“My lady.” Heloise stirred finally. “I am flattered that you think I am trustworthy to serve in such a manner but it would be very easy for an enemy to fabricate evidence against me.” Gathering her wrap close, she drew back the bedcurtain on her side and slid her feet to the floor.
“No, wait,” protested Margery, gazing at Heloise’s braids. “I . . . I understand your vulnerability. Forget what I suggested. Listen, there has to be a solution. Surely if you have the peace offering of Rushden’s horse to return to him, the man will be a cur not to be grateful for that, so why not go to Wales for that reason alone? Or is your intuition warning you against Brecknock?”
“No.” The oaken bedpost was smooth beneath her fingers as Heloise stroked it. “It is being friendless that bothers me. A man can easily obtain respectable employment but it is not easy being a gentlewoman and I cannot keep that state for long. My father will never have me back after Rushden has turned me away.”
“Then you will go to Wales.”
“It seems I have no choice.”
“Then let me give you a gift that may bring you comfort.” Margery padded across the room to a wooden jewel coffer that sat upon the small table beneath the casement. “A charm for the courageous cockatrice and valiant lady knight.” She tugged a gold chain with a key from beneath her nightclothes and unlocked the casket. “Here.” A unicorn brooch, small enough to be a hat badge, gleamed upon her palm. “Take it, Heloise. Wear this in Wales if ever you are in desperation.”
Was this just a token to give her courage? Or did Gloucester have an agent already at Brecknock who might help her?
With a wry smile, Heloise lifted the brooch. “You mean someone will nudge a cartload of straw beneath my window in case I have to jump?” she asked.
“Exactly, but only if the roof is on fire and you cannot— Have I said something wrong?”
“No,” spluttered Heloise, but her merriment stilled abruptly. Strength emanated from the snowy enamel, tingling her fingers. The fabled beast’s eye glinted at her, reminding her of Traveller. “Thank you,” she said softly.
“I had a St. Catherine brooch once from the king himself.” For an instant, her friend’s face was shadowed and then she shook herself back into the present. “I wish my husband were here to advise us. A groom and a maid are insufficient escort. You will need some well-trained men-at-arms. I could spare two of my escort to protect you from all those lawless Welshmen.”
“Two! Oh, Margery, how shall I repay your generosity? I have a few jewels my mother left me. Would you take those for surety?”
“Nonsense. Now, it could take two weeks or more to reach Brecknock from here. Do not go by way of Gloucester but take a ferryboat across the Bristol Channel to Chepstow and seek advice there about the best road. When is your father sending Rushden’s horse to be sold?”
“Two days hence.”
“Then you leave that day and you demand the horse.”
“Demand?”
“Yes, my lady Rushden, after all, it is your husband’s property.”
“My husband’s,” repeated Heloise, as though it were a new prayer still to be learned. “Yes.” It was an empowering thought.
“Now to bed with you, cockatrice.” Kind arms embraced her. “You have friends, remember that.”
“I have one more favor. Please, will you watch over my sister at Middleham? For all her mischief, I love her dearly.”
“I rather think she can take care of herself. Now sleep well. Wales is waiting for you, Heloise!”
HARDLY! HIDING BEHIND A DAMP MIZZLE, WALES WELCOMED the travelers with the enthusiasm of a scowling, underpaid servant, as the oarsmen raised their blades dripping from the grey water of the Bristol Channel, and the ferry barge was roped to the quay. Heloise had expected to make the crossing earlier but the ferry passengers had been forced to wait until the Severn bore had run its course, and now Chepstow looked scarcely worth the effort. A great castle high on its cliff above the river stared blankly down at the salt-sprayed disembarking passengers. The scent of sour ale wafted from the tavern at the end of the quay, adding to the stink of what must have been someone’s day-before-yesterday’s unsold catch, which was festering forgotten in a wicker putcheon with a ragged tomcat trying to claw it forth. If the rain had brought out the rats, the ferry’s arrival drew the inevitable touters, prating of ale, whores, and dice. A one-legged beggar hobbled among them, rattling his bowl and cursing a pitifully young strumpet for distracting his customers, and beyond them a drunkard spewed his innards on a warehouse step. Heloise had been to ports before but well chaperoned with her father in command. True, it was a miserable March day, but the English wharfergers loading the panniers of salmon and sea lamprey onto carts did not whistle as they labored, as the Bristol men did, but swore and cursed. This, then, was Wales.
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 sympathizer 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 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. Enduring lanes of dung, they called at prosperous farmhouses, where they bought cheeses to exchange for the goods 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 for another reason. 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 yelling out of some 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 thei
r 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 rubdown?”
“Wel!” One of the brigands understood her and laughed, kneeing his pony forward and raising 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 fur-skin 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.
“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 traveled 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 travelers 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 jewelry 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 Duke Harry you met me—if you dare open your mouth to him.” She spurred away before an utterly puzzled Heloise could answer.
“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 by Lady Vaughan, and did not speak until they were into open country. “Nawr te, arglwyddes, that is Tretwr.”
It was unbelievably stylish. Heloise had expected a Norman keep, and there was an elderly round one squatting in the backyard like a forgotten relative, but it was the stone house in front that took her breath away. A window, surmounted by an arched molding 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 doors 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, 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 bull’s-eye butt.
The guide’s brows rose 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, she thought. 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!”
Eight
One could believe it was sheep not Englishmen who 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 apologizing with a rainbow. Hoel led them north to Talgarth, a village with a ruined fortress not far from the broader highway that ran betwixt Hereford and Brecknock, and now she no longer needed a guide, Heloise paid him off.
At Bronllys next day she delegated the Huddleston men to hire a byre where they might hide Traveller from Rushden in case she needed the horse as bargaining. 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. She would need every ounce of courage to face him.
As they drew closer to Brecknock, other mountains, visible and invisible, climbed the horizon to the southwest, barren and formidable, 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 making a prayer for the dead youth’s soul, Heloise kneed Cloud on, fearful lest a vision come to her.
There were dwellings now, and the riders 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 marketplace. Heloise did not tarry, or 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 ca
stle 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 that 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. 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 splendor 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 farther 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.
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