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Judith widened her eyes.
“Of me?”
“You do recall I told you I fell in love with you when I first heard your voice.”
“Aye, I recall when we first met. You were blindfolded.”
“Yet it was not the first time I had heard your voice. The first time – I heard it in the garden. You were gone when I got there, but there was a sweetbriar on that spot.”
Now Judith remembered one blissful morning she’d spent in the gardens at Court singing by a sweetbriar. She shook her head in wonder.
“Why did you never tell me of it? I wish you had! Then I’d have been able to perceive your true love for me!”
She paused, staring sadly at the love token and feeling deep regret at all the years they’d lost because they’d failed to confess their love for each other. Tristram heaved a sigh, kissing the top of her head.
“I suppose it was my own silly pride. I did not even want to own up to myself I’d tumbled in love with a woman just at the sound of her voice. Yet it was what it was. I see now though that what you say is true. I fell in love with you then, like a fanciful child, but it was only after I got to know you that I learnt to love you in truth. And when we reunited, I learnt to love you anew.”
“That is a fine tale of courtly love, the way you speak of it. You’ve always enjoyed such tales, my lord Tristram.”
“And so have you, my lady Judith,” Tristram countered. “Perchance you could make one of your songs of it.”
“A song,” Judith mused. “No. A tale is better. It seems better to have a tale of this, yet it would be a mightily strange tale. I don’t know if such a story has ever been written… in Norman or in Occitan…”
“Make it in English then,” Tristram suddenly said.
Judith frowned. English? Who’d ever heard of courtly tales written on parchment in English? They called such talesromanz,andFrench was the language of them. Yet now she thought better on it, Tristram had the right of it. Somehow, when she conjured up the words to tell it, she understood their strange tale of love lost and regained would sound even better in English than in Norman or Occitan.
“Whose English? My English?” she said, unable not to tease him, although he’d learnt to speak the English of the North quite well.
“Yours, to be sure,” he said with a teasing smile of his own. “It seems a more fitting means to tell of the ways in which I chastised you.”
She frowned.
“If I ever bring myself to put on parchment such a tale, I mean to leave the chastisements aside from it. It is a tale of courtly love, after all!”
“I don’t see anything wrong with aromanztelling of chastisements or of heated love,” Tristram shrugged.
“Truly? And what do you think the Church would say of it?” Judith asked with a cocked eyebrow.
Tristram waved his hand.
“They’d probably mean to punish us for the blasphemous sinners we are,” he said, yet his voice sounded light and unconcerned as he spoke the words.
Judith found herself brushing her fingers upon his scarred back, then beginning to kiss each of the scars her husband had borne for her.
“Don’t ever speak so lightly of it,” she said between kisses. “They hurt you. And you let yourself hurt for my sake.”
He cast her a brilliant, careless smile, and spoke to her in a steady voice.
“Yet for your sake I’d do it a thousand times over. It is just as it is.”
But Judith placed a staying finger on his lips.
“Nay. Never again! I will not let them hurt you. And perchance it’s best certain courtly tales are left unwritten. I’d rather have my husband safe and sound rather than a knight who suffers for my sake.”
Tristram’s lips kissed her fingers.
“Fine then. Have it your own way, although the Church need never learn of it even if you write aromanzthat tells of heated love. Besides, they would simply dismiss it if it were written in English.”
