“Wine doesn’t hinder sleep-it helps. That fight bothering you?”
“Only the silver penny I lost on it.” But Pascal’s answer was too quick, too elaborately casual. “It is bothering you.” Matt frowned. “What’s the matter? I thought I was the one who was preoccupied with morals here.”
“You are! I am not! ‘Twas only… well, ’twas seeing that knight go off with that lady, ten years younger than he at least, and realizing what randy goats they must have been, both of those who fought over her…”
“Oh.” Matt straightened “It isn’t blood that bothers you-it’s the affluent older man soliciting the favors of the younger woman.”
Pascal just glowered at the fire. “I hope your cousin doesn’t find men’s brawling attractive,” Matt said. “I doubt it-or at least, I doubt that she is worse than any, in that regard. I have heard that all women thrill to see men fighting over them.”
“That’s a popular fancy, yes. But you think she might find older men attractive?”
“How could she?” Pascal demanded, his eyes glittering with anger. “He is twice her age at least, and belike is paunchy and foul of breath into the bargain!”
Matt frowned, studying him, then hazarded a guess. “You don’t think she’d be able to ignore all that if he were rich enough?”
Pascal shot up from his blanket, face an inch from Matt’s as he growled, “How can you defame a pure innocent maid so!”
“I didn’t,” Matt said hastily, “just made a guess. So you don’t know that he’s ugly and feeble?”
“How could he be aught else?” Pascal bleated. Matt forced a smile. “Some of us manage to keep in shape, even if we do have desk jobs. But not too many teenagers find forty-five-year-old men attractive. You’re probably safe on that score.”
“But I have only youth,” Pascal mourned, “no beauty of face or form, no wealth, no rank! I shudder to think on it, but I cannot help it, not when I saw that knight ascend the stairs with that lady to their temporary ecstasy! What manner of man is he, who will soon be debauching my fair cousin?”
“Nice question.” Matt wondered how the prospective bridegroom had made his fortune. He also wondered what the knight’s wife would say if she ever found out what was going on tonight. He didn’t think her own infidelities would insulate her feelings, as Pascal seemed to believe. In his experience, most people thought that their own little sins were perfectly all right-it was just everybody else’s that were wrong. The windows were gray with the coming dawn as Matt shook Pascal awake. “Come on, lazybones! I want to get an early start.”
Pascal rolled one eye open, took in the light-or lack thereof-and closed his eyes with a groan. “ ‘Tis not yet dawn!”
“Yeah, but we have a lot of miles to cover, and we don’t want to get there staggering and worn out. We want to be at your cousin’s castle by mid-afternoon, remember?” Actually, Matt didn’t want to be there in the common room when the knight and lady came back downstairs-now that he was a husband himself, he found that he had a tougher time watching other people’s adulteries. He resolutely refused to think why. But before Pascal could even get up, the knight came down the stairs. It wasn’t the victorious knight, though, it was the loser-and it wasn’t the lady who was with him, but one of the serving wenches, hanging on his arm and laughing gaily at some jest he was making. Matt realized he was staring and wrenched his gaze away just before the knight happened to glance around the room, smiling, one arm around the girl’s shoulders, the other in an improvised sling. “You look like a fish being served up for dinner,” Matt muttered to Pascal. “Better get up and start moving.”
The young man had been staring as if his face wore a matched pair of fried eggs. Now he gave his head a quick shake and turned to climb out of his blanket, then fold it up. Matt followed suit, relieved to find that he wasn’t the only one taken by surprise. The knight sat down at a table, still grinning. “I could eat my horse, or at least as much food as he!”
“ ‘Tis early still, but I shall bring you whatever is hot.” The wench favored him with a slumberous look. The knight laughed softly, with one last tug at her fingers, and she turned away, tossing her head at the chorus of catcalls with which her fellow serving maids greeted her. “Jealous witches! Simply because he did not choose one of you!”
“Who else among us was so quick with comfort and nursing?” a buxom wench countered. “Was the loser worth your time?” The girl smiled and flaunted a brooch. “Gold!” The buxom one lost her smile, eyes round. “And more in coin,” the wench told her. The other girls hissed envy. She tossed her head again and flounced over to pick up her tray. “It is good to be charitable to poor wounded knights.”
“Aye, if they be rich and spendthrift!” another girl sneered. “And lacking in taste,” a third contributed. The chorus of jibes went on until she had taken her tray away, still with a self-satisfied smile; she obviously felt that she had pulled off a coup right beneath their noses. So, obviously, did they. “I find I have small appetite for breakfast,” Pascal told Matt. “Let us take a loaf and eat as we march.”
“Good idea.” Matt went to the innkeeper to pay their score and pick up some bread. He was glad to see that Pascal’s part of Merovence hadn’t been completely corrupted by Latruria-yet They passed out of the village, managing not to be shocked by the number of people who were up and about-at least to judge by the smoke rising from chimneys and, in the case of peasant huts, smoke holes. Pascal seemed not even to notice, and Matt had become inured to a culture in which people went to bed with the dark and woke with the light. It wasn’t quite that bad at Queen Alisande’s court, where the candles, fueled by the royal exchequer, burned until well after ten p.m.-but it still made Matt do a mental double-take when he realized that most of the common folk were up and about when he would have been just getting to bed in his protracted college days. They hadn’t gone more than two rods past the village limits when a soft padding behind them made Matt turn around. Sure enough, it was Manny. “Did you eat well?”
“Aye, though the cowherd seemed inclined to dispute ownership with me.”
“You didn’t eat him, too, did you?” Matt said anxiously. “Nay. After all, ‘twas in your interests he objected.”
“Ours?” Pascal frowned. “Aye. ‘Avaunt!’ cried he. ‘I’ve sold that beef to a minstrel!’ ‘He is my master,’ quoth I-it galls me, but I find these simple peasant folk cannot comprehend how a monster might be loyal to a family, even as one of its servants might be.“
“I have a little difficulty understanding it myself,” Matt confessed. “Not objecting, mind you-I guess Great-Grandpa did a better job enchanting you than he knew. So what happened to the cowherd?”
“He did not agree with me.”
“I told you not to eat him.”
“Nay, ‘twas with my words he failed to agree, not my stomach. At the last, I became angered and told him that ’twas for me you had bought the steer, and he seemed doubtful enough that he left me to my repast.”
Matt sighed. “I can’t imagine why.”
“Certainly the wisest choice,” Pascal agreed. “Then you slept well?”
“Aye; green grass is soft enough for me. Why you plaguey people seem to think you have need of feather beds and such, I cannot fathom-nor why you will not allow me to accompany you into the towns.”
“Bad for business,” Matt explained. “We’re trying to attract crowds, not chase them away.”
“So you have said-though I should mink that no matter how well they pay you, they would pay better to be sure I would go away.”
“Well, yes,” Matt said judiciously, “but that way, they might be a little more careful what they said around us, and I’m out to pick up gossip. Matter of fact, with you along, I don’t think we’d get close enough to overhear anything they said.”