The Leopard Unleashed

Chapter 28

‘John!’ Elene hastened to embrace her brother-in-law as he dismounted from his palfrey in Woolcot’s courtyard. ‘This is indeed a welcome surprise!’ She hugged him hard, cheek pressed to the rough wool of his habit, then stood back to look into his eyes, fear present even in the midst of her delight lest he bear evil tidings. His face, however, was open and smiling, the only lines on it those around his eyes from constantly narrowing them in order to focus.

‘Where’s my nephew?’ he asked as she led him across the bailey towards the keep.

‘Crawling after dog bones in the hall and leading Alys a merry caper! You won’t recognise him.’ She looked along her shoulder. ‘Have you ridden far?’

‘Only from Ravenstow. Mama told me that she thought Renard was here?’ He squinted around as they walked. She had to grab his arm and steer him to avoid a pile of dirty rushes that had recently been forked from the hall. He said ruefully, ‘When I write letters for Lord Leicester, I look through a glass orb of water to see the page better. If there was some way of carrying such a thing around on the end of my nose, I might be able to see where I was going.’

Elene laughed at the image he conjured and patted his arm. ‘You’ve missed Renard by less than an hour. He’s gone up to Caermoel to sift reports and sit at the manor court. I’m here to supervise the wool clip, and then we’re travelling down to Ledworth for the Lammas feast. He’s due back at the end of the week. Do you need him urgently?’

They had reached the hall. John stared myopically around. He had seldom visited Woolcot and was unfamiliar with its layout. It was much smaller than Ravenstow and Ledworth, but sturdily built for all that and made comfortable by Elene’s domestic wiles. Bright hangings abated some of the damp from the walls and the central hearth was well tended so that it burned cleanly without enveloping the hall in a smoky miasma. ‘Yes, I do,’ John replied.

‘So urgently that you cannot stay to dine?’ She propelled him in the direction of the dais.

‘Oh plenty of time for that, Nell,’ he assured her, patting his stomach, ‘but I won’t stay overnight.’ He gave her a smile. ‘There’s no need to look like that. It’s urgent, but cause for relief, not alarm.’

She raised her brows at him, but did not pursue further. She left him and went down the hall, returning a moment later with Hugh, whom she deposited in his lap. The baby took his usual exception and yelled.

‘He’s definitely louder than I remember from Christmas,’ John said wryly, ‘although even then I marvelled at the power of his lungs.’

‘Renard says that even if you put his cradle in the undercroft, you’d still be able to hear him on the battlements,’ she laughed and poured him wine.

John snorted and put the baby down on the floor to watch him crawl, which he did with concentrated determination. ‘Lord Leicester sends his greetings to you and his godson and hopes to make you a visit soon.’

‘I thought he was with the Empress.’

‘Was,’ John emphasised, taking a swallow of the wine. ‘Only he grew so irritated by her haughtiness and so impressed with Stephen’s fortitude in captivity that he’s returned to the Queen’s party as meek as a washed lamb, and that is only half the good tidings.’

‘Oh?’

‘The Londoners have rejected the Empress too. They let her into the city on midsummer day, reluctantly resigned to giving her the Crown. She needed to handle them as delicately as blown eggshells but instead she demanded money from them — said it was not her fault if they were hard pressed to pay, they should not have squandered their coin on a perjurer like Stephen.’ He shook his head. ‘Both sides left the meeting in high dudgeon. My lady went to eat her dinner; the mob went to fetch their weapons. She escaped by the skin of her teeth. Fled to Winchester so I hear, shedding supporters like autumn leaves.’

‘There is hope then?’ The gold flecks in Elene’s eyes were suddenly very bright.

‘More than there was last month, certainly.’ John’s voice constricted as he leaned from the midriff to rescue his nephew from crawling too far. ‘Apparently the Bishop of Winchester has shut his palace against her and refuses to see her. She won’t give him an inch of ground and it’s beginning to play on his conscience that he betrayed Stephen. After all, they are brothers, and until recently they were very close.’

‘We had heard from William that Winchester petitioned her to let Stephen’s son keep his father’s Norman lands.’

‘It was refused. And then to add insult to injury, she put Stephen in chains. Men are saying that it is disgraceful to treat him thus. My lord of Leicester would have no more to do with her after that. He helped her to escape from the London rabble as a matter of courtesy, but he took the road to Kent, not Winchester.’

‘And Earl Ranulf?’ She took Hugh back from him.

‘Cursing his decision to turn rebel in the first place. Expect him back in the marches full of spleen, but more concerned to defend for the moment than attack.’

Elene looked down at her son, at the chubby hand grasping one of her braid bindings. She felt him heavy and warm in her arms. ‘John, it frightens me,’ she said. ‘I wish there could be peace between us and Chester. I know that Renard fought him off at Caermoel, but it has not stopped the raiding. He sends his routiers to strike at our vulnerable parts and we strike back — ripping out each other’s entrails for the Welsh to feed upon and grow fat.’

‘What does Renard say?’

‘That the blaze is not of his making and that he is not the one who keeps piling on the branches. I suppose it is true, but neither will he make any move towards peace.’

‘You cannot blame him for that,’ John said. ‘Not after what happened to Henry at Lincoln.’

‘I don’t blame him, I just wish there was a way.’

A heavy silence descended. A maid set a bread trencher before John and put a steaming dish of pigeons in saffron sauce upon the table and a savoury accompaniment made of bread, herbs and onions.

Elene sat down with him, giving Hugh a crust to suck, while she picked at her own food.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked John. A servant leaned over him to pour wine into his cup.

‘Nothing … I …’ she hesitated. ‘I … I was thinking that sometimes it is possible for a woman to tread where even angels fear.’

‘You mean go to Earl Ranulf yourself?’ His hand paused, halfway between mouth and trencher and his eyes grew round with alarm. ‘That would be walking into a lion’s den and asking the lion to eat you!’

‘I was thinking of his wife. She is your cousin and not ill disposed towards Ravenstow. I’ve met her before and I think that she would probably agree to help bring this petty warring to a truce.’

John continued to stare at her. After a moment he remembered to put his food in his mouth.

‘Would you carry a letter if I wrote it?’

He swallowed his mouthful convulsively and almost choked. ‘What, behind Renard’s back?’

Elene bit her lip. Then she looked at Hugh and the mess he was making of the crust. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you strong enough to face him when he finds out?’

She thrust her jaw at him. ‘Yes.’

John concentrated on the meal and said nothing until he was washing his hands in the finger bowl. Then he leaned back and folded his arms. ‘A year ago I’d not have believed you, but then a year ago you’d not have answered yes to either question.’

‘A year ago I knew neither Renard nor myself.’

‘And now you do?’

‘I know Renard,’ she said with quiet surety.

John rubbed his chin and noted absently that he needed to shave, knew without feeling that his tonsure would be fuzzy too. ‘Have it written down,’ he said, not at all sure that he was doing the right thing. ‘And I will do my best to deliver it to Matille.’

‘Thank you.’

They looked at each other sombrely, as if their thoughts were made of lead.

To throw off the guilty feeling of conspiracy and ease her mood, Elene had her mare saddled, and when John left, rode with him a little way in order to show him the fulling mill and the weavers’ cottages that now existed in Woolcot village.

John was impressed by the industry and bustling enthusiasm of the operation. Cloth was being cleaned and felted by the pounding of hammers driven by the mill’s water-wheel, and some village women were delivering hanks of distaff-spun yarn to be woven into cloth on the Flemish looms. Another shed housed dye troughs and the frames on which the wet, newly dyed cloth was stretched to dry, secured by tenterhooks. In the final building, Elene showed him a pile of finished bales.

‘This is homespun for the cottars. Some of the women take their wages in cloth.’ She plucked out a corner of a plain, fairly coarse tawny weave, then two smoother ones in green and russet. ‘This is slightly finer, the sort of thing a craftsman or merchant would wear to mass. And for the merchant or wealthier freeman who would like to look as if he wears Flanders cloth but baulks at the price —’ she gestured and Master Pieter, her manager, tugged a dark blue cloth from the foot of the pile. It was fine and soft to the touch with a slightly glossy appearance ‘— Woolcot weave. Half the price of Flemish cloth and twice the quality.’

Mouth open, John stared at her. Then he spluttered and put his palms across his mouth. ‘Elene, you sound like a huckster at a fair!’

‘I’m proud, that’s all,’ she said defensively and blushed poppy-red. Then she looked at him through her lashes and smiled.

‘And rightly so.’ John’s doubts concerning the letter he carried were at one and the same time increased and diminished. Elene’s nature was like amber. It did not give off its glow until it had been warmed, and then heaven help the recipient if he was not prepared.

They returned to their mounts. Guy d’Alberin boosted Elene into the saddle, while John, distracted and thoughtful, set his foot in the stirrup.

‘Have a care to yourself,’ she said. ‘And come back soon.’

‘I will. And I’ll send a message to let you know when I’ve delivered the letter to Cousin Matille.’

She nodded, her smiled apprehensive as she kissed him farewell.

He started up the track that led over the hill and down to the main road. Elene shaded her eyes to watch him and his small escort of serjeants, and resisted the urge to tear after him and take back the letter she had written to the Countess of Chester. For all that she had proclaimed herself capable of standing up to Renard’s wrath, she was nevertheless afraid.

A shout floated on the wind from the direction of the horsemen just gaining the top of the rise and Elene saw them suddenly wheel around and come galloping back down towards her, the foremost man frantically gesticulating. She saw the twinkle of his spurs as he dug them into his horse’s flanks.

Master Pieter came to Elene’s bridle and stared. ‘Trouble afoot,’ he said brusquely. ‘Best go, my lady.’

Elene drew Bramble’s reins through her fingers. On the brow of the slope several more riders appeared. Sun flashed on armour and drawn swords. ‘Holy Mary!’ she whispered and swallowed convulsively. Bile rose in her throat as she remembered her kidnap and the assault that had so nearly ended in rape. Horsemen tearing out of nowhere and ripping the world apart.

Thus far Woolcot had escaped lightly from the Earl of Chester’s raiding. To reach it, his men had to get past the garrison at Caermoel. Twice at least since the siege they had attempted it and twice been beaten. The only other approach was from the east, across Henry’s former lands at Oxley, unoccupied now except for a harassed constable who did his best but was not really fit for the task in hand. Renard had had scant time to give his attention to Oxley, the defence of Caermoel and the earldom being his first priority. It was their Achilles heel and now it was exposed.

‘The church!’ she cried, whirling to Master Pieter. ‘Get everyone into the church!’ It was no guarantee of safety, but it was all they had. ‘I’ll ride back to the castle for aid!’ Turning Bramble, she slapped the reins against the mare’s neck and shrieked in her ear.

Unaccustomed to such rough handling, the little mare broke into a panicky gallop. Elene clung on for dear life, but when Bramble started to slacken pace, she kicked her again and shouted, wishing fervently that she were a man and accoutred with spurs.

Sheep scattered in bleating panic before woman and horse. The ground became tussocky and started to slope. Bramble stumbled and Elene was pitched on to her neck, lost her hold and fell off. The softness of the ground broke her fall, but even so her breath was knocked from her body and she was momentarily too stunned to do anything but lie on the prickly-soft grass, her heartbeat roaring in her ears, blackness before her eyes.

Gradually she became aware of shouting and the clash of weapons as the men of her escort and John’s attempted to hold the routiers while the villagers and cloth workers evacuated to the church. Elene sat up and collected her wits. Apart from bruises, she appeared to be in one piece. She staggered to her feet, hampered by the drag of her skirts. Her legs felt as though they were made of wet hemp. Bramble had stopped several yards away and was looking at her with flickering ears. Not daring to turn around lest she see some of the routiers galloping after her, Elene whistled to the horse and extended her hand. Bramble side-stepped, her nostrils wide, drinking in the smell of smoke.

‘Good girl, Bramble, good girl,’ Elene coaxed, advancing on the mare. Bramble tossed her head and sidled, Elene’s familiar scent warring with the instinct to run from the pungency of the smoke.

Elene closed her fingers round the reins and gasped with relief. Her limbs were weak and trembling but she knew she had to remount. Bramble was trembling too, ready to bolt. Elene set her foot in the stirrup. There was no groom to boost her into the saddle, no mounting block to stand upon, and nothing in sight she could use as one. Bramble was not a large horse, but suddenly she seemed like a mountain.

Sobbing through clenched teeth, Elene struggled. She grabbed a handful of Bramble’s cropped mane, pressed the heels of her hands into the brown, sweating neck and somehow scrambled crabwise across her back. The pommel dug into her abdomen and she had to fight to breathe, but the congestion eased as she came upright and shifted her weight backwards. The mare plunged and circled as Elene searched for the stirrups.

The smell of smoke was increasingly strong. Elene caught a glimpse of the cottages, flames bursting in the doorways, with their thatches alight as men armed with brands and weapons ransacked and then torched them. Her eyes filled with tears of grief and rage. ‘No,’ she sobbed, ‘oh no!’ The reins slackened in her fingers, and Bramble took the bit between her teeth and bolted, this time in earnest.

Woolcot’s priest was elderly with eyesight poorer than John’s own and a hazed mind. Elene had bought a corrody for him at a nearby priory, but it had yet to be implemented and a new priest found to replace him. Confused and querulous at the sudden invasion of his church when as far as he recalled no one had recently been born, betrothed or died, Father Edwig wrung his hands and tearfully demanded that they all get out.

John, still panting from the exertion of his rapid ride, took the old man’s arm and sat him down on a bench along the nave wall. ‘There are routiers coming,’ he gasped. ‘Hell spawn. The people have gathered here for sanctuary.’

‘Routiers?’ Father Edwig quavered. ‘Have they come to confess?’

‘Crime first, confession later,’ John replied, more than a hint of Renard ringing in his tone. ‘Are you strong enough to go up the bell tower and toll out the excommunicat?’

The old man regarded him dimly. ‘Have you come from the Bishop?’

John hesitated. Then he said, telling the lie with a face as open and candid as a child’s, ‘He sent me personally. You go aloft, take this brawny young fellow with you, and ring out the excommunicat as hard as you can.’ Beneath John’s hand, Father Edwig’s shoulder was light and bony. Hardly the strength to lift a halter, let alone peal down the wrath of heaven and hell upon a troop of hardened mercenaries.

The old priest stared hard at John. Sunlight poured through an unshuttered window and Edwig’s fuzzy vision detected a golden nimbus haloing John’s tonsure. An expression of awe filtered into his slack face. A dribble of saliva ran down his chin. Convinced that he was in the presence of God’s messenger, he let a burly young hayward help him to his feet, and in a daze shuffled off with him towards the belfrey stairs. When he looked over his shoulder, John’s figure was aureoled in sunshine so that he was impossible to look upon. ‘A miracle,’ he whispered to the hayward.

John, less convinced about the possibility of miracles, stepped from the shaft of sunlight and turned to the gathered workers and villagers. Several of the men were armed with pitchforks, spades and hoes. One even had a sword that had been handed down through his family for several generations. The women had their distaffs and brooms. Their array was brave, but scarcely impressive and probably laughable to the kind of men now plundering and burning their homes.

John set about calming and reassuring them. Help would come very soon, he said. He had a rich, bass voice that he knew how to control so that it enfolded the frightened villagers like a comforting blanket. His arm around a weeping, pregnant woman, he listened to the triumphant yells of the raiders and the first ominous crackle of flame and wondered if he could remember the damning words of the excommunicat. He had never had occasion to use them before. From the bell tower, the tocsin stuttered into life and was unevenly sustained, although John was unsure if the sequence was quite correct. The roar of flames grew louder as more of the village fell to the torch, and then they all heard the heavy thump of a sword hilt against the barred church doors.

John told the villagers to go and kneel before the altar, the women in the centre, the men protecting them in an outer ring, and the armed men of his escort and Elene’s standing slightly forward. John himself stood alone in the nave by the font to face the door as it trembled beneath the blows rained upon it. He heard snarls and threats, as though a pack of wolves yammered outside. A final blow and the hinges gave way and the doors reeled inwards.

‘Silence those bells!’ howled the foremost routier, sword blade dripping with what John hoped was nothing more serious than animal blood. ‘Now, priest, before I cut off your head and stuff it up your arse!’

Elene and Renard might have recognised Hamo le Grande. John had never encountered him before, but he recognised the type well enough. The Earl of Leicester kept such men in his own employ and for a similar purpose. Ministering to them was generally a waste of time unless they were dying and in fear that they would do so un — absolved of a lifetime of atrocity. Killing a priest on holy ground while the excommunicat rang out might daunt them, but it depended how hardened they actually were.

John filled his lungs, pointed a finger, and channelled all the charisma he possessed into his powerful voice as he began the Latin words that would damn the routiers to eternal hell.

Renard had ridden less than a third of the way to Caermoel when Gorvenal started to limp. Cursing, he dismounted and ran his hands down the stallion’s foreleg. It was cool to the touch and felt sound, no sign of swelling at fetlock or cannon. He picked up the hoof to examine that and immediately the source of the problem became obvious. A stone had lodged in the tender frog. Gorvenal laid his ears back and tugged against the bridle that Owain was holding close in to his head. Another knight dismounted and helped the lad to hold the horse. Gorvenal’s hatred of having his feet picked up was notorious, and this time Renard had no dried dates to sweeten him.

Unsheathing his meat dagger, Renard braced his body against the jarring shocks of the stallion’s attempts to plunge, and tried to gouge the stone from the hoof without sticking the point of the knife into the sensitive frog.

He succeeded, but not without a deal of swearing, at the horse, the stone, his squire and the knight. By the time the stone finally did fly out on to the grass, tempers were boiling, limbs weak, and the stallion’s hide was creamed with sweat. Renard wiped his hands on his surcoat, his brow on the sleeve of his gambeson, and sat down on the tussock to regain his breath.

‘Do we ride on, my lord?’ a young knight said hesitantly.

Renard restrained the urge to be sarcastic. ‘I think we’ll eat first,’ he said. ‘It’ll give the horse — and me — a chance to recover. It’s only a bruised frog, nothing that will hamper him. Owain, mount up and stand lookout on that hill up there.’

The boy left. Renard rose and went to Gorvenal. He gentled the horse with soft words and fondling, unslung his wine costrel from the pommel and took a packet of food from his saddle roll. Leaning against the horse, he ate cold roast fowl and bread, washing it down with the slightly sour wine. A skylark bubbled. Renard squinted into the cloud-ridden blue and sought it out — a tiny, dark speck with a song ten times as loud and spectacular as its drab, brown plumage. He was reminded of Elene and smiled.

Temper forgotten, Gorvenal swung his head to butt Renard and demand a chunk of his bread. The stallion’s full, black tail swished at the flies. His glossy hide shivered. Renard scratched the horse’s withers and enjoyed the peace of the moment, culled from the midst of uncertainty and war.

Following the aborted siege of Caermoel, hostilities between himself and the Earl of Chester had ceased for a while, and then, like a cry cast into a well, the echoes had resounded, on and on for ever. Ranulf, having learned his lesson, did not attempt another siege or blockade. Instead he used Welsh tactics and struck out at the small and vulnerable targets. Timber and wattle manor houses, and villages. Wanton, indiscriminate destruction. Renard retaliated with equal savagery, but sometimes, looking at earth that was scorched instead of growing with young crops, or at slaughtered plough teams, he was sickened. Watching the skylark now, he wondered if Elene understood.

The bird plummeted like a stone. Owain came down the hill at a gallop, shouting something that was snatched away by the wind. Renard dusted off his hands. Stoppering the costrel, he looped it quickly back around the saddle, and mounting up, cantered to meet the squire.

‘It’s Woolcot!’ the boy gasped out. ‘Woolcot’s burning!’

Renard spurred Gorvenal to the crest of the hill to look for himself. A thick, grey coil smudged the horizon, too large to be a midden bonfire or anything legitimate concerned with Elene’s weavers and dyers. He wrenched the horse around and sent him flying back down to his men. Owain had already passed on the news and they had remounted, food abandoned, and were looking to him for confirmation.

‘The whoresons have hit Woolcot,’ he snarled, ‘but they’ve reckoned without us being so close. Gerard, when we get there, sweep round by the mill with half the men. I’ll take the other end. We can talk as we ride!’

It was a little more than three miles back to Woolcot and Renard and his men covered the distance as though they were racing each other on the Smithfield coursing ground rather than bumpy sheep terrain. As they neared the stricken village they heard the tolling of the church bell and the smell of the smoke thickened and gouted on the wind. Added to it came the stink of charring meat. It caught in the lungs and cut off breath. It stung the eyes with more than just the irritation of smoke.

Garden crops were burning, dwellings were on fire. Animals lay where they had been slaughtered. The main street was an avenue of fire, every building alight. The roar of the flames was like the breath of a ragged, mythical beast, stalking and destroying in the wake of the perpetrators. Of them there was not a sign except for one body trapped beneath the bulk of a dead ox.

Gerard de Brionne split away from the main group and took a handful of men round by the fulling mill. That too was on fire, although not yet as wildly ablaze as the houses. Torches still held aloft, three men were backing away from the building, shouting gleefully to each other. Gerard and his companions rode them down, dousing both brands and men in the fast-flowing river beside the mill. Their armour pulled them under. Those who floated were encouraged to sink. Renard’s knights removed their cloaks, saturated them in the river and set about beating out the fire.

Renard came round to the church by way of the village pond where incongruously, amid all the destruction and chaos, a pair of ducks still dabbled with a total lack of concern. The church itself, stone-built by Elene’s father, was untouched by fire, but the doors hung drunkenly wide, and clustered around them were a group of routiers in mail shirts and quilted tunics. From the belfrey, the excommunicat resonated, tolling amid the drifts of windblown smoke. The wind veered and the bells faltered and suddenly died. Within the church a child wailed.

‘Hah!’ Renard cried and spurred Gorvenal. The horse passed the pond at a canter. Renard leaned forward, left fist curved around the hand strap of his shield, right around his sword grip. The child’s wail became a full scream, and above the roar of the flames Renard heard a man’s voice thundering in Latin. John, he thought, recognising it even as it was cut short.

He spurred Gorvenal again, frantically, and they galloped into the churchyard. Without stopping, Renard took the stallion straight up the path to the broken church doors. A routier stared. His mouth widened to yell a warning. Renard stood in the stirrups and clove him like a bacon pig. Gorvenal dealt with a second man, a lashing kick doubling him over, and Renard finished it. Then he was riding into the church, horseshoes clattering on the stone flags of the nave.

Hamo le Grande turned and gaped as a vision from the hell the priest had just promised him bore down the nave. A horseman of the apocalypse, his sword edge dripping blood and his horse wild-eyed with crimson-lined nostrils. At Hamo’s feet, John used his good arm — the one that the mercenary had not slashed to the bone, to grasp Hamo’s ankle and pull hard. The mercenary threw out his arms to save himself, but was too late. The cry of surprise on his lips rose to a scream as he landed without cushioning on the hard flags. They all heard the crack of bone as his spine broke. And yet he was still alive to suffer the agony. Unable to move, he watched Renard slow the horse and pace him up the nave, finally drawing rein before him.

Renard looked down implacably. ‘Take him out,’ he commanded to the men waiting behind. ‘And hang him … slowly.’

Hamo’s screams as he was dragged outside the church faded to background insignificance. Renard dismounted. Owain appeared, to take charge of the horse and lead him outside. Renard knelt beside John who was ashen with pain. His habit sleeve was saturated in blood.

‘Not as bad as it looks,’ he tried to jest. ‘His blade was blunt.’

‘Let me see.’ Renard drew his knife and ripped the material. The wound was deep and sluggishly oozing, but not so deep that it would not mend or damage the arm’s function. ‘It’s nasty,’ he said, ‘but it won’t kill you. Elene will be able to stitch it and pack it with a mouldy bread poultice.’ While he spoke, he worked to temporarily bind the wound with strips from the linen shirt that Master Pieter had obligingly sacrificed.

‘Elene?’ John grimaced. ‘Elene rode back to Woolcot to fetch help from the garrison … She was here in the village showing me the wool sheds and seeing me on my way.’

‘What!’

‘She was gone before they struck.’

Renard sprang to his feet just as the brawny youth came up the nave, Father Edwig’s body borne in his arms. ‘He’s dead,’ the young man said in a wondering voice. ‘Just suddenly dropped at the bell rope, but see, he’s never looked so happy!’

People gathered to marvel or weep over the serenely smiling old priest. Renard left the church at a run, snatched Gorvenal’s bridle from Owain and vaulted into the saddle.

‘There are some men from the keep looking for you,’ the boy said. ‘Sir Oswel and Sir Randal.’ He pointed down the churchyard, his young face frightened.

Renard rode over to the garrison force. A little beyond them several corpses swung on a gibbet. ‘Where is Lady Elene?’ he demanded brusquely.

Sir Oswel looked troubled. He wiped his hand over his beard. ‘I do not know, my lord.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘Her mare came into the bailey all sweated up and riderless about the same time that we heard the bells and saw the smoke. We rode here first, thinking perhaps to find her, but …’ he gestured bleakly at the burning village.

Renard coughed as he inhaled a gust of smoke. He felt as if he had swallowed a lump of ice. ‘Oswel, stay here and organise the villagers into putting out the fires and cleaning up. Randal, take half a dozen men and search the area between village and keep.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Renard wheeled Gorvenal and rode in the direction of the castle. On all sides of him stretched the rough pasture. Grazing sheep raised their heads and stared at him with indifference, jaws circling busily. The wind veered and buffeted, bringing the stink of burning with it, hot and strong. It was difficult to remember a time when that smell had not pervaded his every waking moment and stalked him through his dreams.

Across the moorland he and his men searched without finding a sign of Elene, and with each piece of ground unfruitfully covered Renard’s apprehension grew. What if she had been caught in the fire? What if the horse had bucked her off in the village and run home to her stable riderless all the way? Unknowing, he passed the place where she had first fallen from the mare, and then the place where a second time she had lost her seat in the saddle. Nothing. He halted Gorvenal and stared at the wind-whipped moorland until his eyes stung.

‘Hola!’

Renard turned in the direction of the shout and saw a shepherd and dogs running towards him. The man was waving his arms, and a molten flicker of hope coursed through Renard as he rode to meet him.

‘My lord!’ the shepherd saluted him, then had to stop to gather his breath.

‘Is it about Lady Elene? Is she all right? Tell me, man!’

‘I … I think so, my lord … She was a bit shook up at first, but my wife’s looking after her.’ He gulped and gasped, pressing his hand to the stitch in his side. ‘At first we thought her ankle was broken, but I do believe it is only a nasty sprain.’

‘Where is she?’

‘My hut … over yon.’ He pointed to a small dwelling a few hundred yards away. ‘I carried her like I would a wounded sheep. It weren’t far and my wife had just brought me food.’ He straightened slightly and creased his eyes at Renard. ‘Is it true the village is burned to the ground? I can smell smoke. Dogs are restless.’

‘Yes, it’s true.’ Renard left the shepherd and galloped to the hut, dismounting even as he drew rein. Tethering Gorvenal to a hook protruding from the dung and wattle wall, he ducked inside the hut. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the single, tiny room, but Elene’s glad cry brought his gaze immediately to the place where she lay, tended by the shepherd’s wife who was pressing a cold cloth on to her swollen ankle.

‘Praise God!’ Renard said. ‘We’ve been searching everywhere for you!’

The woman stood up, dried her hands on her gown and, bobbing a curtsey, went outside.

Elene struggled up from the shepherd’s narrow bed of bracken and sheepskins and as Renard knelt at her side, she flung her arms around him. ‘You smell of smoke,’ she tried to say lightly, but the words cracked and broke up, and she buried her face in his surcoat, sobs shuddering through her.

Silently, tightly, he held her, as much for his own comfort as hers.

‘I suppose the village is in ruins?’ she asked at length, her voice choked.

‘More or less. Gerard saved the mill, I think, but everything else bar the church is gone.’

‘The people … I tried to get help, but Bramble took fright at the smoke and I could not control her.’

‘The people are safe,’ he reassured her, and told her everything that had happened, adding in a growl at the end, ‘If de Gernons thinks that an atrocity such as this will go unavenged, then he was never more mistaken.’

Elene clung to him, her fingers clenched in his surcoat, her knuckles pressed against the unyielding rivets of his hauberk. ‘No, let it lie!’ she cried. ‘You have hanged the men responsible. If you raid on his lands you will only continue the circle. It needs to be broken, don’t you see!’

‘If I do nothing, he will think I have weakened.’

‘He will think nothing of the sort. His routiers are dead or scattered. Call it even!’

‘I do not think you have seen the extent of the damage,’ Renard said grimly. ‘Everything is gone — every last bale of your cloth, and that cannot be rebuilt as quickly as the houses.’

‘It can never be rebuilt if you keep raiding tit for tat. Renard, promise me you’ll hold your hand, I cannot bear it any more!’

‘I will promise nothing of the kind!’ he growled, and then swore as she began to weep again. His defences were not up to dealing with Elene’s grief, nor could he understand her insistence that he must not retaliate. Part of him wanted to stand up, walk away, pretend none of this was happening. He disliked being pushed into emotional corners. ‘The only promise I’ll make is to think about it,’ he temporised, running one hand down her braid. ‘Don’t push me further than that, Nell.’ He tipped up her chin and kissed her tear-streaked face. ‘Come, I’ll take you to the keep before I go back to the village and see what’s to be salvaged.’

Elene put her arms around his neck as he lifted her up. She kissed him back and he felt the corner into which he was backed growing smaller and tighter. Ducking under the low door arch, he carried her out to Gorvenal.