The Running Vixen

Chapter 12

Guyon looked across the gaming board at the young man seated opposite, and suppressed with difficulty the urge to lay violent hands on him and throw him out of the house. It was a gut reaction. Adam de Lacey sometimes looked so much like his father that Guyon would find himself forgetting that physical similarity was the only resemblance.

He dropped his gaze to the jet and ivory counters and nudged one gently across the squares, reminding himself that life, unlike draughts, was mostly marked out in subtle shades of grey. ‘I do not know what to say to you,’ he admitted. ‘A part of me is so angry that I could kill you here and now without remorse, but only a part and that the lesser. I can see how it happened and how it was drawn out of all proportion, but Christ alone knows how long it will take to unravel all the tangled threads and sew them into some semblance of order — and I’m not talking about my wife’s tapestry silks.’ He sighed heavily. ‘It goes pride-deep, Adam, and you’ve done the equivalent of striking the de Mortimer family in the face with a rotten fish. Are you quite certain of your facts?’

Adam’s eyes brightened. ‘You saw the Welsh lad’s reaction for yourself when he laid eyes on de Mortimer, and your father was with me when I received from him the full tale and will bear me out. The lad was not lying or mistaken, I would stake my life on it.’

‘You will probably have to,’ Guyon replied grimly: ‘trial by combat is almost a certainty. Warrin’s not going to admit to the crime, and he’s got a very personal grudge now, hasn’t he?’ He shook his head at Adam. ‘Heulwen knows how to pick husbands,’ he grimaced, ‘all three of them.’

Adam felt the hostility emanating from Guyon. He was not really surprised. Guyon had shown remarkable restraint thus far over what threatened to develop into a full-blown scandal and had caused a serious rift with the de Mortimer family, formerly close allies to Ravenstow. Now and then, like steam escaping from a lidded cauldron, a spurt of anger was bound to erupt.

‘If I could undo it, believe me I would,’ he said.

‘Even down to retracting your request to the King?’ Guyon arched a sardonic brow.

Adam’s eyes kindled with a harder, amber light. ‘I’m sorry if I went to him first, but I did not know how much time I had, and I had to stop her from pledging herself to de Mortimer.’

A small, uncomfortable silence fell. Into it Guyon said, ‘It will break Hugh de Mortimer if his son is proven guilty.’

‘Perhaps you would rather I retracted the accusation, gave up Heulwen and sailed on the first ship for Outremer!’ Adam said, angrily as he heard Guyon’s ambivalence.

‘Perhaps I would,’ Guyon snorted. ‘But it wouldn’t be justice, would it?’ And then he clenched his fist and crashed it down on the board, sending the counters leaping awry. ‘Christ, Adam, why didn’t you ask me for Heulwen before all this blew up in our faces like a barrel of boiling pitch!’

‘Because I knew she wouldn’t have me!’ Adam retorted bitterly. ‘She wants a cold-blooded contract of convenience, not a love match.’

Guyon studied him, and gradually his fierce expression softened and he sighed. ‘It is not to be wondered at after the way Ralf treated her. She loved him so hard it almost broke her when he took off in pursuit of other women.’

‘I don’t need other women,’ Adam said intensely. ‘I never have, except as a salve to ease the wound of not having her. I know we have not had the best beginning, but God willing I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to her.’

Guyon made a rude sound. ‘And a fine martyr you will make!’ he scoffed. ‘As I have heard the tale, it was only half your fault. Granted, it was a serious breach of courtesy to go above uninvited, but I suppose your news warranted it, and Heulwen didn’t scream rape, did she? If one of the maids did hear her cry out, it was certainly not for help.’

Adam cleared his throat and looked down at his hands as if their conformation was of great interest. He remembered her undulating beneath him, the sounds he had dammed against her mouth with his own as the last fragment of sanity was consumed in the conflagration. Was it truly no more than a carnal matter of lust?

Guyon shook his head. ‘Christ knows, Adam, for I do not. You escort that sharp-clawed termagant across Europe, rescue her from a handful of dangers, weave your way with diplomacy through the courts of barons, princes and kings, only to bloody your nose on something as simple as this!’

‘Perhaps because it’s been too simple for too long,’ Adam said wearily, and raised the hands he had been studying to dry-wash his face. ‘I haven’t the ability to fathom it any more.’

Heulwen watched her father remove his thick outdoor cloak and pace to the brazier to warm his hands. Two rings winked in the light: one set with a ruby, the other with intaglio. Were it not for the need to dress in finery at court, they would have remained buried at the bottom of a casket so seldom opened that spiders had been known to weave their webs across its lock before now. Heulwen put down her piece of sewing, which was only a pretence anyway, and came to his side.

With a brief, tired smile, her father gently tugged one of her braids. It was a gesture she remembered a hundred times from childhood. It had many meanings — teasing, affectionate, conspiratorial or warning, but never anything less than love. Tears filled her eyes and she flung herself into the haven of his arms and wept against the breast of his scarlet court robe. ‘I’m sorry, Papa. If I’d known the trouble it would cause, I’d never have done it — I thought Adam was going to marry elsewhere — I thought that just once it wouldn’t matter.’

‘Hush, cariadferch, hush, you’ll drench my robe and shrink it,’ he said, his lips at her temple. ‘I thought you were supposed to be lying down. Judith said she had given you poppy in wine and that you were best left to sleep.’

‘I tipped it into the rushes when she wasn’t looking,’ Heulwen confessed. Sniffing, she pushed herself out of his arms and looked up into his face. ‘I didn’t want to sleep until you returned from court; I had to know what happened.’

‘You would have done better to drink the wine,’ he said, and wandered from the brazier to his shield to examine its raw, splintered surface.

‘Papa?’ She swallowed, feeling frightened.

‘What do you think happened?’ he growled. ‘Warrin’s fast, I’ll give him that. He drew first blood: accused Adam of maligning his good name by a false claim of murder, and of deceiving and dishonouring you. It shifts the onus to prove the claim from his shoulders on to Adam’s, and because Warrin brought it into the open of his own will, it diminishes the suspicion against him. The King was quite content to agree to a trial by combat and I’m a cross-eyed leper if I don’t know the reason why.’

‘Why?’ Heulwen was driven to ask, feeling sick.

‘A fight to the death is going to make excellent entertainment to follow up our swearing to Matilda. It will take men’s minds off their anger at having to swear to a woman. It’s going to ease their frustration to see spilled blood, preferably Adam’s, as he was one of the men responsible for bringing Matilda to us in the first place. Tomorrow’s the swearing, and the trial’s to take place the day after.’

‘That’s horrible,’ Heulwen whispered, appalled.

‘No, just expedient. You can’t blame Henry for using it to his advantage. This reckoning between Adam and Warrin has been coming for more than ten years.’ Guyon shrugged. ‘It’s not just over you, Heulwen, you’re only the spark that ignited the dry tinder.’ He removed the rings from his fingers and tossed them on the clothing chest.

Heulwen sat down again, her hands pressed to her mouth. Guyon looked at her with troubled eyes. He could see the imprint of himself stamped upon her features, mingled with those of her mother. Her hair grew the same way as Rhosyn’s, and the timbre of her voice was an exact, poignant reminder of the woman he had lost to the savagery of Walter de Lacey. And Adam de Lacey was Walter’s son. Guyon cast that thought from his mind. Adam was no more like Walter de Lacey than a lump of flawed glass was like a polished jewel.

‘Child. ’ he began softly, and crouched beside her.

‘I’m all right, Papa.’ Tear-tracks streaked her bruised face as she stared beyond him into some unpleasant distance. ‘Only I think I’d like that poppy in wine now.’