The Leopard Unleashed

Chapter 6

The Welsh Marches, Autumn 1139

Judith, Lady of Ravenstow, genuflected to the small altar and stood up. Her knees were stiff from kneeling too long, although the discomfort began to ease as she walked slowly to the chapel door. She was fortunate and as yet did not suffer from the severe aches and pains of encroaching years unless the weather was particularly damp, and it had been a dry autumn thus far, praise God.

In the ward some women were dipping rush wands into a vat of warm tallow to make lights for the dark months ahead. Another group from the kitchens was organising to go out berrying on the common grazing. Judith listened to the chatter of the women and wished that she could share their high spirits. Berries were a late harvest gift, excellent preserved or stewed with apples and spices, or served tart with the roasts. They were also a reminder of how swiftly the year was advancing; how fast time was running out.

Two children came skipping across the ward towards her with their nurse puffing in pursuit. Judith regarded her twin seven-year-old granddaughters. Juditta, her namesake and the older by half an hour, was the taller of the two, with her mother’s red-gold hair and her father’s tawny eyes. Rhosyn was more daintily made with fine features drawn in shades of olive and brown.

‘May we go berrying with Hilda and the others, Belmere?’ Juditta pleaded breathlessly. ‘We’ll wear our oldest gowns, I promise.’

Judith considered the two upturned smiling faces and then the beet-red countenance of their gasping nurse. ‘Berrying?’ She had to hide her smile. ‘When I see you have been bedevilling poor Adela into a state of collapse?’

Juditta looked at the rumpled, dusty hem of her gown and shuffled her feet.

‘We didn’t mean to, Belmere,’ said Rhosyn, giving her an incorrigible grin.

‘I said that they weren’t to disturb you, madam, that you were at your prayers,’ Adela panted, and pressed her hand to the stitch in her side.

‘But we saw you across the bailey so we knew you must have finished,’ Rhosyn said triumphantly and smiled at her nurse before looking again at her grandmother. ‘Please may we go?’

Judith eyed the kitchen women with their baskets. ‘I suppose so,’ she said after deliberation. ‘But don’t wander away from the main party. Stay near Adela or Hilda and do not even think of going near the river!’ She wagged her index finger in warning.

‘Yes, Belmere!’ they chorused in unison and whirled.

‘Walk, don’t run!’ cried Judith, and bit her lip, torn between pain and laughter as she watched them cross the bailey to one of the towers, dragging their poor nurse along as though they were a couple of hound puppies on a leash. She could remember how it felt to be scolded for running when she should walk, could remember sneaking off to the stables or hiding in the guardroom where she had cozened de Bec, the constable, into teaching her how to use a dagger. So near and yet so far away. It was the same riverbed but different water. She was in her fifty-sixth year and Guyon would be sixty-nine in the spring. Only sometimes spring did not come.

The girls returned with Adela and, clad in their oldest gowns, joined the berry-pickers. Their laughter was as clear and careless as the light chime of bridle bells. Rhosyn waved to her as they walked towards the outer bailey. Judith smiled and waved in reply and followed them at a slower pace until she reached the castle garden.

Guyon was there, sitting on his favourite turf seat beside the rose hedge, playing a game of tables with the girls’ older brother, Miles. The boy heard her first with the quick ears of the young. He was almost eleven now, his voice starting to deepen, although it would be some time yet before it broke. He gave her Adam’s tilted smile and a look from beneath his brows.

Judith sat down next to her husband. ‘Who’s winning?’

‘Grandpa, he always does,’ Miles said without rancour.

A skein of geese arrowed the sky. Judith followed their flight until they were specks on the horizon, then looked at her husband, only to find that he was already watching her.

‘Bearing south.’ His voice was husky, a legacy of his near-drowning last year.

‘Your throw, Beausire,’ said Miles.

Judith looked away over the late summer bursts of colour lingering in the herb beds. Marigold, chamomile, yellow hawkweed and purple devil’s bit.

Guyon threw the dice, studied the board and made his move. Then he looked at his wife. ‘Stop fretting,’ he said. ‘Renard will come.’ He closed his hand over hers and squeezed.

She sighed ruefully. They knew each other too well to hide anything for long, or even to want to hide anything. ‘Yes, I know. It just seems an age since his last letter reached us from Brindisi, and it is such a long and dangerous road.’

‘No more dangerous than England.’

Judith watched his mouth tighten and set. He had put on flesh during the dry, hot summer, but she knew that as soon as the damp weather returned, the harsh, racking cough would burn it away within weeks, stripping him down to the bone. Every time he even cleared his throat she was afraid. She had brewed up horehound and feverfew syrup, had all the ingredients for hot poultices and plasters ready. Sometimes they eased the worst of the symptoms, but they did nothing to cure them.

‘I wish my father hadn’t had such a passion for lamprey stew!’ she declared with sudden vehemence.

Guyon looked at her and laughed, then coughed.

‘I hate lamprey stew!’ Miles pulled a disgusted face.

‘So do I,’ said Judith, thinking of the dish that had sent King Henry untimely to his grave, and would probably kill Guyon too. If only they had been given a few more years of his iron-handed rule while his young grandson and namesake grew to maturity, then there would have been none of this wrangling over a crown that neither Stephen nor Matilda were fit to wear, in her opinion.

Guyon coughed again. She was desperate to leap to her feet and run to fetch her medicines. Past knowledge prevented her from doing so. If he thought she was fussing he would baulk, and probably out of sheer pig-headedness would push himself to prove her wrong and make himself very sick indeed. She had learned to be either extremely circumspect or teasing about it these days, never maternal. Even so, she could not bear to sit here on a knife edge waiting for the next cough.

‘I must go and write to your mother and Elene,’ she told Miles, and with that excuse, rose to summon a maid, but in the event, it was the shrieking, excited maid who summoned her.

On the common grazing Rhosyn sat down on the grass and sucked at a blackberry thorn that was embedded in one of her purple-stained fingers. Her mouth was purple too, and there were splotches on her gown, fortunately an old homespun. She had dragged its encumbering length through her belt like the other women, and her legs were bare to mid-calf. If Adela saw, Rhosyn knew she would be in trouble, but the nurse had twisted her ankle on a half-buried stone and was sitting guard over two full baskets of the fruit on the low bridge over the brook that further down fed into the Dee.

Juditta yelped as a nettle pricked her exposed skin and swore an oath she had once overheard her father use to one of the grooms.

‘You’re not allowed to say that,’ Rhosyn scolded.

Juditta scowled. ‘I can say what I like.’

‘I’ll tell Belmere.’

‘You’re always telling tales. She won’t listen.’

‘I didn’t tell when you—’

‘What’s the matter, my young mistresses?’

Both girls turned and stared guiltily up at Hilda, the senior kitchen maid. She was neck-craningly tall to a child’s eye, as broad in the beam as a merchant galley, gave respect where respect was due, but was not in the least intimidated by differences of rank. Juditta and Rhosyn had watched her knead dough at the huge, scrubbed trestle near the bread oven and knew the power in the muscular pink forearms and thick hands.

‘I’ve got a thorn in my finger,’ said Rhosyn, drooping her lip and fishing for sympathy.

‘Look how many berries I’ve picked.’ Juditta quickly held up her basket, determined that her sister was not going to get all the attention. ‘And a nettle stung me.’

‘Rub it with a dock leaf, over there, look, and then pull your gown down a bit; that way it won’t happen so easy.’ Hilda tucked a stray wisp of greying hair back into her wimple and stooped rather breathlessly to examine Rhosyn’s finger. ‘It’s not in deep. Belike your grandmother will be able to get it out and put some salve on it when we go back.’

Juditta discarded the screwed-up dock leaf, a juicy green stain on her rubbed leg, and stared towards the floury main road. ‘Hilda, look!’ she cried. ‘Horsemen!’

Hilda followed the child’s pointing finger to the distant but swiftly approaching riders. ‘They’re none of ours,’ she muttered with alarm, and, grasping Rhosyn’s arm, hauled her to her feet. ‘Go on, child, get you back to Ravenstow as fast as your legs will carry you. Mistress Juditta, go with your sister now!’

Juditta ignored the woman and shaded her eyes against the hot, golden beat of the sun.

‘It’s all right!’ Juditta cried. ‘It’s Papa! It’s his shield and he’s riding Lyard. I’d recognise him anywhere!’ And as if her skirts were not already raised to an indecent level, she drew them higher still and began running towards the party.

Hilda screeched after her but to no avail. She lumbered round to detain Rhosyn, but heels flashing, like a hare’s, she too evaded the maid and headed at a direct run for the horsemen.

Renard reined down as he saw the girls approaching. For a moment he thought that they were serfs’ children but quickly dismissed the notion. Serfs’ children would not run yelling at a strange troop of riders. To the contrary, they would run screaming in the opposite direction and warn everyone else.

Adam pulled Lyard round. ‘The hoydens!’ he growled with a mingling of anger and amusement.

‘Surely not … They can’t be!’ Renard’s eyes widened with disbelief. ‘Juditta and Rhosyn?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Adam said ruefully. Taking Lyard out of the company, he cantered the last twenty yards to reach his nearest daughter before she could reach him amidst a press of iron-shod jittery horseflesh.

‘Papa!’ She held out her arms for him to lean and sweep her up on to his saddle. Then, half-choking him, she smacked kisses on his cheek and the corner of his mouth and wriggled herself secure, by which time Rhosyn had arrived at her father’s stirrup and was clamouring to be lifted up. Adam thought it fortunate that Lyard was no longer young and full of fire or they would probably all have been thrown, but he could not bring himself to scold his daughters.

‘Mama’s not here,’ Juditta said. ‘She’s gone to visit Elene up at Woolcot, but she’ll be back before Michaelmas.’

‘Will she?’ Adam felt a small twinge of disappointment but did not let it show on his face. It was selfish and Woolcot was but a day’s ride away, not half the world as Jerusalem had been.

‘I don’t like your beard.’

‘Don’t you, puss? It was easier to grow than to shave off while we were travelling. Your Uncle Renard’s got one too.’

‘Uncle Renard?’ Rhosyn, seated behind her father, arms squeezing his waist, looked at the riders in her father’s company. A man was staring at them. His smile was very white against a skin that was almost as brown as her homespun gown, and bracketed by a full, beech-red beard.

‘Don’t you remember? No, I suppose you’d both be too small.’ Adam wheeled the sorrel and trotted him back to the line.

‘Who is the lady?’ whispered Juditta.

‘Her name’s Olwen. She’s travelling with us,’ Adam said, telling the literal truth. Time enough for revelations later. ‘Rhosyn, it’s rude to stare.’

‘But she’s very pretty, Papa. I wish I had hair like that.’

‘But then you wouldn’t be mine. Here Renard, what do you think of these two hussies?’

‘I think they have more than doubled in size.’ Renard laughed and tweaked one of Rhosyn’s black braids.

‘Grandpa does that to me too,’ Rhosyn said, giving him a wary brown stare.

‘Does he now?’

‘You don’t look much like him.’

‘It’s probably the beard,’ he replied and turned to his other niece who was watching Olwen with the kind of fixed fascination found in young children who had yet to learn the artifice of manners. ‘As I remember, you’re Juditta?’

Her eyes came back to him, Adam’s eyes but differently tinted by the reflection of copper hair, brows and lashes. ‘Yes.’ Her round chin came up. ‘I’m the eldest.’

‘So,’ sniffed Rhosyn from behind the safety of her father’s bulk. ‘You’ll get wrinkles sooner than me!’

Renard grinned. ‘Not for the sake of half an hour,’ he chuckled.

Adam tightened his grip on Juditta as she drew breath to do battle. ‘Is this how you have been taught to behave? Will you shame yourselves and me before family and visitors?’

Both girls fell silent beneath the tone of his voice. ‘Sorry, Papa,’ murmured Juditta, lowering her lashes to purple-stained fingers. Rhosyn laid her cheek against his back and gave him a squeeze.

‘Come,’ Adam said with a rueful look at Renard who was biting back his laughter. ‘We’ll ride on to Ravenstow and let them know Renard’s on his way, shall we?’ He slapped the reins against Lyard’s neck.

Renard shook his head, and chuckled into his beard. ‘They wrap him round their little fingers,’ he said to Olwen.

‘Women are born with their weapons already honed, otherwise they would be defenceless,’ she replied.

Some of the humour left Renard’s expression. ‘You were certainly born with an abundance!’

‘The gift matches the need,’ she retorted. ‘Are those the Welsh hills over there?’

He narrowed his eyes against the sun. ‘Yes. That line of trees marks the border dyke. Where was your father from?’

‘Near Ruthin.’

‘That’s north of here. Closer to Caermoel than Ledworth and Ravenstow.’

They rode on in silence. Olwen gnawed her lip and looked at her lover’s broad, hauberk-clad shoulders. Their relationship was as volatile as a barrel of hot pitch and occasionally she had the disquieting feeling that the passions invoked were beyond all control. Had they all been on Renard’s part, it would not have mattered; it was her own responses that troubled her.

On the road from Brindisi when her flux had come at the appointed moment, she had feigned a miscarriage. As it happened, she had indeed been mildly ill at the time with a stomach upset from eating tainted meat. The results had been convincing, particularly as she had been overtaken by a storm of grief, as if the child had been real and not a figment of her imagination. Certainly Renard had believed her dramatics, had been so gentle and tender with her that she had wanted to lash out at him from the depth of her guilt. That release had not been feasible. She wanted to keep him, not drive him away. Her anger had turned inwards against herself, but every now and then some of it would surface and she would be unable to keep from baiting him.

When they reached the keep defences, the people were out in force to greet them. Serving maids, scullions, soldiers, hound-keepers, the blacksmith and his apprentice, the falconer, knights, squires and serjeants, all pressed forwards, cheering. There was a lanky boy who strongly resembled Adam de Lacey. There was also a young woman with fat, honey-coloured braids, a toddler balanced on one hip, another child ballooning beneath her skirts. Renard leaned over the saddle to speak to her and she blushed.

As it came to her turn to pass the young mother, Olwen changed her grip on the reins, jibbing her mount sideways, forcing the girl to dart back out of the way. As the young woman met Olwen’s eyes her pretty colour faded. A former mistress, Olwen surmised, and busy in his absence if the child and advanced pregnancy were any indication.

The bailey was thick with people jostling and clamouring, cries of delight and welcome on their lips. Renard felt the euphoria sing through his blood. His eyes filled and he had to blink as he slid from Gorvenal’s back.

‘Jesu!’ his mother said, ‘Adam has brought me home a Saracen!’

He turned swiftly to face his mother’s scrutiny. ‘It’s a good disguise, isn’t it?’ His light tone contradicted the expression on his face. ‘Sometimes I even forget that there’s a man living behind the mask.’

And then they were in each other’s arms, hugging hard, kissing and weeping.

Judith, practical as ever, sniffed, and wiping her eyes stepped back to study the whole of his long, lean form. ‘Is a beard part of the mask too?’

Renard fingered the luxuriant growth on his jaw. ‘It was more convenient to let it grow while we were on the road. If you promise not to cut my throat, I’ll let you barber it off.’

‘I’ll do my best.’ Her laugh was shaky. ‘But my eyesight is not as good as it was!’

‘Rubbish!’ said Guyon from behind her. ‘It’s still sharp enough to pluck a needle from a haystack!’

Renard had expected to set his eyes upon a walking skeleton or an old man, hunched and incapacitated. His father was neither. Thinner, yes. There were marked hollows under his cheekbones and his eyes were set further back in their sockets and pouched with wrinkles, but they still glowed with vitality, and there was not a great deal more grey in his hair for the sake of four years.

Renard wondered briefly if Adam had been wrong and merely panicking, but as he embraced his father, Renard felt the roughness of the older man’s breathing against his palms, and heard a faint whistle that would only need an injudicious sprint across the bailey to turn it into a severe wheeze.

‘You made good time,’ Guyon said as they parted. ‘We did not expect to see you for another month at least.’

‘The summons was urgent. I came as fast as I could, and the good weather has been a blessing.’ He turned to face the keep.

‘Yes, it has,’ Guyon said, turning with him.

Judith had not moved with her husband and son but was regarding the young woman who had dismounted unaided from a brown mare and was staring at Renard’s back with an almost hostile expression in her deep blue eyes. Adam had very briefly told her that Renard had a female travelling companion. His expression had said far more than his few words, but now Judith was wondering how to deal with the situation.

Renard’s associations with women before he left for Outremer had been fleetingly casual. The closest he had ever come to forming a permanent bond was with Eloise, the falconer’s daughter who had borne him a little girl. The infant had died of a fever the summer before he left. Since then Eloise had married the farrier’s journeyman and settled well to the yoke. Renard, it seemed, had moved on to more exotic fare, and if he had brought her all the way from Antioch, then it was more than just casual.

‘Renard’s absence has certainly not taught him any manners,’ she said to the girl in a carrying voice. ‘It seems that we must introduce ourselves.’

Renard turned. Both women were watching him expect — antly, and his face grew ruddy beneath his tan. He cleared his throat. ‘Mama, this is Olwen. She has travelled with us from Antioch. Her father was a Ruthin man who took the Cross with Duke Robert and settled there …’

There was a drawn out pause where much went unspoken but a great deal was communicated. Eventually Guyon stepped into the space where courtesy and etiquette were unmapped.

‘Come within and be made welcome,’ he said formally to Olwen, giving her the kiss of peace and flickering a brief, eloquent look at his wife and his son. ‘Time later for all else. Today is a day for celebration.’