Ashes of the Elements Read Online Free PDF Page B

landowner. He had no skills with the land, nor with animals, other than horses; no interest in organising his tenants and his peasantry into working for the good of all who depended on Acquin. His brothers, Yves, Patrice, Honoré and Acelin, were the ones who loved and understood the land.
    Josse, anyway, had left home as soon as he could after coming into his inheritance. He’d been away before, apprenticed as page, as were so many eldest sons, to another knight’s household, to learn a very different profession from agriculture. He’d even spent a couple of years living in England with his mother’s kin, where his maternal grandfather, Herbert of Lewes, had given him a hearty welcome, apparently having got over the shock of his beloved Ida having left home to marry a Frenchman. When he was old enough, Josse had become a squire. And, in time, won his spurs.
    When he was but a youth, he’d ridden with King Richard himself, not that he’d been King then. But he was now.
    Through the generosity of the new King Richard, Josse had a manor house in England. Or he would have, when the builders finished. And God alone knew when that would be.
    In the meantime, while Josse tried to be patient with delay after delay, he was back living at home. In what was legally his home, but in which, as he was all too well aware, he was now more of a guest.
    And, at times like this, not a very welcome one.
    He flung himself down on a stout wooden bench, feeling both angry and embarrassed.
    ‘I was doing the lad no harm!’ he protested, drinking down a huge mouthful of wine.
    ‘Maybe you weren’t,’ said his sister-in-law Marie, Yves’s wife. ‘But that isn’t the point. Theophania asked you not to let Auguste ride your horse, and you took no notice.’
    ‘The lad’s too mollycoddled!’ Josse cried. ‘He only gets to ride that tiddly pony of his, which is no challenge whatsoever to a red-blooded lad! And there are too many women here – he needs a bit of masculine company.’
    ‘He has that, in plenty!’ Acelin said, clearly affronted. ‘He has me, and he has his uncles Yves, Patrice and Honoré. In addition, there are Yves’s boys, Luke, Jean-Yves and Robert, and, when he has grown bigger and stronger, soon Honoré’s little boy will be a playmate too. Enough male company there, surely, Josse, even for you.’
    ‘That’s as maybe.’ Josse had the unpleasant feeling that he was not only outnumbered, but also being out-argued. ‘All the same, he’d be well used to riding a big horse by now if he’d had the upbringing I had, let me tell you!’
    ‘You were still here when you were six, galloping about on a pony not much larger than Auguste’s, and making a thorough nuisance of yourself,’ Yves said pedantically. ‘You didn’t go off to be Sir Guy’s page until you were seven.’
    ‘Yes I did!’
    ‘Didn’t!’
    ‘Did!’
    ‘Oh, stop it!’ Marie shouted. ‘Really, Josse, what is it about you, that you make sensible grown men act like small boys again?’
    ‘They’re my brothers,’ Josse muttered.
    ‘Oh, that explains it.’ There was a definite note of sarcasm in Marie’s voice. But she did, nevertheless, give Josse a smile; she had always been fond of him.
    ‘Josse should not have called Theophania a— called her what he did,’ his brother Honoré said piously. ‘It was very rude. And very inaccurate.’
    Acelin, furious all over again at the insult to his wife, made a choking sound.
    ‘Sorry,’ Josse said quickly, before Acelin could get going on a renewed bout of self-righteous indignation. ‘It just slipped out.’
    ‘What did you call her, Josse?’ Marie whispered, while the two youngest brothers were nodding and agreeing about Josse’s lack of respect. ‘Acelin wouldn’t tell me, and Theophania threatened to go into hysterics when I asked her.’
    ‘I’m afraid I called her a bitch,’ Josse admitted. ‘I’m very ashamed of myself, Marie. I’m thinking of going to market and buying