The Wild Hunt

CHAPTER 17

Judith lifted the goblet. It was made of the finest silver gilt delicately incised with a scroll work pattern of vine leaves. The wine within was sweet-sharp and cold from the well in which it had been chilled prior to being brought to table.

The King's new hall of Westminster blazed with rich colour, the wall s painted in a bold, angular design that glowed red and blue, gold and shadowed matt black. Banners sparred the wall s in vivid primary colours. Candles flamed and dripped, cream and gold, reflecting the napery on the long trestles. The high barony of England glowed like a mobile, flowing tapestry.

Judith sipped her wine and watched the weaving men and women - her uncle Arnulf de Montgomery, as objectionable as ever; her maternal uncle William Breteuill was with him and they were talking amiably enough, although the frequent flicker of their eyes betrayed their mistrust. Her most notorious relative, Robert de Belleme, was not here at this gathering, preferring to hold his own court in Arundell prior to taking ship for Normandy, but Arnulf, among others, was his informant as to the happenings at court during his absence.

Further down the room Gilbert de Clare, lord of Tunbridge, was deep in conversation with his brother Roger and with Robert FitzHamon of Gloucester who had been at her wedding. Guyon himself stood on the edge of the group that included them, having just arrived from the direction of the latrine. He was resplendent in a gown of garnet-red wool embroidered with thread of gold. The tunic, unlike the ones worn at knee length for the rigours of everyday life in the marches, swept the tops of his ankles. He was a lord of some importance and at court, if nowhere else, had perforce to dress as one, even down to the heavy rings encumbering his fingers.

A man on his way from the hall paused in the act of pinning his cloak to speak with the group of men. Prince Henry. She had seen him sitting on the high dais beside the King, his brother. He was of middling height and girth with a shock of soot-black hair and narrow features. Guyon replied to something the Prince said and Henry laughed aloud. The plain features lit up, became attractively mischievous and he thumped Guyon's shoulder and walked on. Guyon bowed, then straightened to glance across at her. Caught in the act of her own scrutiny, Judith blushed and quickly attended to her wine. A youth refilled her cup to the brim and passed on down the board with the flagon.

She drank in deep gulps until her panic had subsided. She could not forget the delightful, unsettling sensations aroused in her by the skilful play of his hands upon her. The body as a weapon. It was a two-edged sword and she had yet to learn how to handle it. What was it the Welsh said? Arfer yw mam pob meistrolaeth.

Practice is the mother of mastery. Guyon had a vastly unfair advantage and he knew it. It was there in every look he had given her since that afternoon. He had not touched her again. He did not need to. The tension between them was a palpable entity crackling the air. The eye sufficed, speaking all that the tongue avoided and the body suppressed.

Some tumblers leaped before the trestle, their costumes parti-coloured and sewn with bell s. One of them between gyrations juggled with six flashing knives, catching them expertly by the hilt.

'Enjoying the experience?' Hugh of Chester said in her ear.

Judith jumped and turned round. The Earl was opulent in blue silk, loose cut for comfort over his great belly. Roped gold winked across the width of his breast and there was a huge round Welsh brooch pinned to one shoulder.

'I am glad to have come, my lord,' she said with a smile, 'but I think I prefer the clean air of the marches to that of the city.'

An elderly man at the Earl's shoulder was staring at her with frank, almost startled curiosity.

Chester introduced him as Sir Hubert de Caen, a veteran of Hastings and aide of the late King William. Judith smiled and responded politely.

'Ravenstow's wife?' Sir Hubert murmured, taking Guyon's place at the trestle. 'Forgive me for asking, but surely you are related to the Conqueror?'

'Well yes,' said Judith, looking doubtful, wondering at his intention. 'My grandfather and King William were cousins.'

He looked disappointed. 'The tie is no closer than that?'

'I'm afraid not.' She glanced up at Earl Hugh, who shrugged his flesh-padded shoulders and surreptitiously tapped his head.

'It is curious,' pursued Sir Hubert. 'You are the living image of Arlette of Falaise, the old King's mother. She had freckles too, you know, and hair of your colour in her youth and that same way of looking.'

'I am sorry to disappoint you, but the lady Arlette is no part of my bloodline. My grandfather was related through the male line.'

'Remarkable,' Sir Hubert murmured, shaking his head as he rose stiffly to his feet.

The juggler nearly missed one of the knives but swooped and recovered. On the dais, Rufus roared with laughter at a joke. Hugh of Chester moved on with his companion. Judith drank her wine, looked for Guyon and choked on it when she noticed that Alais de Clare had accosted him by one of the stone arches supporting the roof of the hall . A blue and gold banner drifted in the haze above their heads. Alais had her arm linked proprietarily through his, her face upturned and dazzling. He dipped his head to listen to what she was saying. She giggled and flashed a glance around and then stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear, her hand going boldly down between them.

Judith sat in stupefied amazement, watching her, and then the wine in her blood exploded into rage. She jerked to her feet, shivering the surface of the remaining drink in her cup, walked around the startled juggler and stalked over to her husband and the courtesan.

Taking hold of Guyon's free arm, she stood on tiptoe in mimicry of Alais, but instead of whispering, she bit him. Guyon jerked with a stifled yelp. 'Just thank Christ I chose your ear,' Judith said and looked at the startled older woman. 'You must be Alais,' she said. 'I have heard much about you, so I won't waste any more of my time, yours, or my husband's,' and, in guardroom English, purloined from childhood escapades, she told Alais de Clare precisely what she could do.

Guyon spluttered. Alais gaped at Judith in horrified astonishment. Judith, taking her rival's rooted shock for defiance, raised her arm to strike her, but Guyon seized her wrist and bore it down in a grip of steel.

'It is best if I go, Guy,' Alais cooed in a pillow-soft voice and patted his arm. 'You can give me your reply later.' Ignoring Judith's dagger-bright stare, indeed ignoring Judith altogether, she left him and moved on to intercept, with a ready smile, a young baron attached to Chester's household.

'What in God's name do you think you are doing?' Guyon hissed at her. 'You're a marcher baroness, not a fishwife and the sooner you remember that the better!'

'And she's a high-bred gutter whore!' Judith spat in return. 'I suppose you have arranged to bed with her!'

'You've hardly grounds for complaint, have you?'

For a moment they glared at each other, the air between them charged with tension. And then Guyon released his breath on a hard sigh. 'I wasn't making a liaison behind your back,' he said and tugged her silk-twined braid. 'Jesu God, don't you think I have enough trouble controlling the woman I've got without noosing myself to a featherbrain like Alais de Clare?' He grimaced and rubbed his bitten ear.

Judith lowered her lids and looked down at her soft gilded shoes. The impetus of the wine was beginning to wear off. She felt foolish and a little sick. 'But I thought ... Christen said that you and she used to ...' Guyon snorted. 'Once, twice, no more. I was too drunk the first time and too desperate the second to make better provision and Alais was so pleased with herself that she made the whole court a party to her conquest until her husband clapped his hand over her mouth and pushed her at Henry. He's very partial to brainless blondes.'

'And you are not?'

'I have a marked preference for tawny-haired vixens.' He slipped his arm around her narrow waist, drawing her close to his side.

On the dais, William Rufus laughed again and clapped a brawny arm across the shoulder of the slender young man seated next to him. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed with a mouth like a freshly bitten strawberry.

'His latest toy,' Guyon said. 'He's called Ernoul and comes from Toulouse. It's fortunate that Anselm of Canterbury isn't here, he'd have a seizure.'

'Who's the priest on the dais with him, then?'

Judith asked and shifted her hip from the intimate sidelong pressure of his thigh.

Guyon pretended not to notice. 'Rannulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham. He wouldn't flinch if Rufus led a goat in here and held a black mass before his very eyes, providing there was money in it of course.' He cast his gaze around.

'Flambard designed this hall . Rufus says it's too big for a room and too small for a great hall , but that's just his nature.'

'As is Ernoul?'

'As is Ernoul,' he said and tried not to think of how it felt to have the King's arm draped heavily across the back of your neck, or to feel his breath hot on your cheek and know that any moment you were going to be sick. Probably Ernoul didn't mind. Probably Ernoul was being paid a lot of money.

Judith shuddered. The royal court was twice as dangerous and barbaric as life in the marches.

As in nature, the bright colours were a warning not to touch. She too knew how to stalk and snarll in all that jungle of colour, but inwardly it worried her. When everyone was a predator, someone was bound to get eaten.

The evening continued. Yet another course of the interminable feast arrived. Things disguised as other things, stuffed and gilded and caparisoned in mimicry of the great gathering they were intended to feed. The wine changed from cold, sharp Anjou to a cloying French red.

The dishes ran the gamut of the head cook's heat-sweated imagination. Decorated roast meats served with spicy perfumed sauces, pies filled with fruit and chopped meat and one full of tiny live birds that flew amok and twittered around the hall , soiling the new hangings in their panic.

The King sent to the mews for his sparrowhawks. Musicians played with varying degrees of skill . A jester told some bawdy jokes. A sword swallower amazed the gullible. The knife juggler attempted a refinement that did not quite work and was carried off bleeding like a stuck pig.

Rufus did the rounds of his vassals, full of a bluff, jovial bonhomie, the force of it hinting at the choleric temper that lay close to the surface.

The King was a squat, compact barrel of a man with a round, sanguine face and short, powerful limbs. None of the Conqueror's sons were able to boast their sire's inches, although all of them possessed his breadth and inclination towards middle-aged corpulence. Florid and strutting like a barnyard cockerel, Rufus chucked Judith beneath the chin as though she were a kitchen maid. 'So,' he grinned, 'this is Maurice FitzRoger's wench, eh?'

'Sire.' Judith lowered her lids. His fingers were as thick and clammy as raw sausages, but instead of being limp they gripped powerfully, pinching her flesh.

'Skinny little thing, isn't she?' Rufus mused to Guyon as if Judith was deaf. 'No sign of a belly on her yet either?'

'I'm in no hurry, sire,' Guyon responded with a lazy smile. 'A flat furrow's easier to plough than one with a slope.'

Rufus let out a great guffaw and his variegated grey-brown eyes squeezed into puffy slits. His sense of humour was crude and boisterous and it was the kind of remark that he wholeheartedly appreciated.

Judith lifted her taut jaw off his fingers, feeling like a market beast on a block. Rufus opened his eyes and she glared back at him.

'God's blood!' He chuckled softly. 'I remember my grandam Arlette giving me that look when she was wrath.'

It was the second time that evening that she had been compared to the dead Countess of Conteville and it disturbed her not a little.

'Probably you deserved it,' she said.

There was a momentary silence. The bonhomie slipped a little. 'You've a saucy tongue,' the King remarked sharply.

'It's the teeth you have to watch.' Guyon grinned, touching his bitten ear, and kicked her hard beneath the trestle.

Rufus chose suddenly to laugh. 'I can see that! Speaking of which, Hugh d'Avrenches told me a good one just now: "If you were a knight, you'd not have done that." "If you were a lady, you'd not speak with your mouth full !"'

Guyon snorted and laughed. Judith looked blank.

'I thought that knowing Alais de Clare, you'd appreciate it,' Rufus chuckled. 'Meet us tomorrow at Clerkenwell if you desire to hunt. I've a new Norway hawk I want to fly.'

Slapping Guyon's shoulder, Rufus moved on to accost another victim.

'Christ, are you trying to get me exiled?' Guyon demanded with exasperation.

Judith drained her goblet. 'I am not a lump of meat on a trencher to be poked and prodded and discussed intimately as if I have neither ears nor feelings!'

Guyon shrugged. 'Rufus cares little about such niceties where women are concerned.'

'I did not understand his joke.'

Guyon crumbled a piece of bread and watched the action of his ring-bedecked fingers. 'It is probably best you did not. It was very crude, and no, I am not going to give details.'

Judith narrowed her eyes at him. Her thinking processes were by now badly impaired by the wine and it was a struggle to remember how to control her limbs let alone set about cajoling Guyon into explaining what he did not wish to explain, or solve it for herself. She smiled hazily at the servant who refilled her goblet and raised it to her lips. 'Rufus still fancies you, doesn't he?' she said instead.

'Fancies is as far as he will get.' Guyon quirked his brow at her. If she had been less than sober before, she was now well and truly on her way to being gilded. It was seldom that she took more than two cups of wine at the evening meal and frequently they were more than half water.

Tonight, he had lost count of the quantity she had swallowed.

He wondered if Judith was anxious in the midst of such an important gathering, although it was not in her nature to soothe herself with drink. He had a strong suspicion that the opulent bed manoeuvred that evening into the bedchamber of the house they had rented was the main reason for her attitude now. Terrified of what the night held in store, she was taking the advice of many a mother to her daughter on a wedding eve and drinking herself insensible.

'Judith, no more,' he said compassionately, staying her hand as she reached to her cup.

'Why not?' she protested. 'I'm enjoying it now. It was hob ... hobbir ... horrible at first, but you get used to it, don't you ... like a lot of things?'

'When you're drunk,' he agreed wryly.

'Who's drunk?' she demanded in a loud voice.

Heads turned. Fortunately, at that juncture the King chose to leave the hall and amid the etiquette of rising and reseating, Guyon succeeded in calming his belligerent wife to a muttering simmer. That mood did not last long.

The wine had reacted upon her blood to produce aggression. Now it reacted against the contents of her stomach and she began to feel very sick indeed. When Guyon drew her to her feet she lurched against him, her balance awry, her hand to her mouth.

Guyon took one look at her green face and propelled her out of the hall and into the cool, blossom-scented night where she was violently sick, shuddering against his support.

'Sorry,' she gulped weakly.

'I can see that,' he said with exasperation.

After it was over, he swung her up in his arms and took her lolling and semi-conscious to where Eric waited with their horses.

'She won't want her head in the morning, my lord.'

'She doesn't want it now,' Guyon replied. 'And certainly not her stomach.'

'Poor lass,' said Eric with sympathy, recalling many a night of his own misspent youth. 'You'll not be needing the mare then.'

'No.' Guyon gave Judith to his captain while he mounted his horse, then reached to take her up before him. 'God's bones,' he muttered, trying to settle her so that she would not give him a dead arm on the ride home. 'You'd think to look at her that she weighed less than a feather.'

Judith merely groaned and flopped against him like a dead doe.

Helgund unbarred the door to him and exclaimed in horror at the sight of Judith's wan face.

'Too much wine,' Guyon said, sweeping past the servant to the capacious scarlet-bedecked bed, where he deposited Judith.

Clucking like a mother hen, Helgund leaned over her mistress. Judith's eyelids fluttered but did not open. Another maid goggled around the curtain, received a sharp command from Helgund and disappeared again.

'I'll sleep below with Sir Walter,' Guyon said, aware that he was now redundant, but oddly reluctant to leave. Judith looked so vulnerable, her hands pale and long-fingered against the cover of stitched beaver skins, her profile flushed and delicate. He knew how her nose would wrinkle when she laughed and that one of her teeth was chipped where she had fall en down the dais steps as a child. He knew that her waist was slender and her breasts as round and resiliently soft as the breasts of the white doves in the cote at Ravenstow. She had also quite deliberately drunk herself into a stupor rather than share the intimacy of this bed with him.

Helgund arranged the cover and looked around at him, her broad features creased with concern.

'My lady has been very unsettled of late,' she ventured.

'I know, Helgund.' The same could be said of himself, he thought and for parallel reasons. He looked thoughtfully at the maid. She owned a position of considerable trust and as a result knew most of what did, or rather did not, transpire between himself and Judith, and must also be aware of the undercurrents and tensions that existed as a result.

Helgund returned his scrutiny beneath the deference of half-lowered lids. 'She is like a vixen confronting food in a trap, sire. She wants the meat, but dare not attempt to snatch it for fear of paying the price.'

His brows twitched together. 'Am I the meat or the price?' he enquired.

'Both, sire. She fears lest she become reduced to the status of bitch or brood mare, or cast-off wife. It is rumoured at court that you prefer the chase to the kill .'

Guyon's frown deepened. Helgund swallowed, but continued doggedly. 'It is not her fault, sire. If you had seen what Lord Maurice did to her lady mother in front of us all , and mistress Judith no more than a mite of three years old. Said he would fill her belly with enough seed to plant a dozen children and dragged her to the bed there and then before us all and used her like a whore... Happened more than once too and sometimes he was in too much of a hurry to draw the hangings. We protected the child as best we could but ...' Helgund drew a shaken breath and fell silent beneath the onslaught of his stare.

'Thank you, Helgund.' His voice was frighteningly quiet, belying the anger she saw in his eyes. 'Thank you for telling me. I can see the kind of obstacles across my path now. Before, I just kept treading on them. Go back to your bed now. I'll seek mine in a moment.'

Relieved, Helgund curtsied and made herself absent.

Guyon drew a deep breath and controlled his ire. Maurice de Montgomery was already dead; the Welsh had got there first.

'Well , Cath fach,' he said softly, brushing a stray wisp of tawny hair away from her eyelids and the thick, downswept bronze lashes, 'how do I avoid these obstacles of yours?'

He knew she was not indifferent and that the times when her guard was down, he would have sold his soul to keep her that way. The times when her guard was up, she was impossible to reach.

Never once of her own accord had she offered him a sign of affection or endearment. Jealousy, yes, but that was an emotion born of insecurity and mistrust. The moves were all his, and they were straining the bounds of her acceptance.

Today he had stepped beyond the limit. Tonight she was blind drunk. So what else was left? He shied from the thought.

' Nos da, Cath fach, ' he murmured softly, tugged her braid and quietly left the room.