The Leopard Unleashed (11 page)

Olwen stared down at the document in her hands and felt disturbingly ambivalent. A manor, servants, money – distant stars longed for from the gutters of Antioch, but now that she held them in her hands, she felt more desolate than triumphant and did not know why.

‘It still needs witnessing,’ Renard said when she did not speak. ‘Your cross or thumbprint and mine and my father’s signatures. It can be done tomorrow and I can take you to Hawkfield as soon as you’re ready.’

‘In haste to be rid of me?’

‘You know I cannot keep you here at Ravenstow.’

‘And what is to be my payment for all this generosity? Accommodating your needs whenever you choose to take a diversion while out hunting or on patrol?’

‘By mutual consent.’ He smiled. ‘I won’t constrain you to anything you don’t desire of your own free will.’

Her colour was high. ‘Stabling for a mare, occasionally to be ridden?’ she demanded. ‘Do you expect me to hang over the paddock fence quivering for your approach?’

‘Knowing you,’ he said drily, ‘I’m more likely to find myself bucked off in the midden.’

Olwen gave a half-smile, as she remembered their first meeting in Antioch and how he had said they would never get any further than the stable yard until they had decided who was the horse and who was the rider. He had yet to learn that a parameter set for one occasion, unlike a charter, was not binding for a lifetime.

As the first light of dawn greyed Hawkfield’s courtyard, William dismounted from his spotted stallion and stared round at the few yawning servants shambling about their first duties. ‘Where’s Lord Renard?’ he demanded of the scratching, gummy-eyed groom who came to tend the horse.

‘Dunno, sir,’ he mumbled. ‘Still abed, I think.’

‘Still abed?’ William repeated flatly. His jaw tightened and he signalled his men to dismount. The hall door was barred. William thumped on it with the hilt of his sword until a serving woman opened it. He barged past her into the darkness which was dimly lit by the fire from the central hearth, the former only just being resurrected to day time use by a puffy-faced maid.

In the bedchamber located behind screens at the end of the hall, Renard sat bolt upright and cursed.

Olwen caressed his thigh. An hour ago her hand had been on a part of him even more intimate.

Withdrawing brusquely from her touch, he began scrambling into his clothes.

‘It’s not my fault if you go back to sleep instead of getting up.’ She rolled over, half raised her lids, and extended fingers and toes in a replete feline stretch.

Renard scowled at her but omitted to retort. The blame was his, he acknowledged, but she had meant it to happen. The way she had lain against him afterwards, soothing and stroking him into sleep, knowing full well that he was supposed to be meeting his brother at the crossroads north of Hawkfield before the crack of dawn. He knew he should have spent the night at Ravenstow, not arranged to set out to meet his betrothed straight from the warm bed of his mistress. And now he was going to be late.

Outside there was a squawk of protest from one of the maids, and the curtain separating bedchamber from hall was rudely clashed aside. ‘Are you going to malinger there all day?’ William demanded. ‘We’re supposed to be meeting Elene before noon.’

Renard fastened his hose and hunted out a leg binding. ‘Stop being so damned righteous and fetch me a drink!’ he growled.

Olwen slowly sat up, not bothering to draw the sheet around her body. William stared at her silken shoulders and arms, at the seductive curve of her breasts stranded by her tousled hair, at the look she gave him, provocative and mocking.

‘Fetch it yourself!’ he snapped and stalked out into the hall.

Olwen murmured sweetly, ‘He
is
in a temper, isn’t he?’

‘Can’t you sheathe that tongue of yours for once?’ Renard snarled. Having scrambled into the rest of his clothes, he began to struggle with his hauberk.

She made no effort to help him, but watched him with amusement. ‘That was not your wish earlier,’ she said.

Renard finally succeeded in donning the garment. The awareness of her silent laughter mortified him. Mouth compressed, he latched his swordbelt, and made to leave the room.

‘What, no fond parting kiss?’ she said.

On the threshold he paused, knuckles clenched upon the wall. ‘Stop playing with me, Olwen. I’m not a tame hound to jump through hoops at your bidding.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘And that is what makes you interesting.’

He struck his fist once against the wall and, without looking round, walked out.

Olwen rolled on to her belly, and smiling, closed her eyes.

The first few miles of the journey up the march to greet the bridal party travelling down towards them were loaded with tension and brooding temper. Renard set a vicious pace, and Gorvenal, half Arabian and lighter boned than a full destrier, flew over the ground and left the escort lumbering. William had to spur Smotyn hard to keep level, and after one particularly bad stumble, shouted at Renard to slow down.

‘You’re going to founder us all!’ he complained.

‘Don’t blame me if you can’t keep up!’ Renard retorted, but he drew rein and looked round at the men strung out behind, and knew that the blame was indeed his. It was not horses or men he was riding into the ground but his own foul temper. If any serjeant or knight of his had led the troop in such a sloppy formation as he now saw, he would have blistered that man’s ears from his skull and docked his pay.

‘Christ, Renard, take a grip on yourself !’ William’s voice cracked with anxiety. ‘The whole future of our family is in your hands. You can’t throw it away because of a … because of a …’

‘… Half-breed dancing girl?’ Renard finished for him, with a mirthless laugh. ‘Jesu, if you knew how easy it just might be.’

William eyed him. Renard’s features were now schooled to impassivity. William’s gut ceased to lurch with fear and the tightness across his shoulders eased. Just before the leading knight reached them, Renard slapped William’s mail-clad arm. ‘My wits had gone wool-gathering and left my temper in command,’ he said with forced lightness. ‘I’m all right now, you can stop fretting.’

Which meant, thought William, that the temper was of a necessity locked up, not that it had magically evaporated. He watched Renard muster the men, jest with them about his haste to greet his bride, watched him organise them into a tight escort, van, centre and rearguard to his liking, and then settle companionably among them to ride at a sensible, disciplined pace. It was more than just the girl, he thought. It was the responsibility for Ravenstow. It was the sight of their father dying by fractions before his eyes. It was the constant living on a blade’s edge. What wonder that he should seek oblivion in the arms of a woman who was a reminder of the lost freedom of Outremer. What wonder that he should object to being roused and thrust face to face with duty.

William was suddenly thankful that as his father’s youngest son, and unlikely to succeed to the earldom, he still had the freedom that Renard was being forced to forfeit.

* * *

The wind surged like an ocean, roaring through the trees and leaching them bare in trailing swirls of copper, gold and brown through which the horses waded and crunched as though they were treading shingle.

Elene shivered in her squirrel-lined cloak as the wind spattered rain into her face so hard that the droplets hurt her. She gripped her hood tightly and fidgeted in the saddle, her thighs chafed by the long day astride.

‘Not far now,’ Adam de Lacey said to her with a sympathetic smile. ‘Are you anxious?’

Elene explored the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. ‘A little,’ she admitted. ‘It seems so long ago. We’ll be strangers – married strangers within a week.’ She tried to smile at him and failed.

Adam leaned over and clasped his hand over hers on the reins. ‘It will be all right, Nell,’ he said with compassion. ‘I know it will be difficult at first, but you’ll adjust, you’ll see.’

She nodded stiffly and wished she was marrying Adam. He was tolerant and seldom out of humour. He would have the time for her that she already sensed Renard would not.

Elene bit her lip, and looked down at Bramble’s dark mane. She had sewn all her dreams into her wedding garments, but was beginning to wish that she had been less obvious. There was a tunic for Renard too, the rich embroidery a play on his name. Renard, taken from his Norman great-grandfather who had borne the colouring and cunning of a fox.

They had corresponded briefly over the matter of the wedding. His letter had been terse and impersonal, bearing no imprint of the young man she remembered. No humour,
not even a glimpse of the carelessly affectionate hand that would pat a dog’s head in passing. It was more than just anxiety that tensed her stomach; it was fear.

Adam made excuses for Renard, saying he was very busy with matters of estate, but as he spoke, he had avoided her eyes. There was more that he was not saying, but Adam was adept at keeping secrets. Elene had decided of her own intuition, which was seldom wrong (at least as far as sheep were concerned), that to Renard this marriage was a necessary, but far from welcome, intrusion into the pattern of his life: a duty to be consummated and dispensed with as quickly as possible.

Hamo le Grande was the leader of a troop of mercenaries in the pay of Ranulf, Earl of Chester. He was a hard-bitten soldier who had been fighting for money since his early adolescence. His career now spanned almost thirty years of battles, skirmishes and chevauchée. It was a rough, uncertain way to make a living and only the strongest and most fortunate survived to the years that Hamo now wore like a lead cope around his shoulders, dragging him down. Time was against him. He knew that the next ten years would see him either settled in a more permanent occupation or dead in battle.

He rubbed the fingers of his right hand over his thick grey beard, found a crumb, and absently teased it out. Below the ridge on which he had paused to rest his stallion, his paymaster’s lands blended with those of the enemy – Ravenstow. A few miles to the north on a finger of land pointing into Chester’s earldom lay the keep of Caermoel with its ownership bitterly disputed. Earl Ranulf wanted it, but was not yet ready to make his move. Other, more
important pots were simmering on his hearth, such as forging contacts with the rebels in Bristol and poking his nose into affairs at Lincoln, but he had given his patrols and the Welsh levies of Cadwaladr ap Gruffydd rein to raid and forage where they would.

Hamo gazed at the lands, imagining himself the lord of one of these border fiefs. He had been indirectly promised a holding of his own if he proved worth his salt, or failing that, a castellan’s position in one of the Earl’s many keeps. It was a dream that goaded him as he fought to pitch a tent in the streaming rain of a dark field, while snug within the keep the lord he served sat practically on top of a roaring fire, gorging himself on venison, drinking wine and fondling the maidservants.

‘Do we go in?’ asked his second in command, a small tough Welshman who spoke appalling French.

Hamo gave him a withering look. ‘Don’t be stupid, boyo!’ he mimicked. ‘Of course we go in. Who’s to stop us? There’s a village a few miles down. Anyone fancy roast pork?’

The village consisted of no more than a dozen daub and wattle huts clustered around an even smaller ramshackle wooden church. There was very little to raid, but the villagers had not yet begun the autumn slaughter and there was pork to be had, the young pigs plump and succulent. The sound of their squeals was deafening and drowned out the screams of the human occupants as they either fled or died.

Hamo allowed his men to quench their thirst on the villagers’ cider, but not to the point of intoxication. A pack-horse was laden with spoils and provisions. What they could not carry they killed or burned and then they rode on,
their passing marked by the crackle of flame and a pall of smoke darker than the sky.

An hour later Hamo was contemplating turning for home via a quick slaughter run through a flock of sheep he could see dotting the horizon when he caught sight of the riders joining the main road below from the rutted drover’s track that led to Woolcot. Hamo narrowed his gaze and counted eight knights and a like number of serjeants.

‘Women, look you!’ cried his second with a wolfish grin.

Hamo fixed his gaze upon the red chevrons on the leading knight’s shield, and a little behind him, riding with the women, the gold lozenge on blue background of another knight.

‘God’s teeth, it’s Henry FitzGuyon and Adam de Lacey.’

‘Who are the women then?’

‘How should I—?’ Hamo began on a snarl, then stopped, his focus becoming intense. ‘That one in front is de Lacey’s wife. Those two behind are maids, you can tell from their dress, and they’re joining the road from the Woolcot track, so the other must be Elene de Mortimer – Renard FitzGuyon’s betrothed.’ Discovering her identity as he spoke, his eyes brightened with the hunting instinct that was never far from the surface. ‘And what would my lord of Chester give to have her in his hands?’ Hard on that question came the thought that despoiled goods were far more likely to go to the despoiler than to a second party, particularly if that despoiler had already been promised lands of his own.

‘Are we going to take them on?’ The Welshman’s voice was rough with excitement. Henry FitzGuyon might be as dull as an ox, but he was also as solid and strong as one in a fight and de Lacey had a fearsome reputation in battle.