by Grace Ingram
‘You are better?’ she asked anxiously.
‘They said you’d die,’ Roger whispered, climbing up beside her and kissing Guy as though afraid he might fall apart. ‘You’re not going to die, are you?’
‘Not this time,’ Guy assured them, wishing he had strength to hug them both.
‘We said our prayers for you,’ Matilda told him. ‘All the time we kept saying them. Lady Mabel said God might heed little children.’
‘He did,’ Guy told them, warmed by their love.
‘Yes, because you didn’t die.’ She kissed him again, and said severely, ‘Your face is bristly.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Dearly as he loved them, in his weakness he found their company exhausting, though nothing would have induced him to say so. The Slut crunched her bone, and he had an inspiration. ‘If my poor bitch—has not left me all these days—will you take her for a run?’
Roger slid from the bed and regarded her dubiously. ‘Will she go with us?’
The Slut knew the word ‘run’ and was already on her feet, looking eagerly at her master; then, when he did not move from the bed, her tail drooped and her head hung in dejection. ‘Take your ponies—exercise her well. Go with them, lass.’ The Slut looked piteously at him, and then obeyed Matilda’s hand on her collar. Guy turned his head on the pillow and shut his eyes in peace. He could hear the women beyond the curtain, chatting quietly as they put away the bedding for the day and settled to their sewing and spinning, more subdued than most feminine gatherings he had heard. He hoped no one would prevent Matilda’s truancy from needlework, and found himself wondering what sort of man would take her to wife in eight or nine years’ time, and whether he would appreciate his good fortune as she deserved.
Guy was sliding back into sleep when the curtain-rings heralded another entry. It was too soon for the children to return, so he supposed Lady Mabel was there again, and did not move as soft shoes padded over the dry rushes. The feet halted at his side, and kicked the Slut’s abandoned bone aside with a clatter. Lady Mabel was too neat-footed to do that. He shifted his head and looked up into Lord Reynald’s face.
‘They said you were mending, but you look only fit to be measured for your winding-sheet,’ he observed, surveying him with a perturbed expression.
‘Then appearance is against me, my lord,’ Guy answered, ‘for I’m certainly mending.’
‘I’m heart-glad of that,’ Lord Reynald declared, with the first semblance of a true smile Guy had seen on his face. Then it clouded to petulance again. ‘Your wolf-bitch kept me from your side while you were out of your senses.’
‘I apologize for her—and for usurping your bed, my lord.’
‘You don’t reckon I grudged it you? Or anything else that would help to save my son? But that bitch of yours would not let me pass the door.’
‘She meant but to guard me, my lord.’
‘Teach her I’m no enemy but your father. And an undutiful son you are, spoiling sport and taking that wench out of my hold. If you didn’t want her for yourself why deny her to your comrades?’
‘To save her from them.’
‘You’re a soft fool. You’ll have to harden if you’re to make a knight.’ He leaned against the bedfoot, scowling. ‘A dear night’s work, that. No loot, no sport, and my marshal dead.’
Guy gasped. ‘Sir Gerard—dead?’
‘Lockjaw, four days ago. As well you’re knighted. You can train up to his duties.’
‘But my lord, I—I’ve no experience—’
‘You’ll get it this summer. The Angevin is marching north.’
‘My lord—’
‘Why won’t you ever call me “Father”?’ he demanded with a spurt of temper.
‘I—it would not be seemly in a bastard, my lord.’
‘Seemly? You’re my son, my tall fine first-born, for all that you’re an undutiful whelp, and I’d be even prouder to have sired you if you’d only conform to my wishes. And when we thought you’d die—’ He broke off, his face working.
‘Your lady’s tending saved me,’ Guy said, moved despite himself by his sire’s undoubted concern.
‘Not it! I sacrificed for you, a hen and a cock and a goat. She wanted a priest, with his oil and his Latin what use? But I made the offering, and when I came down from the waste the fever had broken and you were asleep. Isn’t that proof enough?’
‘What did Wulfrune and Rohese sacrifice for?’ Guy asked dryly. ‘God answered the prayers of my lady and the children.’
‘Who gives something for nothing, least of all a god? Blood for blood, life for life—’
‘Our Lord made the sacrifice Himself, once and for all time and all sinners.’
‘That’s what you believe, is it? And too late to change you.’
‘It’s the faith I was bred in and the truth I hold by,’ Guy told him deliberately.
‘It’s not you I blame, but those who withheld you from me—my son. I’d have bred you up to that power and pleasure, and you’d have led the worship after me. And instead they made a gutless Christian of you, and cheated me—’
He checked abruptly, and stalked out. Guy found that he was trembling through all his body. Many thoughts jostled for his attention, foremost the realization that Lord Reynald would have let him die without the last rites of the Church. His brain refused to cope with them. He lay in a kind of mindless languor, dreamily regarding the figures in the hanging that stirred in the draught from the window, and listening to the twitter of women’s voices in the bower.
Lady Mabel returned with a posset of eggs, milk and hot wine, and took a stool by his bed, busying herself with some sewing. When the children returned, flushed and windblown, with the Slut, she shooed them out. The bitch settled to her bone again with small cracking noises. Grey and white clouds scudded across the blue sky in the window-slit, and a sharp wind whistled round the battlements and set the coals winking in the brazier. Now and then Lady Mabel got up to warm her hands at it. Guy was snug enough, deep in the featherbed with covers piled to his nose, rousing to swallow posset, gruel or broth every hour or so and feeling strength slowly creeping back into his body.
About mid-morning the curtain moved again, and Conan entered. Lady Mabel nodded and began to fold up her work. He strolled to the bed and looked down, his eyebrows lifting. ‘No funeral this time? You have disappointed me.’
‘You’ve had one funeral!’ snapped Lady Mabel, whose many excellences did not include a sense of humour.
‘I’d hoped to be quit of my inconvenient obligations.’
‘Is that why you’ve spent your nights and days helping me tend him?’
Guy smiled. ‘So I owe you thanks.’
‘Oh, soldiers always tend their comrades. First because there’s seldom anyone else to do it, and second because it may well be your own turn after the next skirmish. I see you’re mending.’
‘I’ll be as good as new in a few weeks,’ Guy said confidently, and then caught a flicker of contradiction in his stepmother’s glance. ‘Shall I not?’ he challenged her.
‘You’ve had the lung-fever,’ she said. ‘Not many survive it. You’ll have a weakness in your chest for years, the rest of your life maybe, and you must guard against chills, wrap warmly and always change wet clothes, for you’ll not live through another attack.’
‘You mean I must coddle myself like a weakly infant?’ Guy demanded in revulsion.
‘You young men! ’ she cried in sudden passion. ‘You treat your bodies as though they were hammered out of the same iron as your weapons! Is it any wonder that, if we come through childbed, we weak women outlive you ?’
‘My lady—’
‘You had no more sense than to go wandering in the wind and rain, in soaked clothes without even a cloak to keep out the weather, no food in your belly but wine enough for six—and then you wonder at what you’ve brought on yourself?’
‘But—’
‘Men!’ she enunciated bitterly, and stalked out with a clash of curtain
-rings.
The two regarded each other, neither demonstrating the least inclination to laugh. Conan pulled up the stool. ‘She’s most likely right. Few of us make old bones.’
Contemplating a lifetime’s need to consider his health, Guy grimaced. ‘Doddering by a fireside like a grandfather!’ he muttered.
‘By Easter you’ll be ready to ride out,’ Conan assured him. ‘We’ll go together.’
‘Together ? Your service ends then, but—’
‘Had you forgotten I’m your man?’ He grinned at Guy’s embarrassed scowl. ‘You’ll not leave me behind. Your father has offered me a year’s engagement as his marshal, and your sister to wife, a prospect to make any man run fast and far.’
Guy grinned. ‘I wonder you’re not already on your way.’
‘Besides being pledged, I’ve business to finish.’ He got up to refuel the brazier, and seeing that Guy was laboriously attempting to change his position, rolled him on to his side, shook up the pillows and tucked the covers round his neck, competently as any woman putting a child to bed. Guy thanked him, inwardly galled to be dependent on the help of this man he detested.
‘How go your ribs ?’ he remembered to ask.
‘Mended.’
‘A sorry night’s work that proved.’
‘A night to rejoice for,’ Conan contradicted, his face lighting. ‘It rid me of my enemy.’
‘Gerard?’ Guy stiffened in disgust; he had not liked the marshal himself, but to rejoice so blatantly in any man’s horrible death was monstrous. ‘And now his wife is unprotected for you to ravish?’ At the tone of his voice the Slut, dozing beside him, lifted her head and growled softly.
‘This time my intentions are entirely honourable.’
‘How should anyone guess that?’
‘I hope that she’ll go with me after Easter, as my wife.’
Guy gaped at him. ‘In God’s Name, man—’
‘She’s free, and my hands are clean of his blood. Why not?’
‘In God’s Name!’ Guy repeated. ‘She loved Gerard and loathes you. She’s in great grief. Go gently—’
‘What else is there for her to do? A woman alone?’ He walked across to the window and stood looking out. With misgiving Guy regarded the harsh beauty of the mercenary’s profile, sharp against the sunlit whitewash, and noted the confident smile on his mouth. His uneasiness deepened. Conan’s pursuit of Lady Cecily had not been pure malice against her husband; he intended marriage, not rape, so some semblance of love animated his carcase.
Conan swung round, his back to the light. ‘You are going to say I am not fit to hold her horse’s bridle,’ he mocked.
‘Are you?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Go gently,’ Guy appealed again.
‘God’s Death, I cannot go at all! Not one chance for a word alone with her can I get! ’ He began to pace across the floor and back like a caged wolf. Guy watched him in silence for a while, too troubled to be amused, until all at once his eyelids fell and the sleep of weakness overwhelmed him unawares.
He mended steadily. After the first few days of utter weakness he was able to lie propped against pillows, his fur-lined cloak wrapped round his shoulders, and play dice and chess with Conan or occasionally with Lord Reynald. He was the children’s captive, and Roger begged to be taught his letters. ‘I’ll never be of any use as a fighting man,’ he pointed out with a realism beyond his years, ‘but any lord’s a fool who puts himself at his clerk’s mercy.’ He took to it with single-minded determination, but Matilda, who begged to learn also, equalled him.
By the end of a week Lord Reynald’s small tolerance for his own inconvenience was at its end. He would no longer be excluded from his own bed-chamber by a mannerless bitch that dared show him her teeth. Lady Mabel therefore had a bed set up for Guy between the partition and the stair, and he had all the bower’s activities to entertain him. He had Lord Reynald’s servant shave him, and one glance into the polished silver mirror shocked the breath from him. He had expected to look white and wasted, but not fifteen years older. Nothing of boyhood was left in the face that gazed back at him stripped to the skull, mouth and brows set in harsher lines and eyes sunk deep in shadowed sockets.
February was gone, and March brought longer evenings, brighter sun and winds whooping about the battlements. Guy could totter from bed to stool and sit, bundled in his cloak, looking from a window-slit at fields and woods, distant peasants sowing and harrowing, small boys scaring birds and horsemen going to hunt or hawk. He was wearying of inaction. The children knew their letters and could already spell out simple words with charcoal on boards, his chess had improved until he was almost a match for Lord Reynald, and the Slut had resigned herself to a master who lay day-long in bed and left her exercise to young deputies.
One night a serving-woman was brought to bed, and Guy lay listening to the bustle and the cries, watching the fights and flitting figures and offering his prayers, sharing in the occasion from which his sex was normally excluded, the anxieties of the labour and the joy when a boy was safely delivered. On the third day Lady Mabel, having procured the services of Thorgastone’s priest, declared a holiday in the bower for the infant’s christening. All trooped out to the village church except the mother and Lady Cecily, who was too deep in mourning to go forth in public.
Guy lay alone, propped against several pillows, dozing or watching the sky. Distant voices and the ring of the smith’s hammer floated up from the bailey, but the keep was quiet, all but empty. Lady Cecily rustled over the rushes, her black skirts sweeping them into drifts, her face almost swallowed in a black kerchief. Grief had made her a little white ghost. Twice Guy had tried to utter his condolences, but sympathy dissolved her into tears. Now he greeted her, but she merely inclined her head and moved past him to the stair.
He heard her feet go slipping down half a dozen steps and then check, and a mouse-small squeak of fright.
‘Lady Cecily!’ said Conan’s voice.
‘No! No! Go away!’
‘I must speak to you—’
‘I—I won’t! Let me pass!’
‘Since I have been waiting a fortnight to get a word with you alone, hear me out, my lady—’
‘Alone—Mother Mary protect me!’
Guy heard a slight scuffle, and sat up in bed. The Slut rose to her haunches and looked at him with pricked ears. Conan’s voice attempted reassurance.
‘My lady, don’t be afraid. I swear I mean you no harm. Only hear me—’
A terrified whimper broke from her. Guy threw off the covers and reached for his cloak; this intolerable scene must be interrupted.
‘You mean you’ll ravish me—now my husband’s dead—’
‘No, no, on my knightly oath! You’re free now—alone—and how can a woman fend for herself without a man? Who’s to protect you but me? In all honour, my lady! I’ll marry you—’
‘Never!’ she cried, anger breaking through fear. Guy, huddling the cloak about his shoulders, stumbled to the wall, and with its support made for the stair as she rejected him. ‘You—raptor—I’d die first!’
‘My lady, my lady, I love you—all along I have loved you! Marry me, and I swear to honour and cherish you all my days—’
Guy reached the stairhead as Conan made his avowal, and stared down at her, tugging ineffectually against his hold on her wrist, and at the mercenary four steps lower, his upturned face eager and earnest. Neither saw him. Feet pelted up from below. Philip’s face appeared round the newel and convulsed with fury.
‘Take your hand from my mother!’ he screeched, and hurtled at Conan, clawing at his hand and then sinking his teeth into it.
The man fended him away. It was no blow, a mere back-handed flick to ward him off, but Philip was on the inner edge of the step with barely an inch of toehold. He toppled backward down the stair out of Guy’s sight, but he heard the crack as the boy struck the wall and saw his legs sprawl upward. Conan was after him on the instant as he slithered, c
alling his name. He caught him up and turned back with the child in his arms. He checked. Guy heard him gasp, and then he lifted a face yellow-grey as tallow.
'Philip!’
The boy’s head jolted over Conan’s arm at an impossible angle. His mother descended three steps, slowly raising clawed hands to her face, her eyes dilating. ‘You’ve killed him! ’ she whispered. ‘Philip—’Then she whirled and scudded up the stair.
Guy glimpsed her demented face, lurched to grab and caught only a fold of woollen cloth that jerked through his fingers. Conan, rousing from a trance, laid down the boy and started after her black skirts disappearing round the newel. The door above flung open, the sentinel shouted alarm, feet scurried. An appalling scream fell from the sky and snapped off at the wall’s foot in a thump.
Guy stood paralysed, leaning against the wall, his knees melting with shock. Then he lifted his hand to cross himself. ‘God have mercy on her,’ he muttered.
Conan stared up where he had last seen her, his hands reached out as though he were suddenly blinded and all colour gone from his face. Then his joints folded; he sank to his knees, whimpering between clenched teeth, and beat his head against the wall. Guy stumbled down to him. The Slut howled once. He laid a hand on the man’s shuddering shoulder. His legs gave way, and he sat heavily on the stair above. Conan twisted round, his face distorted and blood streaking down his brow. ‘My fault—she killed herself—my lady!’ he gasped. Involuntarily Guy set his arm about him. ‘Oh God, oh God, I loved her!’ He sank forward, his head in Guy’s lap, sobs rending him. Guy, wrung with pity, could only hold him, uselessly smoothing the black head on his knees, while below the christening party came crying and questioning into the keep.
Chapter 15
Guy had never seen a man so changed by grief as Conan. Remorse and despair devoured him; he could neither eat nor sleep, and daily lost flesh and colour. Despite the testimony of the one eye-witness, none believed him guiltless of even wishing Philip harm. Lord Reynald was indifferent; all others ostracized him. His own ruffians even, who could stomach most sins, looked askance at the man who had tossed a woman’s child down a flight of stairs because she rejected his offer of marriage. Guy, whose own misery had made him sensitive to that of others, was intensely sorry for the mercenary, drifting about the sentry-walks or exhausting himself and his horses in wild rides alone through the greening countryside.
