The Running Vixen

Chapter 21

‘Hot pies, hot pies!’ a vendor bawled close to Heulwen’s shrinking ear. ‘Fresh lily-white mussels!’ another exhorted in counterpoint, a laden basket balanced on top of her head, her wide-brimmed hat protecting her wimple from the dripping shellfish. Her wares did not smell particularly fresh to Heulwen, or perhaps it was just the fact that down here near the wharves the air was more pungent anyway, replete to surfeit with the watery aromas of a busy river and the numerous vessels plying their trade. Fishing craft in various stages of decrepitude, inshore cogs, larger merchant galleys, sleek nefs with striped sails and rows of decorated oar-holes.

Heulwen paused beside Adam to watch sailors rolling barrels of wine on to one of the galleys. Water slapped against the stone. Rain had been in short supply that year and a green weedy line showed how far the river level had fallen, although the lowering sky and the damp warm wind suggested this was soon to be remedied. She looked at the water, thought of the Channel crossing and grimaced to remember the cold choppy sea. That she had not been sick on the first crossing was owing to the relative calm of the waves and her own iron determination not to burden her husband or put him off wanting to take her anywhere again. Adam’s travel-hardened constitution was impervious to most discomfort, and he treated those who suffered with surprise and mild impatience.

Adam set his good arm across her shoulders. He was wearing his injured one in a sling. ‘Not long now, love,’ he said, as if he had caught the drift of her thoughts. ‘Once I have Count Fulke’s reply, we can be on our way.’

‘Tomorrow dawn, then.’ She wrinkled her nose, and not just at the sudden stink of hot pitch as they passed some men caulking a galley’s strakes.

‘Too late to set out today,’ he confirmed with regret. ‘I don’t go to him until this afternoon and it’s bound to be vespers at the earliest before I can get away, if not compline and full dark…Are you hungry?’

Arm in arm they left the blended stenches of the wharves and warehouses and found a space to sit and eat hot mutton pasties, bought from one of the ubiquitous street vendors and surprisingly good, washed down with a costrel of the local wine. Adam had purchased several barrels to take home with them, for being bought at source, it was of high quality at an attractive price.

The sun was a warm white halo beyond the clouds and the breeze blew the market-place smells at them. Spring came earlier to Anjou than it did to England. Here the trees were preparing to blossom; in the marches the snow was still skittering in the wind. Heulwen found herself longing to put out her tongue and taste it.

Repast completed, they moved on through the seething mass of humanity. A woman, her teeth rotten stumps, tried to sell Heulwen a caged bird and was rejected with a shudder, for Heulwen had never been able to tolerate the sight of a creature in a cage. She did, however, succumb at Adam’s insistence to some new hairpins and a pair of beautifully worked silver braid fillets from a haberdasher’s stall.

Adam looked critically at the horses that were for sale. A young black Flemish mare caught his eye. She was compact and solid without being overly thickset and possessed of a bold, confident carriage. Her winter coat was coming away in handfuls, making her look patchy, but this was no detriment save to appearance and probably the reason she was still for sale. He ran his good hand down her legs and found them well formed and sound.

‘Adam.’ Heulwen touched his shoulder.

He turned at the warning in her voice and looked at the entourage winding its way through the market-place: William le Clito with an escort of knights in their finest array. No women this time, their presence replaced by a string of laden pack ponies, and all headed in the direction of the city gates.

‘Well well,’ he said, lips curving into an arid smile. ‘What a pretty sight, and Warrin doing rearguard duty. It’s a pity I’ve never been much use at left-handed knife-throwing.’

The piebald was limping from a hip strain incurred the previous day. Straight-backed, Warrin rode him competently. Beneath his helm, his square jaw jutted with determination and his left, ring-bedecked hand was clenched hard on his thigh, hinting at the violence that was so much a part of the determination.

After one hard stare Adam deliberately turned his back to continue his examination of the black mare. Although he affected indifference, his body was rigid.

‘I will sleep easier in my bed tonight,’ Heulwen said on a relieved note.

The group moved on. Warrin glanced once and briefly at Heulwen and Adam, his expression blank. Then his gaze fixed on the Angevin Thierry, who was whittling a piece of wood with his meat dagger, tiny slivers and shavings dropping on to his tunic. Thierry raised his head and returned Warrin’s stare blandly, then returned to his whittling.

‘He’s gone,’ Heulwen murmured.

‘Deo gratias,’ Adam said through his teeth, some but not all the tension leaving his body.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, sensing the residue.

Adam shook his head. ‘Nothing.’ He twitched his shoulders. ‘A knife’s echo between my shoulder blades.’ He spoke abruptly to the horse coper. ‘How much do you want for her?’

Heulwen chewed her lip and considered him with exasperation. Tail-chasing again, she thought, and to no good purpose.

He bought the black mare for twelve marks, haggling the coper down from the fifteen he had first asked. Bargain struck, he turned to his pensive wife. ‘Can you take her home with you if I go to see the Count now?’

‘Yes, of course.’ She forced a smile. ‘Compline, you said?’

He grimaced. ‘Most probably…I’m sorry, love, but I cannot bring you with me. I wish I could.’

Heulwen pouted. ‘You’ve taken a fancy to one of the court whores,’ she accused him, ‘and you want me out of the way.’

‘They are rather engaging,’ he admitted, his face as straight as her own, but then his eye corners crinkled, marring the deception. ‘But I’d rather share a bed with you any day.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ She stood on tiptoe to kiss him. ‘For your sake.’

When Adam arrived at the castle, Geoffrey of Anjou was tilting at a ring that had been set up on a quintain in the bailey, and he was making a commendable job of it. Adam joined the gaggle of spectators, among them the kitchen girl with whom Thierry had been so familiar two nights before. She blushed and giggled behind work-roughened hands. Adam ignored her to concentrate on Geoffrey’s performance.

Geoffrey lifted the ring on the end of his lance and came away cleanly without encountering the sandbag. Turning the grey at the end of the tilt he saw Adam, and having handed the lance to a squire, jogged over to him. ‘What do you think?’ He was panting slightly, his lips parted in a grin that only just fell short of being smug. He knew he was good.

A rainy gust of breeze flurried across the ward. Adam hooked the fingers of his uninjured hand in his belt. ‘Not bad, my lord,’ he nodded in reply, ‘you check yourself slightly before you go for the strike. It would be better if you could maintain the pace.’

Geoffrey favoured Adam with a glittering look. ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he said, and then gestured at Adam’s slung arm. ‘How do you fare?’

‘It is sore, my lord, but no lasting damage, I think.’

Geoffrey dismounted gracefully. ‘And your horse?’

‘He’s got his legs back and took a handful of oats from my hand this morning, but he’s still subdued. A splitting skull, I hazard.’ His lips tightened. ‘God knows the kind of potion he was given.’

Geoffrey snapped his fingers at a groom, and as the grey was led away drew Adam across the bailey in the direction of the hall. ‘We found the lad who gave him those apples,’ he said, watching Adam through eyes half shut against the rain.

Adam checked. ‘Did you? What did he say?’

‘Nothing. They took him dead from the river this morning and by the looks of him he’d been all night in the water. He must have slipped on one of the wharves. It’s easily done. We’ve had three drownings already, this year.’ He spoke without inflection.

‘I see,’ Adam said softly.

‘I thought that you would.’

They went into the hall. Smoke from a badly tended hearth stung his eyes and caught in his throat. He coughed and blinked. ‘Where does it all end?’ he said.

‘William le Clito told me all about your quarrel with de Mortimer.’ Geoffrey balanced on alternate legs as he removed his spurs.

Adam’s lip curled. ‘How generous of him.’

‘Not at all. He was explaining why we shouldn’t clap the whoreson in irons and leave him to moulder in a cell. Said the man had a right to be aggrieved by what you had done.’

Adam’s expression became intractable.

‘Is it true?’ Geoffrey asked, persisting where an angel would have feared to tread. Between his thick golden lashes, his eyes were very bright.

‘That he was responsible for Ralf le Chevalier’s murder? That he was involved with le Clito in plotting against the Empress? Yes, both counts are true.’

‘And the other?’

Adam gave Geoffrey a hard stare that told the youth he was walking a very dangerous edge, then he transferred it to the banners above the dais and said quietly, ‘When he discovered myself and Heulwen together, King Henry had already vouchsafed her hand in marriage to me.’

‘But snatched from beneath his nose,’ Geoffrey said as they mounted the stairs to the private rooms above. ‘Was that the reason you did not kill him?’

Adam’s anger, caught in mid-stream by surprise, submerged into thoughtfulness. He disliked Geoffrey of Anjou, but then he was not particularly fond of King Henry, and the latter’s ability to rule had never been in dispute. Geoffrey, it appeared, read men as easily as he read the vellum-bound copies of the romances which were currently so popular. ‘One of them,’ he answered.

Geoffrey paused on the stairs and glanced over his shoulder. ‘Is the Empress really as beautiful as they say?’

Adam struggled to keep pace with the fluctuating levels of Geoffrey’s mind: mirror-bright shallows, tepid mid-waters and opaque, cold depths. ‘She is handsome,’ he heard himself respond. ‘Rich-brown hair and milk-white skin.’ A mouth to make your loins ache and when she opens it, the venom to shrivel them.

‘And a temper?’

Adam smiled faintly. ‘A royal temper, my lord, but then you said yourself that you liked spirit in a woman.’

Geoffrey continued up the stairs. ‘A mare too spirited to permit a man in the saddle is a waste of time…is she?’

There was a hint of satisfaction in Adam’s tone as he said, ‘You called her old enough to be your grandam, but the difference in age is a double-edged blade. She is hardly going to run with enthusiasm into the arms of a boy barely out of tail clouts. Believe me, you will have to catch and saddle her before you can even think of mounting.’

Geoffrey threw him an angry stare, but eventually it dissolved into a snort of reluctant laughter. ‘I thought you were supposed to be a diplomat?’

‘I am, my lord. I did not say that the Empress was unridable. When she is not being haughty and impossible, she makes interesting company, but you will need curb and spur and God’s own patience to deal with her.’

Geoffrey made a noncommittal sound. ‘And your barons?’

‘They will hope you get a son on her, the sooner the better — those of them that do not will hope that you fall off and get trampled in the act.’

The neutrality became another smothered ripple of amusement. ‘So that the child can grow to manhood before Henry dies and your barons change their fickle minds?’

‘You have nailed the shoe to the hoof, my lord.’

‘The mare’s hoof,’ Geoffrey compounded with a mischievous twinkle as he swept aside the heavy woollen curtain and led the way into his father’s rooms. ‘You have heard I suppose that le Clito’s gone to claim his own destiny?’ He took an unlit candle from the holder on the trestle and kindled it from another wavering in a wall bracket.

‘Yes, my lord.’

Geoffrey eyed him thoughtfully now, the mockery flown. ‘William le Clito’s going to be too busy to look to England for a long time. Flanders is a bubbling stew of trouble, and it will take all the housewifely skills he does not possess to simmer it down.’ He returned the candle to its holder. ‘Mind you, your King is not going to like this promotion one small bit. He has a better claim himself through his mother. She was Count Baldwin’s daughter, and le Clito is a generation removed.’

‘Flanders depends on English wool,’ Adam said. ‘Therefore Flanders depends on King Henry’s goodwill.’ He pushed his hair back from his brow. ‘I’m glad I’m not William le Clito.’

‘We are all pawns.’ Geoffrey shrugged and picked up a sealed package from the trestle, turned it over in his hands, deliberating, then gave it to Adam. ‘Here, take it. It is my father’s reply to your King.’

Adam lowered his hand from his hair to accept the document. ‘Does the Count not wish to give it to me himself?’ he asked doubtfully.

Geoffrey gave him a twisted smile. ‘It’s more appropriate coming from the sacrificial pawn, don’t you think?’

Adam frowned.

Geoffrey forced a laugh. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not treason. My father should be here any time now. He’s busy with an envoy from the Holy Kingdom of Jerusalem and a couple of papal messengers — arranging another appointment with destiny.’ He sprawled gracefully on a chair and considered his exquisite gilded boots. ‘Have some wine, and tell me more about my delectable future bride.’