Page 10 of My Hero
The prior clapped him on the shoulder. “We’ll be sorry to see you go.” He didn’t look sorry in the least. In fact, he looked inordinately pleased with himself. “When would you likeFather Garthto begin?” he asked the Abbot.
Garth snapped his gaze toward the prior. Never, he thought. Never.
The Abbot scanned him from head to toe dismissively. “He can’t have many possessions to pack, and I’m certain you can find others to take over his responsibilities. As you can imagine, I’m a busy man. See that he’s ready to leave on the morrow.”
Garth’s heart dropped. He fought the urge to put his fist through the plaster of the prior’s wall. With one wave of the Abbot’s hand, the neatly packed cart of his life had been utterly overturned.
He felt betrayed, exiled, damned. And only in the most private confessional of his soul did he admit the emotion underlying all the others—terror.
But despite his reluctance and in accordance with the Abbot’s wishes, after a long and sleepless night, he bid a bitter and silent farewell to the indifferent stones of the monastery walls, leaving forever his life of serenity.
The sun winked its mocking eye behind a bank of bleak clouds as Garth trudged behind the Abbot’s cart to Castle Wendeville with all the fervor of a prisoner to his execution. He had no desire to ride. He’d rather huff like a winded warhorse and blister his heels on the rough road. It was only fitting that his body should suffer as much as his spirit.
Chapter 3
Cynthia shivered as she placed first one bare foot, then the other, atop the winter-packed soil of the garden.
The sun peered over the gray horizon, tentatively nudging the world awake like a late-arriving husband afraid to incur his wife’s wrath. The dark trunks of the apples and willows in the orchard released eerie wraiths of steam that wisped into the air, escaping their earthly prisons. Mist made a soft carpet across the sward, and the faint crackling of ice-covered grasses thawing in the sun’s caress peppered the silence.
Was today the day? Every morn since John’s death, she’d completed the spring ritual, coming to the garden at dawn to kick off her boots, press her toes into the cool mulch, and wait for the familiar sensations. But winter seemed exceptionally stubborn this year, dragging on and on without the merest stirring of life beneath the soil.
She cleared her thoughts and waited.
Nothing.
She wiggled her toes.
Nothing.
She closed her eyes.
Nothing but cold, hard ground, still and silent.
Perhaps spring would never come, she thought dismally. She sighed and bent down to retrieve her boots.
Then, just as her fingers brushed the soft leather, it began. A gentle humming. Faint. Distant.
The soles of her feet tingled and grew warm, as if the earth squirmed slowly awake beneath her. Like the roots of a tree sucking water from the soil, her veins began to absorb the warmth. The pleasant vibration wound its lazy way up through her ankles and calves and thighs. Then it gained momentum, circling her hips and waist, flowing upward to a liquid pulse in her breast and throat, coursing powerfully now along her arms to emanate from the very tips of her fingers, filling her head with sound and heat and light.
She smiled. It was time. The earth beckoned her. It was time to plant.
The energy resonated behind her eyes, at the base of her neck, in the restless stretch of sinew along her spine, like the embrace of an old friend.
She squatted down, crumbling handfuls of soil between her winter-pale knuckles and breathing deep the damp, rich odor of earth. And for the first time in weeks, she felt promise.
John had bid her be happy after his death. The dear man couldn’t bear to think of her suffering. And she’d done her best to fulfill his wishes, short of keeping the promise she’d made at the end, the one that worried at her like a diseased tooth. She’d smothered her own cares these past weeks, busying herself with the troubles of the castle folk—setting broken bones, relieving aches, birthing babes. But it was difficult, lying like a dormant bulb beneath the cheerless, barren soil of widowhood.
At last this morn the sun broke through the winter’s pall, and with it came the assurance of new life, new beginnings. Inhaling a fresh breath of spring, she could almost feel the flower of her soul reaching upward to be born.
Heedless of her velvet surcoat, she knelt in the mud and carefully brushed aside the carpet of straw mounded up over last year’s roses.
“Oh, la!” Elspeth shrieked in dismay as she came plowing across the damp ground toward Cynthia. “What happened to the lovely lady I dressed this morn?” Her wimple flapped about her old apple-cheeked face like a floundering dove pasted to her head.
Cynthia grinned. She was happier than a beggar with a pile of coins, kneeling here before the skeletons of rosebushes that had survived the cruel winter.
“Why, you’re covered from head to heels!” Elspeth scolded, rushing forward to scrub at Cynthia’s forehead with a corner of her apron.
Cynthia wrinkled her nose and ducked away from the pointless scouring. “Look, Elspeth. The roses.”
