Maid Of Midnight

Francis’s smile was sympathetic. “You know that if anyone outside learned of your presence here, you’d not be allowed to stay with us.”

“Aye, I’m well aware of it.”

Bridget scooted around the bulky monk, making sure not to spill the tea. It was one of the rare days when the brothers’ overprotective ways irritated her. She was sure her dissatisfaction had something to do with the young man who lay unconscious in the monks’ sleeping quarters. She’d caught a glimpse of him when Brother Ebert and Brother Alois had first brought him in the previous day. They’d found him on the road on their way back from market day in Beauville.

“I’ll go with you,” Francis said, giving a little puff as he lifted himself from the kitchen bench.

“You’ll not,” Bridget replied firmly. “I can’t tend the patient and my stew at the same time. Just sit there and give it a stir every now and then.”

Francis looked doubtfully from the young woman to the bubbling kettle and back. “You won’t…touch the man, will you?”

Bridget rolled her eyes. “’Twould be quite a feat to feed tea to a senseless man without touching him, don’t you think?”

“I should go with you.”

“You should mind the stew. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and if those carrots are scorched to the bottom of the pot, I’m sending you to dig me some new ones.”

With a little sigh of relief, she ducked out the low door of the wooden kitchen and walked across the yard to the low brick dormitory that housed the Cistercian monks of St. Gabriel. When she was a child, growing up within the walls of the abbey, this building had been forbidden to her, but the practicality of her efficient housekeeping and sense of order had long since overcome the monks’ scruples about allowing her access to their bedchambers.

Nowadays she had the run of the entire abbey, and used both smiles and a firm hand to keep it operating with the precision of the water timepiece Brother Ebert had invented. She rarely had problems, since the monks adored her, but some of them were a little…absentminded was the kind word, she decided. So she made it part of her routine to give gentle reminders when it was time to feed the animals, tend the vegetables, remove the week’s baking from the oven, pour the tallow into molds before it boiled entirely away….

She smiled as she walked inside the building into the largest sleeping room. Around the walls were sixteen beds, lined up perfectly and with covers folded and neatly stacked on top of each cot. Before she’d taken charge, the monks had never had individual beds. The neatness had taken some doing, but it had now become routine.

Remembering her mission, she walked quickly through the other two sleeping rooms to the far end of the building where two individual chambers held single cots reserved for brothers who were ill. Bridget had often tended to sick brothers in the past, though she knew that her charges were never entirely comfortable with her ministrations.

They’d placed the stranger in the rear chamber. A single candle flickered on the stand next to his bed and more light filtered in from the small window at the far end of the room. For a moment, she stood in the doorway, studying him.

There had not been a new novice to enter the order at St. Gabriel in Bridget’s lifetime, which meant that the youngest of the brothers who had raised her was old enough to be her father. When the odd visitor had entered the abbey walls, the monks had always bustled her away into hiding before she could be seen. This was the first time, Bridget realized, that she had ever been in the same room with someone young. The man lying so still on the cot in front of her looked to be not much older than she herself.

His head was swathed in bandages and his face was stark white where it was not streaked with crusted blood. His eyes were closed, and appeared sunken in his skull. All in all, he was a rather gruesome sight, she decided, but fascinating for all that.

Brother Ebert and Brother Alois had found the man stripped of anything that could possibly identify him. He’d been beaten and left for dead. Such things happened in the outside world, Bridget knew, which was just one more reason why she should be content with her tranquil life behind the walls.

The tea was growing cold in her hands. She walked over to the bed and placed the mug on the candle stand. The stranger lay so still that for a moment she wondered if he was breathing. Then her eyes moved to his chest and she saw an almost imperceptible rise and fall. He wore a thin under-tunic that was stiff with dried blood. The sight of it, along with his bloody and battered face, gave her a shiver. Before anything else, the man could stand a good cleaning.

With sudden resolve, she spun around and marched back out through the monks’ chambers, across the yard and into the kitchen. A dozing Francis bolted upright in his seat.

“I’ve stirred it well, lass,” he said, the words thick.

Bridget paid him little attention. “Pray continue to do so, Francis. The fate of tonight’s supper is in your hands.”

Then she took an iron pot lifter from the wall and retrieved a kettle from the back of the fire.

Francis leaned forward. “What are you doing?”

“I need hot water.”

“For more tea?”

“Nay. I mean to bathe the man.”

Francis’s jaw dropped. “Bathe him?”

“Aye. He’s filthy with blood and dirt. How can we tend his wounds if we can’t even see them?”

“’Tis an outrageous plan, Bridget. For one thing, a bathing could finish what the brigands started. And for another…why, child, you can’t seriously be thinking of…” He stopped and clasped his hands together under the long sleeves of his habit.

Bridget spoke briskly as she wrapped her skirt around the handle of the kettle and started out of the room. “Just forget that I ever told you about it, Francis. And mind the carrots,” she called over her shoulder.

She was still smiling when she reached the sickroom. She couldn’t remember ever seeing quite the same look of consternation on Brother Francis’s kind face. It was wicked of her to enjoy it, but she’d had so little chance to do anything out of the ordinary, much less shocking, in her life here. This was an adventure, even if it only meant cleaning up a stranger who, from the look of him, was destined for the tiny graveyard behind the chapel.

The room’s candle had burned out in a puddle of tallow, but the late afternoon sun slanted through the tiny window, providing plenty of light. After a moment of hesitation, Bridget set her shoulders and walked over to the cot. She put the kettle on the floor and sank to her knees beside it, bringing her face only inches away from the sleeping man.

This close, she could see the stubble of whiskers along his square jaw. She had a sudden urge to know what they felt like, and, realizing that there was nothing to prevent her from doing so, she reached out a gentle finger and stroked his chin. The harsh prickle surprised her. She pulled back as though burned, then touched him once again, more slowly.

His sunken eyes were rimmed with thick black lashes. Tendrils of hair escaping from his head dressing were black as well. What color were his eyes? she wondered.

Giving herself a little shake, she took one of the rags she’d brought along, soaked it in the hot water and began to wash him. The dried blood was two days old, and she had to rub to remove it. Her patient moaned and shifted restlessly on the cot, but did not awaken.

She removed his bandage to reveal an open, oozing gash along the side of his head. After supper she’d return with one of her herb poultices, but for the moment, she wrapped him back up in a new dressing. She finished washing his face, then his neck. Clean of the dirt and blood, his countenance was undeniably handsome, in spite of the pallor.

She reached the collar of his tunic and stopped, uncertain. It should come off, she decided. Now that his face was clean, the blood-soaked garment looked horrific. She threw the rag into the water and rose to her feet. The most sensible thing to do would be to leave the disrobing to the brothers. She had no doubt she was strong enough for the task—her days of hard work had made her stronger than many of the monks. But she had some doubt about the propriety of such an action.

She stood watching the patient for a long time, hesitating. He’d settled back into his deathlike stupor. In truth, she told herself, ’twas no different than cleaning up the bloody calf one of the milk cows had birthed last week. Taking a deep breath, she pulled the blanket from the inert man and threw it to the floor. Beneath the waist-length tunic, he wore woolen hose. Bridget gave a little gasp. She’d seen paintings in her books, but the only men she’d seen in person had been the monks, clad in their billowy robes. This man’s legs bulged with sinewy strength. Between his legs were bulges of another sort.

At the pit of her stomach was a curious stirring.

She should definitely call the monks, she thought, even as she began to lift the man and strip the bloody tunic from his back. His naked chest was as hard and powerful as his thighs. Bridget swallowed, her mouth gone suddenly dry.

Without taking her eyes from the man’s body, she leaned over to rinse the bloody rag in the cooling water. She was staring, she knew, but who was there to see? Then, with an impish grin at her own boldness, she proceeded to give the mysterious stranger a thorough washing from chest to…toe.

Ranulf couldn’t understand why it was taking so long to cross the Channel. And why had they stuffed him into a barrel for the crossing so that he couldn’t look out at the sea and sky? He tried to lift a fist to pound on the lid and demand release, but, to his amazement, his arm wouldn’t move. Nothing would, for that matter.

Nothing was moving except the barrel, which made its regular up-and-down swoop with every new wave. Ranulf wanted to be sick, but even his stomach wouldn’t move. Nor his mouth. His eyes wouldn’t open, either. What had happened to him? he wondered in sudden panic.

The barrel surged again with the wave—up, up, then holding for an endless moment, then down. The movement sent a shaft of pain stabbing through his head. Jesu. What was wrong?

As the pain splintered light into his brain, the top of the barrel lifted and a beautiful, golden-haired woman peered in at him, smiling. He tried to call to her, but his throat closed around the words.

Darkness swirled, then she was there again—the golden angel. He made another desperate attempt to speak, but all he could produce was a moan of pain. His groan echoed off the sides of the barrel. As the sound grew louder and louder, the angel slammed the lid of the barrel shut on top of him, and everything went black.

Brother Alois, acting abbot of St. Gabriel, seemed to assume that it had been Brother Francis who had bathed the wounded man and dressed him in one of the monks’ own habits. Neither Bridget nor Francis bothered to correct him. But after her intimate session with the stranger the previous evening, Bridget had decided to let the monks take over the nursing. She’d spent one of her restless nights with visions of outside the walls. She dreamed that she’d accompanied the monks to market all the way to Rouen, walking freely beside them along the road, and that everyone they passed on the way looked like the handsome stranger lying in the monks’ quarters.

She woke up resolving to stay away from the visitor, and kept her resolve throughout the day until evening when Francis came to request her help. “You mentioned one of your poultices, child, and I think it might help, for the poor lad has surely got the blood poisons.”

She’d finished cleaning up from dinner and the monk had caught her leaving the kitchen, ready to retire to her little home next door to it. Long ago, the small brick building had been a brewery, and the faint, yeasty smell of ale still clung stubbornly to the masonry walls. But Bridget had lived there these past ten years or more, ever since the monks decided that she needed a place of her own with a sturdy door and proper latch.

It was not that they thought any member of their order capable of the unimaginable sin that those precautions suggested. But, Brother Alois had cautioned gravely, none of them had thought Bridget’s father capable of such a transgression, either.