waving him away. ‘I’ve finished your wash.’
‘I see that. That was not my question. I asked why you’re sitting in the laundry tub.’
‘Well, you’re the educated one.’ Her heart skipped faster. From fear? Or something else?
Without the beard, she could see his mouth clearly, the top lip sculpted, the lower lip unexpectedly full. She wondered how they would feel against hers.
A dangerous idea when she was sitting half-naked in a tub of cooling water. ‘Can ya not see I’m taking a bath?’ She mocked the lilt of his accent.
‘Do you truly think me such a miscreant that I’d have you bathe in the laundry tub?’
He was in one of his testy moods. Bathing in leftover laundry water was eminently sensible and many house-holds did it. ‘I don’t see how my bath says anything about you at all.’
He blinked, then gave her a sideways smile. ‘You may succeed in logic after all, Little John.’ He started across the grass. ‘The University’s Proctor frowns on the bathhouse, but since you’ve been sleeping with the horses, he might make an exception. Come with me. We’ll share a tub. Wash off the journey’s dust.’
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
