She thought of Jamie’s midnight-blue eyes… and then of how the hard muscles of his stomach felt under her fingertips.
Unappealing might not be strong enough.
“The potion must make him repulsive. Repugnant. Abhorrent.”
The old woman gave a high-pitched cackle. “If one medicine does its work, dearie, you’ll not need the other. So which is it you want,” she said, chortling and waggling her head from side to side, “to prevent the bedding or just the begetting?”
“This one is for a friend,” Linnet snapped. This was not entirely a lie; the queen could use a dose to keep her from Edmund Beaufort.
The old woman wiped her eyes on her dingy apron. “Tell your ‘friend’ to confess to the priest and stop fornicating with a married man.”
“He is not married,” Linnet said, growing more annoyed.
“All the same, ’tis the work of the devil, and I’ll not do it. I am a God-fearing woman, I am.” Her head bobbed, and she added in an undertone, “Unlike some I know.”
The woman groaned as she leaned down to lift a large cloth bag onto the table that held her weights and measures. “I’ll get the wild carrot seeds for you.”
“Let me help you with that,” Linnet said, rushing over to lift the bag for her.
“Ah, you’re a good girl,” the woman said. “Not like that other highborn lady what come here.”
“Who was that?”
“If I’d known she meant to use that love potion on a Lancaster—and a married one at that,” the woman said, ignoring Linnet’s question, “I swear by the bones of Saint Peter, I’d never have given it to her.”
“A Lancaster? Which one?” Linnet asked.
The woman shook her head. “I can see warning you about curiosity a second time is a waste of my breath. ’Tis in your nature, just as evil is in others.”
Linnet disregarded the shiver that went up her spine and leaned across the table on her elbows. “Come, tell me. Who did she give the potion to?”
“Never say where you heard it.” The old woman glanced toward the door, then said in a raspy whisper, “She used it on Gloucester himself, to take him from that foreign wife of his. May God forgive me.”
Linnet sucked in her breath. “You mean Eleanor Cobham?”
“Aye. She’s a bad’un, I tell you. Her and that priest who follows her like death.”
She motioned for Linnet to lean closer. “Then she comes back, asking for the other kind, same as you. ’Tis a dark art, I tell her, but she don’t care. She’s one who wants what she wants.”
“What did she do when you refused her?”
The woman began scooping wild carrot seeds from the large bag into a small one. “I hear she went to Margery Jourdemayne.”
“So this Margery can make a potion that renders a man repulsive?”
The old woman fixed Linnet with her bulging eyes. “Put that thought out of your head. Better to fornicate with that married man of yours than dance with the devil.”
“I told you, he is not married—”
“But he ain’t married to you either, now is he, dearie?”
Linnet had nothing to say to that.
“You can be sure I never taught that sort of magic to Margery when she was my apprentice.” As she put another scoop of wild carrot seeds into the small bag, she mumbled, “Sorcery! Consorting with the devil!”
Linnet leaned back. “Surely not.”
“Just mind you don’t cross either of them two women,” the old woman said as she tied the bag closed with her gnarled fingers. “Birds of a feather—and they are sharp-beaked ravens who would pick eyes from the dead.”
