Innocence Unveiled. Blythe Gifford

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      Thank you, Saint Catherine, for stopping my flapping tongue.

      Renard thought Giles was her father. When he said ‘your mother,’ he meant Giles’s wife. She had almost told him that her mother was dead and her father was a Flemish noble.

      In an English jail.

      She poked a stick into the fading fire, releasing a flame. Better he think Giles was her father. A dead man would not mind the untruth and he had never had a wife who would be wronged by the tale.

       Forgive my sin of omission.

      ‘No, not even for my mother,’ she repeated. ‘Many asked for it, but Duchess cloth was made only for the Duchess.’

      When she turned back, his midnight-blue eyes looked as if they had just stared into the pits of hell. She blinked against the agony, but when she opened her eyes, the pain had been swept clean.

      She shook her head to clear her muddled vision. She must have been mistaken. This man had no feelings. And no reason to mourn a dead duchess.

      ‘Tell me,’ he said, with an expression more serious than the question, ‘about your father.’

      She sighed with relief. It would be easy to pretend a daughter’s affection for Giles. ‘He taught me everything he could and left me everything he had.’

      ‘When did he die?’

      ‘Two years ago Michaelmas.’

      ‘You miss him very much.’ His voice felt like an arm draped over her shoulder.

      ‘Yes, I do.’

      ‘It cannot be easy for a woman to be a draper.’

      She resisted the temptation to rest in his sympathy. Better he not know how difficult it was. He must see her as a business owner, not a woman who might be prey for his passions.

      She donned again the voice she used with strangers. ‘The workers respect me. I know my business.’

      ‘How many times every day must you prove it?’

      He heard too much. ‘As many times as I must.’

      Renard walked over to the loom, squatting just beyond the firelight.

      ‘That loom was his,’ she said, watching Renard stroke the uprights, the threads and the batten, as if he were searching for a secret lock. His hands, strong and graceful in all things, seemed awkward only when they neared the loom. ‘He was a weaver before he started dealing in cloth.’

      ‘But he kept weaving, you said. He wove the Duchess cloth.’

      ‘He was always experimenting, trying new things, until the stiffness took his hands.’ Joining him by the loom, she rubbed her thumb over wood worn smooth for more than fifty years. ‘He taught me on this loom. He said I must know how to weave in order to supervise weavers.’

      ‘Show me.’

      She stilled her fingers and tried to read his face. A strange request. ‘Why would you want to learn?’

      He never moved his gaze from the threads. ‘When you are finished, you have something to show.’

      His whispered words seemed a confession. A smuggler’s very life was secret.

      ‘Perhaps tomorrow.’ In daylight. When the intimacy of the night had passed.

      ‘Now.’

      ‘In the dark?’

      His silence, thick and heavy, touched her as his fingers had touched the threads. ‘You were the one,’ he said, finally, ‘who told me I needed to know my trade.’

      No harm in teaching, she supposed. Good weavers worked by touch anyway, so the dark should not matter. And she could prove to herself that she felt nothing unusual when she shared his space.

      Taking a seat on the end of the bench, she patted the wood to her left. ‘Sit.’

      He did, his legs so long they nearly overshot the treadles that she could barely reach with a pointed toe. Through the layers of his chausses and her skirt, she felt his leg muscles flex at the unfamiliar movement.

      ‘These,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice even, ‘are the treadles. Think of them as your stirrups. Your feet ride there to control the loom.’

      He placed one foot on each, his knees within a whisper of the cloth on the loom. ‘Are all weavers such small men?’

      She smiled. ‘You are a very tall man. And this is an old loom that I’ve adjusted to my size. The newer ones must be worked by two men.’

      ‘How tall was Giles de Vos?’

      He asked the question without looking at her, his fingers running ceaselessly over the loom, stroking the batten, reaching for the heddles, smoothing the warp threads.

      The sight of his fingers caressing the loom made her skin tingle. She rubbed her sleeve as if she could scrub away the feeling. ‘Giles was shorter than you. By at least a head.’

      He spread his arms to span the loom, easily reaching the width of the cloth. She caught a whiff of soap and skin. He must have visited the bath house today. His scent, the pressure of his leg against hers hidden in the darkness, made her heart trip.

      Sweet Saint Catherine, is this what they mean by temptation?

      If so, it felt good—warm, cosy, exciting, perhaps a little dangerous and very, very alive.

      She felt no answering surge from him. His concentration was all on the wood and the wool.

      He said I did not need protection from him. I must indeed be an immodest woman, if I feel like this while he feels nothing.

      She slipped off the bench, smoothed her skirt and stood at the corner of the loom, where his scent was fainter and it was easier to fight her shameful urges. ‘I can show you better from here.’

      She ran her hands over the loom, checking the tautness of the threads, trying to concentrate. СКАЧАТЬ