She nodded. “You were thrashing about like a trapped eel and when you flung out your arm, your ring caught me here.” She’d slid over beside him again, showing that she’d not retreated to the end of the bed from fear, simply to get out of range. When he offered the rest of the wine, she took it eagerly and drank with obvious pleasure. He could see now that her cheek was swollen, too, but she seemed quite unfazed by it. He supposed that since bruises were an occupational hazard, she did not consider unintentional ones worth bothering about, especially when she was likely to be well compensated for them.
She leaned over to set the cup down in the floor rushes, and then propped herself up on an elbow, saying chattily, “That must have been an awful dream, my lord. I have never had one myself, at least not one that I remembered come morning. But my late husband, may God assoil him, suffered dreadfully from bad dreams. He’d often awaken me, yelling and flailing about like one possessed. He even sleepwalked sometimes. Do you ever do that, my lord?”
“What was your name again?”
Her smile set free two deep dimples. She was called Eve, she told him, a popular name for women who made their living by bartering their bodies.
“Stop talking, Eve,” Richard said and rolled over on top of her. She wrapped her arms compliantly around his neck, adjusting her body to accommodate him, for she was skilled in all the ways of pleasuring a man and she’d discovered earlier that night that a king was no different from other men when it came to hungers of the flesh.
Richard got the physical release he needed and, for a time, he did not have to think at all. Afterward, his bedmate had fallen asleep almost at once, but he could not, despite being exhausted by the nightmare. Eventually, he gave up and rose from the bed. Crossing to the window, he pulled the shutters back, gazing up at a sky in which stars still glimmered. Dawn was at least an hour away. He grimaced, for it was going to be a long day—the start of the great council—and then began to pull clothing from a coffer. Robert continued to sleep, snoring softly, but Arne soon awakened, for he seemed to have a sixth sense, always on hand when he was needed. He insisted upon assisting Richard in dressing and then quickly did so himself.
Richard retrieved a small casket from another coffer and poured some coins into a leather pouch. Tossing it to Arne, he said, “Give her this when she awakens, lad, and then see that she gets safely back into town.”
Arne tucked the pouch into his belt. “I will, my lord.” His gaze drawn toward the girl in the bed, he said wistfully, “She is very pretty.”
Richard raised an eyebrow. “You want her?” He was turning to take more money from the casket when the boy hastily declined. “Why not?” He glanced over his shoulder, surprised by the refusal. “I daresay she’d fancy a polite lad like you over some of the men she takes into her bed.” When Arne continued to shake his head, Richard looked at the youth curiously, remembering that Morgan had said he was younger than they’d first thought. “How old are you, lad? Sixteen?”
“Come Michaelmas, sire.” Arne blushed when Richard asked if he’d been with a woman yet, but he was proud to say he had, for some of the king’s knights had gone to a German brothel to celebrate his impending release and Guillain had taken a brotherly interest in engaging a suitable girl for Arne’s first time. So he was no longer afflicted by the shyness that had kept him from losing his virginity in that Ragusa whorehouse, but the idea of sharing a woman with his king seemed somehow sacrilegious to him. Knowing Richard would have laughed at him had he confided that, he said instead, “May I ask you a question, sire?”
He lost his nerve then, fearing that he’d be unforgivably presumptuous. But when Richard urged him on, he braced himself and blurted out in one breathless sentence, “You could have any woman you wanted, my liege, so why do you choose to pay for one?” And to his vast relief, Richard looked amused.
Gesturing toward the young woman asleep in his bed, Richard said with a grin, “I wanted to swive her, Arne, not court her.” Leaning back against the edge of the trestle table, he decided to share a family story with the lad, for they’d developed an odd intimacy since being reunited at Speyer nine months ago, a bond begotten in the torture Arne had undergone for his sake and reinforced by dreams of French dungeons and burning flesh.
“When my brothers and I reached the age of thirteen or fourteen, our father declared that we were now going to be ‘thinking with our cocks,’ and gave us each a blunt talking-to. ‘If you plant a field, you have to harvest the crop,’ he said, telling us that we must look after any children we sired. He said he’d not blame us for ‘a wench ploughed and cropped,’ but we should stay away from virgins and other men’s wives, saying, ‘If you have an itch, get a whore to scratch it.’ He did not always practice what he preached; what man does? But it was good advice nonetheless, which I will eventually pass on to my own sons, and which I am now passing on to you, Arne.”