Loving Lucianna

Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

            How could he have lost it? He had kept the chain tucked in his clothing since the day she had hurled the ring back into his hands, yet chain and ring had both undeniably vanished. At first, Sir Balduin assumed the clasp must have broken during a change of clothing, but he had spent the entire night searching his bedchamber. Ransacking it had been more like it, for as his alarm at its disappearance increased, he had upended every object in the chamber, great and small, and even crawled under the bed when dawn had allowed enough gray light through the window for him to see murkily beneath it. He had discovered a missing shoe, a bent spoon, a bronze brooch he’d misplaced more than a month ago, three copper coins, a broken chess piece he’d meant to mend, and a great deal of lint that made him sneeze. But there had been no sign of his grandmother’s ring.

            Bad enough that he had lost the only heirloom handed down to him from his family, but Lucianna had worn it long enough upon her finger for him to forget about his grandmother and think entirely of the woman he had grown to love and hoped to marry when he gazed on it. It would always say Lucianna to him now. He had intended to cherish it as though her very memory dwelt in the fiery green depths that glowed like her eyes when she kissed him. Without it, what would he have to remember her by when she had gone?

            Having come up fruitless in his chamber, he had spent today tracing and retracing his steps from yesterday. He had passed the morning searching the hall where he had made that humiliating spectacle of himself, before they set the table afresh for another dinner. Lucianna had kept her vow not to attend, and Sir Balduin had sat through a miserable meal without her, too occupied with mentally flailing himself for yesterday’s stupidity to care for the snickers and smirks that still occasionally broke from those household members who had witnessed the debacle.

            Sir Balduin had questioned every servant he could find, including each one who brought a platter of food onto the dais, but none of them had seen the chain or ring. As soon as the meal was over he headed for the garden. He did not know how he could have lost it there during his exchange with Serafino, but it had fallen off sometime between yestermorn and yesternight, and Sir Balduin would leave no stone or rosebush unturned in his determined hunt.

            Once again when he reached the garden, he found Perrin there before him. This time the boy sat cross-legged in the flowery mead, with a wax tablet in his lap and a stylus in his hand. An autumn wind tossed his dark curls about his face so that he had to push the hair out of his eyes as he looked up at Sir Balduin’s footstep.

            “Father Michel said I could practice tracing my Latin lines out here today,” the boy said quickly, as though to preempt another scolding.

            Sir Balduin waved a distracted hand. “Have you seen my emerald ring?”

            “The one you gave to Lady Lucianna?”

            “Aye. The chain broke yesterday. I thought it might have done so while I was here with her brother.”

            Sir Balduin walked around the edges of the garden while Perrin laid his tablet aside and scampered through the mead on his hands and knees, searching through the low growing flowers. Sir Baldin bent over to lift the lower branches of the rose bush Perrin had beheaded the previous day, then winced and bit off a gasp as his knees popped and the muscles of his back protested, reminding him that a man his age had had no business to be scrambling around underneath beds, no matter how urgent the quest.