‘A pity you are too dull to profit by your position,’ he said kindly.
Resentment flickered in her heavy face; the point had gone home. She prodded the lad again. ‘Rouse up and fetch m’lord’s horse, you daft lump! Wanting from the cradle, m’lord,’ she added as he slouched to the corner, and with an impatient snort followed him.
One of the horses squealed angrily, and Gino leaped for the shed, knowing the voice of Hélie’s stallion. He returned with all three bridles over his own arm, spitting maledictions in Italian. Hélie, who had in three years picked up a fair amount of that tongue from him, grinned appreciatively. The tiny dimple quivered at Durande's mouth-corner. They mounted, and the ale-wife approached, her hard gaze lifting to Hélie's purse and then to his face. He ignored it. She had provided neither service nor courtesy. He nodded curtly and lifted his reins, and they clattered away.
‘A pity,’ pronounced Gino awfully from the rear, 'that you interfered this forenoon, Lord Hélie. She would have learned a lesson in humbleness, they would have come to the hangman's lopping-knife, and all very justly served!'
Hélie contemplated this original view of justice entranced for a long moment. 'A sorry blunder of mine,' he admitted in a shaking voice, caught Durande's delighted eye and bowed once more over the saddle-bow in an agony of laughter. When he had regained some command of his faculties he saw that she was in little better case.
'How did you come by this—this treasure beyond price?' she choked.
'He was a brigand who quitted Italy one jump ahead of the hangman. He tried to stab me when first we met, but I persuaded him he would do better in my service,' he told her gravely.
'Doubtless you had use for his peculiar talents?' she inquired as gravely, with only the quivering dimple to betray her.
'A private assassin is a valuable asset,’ he agreed. Delight fountained sparkling within him; he had not guessed that she was laughter itself, beneath the dour armour set on her by life's harshness. She was indeed the rarest part of this adventure, and he had no desire to see its end and set her tamely behind the convent's incongruous walls. That was no place for valour and mirth and the quick wits that had freed them all from Fulbert's hold, nor for the beauty that shone triumphant through dirt and disorder.
Suddenly he was aware that his stallion's stride was uneven, and that he should have felt it earlier; he was favouring his near hind leg and growing more lame at every step. Exclaiming under his breath, Hélie reined in and dismounted. He swore to see the swelling already risen just above the hock, and then bit off his oath, his brows drawing together. There had been no stumble or wrench to account for it. Gino was already at the stallion's head; Hélie stooped and lifted the hoof that came docilely into his hand.
‘Steady, Tancred, old fellow. What's amiss?' he murmured, running his fingers gently up the leg. Tancred flinched and flung up his head with a jingle of bit-chains. Gino controlled him with a lean hand on his bridle, stroked his muzzle and soothed him in his own tongue.
‘That's no strain, Lord Hélie!' declared Stephen, peering knowledgeably over his shoulder. ‘He was right enough when you reached yon ale-house, and there's been naught to lame him since!'
Hélie squatted on his heels, feeling lightly at bone and tendon and the increasing swelling. The horse flinched again, jerking at his hands and almost dragging Gino from his feet. Hélie exclaimed and peered closely at a tiny dark spot amid the chestnut hairs, a little hard projection that his finger-tip had discovered. He closed his nails firmly on it and tugged, drawing out a long dark hawthorn-spike that had thrust under the skin to lie along the great tendon. The stallion squealed protest, and Hélie set down his hoof and held the thorn up for all to see. Then he stared at the swollen leg, a monstrous suspicion dispelling bewilderment from his brain. Thorns Tancred might well have picked up in his wild plunge into the woods, but no thorn he had encountered before had ever done so much.
He inspected it. It was not fresh wood but hard and dry, and when he touched it to his finger, sharp as a needle. Durande's hand came over his and jerked it back before he could break the skin, and he nodded acknowledgement as their eyes met in perfect, grim comprehension.
He squatted again. The swelling had mounted to the knee-joint, and the stallion was trembling all over, his head drooping. Hélie held the hoof firmly over his thigh, whipped out his dagger and opened the tiny mark as deeply as he dared, into a long cut. Tancred squealed and flung up his head with a clash of teeth, but there was no spirit in his resistance and it was over at once. He stood shuddering and submissive as Hélie squeezed out darkly-trickling blood.
‘Poison?’ exclaimed Stephen incredulously. ‘God's Life, witchcraft!'
He flung himself without further ado over his nag's back and kicked it into a clumsy gallop, back the way they had come, the clatter of his hoofbeats rapidly diminishing.
‘He will catch nobody, with that noise to herald him,’ Gino observed.
‘Or without it. They took to the woods as soon as our backs were turned.' Hélie had set the sluggish blood to running, pressing and squeezing to force the poison from the wound, but his cars were cocked as he worked. They were not more than a furlong from the ale-house, and soon Stephen stormed back to them, ablaze with fury.
‘Gone, and the miller’s nag too! They knew—they were joined to him—they are witches!’
‘The woman did it,’ Hélie said, remembering her hands in her apron, Tancred’s squeal when she went to the horses. ‘Lady Durande, what more can we do? What is the poison?’
‘I do not know,’ she answered regretfully. ‘Since it is in the blood, bleeding is all I can suggest.’
Oddly enough, it was Stephen who provided an answer. ‘Reminds me of a pup I had once, found an adder in the woods. Swelled up the same way.’
‘Adder’s venom—by Heaven’s Lord, what else? When I crushed it under my own heel in the witch’s place!’
He made another cut higher up. Tancred stood with head bowed, his flanks heaving and his breath sucking noisily. The blood came more readily, and the flesh showed darkly in the wound, not healthy crimson.
‘What came of the pup?’ Gino asked bluntly, stroking the horse’s shuddering neck.
‘Died.’
‘She would get very little venom upon a thorn,’ Durande observed quietly, ‘and it would need more to kill a horse than a pup.’ They took heart. There was little more they could do for the poor brute in this wilderness. For a short time Hélie feared that he would go down, but they kept him on his feet, encouraged the wound to bleed, and waited. Durande proved an accurate prophet. The swelling rose more slowly and then checked. After a while it began to diminish, and Tancred’s distress eased. Gino admonished him forcibly, and he lifted his head and blew a shuddering snort. By the end of another hour he was sufficiently recovered for Hélie to lead him, slowly and carefully. Clearly he could not go far. Hélie considered briefly and then, accepting the inevitable, turned back towards the ale-house.
'The nearest hamlet is half a mile along that side road,’ he explained to Gino's questioning brows. 'We must leave him there.’
'Those devil's servants will be watching!' objected Stephen.
'They must know we have no other choice.'
'But why? What sense does it make?' he burst out.
Hélie shrugged; he could only guess. 'To delay my return to Warby, I suppose. Maybe to embroil us in scandal to our necks; we cannot reach the convent tonight. Perhaps to win Fulbert time to overtake us.’
'But your horse—you, Lord of Trevaine!'
'Do such cunning vermin ever credit others with wit to fathom their devices? They cannot tell we found the thorn or knew the venom.'
Yet the ale-house, when they reached it, seemed full of eyes leering at them round the half-open door, through the gaping wall and broken thatch. The rustling woods whispered with secret voices, and the skin prickled between Hélie's shoulders as he turned his back on it. Gino glanced uneasily about him, his sling looped in
his hand and a stone ready, and Stephen's head turned on his shoulder until the house was out of sight.
'Truly there is a stink of witchcraft about that place!' he declared violently, crossing himself.
Hélie had noticed no stink beyond that of spilled ale, but there was no reason to be had from his half-brother when witchcraft was in question. He devoted himself to coaxing the lame horse along the track, with many pauses to let the distressed stallion rest. Fortunately the distance was but short. They forded a calf-deep stream, the woods thinned and opened, a swineherd left his ridge-backed charges to his lean cur and came running to offer succour, and as they reached the cottages scattered about a green where linen lay bleaching, the whole population had gathered about them. Hélie's name ran through the throng.
A stocky fellow in decent homespun presented himself as the reeve and set the hamlet's entire resources at Lord Hélie's disposal. Tancred was led away by the cowherd, a wizened elder warranted skilled with sick beasts. Before Hélie could silence him Stephen had blurted out a scorching denunciation of the ale-wife. No one seemed surprised; the virago Gytha was obviously notorious. They were regaled with bread, new cheese, honey and foaming mugs of authoritative old October ale. The reeve's gaze moved from the fading rope-weals on Hélie's wrists to the graze on his cheek, and its careful blankness as it rested on the lady's shocking disorder was more eloquent than the blatant goggling of the undisciplined. Hélie sighed resignedly; better that they should gossip over the truth than embroider their own scandalous speculations. Between mouthfuls he briefly accounted for their state. After that he could have had anything for the asking save his one great need; there was no horse within the hamlet.
Hélie ruefully regarded Lady Durande, for whose safety and good name he had assumed responsibility, and ran a hand distractedly through his unruly mane. She grinned at him, and he bit at his lips to restrain his own mouth from slipping into reciprocal amusement.
'It is no matter for laughter, Lady Durande,' he told her austerely. 'We cannot reach the convent before tomorrow, and a night in my company will ruin your good name for ever.'
'It is already beyond harm,' she answered coolly, 'and what cannot be mended must be borne with.'
'Your honour shall not be lightly regarded. And the man who marries you must never have excuse to cast doubt in your face.'
'No man shall marry Vallaroy who doubts our honour,' she said flatly, her face sombre again. 'I am safe in your hands.'
He flushed like an awkward boy at that avowal, and stared tongue-fast at his own feet. Then he heaved himself up from the turf bank where they had eaten. The shadows were lengthening. He was a good twenty miles from Trevaine, and the horses had done enough. He read in the reeve's face an impending offer of hospitality for the night, and that quickened his wits; he had no wish to share a reeking cottage with beasts and vermin.
'My father had a hunting-lodge up at Ashley on the forest edge. It is no more than four miles hence. There should be servants there, and women to care for you,' he said to Durande. ‘We will pass the night there.'
He thanked the reeve, conferred again with the cowherd, arranged to send a groom for Tancred when he was healed, distributed a few silver pennies, and at last won free of the village's good wishes, and the children who trotted alongside to set them on their way.
Stephen insisted that Hélie should ride his dispirited nag, and tramped beside him. Once beyond the village the track was barely recognizable, and they made slow progress. This was not the busy, populous country of the lower valley, with villages within sight of each other along the plain, set down amid their broad fields and shrinking woods with their homely smoke feathering skyward all around. This was rougher land, rising to hills and mantled with trees, the wide-scattered hamlets set in their painfully-hacked clearings, their life over-shadowed by the nearby royal forest.
Clouds gathered in the sky, but they seemed to enclose and retain the day's heat like a heavy blanket. The trees' shade afforded no coolness; the sultry air, unstirred by any breeze, stifled lungs and skin. They sweated in streams. Dust caked thickly on their flesh and turned to a kind of gritty mud. Flies pestered them. The horses flagged; in the rougher parts they had to lead them. Thorns and branches snagged their clothing.
Where the soil lay scantly over the rocks the trees thinned, interspersed with open spaces of heath and scrubland. It was a relief to emerge upon a half-mile stretch of rough grass and bracken, and draw free breath. Durande suddenly urged her palfrey alongside Hélie's mount, and he signed to Stephen to drop back with Gino. He surveyed her with compunction. Though she sat as erect and as easily as at the day's start, she was a spectacle to make feminine vanity blench. Her hair was dimmed with dust, her face a mask of it, and her dilapidated gown, which no renovation would ever render wearable again, had been ripped from knee to hem, affording a shocking glimpse of shapely calf and ankle.
"Lord Hélie,' she began bluntly, "I fear this knightly venture has done you grievous harm.'
He grinned, one eyebrow lifting comically. "I have been rarely entertained, demoiselle, and regret none of it.'
Low-voiced she asked, "Hermeline—and your mother?'
"This legend of my deathless passion takes a deal of demolishing,' he declared with mock plaintiveness. "I am another sort of fool now, and her pretty face is nothing. My mother must reconcile herself.' He foresaw weeks of gentle, sorrowful, unwearying reproaches, but though like his sire he was prepared to yield Lady Avice her will in most matters for the sake of domestic harmony, he would enter matrimony at his own choice and not hers.
‘Is that truth, or do you seek to cheer me?’ the red-headed girl demanded with the appalling candour that delighted him.
‘I could never look on Hermeline without seeing Rohese the witch in her face,’ he answered flatly, and paid a passing tribute to his father's wisdom when he swore by many oaths that no Warby blood should pollute the purity of Trevaine's breeding— and filial reverence had never been Hélie's outstanding characteristic.
‘She must have been very beautiful,’ Durande observed meditatively, under her breath.
‘Who? Hermeline?'
‘The one who taught you distrust of all pretty faces.'
He gasped as if she had smitten him over the heart. For a moment the ghost rose before him of lovely, wanton, treacherous Osanne de Périval, who had mazed and enchanted him through hot, rose-scented nights, and at the last plunged him into a hell of shame and rage and despairing grief. It was nothing now. The last strands of magic's web snapped about him and released him to reality. He looked back marvelling on the besotted young fool he had been, and a wry grin tugged at his mouth as he admitted his debt to her.
‘Yes, a boon worth winning,' he agreed, caught the flicker of her dimple and began to laugh that so much violent passion had dwindled to nothing. It was blown away like thistledown on a summer breeze, and he was cheerfully jogging knee to knee with a forthright lass in whose company no man could cherish melancholy. They grinned at each other in complete accord.
‘Another boon, my girl,' he said severely, ‘is that this day's adventures have rendered that deplorable gown unfit for aught but kitchen-clouts, for indeed I have seen too much of it.'
‘If you have seen too much of it already, how do you reckon I regard it after wearing it longer than I care to remember?' she retorted, with a flash of fine teeth.
Behind the laughter his quickened perceptions glimpsed the bitter humiliation of a young girl who knows her appearance makes her the butt and mockery of her small world. ‘What need was there?' he demanded indignantly.
She shrugged. ‘I was not fourteen when I went to Warby, and bursting my gowns asunder. If Robert had been willing to squander his thrice-pledged revenues on my attire, I was not willing to accept anything of his. Lady Emma gave me this.’
'I shall take you to Trevaine,' he offered impulsively, ‘and set my mother's women sewing for you!'
‘What will your mother say to that, my lord?'
she answered dryly.
‘A good deal,' he admitted, ‘but that need not hinder their needles.' He eyed her judicially. ‘There is a length of golden silk I brought from Toulouse will become you, and a Flemish broadcloth of popinjay blue. Yes, and—'
‘Stop, my lord! You brought them as gifts for your mother; you cannot bestow them elsewhere!'
‘But she assured me she would wear naught but mourning for the rest of her life,' he informed her, grinning broadly.
‘But it would not be seemly to give them to a stranger!' she protested.
‘It would be a deal less seemly to present you at the convent gate in that gown!' he declared warmly. ‘I should come away with a fame as a ravisher I should never be able to sustain!'
‘Then for your reputation's sake I must make the sacrifice, my lord,' she replied demurely, and laughter broke from them like water from a fountain. But Hélie had seen the instantly-suppressed longing in her face at mention of silk and broadcloth, and was surprised by his own desire to heap her with lovely and costly stuffs to compensate for shamed years in another woman's discards.
‘Golden silk,' he pronounced firmly, his heart-beats quickening a little as he pictured the rich gleam of it closely embracing her proud breasts and slender waist, and flowing like water about her long legs. ‘Golden silk, my girl, and a fillet of gold about your glory of hair. Never a wimple, for beauty's own sake!'
‘Will you have me rival Hermeline?' she laughed protest.
‘Mend your wits, lass! You are fairer by far than that silly ninny,' he stated so flatly that she stared incredulously. ‘And have you any urgent desire to seek refuge in the convent? I should reckon you most ill-suited.'
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