Efficient and sensible, her escorts sought out a reputable horse lender and learned that to reach Brecknock, they might ride west to Newport and hire a guide to Abergavenny, or else travel up the Wye to Monmouth. Heloise decided on the latter as the safer choice.
The track, hedged for the most part with budding beech and hazel, followed the valley northwards. In the upper town of Monmouth, they sought to hire a guide and found Hoel, a balding, prickly local – ‘Neither Welsh nor English, look you, but a Monmouth man and proud of it’ – who began every one of his utterances with ‘Yn affodus’, which Heloise learned to her cost translated as ‘unfortunately’ and meant she would have to delve deeper into her purse.
Monmouth, so proud that it had birthed the hero of Agincourt, had also spawned an oversupply of Saturday stalls that sold medallions and crudely hewn cameos of Henry V with his monkish haircut, as well as a variety of enamel hat badges (that would have pleased many a secret sympathiser with the defeated House of Lancaster), and small metal knights on horseback to take home to pampered sons. Heloise bought one of these to send back to Margery’s babe for when he was older.
On Easter Sunday, 30th March, Heloise’s party heard Mass and rested. At dawn next day, Hoel led them out across the drawbridge over the Monnow River to journey along the Frothy Valley. Fewer cutpurses perhaps, but dawdling cows aplenty. They endured lanes of dung, to call at prosperous farmhouses where they bought cheeses to exchange for the goods which Hoel had told them to buy in Monmouth for barter. The little English spoken was barely intelligible, but Heloise paid attention to the lilting cadences and by the end of the second day had even learnt a few words of Welsh.
With a fresh audience, Hoel was as full of stories as a pond with frogs after rain. It passed the time, except he put Martin so in fear of Welsh faeries, the tylwyth teg, that every time an evening shadow quivered, the poor man jumped. By Abergavenny, Heloise was growing fearful. In two days she would be confronting Rushden. Maybe he was not so mighty in Buckingham’s household as he claimed and the duke might give her testament a fair credence. The small unicorn pinned to the collar of her gown gave her courage, but the brooch also reminded her that the Huddleston men would quit her company very soon. She would be an outsider and her foe considered her a witch.
*
‘Edrych mas!’
Hoel tensed like an arching cat as armed horsemen and a half dozen ruffians on foot burst out of woods ahead of them on the road north of Crickhowell. What were they? Horse thieves? Prayers to St Catherine and St Christopher were speedily on Heloise’s lips as the men rasped out their swords and formed a protective circle about her.
‘Can we outride them?’ she muttered, swiftly kneeing Traveller round. The River Usk sealed any escape to the west. Trees grew thickly up the hillside to the right. That left the way they had come.
‘I doubt it,’ mouthed the older Huddleston man. ‘Godsakes, Welshman,’ he growled at their guide, ‘open your mouth and say something useful for a change.’
Hoel let rip a speech of voluble Welsh and punctuated it finally with a spit upon the grass. His new audience, for the most part bearded, and lacking any insignia to show their allegiance, glared back with blatant hostility.
‘That was useful,’ Heloise commented dryly. ‘What now? We all go back to Crickhowell for oatcakes and a good rub down?’
‘Wel!’ One of the brigands understood her and laughed, kneeing his pony forwards and raised a leather gauntlet to thrust back his riding hood.
Astonishingly, Heloise beheld a woman! One of indeterminate age, for the creature’s complexion was as brown and speckled as a milkmaid’s and the unruly dark hair, snared back like a horse’s tail, showed a few glints of silver. A furskin cote protected her upper body from the wind, half hiding a brown leather tunic that covered her to her thighs. A riding skirt, hitched high, left her boots unencumbered. One did not have to be Welsh to know that her vehement language, as she circumnavigated them, was interrogatory. Their guide answered with a shrug and the woman halted, facing Heloise.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked bluntly in understandable English.
‘Who asks?’
‘The Lady of Tretwr.’
‘Tree Tower?’ Heloise sounded out the word. ‘I never heard of it.’ She looked round at her Welsh guide. ‘I thought by now we were in the demesne of the Duke of Buckingham.’
Hoel sucked in his cheeks and, of a sudden, found the opposite tree branch worth studying.
‘Harry Stafford!’ The woman spat, wheeling her shaggy pony about. ‘He merely thinks he rules. I will ask again, woman: State your business.’
‘It is of a private and delicate nature.’ Heloise answered with intended haughtiness and let Traveller dance impatiently beneath her.
‘So someone’s fathered a brat beneath your girdle, eh.’
‘No.’ Amazement made Heloise smile without fear. ‘Do I look as though I would let a man take advantage of me?’
A spark of admiration gleamed in the narrow eyes studying her. ‘Aye, if it pleased you.’ As the woman’s keen gaze slid over Rushden’s stallion, Heloise pressed her lips together in fear and adamance, ready to grab her dagger from the sheath stitched to the saddlebag; she had travelled too far to be bested now. ‘Whither are you bound then?’
It was tempting to be discourteous but it would achieve little.
‘Brecknock castle.’
‘Of course, and your horse too.’ Mischief glimmered in the woman’s expression, fingers stroked a dagger’s spiral handle. ‘You have to pay a toll for crossing our land.’
‘Of course, the point of this little encounter.’ With a suspicion that Hoel might have had some arrangement to bring his travellers through the illicit toll, Heloise opened the purse on her girdle and drew out two rose nobles. ‘These you shall have, but I should not advise you to snatch anything else. I have friends who will not be pleased to hear of it.’ The woman’s eyes had noted the jewellery she wore and she frowned.
‘To be sure,’ she said, holding out her palm for the coins, then she gave an order to her men in Welsh and laughed, adding in English. ‘I wish you joy of Y Cysgod. Tell him and Duke Harry you met Lady Vaughan of Tretwr if you dare open your mouth to them,’ and she spurred away before an utterly puzzled Heloise could answer. Did all the Welsh talk in riddles?
‘Tree Tower?’ echoed Heloise, her heart settling back to normal rhythm as they took the road again. ‘Do the Welsh nest high in these parts?’
Hoel ignored the jest, his feathers still ruffled and he did not speak until they were into open country. ‘Nawr te, arglwyddes, that is Tretwr. Lady Vaughan is wife to the oldest of three Vaughan brothers.’
Tretwr was unbelievably stylish. Heloise had expected a Norman keep and there was an elderly round one squatting in the back yard like a forgotten relative, but it was the stone house in front that took her breath away. A window, surmounted by an arched moulding and flanked by arrow embrasures, looked out from the front of each wing and attached between them was a splendid gatehouse, three storeys high, whose huge double door stood open, giving Heloise a glimpse of a fine courtyard surrounded on four sides. The chimneyed hall looked out to the south across a walled garden. From horseback, she could glimpse trellised arches.
‘Wfft! This might look pretty, see, but those are murder holes above the door,’ muttered Hoel testily. ‘Let us hasten past lest they string us in a row for beans to climb upon. Yn affodus, Black Vaughan’s ghost still rides although he has been fourteen years in his grave. His three lovely bully sons have seen to that. Keep the legend alive, they do. And the women are no better. Their mother, Elen Gethin the Terrible, the Devil keep her in her coffin, shot a man at an archery contest in cold blood, gwelwch chi.’
If the Welshman was expecting her to turn white as a miller’s apron and tremble, he was disappointed. ‘Why?’ she asked, biting her lip, not daring to wickedly ask if Elen had been actually aiming at a bullseye butt.
The guide’s brows ro
se in surprise. ‘An intelligent question, Englishwoman. To settle a score, it was – because the man had killed her brother.’ As if he sensed that she was not frightened enough to please him, he added crossly, ‘Glad you have come into such lawless wilds?’
‘It thrills me exceedingly,’ she countered dryly, ‘but let us follow your advice and press on.’
God protect them from further harassment by any other local villains. If Lady Vaughan could make her own laws, then the Welsh Marches were not so crushed beneath the English heel as Heloise had expected. ‘Do all women in Wales behave so?’ she asked Hoel, curious to know if women here were permitted more freedom.
‘Gwaethaf modd,’ he muttered and then had mercy on her. ‘Yn affodus, yes!’
Chapter 8
One could believe that sheep not Englishmen ruled Wales, for the silly beasts were as numerous as maggots on a carcass – noisy, too, with their new lambs. They decorated every hillside and, with sheer dithery malevolence, blocked the road wherever possible. It was wild and handsome country – like Miles Rushden, yet to be tamed. Great breaths of April clouds were tossed above the Black Mountains, one instant shadowing the terraced moorland, then cockily showering the riders and apologising with a rainbow. Hoel led them north to Talgarth, a village with a ruined fortress not far from the broader highway that ran ’twixt Hereford and Brecknock, and now she no longer needed a guide, Heloise paid him off.
At Bronllys next day, Heloise delegated the Huddleston men to hire a byre where they might hide Traveller from Rushden in case she needed the horse to bargain with. Just as she set her foot in Cloud’s stirrup for the last stretch to Brecknock, her maid confessed with sobbing gulps that she and the youngest Huddleston man had sworn a trothplight and please might she return with him to Lady Huddleston? Heloise enviously gave the wench her blessing and left her with her lover. Yn Affodus! Brecknock might sneer at her for arriving without a maid.
The Brecknock road led with Roman straightness along a broad, level valley. Fruitful desires were opening the whitethorn thickets and yearning seeped through Heloise as though the sap were rising in her too, but a stark future lay ahead. What use daydreaming of a knight who would adore her, or Rushden as a princely dark lover? The real man was going to be angry, cornered and ruthlessly dismissive. Dear God, she would need every ounce of courage to face him.
As they drew closer to Brecknock, other mountains, visible and invisible, barren and formidable, climbed the horizon to the southwest, and Heloise was glad that Brecknock proved not to lie in their shadow but in friendlier farmland on a meeting of roads where the River Usk coiled north. But Brecknock was not welcoming. Carrion crows perched upon a gibbet, freshly occupied by a stinking corpse. Crossing herself, and with a prayer for the dead youth’s soul, Heloise kneed Cloud on, fearful lest a vision come to her.
There were dwellings now and they passed over the town ditch, and through the Watton Gate, fuming at the iniquitous toll. No spires or towers showed them where the town’s heart lay so they slowed the horses to a walk behind a Benedictine monk who was humming plainsong as he led his ass along the eastern side of the market place. Heloise did not tarry nor let Martin try his raw Welsh on any stallkeepers, for now the castle could be plainly seen at the northern end of the town and a miserable rain was setting in.
And a humble little castle it was too. Were they in the right town? Surely this could not be the dwelling of a duke? Plumes of smoke rose from within the fortress’s walls, but no pennons decorated the towers. It was not a good omen and Heloise observed with a heavy heart that the town did not nestle close to its protector like a camp follower, but seemed to be trying to crawl away from its master’s vigilance. Maybe it was because yet another river, narrow and unfamiliar, severed the castle from its charge.
The monk turned off purposefully through the town’s northern gate and Heloise was left to face her hazardous future.
‘Will you grab the nettle now, mistress, or shall we seek lodging and return tomorrow?’
‘Oh, Martin, say a prayer for me.’ Heloise bit her lip and rode forward, trying to keep her courage high. What could they do to her that her father had not done already? At least the castle drawbridge was down, but so too was the portcullis. It looked as welcoming as Rushden would be. A nettle indeed! He would recoil from her with icy hauteur and what should she do then?
‘It is not what I expected.’ She took Martin’s hand and slid stiffly from Cloud’s saddle to stare forlornly up at the rose sandstone barbican. She had anticipated something of Middleham’s splendour, but this seemed like a poor kinsman in comparison. The loops and slits hinted at a dark, cold Norman interior. Beyond the grid of the portcullis, the bailey was as empty as a larder plagued by mice. Little money had been spent here and her heart sank. If Buckingham was hardfisted, he would have little patience with her woes.
‘I think this may be the lesser entrance, mistress, but no matter.’ His belly gurgling as noisily as the river, Martin rapped at the porter’s window. ‘Ho! You asleep in there?’ He politely ushered his mistress further into the shelter of the arch and smote the shutters again with his riding crop. Egglike, they burst open and a rough-chinned, hairless fledgling poked his head out.
‘My lady,’ he exclaimed in a cheery English voice, ‘we were not expecting you for another two days. Welcome!’
Creaking machinery urged the portcullis up and a fleshy porter in a tabard, half-scarlet, half-black, stepped out onto the drawbridge, gave her a gap-toothed grin and whistled a pair of stableboys to fetch in the laden sumpter and mud-spattered Cloud. ‘Her grace will be pleased to hear that you have arrived safely.’
Heloise made a surprised face at Martin. Who were they expecting? Obviously a stranger since the porter did not know her face.
‘She will?’
‘Aye, my life on’t,’ chortled the gatekeeper, ‘but she ain’t here at present. Over Eastertide she been at Lady Darrell’s, ’is grace the duke’s mother, with the little demoiselles, but young Lord Stafford is here. An’ his grace will be back Wednesday. Now don’t you be standing’ there afreezin’, my lady. I’ll send a lad straightway to tell Sir William that you are here. Is your maid tarrying behind, my lady?’ At least the man asked the obvious as discreetly as he could.
‘Alas.’ The expected guest crossed herself with melancholy devotion; the gatekeeper could draw his own conclusions. He did, and drew breath to press her for details, but her small silencing gesture was sufficient.
Well, thought Heloise, with a quick thanks to St Catherine as she stretched out her ungloved hands before the porter’s brazier, she was into the castle on a lie, but at least she might have a chance to speak privily with Rushden.
‘Those bells sound close by.’ She offered the porter a friendly smile; new friends were useful and she might need to leave the castle hurriedly.
‘The Priory of St John the Evangelist, my lady.’ So that explained the monk. At least she might seek a night’s shelter from the hosteller if the castle turned hostile. ‘We have Dominican Brothers too, my lady, at Llanfaes, across the bridge, over the Usk.’ He pointed south-west. Brecknock, then, lay within a carpenter’s square where the Usk and this lesser stream intermingled. It did no harm to get her bearings.
‘Sir William will see you now, my lady.’
As she followed the servant across the silent courtyard, she realised Martin was right: a larger gatehouse with a drawbridge faced the Usk. Maybe the castle looked grander from that approach. The youth led her past a roofed well, not towards the old Norman keep squatting, gaunt as a hungry anchorite, on its high motte to one side of the bailey, but up a small flight of steps, through a porched doorway and into an unheated great hall set against the southern curtain wall.
She shivered, longing for the bright, tapestried walls of Middleham, but the page ushered her into a counting chamber where a generous fire crackled blessedly. This must be the castle exchequer or the receiver’s room. Folded letters were tucked or hanging over the lower
of the two wooden wall rails and sealing wax seals dangled on broad bands of tape above. Ledger boxes and parchment rolls were stacked upon the shelves behind a cheerful, well-fed man in his forties who sat before a baize-draped board with a leatherstrapped courier box at his elbow. Seeing her, he closed the inkwell, dropped his pen into a wooden jar, feather down to protect the quill tip, and came round to hold out two hands to clasp hers in greeting. Why was she being so vigorously welcomed? she wondered. An impression of sky blue eyes and a peppery mane of hair stayed with her as she lowered her eyes modestly and curtsied.
‘Lady Haute. What a long journey you have had. What do you think of our hills, wild, eh, compared to Kent?’ Kent! Saints preserve her, she had never set foot in Kent, not even to make a pilgrimage to Canterbury.
Rapidly plumbing her memory, she managed a breezy answer. ‘I suspect that our cherries are as good as your mountains, Sir William.’
He bowed charmingly over her hand. ‘And have they repaired the Akeman Road outside Cirencester yet? You could have lost a horse and cart in some of those holes before Christmas.’
Dear God, yes, it was the old Roman route, but from where? St Albans put its hand up for a mention, but little else came to her. How dangerous would it be to lie? ‘Actually I-I journeyed up from Chepstow. I had … have … a good friend in Somerset I desired to see.’ She smiled amiably, wondering who in Hell this Lady Haute was. A noblewoman, so certainly not a midwife or a wetnurse, but was the lady wed or widowed? Thank God the duchess was at her mother-in-law’s with her children. It at least gave some respite. And who was this man? What standing did he have with the duke?
‘Sir William –?’
‘Knyvett, madam, of Buckenham, Norfolk. Acting Constable. Ah, Bess, my sweet, do not hover there. Close the door and come and greet my lady.’
Another challenge to be faced? But there was no sign of recognition, merely shy politeness as a thin young gentlewoman came across the rush matting to curtsy.
The Silver Bride Page 11
