The Wild Hunt tor-1

by Elizabeth Chadwick

  He looked disappointed. 'The tie is no closer than that?'

  'I'm afraid not.' She glanced up at Earl Hugh, who shrugged his flesh-padded shoulders and surreptitiously tapped his head.

  'It is curious,' pursued Sir Hubert. 'You are the living image of Arlette of Falaise, the old King's mother. She had freckles too, you know, and hair of your colour in her youth and that same way of looking.'

  'I am sorry to disappoint you, but the lady Arlette is no part of my bloodline. My grandfather was related through the male line.'

  'Remarkable,' Sir Hubert murmured, shaking his head as he rose stiffly to his feet.

  The juggler nearly missed one of the knives but swooped and recovered. On the dais, Rufus roared with laughter at a joke. Hugh of Chester moved on with his companion. Judith drank her wine, looked for Guyon and choked on it when she noticed that Alais de Clare had accosted him by one of the stone arches supporting the roof of the hall . A blue and gold banner drifted in the haze above their heads. Alais had her arm linked proprietarily through his, her face upturned and dazzling. He dipped his head to listen to what she was saying. She giggled and flashed a glance around and then stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear, her hand going boldly down between them.

  Judith sat in stupefied amazement, watching her, and then the wine in her blood exploded into rage. She jerked to her feet, shivering the surface of the remaining drink in her cup, walked around the startled juggler and stalked over to her husband and the courtesan.

  Taking hold of Guyon's free arm, she stood on tiptoe in mimicry of Alais, but instead of whispering, she bit him. Guyon jerked with a stifled yelp. 'Just thank Christ I chose your ear,' Judith said and looked at the startled older woman. 'You must be Alais,' she said. 'I have heard much about you, so I won't waste any more of my time, yours, or my husband's,' and, in guardroom English, purloined from childhood escapades, she told Alais de Clare precisely what she could do.

  Guyon spluttered. Alais gaped at Judith in horrified astonishment. Judith, taking her rival's rooted shock for defiance, raised her arm to strike her, but Guyon seized her wrist and bore it down in a grip of steel.

  'It is best if I go, Guy,' Alais cooed in a pillow-soft voice and patted his arm. 'You can give me your reply later.' Ignoring Judith's dagger-bright stare, indeed ignoring Judith altogether, she left him and moved on to intercept, with a ready smile, a young baron attached to Chester's household.

  'What in God's name do you think you are doing?' Guyon hissed at her. 'You're a marcher baroness, not a fishwife and the sooner you remember that the better!'

  'And she's a high-bred gutter whore!' Judith spat in return. 'I suppose you have arranged to bed with her!'

  'You've hardly grounds for complaint, have you?'

  For a moment they glared at each other, the air between them charged with tension. And then Guyon released his breath on a hard sigh. 'I wasn't making a liaison behind your back,' he said and tugged her silk-twined braid. 'Jesu God, don't you think I have enough trouble controlling the woman I've got without noosing myself to a featherbrain like Alais de Clare?' He grimaced and rubbed his bitten ear.

  Judith lowered her lids and looked down at her soft gilded shoes. The impetus of the wine was beginning to wear off. She felt foolish and a little sick. 'But I thought ... Christen said that you and she used to ...' Guyon snorted. 'Once, twice, no more. I was too drunk the first time and too desperate the second to make better provision and Alais was so pleased with herself that she made the whole court a party to her conquest until her husband clapped his hand over her mouth and pushed her at Henry. He's very partial to brainless blondes.'

  'And you are not?'

  'I have a marked preference for tawny-haired vixens.' He slipped his arm around her narrow waist, drawing her close to his side.

  On the dais, William Rufus laughed again and clapped a brawny arm across the shoulder of the slender young man seated next to him. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed with a mouth like a freshly bitten strawberry.

  'His latest toy,' Guyon said. 'He's called Ernoul and comes from Toulouse. It's fortunate that Anselm of Canterbury isn't here, he'd have a seizure.'

  'Who's the priest on the dais with him, then?'

  Judith asked and shifted her hip from the intimate sidelong pressure of his thigh.

  Guyon pretended not to notice. 'Rannulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham. He wouldn't flinch if Rufus led a goat in here and held a black mass before his very eyes, providing there was money in it of course.' He cast his gaze around.

  'Flambard designed this hall . Rufus says it's too big for a room and too small for a great hall , but that's just his nature.'

  'As is Ernoul?'

  'As is Ernoul,' he said and tried not to think of how it felt to have the King's arm draped heavily across the back of your neck, or to feel his breath hot on your cheek and know that any moment you were going to be sick. Probably Ernoul didn't mind. Probably Ernoul was being paid a lot of money.

  Judith shuddered. The royal court was twice as dangerous and barbaric as life in the marches.

  As in nature, the bright colours were a warning not to touch. She too knew how to stalk and snarll in all that jungle of colour, but inwardly it worried her. When everyone was a predator, someone was bound to get eaten.

  The evening continued. Yet another course of the interminable feast arrived. Things disguised as other things, stuffed and gilded and caparisoned in mimicry of the great gathering they were intended to feed. The wine changed from cold, sharp Anjou to a cloying French red.

  The dishes ran the gamut of the head cook's heat-sweated imagination. Decorated roast meats served with spicy perfumed sauces, pies filled with fruit and chopped meat and one full of tiny live birds that flew amok and twittered around the hall , soiling the new hangings in their panic.

  The King sent to the mews for his sparrowhawks. Musicians played with varying degrees of skill . A jester told some bawdy jokes. A sword swallower amazed the gullible. The knife juggler attempted a refinement that did not quite work and was carried off bleeding like a stuck pig.

  Rufus did the rounds of his vassals, full of a bluff, jovial bonhomie, the force of it hinting at the choleric temper that lay close to the surface.

  The King was a squat, compact barrel of a man with a round, sanguine face and short, powerful limbs. None of the Conqueror's sons were able to boast their sire's inches, although all of them possessed his breadth and inclination towards middle-aged corpulence. Florid and strutting like a barnyard cockerel, Rufus chucked Judith beneath the chin as though she were a kitchen maid. 'So,' he grinned, 'this is Maurice FitzRoger's wench, eh?'

  'Sire.' Judith lowered her lids. His fingers were as thick and clammy as raw sausages, but instead of being limp they gripped powerfully, pinching her flesh.

  'Skinny little thing, isn't she?' Rufus mused to Guyon as if Judith was deaf. 'No sign of a belly on her yet either?'

  'I'm in no hurry, sire,' Guyon responded with a lazy smile. 'A flat furrow's easier to plough than one with a slope.'

  Rufus let out a great guffaw and his variegated grey-brown eyes squeezed into puffy slits. His sense of humour was crude and boisterous and it was the kind of remark that he wholeheartedly appreciated.

  Judith lifted her taut jaw off his fingers, feeling like a market beast on a block. Rufus opened his eyes and she glared back at him.

  'God's blood!' He chuckled softly. 'I remember my grandam Arlette giving me that look when she was wrath.'

  It was the second time that evening that she had been compared to the dead Countess of Conteville and it disturbed her not a little.

  'Probably you deserved it,' she said.

  There was a momentary silence. The bonhomie slipped a little. 'You've a saucy tongue,' the King remarked sharply.

  'It's the teeth you have to watch.' Guyon grinned, touching his bitten ear, and kicked her hard beneath the trestle.

  Rufus chose suddenly to laugh. 'I can see that! Speaking of which, Hugh d'Avrenches told me
a good one just now: "If you were a knight, you'd not have done that." "If you were a lady, you'd not speak with your mouth full !"'

  Guyon snorted and laughed. Judith looked blank.

  'I thought that knowing Alais de Clare, you'd appreciate it,' Rufus chuckled. 'Meet us tomorrow at Clerkenwell if you desire to hunt. I've a new Norway hawk I want to fly.'

  Slapping Guyon's shoulder, Rufus moved on to accost another victim.

  'Christ, are you trying to get me exiled?' Guyon demanded with exasperation.

  Judith drained her goblet. 'I am not a lump of meat on a trencher to be poked and prodded and discussed intimately as if I have neither ears nor feelings!'

  Guyon shrugged. 'Rufus cares little about such niceties where women are concerned.'

  'I did not understand his joke.'

  Guyon crumbled a piece of bread and watched the action of his ring-bedecked fingers. 'It is probably best you did not. It was very crude, and no, I am not going to give details.'

  Judith narrowed her eyes at him. Her thinking processes were by now badly impaired by the wine and it was a struggle to remember how to control her limbs let alone set about cajoling Guyon into explaining what he did not wish to explain, or solve it for herself. She smiled hazily at the servant who refilled her goblet and raised it to her lips. 'Rufus still fancies you, doesn't he?' she said instead.

  'Fancies is as far as he will get.' Guyon quirked his brow at her. If she had been less than sober before, she was now well and truly on her way to being gilded. It was seldom that she took more than two cups of wine at the evening meal and frequently they were more than half water.

  Tonight, he had lost count of the quantity she had swallowed.

  He wondered if Judith was anxious in the midst of such an important gathering, although it was not in her nature to soothe herself with drink. He had a strong suspicion that the opulent bed manoeuvred that evening into the bedchamber of the house they had rented was the main reason for her attitude now. Terrified of what the night held in store, she was taking the advice of many a mother to her daughter on a wedding eve and drinking herself insensible.

  'Judith, no more,' he said compassionately, staying her hand as she reached to her cup.

  'Why not?' she protested. 'I'm enjoying it now. It was hob ... hobbir ... horrible at first, but you get used to it, don't you ... like a lot of things?'

  'When you're drunk,' he agreed wryly.

  'Who's drunk?' she demanded in a loud voice.

  Heads turned. Fortunately, at that juncture the King chose to leave the hall and amid the etiquette of rising and reseating, Guyon succeeded in calming his belligerent wife to a muttering simmer. That mood did not last long.

  The wine had reacted upon her blood to produce aggression. Now it reacted against the contents of her stomach and she began to feel very sick indeed. When Guyon drew her to her feet she lurched against him, her balance awry, her hand to her mouth.

  Guyon took one look at her green face and propelled her out of the hall and into the cool, blossom-scented night where she was violently sick, shuddering against his support.

  'Sorry,' she gulped weakly.

  'I can see that,' he said with exasperation.

  After it was over, he swung her up in his arms and took her lolling and semi-conscious to where Eric waited with their horses.

  'She won't want her head in the morning, my lord.'

  'She doesn't want it now,' Guyon replied. 'And certainly not her stomach.'

  'Poor lass,' said Eric with sympathy, recalling many a night of his own misspent youth. 'You'll not be needing the mare then.'

  'No.' Guyon gave Judith to his captain while he mounted his horse, then reached to take her up before him. 'God's bones,' he muttered, trying to settle her so that she would not give him a dead arm on the ride home. 'You'd think to look at her that she weighed less than a feather.'

  Judith merely groaned and flopped against him like a dead doe.

  Helgund unbarred the door to him and exclaimed in horror at the sight of Judith's wan face.

  'Too much wine,' Guyon said, sweeping past the servant to the capacious scarlet-bedecked bed, where he deposited Judith.

  Clucking like a mother hen, Helgund leaned over her mistress. Judith's eyelids fluttered but did not open. Another maid goggled around the curtain, received a sharp command from Helgund and disappeared again.

  'I'll sleep below with Sir Walter,' Guyon said, aware that he was now redundant, but oddly reluctant to leave. Judith looked so vulnerable, her hands pale and long-fingered against the cover of stitched beaver skins, her profile flushed and delicate. He knew how her nose would wrinkle when she laughed and that one of her teeth was chipped where she had fall en down the dais steps as a child. He knew that her waist was slender and her breasts as round and resiliently soft as the breasts of the white doves in the cote at Ravenstow. She had also quite deliberately drunk herself into a stupor rather than share the intimacy of this bed with him.

  Helgund arranged the cover and looked around at him, her broad features creased with concern.

  'My lady has been very unsettled of late,' she ventured.

  'I know, Helgund.' The same could be said of himself, he thought and for parallel reasons. He looked thoughtfully at the maid. She owned a position of considerable trust and as a result knew most of what did, or rather did not, transpire between himself and Judith, and must also be aware of the undercurrents and tensions that existed as a result.

  Helgund returned his scrutiny beneath the deference of half-lowered lids. 'She is like a vixen confronting food in a trap, sire. She wants the meat, but dare not attempt to snatch it for fear of paying the price.'

  His brows twitched together. 'Am I the meat or the price?' he enquired.

  'Both, sire. She fears lest she become reduced to the status of bitch or brood mare, or cast-off wife. It is rumoured at court that you prefer the chase to the kill .'

  Guyon's frown deepened. Helgund swallowed, but continued doggedly. 'It is not her fault, sire. If you had seen what Lord Maurice did to her lady mother in front of us all , and mistress Judith no more than a mite of three years old. Said he would fill her belly with enough seed to plant a dozen children and dragged her to the bed there and then before us all and used her like a whore... Happened more than once too and sometimes he was in too much of a hurry to draw the hangings. We protected the child as best we could but ...' Helgund drew a shaken breath and fell silent beneath the onslaught of his stare.

  'Thank you, Helgund.' His voice was frighteningly quiet, belying the anger she saw in his eyes. 'Thank you for telling me. I can see the kind of obstacles across my path now. Before, I just kept treading on them. Go back to your bed now. I'll seek mine in a moment.'

  Relieved, Helgund curtsied and made herself absent.

  Guyon drew a deep breath and controlled his ire. Maurice de Montgomery was already dead; the Welsh had got there first.

  'Well , Cath fach,' he said softly, brushing a stray wisp of tawny hair away from her eyelids and the thick, downswept bronze lashes, 'how do I avoid these obstacles of yours?'

  He knew she was not indifferent and that the times when her guard was down, he would have sold his soul to keep her that way. The times when her guard was up, she was impossible to reach.

  Never once of her own accord had she offered him a sign of affection or endearment. Jealousy, yes, but that was an emotion born of insecurity and mistrust. The moves were all his, and they were straining the bounds of her acceptance.

  Today he had stepped beyond the limit. Tonight she was blind drunk. So what else was left? He shied from the thought.

  ' Nos da, Cath fach, ' he murmured softly, tugged her braid and quietly left the room.

  CHAPTER 18

  On the crest of the hill , Guyon reined his courser to a halt and shielded his eyes to watch the goshawk assault the air on dark, swift pinions, gaining height against the hot blue sky before stooping like a wind-ruffled stone upon the desperate flight of a round-b
odied partridge.

  Prince Henry, triumphant owner, fisted the morning air as the partridge tumbled over in a puff of feathers and was borne to earth beneath the goshawk's talons. The falconer and a huntsman ran towards the two birds, one to be retrieved in proud prowess to Henry's wrist, the other to be added to the mound of soft bodies already culled that morning. The King's Norway hawk was a skilled killer too.

  Henry stroked the breast of his own bird where she perched, dark wings folded, and deftly replaced the leather hood over the fierce golden eyes. Then he looked at Guyon.

  'I hear your wife made quite an impression last night,' he remarked with a laconic grin.

  'She is not accustomed to quite so much wine, my lord,' Guyon excused and eased himself in the saddle. He had backache as a result of sleeping on a lumpy, makeshift pall et within range of a sly draught.

  Henry's grin deepened. 'I didn't mean that business with Alais, although I wish I had been there. I meant her resemblance to my grandmother, Arlette. Old Hubert couldn't believe his eyes, thought he'd seen a ghost and Rufus remarked on it this morning at mass ... and he told me an appalling joke.'

  Guyon lifted his stiff shoulders. 'As far as I know, the only blood she shares with your family is that of her maternal grandsire, and, even then, the Countess of Conteville is not of that line.'

  'Maurice FitzRoger's girl, isn't she?' Henry looked thoughtful. 'How old is she now, Guy?'

  'She was born in the November of 'eighty-three, my lord.' Guyon squinted against the sun at the Prince whose look had suddenly grown secretive, the way it sometimes did after he had been closeted with Gilbert and Roger de Clare. Still waters ran deeper than anyone could fathom.

  'Any girl of seventeen who looks like my grandmother deserves closer examination,' Henry said, still stroking his hawk, his gaze intent upon the action of his fingers.

  'Angling for an invitation sire?' Guyon jested with the familiarity of long acquaintance and the occasional deeper friendship.

  'How did you guess? Anyway, I used to rent the house. You cannot refuse. Is tonight all right? After the hunt?'