Something Red (21 page)

Halfway up, the stairway leveled out for about seven or eight feet. The floor beneath their shoes here was dark scarred wood, with chains running from the near corners of the wood up at an angle to wind around small capstans set in the walls, perhaps eight or nine steps above.

Roger stamped on the wood as they traversed the landing, producing a sepulchral
boom.

“If anyone comes so far with ill intent—not, mind you, that anyone has, yet—we’ll pull this up. There’s a pit beneath our feet, and this little bridge closes off the stairway above, and stops any arrows they’re shooting up at us. But best of all, it shuts off the light from above when it’s up, and anyone coming up those lower stairs in a rush, without torches”—he pointed backward with his thumb, not looking—“well, they’re in the dark, aren’t they, and their friends crowding up behind them, and a big fucking drop before them. The drop’s twice as high as I am.” Roger gave a hard and merciless grin; suddenly he looked ten years older, and much grimmer. “There are spikes.”

They trooped on up the stairway. Hob could hear a murmur as of many people, a bustle of activity, drifting down from above. The air grew perceptibly warmer as they neared the top landing. Here they found heavy doors, with the inevitable pair of guards lounging near. The Sieur de Blanchefontaine did not follow military ceremony out here in the northern forest, but the Scottish border was not distant, with its clansmen under uneasy Norman rule, and a Norman lord had many enemies: there was a careful roster of rotated guards, men who remained armed when others had hung sword-belts and mail and boiled-leather gambesons on pegs, men leaning against the walls or sprawled on the outer benches in the hall or at the main entrances, eating and drinking very little. New guests were unobtrusively watched; so discourtesy was avoided and safety preserved.

As they came up the men pulled the doors open, with the inevitable barrage of greetings for Roger. There was speculation that a certain Lucinda might be easier to live with now that Roger had returned to comfort her; although it seemed that Olivier, who had just preceded them, had reported that Roger’s mare had replaced Lucinda in his affections, and that he had paid the mare the sort of attention formerly reserved for Lucinda, and so on, without mercy but without malice either; all this Roger accepted with a grin, and there was a great deal of slapping of backs and shoulders.

Hob and Jack followed Roger through the arch that led from the stair landing into the great hall. Before them was a carved wooden screen that stood across the entranceway, four feet in, blocking their view: it was several feet wider than the doorway, so that they had to walk a few paces sideways and turn around the end of the screen to enter the hall. The screen was another device to slow down attackers, and to prevent arrows from being shot from the landing into the hall.

Once around the screen, Hob found himself at one end of a long high hall, with perhaps forty men and women bustling here and there, setting up rows of trestle tables and benches, positioned lengthwise up the room. There was a low hubbub of conversation; the occasional burst of laughter; the odd bang or screech of wood as tables and benches were dragged from the walls to the center of the room. As the tables were assembled in long lines down along the room, rough aisles took shape between them.

The broad planks of the floor were covered with rushes. A faint rattling could be heard beneath the growing din: a handful of boys were strewing a fresh layer of rushes atop the old, working from baskets of the tubular stems. The baskets stood here and there in the aisles. At least one lad was sprinkling some mixture of dried herbs between and beneath the tables. Hob thought to detect the scent of lavender and lady-of-the-meadow, and the warm sweet smell of winter savory; perhaps there was germander as well.

Across the width of the hall, Hob spied Ranulf, a little girl on one hip and a broad grin on his face, talking with a heavyset woman, a bit younger than he, with a plain pleasant face. Roger clapped Jack on the shoulder, pointed up the hall toward Molly, and ambled off to report to Ranulf.

Hob’s face began to tingle. He became aware that there were two fireplaces against the far wall. The smaller was down at this end of the hall; an enormous hearth dominated the upper part of the big chamber, and for the first time in what seemed a year, Hob felt real heat beating against his skin.

Molly and Nemain stood talking amid a small knot of splendidly dressed people. The sudden heat after the brutal cold of the storm had brought a ruddy glow to Molly’s cheek, and Nemain’s throat and face showed a rose blush overspreading her pale skin.

Jack carried the chest up near them; he stopped a respectful five paces short. Molly looked about, still talking, and nodded. She pointed to the floor, and Jack set the chest down in the rushes with a soft thump, and sat down on it, waiting. Hob came up beside him and loitered, trying to see and hear without seeming to do so.

He sauntered forward a step or two toward Molly and the two people with whom she was closely engaged: a tall richly dressed woman with a bunch of keys at her girdle, clearly the chatelaine, and beside her, a grim knight whom Hob at first took to be her husband.

Hob’s English tended to be more low speech, with its roots in the thick Anglian and Saxon dialects, but Father Athelstan, though from a Saxon family, had been chaplain to two Norman lords before the changing tides of fortune had beached him, elderly and lame, in his position as pastor of Hob’s little village and, later, Hob’s protector. He had intended Hob for the Church, and he had taught Hob some rudiments of writing, although they had not gotten far past the alphabet when the old priest’s eyes began to fail, and instruction began to falter.

Still, Father Athelstan spoke of a cousin in the bishop’s service, and of sending Hob thence when he should be more grown. To that end he had insisted that Hob learn to serve at table as a page, and to speak passable, if somewhat accented, Norman English, and many summer afternoons Hob spent learning to assist at Mass and to spell out letters with all instruction conducted in crisp nasal Norman English, studded with French terms like currants in a bun, while through the windows the warm drowsy air brought the guttural Germanic accents of the village lads shouting at their play.

Molly had swept like a salt breeze from the Western Ocean through the little hamlet, and convinced the ailing old man to apprentice Hob to her service, and swept out along the road again two weeks later. Father Athelstan she left, with bottles of her potions in a goatskin bag, standing in the roadstead, one hand raised in farewell, next to a priest house that suddenly seemed curiously empty to him, and which he felt reluctant to re-enter.

Now Hob watched Molly, and Nemain as well, in travel-stained garb, speaking to this mighty lady, both boldly confronting their hostess and the grim figure beside her, and gradually his ear became attuned to the Norman speech of the highborn, more sophisticated than Ranulf’s, and certainly more well-mannered than Roger’s.

He was still a little distance away and so, even as his grasp of the idiom returned to him, he could hear only disjointed phrases. He heard “Ireland” and “gone into exile”; he thought he heard the word “queen” or “queens,” and—to his surprise—Molly’s real name, “Maeve”; and then, as Molly’s expression darkened, “stalked us through the woods.” The Norman knight and lady looked at each other with concern at that point, and Hob guessed he knew their topic at that moment.

A boy perhaps a year his senior passed by, the white fountain badge on the breast of his tunic, a large bundle of dried rushes held in the crook of his left arm; with his right hand he was throwing handfuls
down along the aisles. Where the planks of the floor met the wall was a small pile of dog droppings, dried almost white, and he swerved to bury it deftly beneath a layer of rushes. Every sennight or so, or before major festivals, the hall was broomed clean, down to the boards, and new rushes laid, but tonight the serving lads went ahead with the everyday practice of covering the old rushes with a new layer.

As the boy came back, Hob stepped out of his way, contriving to come a bit closer to the central group, to learn how Molly fared with her introductions. It did seem to him as though Molly was as comfortable as she was at Osbert’s Inn, and as sure of a reception, and gradually the atmosphere thawed, and he had a chance to examine the woman whom Molly addressed as “Lady Isabeau.”

Lady Isabeau was tall for a woman, nearly as tall as Molly, but slender where Molly was stout, with a smooth immobile face that looked as if it had been carved from ivory, pale and serene. Hob stared at her: glossy black hair bound about the brows with a broad white linen fillet and partially concealed by a veil that draped down her neck; dark eyes beneath dark brows plucked thin; unsmiling lips, full and well shaped. There was so little expression on her face, and its beauty was so unworldly, that Hob had a moment when he thought her an apparition, or a graven figure.
“Blanche comme la neige,”
came to his mind, a song Molly had taught him,
“belle comme le jour.”
The thinnest of scars ran from her hairline down her forehead, divided her left eyebrow, and curved along her cheek to the corner of her mouth, and seemed at once to augment her beauty and to reinforce its carven stillness, as if some wright’s chisel had slipped in the course of fashioning her visage. A linen band of the sort known as a barbette ran down from the fillet at her temples and passed under her chin, framing her face, and rendering her features all the more austere.

Her gown was a muted purple; heavy embroidery of red and blue circled its neckline, and it was gathered by a zone of gray silk, sewn with
pearls, that circled her hips. From this belt depended a silver ring, as wide around as a big man’s fist. On the ring was a bunch of black iron keys, of varying sizes: the symbol and reality of her standing as administrator of the household. As she spoke, she fiddled with the keys as though they were prayer beads; they gave off a continual muted clink, just barely audible to Hob above the rumble of voices, the thuds and thumps of plank tabletops settling onto their trestles.

If Lady Isabeau suggested a figure rendered from cool ivory, Sir Balthasar was her antithesis: one in whom the sanguine strove with the choleric. Hob’s first impression was of long, flat, darkly ruddy cheeks, clean-shaven in the Norman style; a clenched jaw; a grim unforgiving mouth. The knight seemed to radiate a black heat. Sir Balthasar was a man tall and brawny, with thick strong limbs and a hard-fleshed barrel-shaped body. His shoulders, which strained against the linen of his tunic, were not so much wide as heavy; his calves swelled the cross-braces of his hose. He was still in his prime, but at the far end of it, his black eyebrows beginning to show the luxuriant tangle of the aging male. From beneath these thickets two stony black eyes peered out at the world with the suspicion, the arrogant belligerence, of the wild white king bull.

He was dressed with almost clerical severity: over his long gray tunic was a surcoat of darker gray; his hose were green; his belt and shoes of dark green leather. Even the coif he wore, the linen helmet fastened beneath his chin, was a pale gray. Fastened to his surcoat was a brooch worn as a badge: a silver disk inlaid with murrey-colored enamel, against which the white fountain of Blanchefontaine stood out, rendered in raised silver. At the right side of his belt, a heavy dagger nestled in its green leather sheath: its hilt was plain, wrapped in leather strips; its pommel was a sphere of gray pitted iron, darkened with age. The impression that he made on Hob was one of implacable force.

It was not until Lady Isabeau said, with a nod to the knight,
“Sir Balthasar has heard from certain of our people that you are of good repute among the countryfolk about atte Well’s inn,” that Hob realized that this was the formidable Sir Balthasar, the mareschal whose wrath Ranulf had cautioned Roger against arousing, and not the lord of Blanchefontaine himself.

As forbidding as the knight was, Hob noticed that Nemain, who stood quietly by as Molly spoke for all of them, held herself erect, gazing coolly at Sir Balthasar as though he were the supplicant seeking hospitality and not she, and he of lesser station at that.

Hob, though, was thinking that he had never seen such grandly dressed persons, save only Lady Svajone and her entourage. As though the thought had conjured them up, here, making their way down the hall with difficulty, was the Lietuvan party: Lady Svajone, and Doctor Vytautas, and the noblewoman’s two-peas-in-a-pod esquires.

CHAPTER 13

T
HE OLD WOMAN WAS SUP
ported on one side by Azuolas, the stockier of her guards, and on the other by Vytautas. The doctor walked with prim steps, keeping pace with the tiny noblewoman’s slow progress, but his eyes were on Molly’s face, and he gave her a delighted smile.

Behind them paced Gintaras, lithe as a panther, looking about him, expressionless, alert for any disturbance that might come too near his frail charge. Even a boisterous serving-maid might do harm to those delicate old limbs. He had divested himself of his sword, as a guest in this hall—only the guards went fully armed indoors—but, perhaps from habit, his hand did not stray far from the dagger slung down beside his right hip. Its hilt was carved from some rich pale wood, the pommel representing a fanciful bird’s head, with its neck ruff rendered as pointed scales rather
than natural-seeming feathers; the bird’s eyes were balls of what looked to Hob like lead, perhaps to add weight for balance.

Lady Svajone tottered up to the group and saluted Lady Isabeau and Sir Balthasar. Then she turned to Molly and took both the Irishwoman’s hands in hers. Azuolas unobtrusively steadied her with a hand beneath her elbow and the other across her back. “I am happy, we are well meeting again, and also, also though you, you, you is coming through the white, the white, the coldness . . . ” Here she gave up all attempt at language, and just grinned at Molly with the pure unaffected pleasure of a child meeting a playmate. Vytautas stood beaming at them from the side.