“But no one follows the church’s guidance on this,” Jamie said, raising his hands into the air. “I doubt even men who are repulsed by their wives follow it, unless they are very, very old.”
“Celibacy within marriage is a great virtue.”
“ ’Tis not healthy for a man.” He was shocked at the very notion of it. “These silly rules do not come from God. They are made up by priests who dislike women—or who have no notion what they are asking a man to go without.”
Agnes’s face was flushed. “You criticize the judgment of men of God?”
They were having a real argument now.
Jamie took a deep breath. She was speaking from ignorance. Once she experienced “conjugal relations,” she was bound to change her mind.
“While the church encourages husbands to forgo their marital rights,” she said in a calmer voice, “it does permit the activity on more days than is necessary for procreation.”
Jamie remembered laughing about this with his friends. One long evening during a siege, they had attempted to count the prohibited days as they sat around their camp-fire drinking. They had stopped at three hundred.
He was not laughing now.
Agnes sniffed. “That is the church’s preference. A wife, however, is not permitted to refuse her husband.”
Just to be contrary, Jamie said, “Under the law, a wife may demand her conjugal rights as well.”
Agnes made a very unpleasant sound through her nose. “I shall have to discuss this with the abbess at length when next I see her.” She furrowed her brow, apparently lost in contemplation of sin and marital conjugation. “It seems unfair that I should be tainted by my husband’s sin if he is weak. And yet, it would be a sin to wish my husband would satisfy his carnal lust elsewhere.”
Jamie swallowed. “Avoidance of sin is the only reason you would not want your husband to lie with other women?”
She blinked several times, as if she was trying to puzzle through some great mystery. “What other reason could there be?”
“Time for us to return to the house.” He took her arm and started walking, determined not to think about what she had said.
As they crossed the field to the house, he felt as if stones weighed on his chest, making it hard to breathe.
Chapter Thirty-three
Linnet heard a knock on the front door, followed by her maid’s feet on the stairs. There was not one person in all of London she wished to see. When her maid appeared on the solar’s threshold, she held her breath, waiting to hear who it was.
Lizzie clenched her skirts and darted her eyes about the room. “A priest is here, m’lady. He says he must speak with you.”
Linnet wondered at her maid’s unease. Though she could not imagine why a cleric had come to see her, she could think of no harm in it. She revised her opinion when she went down and saw the black-robed man waiting outside the door. What did Eleanor Cobham’s clerk want with her?
“Father Hume.” She dipped her head slightly, but she did not invite him inside.
She had forgotten meeting him and Margery Jourdemayne on the stairs to the undercroft at Windsor almost as soon as it happened. The memory of it now made her uneasy. She’d never liked this sinister priest, who followed Eleanor like a shadow.
The priest glanced up and down the street before he spoke. “I have come to bring you a warning from a friend.”
Linnet raised her eyebrows. “Lady Eleanor considers herself my friend?”
“I did not say it was Lady Eleanor,” he said through tight lips.
So it was Lady Eleanor. “What is the warning my mysterious ‘friend’ wishes to give?”
“There are rumors traveling about the City that you are engaged in sorcery and witchcraft.”
“What?” Her hand went to her chest, and she was unable to keep the tremor of alarm from her voice. “I have heard nothing of this.”
“But others have heard the rumors. Powerful people. Men in the church,” the priest said, drawing out the last word.
Fear clawed at her belly. After Pomeroy accused her of killing her husband with sorcery, she had lived under the shadow of the accusation for months. She remembered how the villagers backed away and made the sign of the cross when her carriage passed. The memory of the black fear on their faces sent a frisson of terror up her spine.
