Time to Love Again by Speer Flora

Author:Speer, Flora
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: romance historical
Publisher: Flora Speer

She wakened to total blackness and the sound of the bar being drawn back across the door. The sudden glare of a torch nearly blinded her.

“Come along,” said the guard, motioning to her to pass through the door.

“Where am I to go?” India sat up, rubbing her eyes, but she did not move off the pallet. “What time is it?”

“Past midnight. Bishop Turpin wants to see you.” Again she noted the guard’s curious indifference to her, but at least he was not threatening. India got to her feet.

“I hardly look presentable enough to see a bishop,” she said, wondering what the man’s reaction would be. “Could I have some hot water and soap?”

“If Turpin wants you clean, he’ll provide the water,” the guard said. “Don’t keep him waiting.”

Deciding that it was probably best not to annoy either the guard or Turpin by further delay, India went with the man. He took her to the far end of the corridor, to a narrow, winding stone staircase that led upward past the landings for two other floors before he stopped her at the third level. They passed through a small anteroom, bare and cold as the rest of that forbidding building, to a door on the other side. The guard knocked, and India heard Turpin’s voice bidding him enter.

The chamber into which she was now conducted was so different from anything she had so far seen in Francia that it made India catch her breath in surprise. There was a brazier burning charcoal to warm the room and enough tall, thick, beeswax candles to light and scent it. The Frankish bed pushed against the wall to India’s left was covered in glowing red silk and well padded with silk cushions in many colors. The floors were strewn with patterned Arabic rugs over a layer of dried herbs and rushes. A swath of more red silk had been draped across part of the wall opposite the bed, covering what India assumed was a window. At a table sat a scribe, using a quill pen to write upon a narrow parchment scroll.

In the center of the room, facing the door, stood Bishop Turpin. He had discarded his scarlet vestments in favor of a bleached white linen cassock, cinched around his thick waist with a knotted cord.

“Wait outside,” Turpin said to the guard. To the scribe he gestured with one smooth white hand. “You, too. Leave us.”

When they were alone, Turpin motioned to India to come forward. He was a good two inches shorter than she, and there was about him a facile, almost oily manner that she found repulsive. His hands, now folded before him at waist height, were plump, with tapered fingers ending in clean, shining nails, as if they had recently been manicured and polished. The amethyst ring of his rank gleamed in the candlelight.

“From what heathen country do you come, that you do not bow to a bishop?” Turpin demanded.

“A country where all men and women stand upright and address each other with respect,” she answered.

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