He turned, then, to let the steaming water play over his back and shoulders now thickly call used from bearing the weight of a cuirass. He silently mused on.
“Well, at least our northern marches are secure—anyway, secure as they’ve ever been, considering the temper and endless feuds of the Borderers. James of Scotland not only doesn’t want any more war with us, he’s willing to send unsecured hostages for his continued good conduct. Too, Hal of York says that in addition to offering Arthur his only child as a wife, James’s emissary keeps obliquely inquiring whether Arthur might be willing to send part of his army to Scotland to help put down a covey of rebellious lairds.
“And I doubt we’ll see much of the Irish, for a while, what with the hot little civil war—five-sided, last I heard!—the High King’s got on his bloody hands. If we can put stock in our chubby Bar6n Melchoro, no Portuguese will be back. But there are still the French and the Spanish, and you can bet that Rome will be hiring another army and another captain, come campaigning weather. Old Count Hereszko will be passing the word among his colleagues that we’re a tough nut to crack, but that won’t faze the condotfieri, of course; each one of them thinks he’s a better captain than any other, so they’ll just put his defeat down to his senility . . . and jack up the price to whatever the Church is willing to pay.
“But the Church dislikes spending money on wars and soldiers to fight them and Wolfie says that, if it appears that the English Crusade is going to continue to drain the Papal treasury at the rate last year’s campaignings did, it’s more than likely that the Pope will call off the Crusade and try to normalize relations with Arthur. If London falls, he says, and the Pretender and his harridan of a mother should happen to meet with fatal . . . ahh, ‘accidents’ before a new war season can get under way, it’s a near certainty that Rome will try to negotiate. God, I sure hope he’s right!”
The sound of the rushing water wakened Krystal Foster, slowly. She stretched once, deliciously, then snuggled back under the blanket, purring like a cat, her mind filled with thoughts of her husband.
There had been many times in the not-too-distant past (or was it future?) when she had thought she would never have either husband or child, as she trod the fine line between the insensate demands of mother, aunts and other relatives— “marry a nice, Jewish boy and settle down and start having babies; that’s what a girl is supposed to do with her life, Rebecca, that’s what makes life worthwhile”—and the gut knowledge that her baby brother would never willingly amount to a damn and so only her accomplishments would be available to salvage her beloved father’s pride.
In the eight years of pre-med and medical school, she had done her share of sleeping around, of course, and had soon come to the conclusion that damned few of the young men of her peer group were free of some sort of sexual hangup. She had started to wonder if the religious nuts were not correct in their vociferous assertions that American society was rotten to the core, hopelessly decadent and bound irrevocably for hell in a handcart, until she met Dan.
That was in her junior year of med school and, within two months of meeting, she and Dan Dershkowitz were sharing a tiny off-campus apartment In the beginning, he seemed the man of her dreams—tall, handsome, trim and athletic, highly intelligent and well-educated, urbane and charming, abrim with humanism. A native of Chicago, he was a psychiatric social worker in Baltimore and also taught a couple of evening classes each week at Krystal’s university.
It lasted for five glorious months and ended terribly, trau-matically, one lovely spring afternoon. Her last class of the day having been canceled in the unexpected absence of the professor, she had returned to the apartment two hours earlier than usual. As she climbed the stairs, she was already planning to call Dan at his office, cook him a fine meal, and have a wonderful early evening before again hitting the books.