The Leopard Unleashed

Chapter 9

As the first light of dawn greyed Hawkfield’s courtyard, William dismounted from his spotted stallion and stared round at the few yawning servants shambling about their first duties. ‘Where’s Lord Renard?’ he demanded of the scratching, gummy-eyed groom who came to tend the horse.

‘Dunno, sir,’ he mumbled. ‘Still abed, I think.’

‘Still abed?’ William repeated flatly. His jaw tightened and he signalled his men to dismount. The hall door was barred. William thumped on it with the hilt of his sword until a serving woman opened it. He barged past her into the darkness which was dimly lit by the fire from the central hearth, the former only just being resurrected to day time use by a puffy-faced maid.

In the bedchamber located behind screens at the end of the hall, Renard sat bolt upright and cursed.

Olwen caressed his thigh. An hour ago her hand had been on a part of him even more intimate.

Withdrawing brusquely from her touch, he began scrambling into his clothes.

‘It’s not my fault if you go back to sleep instead of getting up.’ She rolled over, half raised her lids, and extended fingers and toes in a replete feline stretch.

Renard scowled at her but omitted to retort. The blame was his, he acknowledged, but she had meant it to happen. The way she had lain against him afterwards, soothing and stroking him into sleep, knowing full well that he was supposed to be meeting his brother at the crossroads north of Hawkfield before the crack of dawn. He knew he should have spent the night at Ravenstow, not arranged to set out to meet his betrothed straight from the warm bed of his mistress. And now he was going to be late.

Outside there was a squawk of protest from one of the maids, and the curtain separating bedchamber from hall was rudely clashed aside. ‘Are you going to malinger there all day?’ William demanded. ‘We’re supposed to be meeting Elene before noon.’

Renard fastened his hose and hunted out a leg binding. ‘Stop being so damned righteous and fetch me a drink!’ he growled.

Olwen slowly sat up, not bothering to draw the sheet around her body. William stared at her silken shoulders and arms, at the seductive curve of her breasts stranded by her tousled hair, at the look she gave him, provocative and mocking.

‘Fetch it yourself!’ he snapped and stalked out into the hall.

Olwen murmured sweetly, ‘He is in a temper, isn’t he?’

‘Can’t you sheathe that tongue of yours for once?’ Renard snarled. Having scrambled into the rest of his clothes, he began to struggle with his hauberk.

She made no effort to help him, but watched him with amusement. ‘That was not your wish earlier,’ she said.

Renard finally succeeded in donning the garment. The awareness of her silent laughter mortified him. Mouth compressed, he latched his swordbelt, and made to leave the room.

‘What, no fond parting kiss?’ she said.

On the threshold he paused, knuckles clenched upon the wall. ‘Stop playing with me, Olwen. I’m not a tame hound to jump through hoops at your bidding.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘And that is what makes you interesting.’

He struck his fist once against the wall and, without looking round, walked out.

Olwen rolled on to her belly, and smiling, closed her eyes.

The first few miles of the journey up the march to greet the bridal party travelling down towards them were loaded with tension and brooding temper. Renard set a vicious pace, and Gorvenal, half Arabian and lighter boned than a full destrier, flew over the ground and left the escort lumbering. William had to spur Smotyn hard to keep level, and after one particularly bad stumble, shouted at Renard to slow down.

‘You’re going to founder us all!’ he complained.

‘Don’t blame me if you can’t keep up!’ Renard retorted, but he drew rein and looked round at the men strung out behind, and knew that the blame was indeed his. It was not horses or men he was riding into the ground but his own foul temper. If any serjeant or knight of his had led the troop in such a sloppy formation as he now saw, he would have blistered that man’s ears from his skull and docked his pay.

‘Christ, Renard, take a grip on yourself!’ William’s voice cracked with anxiety. ‘The whole future of our family is in your hands. You can’t throw it away because of a … because of a …’

‘… Half-breed dancing girl?’ Renard finished for him, with a mirthless laugh. ‘Jesu, if you knew how easy it just might be.’

William eyed him. Renard’s features were now schooled to impassivity. William’s gut ceased to lurch with fear and the tightness across his shoulders eased. Just before the leading knight reached them, Renard slapped William’s mail-clad arm. ‘My wits had gone wool-gathering and left my temper in command,’ he said with forced lightness. ‘I’m all right now, you can stop fretting.’

Which meant, thought William, that the temper was of a necessity locked up, not that it had magically evaporated. He watched Renard muster the men, jest with them about his haste to greet his bride, watched him organise them into a tight escort, van, centre and rearguard to his liking, and then settle companionably among them to ride at a sensible, disciplined pace. It was more than just the girl, he thought. It was the responsibility for Ravenstow. It was the sight of their father dying by fractions before his eyes. It was the constant living on a blade’s edge. What wonder that he should seek oblivion in the arms of a woman who was a reminder of the lost freedom of Outremer. What wonder that he should object to being roused and thrust face to face with duty.

William was suddenly thankful that as his father’s youngest son, and unlikely to succeed to the earldom, he still had the freedom that Renard was being forced to forfeit.

The wind surged like an ocean, roaring through the trees and leaching them bare in trailing swirls of copper, gold and brown through which the horses waded and crunched as though they were treading shingle.

Elene shivered in her squirrel-lined cloak as the wind spattered rain into her face so hard that the droplets hurt her. She gripped her hood tightly and fidgeted in the saddle, her thighs chafed by the long day astride.

‘Not far now,’ Adam de Lacey said to her with a sympathetic smile. ‘Are you anxious?’

Elene explored the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. ‘A little,’ she admitted. ‘It seems so long ago. We’ll be strangers — married strangers within a week.’ She tried to smile at him and failed.

Adam leaned over and clasped his hand over hers on the reins. ‘It will be all right, Nell,’ he said with compassion. ‘I know it will be difficult at first, but you’ll adjust, you’ll see.’

She nodded stiffly and wished she was marrying Adam. He was tolerant and seldom out of humour. He would have the time for her that she already sensed Renard would not.

Elene bit her lip, and looked down at Bramble’s dark mane. She had sewn all her dreams into her wedding garments, but was beginning to wish that she had been less obvious. There was a tunic for Renard too, the rich embroidery a play on his name. Renard, taken from his Norman great-grandfather who had borne the colouring and cunning of a fox.

They had corresponded briefly over the matter of the wedding. His letter had been terse and impersonal, bearing no imprint of the young man she remembered. No humour, not even a glimpse of the carelessly affectionate hand that would pat a dog’s head in passing. It was more than just anxiety that tensed her stomach; it was fear.

Adam made excuses for Renard, saying he was very busy with matters of estate, but as he spoke, he had avoided her eyes. There was more that he was not saying, but Adam was adept at keeping secrets. Elene had decided of her own intuition, which was seldom wrong (at least as far as sheep were concerned), that to Renard this marriage was a necessary, but far from welcome, intrusion into the pattern of his life: a duty to be consummated and dispensed with as quickly as possible.

Hamo le Grande was the leader of a troop of mercenaries in the pay of Ranulf, Earl of Chester. He was a hard-bitten soldier who had been fighting for money since his early adolescence. His career now spanned almost thirty years of battles, skirmishes and chevauchée. It was a rough, uncertain way to make a living and only the strongest and most fortunate survived to the years that Hamo now wore like a lead cope around his shoulders, dragging him down. Time was against him. He knew that the next ten years would see him either settled in a more permanent occupation or dead in battle.

He rubbed the fingers of his right hand over his thick grey beard, found a crumb, and absently teased it out. Below the ridge on which he had paused to rest his stallion, his paymaster’s lands blended with those of the enemy — Ravenstow. A few miles to the north on a finger of land pointing into Chester’s earldom lay the keep of Caermoel with its ownership bitterly disputed. Earl Ranulf wanted it, but was not yet ready to make his move. Other, more important pots were simmering on his hearth, such as forging contacts with the rebels in Bristol and poking his nose into affairs at Lincoln, but he had given his patrols and the Welsh levies of Cadwaladr ap Gruffydd rein to raid and forage where they would.

Hamo gazed at the lands, imagining himself the lord of one of these border fiefs. He had been indirectly promised a holding of his own if he proved worth his salt, or failing that, a castellan’s position in one of the Earl’s many keeps. It was a dream that goaded him as he fought to pitch a tent in the streaming rain of a dark field, while snug within the keep the lord he served sat practically on top of a roaring fire, gorging himself on venison, drinking wine and fondling the maidservants.

‘Do we go in?’ asked his second in command, a small tough Welshman who spoke appalling French.

Hamo gave him a withering look. ‘Don’t be stupid, boyo!’ he mimicked. ‘Of course we go in. Who’s to stop us? There’s a village a few miles down. Anyone fancy roast pork?’

The village consisted of no more than a dozen daub and wattle huts clustered around an even smaller ramshackle wooden church. There was very little to raid, but the villagers had not yet begun the autumn slaughter and there was pork to be had, the young pigs plump and succulent. The sound of their squeals was deafening and drowned out the screams of the human occupants as they either fled or died.

Hamo allowed his men to quench their thirst on the villagers’ cider, but not to the point of intoxication. A pack-horse was laden with spoils and provisions. What they could not carry they killed or burned and then they rode on, their passing marked by the crackle of flame and a pall of smoke darker than the sky.

An hour later Hamo was contemplating turning for home via a quick slaughter run through a flock of sheep he could see dotting the horizon when he caught sight of the riders joining the main road below from the rutted drover’s track that led to Woolcot. Hamo narrowed his gaze and counted eight knights and a like number of serjeants.

‘Women, look you!’ cried his second with a wolfish grin.

Hamo fixed his gaze upon the red chevrons on the leading knight’s shield, and a little behind him, riding with the women, the gold lozenge on blue background of another knight.

‘God’s teeth, it’s Henry FitzGuyon and Adam de Lacey.’

‘Who are the women then?’

‘How should I—?’ Hamo began on a snarl, then stopped, his focus becoming intense. ‘That one in front is de Lacey’s wife. Those two behind are maids, you can tell from their dress, and they’re joining the road from the Woolcot track, so the other must be Elene de Mortimer — Renard FitzGuyon’s betrothed.’ Discovering her identity as he spoke, his eyes brightened with the hunting instinct that was never far from the surface. ‘And what would my lord of Chester give to have her in his hands?’ Hard on that question came the thought that despoiled goods were far more likely to go to the despoiler than to a second party, particularly if that despoiler had already been promised lands of his own.

‘Are we going to take them on?’ The Welshman’s voice was rough with excitement. Henry FitzGuyon might be as dull as an ox, but he was also as solid and strong as one in a fight and de Lacey had a fearsome reputation in battle.

‘If it were man to man I’d think twice, but they’re hampered by the women, and it’s the women — or rather one woman — we want. We’ll catch them going into those trees further down, hit them in the centre, cut out the woman and use our bows to stop them pursuing.’

The glint of sunlight on mail rivets caught the corner of Henry’s vision. He jerked round so quickly that he wrenched his neck and the sudden streak of hot pain, coupled with the inability to move his head, prevented him from scanning the horizon. When he was able to look again, the sun had retreated behind clouds and there was nothing to be seen.

‘What’s wrong?’ Adam asked, as they rode into a scrubby willow coppice lining the moist valley bottom.

‘Nothing. I thought I saw something on the hill but it was probably just the sun reflecting off that stream up there.’ Rubbing the back of his neck, Henry winced.

Adam decided nevertheless to tighten up their form ation and turned to give Sweyn the order, his words becoming a bellow of warning as the horsemen crashed suddenly upon them, hitting them dead-centre.

Elene screamed as a weight smacked on to Bramble’s crupper. Hard mailed arms snatched the reins from her hands and spurred heels rammed into the mare’s flanks, sending her at a bolting gallop through the trees. A branch whipped Elene’s face. Her world tilted and see-sawed as the mare ploughed through the mud and started to strain up the slope. The man seated behind shouted at the horse and kicked her again. Elene wriggled and immediately his right arm clamped around her waist.

‘Don’t even think of it,’ he growled against her ear.

Adam slammed his shield into one man’s face, cut at the mercenary on his right, and pressed Lyard forward in front of Heulwen’s mount.

‘They’ve got Elene!’ Henry bellowed, hacking at his own opponent. The blade bit into the man’s arm and lodged in bone. He screamed. Henry grunted with effort as he wrenched his blade free and spun his stallion in the direction of the escaping mercenary. He found himself accompanied by several of the enemy, but none of them bothered to engage him, and in the moment that he realised why, an arrow thumped into his right pectoral and sent him reeling from the saddle. As he struck the ground, he heard the shaft snap. Fluid filled his mouth. As he lost consciousness, the last thing he saw was Adam’s sorrel stallion buckling beneath a rain of arrows and Adam trying desperately to scramble free of the saddle.

Renard slowed Gorvenal from lope to walk as he reached the crossroads where he had arranged to meet Elene and her escort, and discovered that he was the first to arrive.

‘You could have spared me another hour abed, Fonkin,’ he said, dismounting to stretch his legs and gaze into a windswept distance of half-naked autumn trees that obscured the road from view.

William squinted at the dull haze of the sun. ‘It’s not that we’re early,’ he said, ‘but that they’re late, and that’s very unusual for Adam.’

‘But not for Henry. He’d miss his own funer—’ His eyes narrowed as a startled flurry of birds wheeled above the treetops.

‘That will be them now,’ said William as Smotyn sidled, nostrils flaring to test the wind. ‘In a hurry, whoever they are,’ he added as the sound of galloping hooves came to them, accompanied by a dull vibration.

Renard caught Gorvenal’s bridle and remounted. ‘It can’t be Adam, there aren’t enough horses.’

Around the bend and into their sight pounded a grey palfrey racing at full stretch. Astride her was a young man in a half coat of mail whom William recognised immediately.

‘It’s Gerard, Adam’s squire, and that’s Heulwen’s mare!’ he cried in alarm as the youth galloped up to them, reined his mount back on her haunches, and all but fell out of the saddle.

‘Lord Renard, Lord William, grave news!’ he gasped. ‘We were hit by a mercenary troop five miles back! They snatched Lady Elene and made off with her. Lord Henry’s sore wounded and Lord Adam’s horse killed beneath him … They sent me … lightest man … fastest horse … fetch you!’

‘Blood of Christ!’ William muttered.

Renard set his jaw. ‘All right, lad, well done.’ His gaze moved from the youth to the road. ‘I’ll have to leave you with the mare. When she’s recovered enough, ride on down to Ravenstow and raise the alarm there.’

‘Yes, sire.’

Renard grilled the squire for the finer details and fixed them in his mind as he rode for the place described. Again Gorvenal started to outstrip the other horses, but this time no one hailed him back.

He found Heulwen kneeling beside Henry, one of the knights’ cloaks pillowed beneath his head.

‘Renard, thank Christ!’ Adam exclaimed.

Renard flung himself down from the saddle. He spared a brief glance for his brother-by-marriage, saw that he was not injured beyond nicks and bruises, and knelt quickly beside Heulwen.

She gave him a desolate look. ‘He fell on the arrow and broke the shaft. The head will have to be dug out and it’s in deep …’ She drew a shuddering breath and choked down a sob. Such a wound was almost certain death, and if by the remotest chance he survived, he would never wield a sword again.

Henry’s sparse sandy lashes flickered as he heard Renard’s voice. ‘I saw them coming,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I saw them coming and I ignored them!’ His eyes were hazed with pain and there were gashes in his lower lip where he had bitten down on it.

Heulwen made a small, helpless gesture. ‘He saw the flash of armour just before they attacked and he keeps blaming himself for dismissing it.’

‘Idiot.’ Renard’s voice was gritty with emotion. ‘From what I hear it wouldn’t have made that much difference.’

‘Except between life and death,’ Henry gasped through clenched teeth, his complexion turning grey.

‘Lie still,’ Heulwen murmured. ‘It’s no use to rail.’

He swallowed. ‘Renard, get Elene before anything happens to her. I’ll never forgive myself …’

Renard stood up, grasped Gorvenal’s bridle and remounted. He felt as if he had been punched.

‘I sent one of my men after them,’ Adam said. ‘He’s a good tracker, and he should be able to keep them in sight. He’s leaving signs for you to follow.’

Renard nodded. ‘Send William after me when he arrives. I’ll leave you to get Henry to shelter. Take my remounts when they come. It was de Gernon’s men, I suppose?’

Adam shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. They were well led though, not just rabble and de Gernons has long had his eye on destroying the union between you and Elene.’ He shook his head. ‘I would have stopped them if I could, but you can see what their archers did. We could not pursue in force. It was well thought out. I was in half a mind to bring Miles and the girls on this trip. Thank Christ I left them at Thornford.’

As Renard rode off, Gorvenal snorted and shied from the corpse of a destrier with arrows quilled in throat and chest — Adam’s sorrel Spanish stallion, and, after Heulwen and the children, the pride of his life.

Renard felt Gorvenal heave beneath him as he ploughed through the mud and took to the wooded slope. He knew how it felt to have a horse killed beneath you. He had been a stripling of fifteen when his mount had been gut-shot by a Welsh arrow during a skirmish and he had had to finish the horse himself with his dagger. Putting his hand in reassurance on Gorvenal’s warm black neck, he saw in his mind’s eye that other horse of his youth screaming and threshing on the ground, the look in its eyes as he went to it with the knife … the look in Henry’s eyes. For a moment he bent over the saddle as the anguish became a physical cramp. The spasm passed, to be replaced by an implacable rage. Setting his gaze to the trail, he sought the enemy.