Read Janna Mysteries 1 & 2 Bindup for Free Online Page A

chance.’
    ‘I swear that tongue of yours has been sharpened by the devil!’ Eadgyth gave her daughter a good, hard shake. ‘Soon enough you will marry, have children, be happy. That’s the future I wish for you.’
    ‘And what about my wishes?’ Janna flashed. ‘I don’t want to marry, at least not yet.’
    ‘Why not? You are certainly old enough to wed. Far better a life with a good husband than the hard life we live here.’
    ‘I want something more than to become some man’s drudge and a nursemaid to his children.’
    ‘There’s much more to wedlock than that!’ Eadgyth retorted. Seeing her daughter blush, she added, ‘As well as bedgames, a good husband would give you security. Safely wed, you’d be both respectable and respected.’
    ‘And how would you know, Mother?’ Janna seized the opportunity Eadgyth had given her. ‘Were you ever safely wed? What was between you and my father? Why will you never speak of him? Are you ashamed of him, or is it your past that shames you?’
    ‘It is because of him that I would see you wed.’
    Janna read the pain in her mother’s eyes, but the devil snapped at her heels. She had to go on, to push for answers to the questions that would not go away. ‘Tell me about him, please,’ she begged.
    It wasn’t the first time she’d asked the question. Her father had died just before her birth, or so her mother had told her. Janna had often wondered if Eadgyth was telling the truth, or trying to cover the fact that she’d never been wed – that Janna’s birth, in fact, had been an accident. This thought nagged Janna like a sore tooth, but after she’d seen how talking about her father so distressed Eadgyth, she’d stopped asking after him. She knew anyway that Eadgyth never answered her questions. Nor did she now. She turned to her task, dismissing Janna with a brief, ‘See to the herbs, girl.’
    Frustrated and resentful, Janna stamped outside. Their garden was a small, awkwardly shaped piece of land that had come with the cottage because it didn’t fit in to the long strips of fields worked by the villeins. The hives that provided honey for her mother’s salves and potions were tucked into one corner. Janna was protective of her bees and took good care of them, for their honey was like liquid gold when silver was always in short supply. The bees lived in straw skeps, woven and crafted by Janna herself, and usually she stopped and talked to them, following a long tradition of telling them about the doings of the household. Today she did not take her usual comfort from the soothing buzz that marked their industry. Instead, she slapped angrily at a lone bee that circled close to her nose, and seethed with the injustice of being treated like a child when she no longer considered herself to be one.
    She stomped on past the dew pond that provided them with water, past rows of turnips, cabbages, leeks and broad beans that put food on their table, past bushes of alecost which they used to flavour ale, and past flax plants which were boiled into decoctions to ease various ailments, or stripped and woven into cloth.
    Janna looked beyond the neat lines of plants to the wattle fence that penned their two goats, Nellie and Gruff, along with Fussy, Greedy, Rusty and Laet, their hens. The goats bleated anxiously, reminding her that they still needed to be fed. She stooped over the clusters of herbs that formed the basis of her mother’s healing mixtures, forgetting her sulks for the moment as she concentrated on her task. She could not afford to make any mistakes if she wanted her mother to treat her like an adult, someone more fitting than Fulk to be her partner.
    First, Janna stripped off several leafy sprigs of tansy and put them in her scrip. It was a useful plant. The flowers made a fine golden dye, while the bitter, aromatic leaves served as a repellent for lice and fleas. Janna turned next to the fleshy leaves of houseleek and the other herbs her mother had