The Running Vixen tor-2 Page 12

  Judith contemplated her stepdaughter, or what could be seen of her through the screening swathes of tangled red hair. She was whimpering softly now, and Judith judged the pain of Warrin’s blow to be the least of her agony.

  ‘Adam, when you’re dressed, I think it would be advisable if you went below to wait for Guyon,’ she said in a gentler voice, and to Heulwen, ‘Come, child, calm yourself. No one yet died of shame.’ Under the weight of Judith’s stare, Adam reluctantly relinquished his hold on Heulwen and sought out his clothes. Stony-faced, the maid picked up his crumpled shirt from the floor and handed it to him at arm’s length. Awkward in the uneasy silence, he fumbled into it and struggled with chausses, hose and tunic.

  ‘I suppose,’ Judith said wearily, ‘that I should have seen it coming.’ And then on an angry, exasperated note, ‘If you wanted each other this badly, why in God’s sweet name did you not speak to me or Guyon!’

  Adam stamped into one of his boots, then hunted around the room until he found its partner half buried beneath a trailing length of creased sheet. ‘I was going to if you had been here this afternoon, but…well, the wain came before the ox.’

  ‘Not just the wain but an entire baggage supply of trouble!’ Judith said tartly as he pulled on the other boot and began latching his belt.

  Renard returned with the usquebaugh flask in his hand. ‘Papa’s just ridden in,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘Good luck, Adam. I don’t know what he’ll do to you when he sees the state of his shield.’

  ‘Renard!’ Judith’s tone was peremptory.

  He gave the flask to Helgund and came to the bed, where he squatted lithely on his haunches to peer under and within Heulwen’s curtaining hair. ‘Come on, Helly,’ he coaxed. ‘I’d have hated it to happen to me, but de Mortimer’s been deserving a kick in his arrogance for so long now that it’s a pleasure to see him get it. I’d rather have Adam for a brother-in-law any day than that conceited pea-brain…All right, Mama, I’m going.’ Grinning, less than contrite, he sauntered out of the door.

  ‘You’d better go down too,’ Judith said sternly to Adam.

  He swallowed and nodded, but his feet drew him not to the door, but to stand and then crouch before Heulwen as Renard had done. He took her hands between his. ‘Heulwen, look at me,’ he pleaded.

  She shook her head. He released one of her hands and parted her hair to expose her face. For an instant her eyes met his, and they were full of a furious misery before she turned her head aside.

  ‘Heulwen, please. ’

  ‘Adam, go!’ Judith snapped. ‘Can’t you see that she’s in no fit state to deal with herself, let alone the burden you are trying to set on her?’

  He bit his lip and stood straight, desiring somehow to set the thing to rights and knowing that what was right by his code was not necessarily right by Heulwen’s.

  Chapter 12

  Guyon looked across the gaming board at the young man seated opposite, and suppressed with difficulty the urge to lay violent hands on him and throw him out of the house. It was a gut reaction. Adam de Lacey sometimes looked so much like his father that Guyon would find himself forgetting that physical similarity was the only resemblance.

  He dropped his gaze to the jet and ivory counters and nudged one gently across the squares, reminding himself that life, unlike draughts, was mostly marked out in subtle shades of grey. ‘I do not know what to say to you,’ he admitted. ‘A part of me is so angry that I could kill you here and now without remorse, but only a part and that the lesser. I can see how it happened and how it was drawn out of all proportion, but Christ alone knows how long it will take to unravel all the tangled threads and sew them into some semblance of order — and I’m not talking about my wife’s tapestry silks.’ He sighed heavily. ‘It goes pride-deep, Adam, and you’ve done the equivalent of striking the de Mortimer family in the face with a rotten fish. Are you quite certain of your facts?’

  Adam’s eyes brightened. ‘You saw the Welsh lad’s reaction for yourself when he laid eyes on de Mortimer, and your father was with me when I received from him the full tale and will bear me out. The lad was not lying or mistaken, I would stake my life on it.’

  ‘You will probably have to,’ Guyon replied grimly: ‘trial by combat is almost a certainty. Warrin’s not going to admit to the crime, and he’s got a very personal grudge now, hasn’t he?’ He shook his head at Adam. ‘Heulwen knows how to pick husbands,’ he grimaced, ‘all three of them.’

  Adam felt the hostility emanating from Guyon. He was not really surprised. Guyon had shown remarkable restraint thus far over what threatened to develop into a full-blown scandal and had caused a serious rift with the de Mortimer family, formerly close allies to Ravenstow. Now and then, like steam escaping from a lidded cauldron, a spurt of anger was bound to erupt.

  ‘If I could undo it, believe me I would,’ he said.

  ‘Even down to retracting your request to the King?’ Guyon arched a sardonic brow.

  Adam’s eyes kindled with a harder, amber light. ‘I’m sorry if I went to him first, but I did not know how much time I had, and I had to stop her from pledging herself to de Mortimer.’

  A small, uncomfortable silence fell. Into it Guyon said, ‘It will break Hugh de Mortimer if his son is proven guilty.’

  ‘Perhaps you would rather I retracted the accusation, gave up Heulwen and sailed on the first ship for Outremer!’ Adam said, angrily as he heard Guyon’s ambivalence.

  ‘Perhaps I would,’ Guyon snorted. ‘But it wouldn’t be justice, would it?’ And then he clenched his fist and crashed it down on the board, sending the counters leaping awry. ‘Christ, Adam, why didn’t you ask me for Heulwen before all this blew up in our faces like a barrel of boiling pitch!’

  ‘Because I knew she wouldn’t have me!’ Adam retorted bitterly. ‘She wants a cold-blooded contract of convenience, not a love match.’

  Guyon studied him, and gradually his fierce expression softened and he sighed. ‘It is not to be wondered at after the way Ralf treated her. She loved him so hard it almost broke her when he took off in pursuit of other women.’

  ‘I don’t need other women,’ Adam said intensely. ‘I never have, except as a salve to ease the wound of not having her. I know we have not had the best beginning, but God willing I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to her.’

  Guyon made a rude sound. ‘And a fine martyr you will make!’ he scoffed. ‘As I have heard the tale, it was only half your fault. Granted, it was a serious breach of courtesy to go above uninvited, but I suppose your news warranted it, and Heulwen didn’t scream rape, did she? If one of the maids did hear her cry out, it was certainly not for help.’

  Adam cleared his throat and looked down at his hands as if their conformation was of great interest. He remembered her undulating beneath him, the sounds he had dammed against her mouth with his own as the last fragment of sanity was consumed in the conflagration. Was it truly no more than a carnal matter of lust?

  Guyon shook his head. ‘Christ knows, Adam, for I do not. You escort that sharp-clawed termagant across Europe, rescue her from a handful of dangers, weave your way with diplomacy through the courts of barons, princes and kings, only to bloody your nose on something as simple as this!’

  ‘Perhaps because it’s been too simple for too long,’ Adam said wearily, and raised the hands he had been studying to dry-wash his face. ‘I haven’t the ability to fathom it any more.’

  Heulwen watched her father remove his thick outdoor cloak and pace to the brazier to warm his hands. Two rings winked in the light: one set with a ruby, the other with intaglio. Were it not for the need to dress in finery at court, they would have remained buried at the bottom of a casket so seldom opened that spiders had been known to weave their webs across its lock before now. Heulwen put down her piece of sewing, which was only a pretence anyway, and came to his side.

  With a brief, tired smile, her father gently tugged one of her braids. It was a gesture she remembered a hundred times
from childhood. It had many meanings — teasing, affectionate, conspiratorial or warning, but never anything less than love. Tears filled her eyes and she flung herself into the haven of his arms and wept against the breast of his scarlet court robe. ‘I’m sorry, Papa. If I’d known the trouble it would cause, I’d never have done it — I thought Adam was going to marry elsewhere — I thought that just once it wouldn’t matter.’

  ‘Hush, cariadferch, hush, you’ll drench my robe and shrink it,’ he said, his lips at her temple. ‘I thought you were supposed to be lying down. Judith said she had given you poppy in wine and that you were best left to sleep.’

  ‘I tipped it into the rushes when she wasn’t looking,’ Heulwen confessed. Sniffing, she pushed herself out of his arms and looked up into his face. ‘I didn’t want to sleep until you returned from court; I had to know what happened.’

  ‘You would have done better to drink the wine,’ he said, and wandered from the brazier to his shield to examine its raw, splintered surface.

  ‘Papa?’ She swallowed, feeling frightened.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ he growled. ‘Warrin’s fast, I’ll give him that. He drew first blood: accused Adam of maligning his good name by a false claim of murder, and of deceiving and dishonouring you. It shifts the onus to prove the claim from his shoulders on to Adam’s, and because Warrin brought it into the open of his own will, it diminishes the suspicion against him. The King was quite content to agree to a trial by combat and I’m a cross-eyed leper if I don’t know the reason why.’

  ‘Why?’ Heulwen was driven to ask, feeling sick.

  ‘A fight to the death is going to make excellent entertainment to follow up our swearing to Matilda. It will take men’s minds off their anger at having to swear to a woman. It’s going to ease their frustration to see spilled blood, preferably Adam’s, as he was one of the men responsible for bringing Matilda to us in the first place. Tomorrow’s the swearing, and the trial’s to take place the day after.’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ Heulwen whispered, appalled.

  ‘No, just expedient. You can’t blame Henry for using it to his advantage. This reckoning between Adam and Warrin has been coming for more than ten years.’ Guyon shrugged. ‘It’s not just over you, Heulwen, you’re only the spark that ignited the dry tinder.’ He removed the rings from his fingers and tossed them on the clothing chest.

  Heulwen sat down again, her hands pressed to her mouth. Guyon looked at her with troubled eyes. He could see the imprint of himself stamped upon her features, mingled with those of her mother. Her hair grew the same way as Rhosyn’s, and the timbre of her voice was an exact, poignant reminder of the woman he had lost to the savagery of Walter de Lacey. And Adam de Lacey was Walter’s son. Guyon cast that thought from his mind. Adam was no more like Walter de Lacey than a lump of flawed glass was like a polished jewel.

  ‘Child. ’ he began softly, and crouched beside her.

  ‘I’m all right, Papa.’ Tear-tracks streaked her bruised face as she stared beyond him into some unpleasant distance. ‘Only I think I’d like that poppy in wine now.’

  Chapter 13

  The Empress Matilda’s slender body was encased in a tunic and gown of royal purple, trimmed with ermine tips at cuff and knotted hem. Apart from the colour, she might have been an effigy. Adam set his own hands between hers and received an icy kiss of peace in return for his oath of loyalty to her and the future heirs of her body. Unsmiling, tepid, she took his fealty as her due, her expression remote, declining to acknowledge how many times over she owed him her life. Had she permitted herself to smile, she would have been attractive. Beneath her gauze veil, her braids were a bright brown, and her eyes were of an arresting lake-water blue, challenging every man who dared to look into them. On all sides of the great hall, the high barons and bishops of the land stood as witnesses to each other’s swearing: Bigod, Ferrers, de Clare, de Blundeville, Salisbury, Winchester, Canterbury. Adam stepped back and another lord took his place and swore allegiance.

  Henry was smiling in lieu of his daughter, not just a flimsy parchment smile to put a good grace on the proceedings, but one of deep and genuine satisfaction. Adam supposed that it was indeed gratifying to him that his barons had agreed to acknowledge Matilda as his successor, which was in part due to the tireless persuasion of Robert of Gloucester. But if they had been brought to swear, then so had Henry — that he would not seek a foreign husband for his daughter without the baronial consent. But then what had oaths of that kind ever meant to the King, except the buying of time to break them later? Adam thought. Henry would marry his daughter to whomsoever he chose; that smile said so.

  The celebration feast commenced with the pomp and ceremony befitting such a grand occasion and the presence of so many important men. Adam, as a minor tenant-in-chief, was relegated to a place at the far end of the hall, for which he was grateful. He had no great fondness for these gatherings with their rife hypocrisy, everyone trying to outdo each other and glancing sidelong to see if they had succeeded. There was the back-stabbing, there were the sly insults and, for him also, the hostile shoulder-nudges of men who wanted to see him lose the forthcoming trial by combat. Men who supported Warrin de Mortimer for the sake of his father, who was well thought of and respected at court, and undeserving of the scandal visited upon his house by a young man whose own family reputation was considerably more tarnished. And then of course there was the gossip; the jests at his expense, the sniggers and the sly innuendoes. Adam bore them stoically, but it did not mean that inwardly he was not goaded raw.

  ‘I’m either going to marry you to Heulwen or officiate at your funeral, so you might as well speak to me!’ complained a rich, deep voice at his hunched left shoulder.

  Adam swivelled and stared at the grinning young priest who had just squeezed his way on to the trestle beside him. He found a sudden answering grin of his own. ‘John! I hadn’t thought to see you here!’

  ‘The Earl of Leicester might feel in need of a confessor after swearing to an oath like that,’ laughed Guyon’s second son and namesake. To avoid confusion, he had early on been called for the saint on whose eve he had been born, and only on the most formal occasions ever went by his christened name.

  ‘So might we all,’ Adam said ruefully, ‘the King in particular.’ He stretched out his arm and playfully patted the bald island of scalp ringed by a thick sea of reddish-black waves. ‘You’re ordained now?’

  ‘Since last Martinmas.’

  ‘So I’ve got to call you Father and treat you with a proper respect?’

  John’s dark, beautiful voice rumbled with laughter. ‘Is that so much of a trial?’ He folded his arms on the trestle. A serving girl dimpled at him as she leaned over to pour wine. He smiled back, but without noticing how pretty she was, not because he was unaffected by pretty women — indeed on occasion, celibacy had been a discipline he had failed — but because he simply could not see her clearly enough to know. Ever since early childhood when he had fallen over cradles, sewing baskets and hound puppies rather than walk around them, when he had been defeated in sword practice because he could not see the blows coming until it was too late, he had known he was destined either for the priesthood or an early death. It was an obvious choice, and he had flourished, and already had a responsible post in the Earl of Leicester’s household.

  Adam glanced sidelong at the young man. ‘Aren’t you going to lecture me from your pulpit, then?’

  John squinted at a dish of eels stewed in herbs and wine, and answered with a question of his own. ‘Do you know why my Lord Leicester chose me above several others to be his household chaplain?’

  Adam shook his head.

  ‘Because he knew I wouldn’t keep lecturing the soldiers about mere peccadilloes. Men will always gamble, take the Lord’s name in vain, and fornicate where they shouldn’t with someone else’s woman, and then brawl about it. They’re unlikely to take much notice of the bleatings of a mealy-mouthed priest young enough in some instances
to be their grandson. I suppose I could hurl hellfire and damnation at them, but I prefer to keep that for the sins that really matter — like murder.’

  Adam looked sharply at John. A soft, myopic doe-brown his eyes might be, but they bore the clarity of knowledge. ‘You believe me then?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘No one else does.’

  ‘That is not true,’ John contradicted. ‘It is just that empty vessels make the most noise, and if you’ve noticed, it’s all coming from de Mortimer’s side. Don’t worry, Adam, we’re not all out to knife you in the back. That’s Warrin de Mortimer’s particular vice.’ He took a mouthful of the eel stew, swallowed, and added thoughtfully, ‘I saw Warrin de Mortimer in the early spring when I was returning from my studies in Paris. He was a member of a hawking party that included William le Clito when they crossed our path.’

  ‘He was what?’ Adam stared.

  ‘There were a lot of other young men present, mostly from the French court, I think. I do not suppose there is any harm in going hawking with William le Clito, it just depends what they were talking about, but I didn’t hear any of that.’ He reached for a piece of the fine white bread that had been baked especially for the feast. ‘I saw Ralf, too.’

  ‘What, with them?’

  ‘No, the following day just outside Les Andelys. He was kicking his heels beside a water trough, obviously waiting for someone. I would not have recognised him, my eyesight being what it is, but my horse needed to drink and Ralf was too close for me to miss. He wasn’t pleased at being discovered either, and not just because there was a woman clinging to his arm or because I’m Heulwen’s half-brother.’ He bit into the crust and moistened it with a sip of wine. ‘He asked me not to say anything, tapped his nose and told me he was about the King’s private business, and at the time I believed him. I had no reason to doubt then.’ He gave Adam a reassuring smile. ‘Don’t worry, the King knows. I told my Lord Leicester last night as soon as I realised its significance and he took it straight to Henry, so even if this trial by combat doesn’t favour your cause, it’s not a lost one. Warrin de Mortimer is marked.’