“It needs no more than water!” she said impatiently. The old woman was glaring malevolently at the squire, and Rodriga knew her misanthropic mind so well that she made haste to check her. She spoke hastily in Moorish so that he should not understand. “You are not to insult him! He has done me great service!”
The old woman uttered a laugh that was half a snarl, but that was her normal mirth, and answered in the same tongue, “Never trust a man, my sweeting, and least of all hot young cockerels who would serve you! Aye, serve you indeed!”
She stiffened at the play on that word, and the blood rose in her face. “Urraca! Enough! Send Diego with food and wine!” It was useless to try to fetter that tongue; the only course was to dismiss its owner to other occupation.
She laughed again, and hooked up the curtain at the entrance before she came out. Over her shoulder she grinned at them. “This lusty young stallion will not care for it, but you will be better for daylight in here, my pigeon!”
Rodriga bit her lip and glanced aside at the squire, who raised courteously inquiring brows. At least he could not have understood Moorish and kept his countenance, and she thanked the Saints for so much. “That was Urraca, Ramiro’s mother,” she explained shortly, “and it is too late to amend her manners.” She kicked a battered leather cushion to him across the canvas floor, well within the patch of daylight that filled the entrance. Unpalatable advice was yet worth taking, and the Saints themselves might hesitate to foretell how long an argument would detain her father if the wine held out. Her brief life had been spent largely in camp and castle, and it had left her no illusions about personable young squires practised in pleasing women. Not that she had attraction, nor cause for fear, but it was wisdom to withhold even the semblance of opportunity. So she kicked another cushion to a discreet distance from the first, and over a platter of flat coarse bread and sticky dates brought by Diego they improved their acquaintance a little. The squire was curious, and in Acre, where men had gathered to the Cross from all parts of Christendom, curiosity might be reckoned justifiable.
“The tongue you speak with the old woman, demoiselle, is that of Spain?”
“Moorish. Arabic of Spain. All my people speak it.”
“All? Then they are all Spanish? You must have lived long there.”
“There is Ramiro, whose wife was my nurse, God rest her, and his five sons. They are all our force. And we have lived everywhere from England to Acre.”
“England? My lord has a holding there.” He slid easily from personalities that she did not relish so soon after meeting, and she knew that she had betrayed resentment and became awkward again. Piers de Veragny’s social gifts covered her deficiencies; he chatted easily and innocuously of England until her constraint eased in exchanging reminiscences, and she thawed into liking. He was a very affable, good-natured young man who had greatly helped her, and she was flattered by his attention. Yet she was not sorry when their talk was interrupted by a loud and cheerful voice beyond the tents, and she leaped up to welcome her father.
CHAPTER II
Landry de Parolles was a shrewd soldier and a stout man of his hands, who had failed to achieve the success or fortune those assets merited through two major defects, a caustic tongue that spared the errors of neither rank nor office, and infallible proclivity for enlisting on the losing side. Plunder and ransoms had seldom been his, no lord would long tolerate his unfettered speech; after close on forty years of wandering amidst sieges, battles and bickerings of all kinds he had come at last to win a fief or a grave in the Holy Land, unsoured by failure, old and outworn but preserving undimmed his humour and his zest for living.
He enfolded his daughter in an enormous hug and then held her off by the shoulders, grinning across his freckled face. “Robbing the vultures, I hear?” he accused her. “What have you scavenged, lass? . . . Ho, that? Misguided, my brat. Or no, he would have poisoned the pretty birds.”
“They were five to one, and he was brave,” she extenuated her lapse, as he stood over the renegade, who lay like vultures’ meat indeed but for his heavy breathing.
“God forbid I should deprive you of your winnings, lass. Do as you please with him,” he chuckled, flinging an arm round her shoulders. She grinned up at him.
“Let me present the squire who aided me,” she said, and led him to Piers de Veragny, standing respectfully just inside the tent doorway. Her father took one look and checked, staring. Then he limped forward, smiling a welcome.
“By God’s Life, I can put a name to you without telling, boy! Rionart, is it not? Simon de Rionart’s son?”
The young man fell back a pace, eyes and mouth open, gaping as if he were bereft of his wits. “I am Piers de Veragny!” he declared. “Richard de Veragny was my father!”
Landry’s red brows drew together. “Holy Saints, there is no mistaking that face of his on you!”
The young man’s eyes dilated, and he backed a pace, his hands outspread as if to thrust away a menace. There was indeed no mistaking his face, and Rodriga realised with sick dismay what her father’s heedless words had done to him. His mouth opened, but no words came from him.
“I am an old fool,” growled Landry de Parolles, distress and sympathy warring in his face with the certainty of recognition. “I never thought—” He broke off, his eyes intently surveying Piers, and the certainty hardened. “I never dreamed that Simon, of all men—”
“You tell me,” Piers said in a curiously still and lifeless voice, “that I am this Simon de Rionart’s bastard, and my mother cheated my—Richard de Veragny?”
“I would not have done this to you for all the gold in Byzantium!” Landry muttered. “But you are Simon—Simon as I knew him twenty years ago, and his face is not to be mistaken! But to make you a bastard—”
“I always knew I was that,” said the same toneless voice, “but his—always his! And my mother—my mother a cheat and whore—”
“You knew!”
“My—he married my mother after I was born.”
Landry de Parolles caught him by the shoulders. “Boy, who was your mother?”
He put up his hands and lifted the great hairy paws from their hold. “Is there need for any more, my lord?” he asked bitterly. “She was my mother. Let her name be.”
“No!” said Landry forcefully. “Since I have done this, we will finish it! No, do not go! Not like this! If I could undo the harm—”
“Water that is spilled cannot be gathered up again,” Piers answered harshly from the doorway. Landry seized him by the arm and shook him insistently, and Rodriga, seeing him so distressed and determined together, moved to bar the squire’s way. He yielded. “My mother was Melisande, daughter of Fulk de Barroday. And she is dead, so spare her.”
Landry de Parolles grunted, frowned in utter bewilderment, and freed him so that he might thrust his hands through his grizzled red thatch. “But—what—Melisande de Barroday was Simon’s wife!”
Piers, his foot over the threshold, froze in the act of stepping out. “Wife?” he repeated witlessly.
“Lord Above, I danced at their wedding!” exclaimed Landry, tearing at his hair until it stood on end. “Here, come back and sit down. You do not go until we have reached the truth. Hey, brat! Wine to set our wits working! Mine are near addled over this!”
Rodriga filled and brought three cups of the cheap, rough country wine, and in silence sat down at her father’s side. The squire looked dazed and wretched, as well he might, but Landry had now set his teeth into the problem and would not be detached until he had worried it to a conclusion.
“Simon de Rionart married Melisande de Barroday in February of 71,” he began briskly. “I was a witness. Not likely to forget it,” he added parenthetically. “The last celebration I enjoyed in Poitou before I skipped out of it a spear’s length ahead of my overlord. But I knew Simon well. When were you born, lad?”
“In 72,” answered Piers flatly. “The eleventh day of Christmas— that was a jest at Veragny.” He looke
d down at his hands, clenched on his knees, and then up at Landry.
“And Simon died, I heard later, in March of that year. You were born to his wife in his lifetime, not even posthumously. Lad, you are his legitimate son. You cannot be any other. What is your name— Piers, you said? Yes, his father’s. And this other, Richard de Veragny, married your mother? When?”
“I do not remember,” Piers said ridiculously, and then smiled faintly as though he had just appreciated the foolishness of that answer. “But I was told that I was a babe just learning to stand alone when my father— when Lord Richard brought me with my mother to Veragny.”
“Maybe a year. It all fits. He was your step-father. Your mother’s husband and your guardian. And you are too young to remember, but we who were grown and survived them will not forget the years of 73 and 74, when it seemed that Heaven would avenge the holy martyr Saint Thomas on King Henry and all that was his. All Poitou was up. I grant you that is the normal state of Poitou, but not with the Count himself heading rebellion against his own father. So this fellow married your mother and assumed rule over Rionart in those times. Convenient for many things. What manner of hound was he?”
“No hound! No hound at all!” Piers protested. “He was brave and just and kind, a true father to me!”
“But that was a knave’s trick, to pretend you were his bastard. Veragny—I never met the man, but the fief is in the Landes. Barren country that. Some small parcels of land elsewhere, but none worth much.”
“My lord, I will never believe that he intended to wrong me! He loved my mother above all else on earth, he told me, and me for her sake! And she would never have been a party to such a lie!” He was half-risen on one knee, defending his step-father with an eager intensity that carried conviction. “Neither he nor my mother would have called me bastard!”
“Steady, lad! Then your step-father sat fast and waited for you to grow, while folk muttered that if he took so much trouble he must have sired you. What went amiss? He died too soon?”
“He died suddenly. Broke his neck hunting. And it was Robert called me bastard—Robert was the thief—ah, God’s Life, I see it now!”
“And who,” inquired Landry, “is Robert?”
The young man collected himself, and spoke more soberly. “My half-brother—no, my step-brother, thank God! He succeeded. He was first to call me bastard. He told me I had no inheritance, as I was born before marriage. It was the year of great troubles, when the young King died in arms against his father.”
“Coolly took your inheritance, eh? Your mother?”
“She died when I was small, in childbed of twin girls who died also.”
“Holy Saints, boy, was there no one at Rionart knew you for Simon’s son?”
“I was never at Rionart since I can remember anything, my lord. My—my step-father kept me always at Veragny, where the war never came. I suppose Robert said I was dead. He tried to make it so.”
“Go on, boy.”
“He sent me to Lacombrey, near the Angevin border, as page to the seneschal. A risky place, and he kept it ill-garrisoned, but nothing happened. We never smelled an enemy. When I was thirteen, and by his thinking, I suppose, growing dangerous, he visited us. Two days later he arranged a day’s hawking, and then made excuse not to accompany us. We were attacked by a band of routiers, but the seneschal was too quick for them. We escaped into the woods. When we returned he beat me—that was the third time in two days, and for no reason. I crawled into a shed to hide from him, and while I was in hiding I overheard a dispute between him and the seneschal, who— who objected to being included in my removal. I heard enough to be sure that he had arranged the attack, and that he was determined to murder me. Next day I contrived to escape from the manor by hiding inside an empty barrel in a cart. He pursued me and caught me by the river. He stabbed me and threw me into the water. But my lord Gilbert de Cherberay and his father were riding by, out of sight behind trees on the other side, and he swam his horse to me and saved me. Then he took me into his household, and I have served him ever since.”
The young man had no acquaintance with the art of narrative, but he still contrived to hold his hearers’ entire attention through that bald exposition of his affairs. Rodriga found that she was clenching her fists so fiercely that her nails dug painfully into her palms, and her father was looking uncommonly grim.
“Carrion like that would gripe the guts of a grave-robbing jackal!” he growled, and took a deep swallow of the indifferent wine to wash away the taste of that story. “Does he know you are alive?”
“We met in Acre two nights ago,” the young man answered, drinking deeply himself. “He had not known until then—the shock came near giving him an apoplexy.” His hard smile suggested that he had enjoyed the encounter.
“Then it was he hired Marco to kill you?” Rodriga asked quickly, interrupting for the first time.
“No one else in Acre has any grudge against me.”
Landry de Parolles spat emphatically through the doorway. “Hired your killing, eh? That black vulture? Lord Above, this is stinking vermin, not a man!”
“Robert himself is crippled. He can walk only with a crutch, so he must kill me by proxy if at all.” He seemed surprisingly temperate, Rodriga thought, for one who stood in danger of murder; then she realised that he despised both his step-brother and Marco so thoroughly that he could not conceive of them as a danger. He looked up, a grim smile on his face. “I told him that it was the justice of God, and that it preserved him from my vengeance. I thought his own rage would burst him. And last night that renegade tried to kill me.”
“How?”
“Forced a quarrel on me as I was leaving—” He checked, and glanced uneasily at Rodriga, who grinned.
“We will not inquire more particularly into your whereabouts,” she assured him, and was rewarded by a burning blush. Fair enough; it was his turn to be set at a disadvantage. Her father cocked an appreciative eye at her and smothered a chuckle.
The young man scowled a little. “My friends got between us and dragged me away before I could teach the dog what respect is due to a gentleman,” he ended sulkily. It was a tame result to confess.
“They did you good service,” Landry told him flatly. “No, take that mutinous scowl off your face; it does not impress me! Would you rather that they had waited to bury you?”
He sat back, looking sheepish and unsure of himself, and then managed an apologetic smile. “I ask your pardon, my lord,” he muttered. After all, Rodriga excused him, he was only a confused and worried boy of nineteen, suffering from a shock that had turned his whole life upside-down.
“This Marco is no great matter. Denounce him to the Provost if you please, though as you did not come to blows you have no case,” said Landry crisply. “Robert is the one we must consider. If he has in truth tried to kill you, he will not rest with failure. And then there is Rionart.”
“If it is rightfully mine I will never rest until he has disgorged it!” he declared with savage fervour. Thought of his stolen inheritance had indeed burned deeply, Rodriga thought with some amusement.
“We must challenge him before the King’s court,” Landry went on. “And the evidence—humph. Yes. The evidence.” He rolled a doubtful eye at his daughter.
“Amounts to very little,” she answered promptly, having already given thought to that. “You claim to have recognised Master Piers through his resemblance to his father. What would the King say to your recognition of a man nineteen years dead, and you without standing or repute?”
“Disrespectful brat!” exclaimed Landry, grinning cheerfully at the aspersions on his character. “I danced at his parents’ wedding. Does that count for nothing?”
“Less than that, I should reckon, since Poitou considered itself well rid of you twenty years ago,” Rodriga told him heartlessly. “Robert would call it a malicious conspiracy between his father’s bastard and an unscrupulous adventurer, and who would credit your story? Besides, he is in possess
ion.”
“Should have inquired more carefully into your mother’s ancestry!” growled her father, eyeing her with mock awe. “Lawyer’s ink in your veins somewhere, and never from my unblemished blood! Trial by battle—no, wiser not to ask. He, being crippled, can demand a champion, and here we have an untried lad. Proof is what we need.”
“What must we prove?” asked Piers, who had followed the argument with a bewildered expression on his face. Rodriga refilled the men’s cups, and sat back hugging her knees to her slight breast, gravely considering him as he used his own wits on the problem. “First, my parents’ marriage. We have one witness—”
“Two are needed. Proof that a child was born of that marriage, and that you are the child.”
“And my father’s death and my mother’s marriage to Richard de Veragny.”
“And here we are half the world away from Poitou, where the truth must be dug for,” finished Landry, and buried his nose in his cup.
The list was formidable, and he looked at them in dismay. Rodriga was visited by inspiration.
“That attempt to murder you when you were a child? Was not your lord a witness? That would be evidence to set before King Richard!”
“He and a squire who was present can testify that he hauled me from the river, with a knife-wound in my breast of which I still bear the scar,” said Piers grimly, running his fingers through his rough curls, “but Robert fled when he heard them coming, and they never set eyes on him.”
“Your unsupported word, against that of a tenant-in-chief. Not enough. What of that other scar on your brow?”
He put up his hand to the ragged white mark on his right temple, revealed by his disordered hair. “This? Oh, no help; a hawk mauled me in my cradle. No, it is not a credible tale. If he were whole I would challenge him and win my rights from his carcase, but a cripple is safe. Yet Rionart is mine, and I will have it!” Flushed and eager, he looked ready to leap up and seek out combat.
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