From October 22, 2020 through December 3, 2020 I participated in a Writing Historical Fiction Course sponsored by Curtis Brown Creative. Throughout the 6 week course we received various assignments to help us explore the craft of writing historical fiction and particularly, how to apply it to our personal works-in-progress. I shared my progress with my newsletter subscribers, and I thought it would be interesting to share it with my website readers too. So here is my journey, assignment by assignment, for my current work-in-progress which, for the time being, I simply call Adela’s Story. I hope to publish it in late 2021 with a much better title!
***Disclaimer: All of these extracts are subject to change through revision and professional editing in the final version of my book.
I’ve loved reading history for as long as I remember because I love stories and there are so many wonderful stories in history! My mother loved history, too, and encouraged my interest in it. I still vividly remember her telling me about a historical novel she read when she was young about a young Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. So many years later, she could still describe in detail the scenes she had read about the “Field of the Cloth of Gold.”
In high school, my mother introduced me to the Plantagenet series by Thomas B. Costain. As soon as I read them, I knew medieval England was where I one day wanted to tell my stories. Henry II particularly captured my imagination and remains a favorite of mine to this day.
Recently while researching some ideas for a new novel to write, I stumbled across an account of 22 knights who were starved to death by Henry II’s son, King John, at Corfe Castle while Eleanor, the sister of the tragic Arthur of Brittany, was imprisoned at the castle. My first thought was to write a book about Eleanor, because there seems to be so little written about her. But these 22 (some sources say 25) starved men continue to nag at my imagination. I found a list of their names, but beyond that, who were they? Why were they starved? And what if one of them survived? How did he do so, and who took his place among the dead? (Yeah, that last bit is my writer’s “what if…?” mind at work.) These questions won’t seem to leave me alone, so my version of the story of these 22 men will be my focus for this class. (And Eleanor of Brittany might play a role, too.)
She and Guibert followed the page up the remainder of the stairs and down a passageway lined with tapestries, their threads newly woven, their colors fresh, unlike the soot-muted hangings in the Keep. Given the smoky, acrid fumes of the tallow candles that continued to light the hall there, as well, alas, as Adela’s bedchamber, ’twas no wonder the old tapestries had grown so dull.
As she had improved the fortunes of Halstoke Castle, Adela had replaced tallow with clean burning beeswax candles. It delighted her to inhale the same sweet, mellow honey scent from the candles here, perched in clusters of six on metal stands between the hangings, lighting a cheerful path down the windowless passageway that would otherwise have been a gloomy tunnel this time of day. Beeswax candles. Tapestries that would never darken and dull but remain forever unsullied by a clinging haze. Just as she had observed below stairs in the New Hall, King John clearly demanded the best of everything in his new Gloriette.
They reached a door, so highly polished that Adela could see her blurred reflection in the wood. Above it a flourish of flowers were carved into the stonework inside a pointed arch, their petals painted in reds and pinks and violets that sheened radiant in the candlelight. Surely the exotic interior Guibert had hinted at yesterday must lie on the other side?
Adela touched the page on his shoulder as he raised a fisted hand toward the door. “Just knock. Do not announce me yet.” ’Twas no point in giving anyone inside a reason not to answer.
The boy nodded and rapped his knuckles in a firm cadence against the wood. Adela strained to hear footsteps on the other side, but the door must be too thick. Anxious moments pulsed by too slowly until Adela sought to release some of her nervousness by fiddling again with her pendant.
At last, the door opened, gliding silent on its new hinges, just wide enough to reveal Lady Solena’s pale face. A tormentingly fragrant cloud of lavender, balm and mugwort infused Solena’s linen undertunic and made her face briefly wobble before Adela’s gaze. Adela fought back the sudden wave of memory that clenched her chest until Solena’s form grew sharp again. From her dark, unbound, disheveled hair, red-rimmed eyes and ruddy nose, Adela knew Lady Eleanor was not the only one who grieved at this day’s news. Servants had once mingled the same perfumes to comfort Adela’s mother.
Suspicion flashed in Solena’s eyes.
“Please,” Adela said, “I have come to express my sincerest condolences for Lady Hawis’s misfortune. Allow me to speak with your mistress. I vow I will only stay a few moments.”
Solena removed her hostile gaze from Adela to study Guibert behind her. Adela guessed it was only his presence that moved Solena away from the door to vanish into some inner chamber beyond Adela’s sight. Adela expelled what felt like a nearly fathomless breath, trying to banish the reminiscent scent that thankfully receded with Solena’s departure. While voices rolled softly from the inner chamber, Adela peered at as much of the outer room as she could see through the wedge of an opening Solena left behind.
Adela knew leaving the door ajar was a risk, but with a brisk March wind howling outside the shuttered window there was no other way to disperse the chamber’s reek. The cloying fumes of her bedridden husband’s potions, sleeping aids and tonics, heightened by the heat of the roaring fire on the hearth, grappled for dominance with the pungency of his sweat and the stench of the chamber pot. Adela had grown wearingly resigned to the malodorous battle. Her little deception had forced her to endure it for the last four years. But today an unsettling vapor slithered under and over and through the mêlée besetting her nose. She knew the scent’s name, but shrank from it. Death. However loathsome her husband had once been, however burdensome he had since become, death frightened her more than his once repellent embraces. Her only freedom lay in his continued life, such as it now was. But she had learned the smell of death at her father’s bedside.
She paused her pen’s scribblings across the parchment and listened once again to her husband’s labored breathing in the bed. He would not live out this day. And by morning, Adela’s future would lie in the hands of men again.
Sir Martin would be here soon, her husband’s son from his first marriage. Adela had only met him once, when he had come to Halstoke Castle to attend his father’s wedding. Sir Martin had taken an instant dislike to his father’s new wife, calling her a scheming seductress straight to her face. As though it had been her choice to be betrothed to Lord Eustas when she was ten, raised in his household, and married to him at sixteen when Lord Eustas had been past thirty. Even now, she shuddered at the memories of her distasteful fortnight as his bride, before he had sailed off to join King Richard Coeur-de-Lion to fight the king of France.
Adela finished her letter, then pressed her husband’s seal into the pool of red wax she poured at the base of the letter.
No, the seal is mine. I am the one who found it when Lord Eustas was gone and dared to wield it when Sir Stephen was afraid to do so in his master’s absence. I am the one who restored our peace and comfort when my husband abandoned us to fight his silly battles. I have done more to honor the Baignard name than Lord Eustas did with King Richard’s failed war. And now Sir Martin will wrest the seal away from me as though I were as witless a fool as his father has become.
What would happen to Sir Stephen and the rest of their knights, the squires, the pages, the servants, when she was gone? Would Sir Martin let her remain in communication with them? Or would he cut her off as completely as her uncle had severed her from the baby sister she had left still wailing in the cradle the day Adela had been sent to live at Halstoke?
The mercenary captain made a snarling sound in his throat. “I’ve thrown down each of your brother knights hard enough to shake the earth this morning”—Thibaut stabbed his forefinger into Guibert’s chest—“except for you. Where, young scamp, have you been?”
Guibert knew better than to let the gleam of amusement in Thibaut’s eyes disarm him. Thibaut governed his soldiers with generosity and humor, but despite his fifty-odd years he could still thrash every one of them into painful shades of black and blue and purple.
Guibert glanced over his shoulder at their English guards. “I have been admiring the roses here,” he said. “One dazzling rose in particular. I thought Lady Eleanor might enjoy it, too, but she was not in the mood today.”
Thibaut’s shoulder brushed against Guibert’s as he shifted alongside him to watch his wrestling soldiers. “Be careful.” The captain’s warning came on a rumbling growl, pitched only for Guibert’s ears. “This is one rose that is not worth trying to pluck, Guibert.”
“I do not know what you mean, sir.” How could Thibaut suspect anything?
Thibaut pointed at Samuel and Phillipe, tangled in an upper body clutch, each trying to leverage the other off his feet. The English would think him commenting on his soldiers’ combat while he replied to Guibert. “Jealousy makes loose tongues, and this one says you are continually sniffing about her like a hound after a savory morsel at the dinner table.”
Sir Neil. The ginger-haired English knight must still hold a grudge for the way Adela had spurned his insulting attentions when they dined yesterday. “She has only been at Corfe for three days. I’ve barely spoken a dozen words to her.” Guibert laced his middle two fingers together, then obscured the sign of the cross for his lie by scratching an “itch” atop his third finger with the tip of his second. “And he did not call me a hound, did he?”
“No.” Thibaut switched the position of his hand to draw Guibert’s attention towards the “technique” of Samuel’s and Phillipe’s scrambling feet. “He called you a mongrel. He called your ‘rose’ something cruder than a savory morsel, too. I will give you the benefit of the doubt, Guibert, that you are not pursuing Lady Adela merely to indulge your passion. But if you are thinking you can turn her from the Usurper’s cause to ours, I am ordering you not to risk it. John is too covetous of his stolen crown to make the careless mistake of replacing one of Lady Eleanor’s Breton companion’s with an Englishwoman who is anything less than unassailably loyal to him. We stick to our original plan.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Which is?”
Guibert fell into the recitation Thibaut had imposed upon all their band. “We wait for our ransoms to be paid. We return to Brittany. We renounce any oath of peace we are forced to swear for our release on the grounds that John Plantagenet is false heir to his brother Richard Coeur de Lion. We rally once more to his nephew Arthur, our duke and true born king, drive the Usurper from England and place Arthur on his rightful throne where he belongs.”
“Good, good.” Thibaut slapped an approving hand to Guibert’s back.
Guibert felt his captain stiffen, followed by the slow slide of Thibaut’s hand tracing the shape of the object beneath Guibert’s cloak. The searching fingers stopped when they reached the contour of the sword’s cross-guard.
Thibaut growled again, but this time Guibert recognize danger in the rumble.
“Is that what I think it is, Guibert?”
There was no point denying his captain’s discovery. “Aye. I have a dagger hidden in my boot, as well.”
I don’t want to give away the whole story before it’s finished, polished, and published, so I’m only going to share the first 4 parts of the outline with you. (The part about seizing the keep is historical, so I didn’t see any point in not sharing that part with you. 🙂 )
Working outline for Adela’s Story
Part 1 – Inciting Incident
The Earl of Saxton arrives at Adela’s castle just as her husband is dying. Adela possessed a degree of freedom while her husband was ill, but once he is dead her freedom will be curtailed by her unsympathetic stepson. Saxton offers Adela a different future: travel to Corfe Castle where King John’s niece, Eleanor of Brittany, is under “gentle” imprisonment and persuade her to convince her brother, Arthur, to surrender his rival claim to the throne of England. If Adela succeeds, Saxton promises to prevent Adela’s sister from a forced marriage and let Adela decide her and her sister’s future for themselves. Adela agrees to go to Corfe.
Part 2 – Journey
Adela travels to Corfe where she tries to befriend Eleanor, but Eleanor views Adela as a spy for King John and spurns her friendship. When a rumor arrives that Eleanor’s brother, Arthur, has been murdered by King John, the relationship between the women changes. Eleanor feels that she failed to protect her younger brother. Adela carries guilt for not protecting her younger sister from Saxton’s power, as she promised her dying parents she would. Horrified by the rumored crime, Adela’s loyalty shifts to Eleanor. Adela allows herself to be drawn into a plot by 22 Breton knights imprisoned at Corfe to help Eleanor escape. These knights once served as Eleanor’s personal bodyguard.
Part 3 – Midpoint Climax
Saxton arrives at Corfe. With Arthur dead, he wants Adela to encourage the Breton prisoners into an act of rebellion to incur King John’s wrath so that King John can use a threat of lethal punishment to pressure Eleanor into surrendering her own claim to the throne. Adela has fallen in love with one of the prisoners named Guibert and initially resists, but Saxton threatens to marry off her sister to a highly unpleasant husband. Obeying Saxton’s command is the only way to save her sister from repeating Adela’s loathsome marriage and keep her promise to her parents.
Part 4 – Crisis
The 22 Breton knights seize the keep of Corfe Castle, are captured, and thrown into the prison’s oubliette. Saxton denies them food until Eleanor forfeits her claim to the throne, but Eleanor continues to refuse. Guibert will be starved to death if Adela doesn’t find a way to save him.
Part 5 – Final Climax and Resolution: TBR (to be revealed) when my book is completed . . . because in addition to not wanting to spoil it for you, knowing myself, the plot points I envision in my head might change entirely by the time I actually write this section.
So here it is . . . the first 3000 words of my first draft of Adela’s Story. I hope you enjoy them! And I hope you’ll join Adela and Guibert for their full completed story when it’s published.
CHAPTER 1
Adela knew leaving the door ajar was a risk, but with a brisk March wind howling outside the shuttered window there was no other way to disperse the bedchamber’s reek. The cloying fumes of her husband’s potions, sleeping aids and tonics, heightened from the heat of the roaring fire on the hearth, grappled for dominance with the pungency of his sweat and the stench of the chamber pot. Adela had grown wearingly resigned to the malodorous battle. Her little deception had forced her to endure it for the last five years. But today an unsettling vapor slithered under and over and through the melee besetting her nose. She knew the scent’s name, but shrank from it. Death. However loathsome her husband had once been, however burdensome he had since become, death frightened her more than his once repellent embraces. Her only freedom lay in his continued life, such as it now was. But she had learned the smell of death at her mother’s bedside, and then her father’s. She paused her pen’s scribblings across the parchment and listened once again to her husband’s labored breathing in the bed. He would not live out this day. And by morning, Adela’s future would lie in the hands of men again.
Footsteps. She pressed her husband’s seal into the pool of red wax she had just poured at the base of the letter, then blew her breath against it, hoping to quicken the wax’s hardening. No time. She slid a blank sheet of parchment over the page to conceal the still-fresh ink, stopped the inkwell, then stood, pretending to be straightening the correspondence on the table. The speed of the footsteps slackened. Had Sir Stephen slowed his stride to give her time to do exactly what she was doing before he entered with the priest? Bless him! All men were not as belittling of womanhood as her husband and stepson.
“I should have cleared these letters away yesterday,” she said, as the door finally creaked wider, “but I wished to pass our last hours together sitting at my husband’s side.” She glanced up, surprised to see Sir Stephen enter alone. “Has the priest not come?”
“Father Donatus is in the hall, awaiting your summons,” the grey-bearded knight replied. “I thought you might like a moment or two to compose yourself.”
She took his meaning as his gaze dropped to the table and parchments. “Thank you.” She silently blessed him again.
Sir Stephen cast a hesitant glance at the bed. “Do you think you can rouse Sir Eustas so Father Donatus can shrive him?”
“I will try.” Not that her husband could confess his sins, even if she did, but they must go through the formality for the sake of his soul. Adela would have no trouble recounting enough trespasses to satisfy the priest. She tried to smother the sigh that rose in her heart, but it fought its way free. “I suppose you must take the table away?”
Sir Stephen nodded. “It is for the best, my lady. You have done all you can for our manors. You saved us from the brink of poverty when even I did not know how to stave it off. Because of you, Sir Martin will inherit naught but prosperity.”
Her husband’s son from his first marriage. Adela had only met Sir Martin once, when he had come to Halstoke to attend his father’s wedding. He had taken an instant dislike to his father’s new wife, calling her a scheming seductress straight to her face behind his father’s back. As though it had been her choice to be betrothed to Lord Eustas when she was ten, raised in his household, and married to him at sixteen when Lord Eustas had been seven-and-thirty. Even now, she shuddered at the memories of her distasteful fortnight as his bride, before he had sailed off to join King Richard Coeur de Lion to fight the king of France.
Would Sir Martin be a wise master, or would he ruin the estates all over again? What would happen to Sir Stephen and the rest of their knights, the squires, the pages, the servants, when she was gone? Would Sir Martin let her remain in communication with them? Or would he cut her off as completely as her uncle had severed her from the baby sister she had left still wailing in the cradle the day Adela had been sent to live at Halstoke Castle?
Sir Stephen motioned a pair a servants to enter. He allowed Adela time to gather the pile of parchment before he picked up the seal and inkwell. Adela watched with a lump in her throat as the squires carried the table out of the chamber. When she turned her gaze back to Sir Stephen and saw the seal in his hand, she felt tears well up in her eyes.
It is mine. I am the one who dared to wield it when Sir Stephen was afraid it might anger Lord Eustas, I am the one who restored our peace and comfort. I have done more to honor the Baignard name than Lord Eustas did with King Richard’s silly, failed war. And now they wrest it away from me as though I were as witless a fool as Sir Eustas has become.
“I must have the documents too, my lady,” Sir Stephen said. His tone suggested more apology than demand.
Adela forced herself to relax her clenched fingers and placed the stack of parchment in Sir Stephen’s outstretched hand.
“Thank you, my lady. I will send up Father Donatus.”
The chamber felt oddly barren without the table and parchment, despite the graceful tapestries on the walls and an abundance of decoratively carved chests of various sizes in the room. Hard, heavy breaths dragged through the curtains around the bed, as though each inhalation came at an arduous, exhausting price. Perhaps they did. She had been selfish not to pity Sir Eustas more when he returned from King Richard’s war, a mumbling idiot, but she had been too relieved that he could never play the husband’s part with her again.
She drew back the bedcurtains. At least Mama had still looked like Mama when she died. Papa had looked like this, his skin stretched so tight over his cheekbones that he might already have been a skeleton. Though her husband had been incapable of chewing food when he returned broken from the war, he had been able to swallow gruel until the last few weeks, when he had refused to consume even that. Her father’s illness had worked the same cruel fate on him in the end, though her father never lost his wits as Lord Eustas had. A well aimed stone tossed from the walls of a besieged Norman castle had cracked Lord Eustas’s on the head and turned the boastful warmonger into a feeble imbecile.
She cleaned her husband’s beard with a moist cloth, even though he had been too dehydrated for days to drool, then smoothed the bedclothes around him. A few moments later, Sir Stephen returned with the priest.
“He is ready,” she said.
Father Donatus gazed doubtfully at Lord Eustas. “He must be awake to confess his sins.”
Adela shook her husband’s shoulder, vigorously but not harshly. “Come, my dear, open your eyes. Just this one last time.”
Lord Eustas’s mouth wobbled silently for a moment, then a burble of stuttering sounds spluttered out and his eyes cracked open.
“Father Donatus is here to shrive you,” Adela told him. She added, anticipating the priest’s objection, “I know it is unusual for a wife to attend her husband’s confession, but I have grown adept at interpreting his words.”
“As have I,” Sir Stephen said, to Adela’s surprise. He joined her at the bedside. “It took much diligence on my lady’s part, but with admirable patience she has taught me to make sense of what sounds like unintelligible gibberish to others.” Adela raised her brows in question at his fabrication. Sir Stephen bent forward to take Lord Eustas’s wrist in his hand as though to test his pulse, whispering as his mouth glided past Adela’s ear, “Lord Symeon Achard is in the hall. He wishes to speak with you and is not of a mind to wait until Father Donatus is finished with your husband.”
Ah. Adela had not seen Symeon Achard for nearly ten years, but it did not sound like he had changed a whit. She nodded and said to Father Donatus, “Then I will leave you with Sir Stephen. My husband may confess his indiscretions more comfortably before another man than his wife, anyway.”
She dipped a low curtsy to the priest, then moved towards the doorway. Lord Eustas gurgled and blubbered behind her, while Sir Stephen’s voice trailed, “‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned . . .’”
♥
Lord Symeon Achard lounged in Lord Eustas’s former dining chair on the great hall’s dais. His husky frame made the spacious chair look small. Symeon had pushed the chair back to stretch out his long, muscular legs and prop his muddied riding boots atop the large oak table in front of him. Adela’s first reaction at his negligent posture was anger. He had been one of her husband’s squires when she came to live at Halstoke Castle. Although Symeon’s father had been a mere knight with a single castle of his own, Symeon’s aggressive stares had clearly intimidated the wealthier and much older Lord Eustas and everyone else in the household. At seventeen, Symeon had already been taller than Lord Eustas, bulging with hard-honed muscles that might have threatened any man to glance at. His ability to coerce someone with a single bleak, crushing look had both daunted Adela and stirred her envy. How she had wished her glares held such power as Symeon’s whenever Lord Eustas slapped her for speaking some random word that displeased him.
Over the years, Symeon had grown from a fearsome but intriguing squire into an unexpected ally. Adela remained grateful for the services he had rendered her. But that oak table had become hers after Lord Eustas left for King Richard’s war and she had continued to view it so after he returned too broken to ever sit behind it again.
“You wished to speak with me, my lord?” My lord still felt strange on her tongue. He might now be a baron twice over, but he had always been just “Symeon” to her. She kept her voice poised but chill to impart her displeasure. She had not only observed Symeon for six years, she had studied him and his cool, contemptuous nature until she had learned to imitate it.
He looked up from his study of the parchment sheets in his hands. She could see her seal stamped in the red wax at the bottom. He must have taken her letters from Sir Stephen.
“Adela, love.”
He crooked her a grin that she knew, also from former observations, set most women’s hearts a-tumble. She owned that he was handsome, in a rugged sort of way. Dark hair curled in a wave around the collar of his brown surcote, while his hazel eyes held even more arrogance than she remembered. A compelling hint of danger rippled across the air between them, the sort that she supposed lured the fascinated moth to its destruction in the flame. But he had jolted her heart only once, and that had been in fright of her husband’s wrath rather than from any responsive passion.
She mounted the dais and pushed his feet off the table. They left behind several clumps of dried mud. “Your manners are as deplorable as your morals used to be,” she said, brushing the dirt away. “I thought you were in Poitou with the king.”
“I was, but he sent me back to attend to some important matters in England.” Symeon’s voice still carried the acerbic edge that she remembered, even when he spoke in good humor. Apparently unconcerned by her shove, he crossed one ankle over his knee, both hosed in green silk. She recalled when he could only afford the most inexpensive wool. He motioned at the parchment he still held. “I see your ingenuity has not failed you since your husband’s return. Who is John the mercer?”
“A merchant from Bristol. He trades in some of the finest cloth in England. This gown is from a purchase I made from him.” She swished her skirts of fine scarlet. Symeon did not need to know that she had sold expensive cloth from her dowry to Mercer John to raise money for their manors long before the manors had prospered enough for her to buy cloth from him.
Symeon tossed the top page of parchment onto the table. “And Roger Polson? Also, I see, of Bristol.”
“A goldsmith.” She held out her right hand, adorned with three rings—a ruby, an emerald, and a topaz. They were not the same she had sold to Roger Polson seven years ago, also from her dowry, but they were passably similar enough that Lord Eustas would not have noticed the difference, had he still had his wits. Seeking to change the subject, she asked, “Do you prefer I call you Lord Ludbroke or Lord Grenham?”
“Simply ‘my lord’ is fine.”
Still insufferable. And yet, she smiled, her irritation with him fading. She had not known if she would ever see him again after the king had gifted him with not one, but two baronies and several manors. She should show him more respect, but it was hard to cast aside the sportive friendship that had grown between them so long ago.
She took the parchments from him and began to stack them neatly on the table.
“I bring you good news,” he said. “Your uncle is dead.”
Her hand swept the upper page askew in her surprise. “Uncle Neville?” Papa’s brother?
“Aye. And I have brought you a visitor you will be very glad to see.” He stood, looming over her, but his soaring height had ceased to awe her. “Tybert!” he called.
A knight Adela did not recognize entered the hall, accompanied by a young girl in a dandelion yellow kirtle and a red girdle around her slim waist. Sleek black curls tumbled about her shoulders.
“Who is this?” Adela whispered to Symeon.
“Your sister, Julianna.”
“Julianna?” Adela’s cheeks chilled in shock. The babe she had hated for taking their mother’s life? The squalling infant who had spun Adela’s hate into protective love when she’d held the tiny bundle in her ten-year-old arms?
She had promised Mama she would care for her newborn sister when Mama was gone, a vow Adela had grieved for thirteen years over failing to keep. Her uncle, who had assumed guardianship of both his nieces after Adela’s father also died, had betrothed Adela to Lord Eustas and sent her to be raised in his household, separating her from her baby sister, Adela had thought forever.
The imperturbable composure Adela had cultivated until it had become inseparable from her very nature broke. She almost turned her ankle in her haste to rush off the dais and across the rush-strewn floor to her abandoned sister. She would have embraced Julianna, perhaps even have burst into tears, but Julianna widened her eyes—green like their father’s—and stepped back a pace.
Fool. You have frightened her.
Adela drew a calming breath and regathered her self-control. “Julianna? It is I, Adela. I know you do not remember me, but we are sisters.” Weren’t they? Aside from the color of Papa’s and Mama’s eyes and hair, Adela remembered little of their features. And Julianna had been a mere baby. But Symeon had no reason to lie to her.
Nevertheless, he must have seen her hesitation in the glance she tossed at him. He strolled across the floor to join them. “I can summon all the witnesses of her heritage that you require to ease your mind, if you ask it, including the knights who served your father before they served your uncle and the servants who waited on you both at Ravencott Castle.”
“That will not be necessary. If you say this is Julianna, of course I believe you.”
Adela could not drag her gaze from the young girl’s face. Julianna stared back just as hard. Her green eyes held a gleam of open curiosity. She did not look the least bit shy at being confronted by a “sister” eleven years her senior whom she had never met before this day. Adela had been shy of everything when she had first come to Halstoke. Julianna had Papa’s dark coloring, as Adela’s fairness reflected Mama’s. The pretty curve of Julianna’s lips pressed together with a firmness that bespoke a tenacious self-assurance, or perhaps rebellion, Adela could not yet guess which. She was shorter than Adela, although she might still grow to match Adela’s height. Her sister had only turned twelve in January. The fourteenth. Born three days before their mother died. Thirty-four days before their father joined her. Twelve years, one month and twenty-seven days since Adela’s uncle sold her to Lord Eustas.
The ugly memories fell away, replaced with the first true thrill of hope Adela had experienced since before her mother’s death. She motioned Julianna towards a bench beneath one of the great arched windows that poured gray daylight into the hall. “Come, sit with me here. There is so much to speak of! We must learn to know one another—”
Symeon set one of his massive hands on Julianna’s shoulder. Adela counted six rings on his fingers. He had only owned one when he lived at Halstoke.
“Later,” he said. “You and I must talk first. Tybert, take Lady Julianna to the stables and show her Lord Eustas’s horses. You sister has a passion for horses.”
The young girl’s face lit with more enthusiasm for this suggestion than it had for Adela’s. Julianna dropped a respectful curtsy to Adela and followed the knight out of the hall, a bounce of confidence in her step. Adela had not even had a chance to hear the color of her sister’s voice. She whirled on Symeon, half angry, half brimming with questions.
♥♥♥
All content on this page is copyrighted by Joyce DiPastena
♥♥♥
Want to stay up to date with Adela’s Story? Sign up for my newsletter and join my medieval world! (Free copy of my medieval romance, Loyalty’s Web, is included with your subscription.)