The Champion (70 page)
Stafford off the fire before he asphyxiated everyone.
When the smoke cleared, the strange girl, the soldier in the doorway, and Stafford’s sword were gone.
When Stafford limped outside, it was to utter silence. Not a single one of his men remained, except as corpses. All the horses had gone, including the packhorse bearing le Boucher’s silver. One by one the alehouse customers trooped out after him, their cups in their hands.
High above their heads, a bright silver moon cast its magical light over a tranquil, silent land.
Once again, Monday rode pillion on a horse, but this time, her arms encircled the rider’s waist, and her cheek was laid against the softness of his cloak. A blanket covered her chemise, and another soldier had lent her his hood and shoulder cape, so she was reasonably warm, if somewhat outlandishly dressed. But nothing mattered a whit except that she and Alexander were safe and together. Under the April moon, the road to Canterbury shone like a fairing ribbon.
‘I am glad you did not fight him,’ she said.
‘So am I,’ he said wearily. ‘I might not have carried the victory.’ She felt him draw a deep breath. ‘I have what I want, and I suspect that in itself will break him.’
‘But he must have thought he could succeed.’ Monday shivered. ‘And to do that, he must have known that … that John would turn a blind eye.’
Alexander said nothing.
‘Mustn’t he?’ she persisted.
‘People, lands are bought and sold every day.’ He twisted in the saddle to look at her, and she sat up. ‘Yes, John probably did know, and while the expense and the risk were not his, was prepared to gaze in the opposite direction.’ He sighed. ‘I think that the King and your grandfather have certain similar traits – an unwillingness to share being the major one. And both of them bear me a grudge for taking you.’
Monday shivered. ‘Then what are we going to do?’
‘Nothing. Go and take up residence in Abermon. It’s far enough removed from John’s politics, and nowhere near Stafford.
And if I receive promotion, it will like as not be across the Irish sea. After this episode, no one will dare lay a finger on us for fear of the cry of treachery.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Suddenly she felt very tired.
‘I know so. Here.’ Reaching round, he pressed the Byzantine cross into her hand. ‘I lost it the day I lost you at Vaudreuil,’ he said. ‘Now, tonight, I have it back. That surely is proof of our future. Hold it for me.’
He turned to the front again, intent on guiding the horse. Monday rubbed her finger over the facets of the cross, and feeling comforted, closed her eyes and leaned against his cloak once more.
A stiff March wind whipped white clouds across the sky and ruffled the heads of the first flowers carpeting the woods. In the solar at Abermon, young Clemence de Montroi drowsed replete in her cradle, her blue eyes closed and a fluff of blonde hair peeking from beneath her bonnet.
‘She looks like you,’ Alexander remarked to the monk who was stooping over the foot of the cradle, a wondering look in his eyes. ‘And certainly she has your appetite and your bellow.’
‘You begot her,’ Hervi retorted with a smile.
‘What does that mean?’ Florian piped up.
‘It means that I’m her father,’ Alexander said with a look at his brother.
‘You couldn’t have arrived at a better time.’ Monday linked her arm through Hervi’s and kissed his cheek. ‘It’s my churching ceremony on the morrow, and there’ll be a feast and celebration.’
‘Excellent timing then,’ said Hervi, and placed his finger against the baby’s hand. She yawned, and without opening her eyes, clutched him fiercely with her tiny fingers. ‘The first girl in how many generations of Montrois?’
‘At least five,’ Alexander said smugly.
‘Aye, well, you’ve broken the mould in more ways than one.’
‘So have you.’
Hervi made a sound in his throat and gently removed his finger from the baby’s grasp. ‘I suppose that’s true enough,’ he said, ‘but it was your doing in the first place … and before you protest or get that guilty look on your face, I’m not apportioning blame. Far from it. I have a far greater contentment now than I ever did on the tourney field.’ Taking his stick, he limped over to the bench against the wall, where Monday had just finished plumping some embroidered cushions. She went to bring wine. Florian wriggled on to the seat beside his uncle, changed his mind, and ran off to fetch his pouch of marbles.
‘Quicksilver, just like you,’ Hervi said with a smile. ‘Are you content at Abermon?’
‘If you mean do I miss the hurly-burly of life at court and on the tourney field, then no to the first, and only a little to the second. There is enough to do here, keeping peace with the Welsh and skirmishing them to treaty point when all else fails. After last year, I’m glad to be no more than a common border knight for nine-twelfths of the year. And for the other three, I see enough variety in the lord Marshal’s service to stop me from yearning. Besides,’ he glanced at his wife as she returned with two cups of sweetened mulberry wine, the kind that was Hervi’s favourite, ‘why should I yearn when I have all I want here?’
‘No reason.’ Hervi shrugged, took a generous mouthful from his cup, and gave a small shudder of pleasure.
Monday narrowed her eyes at her brother-in-law. ‘No reason?’ she repeated suspiciously. ‘What have you heard?’
‘Oh, nothing, just a rumour on my travels.’ He took another drink of the wine, and then sighed. ‘Well, actually, it’s more than a rumour. I heard for a fact three days ago from the Bishop of Stafford that your grandfather has died, and that his estates have several claimants. Aside from my desire to see you, it is one of the reasons I’m here. I wondered if …’
‘No!’ Alexander snarled.
Hervi’s gaze widened.
Monday caught her husband’s eye, and made a calming motion with the flat of her hand. Hervi had no inkling of what had happened last year; very few people had beyond those directly involved, and any rumours of scandal and foul play had been firmly smothered. ‘No,’ she repeated calmly. ‘I have no desire to wrangle with lawyers over my inheritance. I would have to prove my blood line, I would have to face down men far greater than myself, and for something that I do not even want.’
Hervi drew breath.
‘I have not told you this, but my grandfather offered his estates to me once, with certain conditions. I refused then, and I refuse now. I cannot mourn his passing; in a way I am pleased, because perhaps now he will find peace. He knew only bitterness and anger in this world.’ She crossed herself. ‘I will say a prayer for his soul at mass.’
Hervi looked at Alexander and Monday, his brows raised in question. ‘Is there more I should know?’
Florian returned with his pouch of marbles and spilled them out on the floor at the adults’ feet, brightly coloured beads of glass and wood. Blue and red and yellow.
Alexander shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. ‘Some matters are not for sharing.’
There was a peculiar silence. Hervi stared at Alexander, then gave a shrug. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ he said, and after another pause, added, ‘Did you know that Cranwell Priory has been abandoned?’
‘What?’ Alexander lowered his cup.
‘It is true. Last spring. Prior Alkmund went missing in the winter – never returned from one of his outings. Investigations revealed all that you told me and more. The remaining monks were transferred to Tutbury.’ As Hervi spoke, his colour heightened, and by the time he had finished, the flesh across his cheekbones was a dusky red.
‘Hervi …?’
‘Matters not for sharing,’ he said gruffly, and stooped to admire his nephew’s marbles.
‘These have got holes in the middle,’ Florian declared, showing Hervi a handful of the more luridly coloured wooden ones. ‘I found them on a string in one of the coffers.’
Monday sat cross-legged on the bed, patiently rethreading the twenty-eight wooden beads in their correct order as Alexander closed and barred their chamber door.
‘Hervi’s abed … at last,’ he said, and made a pretence of wiping his brow. ‘Jesu, I thought Osgar and I were never going to get him there. He seemed to have six legs, not one. Still, he’s snoring like a bear now.’
She raised her head from her task and smiled at him. In the privacy of their chamber, her hair was bound in a loose bronze-brown plait, her wimple discarded on the coffer. This morning’s churching ceremony, forty days after Clemence’s birth, had given them sanction to lie together again as man and wife. With a feast to oversee, guests both English and Welsh to entertain, and finally her drunk one-legged brother-in-law to escort to his small wall chamber, such an opportunity had only just arisen.
Alexander sat down beside her on the bed, almost but not quite touching. Monday slanted him a glance through her lashes, and resumed her threading. She intended taking no chances. After their narrow and traumatic escape of last spring, the first bed they had come to had seen a vigorous confirmation of the life in each other, and Clemence had been the result. Loved though their daughter was, Monday had no intention of producing another infant nine months from this night.
‘Do you remember when you wanted to be a great lady with a silk train a mile long?’ he asked, watching her string the beads.
‘Silk trains become mired in the dirt,’ she said softly. ‘Silk trains trip you up and make you walk slowly through life, when you could be running barefoot through the fields. Besides, that was the dream of someone else. I knew her once, and even travelled for a time with her, but we parted company in Rouen when I met the someone else that you had become.’ She tilted her head to one side and regarded him with a half-smile. ‘What about your own dreams of glory?’
‘Like strong wine.’ Lying back, he pillowed his head on his arms. ‘Heady at the time, but vile the next day. I started my life as a younger son with nothing. A single castle will content me well enough.’ He reached one hand to tug at her plait. ‘Do you want to know what my dreams are at the moment?’
She turned round, the completed string of beads dangling from her fingertips, her gaze provocative. ‘I think I can guess,’ she murmured, and went into his arms.
A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE
Many strands of research go to make up the writing of a historical novel, and are woven into a whole so that (hopefully) no loose threads show. But sometimes I cannot resist explaining how a particular thread came to be woven, and the author’s note is my opportunity to do so!
Medieval contraception was a haphazard affair. Frowned on by the Church, it was nevertheless practised with varying degrees of success. The most widely used form was
coitus interruptus
. To a certain extent also, a breast-feeding woman was protected from conceiving. Wealthy women who hired wet nurses were therefore more at risk of becoming pregnant than their less well-off sisters. The safeguards mentioned in
The Champion
were also known to a small section of society. To those in the know, contraceptive lore was available in Greek and Arabic texts, and although not foolproof, tampons of sheep’s wool and douches of vinegar lessened the likelihood of pregnancy. I admit to a touch of author’s licence with the wooden beads, but it could have happened. The second-century Greek gynaecologist Soranus recommended that a woman should avoid intercourse during fertile times of the month, and a system of counting the days would have been essential.
Although many of the personalities in
The Champion
are people who actually lived, Monday, Alexander, their families and acquaintances are imaginary. I have, however, striven to take their characters and circumstances from twelfth- and thirteenth-century life. Couples did flout the rules if they had sufficient courage. In the
Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal
, there is an incident where William Marshal comes across a run-away monk and a noblewoman eloping together. To many knights and soldiers, the tourney circuit was a way of life. It was a training ground and employment market, a place where fortunes and reputations were made and broken. Despite the Church’s condemnation of tourneying, it continued to flourish, and developed through the following two centuries into a vastly popular spectator sport with ever more elaborate rules and equipment. William Marshal rose from the ranks of the common tourney knights to become, on John’s death, the regent of England.
King John is known to have had at least five mistresses, and probably more. History has left us the traces of Susannah and Clemence, and probably Alina, but the others are unnamed. In the circumstances, I felt justified in making Monday one of them.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1 THE BRETON BORDERS , SPRING 1193
CHAPTER 12 NORMANDY, SPRING 1195
CHAPTER 18 STAFFORD, WINTER 1195
CHAPTER 21 THE WELSH MARCHES, AUTUMN 1197
CHAPTER 22 LAVOUX, SUMMER 1198