~BBW, Eating, Adventure, Romance, ~MWG - a tale of true love set in medieval times
Part I
“In the name of Mary, the holy mother of God, help us!"
Sir Colm shrugged his heavy leather cloak on and peered out of the tent into the dark and driving rain.
He saw a white-faced boy of seventeen or so, covered in mud and leading a horse that looked as exhausted as the swaying figure on its back. As he took in the scene, the rider let out a sigh and fell sideways. Sir Colm leapt to the rescue of the rider and found himself holding a young woman, soaked through and evidently faint from hunger and weariness. Her loose square-necked dress was slipping off her shoulders and revealing the top of her bosom, an effect which might have been interesting had there been any flesh covering her ribcage and collarbone.
"Well, come in, stranger," said Sir Colm, carrying his meagre burden into the tent. The boy tied his horse to a post and followed him. Once the girl was laid down on a bench, Sir Colm demanded to know where they had come from.
"We seek sanctuary in the castle. We have travelled many miles, and, as you see, the lady can go no further. I am afraid she will become ill if we spend this wild night out of doors, and we have not eaten for two days."
The boy was well-spoken, and evidently the now reviving girl was no mere serf's daughter either; her gown was plain and woolen but finely woven, and there was embroidery around the square neck and the edge of the fashionably ample skirt. Her soaked hair was fair and finely braided, her skin pale and unblemished – and a little blue from the cold.
"It would be inhuman not to offer you a night's shelter," agreed Sir Colm. "But there are things you should know. You must have seen soldiers encamped around this castle. We are under siege. How did you get within the outer wall? Come to that, how did you get to the outer wall at all, through Sir Bruse's men?"
"The rain dulls all sound, and I had muffled the horse's bridle so that it should make no noise. Your guard at the postern gate is not reliable, Sir; he was around the corner kissing a woman, perhaps a kitchen girl, and did not see us come through."
Sir Colm's face darkened at this information.
"It is as well that you were not a company of Sir Bruse's men, then. Or perhaps you are a spy, sent ahead… No matter. If you come within this castle, you do not leave again. We will shelter you and offer you food – we have plenty. The Seigneur always keeps a good larder and we have livestock and some crops within the walls. But until we know clear you are not a spy, you stay. If you wish to leave now, we will accompany you to the enemy camp. Rest assured that the postern gate will be guarded differently from now on."
"We will be glad to stay in the castle," said the boy. "I assure you that we are not spies. My name is Roland, younger son of Jacques, liegeman to the Seigneur of Avan. My older brother is a knight. This is the Lady Alys, youngest daughter to the Seigneur and my betrothed. "
There was bravado in his voice as he said this.
"Well!" Sir Colm knew there was more to this story, but he had no time to go into it now. He was a busy man, as the commander of the castle's defense.
"I am not sure you do not deserve hanging for the kidnap of the Seigneur's daughter, but it is not up to me to condemn you. Our own Seigneur is not here; we can deal with you when he returns, if we live so long. Sym! Take these two to the castle and see that they are taken care of. Keep an eye on them."
Once he saw the couple in the light, Sym realized they were older than he had first thought. Roland was about twenty, but looked boyish because of his narrow frame and long gangling arms and legs. The lady was a little younger, quite tall, but so thin that her body was like a twelve-year-old child's, her breasts hardly swelling under her bodice. She was pale as parchment and still looked close to fainting. Both were soaked through and plastered with mud from their ride through the mire. Sym called for hot water, and led them to a tower room where a fire was laid ready.
"You can dry yourselves here," he said, setting a spark from his flint and steel to the kindling. "Do you have any dry clothes?" Roland assented, indicating a leather-wrapped bundle, and Sym left them alone in the chamber.
The Seigneur of Avan had had seven daughters before managing to produce a son, and Alys was the youngest. Now that the succession was secure, he occupied himself with marrying his girls advantageously, which became more difficult as time went on. He was a demanding man, and expected his sons-in-law to look after his interests even to the detriment of their own. Worse, the amount of money he felt able to afford as a dowry declined with each daughter, and with five already married, he had matched one with every noble family in the region. Therefore his youngest daughters, Cecilie and Alys, had reached the ages of nineteen and seventeen without anyone having offered to marry them at all.
Cecilie was considered a very pretty girl, who would have made an excellent wife if only her father wasn't so difficult. She had fair curls, sparkling blue eyes and a curvy figure, with tenderly plump little hands and rose-petal cheeks. She was also lively and charming. As she reached nineteen with no lordly suitors in sight, a brave young herald announced to her father that he was smitten with her beauty and despite his lack of worldly wealth (he was a nobleman's younger son) he dared to ask for her hand. The Seigneur granted his request (grudgingly, but nineteen was a bit old and he didn't want to be stuck with a spinster to keep). Cecilie was overjoyed.
No such escape seemed to be in store for Alys. The Seigneur doubted if men ever noticed her; she was always off in a corner with her nose stuck in a book of romances, or cradling her lute and plucking out some silly tune or other.
“That is what comes of teaching girls to read and letting them learn music,” he mused to himself. “I should have stood up to their mother and kept her to sewing and dancing – ladylike accomplishments.
“Oh, well, if I must have one spinster daughter it might as well be Alys,” he muttered..
Unlike her sisters, she wasn't pretty at all, he thought; so sallow, skinny and sharp-featured, nothing for a man to get hold of. And she seemed to be wasting away even more these days. No wonder none of his knights fancied her. Well, there were always convents if he couldn't find Alys a husband He dismissed her from his mind and went hunting.
Little did the Seigneur know that there was a reason why Alys seemed thinner every day (and nor would he have cared greatly if he had known). Alys was in love. The herald to whom Cecilie was betrothed was in the habit of sending a troubadour to sing love-songs to her every morning, and as the girls shared a bedchamber Alys saw him too. He was a tall thin young man who played the lute as she did, and as the girls stood leaning out of the casement to listen, Alys imagined that he was singing to her, not to Cecilie. Her romantic soul thrilled to the courtly lyrics and his beautiful voice and playing.
The troubadour was Roland, and he was indeed singing to Alys. In truth he was not very sure which girl was Cecilie, and on the first day he had hoped she was the girl who was listening to his music with rapt attention. But by the fourth day, he hoped she was the other, the plumper girl with curly hair, because he knew Cecilie was betrothed and he had lost his heart to the slender Alys and her dreamy grey eyes. He picked out his best love songs for her.
Despite his natural shyness, he began to haunt her father's great hall in the hopes of seeing her, and was thrilled to spot her watching him from where she sat with her lute in a corner, playing a tune of her own composition. He heard her father calling her away, addressing her as "Alys", and his heart leapt. He watched her put her lute away in a chest, wrapped in a silken cloth, and as the hall emptied quickly took a scrap of parchment and composed this:
It was not exactly his best verse, but he hoped it would serve. As he opened the chest and interwove the paper between the strings of the lute, so that it would not drop out, he suddenly saw a girl behind him and dropped the lid of the chest with a bang. It was Cecilie. She grinned in a friendly way, and asked him what he was doing. Caught in the act, he had no option but to confess.
"You are a silly fool," said Cecilie briskly. "Leaving a note between the strings of a lute sounds like something out of a romance. People will see it. Now if you give it to me, I'll pass it on to Alys in private."
She tucked the note down her bosom.
"I knew something was on her mind. She's been daydreaming lately – starts if you ask her a question – and at meals she hardly eats, just pushes the food around. What's your name? Roland?"
She was off in a swirl of forest-green silk before Roland could say that he hadn't actually met Alys yet.
Alys was standing at her chamber window with a book in her hand – Ovid's Metamorphoses – but she wasn't reading it. She was dreaming of the tall, dark troubadour and wishing it were morning. She had seen him earlier in the hall, and had imagined he might be looking at her.
Cecilie bounced into the room and slammed the thick oak door.
"You are a sly cat, Alys," she laughed.
Alys nearly jumped out of her skin and demanded to know what Cecilie was talking about.
"Your intrigue with that skinny troubadour Roland! I've just caught him leaving you a note between your lute-strings. He seems utterly smitten, I must say."
Cecilie fished between her plump breasts and retrieved the verse. Alys read it in wonder, noting that the initial letters of the lines spelled out ALYS – there could be no mistake! It was as though he had read her mind – he was really singing to her? She tucked the note into her sleeve (if she'd put it down her own bodice it would soon have fallen to the floor, as she had nothing to hold it there). Alys revealed to her sister her feelings for the troubadour, whom she had not yet spoken to, and begged Cecilie to help her.
Roland, returned to his mother's house, received a note from by a messenger sent by Cecilie the next day. My father hunts tomorrow, it read. Alys will be on the castle parapet an hour before noon.
At the appointed time he set out, and saw her pale green dress fluttering on the parapet. His heart quickened and he ran to the castle.
In this way Alys and Roland became acquainted over the next two months. Their imaginary passion conceived for an ideal figure quickly developed into something real – they had music in common, and both loved stories and romances. Roland lived with his widowed mother – his father had been killed on a crusade when he was three, and he had grown up gentle and shy. Other boys had scorned him as one who would rather sit indoors with his lute than join them in play-fights, and it had swiftly become apparent that he was not robust enough to make a good squire, much less a knight like his older brother. In Alys he had found someone who did not scorn his gentle nature; she too was quiet, a natural effect of having grown up with six noisy and talkative sisters.
Though Alys and Roland were happy in their brief moments together, it made the rest of their lives harder to bear. As Roland was not nobly born, the son of a mere squire, he could never hope to marry her. He might remain her lover, in the courtly sense; that is, devote himself to her but never hope for consummation.
Alys meanwhile had discovered that though she loved reading romances, they fell short of her feelings for Roland. She wanted to be his, utterly; she wanted to marry him. As summer drew on she began to despair, as she did not see how they could ever be together; she could not eat, and quickly became hollow-eyed and sallow. Her thick straight blonde hair looked lifeless, and what little flesh she had fell away, leaving her dresses loose on her. She looked like a living skeleton. Roland was horrified to see what was happening to her, and determined to ask Cecilie what to do.
That young lady was having second thoughts about encouraging the romance. It had been exciting at first, but she felt that Roland was making Alys unhappy, and she told him so.
"You have nothing to hope for here," Cecilie stated definitely. "My father will never let you marry her. He made enough fuss about my betrothed, and he is nobly born, though a younger son."
"I shall leave, then. Perhaps she will forget me, if she thinks I am faithless," said Roland, although it was breaking his heart to say it. "As a troubadour, I can get a place at another lord's court, or even wander the roads as a joglar if I must. I shall never break faith with Alys till the day I die, but if you think it would be better to go, I will."
The Metamorphosis
By Charisa
By Charisa
Part I
“In the name of Mary, the holy mother of God, help us!"
Sir Colm shrugged his heavy leather cloak on and peered out of the tent into the dark and driving rain.
He saw a white-faced boy of seventeen or so, covered in mud and leading a horse that looked as exhausted as the swaying figure on its back. As he took in the scene, the rider let out a sigh and fell sideways. Sir Colm leapt to the rescue of the rider and found himself holding a young woman, soaked through and evidently faint from hunger and weariness. Her loose square-necked dress was slipping off her shoulders and revealing the top of her bosom, an effect which might have been interesting had there been any flesh covering her ribcage and collarbone.
"Well, come in, stranger," said Sir Colm, carrying his meagre burden into the tent. The boy tied his horse to a post and followed him. Once the girl was laid down on a bench, Sir Colm demanded to know where they had come from.
"We seek sanctuary in the castle. We have travelled many miles, and, as you see, the lady can go no further. I am afraid she will become ill if we spend this wild night out of doors, and we have not eaten for two days."
The boy was well-spoken, and evidently the now reviving girl was no mere serf's daughter either; her gown was plain and woolen but finely woven, and there was embroidery around the square neck and the edge of the fashionably ample skirt. Her soaked hair was fair and finely braided, her skin pale and unblemished – and a little blue from the cold.
"It would be inhuman not to offer you a night's shelter," agreed Sir Colm. "But there are things you should know. You must have seen soldiers encamped around this castle. We are under siege. How did you get within the outer wall? Come to that, how did you get to the outer wall at all, through Sir Bruse's men?"
"The rain dulls all sound, and I had muffled the horse's bridle so that it should make no noise. Your guard at the postern gate is not reliable, Sir; he was around the corner kissing a woman, perhaps a kitchen girl, and did not see us come through."
Sir Colm's face darkened at this information.
"It is as well that you were not a company of Sir Bruse's men, then. Or perhaps you are a spy, sent ahead… No matter. If you come within this castle, you do not leave again. We will shelter you and offer you food – we have plenty. The Seigneur always keeps a good larder and we have livestock and some crops within the walls. But until we know clear you are not a spy, you stay. If you wish to leave now, we will accompany you to the enemy camp. Rest assured that the postern gate will be guarded differently from now on."
"We will be glad to stay in the castle," said the boy. "I assure you that we are not spies. My name is Roland, younger son of Jacques, liegeman to the Seigneur of Avan. My older brother is a knight. This is the Lady Alys, youngest daughter to the Seigneur and my betrothed. "
There was bravado in his voice as he said this.
"Well!" Sir Colm knew there was more to this story, but he had no time to go into it now. He was a busy man, as the commander of the castle's defense.
"I am not sure you do not deserve hanging for the kidnap of the Seigneur's daughter, but it is not up to me to condemn you. Our own Seigneur is not here; we can deal with you when he returns, if we live so long. Sym! Take these two to the castle and see that they are taken care of. Keep an eye on them."
Once he saw the couple in the light, Sym realized they were older than he had first thought. Roland was about twenty, but looked boyish because of his narrow frame and long gangling arms and legs. The lady was a little younger, quite tall, but so thin that her body was like a twelve-year-old child's, her breasts hardly swelling under her bodice. She was pale as parchment and still looked close to fainting. Both were soaked through and plastered with mud from their ride through the mire. Sym called for hot water, and led them to a tower room where a fire was laid ready.
"You can dry yourselves here," he said, setting a spark from his flint and steel to the kindling. "Do you have any dry clothes?" Roland assented, indicating a leather-wrapped bundle, and Sym left them alone in the chamber.
The Seigneur of Avan had had seven daughters before managing to produce a son, and Alys was the youngest. Now that the succession was secure, he occupied himself with marrying his girls advantageously, which became more difficult as time went on. He was a demanding man, and expected his sons-in-law to look after his interests even to the detriment of their own. Worse, the amount of money he felt able to afford as a dowry declined with each daughter, and with five already married, he had matched one with every noble family in the region. Therefore his youngest daughters, Cecilie and Alys, had reached the ages of nineteen and seventeen without anyone having offered to marry them at all.
Cecilie was considered a very pretty girl, who would have made an excellent wife if only her father wasn't so difficult. She had fair curls, sparkling blue eyes and a curvy figure, with tenderly plump little hands and rose-petal cheeks. She was also lively and charming. As she reached nineteen with no lordly suitors in sight, a brave young herald announced to her father that he was smitten with her beauty and despite his lack of worldly wealth (he was a nobleman's younger son) he dared to ask for her hand. The Seigneur granted his request (grudgingly, but nineteen was a bit old and he didn't want to be stuck with a spinster to keep). Cecilie was overjoyed.
No such escape seemed to be in store for Alys. The Seigneur doubted if men ever noticed her; she was always off in a corner with her nose stuck in a book of romances, or cradling her lute and plucking out some silly tune or other.
“That is what comes of teaching girls to read and letting them learn music,” he mused to himself. “I should have stood up to their mother and kept her to sewing and dancing – ladylike accomplishments.
“Oh, well, if I must have one spinster daughter it might as well be Alys,” he muttered..
Unlike her sisters, she wasn't pretty at all, he thought; so sallow, skinny and sharp-featured, nothing for a man to get hold of. And she seemed to be wasting away even more these days. No wonder none of his knights fancied her. Well, there were always convents if he couldn't find Alys a husband He dismissed her from his mind and went hunting.
Little did the Seigneur know that there was a reason why Alys seemed thinner every day (and nor would he have cared greatly if he had known). Alys was in love. The herald to whom Cecilie was betrothed was in the habit of sending a troubadour to sing love-songs to her every morning, and as the girls shared a bedchamber Alys saw him too. He was a tall thin young man who played the lute as she did, and as the girls stood leaning out of the casement to listen, Alys imagined that he was singing to her, not to Cecilie. Her romantic soul thrilled to the courtly lyrics and his beautiful voice and playing.
The troubadour was Roland, and he was indeed singing to Alys. In truth he was not very sure which girl was Cecilie, and on the first day he had hoped she was the girl who was listening to his music with rapt attention. But by the fourth day, he hoped she was the other, the plumper girl with curly hair, because he knew Cecilie was betrothed and he had lost his heart to the slender Alys and her dreamy grey eyes. He picked out his best love songs for her.
Despite his natural shyness, he began to haunt her father's great hall in the hopes of seeing her, and was thrilled to spot her watching him from where she sat with her lute in a corner, playing a tune of her own composition. He heard her father calling her away, addressing her as "Alys", and his heart leapt. He watched her put her lute away in a chest, wrapped in a silken cloth, and as the hall emptied quickly took a scrap of parchment and composed this:
Angel of celestial music,
Listen to one whose heart is true…
Your beauty holds my soul captive;
Soul to soul, I sing only to you.
Listen to one whose heart is true…
Your beauty holds my soul captive;
Soul to soul, I sing only to you.
It was not exactly his best verse, but he hoped it would serve. As he opened the chest and interwove the paper between the strings of the lute, so that it would not drop out, he suddenly saw a girl behind him and dropped the lid of the chest with a bang. It was Cecilie. She grinned in a friendly way, and asked him what he was doing. Caught in the act, he had no option but to confess.
"You are a silly fool," said Cecilie briskly. "Leaving a note between the strings of a lute sounds like something out of a romance. People will see it. Now if you give it to me, I'll pass it on to Alys in private."
She tucked the note down her bosom.
"I knew something was on her mind. She's been daydreaming lately – starts if you ask her a question – and at meals she hardly eats, just pushes the food around. What's your name? Roland?"
She was off in a swirl of forest-green silk before Roland could say that he hadn't actually met Alys yet.
Alys was standing at her chamber window with a book in her hand – Ovid's Metamorphoses – but she wasn't reading it. She was dreaming of the tall, dark troubadour and wishing it were morning. She had seen him earlier in the hall, and had imagined he might be looking at her.
Cecilie bounced into the room and slammed the thick oak door.
"You are a sly cat, Alys," she laughed.
Alys nearly jumped out of her skin and demanded to know what Cecilie was talking about.
"Your intrigue with that skinny troubadour Roland! I've just caught him leaving you a note between your lute-strings. He seems utterly smitten, I must say."
Cecilie fished between her plump breasts and retrieved the verse. Alys read it in wonder, noting that the initial letters of the lines spelled out ALYS – there could be no mistake! It was as though he had read her mind – he was really singing to her? She tucked the note into her sleeve (if she'd put it down her own bodice it would soon have fallen to the floor, as she had nothing to hold it there). Alys revealed to her sister her feelings for the troubadour, whom she had not yet spoken to, and begged Cecilie to help her.
Roland, returned to his mother's house, received a note from by a messenger sent by Cecilie the next day. My father hunts tomorrow, it read. Alys will be on the castle parapet an hour before noon.
At the appointed time he set out, and saw her pale green dress fluttering on the parapet. His heart quickened and he ran to the castle.
In this way Alys and Roland became acquainted over the next two months. Their imaginary passion conceived for an ideal figure quickly developed into something real – they had music in common, and both loved stories and romances. Roland lived with his widowed mother – his father had been killed on a crusade when he was three, and he had grown up gentle and shy. Other boys had scorned him as one who would rather sit indoors with his lute than join them in play-fights, and it had swiftly become apparent that he was not robust enough to make a good squire, much less a knight like his older brother. In Alys he had found someone who did not scorn his gentle nature; she too was quiet, a natural effect of having grown up with six noisy and talkative sisters.
Though Alys and Roland were happy in their brief moments together, it made the rest of their lives harder to bear. As Roland was not nobly born, the son of a mere squire, he could never hope to marry her. He might remain her lover, in the courtly sense; that is, devote himself to her but never hope for consummation.
Alys meanwhile had discovered that though she loved reading romances, they fell short of her feelings for Roland. She wanted to be his, utterly; she wanted to marry him. As summer drew on she began to despair, as she did not see how they could ever be together; she could not eat, and quickly became hollow-eyed and sallow. Her thick straight blonde hair looked lifeless, and what little flesh she had fell away, leaving her dresses loose on her. She looked like a living skeleton. Roland was horrified to see what was happening to her, and determined to ask Cecilie what to do.
That young lady was having second thoughts about encouraging the romance. It had been exciting at first, but she felt that Roland was making Alys unhappy, and she told him so.
"You have nothing to hope for here," Cecilie stated definitely. "My father will never let you marry her. He made enough fuss about my betrothed, and he is nobly born, though a younger son."
"I shall leave, then. Perhaps she will forget me, if she thinks I am faithless," said Roland, although it was breaking his heart to say it. "As a troubadour, I can get a place at another lord's court, or even wander the roads as a joglar if I must. I shall never break faith with Alys till the day I die, but if you think it would be better to go, I will."
