Daughter of the Wolf (38 page)

Within moments the excited girl came scurrying back into the weaving shed. ‘It's a pedlar! Asking leave to open his pack! Please, lady...' She looked at Elfrun with enormous, hopeful eyes, and looking round the gloomy shed Elfrun could see that expectation echoed on every face there. She nodded, and before she could even open her mouth the girl had swung round, scooped up her skirts and raced back into the sunshine. Elfrun could hear her shouting all the way.

‘May we, lady?'

‘Yes – but don't just drop everything!' Almost too late, but shuttles and heddles were hastily stowed, and bobbins rolled at speed and tucked into their baskets. Moving much more slowly, Elfrun followed her women out and latched the door behind her. The last thing she needed was one of the goats getting into the weaving shed again. Gethyn had been waiting for her at the door, and now he bounced to his feet, tail an eager blur. She snapped her fingers, and he fell in behind her.

As she had expected, it was Finn.

He was standing in the open space outside the door of the hall, his hands resting on his pack, half-protective, half-teasing, and he was fielding questions and comments from the Donmouth girls with a merry smile. She could hear his laugh from where she stood.

Next to him stood a girl in a kale-green dress. Her hair was smooth and tightly braided, and it took Elfrun a long drawn-out moment to recognize her as the dancer whose rippling brown locks had shimmered so enticingly on the dreadful day nearly two weeks ago when the bear had fought the dogs. Elfrun felt her throat tighten. Oh God, what stupidity was this? She barely knew the man. Why should the foundations of the earth be shaken at the sight of him standing by the side of another girl?

But he had called her beautiful, and he had noticed that she had been crying; he had recognized that like him she had a burden to shoulder. She could feel her heart hammering: it had moved up into the space beneath her breastbone and was threatening to rise up further yet and choke her.

Did he know her father was dead? If he knew, surely he would say. Some word of sympathy, of understanding...

Not trusting her treacherous face, or voice, Elfrun kept her distance and watched the pair of them. The stranger girl was standing back a little, hands folded and gaze lowered, letting Finn have his moment of glory, very different from the way she had milked the crowd on her last visit, with her tossing hair, her gestures like withies in the wind, and her radiant smile. Finn was fending off those would-be customers who were trying to dart in and unlatch his pack, when he looked up and saw her. His face lit with his own heart-lifting smile, the one she remembered so well from her first sight of him, and she felt a sudden blaze of anger with him for his easy power over her and her women. These stupid girls, blushing and giggling. Bite it back, hard.

She might well be a fool, but no one else could be allowed to catch a glimpse of her folly. And it was
her
folly. It hurt beyond reckoning to think that any other woman might respond to him with the same delight as she did.

‘See?' His voice was pitched loud for her to hear. ‘I told you all I wouldn't open my fardel for anyone but the lady of Donmouth herself.' He beckoned with his free hand. ‘Come here, lady. What can I lure you with?'

She walked across the yard straight towards him, head high, aware of the stares. ‘What have you got for me, pedlar?' She looked right into his eyes, and he held her gaze until she felt the colour burn hard in her cheeks and her mouth go dry. She had meant to say,
Transact your business, and move on. Let my women get back to their looms
. But she was silenced. Her heart seemed to be beating in unfamiliar places: in her throat, in her belly, between her thighs.

‘Nothing like good enough for you.' His fingers were working the buckles as he spoke. ‘But pretty, pretty things, all the same, to tempt these Donmouth magpies.' He pushed the fall of his ash-blond hair out of his eyes and pulled the lid back, drawing out a length of coarse brown cloth at the same time. He handed this to the nearest of the giggling girls. ‘Lay this out for me, will you, my darling?'

Little brooches of gilt copper, some set with enamel. A leather bag of beads, white and purple crystal, amber and jet, which he tipped rattling into a wooden bowl. Silk ribbons, some with gold and silver threaded in. Treasure piled upon little sparkling treasure until the brown cloth had almost disappeared under its tantalizing burden. The girl in green had moved closer. Elfrun thought at first that she too was drawn by the glitter though she must surely have seen it all before, and then she realized that the girl was watching for any hint of pilfering, leaving Finn at liberty to flirt and flatter and haggle. Elfrun bristled a little at the silent implication that her women might be light-fingered, and then she forced herself to relax. This was their livelihood. The girl's narrowed eyes meant no more than her own latching of the door of the weaving shed against that opportunist goat.

Finn was squatting, swirling his fingers in the beads, trailing the ribbons, smiling up through his lashes.

‘What's going on? Why aren't you at your work?'

Luda had come limping up to the chattering group. His face darkened, and his eye fell on Elfrun. He beckoned, more abruptly than she liked. Had the steward not seen her when he had first addressed the group? He would never have spoken like that, surely, if he had known she was there.

‘Those are two of the cheating vagabonds who came with that damned bear.'

‘There was no cheating.' She squared her shoulders. ‘That bear won both its fights, and fairly. Hirel is recovering cleanly.'

‘I know that. But they should have asked me before they came back.' Elfrun stared at him. His face was turning purple, veins prominent on his forehead, in a way that the day's warmth couldn't explain, and glancing down she saw his fists were clenched. Had his son-in-law's defeat by the bear rankled so much?

‘But they asked me, Luda.' She shook her head at him. ‘Me.' She had to make this clear though she would have preferred a smaller audience. ‘I'm the lord. If I say it's all right, what business is it of yours?' She was trying to keep her temper, trying not to say,
You're only the steward
. But it was in her voice, and her face, and she knew he could read her.

‘The steward?' Finn was at her side, leaving the silent girl in green to watch over the goods. Athulf had appeared from nowhere, and Elfrun could see him both eyeing up the trinkets and listening avidly to the conversation. Finn said, ‘They told us about you, on the road.'

Luda opened his mouth, but Elfrun held up her hand. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Look out for the steward of Donmouth, they said.' A teasing note had crept into Finn's voice, and Luda scowled even more furiously. ‘He's got a name for it, they said. He'll make you pay a fee to open your pack, and a fee to close it again, and like as not set the dogs on you to close the bargain.'

‘Is this true, Luda?'

‘No less than I'm entitled to do.'

Elfrun folded her arms. It was bad enough when he patronized her and dismissed her questions in the privacy of the wool shed but here, with all her women looking on, was infinitely worse. ‘The pedlar is welcome here,' she said through gritted teeth. She thought of her mirror, wrapped in its linen. Fit for a queen. ‘He has already paid any fee required. To me. He and his are our guests.' She turned to Finn, angling her shoulder to shut Luda out but raising her voice. ‘Will you do me the honour of coming into my hall and drinking some wine, when you have done here? Both of you.' It was an unheard-of courtesy. The most her father would ever have done for a chapman would be to send him round to the cook-house for bread and small beer. But it was worth it, if only to see the blind fury on Luda's face.

And worth it a thousand times to have the pleasure of Finn's company. She could feel how her longing for him was drawing her into duplicity, into lying to herself about her motives. And she didn't care.

And she suspected Finn knew exactly what she was doing. ‘With pleasure, lady.'

Now she stepped back to include Luda in the conversation once again. ‘See that cups and a jug of the Rhineland wine are set out in the hall.' After a long moment he turned without acknowledgement.

‘And will he do it?'

‘He is my servant,' she said, her jaw still painfully tight. ‘He was my father's servant when they were boys.'

‘Your father. We heard something – is it true?'

She couldn't speak.

Finn looked at her hard for a moment, then nodded silently and turned back to his customers. She was grateful for the opportunity to swallow down the sudden surge of misery that had threatened to overwhelm her. Speaking those words had summoned a vision of her father far more real than the busy court in front of her. For a blessed moment he had been standing before her, solid and foursquare, his hair more grey than blond but his eyes as bright as those of any young man in the yard. Why did folk always comment on how handsome Ingeld was, with his white smile and his high colour? There had never been anyone to touch her father.

She realized that the chattering group had slowly fallen quiet, and that a dozen faces were turned to hers. ‘Lady? Please?' She gave herself a little shake. Her women, slave and free, all earned silver and bronze by their weaving, but she kept it for them.

‘Of course. A moment.'

She turned and hurried into the hall. It had been a gloomy space since her father left, chilly today despite the spring sunshine, and she spent as little time there as she could. Though Dunstan had successfully steered most of the baggage home again the bundles were still tight-packed, stored in one of the barns. She could not bear to touch them, even to find out how sea-ravaged they might be. So the hall was dark still, the iron pegs forlorn without their bright, bullion-tricked hangings. Radmer's massive chair with its gilded finials likewise looked forsaken, bereft of its silk-trimmed cushion. The great table was dismantled, board propped against trestles. The one patch of colour in the whole gloomy barn of a place was her red cloak on its peg. Only now that she was to welcome Finn under her roof did she fully realize what a shabby apology for a house this had become. ‘Get a fire lit,' she snapped at Luda, fumbling at her waist for the keys to the heddern and the little chest where the silver and bronze were kept.

The handful of coins exchanged, the women chivvied back to the weaving shed, she turned her attention again to Finn and his silent companion. ‘It would do me great honour,' she repeated, feeling clumsy and stupid, ‘if you would share that cup of wine with me.'

Finn nodded. ‘I'll just pack all my clutter away.'

Luda, still glowering, had delegated the making of the fire to a small boy who came scurrying in with a bucket of glowing charcoal. The girl in green still hadn't said a word. Elfrun watched her settle on to a bench. They were much of an age. The stranger was no more than medium height, shorter than Elfrun herself, but so slender that she appeared tall. Her sleek brown hair was tucked into tidy plaits which were knotted into one at the base of her neck and fell from there down the length of her spine. Elfrun was intrigued by the girl's dress. She had a tunic of unbleached and fine-pleated linen, and over it she wore the kale-green pinafore. The back of the dress was pulled somehow up and over each shoulder, fastened to the front over each collarbone by a pair of big lumpy brooches. The dress had a band of sage-green woven decoration across the front, between the brooches, and below it that single string of polished amber. Her hands were folded in her lap and her ankles crossed. She had coiled bronze bracelets that went from her wrist halfway to each elbow, and an impressive belt-knife in an elaborate sheath nestled in her lap.

She still hadn't said a word, and was looking at the fire; Elfrun wondered if she were crippled with shyness when she didn't have her bowl and her smile to hide behind. Her clothes were so fine for all their strangeness, much better than Elfrun's own.

Was she Finn's woman? She had seen no sign of affection between them – indeed, she wasn't sure she had heard them exchange a word.

And, if she were Finn's woman, what difference could it possibly make to the lady of Donmouth?

Just as these thoughts were rattling thorough Elfrun's mind, Finn came in and set the wicker pack down by the door, Athulf at his heels. ‘That's lighter by half.' He ruffled Gethyn's ears. ‘Glad to see this fine beast still with us.'

‘They can't have bought that much!' She glowed at his praise of Gethyn.

‘And my wares aren't heavy.' He grinned and came towards the women. ‘I was joking, Alvrun.' He looked around, his quick gaze seeming to rest on nothing and yet take everything in.

Blushing, she went over to the small table where the jugs were standing and poured wine into the waiting beakers. Only three had been set out, and she was determined not to let Athulf bully her into waiting on him as well. The wine was thick and almost black in the dim hall-light, and she tipped water in to thin it before bringing one to Finn. ‘Does – will—?' She glanced at the mute girl.

‘Auli?'

The girl said something rapid and incomprehensible, and inclined her head with dignity.

‘Yes, she will. And she says that, to thank you for your hospitality, she would like to tell your fortune on this fine midsummer morning. She's famous at home for her fortunes. She and her mother both.'

Elfrun busied herself with jug and beaker, hoping they couldn't see how the hot blood was still coming into her face. The Donmouth women were obsessed with fortunes and omens, but she knew they kept it from her, as they had always kept so much from the lord's daughter. And she in turn had come to despise this kind of talk, as Abarhild was training her to do. Those girls were just stupid; all they were interested in was men and babies.