Knight of Jerusalem by Helena P Schrader
Author:Helena P Schrader [Schrader, Helena P]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, FIC014000
ISBN: 9781627871945
Publisher: Wheatmark
Published: 2014-09-30T04:00:00+00:00
Chapter 8
Ascalon, September 1176
THE PACE OF THE MUSIC (IF not the quality) was increasing as the musicians and their audience became more and more inebriated. The bride’s garland of flowers was slipping farther and farther off her head as she spun on the arm of first her bridegroom and then all his guild brothers. Despite the canvas stretched across the cobbled courtyard of the smithy, the late afternoon sun was so hot that she was the color of boiled crab under her bright, blond curls, free of covering veils for the last time in her life. Most of all, her laughter was contagious.
Chuckling as he left the floor to make way for younger dancers, George Smith thumped himself down on a bench beside his old friend and companion-in-arms, Sergeant Roger Shoreham. Smith, too, was beet red from the heat and the exertion of dancing, and he used the back of his arm to wipe away the sweat dripping down his brow. Then he grabbed a tankard of ale from the tray of a passing servant and declared, “I’ll be damned if she ain’t the prettiest bride I’ve ever seen. Good housekeeper, too, or so my boy says.”
“Oh, I think you can count on that,” Roger agreed, clunking his large pottery tankard with that of the father of the groom. “All Joachim’s girls have been well trained by their mother to keep a proper house.” Roger could speak with authority since his eldest boy, Edwin, was married to the second Zimmermann girl, the bride’s older sister.
“I guess we’re kin now,” Smith declared, nodding smugly, before gulping down half the ale in his tankard to quench his thirst.
“Indeed,” Roger agreed, clunking tankards again. “Which I didn’t expect, seeing as we both have only boys.”
“Speaking of which, what’s this I hear about Daniel running away from his apprenticeship?”
Roger frowned. It was a subject he would have preferred not to discuss on a happy occasion such as this, but it was the scandal of the town, and he could hardly expect Smith to ignore it. “The boy’s a disgrace! He was late to work, impudent, and then when Fulk thrashed him—as he well deserved—he ran away. Fulk says he won’t have him back, not for anything,” Roger admitted glumly, shaking his head.
Smith nodded sympathetically, noting, “Daniel always had a wild streak in him. He got into all kinds of scrapes as a boy.”
Roger growled. “Well, at fifteen he’s not a boy anymore! And who’ll take him on after this? No master worth his salt will hire an apprentice with Daniel’s reputation. His mother is in despair and thinks he should be given to a monastery to learn discipline.”
Smith grunted, expressing eloquently—if nonverbally—Roger’s own doubts. He felt almost obligated to offer Daniel an apprenticeship in his smithy, but was reluctant to do so. Even if he’d known the boy all his life, he didn’t need an apprentice who wasn’t punctual, much less talked back. He decided to change the subject before Roger thought to ask him outright for the favor, since it would have been hard to deny him when they’d just become kin.
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