Loving Lucianna

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

            “The wedding is off, carissima!” Lucianna announced. She held her head high as she swept across the sunlit chamber to where her former charge, Siri de Brielle, sat painting an elegant prayer book.

            Siri looked up, her jewel blue eyes radiating dismay. “What, again? What happened this time?”

            “He called me paffuto. I will have you know that my gowns fit me just as neatly as they did twenty-five years ago.”

            A cup of wine and plate of cheese sat on a table to the side of the window so that Siri could refresh herself while she worked. Lucianna set these items aside, picked up the tray and buffed the metal surface with the wide green sleeve of her surcote, then examined her blurred reflection. She could make out little of her features, but her figure remained undoubtedly trim, despite her passing her fortieth-and-fourth year last month.

            “Perhaps you should stop trying to teach Sir Balduin Italian,” Siri said. “I am sure he did not mean to call you plump.”

            “If he loved me as he says, he would pay stricter attention to my lessons. I have shown him the courtesy of learning his tongue. One would think it a small enough request that he should learn mine.”

            To an unfamiliar eye, the frown that pulled at Siri’s full rosy lips would have appeared a pout, but Lucianna had known her since she was a babe and discerned the reproof Siri directed at her.

            “Lucianna, you learned French with my mother in a nunnery in Venice before she married my father. Our minds are nimble when we are young. Sir Balduin—”

            Lucianna cut off Siri’s defense of the gray-haired knight with an impatient gesture. “Oh, si, he says he is too old to learn new things. ’Tis merely an excuse that will haunt our marriage. If he is too old to learn the difference between paffuto and pazienza, then he is too old to learn how to please a wife.”

            Siri’s pout dissolved into sudden merriment, setting aglow the golden face that had bewitched their neighbors far and near and held her husband, Triston, joyfully smitten.

            “Then perhaps,” Siri said, “Sir Balduin forgot the word because you are not in the least pazienza. You know you are not, Lucianna, you are not patient at all!”

            Lucianna gave a haughty sniff and put the tray back down. “Is it my fault the men of Poitou are so trying? When they are not kissing or trying to abscond with you behind my back, they are provoking quarrels with one another or reciting nonsensical poetry. The land is filled with hommes fous.”

            Siri dipped a tapered brush into a vial of red paint and resumed filling in the flowing scarlet dress of Mary Magdalene, clearly dismissing the seriousness of Lucianna’s indignation. “They are not madmen. And I do not know why you were so cross with Acelet’s verses when he came for Christmas. We had poets in Venice, too. Some of them turned your eyes quite dreamy.”

            Lucianna swept over to the window that overlooked the castle’s bailey. Sir Balduin stood below, conversing with Siri’s husband, Triston de Brielle. Lord Triston they called him now, since he had inherited the barony that had come to Siri through her late father. Sir Balduin was not as tall as his young master and his hair may have turned the color of slate, but he maintained an athletic physique despite the limp an enemy knight’s sword blow had left him with.